Yeah You

YEAH YOU is Gustav Thomas and Elvin Brandhi, father/daughter from Wales but citizens of the world, with ever-changing logistic between Vienna, Kampala, Berlin, Cairo, Newcastle. Improvised musical and geographical excursions are the base of their Kh-art’ Car-art.

The project has an innate portability. It grew from a desire to make something during every spare moment, using compact recording gear to turn the usual banal everyday family drives to into spontaneous recording sessions in the car. Indeed, warped into identity politics, this could be an anti-formulaic deconstruction of the nuclear family and of psychic uniform, which normative roles serve to sustain. In itself is just an improv life stream. Diving in with an admittedly involuntary entropic approach, YEAH YOU provide something to enjoy/not enjoy, where the content shifts depending on how many supermarket discounts they found. “It’s really about having developed an approach to performance which eradicates its framing as ‘separate’ from what people think of as daily life”. Living under the suspicion that routine suffocates, the pair satisfy the impulse to create indiscriminately and on the go by carrying around a pocketful of miniature speakers, dictaphones, samplers, plus camera or mic – in all, more than enough to suffice.

What indeed could be more late modern in music than the nomad musician travelling without any instrument at all – besides something to capture it all on? Thomas’s distorted, alluringly jarred synthesisation acts as a jagged platform for Brandhi’s improvised stream of consciousness lyrical trips: a lo-fi noise or a dismantled freestyle.

They have performed at international festivals including Sonic Acts, Borealis, Counterflows, Supernormal. After their first improptu songs, they released two LPS, Id Vendor and KRUTCH, on UK/Berlin imprint Slip and the cassette Vhod on Alter/Opal Tapes. Since 2013 Elvin Brandi (aka Freya Edmondes) is also active in solo as a poet, sound-artist and producer, and in a variety of collaborations with improv musicians. In 2017 she was awarded the PRS Oram Award for Innovative Musicians, with a production commission at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and is part of SHAPE platform 2020.