Since we are a publication called ‘Mesmerized’, we had to feature Outside Now: the Manchester-based outfit is the definition of what hypnotising is, an ethereal and spacious stream of sonic consciousness, blessed by evocative and angelic vocals and a collective experience that feels like a blend between shoegaze and eclectic ambient influences.
A cathartic, solemn record, ‘Dream House’ baths in haunting tones and flourishing harmonies, constantly balancing the contrast between guitar-based magic and oriental-flavoured soundscapes. It is this very same tension that gives the album its edge, celebrating Outside Now as a forward-thinking band.
Intrigued by the project, we caught up with Clayton James, the group’s main songwriter, to find out more about their artistry and future goals… Interview below!
Hey guys, how is it going? some of our readers might not be familiar with your project, how would you describe yourself, in a few words?
We’re Outside Now, a five-piece band from Manchester. Well we perform as a five-piece but our recorded works feature a fair few friends who we collaborate with. Incorporating these elements live, or not as it were, is entirely down to a lack of resources, not imagination. But you have to dream big don’t you? In terms of our sound, we were told by a promoter after our first single ‘Nadir’ was released that we were “extremely difficult to pigeonhole”, we immediately said, well wait until you hear the next couple of releases. In our bio, for the sake of brevity, terms are bandied around like dream pop, shoegaze, psychedelic… which are all applicable to one degree or another, but art should be grasping at the, as yet, unexplored territory. Eclectic is the best word I can fathom. Just please don’t compare us to Radiohead. Just because we’re British, modern, melancholic & sound a bit out there doesn’t warrant an immediate comparison to Radiohead. Stop it.
Your current work is the result of a long journey; Where did you all meet and how did the project develop?
I met Danny Gage (drummer) when I was invited to join a Math Rock band by a mutual friend back in 2015. That band was going absolutely nowhere, but I think we both recognised each other’s talent and that vital musical rapport; so, we’ve been playing together ever since in multiple primordial iterations of, what is now, Outside Now. When the Covid lockdown came into effect one of these previous incarnations had a half-finished EP, but we were losing motivation and struggling with creative differences, so I decided to jettison everything and everyone except Dan and just start over. I was determined to just make what I had always envisioned without compromise.
’Dream House’ really started then with me getting down the music I was writing at the time as a sort’ve playground to get my head around basic music production. The name Outside Now is taken from the 1979 Frank Zappa album ‘Joe’s Garage’, one of my favourite albums, and Zappa is obviously a huge influence on the music I write. He had this idea of, what he called, ‘conceptual continuity’, where everything he did should be taken as part of one grand piece of work that was his entire artistic output.
In that vein, I’ve had this idea gestating for years regarding each album being titled “something-house” , with every album having its own motifs, vibes and blending of styles. It provides a loose frame for us to decorate with songs and imply these overarching themes musically and lyrically. In the end I want to have constructed this entire, uncanny street in the memory palace. You are outside now, on the street, with each album beckoning you inside. So, I decided to start with ‘Dream House’ as I had just written ‘I Keep Falling’, which is about falling asleep on the train home from work; and that jarring, falling feeling when you suddenly bolt up.
I thought, at the time, I’ll use this as the centrepiece to build the rest of the album around. I also felt it was a good place to start as, in my mind, all art is dreams fundamentally. It starts in the mind and we’re just extracting our dreams onto canvas or tape or whatever your medium is. So, we start the series with dreams as the proof of concept, then we can move on from there. I met George Richards (lead guitarist) through our original singer, my ex-girlfriend.
George, despite being only 19 at the time, struck me as an immensely gifted and passionate musician. He’s is an animal that operates purely on instinct and plays with tremendous feeling, which is what music that skirts the line of pretentiousness absolutely needs to ground it. I’ve met plenty of accomplished musicians who know all the theory and play like they’ve got saucepans strapped to their hands. We also just completely vibe together in terms of our loves and influences so we’re really a match made in heaven. The yin to my yang. We roughly outlined the album through 2020. Peter Hartley (bassist) responded to a gumtree ad around summer 2021 and I knew he was the right guy within about two minutes. He’d said he was impressed by the bizarre sound and wanted in. Pete’s from a jazz background and is an absolute secret weapon. A pitch perfect multi-instrumentalist.
