Deluxe Issue Fourteen

Issue Fourteen: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, This Is The Kit, Julia Jacklin, Binker & Moses and the usual racks.

SHANNON LAY ‘Living Water’

MONOLORD ‘Rust’

Woodsist/Mare LP the debut release on Mare, Kevin Morby’s new imprint with Woodsist records, Shannon Lay’s Living Water is an instant classic.

PAPIR ‘V’

Stickman 2LP/2CD organic structures of sound that move forward with the hypnotic groove of Can or electric Miles davis through euphoric peaks, thunderous riffs and beautiful cosmic dronescapes.

Agitated / Cardinal Fuzz LP/CD brand new studio album from arcata's stratospheric sound blasters... prime hawkwind and primal Stooges in large doses at play here... sike-a-delic warlords from northern California with riffs and drones a-plenty..tuck in!

SECRET PYRAMID ‘Two Shadows Collide’

SIDE EYES ‘So Sick’

Ba Da Bing! LP Cosmic awe fuels exploratory immensity, basking in a dreamlike presence. these works move slowly, like shifting and morphing monoliths. Ligeti’s string works, combined with field recordings, inspire “Possession,” while the badalamenti-esque “in Wind” pays cinematic homage to the Pacific northwest.

NeW ReLeAsEs OuT NoW oN

KELLEY STOLZ ‘Que Ora’ Castle Face LP/CD

WHITE MANNA ‘Bleeding Eyes’

Riding Easy LP/CD Sweden trio Monolord is a rare breed: a band both encompassing and transcending genre; a vortex of heavy rock density that consumes all others.

I.L.Y.S ‘Bodyguard’ Castle Face LP/CD

In The Red LP/CD So Sick, is the debut album on in the red records

by Southern California punk quartet the Side Eyes. riYL: red Kross & go go's.

CaStLe FaCe....

MALE GAZE ‘Miss Taken’ Castle Face LP/CD

MAGNETIX ‘Live In San Francisco’ Castle Face LP/CD

OH SEES ‘Orc’

Castle Face 2LP/CD

CoMiNg sOoN....

DUDS ‘Of A Nature Or Degree’ Castle Face LP/CD

UK TOUR: 21st September, Edinburgh - Sneaky Petes 22nd September - LivErPooL Psych Fest 23rd September, LEEdS - Wharf Chambers 25th September, ShEFFiELd - delicious Clam 26th September, briStoL - the old England 27th September, London - new rivers Studios 28th September, brighton - the green door Store 15th october, MargatE - tom thumb theatre

ORB ‘Naturality’

FLATWORMS ‘Flatworms’

an exciting development from under strange australian lab-lights: o.r.b. have respawned from last year’s birth with a further mutated slab of paranoid heavy shred, naturality. naturality finds them sprouting new appendages and clawing at their enclosures. this is potent stuff, be careful!!

UK TOUR: 13th october, London - Shacklewell arms 14th october, nEWCaStLE - Cluny 15th october, gLaSgoW - broadcast (Late Show) 16th october, ManChEStEr - the Eagle inn (and MarC riLEY SESSion) 17th october, MargatE - olby’s Music room

Castle Face LP/CD

Castle Face LP/CD

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

Deluxe.

Welcome back to Deluxe, doubtless the World’s best free independently distributed quarterly periodical newspaper about independent record shops™.

One of our guests in this issue spoke about Smashmouth ‘All Star’ (we won’t ruin the surprise) and that really sent us off down a rabbit hole of misconstrued lyrics and high pop production. We wrote all about the song, the words and the band but we ran out of space, so that will probably appear on our website at some point. ‘Websites’ will be the theme running through the next issue funnily enough, but coming back to the present, in this edition we had the great pleasure of speaking with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Kate Stables of This Is The Kit, Julia Jacklin, Katie Von Schleicher, Binker & Moses and Ernest Greene of Washed Out about some brilliant first record shopping experiences with sage advice from all concerned.

Interviewed, edited and compiled by The Drift Record Shop.

Sub edited by Louise Overy Printed by Newspaper Club Distributed by Forte Music Distribution www.fortedistribution.co.uk / 01600 891589

Whilst every care has been taken in the preparation of this newspaper, the publishers cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of information or any consequence arising from it.

Published in Devon by The Drift Record Shop. ©2017

Scribbled on post-it notes around our desk here are the following forthcoming destinations; Superfly Records in Paris, Råkk & Rålls in Oslo, Hot Salvation in Folkestone, Black Gold in Amsterdam, Friendly Records in Bristol, Music Mania in Gent and Fascinating Rhythm in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Maybe you shop at one of those? Maybe you have one of their plastic bags? Maybe you want to send us one? We’ve not featured bags for a while.

Hope you enjoy reading about these wonderful artists and what record shops mean to them. We will return the compliment in November, when we bring you the ‘End of 2017’ issue of Deluxe, where we will be talking about the records released this year - what is on the racks rather than which shop you found them in.

Photographed by Florian DuboĂŠ

This Is The Kit Ten years and four albums deep, This Is The Kit are distinctly old fashioned, a band given the rare opportunity to grow slowly into the musical conscious with works of ever increasing critical acclaim and greater public awareness.

We phoned ‘the master’ of the operation, Kate Stables, at her home in Paris to talk about writing, remembering and the role of the shop.

Deluxe: Your house sounds full today, have you had any situations where your little people have ‘assisted’ in interviews yet?

KS: She is ten. It has changed over the years, when she was little it was one type of thing. But now she heckles me and joins in, (laughing) corrects me on how I sing things.

Kate Stables: Not interviews, but gigs. I have one little person, a daughter, but at the moment there are other friends around, so they are all in the other room. Yes, she has had, and does have and will probably continue to have different versions of interaction with my gigs, depending on how she is feeling and what the set up is.

D: Amazing. What’s your lyric retention like? Do you ever forget things?

D: How old is she?

KS: I sometimes do actually, but I don’t usually forget my lyrics, but when I am trying to sing other people’s songs it’s a real memory challenge. That’s why I feel I need to do it more. My memory needs a bit of exercise. The more memorising tasks I give myself the better. My daughter

comes home from school with whole A4 sheets of poems to memorise by heart and I would think ‘I should be doing this too, this is just what my brain needs’.

D: I think that’s why I asked, I am constantly stunned by young people’s ability to retain and learn things, and also horrified at my ever-increasing inability to do so.

I wondered whether you were seeing that?

KS: Yeah, I definitely think that’s the case. I also think I have noticed my daughter being less good at remembering things since she started learning to read, because now she does not have to remember every single visual thing. I think that the next notch up from that is what I have done to myself – in having a smart phone and a computer, and it all being logged on there instead of in my brain.

D: I have now finally got to the point where I have managed to unify all of the apps, so I am now entirely efficient but utterly reliant on my phone.

have brought to the table on this record.

K: First of all, ‘Wriggle Out the Restless’ was possibly verging on being just as collaborative because we started it with a certain group of people and then took it around to so many friends, and places and countries and added them on. So that was a really nice collaborative process, but it was very different as it was all very home studio-y and us trolleying around the project. Whereas with this album it was collaborating IN the studio over those two weeks, in the same place. That made a nice, different collaboration feel.

D: That is very different in terms of collaboration I guess?

KS: Yeah, it’s probably more of a collaboration maybe, if you are all there in the same room, in the same space, at the same time, rather than one or two master minds taking it around to people and getting them to add bits.

D: You are the boss though?

KS: Yeah, it’s tricky isn’t it. It’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it.

D: So your new LP ‘Moonshine Free’ is released next week give or take, how are you feeling about it?

KS: I am really pleased with it. I feel like very record I have made I have had a different experience or relationship with the record. Usually I don’t want to listen to it in the early days anyway. Slowly I have been getting more into the records I have made, and with this one I actually find myself occasionally thinking that I would quite like to listen to this or that song again, to remind myself what it sounded like in that recording. So, yeah, I am really pleased with it. Also the fact that making it was such a pleasure, doing it with John and the whole band in Bristol and it’s just really nice being reminded of that time. Obviously it was quite intense, recording all day every day for two weeks but I loved it. For me the making of a record is the documenting of the time spent in that room together, or wherever you record the stuff, so I am not so into the ‘perfect definitive version’ approach, even though these versions are all totally fine definitive versions, but the songs for me continue to change after I have made records. And will continue to change, not doing carbon copies of them at the gigs. But I love making records with people – really like it. Listening to the record reminds me of that process and all the excellent people I feel really honoured to have on the record. It feels very positive all round.

D: I would like to talk more about the journey leading up to that record, but as you have mentioned everybody, I have a slightly difficult one for you. So, this is arguably your most collaborative album I think, certainly from a listener’s point of view. So I wondered if you could describe, in a couple of words, what your co-conspirators

KS: I haven’t got a master-mind, but maybe I am the master (laughing) and I do have a mind.

D: So if I list your co-conspirators, what do they bring to the mix? First of all Jessie…

KS: Jessie brings excellent arrangements and gratuitous guitar solos.

