Mindless Ones

Guitar/bass/effects/vocals: Guisers, Even Sisters, Blue Kanues… fukken hunners of bands, honestly (see below). You can enjoy Isobel’s patter here, and support her on the Vivarium Sounds Patreon or by trading cash for local sonics on Bandcamp. 

What are the best sounds you’ve made?

The stuff I’m doing in my band Blue Kanues each time we play together. No matter what song I bring to practice, the three of them Hannah, Laura and Mattie all come up with the most beautiful parts. We are going to record an album and will be playing a Glasgow show at the end of June (UPDATE: June 27th at Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre, gig fans! – Ed).

What are the best sounds you’ve heard?

The best sounds I have ever heard was deep in Hangasjarvi when I lay down in the what seemed to be quiet forest and then after a few moments of silence there was sound coming at me from every direction.

What can you tell us about East Kilbride? 

Coming from Motherwell, East Kilbride seemed quite fancy when i would visit my uncle as a kid and when I was a bit older I played in bands there with my cousin and his pals and smoked a lot of hash with old punks and hippies and bams and listened to all the music they would play me, a lot of which was terrible but among the dross was stuff that really encouraged me to play more music

What can you say about Glasgow?

Glasgow is where I live just now. I like walking up to the flagpole in Queens Park and try and get up there to see the nick of the central belt every day. The buses are extortionate.

You’ve got a track called ‘Target: 2006‘. Which Transformers are best and why?

Target 2006 was the first big story in the UK comics after Dinobot Hunt for me. I remember reading it all before the movie came out so knew who Galvatron was in advance. My favorite Transformer is probably Ratchet. I had the wee toy of him and thought he looked really cool and then saw that the comic and cartoon representation of him was quite different to the toy. I really liked him sneaking about the Ark and recovering the Dinobots and then later the horror of him being merged with Megatron. Great cunt.

What are you working on now? 

I’m working on a few things. The Blue Kanues album is the main focus but I also play bass in a band called Life with Laura who plays guitar in the Kanues. I just recorded a black metal record with Laura and it will be getting mastered and mixed by Robert Dallas Gray and we are going to look at having it come out as a physical thing. The band is called Spring and the record’s name is Forth.

I walk around with a microphone and make noises for Even Sisters with Robert. I do a band with my bf called The Loaning where we have been filling up cassettes with jams and field recordings all made on a portable wee fisher price cassette recorder. I have a country band called OPULENCE who plan to play one gig and record an album.

I’m also working away on a lot of songs I have been recording on my phone and then overdubbing on a 4 track and there are close to 30 songs on it. I keep playing guitar and bass, either or both every day.

Guitar/not guitar: Life Without Buildings, Whin, Guisers, Even Sisters. His latest solo album, The Vallum, is released 20th June 2025.

What have you learned about making music since Life Without Buildings finished?

There’s a few different ways I could answer that. I was talking to a friend who’s a visual artist a while ago. He had stopped making art for a while, and I’d stopped making music for quite a long time, and we both found that when we stopped making things we went a bit mad. And so he was sort of forced back into making stuff, and in a way that helped with things like impostor syndrome, because he had the excuse that he had to make stuff or his mental health went down the pan. And it was a bit the same for me, I discovered I was actually just a lot more healthy when I was making music. I’d filled the hole with other stuff but it wasn’t really working.

In more practical terms, over the years I’d tried various times to get music theory to stick. I’m a typical guitarist, completely self-taught and I only had the most basic theory necessary to communicate to other self-taught musicians – you know, ‘play E here’ or whatever. So the Lwb stuff comes out of that post-punk tradition, which I think is a very rich thing where musicians really invented their own ways of playing.

But at certain times I’d found that to be a bit limiting – you tend to sort of plateau and start boring yourself. And I’d started to listen to a lot of jazz, and to want to understand more about it. I particularly wanted to understand how harmony works – how chord progressions are built, that sort of thing – so I started reading a bit about jazz harmony for the guitar. And quite quickly I came across these things called shell chords, which are sort of cut-down chords with just what you need to play rhythm over a band, like two or three notes. And the shapes were really really similar to a lot of the stuff I’d been playing in Lwb (although I used open strings to make sort of ringing drones alongside the notes that created the harmonic movement). So that was a route into understanding a bit of music theory, and from there I was able to build on that and develop a more confident understanding of what I was doing, what approaches I could take, how to teach myself stuff when I got bored. That’s been the major change I think, that’s most affected how I play and approach music.

