Last Monday, I watched a street musician in Piccadilly Gardens playing what I initially thought was a broken guitar. Half the strings seemed to be missing and the sound emerging was unlike anything I'd heard before, part percussion, part melody, entirely hypnotic. A small crowd had gathered, equally puzzled and enchanted.

During a break, I asked him about the instrument. He explained he'd been experimenting, weaving fishing line through the strings and clipping clothes pegs to the neck to create new tonal possibilities. 'I got bored with what six strings could do,' he said, 'so I started asking what they couldn't do.'

What struck me wasn't so much his innovation, but how his modifications had attracted an audience that clearly didn't understand the mechanics yet found themselves unable to walk away. Intrigue sparking innovation sparking possibility. Technique serving something that transcended technique entirely. Or something.

Welcome to the third issue of Science & Magic.

This edition brings together voices doing exactly that. Jeff Young takes us to the haunted artery of a Liverpool canal, revealing a portal to a world beyond permission. Eimear Kavanagh explores the absurdity and magical essence of Twin Peaks, while Ange Woolf finds her own unlived life in the form of a 'Wild Twin', John Canning Yates shares a late-night communion with Richard Manual and photographer Mark McNulty maps his musical history, from The Star Club to The Warehouse and beyond.

Meanwhile Dominic Lewington offers a song born from friendship and compassion, Tom Roberts introduces the strange, beautiful cinema of Rainer Sarnet, and Maya Chen kicks off her lexicography of Gen Alpha slang, We also have a dispatch from Ian Bickerton, who has successfully transplanted our Società model to Haarlem.

The work in these pages keeps reminding me that the best discoveries happen deliberately and by accident. When we put two unrelated things together, something new and unexpected emerges and amplifies the experience. A shared curiosity sparking something altogether new.

I hope you find something here that catches you off guard.

Matt

Ten Questions

with Mark McNulty

For over thirty years, Mark McNulty has been documenting the spaces where culture happens - from the sweat-soaked intimacy of underground club nights to the pristine galleries of major institutions. Born in Liverpool and now based in North Wales, his career reads like a parallel history of British cultural life, moving from the music industry's touring circuit to become one of the most trusted photographers working across arts and culture today.

What makes Mark's work compelling isn't just his technical mastery - though clients from the BBC Philharmonic to Tate clearly value his craft - but his understanding that great cultural photography requires both precision and intuition. You can see this in his exhibition history, which spans from 1991's Faces North West at Liverpool's Open Eye Gallery to last year's The Mersey Side of Art and Play in Germany, always finding the human moments within institutional spaces.

His books, from Rocketships & Windmills to Ten 'til Late, reveal someone who clearly understands that documenting culture is itself a form of cultural creation. There's something very perfect about how his images capture what happened and what it felt like to be there. We caught up with Mark between assignments to explore the sounds, memories and creative processes that shape his world.

● If you could time-travel to witness one musical moment in history, when/where would you go?

The Beatles at the Star Club in Hamburg.

● Which band from Liverpool deserved to be huge but wasn’t?

Rockin’ Horse, which was a one-off album project by Jimmy Campbell and Billy Kinsley. I loved everything by Jimmy Campbell, from his early Merseybeat days, through The 23rd Turnoff to his three solo albums, but Yes It Is by Rockin’ Horse is my all-time favourite.

● What song became the anthem of your first teenage friendship group, played endlessly during that one unforgettable summer?

Probably 'This Charming Man' by The Smiths, which brings back memories of The State or seeing them live at University of Salford.

● What album would you press into the hands of an 18-year-old today, insisting they listen to it front-to-back right now?

Blue by Joni Mitchell. It’s perfect from start to finish, whereas some of my favourite albums, like Revolver and Abbey Road, are flawed. Sorry Ringo.

● What's your favourite sound that isn't music?

Birdsong, particularly the sound of the first Chiffchaff of spring.

● What's the last album or song that made you stop whatever you were doing and just listen?

