Lung Dart Make Ambient for England's Insomniacs

It's a rare gift, creating music that sounds both warm and deeply sad in the same stroke. To be full bright and full, while hollow and rotten. Present and alive, yet long since dead. The first time I heard Lung Dart's "Healthy Functional Tissue," I recognised just that quality. The dislocating, sentimental drift of the choral echo sounded familiar in a way. It was as though I'd heard the song before, years ago, except I hadn't. There's no way I could have done. As I worked my way through the rest of the record I was gripped by the same sensation. That's not to say their music is predictable, but rather that it sounds like a memory.

I was first introduced to Lung Dart last year, ahead of the release their debut mini-album As I Lay Drying on contemporary classical and experimental label PRAH Recordings, and I've been in semi-regular contact with the pair since. When they announced they were releasing a new EP, Some Other Hunger, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to talk for a while longer about their music.

Tim Clay (27) and James Rapson (28) live and work in London. As with many young artists, their first challenge after moving in together in Bow a few years ago was figuring out how to fund themselves. They needed to work, so began temping in the hospitality industry, pouring pints at Lord's or moving furniture around Wembley Stadium under floodlights at four in the morning. "It would be us and kids from parts of London you'd never heard of and 40 year-old artists, all smashing Mars Bars to stay awake," Tim remembers. They were working in concentrated bursts, up to 50 hours in one go, in order to then take the following week off entirely to work on music.

Ever since meeting at university in Leeds, they've been a unit. Besides living together, they tell me the temp agency they were registered with knew to send them both to the same jobs, and even now they are working more reasonable hours in a warehouse, they still do it as a pair. James spends a few hours a week in the basement of a restaurant sorting their accounts, but outside of that they seldom spend moments apart.

This closeness is heard in their music, probably because their music and their closeness are byproducts of each-other. "I've known music was my thing since I was 13 or 14, but never really been in a band that entire time," Tim explains. "When James and I started playing together, it was like oh shit, we really get each-other." Their friendship was forged over strange looped and edited foley recordings on mobile phones, and an ongoing challenge to push things—egging each-other on to take their experiments in weirder directions. Despite spending a short time in a band with other members, it quickly became clear that their mutual interests were far to unique to work as component within a bigger group. "Tim was only in the band for about three weeks," James remembers. "The problem was we were sending each-other stuff that the rest of the band just weren't interested in at all."

This period of playful trial and error has never ended. It's present throughout their most recent EP Some Other Hunger, most notably "In the Sink," a 44 second melody, dopily hummed underwater, wrapping the tune in a soft wall of bubbles, as if lazily sung by a child in the bath. Both of their records contain eccentricities of this kind. They are littered with the textures of their environment and field recordings taken from the most mundane of places. The clatter of public transport or indiscriminate snatches of conversation situate every song in a room, on a bus, or at the bottom of some stairs—real or imagined.

"Each individual track has a space to live in," Tim tells me. "I personally don't think most musicians think about sound enough. I hear so much new music where I think, that song's really nice but the song is so tepid. It doesn't live anywhere."

"We're honest about the space we work in," James continues. "We make these songs in our bedrooms or living room, with the washing machine going, housemates in and out, sirens going past. We could sit there editing it out, but why bother?"

The resulting music finds romance and atmosphere in the trivial ephemera of daily life. Alan Lomax if he'd ever endured an aimless, rain-tapped weekend in England's suburbs. Both records sit somewhere between the grim memorial of Leyland Kirby's work as the Caretaker, and Ed Droste's early tape-recorder experiments when Grizzly Bear was still a solo venture on Horn of Plenty. Yet more than that, it lives somewhere specific. It exists in the rolling hills and crinkled Rizlas of a twenty-something malaise.

The pair tell me a lot of their friends think the music they make is perfect for the four AM shift after a night out—"people smoking weed, drinking orange juice, trying to sort themselves out," Tim expands. While they both agree it's not a situation they are keen on inhabiting as often themselves anymore, they agree it remains a fascinating window of time to them. In essence this could be because it's the one time the world begins to speak their language. The post-club gap between the end of the night and the start of the day is a domain of the shell-shocked. Recollections from the night before are still present, but minds are cracked and exhausted, so stories are warped as they drift gently out into the ether, much in the way Lung Dart's melodies are and do. James agrees. "I personally have really bad insomnia, so I've never slept well during my entire life," he explains. "There are photos of me as a child with black panda-like eyes. So, after a party is when everyone else joins me."

That said, the communal post-club prolapse is only one way of understanding the mood set by their music. Naturally the beauty of listening to ambience, however detailed it may sound, is in allowing the listener to impose his or her own surroundings onto it. To move in and distribute their own furniture about the place.

Part of this means Tim and James have to let go of what they create, handing what are essentially audible-diaries of their environments over to be restructured in the imaginations of others. That said, they are resolutely focused on not getting too attached, allowing themselves the freedom to release music regularly. "I suppose it's about not being uptight," Tim adds. "We've got so much music on our hard-drives so we're trying to be way less protective about what we put out. This album [Some Other Hunger] was out in a month, including artwork and mastering."

It's not haphazard, or careless, but more that the Lung Dart experiment is an ongoing and constantly productive process. Writing songs on the piano, collecting the reverberations of their environment, and then playing with those elements by warping and weathering the sound. This technique is present on a track they produced for Alexis Taylor's recent Listen With(out) Piano—a complimentary album to the Hot Chip man's 2016 effort Piano. The project saw Taylor recruit collaborators to record music which would work standalone, or as overlay companions played on top of the original LP. For their contribution, Tim and James recreated album track "I'm Ready" in the style of a fictional community choir in rehearsal, complete with creaking chairs, missed notes and the ping of mobile phones. The sweetness of the melody makes it perfect material for their treatment—a heartfelt swell for Lung Dart to gently decay, and leave to gather dust in the store cupboard of a parish hall.

Parting ways with Lung Dart, we agree that they are going to take a disposable camera with them in order to provide pictures to accompany the article. After disappearing into the thin gauze of snow that had arrived in London that afternoon, they later email me to tell me they had instead offered the camera to members of the public and asked them to take the photos.

"It was quite nice actually," they told me. "People think you're going to ask them for something they don't want to give, but when it's just a photo the atmosphere changes and it becomes a nice exchange." It's a neat epithet for the exchanges that go on in their own work: the minute but vital work of finding strange in the familiar.

Some Other Hunger is out now.

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