“You find different corners of your personality in unknown spaces”: Lex Amor in conversation with Debby Friday

North London rapper Lex Amor and Canadian artist Debby Friday connect to discuss poetry, creative freedom and environment as inspiration.

Lex Amor likens writing music to running inside “a really big hall.” There is room to play, but eventually, you will hit a wall. You have to respect the space. Next month, Southbank Centre will debut its bespoke large-scale experimental audio project, Concrete Voids, turning the building into a live instrument to literally embody the hall of sound that Lex imagines herself writing in. 

Designed by sound technician Tony Birch, the installation will feature over 80 speakers hidden within the chambers and vents of the Queen Elizabeth Hall auditorium. Within this sound world, Lex plans to bend reality with a reflective blend of music and poetry that assumes “anything can be anything” and stretches the creative push and pull between restriction and space to its limits. 

Lex has crafted her smooth, yet stirring sound replete with introspective, softly-spoken lyrics over time spent performing poetry at open mic nights and absorbing the swing and R&B tunes she heard while growing up on an estate in Highbury. If writing music is like running inside a hall, writing poetry is “running in a field where you can run in any direction.” 

Like Lex, Debby Friday writes creative poetry and prose to bend space and explore personal philosophies. Her ecstatic electro-pop and frenetic onstage energy itches a different scratch from the poetic musings she shares on thediaries.online, meditating on technology, love and spirituality. 

In a world that seeks easy categorisations, Lex and Debby refuse to let their writing be boxed into one discipline. Music is a canvas for their curiosity. It’s a stage for their written ideas to have a broader reach. Ahead of Lex’s Concrete Voids performance, we brought these two artists together to discuss the creative freedom of music versus poetry, inspiration found in different physical spaces and the role of the artist in preserving history.

 

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Lex, your show at Concrete Voids will feature a custom-built sound system with over 80 hidden speakers that will turn the building into a live instrument. How has this influenced the way that you’ve planned the performance?

Lex Amor: We’re trying to bend reality. Where we are in the world, the concept of reality as a solid construct is becoming increasingly void, pun intended. We’re going with the idea that anything can be anything. Everything can be everything. So I’m being super ambitious. There’s no idea that’s off the cards. It’s nice to work with people who are really, really good at what they do, really passionate and open. Shout out to Tony Birch. He’s a genius. 

How important is space and environment to you, both when you are performing and as a source of inspiration?

Debby Friday: I move around a lot when I perform. I remember once I played in a venue where the audience was 360, all around me. It almost felt more ritualistic or communal because you don’t have the same divide of like, OK, I’m the performer here, and then the audience is there. It was like I was connecting with more people, and I was seeing different aspects of the room from different vantage points. I felt like I got a 360 view and a 360 experience. 

L: Yeah, space is super important. Anywhere I can be comfortably and safely myself is where I’ll be my best self, but there are spaces that require you to contour a little bit. Sometimes creating a little bit of tension in your body can be interesting as well. 

I started writing in bedrooms and familiar spaces like that, then I moved to studios and I think there’s something about that tension, about that slight unease, that can be interesting. It’s in spaces like that where you find out things about yourself that you wouldn’t necessarily find out if you were somewhere where you feel super comfortable. You find different corners of your personality in unknown spaces. Both the comfortable and uncomfortable have their benefits and their merits.

Lex, your Concrete Voids performance merges music and poetry. You both write creatively separate to your music. Do you approach this writing the same way you approach music? 

L: The only thing that comes to mind that would make the two distinct is the form and boundaries of writing. I feel like you have to be a little bit more obedient to and aware of space when writing to music. It requires a bit more humility. It’s not just a stream of consciousness. Poetry is like running in a field where you can run in any direction. Music feels like running but inside a really big hall. There are walls, so you can only run so far in one direction. You’ve got to know where the walls are. I think that the hall can be as big or as small as you need it to be, but restriction, or respect, or humility, is the distinction between poetry and writing lyrics.

