Band To Watch: RIP Magic

The press bio for rising London quartet RIP Magic doesn’t have any words. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t say anything. The group of four multidisciplinary artists — drummer Beth Boswell-Knight, audio-visual artist Felix Bayley-Higgins, DJ and sound designer Marco Pini, and bassist Pedro Takahashi — opted to use visual language to describe their band’s warped, technicolored world. The Dropbox file of images include kids exploring a neon bouncy castle, stills from filmmaker Sissel Morell Dargis' hot air balloon documentary Balomania, cartoon devils, rainbow bursts of light, balloons from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Kim Kardashian with a sunglasses sunburn, Pope Leo XIV holding a vintage baseball bat on an airplane, and a facepainted image of Garfield. Their debut album 1,2,3 — which came out Friday, a little over a year after the release of their earliest singles "Loot" and "Dox" — is an amalgamation of bizarre samples, gauzy rhythmic trances, fuzzy vocals, and hypnotic noise. It evokes the kaleidoscopic grandiosity of groups like the Chemical Brothers or Animal Collective. Over the past year, they’ve attracted admirers including Tyler The Creator (who was onboard when all they had was demos), LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy (who produced their single “5words"), and Tame Impala (who they opened for in UK arenas this past spring). Whether it’s their unexpected sound choices or business pivots, the foursome is boldly creating a new kind of sound in our age of overstimulation. It’s the sound of rotting in your car on a building summer’s day: sort of sluggish and disorienting, but also strangely comforting. That’s evident on the low-riding tracks “11:30” and “Rock,” where Boswell-Knight’s drumming and Takahashi’s bass lock into a magical (pun somewhat intended) synchronicity. Across 1,2,3, samples take infinite detours, with buried screams and melted conversations mingling with laser synths, acrylic guitars, and jaunty drums. I couldn’t help but let out a laugh when I recognized the sample of Lissie introducing her “Pursuit Of Happiness” cover at the Great Escape 2010 that closes out album highlight “Loverboy.” It’s a strange and fun inclusion that doesn’t seem to nod at any profound meaning. I sat down with the band a couple of weeks before the album’s release. They were tired after a long day consumed by a photo shoot, but our conversation quickly turned to the world they’ve built around RIP Magic. Listen to 1,2,3 and read our conversation below.Is it hard to balance your sound live with all the samples? I'm curious on your approach to intentionality regarding what comes through very clear and what's more obscure. Even on the album, there’s a fuzzy element to the vocals, where it purposefully sounds like you can't really tell what is a sample and what's not, or maybe the vocals feel closer connected to the samples because of that veil of noise. MARCO PINI: I think we tried for a long time to figure out where the track sits, because we're a big fan of using track as a sort of element, because we're quite influenced by DJ culture. We all sort of do DJing as well. So we wanted to sort of try and fuse that with the band elements and ride the track a bit.FELIX BAYLEY-HIGGINS: People shy away from that quite a lot. When we first set out to do live shows, the onus was on approaching the whole thing in a way where we're just able to have the most fun on stage, rather than pure technical performance.PINI: I mean, these guys provide the majority of the live band swing.PEDRO TAKAHASHI: Maybe it sounds a bit punchier live as well. Some of the songs, there's a different character sometimes when you play them live. Certain elements are more pronounced than the recorded versions, which can be a bit headphoney sometimes. There's more attack to certain songs.PINI: Some people thought we were quite more of a hardcore band, actually, when we first started playing with the album. That wasn't intentional. I think just when you get a chance to play live, you can go as crazy as you want.TAKAHASHI: You're a bit excited.PINI: It's the only opportunity you get to really do that in any sort of setting. Do you have specific artists that inspire like how you come to the stage or present yourself, or that feel like maybe inspired like a certain wildness?TAKAHASHI: I grew up going to a lot of hardcore shows, and being in that environment. And in the live setting that comes out maybe a little bit more, the wildness of that. Definitely more on the fun end of the spectrum, obviously.BAYLEY-HIGGINS: We're just gassed to be playing with each other.PINI: I think it's no artist in particular, but I think audiences really respond well when you are genuinely having some sort of catharsis on stage. Especially with dancing, I almost get more inspired by looking at dance stuff because that's such a mad expression of emotion that's unintelligible.Do you imagine how people will dance to your music when you're writing it?BAYLEY-HIGGINS: