Lurking at the fringes of electronic music, artists such as Richie Culver, Rainy Miller and Iceboy Violet are confronting the alienation and deprivation of the UK’s north
‘W
hat kind of god builds a world on this forgotten town?” Richie Culver seethes on Curse, closing out his dark, cinematic album I Trust Pain. He’s referring to Withernsea, a faded seaside resort near Hull, where he grew up and then desperately wanted to leave. “I remember feeling so resentful,” he says. “I heard Tracey Chapman’s Fast Car and thought: is this song about me?” He duly got out aged 17, eventually settling in London and finding success as a visual artist and musician.
But in recent years, the 46-year-old began hearing younger avant garde musicians “talking about their satellite towns” in other often forgotten corners of the north. “I’d never looked at the north like that, in the way these artists are unravelling these narratives.” Having dabbled in music for decades, he was inspired by these acts to embark on his first serious records, with Withernsea as his muse – finally seeing his old town as “ripe for storytelling”.
The artists Culver discovered are a wave of experimentalists writing a new chapter in northern English music – including Preston’s Blackhaine, Bradford’s Iceboy Violet, Huddersfield’s Aya, Manchester-based Shell Company and others – with noirish, club-adjacent sounds and confessional lyrics. Frequently collaborating with one another and linked via avant garde music hub the White Hotel in Salford, their roots are in the north’s less spotlit corners, and their inspiration is often drawn from feelings of alienation and boredom. With London receiving more culture funding than the entire north of England (according to think tank IPPR North), many young northern artists beyond the metropolis of Manchester find themselves isolated.
