Nick: Who are you and how’ve you been lately?

 

Led: I’m a random nobody known as Led and I make music for other random nobodies. I’m doing fine I guess. Busy and tired mostly.

 

Nick: Where and how did you grow up?

 

Led: I grew up in this southwestern part of England. My parents were south asian, so my upbringing was kind of all over the place to be honest. We lived in a working class household so things were pretty boring I guess. I was mostly sheltered and wasn’t allowed out that much until I was a bit older, so yeah it was fun!

 

Nick: How did that lead into making music?

 

Led: It's kind of weird actually because I was never really into music as a kid. I grew up loving films and I guess music was just there, you know, existing. My parents got me into Michael Jackson as a kid and I remember loving his music videos and the way he danced and all that. I remember trying to mimic the moonwalk and sucking at it. I just realized I went off-topic, my bad. I didnt get into making stuff until sometime after COVID I think, so early 2021. Before that, I had an obsession with wanting to be in a band which was really shit to be honest. Me and the other band members didn’t really get along that much. There was this one black friday sale and somehow my dad managed to get a Mac. I would often mess around on it and stuff but then I found Garageband and I just started making shit. It was just basic electronic-synthy-stuff to be honest. I think it was a year or two later that I got my first ever laptop which was given to me for the main purpose of “studying” but instead I looked for DAWs and stuff to download. There was a lot going on and I was isolated to be honest. I spent a lot of time by myself. The only time I went out was for school. I guess I kind of manifested all the boredom and stuff I felt back then into my music.

 

Nick: On new year's day, you dropped “Untitled lp” which just so happens to be the first 2024 release I checked out. Where did the cover art originate from? Congrats by the way.

 

Led: Thank you. To be honest, I didn’t have a plan for the album cover until maybe a day or a few hours before the release. Originally I wanted it to be the cover of the EP, “Untitled ep,” but I didn’t want to do the thing that a lot of artists do where they use the same album artwork as their singles and EPs. I made this one other design for it which ended up being the Bandcamp profile pic for Skin Damage. I think I just scrolled through my camera roll and found this old edit I made. It was a screenshot from this old Atari Teenage Riot concert I found, it had this gloomy-dark-greenish-nightvision like thing to it. I don’t know man, it looked cool!

 

Nick: What was your reasoning behind the predominantly droning plunderphonic atmosphere?

 

Led: I feel like the album was just a collage of everything I was feeling at the time. I never knew how to put that into music so I just messed around with samples. I wanted it feel like a soundtrack, in a way, for a film, as if each song was a scene from the film. I also wanted to “experiment” with the samples. You know…its weird because I don’t even know how to explain it to be honest.

 

Nick: Are there any music albums or even films that served as an inspiration for this album?

 

Led: Kinda? I guess. Mostly just Dean Blunt or Hype Williams, The KLF too. Argo Nuff has had some influence and I was originally supposed to collaborate with them but we kind of lost contact and never really settled on anything afterwards. In terms of albums, “Black is Beautiful” by Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland is a massive influence. I feel like for my next album, I’d be trying my best to recreate that album again. I feel like a lot of the films I sampled could be inspirations too, “Mauvais Sang” (1986), “Totally Fucked Up” (1993) etc.

 

Nick: Could you give me a sample breakdown on some of these tracks and why you used them in the ways you did?

 

Led: Of course. The sixth song, “Powerline,'' has this sample that plays around a minute and 30 into the track. It's actually a sample of David Bowie’s song, “Modern Love.'' I think I just took a random portion of it and looped it, then reversed it and added some reverb as well as pitched it down a bit, might’ve slowed it down too but I can't remember. I was just messing around with the sample to be honest, trying to see what sounds I can come up with. It makes sense in the context of the french film I sampled in the same track, in which the main character would later start running with the Bowie song playing in the background. I did the same with the other sample in the track, which is more electronic I guess. That one sampled that Crystal Castles song, “Vanished,” was the track I think, it was mainly me cutting up the sample and rearranging them to create a new melody or something. The second track, “Permanent,” is pretty small, an interlude, and it’s called that mainly because the guitar in it is sampled from this Radiohead B-side, “Permanent Daylight.” I’m surprised that not many people talk about that track. Any ways, I took the sample and slowed + pitched it down a bit. To fit with the atmosphere of the album, I added field recordings in the background to make it sound or feel like its being played in a scene from a film or something. I added a sample from this film called “Totally Fucked Up” (1993) in which a character briefly opens up about themselves in a videotape or something.

 

Nick: Interestingly, you released “Untitled ep” back in Sept 2023 which included a few tracks that would eventually end up on “Untitled lp,” however it included a few that didn’t make it onto the album. Why did you decide to cut those from the album or was that always the plan to only include them on the EP?

 

Led: Those were mainly just B-sides to be honest. I didn’t really think much of it to be honest. I’d say that even the tracks that did end up on the album are still different. The album versions of those tracks are more, “cleaner,” I guess, in terms of mixing and stuff.