Kind of, yeah. Or we'll dance to it as a way of figuring out what the groove should be.PINI: It’s very zonal with it. We really go in and we don't really know what's happened in that moment where we're making the music and we sort of come out. We literally will probably do that for hours.BAYLEY-HIGGINS: We’ve had discussions where the swing should be, like this rather than like this. PINI: We talk a lot about swing, a lot about rhythm. When did you realize that you wanted to play together?PINI: It came from like a vibe-based thing, in the sense that we didn't really know each other as well.BAYLEY-HIGGINS: We met to do the band.PINI: We met to do the band. Me and Felix wanted to — he was doing a lot of visual work, and I was doing a bit of music stuff, but not in any professional musician way. Me and Felix had been working on a lot of art stuff, and we wanted to make a band as a project, as we would any other sort of art project. So we just chose people that we thought were really vibey. And then I guess that in some ways informed the music, because I think people's energies, people's vibes carry through into the way that they perform the music. That's maybe how the language is just formed through deciding to all come together and do something. I don't know. Don't know if that answers your question.You were more comfortable with each other as friends, as opposed to being like this is like a sound that we agree on. PINI: Yeah, totally, totally. First. But also because I think we just respected everyone's different visual medium, because we're all from mainly visual backgrounds. Beth’s a photographer and Pedro’s a filmmaker-director, and I think we came together firstly through mutual respect of the visual medium. So maybe that's helped how we can talk about music in a very naive way. I don't know if this is common, or I actually have never seen this done with any band. But the visual bio that you guys made is very unique and really cool. I would love to hear more about your own individual relationships with images and how that multidisciplinary approach informs the songwriting. BAYLEY-HIGGINS: [Laughs] I don't know. I sort of started out, like when we were like 22 or something, Me and Marc were in a project that we did together, which was like an improv thing, and I was doing playing with video as an instrument, basically. As he was saying earlier, I don't have any training or anything musically, so I think it provides an angle into the whole thing, which is you're sort of liberated from trying to be a good musician, trying to like do things which follow music theory guidelines, or you're free to make your own metrics and stuff. So that's the main way having an output as a visual thing, it allows you to feel confident in taking a different angle into making music. TAKAHASHI: Yeah, I guess like Marco and you were saying, all of us sort of have a visual background, studied or trained in that sort of area. For me personally, I've made music videos mainly and commercials and stuff like that, everything's very image-based. It’s quite interesting coming into this band, working in a certain aesthetic, and then it's almost the opposite of what I've been making. But it feels like taking the brakes off a little bit. It's training in one thing, and then you have to open up to this RIP world. We’ve said this in a few interviews, but we all know what an RIP vibe is. It’s a certain intangible sensibility that runs through imagery that appeals to us. I think definitely having a visual backgrounds has helped the band move forward and not just be a music-based project. It's a universe more than just music. PINI: It widens the goalposts of what you can do if you can explain something — also with the press thing that you said with the bio, we've always been like, "Well, why can't you just do that?" Pretty much every decision has been made like, "Oh, it'd be really cool to do this. Ah, but wait, no, you can't do that." And then it's like, "Well, fuck it. Yes, you can and we should because..." and basically trying to be confident with the stranger ideas of how to approach music because we're not confined to any training or anything learned. BAYLEY-HIGGINS: It’s a huge part of how people receive music, and it doesn't make any sense to not take hold of those handles as well, as something to be creative with. I've never understood the thing of — I mean, I get it for certain acts, but it just wouldn't ever make sense to me to do the music and then hand off everything else. The way that people receive something is as much a part of the thing as the content itself. You know?PINI: I think it's funny you say that. When I was younger, I would force myself to get into albums I like the cover of, like really, really try to like the music, and actually, a lot of that music has ended up being maybe some slightly more experimental stuff that then informs what the music is. So it’s so important, I think, to be guided by your visual sense.TAKAHASHI: So many of my favorite albums, I can’t remember who I