Michael Kasparis lifts the lid on his new record as Apostille, explaining his aim to make ecstatic trance music as sung by Meatloaf
Apostille is the solo project of Night School Records captain, Michael Kasparis. A Glasgow and London scene veteran who doesn’t appear to have aged much since the mid-90s, Michael is a force of positivity within the UK underground. You might also know him from the mailouts and social media posts for Monorail Music that are bursting with his signature fuck-the-gatekeepers warmth and read like community lifelines to this Glasgow ex-pat at least. Prisoners of Love and Hate is his third LP, following in the outsider electronic pop footsteps of 2018’s Choose Life (on Upset the Rhythm) but boasting an even bolder outlook and more eccentric sonic palette. There may be synths involved, but rather like comrades in arms Free Love (with whose Lewis Cook Michael recorded this album and the previous), this is not another case of heard-it-all-before synth scene noodling. Rather, Apostille sounds like Meatloaf let loose in the Scottish rave archives, preparing to visit the shitty disco in your dead-eyed hometown.
It’s a Sunday afternoon when I fire up the London-Glasgow communications system and talk to Michael on a video call. My ten-year-old son is around and since he’d spoken to Michael in Monorail when we were all last up in Glasgow, the two of them briefly talk guitars, my son having recently been learning to play his first proper song, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” after his guitar teacher picked up on his interest in Nirvana. “That’s how I learned to play guitar,” Michael tells him. “I got really sick one week with the flu and when I started getting better my mum bought me the Nirvana Unplugged chord book.” My son shows Michael his Foo Fighters The Colour and the Shape book and Michael’s impressed. “Oh yeah, great record,” he says, before advising “that’s maybe a bit harder actually.” I leave this interaction in because it shows Michael’s welcoming and encouraging nature. There are no gatekeepers in this dojo.
Although I’m not a politician with a career-threatening business relationship to disclose (although nothing seems to bring political careers down these days of course), I probably should mention that I know Michael from back in the day, otherwise known as mid-to-late-90s Glasgow. I would have been 18 or 19 and he was a couple of years younger. “I probably did think of you as an adult!” he says at one point with his trademark good humour – something I find particularly amusing considering how un-adult-like I actually was. Michael was a member of my flatmate’s band Late Night Foreign Radio. They’re the reason I hold a grudge against Biffy Clyro to this day, after they beat Late Night Foreign Radio to win a Battle of the Bands competition at the Queen Margaret Union. “It’s funny, I was telling someone about that recently,” Michael explains. “I don’t even remember what they sounded like.” He thinks for a moment before continuing. “They kind of sounded like a Smashing Pumpkins rip off, I think, or Feeder, which everyone did at that time.” But he is less bothered by it than me it would seem. “I mean, we came second, so you know, whatever.”
Michael moved to Scotland from Cyprus when he was 14. He “was kind of into music” but hadn’t picked up a guitar yet. This was around 1995/1996 and a friend got him into the burgeoning Glasgow music scene. “It was Mogwai, Teenage Fanclub, early Belle and Sebastian and all that sort of stuff.” When he did get into playing guitar, he was however “more influenced by American stuff like Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins. Neil Young was a big thing for me,” he adds.
Like many teenagers in bands, Michael developed quickly and so did his listening tastes, which got “more out there.” He started playing improv and noise gigs, was in a couple of trios and “moved away from playing structured pop music.” He did have “a brief stint in an early incarnation of Franz Ferdinand” and was a member of V-Twin for a while, “but I think by that point I was just as excited about going out and getting wasted.” This was fuelled by spending Sunday nights at the deeply influential Optimo (Espacio) weekly party under the spell of JD Twitch and Jonnie Wilkes. “That opened my mind up to a lot of dance music. I’d always enjoyed it, but it wasn’t something that I knew much about.” Getting into clubbing helped him contextualise dance music in terms of what he was already into, but by his own admission he was “being way more hedonistic than creative. I think if I hadn’t moved to London, I probably would have just continued down that path and not ever done anything.”
