Ones To Watch: Walls

Instrumental noise pop duo

Legends are often made from mismatched partnerships. Mentor and Odysseus. Obi-Wan Kenobi and young Skywalker. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or even Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno and Tom Meighan.

So when veteran guitarist Alessio Natalizia, AKA Banjo Or Freakout, asked total stranger DJ Sam Willis, AKA Allez Allez, to make music with him – it could have ended in limp handshakes and fast exits.

“Ah! No, we are like a couple!” laughs Alessio. “Yeah, like two old Italian guys,” continues Sam. “We should walk around the park arm in arm after our daily coffee.”

Alessio is also the tour-hardened guitarist with Disco Drive, whilst Sam previously had been knocking together slick DJ mixes but living a vicarious musical life through PR. But, in Sam’s spare room, their collaboration has grafted together solidly, giving birth to captivating instrumental noise pop pumping through krautrock veins.

Quite a lot of it in fact. Since Sam virtually moved in next door to the Italian, close to Hackney’s London Fields, it’s been a whirlwind, as Sam reveals: “Working with Alessio, we were finishing each other’s sentences straight away, and …” “Yeah, we both got quite obsessed with detail,” injects Alessio, as if to illustrate Sam’s point. “We both have a similar feeling about emotional content in music,” Sam continues, “and we are drawn to similar things and although we have different backgrounds we have shared goals.”

Their debut album has been snapped up by German dance label Kompakt, and it’s easy to see why. Their fuzzed out, trippy pop music will appeal to fans of Fuck Buttons as much as it will Berlin’s Panarama party people.

But has it been hard to keep the two projects separate? “Alessio has a clear idea of what the Walls sound was because he’s got more experience making music than me,” admits the talkative Sam. “I have more of a naivety that I bring to the table. He has a steady hand on the tiller.”

Drenched in sunrise emotions, bliss-kissed pulses and gliding balearic beats, the spaces are then filled with Alessio’s avant-garde guitar loops and processed vocals. Numerous sections toy with loops then move on; disassociating, severing then progressing. This gifts their music a strange tone of amnesia, and at points Walls sounds like a brain searching for happy memories, or a mind waking from a beautiful dream.

Sam dives in and rounds off: “I hadn’t really thought about that before. Just in between; that blissful state. Like a Sunday morning when you wake up and you know you can go back to sleep. There is that lucidity and transportative or escapist thing. I think that’s what we want out of music. We want it to take you somewhere.”

Words by Matthew Bennett

Where: London
What: Instrumental noise pop
Unique Fact: Alessio is obsessed with whippets. But not in a sexy way.
Get 3 songs: ‘Burnt Sienna’, ‘Cylopean Remains’, ‘Gaberdine’




Clash Magazine Issue 50

This is an excerpt from an article that appears in the 50th issue of Clash Magazine. Pick it up in stores from May 7th.



You can read the full issue online HERE and subscribe to Clash Magazine HERE.




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