Lanark Artefax’s abstract, idiosyncratic sound design is making an Impact

There’s a tendency for some of the most experimentally inclined musicians to come from somewhat remote regions. Aphex Twin and Luke Vibert hail from the wilds of Cornwall; Jlin and Holly Herndon grew up in landlocked US states away from the bustling scenes of each coast. It’s almost as if the boundless setting fuels an approach to making music that’s unconstrained and liable to spiral out at unpredictable angles.

Glasgow’s Southside, where Calum MacRae aka Lanark Artefax has lived all his life, is a more metropolitan location than those, but the 23 year old producer has still found it to be a liberating environment to hone his craft. “In Glasgow you've got the advantage of being a wee bit out of the way, and because of that we do our own thing,” he says. “I'm not big into clubbing, and I think I'm one of the few people in the city that makes the type of music that I make. In Glasgow you get the space to do that, to work on your own.” Stylistic singularity shines through in the abstract, uncoiling music MacRae makes.

As a child he recalls long car journeys listening to punk and other music his parents were into, developing an interest in “shit indie” through to his teenage years. A school friend passing him Aphex Twin’s ‘Druqks’ at the age of 14 marked a turning point in his tastes: he began delving into electronic music, and sneaking into LuckyMe and Numbers nights at the Ballers Social Club and Sub Club, getting exposed to all kinds of sounds spanning dubstep to aquacrunk. Taking piano lessons through his teens also informed his interests, with classical music remaining a strong source of inspiration on his present output.

While at Bloc Festival in 2015 he became friends with the Cong Burn collective, founded by Manchester-based artist John Howes, and put out his debut release ‘Windox Rush’ through the label arm in 2015 - an EP that he sees as “transitional” towards his current sound.

Releases on Lee Gamble’s UIQ and Tasker’s Whities have since followed, showcasing an electrifying style of making fragmented yet richly personal music that marks out Lanark Artefax as one of the most exciting young producers in the UK right now. And he’s only just graduating from an English Literature degree at Glasgow University this month.

We spoke to Lanark Artefax the day after the UK general election took place this month, and after overcoming our political fatigue (“I think since I've turned 18 I've voted in two referendums, which will probably become a third, and I've voted in like five fucking elections”) we got down to discussing warped music, storm-chasing death cults and a compulsion for Keanu Reeves. Check out an exclusive Lanark Artefax mix, tracklist & Q+A below.

Are Alasdair Gray and Lanark an influence on your work? Where does your artist name come from?

Lanark is one of my favourite books and I love Alasdair Gray - he's obviously a big figure here. He's an artist who gets overlooked because he does his own thing. He's from the city and stayed in Glasgow, so he often gets lumped in with Scottish Literature rather than English Literature.

He wasn't a huge influence on the name; it was more or less that Lanark is probably my favourite word ever. One of the most common destinations on the trains in Glasgow Central Station is Lanark. Since I was a child I’ve been walking through the train station and all you hear is “Lanark”, “Lanark”, “Lanark”. It's a word that stuck with me. To me it sums up my experience of being in Glasgow in some way. My family come from Lanark so even though I haven't spent a lot of time there it's a place I have an affinity with.

Can we talk about Keanu Reeves - you use his image across various sites online. What does he mean to you?

It's a similar thing; since I was a child I've developed this bizarre compulsion. It's not really to do with him as an actor or as a person, it's just to do with his image. I locked onto it as being representative of some kind of order or structure that I could use. It was a bit of an accident that I started using it with music and now I can't shake it! It's like in my music: I put what you might call 'tags' into tracks, and if I make a track and don't include them it doesn't sound like me, and the tracks aren't finished until I've done that. So I've inadvertently developed these tags or signatures that I can't escape. I've no choice in the matter at this point.

What draws you towards warped, abstract sounds?

It's a way of working that I've developed where I start from a position where I try not to do anything predictable. I prefer to sit down without having an exact idea in my head about what I want to write; I usually just let something emerge. A good way of doing that is to always try and position yourself outside of various rhythms, tempos, time signatures or keys. If you start outside of this you can find something interesting to work with.

I find abstract music interesting in that it’s warped and alien sounding, and yet at the same time feels rich with human emotion. I always have a kind of inner lucidity when listening to it.

Yeah, I think with club-orientated music it's quite hard to have that human element because there are formulas and structures that are necessary to the way that it works and the language it uses. More abstract and deconstructed music lets you pick all that apart and you can do something else with it. A big thing for me is the John Cage quote: “Every something is an echo of nothing." It makes a lot of sense with the music I make. I'm always trying to point towards a thing that I can't describe, and the music is trying to articulate something that is impossible to articulate. With abstract music you can get closer to representing that.

You’ve cited Lee Gamble as a prominent influence on your work. Did it feel like a significant validation when UIQ locked you in for an EP?