Moving to London in his early twenties, Michael got involved in a “fiercely DIY” micro-scene, based around a house that was host to various American and European DIY bands. During the day he worked as a buyer at Rough Trade East. “Basically, in the space of a year I came out of a long term relationship, changed jobs, started a record label and started doing solo music. Some people get Harleys and shit, but I suppose my early midlife crisis was doing all this other stuff that costs a lot of money.” Night School Records was thus born, made possible by Michael selling around half of his record collection to fund two 7″s he put out at the same time. “It was like a kind of alchemy,” he tells me, still a little bit in awe of the magic he made happen. I take it he believes that was the right decision for him then? “Yeah, I’m glad I did that.”
Night School has never settled upon a single sound, rather eschewing genre boundaries and following Michael’s varied musical interests. Is it important to him that he puts out music that he loves rather than seeking a house sound for Night School? “Yeah, it’s important to me because I can’t do it any other way. It’s the same with my own music as well. I’ve never thought or experienced music in genres or in categories or anything. So even though I love a lot of hardcore punk or whatever, I would never just go, that’s the thing I’m into. My mind just doesn’t work like that.” He concedes that many of the most successful labels in history have had a house sound – which is exactly why he loves a label such as Impulse! – but as a curator himself, that approach doesn’t appeal. “It would just go against my personality,” he explains, “and honestly, I’d probably get quite bored.” There’s longevity built into his approach though. “The way I’ve set up Night School is it could – I mean, it probably won’t – but it could go on forever. Because ultimately, I’m not focusing on any one style of music. I think it’s more of an ethos that I respond to.” Have there been any challenges with this approach? “The only problem I’ve encountered with it is that sometimes the records just don’t sell. When you have genre music and genre labels, it’s easier for people to gravitate to something that they already know they’re going to like.”
It’s purely a result of going, I really love ecstatic trance music, but how could I do that if Meatloaf was singing it?
Michael Kasparis
For his third solo album as Apostille, Michael decided to release the record on his own label. Its voraciously open relationship to genres – “classic 80s synth pop, 90s house music, 00s trance, wistful balladry and 70s power pop” according to the press kit – is very much indicative of the free-from-expectation spirit fostered at Night School. It’s quite the musical cocktail and I wonder how he was able to bring them together into something cohesive. “I’m glad you said that, because that’s the one thing I’m always a bit worried about, that it’s not cohesive. I treat every song as its own kind of world. When it comes to writing something, there isn’t that much that I wouldn’t try and turn into my version of it.” Although he carefully points to the “more advanced conversations these days about appropriation” and how he would feel uncomfortable adopting certain musical idioms (“obviously I’d be quite bad at them as well”). When Michael was writing these new songs, it was mostly what was exciting him “in the moment.” The time for evaluation arrived later and it was then he was able to get a sense of the “distinct eras and how they influenced the record.” A degree of editing followed to ensure that the album worked as a whole, but Michael maintains that “each song is its own mini-world.” That’s certainly the case for closer “Feel Good (You Can Make Me)”, a “pretty brash trance song” that references N-Trance and sums up Michael’s madly egalitarian approach to music-making. “It’s purely a result of going, I really love ecstatic trance music, but how could I do that if Meatloaf was singing it? Because to me, that’d be like two of my favourite musics ever. Then it just becomes about having the brass neck to try and do that.” That brass neck is very much in evidence throughout Prisoners of Love and Hate.
Elsewhere on the record, “People Make This City” and “Natural Angel” hint at the late Scottish troubadour Jackie Leven, whose work Michael has helped keep in the record buying public’s consciousness with the superb Night School compilation, Straight Outta Caledonia. I wonder if putting that collection together informed his songwriting in any way? “That’s a good spot,” Michael tells me. “I think it must have. I was compiling that around the same time I was making the record. So yeah.” Michael’s vocal performance of “Natural Angel” live is, he says, “a lot more over the top, which has a kind of Jackie Leven-esque bent to it.” And “People Make This City” was originally a finger-picked guitar song written at a time when he was listening to a lot of live Jackie Leven that highlighted the artist’s incredible abilities as a guitarist. “But apart from all that, he just had such a massive spirit and a generosity of spirit. The more solo music I make, the more I feel like that’s what I bring to the music, especially live. I think that my next record will probably be even more Jackie Leven-esque.”
One of the classic bullying moves was to take someone’s backpack, throw it down and then anyone who wanted to would line up on the railings and gob at you. That happened to me.
