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Hackney, London based pop production duo 0171 (aka Joe Bedell-Brill and Georgie Hoare) share new 5 track EP Welcome Back To My Channel.
Discussing the EP the pair comment "At times we’d been feeling like we were losing ourselves, forgetting to be nice to ourselves, We wrote most of it in a cottage surrounded by sheep in Wales with no running water, and it did end up being a form of therapy for us - taking us from our lowest point in music to a place of positivity and love."
Title track and the EP’s opener, "Welcome Back To My Channel" affirms the notion of positivity early, with the lyrics lifted entirely from ASMR videos routed in reassurance. "There is something scary about a stranger whispering so many clichés directly into your ear, as if this could solve the complex and confusing feelings you might be having. But these videos are also a genuine reaching out of positivity and love across the cold internet. We wanted this song to have the same effect, an expression of love to listeners and to ourselves."
"The Utopians" is the EP's emphatic showpiece; an ironic trip through a nonexistent paradise, written about the comfort Joe and Georgie find in making music in a world of their own. "It’s the feeling of running away together, full of defiance and anxiety. It’s upbeat and warm, and we find ourselves on familiar ground, falling back into the nostalgic sounds of turn-of-the-millennium garage / dance pop we’ve grown up listening to. The two final lines of the middle 8: ‘Is this enough? / The final beat of every love’ ended up feeling like the centre of the whole EP. The whole confusing mess of doubt mixed in with care and love."
Closing track ‘The Basics Are Coming Back’ opens with an irrepressibly danceable synth line, as the song unfolds to suggest new beginnings... "It’s meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek," the pair say. "But we love that way lyrics gain depth as you repeat them in a song. Whenever we listen to it the line takes on a different meaning. In a way this song feels like the beginning of a fresh start - a return to positivity. But then it’s also about the way we obsessively chase the fads that are supposed to make us feel better. Losing our heads trying to live our lives in specific but fleeting ways."
On the EP artwork, 0171 again worked with Terence Broad, whose neural network generated images turned Joe and Georgie's faces into abstract visions for previous EP 'Change Nothing'. For 'Welcome Back To My Channel' they rolled the process back so that Georgie’s face remained (relatively) intact, manipulated into strange states beyond their control. "This felt like the perfect backdrop to the EP - a neural network trying its best to recreate Georgie, but distorting her in the process, like the disconnect between the process of making yourself feel better, and actually feeling better. Similarly on the music side, we used vocoder and choir samples extensively across the EP, which straddle the same border between human warmth, and unreal digital cold," Joe commented.
Accompanying the EP is a new short film encompassing the EPs title track and "The Utopians directed by frequent visual collaborator Jake Alden-Falconer who explains: "I love these two 0171 singles which somehow pivot between restful to wry to genuinely unsettling in the space of a few moments. In keeping with these multiple movements in the music, I wanted the visuals to have both a nostalgic technical approach — full of split-screens, mirroring and double-exposures — and some of the oversaturated noisiness of the network age. Taking glimpses of joyful home video memories and converting them into something more ambiguous. We wanted to connect them through one journey with 0171 taking us through an ASMR video into a gaudy, kaleidoscopic dreamscape. We talked about half-remembered videos from our childhood era, like the lethargic psychedelia of early Stone Roses videos, and the tongue in cheek mindfuck of Being John Malkovich."
