Eyes of Others share ‘Big Companies, Large Tentacles’ video 

Eyes of Others, the studio alias of Edinburgh based John Bryden, a self-proclaimed ‘post-pub couldn’t get in the club’ producer, has shared the video for Big Companies, Large Tentacles. It’s the latest track lifted from their self-titled debut album, which will be released via Heavenly Recordings on May 19. Watch the video via YouTube below.

Talking about the track, John said: “A while ago I visited Sigmund Freud’s old house. I stared at his couch in his study for a good five minutes. I thought of all the twisted souls who would take up there as he went about his psychoanalysis and excavations of the mind.”Big Companies, Large Tentacles, is an ode to a turbulent session on Freud’s couch. Where words are not enough, overwhelmed by emotions and dust particles permeating the psyche, it is something to be purged and tossed into an acid bath with a sort of gay abandon.”

Having announced their signing to the label last November with the release of a 10” vinyl-only 6-track EP, ‘Bewitched By The Flames,’ which sold out immediately through independent shops and mail order, the beautiful video for this latest track is the second in a trilogy directed by Niall Trask following New Hair New Me.  Once again shot somewhere in Norway by Rob Jarvis, John said about the video: “It was the coldest of the three but also the hottest. Seesawing between -18°C and 90 °C and at the mercy of the director, I was driven from church to sauna and back again on some sort of physical and spiritual quest for something or other.”

Marrying the anything-goes, freestyle magpie tendencies of Beck and The Beta Band to the electronic stylings of primetime 80s New Order by way of the spacious moods conjured by King Tubby, Eyes of Others debut’s whimsical demeanour is the perfect sonic balm to the utter confusion of the outside world. As is its sense of almost Balearic musical freedom. Such a mindset is fundamental to the music according to Bryden.   

“In so much of life you don’t feel free,” he laments. “There’s so many varying constraints and music is the place where you can do what you like. That’s your space for expressing yourself. I suppose I feel a bit emotionally repressed in some ways. In music I can react to the things in life that I find difficult, reincarnate those messy feelings, and create my own world within a world.”   

The bewildering qualities of modern life are also neatly – if somewhat inadvertently – captured in the name. His first release under the moniker came in 2017 with the ‘I See You in the Shrubs’ 12-inch (replete with a magical reworking by one Andrew Weatherall) on local Edinburgh label Paradise Palms. Prior to its release he had a few names vying for contention until he eventually hit upon Eyes of Others.    

“I’d obviously seen it or read it somewhere,” he recalls. “It just felt right. You can read different things into it. Particularly the way we use online stuff, we’re always judging other people and looking at one another through each other’s eyes and all this stuff.”   

The challenge of meeting his vision of musical freedom has not only been met on the album, but expectations have been exceeded. Coming in at a brisk 41 minutes, the album reveals its manifold charms immediately, but also does so in a meandering, nuanced and irreverent fashion   The spacious grooves of Safehouse recall Adrian Sherwood working his deep hypnotic magic on Primal Scream’s ‘Echo Dek’ dub album. Meanwhile, At Home, I’m A Leader takes the dub aesthetics on a more psychedelic, pastoral journey, where folk rock and krautrock combine to stunning effect. Elsewhere, the fanciful singalong New Hair New Me is the sound of The Lovin’ Spoonful being given a thoroughly unique Scottish makeover; the measured psych-house of Ego Hit is Ron Hardy transforming Spaceman 3 live down the Music Box and the elegant, orchestral Baroque pop of Mother Father is either the Velvet Underground at their most beatific or Four Tet at his most expansive.   

“I was thinking where’s my spot?” Bryden reflects about the pick & mix quality of the album. “The music is later than a gig but it’s not full-on early morning club fare. It’s the in-between space where I was imagining where my music works.”   

But his beguiling tunes are perfect for the music soundtracking the afters too. As the dawn breaks and the sun begins to rise. “Maybe there aren’t enough venues opening at 7am!” he laughs, before quickly adding: “I don’t think it will catch on unfortunately.” 

‘Eyes of Others ‘Tracklist

1. Once, Twice, Thrice 
2. Safehouse 
3. Escalation 
4. At Home, I Am A Leader 
5. New Hair New Me 
6. Ego Hit 
7. Mother, Father 
8. Jargon Jones & Jones
9. Come Inside 
10. Big Companies, Large Tentacles