The Null Club On Collaborative EP, Live Experimentation And Gilla Band

---

---

We chat with The Null Club, the new project from Gilla Band guitarist Alan Duggan Borges, on his new EP and insane collaborations

You may know Allan Duggan Borges as the guitarist of Gilla Band, the legendary and massively influential Dublin noise rock band. Now, he has set out on his own, with his new project The Null Club.

With the self-titled debut EP due for release on 4th April and is already one of our most anticipated releases of the year, partly due to the hugely varied and exciting feature list. Valentine Caulfield (Mandy, Indiana) graced lead single ‘Slip Angle‘ and we’re yet to hear tracks featuring Faris Badwan (The Horrors) and ELUCID.

Below, we chat with Alan about the new project, its relationship to Gilla Band, and just how these collaborations with some of the most exciting experimental voices came about.

---

Can you explain what motivated you to start this new project? 

I don’t know. I should probably have a quicker answer for that one. With Gilla Band, that’s always been really, really fun and I’ve been able to get a lot from that. I was in another band in 2019 called The Claque and it just didn’t really work out. But something that was really fun from that was writing with new people and also writing by myself, you know.

It was the first time I’d actually kind of written something using a drum machine and brought it to that band. That got me excited about writing stuff by myself because, with Gilla Band, it had always been a case of we only all write together in the room and whatever comes from that is what ends up being the track. Being able to sit down and just work on stuff myself was really fruitful. 

In terms of what inspired it, it was a real kind of curiosity of learning more about production and learning more about synthesis and then it just kind of just evolved, I guess. 

Can you quickly talk us through the name, if there was a story? 

I was looking up potential titles and just going down different rabbit holes of Wikipedia articles or tracks or anything just to find stuff. And I ended up going through a lot of old pulp type comics and stuff like that. One of them was called The Null ABC, and I just really liked the name of that. I didn’t read it. I don’t know what it’s about, but I like the name of it. 

And then with the club aspect, I always like names like The Gun Club and stuff like that but I also like the idea that there would be different vocalists on different tracks so there’s the idea of people coming and going.

This is your solo project in a way, but on the other hand, every track on the EP is featuring collaborations. Do you view the project more as a collective or is this just how it’s ended up this time? 

I think maybe for the moment this is how it’s ended up this time. I mean, I wouldn’t be opposed to releasing something down the line where it’s just tracks that I’ve made with no vocalist on it.

I think for the moment, I’m really enjoying the idea of working with different vocalists and getting their take on it and then just seeing what happens. It’s pretty open, which is quite fun. There’s something quite freeing about that where it’s like, “oh, this could go in a lot of different directions depending on the opportunities that come up.”

In Gilla Band, there have definitely been moments where you’ve leant into the more electronic side of things. Especially with the most recent album, on the opening track it’s pretty heavy noise-wise, but it’s also got this crazy electronic aspect as well. Did you feel like this progression into more techno territory was a natural progression with this new track? 

Yeah, I think so. With Gilla Band, that electronic influence has certainly always been there. So when I went to start doing stuff by myself, that felt very natural because, first of all, I can’t play drums, so getting a drum machine is gonna be very useful for creating beats. And then it was just kind of leaning more into that. 

The approach towards writing The Null Club stuff is in many ways super similar to how I would go about writing stuff with the lads in Gilla Band except it was just with slightly different instrumentation and less of a band altogether. A lot of times how we start a lot of Gilla Band tracks is we’ll start with drums and then we’ll add stuff to that and this is quite a similar process.

There’s always been a connection between Gilla Band and Mandy, Indiana. I’ve seen you tour together and you’ve got similar sounds. What was the creative process of working with Valentine? Was it a case of sending stuff over to her or was it more of a creative collaboration? 

I had sent her the instrumental, which is the same as it is now. She then sent back vocals that she had recorded on a headphone microphone type thing and then I just kind of placed that in the track. That was kind of it, you know what I mean? There really wasn’t much more to it! 

I took a little bit of her vocal from the start of the track and then looped that at the end, cause she had just stopped doing vocals where that noise build up things and just kind of let it go from there. She had all the lyrics. She kind of had the whole thing. It was really good. 

To record it, I was over in Manchester and went over to her apartment and we set up to record. I think we got it done in about an hour, it was super fast. And then I went home and we ended up using the vocals from the microphone on her headphones. That whole second half of the track is actually from that take. It was just really, really, really easy.

