photo courtesy of Mark Gregson
The gorgeous jazz soaked electronic rock fusions of "What We Are and What We Are Meant to Be" by Manchester UK jazztronic / abstract indie rock trio GoGo Penguin, and from their upcoming album "Necessary Fictions" via XXIM/Sony (dropping on June 20th), feels like a cage match of beautifully kinetic drum work, stand up bass counter positions, crystalline piano keys and rattling electronic arpegios with a rustic patina of distortion. The whole enthralling sonic affair builds it's narrative like a film noir, enchanting one minute and aloof the next. The emotional pull is so alluring that while it clocks in at well over 5 minutes, it seems to end so quickly, so much so that you will find yourself listening repeatedly and hearing it a bit differently each time, seeing a different movie in your head. GoGo Penguin, comprised of pianist Chris Illingworth, bassist Nick Blacka and drummer Jon Scott, are ever expanding their sonic territories incorporating modular synthesizers in bigger, more deep ways.
On "Necessary Fictions" they also bring on guest players and even a guest vocalist, a bold move indeed for an instrumental group.
LINER NOTES on the album "Necessary Fictions" (excerpted and bracketed):
[...for the first time, GoGo Penguin expanded their familiar three-man formation to invite in some guest players: on a further two tracks, "Luminous Giants" and "State Of Flux," they enlisted the eight-piece strings ensemble, the Manchester Collective, led by creative director and violinist Rakhi Singh, while "Forgive The Damages" features the debut appearance of a human voice on a GGP recording, belonging to their close friend and sometime tour support, singer-songwriter Daudi Matsiko.]
[Nick and Chris, who both, as Nick discreetly puts it, have now “entered our fifth decade”, felt an urgent sense of purpose to cast off inhibitions and unhelpful habits in their music, to get deeper to the essence of what they want it to say. The album title derives from a book Nick had been reading called ‘The Middle Passage’ by James Hollis, which, he says, presents “very Jungian stuff about the shadow self, and hidden personae. You begin to think, ‘Hang on, there’s an authentic me, deep down in there somewhere!’"]
[All told, Necessary Fictions is an album of ambitious fresh developments, from a band fully at ease with who they are: confident enough to open the door to collaboration, excited about where they can explore next, and also keen to have fun doing so. “I was very aware of smiling a lot in the studio while we were making it,” says Illingworth, “and I’m smiling now just thinking about it. I hope that energy translates to people”.]
[For Necessary Fictions, they were free to make their own studio space in Manchester into more of a vibey hang-out, a nice place to go, with artwork, photographs and other images tacked up on the walls for stimulus and inspiration. Illingworth and Blacka went in there pretty much every day for twelve months through 2024; then Scott, who lives in London, journeyed up to work with GGP’s two mainstays when they were ready for his rhythmic input.]
[Nick and Chris, who both, as Nick discreetly puts it, have now “entered our fifth decade”, felt an urgent sense of purpose to cast off inhibitions and unhelpful habits in their music, to get deeper to the essence of what they want it to say. The album title derives from a book Nick had been reading called ‘The Middle Passage’ by James Hollis, which, he says, presents “very Jungian stuff about the shadow self, and hidden personae. You begin to think, ‘Hang on, there’s an authentic me, deep down in there somewhere!’"]
I love instrumental (and non instrumental) music that takes you places, that shifts your view and inspires you to create something out of whole cloth. GoGo Penguin crafts such music. I look forward to delving into "Necessary Fictions".
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM
https://www.youtube.com/user/GoGoPenguinMusic
https://www.instagram.com/gogo_penguin/
https://www.facebook.com/Gogopenguin
https://x.com/GoGo_Penguin
https://gogopenguin.lnk.to/necessaryfictions
On Friday. June 20th, GoGo Penguin will be releasing their new album, Necessary Fictions, via XXIM/Sony. Today, the UK trio shares the single "Fallowfield Loops," which prefaces the dynamic, genre blurring album.
For GoGo Penguin, the Manchester trio who’ve inspirationally blended jazz, classical and electronic influences since forming in 2012, the searching impulse in their music has reached a thrilling moment on their new seventh long-player.
Called Necessary Fictions, it finds pianist Chris Illingworth, bassist Nick Blacka and drummer Jon Scott digging deep internally, says Blacka, to reach “what we think are our integral, authentic qualities at this moment in time”. That entails some of their boldest moves to date, such as incorporating modular synthesizers into their sound more than ever before.