It was cool because I did it in an old skool way; I basically just emailed him a bunch of demos. I caught him at Bloc in 2015 and his set was the best thing I saw all weekend. I didn't really know what he was playing and I wasn't that aware of UIQ at the time, but I came away from it thinking that whatever he was playing is the type of stuff I want to make. When I got back to Glasgow I found his label; it just so happened that I'd been working on some stuff that I thought might fit, and I was confident he would like it, so I sent it over and he quite quickly said that we should do a record. He was the first artist that I had a lot of respect for that had heard my music - I think he was first person other than a couple of my mates to actually hear anything I'd made - so that was definitely validating.

UIQ is underpinned by experimentation. Does it enable complete artistic freedom in your output?

Yeah, totally. It's also a really young label. [Lee Gamble's] got a particular vision for it, and I think he's got big ideas about what it should be doing, but he certainly didn't push me in any direction and we didn't spend that much time talking about the tracks. I can't speak for anyone else on the label but with me it felt like he was happy to just let me do what I wanted. It was very straightforward, free and open.

How did you get you first link up with Whities?

Somebody introduced me to Nic [Tasker, Whities founder] because they were chatting to him about doing a record. He said if I was ever working on anything to send it over, and after putting the UIQ record together with Lee Gamble we got chatting again. I had a couple of things that I didn't feel were suitable for UIQ because they were a bit dancier, so I thought Nic might like them and sent them through. Those were the early demos of the Whities release. From there we became good friends; I was quite a big fan of the label already and he had a pretty good sense of what he wanted to do with it. I went down to London and met with him and the designer Alex McCullough and felt really good about it.

The EP on Whities conceptually tells the story of a youth/death cult of storm chasers, which is explored through its visual accompaniments. What inspired this theme?

After I did the UIQ release, people felt like it was cold, industrial, fractured. I didn't really see it like that: I thought it was emotional, and that was my intention. The music I was making after that also felt quite emotional, and not very postmodern. It felt like it had some big idea behind it. I didn't quite know what it was but I wanted the record to reflect that in some way. It just so happened that when I went down and met with Nic and Alex, he said he couldn't stop thinking about storms, hurricanes and natural disasters when he was listening to the music, but also this kind of 'youthful urgency'. At that meeting we came up with this idea about inventing a cult.

We didn't want to do a concept record because that often turns out really lame and shit, but we thought we'd build a bit of behind the scenes mythology and then loosely shoot it with the artwork and promo. That way people could get a sense of it themselves and it could grow into something that's non-descript but still conveys this idea. Hopefully the music will then take on that significance without being burdened by it.

Do you see yourself continuing to work conceptually in this way in future?

Definitely. I'm a big fan of Oneohtrix Point Never and I loved when he was doing the promo for his album that he created that fake band Kaoss Edge - that loosely inspired the Whities promo. The projects I'm doing in the next few months are more like art installation type projects which are in a similar conceptual vein, and I'm working with visual artists and some writers. So that's a direction I think I'll look at more.

You did a show on NTS featuring spoken word monologues you’d penned threaded through the music, which was quite conceptual and art rooted. Do you see your music as club music?

Probably not. I do in the sense that clubs are one of the few spaces that people would play that type that of music and you can go to hear it loud, but I don't really spend a lot of time in clubs or go to a lot of nights, so I don't make music with a club environment in mind. But I do make it with the idea of it being played loud and it being powerful. It's inspired in some way by club music, but I wouldn't necessarily call it that. 'Touch Absence' on the Whities record is quite a dance-y, clubby tune, but that wasn’t deliberate, it just kind of happened.

Do you DJ out?

I do a little bit; it's kind of alien world to me. I do enjoy it, and I'm hopefully going to do a bit more of it. But I don't really listen to dance music so it's hard to DJ when you don't play dance music often. Hopefully I'll be playing out at specific events where it's more appropriate to play more abstract stuff.

I get booking requests come in and I'm trying to carve a bit of a path out that way. It seems like there's a bit more of an appetite at the moment for alternative type nights and they seem to be cropping up more and more. So hopefully I'll find appropriate things to do.

Would you do a live show?

I'm working with some people to put that together at the moment; hopefully it will be ready over summer.

What is your next big goal?

I'm concentrating on some projects that will come together at the end of the year, so that's the focus currently. And then I'm trying to get the next release together and find a home for it.

'Whities 011' is out now, order it via Boomkat

Patrick Hinton is Mixmag's Digital Staff Writer, follow him on Twitter

Tracklist
Pleq & Philippe Lamy - Sans Titre Une (Christopher Bissonnette remix)
Unintentional ASMR - Relaxing Neurological Exam
Blesses Initiative - Delirium juice and Taste of jewelry
Veritasium - Seeing the Invisible: Schlieren Imaging in SLOW MOTION
Unfavorable Semicircles - Ovni Noir
Lee Gamble - Voxel City Spirals
t.e.s.o. - box()
Second Woman - II E/P
Peder Mannerfelt - I Love You
Sim Hutchins - Some Men (me) Just Want to Watch the World Burn
WINTERMUTANT - Defined By a Hollow (Lanark Blockchain Mix)
Eaves - Manual Children
Coil - Careful What You Wish For