Debut album for school mates

School mates Plaitum play Brighton's Prince Albert on April 24 on the back of the release earlier this month of their debut album Constraint.
PlaitumPlaitum
Plaitum

The duo comprises former Colchester class mates Matt Canham and Abi Dersiley.

“It’s been quite a long time coming,” admits Matt. “We have been best friends for ten years, and then to be getting to the point of talking about the release date for the album, you realise it is soon!

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“We were just at school together. We were lumped together in music class at secondary school in deepest, darkest Essex. A lot of people would be messing about in music class because they were not interested, but we were and then we did a lot of gigs together when we were younger. We just both had this upbringing in music. We were bound together by those music lessons and started taking it seriously. We started playing in lots of bands, and then we decided we wanted to make something that we actually wanted to listen to.

“We did our first song as Plaitum in August 2011. We recorded a song in the second half of our GCSE music exam.

“The music is electronic pop really. It is quite dark, very loud, very distorted and very intense. It has its roots in pop music but with big chords and very aggressive instrumentals. Generally, if there is any kind of instrument, it will be Abi. I tend to do all the drum programming and a lot of the synthesiser sounds. We drift across stuff.

“We did that first song and then we did college for two years playing the odd show in our spare time until we got picked up by a record label a few years ago and they said ‘You guys can make something out of this.’ They said ‘You have got something that other people will want to hear.’ And so we went into the studio to make an album. Most of the songs started in my bedroom in 2015 and then in the early part of last year, we recorded it, and then we finished it late last year.”

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Abi is hoping to make a big impact with it: “We have got to do a lot of grinding. I never had a bad feeling about it. I have got a good feeling. It is about a time when we were going through things and wanted to get out and make a connection with music. We were coming out of college and not going to university, and there were periods of thinking ‘What are we doing?’ A lot of our friends had gone away and we were sitting there making quite dark music, wondering what we were doing. And there were bad relationships at the time. It was like we were digging a hole in our darkness. Things are a lot better now!”

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