D: Neil…

K: Neil brings electric guitar landscapes and whatever the English is for ‘bonne volonté’. It’s like good will and very positive. I don’t mean exactly good will, more ‘up for it’.

So – ‘excellent participation and beautiful electric guitar’.

I hope that’s not too many words there?

D: And Jamie?

K: Jamie brings… groovy octopus rhythms, combined with tasteful energy distribution.

D: (laughing) Wow, I think I should try and get someone to illustrate these. How about Rozi?

KS: Rozi, again she brings amazing positive participation vibes, but she brings beautiful, unexpected melodic baselines and a solid shaker… and very beautiful singing!

D: And from afar, Aaron.

KS: People ask me a lot about Aaron being on the record but I feel he is not on it as much as some other people, but I will still see what I can say about Aaron. Aaron brought really marvellously wonky synth sounds and excellently

dislocated electric guitar interventions.

D: I have been struggling to describe your record… (laughing)

D: And lastly John?

KS: (laughing) … oh?

KS: Oh my god, what didn’t John bring to the record?

That would be a short list. He brought such clarity, calmness, and taste. The drums, percussion and bass that he played were all so spot on; mostly he did everything in one take. He just brought incredible skill and educational energy. I feel like a lot of time when you are recording in the studio a lot of time is spent listening or not speaking, and I just feel he manages to teach you so much while he is not saying anything. So – silent teachings and really lovely arrangement additions.

D: It is a positive thing, I promise. I thought it was fascinating you talking about it being a document of you being together in the same place at a moment in time. The record feels very live, with a real sense of spontaneity of delivery, and that you are all conveying the same feelings or emotion across the thing. More than anything else I took a feeling away from the record, which for me was about nostalgia. It set off lots of triggers for me.

“I sometimes feel that there is so much to admire about people who run shops, but especially the accidental hat that gets put on them for being therapist or whatever.”

D: That might be the highest accolade you can give a producer, their ability to work with silence. That might be the farthest end point.

KS: Yeah, his ability to choose where to have things, and where not to have things was so crucial, especially having so many people involved in the creative process. But also just the talking silence - I am not saying that he never spoke to anyone. He is also a very clear, direct and ‘straight up’ communicator, but he does not mess around wasting words.

Speaking as someone who does do that, I really admire it, and feel I learn a lot from people who do know how many words to use.

KS: That was nicely put. I think you hit a few nails on the head there.

D: With this record are you happy that you have successfully conveyed what you hoped to convey?

KS: One never knows, because I am constantly surprised at how people interpret my music and the energy of certain songs and stuff. So I don’t think I can ever know how the mass of people who listen interpret it. When I listen to the record, it seems to me that the energy I get when I listen to the recordings suits the energy that went into the writing of them. I hear and see the songs from inside the songs, as it were, so do not know how to lift myself out of that place

and look from the outside in.

D: Hard for you to disassociate from the songs too I imagine.

KS: True. Which is why it is nice when people do talk to me about their interpretation of the songs.

Sometimes maybe it’s due to my contrary nature, or the way I end up choosing certain bits of music to go with certain words. Like, some people will hear one of the songs and assume it’s about something happy and positive. But actually I have reservations about it being a song because it is so dark and negative in my understanding of the lyrics. So it is interesting how differently people interpret the songs. The album came out of quite a tough time of steep learning curves for me, paired with thinking a lot about story telling, truth and interpretation of stories and signs and coincidences. Whether we chose to see things around us as a message or not, or how indeed we chose to see things. One day you might see things as a bad sign and then the next that you are on the right track. As human beings everything we do is interpretation, so a lot of the album I feel I am thinking out loud about that.

D: Without being specific about what I took from the record track for track, and also given that lyrics can be surprisingly misleading, I found it such an emotive record - which I mean as a compliment - I took colours from it, and feelings from it, which I feel is really quite something to accomplish with a record.

KS: Well I hope I did accomplish that, because that would please me, but again, who knows. I do know that in the writing of the album there were definitely colours, feelings and emotional trips, so I guess it’s nice that they are still there – that they have not been lopped off in the writing and recording process.

D: Song as a communication tool in that way is fascinating.

KS: I like it. For example, for promo purposes people will ask me to do a piece of writing about something, ‘Just write about something you like…’ and I am just not a natural journalist. I can’t do grammar, I can’t do it, I can’t do punctuation, I can’t spell, and I can’t do sentences.

Everything is just like a long stream of consciousness and random words. But in the song-writing context that’s fine and I feel I can communicate more freely and more naturally the way I am inclined to. Maybe also it’s because I have been writing songs like that for so long that I have lost the ability to write an essay as I did at school.

D: You can’t do everything, but for God’s sake don’t let on that you are prepared to write a song instead of an essay or you’ll never get past the requests…

KS: Mainly I feel like things like that turn out like lists for me. My natural writing style is just lists. I think you can see that in the style of my songs.

Long lists.

D: That’s how things are retained.

I think it is fascinating talking to people who do write songs about what comes out and why.

KS: To my it’s a mystery what comes out and why. Why we get drawn to certain vowel sounds, consonants or the percussiveness nature of certain phrases within songs. It’s a funny mystery, but I like a mystery.

D: Way back when, what was your first record shopping experience? Do you remember what you bought and on what format?

KS: I think my first shopping experience may have been a 7” single from Woolworths. I was at primary school. I don’t know how old I was.

We will have to find out when the single was released and then we will know how old I was. I bought a single

by Roxette. I think it was ‘Dressed for Success’? Does that ring any bells?

That was the first one I bought.

D: I am googling it now. That was 1988.

K: Was it??!! Two eights, that’s easy to remember. I used to put it on the record player in my parent’s bedroom and dance around on their bed. I loved it. I don’t remember the last time I heard it. I wonder what I would think of it if I heard it now. I would probably still love it. Outside of record shops, I borrowed from my friend Nina the 7” of ‘Starman’ and ‘Suffragette City’. It just blew my mind, I loved it.

D: I think it’s really interesting because of what we talked about earlier, young people, how they understand things and music and stuff. It’s so special, and important, remembering when you first got switched on to music. Did it feel like you were entering something?

KS: Not really. I probably was, but up until then I had listened to a lot of music. Starting off listening to music my parents listened to, and then being influenced by what my elder sisters were listening to. Then discovering the Top 40 and listening to that every week. That is probably how I would have hard of Roxette, via my radio explorations. So I feel it’s a gradual thing. It does feel like a definite change when you are old enough to go into town by yourself, and look around in record shops by yourself.

For me then, and also now, that’s how I find out about new music. I’m not someone who has a very nice time doing research on the internet, So I don’t find out about new music that way. It’s always in record shops or at gigs. For me it’s really important to have a physical place to go and find out about things.

D: Yeah, I would agree and think that is why we do all of this. It’s about understanding the importance of having place and sanctuary and experience and interaction.

KS: It’s about people.

D: Yes, it is about people.

KS: I sometimes feel that there is so much to admire about people who run shops, but especially the accidental hat that gets put on them for being therapist or whatever. People will want to come in and just need to talk to you about what they like and what they like and that is tough going for people who work in shops, but if you can handle it then it’s great, and a real good skill. People do need that. They need shopkeepers they can go in and have a little exchange with.

KS: Yeah, exactly, they do care, they are really into music.

I am not sure you can even run a record shop if you are not into music because it would be too gruelling.

D: Oh you would be surprised, there are some awful cantankerous old men in the UK. KS: Yes, that’s true, but I feel that’s just a front for their record collecting habit. They don ‘t want to sell you anything, they just like having it.

D: You could be on to something there.

D: So long as they are polite about it, I never mind the community outreach – one-part therapist.

KS: (laughing) I think it’s great but I have witnessed people who work in shops… Sometimes you will get a real number!

D: Which record shops have had particular impact or acted as sources of inspiration for you?

KS: In my formative record-buying years as a teenager growing up in Winchester, there wasn’t an independent shop, although someone is bound to remind me about one now. There was an independent shop just a little bit before my time and then it shut down. I wish I could remember what it was called. I was the wrong age for it to be a formative place. When I was the right age it was Woolworths or HMV. I did not start to get a personal relationship with record shops until maybe when I moved to Bristol, and then there were some good ones. More recently I have real fond connections with the record shops in Paris, I really love them. There is a nice little community or collective of record shops in Paris, maybe even in France.

They all help each other out and stick together. There’s a great record shop called Ballad Sonor. It started off as this guy Thomas turning up at gigs and selling records, a bit like a travelling shop at different events. People were so in need of an indie outlet that it ended up working really well and he got premises, and now he has a really nice shop that does really well. There is also another shop called Ground Zero who have always been so friendly and excellent at being directly in touch with local musicians, and taking your record when you drop in and being on your case about paying you when someone buys your things. So I am just really grateful to the nice little record shop community here in Paris. There are loads that I don’t even know about, specialist techno or drum and bass. There is a lovely one called Souffle Continu. They specialise in experimental music, and it’s a great place to browse around. They have great events on there too. It feels nice that they survive really well and people need them and use them and they are good little hubs.