was talking about this with today, but like going to HMV when I was a kid, and you see an album cover, like seeing the first Vampire Weekend album and not knowing what the music really sounded like, but you're drawn to it for certain reasons. BAYLEY-HIGGINS: Yeah, yeah. TAKAHASHI: And then you end up liking the thing. I don't think imagery and music are divorced from each other. BETH BOSWELL-KNIGHT: Yeah I think it’s very much like anti-don't judge a book by its cover. We're very like — well, I am especially like, "I'm going to judge everything by the visuals." I think that's how we work. Everything’s tied together. I feel like you can know that you're going to be into something just by the visual language.BAYLEY-HIGGINS: Or be confused by it, and then you're drawn to it for that reason. Like I remember growing up, as you're discovering different areas of culture, it's like, like I don't know, with Vampire Weekend, I’d never seen like that visual language before, and so then you're drawn into what the sound, which is like harmonizing with that, would be.Do you take into account what people will project onto you as an act?PINI: We've learned to maybe try and not care about as much as we possibly can. I think it's a natural human instinct to worry about or expect what people are going to think. But then we're always just like, "Well, we like this. Let's just go for what we are taken by or disturbed by."BAYLEY-HIGGINS: That's the only guiding force you have, really. If you try and get into preempting that, then you're kind of cooked.What was the conversation regarding the album cover, then, for 1,2,3?BAYLEY-HIGGINS: There was a bunch of images. We just got savaged time after time for a bunch of images that we wanted to license to use for the cover that we couldn't license, and I guess they were more in the domain of what you would think about as being a RIP-type visual language. And then actually I think having a line drawing as the cover would not have been something that we would have expected. PINI: We both had late night 3 a.m. [epiphanies] in bed, like, "Oh it needs to be black and white. It needs to be devoid of as much information as possible. It needs to be a mainly white space so people can fill it with their own color." I think because all the singles have been photos that we very much would consider the RIP world, it's something quite nice about extracting that for the album. We've also commissioned loads of different artists that we respect and loads of different mediums to make a version of the cover for each song, which yeah, even to get to do stuff like that is quite fun. This is fun, isn't it? BAYLEY-HIGGINS: I think it's still a boxing glove image somehow, or it still has a punch to it. It's more of a framework rather than a fixed meaning. Do you know what I mean? For people to take one reading from, it’s more opened-ended. It is interesting how it sounds like there's this tension between having a definition of who you are, but then also constantly rebelling against it, and the limitations that are imposed on you. And it's a silly question to ask what you mean by a RIP Magic vibe, but I am curious how you would put it into words outside of just intuitively knowing. PINI: I think that's why there's the image [bio]. That’s the whole point. Well, there isn't. It's just —BAYLEY-HIGGINS: We when we had the call with our press people about what would you like to write in the bio, it didn't make sense to try and land that in words, and I think that remains the case. PINI: It’s not like we're above words. [Laughs] You just don't want to fall into the formulas of — there is a formula in music, about the way it's constructed. I think we just want to make stuff a bit more fun. Maybe that is a bit of the RIP vibe, just playing a bit more with that kind of stuff.With the visual bio, I was trying to connect all the dots, and all I could come up with was a lot of balloons and inflatable things.PINI: Oh wow! Yeah, you've hit the nail on there. We definitely looked at a lot of inflatable images over this album. BAYLEY-HIGGINS: [Laughs].PINI: I don't know why, but it all started with watching videos of the Macy's parade and all these crazy massive floats —Oh my god, have you seen the ones where they deflate?PINI: Yeah, where they pop? Yeah. It's crazy. But there's something really amazing about the idea, that I think Felix and I both really got intom is this absolutely surreal and massive inflatable image parading through city streets.BAYLEY-HIGGINS: There's a brashness about them, which feels somewhat resonant of the attitude of a lot of the music maybe.I want to know more of how it's integrated into the song process. Do the images actually inspire the sounds that you want to translate, or is it you make a song, and then you're trying to find an image that captures the essence of the song?PINI: It’s never finding an image for a song.BAYLEY-HIGGINS: Yeah, that feels like a very boring way of approaching it. PINI: I think we just naturally all share images with each other all the