Harry Agius had been DJing in clubs for almost a decade, but in 2019 something switched. After a summer spent at NYC Downlow, the LGBTQ+ dance space at Glastonbury, and Honcho Campout, a queer festival in Pennsylvania, the DJ-producer better known as Midland finally felt as if he had tapped into his “authentic self”. Tracing his formative years at drum’n’bass and dubstep nights, he tells me: “For a long while, I would feel like the only gay person in those spaces. I came out of the summer of 2019 feeling like: I can’t really go back.”
Then came the pandemic. With all live shows pulled and time on his hands, Agius began to reflect on that transformative year and the “dual void” he had been living in beforehand, something he had managed to ignore by being so busy (at one point, he was playing more than 100 gigs a year). Born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1986, Agius had grown up in the shadow of section 28, which prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools and by local authorities; meanwhile, HIV and Aids had always felt close to home: his childhood nanny had died of an Aids-related illness.
Though Agius came out at university in Leeds, around the same time he started DJing (his alias is a reference to the street he lived on there), there was a lot he was yet to unpack. “I realised I had just grown up in this total silence,” he says. “Growing up as a gay teenager, you are always hiding yourself.” It was within this period of introspection that the seeds of his debut album Fragments of Us began to grow; an attempt to fill, and reclaim, that silence.
Agius has reached many milestones in his 14-year career – amassing an international following in the underground dance music scene; launching three record labels; taking on remixes for artists including Dua Lipa and the Chemical Brothers – but his upcoming album feels like his biggest achievement yet. Fragments of Us is a deeply personal documentation of his gradual queer reckoning, told through the voices and spaces that have helped him along the way. It represents a shift, not just in format – and sound – but also ambition: “It’s the first time I’ve really created with intent, not just: oh, this is a track I’m going to play in a club,” he says. “Each track on the album has a very specific world.”
Welding bubbling synths and vocoder-heavy vocals with archival and field recordings, he tells the story of the Aids crisis in uninhibited detail. On David’s Dream, we hear an excerpt from the American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz’s 1989 tape journals, in which he ponders the prospect of his own death. A little later, Marlon Riggs, a Black gay film-maker, explores the intersections of race and sexuality, urging his community to connect with one another and “construct our own salvation”.
While making the album, Agius realised he was the same age – 37 – as both Wojnarowicz and Riggs when they died. “It was weird to feel at this point in my life where I’m finally making art that I am really proud of, and knowing what it must have been like for them,” he says. “It just reminded me to not wait until you have a deadline.”
Other nods to LGBTQ+ culture can be found throughout the record: Ritual samples the dreamy vocals of Arthur Russell and Agius cites synth pop pioneer Patrick Cowley as an influence on the moody instrumental Never Enough. Meanwhile, the title of Omi Palone, the opening track, draws from Polari, a clandestine gay language from the mid-20th century. “I liked the idea of starting with this thing that existed before me, but is still a part of the community,” he says. “We don’t necessarily still talk in Polari, but there’s a kind of genetic link to how we share information and how we protect ourselves.”
Though Aids is a focal point, Agius was determined to uphold a sense of hope on the album. For a while the track 1983-1996, on which the DJ Jonny Seymour recalls Sydney’s queer dancefloors during this period, sounded too mournful. After extended close listening sessions with his husband Mike and around 20 revisions, he completed the final version, buoyed by squelchy, experimental synth stabs. “I wanted it to be playful and bendy,” he says, smiling. “I wanted it to sound alive.”
Agius carries this joyful, defiant spirit into what he sees as the third section of the record, which focuses on the club – a cornerstone for him, but also for much of the LGBTQ+ community. Alongside his homage to NYC Downlow, he pays tribute to Chapter 10, a queer dance party that ran in London from 2013 to 2023. As in NYCDL, the track is bookended with field recordings from the green room at the end of a night there; you can hear punters cackling and chatting with one another as the sun comes up.
It’s these tender moments that Agius treasures most: “Not only is it the end of the night, but you might’ve just gone through something life-changing. I find that to be incredibly powerful.”
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Fragments of Us is out now
Source: theguardian.com
