The sketch comedy show was a staple of my TV upbringing, with programmes like The Fast Show and Trigger Happy TV packing in micro-blasts of funny stuff in an almost disorienting rapid-fire burst, pushing the ideas per minute into the red.
Quantum Flirts, the new project of Nathan Loughran (known to regular readers as the frontman of Blang Records staples The Reverse), takes a similar approach on this self-titled debut album, cramming in 15 tracks at a rate just proud of one per minute, and finding time within that quarter of an hour for guest appearances from Emma-Lee Moss (Emmy the Great) and Tom Mayne (David Cronenberg’s Wife), who provide spoken word vocals on a track each and Helen McCookerybook (The Chefs/ Helen & the Horns), who adds backing vocals and guitar on ‘Love & Compassion’.
In a similar style to the aforementioned sketch shows, Loughran throws a myriad of styles at the wall, and thankfully they pretty much all stick (and even if they don’t land for you, there’ll be another one along 60 seconds later). There’s plenty of space for a bit of humour too, as ‘Songs for Myself’, the self-deprecating tale of a DIY band playing to an uninterested audience of two, while ‘Have You Read The Book?’ hones in on society’s infatuation with the latest media trend (whether they’ve read it or not), while the short run-time doesn’t prevent Loughran from going deep on tracks like ‘Turn The Lights Out’.
We asked Nathan to guide us through the album, track by track.
At a time when we’re told our attention spans are shrinking, and so much music and art is consumed in short bursts, I wanted to explore brevity as an art form. The idea had been at the back of my mind since an open mic where I was given fifteen minutes rather than the usual three songs. I remember thinking I could play fifteen songs if they were a minute each.
The challenge was to create complete songs that could be just as musically and lyrically complex as longer ones. I wanted to move away from the expectation that songs should follow a familiar structure, repeating verses and choruses or including a middle eight simply because that’s what you’re supposed to do.
Could you say as much in a minute as you might in four? Could breaking away from those conventions encourage people to listen differently? Perhaps more attentively?
The album also plays with the idea of what an album is. Fifteen minutes arguably doesn’t constitute a long player, but I do see this as an album: fifteen complete songs, not sketches or fragments, each as fully realised as a song several minutes longer.
The songs touch on anxiety, loneliness, getting older and the oddities of everyday life. Some come from personal experience, others from things I’ve observed or imagined, and there’s humour alongside the darker moments.
Here’s a track-by-track guide:
1. Gentrify My Soul
I liked the idea of taking the language of urban regeneration and applying it to something personal. The line about the cladding still being there five years later brings it back to the real world, though. There’s a slightly absurd mixture of spiritual renewal and the kind of promises we’ve become used to hearing about housing and regeneration. I love the counter-melody Teresa Kelly adds on piano. It’s one of those little details I find myself listening out for every time.
2. Deep Listening
This came out of a workshop run by Emma-Lee Moss, aka Emmy the Great, exploring deep listening, a practice associated with the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. I wanted to do something with the idea of listening properly, both to sounds and to other people. What began as an invitation for Emma to add backing vocals developed into a much more substantial contribution, including a new spoken-word section and sound design. Her spoken vocal section takes the track somewhere more dreamlike, with its strange sensory details and feeling of being somewhere unfamiliar.
3. Songs for Myself
This is about the reality of playing in small bands, when there are twice as many people onstage as there are in the crowd. You watch the support band leave before you take to the stage to an almost empty room. You wonder why anyone bothers but carry on doing it yourself anyway. “It doesn’t pay, but we do it all the same.” There’s something quite ridiculous about it, but I think there’s also an integrity in the decision to keep writing songs, even if nobody’s really listening.
4. We Never Sleep
Tom Mayne from David Cronenberg’s Wife wrote and performed the spoken word section on this one. It captures the exhaustion of chronic headaches and insomnia, with the slightly surreal details of trying to medicate yourself. The repeated lines about the rain and the flat champagne have a sort of dreamlike quality, before Tom’s second spoken section adds another dimension to the song. It’s a song about being awake when you really wish you weren’t. Jason Moran adds some delicate atmospheric percussion to this.
5. All Sorts of Things
This is about worrying over things that haven’t happened and probably never will, particularly the possibility that you’ve offended someone. The funny thing is that the less you speak to someone, the more room there is to imagine that you’ve somehow got something wrong. It’s a small song about a familiar sort of anxiety. I’m channeling my inner Stephen Malkmus on the ridiculous lead guitar part!