D: I guess you are saying it’s that they are doing their own thing and you can tell they care?

KS: Maybe all the years of being a therapist has worn them down into not wanting to talk to anyone. But when there are really great engaged and passionate people running the shops… it’s just great for everyone.

JACK JOHNSON

ALL THE LIGHT ABOVE IT TOO THE BRAND NEW ALBUM OUT 8TH SEPTEMBER

Katie Von Schleicher Based on her discography titles, you could be mistaken for thinking that New York based Katie Von Schleicher is not taking it all that seriously. This ironically couldn’t be further from the truth, whilst interning at Ba Da Bing!

Records (a position once occupied by Sharon Van Etten) she misunderstood the concept of taping some demos and delivered the brilliant mini LP ‘Bleaksploitation’. She has just followed it up with the equally brilliantly titled ‘Shitty Hits’… We had to talk to her about that if nothing else.

Deluxe: Is today a working day or are you taking it easy?

Katie Von Schleicher: It’s a holiday today, so my way of celebrating is doing nothing…

D: Strangely we have a tradition of interviewing people on July 4th. I always forget about it until reminded and realise it’s a bit of a big deal over there right?

KVS: Where I live people are setting off fireworks all

hours of the night for a couple of weeks coming up to it, so you know that it’s coming, more than other holidays. It seems like you are supposed to go watch fireworks in a very crowded place, and I don’t like super crowded places.

D: How do you feel about fireworks?

KVS: I used to be really scared of them when I was a kid, also I used to live in a neighbourhood in Brooklyn, probably one I shouldn’t have lived in and there were

Photographed by Chris Baker

shootings on our block all the time.

I mean, you would be inside and hear gunshots and we would hit the floor (laughing) of the kitchen and crawl to the bathroom. Cops would come down the street and close the whole thing off. So now when I hear fireworks I get really freaked out and think they are gunshots every time.

D: Much to the delight of my kids, whenever I hear fireworks going off I always pretend I have been shot. So I guess it definitely does have that ‘gunshot’ ring to it, or what I think a gunshot sounds like? Are you proper New York then? Born and raised?

KVS: I am from Maryland, not quite the country, the suburbs. I moved to Brooklyn when I was 25. I lived in Boston for quite and while and went to school there and moved to New York.

D: Does New York feel like home yet?

KVS: It takes time for any place to feel like home, but I have been here four and a half years or so, so now it does feel like home. You know New York’s a strange place. I think it has that quality that’s addictive because it feels like home, but it also feels like – unknowable in a way. And then there’s gentrification, I am sure it’s the same in any major city. First of all it’s not my home because I live in Flatbush, which is a Caribbean neighbourhood. Before that there were Dutch settlers, so it’s weird thinking about all that history and legacy. And then there’s the fact that your rent will always go up and you will have to move somewhere.

D: It’s interesting to hit on gentrification because that seems to change things more than anything else.

KVS: In New York there is like systematic white flight, and I don’t know about London and the city planning of that, it’s so strategic, or it was, and now it’s just like a real estate

bubble thing happening.

D: London seems to be mostly owned by guys from the Middle East who’ve got a huge amount of money… or Russian oligarchs. Listen to me sounding all xenophobic…

KVS: (laughing) Same thing here.

Here there are penthouses that are empty three quarters of the year.

D: I think there are a lot of parallels between London and New York. It’s interesting when you talked about ‘unknowable’ – the scale is just too big.

is the saddest. It feels absurd to celebrate something today. Also I don’t know if this is better than you guys or what anyone else is going through, whose government is tending towards such extreme policies, but with ours it’s like we are living inside of, like, a joke novel, a satire? We have a television host for a president – that’s absurd. So, I don’t know, it’s at least blatantly absurd, but I don’t know if that makes anything better.

D: I feel that the whole narrative of Trump has been so extreme and so

“I had to write my own bio at Ba Da Bing! It’s about what you want to put out there, how you want to dictate the narrative for the lowest common denominator in a certain way.”

KVS: Yeah, it’s definitely interesting.

Not to say anything against the countryside, which I would also like to live in, it’s just accepting that our country sucks so bad and there are a bunch of places I don’t want to live just because of the political demographic.

surreal that you can’t help but feel that we are not even half-way through the curve yet –where’s it gonna go?

D: It’s a really tough time for you guys. Not that I think it’s easy for us, but I think there was a time, maybe a year ago where I would mention it, but now I definitely don’t. Avoid the guy… I feel like you guys are suffering.

KVS: Oh yeah! I definitely agree with you. We are definitely not through the curve. The craziest thing about any demagogic person is that the demographic of people that support him will continue to exist and have their ideas, but it’s all contingent on this one man, his personality. It is more reminiscent of more extreme world leaders through history. I don’t know but we are definitely not through the curve.

KVS: Yeah, we definitely are, this

D: I accept that you seem lovely and

definitely in your right mind? (laughing) You can see he’s mad?! I promise you I am nice and I did not want to leave the European Union. I love being European, I am not narrow-minded, so we have to live with these people we share a country with… let’s not dwell on it?

KVS: Yeah, she is great. It’s all done purely on a musical decision too, that kind of press I have admiration for.

KVS: (laughing) It’s absurd. I was in Paris for the first show of our tour and it was my first time playing music in Europe at all. I think I said something like – we just came here from America… and there was this silence. Not that I expected like ‘Wow America!’

KVS: (laughing) I had to write my own bio at Ba Da Bing!

It’s about what you want to put out there, how you want to dictate the narrative for the lowest common denominator in a certain way. There are people who literally just re-post your bio. So it’s not that you need to represent yourself but it’s definitely not the start and finish.

D: Maybe we are actually doing the right things, so whenever I meet anybody I should assure them that in my level mind I voted very much to remain in the EU and you can assure people that you voted to the best of your ability to avoid Donnie Trump?

D: How do you feel about music press broadly... realising that is a pretty swooping non-question?

D: I totally agree. Maybe this is a good point to mention the record titles. Firstly ‘Bleaksploitation’ (laughing) which is astonishingly good.

KVS: Thank you!

KVS: (laughing) Exactly! My take on politics is that it’s such a strange time, that I spend so much of my time reading obsessively about politics. Not just the news, which has become insane, and like rapid fire. I have been reading a book called ‘Dark Money’ about how dark money is influencing so much in politics in America. The image of pseudo-events and the invention of PR, and the Committee on Public Information to make Americans support World War 1. This stuff is driving me nuts, but I never want to put it in the music because I don’t feel I have any fresh take or hot take on the thing.

D: So you mentioned PR just now. Am I correct in thinking that you did the PR on your own first release under a pseudonym?

KVS: Yes, I was Caro with a ‘C’.

D: (laughing) Did you have to, like… form who she was?

Or could you just become Caro on demand?

KVS: If I was a better press agent I would probably have really become Caro. I still work at Ba Da Bing! [records] and do press from there. It’s funny because I started really doing press when I did it for myself. Kind of, extracurricular using the Ba Da Bing! email address and building a database and contacting people. The other day I was speaking to a writer who was doing a piece on me and at the end of the interview I was like, ‘Hey just so you know, we did speak before, but under a pseudonym’, and that is weird.

D: I think it’s nice that you ‘fessed up about it.

KVS: Yeah, he thought it was funny, was a good sport about it. I started doing the press but it’s different now. I have Jodie Banaszkiewicz doing press for me in the UK. D: She’s the best, man…

D: … and you have really gone bold with ‘Shitty Hits’. I love it, so what was the thought process?

KVS: Those were the two simplest decisions of the whole thing. I joke about things constantly, and I am really self-deprecating, that’s my style. Those were purely my personality, and I was hoping to find some way to make it work with the music. It’s like with a song like ‘Life’s a Lie’, which is potentially funny and also pretty dark, and super self-deprecating. Maybe that’s how I look at the album. I definitely have a positive feeling about it, or else I would not be here, but you know I also have negative feelings about it. ‘Shitty Hits’ specifically, even though I am kind of proud of it, it has a ring to it for one thing. I mean it rhymes. ‘Bleaksploitation’ paves the way for this album certainly. It was a genre that my friend made up.

It’s like we were saying we would make all the music in the genre that was ‘Bleaksploitation’. We had decided all the restraints of what the genre is, and that kind of thing. Then a few years later using it for the album title, because I was at that point, setting out on a different path musically than I had been on. I think one thing you don’t put in the bio because no one of a business mind wants to talk about it, is that I went to music school. I have made music since I was 15 and now I am 30. So I have been doing it for 15 years. It’s just that I did not find my voice until the last mini album I made.

D: Totally, but you know what, I think that is such an important point to make, because you have to find your own voice. Anything that is derivative, or too closely identifiable with something else seems so… vacuous?

