Brighton's Squid perform songs from their 2021 debut album, Bright Green Field (Warp) and beyond, live in the studio for XPN's Indie Rock Hit Parade.

Produced by Eric Schuman
Photos + Video by John Vettese
xpn.org // #IndieRockHitParade

Indie Rock Hit Parade Live Session

Squid - Boy Racers/Paddling (Live at XPN)

DASH BABY ! (Demo) [londynne]

POISON (ft. Tonytwochoppas) (@akio)

Type: EP
Format: Digital
Releasedate: May 14th
Cat. number: SLA25
Artwork: Oliva Rawlings
Master: Norman Orro

If you listen to the breeze long enough, a song will emerge.
The air hangs on the cusp of rapture.
It will have you foraging in existential void, identity-gardening for a better future...
realworlding.

––––

Hiding in relative obscurity, Music For Your Plants – the sonic environment tended by Tallinn's Norman Orro – originated in late 2000s as a library-music-obsessed prog-rock collective in the dusty attics of the Estonian Academy of Arts. The project has since shed its initial kraut-informed sprawl, evolving through junglist, breakbeat hyperstitions toward a sort of post-anthropocene chamber music: densely layered, rhythmically unstable, and emotionally euphoric.

MFYP maintains a fascination with nonhuman perspectives and systems,
expressing this through forgotten esoteric plugins or operating 90’s hardware with the casual precision of someone peeling particularly stubborn fruit. Despite surface affinities with ambient or post-club sonics, Orro’s output eschews the genre’s more pristine tendencies. MFYP’s productions are texturally grainy, often abrasive in detail – the residue, perhaps, of early-digital workflows and a background in tape-saturated, longform rock improvisation.

Where Hassell sought hybrid utopias, MFYP’s trajectory leads deeper into what Orro has referred to as “Fifth World sonics,” creating a deliberate babel of "world musics" – sometimes deploying reflective detachment, elsewhere earnestly attempting to reconfigure music for an age where the concept of "world" is in crisis. This approach, crystallised on the 2013 Humanity EP, helped cohere the “eco grime” microgenre through holographic, deconstructed folktronics and mutations of UK bass DNA.

On Aeolian Software, we find bit-crushed fretwork and pop-leaning structures, if only briefly gasping for air. MFYP’s current phase appears concerned with breath and density, melodic cells surfacing through mist before dissolving again – as if uncertain whether to take root or vanish.
New Age textures creep in sideways, only to be clipped by loose 2-step scaffolding, while vocal trance fragments pockmark the air like overheard dreams. Somewhere between the PS2 boot sequence and a pan-global spiritual, it's panglossia for the post-everything listener.

contarex - 8FFF

outerworlds

Related tracks