What I was listening to when I started worriedaboutsatan, 20 years ago

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Music

Gavin Miller has been making music as worriedaboutsatan for twenty years now. Twenty albums, too, the latest being No Knock No Doorbell, out on his own This Is It Forever label. That’s a lot of finishing touches in a lot of bedrooms.

The project started in 2006 with a MySpace page, some cracked software courtesy of his brother’s uni trips, and a desire to do something other than the po-faced post-rock band he was already in. What came out was something between those worlds: resonant, melancholic, noirish electronic music that has since found its way onto stages with Ólafur Arnalds, Tim Hecker, Pye Corner Audio and snooker legend Steve Davis (who you may have seen at our very own Watching Trees last year), and into the pages of anyone from The Wire to Prog Magazine to Pitchfork, who once called it “Burial for English lit majors”.

Miller’s music has also become a recurring presence in Adam Curtis’s BBC documentaries, a relationship that deepened into a music supervisor role on several of the filmmaker’s projects.

The new record sees the Yorkshire-based musician moving away from the glacially paced longform pieces that defined earlier releases towards something more direct and organic. Guitar, bass, live drums. Concentrated bursts of dark, noir-infused sound across ten tracks, from the skittering opener ‘A Looming Spectre’ to the euphoria of closer ‘The Dream Is Over’. The Lynch-influenced title tells you where his head’s at.

To mark the anniversary, Miller put together a list of the ten tracks that were floating around his head when worriedaboutsatan first took shape. It’s a good one. The band name came from a dEUS song. Boards of Canada gave him a chord progression he lifted for the very first satan track. Sigur Rós taught him you could do post-rock without tremolo picking. And it took him ages to get into Autechre, which feels reassuringly honest. Here’s the list.

No Knock No Doorbell is out now on This Is It Forever

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Adam curtis Ólafur Arnalds Pye Corner Audio Steve Davis Tim Hecker Worriedaboutsatan

LISTEN

dEUS - Theme From Turnpike

I mean, you take an art-rock band from Antwerp and basically make a noir-jazz freak out based around a slowed down Charles Mingus sample and spaghetti western guitar. How am I supposed to say no to that?! Incidentally, worriedaboutsatan as a band name comes from the song of the same name on the b-side to this single.

dEUS - Theme From Turnpike

I mean, you take an art-rock band from Antwerp and basically make a noir-jazz freak out based around a slowed down Charles Mingus sample and spaghetti western guitar. How am I supposed to say no to that?! Incidentally, worriedaboutsatan as a band name comes from the song of the same name on the b-side to this single.
Mogwai - Hunted By A Freak

I used to watch 120 Minutes on MTV2 a lot back in the day, and this was always on it. I had a sort of vague notion of who Mogwai were, but this one was a gateway drug to their entire thing. Just a beautiful little compact burst of emotion and energy, which is exactly what I wanted to do with satan back in the beginning.
Boards of Canada - Amo Bishop Roden

When I first found out about BoC, I devoured their back catalogue almost immediately, but back then the harder to find stuff was incredibly hard to find, so I had to wait a while to discover the EPs and the rarities. I eventually managed to track this EP down, and then set about basically lifting the chord progression to ABR, tinkered with it slightly, and it gave birth to the very first satan song: EP1’s ‘Morwenna’, so thanks for that Mike and Marcus!
Sigur Rós - Di Do

I’ve always been a big post-rock guy, so Sigur Ros has always been there for me at some point, but this particular track was from an experimental EP they put together for a Merce Cunningham ballet, so that opened my eyes to a whole other avenue- it was like ‘oh shit, you can be post rock but not have to do the tremolo picking! you can get weird!’
Radiohead - Meeting In The Aisle

This is a B-side to the Karma Police single from 1997, but i always thought it was a bit of a clue as to where they were headed next on Kid A. It sounds pretty silly to say now, but you have no idea how influential Kid A was to nerdy kids in the suburbs that didn’t get out much (ie me) back in 2000 – I’d literally never heard anything quite like it, especially from a big major label ‘band’ band, so it was just mind-blowing to get exposed to this sort of thing as a 17 year old.
Broadcast - Pendulum

Another one I have to thank 120 Minutes for – this one blew my fucking mind. I had no idea you could be like a proper band and still sound this a) melodic, b) insane and c) cool. They quickly became my favourite band at around this time, and I’m gutted I never got to see them play.
Autechre - Second Bad Vilbel

I’ll not lie, it took me fucking AGES to get into Autechre. I saw this video and was like ‘holy shit, what’s this?!’ – I just couldn’t get it, no idea what it was about or who it was for, but my friend Dan was big into all the Warp stuff around the time that Kid A came out, so I was always trying to impress him with my musical taste (something we still do to this day lol) but for the life of me, I just didn’t get it. A few years later though, at music college, I listened to Untilted and it just clicked. Fucking finally haha.
Explosions in the Sky - The Only Moment We Were Alone

Well I did say I was a big post-rock guy, didn’t I? This album… holy shit, I’m still trying to rip it off even now. What a way to show people that sometimes all you need is just really strong melodies and a vision of what to do with them. There’s a track on the first satan EP that had a working title of ‘EITS one’ as I was desperate to sound like them. It didn’t work as I’m a bit shit at guitar, but this album was a real big influence on me. They were fucking great live too, back in the day.
Hood - Any Hopeful Thoughts Arrive

I spoke to Chris from Hood once, in a really dingy club in Leeds, and said how much I loved the album Outside, Closer and he said thanks as no-one had ever told him that and people preferred the older stuff. I mean, the older stuff is great too, but fucking hell – come on, have you heard this?! Again, I’d no idea you could meld electronic stuff with acoustic instruments in general, let alone do it this well. A game changer for me. Weirdly enough, Richard from the band now lives on the same street as me, which is nice.
Four Tet - She Moves She

Yeah he doesn’t really do this stuff anymore does he? But that’s fine, I’m glad he got his flowers and that bag after years of schlepping on the indietronica circuit, but maaaan I wish he’d knock out another album like this one haha! I love rhythms that aren’t made by rhythmic instruments too, so that proper choppy, cut up sample in this just ticked all my boxes, and I spent far too long with much shittier equipment trying to copy it.