A Group ‘About Being Messy and Chaotic’? porridge finds the radio

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In the songs that Dana Margolin writes, sings, and sometimes shouts for an English rock band, she utters primitive statements. porridge radio. While the band’s simmering, fickle arrangements invoke many eras and styles, including post-punk, psychedelia, low-fi indie-rock, synth-pop, Chamber-rock, Margolin’s lyrics often turn arguments into cathartic spells.

“Don’t touch me/I’m afraid of what I’m going to feel,” said Margolin. “Ugh,” from 2016. She sang “Thank you for leaving me/Thank you for making me happy”. “Born Confused” And on the band’s upcoming album Friday – “Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky” – Margolin tries to find a throaty, throbbing enthusiasm for her singing on “Birthday Party.” The phrase “I don’t want to be loved” at least 57 times.

“So many times to say something that isn’t true,” he said, laughing through a video from his London painting studio. “But to hear them, to see if I agree with them, I have to say it out loud. I need to hear it and say it over and over because I need a space to process what I’m saying. Singing is a space where I can do and share that with my whole body.”

Mugs holding half-crushed tubes of paint and various brushes sat on a desk behind Margolin. He has drawn album covers and designed products for Porridge Radio since he started uploading solo recordings to SoundCloud in 2012.

“I like to do things,” she said. “When I’m not singing, I tend to notice that I’m writing a lot of words. Or if I’m not writing anything, maybe I’m drawing a lot. There must always be a place for him to come out, but he can’t always come out the way I want.”

Margolin began writing poetry while in elementary school and began putting them to music in her youth. “I didn’t know how to play the guitar, but I thought, ‘Somebody has to do this, I’ll do it,'” he said.

She found kindred spirits online as she explored SoundCloud and Bandcamp and connected with do-it-yourself songwriters. Then he decided, “If everyone is doing it, I’ll do it too. I’m just going to put it online because it’s a way to share something very close to my heart anonymously.”

“The core values ​​have always been: Be vulnerable. Try to connect with people. Try it and convey your inner world. Try to understand the emotions and what is going on and try to give yourself a space for that. Porridge Radio is about being messy and chaotic.”

Even as she wrote songs alone and recorded with her laptop in a bedroom, Margolin embraced bold contradictions. “I can be anything I love and hate at the same time,” he said very quietly, in an early song, “Trash Tape.”

Porridge Radio cannot reveal its name. “Words,” he said. “You don’t choose your band name, you don’t choose your bandmates, and you don’t really choose any of them. That happens sometimes. Then you turn around and it all happened all of a sudden. You’ve been called Porridge Radio for 10 years and you don’t know why.”

Margolin majored in anthropology and graduated from the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. “I never thought I would be a musician or an artist,” he said. “My interests were biology, philosophy, politics, languages ​​and religion. And it turns out that anthropology is all these things, namely people. I just wanted to learn how people live, feel, experience and relate to one another. I loved it and it made so many other things meaningful in my life. And I guess that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing now.”

He started playing his songs in open mic shows while in college. By the end of 2014 he had formed a band that included fellow students from Brighton: Georgie Stott on keyboards and backing vocals, Maddie Ryall on bass and Sam Yardley on drums and keyboards.

“The emotional intensity was there from the start,” Yardley said in a video interview. “The experience of those quiet bedroom recordings was seeing them live – even when it was just Dana and an acoustic guitar, the intensity was even more brutal back then. But I think a lot of them were first recorded in college dorm rooms, where you can hardly get rid of the guttural screams.”

Porridge Radio’s debut album – “Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers” – was released in 2016 and overhauled some of Margolin’s early songs into undersized full-band productions. The group performed as often as they could while tackling schoolwork and errands—sometimes three or four times a week.

Porridge Radio was fully awake when it aired “Every Bad” in March 2020, just as the pandemic began. It was the work of a group that sharpened its identity and sound: guitar-played, full-throated, unpolished, exuberant yet nuanced. In another year, Porridge Radio would have risen to the top of the indie-rock circuit of clubs, festivals and theaters. Instead, it’s an occasional disaster during pandemic isolation. webcast.

Nevertheless, “Every Bad” still found ardent listeners. He was on the shortlist for the Mercury Prize, the UK’s music quality award that year. An expanded version of the album contained some of them. radical electronic remixes hand-played songs signaled Porridge Radio’s lack of interest in guitar band purity.

The pandemic gave Margolin a break from the tour – and some time to sleep – and gave the band time to review their new songs, layer by piece and try new textures, giving more room for introspection. New album of turbulent, overloaded post-punk guitars “Back to the radio” but other songs are built around keyboards, from shallow synthesizers to the majestic Hammond organ. “’What happens if you put this in?’ “We really enjoy asking,” he said.

“Water Slide, Diving Board, Stairway to the Sky” takes its name from Margolin’s paintings that she painted at the same time, and finally realizing that her songs were united around three emotions: joy (water slide), fear (diving board) and eternity (ladder).

But other readings are totally awaited and welcomed. In “U Can Be Happy If U Want To,” Margolin sings about a relationship as close as “My skin is attached to your skin/I touch everything you touch.” But as the song progresses towards the top, it cries out, “I had a dream, you sang my song/ You always sing it wrong”.

This is the picture of a sincere misinterpretation. “When I let go of the fact that it’s painful and hard to share,” Margolin said, “there’s really a lot of joy in the fact that I have absolutely no control over how people hear or see me. While it’s scary and difficult, there’s a kind of freedom that makes it fun and good. ”

“You can forgive yourself a little for being embarrassing. I realized that every time I tipped too much, it was ‘too much’ that made someone understand what I was talking about.”

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