Lloyd Wayne announces debut EP 'Bird Beyond' EP, out March 13th and shares title track.
Lloyd Wayne (FKA Compton White) today announces his debut EP 'Bird Beyond', as well as sharing its title track. Wayne recently returned from an extended hiatus with 'Saviour' - a single that won support from international media outlets.
Lloyd Wayne's nomadic Romany Gypsy upbringing spent traveling with his fairground-running showman family between London, South England, and the Isle of Wight gave him boundless freedom to get into scrapes, make mistakes and generally figure life out for himself.
With his parents occupied running the candy floss kiosks and rides, Wayne and his brother Reed could roam free. Since receiving critical acclaim under his Compton White moniker, he has been writing with Mura Masa and Westerman + this newly announced EP represents music released for the first time under his own name.
On the new single, Lloyd Wayne says
"Bird Beyond was the first track on the project to come together. My little brother Reed (with whom I originally started making beats in 2010) was up in Feltham and I showed him the chords and a top-line idea and it sparked. We kept stoking the thing for 2 days.
I wanted it to sound naive and raw and keeping it messy seemed to support that. The lyric was an attempt to emulate the feeling we had as kids overhearing the grownups tell crazy tales from the our Traveller heritage. Epic tragedies from a dead age.
It's one of those rare songs that just sort of happened."
The desire to make music and tell stories is something Wayne’s been pursuing since the age of 8, but from a fascinatingly unorthodox position.
“Seeing the dueling banjo scene in the film Deliverance had the most powerful effect on me when I was very young and impressionable. I became obsessed with learning to play the banjo and received lessons for 3 summers from a homeless man called Alastair Foot.”
With all lessons happening in full public view outside the family cafe, Wayne was given a bizarre, DIY introduction to music - one that has undoubtedly shaped his career.
“There was no theory, no learning to read music. It was all ‘now put your hand like this'.”
From the banjo, Wayne progressed from GarageBand beat-maker to Ableton obsessive - teaching himself everything he needed to know about music production using YouTube and his intuition. The Compton White record - which received great acclaim and support from the likes of NTS Radio residents and BBC Radio DJ’s Huw Stevens and Annie Nightingale - was the product of these years of experimentation, and saw his desire to tell the story of his background come to fruition, identified in a shining review by The Quietus as a 'wordless telling of an intensely personal tale, capturing the motions of a life lived in two opposing worlds'.“The first record was more experimentation-motivated. Even though it's instrumental, I obsessed over structuring it narratively, even if the arc was felt rather than understood.”
It was the Compton White record which then caught the attention of legendary underground label head Robin Carolan, whose roster boasts production credits for the likes of Arca and Björk.
“Tri-Angle was a dream come true. I'd been a fanboy since 2012 and ended up interviewing Forest Swords, Sd Laika and Robin as a case study for my Graphic Design dissertation. A year later I sent an email complaining about the late arrival of a Tri-Angle t-shirt I’d ordered, got chatting to Robin over email and ended up getting signed.”
In Bird Beyond, Wayne blends the weird, the crude and the mischievous with gorgeous production. The result: an extraordinary soundscape that’s so poppy you’re sure you’ve heard it before, and yet so strangely idiosyncratic you can’t stop listening.