Hastings of Malawi were formed during industrial music’s nascent period in 1980s London. They sit on the fringe of the industrial genre carving out a space for themselves within the more experimental corners of the scene. Their work challenges the tedious, peurile, repetitive beats that populate the insipid sonic environment that is popular music.
Theirs is an anti music of eclectic diverse elements – they follow their own rules.
They have been variously described as dada, underground, industrial, post-industrial, musique concrete, DIY, punk, countercultural, anti-melodic, scrappy, abstract expressionist, fluxus, surreal, futurist, post-modernist, avant-garde, provocative, improvised, experimental, dissonant, cerebral, mechanical, immersive, disorienting, handmade and rough.
They create low-resolution, lo fi, dissonant sounds that they have described as films without light and poems without words, and that others have described as untrammelled, explorative madness with an uncompromising artistic vision.
They create music out of old records, computers, custom-built sound machines, telephones tape manipulation, distortion, found sounds, machinery, spoken-word and telephone switchboards.
Describing one of their albums Wire magazine wrote “Rarely has an album so consistently made me question what the actual fuck is going on”