Probably a compilation by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, who was a piano-playing nun from Ethiopia. Recorded back in the 60s but still able to stop me in my tracks. Currently listening to the new Carwyn Ellis album and a song called 'Bolymnydd' by Pys Melyn.

● What's the first record you saved up to buy with your own money?

All Mod Cons by The Jam.

● Which person most shaped your musical taste before you turned 18, and what specific record or gig did they introduce you to that changed everything?

My mate Carl in school got me onto The Au Pairs and we went to see them at The Warehouse.

● What music did your parents play that you initially rejected but later embraced?

My mum listened to the Dubliners and various Irish rebel songs and my dad listened to James Last. Mum very much had the greater influence here.

● What's your favourite song that is from a soundtrack to a film?

'Lara’s Theme' from Dr. Zhivago or 'Gently Johnny' from The Wicker Man.

Magnetic North

by Jeff Young

3 : The Canal

Dark artery. Strange shapes of birds, an alphabet of swans. I walk along the canal towpath remembering the truant zone, walk beneath stone bridges, the portal gates to elsewhere. Once, more than fifty years ago, I used to come here with other boys, the school deadbeats who, like me, could see no sense in classrooms. First cigarette, first kiss, ritual burning of school uniform, the bonfire of resentment, delinquent flame and smoke. The cut is Elsewhere. Sometimes I wonder if it really exists. Walking here now on a wet morning in June, one eye on the skulkers, one eye on the water looking for Ted Hughes’s pike: Of submarine delicacy and horror...The canal’s guts are thrown up on the path: shopping trolley, Barbie Doll, a bloated mattress, the mangled skeleton of a bicycle. Behind a bricked-up warehouse door I can hear children’s voices singing a pop song. King Heron watches the schoolkid skivers. Black rain pockmarks the ditch. Remember the day we built a pirate ship and sailed beneath the bridges? If you shelter from the rain beneath the railway bridge when the train passes over, the ground shakes, your bones rattle and the pigeons sound like ghosts.

In Ghost Town I write, ‘I was always drawn to the canal, to the undersides of its bridges where the wild boys lurked, and beyond that, as it cut through and into the landscape, a portal into a world beyond permission. When I was there, I felt unauthorised, a trespasser and a runaway...’ the canal was my secret place where I could disappear.

Today, in the rain, walking through the truant zone, a dog walker says hello and for a moment the dark artery is transformed, no longer the fugitive, occult, haunted place of memory. In the water, a glint of stickleback and a football that looks like a fallen moon. And then, the pike in the shadow of a bridge, over a bed of emerald. Behind the bricked-up warehouse door the lost children are singing. I walk into the Elsewhere of the past.

— Jeff Young, 25 June 2025

—

Jeff Young, author of the remarkable Ghost Town, maps Liverpool's hidden geographies with precision, poetry and just enough melancholy to keep it honest. Longlisted for the 2022 Portico Prize, his memoir was praised for its "plangent beauty" and "sonorous, lyrical" prose — phrases that, frankly, still don’t quite do it justice. That one of our greatest living writers has agreed to write for us feels implausible and entirely inevitable. A playwright, essayist and former lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, he has a knack for unearthing the mythic in the mundane. Each fortnight, he’ll lead us through a Liverpool both recognisable and uncanny, reimagined through his singular eye. His new memoir Wild Twin is available now - haunting, sharp and quietly devastating.

Shadow Songs

by John Canning Yates

Late at night, John Canning Yates approaches songs like a master watchmaker. He sits at his piano and carefully dismantles the compositions he loves, laying out their component parts - melody, harmony, rhythm - to understand the delicate mechanics of what makes them tick. What emerges is not a cover version, but John's personal blueprint of the song's soul.

The Lost are Found : A Quiet Tribute to Richard Manuel

It was good to read that there’s a book coming - the first biography of Richard Manuel from The Band, a musician and songwriter too often eclipsed by his tragic end.

By the time of The Last Waltz, he wasn’t in the best shape. He’s often in the shadows.
But watch when he opens his mouth to sing the second verse of Dylan’s 'I Shall Be Released' - something raw and radiant cuts through. Van, Bob, Neil, Joni - they all feel it. So do I.

