LIVERPOOL’S DIALECT SPEAKS IN TONGUES OF ELECTROACOUSTIC CHAMBER-JAZZ
“We wanted to get the music to as big an audience as possible.” ANDREW PM HUNT
IF THERE’S a slight echo to Andrew PM Hunt’s voice it’s because he’s calling from the wooden dome of Bidston Observatory on the Wirral. Built in 1866 and now an artistic research centre, it’s where the musician is currently working on ideas for his next Dialect album, the follow-up to 2021’s under~between, a fluid, delicate, beguiling blend of chamber music, folksy found-sound and jazz miniatures. It’s MOJO’s Underground Album Of The Year.
“I’m here for the week,” he says in his soft-edged Scouse accent, testament to growing up on the Wirral, before moving to Liverpool as a teenager. “I’m experimenting with the acoustics and songcraft. I’m basically spoilt rotten here.”
Songcraft has always been at the heart of Hunt’s recorded work, ever since his first group, Liverpool quintet Outfit, were fleetingly touted as the next big art-pop thing back in 2011. “Outfit definitely harboured delusions that we might make it,” says Hunt. “Always with a cynical Northern edge, but yeah, we definitely wanted to get the music to as big an audience as possible.”
Wisely investing some of the band’s publishing money on building a studio in the house he shared with other local musicians, Hunt started to compose solo music under the name Dialect, music inspired by the sounds that had occupied his childhood.
“My dad played the piano,” he explains, “and mum played the trombone. They met each other playing in an orchestra. A lot of those acoustic sounds I grew up with fed into Dialect, along with the more exploratory tracks by bands like Can, Gong and Faust, the ones I’d skipped as a teenager.”
An interest in these mid-’70s European music-making collectives has also meant that, for the past 10 years, Hunt has lived in communal arts spaces, first a one-time nursing home, Croxteth Lodge, and now the former Brazilian embassy in Sefton Park, where Hunt is de
facto caretaker and collaborates with Benjamin D Duvall of Liverpool percussive ensemble Ex-Easter Island Head on his other current music project, Land Trance. It’s there that the duo recorded their debut album, 2021’s dreamlike, melancholy
First Seance and its follow-up, Embassy Nocturnes, a somnolent collaboration with doom-noir jazz quintet Aging that still retains the trademark stripped-back sound of his Dialect projects.
“That’s something I got from listening to late Talk Talk,” says Hunt, “where everything is super-dry, no vibrato, you can hear each instrument and there’s a real intimacy to it. I’ve been experimenting with my voice in the observatory, writing lyrics… I’m thinking of bringing in more of that for the next Dialect record but…” He pauses, caught out by his own enthusiasm.
“That’s a cat that needs to be kept in the bag.”