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To set the record straight, experimental musician and DJ Jennifer Walton has not attended Goldsmiths at any point in her life. Despite numerous rumours to the opposite effect, Walton actually attended the University of Hertfordshire to study a film composition course––it was the only course of its kind that she could find––an experience she describes as ‘awful:’ ‘I had no one, no friends, no one knew anything.’
Walton did, however, manage to integrate herself so successfully in the Goldsmiths Fine Arts community in her early 20s that her attendance at the university is often quoted as fact. ‘My girlfriend at the time was on Fine Art, and gave me a desk in her studio. I was scuttling around, went to all of the same parties, and just kind of existed in that student bubble. I was attending the fine art lectures.’
So as she finished up her degree, she commuted between rural Hertfordshire and South London, using a manual push scooter and sheer determination to conquer the four hour round trip each day in order to continue living in Deptford. ‘All of these people are still my absolute best friends. I’m not surprised people think I went [to Goldsmiths], but I hope the interview isn’t contingent on the fact that I went!’
Luckily for Walton, alumni status does not change the fact that her debut album Daughters is an astounding piece of work: soaring, inventive, and forest-like in its complexity. Released last autumn, the album unpacks her experiences of grief surrounding her father’s cancer diagnosis, and eventual passing. He was also a musician, and Walton describes her first forays into music as opening up from the first time she tried Logic on his computer when she was in her early teens.
‘I went back to school with all of these awful beats that I’d made on my iPod that I was showing people, but I think that just got so lodged in my brain. I do find it quite funny as well, that it is just the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do, which in some ways is very liberating. It means that I’m not going to stop doing it, no matter what, and it kind of takes the pressure off to even figure that out.’
Before Daughters, Walton’s work was situated squarely in the electronic production world, and as a DJ, releasing club EP WHITE NURSE in 2019. You can hear these roots across the album, which shifts between tender, stripped back vocals and points that lean more in the direction of dance tracks. ‘There was a time, around [Daughters] and before, where I wasn’t listening to any electronic music at all, but I guess when the tools that you’ve built and the ones that are at [your] disposal are these elements and soundscapes, and it kind of trickles in, in funny ways.’
In Daughters, Walton takes on a new role as a singer-songwriter, a space that she tells me she’s interested in continuing to explore further. ‘I think in a lot of ways it was a huge departure from what I’d released before and what I thought about, but then I think it kind of was the only way it was ever going to work out in some ways. I already felt very burnt out on club music and club spaces, and I really enjoyed making electronic music and club music, but it always came back to singer-songwriter-y avenues … Nine Inch Nails, Crystal Castles, it’s electronic soundscapes but in a trad songwriting way.’ Rather than electronic music, it’s 60s and 70s rock that formed Walton’s listening history while she worked on Daughters, in particular the American band The Grateful Dead, which she describes as a ‘cosy blanket to return to.’
Daughters came together as a sort of hodge-podge, or assemblage, fragments written well before Walton ever saw them coming together to become what she describes as ‘the grief album.’ Tracks It Eats Itself and Miss America became anchors, points from which Walton defined how everything would fit together, leading to decisions like adding orchestral touches to Saints, the oldest song on the record.
The album is filled with references to America, where Walton was touring as the drummer for indie group Kero Kero Bonito when she first got the news about her father. ‘I think there is a history of British people being obsessed with America, and I always come back to Prefab Sprout, and that is what is so palpable to me too … I think that kind of obsession with Americana or old American culture is still so palpable for me, and I think even in just the tropes of the songwriting, or the imagery feels so evocative, and I do think that there is a lens to interact with that as an outsider, where those things are just still so palpable.’
Even with the repulsion many Brits express towards American politics––particularly post-2016––Walton and I agree that there’s still a palpable fascination with American culture evident across London, whether it’s in the country music that Walton heard playing in ‘a random health food store in Dalston,’ or the explosive rise of Geese, described in the press as the new generation’s ‘first great American rock band.’
The American references throughout the record also became a mode for Walton to express the dissociation and alienation that came with her grief. ‘The first time I went was just before I found out about my Dad and then the subsequent trips exist in that, and [then] there’s the achievement of dreams, land of opportunity kind of angle.’
‘Touring was a huge thing that we shared and talked about––his tour stories, and eventually mine. It’s so strange to be pulled in these two directions. While [the tours] do even now feel like this huge highlight, or something that I really evangelised, it was unbelievably difficult, and I saw some of the darkest things I’d ever seen, experiencing such crazy shit every day. And so there is this kind of dual edge to it.’
Photography by Liam Cosford