Tunng - Colorful folk-based patchworks

Among the most interesting and active revitalizers of a scene that would be reductive to confine to British folk alone, Tunng represent an experience of an open musical collective rarely found in these years: timeless in the many and heterogeneous contributions of the individual artists involved, yet absolutely contemporary in their expressive freshness and their ability to call into question any rigid generic scheme.

After all, the very origin of the artistic project that would go on to become the band tells of different musical paths crossing, each trying to combine its own inclinations into an unprecedented formula, even though it was not originally intended to create anything new. The spark that gave rise to Tunng was, in fact, the meeting between Mike Lindsay and Sam Genders in 2003: the former had set up a small recording studio in the basement of a clothing shop in Soho, where he worked on music for radio adverts while also dabbling in various electronic experiments; the latter was instead a classic singer-songwriter with a strong leaning towards folk, who at the time moved within London's underground pub circuit.

Almost as a game, the two decided to join forces, and so Genders' already substantial folk singer-songwriter repertoire began to be reworked and enriched by Lindsay's glittering and often bizarre electronic sounds. Their first approaches drew on psychedelia and the age-old but ever-effective British folk tradition; soon, however, the writing and composing process became shared, and new songs with shape-shifting forms often grew out of a single idea, a sound, or a phrase.

The move from this first phase, which culminated in the now-unfindable demo The Would Wood, to a long series of collaborations and 7-inches happened very quickly, helped also by the interest of the small but important label Static Caravan, which gladly welcomed them onto its roster in 2004, pressing limited editions of the singles Tale From Black and Maypole Song. Both already revealed Tunng's intent to break away from the conventions of British acoustic, singer-songwriter folk by pairing crooked guitar notes with all sorts of rhythms and disturbances, from a cheap drum machine to creeping drones, right up to a myriad of playful bleeps, which gave the songs a bizarre, deliberately distorted feel.

By early 2005 it was already time for the debut album, Mother's Daughter And Other Songs, which gathered together what had already been shown on the singles, achieving a thoroughly cohesive and accomplished fusion between lo-fi guitar and a kaleidoscope of electronic backwash, in a set of pleasantly contagious songs with richer, more carefully crafted arrangements than those on the singles, as is evident in the reworking of the already-released "Tale From Black".

From the haunting lament of the opening "Mother's Daughter" to the dark mantra of "People Folk", from the acoustic-digital hybridization of "Beautiful And Light" to the lo-fi country of "Song Of The Sea", Tunng seem thoroughly at ease reshuffling conventions and keeping their songs unpredictable: carefully built on a melodic level, yet made unsettling each time by lopsided glitch inserts that mildly disrupt the melodies, and by an instrumental setup capable of surprising at every turn, moving effortlessly from playful folk, complete with banjo and accordion, to moments of deliberate orchestral chaos created by interweaving violin and cello, as in the excellent "Kinky Vans".

That's the whole of their experimental streak right there, at once twisted and accessible, acoustic and groovy, disarmingly simple yet dotted with a host of pleasing details to be discovered in the folds of ten tracks that reveal, on a wider scale, the eccentric freshness of two artists who, above all, enjoy making music, caring very little about forms and labels.

The album was followed by a period of intense activity, also attested by the split release with Dollboy, which saw Tunng touring for the first time. This was an important turning point for the band, triggered by Sam Genders' initial decision not to perform live; far from putting the Tunng project in crisis, this decision instead helped broaden its horizons, turning it into a proper band. Indeed, while for the first two years of Tunng's existence Genders remained in the shadows, providing his essential contribution on the compositional side, Lindsay set about expanding the band's line-up, recruiting four more travelling companions: percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Martin Smith, electronics manipulator Phil Winter, singer Becky Jacobs, and fellow guitarist Ashley Bates, the latter with a surprising past as the drummer of shoegazers Chapterhouse.

The contribution of the new musicians, initially meant only for the live experience, soon extended into the studio as well, first occasionally and then more consistently, and already on the following single Pioneers, released in early 2006, Tunng's sound grew richer and more structured, while it was precisely in the incredible syncopated cover of the Bloc Party song of the same name that Jacobs' vocals appeared for the first time.

