For 15 years, the Liverpool band have been making some of the boldest experiments in British music (around their day jobs). They explain why quietness and community are so important in a chaotic world

For most bands, the main perk of living in a slightly rundown mansion-cum-artistic community on the city’s edge would be having licence to make an enormous racket. For Ex-Easter Island Head, says Benjamin Fair, it’s that “we get to play quietly”.

The four members of the Liverpool minimalists are sitting in Benjamin Duvall’s slate-grey bedroom/rehearsal space around the edge of their circular setup: guitars laid flat on keyboard stands, often with sticks wedged under the fretboard strings ready to create a giant reverberant twang, and mallets for hitting them on the floor; a drum kit deconstructed between the stations; haptic motors extracted from mobile phones primed to dance across the surface of the strings and cymbals. The band’s old amps are stacked in a corner behind Andrew Hunt, who joined in 2019 and suggested jettisoning them. “It eliminates any hum so you’re just hearing the strings,” he says.