By BRUCE DENNILL
London-based band Lunar & The Deception recently released the single Your Monsters ahead of new album The Somnambulist. Their journey has seen them back Pussy Riot at the Glastonbury Festival, electrify stages across London and make waves at the 2022 Sync Summit Music Conference. Your Monsters is co-produced with Michael Rendall, known for his work with The Orb, Peter Murphy and Killing Joke.
The band, with ties to Durban and Nelspruit in South Africa, is centred on expat vocalist Britt Xyra Dusk. She is a London-based songwriter and professional costume designer, recognised for activism and captivating performances. Dusk designs the band’s visuals, pulling from themes of ancient deities, prophetic sorcerers and tribal warriors. Percussionist Hedge Seel, raised in the Oxfordshire countryside near local monoliths the Rollright Stones, expanded his rhythmic approach after his travels in Southeast Asia and India. The line-up also includes experienced players like dub producer Thomas Hammond and sound engineer Greg Chapter. Mixing alt-rock, indie-rock, darkwave, dream-pop, gothic and neo-psychedelia, the band draws inspiration from the likes of Led Zeppelin, Radiohead and Tool, to name a few. Their sound has been compared to Portishead, Evanescence and Esben & The Witch.
What are the aspects of music that most appeal to or thrill you as a listener, from lyrics to arrangements to instruments used to production techniques?
I love songs that take you on a journey, so you never know where you are going, that are quiet one moment, then thunderous, then swooping down a hill. I’m bored of the standard song structure, so I love it when a musician is creative and doesn’t stick to the so-called formula! I love a variety of instruments too, when you’re listening to a song and try to pick out what made the different sounds. It keeps it interesting! We love to create sounds from anything from clavichords, lyres and synths to plug-ins on Ableton. We will always use real strings, though – I think you can hear the difference if it’s a real instrument or a midi instrument. We use an Arturia Mini-Freak and Korg synths too. And percussion is a big part of the layering process. We have collected a wide variety of percussion, including the Djembe, Darbuka, Thavil and Sabar drums. When it comes to arrangements, we don’t follow a standard verse, chorus, bridge deal – these elements are dependent on which way the music flows or the melody and lyric structure align. We always want our tracks to progress and build, but there is never a particular order to arrangement. It’s more about feeling out the lyrics and melody. Songs really do have a life of their own if you let them, and its good not to try and cage them too much.
Are those the same things you try to recreate in your writing or performance?
Yes to a certain degree, but when it comes to performance, we have a more structured basis from which we work and fill out areas so we can jam live and extend sections. We try to upscale or downsize our performances, so we can perform the song with just drums and vocals as a basic minimum or keep adding until there is a full orchestra.
Which aspect of creating music comes most easily to you, and which requires the most discipline and practice?
Writing lyrics and melody is always the most free-flowing element of the writing process for me. The hard part is essentially figuring out the key and putting all the different sections together in an arrangement that works together and takes the listener on a journey. Artists can sometimes be antennae to ideas that float by, then the hard part is pulling them down and crafting them into something tangible.
Outside of the actual music, what is, for you, the most important part of a great new release (single, album, etc)?
Making sure people get to hear it. Sometimes the music sphere can feel a little saturated and now that AI music has joined the playing field, it may be even harder to get heard.
Live performance: which artist has most impressed you in terms of what they deliver on stage?
Secret Chiefs 3 are incredible musicians who use interesting time signatures, Eastern instruments and electronic aspects too. They are so intense live that you are totally drawn into the sound. Other bands like HEALTH have a density and power that is unparalleled. I’m also really enjoying Chinchilla as my favorite vocalist lately.
What role does music play in your life on a day-to-day basis – listening to it, writing it, practising it, buying and selling it, performing it, etc?
Music is always woven into my life from the moment I wake up and I also love discovering new music. Hedge, our drummer, works in a record shop in London and is always discovering new gems and old jewels. Melodies come to me on a daily basis, but I really need silence to create.
What is your most recent release? What is the story behind it – the genesis of the song, the people involved, the muse behind its creation?
Your Monsters is a love ballad, The song was inspired by how you can love someone but also that same love, can open up the capacity to be filled by frustration, rage and pain. Love is not always pretty, perfect or beautiful, -it also contains a space for growth and a place to unleash…‘Your Monsters’. I don’t mean malevolence or violence here – rather allowing yourself and your partner the space to also explore the shadow side of love. I love the Kahlil Gibran poem On Joy And Sorrow from his seminal work The Prophet: the central idea is that joy and sorrow are dual, inseparable and deeply interconnected. Joy is not the opposite of sorrow, but rather sorrow ‘unmasked’. As he says, ‘The same emotional well that produces laughter has often been filled with tears. The deeper sorrow carves into you, the more joy you can contain: Pain shapes the soul to hold greater joy, much like a cup must be fired in a kiln to hold wine, or a lute must be hollowed with knives to produce music. They are not rivals but partners: One cannot exist without the other.’