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From haunting acoustic ballads to gritty rock and roll songs filled with swagger and attitude, Matthew Mayfield has spent the past decade releasing music that has changed the hearts and lives of his listeners. His latest LP, Gun Shy, is a collection of songs as varied as the emotions each of us feels. If his previous release, RECOIL, was the fruit of an intense effort by Mayfield to depict the good, the bad, and the ugly in the world he inhabited, Gun Shy is a look into all worlds – those full of darkness and hope.

To connect with listeners and draw them into these worlds, Matthew created Inside the Song with Matthew Mayfield, a podcast dedicated to telling the stories behind the songs of Gun Shy. According to Mayfield, “I grew up with songs in such a deep way that I wanted to be inside them. I wanted to know how this artist could articulate the things I was feeling better than I could myself. The lyrics, the sonics behind the music, everything. I just craved to know more. Growing up with music when I did meant that I looked to liner notes. I think of the podcast as liner notes for your ears.”

Listen to any of the podcast episodes, and you’ll hear what makes Gun Shy Mayfield’s most introspective and personal record to date. “Our Winds” speaks of true love and hope in the midst of pressure from external forces while “Broken Clocks” finds Mayfield accepting a relationship that is doomed to fall apart. The riffs and hooks found in “Gun Shy” and “Best of Me” show Mayfield as the rock and roller he is.

While Mayfield is known for crafting both gripping ballads and eclectic rock songs, Gun Shy’s greatest triumph lies somewhere between those two styles. “S.H.A.M.E.,” the album’s third track, touches on what is currently Mayfield’s deepest concern – a world full of people that feel as if they are alone.

“Shame is something that no one wants to talk about, but we’re all ashamed of something. We all have demons and things that prevent us from seeing our self-worth. The song is about connecting with people and letting them know they are not alone,” says Mayfield.

Gun Shy was produced by Paul Moak, who Mayfield describes as, “one of the most gifted producers, players, songwriters, and overall artists I’ve ever met.” This is the fourth full-length album the two have recorded together, and Moak’s talents played a major role in making it special. Mayfield and Moak also happen to be great friends, which Mayfield says, “helped us push each other along through the process.”

With each new record, Mayfield has grown in his ability to evoke a broad range of emotions in his listeners. “I want to create melodies and lyrics that move people, that make them feel something. Connection is everything, and music has a unique way of helping people connect to others and to parts of themselves that they might otherwise be unable to access.”

Gun Shy is now available on all digital platforms worldwide. Physical copies are available on matthewmayfield.com.

Blanck Mass – Animated Violence Mild bio

“In this post-industrial, post-enlightenment religion of ourselves, we have manifested a serpent of consumerism which now coils back upon us. It seduces us with our own bait as we betray the better instincts of our nature and the future of our own world. We throw ourselves out of our own garden. We poison ourselves to the edges of an endless sleep.

Animated Violence Mild was written throughout 2018, at Blanck Mass’ studio outside of Edinburgh. These eight tracks are the diary of a year of work steeped in honing craft, self-discovery, and grief - the latter of which reared its head at the final hurdle of producing this record and created a whole separate narrative: grief, both for what I have lost personally, but also in a global sense, for what we as a species have lost and handed over to our blood-sucking counterpart, consumerism, only to be ravaged by it.

I believe that many of us have willfully allowed our survival instinct to become engulfed by the snake we birthed. Animated — brought to life by humankind. Violent — insurmountable and wild beyond our control. Mild — delicious.

This is perhaps the most concise body of work I have written to date. Having worked extensively throughout my musical life with dramatics, narrative, and ‘melody against all odds’, these tracks are the most direct and honest yet. The level of articulation in these tracks surpasses anything I have utilized before.”

-Benjamin John Power

Helm
Helm is Luke Younger, a London-based sound artist and musician. He has released five studio albums and three EPs of textural experimental music, exploring a relationship between acoustic, electronic and real-world sounds. His first album ‘To An End’ was released on his own label ALTER in 2010. Influenced by 20th century electroacoustic music and Britain’s esoteric post-industrial underground, the record contained two long-form pieces that mixed haunting, respiratory-themed tape music with warm meditative ambience. ‘Cryptography’ followed a year later via Graham Lambkin’s KYE as a five-part suite of glacial drone, reconfigured gamelan clusters and searing metallic resonance. Warmly received by the press and underground community alike, it helped to establish him as a serious new voice in experimental music.

