WHO ISLET?

We first read about Welsh group, Islet, ages ago and became instantly fascinated by this mysterious gang. Given the tag line (as we remember) "So LO - FI that they don't even have a Myspace", Islet didn't seem like a regular band of wannabes. They're not.

They've now got a website and a blog (still no Myspace) and are farming out creative wonders faster than you can say "Rebecca Riots". The odd thing about the band, and something that made us even more interested in them, is that they don't appear to be a band at all. Looking at their website, there's zines, collages, GIFs and free downloads...everything you could every possibly want to become an Islet superfan.

The intrigue continued even after we found a way of getting hold of them - this interview was conducted via their (real nice) press lady with Emma from the band. Who the eff are these guys?

Hey (sort of), you seem to be more of an art collective than a regular band, what with not going down the Myspace route, was it a conscious decision to not go down the regular path to be heard?

We do what we do for fun, love and good intentions. We’re not interested in doing anything at all simply because it is expected of us. As far as being heard goes, we release records, play gigs, make a zine, have a website and a blog- and do interviews!

I’ve always been inspired by artists’ collectives, and I wanted Islet to me more of a group than a band. That means being looser in structure, people being able to take on different roles, being part of it or not as time goes on.


What was you intention when you started Islet?

Mark and JT are brothers, and when Mark became my boyfriend it seemed natural that we should make music together. We all love the excitement and release of playing, it is a passion. We wanted to make a group where anything is possible, isolated in that it’s a place where we can do what we like. We record ourselves, do all the artwork, do as much of the fun bits as we can.

Art - Music or Music - Art?

I’m not sure where being an artist or musician begins or ends, in many ways it’s the same thing. But in Islet, everything starts and goes back to the sounds we are making.

Who are your artist influences?


At the moment I’m into an art bookshop in Edinburgh called Analogue books, Czech photographer Vojtech Frohlich, London collective LuckyPDF, the Salford Zine Library, Wolfgang Tillmans, London collective LuckyPDF, supersaturated secondhand books of mountains, papercuts, people who make things happen.

You guys are a bit GIF crazy (so are we), what do you like about GIFs?

What’s there not to like? Mark is a proper geek for lo-fi html coding. Check out the Shape Records website that he does with his brother Lee (http://www.shaperecords.co.uk) if you ever have a yearning to see Courier New sliding back and forth. He’s been obsessed with gifs for a while. Ewan Jones-Morris came up with the idea of gif motion for our ‘Ringerz’ video. My favourites are the really dull bits, like a gate blowing in the wind… We probably really annoyed Ewan by phoning him up with ‘Make it more boring! Cut that interesting bit! Can you make it look more shit?!’ Rubbish is good, a drizzly afternoon on a farm is where it’s at. To me, anyway.




Do you have any other projects in the pipeline?

We’ve recently started a blog, which is a place for ideas, doodles, photos and works in progress. It’s a high speed, RGB accompaniment to our zine, The Isness, which we’ll be doing more of. And our next big project is writing and recording an LP!