KVS: It’s so tough, For one thing, you have to believe in yourself enough to ask the question – what would I do if I did not give a fuck what anyone thought? Or, what would I do if I live in a vacuum from here on out, and just made music for myself. Some people I think finding their voice

wouldn’t make them successful, right. I am in a specific musical community here in Brooklyn and there are these sonic threads that you can hear. Telltale signs - someone finished a record and you can tell which drummer was playing on the records, or certain ways of writing songs that go back and forth. Of course I am imbued with that as well, but it still seems really important to find your own voice. But then there is this pool, like a community of people who are of ostensibly like mind who are all, sort of, working in a similar vein?

If I have any kind of career - and who knows if I will or I won’t - this is the most that has ever happened for me.

There is a willingness to cover kids making music at 19 regardless, but for some reason speaking about someone who is 30 is almost apologetic? It’s interesting because who knows what the hell you are equipped for at 19?

D: I think that some people are fully formed at that age, but speaking very specifically about myself, I was a fucking idiot at 18/19.

KVS: Oh my god, me too. I am personally thankful that nothing I made at 19 is publically available.

D: So there’s not going to be a pre-‘Bleaksploitation’ ‘The Formative Years’ box set out for Record Store Day?

KVS: (laughing) No! oh god no.

D: So if we may, I would like to go back in time and ask you about your very first record shopping experience. Where were you?

KVS: I wish I could talk about one that wasn’t my first.

D: You can cheat!

KVS: My first, to be perfectly honest, I won a certificate in school for Sam Goody Music stores, a chain that now doesn’t exist. It was the era of CDs and I bought Madonna’ s ‘Ray of Light’.

D: That’s a banger! William Orbit’s production on it is fantastic.

KVS: Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking at all when I bought it, but in retrospect it’s not such a bad choice.

I remember a more formative record shop experience was moving to Boston. There was this record shop in Harvard Square called Twisted Village that sadly has gone. That was where I got into anything that was weird. Ambient music. They were used records for the most part and you could take out the used ones, put them on the turntable and listen. Or you could buy CDs. I got into Tropicália that way. That was a really formative place. It was really cool

BABY IN VAIN MORE NOTHING

THE BLACK ANGELS DEATH SONG

TENDER MODERN ADDICTION

“BABY IN VAIN ARE GIVING GUITAR MUSIC A SNARLING SHOT OF ADRENALINE” NME

“A MENACING RETURN TO FORM” THE GUARDIAN ««««

“WARPED AND FILTERED THROUGH THE MYSTICAL WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING WHERE SURREALITY REIGNS SUPREME” THE LINE OF BEST FIT

OUT NOW

OUT NOW

“WILL BLOW YOUR MIND.” CLASH

OUT NOW

CIGARETTES AFTER SEX CIGARETTES AFTER SEX

DEER TICK VOL. 1 & 2

“NOIR DREAMPOP COULD BE AMONG 2017’S BEST” THE GUARDIAN ««««

VOL. 1 IS QUIET, VOL. 2 IS LOUD. DEER TICK’S DUAL PERSONALITIES, FINALLY CHANNELLED ONTO TWO DISTINCT AND EQUALLY BRILLIANT RECORDS.

OUT NOW

“SURELY ONE OF THE YEAR’S FINEST” Q ««««

OUT SEPT 15

obviously, but it was nerdy cool. We had Newbury Comics, which was like a local Urban Outfitters vibe of music stores. I would go there and I never felt cool enough, but I did get into some good stuff there. Twisted Village was the best because it was all weird.

I would go there and genuinely take a chance and have no idea what I was buying. I kind of miss that. I don’t do that as much any more where I say OK I will go look at the album cover and make a split decision and come home with some random new record.

D: That’s such an important part of record stores to exist physically, to be able to do that for people.

Other Music – we talk about it in every Deluxe issue. I am stunned, it felt like such an important shop.

KVS: How did it happen?

D: I think they saw that the writing was on the wall at some point, and I think they just decided to take a very pragmatic approach like – the lease ends here. Let’s stop this before we are in a position where our rent gets jacked through the roof and we are out on our ear and beholden to other people. I am not sure if they are doing mail order still? The label is still very much happening. I think that it’s just that the area they were in, in the last 20 years, has become an entirely different world.

KVS: Yeah.

D: Which stores do you visit regularly now?

KVS: Sadly, to be honest, I mostly buy records from our distributor, because you get distributor pricing.

Revolver, our distributor in America do a great small curated lot of vinyl and cassette. But one of my favourite stores is Mississippi Records in Portland Oregon. I really love those compilations they make. And I shop a lot on Discogs as well. I know, this is awful…

D: (laughing)… Katie, this was all going so well.

KVS: (laughing) It’s because I find I am looking for specific stuff all the time. I need to be more open to going to the random stores, although New York prices are usually kind of insane.

I’ll go to Academy Records in New York. Other Records was a great store that unfortunately we lost.

D: This is all very logical. I am teasing you. I think Discogs is a really good community and if you are trying to track down this one particular 1963 Chet Baker record that was released in between these other two Italian sessions… then you have to get it on Discogs. You are not going to walk into a record shop and just find it?!

KVS: For you, what is it like owning and running a record store?

D: Well, I think it makes me cooler… (laughing) I think the most exciting thing is hearing something, and having an emotion or a feeling and being in a position where you are - in some tiny tiny way - responsible for getting other people to hear that. It feels like you are part of something special.

KVS: Do you feel like you get to recommend stuff as much as you would like?

D: Yeah, I think so. I have like a killer bunch of staff here, super friendly, predominantly female, which does make a big difference, and we just try and make a welcoming space.

KVS: A record store can be intimidating. There is another shop in Boston, again closed now, called Weirdo Records that was run by this woman. It felt like a very safe environment considering she was selling stuff that you couldn’t even hear on the internet. You were really taking a chance. You want to feel like you can go up to someone and tell them what you don’t know and not feel stupid.

D: Definitely. I am very very lucky.

It’s a family-owned business and my Mum is in the shop more than I am.

My Mum is cool and she definitely turns people on to records. So I think I got lucky.

KVS: Wow, that’s awesome.

I wondered how often you find a new record that blows your mind, that you had not heard before.

D: Well I am not going to embarrass you and say ‘yours’. But I have been listening to your record a lot this week.

KVS: Really?

D: Yes, totally. If I am completely honest, I feel I have some ability to pick things out the ether… like, if you listen to all the noise constantly about who is releasing what, or producing, or touring… you hear everything and it’s funny what little threads stick out and prick up your ears. That said, I do definitely get shocked still when I hear something and it knocks me sideways. That’s thrilling.

KVS: That’s good to hear.

D: Well, I try not to be arrogant with it. I can’t know everything.

KVS: It’s hard not to be. I work at a record label, so obviously we have a relationship to stores, and we produce records and have an insane collection in the office and listen to vinyl all day long. My boss, to me, is a perfect listener. He plays a mix of weird older and new stuff and his taste is constantly so wide it’s really inspiring.

Yeah, it’s important to remember to not get too cocky or too stuck in one place.

D: Undermining all my evangelising…

If I don’t like a press release, I resent having to listen to the record…

KVS: (laughing) That makes Caro sad.

Binker & Moses There was a time not too long ago when jazz , on a more mainstream level, fell into one of a few condescending categories. Radio 2 and the ever well-meaning Jamie Cullum, imitation Blue Note Record sleeves, the perennially overlooked but mandatory ‘Jazz’ finalist in the Mercury Prize or most damning, John Thomson’s “...nice” catchphrase on The Fast Show’s Jazz Club. In the last decade there has been a seismic shift, spearheaded by music makers forging their own scenes in the underground and exploding back into public consciousness. Binker

Golding and Moses Boyd are a semi-free jazz saxophone and drums duo. They are among the frontrunners of a loose yet interconnected group of London-based jazz musicians who are influenced by the music that surrounds them, including grime, hip hop and electronica as well as traditional jazz structures. Like their US counterparts, they’re connecting with a new, younger audience. During a fortnight of touring live in independent record shops, we phoned them in an East London alleyway to talk about their own journey.

Deluxe: Am I right in thinking you are about to play at Rough Trade East?

Binker Golding: Yeah, we are playing there in about half an hour. By the way, I can’t hear you all that well.

D: (laughing) Well that makes the whole thing more exciting...

BG: (laughing) Hardcore man. Like in ‘Alien 3’ when Sigourney Weaver wakes up and the android’s all busted up and it can barely talk to her. Ah, found Moses. Go for it man, the foundation of this band is built on adversity.

D: Damn right.

MB: Exactly! We like that the audience can see it a variety of ways. You get more out of the listening experience, in that you shouldn’t have to decide that it is one idea. That adds to the whole picture and the way you view the music and the record, and so on and so forth. So that is the reason. We did not want the listener to feel wrong if in their head they thought they got it wrong, if you see what I mean. There’s more ways to look at it than one.

D: Has anybody spoken to you about what they have taken from it, their understanding of it?

D: I want to talk about the title of the record, ‘Journey to the Mountain of Forever’. It is so fierce. How did that come about?

MB: Not that I know of. Maybe we should reach out to our audience. (To Binker) Has anyone come up to you yet and said what they think the mountain is?

BG: We actually came up with the title of the album on a beach in Portugal. We were on tour and in the midst of writing an album and planning it and all that sort of thing.