6. Number Withheld
An unexpected phone call from someone you haven’t heard from for a long time. You recognise their voice eventually, but the conversation is confusing and difficult to follow, and then the line goes dead. You’re left wondering whether they meant to call you at all. I liked the uncertainty of that situation, where even after the call has ended you don’t really know what just happened. This is the shortest song on the album at just 37 seconds and one of my favourites.
7. Have You Read the Book?
This is about the slightly ridiculous social ritual of talking about books and films that everyone seems to know about, while admitting you haven’t actually read or watched them. There’s no great revelation at the end, just the same conversation going round again. I used an old Yamaha Portasound keyboard to get a retro, naive sound. James Saunders plays xylophone on it and when he first heard the song he said it sounded like John Shuttleworth. Ha!
8. Caffeine in the Morning & Alcohol at Night
The title pretty much gives the game away. It’s about what we do to get through the working day and then get ourselves to sleep afterwards. The line about getting older every day but being younger in a different way gives the song a playful optimism. Teresa and Jason from The Reverse play bass and drums, giving the song a lovely sense of movement.
9. Turn the Lights Out
This is about an argument where things have been said that can’t really be taken back. You suspect the other person regrets what they said, but that doesn’t mean you can forget it. Turning the lights out feels like an attempt to draw a line under the situation, although the song acknowledges that time takes its toll and some things stay with you. It’s a circular song with one section that repeats and builds. James Saunders from The Redheaded League plays the electric guitar and Sam Drake from The Graft plays the bass. When we play it live, Jason and Teresa from The Reverse add drums and piano.
10. Not Leaving London
A song about the gap between the life you imagine yourself having in London and the one you actually lead. Your friends have moved to the countryside, you still live in the city with all its theatres, gigs, clubs and bars, but you don’t actually go to any of them. Instead, you share a joke with the Deliveroo guy. I wanted it to be funny, but there’s a bit of sadness in it too. It’s the longest song on the album at an astonishing prog-rock-style one minute and 20 seconds!
11. People Are Everywhere
Sometimes you just want to be left alone. People are in your clothes, in your hair, on your phone, on the television and in your social media feeds. Even when you close your eyes, they’re still there. I suppose it’s about that feeling of being overwhelmed by other people’s presence, while recognising that they’re not all bad. You just need some space. Jason and Teresa from The Reverse make this the biggest-sounding track on the album.
12. Love & Compassion
This is for those days, weeks or months when nothing seems to make you feel better, you’re struggling to sleep and you don’t particularly want to talk about it. The response in the song isn’t to offer advice or try to fix everything. It’s simply to hide away with someone, shut the world out and look after each other. Helen McCookerybook sings stunning backing vocals and plays sublime electric guitar on this one.
13. Have You Heard?
This starts with the language of status updates and data, then moves into something more elusive, with smoke rings, birds singing in the garden and the feeling that time is speeding up. “Five minutes is now one” is a playful reference to the shorter song length. The song is about the different kinds of things we hear and pay attention to, from the constant flow of information to the sounds and memories that are harder to pin down. I like the way the questions keep opening up rather than arriving at an answer, and I love the weird distortion on the whole song, like we’re hearing it through a broken transistor radio.
14. Simon
Simon is a long way from home, and we don’t really know why he’s there or what he’s looking for. The questions about packing winter clothes and downloading music in case he can’t connect give the song a contemporary kind of uncertainty. I wanted to leave it open rather than explain who Simon is or what happens to him. He could be going somewhere, running away from something or simply trying to find some space for himself.
15. These Days
This brings together a few different kinds of anxiety: the memory of having been unkind, the uncertainty of relationships and the effort of getting through the day when your thoughts won’t leave you alone. The repeated lines about days bleeding into nights and nights into days capture that sense of time becoming indistinguishable. The final lines suggest a promise to sort things out once the worry has gone. It felt like a fitting place to end the album, without necessarily resolving anything. It’s the only track recorded live. I played the guitar and sang in my bedroom with a microphone positioned at the bottom of the stairs, giving it an intimate but slightly distant feel.
Quantum Flirts is out now on 10″ vinyl and digital download via Gare Du Nord Records, order now on Bandcamp
They play a launch show at Servant Jazz Quarters in London on 29th November
Quantum Flirts: Instagram / Facebook / Bandcamp
Introduction by Paul Maps
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