Talking to: Fake Turins

At first glance and listen Fake Turins are one of the many exciting bands to come out of the London electronic, post-punk music scene recently. But they are more than just a band. With their headquarters in a North East London warehouse they are a collective of artists plotting to take over the city through the power of inclusive and experimental art and noise.

Conjured up by band frontman Dominic Rose, with help from his long term friend and collaborator Mars Washington, they gathered artists and musicians to make something more powerful than the sum of their parts as a reaction to the difficulty of navigating the rough terrain of the London creative scene as an individual. Their debut EP Time Flowers Now was released in July on Hideous Mink Records. With echoes of LCD Soundsystem, Black Midi and Black Country New Road, Dominic also lends an air of David Byrne-esque vocals and philosophy to their sound and outlook.

Mars and Dominic sat down with us recently to talk about their passion for truly democratic collaboration, the Turing Test, and the melding of visual art and sound that Fake Turins all pull off so well.

Tell us a little bit more about Fake Turins in your own words.

Dominic: The way I would describe Fake Turins is, it’s a multi-faceted audio-visual collective of a lot of creatives coming together under one umbrella to be able to build much more of a community. Originally it was born from my sense of isolation inside the musical community in London. I reached out to a lot of musicians I knew - they all had the same feeling of being a little bit despondent and disconnected. We realised the way forward was to put our heads together - feature in our own projects and do our own work as well - but to actually have this collaborative intent to make something more than ourselves.

What do you think caused that feeling of despondency in the music scene in London at the time?

Dominic: I think it's not even something of the time, I think it is something you feel even now, a lot of young musicians have this feeling I am sure. A lot of it came from my own feeling of not seeing a way forward, wondering what is the next step? I think that is a big question for everyone - how do you build a career out of music? How do you build a career in the arts? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of ground level help . There's always help for your first step up but being able to reach out and get gigs, it is such an important step but some people just don’t know where to go and you can get very overwhelmed very quickly.

Mars: I think sometimes London can be quite a difficult space to creatively navigate. And the more that you can align yourselves with others and that sense of community can really open up lots of doors, and that's a really great thing.

Dominic: I completely agree with that Mars, it has so much to do with London and the way it is navigated. Even the way it is laid out, that physical representation of our own mindset - it’s sprawling, there are so many different pathways you can take. To be able to be with someone who knows where they are going, who has walked those roads before, is so important, or to at least have many people with you to make those roads more interesting.

Mars: London, due to its size, can often feel quite isolating for creatives, it can be quite hard to break through. I think a number of us have been struggling with that over the years whilst trying to produce our work. Actually forming a creative community has given us a chance to expand our resources, to expand our reach in terms of audience and essentially just open more doors through the connections we all share. And having a group of people who all share a similar perspective is a really great thing.

Dominic: Fake Turins was born out of the ashes of so many of our projects, trying futilely, almost pressing against a wall, and needing to band together to get something a lot more satisfying and a lot more fulfilling.

How did you all find each other?

Dominic: Predominantly through the warehouse community that Mars is still a part of, and he would probably class where he lives as Fuke Turins HQ, would you agree with that Mars?

Mars: Yes, we have based a lot of our explorations through using that space really, which is a great luxury we have.

Dominic: It's a lovely North East London warehouse community based in Haringey, The Arena Design Centre.

There's absolutely loads of you as well…

Dominic: There is, 250 at the last count and going up. Only kidding, but we have a manifesto and the plan is to take over London, so hopefully eventually we will ingratiate the whole place with this semi-cult we have got running.

The Fake Turins cult is coming!

Dominic: It certainly is, to a shore near you!

So how did you all come up with the name for the collective?

Dominic: Fake Turnins was a project name I came up with when I was trying to expand. This was off the back of another project I had been working on, I desired to set up something based solely around electronic online music. Alan Turing is the bastardisation of where the name comes from originally, this idea of the Turing Test, which is testing the sentience in machines and people. So if a robot passes the test it would be an unrecognisable sentience that they have; they would have some form of human recognition. I really liked the idea that when I uploaded music under the name Turins people would have no idea whether it was machine made or human made.

