A knack for fragile songs bursting with originality
Rising London indie pop gem Mari Dangerfield will release her album ‘Love And Other Machines’, a collection of 12 catchy synth-driven alternative pop tunes, on CD via Dimple Discs out now.
She also presents fun buoyant videos for the uber-catchy ‘Screen Time’, one of several songs on the album surrounding technology and its effects, and the endearing and reverie-filled electro-ballad ‘The Stars Were Wrong’.
Hailing from Ealing, West London, Mari Dangerfield is a multi-talented and colourful alternative / electronic pop artist, producer, writer and musician with a knack for fragile songs bursting with originality. Coining her sound “Quirkpop of the mind, body and laptop”, her productions are characterised by rich vocal harmonies, catchy hooks and cinematic arrangements.
Broadly a concept album, ‘Love And Other Machines’ explores the connections between emotions and technology and is filled with love songs that use objects and gadgets as songwriting metaphors. Dangerfield made her first appearance on the music scene after winning a Mute Records video competition. In 2017, she also won a competition created by French composer Yann Tiersen, for which she covered his song ‘Porz Goret’, winning in the Best Non-Piano category.
Building on a string of self-released singles and videos since 2018, she has been able to build a devoted audience, both online and for her unique live shows. Already something of a polymath, she records, arranges and produces all her own material, as well as designs the visual content for artwork, new media and video. She’s also known for re-popularising the Stylophone, which features in her early singles and her live set.
Thematically, many of the songs are connected to technology (whether from the exhaustion of its use or anguish from the way it highlights loneliness, dependency or one’s psychological condition), with other songs about love and relationships. ‘Love Machine’ is the anchor that binds those themes tightly together, exploring how love can be a mechanical process (certainly on the biological and psychological side of things). ‘Coping Mechanism’, ‘Virtually’, ‘Screen Time’ and ‘Webcam’ continue this exploration.
“This album is so much more than just a collection of songs to me – It’s a sort of record of the first few years of my career, and an even longer period of my life. It reveals so much about me, personally and professionally. It feels like my artist’s palette has been formed. If you really listen to these songs, you can get to know me on quite a deep level. There’s a lot of my reality embedded within the concept and the stories. I would have been lost without making music. It saved my mental wellbeing,” says Mari Dangerfield.
This album is as diverse in sound as it feels in how it’s travelled with me as I’ve developed as an individual over the past three years: No song sounds the same and, as I’m sure you’ll agree, it feels like I’m in a very different place at the end from where I was when it began. Undeniably, some of the songs delve into some quite personal struggles of mine and were inspired by my time in therapy between 2015 and 2018, as I came out of some incredibly dark places. I was so lucky to have been gifted all this time to learn about myself and my inner wounds, and not only improve as a person but to be left with the tools to continue to reflect on my struggles, as undoubtedly, they would and do return in different guises.”
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