Small Studio Saturday: Blind Yeo Recorded a Debut Album on a Disused Airfield, and It's Genuinely Strange in a Good Way

Blind Yeo doesn’t have a fixed lineup so much as an open door. The Falmouth, Cornwall collective started during lockdown around singer/guitarist Will Greenham and vocalist/synthesist Anoushka Helm, built out of a residency at a local venue called The Cornish Bank, and has rotated through musicians, artists, and performers ever since – the kind of loose, rolling membership that normally never survives long enough to make a proper album. This one did. The Lemoine Point, their debut LP, came out August 28 on Bongo Joe Records, a small independent label out of Geneva, Switzerland that’s built its whole catalog on records exactly this hard to categorize.

The current lineup behind it is Greenham and Helm plus Greenham’s son Henry on synths, Phyllida Bluemel on cello, Phil Self on guitar, and Sam Pert on drums, with outside producer Sam Jones – eight tracks recorded on a disused airfield near St Agnes, a location choice that tells you something about the record before you’ve heard a note of it. This isn’t a band chasing a clean, radio-ready sound in a rented studio. It’s a band with room to make noise and nobody telling them to stop. Lead single “Colour Pillow/Kologo” leans on the kologo, a traditional Ghanaian funeral instrument, threaded into a mix that also pulls from desert blues, Krautrock, and North African trance-rock – a combination that has no business working as well as it does, and does anyway because nobody involved sounds like they’re forcing it.

That’s the real case for The Lemoine Point: it sounds genuinely improvisational without sounding unfinished. Bandcamp Daily’s Album of the Day writeup landed on the same read, comparing it to the Switched On-era Stereolab and calling out how no guitar solo or synth passage ever repeats itself the same way twice – a band audibly having fun rather than performing looseness as an aesthetic. Backseat Mafia went further, scoring it 89/100 and reaching for Gong, Ash Ra Temple, Magma, Goat, and Neu! as reference points while still insisting Blind Yeo has “their own bespoke energy” – a list of touchstones long enough that it stops being useful as a genre tag and starts just meaning: nobody’s quite sure what to call this, and everybody who’s heard it likes it anyway.

Bongo Joe is the right home for a record like this. Founded in Geneva in 2015 and named one of WOMEX’s top 20 independent labels in 2023, the label has spent a decade putting out records built on exactly this kind of unclassifiable, outernational instinct – Altın Gün, Meridian Brothers, Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp – none of it chasing a single genre, all of it betting that a band with a real, specific sound will find its audience without being smoothed into something more marketable first. Blind Yeo is a rolling cast of Cornish musicians who record on airfields and pull funeral instruments from West Africa into psych-rock without irony, on a label two countries away that seems to specialize in bands exactly this hard to sell in one sentence. That’s the whole small-studio pitch in one record: nobody involved needed permission to make something this specific, and the record is better for it.

Hero image: “The Lemoine Point” album cover art, Bongo Joe Records. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.