We had half the story done already really, and I would say half the music done as well. We put it together piece by piece. We knew it was a journey of some description with the music of the journey of some description but we were trying to think of an object, or a place, or a temple.

Something that was the goal, something that was the end of the quest, so to speak. Like a holy grail but not the holy grail. We played around with a lot of ideas. A lot of temple ideas, and rivers, deserts. I am not sure why we settled on a mountain now, but we felt that it sounded right.

Felt like something we could visualise most importantly in our minds. We settled on that and toyed around with potential names. The order of the title went from Journey to Forever Mountain to all sorts of permutations. And eventually we settled on that. We knew when it was completely right, that’s it, we don’t need to change it anymore. It’s settled.

BG: Not yet.

D: All the pieces in place.

MB: We knew after our epic journey on the beach, when we came up with the title that we really wanted something to mirror it. For us, the best sort of references that kept coming up were like prog-rock art – you know. People like Yes or King Crimson, Soft Machine, as well as Zeppelin and all sorts of things, but every time I would think of the album, the artwork of Roger Dean, his style. We wanted really kind of romantic, epic, sci-fi, all those elements in the artwork. It was a matter of finding the right artist, which wasn’t that easy if I am honest. That particular style, I would not say it’s dying out, but it’s not the easiest to find. It took us a while to locate a guy called Jim Burns, he’s great. He does a lot of science fiction illustrations and comics and commissions.

BG: (laughing) Think it took about an hour, and all the pieces were in place.

D: I thought what was really nice about it was you guys talking about the notion of it being a concept album, but not talking directly about what the concept is, or what the journey is. It’s important that people should find their own way, right?

BG: Yeah, yeah, totally.

Moses Boyd: I think that’s a good thing, being unexplained. It does not have to be just one way for viewing the picture or the sound, or the whole vision. We see it through a variety of ways, but we are not going to explain it. Equally we are open to interpretation...

MB: We have had a couple of questions from interviewers and stuff about some of the characters or titles but nobody has yet. Maybe we should put a post out.

D: Yeah, definitely. You have to find out. I will completely put my neck on the line here. I have listened to it quite a lot over the last couple of weeks and it feels very much to be about growing up. Like becoming independent, very much about being your own people. It felt like an adulthood experience for me. How wide have I shot?

MB: I won’t give that away.

BG: … all correct and none correct. (laughing) D: (laughing) ‘sake, I am going to get nothing from you guys am I? One thing that is front and centre is the incredible artwork. How did that all come together?

BG: It was his first album cover.

MB: He has been around since the 70s and is a really

“Whereas the music trade has all of this and people are pissed off about everything sounding the same. At the same time they don’t take the initiative to change that or reject that. One way that you can effectively do that is by going to an independent record shop and actually letting your guard down and take advice from people who are actually selling stuff in there.” cool guy. Think he lives in Wales.

Was really up for it, came down to London. He brought a lot of his work, and his book to show us what he does. The art was an instant fit straight away. There was a bit of back and forth, but he got pretty close to what we wanted in his first draft.

BG: A few minor changes that we threw in his way, but he got it completely. He loved it.

D: That must have been pretty thrilling, seeing that artwork come through for the first time.

MB: Oh yeah. The funny thing was with that artwork, we had a meeting or so and maybe two or three months later, I will have to check back, but it felt like a long time till we heard back from him. We were thinking, what’s going on, what’s it going to look like.

And he is the sort of person who needs a deadline, but will come as close to the deadline as possible. Which he did, in fairness. There was a lot riding on it because to us it was the last piece of the puzzle before we were happy to hand over to the label. The music we were happy with – the sound, the recording, everything. The playing, the tracks. But if the artwork did not match the vision, it was like we would have to start again. There was no way we were putting it out. But he got it, completely.

D: Lets talk about the Gearbox crew, because we love those guys. How did your relationship start with them?

BG: The Gearbox relationship really started with Adam Sieff. I believe he won the unsung heroes award in the music industry years ago? He is a guy most people haven’t heard of

but has played a crucial role in a lot of bands’ prominence and recordmaking sort of thing. I knew Adam but to be honest at that point, just before the first album, not very well.

I knew him by sight and for light conversation and we always got along.

He started working at Gearbox in a semi-retired phase of his life. He was talking to the owner, it’s not a big company, basically run by two people at the helm, with one or two others underneath. Adam knew that Moses and I were doing this project but had not done any real recording yet, and he suggested us to Daryl who runs the company, as an act for Gearbox.

Daryl heard some of the Duo stuff we had online, the preliminary versions of them, and really liked it. He suggested we should re-record it, but his way. Once he revealed to us his ideas of recording and stuff like that, and the equipment and the engineers,

we thought it was a good idea.. (laughing) We basically re-did the album, which was an unpublished album, unsigned album initially. We re-recorded the whole album incorporating some better ideas, because we had more time to think about it. That was it really, and we have been rolling with him ever since. That was about two or three years ago now and that was really how the relationship started. We have never had any problems with Gearbox. The only problems we have ever had have been disagreements over the art work – other people chiming in.

Moses and I knowing what we wanted and what was best, and Daryl throwing in some sort of guidance, or whatever, and just rejecting it, and arguments breaking out. That’s the worst that has ever happened.

D: That’s interesting because their catalogue has a definite look to it to date, and you guys stick out like a sore… dragon?

BG: Yeah, there definitely is a distinct Gearbox look, which I would say in a way... I would not put it in the same boat as Blue Note, but I would put it reasonably close, which I think is good in a sense, because of the markets they generally target – but we didn’t really want to look like that and we made it very clear from the get go basically. It was fine, but the problems came later but we got our way in the end, as we usually do on our artistic things. We generally don’t do something unless we 100% agree on it artistically.

So there was a slight conflict there but in the end they understood where we were coming from. To be quite frank, we were right.

D: Everyone has to put trust in each other right? You all have responsibility.

BG: Yeah, exactly, you have to trust the artist. We have trusted them on many things, and them us on many things as well. Trust is big. I don’t generally work with people I don’t trust. I am sceptical of many people, basically. Trust was a big issue but they listened to what we were saying and let us do it. We were right in the end, it did work.

I think ‘Demons’ wouldn’t have done as well, had we had a different front cover, really.

D: Let’s talk briefly about awareness, in terms of what you are doing. As an indie shop, it feels like your real estate is really high right now. I think you are doing something really different. It’s highly credible and super exciting.

With that broadening, obviously doing stuff like Jools Holland’s Later and MOBO and stuff. Has it felt like a translation in terms of playing to a less partisan jazz crowd?

How has it felt to you guys playing to a different sphere of people?

MB: I think it has been cool, good, definitely been a positive. It was definitely a shift, even before ‘Dem One’

for myself and Binker and also other bands, my band and people like Theon Cross and at events like Jazz Re:freshed or Brainchild, where there was a movement of that kind of counter “let’s take jazz out of where jazz is”. I wouldn’t say it was us that spearheaded it, but in terms of Gearbox it was definitely us that brought that energy to the label. So I think we were already experiencing it prior to this whole “resurgence”, which the press and everyone has realised now, which is a good thing.

It’s not that it’s a bad thing, but when people ask me now it’s almost like a delayed question to me… its been happening for a long long time.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying it in an ungrateful way. It has been good and a positive thing for music generally, before the teams were very separate. Even beyond the music, the infrastructures, the way promoters set the rules, because everything was very separate. Me and Binker had a play on 1Xtra the other day, I would have never imagined a drums and sax duo would ever get played on 1Xtra in my lifetime.

D: What you guys are doing is not straightforward music.

MB: No, There is definitely an element of that. Every gig I am still surprised, like this is not easy music in the sense that we are not trying to water anything down here. Not even remotely trying to be accessible in any way but it gets bigger and bigger.

There is still an element of – this is amazing, and telling of where the general public and listeners are. I think it’s a lot broader and people have become more open, whereas four or five years ago it was not the case.

Not to say people didn’t like it, but they are a bit more daring and open to trying something outside of their usual comfort zone. I always saw it as – I listen to my music, and then there’s jazz. Or, I listen to jazz, and there there’s everything else. Whereas now it’s part of the same conversation.

People will talk about Christian Scott or Yussef Kamaal in the same light

they will a Burial or a Floating Points record as well as Hendrix, Bowie or whatever’s happening. It’s like the scenes have become merged. It’s hard to ignore. Rather than separate, just put it all together, which is definitely a good thing, and the whole music community has benefited from it in my opinion, and there is so much happening right now it’s just incredible.

you do, as opposed to just stock coming in that they are gong to sell.

Its nice to know that, particularly in a city you are from, there is a community and network of record stores that do really promote and champion what you do. I think it’s good from a grass roots level - it’s good to aim high, but equally I am not trying to be a pop star. I want to attract people like me. You know,

“We knew after our epic journey on the beach, when we came up with the title that we really wanted something to mirror it. For us, the best sort of references that kept coming up were like prog-rock art – you know.”

