Foto-© Daisy Ayscough & Tomos Ayscough

Das Debütalbum von My New Band Believe nahm seinen Anfang unter ungewöhnlichen Umständen. Während eines Aufenthalts in einem chinesischen Hotel litt Cameron Picton an einem plötzlich eintretenden Gefühl des Krankseins. In diesem delirierenden Zustand entstanden fragmentarische Bilder und Textfetzen, die später teilweise zu Songs ausgearbeitet wurden. Besonders präsent blieb ihm dabei der seltsame Ausdruck “My New Band Believe“, der schließlich zum Namen des Projekts und zugleich auch des diese Woche erscheinenden Debütalbums wurde.

Picton beschreibt den Namen selbst ambivalent. Er empfindet ihn gelegentlich als peinlich und kitschig und jenseits von grammatikalisch korrekt. Gleichzeitig erkennt er seine sonderbare Brillanz. Der Name stellt zwar den Autor in den Vordergrund, räumt aber auch die Bedeutsamkeit des kollektiven Charakters des Projekts ein. My New Band Believe ist eine bewusste Wiedervorstellung. Ein Neuanfang.

Als Bassist und gelegentlicher Frontmann der Band black midi war Picton zuvor Teil eines Ensembles, das für komplexe musikalische Strukturen und Erzählformen in kontrolliertem Chaos bekannt war. Nach der Auflösung von black midi im Jahr 2023 verfolgte er zunächst keine klaren Pläne für ein Solo- oder Bandprojekt. Es gab einige lose Überlegungen zur Zusammenarbeit mit verschiedenen Musiker:innen aus London, die jedoch nie richtig materialisiert wurden. Aus dieser eher offenen, nicht klar definierten Position heraus begann Picton schließlich mit Studioarbeiten, aus denen My New Band Believe hervorging.

Das Debütalbum von My New Band Believe bewegt sich durch unterschiedliche emotionale und thematische Ebenen. Die Stücke folgen dabei keiner linearen Erzählweise, sondern sind von einer assoziativen, teilweise fantastischen Logik geprägt. Picton arbeitete dafür mit einer Reihe von Musiker:innen wie Kiran Leonard, Caius Williams, Steve Noble, Andrew Cheetham sowie Mitgliedern von caroline zusammen. Mit seinem Debüt findet er nicht nur zu seiner Rolle als Frontmann, sondern verschmelzt widersprüchliche, fragmentarische und hysterische Ideen miteinander bis sie Sinn ergeben. Wir sprachen mit Pictron im Februar über sein neues Projekt und das „zweite“ Debütalbum.

In preparing for this interview, and reading the assets you mention that you want to “avoid talking about the record best discovered by yourself”. You sure do make my job hard here, hahaha.
That was just for the public

One of the reasons I think you’re right about this is because the record feels like a song cycle, perhaps even a suite, in which – for me – it felt a bit hard to make a hard distinction between individual songs. Do you look back on the recording as making an “album”, or were you more concerned with the individual songs?
Probably both, I think. Since there were like weeks that I would spend on one song um but then like obviously spend a lot of time sequencing it and listening through to the whole thing. Or to each song separately and like just being like: oh. Actually, this is way different on this song than that song and just trying to make sure that they were all at least to some degree standardized. But it kind of helps that it’s all acoustic instrumentation and that’s for pretty much every track. Even if it’s not kind of focused on it, it does return back to like some kind of acoustic guitar motif.