time, and then when it comes to writing the music, Felix might just pull up an image, like, "Oh my God, this reminds me of this," and I’ll be like, "Exactly." And then we follow that vibe until the track feels like it's accomplished. It’s in our minds, but it helps to define the sonics. BAYLEY-HIGGINS: The image is a way of trying to explain what you can't articulate. You know what I mean? There would be an energy about a photo that feels it needs to be more in the song or whatever.PINI: We also talk about it as joints. It's like another way we can quantify it. It's like, "This is like a car chase joint," we've said that in a lot of interviews. But we'll also talk about it and be like this feels like this mood-setting. This feels like — you know, like the old Batman: The Animated Series, City Street kind of thing. Stuff like that. How did you approach the album itself? Were you thinking in terms of, this is your first album, and this is like what you want the RIP Magic sound to like be? Was there a structure you were trying to follow in order to keep it one thing?BAYLEY-HIGGINS: It definitely didn't start out that holistic. It was more just like, "Let's just like make songs from a place and see what happens." But then I guess towards the end you get a bit more macro on it. PINI: We clocked on pretty early to what the vibe was, and we made 10 songs over two weekends pretty much, and a lot of those became the album.BAYLEY-HIGGINS: You can get into an overthinking process, but we're quite into first thought, best thought. A lot of the takes, most often, the actual take where you're figuring out what the part is, is the take which goes in the final mix. PINI: Same with [Bayley-Higgins and Takahashi] as well. When we do the demos, we fold in — obviously, the writing process and live are weirdly quite different things, I'd say. But they really interconnect in the sense that when we're rehearsing for live, how to make the songs live from the demo, then that gets folded into the final track. These guys always use the first intuition that they have on the drums and bass parts.TAKAHASHI: There's been a few instances where the demo will exist, bring it to me and Beth, and then we play it live as well. And then through playing it live, you understand certain logical places where those parts can develop, and then they end up informing what ends up in the final song. To Marco’s point, the recorded and live elements inform each other and make a nice marriage.PINI: I would say in everyone having their own musical language, it's often vastly different to what we've done in the demo, but it's way better. It's really interesting hearing when you've written pieces of music how these guys see it and perform it, in ways that are totally new, which is really an exciting part of the process.BAYLEY-HIGGINS: Yeah, there was a song on the album, which was in a demo a dub song, and it ended up as a hardcore-ish song. That's weirdly one of the most exciting [things], just seeing Beth and Peds instantly sniff out where the space is in the song, or what to snake around.In an instance like that, do you have an editing process?PINI: I think we're heavy editors. I would say first thought, best thought, and then a long process of editing, which I actually find interesting going off that last point and what Felix said about the band snaking around the tracks — you could feasibly do that forever. You could feasibly keep adding bits where there's space left, and that's what we do, I would say. And then sometimes things get deleted, and it's just pasted over. It's like a collage, and it just keeps getting pasted over like a wall with fly posting. One gets ripped down and you put something else there. Sometimes to the very last moment. Like with “Stadium Drive,” we battled over that song for like two years, and I just added this vocal sample that we call like “The Billboard” that just overtakes the track, is really the top layer of the track and just interrupts it with this female vocal sample that totally changes the the lay of the land. I think we're quite into doing that. There's been many tracks where Felix will throw on some crazy extra bit, or Beth and Peds will randomly, in a jam, add some bit. And it's just like, "Whoa," and that totally shifts it. It's hard to know when to stop, obviously.TAKAHASHI: It's interesting, playing the songs live and hearing the final album versions. Because like you're saying, these songs can just keep on developing. For me, when I listen to the album, these feel like versions of the songs that exist somewhere in the ether. You can keep on evolving in this thing, but we've captured it in those forms on this album. There's still some songs we play live differently to what they are in the recorded version. Yeah, it's interesting how you relate to those songs and how they exist in your head. You play them differently as a way to keep it fun or exciting, or just because it's hard to translate compared to what you recorded?PINI: There's certain songs that you can consider as almost