D: I guess the front line of where things are happening is record shops, in terms of cross-pollinating and introducing people. All last week you guys were at Resident Records and Banquet, and in ten minutes you are at Rough Trade, so how has all that been for you, have you enjoyed doing the in-store shows ?

MB: You will always find me inside a record store if we pass one. Checking it out, particularly the independent ones, so it’s nice to see it come full circle. Shops you supported, supporting you as well and seeing your record in places and people genuinely having a passion for what

that guy who goes to record stores like me or digs it or samples it, all that.

If my records are there, where I would be, then to me that’s already a victory.

BG: The in-stores are all different but do feel related. Playing in the shop is not a problem, we can pretty much play anywhere with this lineup, give or take, as long as there’s enough space to fit the drums.

D: You jazz guys could play stood on your heads right?

BG: Sometimes you just have to make do, make it work. The Independent shops are like an identifiable thing.

They are not the same but there is a feel that unifies all of them in my opinion, the good ones. It is important as well that people pay attention to them and go into them, and stuff like that. People complain a lot about music. Of all the art forms it’s probably the one that is most complained about. No one ever complains about novels - oh these detective novels you see advertised on the tube, they are all the same these days. They all read the same and they are just manufactured. They’ve got a TV show – X Factor novelist, and shit.

You know what I mean. Whereas the music trade has all of this and people are pissed off about everything sounding the same. At the same time they don’t take the initiative to change that or reject that. One way that you can effectively do that is by going to an independent record shop and actually letting your guard down and take advice from people who are actually selling stuff in there.

They have every right to complain about pop music, but at the same time people are sometimes afraid to listen to an opinion or advice on something they are going to consume for their own pleasure. They do need to do it or you will be stuck listening to Katy Perry all your life, because that’s all that is on TV. So it is important, basically the whole thing. It’s a small scene I guess, a small part of the market and always will be I imagine, but it is important that it survives and thrives on whatever scale it can.

D: What was your very first record shopping experience and what did you buy?

BG: For me it was probably in an HMV or Our Price, because I started very young and that’s all I knew about back then. I was about eight years old and it was all about cassettes back then. Most musicians do start young, either playing, listening to music, or buying records. I am not trying to show off here, most musicians do start out about that stage. The first tape I remember buying was Nirvana – ‘Bleach’.

D: That’s a good one…

BG: It wasn’t the first one I had, but it was the first one I remember consciously buying. I still own that cassette to this day and it still sounds good actually. That first Nirvana album is music built for cassettes, so I am a proud owner of ‘Bleach’. So that would be it for me.

M: For me I think I was working in John Lewis in Oxford Street. I had already had a lot of music, because I had a lot of brothers and sisters that would supply me with music, but the one that I first bought was actually, I would say, Wynton Marsalis – ‘Standard Time’. I was older, about 16/17, but like I say I was fortunate and could steal my brothers’ and sisters’ collection. So that was the first one I actually went out and bought, and that was because as I said, I was working at John Lewis Oxford Street and before I got there I would check out HMV at the top of the road, which turned into a Zavi I think.

I would go into the jazz section and pick things out by their cover. Even though I did not know much about jazz, Wynton was the only name I recognised. So I took a gamble and then spread my net and kept buying things in there. Slowly I would piece things together. Wynton played with Blakey, and so on and so forth.

D: You guys did well. Most people pick up pop, Madonna or Michael Jackson or something, but you guys have both done good.

MB: (laughing) No, I had a lot of bad things before then.

Washed Out As Washed Out, producer Ernest Greene is often credited as being one of the principal architects of the “Chillwave” genre, a dreamy, hazy sort of pop. For his third LP, “Mr. Mellow”, he has followed a different path, equally dense and layered, but with halcyon snippets and textures very much in the hip hop mould. Samples always lead to crate diggers, so we wanted to talk about browsing racks.

Deluxe: What’s the narrative of “Mr Mellow” from your side of things, how did you record it?

Ernest Greene: Well after the last record and touring, which lasted a couple of years, I worked on quite a few projects without much direction, and in the meantime I was working on these more kind of crazy demos that I had never really thought of as Washed Out songs. They were more sample-based material and stuff that I do for fun in between times, whether I am on a flight or just killing time.

So after trying out some ideas for the next Washed Out record, I kept coming back to these demos, and because in my mind it wasn’t anything serious there was something special about how crazy and erratic some of the material was that I really liked. Some of my last records have been a lot more thought-out ideas and pristine recordings.

I began liking the idea of being a bit more chaotic. I began gathering some of these demos and then building them out

into proper songs. So that slowly turned into the album.

It was made pretty much entirely on my laptop computer.

Again, very different from the last couple of records which were done in a proper studio with really nice equipment and all that.

D: Does it sound like a different record to you?

EG: It does to me, yes. I realise my interpretation of things is often quite different to the average listener. To me it sounds dramatically different. The main thing for me was embracing things being imperfect and out of time or out of key or whatever. Actually a big inspiration was - I am pretty into visual art and animation in particular. I was watching a lot of stuff online. You know what I really love is artwork or animation that clearly has like a human feel, like a messy hand-drawn thing, versus the Pixar version of animation, 3D, modern vibe. That kind of human quality,

something about that felt really magical and I could see similarities with the demos I was talking about that were just done super fast, without much thought. There is a life there that, when I look back on some of the previous Washed Out records, if you work and work on something you can obviously lose some of that magic over time. That was the main jumping off place for the album.

D: Talking about the sound and reputation that you have built with your previous body of work, did it feel like it was a departure? Did you feel any pressure to do, or not do anything, with where you wanted to head sonically?

EG: Yeah, sure. Again, I am always guessing at the average Washed Out sound, what it’s at. I feel that’s really hard to do but I think I am most known for using a lot of synthesizer stuff and to be honest synthesizer stuff and 80s music production is not that interesting to me today. At the end of the day I just tend to explore whatever I am listening to at the time, or feels inspiring to me, so I think this record is probably quite different. I felt excited by using more acoustic instruments. There’s not a ton of synthesizer stuff. There’s a few low end synth parts here and there, but there’s rarely a place where it’s used prominently. That has a lot to do with reacting against what I hear that’s around me as well. I am always wanting to create my own little space.

Oftentimes that means rejecting everything that I am hearing at the time. So much of pop music these days has prominent synth and all that, so the idea was to react against all that in some ways.

D: The textures on the record are really beautiful. I did not want to look too deeply into working with Stones Throw, and the Los Angeles hip hop legacy and that almost mix tape, samples and found record culture - the crate diggers I guess but I felt like the journey was almost more prominent on this most recent

work, compared with music you have released previously.

EG: I have been a big fan of Stones Throw for a very long time, they put out some of my favourite records. So in my mind it’s the perfect home for the album. Texture in general is a big part of my process. Oftentimes songs start with some sort of interesting background texture. I am certainly not the type of musician or songwriter who sits down at the piano and writes a song, and then goes into the recording studio and figures everything else out. I am sort of the opposite approach. I start with some weird texture that inspires a baseline, then I get on with putting the rest of the song together. That’s superimportant to me, as a producer I am most excited about coming up with unique sounds, and maybe bringing together styles from various places you haven’t heard before, meshed together. Stuff like that excites me D: How does being labelled as a genre artist affect you, do you find it limiting?

EG: It’s problematic for sure, because I don’t think I live comfortably within any genre. I certainly listen to a ton of different music and pull inspiration from it. To me it ends up meaning that it might not be quite electronic or dance music oriented to work for a really hardcore dance music fan. It may not be indie rock enough to work for a hardcore indie rock person. It ends up straddling a lot of different things. For me, as a music listener, that’s super exciting. I hope the general audience has an open mind and is as excited about that sort of thing. That’s the hope at least.

D: I wonder how much of a problem us record shops are. It’s us that force everything to be categorised anyway.

EG: It obviously makes practical sense.

D: That’s very kind of you!

EG: I worked for years in a university library, so I certainly know the power of categorisation, (laughing) but yeah it can be difficult. At the same time it means it can create a unique opportunity, where people who have not heard it before will stumble across it, which is kind of cool too.

D: I wanted to touch briefly on the visual aspect of the record, because you have commissioned different artists to work up different animations to accompany the record. That must have been such an exciting process, seeing that work come back to you.

Did you feel anxious? How involved were you?

EG: I was really involved.

I mentioned my process, working, putting the songs together, I was constantly looking and trying to find really rare animation stuff from the past. Yeah, actually the creative way that I have come up with to distance myself from the music, ‘cause that’s really tough as a solo musician, you are so deep into the song on a level that it is so hard to step back and be a general listener. So I figured out that I would take out some favourite videos online and put the music over the top. And somehow that helped me step back. So what happened was a lot of these videos I was using, I just approached whoever the director was, started a relationship, and luckily most of my favourite visual folks were into the project and we were able to work super closely putting the videos together. The great thing is they all had their own very distinct visual style so it was fairly easy. It was mainly me communicating my ideas about the song, and going back and forth a little on content and ideas, but for the most part they were able to do their thing.

