Travel, supposedly, broadens the mind. However, when your intrepid Clash scribe took three months ‘out’ to explore Europe back in the late twentieth century, all travel brought was an enormous overdraft and a lifelong sense of disappointment. As glittering cities were bagged in a criss-cross of roasting-hot train journeys, all was not well. I had hoped to experience a sparkling array of different cultures (that’s polite-speak for ‘I wanted to get over-familiar with ladies from as many countries as possible’) from the cafés of Paris to the beaches of Greece. Sadly, all that happened was 12 weeks spent sleeping in filthy hostels and the stark realisation that I wasn’t able to impress any female from any nation.
Thankfully, some people have greater aspirations. Isaac Emmanuel, the head honcho behind Young Magic, ensured that an epic globetrot from his native Australia resulted in the creation of ‘Melt’, the trio’s fascinating debut album. “I grew up on a small beach town a few hours north of Sydney but somehow it felt like I was from Pluto,” Isaac tells me when asked about his reasons for undertaking his year-long journey. “I wasn’t really travelling to record; I was travelling to travel as I wanted to see more of the world. I sold a lot of gear before I left; some amps, guitars, stands, books. I cleared out my room or gave things away, in fact most of my material possessions. I booked a one-way ticket out of the country and went travelling with just a laptop.”
Isaac initially journeyed through Europe, before hopping over to New York and working his way down to Mexico. Throughout his voyage of discovery, Isaac listened to and began to absorb a huge mish-mash of music. “My background is in the visual arts so through art school my first real interests were bands like The Velvet Underground and Talking Heads. I was getting into making music and spending every spare second feeding new sounds into a DAW [Digital Audio Workstation] and seeing where I could take it,” he reveals. “I wasn’t really thinking about making an album specifically, I was just travelling and if something caught my ear I’d record it to sample later, or play around with instruments that popped up along the way.”
Slowly but surely, Emmanuel began to create a set of songs, which, while in America, sparked the interest of within the music industry. “When I got to New York the [effortlessly cool] Carpark [Records] guys offered to put out an album and I started thinking of it more as something to do,” Isaac recalls. “It was weird to have a label and an agent before I’d even played a show. Then, when I was thinking about how it could be done live was when I got in touch with Melati and Michael.”
Indeed, while travelling, Isaac had kept in contact with two friends, Indonesian-born Melati Malay and an old school buddy, Michael Italia. Italia had also been globetrotting and capturing snippets of music of his own. “We all met up again at the beginning of last year in New York; Michael had come from Brazil and I from Mexico. We started working on it as a project for the first time, with the help of a good friend and super-talented producer T Gill (aka Galapagoose),” Isaac explains. “At the time I was solo and wanted to expand and collaborate. I wasn’t really into the idea of being that one guy onstage trying to properly represent and perform tracks that sounded more like a 20-piece percussive and choral group.”
However, when the trio of friends met up in the Big Apple, it appeared that cross-border, transatlantic alchemy had been at work. “When I heard the music Michael and Melati had been making I think we all realized it came from a similar space, and that we could work together,” Isaac says, still sounding somewhat agog. “The songs worked next to each other, like some weird concurrence of the stars. It felt like a highly synchronistic time, almost beyond my mental reach or explanation.”
As so ‘Melt’ was born. As an album, it references a dizzying array of musical styles and influences – West African rhythms, psychedelia, minimal electronica, ambient house, soul, and Mexican folk are all present and correct amid Young Magic’s twitching synths and roaming drum patterns. It’s an album born out of curiosity and a lack of boundaries.
“I kept a dairy during the last few years and we’ve just gotten around to writing it all down track by track, documenting the journey,” Isaac says when I ask him whether a certain song pinpoints a particular place. “‘Slip Time’ and ‘Drawing Down The Moon’ were from time spent in The House In The Clouds in Mexico, which was an intense and beautiful time. ‘Sparkly’ was the beginning of it all – recorded during a Melbourne summer in early 2010.”
Young Magic have, temporarily hung up their rucksacks and are based in New York. They will now see the world via an endless schlep of tour vans, cheap hotels and gig venues, but the notion of travel will always be a huge source of inspiration for Isaac. “Travel just seems to be one of things that nudges your head in heart in new directions, opens and unlocks understandings of yourself and moves you out of your routine and comfort zone in that subtle way. I find it a nice space for tapping the sublime and making new things.”
If only I’d know that all those years ago.
Words by John Freeman
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Young Magic’s ‘Melt’ is out now via Carpark Records.