Spotlight On... Lost Map presents Weird Wave

As the iconic Scottish indie label Lost Map Records turns ten this year, label boss Johnny Lynch – aka Pictish Trail – has teamed up with seven other affiliate musicians and pals to create Lost Map presents Weird Wave, a Lost Map super group. Joined by drummer Iain Stewart, multi-instrumentalist Suse Bear, guitarist and singer Kate Lazda (Kid Canaveral), bassist Bart Owl (eagleowl), violinist Robyn Dawson, Savage Mansion frontman Craig Angus and Candian singer-songwriter L.T. Leif, the octet released their debut single Astral Difficulties / Weird Wave earlier this week.

Astral Difficulties / Weird Wave is nine-and-a-half minutes of relentless drums, driving grooves, effervescent synths and psychedelic vocals. Written and recorded on Eigg, it is absolutely not what we were expecting from this self-professed 'party band', but we are here for it and excited for the full album set to follow later in the year. In celebration of the band and their debut release, we catch up Lynch, Lazda and Owl, who happen to also all work for the label on the regular.

There are eight of you in the band. How did you decide who would be involved in this collective celebrating ten years of the label?
Johnny Lynch: Initially, the idea was to have some sort of 'Lost Map House Band', a group that could act as an impromptu backing band for the different singer-songwriters on the label. So, aye, I started looking at players on the roster based in Scotland. It was only when I started asking folks that I thought, 'oh, this could actually be its own thing'. Kate and Bart were the first two I approached, funnily enough. They’re both involved in the day-to-day running of the label, and I figured it would be fun to be in a band with my pals.

Kate Lazda: I've been (very) slowly working on a new project with my friend Clarissa [Bee, of eagleowl and Broken Records] but haven't played live for about four years. When Johnny asked if I wanted to be involved it seemed like the push I needed. I've been working with everyone in the band on their own releases for the last few years (as Lost Map product manager) and while that is obviously a creative endeavour, it is also a lot of admin and emails. It was so nice to just go away for a week and only think about the music side of it.

How did you settle on the name Weird Wave? 
KL: Craig [Angus] is a pretty prolific lyricist and prose writer and wrote a bunch of stream of consciousness lyrics while we were writing/recording. I think Leif and Johnny then started riffing on the stuff that Craig had given them. I believe Weird Wave came from one of those sessions.

JL: Yeah, Craig is an absolute fountain of lyrics. It’s a technique he’s honed over years of writing Savage Mansion albums. The phrase 'Weird Wave' comes from an arty era of Greek cinema, I recall. Craig had written it down as part of a series of lyrics, which I pulled phrases from when singing Astral Difficulties / Weird Wave. I was keen for the band name and album to be the same thing, so the full band name is Lost Map presents Weird Wave.

Bart Owl: Yorgos Lanthimos directed Dogtooth, which is seen as the breakout movie of Weird Wave. And he's now about to release the Poor Things Alasdair Gray adaptation. Craig’s first band was called Poor Things, so it all feels connected. In a weird way(ve).

You’ve just released your debut single. At almost ten minutes in length, it really takes you on an unexpected psychedelic journey, sounding not really anything like the sum of the band’s parts. Can you tell us more about the song?
KL: This was the final thing that we worked on the first full day that we were on Eigg. At this point we knew we were playing at Green Man Festival and I'm pretty sure Suse said 'what would people at a festival want to hear?' Bart and Iain started on bass and drums and we all jumped in. I am mainly improvising guitar on this track, even on the final recording, so am maybe not the best person to describe the creative process. Haha. It was really fun to just make an insane amount of noise on the guitar though.

BO: This song came together super quickly. We played it as a full band a couple of times. Then the next day tried to recreate it, recording the instruments individually to get more separation and help with mixing, but couldn’t capture the same energy. So what’s on the record is us all playing live in the room – and maybe only the second or third time we’d played it.

JL: It felt liberating singing someone else’s lyrics, so I really let rip with the performance. I’m bellowing, practically screaming down the mic, warping it with space echo. At the start of the first session, I’d given everyone the theme of 'escape' to work from, and this track seems to capture that perfectly.

What can you tell us about the rest of the songs that make up the album? Are there more close-to-ten-minute epics? Is it all quite psychy? Or given that the eight of you are from a variety of bands, is it a more eclectic mix?
BO: I think there’s a good mix. Before heading to Eigg we had been bouncing around ideas of what we should aim for in terms of sound and direction – with bands like Yo La Tengo, Caroline, and The Beta Band getting mentioned. With an eight-piece band, we wanted to keep the structures simple enough that people could jump in and out with their parts. There was a real focus on just playing what we enjoyed, or playing what we would like to hear at a festival. Making music for the joy of making music.

