STACK NZ Jun #74

MUSIC FEATURE

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house, and I’d just look out the window and… I pretended it was this magical place,” Brown says warmly. Residing in LA sometimes feels magical for the platinum-selling and the platinum-selling Kiwi artist, and occasionally feels utterly alien. “Living there has been so good for me, but sometimes I just think it’s so funny I’m here,” she says. “I’m not your typical Hollywood gal. I can walk from my house to the Walk of Fame in five minutes… I know everyone thinks Hollywood is just a plastic place, but that’s just one little aspect of it. There’s the whole tourism thing… I understand because I feel like I’m a lifelong tourist. I’m constantly in different places with my bum-bag and my camera. The important thing is that you have some close friends there, and that’s really all you need.” I'm fascinated by unhealthy obsessions, and how people become unhealthily obsessed with other people The tracks that Brown wrote and recorded for Wild Things were birthed under the guidance of producer Tommy English, whom the musician met through her LA neighbour and tattooist icon Kat Von D. English encouraged Brown to use panpipes in the gorgeous Money To Burn (“We were joking that we had to get some Toto-style flutes into the album”), the cuica in Wonderland (“It’s a Brazilian percussion instrument, it’s in heaps of Paul Simon’s Graceland songs; it sounds like ‘ooh-ooh-aah-aah!’ [imagine a cartoon monkey noise –Ed] ”), and the bongos in Let It Roll . “Percussion is one of my favourite things,” Brown says. “We did a lot of it live as well; we just went to town.” Meanwhile, Sweet Fascination encapsulates

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

MUSIC

Kiwi songstress Ladyhawke’s highly anticipated third album WildThings was written and recorded in Los Angeles. Pip Brown talks to Zoë Radas about how the magic and strangeness of her new home informed her new record.

everything WildThings is about: it has very emotive synth lines (think CHVRCHES), sparse pops of digital keys, and terribly fearless Sky Ferreira-style drums: a ticking hi-hat and a thumping snare that falls in pitch as it lifts the marimba- tinged synths into the chorus. “It’s about obsession, which is one of my favourite things,” says Brown. “I’m fascinated by unhealthy obsessions, and how people become unhealthily obsessed with other people, whether they’re famous or not. You can delude yourself into thinking something is there that isn’t.”

P each’s Castle, 12 Grimmauld Place, Maurice Sendak’s mind; to this list of chimerical locations we can now add another: Hillside Avenue. The difference with Ladyhawke’s imagined ‘safe place’ is, however, that it also exists in reality. “’Hillside Avenue’ is actually a street – it’s basically the street I live on,” the lauded New Zealand singer-songwriter, also known as Pip Brown, tells us. “It is also this place I imagined in my head. I’ve lived in the same [house] for three years, and in the space of my living there, I was in a really dark place and then all of a sudden I was feeling amazing. I went through all this at Hillside Avenue so I felt like that was

my sacred place,” she says. Brown’s fresh new album Wild Things could be most efficiently described as your life’s soundtrack if you lived on Sonic the Hedgehog’s tropical, secret-laden, pixelated Angel Island; as its central spot of importance, Hillside Avenue features pom-pom synths which open out to a calypso beat in the chorus, and a melody full of aspiration and promise. “I’d wake up and the sun was shining every day; it’s so sunny in LA, and there are lots of beautiful trees around my

Wild Things by

Ladyhawke is out on June 3.

She's also touring in July; check ladyhawkemusic.com for details.

JUNE 2016

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