The Leafcutters started built songs a certain way for 18 months. Then they reversed themselves.
“We called it clumping,” fills in Jo Goba, co-founder of the Leafcutter collective. “We’d all bring little snatches of sound, slivers of things, and put them in a pile. We’d clump it all together, and these ‘listening holes’ would magically form. Now we take those strands and connect them into one long extended linear sound.”
It helps to know that the LCs are industrious tape-snipping DJs and that mixtapes are their main oeuvre. They developed their multi-multi-track methodology after studying radical early 20th century art theory at the college on the hill.
But clumping has lost its luster.
“We Were bunching shards, and that worked for warehouse raves. But now we’re mostly in clubs, so it was worth experimenting with extending strands—connections, nerve endings, communal Babel-building.”
Yes, that’s how they talk. How do they sound? Similarly confusing, without the verbality. Find out Saturday at the main common of the college on the hill, where Leafcutter sound montages will blast out of PAs for an hour, starting at 1 p.m.

A soggy folk-pop double bill of Watershed Way and Closer to the Lake at the Bullfinch..
Beluga Digs and Listening to the Uplands at Hamilton’s… An Evening With The Gift of Bark at D’ollaire’s. Great booking, but those prices!…