The Melodic

The Melodic are a quietly radical band.
 
Conscious and quiet, they are the first young English band to lionise Chilean neo-folk rebel Victor Jara since Sandinista-era Clash.
 
Maybe the most innovative English folk band since Pentangle's jazz/folk fusion of the early 70s, they harness a syncretic sound decorated with charango and kora that makes you think of what would have happened if Paul Simon was raised an Englishman in Brixton.
 
Lovers of the studio who let the story of their songs unfold slowly like Leonard Cohen, The Melodic’s stunning debut album Effra Parade is self recorded in a sound proofed boy's bedroom over years with a baroque line-up of 18 instruments.
 
But if this is the first you have heard of this band in their early 20s then consider this. The Melodic have never been in a rush and have never done much shouting.
 
The Melodic are a collective of musicians that formally went under the moniker Melodica Melody and Me who have taken a slow and steady route to perfecting their sound. The band focuses around  the schoolboy friendship of principal songwriters Huw Williams and Rudi Schmidt who first started teaching themselves to play guitar at 16 in Rudi's Mum's attic in 2004.
 
They arrived at their unique musical DNA evolving their taste together, rejecting the music that was all around them as teens in late 00s South London.
 
Huw grew up amongst his Dad's 60’s folk revival records of artists Bert Jansch, Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel, entranced by the sounds he set about exploring the collections of archivists Cecil Sharp and Francis Child in the pursuit of British traditional folk music. ‘It’s hard to say why this type of music resonated with me so strongly above the American hip hop and UK garage that was massive amongst my schoolmates. I guess there was something I found captivating in the storytelling nature of folk music that offered a pathway to a simpler, bucolic way of life. It was interesting that there was often no known author to the songs. They had passed through the ages by an oral tradition evolving along the way. Singing them connected me to this process.’ 
 
Rudi recalls a similar musical revelation 'A shelf in the kitchen of my teenage girlfriend's house was devoted to her parents 70s British and American folk albums, as well as some reggae. To me they sounded so fresh and new which got me excited about searching for music that I hadn't heard before.'
 
 
Rudi's Mother's partner at the time was the maverick musician and composer Nick Pynn. Not only did he give him guitar lessons but their Brixton house was full of the archaic hybrid musical instruments he played. There was a mandocello (18th century Vinaccia school designed, it is to the mandolin what the cello is to the violin), an Appalachian dulcimer (invented by 19th century Scotch-Irish in the southern Appalachian mountains) not to mention a cocolele (a ukulele made out of coconut).
 
Another school friend originally from Chile lent them his family's charango and a beloved melodica (as heard in his favourite Augustus Pablo records). Their vision slowly came together.
Before they had even mastered these instruments, they started to piece together songs, testing them out across various South London open mic nights. Then through word of mouth they were booked for bigger and bigger shows. A Bombay Bicycle Club support tour and Electric Picnic Festival. Bestival booked them to headline a tent. Radio 1 played their tracks.
 
As they went to university they released a couple of singles on indie label Everybody's Stalking – 'Come Outside' and 'Piece Me Back Together'.
 
And slowly, in between studying, they started to record their debut album. Rudi moved out of his bedroom to a squat down the road so they could soundproof his room and turn it into a studio
 
While Rudi's step-father is an instrument enthusiast, his father is a Bafta Award winning sound editor for British movies like The Kings Speech. He brought this sense of creating a musical picture as he helped the young band record and grow into a studio band.
 
'Our approach with our songs is almost as if painting. Building layers, replacing others until we get the music to say what we want it to' says Rudi. 'I listened to a lot of music, analysing how they did things and trying to work out inventive ways to make the music fresh. We naturally looked towards Lee Perry's production in the mid-70. But we were also really influenced by Bob Jonston who produced Leonard Cohen. He was the producer who set Cohen aside from his 'folk' contemporaries. Although you barely realise at first, his records were very produced, with voices swelling in the background and mechanical instruments swaying into the foreground taking you on a journey'.
 
Rudi fell deeper in love with the charango. So much so, in early 2012 he made a pilgrimage to Bolivia to study with Ernesto Cavour – possibly the greatest charango player of all time. So impressed by the dedica