MELT YOURSELF DOWN | INTERVIEW
With fierce jazz-meets-postpunk chops and fiercer politics, London ensemble Melt Yourself Down have gifted us some truly exciting music, including brand new album 100% Yes. A scheduled Cardiff date in early May will now happen later in the year, but MYD vocalist Kushal Gaya still had plenty to say to Buzz’s Chris Seal.
How’s the pandemic affecting you all individually and as a band?
I feel like the nature of our work as a band and the medium for its broadcasting is going through extremely fast and quite big changes at the moment. Our album tour has been postponed, we cannot perform live or interact with our audience in the classic sense anymore. I do acknowledge that we are going through very challenging times as a society, but as an artist I feel quite excited by being thrown at the deep end and having to find new solutions for my work.
The band is having to be very creative to survive and produce new music and that is setting my fuses alight. I thrive on the power of boredom and uncertainty – these are testing times, but will also be ones that bring about radical new changes to musical and artistic work as we know it. I am also feeling that if there is some sort of human revolution that might surface from the pandemic, it might not be entirely economic, social, religious or political but widely spiritual in nature.
How did signing to Decca shape your third album?
We worked on 100% Yes without the support of any label, we did everything off our own back and with the help of our wonderful managers. We were completely focusing on the music and were expecting to release it ourselves. Signing to Decca was a complete surprise and we were and still are extremely grateful and humbled by it.
Tell us about the choice of album art.
We stumbled upon the work of the Canadian artist Alex Garant. Her work instantly felt right for our overall design. It is iconic, precise, focused and multiple at the same time. Everything that we wanted seemed concentrated in her output. The portraits she paints seemed to represent social diversity and multiplicity whilst retaining singular focus.
There’s been a resurgence in political songwriting lately and a few songs on 100% Yes are linked to recent events like Grenfell.
Since 2016, so much has happened around us politically and socially. In conjunction with the huge pressure that the media has exercised following key events, and as a porous human being, it has been impossible to ignore the magnitude of the domestic social changes and the geopolitical ones. Trump got elected, Brexit happened, the Grenfell tragedy shocked all of us, and there has been a clear shift of world politics to the right. Conservatism and national-populism seem to be of taste lately…
I would not say that we write political songs, we write about being human in 2020 on planet Earth. The songs are the product of reflections, feelings and observations. We do not aim to pass judgment or blame; we are not politicians or proponents of any ideology.
Boot And Spleen has some references to British colonialism in India. What shaped that song and how does it link to Britain in 2020?
The title of the song was directly influenced by a passage in the book Inglorious Empire by the Indian MP and thinker Shashi Tharoor. The ‘Brutish Raj’ officers or regular civilian colonialists would be quite keen to kick Indians in their malaria-enlarged spleen, rupturing it and thus killing them without much of a consequence. They would get away with it with just a slap on the wrist. I read this book as part of my personal research which aimed to reclaim and understand my own Indian heritage.
Now, to link this to 2020 Britain, I wrote in Clash magazine last year: “As an immigrant in the UK, I have often extrapolated those long-forgotten events and reframed them into our modern context whilst asking myself if it is just a matter of time until the British ‘societal boot’ reaches near my very own spleen… I do equate, maybe unfairly, the violence of the ‘boot and spleen’ to the violence of Brexit, a brutal uprooting negating diversity, plurality and multiculturality.”
We have had Brexit now and with this pandemic, the headlines have radically shifted, so it is still unclear as to what the long-term consequences will be for immigrants in the UK. The government might realise that they actually need all the foreign nurses and doctors they can, in order to surmount the incredible challenge we are now facing, a bit like the situation this country faced after World War II, where more hands and brains were needed to rebuild.
The song Every Single Day, meanwhile, talks about our obsession with social media.
Social media has been in many ways a very liberating tool for people. It has eased the access to information, made communication much easier, and has in many cases been helpful to create a certain balance of power between states and their populations. Where I think it becomes pernicious is when the use of our personal information gathered on the various platforms is shared in order to make products out of us. We think we are consuming, but in fact we are actually being sold. Our information and online actions have become an incredibly valuable currency.
Another aspect of social media concerns its incredibly addictive properties – it’s important to be aware of our interactions with the ‘digital crack’ and ‘likes’ to preserve our mental and physical health balance.
With saxophonist Pete Wareham [also of Polar Bear and others] in the band, do you feel more of a kinship with the new wave of jazz since the millennium?
Pete and I want to make pop music. Pop is a huge umbrella for us that includes a lot of the amazing 20th and 21st century music from Jelly Roll Morton, Roland Kirk to Prince, Queen, Fugazi and now Dua Lipa. This allows us a lot of freedom to experiment, but also allows us to restrict ourselves when it’s needed. I feel like being alternative now is not about anger or stridence – to be hip you need to be able to cultivate awareness and consciousness and to be able to generate your own happiness especially in trying times. The dream is for the audience to realise that they themselves have that creative power and each and everyone can create their own reality.
There are a few more elements of dance music in this album, with Crocodile in particular having some menacing synths. How much are you inspired to make music for the body and mind?
Music is by definition for the mind and the body. Sound is physical. It can caress like it can hurt. We are moving towards making more music with those physical parameters (I consider the mind to be physical) in place. Restricting ourselves to fewer elements is what we are moving towards I feel. 100% Yes has just been released but it is also a document of where we were more than a year ago when we finished the record. We are moving somewhere else now…
Whenever ‘normality’ returns, where does the band go from here?
Exactly… who knows what normality will be? We are not really waiting for that to get going, we are busy right now adapting to the situation and producing music. In the words of Bruce Lee, we must ‘be water’ right now.
Melt Yourself Down’s 100% Yes is out now. Info: www.meltyourselfdown.com