Loud Fast Lady with Micachu

Loud Fast Lady chats up Micachu's Mica Levi for some sound advice

By Beverly Bryan
Published: April 3rd, 2009 | 12:25pm

Even before the April 7 release of their debut full-length Jewellery, London’s Micachu & the Shapes’ dismantled pop music is making them the object of infatuation in the British press.

It’s an amusing phenomenon considering 22-year-old frontwoman Micachu, also known as Mica Levi, finds inspiration in the work of guys like iconoclast American composer Harry Partch. He wasn’t NME material but Levi just adores him. “The guy’s amazing. He doesn’t just create his own music. He creates his own intonation, tonality, and instruments in order to realize his music,” she says, before describing the marimba Partch made out of light bulbs. Like Partch, the Shapes — completed by Raisa Khan on keyboards/electronics and Marc Pell on drums/percussion — often use found objects to make music, such as differently pitched liquor bottles for percussion.

“In terms of me making instruments, I’m just finding my way. It’s not really technical at the moment. I’m just preparing guitars and things like that,” Levi says. That is, she puts things in or on her guitar to change the sound.

As a composition student at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in East London, Levi’s had natural exposure to the technique of preparing instruments championed by composers like John Cage. And, while Levi might be having fun with the process, her tiny acoustic guitar is prepared with a purpose. “As a band we try and limit our selves instrumentationwise so we can try and get the special effects out of our percussion and our guitars as opposed to relying on electronics,” she says. The aim is to imitate electronic sounds using acoustic instruments.

Like vacuum cleaners.

On stage, Levi will toy with a vacuum and the mic to make “really interesting sounds.” “Initially, I wanted to start the record with the noise of a vacuum cleaner turning on, because I was realizing that I was doing a lot of my music listening whilst I was Hoovering. It was just really counterproductive and that made me think about how much noise there is all the time,” she says.

Yet there is plenty of noise on Jewellery. Levi may be troubled by everyday noise pollution but she welcomes it in recording. “I really, really like it,” she says. Of course, there are compositional reasons: “It’s a good way to create space.”

Despite her thoughtful methodology, Micachu’s music is far from a dour sound collage. The elements, chunky beats, and snippets of unbalanced melody, are shaken together like sonic Chex party mix. Perhaps it’s because, living in London, Levi has absorbed quite a bit from not-so-academic realms of experimentation. Partch can’t take all the credit for inspiring the bit with the liquor bottles, for instance. “In electronic music, a lot of people sample cups or whatever. You get a nice high-hat sound,” she says.

Levi’s ability to blithely rifle through music’s traditions is mirrored by her ability to flourish in an equal number of its milieus. She worked on Jewellery’s production with versatile experimenter Matthew Herbert, who released her single “Golden Phone” on his label Accidental Records.

Her other projects include adventures on the avant edge of grime as a hip-hop DJ commemorated in the Filthy Friends mixtape, made with a small horde of London rappers and other musicians, and, at the other end of the spectrum, writing an eight-minute piece for the London Philharmonic as part of a student composers program.

The young musician doesn’t feel any friction between conservatory life and her life as a genre-crunching pop musician. She is, after all, only one in long line of musicians in the pop arena — from Frank Zappa to These Are Powers — who draw from the more cloistered experimental enclaves. “I think the worlds are much more blurred than people think they are. If you look at bands like Sonic Youth and all of that lot, they’re incredibly academic. I think they’re respected as composers. It’s just how you dress it up,” Levi says.

With her mix of a radical approach and odd charm, her signing with Rough Trade is manifestly appropriate. The grandpa of indie labels was home in its early days to London DIY bands like the Raincoats and Scritti Politti, who also split the difference between winsome and weird. When asked about those bands she immediately volunteered the resemblance between her band and the Raincoats, but said she’d only just discovered them through a BBC documentary on the label. Their relative quietness seemed to grab her. Marveling, she says, “they had quite a lot of girls in there, but they were making the softest sound.” It’s as if that’s the last kind of sound that would have occurred to her.

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"Loud Fast Lady" is a monthly column featuring women in aggressive, loud, or fast music. Atlanta-based writer Beverly Bryan, the mastermind behind "Loud Fast Lady," falls in love with a new loud, fast lady just about every day.