Stereo Six: Sky_A Sums Up Key Albums that Inspired His Record ‘Labyrinths’

More of an artist than just simply a musician, Sky_A stands out amongst his peers. The London-based songwriter and audiovisual artist is working towards the release of his new album Labyrinths on March 28th. He got the party started last month with the release of the album’s lead single, “Running Out of Winter.” As you hear within this song, Sky_A takes a wide approach when it comes to making his music. The song is an encapsulation of a lot of the musical styles that will be featured on the new record. The album will feature jazz bass, world music rhythms, and layered progressive rock distortion. He takes pride in his diversified approach, showcasing impressive originality and nearly unlimited imagination.

Outside of music, Sky_A, aka Sky Ainsbury, has a whole other artistic life as an audiovisual artist. In fact, he has previously been shortlisted for the Lumen Prize, an international award celebrating tech-based art, particularly digital art. He has spent several years zeroing in on this vast sonic multimedia universe that other artists have been quick to recognize. Currently, he is touring live visuals for electronic musician Rival Consoles (Erased Tapes). Ainsbury is the driving force behind Sky_A, but he is also closely assisted by drummer Adam Betts. The two have come up with something significant, progressive, yet extremely accessible.

For our latest Stereo Six, Sky Ainsbury joins us to run down six records that were crucial to him in inspiring the writing and recording of Labyrinths.

Sky_A, photo courtesy of artist

1. Tool – Ænima (1996, Zoo, Volcano)

“There’s a lot of Tool in this record. Justin Chancellor’s basslines and Danny Carey’s drum parts entered my body at a young age and never really left, it’s always going to be there in the background. When Aneek got involved to mix the project (and subsequently to also perform it live) it’s what we bonded over straight away, that deep, luxurious progressive music. There was a lot of A-B-ing between mixes in progress and tracks from later albums, but Ænima, actually ‘Forty Six & 2’ in particular, is the one that kind of lit a fire for me. It got me reading Jung, engaging with personal development through acceptance of pain and… my shadow. The influence will be hard to miss.

“When Adam Betts, the UK’s Danny Carey, got onboard to record drums, we sat and listened to a bunch of Tool stuff as reference for the way the drums should propel the music, and were just comparing notes on how much particular fills and phrases had tickled us, how much his style and my vocabulary for writing drum parts had been influenced by this one goddamn band.”

2. The Mars Volta – Deloused at the Comatorium (2003, Gold Standard Laboratories, Universal Records)

“Another thing that basically everyone who’s been involved in the project has agreed on is that The Mars Volta’s first album is a total masterpiece. And ‘Cicatriz’ is the track that kind of has everything in one place, it’s outrageously catchy when it wants to be, it’s angular and obnoxious, but also so crisply recorded with so many delicious sounds, this really alive energy. Then it bubbles down into psychedelic whalesong, like Echoes-era Pink Floyd. Then it comes back absolutely roaring with twin guitar solos from Omar Rodriguez Lopez and John Frusciante. I love it so much.

“I think this album pretty much unites everyone in the prog/math scene in the UK. I’m sure it’s somehow indirectly how I met (drummer) Aleks (Podraza) who plays keys/drums in the band, and there’s no way it doesn’t permeate my compositions. It just feels like a really urgent, important music, and the people who know, know.

“I watched the documentary If This Ever Gets Weird, about the band, and at one point they say that their absolute high water mark as a band was a couple of shows they did at Brixton Academy in 2005. I was there, and they weren’t lying, it was incredible. I’ve got a poster of that show on my wall right now.”

3. Brian Eno – Here Come the Warm Jets (1974, Island Records)

“I had pretty weird music tastes when I was a kid. We had a double cassette tape machine and I used to copy my favourite songs from my parents’ albums and put them on a mix tape of my own that I listened to until it was absolutely annihilated. And apparently what grabbed my attention as an eight-year-old was a three-minute freakout guitar solo by Robert Fripp in ‘Baby’s On Fire.’

“It’s quite shreddy, and I never learned to play that fast, but the tone, the layering, the sonic manipulations, the evocation of space, have become a huge part of what I want music to do. I feel like maybe a lot of people haven’t heard this track, even people who like rock and guitar music, and really they have to, it’s from a record released in 1973 and sounds as crisp and fresh and modern as anything you might hear today.”

4. 65daysofstatic – The Destruction of Small Ideas (2007, Monotreme)

“I have a memory of listening to this album while living, for bureaucratic reasons, in a squatted warehouse in Dalston, writing university essays in the middle of the night in the dark of winter, pressed up against an electric heater and wrapped in blankets, drinking just the worst coffee you can imagine.

“It’s got so much depth to it, incredible dynamics of quiet and bombast, some of the prettiest piano and some of the dirtiest guitar. I was writing fiction at the same time, and the track ‘The Distant and Mechanised Glow of Eastern European Dance Parties’ became something I’d put on when trying to visualise the world that would become the setting of this record. So there’s a bit of a full circle there, from music to fiction back to music. And there’s this chord progression that lasts about two minutes and just gets more and more added to it, this feeling of ‘the-most-ness,’ total emotional maximalism. It got me programming glitch drums (admittedly not well), and ultimately was probably the record that pushed me over into properly listening to electronic music, which is a big part of our record’s sound.”

5. DM Stith – Pigeonheart (2016, Octaves, Outset Recordings)

“I got introduced to this album when I was just starting to get serious about producing my own music, and it was a bit of a touchstone in terms of how you could work with unapologetically DIY home recordings and still build to really grand places. Stith has an incredible knack for layering vocals, building up these huge oceanic choirs of his voice. He’s also really confident mixing discordant elements, really harsh synths with really pretty, naive instrumentation, and a really emotionally raw, exposed voice. The genre mix of acoustic singer songwriter / folk and lo-fi electronic is really refreshing… The album Pigeonheart is gorgeous front to back, it definitely encouraged me to embrace some chaos and filth in the production process, and just… go for it.”

6. Aesop Rock – Spirit World Field Guide (2020, Rhymesayers Entertainment)

“Another liminal housing situation. During lockdown, I was living in a property guardianship in London that used to be Cat Stevens’ private studio. There was a soundproofed vocal recording booth built into the room on a kind of diagonal, and a grand piano tucked in behind it in a way where I couldn’t understand how it had ever gotten there. And the place had next to no natural light, which if you can imagine in lockdown was a pretty surreal experience. I ended up staying up all night a lot working on music, singing my heart out in this booth at 4 in the morning. And in the disoriented mornings after, I found myself either: listening to a lot of Aesop Rock’s new album that had just come out, or, playing this Star Wars Playstation game someone had lent me.

“Something about the aesthetic elements of the two forms of media fused together in my head. This rapper was making Star Wars-core, combining quite an earnest spirituality with a lot of bleeps and bloops and futuristic aesthetics. I realized that I was also making Star Wars-core, trying to convey the earth and grit and humanity of a futuristic sonic universe, this world I was trying to visualise with sound. My songs sound like the fucking Rebel Alliance I panicked. But the fact that Aesop Rock was doing it too made it something good, something I could lean into.

“I love this guy, these kind of dense, flowing and multilayered rhyme schemes are something I think sung lyrics could use a lot more of. That’s something I try to lean into when writing, really satisfying lyrical payoffs. It isn’t something progressive rock music is known for, but I think it could be.”

Sky_A, photo courtesy of artist