INSIDE tightrope's WORLD OF ELECTRO PSYCHOSIS

WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY MAX KESSELL

It's 1:30 am, and I'm sitting here looking at the blinking cursor of Google Docs, rehighlighting the same sentence at the top of the page… “Electro psychosis”.

It was the term I’d come up with to describe the band tightrope. Having attended one of their shows at the Shacklewell Arms two weeks before, I became enamoured by them. A bubbling rockstar duo whose sound sat somewhere between mythical siren-like music and your dad's old record collection.

I met Jamie (one half of the band) two years previously at a pub in East London. Articulate and self-assured, he explained the music he planned to make. In between sips of beer, I nodded, not really understanding exactly what he meant, but feeling the physical sensation of passion and ambition crackle through the conversation. But that was two years ago, and this was now. Sporting a Springsteen-inspired outfit, he was joined onstage by his fellow band member, Ciara.

Head rocking back and forth, sweat glistened in the light of the strobes as the drum machine thundered on, catching me off guard. Standing there, a deer in headlights, the term electro psychosis raced through my mind. The low popcorn ceilings of the Shacklewell Arms, drenched in talent from musicians such as Jamie xx and Solange Knowles, seemed to have potentially staged another.

Some weeks later, I approached the pair to photograph them and write this piece in an attempt to understand them better, away from the music and flashing lights. Who really were they? Who or what was tightrope?

Ciara and Jamie make up two halves of the band. Despite originally meeting at university 10 years ago, this is the pair's first collaborative project. I did press on what that felt like, to finally work together after all these years and, considering both had been part of larger bands (Jamie had even pursued his own solo Primrose endeavour), I wondered if it created a new kind of intimacy or conflict, one that involved being both friends and collaborators.

“I kind of always had Ciara in mind as the person who would complete the picture,” Jamie explained.

The name, he says, was as simple as it “just sounding cool”, but since its inception and as the band has grown, they've identified more and more with the idea of this balancing act they perform: two distinct personalities balancing on the circus wire of a million influences.

Their sound is relentless, experimental, and tender all at once. With drum machines that you feel reverberating through your feet before you even register it. Guitar riffs and that gentle bass carry the tunes on top. Jamie's ear for production carries his clear interest in electronic music; thundering bass lines mixed with extraterrestrial metallic twangs melt into Ciara's voice, gentle and siren-like, smeared through reverb and echo until it sounds like it's reaching you from underwater. Recalling old sea shanties, or a luring mermaid's charm, the melody shouldn't work over the speed and energy, but yet it does. It's charming, hallucinogenic, even spellbinding at points.

Back at the show, I felt exactly that openness. A soft purple hue had settled over the room. The two were separated by a single desk, facing each other, seemingly walking a tightrope of electrical wires, perfectly in sync and acrobatic in nature.

The two might be exploring what kind of music they want to create, but they do have a clear direction they want to move in. A live band that sits somewhere in the Venn diagram of a classic punk band mixed with an electro pop duo. Jamie stated his ambition was always to create something that felt deeper than just a band or a DJ, something with another live dimension that he felt previous iterations of his work lacked.

Arguably, the most interesting part of our conversation was their idea around the British experience and the effect their childhood had on their music. We had spoken a lot about memory and the power of nostalgia; this idea of memory is one that I'd tried to push during our shoot, which harkened back to the days of our teens, mixed with those distorted and refracted evenings from childhood. From a generation that grew up on the cusp of the technological revolution, they experienced the tail end of an analogue childhood, as well as the young adult years of the digital world.

Summer in rundown British parks, drinking warm vodka from Evian bottles crushed into an already overflowing rucksack. Their references aren't supposed to represent a romanticised, patriotic version of England. It's not some noughties Britpop knockoff. It doesn't want to recreate the past as we know it. It wants to recreate the memory itself, one that's rough and distorted, weathered by age and misremembered through emotion. It's that lived experience that makes their world feel so tangible. Jamie's own opinion on this strikes a chord with the music I saw at the show, a slow degradation as the ethereal music was replaced with something rougher, more raw and unburdened by judgement. “The things you really like to remember, really want to remember, may be the things that you lose or distort quicker.” A memory from childhood, an argument or a first kiss.