Yeah, I was going to follow up on that as well, because I think one of the reasons that it does feel so unison is because of this instrumentation and because of the intimacy that you achieve with it. I was wondering what made you want to pursue an almost entirely acoustic album?
Well, when I was a teenager, I really like was it really into like all this British folk revival stuff. And to a lesser extent, like the American version of that, like Leo Kottke and John Fahey and stuff. But I was really into like Bert Jansch, John Remble and Davy Graham, those kind of guys. Originally I was a guitarist as a teen, like guitar is my first instrument, and in the band (black midi) obviously started playing lots, I was just playing bass. During Covid I came back to acoustic guitar after, I don’t know, two or three years of not really playing it. And then any time that I had a break from touring I would just play acoustic guitar really rather than practicing bass which you can’t really do in your bedroom because you need an amp well you don’t necessarily need an amp but anyway. I just was way more interested in guitar and you can’t really do that much in the way of like songwriting on bass and all this sort of stuff and that’s kind of what I was interesting interested in. So when the band was breaking up I was like: well, I’ve got these acoustic guitars that I’ve picked up over the years. And I started doing solo shows at the Windmill because I wanted to have some kind of way of writing songs that wasn’t reliant on the band. So I started doing these solo shows and that was all acoustic and yeah.

Yeah, and you mentioned Bert Jansch, I hope I pronounced it, Bert Jansch maybe.
I think some people say Bert Jansch, Bert Jansch, I don’t know.

Yeah, it reads like a German name to me.
It does, and it’s Scottish.

Ah, Scottish, okay. Because I was wondering what made you, for instance, refer to him in the second track, In the Blink of an Eye. I know that the working title used to be ‘Bert Jansch’.
Oh yeah, basically, he’s got this song called Chambertin, and I just took the picking pattern from that and adapted it to a different tuning. Well, not adapted it, I just adapted it from my own use, and it’s in a different tuning and stuff so that the song doesn’t have that much relation to his song.

Another element of intimacy comes from the lyrical content, which seems to be drawing very close to home. In track 4 Love Story, I vividly recall the “washing of the rice” in order to make dinner, for example. It feels like such a bookmark within the album. Can you tell me a bit more about this song, and how it came to be?
Yeah, I mean, I guess that the song is quite normal after two kind of crazy songs structurally and texturally. So it’s a bit of a like moment for breath in the album, I guess. It was quite a quick thing to write. The chord progression is really simple. I didn’t really think that much about it when I was writing it and it’s also one of those things where you do something that’s alright to you. And then you play it and then someone’s like: Wow, what was that? Yeah, I love that song. That recording in particular compared to the rest on the album, I just had a pretty clear idea of how I wanted it to sound and how and the arrangement should be. Apart from this like little intro thing which I wasn’t sure about like what to do um uh so yeah. I feel satisfied with that one because it’s pretty much exactly how I wanted it to be.

And Georgia Ellery is listed as a co-writer on this song, can you tell me a bit about what she did?
Jockstrap have this song, I forgot what it’s called, and there’s one line in my song where it just references this song basically. There’s this person singing along to a song in the in the kitchen basically um and then it quotes the song. So she’s got a credit for the song being quoted.

I was very impressed in reading that the string orchestra sound that you’ve been able to achieve is actually recorded by individually stacking each take on top of each other. And it seemed, well, mad frankly to me to do it this way. I was really wondering, like, what made you want to pursue such a complex recording style?
Well, it wasn’t really done consciously. There was no rehearsal when we did the recording, so we just record everything and record any moment that the others are playing, even the rehearsals and stuff. So like it kind of just naturally ended up being that there would be 15 layers or something. And then when I got all the files I had to organize. I’d fiddle around and wonder: what does it sound like if I listened to every room mic from every take? And I was like, oh, this is sounds sick. You get like the best take of the quartet plus the room mics. I’ll just have all the layers of everything on top of each other and then just cut out any time they fucked up or all like fucked up in like a serious way because there’s obviously gonna be loads of little timing errors but that contributes to a kind of blurriness in the performance anyway which sounds good. Obviously if someone starts playing like something crazy really loud, then you just cut that out from that layer. And because there’s 15 layers, you can’t really tell the difference between 14 and 15 layers. So, yeah.