Then after a while I started performing some of the music live, started getting some friends together, this was the burgeoning of the project. Then we thought the name Turins didn’t have much resonance; we were always going to be the ‘Fake Turins’, the illogical representation of what was put online, the physical form, we were always going to be a fake version when we were live performing. After a while, to be honest, it just stuck, and we became Fake Turins permanently, so every single one of us is a Turin, and none of us is the real one.

What do you all bring to the live and recorded music side of things? Again, there’s quite a few of you in the front-facing band as well. Explain to me a little bit more about the other members.

Dominic: Yes, so there are a lot of us in the wider collective, but also quite a few in the music side of things as well. There's me, Dominic Rose. There’s Mars Washington, he plays guitar, we’ve got Scott Custers, he plays guitar as well, we’ve got Johnny Dickens, he plays guitar too. On bass, we’ve currently got Nathaniel Knowles, we’ve got Amy Wilson on clarinet, her sister Rose Wilson on saxophone, George Truman on drums, we’ve got Mark on synthesisers, noise and pedals. He basically creates his own instruments, runs them through this barrage of noise and helps fill up the ambience around it. We've got Pierre Cat on synth, and Jessie B on percussion who is probably one of the best percussionists I have ever known.

Musical ideas are born from my home studio, then we all bring them in as a skeleton, flesh them out and see how it works. We are looking for that crux of interaction - you want to hit that spot when it feels like everyone is fully engaged, and they are not just playing rote. As there are so many of us we like that movable dynamic dimension, where everything can be bouncing off each other simultaneously. It's almost like a chaos samba of noise just frantically hitting against the wall.

To say where we get the aesthetic purpose from, I would have to say that the musical and visual side feed into each other so completely. There are visual ideas that Mars here will be working on that I will see and interpret, and vice versa, I am sure that there are musical ideas that he will take into his studio and be developing simultaneously.

I’m always interested in when you have large collectives doing stuff together, how do you come to decisions, how do you deal with the gnarly stuff? Because it always happens doesn’t it, there is always a need to sit down and thrash things out. Do you feel as a group you are able to deal with that quite well?

Mars: It's an ongoing conversation at the moment, isn’t it? I think the fact that so much of the community is ultimately based around friendship and mutual support and an aligned sense of perspective, I think that's a really beneficial factor in terms of us having a smooth discourse when it comes to these more pertinent issues surrounding the more serious aspects of the band and the community. The fact that we can talk to each other and hold space for each other and communicate on certain issues, it’s always something that is going to be in development, but there is always scope and space for it and everyone’s open to that fact, which is again really positive.

You’re both here, and I don't want to add any more weight to you over other members of the band, but it would be good to hear a little about your creative upbringings, and what brought you to the sort of music and visual aspects you make.

Mars: Essentially Dominic and I have known each other for the best part of a decade now, we originally met through music, we came together as part of another project, we played together for a few years and then that project disbanded and we continued to collaborate with each other. In terms of my career out of music I am a professional photographer and filmmaker and that was something in my formative years, when Dominic and I first met, that I was still developing.

A great part of our creative coming together was the fact that we could both collaborate through music, musical expression, and visual media. Dominic in many ways has served as something of a muse for me! He has often been my test subject, the person I have dragged around to my studio to take pictures of , whether he likes it or not, and that’s when our creative relationship really started to blossom.

As my career started to take hold of more of my time and my schedule it meant that my opportunities to collaborate with Dominic musically was a bit limited. There was a point when I was collaborating with Dominic on some of his earlier projects but only visually, and that was a sticking point for me as I am so influenced by music, it's always been so intertwined with my visual influence as well, so when there was the scope in this particular project for me to come back to being involved musically that was something I jumped at. It's been fantastic and the place we find ourselves in now is truly wonderful, where we are able to place as much importance on all the different disciplines we have on this project.

Dominic: I echo every word of that. Our friendship started off about a decade ago, and that was formative for me as well. I was on the crux of leaving school and going to university, I was thinking a lot about what I wanted to do. I have been playing music for a very long time. I was brought up and trained as an opera singer. I had been brought up traditionally in a very hegemonic musical background - something that was about the long history of everything - and to break free of that mould and play music with Mars that was more based on experimental jams, that was amazing.

