Bianca Scout Pattern Damage

The Newcastle-born, south London-based dancer, musician and performer Bianca Scout follows solo releases, and collaborations with Space Afrika, Klein, Coby Sey, Mica Levi, Ben Vince and Elena Isolini, with a spellbinding new album. Heralding an age of gothic, technocratic dystopia, in ‘Pattern Damage’ Scout weaves a patchwork of narcotic vocals, blunted after-hours ambience, and chopped-n-screwed sacred music. “The name Pattern Damage flipped in my brain when I was thinking about people’s trauma and patterns of behaviour,” Scout explains. “It has a double meaning. It’s not just the pattern of damage that’s happened to you, the cycle of abuse; pattern damage can also mean the damage that you do to a cycle, to break the pattern.” We hear this pattern break throughout the record, in the cacophonous noise collage of ‘Intro,’ and the labyrinthine chops of strings and voice in ‘Lead Us’. It’s also present in the unadorned yearning and exquisite anger of the heart-rending vocals of ‘Forest Spirit’ and ‘Almost Nothing’, courtesy of Darkmarik, the musical alias of movement artist Malik Nashad Sharpe. Recorded as one-take voice notes sent to Scout while Sharpe took part in an artist residency deep in the forest, here, their voice pierces through melancholy gloam, another sad cycle broken. “As an album it does feel like a dance,” reflects Scout. “It feels like movement.” Calling back to her roots in dance, there is haunted choreography in ‘Chances’, a sultry instrumental elevated into an autotune prayer, punctuated by fits of dusty breaks and smothered percussion. In ‘Desert’ too, recorded by Scout and power electronics mainstay Martyn Reid under their Marina Zispin moniker, demure cold-wave pulse is picked out in Korg licks and Reid’s doom-laden voice, as he reads out an account of one of Scout’s dreams. Yet it’s ‘Passage / Reversal / Fortune’, a collaboration with another movement artist, Kendra Chiagoro-Noel, who appears here as Nwakke, that unfurls most like contemporary dance, with Scout flipping Allegri’s ‘Miserere Mei Deus’ into a whirl of vocal harmony that Chiagoro-Noel then remixes again, producing and writing the latter half of the song, casting both of their voices adrift on a shared ocean of sound. “There are spirits,” Scout asserts. “Nwakke and I have talked so much about what the difference is between a soul and a spirit.” Bianca has performed at Royal Academy of Arts, the Serpentine Gallery and Turner Contemporary for Mark Leckey’s ‘In The Offing’. She choreographed ‘The Heart Of The Anchoress’ at Southbank Centre, alongside music by Peter Broderick and Specimens. She recorded a BBC 6 Music Live session as part of Marina Zispin, whilst further radio action has come from BBC 6 Music, NTS, Resonance Extra, Noods, and Balamii. Press support for Bianca has included Fact, Crack, The Ransom Note, DJ Mag, Resident Advisor, Loud and Quiet and Inverted Audio.