Lifecycle are a live electronic three-piece from East London, fusing breakbeats and psychedelia with improvised digital manipulation. They started life in the late noughties, putting out a string of experimental dance 12″s on London breakbeat labels Electrofly and LondonBreakz. Having started his own Ricochet Records imprint in 2008 (recently celebrating its 20th release), writer / producer Geoff is a continued presence in the city’s leftfield electronica movement.
Bassist Tish met Geoff while exploring the 90s alternative scene, in the bleak corridors of their school music tech studios, their evenings spent recording demos on rusty four-tracks, detuning guitars and crate-digging in the local record store. Hungry for new sounds toward the turn of the century, Geoff began programming abstract digital sketches using FastTracker II (and the 4mb of RAM in his antiquated 486). Around the same time, Tish began experimenting with dance music and left for Europe to spend her summer dancing among the masses. They didn’t see each other again for 15 years.
In 2009, drummer Nick was in the middle of a festival binge. He attended more than a dozen that summer as photographer and journalist (and occasional drum circle crasher), the weeks blurring into a haze of mud, tinnitus and the rolling English countryside. A chance meeting with Geoff at that year’s Glade found a shared interest in developing a more organic strain of live electronica to bring to the stage. Having toured the previous summer playing electronic drums for dance act Debunkt, Nick was itching to take the energy from that summer of love and pound out his tribal grooves on a full acoustic kit. In 2010, unexpectedly reunited ‘in the smoke’ after seeing Atari Teenage Riot at the Camden Electric Ballroom, still neither Tish nor Geoff knew the name of the drop-D chord both had fallen in love with those 15 years prior.
Retreating that summer to construct a new collection of sketches for the band to bring to life, Geoff began expressing thoughts about modern life and the absurdity of office politics through a daily ritual meditating, drinking tea and eating hallucinogenic cacti.
There’s no one trick fix for this dance trio, snubbing trends in favour of an open-minded fusion of styles, held together by tribal percussion and throbbing waves of subbass. Their obsession with spontaneous true live performance leads Lifecycle to approach the stage more like a defrosted prog rock outfit than your average dance act.
The full Lifecycle live band holds their fusion of styles together with an emphasis on true live performance, warping vocals and instruments throughout via a laptop and guitar-mounted MIDI controllers.
Their Debut LP ‘Lino Cosmos’, released on Supersymmetry, follows their tour supporting The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and recent airplay on Tom Robinson’s BBC Radio 6 Music Introducing show.
“…London based trio Lifecycle treat a similar line of all-encompassing music … their new single sees them mix unconventional world-beat rhythms with jazzy bass and hints of rock to create something kaleidoscopic, esoteric and wonderful in equal doses…”
The Metaphorical Boat
“…sort of Black Market era Weather Report colliding with the echoes of Gong and whiffs of early Hawkwind … neither jazz nor rock nor electro but somehow a bit of all that…”
Music Always Gives Me A Lift
“…a deep synergy of electronica and tribal percussions, not like anything else out there right now…”
Knowledge Magazine
“…expect an air of tense unpredictability with heavy doses of jagged grooves…”
Breakinasia.com
“…melodic, deep and edgily euphoric, sounding like the first day in Spring on an Alpine mountain, but with a generous dosing of snarling bass…”
ATM Magazine
LINKS:
http://www.thelifecycl.es
http://www.youtube.com/lifecyclelive
http://www.facebook.com/thelifecycles
