Wake up call: Nick Mulvey

Beginning to write about the world outside of his immediate surroundings was an obvious transition for the guitarist. “At a certain point, it’s obvious that you don’t live in a vacuum,” he says. “For me it’s about daily practices that support you in dwelling in the peace and wisdom that you have inside. It’s about stillness. A lot of this album is about self-enquiry and self-abidance – learning to dwell within your being.”

To practise self-abidance takes time and concentration. Unsurprisingly, Nick sees music-making at the very centre of his meditation. “The guitar, blessedly, has always been a place free from my own intellectual interference,” he says. “I’ve always got a whole world of guitar patterns. I create them very easily – little repetitive cells – and then my melodies will come from them in the spaces the cells supply. Even the melodic shapes give space to the words.”

Nick further developed his practice of self-enquiry and free music-making when he spent time with legendary ambient and electronic musician Brian Eno last year. “Brian was really interested in my guitar playing,” Nick explains. “He instructed me to play, but he wanted me to give over to him the control of when I changed chord. I would play, and of course he didn’t tell me to change for ages. He made me develop a much more ambient, much more environmental approach to the music, where it wasn’t a chord sequence change/ change/ change, like a song. It was more like holding a space.”

Nick’s music has always had a hypnotic guitar sound. The vocal melodies on ‘Wake Up Now’, and indeed ‘First Mind’ are sweetly catchy and easy to sing along to, but it is the guitar patterns Nick plays underneath which are far more intriguing. Having studied music in Havana, and then ethnomusicology at university in London, Nick has a developed understanding and a vested interest in the musical practices of African and Central and South American music, where rhythm is a far more leant-on feature.

“Brian and I talked a lot about West African musicians. We talked about horizontal music, a continual groove that doesn’t change chord. It’s punctuated by moments of verticality – horn stabs, or a community of the singers singing up words – then it’s back down to the horizontal grooves. He knew that my music works on that premise as well. I’ve always based my patterns on songwriters I grew up with, and the groove-based, minimalist, hypnotic qualities that I’ve always loved.”

Nick says that Brian Eno is “the direct reason why there’s a gang sound on the vocal on the record.” ‘Wake Up Now’ is a record made with baby Inka at Nick’s feet, his wife Isadora on backing vocals, new and old friends featured as co-writers and instrumentalists. “That is why I’ll back this album forever in a way that I wouldn’t really do with my first album,” he concludes. “It’s not me standing over here with my opinions. It’s us, and it’s them, as much as me.”

Nick Mulvey’s new album ‘Wake Up Now’ is out on 8th September via Fiction Records.