collaboration / various artists (album)

Genres: Indie, Alternative, Rock, Rap, Singer-Songwriter, Experimental

Label: Warren Records

Format: Digital album

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“(Jodie Langford) such a fantastic artist – I just love her voice” John Kennedy / Radio X

“So many great records coming out of The Warren these days” Jericho Keys / BBC Introducing

“(Chiedu Oraka) the North’s most uncompromising & inspiring voices” DIY Mag

“(Wench!) Explosive!” Amy Lamé / BBC 6Music

“(Bug Facer) the liquid ecstasy of music with a full throttle approach” Darkus Mag

The renowned Hull based talent farm Warren Records brings together a collection of the area’s finest musical talent, who’ve all worked with the label at some point in their career, to create the album collaboration – a body of work that sees bands & artists team up on tracks to create something fresh & original.

As part of a bigger project run by Warren Records & funded by Arts Council England, the purpose of collaboration was to engage up-and-coming artists already working with them & connect them with previous Warren artists, who’ve gone on to carve their own path in music. For each collaboration, the artists involved had a day to get to know each other, generate ideas & then a second day to record & refine their contribution. The result is a fascinating peek into the musical talent base that’s been growing in recent years throughout Hull and the surrounding area.

Established in 1983, The Warren Youth Project provides vital support services to young people in Hull, including free guidance, training, education, counselling, employability skills & creative expression activities. Whether it’s mental-health support, help finding a job, getting involved with music & the arts, learning new skills or just wanting to get away from the world for a bit, The Warren can facilitate all that & more.

Below are artist comments on the experience of collaborating with others & some of the ideas that were brought to the table.

Artist comments & track musings…

• Jodie Langford x WENCH! | Track: You’ve Got Male!
  Jodie – It’s not often I even want to collaborate so to get the opportunity to spend a few days in the studio with WENCH!, a band whose message & ethos I strongly support, was a real treat. I’ve gotten so used to working with a producer, it was interesting to experience how a band who have been together for a while now, form their ideas & structure a song. We came up with You’ve Got Male! – a playful tune that mocks the stupid things heard coming out of men’s mouths when talking about women.
  WENCH! – We loved working with Jodie, it’s not every day you get the opportunity to work with the queen of poetic party punk. Jodie was the perfect person for us to work with & we all fit together so well like an unconventional punk family.
• Chiedu Oraka x Dead In Blue | Track: Bite the Hand That Bleeds
  Dead In Blue – It was very surreal to be challenged to write & complete a recording in two days, especially for a collaboration in a genre we’ve never delved into. To work with Chiedu was a game changer – one of Hull’s biggest & the best! The writing process flowed naturally & we riffed off each smoothly, even though musically we were both out of our comfort zones. The best takeaway for us was not just the music, but the knowledge gained from chats with Chiedu & how he progressed in his career, giving us more of a game plan to branch out of the Hull scene.
  Chiedu Oraka – Absolutely loved working with Dead In Blue. First time I’d met them, so you never know how a session is going to work when stepping into the unknown. They took me out of my comfort zone & brought out a different side to me & I can’t wait for you all to hear it. For me my verses are all about a newfound northern confidence, but we can still be humble cause it’s who we are but we also need everyone to know how good we are too. YOU GET ONE LIFE AND NO ONE CAN TOOT YOUR HORN BETTER THAN YOU… so go live it.
• Trouser Dress x Bombed Buildings | Tracks: Idea 1 / Idea 2 / Take the World / Hull Fair
  Trouser Dress – I really enjoyed the collaboration project, I was nervous at first, doubting myself & what I’d be able to bring to the table, but Bombed Buildings (Stewart Baxter) & I clicked really well – it was organised chaos & a lot of fun. I got to try techniques I’d not done before (like tape recording & looping!) & I’m really proud of our tracks. The lyrics for Take The World were written a while back, when there was a lot of crazy stuff happening in America, especially with Elon Musk’s involvement in their government & was the first thing I thought to write about at the time. I sent the lyrics to Stew & he was on board immediately & we recorded them the next day!
  Bombed Buildings – It was an honour to do this project with Trouser Dress, an up & coming artist who approaches music from a different perspective & lived experience to myself. It was interesting to talk about the process & see what happens when you play with different equipment & try new things. It was something new for Trouser Dress too & we were both pushed out of our comfort zones, taking risks & bouncing off each other creatively.
• Minas Altar x Steph Halsey | Tracks: Midas Angelo / Let Her Burn
  Minas Altar – I love the harp & have often dreamt of singing with a harp so was excited to see what Steph & I would come up with. Both songs we came up with are formed around the story of the character Midas Angelo, who was a talented painter & spiritually devout woman. She was commissioned by the Catholic church to paint the chapels in her town but when the Protestants came to power, they deemed her a witch; painting over her chapels & burnt her alive in front of the townsfolk! In her final moments, the angels she painted sang out to her & she died in a blaze of immaculate heavenly light. I think, subconsciously, the whole thing is a bit of an allegory for my mania. I’d been painting a lot of angels at the time, starting to lose sleep & hallucinating. The manic side of having bipolar feels like burning so brightly in a creative inferno until those you know turn & imprison you. At the time, I didn’t feel like anything was wrong but I was sectioned shortly after.
  Stephanie Halsey – It was wonderful to create with someone who’s taken a different path in music. My own journey’s been shaped by rules & structure, which do have value, but letting go of those frameworks to simply sing, play & explore ideas without a fixed plan felt incredibly liberating. We wrote two songs with a narrative about a woman who doesn’t quite fit in – an outsider who is ultimately labelled a witch & burned at the stake! We explored themes of independence, creativity & intuitive living – qualities that many women are discouraged from embracing. To this day, the UK government has not issued an official apology for the murder of women during the English witch trials. It seems easier for today’s leaders to entertain the idea that witches were real, rather than confront the fact that the perpetrators, predominantly men, were wrong. It’s a chilling allegory, one that echoes through countless media stories involving violence against women & children, cover-ups & hush money.
• Bug Facer x Marx | Track: Main Character
  Bug Facer – It was a lot of fun collaborating with Marx & bringing each of us out of their comfort zone. It felt like we all gelled quite quickly & came up with something we were all happy with. Doing it in one day made it such a cool insight into the time we wrote it and how we were all feeling in that moment.
  Marx – Working with Bug Facer was a great experience. They were keen for me to not just rap on one of their songs, but for it to be a proper marrying of styles which I believe we achieved. I was going through some dramas in my personal life during that session & got woken up to angst-ridden phone calls throughout that morning which put me in a bad mood, par for the course at the time. I channelled that into the beginning of the verse, which just led into the theme “this stuff always happens to me, because I’m the ‘main character’”, which is a recurring theme across my work. It’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but I suppose chaos is my ladder. For me, all the weird, dissonant guitar stuff on the chorus feels reminiscent of early Korn and Mr. Bungle so it’s right up my street.

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