Love Music, Hate Racism with Machines in Heaven

 Who are Machines in  Heaven and how did the band come about?

MIH are Greg, Connor and Davey – this lineup came into fruition from what was previously only a studio project, around 3 years ago now. We play noisy electronic music with guitars and that.

You’ve developed from having quite a post rock aesthetic towards a more electronic sound – is this a natural progression for the band?

In short, yes. We basically went full pop with the last EP (Hindu Milk), and the first LP was very post-rock.

One thing we were keen to progress from bordersbreakdown was the way we utilise guitars and vocals generally. We wanted to get more experimental with it, and as a result we seem to have lost some of the more “twee” elements that were in our guitar lines previously, opting on this record for a quite a krautrock influence, a “less is more” ethos.

You promised me that your new album would combine Brian Eno and Little Mix. Would you like to speak about your influences?

I seem to remember this conversation taking place backstage at Tuts over a beverage or several Brian! We are admittedly all about Little Mix (Black Magic is a TUNE), but I think you’ll be struggling to hear a lot of that in the new record. However, there is a tune that sounds quite a bit Daft Punk (you know, when they were actually good). Eno, absolutely. Our influences have always been super varied between us. A lot of the time we’re turning each other on to music. Davey has been getting into a lot of trap and drugged out southern hip hop (Tommy Genesis, ABRA, etc); got to love those 909 kicks.

 Electronic music can be difficult to present live, but you make it compelling to watch. How do you achieve this?

We do a lot of improv live, and because of that we have a lot of happy accidents on stage, where a lot of the time we adopt a punk rock ethic, in terms of energy being fundamentally more important than traditional “tightness”. The live show is always a work in progress though; I don’t think it’ll ever be otherwise.

 The new album’s called Phenomenology – how did this idea affect you or the album?

Phenomenology is a philosophical term coined by Husserl, Sartre etc. which was used to describe the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: the appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. In modern interpretations though, it’s been adjusted to define a much wider range, addressing the meaning deeper things have in our experience, notably, the significance of objects, events,
tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these things arise and are experienced in our individual worlds. We all read a lot, and felt it was a suitable name for the kind of album we wanted to create. Its simultaneously an homage to our non-musical influences and a template we used to build a concept on. The last track, Ragman Rolls, contains samples of Alan Lomax basically trying to get people in a village up north to sing an old folk song for him; they are all either too embarrassed to sing it, or just didn’t know it but said they did. The way people communicate is fascinating to us. The whole realm of experience and sensation is fucking weird, and one of these things no one ever stops to really think about.