2012 saw the beginning of a working relationship with PAN. His third album ‘Impossible Symmetry’ was released with more of an electronic sound, a result of sessions experimenting with analog synthesizers and rhythmic patterns. Helm performed regularly across Europe, Asia and even North-Africa (Rawabet, a live album of his show in Cairo was released on ALTER in 2017). From galleries to clubs, squatted venues and major festivals, performances took place in a multitude of different contexts including an opening act for a disparate range of groups including Iceage, Godspeed You Black Emperor and Oneohtrix Point Never.

During breaks from touring Younger entered the studio to work on ‘Olympic Mess’. Using repetitive loops to signify motion and movement, Helm’s sound morphed into something upbeat and airy thanks to flirtations with dub-techno and Balearic disco. ‘Olympic Mess’ was released in 2015 and received critical acclaim and support from press and featured in a number of end of year album lists. The sprawling, hypnotic, sometimes euphoric soundscapes act as a counterpoint to the chaos they arose from, as Younger says: “it’s about exploring a perverse desire to pull the rug from under yourself, and the struggle to achieve a healthy equilibrium between one’s own personal and artistic lives… Dealing with the problematic consequences of pushing your own limits, forming and dissolving relationships, transient lifestyles, physical and mental exhaustion, excess and other kinds of personal chaos.”

‘Chemical Flowers’ is Helm’s fifth full-length studio album, arriving in a moment of anxiety and tension without a clearly definable source. Younger states own internal questioning of the mechanisms of music and art and how he engages with each have had an influence. “I find myself asking, how complicit am I in structures I consider to be at odds with myself?” he says, “How can the cultural playing field be truly equal and inclusive whilst it’s increasingly co-opted and controlled by corporations, brands and gatekeeper-sociopaths, perpetuating an endless hierarchy and class imbalance?”. For the majority of the album the themes are diffuse, with the anxiety offset by anecdotes and snippets of conversation overheard in daily life. Across the album Younger weaves varied sound sources through channels of process, with string arrangements by J.G. Thirlwell to broaden the instrumentation and introduce an element more identifiably human. Thirlwell’s arrangements feature heavily on ‘I Knew You Would Respond’. “The intention to use strings wasn’t to explore a neo-classical route but instead make something a bit darker, dramatic and even psychedelic.” Chemical Flowers also features contributions from saxophonist Karl D’Silva, cellist Lucinda Chua and is the first album that Younger has produced and engineered himself.

Younger is a resident DJ on NTS Radio where he has presented his monthly show ‘After Dark’ since 2016. He has also engaged in collaborations with visual artists. A performance at the opening of the Tate Modern’s Tanks space saw Helm perform with video artist and film maker Charles Atlas’ during his ‘Charles Atlas and Collaborators’ series. Subsequently Atlas used edited arrangements from Olympic Mess in his 2015 exhibition “The Waning Of Justice” for Luhring Augustine gallery in New York City. Younger also returned to The Tanks in 2016 to perform in an ensemble using a collection of unorthodox instruments for Tarek Atoui’s “The Reverse Collection”. The same year saw Unsound Festival commission the project “Inner Space: Siberia” with Moscow based musician Moa Pillar and the Embassy For The Displaced, an Athens-based design collective. The project was a location-based A/V collaboration exploring the landscapes of Siberia with audio recorded in Moscow and visuals filmed in the Ural Mountains and Novosibirsk. It premiered at the Vladivostok Film Festival that year with a subsequent performance at Unsound Krakow to an audience of 2000. In support of ‘Chemical Flowers’, Helm has a residency at Cafe OTO, London in October 2019 and will be performing internationally the rest of the year.

“Almost everything changed for us in these last two years,” says Andy Baxter, one half of the acclaimed duo Penny & Sparrow. “It was a painful experience in a lot of ways, but it was also a joyful one.”

