On the live session premiering today, Hugh Lovric spent the recording unable to see his drummer. The room at General Waste Studio is a converted container with no space to turn around in, so the bassist tracked the whole thing locked into Sonny Patten by ear. No click, four other people wedged in around them with cameras and recording gear.
Scared Little Toaster are a bass-and-drums duo from London, and their debut EP “Scared of the Manual” already ran on doom weight, jazz phrasing and mathy rhythms. Playing it in a metal box, with the two of them feeling each other’s timing rather than watching it, is the whole premise of the session.
“I couldn’t really see Sonny as there wasn’t enough space to turn around, so we really locked into only what we could hear and didn’t use any metronomes, so it had a very natural feel to it,” Lovric says. “I think that was a really great way to capture the energy of the songs and not lose any of the momentum that can come from recording different parts to a click.” Not seeing each other turned out to change how they played. “Not being able to see each other well makes you more aware of any pushes and pulls one of us is doing in each section, so it’s cool to see how that happens organically and how the songs sound different live because of that.”
The studio belongs to Isaac Ashby, a mutual friend who recorded, mixed and mastered the session. “It’s been great watching the studio continue to evolve over time and seeing how Isaac keeps finding new ways to use the space so creatively,” Lovric says. “Nothing about it feels standard, which makes it inspiring before you even start recording.” Ending up there felt close to inevitable: “It was one of those situations where the right people and the right space naturally came together.”
The container did a lot of the work on its own. “There’s minimal distance between the players, the microphones, and the sound,” he says. “That closeness gave the recordings a lot of intensity and helped capture the raw energy of us playing together live.” He describes cables everywhere, people squeezed into corners, instruments taking up most of the room, “this sense of organised chaos inside a metal box. It was cramped yet spacious, loud, and slightly surreal, which suited us perfectly.” The bass tone came from running the instrument through both a bass cab and a vintage guitar amp, building weight and extra texture into the low end. Ashby’s mix pulled the bass, drums and the stranger effects together “while still keeping the performance feeling live and physical.”
The four songs each shift the recording somewhere different. “Vibra” reaches back the furthest. “Vibra came partly from a riff I wrote when I was 18,” Lovric says. “I’ve always loved slightly odd, unsettling notes and scales, then building riffs around that tension.” On stage the song has grown a wall of fuzz that hits harder in a room than on the record, and he calls it “a bit of a blueprint for our sound.”
“Fauve” is the jazzier, proggier one, and the live take pushes the playing to the surface. “The nuances stand out more, the drum fills between sections, the ghost notes on the snare,” Lovric says, with those details sitting right at the front of the mix in a way that feels more immediate.
“No Decaf” now runs his voice through a small telephone receiver effect the duo added to the arrangement over time. “It gives the track another layer of unsettling, distorted confusion that really suits the atmosphere of the song,” he says, and it reads especially well live.
“Nudibranch” resets the set. Its jazzy, melancholic opening gives the two of them room to stretch out before the fuzzier songs come back in, and live they open it with a small theatrical moment that “usually either surprises or completely confuses the audience. Both reactions work for us.” Asked what they would change now, Lovric points away from the songs themselves: “It would probably be less about changing the songs themselves and more about making them stranger, heavier, or more unpredictable.”
That pull toward the unpredictable shapes who they share stages with. London has a deep bench of two-piece bands working with limited setups, and Scared Little Toaster rate several. The guitar-and-drums duo Meat Strap supported their EP launch and, in Lovric’s words, “completely blew us away,” the two players converging and diverging inside songs with chemistry that was obvious all set.
They played with Big Trousers last year, who pair heavy bluesy riffs with strong vocal lines, and they point to Jef Jimps as another duo worth catching, jazzy and full of unpredictable turns. On rooms, the Windmill and the George Tavern have both sounded good to them, and a newer spot called Deptford Junction, run by a family they speak warmly of, sounded amazing.
The bill matters as much as the room. “The best line-ups as a heavier duo are the ones built around experimental or slightly unpredictable bands,” Lovric says, meaning bands that move through a wide range of moods, sounds, dynamics and tempos across a set.
“The more unexpected the better, but there still needs to be some thread connecting it all, and songs that hold together with a nice added heaviness.”
What they have been listening to runs in the same direction. Taraf de Haïdouks’ “A La Turk” has been on heavy rotation, the band citing the speed, the sudden tempo changes and a level of musicianship Lovric calls unreal. Fantômas’ “Charade” is another reference point for how it stays coherent while sounding brutally heavy.
“The sonic world Mike Patton and co create is very special,” he says. For Patten, Amenra’s “Dead Born and Buried” has stayed since growing up and still feeds his drumming.
The session was filmed by Milo Moores, Amy Zimber and Romily Frances, and edited by Sludge, the pairing of Moores and Zimber. Ashby, who tracked and mixed it, also plays in Studio 20, a band folding electronic, alt-pop and emo together. All four songs are out today.
🔔 IDIOTEQ is ad-free, independent, and runs on one person’s time. If you want it to stay that way: DONATE via PayPal 𝗈𝗋 SUPPORT via Patreon.
Stay connected via Newsletter · Instagram · Facebook · X (Twitter) · Threads · Bluesky · Messenger · WhatsApp.
