Spotlight On... Guests

Guests are a Glasgow-based duo made up of Jessica Higgins and Matthew Walkerdine. Formerly of bands Mordwaffe and Vital Idles, it’s highly likely you’ve come across the pair before; as soon as you hear Higgins’ unique vocal delivery on A Veneer, A Promise, Whatever, if you were previously familiar with Vital Idles, your memory will immediately be jogged.

But it’s not all about Higgins’ vocals across Guests’ debut I wish I was special. Its 11 tracks are a gorgeous, nuanced and intriguing collage of Higgins’ spoken word musings, found sounds, samples, electronics and more, with a strong focus on pattern repetition, world building and experimentation. While some moments can leave you with an unsettling feeling in the pit of your stomach, others can be soothing, or they feel bright, optimistic and warm. Ultimately, I wish I was special is a special record indeed, one that inevitably offers something new to excite on each listen. With the album due for release via World of Echo on Friday 5 April, Higgins talks us through I wish I was special track-by-track.

Talking About Talking
This one’s a scene setter. The voice on the sample is Beate Nilsen talking about what she wants from her performances. We focused on those words where she’s searching for something to say. It’s cut from Vivienne Dick’s 1978 film Guerilliere Talks which is a series of six Super 8 vignettes of artists and musicians in and around the New York No Wave scene. A classic.

A Veneer, A Promise, Whatever
This one’s a bit cute, a bit sad, too. The other day I was reading a pamphlet where the poet Nisha Ramayya talks about how her writing wraps riddles around what it’s “about”, to render it unreadable in any direct, literal sense. But it’s that secrecy of language which allows a different kind of meaning to unfold from a sensed obscurity, and I felt a kinship with her process there re: writing lyrics. It’s often the case that I’m thinking about a scene of some kind, and sing around it. Things I’m thinking about here are hard to talk about, I guess. But I also reference my favourite things, cheap flowers, which conjures, although unrelated to anything else in the song, the lyric 'I bring you flowers in the pouring rain' which I think of often. I’m pretty sure it was referenced in an old Vital Idles song too. Actually, at New Year we were chatting to Natalie and Stephen (World of Echo, hi!) about what our wrestler walk-on song would be. At the time I said Teardrops but I think it should really be Flowers. 

(my co-operation)
This one’s gentle. We made it quickly and its sounds make me feel that kind of after-the-seaside mellow contentedness. When Ed (Edwin R. Stevens) came round to help mix the record, he immediately broke into a kind of relaxed body smile at this one, so I knew we’d done something right.

Arrangements, As In Making Them
This one’s a touchstone. Matt’s spooky intro/outro is often in contention but I think it’s a perfect seam. To stick with a theme, basically mostly what I’m into is talking about talking or the process of trying to talk about something, anything. The lyrics on the recording were improvised around a melodic hook that seemed to fit with the music, so are a bit hard to learn to play live. I think with this song we’re starting to get used to our instruments and how to make music from the bottom up. We’re not trained, per se, I did some piano lessons as a kid, but before making this record we played as a drummer and vocalist in a post-punk four-piece, so we could thrash and make it up alongside the guitarists who were more adept at building melodic frames.

(something romantic)
This one’s like a place. We think of all the songs in brackets as “interludes”, peppered throughout the record as promises to the future, we might develop them into full-bodied songs one day. Here, we’ve got a field recording from a flea market in Brussels which we played along to. I like how when you listen to it on headphones it feels like a film. A kind of lazy Sunday morning scene of drinking coffee on a town square with a friend, lover, or maybe alone, thinking thoughts, however you like to spend your days.

(anemones)
This one’s an opener! On the LP it starts the B-side with a joke. I love hamminess. The field recording literally ends with subway doors opening. It sounds like counting down until…

Terrazzo 
This one’s a story. I think it was one of the first songs we wrote. It’s achingly simple, and I love it for that. We’d been threatening to make music together for a long time before we actually did, and compiled a mental list of sounds we could record and sample as we walked around where we live and where we visit. Anyway, this song revolves around a nice recording of a rotating outdoor percussion instrument at Glasgow Science Centre, which is essentially for children. I like how Matt’s off-kilter melodies go between harmony and dissonance with the chiming. The words come from a text I wrote with my friends Becca and Jude. We meet up every month or so and write together and I feel a bit bad about using it because I feel it should live there, with them. It was meant to be a placeholder here, but it stuck. Thanks gals <3

Melodrama
This one’s a banger. IMO. Matt plays a synth instrument he made from a recording of a steel drum his friend Kim bought him when she heard we were going to make music. Samples here come from a film called Blow-Up about a photographer who witnesses a murder, or thinks he does. In the latter half, a YouTube rip from a corporate communications advice video. These were lingering on my computer from a failed art piece about feedback, so I guess it’s a good example of how collage works in this record.

(glossy!)
This one is bassy, isn’t it!? Another little interlude, this also has a sample from Blow-Up, before the photographer enters a gig, a scene which the theorist Sianne Ngai writes about when talking about how feedback works in relation to “tone” and its affect.

Chalky Outline
This one’s a mirror image of itself. It’s also probably the most obviously collage-like song on the record. Matt came up with the rhythm and melody one afternoon, and I threw some more of my bank of feedback sounds at it, then more talking about talking on top. And on the flip, a mirrored melody/drum beat, some reversed musak which I think is !hilarious! and a cameo from Matt reading a poem I wrote after a day at the beach (more beaches) where we looked at anemones (see, everything relates) and, as well as briefly getting obsessed with relocating to some rural idyll, I had to get him to explain to me what autodidactic means, for some reason or another. Later, Stephen described the record using that very word (see, everything relates).

(ha ha ha)
This one’s one more joke. It picks up some of Matt’s sound experiments from the first song, and layers some wild bird sounds, which is a bit of a trope, isn’t it? Same with the sound of waves, people doing people things and so on. So the song was born into dispute, but Ed thought we should keep it, so we did.

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I wish I was special is released on 5 Apr via World of Echo; Guests play The Old Hairdresser's, Glasgow, 16 May

by-guests.bandcamp.com