Duck into the narrow side streets of the UK coastal town of Margate and you'll come across a secondhand furniture shop called RG Scotts. On its top floor, an assortment of tables — tables that became field recordings, then programmed scatter rhythms, and eventually the foundations of the new solo album from Mike Lindsay: Supershapes (Volume 1).

It’s the first instalment in a series of records from the Mercury Prize-winning producer and mixing engineer (who’s also the co-founder of UK acid folktronica band Tunng, and one half of electronic alt-psych duo LUMP, with Laura Marling), a series that explores “the miraculous in the mundane”. Volume 1 looks widely at “everyday domestic objects, especially tables, coffee table books, and the daily rituals that shape us, heavily focusing on the majestic in the domestic”.

In fact, the album began life around a table: specifically, the 120-year-old dining room table that Lindsay and his wife Lily sat around every morning, sounding out ideas. “I’ve been chipping away at these tunes as instrumentals on and off in between other productions for about three years,” says Lindsay. “I had around 7 or 8 flavours in a folder that had been heavily worked on, including Ross Blake’s woodwind and soft sax parts, sitting untouched for over a year. All the works at that time were named after strange shapes, like ‘Squircle', ‘Triquetra’, ‘Septagon', ‘Nonagon’.”

Inspired by Lily’s MA studies in fine art, Lindsay mulled over the idea that objects have memories and their own consciousness. “I opened up the folder with the ‘shape tunes’ and started to think of them as ‘supershapes’ that could be inspired by everyday shapes and objects that surround us,” he explains. “This led to me sampling tables, books, and furniture, and making scatter rhythms from those samples to weave into the tunes and shape them into their own objects.”

“Take this table / this perfect rectangle / 1900, French, oak,” begins singer-songwriter Anna B Savage on the album’s third track, an ode to Lindsay’s dining table. “Who else sat round this perfect rectangle, with kids and hopes and friendship? / And who else smeared errant gravy off it with their fingertips?” From an ordinary household object appears a rich seam of history and emotion, the table given its own agency, and a century’s worth of secrets…

The album is a kind of table in its own right, too: those who sit round it include Anna and many other musicians and artists — a sense of collaboration that has run through all of Lindsay’s work. Even the voices of his family feature as samples on opening track Lie Down. “That places the project firmly in the home,” says Lindsay. “A lot of them I recorded on my phone at Christmas, and lots more were sent to me on WhatsApp. They all have the acoustics of their homes on them — and the telly!”

At first, Lindsay had thought the project would be purely instrumental. “I had just worked with Robert Stillman on the Nick Drake cover of Saturday Sun I did with Guy Garvey,” he recalls. “Robert is an incredible saxophone player and musician. He has this beautiful thick and warm wild tone. I asked him to come in for a couple of days to bring his magic to the shapes.”

“As time went on though, I felt the songs were still missing a voice. The more they developed as instrumentals, the more I could imagine the tones of Anna B Savage. I had already worked with Anna on her album in|FLUX which was a wonderful experience. She is a true poet of the everyday emotions. Over four or five days together in my new studio in Margate, the supershapes started to come alive!”

Others came on board too, including drummer Adam Betts, who Lindsay had seen play as part of Three Trapped Tigers, Squarepusher’s Shobaleader One, and his own Colossal Squid solo drum show in Margate. “I thought perhaps he could bring something to the shapes, which of course he did, weaving in and out of the sampled objects.”

Even Robert Wyatt lent his support to the project, when Lindsay emailed him the track Kachumber — “a recipe for kachumber salad inspired by the Dishoom Indian cookbook which lives on our kitchen shelf” — and received an encouraging reply. “He thought my own voice fit the song perfectly,” says Lindsay. “It was an incredible response from a hero.”

Recipe books weren’t the only inspiration. A coffee table book called Josef Albers In Mexico

— a gift to Lindsay from Lily ahead of their own trip to Mexico — was a source of inspiration for the whole record. “The book itself as an object became very inspiring: it’s a beautiful embossed purple large table book,” explains Lindsay. “Obviously inside the book are wondrous images of the Albers’ art [inspired by Mexican indigenous architecture] which feel like supershapes. Anna and I were leafing through this in the studio, leading to Anna writing the mantra for Ruins In Reverse.”

Other influences included “contemporary productions like Foodman’s ‘Yasuragi Land’, a Japanese experimental manic scatter sample electronica artist who blows my mind. Kate NV: I love her bass sounds and twisted melodic rhythms. Also, I was listening to Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s ‘Keyboard Fantasies’,” he continues. “His voice just wraps around me, transporting me entirely to other places, and I only know one other person who can do that and that’s Anna B Savage.”

“This record is one that I’m very proud of,” concludes Lindsay. “I hope we can turn it into an incredible live experience with all of us, even just for a few special shows. There will of course be kachumber salad prepared and shared with everyone who comes to the show. I hope that people are immersed by the record and feel the journey. I hope that they give their own table some love.”

Caoilfhionn Rose

You might also like...

SIGN UP TO OUR MAILING LIST