For a long time, my comfort viewing was The Band’s Classic Albums documentary.
I couldn’t finish it without wanting to run to the piano - to make something, to feel something.
To respond, somehow.

I was talking with a friend recently about the songs that stay with us, and 'Whispering Pines' came up.
It’s one of my favourites - a song I feel I could live inside.

Some nights, when the house is quiet and still, I play it. I recorded one of those nights here
Not perfect - just me, living in it for a minute.

'If only one star shines, well that’s just enough to get inside.'

It’s a song of loneliness, yes - but there’s hope threaded through it, gently.

And I’ve always liked hope in songs.

From the shadows,

JCY

—

John Canning Yates, known for his work with the critically lauded Ella Guru and his more recent solo album The Quiet Portraits, approaches cover versions as performances and as acts of careful disassembly. For his Shadow Songs series, he selects a song that has taken up residence in his quiet, late-night hours and proceeds to dismantle it, note by note, in order to understand it. John believes that only by taking a song apart can you truly understand why it holds you together.

The Wild Twin

by Ange Woolf

Picture yourself in a life you've not led,
Collisions not made
Paths never trod
Walked instead by another
Your wild twin
The banished one
Who galloped through forests
Bareback and howling
Drunk on wildflowers
Lungs filled with green
Mudded soles
Washed clean by streams
Dried by the breeze
Open your window
Take her hand
Follow her back
To the road forgotten
Meet yourself there
Whole and unbroken
Know all at once
All paths lead to her
And love her
For she has always loved you.

—

Ange Woolf, who typically documents the city's fleeting communities from the top deck of the 86 bus, here trades her transport pass for a compass that only points inward. ‘The Wild Twin’ is a field note from a life unlived, a dispatch from the self who took the other path, the one who galloped through forests instead of waiting at bus stops. Ange maintains two distinct archives: one of bus tickets annotated with her famous single-line observations, and another of pressed wildflowers, each corresponding to a decision she almost made. This poem is drawn from the latter. She posits that the 'wild twin' is not a separate entity, but the part of us that remembers how to navigate by moonlight and instinct - a voice she suggests we would all do well to answer.

When Does Something Ordinary Become Unforgettable?

by Eimear Kavanagh

I am falling down the rabbit holes. I am currently binge watching Twin Peaks. Unforgettable because of its absurdity, hilarity and magical essence. Praise to the imagination of David Lynch - which I can only dream up that he existed inside a whirlwind of creative pleasure, brought on by observing the ordinary around him day-to-day.

I admire art when it can remove us from experiencing ‘life’ as we know it. Aren’t we so bogged down with doing all of the ordinary things? Allowing the days to go by, the months, the years and then so much of it being entirely forgettable.

I would like to also honour the British/Mexican Leonora Carrington. It is known that she felt she didn’t fit in with anything or anyone and she rebelled against everything and everyone. Very relatable to some. Looking always for a different way of seeing things. Her narrative scenes leave behind a glimpse into her secret world and maybe for us to see that there is so much more to life than the ordinary. From the BBC film Leonora Carrington The Lost surrealist, her son Gabriel Weisz Carrington says of her ‘My mother had imaginary and real worlds sort of juxtaposed. She didn’t feel that one was as alien to the other. And my mother felt that there was always fantastic in the real and the other way round and the mysterious was always just around the corner’

Love, Eimear

—

Eimear Kavanagh's artistic process usually begins with listening to her extensive library of field recordings of empty rooms, a practice she claims allows her to hear the 'resonant frequency of absence.' She sometimes creates her visual responses using her own private collection of pigments derived from rust, pollen and finely ground brick dust, believing that the materials themselves must have a history before they can articulate a new idea. She has famously declared a profound distrust of verbs, believing they impose a false sense of action on a world that is mostly just being.

