NOLOGO – why Y2K is a hint of the future as well a glimpse into the past
By Tania Chakraborti
Two fun guys making incredibly interesting music – that’s how we’d describe NOLOGO, the UK-based production duo who have spent the last two years crafting their sound. Within a few minutes of starting the interview, it’s clear that Rory is the mysterious silent type whilst Beau is the animated one; yet when they’re both together, there’s a really exciting energy afoot and every time we get to chat to them, it’s just like chatting to two old mates, rather than an interview of sorts. This is even more impressive when you listen to their upcoming body of work, which really offers something unique to the electronic music scene.
October has been a busy month for Rory and Beau, who have spent their time writing new material up in an isolated cabin for a brand-new EP, and after releasing the crazy bop that is Y2K; a track that keeps you on the edge of a razor blade throughout. Y2K is perfect for this Halloween month, with its 1990s call-backs and the visuals of a play-station one chocked full of the effects of an LSD trip.
We love the track’s industrial sound, reminiscent of a Natalia Kills song combined with the rawness of a Jai Paul track. It really demonstrates the duo’s ability to switch genre at will, particularly after the pop-inspired Mother’s Money that earned them both BBC plays and popular play-listing. After chatting with them back in April at the height of the pandemic for their debut interview, we sat down with them again to chat about how lockdown has influenced their music, their upcoming tracks, and the chemistry that makes NOLOGO who they are.
Q: So tell me about your current releases, Y2K in particular and what's coming up in the future for NOLOGO?
RORY: “It's a good question. Y2K - I guess the big theme about which hopefully you'll be able to see from the video, is sort of that a lot of the production is about like harking back to when you were kids; music from the movies from when you were kids. I think we said this with Mother's Money, but Y2K is even more so; I thought the title of the song gives the clue away that its about our influences in terms of Chemical Brothers and PlayStation, or all that world that we wanted to recreate in terms of the project that we were in at the moment.”
Rory cites Chemical Brothers as one of NOLOGO’s early influences
BEAU: “Yeah, definitely. It's like the most obvious harken – I don’t know if harken is the right word (laughs) – to that kind of sound that like, if probably more than the sound that we'd normally do, but it's like ripping influences from big dance music that we used to listen to and bits of Timbaland and bits of grime instrumentals. It's basically doing the best bits, but also in a weirdly dystopian way, because it's all (the world) a bit fucked at the minute. And we're kind of tying that into the Y2K virus, and (of) everything going to shit. So that's kind of the vibe of it, but it's kind of like just grabbing all of the things about that era of dance music, dance music and kind of beyond as well, because there's a bit of grime and shit in there as well.”
Q: So you mentioned last time we chatted that all your upcoming releases draw on different aspects of your music. Have you kind of worked out what's coming next and have you decided on that next track?
BEAU: (exchanges look with Rory) “Sorry, we thought we decided that, we may have changed it literally yesterday (laughs).”
Beau during NOLOGO’s recent writing session
RORY: “You know you have like, you have the plans and you think it's so set, and you think it's the best plan ever. And then you sort of just come to it and you're like actually? but especially, I feel like we're trying to navigate lockdown and I think reflecting that in how we release (our tracks) and the order”.
BEAU: “Because also on kind of planning terms, me and Rory are planning to go away to go write an EP. We're going away for like a week and a half in October to this little cabin to basically make beats for our next EP. So, we're basically, we're going away to do that…Because we haven't written music together, like actually just properly, just written for the sake of writing. Because we've been like, so busy with all this other shit –
RORY: “And lockdown!”
NOLOGO’s writing cabin
BEAU: “Yeah! And well we are making an EP, because what we've done so far like this one (Y2K) has been the most dancy we (can) go probably, the last one (Mother’s Money) is along the lines of the most pop-y, Faithless is probably the most artsy we’d go – if we were going to like put it on a mind map. But we're putting together an EP, which we're going to feature a bunch of different artists on, and that will kind of dictate the order the singles will come in. Even though that’s not probably the clearest answer to put in an article.”
Q: “A little mini essay I love it.”
BEAU: “The mind map section (laughs).”
Mother’s Money has gained nearly 40,000 views on Youtube since its release
Q: “So, in terms of the video for Y2K and the cover art, where did you go with the visuals? Who did you enlist to help you with that? And what it's supposed to represent?”
BEAU: “So basically we started off by our good friend Kalim, who's like an amazing director and like video editor. After we made the song, I was kind of speaking to him about like the influences of the track, and he does quite a lot of creative editing basically and he was like, what would be sick is basically (to drawn on the) whole theme of like the Y2K virus, which in the 90s was going to kill all the computers at the turn of the 2000s…
The NOLOGO Y2K Video
“He was like, it would be really sick to basically chop up all these different kind of images from (the era) as the song kind of draws from all these different sonic influences of the time and chop them all together and also kind of splice them – the video is like super spliced and cut up and in quite a harsh way. Which kind of like makes you think of glitching out and it gets a little bit doomsday at the end. We started making the video before we made the artwork for the video….And the other thing in the video is there's quite a lot of, um, there's a lot of faces (laughs).
“I mean, I know there's a lot of faces and a lot of stuff, but there's like a lot of faces and then computerized faces in it. And then from that, we were kind of like, this is a theme of the video and the whole visual world we're making with this one….A lot of the visuals that we wanted to put on social media where we kind of wanted to have Y2K as the rave – so we wanted to make something that looked like a poster from the time.”
Q: Great! Finally, what’s ‘Rory’s thing’ and what’s ‘Beau’s thing’ and how does that fit into what makes NOLOGO?
BEAU: “Beau’s thing is making a lot of crap and Rory’s is making it good.”
RORY: “I’m the creator, the other one is the destroyer.”
BEAU: “Rory pile drives whatever crap into shape and I just say ‘sick man’”.
RORY: “We definitely come at it from different angles. To be fair in everyday life, Beau’s doing more writing just on his own and with other artists, but with NOLOGO we definitely split our duties 50:50.”
Stream Y2K here.