NEY, based in Glasgow, Scotland
NEY are Lisa Fabian, Matt Robin and Eddie Brooks, a Glasgow-based trio, formed around workshops at Green Door Studios in 2022.
Guided by malleable prompts, they build on spontaneous instrumentation, layering field recordings and noise elements with percussion and guitar, drawing on elements of jazz, ambient, spoken-word and desert blues. Fabian steers the trio with her unwavering vocal direction, spoken in native tongues of Swedish and German, which she processes and distorts into a fever dream of mysticised notations.
Over the past 2 years, NEY have refined their sound largely through live performance and improvised sessions. As a band, they find synchronicity in their sparse but poised playing; a shimmer and sway through thickets of atmosphere, “presesenting vocals, guitar and drums as background details as significant, or not, as the listener wants them to be” (The Quietus, December 2023).
Whilst their recordings often materialize in elusive ambient-adjacent renderings, their live sets can equally erupt into genre-spanning notions of psych rock, industrial and pulsating EBM, a frenetic and prismatic energy that finds it’s place equally in contemplative listening spaces as dark and dank club basements.
NEY, 90mil, Berlin, August 2023, photograph by Lizzie Urquhart
tim@somewhere.press