I feel like there was also an attempt for everyone to work in ways they hadn’t done before. I’ve certainly never written in this way in a group of so many people before, or just come into a session with nothing prepared and being just open to whatever ideas come through. I think that results in an album that – whilst you may hear touches and elements from the players’ other projects, it's very much its own thing. This first single is probably the most psychy element of the record, but there’s also more traditional song structures on there too. And on one song I got to scratch my Talking Heads itch, which I’m forever grateful for.

KL: Having the confirmed set at Green Man as a focal point really helped, I think. We wanted it to be a bit of a party band from the very start. 'Jamming' gives me awful flashbacks of university open mic nights so I really don’t want to use that word, but the improvisational nature of how we started the writing/recording process is definitely evident in the finished album. I think we’ve managed to make them into proper songs too though, phew.

JL: With the exception of Craig, jumping between synths and guitar on different songs, we all stayed on one instrument each throughout the recording process. Because it was such a short period of time to write and record, and it all happened in one room, the group found its 'sound' almost immediately. Stylistically the album feels really varied, to me, but the sound and energy of the band is consistent throughout. 

Image: Lost Map presents Weird Wave by Stephanie Gibson

The album was written and recorded in the space of a week at the Glebe Barn Hostel on Eigg. How did you manage to get it all done in such a short amount of time, and was there anything that didn't make the cut?
BO: Going into it we didn’t have much expectation beyond recording a handful of songs. I think if we’d just come up with enough to put out as a single or EP for our PostMap series, we’d have still been happy. But everyone worked really hard, and really quickly. We got so much covered in the first couple of days – just knocking out ideas, and recording everything so we could go back over it, pick out elements that we liked, and develop them. So there was a lot of stuff from the start of the week that were just ideas that didn’t get taken forward.

I think once it seemed feasible, around halfway through the week, that we could get enough material for an album, that definitely became the goal. It felt quite different from the VISITATIONS series we run, where acts come to Eigg and make music in response to or inspired by the island. It really felt like we were there to work. And play Bananagrams. It became a real focus for the week – starting off as an exercise to generate random word combinations for lyrics, and ending in a grudge match. We were still playing Bananagrams on the ferry home.

KL: I love Bananagrams. Considering how much Bananagrams we played it’s quite surprising how much material we came up with. It felt like a bit of a miracle to me at the time, especially coming up with so many ideas in those first few days. We split into smaller groups to start with and it feels like every one of those mini sessions resulted in something integral to the final thing. I’ve never written songs from scratch with a group before so it was really daunting to begin with – I think getting so much done initially gave everyone a real confidence boost.

JL: I had all this unsold non-alcoholic beer left over from last year’s Howlin’ Fling! – that definitely helped me keep focused, haha! I think if we’d spent the week getting wasted (which is often the temptation with a group of friends, especially on Eigg) we wouldn’t have come up with much.

You’re playing a run of shows as Weird Wave through the summer and beyond – what can people expect of the live show?

KL: I’ve just spent an evening with Leif making our stagewear. I won’t spoil the surprise but it did involve inhaling quite a lot of noxious fumes.

JL: We’re literally about to have our first rehearsal as a band ahead of this summer’s shows, so it’s gonna be interesting to see what shape the songs take. For my own part, not having to hide behind a guitar, I’m looking forward to jumping around the stage a fair bit. I’m conscious I don’t want this to be some over-polished, super-tight buzz band. The best thing about this project is that it doesn’t have to be anything, specifically – these songs might be just a starting point, or they might be the only music we ever make together in this way. Is this a new beginning, or a celebratory moment? We’ll find out, I guess. Either option is exciting to me.

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Astral Difficulties / Weird Wave is out now via Lost Map Records; Lost Map presents Weird Wave is released on limited edition transparent splatter vinyl on 6 Oct via Lost Map Records, with artwork by Oliver Pitt

Lost Map presents Weird Wave play Lost Map's Summer Party, Shacklewell Arms, London, 15 Jul; Howlin' Fling! Festival, Isle of Eigg, 4 Aug [SOLD OUT]; Summerhall, Edinburgh, 16 Aug; Green Man Festival, Wales, 17 Aug; Krankenhaus Festival, Muncaster Castle, Cumbria, 26 Aug; The Tunnels, Aberdeen, 3 Nov