So yeah, it turned out to be really special, and like a dream project. As I am putting songs together I am always picturing in my head various things, and then to see them actually come to life in a lot of cases was definitely special.

D: Did you receive any surprises as part of that process?

EG: Definitely. That’s the tough part. There were cases where I was completely blown away by the quality and the ideas that were brought to the table. And then there were a couple of occasions where I was a little disappointed in the direction it was taken, or whatever. It’s such a sprawling project it ended up being very much a DIY feeling thing, where it was just me and whoever the artist who was working was, and we were collaborating together. So for the most part we were all very hands on throughout the whole process and knew what we were getting into but there are always surprises popping up, for sure.

have really gotten into dance music, It was really surprising making the connection that a lot of dance music producers work in the same way, use the same equipment. You know, these hip hop producers that I idolize / worshipped, they end up putting together their songs in a very similar way.

That opened up a whole new world of influence and of thinking about putting together songs. I think the house music thing is the most unique thing to this record. I realize that was kind of a sprawling answer.

D: Yeah but maybe that’s indicative of a sprawling record though.

“I am always super curious about what’s being played when I walk in. It can be a wide range of genres, whatever, but it’s always something unique.”

D: Yes, I guess that’s really important, keeps it feeling vibrant.

EG: Certainly.

D: I wondered, before we talked about shops and growing up and stuff, what might surprise people in terms of your record collection, or something that has been inspiring you recently.

EG: As far as record shops go, I grew up in a really small town in Georgia about an hour and a half from Atlanta, which is the biggest city in Georgia. So growing up the only record shops I had were the big box huge retailers that were selling whatever pop music or classic rock was popular at the time. But yeah, I am a massive collector. It’s a big part of my process of making music. Inspiring work like, finding source material for sampling and stuff like that. I am generally looking for the most obscure, experimental or out of left field kind of stuff, which is the most inspiring to me. I love solo, untrained producers, whose work comes up sounding very unique and impressionistic. I really like that vibe, kind of outsider artist vibe. Yeah, across the board. I would say that for this record a lot of deep house records were a big influence. For the last five or six years that I

EG: Sprawling, busy and chaotic are the words I keep using. There are piles and piles of layers and sounds that can sometimes be a little disorienting, and like sensory overload on occasion I think. But I think that repeated listening, hopefully listeners can pick out new things.

D: How long have you been based in Athens?

K: I have recently moved back to Atlanta. I had been in Athens for three or four years and moved back here to Atlanta anticipating a lot more travel this year. It’s more of a hub for the airports and all that. I have lived in Georgia most of my life. I enjoy it. Is certainly off the beaten path a bit.

D: Athens is such an iconic musical city and I wondered, in your experience of it, how supportive the scene is and whether, when you are on the inside of it, does it feel like a musical place to be?

EG: In some ways yes and in some ways no. I always imagine what it might have been like living in Athens in the early 80s. Even the Elephant Six era, I moved to Athens right as that band or group was moving out and disbanding, so I never really got to experience any of that. It’s a smaller

“it’s always really special when you stumble across something you have never heard before, or you are recommended something that you might like. My ideal shop for me would be if it carried a lot of different genres but specialized in more rare things.

I would be super excited for that.” college town, it’s very cheap to live, so when you are a musician or an artist you can exist and do your art without worrying too hard about money. So I think that’s really special. I have had good and bad experiences, I guess. I would say that currently there’s not a lot of great music, as far as local bands go, but I feel that can ebb and flow. A lot of what can happen through the university where maybe for a few years there are just not the right people at university, or whatever. It’s an interesting place. For such a small city, there’s really decent venues and a wide variety of venues ranging from rooms that have a limit of 50 people, all the way up to a more professional level. For a young band it’s really cool. You can get in these rooms and get it to feel like a really successful show with only a handful of people there, that sort of thing, which I think is really special. As far as new bands and the current scene, it kind of ebbs and flows as far as interesting things happening.

D: How about Wuxtry Records?

EG: It’s a great great store. I am always super curious about what’s being played when I walk in. It can be a wide range of genres, whatever, but it’s always something unique. I am an absolute music nerd and am always looking for the deepest, rarest stuff and always get solid recommendations.

Yeah, it’s a great record store.

D: What I thought was interesting was they started out

around 1976 and the whole boom of the scene, the real national, if not international prominence of Athens as a musical city was shortly after that, it brings up the question of the chicken and egg with the record shop and the scene.

Did the scene require a record shop, did the record shop make the scene. What’s your take on it?

EG: I would argue for the record store having a major influence, especially at that time. Athens is a small town.

Essentially if you take the university out of it it’s a small town. So having access at that time to good records I think is a major thing. Like I was pointing out earlier, for me personally, outside of the handful of trips to Wuxtry where I would spent much too much money on records, most of my current music discoveries are happening online I think.

D: So how about right back at the start. What was your very first record shopping experience, and do you remember what you bought?

EG: Ironically enough the first cassette I bought was an REM tape actually – the one with “Night Swimming” on – “Automatic for the People”. I still have that cassette in my car now. I definitely bought a few singles of pop brat hits of the time before that, but that was the first proper record I picked out on my own. A ton of Nirvana was big at the age when I was learning to play the guitar and all that, that era of grunge rock was pretty big. That was going to the

local K Mart or whatever, which is a massive retailer.

D: How about today - what shops do you recommend?

Where have you seen on your travels?

EG: It’s cool to be able to shout out to Wuxtry. I guess within the right circles and for a small town that’s really rad. To be honest, we have never had the luxury of doing a bus tour, which friends of mine in bands that do bus tours have the most insane record collections, because they have the entire day to go out record shopping. It normally takes an off day for us. I have spent a ton of time making this record in LA, which for the first time was not doing shows and being there for just 12 hours. I just love going into Amoeba and some of the bigger stores, where you can just dig and dig and dig.

D: That place is enormous, it’s like a football field.

EG: Again I am so obsessive when it comes to finding and digging for things, so I send hours and hours looking at every little thing, so that’s the first one that comes to mind.

D: What for you makes for a really good record shop?

K: I would definitely say stuff that’s off the beaten path, which could even be reissues. Nowadays there’s so many great reissues through labels that do a lot of that, which I think is great. The big box retailer is going to cover the stuff of the moment or whatever, but I think smaller retail shops - it’s always really special when you stumble across something you have never heard before, or you are recommended something that you might like. My ideal shop for me would be if it carried a lot of different genres but specialized in more rare things. I would be super excited for that.

D: …and spend the day there…

EG: Oh for sure, looking at every single cover.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is one of our favourite contemporary composers, crafting hugely evocative soundscapes and electronic suites on a series of synthesizers. We were thrilled to get to talk to her about wires.

Deluxe: Let’s start by talking about your new record “The Kid” and in particular the creative process. When you are working on a body of work, how quickly does it come together? This time in particular?

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: It changes all the time. Sometimes it will happen overnight. I have very vivid dreams. So sometimes it will happen where I wake up and I know exactly what the next album is going to be and I will see it complete. For instance it happened with “Ears”, where I woke up and I knew I wanted to create a futuristic jungle, just like the movie Nausicaä (“Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind”). Altogether I could hear what it was supposed to be. That was not the case for this one. This one was

actually a very slow process. For some reason I got an urge, and this is going to sound really abstract, because I haven’t found the right language to communicate this where other people will understand what’s going on in my head. But I just got a really big urge to create music that sounded like one gigantic frosted shredded wheat.

D: Wow… KAS: So that’s where it started, with this really weird urge in me to create these shredded wheat sounds. So I started with this sound palette of collecting a bunch of sounds that I was making on the modular and all my stents, and I kinda created a lot of orchestral things out of my voice. So the

first few months was just collecting sounds, and I didn’t really know what I was going to do with them. From there, as I was listening back to the sounds, I started to see kind of cotton candy land colours – really bright colours. So that kind of influenced the rhythms I wanted to make. Then my Dad, during a conversation, started talking about the four stages of life and how he is entering into the fourth stage and his feelings about it. It got me really fascinated about that philosophy and I started listening to Alan Watts’ talks about it and researching more. I got really fascinated with the idea of dividing your life into four stages. Throughout my life, and I feel probably a lot of people feel this, constantly feeling like “Am I any older than five years old?” So that has been on my mind a lot, like holding onto that playful energy, and it’s a guiding force for myself.

It’s been something that I have wanted to externalize more and more, and I am very excited about externalizing that. So I guess I would write about this a lot and spread it out in front of me and figure out “What is the through line of this. How can I create a story?” At the same time academically I was being inspired by this book called “New Musical Resources”, which is about the evolution of our hearing as a culture. The book goes up until the 70s, where basically it talks about atonal and micro tonal music is now accepted, and begins at the first time a culture heard a fifth, and how it took a while for our ears to relax into that. I was just excited at where we are at now, and how to challenge our hearing now. So I wanted to play with the idea of splitting our hearing and listening to two conversations at once. So there’s a lot of play in the album about the left ear and the right ear being in very different rhythmic zones, and trying to find a centre spot. This is more in the engineering and mixing of it, where I would try and find centre pans that could keep your brain focused while giving your left and right ear an exercise.

