Words by Chal Ravens

“It’s lonely making music on your own,” says the artist behind one-man band Skinny Pelembe. “But at the same time I recognise that I'm a megalomaniac egohead, so I can't give up things to other people easily.” Doya Beardmore is prone to cheery self-deprecation, a quirk that flows naturally through his soft Yorkshire accent. Born in Johannesburg and raised in Doncaster, his sound is as bittersweet as an overcast summer day, splashed with psychedelia yet rooted in the dust and grime of the everyday, and recalling the emotional currents of artists like King Krule and The Invisible. These days he’s back in Doncaster, splitting his production hours between his own house, where thin walls dictate headphone listening only, and a studio where he collaborates with trusted adviser Malcolm Catto, co-founder of outré jazz ensemble The Heliocentrics.

The first Skinny Pelembe single, the boom-bap ballad I’ll Be On Your Mind, was picked up in 2018 by tastemaker Gilles Peterson for his talent-spotting series, Future Bubblers. Since then, Beardmore has released a handful more tracks and remixes and a remarkable debut album, introducing himself as the kind of artist who can pull off bold studio experiments on a shoestring budget, whether he’s sampling from charity shop records or filming DIY videos for the price of a pizza. Led by Beardmore’s distorted, half-rapped vocals, Dreaming Is Dead Now emerges from the fog as a reluctant pop record, held together by flecks of soul, jazz, post-rock and – with its heavy tape delay effects and studio-bound experimentalism – the unending legacy of dub.

A self-taught guitarist, Beardmore played in garage bands as a teenager before discovering the beat-making software eJay. “Maybe that's why loop-based music is so big now,” he jokes, “it's nothing to do with trends – it's just that loads of schools got eJay and now everyone thinks about music in that blocky way.” He starting hanging out at a studio in Doncaster, Higher Rhythm, where he learned the basics of recording and production, and eventually joined a band based at The Roundhouse in London, where his bandmates included fellow Future Bubbler Rahel Debebe-Dessalegne from next-gen jazz outfit Hejira.

Working alone holds a certain appeal for the “egohead” producer, but when Brownswood signed his album, Beardmore brought in Heliocentrics production Whiz Catto to help realise his lofty ambitions. “When I started working with Malcolm he was like, ‘What do you wanna do?’ I wanted the record to be somewhere between Neil Young and Madlib,” says Beardmore. “They’re the two cornerstones.” The grizzled country-rock legend and the sample-mining hip-hop producer couldn’t be more different, from a distance, but for Beardmore they both represent a deeply personal and intuitive approach to musicianship. 

Young “has just got actual songs for days, never mind good production,” he continues. “Like on the Live At Massey Hall album where it's just him and a piano, and it's better than all of his ‘produced’ albums – he's just there with one instrument. That's testament to the songs. I like that he has that shaky voice that's not even in tune but it's so personable and sounds so close. It's really honest.” As for Madlib, it’s the sense of freedom in his “weird, freaky beats” that appeals, a style that feels entirely idiosyncratic. Is intuition a guiding principle for Beardmore? “I would say yes,” he deadpans, “but I’ve already scrapped this album twice and started it over, so it would be a lie.”

The latest Skinny Pelembe release follows in the giant footsteps of Madlib by reimagining a recording from the archives of legendary jazz label Blue Note, an exercise that the Californian super-producer tried out on his 2003 album Shades Of Blue. Beardmore picked out a 1965 piece by pianist Andrew Hill, a shuffling groove titled ‘Illusion’, from which a tiny, three-second fragment caught his ear. Unfortunately, great minds are known to think alike. “I was listening to Madlib's album and there's this one track called 'Andrew Hill Break' – and he had picked out literally the same three seconds of the tune! Out of all of that tune! So it was back to the drawing board.” 

Instead, he enlisted Catto and fellow Heliocentrics member Jake Fergusion to record their own version of ‘Illusion’ in order to generate percussion and bass stems to manipulate. “I put that through the MPC, chopped it up, put it through a Moog envelope filter and added loads of tremolo and vibrato – which is how we got that engine room rumble in the middle,” he says, pointing to Jack White’s heavy rock project The Dead Weather as inspiration. His X guitar line, meanwhile, was designed to channel the feeling of ‘70s Nigerian funk like The Lijadu Sisters’ ‘Life Is Gone Down Low’. “But we forgot about the fact that the original has strings – that's kind of the main feature,” he laughs, “so that's when I brought in some Spitfire strings. [The result] doesn't sound like the original, but it’s trying to reference it slightly.”

