SYLVAN ESSO

KATY J PEARSON 28 LP

‘That’s how I feel when I listen to the record - the world is creeping outside and you try to make space for yourself, try to plant the garden again’ - Sylvan Esso on Sylvan Esso’s new music.

Last week I was nervously waiting on a Zoom call, checking multiple times that I got the right time zone for the meeting. It’s not everyday that you get to interview a band that has become a household staple, soundtracking countless breakfasts over the past few years. Sylvan Esso captured my attention from the very beginning - ‘Coffee’ showed up in my Discover Weekly the year I moved to England and I guess I never stopped listening.

Amelia and Nick, the two halves of Sylvan Esso, turned out to be exactly how I imagined them; relaxed, funny and extremely intelligent. For a couple of days before the interview I had been listening non-stop to their new album ‘No Rules Sandy’ - what I found most interesting about it was the number of really short tracks, between ten and thirty seconds, capturing all sorts of things. You can hear a kid screaming, the crackling sound of floorboards followed by Amelia yodelling, a woman asking if people who are astrologically compatible can actually succeed in a relationship (probably?!). I just had so many questions - so I asked them.

When they dial in the call I immediately notice how bright the room they’re in is - sometimes I forget not everyone lives in West Yorkshire. It’s early morning for them, around ten. They’re staying at Amelia’s family house in Massachusetts - she tells me she’s quite happy to be doing the interview, delaying the inevitability of going downstairs and dealing with typical family-gathering chaos. A truly universal human experience.

I start by asking them about where they were when they wrote the album. ‘The record was made in the most special of circumstances - we made it faster than we’ve ever done - on the first of January this year we loaded a mini-studio into the back of our Prius and drove from North Carolina to Los Angeles, where we rented a house in Silver Lake. We wrote all of the songs on the record in three weeks’, Amelia says.

It takes me a second to realise how amazing that must have felt - a whole record, a new chapter of your musical career, all in three weeks. The musician in me is half in awe and half jealous.

‘We originally went there to do all sorts of other things. We were supposed to do sessions with a bunch of people, do interviews and go to the Grammys. Then everything got cancelled, no one wanted to hang out’, Nick adds.

They’re so casual about the Grammys, literally a passing comment - I can feel the level of my Sylvan Esso fandom skyrocketing.

We chat more about the creative process of ‘No Rules Sandy’ - you can sense the memory of it is still so fresh in their minds. They tell me about Amelia’s morning runs around Silver Lake Reservoir, how every morning they’d sit down and try to write something new, something cool. ‘It just kept happening’, they said.

I finally got a bit of insight on those tracks I mentioned at the beginning too (you remember the yodelling, right?). Nick talks about how this record wasn’t made in a soundproof space, and that’s why you can hear construction sites, birds, kids and all sorts of other things buried in the production. ‘I love records that feel like that - where you hear the space they were made in. Not that that’s anything wrong with vacuum-packed pop music, but we wanted to bring the pop idea to this way more ‘trashy’ place… hearing the air conditioner kicking on puts a pin in

"HEARING THE AIR CONDITIONER KICKING ON (IN A RECORD) PUTS A PIN IN THE EMOTIONAL CHRONOLOGY OF YOUR LIFE, ALMOST LIKE A DIARY ENTRY." To read the full version of this magazine you can buy print copies delivered direct to you from our Bandcamp or support us via Patreon for even more exclusive goodies!

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BANDCAMP PATREON

I love that. Amelia nods in agreement, sitting next to him.

Before the interview, I got a bit of information on the record from Amelia and Nick’s team - it said this album was going to be ‘wilder and stranger and more cathartic’ than their first three releases. The concept of catharsis is one I am overly familiar with - as a teenager, I used to study Greek theatre, where play writers talk about it endlessly. In a postmodern era, I wondered what catharsis may mean or feel like for a band like Sylvan Esso.

‘Right now there’s a massive sense of catharsis when the record still isn’t out, but we only get to keep it for the next few weeks. Then, other people will get to decide what it means. In the moment (of making it) it feels cathartic’, said Amelia.

‘It was such a cathartic time’, adds Nick, ‘the record revolves around the last couple of years, trying to re-evaluate and find what’s next. I still feel the way I felt when we made it and I think if you do that right, that translates to the person that is listening and they can feel like that too - there’s less lost in translation. We’re just trying to say how we feel and hope it can resonate As I’m sitting in my room typing this article, dangerously close to my editor's deadline, I listen to ‘No Rules Sandy’ one more time. It’s true what they’re saying - this record feels like a collection of amber crystals, the ones that you see at the museum as a kid, with flies trapped inside. It’s not trying to do anything else other than capturing a moment - a beautiful, chaotic, a quiet one - it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s transparent.

