Talking to: Mass House
Indie-Electro duo Mass House, made up of childhood friends Tom and Dylan, are our new favourite Brummies washed ashore on the muddy banks of Bristol. They have been busy in lock down honing their synth-driven tongue-in-cheek sound, and on the back of a series of virtual live gigs, including Bristol Beacon’s massively successful Bristol Takeover, as well as curating the charity compilation album ‘Quarantine Machine’, they have a stack of new music to bring to us fresh for 2021. The first of these new singles, following on from 2020’s ‘Birmingham’ and ‘Imaginary Homelands’, is 'Temptations', which was released on 26th February and is a glitchy indie-electronic song which explores coping with our taboo desires.
We talked to Mass House recently about growing up together, their strong musical connection, why politics is important to them, the joy of playing live, and what is coming up next for Mass House.
I know you are both based in Bristol at the moment but both of you are from Birmingham originally. Did you move to Bristol together? Did you know each other before you came here?
Tom: We have known each other from primary school pretty much, from a really young age. We have been involved in lots of different music projects together in the past, and we have always had a really good musical connection. I moved here for uni, and then Dyl moved down here too. We were still writing together before he did, in that kind of cyber-form of sending stuff to each other then Dyl moved here about a year ago.
Dylan: I wasn’t far away, I was in Cheltenham at the time, I went to uni there. I used to whizz down here once a week and we both just really liked it here. Because Tom was doing his music stuff, getting some connections here, because we were going in more of an electronic direction, compared to the bands we had been in before on the Birmingham music scene, we felt like we wanted to try being based here in Bristol. There is a really cool electronic music scene here and it felt like the right thing to do.
So, Bristol or Birmingham? Which one wins in the fight over your hearts?
T: Ooh, what a position to put us in, god!
D: What, you mean who wins in a physical fight?
T: Bristol would probably win in a fight of the wits, but Birmingham would come in strong, man! There’s something lovely about being a Brummy in a different city, because everyone is a bit wary of you. I think you can be the most lovely person on the planet and people can still be a bit like “ooh, you are from Birmingham, can we trust you?”
D: We’re from Moseley, which has a bit of a Bristol vibe to it, so I don’t think we feel too far from home here.
What else do you two do in your everyday life apart from making music?
T: I work as a support worker and then I’m also doing stuff with HUBB records, bits and bobs of PR for different bands, which has been semi-fun/semi-stressful. It's taught me loads and I have met lots of other musicians, so it is really cool.
D: It has opened the door for us to know more about [PR] and do more for ourselves on that side of things. In bands in the past we have had management and this is just us two, this project, so we have had to learn a lot about that side of things.
T: I think that the way the record industry works at the moment, people who are going to get record deals, you almost want them to already have this great brand or strong presence in the media, which is almost impossible if you don’t already have the know-how.
What sort of music are you influenced by? Who did you grow up listening to and who influences Mass House’s sound?
D: As we grew up together, we have known each other since we were three, our music tastes have been on a very parallel journey; our tastes and trends, we have done it together. When we were younger it was stuff like Gorillaz in primary school, then moving into secondary school it was stuff like The Foals, more math-rock-y guitar stuff, and then in our teenage years we really got into garage rock, American stuff like Weezer and Dinosaur Jr, and then we were in bands making grungy guitar stuff.
For this project we wanted to make something completely different, we made a real conscious effort to not use guitars and the instruments we used before, and bought a load of synths and some drum machines. We have always really loved Massive Attack, and Damon Albarn…
T: ...and Metronomy and LCD Soundsystem and that kind of stuff, people who make band music that nods towards dance music. We have taken that on board as a kind of ethos when writing music for ourselves really.
D: I think as we moved more into the electronic sphere the production side of things became more of an instrument; the recording side becomes an instrument in itself, so we have started looking at artists like Caribou, proper electronic producers.That is the kind of stuff that really influences Mass House at the minute, for sure.
What do you both bring to Mass House?
D: At university I did advertising, so I do more of the art work, video editing, the way that the brand looks. And Tom does the production side of things and the actual writing of songs. Then we piece it all together at the end as a duo.
