Behind The Music: The Nyco Project's Bold New Step

In 1964, Bob Dylan told us that “the times they are a-changin'”. Back then, his take on the social change sweeping America was a dropped needle away. Later it would be burned onto CD, downloaded as an MP3 file and streamed online. Music has always been inextricably linked to the technology of its time, and one London-based band has some big ideas about where to take it next.

The Nyco Project make experimental, psychedelic indie rock and on their debut release, 'The New Machine', they have set out into uncharted waters. The EP will be available on June 24 as a smartphone app and will allow listeners to deconstruct each song, by isolating or muting certain tracks, and learn about the recording process. It's a mishmash of music, video and technology, and one that's been some time in the making.

Forming the foundations of the app are countless hours of footage, with the band determined to document every take, every step of the recording process. Their motto: what you see is what you hear.

“With this download you can hear all our instruments individually, the actual take when it happened, and you can get information about the people in the videos. It gives you a much more in-depth insight into the music,” guitarist Ben Hardy said.

“We love doing things live. I've done a lot of music production and recording for different bands and I've seen some bands do 50 takes for just one track. We thought it would be great if we could do it like in the old days, when people used to do one take for the track and it was done.

“Then we thought, 'why don't we try and film the whole process of it?' We then made them into multi-screen songs,” he added. “We filmed guitar going down a hundred year old train in Spain, drums on a barge going down to Camden, vocals in a graveyard or something, and put them all together.”

While 'The New Machine' allowed the band to experiment with their own recording process, some of the inspiration behind it came from more universal themes. As vocalist Zahara Muñoz points out, it targets issues that are of concern to the music industry as a whole, particularly independent artists and labels.

“The idea was also right at the big concern of the music industry, the problems of piracy and artists not earning the money they deserve for the work they put into creating a song,” she said. “We thought that it would be a good idea to do something that actually showed the artist behind the sound, so you can actually see the person that is making that sound and show the power of collaboration by putting all the bits together.

“Our name, 'Nyco', comes from 'nylon cord',” she continued. “We wanted to use this image as the link between all the parts that make up the song. When you have a necklace, you've got all the beads. On their own, they're just beads. You put a nylon cord through them and it becomes something else. That's how we conceive a song. Everyone puts in something of themselves and you create something much bigger than that.”

Hardy picks up on the theme from a slightly different angle, insisting that the EP is also a response to a faceless culture that has hijacked millions of iPods.

“An MP3 is not like a vinyl, you can't hold it in your hand and say 'look, I've got this', and look at the album sleeve and so on,” he said. “With an MP3, you can download it from the air. You can download it walking down the street. They're kind of invisible. You've got 30,000 tracks on an iPod now.

“They've got them from their mates and they might not listen to half of them. They won't know who half the tracks are by, they won't know who the bands are and they'll have got them for free. This shows the magic of it, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It's not de-mystifying it. The mysterious thing is that when you put it all together, it creates a magic in itself.”

The decision to allow listeners to isolate tracks on the app is also a brave one. Many bands would dismiss the idea, citing creative control or the necessity to understand the 'full picture'. For Muñoz, stripping back the layers of each song enhances the experience and, in fact, creates a more rounded view of each composition.

“It's an experiment,” she said. “We are experimenting with our songs. We don't know how other bands might look at it, they might feel it's a bit intrusive. If you just hear the bass, you're out there on your own. It's kind of exposing for the artist, but at the same time when you put it all together it brings back the feeling of the whole sound.”

To finance the EP, the band assembled their huge bank of video and applied to the Arts Council. The success of their appeal was something of a surprise, given the organisation's previous stance on financing band releases, but came at a time of greater involvement in music through collaboration with PRS and initiatives such as the Momentum Music Fund.

“I'm not saying this is to do with us, but it's like a moment in time that all this is happening,” Muñoz said. “It all happened at the same time that we got it for our quirky release. It shows that the art institutions that have resources are starting to realise that musicians are artists as well, and that they need to have some form of support. Not only that, they've come up with this Momentum thing, which is to support bands for touring or buying equipment. It's all happening at the same time, which is a very interesting change of approach.”

Having caught their lightning in a bottle, the band are contemplating a return to more traditional mediums in future. Innovating takes a lot of effort, and the Nyco Project have put in more than most.

“This is a lot of work, it's been really tough,” Muñoz said. “When you experiment, when you explore other ways of doing things, you have to face wall after wall after wall. All the time. At the same time, it's very fulfilling. We want to have the freedom, also, of just recording like a normal band. We just want to put this out there and see what happens.”

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