Who exactly are Young Hunting? And what makes their black hearts tick?
These are questions which anyone who has heard the duo’s 2011 EP, The Night Of The Burning, will have asked themselves. Combining a youthful urgency and emotional honesty, even earnestness, with a command of composition and refinement of sound design that most artists their age could only dream of, TNOTB announced the arrival of two young men of extraordinary, if tenebrous, talent. Their story, though, begins a year earlier.
Alex Ander and Marc Dall’s first release as Young Hunting was an album, boasting the rather unwieldy title Attachment In A Child and The Subsequent Condition. Painstakingly produced with their friend and engineering wiz Steven Watkins at his Tape Studio in their hometown of Edinburgh, Scotland, the album – which they self-released in 2010 on their own Agenda private press – was remarkable for all sorts of reasons. For one, Dall’s terrifically, unfashionably serious lyrics – sometimes whispered, sometimes bellowed – addressing themes of Oedipal love, violence and separation. For another, the pair’s huge sound, an authentic, alternately tender and bulldozing contemporary gothic conveyed through militaristic percussion, oceanic reverb, searching synth drones and dense, filigreed walls of noise.
“We act from obsession, from compulsion.” – Marc Dall
The album found its way to a small if appreciative audience – Matt ‘Woebot’ Ingram was a notable and emphatic early champion , drawing comparisons to the work of Coil. But it wasn’t until Young Hunting delivered The Night Of The Burning a year later that their star began to rise. The 12″ came out on Blackest Ever Black [full disclosure: a label run by FACT’s Kiran Sande] in December 2011, the roster of which – Raime, Tropic of Cancer and Regis, etc – provided a perfect context for Dall and Ander’s music to be understood and appreciated. Moreover, the EP itself was astonishing – from the haunting female narration and ritualistic drums of ‘Embers Of The Pyre’, via the sepulchral creep of ‘A Hunger Artist’, through to the cascading strings and eerie, operatic vocal layers of ‘Spiritual Abandonment’ and ‘Entrance From The Carnal Mind’.
A sophomore album from Young Hunting, To Tear Apart Living Structures, is due out later this year on Blackest Ever Black. Marc Dall took time out from recording it to talk to FACT’s Richard Rossiter about the origins of the project, its evolution so far, and his ambitions for its future. We’re also pleased to be able to premiere a new Young Hunting track – ‘A List Of Indignities’ – which was originally recorded for To Tear Apart Living Structures, but ultimately deemed unsuitable to make the final cut. You can download it for free via the Soundcloud player above, and watch the suitably gloomy video below.
Young Hunting – ‘A List Of Indignities’
Why, artistically, do you think you’re drawn to what some people would describe as the darker side of human nature?
MD: “We use Young Hunting to document a process of internal discovery, to record our current preoccupations and thought processes. We do this simply, perhaps selfishly, in hope of gaining a deeper understanding of our individual conditions. I don’t view existence in black and white. My interests lie in extreme forms of nature, in concentrations of unbound consciousness and sensuality. We act from obsession, from compulsion. I’m interested in the blurring of conscious and unconscious states of reality. The battle between clarity and confusion.
“We want something that we could have never have imagined possible.”
Tell me more about the lyrical themes explored in The Night Of The Burning. I gather there’s a connection to the films of Jane Arden?
MD: “[Arden’s 1972 film] The Other Side Of Underneath was very influential to me early on in helping to generate a succession of visual images for use as a source of inspiration. Apart from the track ‘Embers From The Pyre’, in which we literally used an entire segment of the film’s screenplay for the lyric, there is really nothing else on the EP that specifically connects to, or references, Arden’s work. At least not consciously.
“With this recording, we were trying to look at cremation as a celebratory act. Unlike the others tracks on the EP, ‘A Hunger Artist’ was inspired by Franz Kafka’s short story of the same name. But where his story was about a man who starved himself for the entertainment of others, I was using the title to, in part, explore the very nature of Kafka himself. But the more time I spend editing my lyrics and deciphering their meaning, the less appeal they have. I try and channel an instinctual pulse, something on a visceral plain, away from logic and order.”
Young Hunting – clips from The Night Of The Burning (2011)
Tell us about your first album, Attachment In A Child And The Subsequent Condition.
MD: “Attachment was conceived over the course of about a year – between June 2009 and August 2010 – with the help of our friend Stephen Watkins, a producer and engineering wizard from Edinburgh. There was no concrete concept to begin with; only a general idea that I had contemplated using in a screenplay. Everything else seemed to unfold and reveal itself in a gradual process that ended with the mastering of the record.
“For the most part, we recorded it all ourselves, in a very naive and inexperienced manner. It was a very intense, taxing experience for everyone involved, but a necessary one. Without the hands on support from Stephen, there would be no album. He literally gave us a crash course in recording and mixing for which we are eternally in debt. We took our recorded files into his studio, from where the three of us spent a year tailoring and experimenting with the sounds until we felt the songs could go no further. Part of the record’s atmosphere came from projecting sounds out into different spaces – among other things we used a church hall, a stairwell and a tiled bathroom to achieve unique reverb effects.”
How do you feel about the album two years on?
MD: “Looking back on the album, it comes across like an unformed, embryonic child. Although we have progressed in our recording and mixing techniques, we are both satisfied with Attachment. It’s a fitting debut offering from Young Hunting.”
What can we expect from your upcoming second LP, To Tear Apart Living Structures?
MD: “We are currently too deep inside the world of Structures to try and give an intelligible description of the piece. We tend to take things to extremes, leaving ourselves the daunting task of refining all these fragmented sounds and ideas into something cohesive. We get ourselves caught up in minute details that seem to lead down the ever-perpetuating rabbit hole. This has been the longest we’ve ever spent on a record. It can be dangerous. You find yourself going over and over a track for a very long time. We try to rely purely on what our gut tells us. There’s always an anxious feeling when a track isn’t on the right lines, or when you know it could be better in some way or another. It seems to have turned into much more of a beat-driven record than we originally set out to create. Because of this, the record is a lot more complex than anything we’ve attempted before.
“The new album is a lot more complex than anything we’ve attempted before.”
“Around 12 songs were initially considered for the album back in August 2011, nearly all of which have been scrapped and replaced with newer works. We both have a very schizophrenic approach to the way we work. We want something that we could have never have imagined possible. Entire tracks are generally created and crushed into one another, making new fusions of sounds and possibilities. Through this almost random, cut-up approach we achieve layers and pathways that we couldn’t have conceived of or generated otherwise. But the chaos of doing this also means that it can take a long time for a track to present itself to us in a fashion interesting enough for us to use on a record.
“We like to think of Structures as Attachment’s extroverted other half. The Night Of The Burning acts as a through-line connecting the two.”
Richard Rossiter
younghunting.co.uk
