Working under the moniker Art School Girlfriend, London-based artist and producer Polly Mackey records emotionally charged, shoegaze-influenced synth-pop that marries introspective lyricism with textural electronics.
Mackey's latest project, Lean In, finds the Wrexham-born artist exploring existential themes of grief, joy, love and anxiety – "Big Life Shit", in her own words – through melancholic, reverb-drenched songs that draw on all corners of her diverse musical background.
An experienced producer and electronic musician that teaches music production at London's ICMP Music School, Mackey formerly fronted shoegaze upstarts Deaf Club before striking out on her own as Art School Girlfriend. Bringing together these two worlds – DAW-based electronics and live instrumental recording – Mackey brings an intimate and deeply human quality to her Ableton-crafted productions.
Speaking from her London studio, Mackey walked us through the making of her track The Peaks, which started out – as many great songs do – with a happy accident. "I was playing around on my Prophet, which has got a really cool bank of sounds that were super ambient, and quite Boards of Canada-ish and very dusty," she says.
"I had it coming into my interface on essentially the wrong input and it was completely peaking. I had a track up here which I think was going to be on some drums, and it just went through this rack of plugins that I'd put together and it sounded really amazing."
"It's my favourite piece of gear that I own now – I use it on absolutely everything"
The result was a "super distorted, super glitchy" synth patch rich with movement and texture thanks to Ableton's Beat Repeat and Vinyl Distortion devices. Mackey also deployed two M4L devices from Hypnus Records' Slink Devices collection, routing evolving waves of modulation generated by the Slink LFO device through to the Slink Filter, a bank of 32 bandpass filters that adds a rippling, watery texture to the Prophet's chords.
From that point, Mackey built up the track with bass, electric guitar, drums and more Prophet, before recording vocals with a Sennheiser 441 microphone that she singles out as an essential tool in her studio. "I got it super cheap on eBay and there's something about it. It's my favourite piece of gear that I own now, and I use it on absolutely everything."
"I wanted this album to feel like it was being made in quite a small space and not an expensive studio; I wanted it to feel intimate and human. Using condenser mics adds this sense of hyper-realness to the voice that feels a bit removed, but I wanted this all to feel quite intimate. Because [the Sennheiser] is a dynamic mic and it's also hypercardioid, it feels like you're right in front of the thing that you're recording.
"All my vocals across this album were recorded using this mic, and it's the first time I've used a dynamic mic fully for my vocals. That was a big part of this sense of intimacy I was trying to get throughout."
Art School Girlfriend's Lean In is due for release 11 March. Pre-order the album or buy tickets for Art School Girlfriend's UK tour.
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