by ANDREW DARLINGTON
An interview based around the album:
‘LEAP THE DIPS’
by CURTAIN TWITCHER
(2025, CTLP01
https://curtaintwitcher.bandcamp.com/album/leap-the-dips)
The Neighbourhood Watch. Those busybodies who observe from behind lace curtains. She’s no better than she should be. The moral guardians who spread gossip and innuendo. They twitch the curtains the better to witness scandalous liaisons, illicit infidelities, dubious assignations.
You see them in TV Soaps and claustrophobic suburban serial dramas.
But what has all that got to do with Sophie Toes, Grace Griffin and a barrage of electronic sounds?
‘I’m immersed in making a techno jam!!’ says Grace, ‘sure beats cleaning.’
I hope that it’s a clean production? ‘Shining’ she agrees.
They must be pleased with the way their album Leap The Dips turned out? ‘Yes! We poured a lot of love and time into it. We’re also fortunate to have a first-class mastering engineer very close by.’
Opening title is ‘Migration’, part of the cycle of nature, where formations of birds cut shapes in the sky as they fly south for the winter. Migration is also the politically contentious issue concerning the movement of people seeking refuge from crisis zones. Migration is also a term for the flow of data from one device to another. All of the above, or none? Music For Stowaways. The soul and heart-pulse of the machine.
Grace clarifies. ‘Many of our ideas incorporate the natural world. For some of the Leap The Dips tracks, we have referenced the world of birds. Migration is very much named with the movement of birds around the planet in mind. ‘Northern Flicker’ is a kind of woodpecker. ‘Sonate’ is the sounds that birds make which are not ‘typical’ bird song.’
French classical composer Olivier Messiaen was known for meticulously transcribing birdsong, into compositions such as ‘Oiseaux Exotiques’. Love that’ says Sophie, ‘birdsong is so soothing sonically, can’t get more analogue than that!’
‘Not sure if you’ve heard of Jean-Claude Vannier’ says Sophie, ‘but he’s another French composer who blends classical and modern styles. He composed string arrangements for Serge Gainsbourg, most notably on the 1971 Histoire De Melody Nelson album. One of my favourite albums I think, most definitely a desert island disc.’
‘Interesting that you mention Messiaen’ adds Grace. ‘The word ‘sonate’ is the sound produced by birds using mechanisms other than their syrinx – in other words, deliberate production of sounds by their wings, bill, tail, feet, feathers or even the use of tools. Would this be Messiaen’s drum part? We quite liked the word because it is a nice analogy for how we approach our music, without lyrical content but with a strong melodic intent. Electronic music can be so versatile!’
Are Curtain Twitcher consciously following the earlier tradition of electronic music generated in Sheffield? ‘I wouldn’t say it is deliberate or overtly conscious’ says Grace, ‘however we are both very aware of the tradition. We both have plenty of friends who are involved and active in electronic music here – indeed, as we have both been for quite some time.’
Robert Moog devised the first modular synthesiser in 1964. There had been electronic music before that time. Musique concrète, the theremin, Delia Derbyshire, ring modulators, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ‘Kontakte’. The Moog enabled small mobile intelligent units. Kraftwerk. Cabaret Voltaire were electronic, but Richard & Mal used vocal samples and voices. Vice Versa and Bleep & Booster. Human League before Dare, and sometimes after. Clock DVA and its more outré TAGC project. Oscillations on undiscovered frequencies. A roof of sky.
Did Grace & Sophie spend their teenage years listening to Tangerine Dream? Grace says ‘I was wrapped up in Rock music, Indie, Goth, Krautrock in my teens. Playing drums in a band. Electronic music was in my awareness – Human League, Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire were more prominent. I knew about Tangerine Dream but wasn’t particularly familiar with them until a while later.’
