Mica Levi: In dreams

“I was once driving on the motorway and the car next to us was the Ghostbusters car – they’re all wearing the uniform.”

I’m in Mica Levi’s studio in south east London, perched on an office chair they found abandoned in the street, when the conversation takes a turn for the surreal. “I was like, ‘Fucking hell! I didn’t know that you guys operated in England!’” they say in their characteristically dry tone. “Might have been in America, actually? I can’t remember where.”

Whether it’s blurry memories, fragments of dreams or revelations of offbeat inspirations from romcoms or horror films – they mention watching movies like Keeping the Faith and Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video – moments like this crop up throughout our conversation. After a while you begin to feel that, for Levi, the membrane between the conscious and subconscious, between wakefulness and sleep, is porous.

This fluid approach and broad range of influences has continually shaped their creative practice, as has their musical upbringing. Born in Surrey to parents who were both musicians – their mother is a cello teacher and their father a professor of music – Levi was raised in Watford, on the outskirts of London, before moving to the capital in their teens. Driven ever since by an intense curiosity and open-mindedness, Levi’s 15-year career to date is characterised by a shapeshifting ability to move between disparate musical traditions: one minute they’re writing a whimsical pop song and the next, they’re producing an unnerving film score. Feeling equally at ease with both underground artists and classical musicians has meant that they’ve managed to subtly infiltrate mainstream cultural institutions, and even Hollywood, despite remaining firmly rooted in south London’s DIY scene. One of their most recent projects saw them composing the score to Zola — a film based on a viral Twitter thread, in which two young women get entangled in a frenetic odyssey through Florida. It builds on their previous and highly-celebrated work on films such as Under the Skin, Monos and Jackie, and further shores up their distinction as arguably the most sought-after composer of their generation. Yet you sense that for Levi, this is all a slight inconvenience.

It’s a warm afternoon in August when I meet them at a train station in Lewisham. Despite the heat, they’re wearing all black: a black jumper with three silver alien heads on it, black tracksuit trousers with orange stripes, and black sunglasses. Walking with a slow, laid-back lope, we quickly fall into conversation (turns out we’ve both been having trouble sleeping recently) as they guide me to their studio space on the corner of a nearby road. They give me a brief history of the building: it was a fire station, a pub and a squat before becoming home to a community of artists and musicians. It’s a humble and unpretentious creative abode.

Levi spent a lot of the past year in the studio, making use of the space to create some structure in the face of the timealtering weirdness of lockdown. “I think I learnt a lot of things and slowed down,” they tell me. They learnt to “really think about what it is I want to do and what’s important to me, which is ever-changing. Just maintaining a good relationship with creativity”. In Levi’s case though, ‘slowing down’ has meant releasing two albums back to back – Ruff Dog, released in December 2020, and Blue Alibi, released in early 2021. Neither album is what you’d expect from an artist who first broke through with the subversive avant-pop of Micachu and the Shapes (the band reconfigured in 2016 as Good Sad Happy Bad). Ruff Dog is stripped back, noisy and raw – built from grungy, heavily distorted guitar and barely audible, reverb-laden vocals, as though the whole thing was recorded with rusty instruments in an abandoned railway tunnel. Blue Alibi is a little more melodic and melancholy; simple, heartfelt vocals with scatterings of field recordings and vocal contributions from friends, all members of the Curl collective that Levi is part of.

“I just felt like I needed to get some stuff off my chest,” Levi says of the pair of albums. “A lot of the things I do are in response to other people’s images, or collaborative with friends, which is great. But it was good to just do a printout of where I was at, and just get that relationship with making and releasing. It’s like dead weight otherwise.” Both albums were released with next to no fanfare and employ a consciously lo-fi aesthetic borne from a setup of guitar and mic. “I just recorded for ages and cut the bits out that felt good,” they explain.

In contrast to the more experimental use of instruments on previous albums, equipment was kept to a minimum on purpose. “There’s no screen. It’s just a physical connection – your voice and an instrument,” they say, quietly probing their relationship with technology. “I really like a lot of music made on computers – I’m not anti-computers at all. I just find for me at the moment, because I’ve been so locked in, it’s like a tonic, that yin-yang. You’ve just got to get the balance up.”

There was also catharsis to be found in the recording process. “I went into rehearsal rooms and they’re like padded cells. You can scream and shout in there and no-one would know what’s going on, or care, which is quite a rare environment. Kind of mad. I literally screamed in there. You scream, scream, scream, no one’s batting an eyelid.” In speaking to them, it becomes clear that music is not just a job, or an artistic practice, but a way of life that offers an essential means of maintaining emotional equilibrium. “I think if I didn’t have music I’d be a really angry person and find life really difficult. I think music can be helpful for everyone like that.”

As we’re talking, I get distracted by some objects dangling between us, what look like tiny horseshoes suspended from a string in the ceiling. It turns out this was a Christmas present from a friend. “It’s made out of stuff from Deptford beach,” Levi explains, referring to the riverside neighbourhood a few miles down the road, “they’re just bits of concrete that have broken off, with stones in them and metal bits. They just get washed up on the beach.” This strikes me as quite an apt physical metaphor for the way Levi approaches sound: random objects, scraps of ideas, dreams and other detritus washed up from the subconscious are crafted into something beautiful, cryptic and slightly warped.