In a pair of mirroring pieces, the first, "Naga Ghost," glides spectacularly yet almost imperceptibly from acoustic instrumentation into electronica, only for the second, "Silence Speaks," a few tracks later, to make its sublime sonic transition in the opposite direction, as if bracketing the latter half of the record.
Elsewhere, for the first time, GoGo Penguin expanded their familiar three-man formation to invite in some guest players: on a further two tracks, "Luminous Giants" and "State Of Flux," they enlisted the eight-piece strings ensemble, the Manchester Collective, led by creative director and violinist Rakhi Singh, while "Forgive The Damages" features the debut appearance of a human voice on a GGP recording, belonging to their close friend and sometime tour support, singer-songwriter Daudi Matsiko.
All told, Necessary Fictions is an album of ambitious fresh developments, from a band fully at ease with who they are: confident enough to open the door to collaboration, excited about where they can explore next, and also keen to have fun doing so. “I was very aware of smiling a lot in the studio while we were making it,” says Illingworth, “and I’m smiling now just thinking about it. I hope that energy translates to people”.
If the ability to open up their working practices at this stage comes from a newfound feeling of strength and stability in their ranks, it follows a period of transition that was, at times, deeply fraught. As for so many people, the Covid pandemic proved to be a crossroads: they parted ways with their founding drummer, but soon found a dream replacement in Jon Scott.
If the new trio named their first album together, released in 2023, Everything Is Going to Be OK, it obviously reveals that for a while there they may’ve thought that it wouldn’t be. Recalls Nick, “It really felt like all the walls had crumbled at that point, and everything was burning down. Alongside all the band uncertainties, I lost two of the dearest people in my life to cancer around the making of that record. The latter, my brother, five weeks before we started recording.”
“So that record was very cathartic to make,” Chris adds, “but it became quite introspective and inward-looking. We were in the studio partly because it was a place of safety, somewhere to get away from what was going on in the outside world with lockdowns and what have you.”
For Necessary Fictions, they were free to make their own studio space in Manchester into more of a vibey hang-out, a nice place to go, with artwork, photographs and other images tacked up on the walls for stimulus and inspiration. Illingworth and Blacka went in there pretty much every day for twelve months through 2024; then Scott, who lives in London, journeyed up to work with GGP’s two mainstays when they were ready for his rhythmic input.
Nick and Chris, who both, as Nick discreetly puts it, have now “entered our fifth decade”, felt an urgent sense of purpose to cast off inhibitions and unhelpful habits in their music, to get deeper to the essence of what they want it to say. The album title derives from a book Nick had been reading called ‘The Middle Passage’ by James Hollis, which, he says, presents “very Jungian stuff about the shadow self, and hidden personae. You begin to think, ‘Hang on, there’s an authentic me, deep down in there somewhere!’"
“Musically,” he goes on, “it’s been the same journey, the same process of ditching some of the things we’d got used to doing which were holding us back. We’d be writing tracks in the past where we’d be hesitant, like, ‘But what are people going to think? Aren’t we supposed to be this jazz trio who are not really jazz? Who play electronic-type music on acoustic instruments and it's all very fast and frenetic?’”
The pandemic period, where many of us plunged deep into online purchasing, proved to be Chris’s watershed moment, to begin investigating that world. As a kid, he’d dipped a toe, tinkering around on MIDI keyboards connected to an Atari with Cubase software, but he’d never taken it any further, or indeed into his work with GoGo Penguin. By trial and error, he realised the thing for him was modular synths, where “it’s like you build your own little instrument, to do what you want, and it feels really personal.”
Both Illingworth and Blacka remained fiercely wary, though, of bolting on wacky sounds just for the sake of it. “We didn’t want it to feel gimmicky,” Chris explains. “There had to be a reason, and for us that was knowing that in places we wanted the character of the music to shift.”
In the music, you start out following one of GGP’s trademark acoustic webs of piano, bass and drums, and you almost hardly notice the shift, as a synth sound like a plucked guitar weaves in, until a borderline rave riff and clattering beats take you to a bangin’ finale. Then, on the closing "Silence Speaks," the melody launches on synths, and the piano part majestically unfurls upon that electronic foundation to an integrated conclusion.