I want to talk about track 2 In the Blink of an Eye. You made me laugh quite a bit when reading your track-by-track info, as you write: “As I opened the door to leave the studio, drenched in sweat from my own body heat and lack of ventilation in the vocal booth, I was confronted with a van loading skinned pig carcasses into a larger, refrigerated truck. The number of CCTV cameras in London is 942,562, the number of CCTV cameras in Tokyo is 49,841.” I found it not just funny, but very illustrative of your phenomenological influence on the album. Everything seems to happen right in front of you and you seem to describe it in a stream of consciousness kind of way. At least that’s my interpretation. But is this like what are the weirdest influences that have made the cut on this album as a result of this?
Well, yeah, I only said Tokyo in the thing because basically the label asked me to write this track by track for Japanese audiences. So yeah, it’s not like a random inclusion of just like, oh yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, just for some context. But I don’t know what the random influence is. Well, there’s that obviously a lot of the lyrics came from being sick in China. We went to China and they put us in the most luxurious hotel rooms that ever been in my whole life and like probably ever will. It was like apartments that they were putting us in and we were we weren’t sharing them we would just have them to ourselves and like giant bath. Like a bath that was like as big as my bed. So the night before we went to like this place Xi’an which is where they have the terracotta warriors. We’d gone out after the show to get street food in Guangzhou and I had loads to eat and loads to drink and I had crayfish on the street which was extremely delicious. But the next day, we were traveling with this Chinese crew and the monitor engineer asked: what’d you do last night. I said: I got crayfish on the street. And he gave me a look and told me that they’re so dirty that’s. You’re gonna get sick. And then on the plane I feel myself getting sick um. So I ended up having a crazy fever for three days or two days that felt like three two days in Xi’an. I ended up being just about coherent enough to write a lot of my fever dreams down. So a lot of phrases and stuff came from that including the band name which is why it’s like that.

I heard that you cringe a little bit when seeing your own band name at the same time as seeing some kind of brilliance in it?
Yeah, yeah. But also conversely, every time someone says it’s a bad band name, it makes me think it’s an amazing band name.

One of your great musical loves seems to be for the arpeggio, which dominates your previous and current work. I was wondering which arpeggio – by any artist or composer – you would like to have thought of yourself
I don’t like arpeggios. I was trying not to do arpeggios on this but maybe it’s too much of a too much of a crux. I guess there’s some moments of arpeggio but it’s almost just supposed to be that there’s some other melody happening at the same time. Or there’s one in that ‘Heart of Darkness’ track. There’s some arpeggios but then that’s they’re not they’re not in time really so it’s supposed to be a bit more free. I think it’s just different because when you’re playing acoustic guitar and accompanying yourself you can just strum chords and that’s obviously fine. But to do it to be interesting you kind of have to do something arpeggio-ish. You know, unless you’re just like playing some counter melody at the same time as singing. Usually, the best way of accompanying yourself is arpeggios. So it just translates from doing the solo shows basically and like having come up with these arrangements where to make it not fucking boring for yourself you have to like do arpeggios basically.

But you wouldn’t say that you’re a lover of arpeggios?
No, no, no, no, definitely not. I’m a hater of arpeggios.

So what do you think will remain with you most from this album really?
Spending like 10 hours on like three seconds of music and then not still not being happy with it and then doing that 40 times. So a real perfectionist urge that is not yet satisfied in a way. It was never really a thing on black midi records. There we were never in control over the edit. we would just kind of be a bit like this or like, I don’t know. I would be like, this sounds shit. There’s obviously so much other stuff going on and you’re doing all the editing and the mixing process. So this time I had the control over the edit. I’m going to do exactly what I want. I just went crazy.

Is there any music that listeners should hear to prepare themselves for this album? Any recommendations maybe?
I don’t know, maybe they should listen to no music listen. To silence, yeah. Just try and find like a real silent environment like any kind of electrical hum, get rid of that. The chirping birds in the distance, get rid of that. Truly experience real silence, go to an anechoic chamber, sensory deprivation.