L&Q Interview: IGLOOGHOST
This Interview was written for Loud and Quiet Magazine, and can be found in the excellent Issue 145, as well as a great cover feature with Squid, and lots of other cool stuff. I love speaking to Igloo. He’s such a sweet and clever guy, and has this amazing sense of humour about what he does. You can find our full chat here, and read a lil tease below:
Iglooghost proudly makes laptop music. The abundant universe of characters and huge genre-smashed sounds that fill up his multi-sensory musical world all came together while staring into a screen. These are alien vistas so vast and believable that it’s surprising to know they came together on a Macbook. It’s art piece, magic trick and in-joke rolled into one.
But there’s always been a beating organic heart at the core of Iglooghost’s music – sometimes a strange, alien heart beating twenty times a second, but a warm-blooded one nonetheless.
His second full length solo album emphasises the warm-hearted pull of his music. It’s teaming with gentle piano lines, sweet lilting vocals, and gorgeous violin arpeggios from Vivek Menon. The drums, while lumbering and gigantic, are surprisingly minimal. Quiet hand claps are used just as much as 808 wubs. Fans will know he is as influenced by delicate Steve Reich pieces and the Breath of the Wild soundtrack as he is by hyperactive bass music. Combining those two worlds so intuitively has long been part of his skill as an artist.
But it’s not enough for him to merely combine separate musical worlds. Lei Line Eon is part of an ever growing Iglooghost Extended Universe that tells the story of tiny gods from another realm, capable of magical acts far beyond our understanding. Now, thanks to his documentation of strange phenomena in his hometown in Dorset, we’re finding out more about how their existence overlaps with our own.
It’s an album about the magic right there in front of our eyes. The music and deep visual material surrounding it is presented with childlike glee – and by extension, half of the fun with Iglooghost remains allowing yourself not to question where fact becomes fiction. After 2019’s bombastic and gloriously silly Gloo album XYZ with his closest musical companions Kai Whiston and Babii, Lei Line Eon is a more reflective and spiritual release, without losing any of Iglooghost’s mysterious charm that filled his 2017 debut, Neō Wax Bloom; a record about a gelatinous worm in a witch hat named Xiangjiao.
I interviewed him back then, in a conversation that switched from the telephone to Google Chat within its first few minutes. This time, we went straight for the text option, for me to learn more about the strange lost tradition that he’s been documenting in Dorset; the latest add-on pack to the Iglooghost universe…