He got me in touch with Pip Rousaimanis of Sylvette (another Manchester-based band) who composed the orchestral parts of the album, and Pete himself is the violinist in those parts. Most of the instrumentation was polished off in the latter half of 2021 – the bass; all the overdubs; the orchestral parts were recorded at Blueprint Studios in the autumn. Myles Burke, our good friend and proprietor of Flatland Records (our eventual publisher) put us in touch with Max Cooper, an exceptionally talented multi-instrumentalist who lives on a commune in Barcelona.
He provided the sitars; music box; gong; piano and bongos on ‘Last Orders’; and more I’m probably forgetting. Myles also introduced me to Charlie Powell, an absolute wizard on the piano who is featured on ‘I Keep Falling’. We couldn’t start recording drums until the summer when the studios opened back up, and Dan was obviously a bit out of practice having not touched a kit for over a year. That was a bit of a struggle. Luckily we ended up at The Nave studio just outside Leeds, on recommendation, and being picked up by Andy Hawkins – one of the more senior engineers. Working with Andy is an absolute privilege. I think he really helped get Dan back on the horse at the time and get as much as we could out of, what was, an unenviable situation to be in.
More so he took a liking to our work, understood what we were going for, and eventually ended up doing the final mixing. The inclusion of flugehorn, performed by James Hamilton on ‘Bridget, It’s to Far Too Jump’ was one of his more memorable ideas. Andy is someone we’ll be working with very closely in all our endeavours for the foreseeable future. Aisha Toussaint (singer) finally sauntered into my life through a mutual friend, Micheal Webster, whose a bit of an unsung hero in the Manchester music scene. He’s a really lovely guy and he’s got a big clique of people who orbit his open mics and live events. At the time, the album was basically finished except for the vocals and I was worried my pitch to her, or anyone, would be unappealing. I’m asking someone to just come in and sing these preprepared songs, these lyrics, in these keys, that might not be in a comfortable register or whatever.
I’d say the album speaks for itself as to whether Aisha managed to inject her own personality, her own spirit into the work. She turned up to the studio with these prepared four-part harmonies that she could just belt straight off the bat and I was obviously over the moon. We’re all perfectionists but Aisha has ears as good as Pete’s and is easily the most stringent of us all. We started recording vocals in March 2022 and were adding and making amendments right up to the day before we went to mix the album in late July of that year. Being sent for mastering by Dave Draper immediately after. The project as a whole, like I said, was mainly just some ideas I was kicking around at the time with the exception of ‘Bridget, It’s Too Far to Jump’ and ‘Last Orders’ which I had written back in 2014-15. It’s hard to describe the actual process of writing it without going into granular detail about each piece. These things tend to just fall out of the sky while you’re in a trance.
If you had the opportunity to pick any artists in the world for a collaboration, who would be your first choice? (and second choice, perhaps?)
Living? We’ll stick with living shall we? Otherwise we’ll be here all day. I reckon the five of us would give you a completely different answer because we all have such different sensibilities. I think if Aisha could work with Olivia Dean she might die then and there having attained complete fulfilment. Whereas Dan would probably want us doing something entirely instrumental with someone like Animals As Leaders or Chon. Jeff Beck sadly just passed who I’m sure would’ve been high up George’s list. Pete’s mouthing ‘Allan Holdsworth’ at me, an exquisite choice. It’s hard, I already work with such exceptional people I don’t know what more I could ask for.
It can be interpreted as nothing short of divine providence that I’ve come into contact with all of the right people at just the right time. I’d be wary of outside influence now. I think it speaks to our depth and malleability that I could probably name almost anyone and the hypothetical result, in my mind, isn’t that jarring. Maybe I’ll say Frank Ocean just because I’ve been waiting seven years now for the follow-up to ‘Blonde’. I’d be there in a purely motivational capacity, not to actually collaborate.
Though I recently saw a band called Devils of Moko at Liverpool International Jazz Festival and the pianist made me feel ashamed to have ever had the gall to profane an instrument with my comparatively listless hands. I haven’t stopped talking about them to anyone who’ll pretend to listen since, and I’m still talking about them right now. So, probably that guy, whoever he is.
We are hypnotised by the eclecticism in your work, clearly there’s a lot of musical research behind that. What can the listeners expect from your latest album, ‘Dream House’?
