How Beyond The Wizards Sleeve Make Magic

Electronic dance music has long flirted with psychedelia. But London's eccentric Beyond The Wizards Sleeve — Erol Alkan and Richard Norris — have developed a heavier variant influenced as much by rock as acid house and Balearica. Now the DJ combo have dropped their debut, The Soft Bounce, via Alkan's Phantasy label — touting it as "a trip album in the widest sense." They even out-trip The Avalanches' Wildflower. 

Alkan and Norris are both veterans. Norris has had a particularly serpentine career. In the late '80s he formed The Grid with Soft Cell's David Ball, airing the infamous Swamp Thing — techno-meets-banjos. Recently, he's worked as The Time And Space Machine. The former NME journo also wrote Paul Oakenfold: The Authorised Biography. Meanwhile, Alkan promoted the fabled '90s indie-electro club Trash. He'd pioneer the mash-up (Kylie Minogue recreated his Can't Get Blue Monday Out Of My Head at the Brits). Alkan then became a go-to producer, guiding Late Of The Pier's classic LP Fantasy Black Channel.

"We like a challenge, and we like putting things together — try things out that you wouldn't imagine would work but that, when they do, it's magic." 

Trash brought Alkan and Norris together. "It just sounded like an indie disco, but on steroids," Norris enthuses. BTWS would do something similar to Trash — smash together "disparate" styles, in this instance '60s psych and electronica. BTSW switched between editing '60s records, to crafting (official) "re-animations" — trippy remixes — of contemporary acts such as The Chemical Brothers. Says Norris, "We like a challenge, and we like putting things together — try things out that you wouldn't imagine would work but that, when they do, it's magic." 

In 2014 BTWS "reanimated" English neo-psychedelia band Temples' Sun Structures album, prompting them to finally consider making their own. "I suppose it gave us an inkling as to what it could become," Alkan recalls. "What we did with Temples was more of a journey. It felt that, if we were gonna make a record, our record should be a journey as such. It wouldn't be a meteoric instrumental record or anything like that. It had to have songs and moments and corners, mountains…"

The BTWS aesthetic has evolved. Their single Diagram Girl, featuring Irish experimental popster Hannah Peel, is less psy-indie, more shoegaze disco. "I think it's always been quite a wide-ranging brief," Norris ponders. "We're just fans of a lot of different types of music… The majority of it started as '60s records, and weird '60s records, but it's gone quite a way beyond that." The biggest surprise on The Soft Bounce are the curated vocalists — Mystery Jets frontman Blaine Harrison, folkie Jane Weaver, and US singer/songwriter Holly Miranda. "We chose them on their talent," Alkan shares. "Also it's fair to say that the actual songs or the backing tracks that they eventually sang on kinda chose them as well, 'cause you can be sitting in the studio and it'll just come to you. You'll say, 'Wouldn't be great if this person was on it?' The people that we chose were people that all could be seen as outsiders in their own right. They're all people who, within their own careers, have done things their own way and are very interesting and very left-of-centre — and I think that's something that's very important to us. We didn't particularly go and choose who the hottest new vocalist is or someone from a band who'd just come off a successful record or such."