D: They’re both forms of expression, and they can look really similar a lot of the time. I’ve had it happen where something will start off as a poem or a story and I’ll turn that into a song, or something starts off as a song and I take that and change that into prose. When you put music into the mix, that makes it a little bit more three-dimensional. It’s a different kind of writing because now this is writing that’s happening in tandem with music, which is in tandem with time.

Do you think that poetry and creative writing offers more freedom than music does? Does music feel more commercial?

D: In a way, music can be more free. There’s more freedom to experiment in very unconventional ways. You can get really, truly experimental with the way that you make music and use your voice. But I think that creative writing and poetry is more freeing in a privacy sense. When it comes to being a public-facing musician, yes, you’re writing things for yourself, but there is always the subconscious consideration that other people are going to perceive this and respond to this, and this is part of your musical output, and now it’s part of your discography, and you’re going to put it online. There are these subconscious considerations. When it comes to creative writing, what I write down doesn’t feel as public in the same way. When you read, you’re reading alone and you’re reading in your head, so there’s privacy for the person perceiving it that you don’t always get with music.

L: I agree. It’s really dependent on the songs and it’s dependent on the writing style. I like what you said about awareness about being perceived. It made me think about how the music I make is so internal sometimes that I forget that an ear outside of me is going to hear it and develop a perception of me. I think the closer I can get to forgetting that, the truer the writing is. As you said, the songs I feel are most reflective of me are the ones where I felt confident enough to be super esoteric and cryptic with my writing in a way that maybe only I understand. Then the music adds in melody and other signifiers that are a little bit broader and more open to interpretation and acceptance. Maybe not everyone’s going to understand 100% of what you’re saying, but they’re feeling something and that’s powerful. That’s the truest way to communicate. Just feel it. Feel it before you hear it.

Lex, you’ve said before that you believe in the role of artists to preserve histories and culture through their art and through their music.  

L: I believe in the role of artistry. Creation is the biggest marvel. We forget that everything around us is created. When it comes to art, there’s an additional responsibility that comes with that. I don’t know if that responsibility is sweet or punitive. Everyone is different, but I think there’s something beautiful about the role, and the opportunity, that comes with it to synthesise a human experience in the same way that other artists have allowed me to feel more involved in the world through sharing their experiences. Musicians do exactly the same thing. Somebody can be on the other corner of the earth and listen to a lyric because the shared human experience transcends all of the archetypes, or whatever it is that we use to define ourselves. I think it brings us back to ourselves, to humanity. There’s a beautiful humanising effect to art, and that’s reflected through music, so the responsibility is there. It’s inevitable.

D: Yeah. With artists preserving culture and history, it kind of just happens on its own. It is inevitable because we’re expressing culture. We’re part of history, so it’s being preserved in the art form itself. I often think about being an artist as being a channel. You’re just open and you express whatever is coming through in the zeitgeist, and you’re in step with whatever is happening. I don’t know if I necessarily see it as a super active thing that I’m doing because that doesn’t really resonate with me. I think it just happens with the expression. I saw that a lot with the art that came out of Covid, with the things that were made around that time or just before or after it. You can feel that tipping point in society through the art.

And what advice would you give to writers and musicians who are just starting out, particularly those who want to work across multiple creative disciplines?

D: Number one piece of advice; keep going, bitch. Just keep going. Never give up. There are always going to be obstacles. There are always going to be challenges. There is always going to be suffering, but you actually cannot give up. I think the only way to be successful at anything is through perseverance and resilience. Sometimes it means you might have to course correct and edit yourself and make little tweaks and changes, but never give up on yourself, your creativity and your expression. Always have your vision in mind and keep going towards it.

L: Don’t look left. Don’t look right. Follow your road. Your journey is unique. Your journey is yours. Put one foot in front of the other. Don’t look left. Don’t look right.