It's clear this band is resisting simply relying on nostalgia to sell tickets: “It's really easy for the way that bands [are] being so deliberate in the way that they try to present themselves that it kind of then just becomes a pastiche of something that already exists.” It's something more instinctual and less bound by aesthetics or the narrative of “who they're supposed to be”. We spoke quite candidly to each other, both on our shoot and during the interview, about how we thought smaller bands were made to present themselves, asked to narrow themselves down into neat, palatable [ironically] niches, to be sold online.

Online discourse says it makes you more distinguishable; Jamie and Ciara believe “the less intentional you are, the more authentic that writing is”, and I agree. Near-constant experimentation, even failure, could lead to something infinitely more interesting than any predetermined identity, one forged at your inception and seemingly bound to follow you thereafter.

I noted their openness to discussing their music and the fluidity with which they spoke about it, especially when it came to how the pair see playing live as an integral, almost natural extension of the work they produce. The pair's recent show in Bristol seemingly solidified the passionate, jovial personas they've given themselves on stage. The show represented what the pair stood for, one that holds the enjoyment of the audience and performer as fundamental to the “live” process.

The pair explained how important it was to have fun on stage, to let loose to the songs they were performing and to play their role as entertainers. The passion the two hold for music is evident when they play. Jamie's head bounces up and down, arms and legs contorted like some sort of musical spider, as Ciara closes her eyes, head tipped to the sky, floating, losing herself in the track. “The whole thing of being nonchalant is just [like] fucking naff,” Jamie says. “If you're passionate about something, let everyone know you're passionate about it.”

The pair have translated the physicality of a rock band through the voice of electronic music, the gig itself occupying a weird balance between concert and club environment, perhaps more physically engaging and less restrained than conventional or curated nightclubs.

Despite their comfortable demeanour, the pair admitted they can get nervous on stage. Ciara explained she'd never held the role as a frontman for a band before: “I think I do get quite nervous, and I think I really enjoy singing on stage, which is actually kind of new because I was never the front person of a band before.” With a self-proclaimed personality of “head in the clouds”, it's not hard to see how this comes through as she performs; the sounds become overwhelming, completely losing herself in the interweaving webs of the music.

Similarly, Jamie believes that the stage provides an environment where he can express his feelings without restraint. In a rather honest interaction, he describes growing up being seen by others as “too much” and the struggle to come to terms with why others might think that. I appreciated that honesty maybe more than I let on. In a way, I suppose the head-banging, flailing limbs and passionate dancing represent an extension of that idea and, going further, perhaps the ethos of the band. The refusal to be nonchalant, to be so unapologetically, undeniably, yourself.

On a final note, we spoke about their new signing to indie electro label “Charm”. Hosting artists like Shanti Celeste & James Rand, the pair spoke about their gratitude for finding a label that seemed to champion the weird psycho electro work they made, even going as far as to create an A side representing the band and a B side exploring the producer / DJ element. Their first release on Charm, “Neptune”, was released this week (21st of September), a song initially born from a previously canned production tune that Jamie felt had shape but simply lacked… something. After discussion between the pair, Ciara's bass melody was eventually recorded and immediately put into the final version, capturing that “click” moment when everything seems to align. The song is quintessentially tightrope: a funky opening riff, not dissimilar from bands like ESG, stretches to this synthpop electro breakdown at the two-minute mark. It feels like each member has their own stamp on it, Ciara's vocals overlaid with Jamie's clear electronic production influence. It's a great example of their growing interest in dance music, perhaps a move away from some of their other unreleased tracks that sat somewhere safer in the realm of post-punk, one that I felt was more explorative and certainly more kinetic.

I asked what was on the horizon. They'd already admitted to a turn towards disco in recent sessions, something neither of them saw coming, but beyond that they weren't pretending to know. All they were sure of was that they felt on the “right path”, whatever path that turned out to be. Whilst writing Neptune, the band explained that they typically produce on a laptop and work back to play it live, and perhaps that was the point. They created something, then grew into it.

Either way, I'm still at my desk, and it's almost 2 am. That blinking cursor is still hovering over the term “Electro Psychosis”. I'm not closer to finding out what it means. That being said, I've tried to write this ending to pin them into some neatly packaged, definable genre, but it's simply not that easy. tightrope, to me, signifies an ongoing art project instead of simply a band or duo. One that's destined to evolve in ways I'm not sure we can predict right now, and one I'm grateful to have been a part of.

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