Ones To Watch – Gyratory System

Post-punk brass

Way more than your average traffic roundabout, Gyratory System is a band that defy description. Depending on what you read, they’re either “Kraftwerk writing a Looney Tunes score”, or ‘the sound of electronica played by clockwork and steam-powered sequencers”.

The band themselves – Dr. Andrew Blick, his dad Robin, and James Weaver – prefer ‘post-punk brass’. Though they freely admit it changes a lot.

“Afro beat is very important to us,” states Andrew, a political historian at Westminster. “I mean, we’ve all got our own influences but then we also have quite clear shared ground. I suppose post-punk, Pigbag to an extent, Konk, Implog – a sort of New York scene band. The krauty ’70s stuff and the Bowie ’70s stuff, the Berlin stuff and then also bebop and Charlie Parker.”

Thus Gyratory System exist as a brass band playing processed jazz over techno structures. Got it? Wait till you hear them live – they happily confuse you further with cybotic jive covers of Kraftwerk and acid house legend Joey Beltram.

They also love a bit of political subtext – their debut LP ‘The Sound-Board Breathes’ was named after a section of Milton’s Paradise Lost, whilst latest album ‘New Harmony’, released on Angular, has a more foreboding historical forbearance, as Andrew explains: “‘New Harmony’ was a commune set up in the early nineteenth century by Robert Owen, a socialist thinker, who had this idea for a model community, where they abolished money and private property and all that kind of thing and everyone lived there, but it all went wrong.” A prophetic title? “We’ll see,” he concludes.

Words by Matthew Bennett
Photos by Samuel John Butt

Where: London
What: Post-Punk Brass
Unique Fact: Andrew played so many sessions with different bands for John Peel’s radio show that John was forced to take him to one side and ask him what the hell was going on.
Get 3 songs: ‘Zowser’, ‘Pampalona’, ‘Sicilian Avenue’

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