Audiobooks - Now! (in a minute) (2018)

If you're going to call your band audiobooks, you'd better have some good stories to tell. Stories that should move you and ones to make you move. Stories about real life and surreal life and all that weirdness that you just glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. Luckily for you, audiobooks really do. The London based duo have developed a unique ability to conjure up magical aural snapshots that wallop you like bong hits. Each of their discombobulating observations comes stretched out over a series of discomfiting oscillations, like messages from the spirit world or pulp fictions found in a box at the end of your road or a crackling pop broadcast from a far away galaxy; Out there, across the wavelengths or in the musty pages of their books, there's a girl who's lost in lust, sat eating mussels on a South Wales beach; there's an alcohol-fuelled vision of Hell as a family melts down in an airport departure lounge and there's a carsick dog in the back of your Grandma Jimmy's car. There's womanly blood flowing and there's friends in your bubble bath and there's some very large pinches of hot salt. So who's telling these stories? Who are the people writing these audiobooks? On the face of it, Evangeline Ling - a 21 year old art student and musician from Wimbledon - and David Wrench - one of the most in demand mixers and producers in modern music, a sometime cohort of Julian Cope and former denizen of North Wales - might seem an unlikely pairing. Yet a chance encounter at a mutual friend's party just one week after David had moved south to the capital very quickly led to an experimental studio session that's been going on ever since. Evangeline: "I'd found myself writing these odd stories as text messages on my phone. They were too short to be proper stories… they were fragments. I'd told David about them when we met and he said, 'Come into the studio and let's put them to music.'" David: "It was so perfect - this incredible text message…" Evangeline: "The next day, we started making music. We realised pretty much immediately that what we were doing might just connect. I'm not a technically minded person, musically - David is - but we kind of synced in because we bonded as human beings. We just met and connected; I immediately trusted David. We didn't really chat about who we are…"David: "Neither of us are any good at small talk so we just got working and it was crazily fast, everything about it. We've never spent more than an hour on a track. We go in, we improvise and we either keep it or we don't. There might be a bit of editing the next day but the creation is done incredibly quickly." Evangeline: "We'd work on a track and then we'd just sit and do nothing. He'd work on a mix for someone or play some records, I'd have a nap or paint or draw…" David: "The second time Evangeline turned up at the studio she arrived in her pyjamas. She'd come all the way from Wimbledon to east London in a pair of Batman pyjamas." Evangeline: "I hadn't slept all night, I'd just had this crazy adrenaline. I knew we were doing something really special and I couldn't wait to get there. I didn't have any clean clothes so I just thought, 'Sod this, I've got to go'."