Make Up Your Own Stories is the debut album by Invisible Minds, and a title that couldn’t be more apt. Its creator, after all, is an acclaimed electronic adventurer writing an exciting new chapter of his own. When a sun-drenched swirl of child-like vocals, drum breaks and bright guitar jangles called ‘Yo Mae Leh’ hit the internet in late 2017, rocketing to half a million Spotify streams, no one knew it was the work of Tim Green, the UK dance innovator who’s pulsing rhythms and abyss-like synth murmurs have been making house and techno scene venue walls quake since 2008. Shining a light on a more melodic side to his musical personality, that track – and the others that sit alongside it on his effervescent debut album as Invisible Minds – are “honest and innocent and kinda searching for a feeling” as Green himself puts it. This album’s a story that’s been 12 years in the making – and it’s a story that proves well worth the wait.
Tims father – a keyboardist, who kept Tim’s family home flooded with the sound of artists like Pink Floyd and Joni Mitchell while he was growing up – often joked with Tim about making some “real music” as his house and techno flourished following breakout singles ‘Revox’ and ‘Mr Dry’. As the 34-year-old burrowed further into refined, clubby sounds under his own name, remixing the likes of Friendly Fires and Seth Troxler before being crowned Best Breakthrough Producer at the 2010 DJ Mag Awards, he wrote different kinds of anthems on the side: optimistic splashes of life-affirming electronica full of live instrumentation and infectious energy that, while not quite Pink Floyd, he laughs “should hopefully win my dad’s approval.”
From the guitar loop hypnotism of ‘Autum’ and breathy, balmy summer haze of ‘The Cut Girl’ (one of three tracks featuring newcomer vocalist Howard Hobbs) to the MPC hip-hop of ‘905 Users!’, it’s a record inspired by everyone from Peter Gabriel to Icelandic icon Bjork. Compiling all these songs written across such a long timespan, then working to turn them into a cohesive album, was a strange, surreal experience for Green: like looking back on old diary entries from across his entire adult life. “It’s funny – you go back to a particular track and can’t help but be transported back to where you were in your life when you wrote it,” he says. “There’s a lot of nostalgia in there.”
Nostalgic-sounding some songs may be, but Make Up Your Own Stories is future-focused in its production wizardry. Bit-crunched synth melodies grind up against deep bass squelches on epic closer ‘Take Them All’, the last track written for the album, while ‘Jump Jet’ feels every bit as soaring and propulsive as its title would suggest. “Just when you thought you could come out of the shadows, there comes that poison drizzle in your ear hole,” a ghostly vocal intones over its Radiohead-ish bed of guitar, atmospherics and experimental percussion. Making use of the original Moog Model D and Voyager synths plus world instruments picked up on his travels as an internationally celebrated electronic master – “there’s a Chinese toy piano, a mbira from Tanzania and a kora from somewhere in Africa, but I can’t remember where…” – its sound never stops evolving across its enveloping 11-track runtime.
It’s a new chapter that represents an ellipsis, rather than a full stop, on his work as Tim Green. “I’m not abandoning that side of what I do,” he says, having released his debut album under that guise earlier this year, in what’s turning into a whirlwind 2018 for the prolific producer. “I love how evocative the words Invisible Minds are, and was really attracted to the mystery of that phrase, which is how I landed on the name. It’s something I’d love to pursue and carry on. Hopefully it won’t take another 12 years to do the next one.” As Invisible Minds, on Make Up Your Own Stories, Tim Green’s story takes a glorious tangent.
Contact: nick@ftmusic.net
InvisibleMinds’s tracks
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