dan rule

Published: The Vine, February 8, 2010.

Victoria Legrand has a way with analogy and metaphor. She speaks of herself and creative partner Alex Scally as wild animals; as horses in their stride. She pithily compares creative process to ten-pin bowling; to hitting a series of strikes. She laughs at herself, sets off again.

Speaking from her home in Baltimore, the former French opera student and now frontwoman of haze-pop duo Beach House is on-edge; energised, electric. Mention she and Scally’s momentous new record Teen Dream and she takes off – elaborate adjectives, justifications and creative philosophies unfurling, spilling and darting every which way.

Considering the shimmering scope of Teen Dream, Legrand’s disposition comes as little surprise. Spend some time with the album – the duo’s third – and you’ll be transfixed. Where 2008 opus Devotion expanded on the woozy, vintage organ atmospheres and beautifully oblique, sun-drunk melodics of their 2006 self-titled debut, Teen Dream bursts with sweeping dynamics and an almost insatiable sense of drive and momentum. Put simply, it’s their most accomplished and ornate work yet.

Legrand – the niece of prominent French composer Michel Legrand – speaks about she and Scally’s artistic growth, their fluid creative process and uprooting their lives in Baltimore to record with Chris Coady in the isolation of upstate New York.

Hey Victoria.

Hi!

I love the new record.

Thankyou, I’m glad.

I’ve only had it for a couple of days, but I guess the thing that struck me immediately was the dynamics. There’s such a sense of momentum and layering compared, even, to Devotion.

Yeah.

I’d love to here your thoughts on that.

I feel like every record we’ve done is different and that’s just natural thing, you know. That’s just what happens when you make something; it’s never going to be what it was like before. We’ve always believed in growing very naturally, evolving naturally and every decision we make is based on an intuitive feeling, that being that it feels right. With this record, the main difference in the creative process was that, compared to the other two records, we had way more time. We had an uninterrupted nine-month period where we stopped touring and we were working on the music and we were able to just make the record for nine months uninterrupted.

We had everything written and everything set in place; we had made demos for months in the studio. Whereas with Devotion, we recorded it in three weeks and the first record, we recorded in two days. So for us, it was really a change and I think that time period made us feel like that when we had an idea, we were really able to follow it to an end that we felt was right. So in the writing of the record, that’s very much what happened. We spent a lot of time in our practice space – like eighty hours a week in our practice space – and it was just a total obsession, and we really worked these songs and brought them to a level that we believe is more of an epic level.

You can hear that.

It’s the same instrumentation; we didn’t change any of the instrumentation. It’s still Alex on guitar and my keyboards and we use the same kind of blend of real drums with the drum machine from our organ. So a lot of things were the same, but just our hunger and our appetite was bigger and a lot of that had to do with the amount of touring we had done.

On the first two records, it felt as though the instrumentation informed the songs a little more than on this record. On this record it feels as though the songs have much more of a life of their own outside of the instrumentation. The instrumental palette acts more as a colour.

I see what you’re saying but, no, I feel that we’ve always cared about the songs. We’ve never been a band that gets too hung up on pure aesthetics. We definitely, above and beyond, prize melody and the structure of our songs. So if the structure doesn’t feel right, we don’t feel that the songs are complete. If it doesn’t reach the necessary highs and lows then we don’t feel that it’s ready and that’s something that has never changed.

The songs we wrote on Beach House, the self-titled album, are songs that we’ll probably never write again because, I mean, we wrote them, we believed in them at the time, they were very simple, but we couldn’t ever write those songs again because of the experiences we’ve had. We’ve learned so much in terms of what we want to get out of our instruments and it’s happened in ways we never predicted.

So I’ve used the same keyboard now on three records, and on Teen Dream I’m just using different sounds on the same keyboard. We’re just really trying to simplify and at the same time expand on what we have. You can work constantly with something that’s in front of you. I think there’s an endless amount of depth and directions in which you can go using just the one thing, and I just kind of feel that that’s where we’re at with Teen Dream. We’ve just expanded a lot more on what we were already using and I think we’ve demanded a lot more of ourselves as well.

