Start Listening To: Fake Turins

On the cusp of their new EP Time Flowers Now, we caught up with London outfit Fake Turins about going live, musical influences, and the Turing test.

For those of you unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us a little about who you are, where you’re from, and what kind of music you make?

We’re Fake Turins, a large extra-musical community with a focus on many artistic disciplines; the music we perform spans a lot of noise, but primarily is geared around groove & in particular disco. As a North London collective, we have a larger production than just our music, so we use each project as a platform to create full worlds — verging on the psychedelic or transcendental practices.

Can you tell us a little bit about what went into the recent single ‘Talking Prophets’?

Talking Prophets is a single about the blind ignorance of our time, drawing inspiration from my own personal life & applying it to the sense that we all get from the tragedy of wilfulness. The song follows a version of that story, following the mind of a soothsayer that has lost his vision & therefore his morals.

What’s in the works for Fake Turins after this? We know you’ve got an EP slated for a late-July release, can we expect an album down the line?

Our next upcoming release is Time Flowers Now – out on the 23rd of July – & following that we have plans to return to the studio to record another record. I’ve got mountains of musical content sitting under my bed so perhaps, once we finish the last of the euphoria this summer as the EP journey comes to a close, we’ll be able to reinvent the narrative once more. Following our EP, however, we do have a collection of videos scored to the entire record – produced by our fantastic Visual Turins – expected later in late summer/autumn.

How is the Hideous Mink Records experience?

Beyond cathartic — a fantastic team of people & those that I now call friends working to develop community in a traditionally fractured scene. I wouldn’t trade the people we have around the band for anything at this point. The fact that even more good acts keep flocking to them says it all.

Can you give us a brief history of how you guys came together?

Turins was founded off the back of my own personal dejection from a series of failing projects [define failing though, truly]. It occurred to me that many musicians & artists around London were feeling similarly, so through the warehouse community that many of us circulated around, we began a concept where we would form a project large enough to house multiple collaborations & projects inside of it: a space where all tenants of the artistic process could thrive equally & have a large enough incubator to birth new ideas.

What do you love right now?

Right now I’m particularly fond of high ceilings & ornate facades.

What do you hate right now?

Inhibitions. Also the rampant demarcation about what defines “good” or “bad” art.

Why the name “Fake Turins”? What’s so fake about these Turins?

Turins was taken from the man Alan Turing, inventor of the Turing test — the measurement for AI or synthetic sentience. The term was bastardised & used in reference to the fact that as music goes online, how could someone authentically tell whether it was humanmade or not; the only real way to tell was by watching the immodest & usually inaccurate representation of it — the “Fake Turins”.

How would you describe your songwriting process?

Much of the songwriting process is broken into cycles of mania. There needs to be a form of unnatural obsession with an idea to see it to its conclusion. I’ve taken to composing a lot through the piano — drawing chordal structures out & then replicating the ghost of them on the guitar. But traditionally, each of the Turins songs starts on a groove or a baseline. Finding the ‘feel’ of each track before composing it is very important to me so that the performance can match when demoing them.

What would you say your main creative influences are — within the music world or beyond?

My biggest, first & final influence will always be the natural world. The trees, plants, flowers & all things that thrive under the sun & rain. Extending from that, any form of deep sensual experience really informs my own compositions, recreating that through sounds & textures is wildly thrilling. There are a few books that capture that for me, and even though I won’t go on to list them specifically here I can say that even just reading a page of them leaves me with a deep feeling of creative excitement.

Which artists out there would you involve in your dream collaboration?

I mean, it certainly changes — but, for now, I’d say: Joanna Newsom & either Stan Brakhage or Andrei Tarkovsky.

Now that things are easing up somewhat, do you have any plans for going live?

Yep! We’ve got quite a full schedule of shows coming up actually, with our main sights on the sold-out Lexington headline we’ve got at the end of July. More historically, however, we had a show on the changeover of restrictions at 00:01 on the 19th of July. A lot of other absolutely floor-spinning acts are playing too, so it’ll be quite a night/morning.

In the same vein, what would you say your dream venue is?

I suppose the obvious would be to talk about large venues but in fact, the two that jump out to me are quite different. The first is the Ray-Ban stage at Primavera Sound [a festival I’ve always loved] & the way it lays along the waterfront with an amphitheatre feel. The second is Jaminaround in Dorset, a beautiful grassy knoll with a venue built into the centre of it, completely circular & very much driven by a community spirit.

Do you have any parting advice for our readers?

To trust in the spirit of your creation, and to make sure to always feed that spark in yourself. Even if you lose sight of what you want from your work, keep moving & trust that the nature of locomotion will keep you alive.