1-800 Girls remix Art School Girlfriend’s ‘Is It Light Where You Are’

London-based DJ / producer 1-800 Girls aka Jake Stewart’s precise creations float on a cerebral and deeply emotional plane, inherently evident on his new remix for Art School Girlfriend’s track ‘Is It Light Where You Are’ out now through Fiction Records.

There are subtle hints of acid over deep, rolling garage-influenced beats. Polly explains: “1-800 Girls and I are big admirers of each other’s music, so he was one of the first people I thought of to do a remix for this album. I always play his tracks on my Foundation FM radio show, and he recently invited me to do a guest mix on his monthly slot on Balamii. He makes such danceable music and has applied his beat magic to Is It Light Where You Are.”

‘Is It Light Where You Are’ is the debut album from Art School Girlfriend, moniker of Welsh producer, multi-instrumental musician and songwriter Polly Mackey. Throughout the record, Mackey showcases her ability at translating emotion through sound design. Mostly written over a two-week period of 14-hour solo studio sessions, the bulk of her album is torn straight from a journal kept throughout 2019. Those pages chronicle the end of a US tour, the tumultuous ending of a six-year relationship and Mackey’s journey back to London from Margate, where she lived and co-owned a book shop with her then girlfriend.

The duality between light and dark being a central theme of the album, she builds tranquil landscapes before crushing them in sound; a constant push-pull in dynamics gives the album a charging momentum over 10 tracks. While the lyrics are autobiographical, the full story can be heard in the album’s sonic relief map. “The main theme is duality between light and dark, lightness and heaviness. The production sort of mimics human emotions: there’s a lot of beauty buried underneath these uncomfortable-to-listen-to sounds.”
 
The album headline tour saw Art School Girlfriend headline a packed-out Village Underground in September of last year. Outside of her own artist project, Mackey also lent vocals to Ghostpoet’s album ‘I Grow Tired But Dare Not Fall Asleep’ and score work such as the BFI’s Shy Radicals film.