Mica Levi: ‘If you’re going to make something, you should try and be wild’
Mica Levi has good claim to be one of the most original artists working in the UK today. She’s gentle, reserved, and I get the feeling she’s making music not for fame or recognition, but because it’s what she loves. Most recently, for example, she could be seen operating the decks for her friend Tirzah’s club PAs, or as an artist-in-residence at Doug Aitken’s sprawling Station To Station project at the Barbican Centre.
“I seem to just get myself into this stuff by chance,” Levi says when we next meet in the very rehearsal studio where the band careened through Good Bad… “I guess, for me to do Under the Skin, they were taking a risk and they chanced it. If you just work hard, then stuff seems to…” she falters. “I don’t know… people have called me up on the phone a lot more since that’s happened. But hopefully that will peter out,” she adds, drily.
For all her self-deprecation, Levi is actually extremely self-assured. You’d have to be to go from a classical background to making skewed art-pop, fusing elements of ambient electronic music with heavily treated guitars and unhinged drum patterns that sound like they were pounded out when Pell was high on adrenaline. How does Levi reconcile all those influences tussling to be heard in the band’s songs? “People are adaptable,” she says. “You don’t have to do just one thing. That’s the same reason why you probably rate a couple of country songs, a couple of punk songs, and might like something from a split genre: because they all have something in them.”
Posted from: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/12/mica-levi-of-michachu-and-the-shapes
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