Michael Kasparis
The most narratively arresting song on “Prisoners of Love and Hate” is its bleak-hearted centrepiece, “Spit Pit.” Although I don’t usually feel the need to interrogate an artist on the meaning behind their lyrics, I wanted to hear the story behind this one. When he first started at school in Scotland, Michael says that “there was this thing called a spit pit. There was a bit where you would go down the stairs and there would be the janitor’s cupboard and the computer room or whatever. Then on top of that there was a railing. And one of the classic bullying moves was to take someone’s backpack, throw it down and then anyone who wanted to would line up on the railings and gob at you. That happened to me and I saw that happen to other people.” Making the experience the subject of a song, Michael feels that he was able to recontextualise and come to terms with it. “In a satellite fading town, I don’t even know its name,” he sings at the opening, a dispassionate third person narrator of his own story, as the throbbing electronic dirge takes hold. Here’s another kind of alchemy: anger become catharsis you can dance to, with Apostille as the Henry Rollins of Saturday night discos.
Under his Apostille moniker, Michael takes on many musical guises, so I ask him how he would describe his sound. “I’ve never actually been asked this before,” he admits, trying to find the right words. He proceeds carefully, working it out as he goes. “I think it’s just trying to make music that’s open and generous. I just try and communicate very directly. Every time I’m writing a song, there’ll be a feeling that I’m trying to communicate with the listener and a lot of times that can be funny or whatever, but I always try and make music that’s the opposite of arch. I suppose having come from a lot of punk, there’s an influence there. In general, I try and make music that’s generous and direct. And hopefully emotional, actually. I mean, it can be quite a kind of lame thing to admit to wanting to make emotional music.” It’s okay, I tell him, he can admit it to me. “This is the cheapest therapy session I’ve ever had!” he laughs.
There’s a confrontational aspect to his live show that lines up with this idea of communicating directly to the audience and I wonder if that’s a particular side of his art that needs to happen live? “That’s a really good question because it’s something I’ve thought about loads. I’ve never been confrontational in that I would put anyone in danger, but it is, I suppose, emotionally confrontational. And one of the things I love doing playing live, is being on the back foot. I really love supporting artists rather than headlining because I love playing to people who don’t know what to expect,” he says. “If a song is going really well, sometimes I’ll just stop it and do something else or just scream for a bit. Because I liked that live thing of me being on my toes and keeping other people on their toes. But as I’ve got older, I’m more into bringing some sort of joy to people rather than confronting them in a kind of angry way. I’ve tried to transmogrify – is that the right word? – it into something that’s a lot more positive and involving. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”
It has certainly worked with Prisoners of Love and Hate, an abundantly positive record that dispels negative energy by embracing the idea that there is no bad taste in music. “One of the worst things,” says Michael, “and this is why I very rarely say when I don’t like something to other people, is going, ‘I fucking hate such and such,’ and they’re like, ‘I’m actually quite a big fan.’ Like those old cliche record shop guys – and they were definitely always guys – those sort of people that are totally fine with saying to a 14 year old, ‘Why are you buying Dookie? That’s terrible, it’s shite music.’ If you’re that sort of person, I don’t want to be your pal and I definitely don’t want you to work in the record shop that I work at.”
To borrow a question from my old boss at Plan B magazine, I ask Michael what motivates him to make music. “I think it’s just the idea that I can get lost for a certain amount of time and forget. Not that I have anything bad to forget about, but I can forget who I am for a few hours. Then maybe make other people forget who they are for a while.”
My son returns to the room to ask the final question of the day before I say goodbye to Michael. He isn’t quite sure if what he wants to ask is a proper question, but asks it anyway: “Do you like music?”
“I used to,” Michael deadpans, before getting to the real answer. “I do,” he confirms.
Of course he does. Prisoners of Love and Hate is a generous, no-holds-barred work of sonic and lyrical openness that goes to show how powerful music can be in our lives. A tonic for modern living and a blast beyond the death-rattle of empty weekends doomscrolling for feel bad kicks.
Welcome to the world of Apostille, where things are never as bad as you think.
Main image credit: Harrison Reid
Prisoners of Love and Hate at Monorail Music
- Death of the Author: Paul Auster - May 1, 2024
- Naum Gabo – F. Lux (DFA) - March 10, 2024
- Concrete Islands Albums of the Year 2023 - December 7, 2023