Domestic disco! How messages from a marriage became a unique double LP
When you are a musician and the primary parent at home – with five children between you and your partner – how do you make space to be creative? Especially when you have recently arrived in Britain from Brazil, and your husband, with whom you regularly make music, is often away for his work.
Out of the culture shock and loneliness, Laima Leyton has made an album full of sharp, precise electronic pop: the inventive and thoughtful Home. Pulsing in between the sounds of Jenny Hval, Ladytron and Laurie Anderson, it is about the questions thrown at you by long-term relationships, parenthood and where you belong. “I got to the stage where I wasn’t fussed about being a big techno DJ any more, pleasing the kids,” Leyton says. “I thought: ‘Why can’t I share the other things I think about? Why can’t I turn that into music?’”
Leyton’s musical life has almost always involved Iggor Cavalera, her partner of 15 years and a founder member and former drummer of the metal band Sepultura (before then, Leyton worked in an art gallery). Since 2009, the couple have made electronic music as Mixhell and, since 2016, played live with Soulwax, Leyton on synths and backing vocals. They coparent four children from previous relationships, and a son, Antonio, from their own. “Being on stage, being glamorous, being centre of attention, having champagne backstage …” Leyton reels off the experiences with mock grandeur. “Then you come home to the laundry and the dishes, which applies to most musicians in the world, unless you’re a super-superstar. But that switch is not always a bad thing. It makes you think what home means.”
Home was not São Paulo, for instance, where Leyton comes from. She says the Brazilian music industry is geared towards commercial success, which didn’t fit the music she wanted to make. Being with like-minded friends in a creative city felt more homely in theory, but Leyton found London’s weather “depressing”, her new existence isolating. She also hated the “nagging texts” she was sending her husband after he got work overseas – although she says she is very happy being the main parent at home: she is the kind of mum already begging the older kids to make her a grandmother.
But then an idea struck. “Instead of sending him emails or texts, I started sending him poems over synths.” They are a beguiling mix. The first she wrote was Poem to Iggor: its lyrics detail “the days that everything seems undone”, “the unfinished songs I don’t sing”. Before America suggests deeper intimacies (“my inside buttons, swallowed secrets and the black bath tub”), while others have meaty names such as Power, Future and Anxiety. “I liked using big titles then dismantling them,” Leyton says.
The best are inspired by her children. Power came after a conversation with Antonio, now 13, about death, while Home explores the weird pushand-pull of a mother wanting her own creative life: “The fear of living, the crave of leaving.” Leyton has never distanced work from her kids, she says; she even snuck Antonio underneath her DJ booth once to show him what she did. She has also been busy working with the charity In Place of War as musical director of the Grrrl Project in recent years, bringing together female musicians from Ghana, Bangladesh, Brazil, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and the UK.
It’s another project, she says, that feels like home. “Sometimes I’m desperate to go [to project initiatives] for weeks, then I’m crying on the plane. And the kids are like: ‘Mum, we’re happy for you, please go.’ Men just go. Women often don’t have the confidence to go.” Not that motherhood is a weak state – as one insistent, clubby track, Disco Pregnancy, asserts. “Pregnant women get treated like vulnerable creatures, which is crazy,” says Leyton. “I’ve never felt so strong since. I mean, I’m growing two people here.”
Leyton’s poems kept coming. Cavalera loved them. Soulwax’s David and Stephen Dewaele felt the same (they are releasing them on their label, Deewee). It felt great making the tracks alone, Leyton says, but they needed beats, so she got Cavalera to do them while reacting to the music for the first time. And rather than syncing them together into a digital album, Home is a vinyl-only release of two albums packaged together. Tonal (Leyton) and
Rhythmical (Cavalera) have to be played simultaneously, like an art piece, on two different turntables, to show the effort and the communication undergone (a digital single is planned for 2020). “It made perfect sense,” she says. “The songs opened doors for us to talk about things that we wouldn’t have had the courage to otherwise. Releasing the music like this shows it so clearly.”
The day her promo copies were going to arrive, Leyton was happy to leave the house to get on with everyday life; Cavalera was too excited to go out. “And the kids were excited, too.” Knowing that all this excitement came from her own creative impetus was pretty good, she says. “It’s genuinely changed how we communicate as a family. And for that to come from me … there’s just this joy.”
• The Tonal side of Home is out on 8 November on Deewee/The Vinyl Factory