“It’s not me standing over here with my opinions. “That is why I’ll back this album forever in a way that I wouldn’t really do with my first album,” he concludes. Nick says that Brian Eno is “the direct reason why there’s a gang sound on the vocal on the record.” ‘Wake Up Now’ is a record made with baby Inka at Nick’s feet, his wife Isadora on backing vocals, new and old friends featured as co-writers and instrumentalists. I’ve always based my patterns on songwriters I grew up with, and the groove-based, minimalist, hypnotic qualities that I’ve always loved.” He knew that my music works on that premise as well. It’s punctuated by moments of verticality – horn stabs, or a community of the singers singing up words – then it’s back down to the horizontal grooves. We talked about horizontal music, a continual groove that doesn’t change chord. “Brian and I talked a lot about West African musicians. Having studied music in Havana, and then ethnomusicology at university in London, Nick has a developed understanding and a vested interest in the musical practices of African and Central and South American music, where rhythm is a far more leant-on feature. The vocal melodies on ‘Wake Up Now’, and indeed ‘First Mind’ are sweetly catchy and easy to sing along to, but it is the guitar patterns Nick plays underneath which are far more intriguing. Nick’s music has always had a hypnotic guitar sound. He made me develop a much more ambient, much more environmental approach to the music, where it wasn’t a chord sequence change/ change/ change, like a song. I would play, and of course he didn’t tell me to change for ages. “He instructed me to play, but he wanted me to give over to him the control of when I changed chord. “Brian was really interested in my guitar playing,” Nick explains.
#Isadora mulvey free#
Nick further developed his practice of self-enquiry and free music-making when he spent time with legendary ambient and electronic musician Brian Eno last year.
Even the melodic shapes give space to the words.” I create them very easily – little repetitive cells – and then my melodies will come from them in the spaces the cells supply. “I’ve always got a whole world of guitar patterns. “The guitar, blessedly, has always been a place free from my own intellectual interference,” he says. Unsurprisingly, Nick sees music-making at the very centre of his meditation. To practise self-abidance takes time and concentration. A lot of this album is about self-enquiry and self-abidance – learning to dwell within your being.” “For me it’s about daily practices that support you in dwelling in the peace and wisdom that you have inside. “At a certain point, it’s obvious that you don’t live in a vacuum,” he says. He admits he is speaking “freely” and “openly” today – and that he’s doing so because he is pleased to be able to talk about the world rather than just his personal life.īeginning to write about the world outside of his immediate surroundings was an obvious transition for the guitarist. The first thing he mentions when asked what he misses most since moving away from London? Local yoga classes. Several times throughout conversation, he’ll hold his hands into a prayer-like shape, and bow his head. He speaks calmly and thoughtfully, often pausing for seconds at a time to ensure he is wording his thoughts correctly. If ‘Wake Up Now’ isn’t simply concerned with recent political events, it instead touches on a more widespread “awakening of consciousness and opening up a new level of understanding,” in Nick’s words. It’s an admittance of weakness, but sung with a celebratory instinct, because it is the realisation that matters. “Oh my goodness me, I’m not ok!” sings Nick, leading a choir, on ‘Transform Your Game’. The result is an album which feels very present – not solely in its themes and lyrical content (although current events cannot help but slip in, as in stories of the refugee crisis in ‘Myela’) – but in its brightness and vivacity.
“Songs started to arrive however they wanted to arrive, and I was just as much writing them down as writing them myself,” he tells me. “When my son was born, everything was heightened,” he says. It’s no wonder he feels dizzy with the preciousness of life.
Nick wrote the songs for ‘Wake Up Now’ in parallel to his wife’s pregnancy. Since the release of 2014’s ‘First Mind’, the former Portico Quartet hang drum player and his wife Isadora have moved from East London to an artist’s community in Wiltshire. “This is an album about celebrating life, when life is not just your circumstances, work and family, but the vitality of your being, your aliveness,” says Nick Mulvey of his upcoming second album, ‘Wake Up Now’.
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