more improvisational songs. At least in my case, with the vocals for a song like “Slacker,” they're just different vocals every time. It’s almost like a performance thing. What are you getting out? You have free rein to go mental. And like every night is going to be different. And I think, I mean, it's the same with us all I would say. BOSWELL-KNIGHT: And definitely the same with drums. Sometimes something will just come out of me that I didn't even plan on doing that just felt right in the moment, a random accent or fill. BAYLEY-HIGGINS: Yeah we'll always be in rehearsal and be like, "That was sick, what was that? And you're like I don't know. [Laughs].PINI: It's very intuitive. I mean I guess we don't really give ourselves credit enough for that. Every show is quite different. We do a lot of improvisation. Maybe that's the joy of playing along to a track because you've got your tempo set and you've got your sections set. But you can really relax into that a bit, which is different to other improvisation, Grateful Dead and stuff. Grateful Dead with with a sort of DJ underneath. [Laughs].It's funny because one of my notes that I wrote down was like “jam band?” Because there is something very jam band about your sound, but I don't mean it in a derogatory way. It feels very impressionistic and expansive.BAYLEY-HIGGINS: It's funny because I do think there's that moment of it, but then I think we do put a big onus on making sure that everything — I think there was definitely a desire for the album to feel quite lean as well. Every part that's in there has its own two legs to stand on. I mean, to be honest, one of the early conversations me and Marco had when we were gonna start something new was for it to be very strict, kind of bare bones and not feeling indulgent with all the bells and whistles. If something has a place, it's because it's earned it. When was the album finalized compared to when most of the songs were started?PINI: It was in the summer. We just knew we had to hand it in. We basically did a big old tour of LA to try and find a producer who would add that sort of glue for the whole thing. And then every producer told us — because I guess we are kind of producers ourselves in a very nonchalant, untechnical way [laughs] — that we didn't need one, that you guys know exactly what you want. The sound has its own sort of glue. So we just worked with an engineer to basically mix it and do little extra little bits. That process itself was another editing process.BAYLEY-HIGGINS: It's never made sense to us the idea that you write the song and then you produce it and then you mix it and then you master. Those stages are all interchangeable. But it took us a while to be able to figure it out. That's why it was sick just working with Bob [Mackenzie], our engineer, because we were able to fluidly go between all of those stages in like 10 minutes. PINI: And it's expensive, man. And you work with a producer and you've got to do it in a week, and it's just done. That's a good way of putting a marker of place and time. But if you are really, really concerned with tracking and production, and it just doesn't work for this project. You don't think to do it that way.Intuition has been mentioned a lot. Is that something that you learned to trust or naturally are confident in?BAYLEY-HIGGINS: For me, anyway, it's the only thing to go off. Do you know what I mean? I'm not going to sit there and calculate what the best chord progression is. It's based off the feeling of the thing. I can't really see another way of working, to be honest. PINI: I think that also comes a bit from our arts school background. I think everyone here is both incredibly obsessive and incredibly creative and really into different influences, music and movies, and I think wanting to just desperately make. I remember sitting on my bed when I was 12 or something, thinking, "I would love to just be able to make a song, something that you can call a song, just so I can just do that," and then following that just makes — [laughs]. Now it's sitting here, and that was just one. It’s a need to create something, like I need to be able to do this because that it’s just so crazy, magical, cool.BOSWELL-KNIGHT: It’s also a way of us connecting to the world as well, being able to translate how you're feeling. It's an accumulation of all of the years of us growing up and just picking up on our interests and soaking it all in, and then it comes out in this crazy puzzle of all of that. TAKAHASHI: Part of intuition, for me, the biggest red flag for any artist is like when someone says, “Oh, I've got an idea for this thing. I want to make a film like that. I want to make a song like this.” It's like you're already sort of confining yourself to certain constrictions. Often it's an intangible thing that maybe you don't even understand yourself. It's this thing that appeals to me, or I'm drawn to for some unknowable reason, and that often ends up being the truest thing you can do. That's this thing about intuition, the moment you start