Joy and pain walk hand in hand on ‘Finch,’ Penny & Sparrow’s magnificent sixth album. Written during their first major break from the road in years, the record finds the band reckoning with a prolonged period of intense personal transformation, a profound awakening that altered their perceptions of masculinity, sex, religion, divorce, friendship, vanity, purpose, and, perhaps most importantly, self. Deeply vulnerable and boldly cinematic, the resulting songs blur the lines between indie-folk and alt-pop, with dense string arrangements and atmospheric production underpinning soaring melodies and airtight harmonies from Baxter and his longtime musical partner, Kyle Jahnke.

Texas natives, Baxter and Jahnke first crossed paths at UT Austin, where they developed both a fast friendship and a deeply symbiotic musical connection. Jahnke was a gifted guitarist with an ear for melody, Baxter an erudite lyricist with a mesmerizing voice and crystalline falsetto, and the duo quickly found that their vocals blended together as if they’d been singing in harmony their whole lives. Beginning with 2013’s ‘Tenboom,’ the staunchly DIY pair released a series of critically lauded records that garnered comparisons to the hushed intimacy of Iron & Wine and the adventurous beauty of James Blake, building up a devoted fanbase along the way through relentless touring and word-of-mouth buzz. NPR praised the band’s songwriting as a “delicate dance between heartache and resolve,” while The World Café raved that they’ve “steadily built a sound as attentive to detail as Simon & Garfunkel and as open to the present day as Bon Iver,” and Rolling Stone hailed their catalog as “folk music for Sunday mornings, quiet evenings, and all the fragile moments in between.” In addition to the mountain of glowing reviews, the band also earned high profile fans—including The Civil Wars’ John Paul White, who produced 2015’s ‘Let A Lover Drown You’—and extensive tour dates with everyone from Josh Ritter and Johnnyswim to Drew Holcomb and Delta Rae.

An artist of rare calibre, Aldous Harding does more than sing; she conjures a singular intensity.
Her body and face a weapon of theatre, Harding dances with steeled fervor, baring her teeth like a Bunraku puppet's gnashing grin.

Her debut release with 4AD, Party (produced with the award-winning John Parish; PJ Harvey, Sparklehorse) introduces
a new pulse to the stark and unpopulated dramatic realm where the likes of Kate Bush and Scott Walker reside.

Igniting interest with her eponymous debut album released just two years ago, Aldous Harding quickly became known for her
charismatic combination of talent, tenacity and shrewd wit. The album drew attention and accolades from some of the most illustrious corners of
the music industry, receiving 4 stars in MOJO and Uncut, while UK blog The 405 hailed her a “toweringly talented song writer”.

Comprising a formidable clutch of songs, 2017’s Party sees Harding shape-shift through a variety of roles: chanteuse, folk singer and balladeer - all executed with her twisted touch of humour, hubris and quiet horror. In other words, she’s having a good time. Stretching her limbs with playful cunning; every note, word and arrangement posed with intellect and inventiveness.

Created in Parish’s hometown of Bristol, Party saw Harding depart her New Zealand base in the antipodes for an intensive two-week immersion in the studio. Articulating her ambitions for Party to Parish was a galvanizing process for Harding, met with stunning results. The pair developed a near non-verbal shorthand, audibly evident in a raft of musical contributions from Parish. Alongside such special guests as Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas (having worked with Parish and toured with Aldous, it only took asking once), there is an exhilarating sense of risk throughout the record as Harding’s muscular wingspan extends. Teased out with inflections of experimental instrumentation and arrangements; Party is always anchored by Aldous’s intimidating command of her own songs.

First single ‘Horizon’ is a lover’s call to arms, powerful for its brutal simplicity and rawness of feeling, love and loathing colliding to devastating effect. “Aldous Harding repeats the line as a mantra, as a truth, as a reality. It's as if the gift of life is right here, with all its beauty and its limitations”, said NPR.

‘Imagining My Man’ commands an air of delicacy as Aldous explores the curiosity of a lover’s idiosyncrasies; steering listeners into a state of intense intimacy laced with hyperactive shots, dirgey saxophone and Harding’s aching voice. The track is one of two that Mike Hadreas lends his inimitably sultry vocals to, the other being the intimate Party closer ‘Swell Does The Skull’.

