On Friday June 20th, GoGo Penguin will be releasing their new album, Necessary Fictions, via XXIM/Sony. Today, the UK trio shares the new single and video "What We Are and What We Are Meant To Be," a genre-shifting slice from the new 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.
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 whole process of change this time out is summed up by a track on Necessary Fictions’ pointedly entitled "What We Are And What We Are Meant To Be." “It's really simple, really melodic,” Nick explains. “It's not showboating, like ‘Hey, look at all the chops we’ve got, and how great we are!’ There's not even any improvisation in it. Bass-wise, it's just got a bass synth like a dance track. There’s still a part of me that’s like, ‘What are people going to think?’ Then there’s another part that just thinks, ‘Fuck it, they can think what they want! This is what we want to make right now, and it feels authentic.’”
For Chris Illingworth, meanwhile, their journey has involved reaching further into a world he’d always been attracted to; namely, synthesizers. “I used to go and see people play live, like Underworld, Prodigy, Orbital, even Nine Inch Nails, and I’d see all their gear onstage, and a part of me would be thinking, ‘Bloody hell, that looks fun!’”
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.
In their own playing, Chris and Nick have felt confident enough both to challenge themselves into breaking new ground, but also to know what is quintessentially ‘them’. Jon Scott is now fully bedded in at the drum kit, both live and within the writing process; they’re appreciative of his technical ability, as well as his aptitude in listening, finding space for himself in their sound, but also creating space for them, and then pushing them when the time is right.
So, in GoGo Penguin’s decade-plus story, they are perhaps at their happiest moment to date. In Necessary Fictions, you hear them referencing formative experiences which they feel define them as who they are: one was a walk through Pacific North-West redwoods around a tour stop in Seattle, duly encapsulated in the awestruck vibe of "Luminous Giants."
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.
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