GoGo Penguin have always had a narrative, cinematic quality to their music, following a linear trajectory far removed from trite verse-chorus pop structures, and influenced by anything from Debussy’s ‘Preludes’ to Underworld’s ‘Pearl’s Girl’. Here, definitely, that storytelling-in-sound acquires wider parameters and far greater sophistication.
As well as synths, this time they added orchestral textures to their armoury. Again, they’d often swerved this idea for fear of it appearing gratuitous, or predictable, and they finally only went in that direction through a characteristically organic connection to Manchester Collective’s Rakhi Singh, whose sister attended Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music at the same time as Chris. For "State Of Flux" and "Luminous Giants," Illingworth had pre-written what they wanted, but it turned into a proper collaboration, with Rakhi using her talents as a violinist to add “simple but really interesting gestural touches at the beginning of "State Of Flux," as faint echoes of things that are going to come later on in the tune”, as well improvised parts to "Luminous Giants."
Their team-up with Daudi Matsiko was another “no-brainer”, says Nick, as the British-Ugandan singer-songwriter, whose album "The King Of Misery" charts his harrowing journey towards diagnosis with bipolar disorder, had supported them intermittently on tour, going back as far as 2016. In the genesis of "Forgive the Damages," they’d played around with overlaying field recordings and spoken-word samples, but when Daudi called them out of the blue, they knew that providence had sent them their man. As a friend, he already totally got what they were after, and delivered a vocal which fully complements the original music’s emotional core.
After the traumatic upheavals of the early ’00s, here finally the self-fulfilling prophesy of Everything Is Going To Be OK has been realised, and, their demons suitably exorcised, GoGo Penguin are now ambitiously digging deep within for their best selves, suitably emboldened to include other talents within their harmonious world. As such, Necessary Fictions is an exciting record, and yes, it’s okay to smile as you listen.
On Friday. June 20th, GoGo Penguin will be releasing their new album, Necessary Fictions, via XXIM/Sony. Today, the UK trio shares the single "Fallowfield Loops," which prefaces the dynamic, genre blurring album.
For GoGo Penguin, the Manchester trio who’ve inspirationally blended jazz, classical and electronic influences since forming in 2012, the searching impulse in their music has reached a thrilling moment on their new seventh long-player.
Called Necessary Fictions, it finds pianist Chris Illingworth, bassist Nick Blacka and drummer Jon Scott digging deep internally, says Blacka, to reach “what we think are our integral, authentic qualities at this moment in time”. That entails some of their boldest moves to date, such as incorporating modular synthesizers into their sound more than ever before.
In a pair of mirroring pieces, the first, "Naga Ghost," glides spectacularly yet almost imperceptibly from acoustic instrumentation into electronica, only for the second, "Silence Speaks," a few tracks later, to make its sublime sonic transition in the opposite direction, as if bracketing the latter half of the record.
Elsewhere, for the first time, GoGo Penguin expanded their familiar three-man formation to invite in some guest players: on a further two tracks, "Luminous Giants" and "State Of Flux," they enlisted the eight-piece strings ensemble, the Manchester Collective, led by creative director and violinist Rakhi Singh, while "Forgive The Damages" features the debut appearance of a human voice on a GGP recording, belonging to their close friend and sometime tour support, singer-songwriter Daudi Matsiko.
All told, Necessary Fictions is an album of ambitious fresh developments, from a band fully at ease with who they are: confident enough to open the door to collaboration, excited about where they can explore next, and also keen to have fun doing so. “I was very aware of smiling a lot in the studio while we were making it,” says Illingworth, “and I’m smiling now just thinking about it. I hope that energy translates to people”.
If the ability to open up their working practices at this stage comes from a newfound feeling of strength and stability in their ranks, it follows a period of transition that was, at times, deeply fraught. As for so many people, the Covid pandemic proved to be a crossroads: they parted ways with their founding drummer, but soon found a dream replacement in Jon Scott.
If the new trio named their first album together, released in 2023, Everything Is Going to Be OK, it obviously reveals that for a while there they may’ve thought that it wouldn’t be. Recalls Nick, “It really felt like all the walls had crumbled at that point, and everything was burning down. Alongside all the band uncertainties, I lost two of the dearest people in my life to cancer around the making of that record. The latter, my brother, five weeks before we started recording.”
“So that record was very cathartic to make,” Chris adds, “but it became quite introspective and inward-looking. We were in the studio partly because it was a place of safety, somewhere to get away from what was going on in the outside world with lockdowns and what have you.”
