Unsigned Act Of The Week: LONGY

If you could fast forward three hundred and sixty-five days into the future, wouldn’t you love to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and think ‘look how far I’ve came in a year’? For an independent artist, the journey from the foot of the mountain to the summit can be unbelievably treacherous with obstacles and setbacks hurtling from all sides. However, for the mysterious LONGY, the past twelve months have seen him rise from busking for change in Central London, to creating Eddy Temple-Morris’ ‘Demo of the year’.

Despite having lived rough on the streets of London, and living off any spare change bystanders could part with, LONGY has now managed to propel his creative fire into overdrive. The result of this thrusting energy comes in the form of striking 5-track EP ‘Bringing It All Back Home To You Now’. Dubbed as the “one to watch for 2014” by XFM’s Jon Kennedy, the EP is a concoction of beautiful, wounded emotion and soulful riffs; elegantly painting permanent pictures vividly into the listeners mind.

If you were asked to describe the sound of finding the light at the end of the tunnel, you would simply describe it as the final track on the EP, ‘Deadly Sins’.

LONGY’s music represents the aggravation breaking-through artists feel towards the modern day mainstream music industry. With only needing a couple of thousand hits on an un-original Youtube cover to make it onto the forefront of music (think X-Factor), it’s becoming increasingly difficult for young stars to rightfully charge to the top. LONGY believes that music should be an experience that should be appreciated, not just listened to and dropped in the way the music industry portrays. And it’s for this reason that you can’t find LONGY’s music online. There’s no streaming and there’s no technology: he’s brought it back to basics.

“People aren’t connecting with music the way they used to, everything is computer based and more diluted nowadays. Sometimes we have to go back to move forward” – for this reason, LONGY’s EP ‘Bringing It All Back Home To You’ and his eventual album, will be exclusively limited to CDs, live shows and seeing him busking in the heart of London. It’s such a refreshing lesson for the youth to learn: put down your camera phone, put down your music player and experience the music as it was intended – live and raw.

LONGY’s main goal is to help people to start enjoying pure, live, euphoric music again, which is why his limited edition EP is only available for purchase from his personal website, his gigs or (if you are immensely lucky to have the privilege) from his busking pitches. Could LONGY perhaps be the future of music?

Follow LONGY on Twitter @whoislongy or invest in this wonderful EP by visiting whoislongy.com.

Ella Scott