Was touring really important to that? The idea that you had to use your voice and you had to make the songs work and make them fresh for yourselves, time and time again?

It definitely had a huge effect. There was absolutely a huge learning process, and you know, we’ve always liked touring but now we both love touring. We’re about to do a shit-tonne of touring starting this February. There’s going to be like seventy shows and it’s just a really insane run.

Wow.

Yeah, wow is right. So we make the record and go on tour and learn a lot about the songs again, and then those songs inform us of new songs that haven’t been written and it’s almost becoming a system for us now. It happened as kind of a surprise, but now I think it’s a real tool that we can use for ourselves because we just learn so much. Playing those songs from Devotion every night, it really helped us learn what we didn’t want to do again and we started to crave this kind of energy that we hadn’t done before. You can feel that in songs like ‘10 Mile Stereo’.

For sure. I was going to mention that song…

You can feel it both as a player and a listener. Playing live definitely informs you of what you want, because you’re living and breathing the music every single night.

That’s what really stood out on this record, that energy and real rhythmic drive, which perhaps wasn’t there before. There was a kind of meandering quality to the rhythmic component of the earlier material.

The earlier material, by comparison, feels more frail to me. It’s innocent. When I look back at those records I kind of see myself years ago, and it’s not bad – it’s the place where we were at. Every record is the place where you are at. So I really hope that by next year, we really learn about a new place in which we want to go and that we keep making records and never feel that a particular record was our peak. I feel very far from our peak and I don’t believe in the peak (laughs). You’re turning your own light off if you believe in that kind of thing. For me, this is just the beginning really. We’re really in our stride and we’re kind of like horses now (laughs). We’re like creative animals – we get out and run our asses off…

And then you sleep it off in the stable…

And then we run again (laughs).

When I was talking to Alex about Devotion a couple of years ago, he kind of pointed to your creative process having this very natural, kind of osmotic quality.

Absolutely.

In that context, how did Teen Dream begin to take shape? Was it just a matter of you guys kind of getting together and playing quite unthinkingly?

I think it was very much like that, kind of one song at a time. For us what will happen generally is that we’ll start on a song – and this is happening again because we’re already writing new material – and a person will have an idea and we just grow the idea together. And then, as we get more and more songs, we’ll generally be working on two songs at a time. So we’ll work on one until we reach a dead end and then we’ll go to the other one. So the energy that you give to a song goes onto to inform other things, so each song kind of gives you something of a realisation and things kind of build on top of each other.

For us it’s very much melody, chord progression, one song at a time, and the next thing you know you’ve got like five songs and it’s like ‘Wow, we’re going to have a record!’. Because when you have a few songs and you can feel that they all give a certain kind of energy or light or darkness, then you know that you’re on a path to making a record. I don’t know what to compare it to (laughs). Maybe like, when you’re bowling and you start to string together a few strikes, you know you’re having a good game (much laughter). Oh man, that’s really bad…

No, no, please continue the metaphor…

(Laughs) You know, I just think that there’s a momentum that happens and it really took hold in Teen Dream, and you know, it happened in Devotion too. Devotion’s writing process was very fragmented, because we would write between touring. We would come home and we would have three weeks and we would write, and then we would go on tour and come home and then we would have a month to write. That didn’t happen with Teen Dream; we had a lot of space and I think we know now that it’s always going to be a blend of the two.

We get very inspired by words too – we just start throwing words at each other and then things go from there. That’s how we got the title Teen Dream. We were working late on ‘Silver Soul’ and then it just suddenly struck us: like ‘Teen Dream! That’s the record’.

So we’re into fully collaborating and talking about things that are exciting to us and we both have very highly active minds, and I just think that that’s very conducive to making records, because that’s what a record needs. It needs inspiration and it needs inspired moments and we’re doing that pretty much constantly.