We’re at the end of the interview - Amelia’s dad walks into the room and she gently tells him they’re gonna be down in a minute. I’ve only got one question left - of those three weeks, are there any moments that stuck with you?

A - ‘Not really…I miss the chair that I was sitting on. It was a really weird chair, a chaise longue actually. Every time I hear that Wet Leg song it makes me laugh now. It was a fake cow-print chaise longue.’ Amelia. He tells me how at one point he moved the mics so that she could record from the chair. ‘I was lying down like a tiny queen the whole time’ she echoes.

He also remembers the moment when the album started taking shape: ‘The first two songs we made were ‘Sunburn’ and ‘Moving’. With both of those, we sat down, trying to make something and it was just bad. The beat was just ridiculous… and then that magical thing started happening, we made one decision and the whole thing started being really good. Feeling that sense of light-switch creativity together felt so validating and surprising - I just hadn't had a moment like that in so long.’

Three weeks, a Prius, the ultimate creative spark and a cow-printed chaise longue - if you are Sylvan Esso that’s all you need to create a remarkable fourth studio album.

"I MISS THE CHAIR THAT I WAS SITTING ON. IT WAS A REALLY WEIRD CHAIR, A COW-PRINT CHAISE LONGUE ACTUALLY"

To read the full version of this magazine you can buy print copies delivered direct to you from our Bandcamp or support us via Patreon for even more exclusive goodies!

Just click on the links below:

BANDCAMP PATREON ‘No Rules Sandy’ is out on August 12th via Loma Vista and I highly recommend it for all your breakfast soundtracking needs.

THE KIT LIST REGRESSIVE LEFT

INTRODUCTION

Regressive Left are a three piece dance-punk outfit from Luton, featuring Simon Tyrie (vocals and electronics), Will Crosby (guitar) and Georgia Hardy (drums). With influences ranging from the cyclical rhythms of EBM to the freedom and expression of the London Jazz scene, the band have been compared to everything from Post Punk heavyweights Talking Heads and Devo to modern art-rockers Squid and dance outfit Scalping. Formed during lockdown, the band burst onto the live scene in 2021 which saw them tour the UK with New Yorker’s Bodega, make appearances at a string of UK and EU festivals and sell out their debut headline show. The group released their debut EP ‘On The Wrong Side of History’ on 15th July via Bad Vibrations Records, recorded and produced by Ross Orton (Working Men’s Club, Amyl and The Sniffers).

ELEKTRON DIGITAKT

Nearly everything we’ve written started out on the Digitakt, so in that sense it’s been the main sketchbook for all our ideas. I actually bought it to play the role of ‘bassist’ in the band but that was before I really knew anything about making electronic music and so it wasn’t really the most logical purchase in that respect. I didn’t even know the difference between types of synthesis like subtractive vs FM or really what a sampler did. But it was the most money I’d ever spent on gear at the time and so I invested a lot of time into learning it – I put my laptop

away and just focused solely on making music with hardware. It’s such a unique piece of equipment and even now I’m still finding new ways to use it. You can do crazy things with the LFOs like assigning them to the sample slot, which can make really unique percussive sequences.

GRETSCH ELECTROMATIC G5122DC

Will has only ever played Gretsch guitars and his black Gretsch is kind of infamous at this point. I think he basically modelled his entire rig, if not his playing, on George Harrison, so he’s always played a Gretsch into a Vox AC30 (though he insists on playing through two at a time, in stereo). He uses really thick strings but sets his action super low for shredding, which is very unusual on a hollow body, and he’s always played a lot behind the bridge and with the Bigsby, though he mostly uses a Boss PS-5 pedal for more extreme pitch bends now.

SYNCUSSION SY-1M

So this isn’t technically ours, but it definitely deserves a mention because our producer Ross Orton went to town on it for the EP. I think he built his from a kit. It’s all over ‘The Wrong Side of History’ and, if you’ve got a keen ear, you might notice that there’s a Working Men’s Club track called ‘Widow’ which has the same tuned squelchy sounds – those are the Syncussion. Apparently Behringer are making a clone.

ARP ODYSSEY

This is another one that belongs to Ross. He actually has an old ’70s ARP Solus and a newer Odyssey, but it’s easy to just say Odyssey because the circuitry is so similar and they sound nearly identical. It’s just an amazing synth, especially for bass lines. It has a super rubbery quality that I think is difficult to get out of other famous analogue mono synths like the MS20, which can be a bit buzzy, or a Moog, which has a much creamier filter. I actually use a Moog Minitaur for bass when we play live – the low end on it is amazing but I’ve never been able to get it sounding as good as the Odyssey.