I really like what you write about, I like your politics especially; what drives you to write about the subjects you write about?
T: Genuinely it’s usually something that has really irritated me! Or something I have felt really passionate about for a moment; you think of a phrase or something like that and it develops from that really. Imaginary Homelands was written around the time that there was a real feeling of oppression, lots of Black Lives Matter walks, we had just gone into lock down, and there was a real feeling that there was one rule for the higher powers and one rule for the people who are more vulnerable in society. That song was really just me feeling really pissed off about it, and reading more about this sort of stuff, and then adding fuel to the fire.
Birmingham was written just before I had moved away to Bristol, so that was written in a kind of weird limbo of a life when I was like “Do I really want to uproot myself and make that change, or do I just want to stay here and keep doing what I am doing here?” I mean, it was almost just like a meditative conversation with myself, a decision making process.
D: I think with Imaginary Homelands, it was written right at the start of lock down, I think it’s easy to forget that it was only a year ago that lock down was this completely new concept, and almost a novelty at the time. Because we lived together we spent the whole of those five months together in lock down and that song really captures that moment for us two. It was all politics at that time and what was going to happen and it was all new to us. It was a kind of digestion for us, of that new way of life.
T: It was all of a sudden a lot harder to ignore, to bury your head in the sand and not think about what was going on in politics. Whilst before it was easy to bury your head in the sand and just think about going to the pub and forgetting about politics! It’s a lot harder to feel like politics doesn’t affect you now, because every decision has a massive impact on everyone really.
Let’s move on to your latest single Temptations…. tell us more.
D: So the studio we are in now, below us is a dominatrix studio, we got told that when we moved in and we just wanted to go and have a look at it, because why wouldn't we? We see people coming in and out of there, the song really just came from the idea of temptations and taboo.
T: Because we keep seeing these slightly embarrassed, slightly seedy looking gentlemen walking out, so the idea of taboo, the idea of temptations, these kind of blokes doing something they feel slightly guilty about, but still carry on doing, we kind of found that quite funny really. It spurred us on for the song.
What’s next for Mass House?
D: We want to release more basically, we want to get on a bit of a roll. We have got loads of songs written, we just need to get them finished. Because over the last year we have just kind of sat on stuff and mulled it over; we took our time with things. We want to get a bit of momentum this year with some quickfire releases, one after the other. We want to kind of really get the ball rolling. And then who knows really? It feels like it has kind of been reduced down to just us in the studio at the moment, which we are happy with, it means we are getting better at it, gaining more skills and writing more songs, we need to put it out there too!
T: We have got another two songs that are ready to go after Temptations, so we are just going to do it every month or month and a half, something like that.
It must be quite frustrating not being able to line up any live gigs. I know you have said you are honing at the moment and enjoying that, but is that difficult ,not being able to go out and play and get that feedback from an audience?
T: It's like you say, it’s not being able to go out and get that feedback from the audience. We played one gig in November when things were eased a bit, a seated gig, and afterwards we were like “Oh god, wow!” because you have people actually listening to your music.
D: You thrive off the energy and the response of the audience when you play live, because it’s like your own little secret thing when you are locked away in a studio doing your music. For example, at that gig we played a song we thought we were going to release and then other songs went down a lot better, so it changed our minds about the order of things, what we were going to do next.
The live side of things with Mass House is a major part of the brand, what we do comes across very differently from what it does on record.
And why is that?
T: I think it's just really energetic music, and because it's kind of a big sound when we perform it takes it to a different level really
D: And the way we set up on stage, there are only two of us but there is quite a lot going on. I don’t know how we ended up playing like that live, but it seems like it was the only way we could play it live, and then people said they hadn’t seen anyone do it like that. We have all these machines set up and we are just pressing buttons and it's all a bit frantic, everything going on at once. So, let’s release some singles and then get out there and play live!
If you can’t wait until the end of lock down to experience Mass House live we have some good news for you, they will be playing a livestream set on our Instagram on Friday 30th April.