Anyone with a keen ear will identify techniques we use fairly consistently throughout the album. Non-functional harmony is a big one; dissonance; key changes and modulation; use of exotic scales; odd meters; fermata; colourful, dense chord extensions. All the lovely things that make music engaging, with tension and release being the fundament. There’s the drama. For me, that’s all music is: tension and release. There are musical motifs sprinkled throughout the whole thing that I’ll leave you to glean for yourself. Just throwing the red meat out there for all the music nerds. For all the less idle people, we’ve got a Gong / Hawkwind inspired Space Rock opening straight out of the 1970s, and we return to that style with ‘Another Day’; a grungy anthem mainly inspired by Jeff Buckley’s masterpiece ‘So Real’; we’ve got a a faux jazz, gospel, progressive mishmash; a couple of sweeping orchestral ballads; a nocturne; and my attempt at a modern jazz standard, an attempt to write something you can imagine Billie Holiday singing. I’m not really sure how I’d pitch this album to anyone. If it’s for you then bless you.
Lyrically it’s pretty dark. We start in the realm of the fantastical, with ‘Follow The Slope Down’ being quite an oblique reference to things like Alice in Wonderland, Dante’s Inferno or anything where the main character descends into the otherworld. Until we hit the ‘Nadir’. We’re still in this haze of dreamy imagery, but maybe it’s occurred to you by now that we seem to keep pining or longing for something, something we’ve already lost, something unattainable. I’ve said I think this album is primarily about failure. Even the title ‘Dream House’ is m kind’ve mocking myself and everyone else. Your dream house is something you’ll never afford, something that is becoming ever increasingly a pipe dream. I like playing with juxtaposition even in so far as opening an album, you’d think would be about the night, with birds chirping and the title referring to the sun rising. The album quickly slides from cartoonish, nightmarish imagery into the very real and mundane as exemplified in things like ‘Another Day’.
Your waking life is a nightmare. We’re all sleepwalking in a post-modern malaise of unreality. Whether you’re asleep on the train or glued to your phone. Night, day. What’s the difference? ‘Overlooked, Overseen’ is juxtaposition again, lyrically the densest song and probably the most savage. I slip in dealings with my own frustrations as a musician, but mostly it’s about our atomisation. Feeling utterly alone despite us all being, on paper, more “connected” than ever. They’re always watching and listening for their own nefarious reasons, but you can’t tease anyone out of the hole in your hand. Staying on the theme of juxtaposition: with ‘I Keep Falling’ and songs like ‘Another Day’, I like to take something really mundane, like riding the train home from working my dreadfully dull office job, and turn it into this resplendent musical epic.
‘Last Orders’ is kind’ve tacked on at the end. The album proper ends with ‘Recklessly Enchanted’, which is mainly ‘Wheeling Empire Bright’ being played in reverse, followed by a very soft, low guitar part playing ‘Dream House’ in reverse. I had envisioned ‘ Last Orders’ as the “I want” song from a musical, like ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, but here I want to drink myself to oblivion because I’ve lost everything and what’s the point. ‘Nowhere over the rainbow’. I didn’t come up with the title ‘Bridget, It’s Too Far to Jump’, that bit of word play came from one of my best friends. This is from when we were in a band together when were like sixteen. He gave all our songs had these clever titles like ‘It’s Not Revolution It’s Just a Turn on The Wheel’.
He just offhandedly mentioned ‘Bridget, It’s Too Far to Jump’ to me once and it stuck with me. Then when I wrote the actual song, nearly a decade ago now, I was reading the Aeneid at the time. The lyrics were inspired by the part of the story where Dido taking her own life after Aeneas departs. My friend was a huge Dylan fanboy and I think I’ve forever internalised the same penchant for meandering, referential, over-intellectualised lyrics. As I said before, we’re skirting the lines of pretentiousness and I’m really conscious of making art that is complex and exciting but still accessible.
At heart I just don’t want to bore people. And I find the very notion of being a genre detestable and limiting. Innovation in art is often characterised by the amalgamation of one’s influences through a new lens, combining x and y; but, with our newly unfettered access to every piece of music ever made, I feel that the taste of those people who have a musical inclination are going to get more eclectic by the day. So, you’re going to end up with music being made by people who are mashing together more and more disparate elements. All I’d ask is for anyone with a broad palate to give us a try. If you’re into jazz; dream pop; shoegaze; 60’s psychedelia; 70’s prog; space rock; Radiohead, dare I say it, we’ve got something for you. We were really testing the waters here to see what works.
What motivates you in composing soundscapes? Do you think it contrasts well with the more indie/shoegaze-styled material?