Drawing on the skills of his multi-instrumentalist collaborators as well as his sample-focused home setup, Beardmore composes with the scattershot freedom of a self-taught musician. But as every bedroom producer knows, making music on the computer can itself be an obstacle to creativity. To escape square-eyed repetition, he tends to start a track away from the screen. “I'm trying to get away from being on the computer – too many distractions, I've got no self control. I've got rid of my smartphone, I'm on this now,” he says, holding up a black brick. “I have to delete my messages after I get, like, 30.”

Recently he’s been trying some low-tech studio hacks to push himself towards the finishing line, like the giant egg-timer which he uses to divide up tasks and rattle through deadlines. That’s the idea, anyway. “If the task isn’t done by the time [the sand is] gone then I need to move on,” he explains. How long does that take? “Er, I don't know. It's too short though, ‘cos everything is half-done at the moment. I can't finish anything in the time that it takes,” he laughs. “It kept me on track in the beginning, but now it has lost its potency.”

The songwriting process usually begins with his MPC and a stack of old records picked up from a charity shop. “The expensive records have already been sampled, so I'll get some western theme tunes or soundtracks. There's a track on the new album that's got these strings from a ‘70s sitcom that never took off. I'll sample them into the MPC and warp everything to make some kind of beat or texture, something that you wouldn't be able to recognise.” Using the sample as scaffolding, he adds layers of drums and guitar, building up the track until the original elements are no longer needed. “It’s just a few walls to hold you in while you're jumping about,” he says. “Then I'll take out the sample, because there's too many frequencies and it sounds like shit. And I can't afford it! It's like being able to jam with anyone you want, but you get to mangle them without their permission.

The song itself emerges through Beardmore’s guitar and voice – two especially personal instruments, on which players tend to be self-taught. Guitar is “the perfect instrument to express yourself with,” he agrees. “You just hobble along and find your way, and you can develop those mistakes that become your style.” Once he’s got the basic elements recorded, he carries out further experiments through software like Guitar Rig, “which I guess proper guitarists hate, but I like it! I use the beat slicer a lot – that's a bit of software that nearly every track goes through.” Sometimes no amount of clever FX tweaks are enough. For ‘I’ll Be On Your Mind’, he ditched the guitar part for a sample of a trumpeting elephant. “I’m not good at distortion and it was sounding a bit Van Halen – I couldn’t get the right tone. So I got an elephant, ran that through a sampling keyboard and messed around with the amp while we were doing it.”

Beardmore’s go-to studio tweaks often play with such unexpected switch-ups or unsettled contrasts, especially when it comes to the mixdown where he likes to scuff up his smooth surfaces with splashes of lo-fi grot. When it came to ‘My Love Is Burning Down’ he took inspiration from Jamaican deejays like U-Roy, “where they’re chatting over [the music] and messing with faders. You can tell that it's on a crappy mixer.” He ran the stems through a DJ setup, took “a shit SM50 mic and was just shouting over the top. It turned out to be one of the best vocals on the album,” he says. On a vocal-led remix of Maribou State’s ‘Kāma’, he used a Tascam Portastudio tape machine to warp the pitch down on certain words, placing a pencil on the tape to create scattered moments of weirdness.

Combine such attention to detail with Beardmore’s desire for total control and you can understand why the new album has been scrapped twice already. “I get into the minutiae of it way too much. I really try not to because it doesn't make for great songs, it just makes for well-edited music.” Still, as anyone who’s channelled their “egohead” tendencies into music will understand, those drawbacks are often balanced by the fleeting assurance of self-belief. Like the time Madlib popped round to his Doncaster studio while on tour in England. Beardmore and Catto had been finishing off the album track ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’ when Catto got a text from Madlib’s manager, who happened to be his old label boss. “Malcolm turns round to me and says, ‘do you wanna meet Madlib?’” recounts Beardmore. “I'd only recently started drinking coffee – that day was like the second cup of coffee I’d ever had. I had on these light blue trousers, really just like pyjamas, and I was holding this coffee and the idea of meeting my hero just shook me, and I spilled it all over the trousers. I was going mad trying to dry them in the bathroom like Mr. Bean,” he laughs. When Madlib turned up he was as low-key as Beardmore had expected. “He doesn't really say anything. Malc played him what we were working on – against my wishes – but it was great, he was into it. Did he offer any suggestions? No. I wouldn't have listened anyway!”