Manchester band Mandy, Indiana came through with one of most intriguing albums of the year in May, with I’ve seen a way.
The experimental noise quartet’s music is a reminiscent of the band Health, in that it’s music played by a rock band which often sounds nothing like it.
“We wanted to alter textures, create clashes, and craft those moments when what you’re expecting to happen never comes,” said producer/guitarist Scott Fair.
Adding to the discombobulation, is Valentine Caulfield’s French language vocals, whispered, growling, seeking and on ‘Drag [Crashed]’, addressing a lifetime of misogyny.
The band have been announced for a Dublin show at The Workman’s Cellar, on February 9th.
Tickets are €16.45 plus fees from Singularartists.ie.
About Mandy, Indiana
Recorded in caves, crypts, and shopping centres, Mandy, Indiana‘s debut album I’ve seen a way is everywhere at once: channelling the chaos that surrounds our everyday lives, their debut is an exquisitely rendered portrait that transcends genre into a expertly-executed vision that’s entirely new and adventurous.
A four-piece experimental noise band that formed out of the fertile Manchester scene, the group initially came to fruition after vocalist Valentine Caulfield and Scott Fair met sharing a bill with their former projects. Joined by Simon Catling (synth) and Alex MacDougall (drums), they have together generated a sound that is at once chaotic and precision engineered, where chance operations are manipulated into percussive geometries, and gnarled guitars sit in thickets of distortion around which vocals spin knots of lyrical repetitions. Their first recordings emerged around 2019, with a smattering of early singles released not long after, culminating in 2021’s critically acclaimed ‘…’ EP which saw the band draw early cosigns including a remix from Daniel Avery and support slots from The Horrors, Squid, and Gilla Band. The latter’s Daniel Fox mixed several of the tracks on debut album ‘i’ve seen a way’ alongside Robin Stewart (Giant Swan) and the album was mastered by Heba Kedry (Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bjork).
Mandy, Indiana draw on the broad sonic palette of experimental noise music, from drum machine snaps to white noise,; sprung synths and pulsing bass to lo-fi scuff. Theirs is music made from their place within the world, and is a sound that arrived fully-realised from their very first singles: “We have no agenda,” says Fair. “The music is chaotic and we draw from every genre we can think of. By our nature we are amorphous – this is often used pejoratively, but we consider it to be a wholly positive quality.” Though painstakingly crafted, where Mandy, Indiana thrives is the unexpected – and the resulting album sounds like nothing that has come before it.
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