I AM LONO are an electronic avant pop duo from Nottingham – they are Matthew Cooper and David Startin. The pair formed the band after realising a shared obsession for The Doors, Hunter S Thompson and John Carpenter.
Initially they began experimenting with sprawling soundtracks, which they then condensed into violent pop songs with big vocals. They named the project I AM LONO, a reference to a moment of madness in the Hunter S Thompson book, The Curse of Lono, when Hunter captures a huge Marlin and beats it to death with a Samoan war club and returns to shore screaming triumphantly: ‘I am Lono’.
They’ve been heavily supported by BBC Introducing Nottingham, played Dot to Dot Festival and have supported Palma Violets, Savages and Walls.
The music they make is all written and recorded with collaborator Chris Moore (Echoboy; Spotlight Kid) in their basement studio. All the songs are recorded in this room and mixed down to reel-to-reel tape. Their songs have been played on BBC 6 Music and BBC Introducing, and a specially made limited run of cassette tapes recently sold out in Rough Trade. The six track self-titled EP will be released on limited 10″ white vinyl and download on 22 August through Louder City Records.
“Why Everything Is Made Of Fives was one of the first things Lono wrote together. It was before we really knew what the band was about and how it was going to be put together, we had an acoustic guitar, and were looking for a female vocalist who could sing like Grace Slick. Strange times indeed. David was interested in John Carpenter soundtracks and I was still listening heavily to The Pixies, somehow those ended up being a prototype manifesto for Lono: to try to make something that is atmospheric while at the same time is immediate and direct.
The lyrics of the song come from a long night out in Nottingham, we kept finding ourselves in heated debates with strangers about the Illuminati! Trilogy; conversations that were littered with talk of secret societies, ancient orders, and how maybe the Pope controls the world and is a lizard from the moon etc. People kept telling us about the ‘Law of Fives’: an all encompassing and usefully vague law which states that “all things happen in fives, or are divisible by, or are multiples of five, or are directly or indirectly appropriate to five.” and that “The law of fives is never wrong”. Absolutely perfect nonsense.
I didn’t understand what we were talking about that night, and I don’t think its any clearer now. I think numerology and superstition are absurd but that it is also a glorious thing that people are so eager to explain how everything is connected, and to find hidden meaning in all things. Long live conspiracy theories.”
Pre-Order the EP
https://iamlono.bandcamp.com/