Interview: Lancing Hnad
The strange aspect of the creative process, although well, at least for me, is that you can try and write something for all loads of time, and nothing happens. And then one day you stumble on something, and it's just like all of a sudden. I just came up with one riff and then the whole piece just seemed to make sense and I mapped it out quite quickly within a few weeks really and the bones of this 32-minute piece.
The hype and limelight of festival line-up announcements are usually stolen by bigger artists for the initial moments after the reveal, before eyes wander to the lower rows. One such name settled in the smaller text which will have been somewhat unknown in the latest Arctangent announcement is Manchester’s Lancing Hand. With no music released and little presence online it may have come as a bit of a surprise to be announced. Gary Davidson caught up with Liam Stewart of Floodlit Recordings latest artist before the Arctangent announcement to discuss the history, the band set up and the decisions around recording a debut release as a singular 32 minute song which traverses stoner, doom, drone and post-rock.
E&D: What is your musical background, which bands have you been in and where have they been based?
Liam: I’ve been in gigging bands since I was around 16 and started doing melodic punk rock and a lot of DIY shows generally centred around Manchester. When I was in my 20s I played guitar in a band called The Freezing Fog for a few years and we did a few albums and tours. I’ve primarily been a drummer in bands but did bits on guitar, the Freezing Fog being the longest thing I’ve done on guitar. Like most drummers I joined a million bands and I probably can’t even remember how many things I’ve done. Then I started gigging a bit more professionally, I played drums for an artist called LoneLady, and currently playing in a band called TVAM.
E&D: What led to the formation of Lancing Hand?
Liam: I’ve sporadically written things and had projects that have done a few gigs here and there over the last few years. Lancing Hand sprung up from a project called Burrowing, which isn’t a band more a collective. I would write stuff and then when it comes to recording just ask various people to join in. So Lancing Hand is kind of like something that’s born from that kind of thing that I’ve been doing for years but just very different to anything I’ve ever done before really.
E&D: Was there a difference in sound that led you to starting something with a new name?
Liam: Yeah, to be honest, this sort of came really out of the blue. I was writing loads of stuff for various things which were a lot more synth based and fairly poppy stuff. I wasn’t intending to write anything like that but it just literally started one day, I just stumbled upon an idea whilst playing guitar. The strange aspect of the creative process, although well, at least for me, is that you can try and write something for all loads of time, and nothing happens. And then one day you stumble on something, and it’s just like all of a sudden. I just came up with one riff and then the whole piece just seemed to make sense and I mapped it out quite quickly within a few weeks really and the bones of this 32-minute piece. It did seem to emerge quite naturally but I didn’t really intend to do it.
E&D: In the current climate of streaming and vinyl, was there any part of you that thought about breaking it down or how did you conclude it just needs to be one piece of music?
Liam: To me, it just makes sense as this one long piece that has different movements but I think it’s just the way it seemed to emerge as one thing. I didn’t necessarily write chunks of it separately. I was speaking to Joe (Clayton, No Studio and Floodlit Recordings) when recording and was asking is this ridiculous? It is a bit ridiculous, a 32-minute piece. It just felt like that’s how I wanted to present it because that’s how it made sense to me and how it was created. And thankfully Joe said yes and he completely understood. I guess we just thought let’s just stick to our guns, and at the end of the day, if someone wants to skip it, they can just skip along. Just to put a tiny inconvenience in there. It makes sense to us as one piece.
I originally wanted to literally have this narrative of a flood. It was going to just be very specifically about a flood. It kind of is about that still, but it went a little bit more abstract as the lyrics emerged, and the theme of it I guess it is just because that’s how it makes sense, and I think I wanted to stick with it because I’ve got this real fondness for things like Old Man Gloom, Seminar 3, even though it’s not One Piece in my head, I consider it to be one piece, or Godspeed and classic stoner epics like Dope Smoker by Sleep. The big, epic one-track monologue. I’ve always wanted to do something like that, just really just go out on a limb, so I guess this is the moment.
E&D: For recording you went into No Studio to record with Joe Clayton. What led to the decision to record in a studio?
Liam: One of my other bands that’s currently dormant, called Nasdaq, did a bit of recording with Joe. I went down to sit in on the guitar recording, and just really liked the vibe and sound and Joe was great to work with. I just saved up some money and wanted to do this properly. I like the sound he gets on his records and it was the closest to what I could imagine the piece to sound like. So it just made total sense and I feel like that’s what we’ve got and it’s as close to what I imagined it to sound like in my head beforehand.
E&D: How many other people did you have involved in the recordings and were they adding parts in collaboration or following what you had written for them?
