When you’ve been writing about music as long as I have (coming up quarter of a century now) it can be hard to avoid repeating yourself – doubly so when your subject is a musician about whom you’ve been writing for most of that time. Not so Joe Gideon, whose music I first scribbled my thoughts about in Joyzine’s infancy back in 2004 when he was fronting excellent indie-post rock quartet Bikini Atoll, and who went on to make me cry with their beautiful melancholy at the first ever Joyfest 20 years ago in Hackney.
When Bikini Atoll parted ways, Gideon teamed up with his sister Viva (also of Bikini Atoll and now making wonderful sound shapes as one half of LUNGE) as Joe Gideon & The Shark, whose expansive story-songs pressed buttons that I didn’t even know I had.
Since 2015 he’s been ploughing his furrough solo (albeit with an excellent cast of collaborators, including Gris-De-Lin, Duke Garwood and Ed Harcourt). He recently released ALTERED SELF, his third LP as Joe Gideon and, as the title suggests, it’s another leap into new musical territory – providing a heady mix of hypnotic explorations of self-evolution, dreamy musings on being hunted from above (complete with screeching bird call impressions) and pages from an imagined entomology text book.
The album sees Gideon teaming up, as he had for its predecessors Versa Vice and Armagideon, with Bad Seed Jim Sclavunos – between them they play all of the instruments on the record, with Sclavunos also taking on production duties. This stripped back set-up enables a collection of songs full of space. Notes are allowed to ring, every element is made to pull its weight and Gideon’s rich vocal is, for the most part, allowed centre stage.
Take opener ‘Psychic Archaeology’, gesturing us into the record with a gentle guitar motif before CLANG! Three chords and an erupting cymbal throw us back in our seat, fading away to set us up for the next impact. Over the course of nearly seven glorious minutes the track evolves into a tremolo rumble as warped vocals fly around our ears like poltergeists, a guitar wails like an air raid siren – layers added gradually until it all inevitably comes crashing down. And then there’s the poetic, piano-led ‘Life Cycle of the Atlas Moth’, telling a tale of the mouthless lepidopteran, which winds into a bizarre circus cabaret trot.
There are many more such skewed delights to be found within this record, and we asked Joe Gideon to provide his guide to the album, which you can read below.
ALTERED SELF‘ is a phrase my incredible scientist wife invented to describe the current experiments she’s working on. These experiments study the earliest stages where the body alters itself on a molecular / cellular level when it detects strange abnormalities.
And I thought, perfect!
1. ArchaeoPsychic: It’s a song that begins at the end and ends at the beginning, “From the sublime to the slime… From the brink to the brine”. A kind of inner psychic quest, set to a motorik rhythm … I’ve always imagined it to be like the film ‘Fantastic Voyage’, set inside someone’s psyche / body. I think it also shares similar themes to ‘Altered States’ by Ken Russell and Jules Verne’s ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’.
2. Bird of Prey is a death song that comes in the form of a predatory bird, twisting and turning, as if dancing in the sky above.
3. The Deforming Mirrors, Part 1: When visiting a funfair in Paris with my family, I noticed my wife always laughed her head off whenever we were in front of the deforming mirrors. I wanted to write a song about that. I like that it’s also a very whimsical song, since I don’t think I’ve ever done a song with that kind of tone before.
4. The Deforming Mirrors, Part 2 is a more twisted look into the mirror, or is the mirror looking at you?
5. Life Cycle of the Atlas Moth: From a songwriting point of view, I love the fact that the caterpillar of the Atlas Moth exists only to be on a feeding frenzy, and then, when it becomes a beautiful moth, it’s reborn without a mouth.
6. Arctic Moon is a song about taking shelter while a storm rages, under the icy gaze of an Arctic moon that never sets, sole witness to the fates of the characters in the song. “Like a Greek tragedy being played out in an igloo…”
7. Grizzly: A song about when you’re so committed to something it breaks you. “When you’re in too deep, to ever leave”. It’s inspired by the documentary ‘Grizzly Man’ by Werner Herzog, which is one of my favourite films of all time.
8. Spiders in Dreams is about finding meaning in dreams about spiders.
9. Wild & Free: I wrote this song to try and break the curse of songwriting. In my mind I’m thinking this’ll be the last song I ever write. (Hopefully).
ALTERED SELF is out now – buy or stream here. Joe Gideon plays Electric Brixton on 3rd July with Mdou Moctar.
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Introduction by Paul Maps
Photograph by Jessica Strid
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