Is isolation really important to that? I was taking to Frida Hyvonen the other day – the Swedish songwriter – and she had a really elegant way of putting it, in that she described being alone in the countryside as allowing her to be ‘thin-skinned’ in the way she writes. It was such a lovely way of describing that kind of permeability to inspiration, as opposed to when you’re in the city, where you have to build higher walls around yourself.

I totally agree with what she says, because when you tour you kind of get thick-skinned; you’re in survival mode. I love touring, don’t get me wrong, but you get into this almost automatic process where you preserve your energy. But when you’re being creative and you’re writing, you’re in a much softer place. You’re in your space, it’s just the two of you and things feel very gentle – and of course, things get very intense – but you do have to kind of get into, not a protective environment, but a place where thoughts can just happen. I think that’s what she means by ‘thin-skinned’. In being thin-skinned you are allowing things to pass through you.

When I’m on tour I tend to store a lot and keep it inside, and I just kind of wait and fill my tank up, and when I get home there’s a period of time where nothing can really happen to me because I’m still getting over the way I felt on tour. But with time you kind of melt a little bit and you let things in and let things out and it starts to happen.

In that sense, was the trip to upstate New York to record with Chris Coady really important to the way these songs formed?

It was very important because we just took what we were doing in Baltimore and just moved all of our life up there. We just wanted to just kind of get out and take the record to a place where it could get even more intense. We were a little more isolated and none of our friends were around and there were no distractions. All you can really focus on is the music. That’s just something that we really wanted to do. We didn’t want to be in Baltimore and then be like ‘When are we going to go to the bar?’.

When you’re making a record, it’s so intense that you don’t really want to go out because your mind just becomes recording (laughs). You are recording, you know. It’s really hard to interact normally because you’re so invested and obsessed.

Dan Rule

Teen Dream is out now via Mistletone/Inertia

myspace.com/beachhousemusic

Published: Broadsheet, January 22, 2010.

For Swedish songstress Frida Hyvonen, music is about connection. By Dan Rule.

By the end of last year’s European summer, Frida Hyvonen found herself facing something of an odd conundrum. Having already completed a round of tours for her beautifully rendered second album Silence is Wild, the Swedish singer, songwriter and pianist had gladly accepted guest roles in an 11-piece traditional ska band as well as in a Finnish orchestra. The only problem, she recounts, was that the experiences were just too damn enjoyable.

“People actually danced when we played,” urges the 32-year-old in her softly spoken manner. “They just danced and danced and danced and really participated in that way, which I kind of came to feel is the way music should be.”

Although relatively unknown outside of Scandinavia, Hyvonen’s two studio records – 2005’s Stockholm Prize-winning debut Until Death Comes and 2008’s Silence is Wild – have made her something of an indie luminary in her native country. Dance records, however, they are not.

“I feel like I owe it to my audience to give them more of a rhythm or something to move against, so they can be a part of the music,” she offers, chatting over the phone from her temporary flat in Stockholm on the eve of her maiden Australian tour. “Sometimes during shows I’ll be like, ‘Hey, you can dance to this song.’ But my music is not really very danceable – it just makes people feel awkward.”

“I’ve been performing in theatres a lot, where people have to sit still, and I’m beginning to feel that I take too much attention up there onstage,” she continues. “So it’s like, ‘Maybe this isn’t right?’”

Nonetheless, Hyvonen’s piano-based compositions and quietly feisty song-craft are nothing if not engaging. Since emerging on the international scene, her oeuvre has found its resonance in both a stark intimacy and an almost loquacious sense of dramatism. While Until Death Comes saw Hyvonen deliver her unadorned, matter-of-fact lyrical sketches in the form of elegiac piano balladry, Silence is Wild’s stark, seemingly confessional verses were counterbalanced by a clutch of swooning, almost theatrical full-band arrangements.

The rowdy honky tonk of Scandinavian Blonde pitches a snide, slightly unhinged take on cultural typecasting, where the spindly, impish piano melody of December belies a incredibly sober, diaristic reflection about the experience of abortion. “You’re the only man in the room, you’re by my side / When it’s my turn to get the injection, you’re sent outside,” she sings. “We’ve had a problem with boyfriends / They often faint if they see blood, the nurse explains.”

