TONE (UK)
̸
Biografía
- South London based Musician, Producer & Songwriter. A CURL collective member and half of the short-lived punk-duo, Farai.Having both Afro-Caribbean and Welsh heritage has informed the ways in which he sees things and the music he has been magnetised to, especially growing up in both a tiny village in the north of England in East Yorkshire as well as further afield in Europe. Time spent in St Kitts and Nevis as a child opened his eyes and ears to calypso, reggae and dub and while back home in the UK, he fell in love with ska, punk and skinhead culture none of which he ever outgrew and to this day still informs his music practice. His most profound collaboration to date, with powerful vocalist Farai, sees him “channel Joy Divisions’s youthful rage… imposing chords and roughly hewn drums” (Pitchfork). Contrastingly, he comfortably delves into left-field, electronic pop, with hints of hip-hop and post-punk for his solo work, and draws on inspiration from films and documentaries such as Babylon, Rockers and Wim Wenders’s ‘Tokyo-Ga’ and ‘Notebook On Cities And Clothes’ in compositions. With a mixtape already under his belt, one that he says was thrown together on a whim; the South-London based musician has announced his debut album “So I Can See You”, is due for release via Rhythm Section on 4 March 2022. This new body of work was created during the pregnancy and subsequent birth of his daughter. TONE was compelled to capture this significant moment, recording mostly at night, with his new life and old life in mind. The album is less a departure of who he was but an embrace of the future and the new life that arrives with beginning a family. Each track was recorded on a Tascam 38 tape machine in the studio he set up with Mica Levi and Coby Sey in Hither Green with the drums, played by Marc Pell (Good Bad Happy Sad) were recorded at Andy Ramsey’s studio (Stereolab). Across the 11 tracks, we hear tender guitar riffs and off-beat R&B elements press up against influences of dub and shoegaze leaving you with a woozy afterglow. TONE’s distinctive vocals are complemented by the familiar voices of Coby Sey on “So I Can See You”, Fran Lobo on “From the North” and Roxanne Tataei on “Make It Drop”. As a film graduate, there is, of course, an expansive list of films that also influenced his music writing but for this album in particular TONE cites documentaries on Tokyo Ga, the Notebook on Cities and Clothes documentary by Wim Wender and the black and white film Rumble Fish by Francis Ford Coppola as a guiding force.