In The Spotlight: Vanishing Twin
Vanishing Twin walk us through the mythology of their newest album, eclectic influences and the pains of being a person.
Vanishing Twin is an assembly operating on its own orbit, away from societal pressures to be anything predictable. They’ve set themselves out on a mission of creating their own musical mythology. Putting it together piece by piece, the group has pickpocket symbols and filtered anything they find fascinating through their demanding lenses.
We met Cathy Lucas, Phil M.F.U. (Man From Uranus) and Valentina Magaletti, missing only Susumu Mukai, in their Stoke Newington studio next to the world’s most secret record shop. In their hidden headquarters, the band let us take a peek into the process of creating a mystery and producing their new project, ‘Ookii Gekkou’. “Our best album yet but in terms of some of the ideas, it’s maybe the most personal and the most intimate record,” says Cathy, “Less abstract and conceptual than the last ones and more about our lives and feeling at the moment”. Recorded and written during the lockdown, ‘Ookii Gekkou’ (Japanese for big moonlight) mirrors every member’s inner battles fought over last year and reconstructed as an epic tale. There’s even a story behind the title. “I was learning the Japanese language. I’ve learnt two words ookii gekkou. I was chanting it to myself as I was walking under the full moon. I came back and I told Cathy about these two words and it clicked with her. She wrote this song ‘Ooki Gekkou’. Just by pure accident, she wrote the lyrics to music on the top of a jam we did while using sound that signifies the full moon. She didn’t know that. It was all very magical,” Phil shares.
When the world got out of control last year and we were trying to make sense out of scraps of reason, Vanishing Twin has applied the same approach to creating. “That’s been a way we work for a while now. We take sessions where we’ve just got together and improvised and trying ideas out and then we work on the production and turn it into songs,” Cathy explains. Out of the spontaneous spirit that watched over the session, they’ve composed a nine-chapter album inspired by nine different stories. ‘In Cucina’ by Cathy’s lockdown Italian cooking, ‘Zuum’ by Chris Kraus’ ‘Gravity & Grace’ film and ‘Wider Than Itself by intricate choral harmonies that Cathy sings in another group. Phil’s personal favourite, ‘The Organism’ tackles the limitations of organic matter. “It really troubles me being an organism so I think I’ve hit the nail on the head there. It’s spooky being a squishy being. It’s very science fiction. Really during the pandemic, in the first three months when we were all trapped by ourselves, I began to feel like a bowl of jelly and that’s what an organism is. It freaks me out,” he confesses.
Vanishing Twin collection of influences is as eclectic as the bands’ sound. Their individual and shared tastes venture in every direction, from 70s Christian folklore, Ottis Redding, West African and Turkish music. “I really like 70s Thai rock and funk music. In Indonesia, a lot of bar bands formed, entertained the American circus when they came over. They would mix surf music, the stuff that Americans were listening to with their traditional. Very spiky sound Indonesia has and with very modern pop and funk music, they’ve created this really dangerous sounding music,” Phil shares. “Which is what we want to do in a way without sounding pretentious,” Val adds.
Absorbing all the tonnes and trajectories of the world’s most disruptive melodies, Vanishing Twin dictate their own order. Though there’s a lot of freedom to it. “We tried to experiment with new song forms. A song like ‘Zuum’ really is constructed out of very different pieces like a puzzle,” Cathy explains, “There are always moments of people stepping out of their normal roles which is always interesting”. Ever since their first album ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ to utopian psychedelic pop of 2019 ‘The Age of Immunology’, the core of Vanishing Twin has always been in the state of flux. “I used to say that Vanishing Twin was like an exercise in creating a new mythology, a personal mythology,” says Cathy. “New tarot deck,” Val adds.
“On the first album, the song ‘Vanishing Twin Syndrome’ was about this story of me having a twin in utero and absorbing my twin. That really was a beginning of this whole idea of creating little myths in the songs that could be their own little spiritual worlds,” Cathy shares. Similar to past art-visionaries like David Bowie or William Blake, Vanishing Twin have thrown themselves fully into their fabricated universes. If you can play gods on your own terms, there’s no need to belong anywhere else. That’s why they find it funny when the press tries to label them as anything, especially psychedelic. “Musically, I don’t think we subscribe to that. We don’t know what the fuck that means anymore. If it’s taking psychedelic drugs, we might enjoy that but like the G chord, that’s not us,” Val says. They’re far too ambitious with their art to comply with any sort of labels. Sadly, this attitude hardly goes in pair with the business side of being a band.
“To define yourself in any sort of way, it only gets relevant when you have to sell as a product. The moment you’re a band, you shouldn’t be really aware of what you want to be labelled as because it’s distracting from fluidity. It gives limits,” Val sighs and adds: “They’re marketing us as an indie band and we don’t want to be an indie band. They’re marketing us as psych-band and we don’t want to be a psych-band".
Ever since Cathy Lucas has started the Vanishing Twin project, originally as Orlando, and got joined by the rest of the chaotic geniuses, they’ve seems to run after something beyond. Beyond the music, melodies and visuals. As if they’ve been trying to capture the uncapturable and then let go, ready for a new adventure. If you want to catch them just before they’ll next metamorphosis, make sure to come to their upcoming tour.
Today, Vanishing Twin strut under the big moonlight shining over last year’s ashes. “Changing is something not permanent but obviously altered the way we worked on this album for sure. It’s different but has its own appeal. It was important also to have that kind of approach because we gave up a more intimate dimension. But if it changed it for good? I don’t think it changed it for good,” Val says. The aim is to keep on exploring. The next record has to be totally different. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be Vanishing Twin, as Val says: “We are a different person every minute”.