A couple of months ago I heard Uh Huh Yeah, a little piece Oliver Leith composed in 2019, for the first time. Perhaps the catchiest thing I’ve heard this year, it now lives completely rent free in my brain. For a good few weeks, the sounds of the piece just swirled around in my head, enjoying constant rotation in my subconscious. There’s only about five seconds of music to remember the piece for, but I remembered, replaying its melancholy harp chords alongside its very comical soprano yelp of ‘Uh huh! Yeah!’. The piece is, unexpectedly, a smash hit, a contemporary composition I’d like to see someone drop in a set.
If you call a piece Uh Huh Yeah, I think it’s only right you’d describe it the way Leith does: ‘It’s the same chords, just falling a semitone by returning the harp… and the singer goes uh huh yeah’. There’s a refreshing simplicity to how Leith describes his music; he makes it sound easy, but in his pieces he extracts little bits of sound others might overlook. He’s able to find joy in musical blips; he champions over-looped phrases, clumsy melodic divergences, and the weird, unwanted sounds that sometimes worm their way into recordings. He doesn’t mind if his music overstays its welcome, and even describes it as ‘wrong’ himself, when he gets the chance. If he finds something peculiar and neglected, he goes overboard with it, emphasizing it above all else.
Leith grew attached to repetition when he was younger. Studying at a school that prioritised jazz music, he was introduced to ‘Prayer (Oh Doctor Jesus)’ by Miles Davis and Gil Evans: ‘it’s one of my favourite pieces of music – except I hate almost all of it.’ Hidden beyond the track’s effusive build-up is what Leith considers a defining influence, a short four-bar breakdown that he thinks sounds like a lion’s roar. ‘All I used to do was take that bit of music and loop it’. The process now is very much the same: he’ll spend an eternity working on something just so that he can hit one moment he’s happy with. It’s how music, and also everything else, works: ‘it’s how I think of all songs, as that song with that bit in it’. There are little bits in Leith’s pieces, too.
When he wrote Uh Huh Yeah, Leith was singing it himself, which was strange, given that he was writing it for a professional soprano singer: ‘I have this weird, stupid boy voice, and then I gave it to Héloïse [Werner] to sing’. When he hands over his pieces, something additive happens, the intentional fractures and rough edges being played correctly by the musicians he works with. These musicians are so good, he thinks, that they roll with the imperfections – ‘no matter how wrongly or unorthodoxly I write, they make it sound right. It is incredibly difficult music, and they make it sound simple’. It happened again with his recent album good day good day bad day bad day, featuring a composition he wrote for percussion-piano group GBSR Duo. Leith filled the piece with awkward inflexions and unstable instrumentation – but they played it. ‘I’m always flabbergasted by what artists can do – you always need to put more difficulty into things, because they’ll just learn it and you’ll be like, you just made it secure!’.
Which is fine, by the way: the things that define Leith’s pieces, the humour and earnestness, shine through in performance. In fact, in their final form, they feel even more pronounced. Seeing and hearing the endless vamp of Uh Huh Yeah on stage makes it even more what it is: absurd, enraging, and even a little bit cozy, because it’s a weirdness we can all share in. good day good day bad day bad day is fundamentally about the tension of trying to perfect imperfections, and Leith credits GBSR Duo’s George Barton and Siwan Rhys as bringing that to life. Written with compassion for people living with compulsive behaviour, good day utilises homely instrumentation to suggest the ‘everyday’ environment our mental health dwells in. Throughout the piece, Leith asserts straight melodic and rhythmic lines, while frantically deviating from them. He asks the duo to do unreasonable things: at one point, Barton has to bow a waterphone, the famously wobbly instrument Leith describes as ‘essentially existing only for horror soundtracks’, sustaining one, serene note. Through their collaboration, the three artists hit at the exact feeling Leith put into the piece – that attempt at trying to order your life in a way that feels comfortable and sane when the world insists it can’t do that for you.
Leith likes doing a lot of different things, and he’s constantly unearthing new combinations of instruments and ideas – so threading his music together isn’t all that conducive to anything. But there are themes, and feelings, that you can trace. Most importantly, there’s an earnestness to what he writes, and an empathy towards those he writes about. He likes people, and he likes their hair-brained schemes: works such as Sexton Blakes, about the dishonest art fraudster Tom Keating, and 664 Love Songs guaranteed to cure heartache, an exhaustive overview of pop music’s enduring sameness, take a loving view of their subject material. Leith doesn’t distance himself from the silliness of the situation: he wants to be part of it. ‘I like being honest, and I’m an oversharer, so that’s what I do in music.’ The art Tom Keating made was fake, but Leith appreciates his motivations. In 664 Love Songs, he takes an endearing look at the hits of the last 50 years, warmly celebrating the fact that no one’s really been able to find new ways to express human emotions in all that time.
Leith’s new work, Me Hollywood, follows a similar line, jumping off from something semi-sociological without passing too much in the way of judgment. Inspired by people who want their life soundtracked, and by Spotify playlists with names like ‘Why Isn’t My Life a Film?’, he created the piece from the perspective of ‘someone who’s hired an ensemble to score their life’. Think Truman Show, but less dystopian – you’re aware of the facade and you’re loving the attention. For the sake of the piece, Leith’s collaborators Explore Ensemble are commissioned lifers, reacting to every little whim Leith’s character has. ‘It covers all the diegetic sound, so essentially the piece is sort of about tuning the world around you’. Leith takes things to an almost comic extreme, musically dramatizing the sound of someone pouring a drink. ‘It’s a fun look at narcissism, but not in a cynical way – it’s sort of a universal thing’. Fittingly, he ends this piece about this weird thing he’s noticed that people do with something that he really likes: guinea pig sounds. ‘They sound amazing’, and that’s all that matters.
Leith’s had the chance to realise his music now, to see it scaled up on the stage and recorded professionally. Crucial to it, though, is the DIY spirit that lives underneath. As a self-proclaimed ‘musician who can’t play anything’, he’s always exploring what things sound like, embracing error and instinct. In the end, Uh Huh Yeah got its contemporary music refinement, sounding like something that fits alongside other pieces at a contemporary music festival. But he thinks about doing his own, homespun version, one more like the version he was singing at home – ‘stupid boy voice’, and all.