Deep Voices #91: Guy Gormley

An interview with the relentlessly curious musician behind RAP, Leeway, and Jolly Discs

Mar 13, 2024

Deep Voices #91 on Spotify
Deep Voices #91 on Apple Music

This week’s Deep Voices is dedicated to the world of British artist Guy Gormley known as Leeway and as one half of the duo RAP. The playlist includes both Gormley’s own music as well as music he’s released on his three record labels. Read on for an interview with Gormley.

And if you like this sort of thing—talk about music, playlists of music, once a week, if you love music, if you’re curious, consider a paid subscription to Deep Voices to keep it going. Thank you.

I don’t think Guy Gormley ever met a drum machine he didn’t like. Across many of his records—and there are a lot—the flat rhythm of a kick drum pounds out something of an SOS, his sustained desire to be released from the purgatory of shiny, boring music. Mixed with his drum machines are hundreds of musical ingredients, jagged acoustic guitars, dark bass, cockeyed vocals. On all his records moments of pure bliss, and moments of utter strangeness. Sometimes they are the same moment. Gormley, a shy Londoner, makes music that feels searching, antsy, nervous, excitable. Colorful restlessness powers his compositions. Looking for linearity? Look elsewhere.

Throughout his decade-plus journey from making lithe post-punk to making hard techno (loosely defined on both ends), Gormley has indulged a desire for askew weirdness that I have found particularly thrilling and unique. RAP, his project with Thomas Bush, is an adventurous collision of folk and techno that caught my attention when I was working at Pitchfork. We awarded the album Best New Music and attempted to profile the group. They politely declined. Why? I have wondered for a few years, especially as Gormley has continued to release excellent music of all sorts. Did he not want people to hear it? Until recently, none of the music he released on his three record labels (Jolly Discs, Wain, and Loose Trax) was available on streaming services. Was this willful resistance or shyness?

More of the latter. I’ve been a longtime fan of Gormley’s and was happy to discover that he’d begun putting his releases on streaming services for the first time and contacted him for an interview to mark the occasion. This time, he agreed. Speaking over the phone, he was forthright, earnest, and occasionally rueful to dig through his past to explain his present and future. But he still did it.

As an American, I've always been drawn to British music, and when I listen to a lot of the music you’ve released, it feels to me inextricably tied to the UK. And I don't know if I feel that way because I am an outsider. Do you feel like there is a location to your music?

I'm from London, proper London. I grew up there, but I've always loved the countryside. It's had this imaginative lure for me. It's not somewhere that I've lived, but maybe that's why it's full of wonder for me. So I think RAP has the thing of being intensely urban and intensely rural at the same time. That's a wish for it. I suppose another way of looking at it is that it's like fringe music or suburban music or something like that, located on the edge between the countryside and the city. It's a mixture of being influenced by where I am and also imagining places.

Tell me about forming RAP. How did you meet Tom and decide to start that group?

We met while living in Brighton and we became part of the same group of friends. I was making sample-based music and Tom was just straightaway interested in this way that I found surprising. He had been touring with bands and was already quite an accomplished musician. He took the strange tracks I was making and reworked them all.

When I moved back to London, we stayed friends and eventually he moved there as well. This is around 2010. We were living together and we just made music at the flat. It had this funny thing of being like ’90s Megadance techno, humorous big room techno, but with folk singing. We just did it for a laugh. And then the name RAP was supposed to be funny. I said, "That's the best word. Let's just be RAP."

It's not Google-able, nor is it rap music. Is it a troll?

I mean, I guess it’s sort of cocky and does get up people's noses. But you have to realize that, at the time, we had no skin in the game. It didn't matter. Not to anyone. Even to us. We just came up with a stupid name. I liked the word "rap." It's onomatopoeic isn't it? It's such a strong word. And the thing was, already taken by rap, this huge thing, rap, the biggest genre in the world. And then it's just quite funny to take it anyway.

I was working at Pitchfork when Export was released and me and my colleague Philip Sherburne, who reviewed the record, loved it and we were able to make it Best New Music. Everybody in the Pitchfork office at that time, everybody really liked it. We reached out and asked if we could profile you guys for a Rising story. And you said no. Which is fine, absolutely your prerogative. But I wondered why you didn’t want to.

We had a good idea. We were staying in this little house in Derbyshire, making music. And we were gonna invite the interviewer to come to this remote moortop house. In the end, we didn't. I think, for various reasons, like hurting, from my side, from a bit of a lack of confidence. Tom is not fussed about what people think. Well, as far as I can tell. But it was just a worry that it would be trivial. And also, at the same time, probably to an equal amount, we wouldn't know exactly what we'd say.

These things are funny because they open up and then close off again. It was like, “Oh, yeah, people are interested, we'll get these kinds of opportunities.” And then you take the ones you fancy and you don't take the ones that you don't. It seemed like everyone followed Pitchfork's lead and Export ended up on end of year lists, but then when we dropped the next record, we had lead story, like what Pitchfork wrote about Export and then it seemingly didn't exist. No one took the plunge to really say anything. So [turning down the interview] wasn't something that seemed like a big decision at the time but then afterwards I felt like we probably should have said yes to it.

Export and RAP’s next album, Junction, have really different sounds. Junction is a really electronic record. Were your tastes changing over time?