For Sophie, ‘Electronic music has been a big influence for me from a young age, growing up in the eighties, technology was really influencing the sound of popular music. Me and my sister would make up dance routines to ‘Axel F’ by Harold Faltermeyer when it came out on Now That’s What I Call Music 5 in 1985. The ‘Dr Who’ theme tune is a really strong childhood memory. It just sounded so futuristic. Certainly, living in Sheffield for the last twenty-five years with its specific environment/history/geography/culture has certainly influenced my/our music-making no doubt. In my teens I loved listening to Rave, KLF, Altern8, the Prodigy, before I started going to house clubs when sixteen. Dance clubs were really exciting places mid-nineties and going to back2basics at that time and listening to the likes of Andrew Weatherall DJ had a big effect on me. I only discovered Tangerine Dream probably in my twenties when I was into the full swing of record collecting.’
Leap The Dips is an album that emerged from machine jamming with a creative freedom that only comes through friendship, a friendship both musical and genuine. ‘We’ll talk about pretty much owt if you provide the tea and cakes,’ say the Curtain Twitchers. ‘Not your average bloketronica’ blags their Press Release, more ‘corrupted downtempo post Balearic chug pulses and wobbles, throbs and twitches, full of fat noises and bolshy Moogery.’ Informational substrate. Music as a continuous informational field in thermodynamic equilibrium. And don’t you just love it?
‘Northern Flicker’ is climate change melting glaciers bringing the Aurora Borealis down latitudes to become spectacular geomagnetic flickers over northern urban cityscapes, free ‘Lumière’ light shows in the city sky. A choreography of curved shapes. Opening slow and moody, it then stitches a dazzling dance of fragments into ‘Analogue Epilogue’, colour-treated meditations in opposition to all things digital-sterile, blood-red nail-varnish, bleeps and twitters that chart unknown realms of the stratosphere. A retro-Sci-Fi cyber-future inhabited by AI Sims. The vibration of subatomic particles.
The duo was spun off from the beguiling psychedelic whimsy of Paul Infanti’s The Cuckoo Clocks when they were performing at Sheffield’s ‘Club 60’ – with Sophie as a group member and Grace as live and recording engineer. I asked specifically about Tangerine Dream because they made an obvious reference when they did ‘Tangerine Nightmare’, which titled a series of live 2023 jams that mark the duo’s earliest direct collaborations. The name chosen for the events obviously references Edgar Froese New Age voyages. ‘Bathyspheric’ (with a Brecht-Weill lilt), ‘The Golden Hour Of Darkness’ and a more throw-away title ‘I’ve Had The Heating On Since Teatime’, travelogue other sequences which can be located on YouTube.
’Yeah absolutely’ from Grace. ‘If I recall correctly, that was the end result of a fairly early jam session of ours. At the time, I think it was the most ambient track we’d made too. We hadn’t explicitly set out to make a Tangerine Dream-‘style’ track, or even an ambient one per se. But when we listened back to it we both found that to be a good reference point. The joy of jamming or improvising without constraint, feeling one’s way into an interesting place. Synths and other electronic musical instruments are great when used like this!’
So the tracks on Leap The Dips evolved through a process of improvisation. Like artist Paul Klee said ‘a drawing is simply a line going for a walk’, so Curtain Twitcher take a synth phrase for a walk and track where it goes? Sophie takes up the narrative. ‘Yeah, we definitely started this whole process as a bit of an experiment in sound with synth jamming. We didn’t want to write Pop songs particularly, but we were more curious with where we could take our ideas in terms of sound and the technology available – synths, modular synths, effects. With the technology to make music these days the possibilities are pretty much endless, and we wanted to incorporate lots of elements that we like about music, fun, strong hooks, psychedelia, warm analogue sounds, appealing sonics, wide soundscapes and really explore what was possible. I’m sure Grace could add more to this list! I guess what I’m trying to say is we didn’t really start out with preconceived ideas, the music really evolved until we were happy with it. Having creative freedom is really liberating especially as we really connect on a music-making level in addition to being really close friends. The references to nature with the song titles are because having the Peak District national park on our doorstep has also a big influence on us as well as the music we’ve consumed over the years.’