Liam: A bit of both, to be honest and there are quite a few people involved as well. I went in and did drums, bass and guitar in those first sessions, the nuts and bolts. Then, to be honest, I didn’t actually have a plan. I knew vaguely who I wanted to get involved and the first person was Ed (Godby Beecher/The Freezing Fog). Ed’s an old school friend I’ve known most of my life, we’ve done various bands together and because it’s the heaviest thing I’ve done I said I’ve done this thing, do you want to do vocals? Literally, it was just literally as casual as that, just sent it to him. I kind of did that with everyone who’s involved in it.
A good friend of mine, Ian (Dominic Breen) who plays in a band called Claw the Thin Ice has done a lot, vocals, synth, bass and he did a lot of the initial mixing as well. My friend Ella, did saxophone, and another good friend Dan did violin.
I’d written lyrics I wasn’t actually that confident of at the time but just sent them to Ed and he just did it really quickly, said they fit really well with the song.
I didn’t really instruct anyone apart from the mood and feel of the piece. I needed people with fresh ears to hear it and put their ideas to it. And I always really like that, because it’s a pleasant surprise to get something really amazing back that you’ve never really thought of. And that was kind of what happened with each person, like, laying down the vocal, synth, saxophone, violin. Everything that came back was just brilliant, and took it in a direction I couldn’t have imagined.
E&D: Does Ed do all the vocals on the track?
Liam: The first bit is Ian, and then once it kicks in that’s when Ed starts, and then they do loads of harmony stuff. And then right towards the end, my friend Ellen does vocal harmonies on it too. But yeah, Ed does the lion’s share, like 70% of it.
E&D: When in the process of being in the studio and recording with Joe did conversations about release come into it?
Liam: I think pretty much at that first session somewhat. Joe didn’t make any promises, he just casually said somewhere down the line he was up for helping get this out. Then there was a fairly long gap because Joe moved studio and me and the other collaborators did a lot of sending WeTransfer links backwards and forwards. So I didn’t speak for quite a while then it got to a place where it was more or less done and I spoke to him again and brought up the release again and he was still keen, so yeah pretty much at those first sessions really.
E&D: Musically what inspired you for Lancing Hand and what influences do you think come through in the recorded music?
Liam: I suppose musically I wanted to do something in the ballpark of Neurosis and Old Man Gloom in creating a deep atmosphere with some big droney sections in it. I listen to a lot of neoclassical stuff these days like Nils Frahm and Winged Victory For The Sullen so I wanted to have elements of drumless passages linking different passages of the song helping to contribute to a world-building sort of thing, to create a world to get lost in. I think some of those influences, especially in the heavy guitar are like Times of Grace era Neurosis. One thing I didn’t realize was how the second half was quite grungy and Sabbath-y. I didn’t intend to do that so it has emerged slightly differently to how I thought it would but in a really nice way. I think that’s largely because of all the people who’ve done their parts on it have created a very different world to what I initially imagined but in a really good way.
E&D: Trying to come up with a FFO does create a bit of a list as there are hints of that stoner touch of Bossk in there and then the drone and string elements have Godspeed notes, it does touch a few different areas.
Liam: I’m quite pleased as it does reflect a lot of the heavy music I’ve been listening to over the last few years. I kind of lost touch with heavy music for a while but during Covid and lockdowns I started to get back into Converge and that led me to rediscovering my love for things like Alice in Chains and a lot of, like, that kind of stuff and I think that’s definitely fed into the second half of it.
E&D: It started as a solo project then into somewhat of a collaboration for the recording. Is Lancing Hand something you see progressing into a live environment?
Liam: Yeah, definitely. We’ve been chatting about that at the moment, actually. Probably not for a little while but there’s definitely talk of some gigs next summer. We’ve had one or two offers but it’s not even really a band yet, but it’s very near. We’ve got a core line-up sorted now and we’re gonna start rehearsing it in December. We’ve made things very difficult for ourselves, although I am in Todmorden near Manchester and Ian (Dominic Breen guitar/vocals/synth) is in Manchester , Ed’s (Godby, vocals) in Belgium and Ash (Babb, drums/artwork) is in London. We are going to get together without Ed until later down the line and start pulling it all together. I don’t really have any intention to gig it extensively but it’d be nice to do a handful playing the piece in full as much as possible.
E&D: When you have one piece of music for 30 minutes, do you find practicing for that would be more difficult than having five songs?
Liam: Probably, although in terms of a rehearsal we would break it up into the different movements, and then just put it back together. With some of the sections it’s just improvised, really. Especially in the droney moments and I would quite like to keep that aspect of it live, and have an element of improvisation, where we’ll have the sort of basic drone, but not really script what happens over the top. Have it be different each time, just whatever happens on the night, really. I think we’d find it very hard, if we did try and very faithfully reproduce what we did on the recording.