Dominic

Dominic Lewington's voice carries the weight of ghosts and angels. He draws his songs like stick figures on foggy windows, all innocent and impossible to ignore. Melodies arrive from somewhere beyond, carried in plastic bags and recorded on equipment that shouldn't work but does. They tremble there, between heaven and madness. A universe speaks through instruments to hand and cassette hiss. Love saves. Music proves that. Listen closely and you might hear yourself.

I was writing a batch of songs about friendship, time and the end. I had a friend from Wales who challenged my mental health, albeit by simply showing compassion and love in real time, and thus changed my life forever. I wanted them to know that, until the end of time, I’ll always believe them above my own inner manipulations. I hoped to capture the purity of the joy they gave me in song.

—DL

The Gen Alpha Lexicography

by Maya Chen

01: 'Ask Siri'

Etymology: Voice assistant culture, Gen Alpha native usage circa 2020-present

Gen Alpha: born after 2012, raised with iPads as pacifiers.

Last week I watched my 8-year-old daughter end a heated family debate about whether penguins can fly by flatly stating "Ask Siri." Not as a helpful suggestion - as a weary directive to adults too stupid to access available information. While my husband and I were mid-argument, citing half-remembered nature documentaries, she'd already moved on emotionally. The subtext was clear: why are you people doing this to yourselves?

'Ask Siri' is Gen Alpha's exasperated response to adult inefficiency in information gathering. Where millennials might say 'Google it' (implying work), Gen Alpha says 'Ask Siri' meaning 'stop wasting everyone's time.' They're not being helpful - they're being patronising. This generation views human debate about factual matters as slightly embarrassing performance art. Why would you argue about penguin flight capabilities when authoritative answers exist in your pocket? My daughter is not offering assistance, she's questioning my commitment to basic competence. They simply don't understand why adults endure confusion when certainty is available. It's not laziness, it's bewilderment at our tolerance for ignorance.

Next time: 'Emoji Only' - When my teenager stops using words entirely.

—

Maya Chen is a cultural linguist who treats internet slang with the same seriousness that other academics reserve for dead languages. Her work here in The Gen Alpha Lexicography, serves as a guide for oldies and a living archive, capturing the brief, brilliant lifespans of digital slang before they are either forgotten or adopted by newsreaders on TV. Maya's secret power is that she can date a social media post to within a three-month window based solely on its emoji usage.

Hot Air - de Nederlanders Società

by Ian Bickerton

Ian Bickerton of Balloon (a performer at our Liverpool and London Societàs) has taken the Società format and coaxed it into full bloom across the North Sea. The result, Hot Air in Haarlem, is a kindred spirit born from the same need. This is what happens when people find each other with a shared belief.

Something is stirring in the musical universe, or at least in that small corner of it where I live. Musicians and music fans are building their own worlds outside of the 'mainstream' business. Independent communities are discovering and supporting new talent, ensuring shows are affordable and accessible, taking care to ensure the sound and the setting benefit both the audience and the artist. It is about community and connection, and the need for that is why I imagine most independent artists make music.

In that respect Violette Records is a trailblazer. I’ve long been impressed by the way they do things. I’ve played La Violette Società, and the energy and enthusiasm of everyone involved - including, importantly, the audience - is infectious. So, when Matt posted on socials appealing for like-minded souls to make themselves known if they were interested in bringing the format to their hometown, I piped up, and offered to try and make it happen in Amsterdam. Matt was up for it, and I had a venue in mind. But that was before Covid. Then came lockdown, and our world’s closed. We shelved the idea, but it stayed with me.

By late 2023 I’d quit my ‘day job’ to record a new Balloon LP and manage a young Dutch indie-folk group Moving. Promotion - gigs, publicity, media - was always challenging, often frustrating, and sometimes depressing. Cutting through the noise, without the resources or backing of a major label, or press or plugging, is a challenge.

I’d increasingly become convinced that the solution was to create our own world. For that I reckon you needed three things: the talent (musicians, artists), a 'home' (an inspiring venue), and community (more than just an audience, but including all those contributing to make things happen - designers, sound techs, venue owners, etc).