Now, ‘The Perfect Light’ rides ominous sonic waves in reverberating tides and crosscurrents of luminosity, the birth of nebulae on the galactic rim. Saturn’s rings thrown around a vase of carnations. ‘Sonate’ has a trippier metaverse of rhythm that invites a dance remix. If the title is a plural corruption of ‘sonata’ then it works, as a composition to be played, rather than sung. ‘Inflight Entertainment’ is a bumpy ride with its own built-in distortion along the flightpath, yet it emerges for a safely tuneful landing; do not turn off your devices! No heavy programmed drums, the nagging undertow provides the rhythmic base on which the pointillistic tangerine nightmares are constructed, with the hint of voice-loops inviting you to ‘open, open, open the door’… the full eight-minute ‘The Fourth Door’ signifies opening the cerebral doors inside your mind, Aldous Huxley’s cleansed doors of perception through which everything will appear to (wo)man as it is, infinite. Or the interdimensional portal into otherness. Or the Slasher Movie where the forbidden fourth door on the landing at the head of the creaky staircase is the one you open at the peril of losing your soul.
Sophie says ‘Yes, ‘The Fourth Door’ definitely signifies opening the cerebral doors of your mind. I think lyrics is something we’re developing as ‘The Fourth Door’ was the last track we made on the album where we felt some chanting would work well. And our music-making is always evolving…’ She closes with ‘we’re doing a few gigs in December if you fancy coming along to one?’
This is Curtain Twitcher – Sophie Toes, Grace Griffin and a barrage of electronic sounds. Unless there are darker meanings at work here? The Curtain Twitcher as the kidnapped victim of human trafficking desperately semaphoring help messages to an uncaring world that ignores her plight?
‘LEAP THE DIPS’ (2025, CTLP01)
(1) ‘Migration’ 5:26
(2) ‘Northern Flicker’ 5:43
(3) ‘Analogue Epilogue’ 5:04
(4) ‘The Perfect Light’ 4:38
(5) ‘Sonate’ 5:02
(6) ‘Inflight Entertainment’ 4:02
(7) ‘The Fourth Door’ 8:05
https://www.youtube.com/@CurtainTwitcherMusic
They had a single release prior (which came out 10/10/25) called ‘Underground Genius’ which was a track commissioned by Amy Carter-Gordon to make for an exhibition at ‘No Bounds Festival 2025’ as part of ‘Switch Room’ at Castle House in collaboration with Treatment Studio. A direct link back to the Sheffield Cabaret Voltaire experimentalists, this was about the topography of the land and the architectural heritage of Sheffield, hence the vocal sample talking about the hole in the road, used with explosive sounds from the demolition of the Tinsley cooling towers. With a percussive bonus ‘Club Mix’:
https://curtaintwitcher.bandcamp.com/album/underground-genius
Previous to that was an ‘Artificial Intelligent’ EP of three remixes the duo did for Sieben (13/6/25):
https://sieben.bandcamp.com/album/curtain-twitcher-remix-sieben-ep
2021 was when they released an album – ‘Gently Deranged’, with their friend Tracy Deakin under the Surreal Appeal name. Two former members of The Cuckoo Clocks – Tracy and Sophie, combine with their erstwhile live and recording engineer, Grace Griffin, to create witch-like stories told over haunting electronic beats, evoking the powerhouse of northern electro with a nod to krautrock. The songs hang in the head and engender a compulsion to return to them:
https://surrealappeal.bandcamp.com/album/gently-deranged
Then, prior to that, Grace mixed some Cuckoo Clocks stuff that Sophie and Tracy were in. That’s how Sophie and Grace met at Sheffield’s Club 60.
2017 The Cuckoo Clocks – ‘Frontiers Of A Seductive Mind’ LP (TCCLP01)
https://thecuckooclocks.bandcamp.com/album/frontiers-of-a-seductive-mind
2019 The Cuckoo Clocks – ‘Say The Word’ (digital single)
https://thecuckooclocks.bandcamp.com/track/say-the-word
2018 The Cuckoo Clocks – ‘Accidents At Christmas’ (digital single)
https://thecuckooclocks.bandcamp.com/track/accidents-at-christmas
2020 The Amorphous Androgynous – ‘Tomorrow Time Immortality’ (Cuckoo Clocks Remix)
https://theaa.bandcamp.com/track/tomorrow-time-immortality