Yeah, I mean, I guess so. I moved to Germany in 2019. I was living in Frankfurt and then I moved to Berlin. I didn't really want to see anyone, so I ended up spending six months really focusing on making techno. And then Tom came to visit and I had all these productions and that basically became Export. All the drums are stuff I’d already written. The whole record happened in five days. I suppose that Export has this strange openness, contentment. It's all stuff very much in development. And then Junction feels smoother. A bit more self-conscious.

What makes you say that?

When we did Export, the stakes couldn't have been lower. We just met up and made some music. It wasn't self conscious at all. You could hear some of the decisions because they weren't labored. Junction was then made when we felt like people were listening. It was lockdown time and life was more serious. We were working more remotely, so it's pieced together much more carefully. And therefore, there's more thought, and therefore, we're more conscious of all the decisions.

Do you wish that you could go back to a time where you knew less?

I feel like I’ve spent my whole life asking the question, "How do you get into the state of mind where you make interesting things?" So I'd like to be in a state where I feel free, but not careless. It's quite a particular sweet spot of feeling liberated, but focused. Getting into that state is kind of tricky, and that's why I would like to be in more. I don't necessarily want to know less.

Can you point to a release of your own, or really of anyone’s, that you think comes from that place?

You want something to be made on its own terms. You want it to have its own authority, an agenda, rather than to be looking to you as a listener or consumer and saying, “What do you want? How do I deliver what you want?” I prefer when something is being itself in a way that's not apologetic.

For me, with your work, that’s the Enchante album Mind in Camden 2. What was going through your mind when you made that?

I made it in Germany. I think leaving London, that was probably there. There were probably other things going on as well, but at the time I was allowing myself to be very emo in a more profound way than I ever had before. Like, I was fucking plowing the depths of the past and childhood in a way I've never done before, which I think was enabled by just not being where I was from. So the record is, yes, about me.

But it's also about this journey, which is loosely based on driving to London from Brighton on a weekend. I always traveled late at night. If you made that journey in the car, you would pick up on different pirate radio stations. The record starts with someone leaving the house and getting into the car. You hear them walking on the gravel, close the door, and start the car. And then the record starts. There were just quite a few ideas, clear in my head, that got woven together to make the record. I'd done it visually as well, I had a moodboard of car interiors.

I had rented a space in the basement of my building where I was living in Germany. All these bands used to use it. So in a way no one actually really used it regularly, it was just damp and empty but full of instruments. I used to go down on my own and play with everyone else's instruments. Most of the instruments are me playing yeah, there's other bits in there. I don’t actually play the drums. I'd been doing some writing, and there's like a poem of mine. Probably one of the only poem's I've ever written. It's spoken by a kind of computer generated voice. It's about being on the street alone.

Why did you move to Germany? It seems like you were really isolated in Berlin.

I moved to Frankfurt in 2015 to study at art school, and that was really amazing, actually. When I graduated in 2018 I moved straight to Berlin, which I actually really regretted. I came to Berlin feeling a bit rinsed and then that was quite a lonely time. I'd gotten really into Plastikman and Scorn as well. So then I just started making techno.

Did you go to clubs a lot by yourself?

I wasn't totally alone the whole time. I mean, I knew a few people. I went to some clubs.

Sorry, I don't mean to imply you were just walking around pining for the human touch the entire time. But you were getting into techno and now you were in the center of it but feeling alone.

I didn't connect with Berlin that much you know. I don't know why, probably more me than Berlin. I think I went to Berghain once but on a Friday.

You recently started making heavy techno records as Leeway. They feel like club records but they also don’t. Is that fair?

I don't really know.

Okay, fair enough.

Maybe that's a lazy answer, but it's true. I quite like the idea of applied music. Club music's technical to produce, it's got a specific function, and I'm interested in that. I like having all these ideas going around in my head that like I'm all trying to get down at the same time. When it comes down to it, I just make a lot of music. And then some of it I like and some of that I don't like and that's becomes the most important criteria.

I was going through your discography, and you have a lot of different names and projects. You could be like, “These are all Guy Gormley records.” How come you don’t do that?

I think, in a way, this is why I started like Jolly Discs, because basically what was happening is I was making all this music with loads of different people and everything was getting lost. Jolly Discs was a bit strategic. It was like, let's put an umbrella over some of this stuff. I struggle to prioritize. I'm not very organized.

These days, I don't really have that many projects. I just have Leeway and RAP. Basically.

Enchante is done?

Yeah, I think I'm done with it.

Can I ask why?

As I've gotten older, I've learned learn about the advantages of prioritizing a bit more. I need I do need stuff to be simpler now. I've got more pressures in my life. Anyway, I love looking back and nostalgia and a fair amount of melancholy, I suppose, but I want to move on.

I wanted to ask you about your childhood and your father. He is—I'm just gonna say a famous artist. How did his career have an influence on you?

I think one thing is that my dad did support the whole family through making art. It wasn't a fantasy. I could probably say more about that, but I'm less keen to talk about it.

I don't care about your dad's career per se, but I think I'm interested in how it changed your vision of yourself as a working artist. My parents both wholeheartedly supported my desire to be a writer but my mom was a nurse and worked at an insurance company and my dad was a lawyer. When I finished school, I had no idea what I was going to do because I had not seen an example of a professional creative life. So it's been a lot of self education. I wonder how seeing an artist’s life up close changed this for you.

I suppose I'm interested in what it is to be an artist, where you value feeling, thinking, and putting something out in response. I have certain reverence for creativity, which probably is a hangover from my upbringing. I'm not sure how useful that stuff is. I feel like I'm still developing as an artist.