Former 'tweedy' indie singer channelled Bowie's Berlin trilogy for his largely instrumental mix of Krautrock, classical and ambient textures. Now Brian Eno turns up to his gigs
East India Youth totally wants you to eyeball him. In the video for his first single, Looking For Someone, he stares vehemently down the barrel of the camera lens like he's willing you to blink first. When he performs live, he doesn't hide under a cap, he headbangs in a tailored, often flowery shirt, his James Blake-rivalling mop of hair flinging back and forth. The cover of his new record is a Lucian Freud-inspired portrait of his face. Really, you can't help but stare.
"I wanted to address the facelessness of electronic music, to inject some personality where it's becoming increasingly anonymous," he explains as he takes off his impeccably cut coat and sits down. "I didn't want to conform to the done thing, which is looking away from the camera, or like a robot, or not even appearing in your videos. This is really personal music to me, it's emotional, and I wanted to make sure that people knew there was a person behind it."
I'm eyeballing East India Youth in a cafe at Trinity Buoy Wharf, part of the Docklands area in London that inspired his name (his real one is William Doyle). He has very blue eyes. As we tuck into cheese toasties, a nearby conveyor belt is shovelling sodden earth from somewhere deep in the capital up a chute, where it cascades into a barge below. The O2 looms in the distance. It's pissing down with rain. "I made a lot of the stuff that would end up on the album when I started coming here a lot," he says, glancing outside. "It's a bizarre place: it's semi-industrial, you're by the water and, architecturally, it's very odd. It really connected with me." And the Youth part? "That's probably because this place was the start of something new for me; I was creatively reborn."
His last incarnation was a different kettle, as lead singer in "tweedy" indie group Doyle & The Fourfathers. They never quite made it out of the UK toilet circuit (though the experience taught him how to "perform his arse off"). Frustrated, Doyle returned to the compositions he'd been collaging together on his bedroom computer. The switch paid off; now, his biggest influence – Brian Eno – turns up at his gigs, while music website The Quietus started a label so it could put out his early songs. Its editor, John Doran, meant it when he said: "I would have remortgaged my soul to get this music out there." That's just the sort of spirit East India Youth's music invokes.
Doyle's solo debut, Total Strife Forever, is a coming-of-age album fizzing with pop, Krautrock, classical and ambient electronics like a pinwheel firework, dense with tension and then burbling into beautiful bleakness. There's just a scattering of songs; otherwise it's instrumentals – a structure, Doyle says, inspired by David Bowie's Eno-supervised "Berlin" trilogy. It's thrilling: one minute his reedy vocals are calling to "find new love dripping down your soul" (on Dripping Down); the next, monstrous techno banger Hinterland threatens to burst apart your speakers. Doyle, however, finds himself propping up the space between: "I don't really consider myself a dance producer or an ambient musician; I want to find my own way," he insists.
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The search hasn't been an easy one. As his album title suggests, there have been complications. Buckets of them. Perhaps no more and no less than any other struggling musician who comes to the big city from a small town and tries to conjure something exciting while living off Super Noodles and Sovereign fags. But East India Youth has funnelled all that uncertainty into his music. "It was pressure that made this record what it is," he explains. "Social, financial, all of that. And I didn't want to do what was expected of me: to make a 'song record' after I'd been a songwriter for the last three years."
That stress suffuses the album's central, four-part motif, which – a nod to minimalist and abstract composers like Steve Reich and Tim Hecker – seethes with serene noise. But Doyle is not what you might call a tortured artist. "The idea that art only thrives in distressing situations is bullshit," he insists. "Otherwise, people think that you have to engineer those situations for yourself to make art and that's really destructive. You either have it in you to make interesting music or art or you don't."
Total Strife Forever has also been praised for making computer music sound full-blooded. Doyle ponders this for a minute. "I don't buy into the suggestion that electronic music, even if you make it on a computer, is sterile anyway," he says. "Compared to genres that rely on, say, the dynamics of heartbroken lyrics, you can actually express a lot more emotion with electronic music; you've got the whole spectrum of frequency to play with."
Its title, too, has raised eyebrows, riffing on Foals' second album Total Life Forever. "Talking about pressure, I really backed myself into a corner with that name," he says, mushing his hair anxiously from side to side. "It's not as if I don't like Foals. I was just working against instinct on this album, and making a pun on quite a trendy band's album title is a fucking terrible idea. But it perfectly sums up my album's atmosphere: Total Life Forever speaks to me about a totally optimistic mindset, something filled with hope; Total Strife Forever is just communicating the other side of that."
At this moment, techno beanpole Dan Avery, last year's breakthrough dance music producer, walks into the cafe and starts checking out the specials board. Avery, like Doyle, is also from Bournemouth. "I think he might have gone from there to London via Southampton, too, which is exactly what I've done," whispers Doyle. "Maybe this is where electronic producers take embryonic form when they move out of a port town." Maybe. Trinity Buoy Wharf's electronic outbreak hasn't quite reached epidemic levels yet, but I'm going to go right ahead and take this moment as a cosmic sign.
Total Strife Forever is out now in the UK
by Kate Hutchinson via Music: Electronic music | theguardian.com
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