A few years down the line, how do you feel about Lwb’s ‘The Leanover’ having its TikTok moment? 

Well in part it helped to buy the equipment I used to make the more recent records, so I’m grateful for that! But it was nice, it coincided with the 20th anniversary of the record, so there was a bit of press and stuff. I think the nicest thing was what Sue said about it: at the time Lwb were active, the music press and really the whole scene was very male-dominated. Sue got a fair bit of stick, and we got bored to death with people comparing her to Björk and Clare Grogan, as if the salient feature of what she did was that she had a high voice, you know. But for Sue, who has a teenage daughter, to see young women taking control of a piece of work she’d made and using it as a tool for self-expression was I think really nice for her, maybe even changed how she’d thought about the whole experience.

What’s been the most surprising thing about your more recent collaborations in Whin, Guisers and Even Sisters?

Really just that collaboration can be such an enormous joy. I remember when we were doing the Whin track ‘Kris‘, very early on, we thought it needed something else and I asked my friend Fritz Welch, who is a percussionist and improviser, to contribute something and he sent us this absolutely incredible percussion track. I was literally jumping about the room with joy when I heard it. That’s happened a lot with Whin – we’ve used other musicians a lot, especially a guy called Craig Mulholland I know who’s a visual artist but as obsessed with music as we are. He’s contributed a lot of amazing synth parts; he’s always quite nervous about it because he has no musical training at all, but they’re always amazing. He also produced the Guisers version of Patti Smith Group’s ‘Easter’, which I absolutely love.

The core of Guisers is me and Isobel McKenna, who’s also my bandmate in Even Sisters, which is a very purely collaborative thing and can be really exhilarating when it takes off.

This is maybe a bit tangential, but there was a sort of ‘aha’ moment in Whin when we played the track ‘Morning‘ together. I’d never considered myself a good enough musician to improvise with other players, but I’d sort of realised that even if I didn’t have a lot of control over melody, harmony etc, I could control things like touch, pacing, timbre. And that opened up the more directly collaborative stuff, like Even Sisters (even though I don’t play guitar in that project). 

You’ve talked before about playing music as meditation – can you say more about the sort of space you’re trying to create?

I should say I’ve never done any sort of ‘formal’ meditation, so I don’t want to be presumptuous. I mean meditation in a couple of senses: one in that particular pieces quite often start as sort of meditations on something, a chord structure or a little melody; and two that the experience of music both as a listener and a musician has always been about that feeling of being ‘inside’ it, for me. So that’s what I’m chasing, really – can I disappear into what I’m playing, be emotionally moved by it, be carried along. So I suppose that’s the kind of landscape I’m trying to create for listeners – something immersive, deep, involving. 

It’s harder to talk about, but there is a sort of devotional, sacramental aspect to it as well. There’s a moment at the beginning of Mark Hollis’s solo record that I’ve spoken about before – about 20 seconds of silence where he’s just … preparing, I guess. And that feels really important to me, that you would be mentally, spiritually preparing yourself to engage in a sacramental act. I think that came out in at least a couple of tracks on The Vallum –  a devotional aspect, if that doesn’t sound too pretentious.

I don’t always want that though, of course! Once I’d finished mastering the new record I’d pretty much had as much Serious Music as I could take and I just wanted to listen to really lightweight, fun stuff for a while.

How does your new album, The Vallum, develop your approach? 

There are technical developments, in that I’ve got more confident in my playing, and that I have a beautiful amp that my Whin bandmate Martin Henry built for me (in the chassis of the Fender Concert that I used in Lwb). So I think there’s a bit more power and assertiveness in the sounds and the playing. There are also overdubs on almost every track – there’s only one ‘solo’ guitar track. I got a Hohner Pianet and a Yamaha YC20 combo organ and they’re used a lot on the record, rather than the VST instruments that I used for the overdubs on The Rain Room; there’s something really attractive about playing and recording real, old instruments. I also got a 1962 Dynachord tape echo, so that’s on there a fair bit as well.

Other than that I think it shakes out quite similarly in terms of the shape and content, but it’s sort of taken further in each direction: there are quite highly-worked things and then things which are very pure performance on The Rain Room, but on The Vallum that equates to something like the track ‘Spiral’, which is very long, very worked-out, lots of overdubs, and then something like ‘Witch’, which is about as pure a performance piece as you can get, almost a Fluxus thing really.

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