Shortly after, another single, Woodcat, preceded the second album Comments Of The Inner Chorus, which can rightly be considered the work of the band's early artistic maturity, where the acoustic-electronic intersections are now arranged in a more rational and, in a sense, orderly manner, so as to emphasize at once the crystalline simplicity of graceful melodies and the whirlwind of samples, effects and various electronic disturbances. The presence of the latter, often confined to a supporting role around seemingly rather conventional acoustic ballads such as "Woodcat" and "Sweet William", is nonetheless dosed with great restraint and, despite its frequently freak attitude, never spills over into redundant excess or self-indulgent drift. The sound is indeed always fresh and immediate, and even when synths and broken rhythms take over ("Stories", the ending of "It's Because We Got Hair"), a sense of playful immediacy remains, a disenchanted attitude, as if the band didn't take too seriously the convoluted alchemies of countless possible sonic combinations, favouring instead a spontaneity that is at once amused and amusing.

Proof of this spirit is in fact provided by the band itself, which, faced with repeated comparisons of the electronic components of its music to artists such as Books or even Fridge and Four Tet, has always rejected the label "folktronica", just as it has rejected the idea that its sonic kaleidoscope is directly descended from the inspiration of the artists to which it has been likened.

Although, on a purely formal level, some similarities can indeed be found, the original inspiration and the context in which Tunng's colourful sonic bric-a-brac is set are quite different. Its origin is still to be found entirely in the rendering, through modern means and sensibility, of playful ballads with an ancient spirit and a bittersweet flavour; within all this, Tunng's uncommon ability lies in balancing, inside each piece, gentle acoustic guitars, catchy melodies, lopsided little choruses and deep, fragmented electronic beats, culminating in the whirling finale of "Engine Room".

Having by now settled into a core line-up of six members, yet still open to numerous collaborations, Tunng were not content to simply perpetuate their own highly personal and unpredictable take on the folktronic paradigm, choosing instead to put themselves back to the test as a proper band with their third record, which, testifying to a thriving creative streak, followed the acclaimed Comments Of The Inner Chorus by little more than a year.

This is how Good Arrows came about, an album rich with colourful facets right from its cover art, on which Tunng firmly place the emphasis on melody, while still retaining the band's core identity, still marked by folk arabesques and faint electronic pulses, bare acoustic arpeggios and sudden electric outbursts, murky field recordings and lively sixties atmospheres.

On Good Arrows, in fact, electronics are just one of the eccentric divertissements grafted onto the band's usual bedrock of enchanted, utterly timeless folk, so much so that they function almost solely to add movement and lightly "dirty up" the excellent, sun-drenched, pleasantly retro-flavoured melodies that dominate especially the record's opening stretch.

Over the course of the album, however, Tunng seem to enjoy presenting endless variations on acoustic, electric and electronic themes, pairing groovy vocal basslines with airier instrumental passages ("Spoon", "Secrets"), or building melodic loops out of interwoven vocals ("King") and the repetition of a bare acoustic chord ("Arms"), which with astonishing ease bring a whole array of eccentric, mismatched elements back into harmonic unity.

And it's this disarming ability that represents the band's true edge: without entirely giving up their sonic quirks, they manage to craft plenty of catchy tracks, and even a potential summer hit like "Bullets", capable of winning over even the staunchest opponents of music's physical dimension.

Yet the band's pronounced pop leanings nimbly dodge any idea of a "normalisation" of their sound, since Tunng here prove that the disorienting effect of their music in earlier works wasn't due merely to a greater dose of electronic inserts, but in fact still stems from the enduring freshness of a vaguely freak-ish approach, genuine and, precisely for that reason, never redundant.

Almost as if to contradict the prolific three-year run in which they released their first three official albums, after Good Arrows Mike Lindsay and Sam Genders decided to take some time to regroup their ideas. A three-year hiatus followed, coinciding with intense live activity and various side projects — including Genders' work with The Accidental — but it proved more than timely in keeping the band's exhilarating freshness from being worn down by formulaic repetition.

…And Then We Saw Land thus marks a partial shift, embodied above all by a more minimal attitude than in the past.

Rather than a true break, it's a recombination of elements that leads, on one hand, to their more independent emphasis, and on the other, to shifting intersections between bucolic clarity, timeless folk-pop, electric incursions and resurfacing folktronic traces.

What sets …And Then We Saw Land apart above all is the toning down of the unbridled freshness of earlier albums: the tones are more muted, and the band's own approach to the music feels more careful and serious, still indulging in divertissements built from electro-acoustic trinkets and sudden sixties-rock flourishes, but rationing their presence to well-defined moments, relegating them elsewhere to mere backdrop.