Obviously there is a huge influence from bands like Gong, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, Yes, Aphrodite’s Child, The Doors, Zappa etcetera. The golden age. I’m going to say straight away that I don’t like music being referred to as ‘cinematic’ in case anyone’s been quietly waiting to throw that term around. Music is an aspect of cinema, cinema is not an aspect of music. I preempt that to say that a big influence on these soundscapes, and my music in general, is compositions made for films and video games; I even reference multiple video game soundtracks on the album, and there’ll be a gold star for anyone who can point those out. But, I think it’s having a love for music, from a very early age, that is made with a different intention to ‘pop’ music.
My mum will tell you that one of my favourite cassettes she had in her car when I was very young was the soundtrack for the Coppola ‘Dracula’ film. Why exactly she owned that cassette I’ve never asked. Music can evoke whatever you want, why shouldn’t it invoke discomfort, dread, the haunting, atomising emptiness of the city at night? We’re still accustomed to these techniques being employed in primarily visual experiences; but classical music has been relegated to the realm of John Williams and is otherwise characterised as the spectral groans of a dead and mostly forgotten world. For the toffs and perpetually out of touch. Outside of the most insufferable gaggles of artists and other ne’er-do-wells, most people have a very narrow idea of what music should be on its own. Music in the popular idiom is Lady Gaga, not Yoko Ono wailing like a banshee for twelve minutes. Not that I’d encourage that either. I’m really just trying to build a world that the songs just happen to exist in.
The soundscape creates context. A thick, autobiographical atmosphere that the songs can emerge from. Also, pacing is an important aspect of any medium that exists as a function of time. You need valleys and peaks. The album opens with this gradually building wall of chimes and bird songs that drops into this serene choral piece, that then ends on a ritual chant thrusting us into this whirring space rock collage that culminates in just one dissonant chord, on a very distorted keyboard, percolating away for a near-uncomfortable length of time. That’s an awful lot of drama packed into the first two minutes of an album. I love the atmospheric parts. The calm before the storm. ’Bridget, It’s Too Far to Jump’ going into ‘Gelatinous Wasteland’ might be my favourite section of the whole thing. Duality and juxtaposition are a big part of the work lyrically and within the music. Contrast is everything.
How does the writing process work in the band, usually? Is it a collaborative effort or more of a personal endeavour?
So, I write most of the music for the band. Certainly all the music on this album. But, as I said, I started writing and recording the album while assembling the band in tandem. I think me writing the bulk of the music won’t necessarily change moving forward. There will be contributions from everyone now, absolutely, but I still want things to sound cohesive and to evoke that auto-biographical, hyper-modernist, fever dream. Most bands will end up with the one or, if you’re lucky, a pair of writers who are the guiding voices of the vision . What will change moving forward is Aisha contributing lyrically and providing the all important vocal lines. She, and the others, are pulling me in directions I wouldn’t have gone otherwise.
Now being able to perform and rehearse together means you have five exceptionally talented musical minds all pitching in to refine, in the finest details, every aspect of whatever we might be working on. So, every piece becomes an entirely collaborative process. I see myself as just writing the skeletons of ideas, it’s everyone else who comes and animates that skeleton with flesh and blood. It’s incredibly cliche, but only because it’s absolutely true, that describing the writing process or anything other than the influences and theory behind music is, like Zappa supposedly said “dancing about architecture”.
Like an athlete you train, you commit your life to writing music and eventually you hit this unconscious, trance-like state; “the zone”, where all your best work just falls out of the sky. You’re more like an antenna receiving transmissions for an idea that was already floating around the universe. I follow just about every music theory YouTube channel under the sun and when I see something interesting that can certainly set me off. I wrote ‘Nadir’ and a few other songs after watching Rick Beato talk about the Double Harmonic Major scale. I included that glassy synth throughout ‘Another Day’ after watching Adam Neely talk about musical fractals, with that synth part being an extreme condensation of the main guitar line in the verses. I want these albums to be like those pieces of art where every aspect can be excruciatingly analysed by the hardcore worshippers, but one can also take at a surface level and enjoy.
You are a rare colourful gift in a grey and boring industry. Never stops being you, and keep going pushing the boundaries forward, people will notice. Do you consider yourself leftfield and experimental?
Yes and no. I think we’re approaching what we do with quite dated sensibilities in some respects. Like I’ve already said, you put all these disparate elements and inspirations in a blender and wind up with something that sounds pretty out there; but that doesn’t remove the fact that you were just writing a 1930’s style jazz standard, or a musical number, or something that, on it’s own, could fit comfortably anywhere in the last fifty years.
