Tucked away on the Kingsland Road, Alev Lenz’s bright, yellow music studio blends with the hipster bars, grocery shops and galleries which have themselves for nearly two decades, sat alongside the Vietnamese restaurants and fast chicken joints lining the pavements towards Haggerston. For the past few months, her studio has been open every Tuesday morning for people to come in and meet her, experience her haunting new album ‘4 In A Cycle Of Thirds’ and even join her for lunch. Today a hearty vegetarian stew and salad with a delicious strawberry dressing is on offer, supplied by her bubbly Turkish mother who beams with pride at her daughter’s various achievements and who joins in with trying to beckon curious people loitering outside to “COME IN AND SAY HELLO…”
It is an interesting model for launching and sharing an album but within a few minutes of meeting Lenz it becomes obvious that she has limited interest in many of the conventions associated with the commercial music industry, though that’s not to say that her music hasn’t had leftfield commercial appeal. All of her records have received significant airplay and critical acclaim. She has collaborated on numerous film and tv scores and with Anoushka Shankar on the Grammy-nominated records Love Letters and Land Of Gold.
Her exceptional dark ambient folk ballad ‘Fall Into Me’ was featured on the Black Mirror episode ‘Hated In The Nation’, has had 375 thousand views on YouTube and more than 2 million plays on Spotify.
Fall Into Me was also the inspiration behind ‘4 In A Cycle Of Thirds’ which is her fourth album. Released earlier this year and recorded as a visiting artist at Studio Richter Mahr (founded by Max Richter and Yulia Mahr), the record is an ambitious 12-track project that anchors each song to a different chromatic note. As Lenz says…
“Fall Into Me” is based on a continuous drone on C, with the lyrics and vocal melody acting as its main character. It resonated so deeply with so many people that I was curious to see if I could write more songs based on the remaining notes of the scale. So I began with single-note drones and wrote and wrote…”
While the record has a strong compositional concept, there are personal and social themes in the lyrics too. Within the dark fairytale imagery, feminist concerns like women’s unpaid labour appear as well as personal stories about family.
As well as opening up her studio to present ‘4 In A Cycle Of Thirds’, Lenz’s basement space has had a very special residency from Earrational Measures, the soundscape project of percussionist, sound artist and passionate music facilitator Anna De Mutiis.
Hailing from Italy, De Mutiis has extensive experience of using her world groove percussion skills on big projects for child and adult refugees led by organisations like Hear Me Out and Music Action International. These often take place in the UK though sometimes even further afield, last December she worked for MAI with young people in Sierra Leone. The installation in Lenz’s studio is an emotional gut punch of a sonic masterpiece called 39 Alpha, 39 Bravo. It features the voice of collaborator and expert by experience Pilo Moreno and presents the sound of “detention’s economies” through the moment-to-moment story of profit and exploitation within a specific immigration removal centre, Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre near Oxford, across a single day in 2016. De Mutiis uses data sonification and the recorded perspective of Moreno, who co-produced this track, and who shares his personal experience of detention with a moving monologue.
Moreno guides the listeners through a whole day in Campsfield House, retracing a generic day through a recurring repeated sequence evoking the five months he spent there. In the background, and as part of the track’s rhythmic landscape, listeners hear the amount three characters of the track earned in one day in 2016: the director of the private corporation managing the removal centre, the custody officer working in the facility and a detainee who is employed by the centre for menial duties. All the sounds associated with the incomes of these three social actors were chosen by Moreno.
Through the juxtaposition of data-sonification, haunting sounds and first person narration, the listeners are drawn into the brutal economies of detention. The piece evokes the extreme exploitation and dehumanisation which is deeply embedded into the daily practices and restrictions of UK Immigration Removal Centres. Even the title – “39 Alpha, 39 Bravo”- is an explicit reference to the numbers of the bed Pilo and his cellmate were called by during their time in detention.
Lenz and De Mutiis have created a highly personal and politically conscious space for people to dive into. It’s an opportunity to experience a really moving collection of music and sound presented in a way which feels warm and welcoming. Sometimes walk up has been random. There have been lots of local and international students (Hackney City College is a stone’s throw away) Vietnamese restaurant owner neighbours, people in the community with kids and artists including Grafittiist Stik who had always wondered what was behind the yellow walls of Lenz’s studio and who has in turn, invited them to visit his premises. Lenz says she didn’t “open up [her] studio and yell at people in the street to come in” before but she has really enjoyed it as an alternative to Instagram content creation – a huge achievement in the slavishly algorhithmic-driven and divided Reform era UK we are navigating.
4 In A Cycle Of Thirds is out now.
Both the record and 39 Alpha, 39 Bravo can be experienced until Tuesday July 14th at Lenz’s studio by appointment or at their last open Tuesday on the 14th.
Both are available to stream and buy from Bandcamp too