#25: Sydenham High Road, Trim, Yazz Ahmed
Upcoming shows, new music and more.
Cantilever is a weekly rundown of London-based gigs and other musical ephemera.
This week’s playlist
Spotlight Shows
Sydenham High Road — Spanners, 05.02.2025
The non-finito is a visual art technique that dates back to the Renaissance. The execution is relatively simple: the artwork is left unfinished. But the result, when conviction is also there, can make for something incredibly moving.
Michelangelo’s The Prisoner / Slave is a great example. The figures appear stuck inside their material reality; a reification of their inability to flourish in society. We know Michelangelo could have easily completed this sculpture. Maybe its unfinished nature was his plan from the start — I like to think it was — or maybe he moved on to something else, ran out of time, we don’t know. Either way, though, this is its final form today.
Regardless of Michelangelo’s original intention, the artwork puts its status as a material art-object in conversation with its representational qualities. It lifts the curtain on the artistic process itself. In this sense, it’s a (very!) early example of conceptual art. Nothing is ever really that new.
I think that a specific kind of low-fidelity music functions along the same principles.
Take the music of Daniel Johnston. Tracks like “Walking the Cow”, “Story of an Artist”, “Like a Monkey in a Zoo”, and so on, contain abundant mistakes. They sound un-finished, incomplete. There’s even a fully wrong chord in “Story of an Artist” about one minute in.
I’m sure some people would debate this definition: Johnston, with his limited recording equipment and mental health issues couldn’t have done it any other way, they might say. But I don't think this gives him enough credit. He could have easily re-recorded “Story of an Artist” to make the chord “right”; to “finish” the song. But he chose to release it with that mistake in. The mistake means something for the story of the song.
Like Michelangelo’s sculpture, The Story of an Artist depicts a struggle. Where The Prisoner looks like a struggle, Johnston’s piece sounds like a struggle and both use their own un-finished-ness to make us feel it.
More recently, there’s been a dispersed collection of musical artists who I think utilise this non-finito, this un-finished technique in a particularly new way. I’m thinking of albums like salvia palth’s melanchole (2013), Dean Blunt’s Black Metal (2014), Forma Norte’s self-titled album (2022), Sydenham High Road’s OK! (2023), The Crying Nudes self titled album (2024), Untitled (halo)’s headbanger EP (2024), with many of the more recent artists revolving around the Scenic Route record label. All evoke some deep inner feelings, unable to be fully expressed, through sounds that sound deliberately broken, busted up, low-fidelity, low-effort even.
If “Bedroom Pop” instills an emotional intimacy — a homely quality despite its hi-fi sound — then this music could be termed “anti-bedroom pop”, evoking emotional detachment, dejection and an unheimlich quality.
The crucial point is that inside all of these albums you can hear the kernels of “actual” songs. Like Daniel Johnston, these artists are all very skilled songwriters. It’s not out-and-out experimental noise, recorded in a lo-fi way. That wouldn’t be non-finito. It wouldn’t be setting the listener up to fail.
Practically, the effect is achieved by plugging guitars directly into laptops, as opposed to recording them traditionally with an amp and a microphone. Keeping loud moments of feedback from unplugging an instrument in the recording. Allowing drums that sound too weak, that a “pro” would pump up to maximum crispiness, to remain just as they are.
In the case of Sydenham High Road, who play Spanners next week and Sebright Arms the week after (with a range of other similar artists: Yorck Street, etta97, Eterna) it’s mainly in the vocals. Even emotive phrases — “My heart’s torn to pieces, I guess I’ll crawl the street for a while” — are deliberately recorded with the most low effort delivery possible.
This may turn some listeners off, but for me it sounds like a vulnerable and tender moment we’re being let into. As if the character were pouring their heart out quietly in fear of waking a next-door flatmate; as if The Streets' Dry Your Eyes weren’t a face-to-face meeting — we’re not in the early 2000s anymore — but that horrendously contemporary invention: the break up text, the digital break up.
It feels like this affect is the primary struggle depicted in the musical non-finito today; it’s no longer about the tortured artist, desperate for recognition and affirmation from society — see Daniel Johnston — but rather a disaffection, a depressive melancholy that aimlessly wanders, a rejection of society wholesale. A lack of purpose. A particular kind of Western Checked-Out-ness.
This is serious stuff, even if it’s presented with a kind of ironic detachment. “Moved to London and can’t hack the rent” is the title of Sydenham High Road’s latest track. It sounds like a joke. It is and it isn’t. Because to be sure, in London, this is the backdrop to (most) people’s lives. The housing crisis, increasing wealth inequality, falling living standards. And, under the sign of the non-finito, you ask: what does this material reality stop people from doing? What does it stop them from becoming?
Trim — Café Oto, 07.02.2025
It’s fair to say that Trim has been in grime since pretty much the beginning. Part of the Bomb Squad from 2002 and Roll Deep with Wiley, Flowdan and so on since 2004 (who he has mostly interacted with in the form of diss tracks since), Trim brought a particularly poetic and occasionally wonky flow, compared to his locked-in peers. He stops and starts, then flows hyper-metrically over where the new bar begins.
This angularity is likely what attracted James Blake to Trim, who remixed his spoken-word piece Confidence Boost (2007) into a track that defined a particular post-dubstep aesthetic. Trim would go on to release a mixtape on Blake’s 1800-Dinosaur label in 2016, titled “1800-Dinosaur Presents Trim” with productions from Airhead, Happa and Blake himself. I’m sure it was their well intentioned belief that the productions should match the unusualness of Trim’s flow, but it does feel occasionally like the producers were trying to take centre stage on that mixtape, while also conveniently getting in on Grime’s contemporary cachet. Although there are some big bangers on there!
For their part, putting on Grime, one of the only truly new musical sounds of the 21st century, is exactly what London’s premier avant-garde and experimental venue Café Oto should be doing. Tickets.
Yazz Ahmed — ICA, 29.03.2025
I first heard Yazz Ahmed through her cover of Radiohead’s Bloom where Thom Yorke’s delicate, trance-like vocal performance is replaced by Ahmed’s deftly controlled trumpet, changing the feel of the song from something mournful to something confident and alive, over what sounds more like Dots and Loops-era Stereolab. It’s a perfect cover because it takes the music somewhere else entirely. As does her arrangement of These New Puritan’s “Organ Eternal”, featured on the same album, La Saboteuse (2017).
Her own compositions take some influence from these artists, particularly These New Puritans’ album Hidden (2010), which included intense, extended passages of group singing, echoed on Ahmed’s Polyhymnia (2019) where a strangely manipulated chorus intones: “the terrorists thought that they would change my place, and stop my ambitions, weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.” But the Jazz influence is always there, as are the Arabic modes which pay homage to Ahmed’s Bahrani heritage.
Her latest release, A Paradise in the Hold, will come out the day after her ICA performance at the end of March. Tickets.
Ellen Arkbro — St James's Church Sussex Gardens, 28.05.2025
Ellen Arkbro is one of the pre-eminent composers for organ today, specifically manipulating the instrument to bring out a spectrum of sounds not traditionally associated with it. Here’s my review of her album CHORDS in The Quietus from 2019 which also did a quick scene rundown for the boom in incredible organ music around that time. Since then, Arkbro has released a collaborative album with Johan Graden, I get along without you very well (2022) — a beautiful slowcore record that brings brass and organ as well as Arkbro’s own vocals into the mix — plus another album of Organ music Sounds While Waiting (2023). These tickets just went on sale yesterday.
Check out the upcoming shows for the Feb and March over on the website!