THERE’S a promo photograph of Johnny Lynch, determination etched on his face, worrying a flock of sheep with a microphone and a sampler.
Near-absurd field recordings were something I’d long fancied as central to the creative process of Lynch, who released his first album as The Pictish Trail back in 2003 on Fence, the Fife-based label he ran for 10 years.
“I do always take my phone out with me when I go for walks,” Lynch says from his newly-built house on the Isle of Eigg, where he has run Lost Map Records from a caravan since 2013.
“Once you get into the rhythm of walking, melodies start appearing, little phrases come out of the woodwork. Walking is a big part of how I write stuff.”
A drumbeat from Lynch’s phone powers Rhombus, a dreamy dance track from new album Future Echoes. Written as something of a protective prayer for his then-gestating son as he and partner Sarah nestled at her parents’ house while their own was completed, it makes for a decidedly confident contrast to much of his previous work.
And Future Echoes, Lynch affirms, is a pop record. Clean and direct, with Lynch’s enigmatic vocals up front and centre, its light-touch grooves and catchy hooks belie a lyrical focus on the looping cycle of loss and new beginnings.
From the sideways hip hop of opener Far Gone (Don’t Leave), a track which takes its cues from the Coen brothers’ Fargo, through radio-ready current single Dead Connections to the psychedelic disco of After-Life, the album’s assured sense of focus is partly down to a difficult birth.
“I started these songs around the end of 2014 and it took about a year and a half of going back and forth to Adem [Ilhan, who produced much of the record] in London,” he says. “We were building the house and didn’t have a place to stay and Sarah was pregnant. It was weird. But there’s nothing like a baby on the way to give you a deadline. I knew this wasn’t going to be another Silver Columns [the name Ilhan and Lynch released an album under in 2010] record. It was definitely a Pictish Trail record. And I knew exactly what I wanted to write about.”
With no studio in Eigg to work from, Lynch would take phone-recorded fragments to Ilhan, who’d work on the structure of what would become Future Echoes’ 10 songs. With additional production from Rod Jones and live percussion from Alex Thomas, a drummer so versatile he can both coax the languid grooves from Air and be a meticulous sparring partner to Squarepusher’s bass-playing frenzy (see their videos for Whiplash-matching intensity), Future Echoes was completed around the time baby Arlo came into the world. With perfect timing the trio moved into their house just before Christmas last year.
The intervening months have allowed Lynch to set up his studio, run the record label with Kid Canaveral’s Kate Lazda and put on festivals such as June’s Howlin’ Fling and an all-day “space-warped cosmic party” in Leith on October 1 with guests including Mercury Prize nominees The Comet Is Coming and Manuela, aka Franz Ferdinand’s Nick McCarthy and his wife (Manuela). Similarly, the months spent shaping the album offered Lynch time to reflect on previous events, namely leaving Fence Records and the death of his mother.
“The first three songs that I worked on with Adem were initially quite angry, but over time they became less so, more robust,” he says. “The knowledge of me becoming a father may have affected that. There’s a lot of death and mortality there, something that definitely came up after my mum passed about five years ago.”
Though the opening verse alludes to a ouija board, Dead Connections is about trying to contact the dead through more digital means – that essential bit of Pictish kit, the mobile phone.
“Adem mentioned that often when people pass nowadays, others phone them just to hear their voicemail message,” Lynch explains. “The finality of them not being here anymore is hard to get to grips with, and you do reach out to them sometimes.”
Future Echoes is released on September 9
The Future Echoes all-dayer, also featuring Rick Redbeard, Monoganon and more TBA, is on October 1, Leith Theatre, Edinburgh. Tickets (£20-£22) from www.lostmap.com
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