Progressive Immersion: Interview with Beautify Junkyards

João Branco Kyron of Beautify Junkyards tells Stewart Gardiner about oneiric domains, unrestricted time and space, and being part of the Ghost Box family

The midsummer night dream states of The Invisible World of Beautify Junkyards are at once unfamiliar and archetypal. Listening to the record feels like wandering into someone else’s dream and recognising the furniture as your own. Although it’s also like stepping through the wardrobe and finding not the winterscape of Narnia, but rather the dense vegetation of a vast tropical forest.

Beautify Junkyards offer the promise of other worlds that are as distinct from the rest of Ghost Box as they are in keeping with the spirit of the label. They exist apart, but access is encouraged. I therefore submerged myself in a sensory deprivation tank to cross states of consciousness and communicate with the band on their own oneiric territory. Our shared dream state is recorded below.

Please introduce the invisible world of Beautify Junkyards. What lies behind the curtain?

We have been together creating music since 2012. The band is located in Lisbon, and after some changes in the line-up we are now a sextet comprised of João Branco Kyron (voice and synths), Rita Vian (voice and synths), Helena Espvall (cello and guitar), João Moreira (acoustic guitar and synths), António Watts (drums and percussion) and Sergue Ra (bass). During this period we have released three albums, two singles and participated in numerous compilations.

Your music feels like being inside strange dreams or on the edge of another world. Is there an otherworldly aspect to your music? If so, where does that come from?

It´s great that you perceive our music that way, indeed there is a will of channeling this continuum flux inhabited by cinematic tales and poetic visions. It´s like crossing to oneiric domains where you get lost in experimentations of melodies and sound textures until you create something that you feel like an invisible extension of each member connecting the entire band. It´s like roots dancing below the earth until a new flower is born.

How do you hope your music makes listeners feel?

It´s hard to answer that. We wish our music provokes a multitude of emotions and establishes connections with the listeners, that our music can trigger energy cycles, inspiration and motivation. We love to have feedback from minds alike that discover our music through similar references. But we also like to attract new audiences where our music can be perceived differently from what we think it would. It´s a constant process of learning and stimulation of our own creativity.

Describe each of your albums in a few words.

Beautify Junkyards our first album is completely made of cover versions, mostly from the autumnal folk period, featuring songs from Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan, Heron, Bridget St John, etc. Our idea was to incorporate the mystique of the original songs and express them through our vision. Also a way to celebrate and dedicate our music to those artists we respect so much.

The Beast Shouted Love is our second album [where] we presented for the first time our own compositions. Continuing to use psych folk in the center of our work we started to add new elements to our sonic structures, like electronic textures, jazz percussive elements and library music induced pieces.

The Invisible World of Beautify Junkyards is a journey into unfamiliar territories where you can slowly sense the stories and the surroundings. It´s not like a curtain that lifts unveiling all the scenario at the same time, it´s more like a progressive immersion. Psychogeographic tales, nature related occult rituals, dense vegetation in a tropical forest, magick.

How rooted is your music in Portuguese culture and how much in other cultures? Is it the particular mix that makes your sound so unique?

As I mentioned before there are a lot of artistic influences on our music from different times, places and artistic expressions. Of course being Portuguese we have in our DNA all those collective memories of our recent history pre and post April 1974 revolution, a period of social turmoil but also very creative in musical terms with wonderful artists like Zeca Afonso, Banda do Casaco and Quarteto 1111, among many others. In a more personal way there are also our local childhood memories, where we enjoyed TV series like Space 1999, the French Le Trésor du Château sans nom,  the psychedelic cartoons of Prof. Baltazar.

But of course, as you ask, there is also a broader picture, where we get also inspired by artistic expressions like Brazilian Tropicalia, German kosmische, Czech new wave cinema, the electronic music pioneers, British folk. I think all of this is somehow incorporated in our music, some more subconsciously than others.

Samples and electronic elements help form the intricate tapestry of the Beautify Junkyards sound – you make all of it feel organic and played, ancient and brand new. Can you talk about how you go about constructing your musical world?

Things appear in different ways, some songs start from experimental improvised jam sessions, others are more built individually at home, but there is a point where both worlds join and then it´s a question of finding what are the best ingredients to serve the ideas for each song. During this process we create an intertwined language between the electronic textures, the samples and the acoustic and electric elements. There are no restrictions of time and space when searching for the right sound palette for each song, that’s why in the same song we can use a dystopian sci-fi movie sample followed by a mellotron flute evoking Pan; it’s all here now to help us projecting into the future.

How did your connection with Ghost Box Records come about? And how does it feel to be fully fledged members of the Ghost Box family?