“I’m really curious about what happens when you actually build a special world on a record or onstage,” she muses. “At the same time, I often just long to do things very clean and acoustically and with no props and no false eyelashes,” she laughs.

“It’s really a fine line between being too familiar and too strange – I want to be somewhere in between.”

Music was always a part of Hyvonen’s life. Growing up in the small, northern Swedish town of Umea, she wrote her first song on the piano at the age of seven (“a simple instrumental piece in D minor”) and spent her childhood consuming anything from Madonna, Neneh Cherry and Michael Jackson to traditional Swedish folk music.

Nevertheless, writing and playing music didn’t take a serious turn until Hyvonen moved to Stockholm in her early twenties. As she goes onto explain, the moment she realised she had a talent for song-writing was the moment she wrote the first song for Until Death Comes.

“The first song that I was really happy about in that way made me want to make an album out of it,” she says. “I must have been about twenty-two or twenty-three and it was about four or five years before the album came out, but I just knew it.

“I think something changed when I started writing songs out of letters that I had written. It was like ‘this is a really rhythmic letter’ and I would write it into a song. It was like a new door had opened, like a way into something, because I wasn’t especially goal-oriented when I did it. So it was like, ‘This is a good song! I wrote it and I like it!’. It was like something that was an extension of me, like a quite pure expression of something that I can associate with.”

Suffice to say, it wasn’t long before Hyvonen became ensconced in the craft. When it came time to begin writing the material for Silence is Wild, she packed up her life in Stockholm and journeyed back to the relative isolation of the northern Swedish countryside. “The most important thing for me when I’m writing is to be in a place where I cannot be disturbed.”

Seclusion, Hyvonen explains, affords a particular creative permeability. “When you’re in a city, you have to put up guards and shields because there is so much impression,” she says. “It’s easier to relax and be kind of thin-skinned if you’re in a safe environment, which is really interesting for the writing process. You reach a level of intimacy with yourself faster.”

Creativity, though, is hardly an exact science. And for Hyvonen, that’s the precise seduction. “The thing I love most is the fantastic feeling and the pride that you’re somewhat of an alchemist for that moment,” she urges. “Out of nothing you draw up a formula that has a life of its own, which is extremely fascinating and somewhat addictive.”

And that counts for playing live as well. She may not have her audience dancing, but connection is still the key. “I really long for something onstage and I know when it happens, but I don’t really know how it happens,” she pauses, drifting off for a moment.

“It’s about making the audience feel very outward and inward at the same time,” she offers finally. “It’s like making a circle, perhaps.”

Silence is Wild and Until Death Comes are available through Chapter/Fuse.

fridahyvonen.com

Published: Broadsheet, January 18, 2010.

With the touring and festival season in full swing, we offer you a slice of this summer’s best music that may not be on your radar. By Dan Rule.

Joanna Newsom
January 20, The Forum
$50, Ticketek

When a diminutive, elfin, 22-year-old Joanna Newsom emerged out of rural California with her remarkable 2004 debut The Milk-Eyed Mender, it was as if she was from another time, if not another world. The classically trained harpist and positively idiosyncratic vocalist crafted a sound so singular that it traced medieval folk as closely as it did the avant-garde, propelling her to the head of the so-called ‘new-folk’ movement in the process. But as Newsom’s majestic 2006 sophomore, Ys, revealed so emphatically, the precocious artist was far more than a fashionable folkie. In fact, the record’s five expansive vignettes – orchestrated by the legendary Van Dyke Parks – cast Newsom not only as a truly innovative artist, but as a significant contemporary composer. After playing with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Opera House last year, she returns with her new band for what will prove to be an extraordinary performance.