My mind went back to the idea of doing something similar to Violette, with a hint of Greenwich Village. At the same time, I was aware of initiatives like Undertow in the US, and Life Is A Minestrone, a scene building around living room concerts in France. It seemed they operated, from choice, outside of the ‘traditional’ mainstream music business. Fiercely and defiantly independent. Run for love, not money. I suggested it to a friend, a fellow musician. If others could do it, why couldn’t we?

I spent months trawling the pubs, cafes, and record shops of Haarlem, where I live, and further afield, discovering talented young musicians who were digging deeper for musical treasure, uncovering songwriters new to them, like Townes van Zandt, Elliott Smith, Karen Dalton and Bill Fay, and channelling that inspirational legacy into their own creative output. This was a gang for whom, I’d later learn, John Prine was every bit as important as Billy Woods. What I saw and heard, convinced me of two things: there was a ‘scene’, but it had nowhere it could call ‘home’.

Finding that home proved easier than I’d imagined. De Oekap in Haarlem is a cultural meeting place - restaurant, café, venue - sited in the oldest industrial building in the city, a former factory on the river, dating from 1800. The folk there welcomed us with open arms and we’ve since become a close team. They share our dream of building a creative community which is inclusive and inspiring, and coincidentally were already looking for a way to stage a musical evening when we called. Serendipity, I guess.

In September 2024, we launched Hot Air. I happily admit we adopted our founding principles from Violette Records. So, there’s no audience chatter during the performances, we pay acts properly and feed them (we even offer free accommodation if required), and we have equal billing. However, we don’t sell tickets because we want to keep the night as accessible and inclusive as possible, so we operate a "pay what you can" system. That may change if Hot Air’s popularity continues to push space limitations (around 100, mostly seated). But if it does, it’ll be a luxury problem we’re happy to have.

Like Violette, Hot Air is meticulously curated. Sound and tech, promotion, and photography are done by people we love and respect. We handle the booking, and quality control is crucial - whether the artists are new or established. Music is about taste, and we trust ours. We keep set times short (20 minutes on average) so there’s time for the audience to socialise between acts.

We're not interested in streaming numbers. We book acts who we think are great and deserve recognition. And for whom the song and its performance is central. Since launching we’ve struck up relationships with a leading booking agency, which sends their acts our way. We've one of the UK’s finest contemporary folk artists visiting early 2026. Meanwhile, a major music venue has approached us with the idea of a partnership. Maybe they recognise that we are what they’re not: a community rather than just a venue, an event rather than just a gig. But we remain steadfastly independent.

The way we see it, so long as we continue to give a stage to artists that have something special to say, and provide a setting that enables and encourages them to perform to the best of their ability, then the audience will continue to come. So far, it’s working. For as Violette Records has shown, the best things are often the simplest things. And that can be the hardest thing in the world to do well.

— Ian Bickerton

—

Ian Bickerton is the Birmingham-born musician whose journey from childhood piano shows by his opera-singing mother to founding the band Balloon defines a quintessentially English musical odyssey. Unable to master others' songs on the cheap electric guitar he received alongside a Velvet Underground record at age 12, Ian began crafting his own music influenced by Buddy Holly and later Television and Subway Sect. After forming his first band Grey with PiL's Jim Walker, he established Balloon with David Sheppard in the late 1980s, moving from London folk clubs to signing with BMG/RCA subsidiary Dedicated. Following their New Orleans-recorded debut "Gravity" and tours with comedian Bill Hicks, Balloon recently returned with "Gas 'n' Air," recorded in Mexico City and mixed in London after a lengthy hiatus.

La Violette Società 57

Experience an evening where melody meets poetry, where experimental sounds blend with classic rock, and where four unique artists come together for one unmissable night at La Violette Società 57.

For one Tuesday evening in July, the usual world suspends itself as Lein Sangster, Ruins, The Keys and Jay Farley hit the stage -buy tickets.

Rainer Sarnet

by Tom Roberts

You might be surprised to hear this, but I don’t consider myself an aficionado of Estonian cinema.

I don’t consider myself an aficionado of any cinema, to be honest.