We are proud to be part of the family, for many reasons, but the most important is the aesthetic and musical affinity. We started talking with Jim Jupp and Julian House when our second album came out. We thought we had a lot in common and sent them The Beast Shouted Love. They enjoyed it very much and invited us to participate in the Other Voices single series. The single went very well and during that period we developed a strong relationship, that’s when they asked us to join the label and create a new album.

Did you adapt anything about your approach or sound for Ghost Box? What is it you bring to the label.

Ghost Box artists were already one of our influences before we joined the label, but at the same time we also shared most of the same roots as those artists and from that we were trying to create our musical language. So there wasn’t much of an intentional approach, it was all part a natural process. I think we bring some particular characteristics to the label, for instance being a sextet with many sonic tools, and I think we also bring a different reinterpretation of British culture, filtered through our Portuguese and Tropicalia lenses.

How does Beautify Junkyards fit into the near-mythic Ghost Box narrative of Belbury?

Belbury is a village of an imaginary world, with no defined time and space, secretive inhabitants, a place of oneiric séance of the Ghost Box family, a place for creation, manipulation, artistic subversion, reality distortion. No matter our geographical location in our real lives.  

How important is the cover art and design to the band? You now have Julian House designing your records, but you already had a striking aesthetic before that – one which perhaps pointed towards Ghost Box. How does the Beautify Junkyards design process work with Julian House?

The image in our releases and in our live acts are a fundamental part of the whole, it´s a complement for the senses and also to awake extrasensory perception. In my opinion Julian has been doing the most amazing work in front of a label, comparable to what Peter Saville did on Factory Records and Vaughan Oliver did on 4AD. Working with him was a wonderful interactive process where we contributed with some images and sounds that were part of our “invisible world” and he came back with lots of root ideas from where he started to create all the pieces and parts. I genuinely think the final result brilliantly illustrates and complements our music.

Are there any books, films or television shows that have had an impact on your music?

One book comes quickly to my mind: Electric Eden by Rob Young was really a turning point, it worked like a written leyline of energy from ancient worlds to futuristic sonic explorations. I can also mention the poetry of WB Yeats and Pessoa, who at a certain time of his life was deep into mysticism and occult (he even established a friendship with Aleister Crowley). Other written publications that I find fascinating and collect is underground material like International Times (IT), OZ magazine, Whole Earth Catalog and old Portuguese magazines. Regarding cinema influences and besides the Czech new wave (with seminal movies like Valerie, Daisies, Morgiana) that I already mentioned, we also admire very much the work of Derek Jarman.

In Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Mark Fisher discusses an interview with Jacques Derrida in the film Ghost Dance. I wondered if that was an influence on your track of the same title or merely coincidence?

You are right about the title, “Ghost Dance” is taken from the name of a terrific movie directed by Ken McMullen, where Derrida has a participation, playing himself and talking about his concept of ghosts and hauntology.

I was transported by the warmth and mysticism of your live show. How important is playing live to you as a band?

It´s an important ritual for us, the songs are in constant transmutation from their recorded version, the members of the band interact in a more visceral way and most of all we receive a lot of energy from the audience. As I told you before we like to project old videos before the shows, create collages specifically for each song and invite friends for DJ sets, all being part of what we want to share and receive.

The Invisible World of Beautify Junkyards is one of my albums of the year. Although it seems to me that it is an album that refuses to be pinned down to any particular year. Time seems particularly fluid in your world. I’m interested in your views on past/present/future as it relates to your music. You introduced “Ghost Dance” at Café Oto with the following: “This next song is about the multiple pasts that exist inside us all the time.” Also, what’s your relationship with nostalgia?

I think nostalgia has feeling attached to it that is similar to an anchor that tends to keep you stuck in the past. We seethe past in all its richness as something that potentiates your abilities to express in the present, you can access whatever you want and play with the concepts of time and space, so I wouldn’t say time is so fluid in our music, I feel it more like a collage of quantized times.

What’s next for Beautify Junkyards?

We’ve been enjoying performing live, we have made some dates out of Portugal and now we have been playing across our country, sometimes joining forces with other artists we love. In 2019 we will slowly start to work on new material. Also, recently one of our songs was chosen to be part of the soundtrack of a new AMC TV series called Lodge 49. It’s something we would like to be more involved [with] in the future, create small pieces of library music and work on movie soundtracks.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders or The Wicker Man?

It’s easy to get mesmerized by the wonders of Valerie but when your hear the call for the Wicker Man you cannot miss it.

ghostbox.co.uk/beautifyjunkyards