London experimental trio Voka Gentle release beautiful, balmy indie cut 'Respect My Eccentricity, Pt.2'! New album 'WRITHING!' following on October 22nd via Leafy Outlook.
Operating on a plane between avant-garde indie, bubbling electronica and cosmic psychedelia, Voka Gentle have an addictive, amorphous sound. A three limbed beast made up of twins Ellie and Imogen Mason, and William J. Stokes, each is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer with an imperious understanding of three dimensional sound.
Within this sonic framework, ‘Respect My Eccentricity, Pt. 2’ stands out in its simplicity. A warm bath of sound, it’s a classic piece of songwriting in the vein of Yo La Tengo or Sharon Van Etten, driven by soft Telecaster strums and subtle vocal harmonies. It’s origins were somewhat more abrasive, as the band explain:
“There was a chord pattern that William was playing around with but just didn’t know what to do with- it was quite a Pavement-y, fast aggressive sequence. Then it was decided to try playing it really quietly and slowly instead, and ‘Respect My Eccentricity’ is the result. When we came to record it fully we were convinced that we wanted to divert from the ‘indie-rock-ness’ of the chords by putting more acoustic instruments in there, things like mic-ing the electric guitar strings (we used an old band favourite, a handmade junky semi-hollow guitar named Vashti - after Vashti Bunyan), hitting a small drum in a kind of tribal way, toying with the tonality by having a kind of sliding synth drone in the background…”
This tallies with the three-piece’s general approach, of deconstructing and reconstituting musical ideas into something new.
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