London /Oxford collective Mandrake Handshake share their debut album , Earth-Sized Worlds, and take Wonderland through it track-by-track.
Free-wheeling psychedelic collective Mandrake Handshake are taping into sounds from across the planet on their joyfully thrilling debut album. Earth-Sized Worlds is playful and musically meticulous, the work of a group of creatives whose chemistry is seamless and vision is unparalleled. The London/Oxford outfit take Wonderland through the album, track-by-track…
Listen to the album…
Read the track-by-track…
“Time Goes Up “
Row: This song introduces the central theme which we used to build the whole record, namely ‘Welcome to Space Beach’. That is, exploring the dichotomy between the organic and mechanical, the intimate and the epic, and trying to evoke a place where you’re surrounded by the richness of nature but you look up and can see the infinite cosmos before you. Of course, you can’t really fly through space until you’ve understood time…
Elvis: Time is one of our favourite subjects to sing about as a band.
Trin: I read an article about how the language we use around our conception of time is shaped by the physical geography that we exist in. This article was explaining how people who live in mountainous regions often view time as going up or down, depending on where they are placed on the mountain. We thought this was a pretty cool thing to write a song about.
“Hypersonic Super-Asterid”
Trin: The lyrics of this song are directly inspired by our experience watching Stereolab’s set at Green Man a few years ago.
Elvis: The beauty of the occasion, our chemically induced elation, and Stereolab’s music, all flowed together, and visions of a utopian society emerged, naturally.
Row: The music was inspired by noisy late-2010s krautrock music, except I wanted to put jazz chords over it. A lot of the synth tracks came from our little MicroKorgXL+. I often just end up leaning on whatever equipment is available, and this one synth Elvis got for his birthday about 10 years ago ended up being used across the record. That little guy has ended up becoming a very central part of our sound.
“Charlie’s Comet”
Row: This song started out when our guitarist Charlie sent me some chords and a bassline alongside a simple request not to turn it into a fuzzy lo-fi vibe. Which I then proceeded immediately to do.
Elvis: The name of the track seemed obvious to us, because Charlie decided to leave for America to fire anti-matter into Plasma for a living. Do you know how hard it is to fire anti-matter into things? The song became a goodbye to him, who’d been with the band even before the very beginning.
Row: We were listening to a lot of 90s trip top and there were a few songs I liked which used the trick of bringing a drum kit in halfway through to bring power and energy into something so loose and floaty, bringing a washy interlude into sharp focus. The delayed Saxophone was the cherry on top.
“The Change And The Changing”
Trin: I wrote the lyrics about a solo trip to Edinburgh, and a profound moment of reflection during a transitory period of life. They reflect on returning to the Self and reconnecting with ideas of autonomy and empowerment beyond the turbulences of a relationship. It’s also a testament to the healing power of nature.
Row: Musically, it’s very indebted to Musica Popular Brasileira, and all the Milton Nascimento I was listening to. We found that style fit the romance in the lyrics perfectly. In terms of our ‘Space Beach’ concept, this song is very ‘Beach’.
Elvis: This all sounds very sophisticated but Row came up with the riff while we were living together and joking about opening our chakras.
“Lorenzo’s Desk“
Row: This was one where the music came first. The idea was to take a classic, slow samba groove, but remove one of the beats so that it was in 7/8 time, giving it an athletic, jumpy feel that invokes afro beats a bit more. The key to the song was our producer Dom Kirtley helping us shift the time signatures to give different emphases to different sections of the track.
Trin: Lyrically, we were inspired by a Bristolian sound engineer named Lorenzo who we worked with for our first Bristol show.
Row: His mastery of the sound desk resembled a captain aboard a spacecraft in a way that I cannot emphasise enough. This was deemed an appropriate enough inspiration for this song.
Elvis: None of us have the confidence to tell him that we did this for him. He’ll just have to find out for himself.
“King Cnut “
Elvis: King Cnut was me processing all the feelings of anger and disempowerment and Universal Credit and Nintendo Switch that came from graduating and spending a year in lockdown. Conceitedly perhaps, we thought it might be fun to link this to the 10th/11th Century ruler King Cnut, who tried to push back the tides, failed, and declared the ultimate futility of his power. And not just because his name is almost a rude word.
Row: For this one, I liked the idea of removing drums and using percussion to drive a song, creating a Hippies-dancing-around-a-campfire-in-orgiastic-ecstasy vibe, which suits us I think.
“Barranmode”
Elvis: Our drummer Joe has an uncanny habit of coining catchphrases while we were on tour, and one that would not go way was “Barranmode”.
Joe. I had a toy as a child which ‘spoke’ to you, and I thought it was saying ‘barranmode’.
Row: The idea was to do a phrygian-style stomper. I was listening to artists like Gong, Can and The Soundcarriers, and made a playlist of songs to share to the band and communicate this vibe. The song quickly took on a life of its own and grew into a nasty doom track. It’s kind of the bad trip of the album.
Elvis: Dom added some really pretty jazz chords in the middle to add an elegant twist, and practically made our saxophonist David blow out his lungs to get the saxophone take. I ended up banging a huge gnarled steel drum for it too.
“Find The Tree and Dig (Deep)!”
Trin: This is the oldest and silliest song on the record.
Row: It starts out with the most stoned, stompy groove, and lyrics just about how fucked up the groove was. That bit is all about the tremolo drone, which is setting the stage for the experimentation in the second half – taking the background chord progression, reappropriating it into a new context and making it sound completely different. We had an idea of doing an 808 trap beat, so Dom again brought some tech wizardry to the drum machine building and we managed to create something super fucked up. I love this song as it’s the one bit of the album which feels totally unexpected. And also because it’s the most dubby.
Elvis: The bird song was a nice touch to add to the transition. If you listen very closely you can hear the monkey screams
“Earth-Sized Worlds“
Elvis: Seeds for songs often now come when we’re on tour, Row picking up a guitar wherever we’re staying and landing upon an idea. The opening riff for this one came on our first UK tour a few years ago after we’d played a few dates with Roscoe Roscoe and had become really inspired by the amazing shit they were (and still are) doing. I can still remember the living room in Glasgow, listening to Row pick out the notes for the first time.
It took many rehearsals to piece together the song’s long, winding structure. It was probably one of the first examples of us working songs through as a group in rehearsals, which is how we write all our material these days.
Row: It’s meant to be the anthemic ‘rounding up’ of the album. It was really difficult from a production point of view: the song starts off wistful and intimate, and ends so big and massive, and to be able to bring in that kind of scope was a challenge. The first half is very lysergic – the familiarity of coming back into your body but also being completely on another planet. The ending was designed to have that post-rock edge of slow, aggressive happiness, where grandiose positivity contrasts with an insane amount of heaviness.