The xx
February 3, The Corner Hotel
$50, Corner Hotel

One of the wonderful things about the last decade in music has been the loosening of both stylistic and methodological restraints. Where the 90s saw clear delineations running between indie music, electronica, hip-hop and so forth, the 00s have been about breaking down boundaries; mixing, matching and mutating schools of musical thought and process. You only need to turn to Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance or Battles for evidence. London quartet The xx are the latest act to defy what was once set in stone. Released a couple of months back through XL/Remote Control, their xx debut witnessed stunning indie-pop tropes and interlocked R&B vocal harmonies skim atop a swathe of tectonic electronic frequencies and textures. Suffice to say, their inaugural run of Australian performances will offer a telling chronicle of music’s brave new frontier.

Frida Hyvönen
February 10, Bella Union Bar, Trades Hall
$27, Bella Union

Singer, songwriter and pianist Frida Hyvönen is something of a star in her home country. The Swedish chanteuse’s intricately rendered, intensely personal song-craft saw her scale the heights of the country’s music industry, winning the prestigious Stockholm Prize for her 2005 debut, Until Death Comes, and garnering trans-continental acclaim for 2008’s beautifully orchestrated follow-up Silence is Wild. An arresting, hypnotic performer, Hyvönen will play one of only two intimate Australian shows at Trades Hall’s beautiful Bella Union Bar in February. Her towering vocals, meticulously composed songs and unabashed lyrical honesty are bound to change the way we think about Swedish pop.

Jamie Lidell
February 13, The Corner Hotel
$38, Corner Hotel

Jamie Lidell has been experimental, white-boy soul’s poster boy for about a decade now, and with good reason. The Berlin-based vocalist’s work with Cristian Vogel in Super Collider – not to mention his own suite of solo albums for Warp Records – set new precedents in future-funk and neo-soul and saw him mash his prodigious vocal talents into the wildest of electronic soundscapes. On top of that, his one-man live show is legendary. Utilising a cache of samplers, microphones, cameras, effects pedals and general electronic flotsam and jetsam, Lidell will turn The Corner Hotel upside down and inside out. This squall of soul is not to be missed.

Published: The Age, Arts, December 29, 2009.

Inspired by the giddy delights of St Kilda, artist Kit Wise’s new video works turn idealised resort towns into surreal dreamscapes, writes Dan Rule.

As beautiful as it is, there’s something uncanny about this scene. The sky is such a vivid blue it almost borders on iridescence; the sand radiates the purest of white glows. It’s only when we focus on the beachgoers milling about on the sand, or scan the bordering hillsides dotted with beachside hotels and opulent coastal homes, that the flawless symmetry of it all becomes – almost eerily – apparent.

The video frame of this Marseilles beach scene is split down the middle; its vibrant summer scene duplicated in a seamless mirror image, its sequence set to short, repetitive loops. It’s a characteristic common to each of the eight video works that comprise Summertime, the new installation by British-born artist Kit Wise, which runs until the end of summer at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s satellite gallery, Mirka, in St Kilda’s Tolarno Hotel.

Inspired by his fascination with St Kilda, the 35-year-old’s “hyperreal” coastal vistas offer an augmented view of some of the world’s most famed coastal resort towns and cities. Drawing on footage garnered from Getty Images and other open-source online archives, and playing out on variously scaled LCD screens, the works “mash up” images of Rio de Janeiro’s Ipanema, Monte Carlo and Waikiki, among others, creating perceptibly constructed and accentuated composites of the various spectacular sea and landscapes.

“I’m very interested in this idea of arcadia and these idyllic natural spaces and where the city meets these spaces,” says Wise, a senior lecturer and acting head of fine arts at Monash University, who arrived in Australia in 2001, later settling in Elwood with his young family. “In Australia, and particularly in places like St Kilda, that sort of beach culture and coastal, waterside way of living is a big part of that. Coming from England, the palm trees of St Kilda kind of represent this exotic paradise for me.”

Themes of paradise and the spectacle can be traced throughout Wise’s work, which has seen him complete residencies in Rome, Paris, New York and Tokyo, and is currently on show in Taiwan as part of the 2009 Asian Art Biennial.

