I’ve been on a bit of noise tear of late and Mandy, Indiana, a four-piece experimental noise band based in Manchester, has been filling that longing nicely and noisily.
Mandy, Indiana is vocalist Valentine Caulfield, Guitarist and lead songwriter Scott Fair, Simon Catling (synth) and Alex MacDougall (drums).
From the liner notes:
Crucial to the album are effects wrought upon the sound by a clutch of unlikely off-site recording locations with novel acoustics, including screaming vocals emitted in a Bristol shopping mall and live drums recorded in a cave in the West Country – the latter session interrupted by literal spelunkers….Fair elaborates that “these locations offered something acoustically, but would traditionally be thought of as having the ‘wrong’ characteristics for producing a ‘good’ recording. These spaces imprint on the sound: It’s not about a lack of access to more traditional recording spaces – it’s about us capturing things happening in a specific place at that moment.”
Fair has also said, “It’s supposed to be nasty, and to not work.”
Nasty and nice, wrong yet right, i’ve seen a way captures Mandy, Indiana’s manic energy and broad sonic scope distilled down into a album’s worth of raw experience.
“Everything popular is wrong.” Oscar Wilde