He took me to festivals, we would go to gigs together, and my musical horizons were broadened, that was an intriguing palette and more of a dynamic space. We started to develop a lot of musical ideas together. My life changed, I was trying to pursue music full time and Mars had a career as a visual communicator, so we did diverge for a while. And then when we had this idea of a community it was time for us to find out how we could get all of these ideas we had had previously back into the fold. And as a small disclaimer Mars is my favourite guitarist, so as a guitarist I would take a lot of my inspiration from his playing. The idea of him coming back musically with Fake Turins was always a very exciting thing.

What's exciting you both musically and culturally at the moment?

Dominic: For myself it's the small music scene that is burgeoning right now. What seems to be happening at the crux of the world opening back up again is that a lot of bands seem to be coming together and looking at forming these bigger communities, and that excites me beyond belief.

Mars: For me one of the most exciting things that has come out of the hardship of the last year is the way that the music industry and other areas of the arts industries have had to adapt. There is a divergence of technology emerging that will enable artists to reach audiences in ways they have not had access to before. As an audio visual collective that is something that really excites us because it gives us more platforms to create content and to reach audiences. I think there is going to be a really big movement in the very immediate future that will align the sense of live shows and real connection with also what we've seen over the last year with streaming services and try to create something which is immersive for the audience in spite of their lack of physical placement.

Tell us a little more about your newest release. Your EP was released recently and the first single from it, Down, came out in May, followed by Talking Prophets.

Dominic: Many of them build their own world, and each has its own journey and takes and builds on a concept and takes it to its absolute maximum. Down was something that was born of a very painful moment of my life originally, and trying to turn that grief into just pure abandon and joy. And submitting yourself to the larger experience of it and surrendering yourself to it at all costs.

Talking Prophets itself is darker and owed to this blind retelling of stories that we have following us around in our lives that we have now. It is particularly about the soothsayer who has no vision, he is unable to see the future but he keeps demanding that what he says is prophecy. The fake cult leader, the false prophet - I find that a fascinating concept and very pertinent to the time that we find ourselves in right now.

What's coming up next for Fake Turins, as a collective and as a band?

Dominic: We have a lot of interesting gigs coming up and a lot of unreleased material that hasn’t seen the light of day yet.

Mars: We’re actually in the midst of pre production for creating a whole lot of visuals that will sit alongside the EP, which is a very exciting project. We have just made all of the artwork for all of our single releases and the EP release, which we are very proud of. We have a visual team as part of the collective and we’ve really developed a fantastic way of working together. Johnny Dickens, the other guitarist in the band, is an amazing designer and he and I often work together kind of passing content back and forth. We have an amazing animator, after effects designer, illustrator and social media guru in Faye Pritchard, who is a fantastic resource in terms of taking content and manipulating it and coming up with something amazing.

Dominic: There is also Jack Satchel who is our amazing video editor as well.

Mars: Oh yes! Jack is essentially my partner in crime in many ways.

The EP artwork that we have just created, we made it over the course of a week, which was daunting but we are really happy with the outcome, and it was an organic process where I went out and shot a lot of imagery which was then layered and sent to Faye to manipulate and then sent to Johnny. We are going to continue along those lines in terms of content creation, to continue to push the aesthetic and push the inclusive element in terms of content creation.

Do you have any last words to share?

Dominic: For me it would just be to express the joy in having such a wonderful group of people involved in this, I can't sing all of their praises enough. I seem to take the bulk of the interviews but I want to say that they are all absolutely integral to this, if not more so.

Mars: I absolutely want to mirror that. It’s brilliant to have a position within this community where you are given the opportunity to lead, but without this community we wouldn't be able to lead. It's really a testament to the work that we have put out and that which we are able to create in the future.

Time Flowers Now is out to buy and stream on Hideous Mink Records.

Listen to the latest single Talking Prophets on our Spotify new releases playlist.

Find the collective on Facebook and Instagram.