Vanishing Twin :: Archives

A house in rural France on one side, a boat in London on the other, the Channel in between: the sound of Archives starts in that distance.

The band’s name comes, if the biographies have it right, from Cathy Lucas’s twin being absorbed in the womb, and ten years on from their founding in 2015, Archives, out on Fire Records on 2 October 2026, feels like the record where that name stops being a label and turns into a procedure. Everything the trio makes gets taken back into the body: daily sessions played back, cut up, put back into circulation, until the source material can't be told apart from the tissue that swallowed it. Lucas calls it "gathering material together, riffing with it, turning it around on itself, trying to put the pieces together and create a story with it". Put like that it sounds like lab routine; to the ear it's closer to a slow digestion, smells and all.

Lucas lives in rural France now, while Valentina Magaletti and Susumu Mukai are in London, on a houseboat. The record was made in a virtual studio, the three of them swapping songs and instrumental scraps without ever sharing a room, and Fire Records' notes slip in a detail that's a whole poetics on its own: no click, no MIDI holding them together, hence layers sliding over one another and a wobbly, never-quite-settled rhythmic balance, plainest on "Bring Me The Axe". The shared room every band record takes for granted, that body of air where sounds rub up against each other before they get recorded, is a ghost here, and the job is to fake one after the fact.

The liner notes own the distance without any embarrassment, home studios in France and a boat in England, and you hear it in the different fidelities living inside a single track, in small-room reverbs, in sections stuck to each other with the stitching left showing. On the table: cellos, zithers, kalimbas, 3D-printed flutes, homemade instruments, and the roles blur to the point that the label tells you to listen out for Magaletti on bass and Mukai on drums. Magaletti says "music is just an energy, it doesn't belong to anyone". In her case the line reads like an inventory: authorship dissolves for logistical reasons, and the philosophy turns up afterwards, once the work's done.

"Bring Me The Axe" and the title track were the two songs picked on 1 July to announce the record, and leading with the two most hostile things in the running order tells you something about the kind of welcome the band has in mind. The lyric draws, they say, on Lizzie Borden and the Fall River murders of 1892, for which she was tried and never convicted. "It's about extremes," they add: extreme acts, extreme heat, sonic extremes, the folkloric and the industrial. The song opens on a modal tune with something of the skipping rhyme and the murder ballad about it, then the drums blow up in saturated digital hits, almost at random, and over them Lucas sings in the voice of a Linda Perhacs who's missed her comeback by another twenty years: walked out of the Parallelograms days with the same sleepwalker's calm, she finds herself in a room with a trio that treats her like tape to be cut. A bit of nineteenth-century true crime gets kneaded into the same dough as ritual chant and dancefloor, and the not-guilty verdict stays on hand as a metaphor for a record nobody much wants to put their name to in full.

Then there's the story. In the title track a long spoken passage sets off from plain facts, a spring, a stream, a mill grinding the people's grain, and somewhere along the way slides into a line of frog-women who live in a cave and worship the rain. It's the road oral transmission takes with any document: land registry turning into legend, place names into liturgy. Around it, strings turning slow as the mill wheel just mentioned and a voice that arrives in bits, ground up with the grain, until sirens and distortion with a sulphurous grit to it tear a gap open and the voice, pieced back together, goes flat and even again to carry the tale to its end. The last track is called "Oral Tradition", and it's also the lightest after so much half-light: the archive of the title ends up in the care of the least reliable storage medium there is, the mouth.

"Hazama", in Japanese, is the space between two things, the gap, the interstice, the offcut, and the word most likely comes from Susumu Mukai's side, a Japanese transplant in London who's spent twenty years putting out oblique club music as Zongamin, all rubbery basslines and machines used against their manuals. The record doesn't say whether the title was chosen for its meaning, but the gap is its real landscape: the dead time between one file and the next, the time difference, the Channel, the years between an idea and its third rewrite. Further on there's "So Calm (Case Study No 8)", and Case Study House No. 8 is the house Charles and Ray Eames built in 1949 at Pacific Palisades out of parts ordered from industrial catalogues. Whether the nod is deliberate, no source says. If it is, it sits right with a method that bolts found parts into something you can live in, and with a title that promises calm to a track built up layer on layer.

The lineage is the one you'd expect, Stereolab, Broadcast, library music, yé-yé fed through a space-age synth, and Vanishing Twin have never done much to hide it. More use, for getting at Archives, is looking at what the three do when they're not being Vanishing Twin. Valentina Magaletti, a drummer born in Bari and brought up on London's improv scene, has spent the last fifteen years relieving the kit of its metronome duties, in Tomaga with Tom Relleen, in Moin, across a long string of duos and solo records where the skins are something to rub as much as to hit. Mukai, as said, comes from the club, and already plays with Magaletti as the duo V/Z, so two thirds of the trio turn up at Archives with a common language road-tested elsewhere. Lucas comes from song, from the chamber pop of Fanfarlo. The real risk, the one hanging over any work whose poetics is its method, is that the explanation gets there before the listening, and that the word "collective" gets waved about like a backstage pass. What heads it off here is three trades that don't look anything like each other: an improviser who mistrusts time, a producer who bends it, a singer who needs it to keep a melody standing. Archives is where those three needs haggle it out, at a distance, with no referee.