We are children of the post-modern era. I think it’s inevitable that we produce something with a loose sense of temporality. Something uncanny, haunted by nostalgia. While paradoxically being from nowhere. Something splintered and fractured. No sense of place or time or purpose. I think I wear the early 70s progressive rock era on my sleeve, aiming for something akin to ‘Meddle’ or ‘Close To The Edge’, but we’re half a century removed from that period. We’re just hearkening back to a time when people could be successful, even world-renowned and celebrated, while still making uncompromising art that wasn’t trying to pander to the presumed, ‘market researched’, algorithmically gamed whims of the public. Art that presumed a level of intelligence and openness to the new and novel in their audience.
Henry Miller said: “America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. To be a rabbit is better still”. Sure the infrastructure exists online for us freaks to indulge and sprout in the dark recesses, but will any of us ever be able to make a living and put our all into these pursuits? Most of our contemporaries and friends are stuck in a cycle of making just singles or maybe an EP at a stretch because we’re told that’s the way to do things and market yourself nowadays. The attention economy has arrested everyones development, so the attitude that everything needs to be hooks and singles and invoke an immediate reaction is ever pervasive. I can’t abide this. You can’t be a fan of a band based on singles.
Where are your deep cuts? To think in this way is to ignore all the great musical ideas that probably aren’t marketable, that don’t appeal to the broad plurality. Something made for everyone appeals to no one. We want to make albums, albums that are part of a series that eventually amounts to one grand piece of work. This is just the first piece of the puzzle. When I talk about music I love, I talk in albums, not songs. Our designs are too grand to artificially limit ourselves for the purpose of marketing. This is the litmus test. If it’s for you, you’re one of us. Maybe these things will change. You see people like Black Midi and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard finding success with a similar, uncompromising mindset.
Jacob Collier’s out there being the world’s priciest music teacher. YouTube and social media have given us the era of the virtuoso. You can find examples of people performing the most extraordinary musical feats, devising the most diabolical, insane music. We’re not doing anything particularly impressive by comparison. The only thing remotely left field about us is that we write music for ourselves, music that we think is interesting, and we’re just praying that there are like-minded people out there and that it will eventually find an audience. Post-modernity has resulted in there being no cultural centre, no zeitgeist for one to deviate from. We’re all in our echo chambers living on the Mobius strip of warped, half-remembered pasts.
What are the next steps for your project? Anything exciting on the horizon?
Oodles. Our next release will be a cover of ‘The Thrill is Gone’, the jazz standard not the B.B. King song. That should be ready within the next couple of months. I’d originally intended on putting it on the album; but decided I wanted ‘Bridget, It’s Too Far to Jump’ to really stand out, and it otherwise disrupted the ordering and pacing. Our second album ‘Light House’ is well underway and we should be ready to start the release process by winter / spring. ‘Dream House’ was really a rough proof of concept, ‘Light House’ will be us having heavily refined our process. It doesn’t deviate massively from the style and tone set by ‘Dream House’, we’ll be collaborating with more or less the same people; but it does have it’s own motifs and secrets to pick through, and I think it’s already shaping up to be a step well above the first album sonically and in terms of the writing.
We also have an instrumental piece called ‘Winter Sun’ that we were planning on sending to Classic FM or something at Christmas, it’s been at the back of my mind for two years at this point, so maybe this holiday season I’ll finally get around to finishing it. We’re currently preparing for a Tiny Desk-esque recording of a thirty-minute live set that I imagine we’ll do in the next couple of months. Give people an idea of what we sound like live. The biggest thing for me right now, while we finish ‘Light House’, is writing what will be the third album. Aisha has been getting me into Olivia Dean and George has been getting me into The Police and Sting’s solo stuff.
As much as I try to bring the best out of every member of the band, they also bring the best out in me, and right now they’re taking my writing in some very interesting directions. So, the third album will be the first time we’ll have written the majority of it in the rehearsal room while refining our live set. It’ll be a much jazzier, poppier affair, while retaining the operatic, grand scope and that melancholic whimsy that is infused into, not just ours, but a lot of British music. All that is looking quite far ahead for us. I’d ask that if you like our music you support us in these endeavours but, as of now, there’s no way to do that monetarily, so please just follow us on this adventure and support us if and when that becomes an option.