You mentioned that all three collaborations happened quite naturally through mutual respect for each other’s work. I was wondering if these tracks had been written with these vocalists in mind?

I’ll be working on stuff with no particular vocalist in mind necessarily, but just trying to write instrumentals or write tracks. Then it might become obvious that a type of vocal would be really cool on this.

The track that Faris ended up being on, he reached out and I thought he could really work on that one. So I sent it over and he was up for doing it, which was really cool. 

With the ELUCID one, that was a little different because I had originally sent him one track, but he wasn’t really able to make it work. And then I sent him another track and that actually ended up going on his album, ‘Revelator’, the track ‘RFID’. And then I sent him this one, which I had actually always seen as an instrument. I sent it over and he was excited by it. That was quite late into the process, I had the track mixed by that point. 

All three are such experimental people in their own fields, but not necessarily three people you would expect to see on a record together. You mentioned that this debut track was a nice halfway point between the two other singles. Is the sound consistent throughout the EP? 

I don’t think the others sound super techno like that one does, but I do think there’s a real similarity. There’s a similar instrumentation that’s used across the tree to try to keep them in the same world. Val and Faris and ELUCID, like you said, they’re very, very different artists. So I like that that kind of makes each track feel kind of different from one another. 

To me, they all sound part of the same world, but I don’t know,how somebody else would interpret that. 

As a guitarist, has that affected at all how you approach production, having been on both sides of it, both behind the scenes and live on stage?

With Gilla Band, the way that we’ve always approached our instruments, whether it’s guitars, bass or drums, from a production mindset. I think we’ve always looked at how we can affect the sound of this instrument to make it exciting to us. 

With Adam, that’s always been adding weird bits of drums and then myself and Daniel have tons of pedals. So that idea of going in and meticulously manipulating a sound has always been part of it. I’ve always felt that, whether it’s focusing on a specific guitar tone or focusing on a drum sound or vocal sound, all of them feel very interchangeable in my head. I see them all as the one thing. 

I produce similarly to the way I play guitar; I’m very heavy handed with effects on the actual track. Instead of just being like, “here’s a vocal and let’s just throw reverb on it and you’re kind of good to go”, it’s more that I love playing with vocal effects and I love playing with drum effects and bass effects.

I want to talk a bit about your live shows that are coming up. Is it going to be a lot of experimentation, what can we expect? 

I’m still in the process of writing the set. What I hope not to happen is just to be standing behind the desk and just letting that stuff happen. I love sets like that but it’s not something I really would want to do. 

So I’ve been trying to figure out how to take these three tracks plus other stuff that I have and perform that live without it being like a drum kit on my back and doing all that kind of shit! Just doing it in a way that’s kind of interesting and hopefully not super dorky looking. 

Basically, I’ve been getting drum machines going and then I’ve taken samples of the vocals and I’m just running them through pedals and effects and looping them. And then I’ve got different synths and like noise generating machines. And I have them routed through different amps and again, through different pedals. So I guess the idea would be a kind of improvisational techno set except instead of being just solely reliant on the PA, I’d have stuff rooted through amps on stage, as well as the PA, and then be just a bit more involved with playing the different parts. 

There’s hopefully a visual aspect to it as well, I’ve got this little video synth pedal, so it won’t just be me walking out and playing the set and then leaving, you know. Let’s see how it all goes, I’ve never done something like that before, so it’s going to be challenging. 

Other than the EP release, what can we expect from you in the future? Are you working towards a Null Club album? Will there be more Gilla Band? 

I’ve got lots of Null Club material that I’m working on. I hope to try get something out later in the year, but probably not an album. Originally, I wanted the first thing I’m going to ever do is an album. And then I was just working on this stuff for so long and I just needed to release this or it was never going to get released. So that got me excited about the idea of just doing EPs.

If I want, I could just put out a single if I want to not be stuck to an album cycle. I hope to get another EP out later in the year, but I’ll see about that. 

With Gilla Band, we’re just working away on new material. We’ve got the bones of what looks like the next album starting to take shape anyway. I feel that Gilla Band massively influenced what I do with The Null Club, but then stuff I’m learning production-wise, I’m able to bring that back to Gilla Band. 

It feels very much part of the same world. Even with The Null Club, mixing it with Daniel, it’s just so, so familiar. It’s all written in the same room. 

Debut EP ‘The Null Club’ is out on 4th April.

Listen to ‘Slip Angle’ here:

---