GUY MANKOWSKI

When I started this blog in 2011 I posted an entry reflecting on the work of Warp Records artist Lonelady, aka Julie Campbell. In 2015, during the course of researching my novel 'How I Left The National Grid', we were introduced and we began corresponding. Our work at the time shared a psychic terrain. This terrain contained preoccupations with Manchester and Factory Records. With how the legacies of both inform the haunting aspects of the city's interzones, concrete flyovers, and tower blocks. The conversation itself teetered on the margins of semantics and terminology. Both of us have tried to make sense of these concerns using walking and words, and the brittle aesthetics of post-punk. She has also used synthesisers, guitars and other forms of music which crackle and twitch like a frightened metropolis. This interview with Pop Matters is a sanitised (believe it or not) version of the chats we had which covered this hinterland. Quite why both of us, at this point in ...

On the rare occasions that I am inspired by a new band, it is often the atmosphere surrounding them that draws me in. I often use music as a three minute portal to the type of life I hanker for, or even as another stepping stone towards that life. The most generous music offers you that opportunity, and gives you space in which to invest in your own imagination. But when the world a piece of music offers is ill-defined, or overly stylized, the romance with it is inevitably short-lived. But if music stands up to scrutiny, after a period of digestion it soon becomes part of the furniture of your life. Lonelady is the first artist for a long time to pass that test for me. In a recent interview she talked about how you when you finish a piece of work you ‘expect explosions of glitter and celebration’ but how ‘that doesn’t happen at all’. I’m starting to learn about that feeling of anti climax, when you put out a piece of work you have agonized over, only to see it inevitably caught up in t...