‘Blend’ sensitively ushers the mood of Harding’s flourishment throughout Party. Its opening lines a nod to the mood of Harding’s last record; sameness is quickly quashed with an electronic drumbeat and the announcement of AldousvHarding as an artist of stirring ambition and trajectory.

The album’s eponymous single ‘Party’ harks to Aldous’ earlier work; delicately pulling at the threads of a seemingly late-night love affair. Again, it’s not long until the rug is pulled out, with a searing chorus - Harding’s electrifying vocal accompanied by a choir of women and waves of percussive bass clarinet - piercing the balloon of expectations around Harding's new record with effortless vigour.

Renowned for the captivating state of possession she occupies in live performance, Aldous Harding has won crowds the world over playing alongside Deerhunter, Frankie Cosmos and Perfume Genius, as well as to hoards of eager crowds at SXSW, Festival Les Indisciplinées, Rolling Stone Weekender, Visions Festival, The Great Escape, Golden Plains and more. Aldous’ 2017 touring schedule spans Europe, the US and the United Kingdom for much of the year, with Green Man, End of the Road Festival, Latitude Festival, Nelsonville Music Festival and more on the horizon.

Hipster Assassins is a collaborative endeavor of virtuosic talent that came together in New York City at the historic Zinc Bar in 2010. Over the next 2 years the band had a weekly Monday night residency at Zinc where it started to develop its own sound playing both originals and covers. Since its inception, the band has played all over the world, including Montreal Jazz Fest, the Jazz Cafe in Costa Rica and plays once a month at NYC’s famous 55 Bar.

Each of the 5 members bring their own unique, original voices to the band. Their vast experience with legends of the industry has allowed the members of Hipster Assassins to bring unique voices and ideas to the band, and has been essential to the development of their unique sound.

Felix Pastorius, Bassist: The son of Jaco Pastorius who has worked with the Yellowjackets, Jeff Coffin’s Mutet, A$AP Rocky, and Onyx Collective, has worked hard and achieved his own voice on the electric bass. This voice is the anchor of the band.

Chris Ward, Saxophonist: Chris has worked/recorded with Michael Stipe and Fischerspooner, Lord Huron, The Family Crest, and various projects from all genres, from video game soundtracks to jazz big bands.

John Bendy, Guitarist: Brought up in the blues, John learned his craft from masters Bill Perry and Popa Chubby. His fierce, virtuosic style comes from a blend of the blues and high energy jazz fusion.

Mike Bendy, Bass: The idea of a second bassist in a band could be strange to some, but Mike’s virtuosic skill and experience give him the tools to complement the other low-end instruments in the band perfectly. Outside of Hipster Assassins Mike has performed with Kenwood Dennard, Alex Foster, Sean Wayland, and metal band Res15.

Kenny Grohowski, Drums: Kenny works regularly with various John Zorn projects as well as the famed fusion group Brand X. He has also worked with Lonnie Plaxico and Andy Milne’s Dapp Theory.

Known for his roles on Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job!, and extensive tours throughout the US, Canada and Australia, David Liebe Hart is an outsider musician, actor and painter. A true original, he has communicated with extra-terrestrials, owns a large collection of puppets, and is obsessed with trains. While his vast and bizarre catalog of songs about aliens, religion, and failed relationships has yielded cult hits, such as "Salame", "Father & Son" and "Puberty", his recent collaborations with electronic musician Jonah Mociun, AKA Th' Mole, have propelled Liebe Hart into previously unexplored territory.

Throughout the past decade Liebe Hart has garnered a substantial and die-hard fan base, not only from his TV and film appearances but from his stints on the road performing music all across the US, UK, Ireland and Australia. His followers are extremely supportive and loyal, won over by David's obvious goodheartedness, honesty and hilarious idiosyncrasies, as well his fun and engaging stage shows. As the public demands it, David is traveling the globe in 2015 in conjunction with the release of his new album, Astronaut. On the heels of his triumphant return to Australia in March, David will spend the rest of the spring and summer canvasing the US.

With Jonah Mociun as backing musician, Liebe Hart puts on a show certain to please old fans and new ones alike. In addition to creating electronicised versions of David's old favorites, the duo performs their new songs along with puppets, projected video accompaniment, and David's oddly endearing stories of past relationships and paranormal encounters.