The reduced immediacy and lower-key profile adopted throughout the album don't, however, come at the expense of that natural ease, which now instead finds expression precisely in the shifting, irregular structures of many tracks.

But alongside the constant juxtaposition of sounds, Tunng never neglect melodic simplicity, through which they offer up essential, bucolic ballads, steeped in oblique folk undertones even more explicit than before. Becky Jacobs' growing contribution is decisive here too, her graceful performances often surfacing in velvety dialogues of lively melodic directness.

Without giving up the dazed electro-acoustic openness that earned them their reputation, on …And Then We Saw Land Tunng make their bond with folk tradition more candid than ever, reworked somewhere between minimalism and choral breadth, with a more decidedly folktronic stance not heard since their earliest days.

A faint experimentalism, an increasingly sketch-like register that seems to hint at a stricter, more reflective conceptual framework: these seem to be the hallmarks of Turbines, Tunng's new album (2013) — a record that almost never indulges the easier motifs of the English band's career, instead remaining prey to dark visions ("Heavy Rock Warning") and unresolved grooves ("The Village").

Amid tribal shards ("So Far From Here") and chewed-up, Vernon-esque riffs ("By This"), "Turbines" betrays an ever more prevalent psych streak, a dark maturity of sound that doesn't, however, carry through into the songwriting, where it's hard to tell inspired refinement from flagging inspiration ("Embers", the trip-hop nursery rhyme of "Trip Trap").

In the end, a record with a solemn tone, largely subdued, as grey as the pale pastoral hue of its harmonies.

In 2016, the encounter between Mike Lindsay and the talented singer-songwriter Laura Marling sparked an intriguing collaboration called LUMP, which two years later would give birth to the project's self-titled debut Lp. Just two minutes of the opener "Late To The Flight" is enough to make everything clear: the two minds behind LUMP are both clearly recognizable, yet the result of their meeting has no precedent in either of their discographies. And it's enchanting: Mike Lindsay of Tunng lets slow folk guitar arpeggios and Laura's angelic voice, now rarefied, now doubled, lose themselves among frothy synths, drones that hum like old refrigerators, and a light drizzle of flutes. It's only the first of six — not counting "LUMP Is A Product (Credits)" — immersive electro-acoustic scenarios, where Marling's supple, voluptuous singing meets backdrops entirely new to her. From the shades of "Late To The Flight" blossoms the second of these visions, "May I Be The Light", which unfurls a quirky, neurotic prayer over a bed of glitchy bass tones. At the heart of the record lies its pulsing core: "Curse Of The Contemporary". Lavish art-pop, where Marling's voice, more of a diva here than ever, coils and stretches between exquisite guitar embroidery and lush horns. Already precious on their own, the songs gain even more value when taken as a whole. Thanks to Lindsay's admirable work of stitching everything together, the record moves between almost antithetical musical scenes with incredible fluidity and clarity. Like when the Moroder-esque keyboard riffs underpinning the saucy electro number "Hand Hold Hero" dissolve into the ambient calm that opens "Shake Your Shelter".

How much the LUMP project served as a stepping stone toward Tunng's triumphant return, there's no way of knowing; the only certainty is that the muses eventually found their way back into the English band's world.

With Songs You Make At Night, Lindsay and Genders not only bring the Tunng formula back to life, but even reassemble the 2007 line-up. The inherent beauty of the new songs stems from an inner regeneration; there's a poetic urgency that manages to do without some of the excesses of the recent past, and the sonic language is fluid rather than contradictory: acoustic, electric and electronic become a single paradigm, from which springs the flexible, hyperrealist organic matter of the English band's sixth album.

That Tunng have been chasing the chimera of pop is an undeniable fact, but the band has learned to handle rhythmic pauses and the fragility of refrains, crafting hypnotic harmonies with an ancestral, dreamlike allure ("Dream In"), cryptic little tunes ("Abop") and delectable electro-pop ("Dark Heart").

The surrealism of the lyrics fuels the record's more moderately psychedelic pages: the mischievous chant of "Flatland", the magical meeting of evanescence and reality in "Nobody Here", the dangerous seduction of the intangible "Like Water".

Songs You Make At Night is an unexpected return to form: the songs are blessed with a genuine, enduring beauty ("Crow"), a love for detail that invites repeated listens ("Battlefront"), and a renewed narrative flair that modernizes the figure of the troubadour ("Evaporate"), but it's in the exquisite synthesis of "Sleepwalking" that Tunng reach perfection.

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