For most bands, the main perk of living in a slightly rundown mansion-cum-artistic community on the city’s edge would be having licence to make an enormous racket. For Ex-Easter Island Head, says Benjamin Fair, it’s that “we get to play quietly”.
The four members of the Liverpool minimalists are sitting in Benjamin Duvall’s slate-grey bedroom/rehearsal space around the edge of their circular setup: guitars laid flat on keyboard stands, often with sticks wedged under the fretboard strings ready to create a giant reverberant twang, and mallets for hitting them on the floor; a drum kit deconstructed between the stations; haptic motors extracted from mobile phones primed to dance across the surface of the strings and cymbals. The band’s old amps are stacked in a corner behind Andrew Hunt, who joined in 2019 and suggested jettisoning them. “It eliminates any hum so you’re just hearing the strings,” he says.