For Necessary Fictions, they were free to make their own studio space in Manchester into more of a vibey hang-out, a nice place to go, with artwork, photographs and other images tacked up on the walls for stimulus and inspiration. Illingworth and Blacka went in there pretty much every day for twelve months through 2024; then Scott, who lives in London, journeyed up to work with GGP’s two mainstays when they were ready for his rhythmic input.
Nick and Chris, who both, as Nick discreetly puts it, have now “entered our fifth decade”, felt an urgent sense of purpose to cast off inhibitions and unhelpful habits in their music, to get deeper to the essence of what they want it to say. The album title derives from a book Nick had been reading called ‘The Middle Passage’ by James Hollis, which, he says, presents “very Jungian stuff about the shadow self, and hidden personae. You begin to think, ‘Hang on, there’s an authentic me, deep down in there somewhere!’"
“Musically,” he goes on, “it’s been the same journey, the same process of ditching some of the things we’d got used to doing which were holding us back. We’d be writing tracks in the past where we’d be hesitant, like, ‘But what are people going to think? Aren’t we supposed to be this jazz trio who are not really jazz? Who play electronic-type music on acoustic instruments and it's all very fast and frenetic?’”
The pandemic period, where many of us plunged deep into online purchasing, proved to be Chris’s watershed moment, to begin investigating that world. As a kid, he’d dipped a toe, tinkering around on MIDI keyboards connected to an Atari with Cubase software, but he’d never taken it any further, or indeed into his work with GoGo Penguin. By trial and error, he realised the thing for him was modular synths, where “it’s like you build your own little instrument, to do what you want, and it feels really personal.”
Both Illingworth and Blacka remained fiercely wary, though, of bolting on wacky sounds just for the sake of it. “We didn’t want it to feel gimmicky,” Chris explains. “There had to be a reason, and for us that was knowing that in places we wanted the character of the music to shift.”
In the music, you start out following one of GGP’s trademark acoustic webs of piano, bass and drums, and you almost hardly notice the shift, as a synth sound like a plucked guitar weaves in, until a borderline rave riff and clattering beats take you to a bangin’ finale. Then, on the closing "Silence Speaks," the melody launches on synths, and the piano part majestically unfurls upon that electronic foundation to an integrated conclusion.
GoGo Penguin have always had a narrative, cinematic quality to their music, following a linear trajectory far removed from trite verse-chorus pop structures, and influenced by anything from Debussy’s ‘Preludes’ to Underworld’s ‘Pearl’s Girl’. Here, definitely, that storytelling-in-sound acquires wider parameters and far greater sophistication.
As well as synths, this time they added orchestral textures to their armoury. Again, they’d often swerved this idea for fear of it appearing gratuitous, or predictable, and they finally only went in that direction through a characteristically organic connection to Manchester Collective’s Rakhi Singh, whose sister attended Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music at the same time as Chris. For "State Of Flux" and "Luminous Giants," Illingworth had pre-written what they wanted, but it turned into a proper collaboration, with Rakhi using her talents as a violinist to add “simple but really interesting gestural touches at the beginning of "State Of Flux," as faint echoes of things that are going to come later on in the tune”, as well improvised parts to "Luminous Giants."
Their team-up with Daudi Matsiko was another “no-brainer”, says Nick, as the British-Ugandan singer-songwriter, whose album "The King Of Misery" charts his harrowing journey towards diagnosis with bipolar disorder, had supported them intermittently on tour, going back as far as 2016. In the genesis of "Forgive the Damages," they’d played around with overlaying field recordings and spoken-word samples, but when Daudi called them out of the blue, they knew that providence had sent them their man. As a friend, he already totally got what they were after, and delivered a vocal which fully complements the original music’s emotional core.
After the traumatic upheavals of the early ’00s, here finally the self-fulfilling prophesy of Everything Is Going To Be OK has been realised, and, their demons suitably exorcised, GoGo Penguin are now ambitiously digging deep within for their best selves, suitably emboldened to include other talents within their harmonious world. As such, Necessary Fictions is an exciting record, and yes, it’s okay to smile as you listen.
GoGo Penguin, Manchester England, instrumental, jazztronic, electronica, indie rock, progressive music, jazz saturated, jazz rock fusions, New album "Necessary Fictions", "What We Are and What We Are Meant to Be" single,
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