There aren’t many films that have left me with that “WTF have I just watched?” look all over my face... but Rainer Sarnet has made two of them.
Maybe you’ve seen them too?
If you haven’t… where do I start without giving too much away?
Sarnet’s films defy easy labels. They’re strange, beautiful, funny and unsettling in the best sort of way.
November was probably the first Estonian cinema experience I’d ever had.
I went into it blind. I honestly don’t know why I decided to watch it. I think it was during lockdown.
Sometimes I like films with subtitles. Sometimes I like folklore. Sometimes monochrome just hits different.

The best I can come up with is that some of my favourite things are black and white:

The Beatles
Zebra Jimnie Gel Rollerball 0.7 Medium Pens
The Velvet Underground
David Lynch
Trees silhouetted to the sky
Rainy Days and Mondays

(There is a longer list. I could go on… I often do, but there are deadlines to meet.)

What am I trying to say?

Like most of us during the pandemic, I wanted to get away from the noise - I wanted to step outside.
I wanted to feel something during a very difficult period.
I wanted to be treated like an adult.

Sometimes I want Disney - without the Disneyfication of Disney.

From the opening scenes, I wasn’t disappointed.
It’s visually stunning and unique. A rare and beautiful film.
A magically real and bizarre love triangle.
Class, myth, and survival in a world haunted by hunger and hierarchy.
It sent me down a wonderful rabbit hole… (The Temptation of St Tony, you’re next on my list.)

Anyway, you might be surprised to hear this – I don’t live in black and white.

I love colour too… What kind of weirdo doesn’t love colour?

Which ties me nicely into the other Rainer Sarnet film I wanted to talk about - The Invisible Fight.

WTF!

And for balance… some of my favourite things are in colour:

The Beatles
Crayola
The Velvet Underground and Nico
David Lynch
City lights reflected in rainwater
Candy luminous skies

(There is a longer list. I could go on, I often do, but again there are deadlines to meet.)

What am I trying to say?

I don’t want to give too much away. I went in blind, only knowing it was directed by Rainer Sarnet.
Heavy psychedelia, martial arts, and spiritual growth in Soviet-occupied Estonia. Where “everything cool is banned.”
What’s not to love?

Sometimes you want to stay up late, eat crap and laugh out loud.
Have fun and contemplate the cosmos while watching someone transcend their everyday restrictions. Don't ya?
Who doesn’t like to be silly? A holy fool.
I learned a new term while researching this film - Wuxia.
I’m still not sure I know how to pronounce it correctly. Maybe that will convince you?

Both November and The Invisible Fight are like stepping into another world - one that’s strange, beautiful, magical, funny, and profound.
I found myself thinking about Sarnet's films months after I'd watched them.

The haunting black-and-white of November, the colour and chaos of The Invisible Fight. Sarnet reminds us that film can be a journey through light and darkness, tradition and rebellion, the mystical and the mundane - all at once.

Monochrome or kaleidoscopic colour, embrace the unexpected.

You might be surprised to hear this, but every once in a while, a film comes along that doesn’t just tell a story - it transforms the way you see the world, if only for a little while…

—

Tom Roberts, a songwriter who has previously appeared on public record as a member of Cranebuilders and Beatowls, now sources cultural recommendations through a process of civic dowsing. He utilises a pair of custom-made copper rods to detect what he calls 'resonant cultural energy' emanating from the bargain bins of second-hand shops across the North-West. He insists this method bypasses conventional taste and critical consensus, leading him directly to artefacts that possess 'a high density of overlooked truth.' He has never once made a significant find on a Tuesday.

An Invitation

The collection of contributors to these pages grows through deliberate, careful selection. We welcome correspondence from both established practitioners and those whose most brilliant work currently resides only in their own notebooks, hard drives or meticulously labeled portfolios.

If you document the world through prose, melody, captured light or ambient sound and feel a kinship with our approach, we invite you to direct your samples and a brief personal history to matt@violetterecords.com. Your correspondence may be shared with our attentive community of 5,000.

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