His 2006 exhibition Superhappiness comprised a fantastical reinterpretation of Tokyo’s flashing neon cityscape, while in 2007’s Rhapsodia he created a glittering, utopian city bordered by the most spectacular of natural landscapes – however altered. Natural Disaster in 2008, meanwhile, featured footage of the Boxing Day tsunami of 2006, duplicated and mirrored to create an equally beautiful and horrific mutation of the gigantic waves striking the land.

While Wise sources imagery that promotes widely held notions of the idyllic, his subtle manipulations result in outcomes that prove as unnerving as they do pretty. It’s no mistake. ”The beach, for example, is something we’re fascinated with and something we idealise and it saturates the media,” he says. “But underneath that is the fact that at the same time as consuming nature as this glamorous spectacle, we’re destroying it.”

Wise sees Summertime, with its mirrored beachside images, as a gentle reminder of such a paradox. “Symmetry is a classic device for describing perfection, whether that’s in architecture or constructed landscapes or the human face.”

When such qualities are applied to images of nature, Wise explains, a shift takes place. “There are moments in each of these works where they flip from being really beautiful to being really kind of wrong.”

In one of Summertime’s works, a duplicated Waikiki beach borders either side of the frame, while the ocean fills the centre like a lake. Ocean swells emerge as a single rising lump in the middle of the frame, only to rupture and roll off towards opposite, mirror-image shorelines. While filled with familiar signifiers, the image is alien. “You could see it as quite … disturbing or even quite monstrous if you wanted to,” says Wise.

This evocation is at the heart of the exhibition’s St Kilda setting. “St Kilda is sort of the epitome of hedonism and pleasure and consumption,” says Wise. “Whether it’s the beaches or the cake shops or Luna Park, it’s sort of saturated in pleasure.

“I don’t want to criticise it at all, but underneath all of that one has to be aware of the price of all that pleasure and consumption, not just on a local but a global scale … Living in Elwood, I know all about things like water levels rising because it’s front-page news every few months.”

That said, Wise understands Summertime as celebratory. “I love the way this part of Melbourne makes you realise we live in a coastal city. I want the work to celebrate all the pleasures that brings, but I hope it can also remind people of the price.”

Summertime runs at ACCA Mirka until February 28.

accaonline.com.au/mirka

Published: Music Australia Guide #72, December/January 2009-2010.

Raised on the lovelorn recordings of Edith Piaf, Martha Wainwright has released a suite of her own live interpretations of the legendary French songstress. By Dan Rule.

1. Piaf was a defining influence on Wainwright’s entrance into music. “She was my favourite singer as a kid and I adore her greatly. When I was about seven or eight my brother Rufus introduced me to her music via my mother’s album collection. Looking back, she started my love affair with very emotive female singers, who I still really enjoy listening to today. She affected me and affected the way I perform myself.”

2. For Wainwright, the project was about assuming the role of the professional performer, rather than the confessional artist. “This was about being a singer; it was about walking into a room with a great bunch of musicians and great bunch of songs and trying not to look like an idiot and deliver something that, as a singer, wasn’t lame. So it was about using my voice to the absolute best of my ability.”

3. Wainwright isn’t afraid of flaunting her ego. “Divas, like opera singers, have this attitude and ego and it’s there for a reason. It’s because they too can bring something to the table and have that belief in themselves and in how they are going to live up to the material. You have to put yourself in that frame of mind when you interpret songs like this; you have to believe and feel that you can do it.”

4. Recorded live with a full ensemble over two nights in New York’s Dixon Place Theatre, the pressure was on. “I tried to have a good time, especially in the last performance, but it was really about the challenge of trying to get something on tape. I knew that we only had a couple of chances with each song and there was an audience of people watching and money was being spent. So it was a very challenging and focussed performance.”

5. While the recorded results speak for themselves, the performances were not the most, err, appealing sight. “It was very physical and you can see – we filmed it – that my arm is up in the air and my face is contorted into these crazy, screwed up faces (laughs). It’s not a very pretty sight, but it helped to convey the songs and the sound in that way, then no problem.”

Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, A Paris is out now via Shock

Visit: marthawainwright.com