overthinking that, I think you’re already starting to fuck yourself over a bit. PINI: It's interesting you say that because I had a great lesson in songwriting by copying specific songs. For a while, I went through a period, as you said, trying to make a song sound like, and that’s just an easy brief isn’t it? Then through that process you learn —BAYLEY-HIGGINS: You learn what you like and don’t like. PINI: That's probably why this project's done better [laughs], because I guess the influence, the intuition is coming from not specific songs or genre maybe.BOSWELL-KNIGHT: If you’re journaling and you start writing, even if it is a basic thing, just by writing that, it opens up a new landscape that you never would have thought of if you hadn’t started with the simple things.Do you have your own creative rituals or ways to open up that pathway?[Everyone laughs.]PINI: Can't say mine. No, no—BAYLEY-HIGGINS: I feel like it's like a 24-hour thing.PINI: I do think it's a struggle. The problem with ritual is life gets in the way, and the best thing to do is to try and keep the ritual, but it's so difficult. And I think maybe it's through the difficulties in trying to keep stuff up that is maybe what gives you a little bit of that magic. BAYLEY-HIGGINS: To be fair, the way that me and Marc write a lot of the demos initially is we charge up for a month or a couple of months in London, and then go to Hastings, and we're just there for five days in one room, locking in. It takes going away. Is there something specific about Hastings, or is it just like the act of getting out of London? BAYLEY-HIGGINS: It’s that flat —PINI: That’s one thing, but yeah, it's about architecture, weirdly. It's about space design. That flat is my mum’s — BAYLEY-HIGGINS: It’s one room. PINI: It's one room, kitchen here, table here where we put all the gear. There's a sofa here, a TV here, and a balcony overlooking the sea here. That's the whole flat. Obviously, what, two bedrooms here. So we are in that one room for five days, and we can easily shift between watching a film, watching trash TV, watching Beast Games, watching Naked And Afraid. And cooking is another form of creativity. And then sometimes just locking in. The ability to have almost a basic living situation, so you can sort of live your normal — you know, eating, watching stuff, and then being able to go into the tunes. It was like a residency, but it does really seem to be the only way we could do it.I'm curious what your teenage selves would think of this album, or the music you make.BAYLEY-HIGGINS: Yeah, that's a great question. I think you'd be kind of gassed.PINI: I mean, all the stuff that's happened this year, and the year before, it's been kind of beyond wildest dreams shit. TAKAHASHI: I don’t know about the album, but I think the experience of the band — I've said this to you guys before, but us being like slightly older, for the longest time I wanted to be in a band. And then the fantasy of that, and now it's living, maybe, what we were seduced by as teenagers. It's quite surreal, existing in this whirlwind moment.BAYLEY-HIGGINS: I'd say that's quite a big guiding force, to be honest. PINI: Yeah, totally. BAYLEY-HIGGINS: It's doing the shit that your 16-year-old self would be hyped off of.PINI: I think we always look at each other like, "We've made a fucking album," like, what the fuck? We've actually made an album. It's a crazy, crazy thing. That would feel very lucky if we'd be able to do it.BAYLEY-HIGGINS: I'm excited for our friends from when we were teenagers to hear it.PINI: Yeah, because they've all been along for the ride.BOSWELL-KNIGHT: I think it's so easy to get swept up when you're doing all this super cool stuff that you have to zoom out and really appreciate it and think about yourself 10, 15 years ago. Then it really sinks in because it's so easy to get caught up in the stressful side of things and how fast-paced everything has been.TAKAHASHI: It's the first endeavor where my parents can understand it a bit, because it’s a level of success and proof in tangible terms that you're playing with Tame Impala at the O2 or some shit. Whereas before that, it was like, "You're in a band now, good luck with that."PINI: I’m just waiting for someone to go, "You've been pranked. Your music is shit." [Laughs.] I don't think any of us really expected this to be a thing. I think we are all such big fans of music, and maybe that's why it worked.BAYLEY-HIGGINS: I've got a lot of friends who have just stopped making stuff, but you have to just keep doing it. TAKAHASHI: You have to be tenacious about it. PINI: Even if people hate the album, we love the album [laughs], and we enjoy playing it. I don't know if we're necessarily even trying to get to any sort of goal. We've just accidentally along the way done a lot of stuff that we always wanted to do.TOUR DATES:11/07 - Bristol, UK @ The Mount Within // Simple Things11/12 - Nightclub 101 - NYC11/18 - Los Angeles, CA @ Oblivion11/20 - Mexico City, MX @ Corona Capital1,2,3 is out now via section1.