We’re pleased to welcome Index For Working Musik to Ramsgate for a mesmerising live show on Saturday 19th April!
The London-based group are formed from previous members of TOY and The Proper Ornaments. 2024 saw the release of ‘Purple Born’, an 8-minute track that channels the likes of John Fahey and Polvo—leather boys, leather girls, and silly cuckoo clocks—and serves as the first signal of the future to come in 2025.
“Index often aurally conjure the clanging and droning of early-’90s alt-guitar legends Pavements and and My Bloody Valentine, sometimes topped with doubly disorienting loops” – MOJO
Unbeknownst to its members, Index For Working Musik was born on an evening in late 2019 amidst the discovery of a collection of faded b&w photocopies that had been marinating on the floor of a urine-alley in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona. An assortment of sacred and profane imagery were crumpled amongst an essay on early Christian hermits, entitled Men Possessed by God, the meaning of which was enticingly vague. Received together, they planted the seeds for a new endeavour. Though Max Oscarnold and Nathalia Bruno were already engaged in a creative ping-pong of sorts, the results to this point had only totaled a 30 min long 1⁄2 inch tape containing one track and four interludes. They needed a page and they needed ink, and they needed a place and it needed energy. Suddenly by chance or divine intervention, their experimental venture had been given form and direction.
Back home in London’s cursed smog, they moved themselves and their 8-track studio into a basement in E8, where the project’s gravitational pull gained strength, quickly developing into an unexpected collective with the incorporation of drummer Bobby Voltaire, double bass player E. Smith and guitarist J. Loftus. As the world shifted around them and the Plague Years followed, it became increasingly clear that they were not going to leave that small basement room. The scarcity of light or outer world presence was less a limitation, instead the main tool at hand, allowing the recording to stretch for boundary-less days in architectural isolation, and forcing them to make straight forward free guitar music, adopting a ‘first thought, best thought’ approach.
What was sparked by that discovery in the Gothic Quarter was actually a realisation that what they were looking for was with them all the while, buried as it was in piles of voice memos and recorded guitar feedback. Men Possessed By God they may be not: it was self-possession that was to guide their way in the end.
“Sexy and contagious” – Sounds of violence
“It’s original and atmospheric stuff that sounds like something that might have been recorded in The Factory and discovered decades later in a dusty corner of Warhol’s archive; all that’s missing is a surprise visit from Valerie Solanas…” – Tim Cooper
