Kieran Webber
Director and Founder of CLUNK Magazine, CLUNK Events, and other CLUNK affiliate businesses. You’ll probably find me tucked away somewhere sending emails, listening to music, and creating content.
PARTICLS, a psych outfit made up of gardeners from London chat to us about how they came to be, influences, and more!
It’s not often your gardeners are also part of a progressive psych outfit in their spare time, it’s even rarer that they’d all be from London and Brazil collectively. However, this is the story of PARTICLS, the newly formed outfit from the big smoke. We first caught wind of these green thumbed groove merchants with their debut single ‘Other Sides’, back in 2024. Now, fast forward to what is possibly the longest month on record (January 2025), they treat us to a two hitter with ‘Loving Feeling’ and ‘Face To Face’.
Off the back of this, we wanted to hear more from PARTICLS, so we caught up with them for a quick chat. They discuss their humble beginnings, dream collabs, and more!
(Interview was with bassist/vocalist Rudy Blu)
Kieran: Hey! Thank you very much for taking the time to chat with us! How has your 2025 been so far?
Rudy: It’s been good thanks. I’m getting a real sense of optimism, unprompted, from a lot of people I’m speaking to. Despite the global picture being utterly chaotic, carnage, people seem to have a good feeling about this year and I feel it too. Maybe something’s happening….
Kieran: Let’s start at the beginning. How did you all meet and at what point did you know you wanted to start making music together?
Rudy: Most of us go way back with at least one other member of the band, and we’ve kind of always been making music if not with each other. When this formation finally came together it just stuck, there’s a really good balance both in terms of music and personality, and not that much ego flying about (says the singer… speaking for everyone..).
Kieran: Did you have a shared influence with the sound you wanted to make or did it differ?
Rudy: We were all dancing at a Kerri Chandler set in the woods and had one of those real kind of collective consciousness, breakthrough rave experiences, ha! After that we just decided we wanted to make people dance.
Kieran: We just got hold of your new single ‘Loving Feeling’ (a real beauty of a release by the way), what was the influence behind this release?
Rudy: Thanks, it’s a pretty simple message – fairly self-explanatory I think!
Kieran: Was anything differently done during the writing and recording process?
Rudy: We recorded this one when we had a bit of time left at the end of a two day session on in the studio (Lightship 95). We’d been doing Loving Feeling as an acoustic, folk-ballad kind of thing and just decided to try something different then came up with this arrangement on the spot. It was then a lot of work trying to get it right in the mix. Ben and Zahara (Strange Pill Artists) are wonderful producers and very much ‘yes’ people, so we always end up trying every possibility at their studio Mashrooms Studios. I remember at one point we stripped out all the drums and spent a month or more doing this like tribal percussive thing. When we finally thought we had it right we thought we should just check how it sounded muted, and eventually ended up going back more or less to the original arrangement. Anyway suffice to say it took a LONG time to get it right but at least we know we tried everything!
Kieran: Your music has a slight noir feel to it, especially in ‘Face To Face’, so I am curious to know, are there any outside things like book, comics, or films that have influenced your sound?
Rudy: I definitely love a lot of books and films, I can’t say I can name any that have directly influenced the sound, not that I’m aware of anyway. I gravitate towards things where the line between happy and sad is blurred, that’s not very well put but I can’t think of another way to say it, and I think we aim to find that line in our music. There is a wonderful book called Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, by Max Porter that does that brilliantly.
Kieran: If you could collab with any other artists/band, who would it be and why?
Rudy: We love Family Time, can’t wait for them to release some more music! I personally love David Byrne and getting to work with him would be amazing. He has this way of putting beautiful, floating melodies over almost industrial, heavy grooves that, along with his weird lyrics, I find really subversive and fun.
Kieran: Lastly, what else can we expect from you in 2025?
Rudy: We are working on a five track EP and hope to have that out in the Summer!
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