I know that was kind of a mouthful, did that answer your question?

D: Yes, (laughing) but I now have about five follow up questions that I have been jotting down on post it notes as you were speaking.

I listened to your album on headphones the first time, because I have small children. I tend to do a lot of the buying in the evening so listen to things on headphones when they are in bed, or in headphones in the car. On listening I found it was incredibly expansive. I am never sure if I am using the correct term with syncopation, but it felt like this. I am throwing my arms around now in different rotations. I felt like there was a lot of different pacing happening on different sides. I can’t wait to go back and listen to it again, with the knowledge that my brain was not going wrong, that was what was supposed to be happening…

KAS: For me, that’s where I exist comfortably. I love to

“But I just got a really big urge to create music that sounded like one gigantic frosted shredded wheat.” dance, and when I dance those are the rhythms that get me most excited, and I got excited about externalising that more and more.

D: I suppose if you were so sensitive about it, you would be able to tell, in some capacity, how successful it was by the “I can’t stop my body dancing to this” kind of impulses.

KAS: Yeah.

D: When you had such specific visual expectations of how you wanted it to sound, were you ever anxious about being able to accomplish that?

KAS: You mean, as far as one giant frosted shredded wheat?

D: Yes, very specifically the giant shredded wheat…

KAS: No, anxious is definitely not a word that I would use. I just tend to get really enveloped in it and keep on working at it until I find it. So that is actually a joy place for me, it’s like the research process.

D: In my understanding of synths and modular synths, I guess the more skilled you are the more control over things you have obviously, and experience and practice.

I wondered if there were ever things that you had created, or tones, that you had struggled to recreate?

KAS: To get it exactly the same is always a challenge, but I think that’s where the fun is. It can be of the same texture but maybe not of the same exact personality. Does that make sense?

D: It does make sense, because I want to talk about

Photographed by Tim Saccenti

computers and people briefly, but I think that effectively, using this medium the more human and imperfect it becomes the closer it comes to human gesture. Does that make sense?

between people and computers. In one of the videos I watched of you performing, you were talking about the voices synths make, and then you were performing with your actual vocals. I loved the blurring, blending, of the two. I wondered where you saw those lines?

KAS: Yeah, I definitely agree with that.

D: With “Tides”, “Euclid”,” Ears” and “The Kid” coming out over three years, it feels like a really prolific period.

KAS: (laughing) There was actually so many more in those years…

D: Do you feel you have periods of writing and not writing, or are you always engaged?

KAS: No it’s always that way, and I think it is where my fun place is, it’s not really work at all. This time period, right before an album’s going to come out, is maybe the slowest time for me because I am focusing on how to perform it live and doing interviews and whatnot, so there’s not as much time for making music. But once I start touring, that is usually where a lot of ideas come, because there’s all that travel time, so I have a lot of time to think and work on stuff.

D: How about using small digital versions of synths?

I know they have become hugely popular. Would you consider them as ways to visualise ideas, or is it all in my head?

KAS: It’s a combo of both. They are definitely valuable tools, and when I am on the plane I use that stuff all the time to sketch out ideas. Sometimes I will double it with an analogue sound. They are very valuable tools.

D: So how good are they these days, speaking to you as an expert?

KAS: That’s very nice of you to call me that, I don’t know if I am.

D: Oh for sure, (laughing) I have been watching the videos of you for months and you are definitely an expert.

KAS: They are their own thing. I would never say that they are, um… I like it when you see one that is inspired by the actual synth because it’s nice to have that nostalgia there and see like a “familiar face”, but I haven’t found one yet that I would say – “Wow, that sounds exactly like that”.

They usually just sound like their own thing, but I still like them.

D: I touched on it early, but the reason I have always particularly engaged with electronic music, if I break it down, is that it’s working alongside computers. And I love the notion of “2001” and “AI” and the blurring of lines

KAS: I feel like humans can only create extensions of themselves, they can’t really create things larger than themselves, which is just my opinion of it. It also goes beyond digital and computers. It goes back to the first instruments. When the flute was made it was intended to be an extension of the voice.

For me, I try and think about it all as one, and that it can interchange when my physical voice can’t do what I want it to do. Or if a computer or something outside myself can’t emote the thing I want, then I can blend them to have a little bit of both.

D: For me the most poignant moments are the blending, not quite knowing what you are listening to.

KAS: That’s what personally I look for in music and in art and in nature. It’s finding moments when my brain can just receive and not try and analyse, so that’s definitely a subconscious intention that I am trying to put into my music. Because what I look for in music is a chance to relax and receive information and emotion, without wondering “What made that?”

D: I particularly like the spiritual end of it with people like Laraji. Do you know the Light In The Attic record label?

KAS: Yeah, I love them, such good sounds.

D: I think it was the “I Am The Center” record, and “The Microcosm” more recently, that for me highlighted the spirituality within “electronic music”.

KAS: Yeah. I just did an interview with this lady that they just put out a re-issue of her album, called Suzanne Doucet.

The way she describes New Age music is fascinating. She says she can hear where the person is at, when they are creating music. She feels that when you are creating New Age music it’s from a mental space that is not a personal space, but comes from an empathetic space, and that you are trying to create space, rather than speaking from a personal space. I thought that was really interesting.

D: I would like to talk to you about synths. I must admit, I don’t know very much about… am I pronouncing it correctly? Buchla… Booc-larr?

KAS: Yeah, it’s “book-la”.

R: I think it was the Suzanna Ciani “Lixiviation” record that was on Finders Keepers in the UK, where they were

talking about Don Buchla and synths and stuff, which was the first time I became aware of it. I felt like it was so exciting to discover that record. It certainly sent me on a path.

KAS: Yeah, it’s amazing. She is the best.

D: How was it working with her?

KAS: So much fun, that’s really the word that sums it up, such a brilliant and wonderful person. So full of wonderment - an inspiring woman.

R: In your field I think she feels like such a Titan. It must have been so exciting to work with her on the split record.

KAS: So exciting to be a part of that, yeah.

D: I mentioned watching videos. It seems so graceful what you do, in terms of moving things and the gestures you make, plugging things in and out. Without meaning to sound funny - how nerdy/techy are you?

D: You grew up in Orcas Island. How was that as a place to grow up?

KAS: It’s the best place I’ve ever been to. Even after all the places I have been to, and all the places I still haven’t been to yet, I still feel it’s my favourite. It’s a very creative place where it’s easy to find space, like psychic space to explore your creativity. One of my favourite places to explore on Orcas, which unfortunately burnt down so is no longer there, was this place called the Exchange. It was a pretty large, indoor/outdoor space where the rule was, if you brought something you could take something. So it was like a trading place. That’s where I would always get my tapes and records. It was infinite fun because you would find the weirdest tapes and records and you wouldn’t really have to risk too much to get it. And you could just listen to it and put it back.

D: Would that have been your first experience of a “record shop”?

KAS: Yeah. And then the next place I lived, Bolinas, had a smaller version of that called the Free Box. Another place I

“I feel like humans can only create extensions of themselves, they can’t really create things larger than themselves, which is just my opinion of it.”

KAS: ( laughing) That’s such a funny question to answer. I would say probably 50/50. I am definitely always thinking about the technical side and I studied engineering in school, and the composition, so I am always thinking about the notation and the music theory side and the orchestration. Also the technical stuff. That being said, I am also very much in the belief system of what Stravinsky and Picasso would say, the “getting back to the baby brain”.

I have talked about this a bunch – I always talk about this.

Learning as much as you can so that you can forget it.

Basically it’s like when you are learning a language, you study that language as much as you can, but then you never think about that stuff when you are communicating. You just think about what you are trying to communicate.

lived in New Mexico had a similar thing. All the small towns usually have something like that.

D: This is a first for us. Of all the people we have spoken to for the magazine, you are the first “exchange” rather than the first purchase. Do you remember the first one you got, and on what format?

KAS: Yeah. It was a tape and it was The Proclaimers – “I Would Walk 500 Miles”. Do you know that one?

D: I would have never guessed that in…

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D: (laughing) That is such a double good one. So how about these days, do you have any particular shops you are fond of?

KAS: Nowhere!

D: Nowhere! You are kidding me.

KAS: Only in Mount Analogue.

KAS: I really like Mount Analogue. I live in LA right now and have a show on NTS, so I go there a lot because the studio is in Mount Analogue. I feel like they have a really nice curated section. Have you been in there?

D: Yes. Beautiful. There has been so much thought put into the vibe. The space feels as important as what’s in it.

KAS: Yeah, I agree.

D: How about on your travels, where have you come across?

KAS: I tend to go in them a lot but don’t let myself buy anything because the way I travel is so minimal. It’s so dangerous. I have some friends who carry an empty suitcase, just to fill it with vinyl. And they do that thing where they call and make an appointment with those people who have shipping crates.

D: That’s pretty serious.

KAS: I would say that on my travels my favourite thing is to find something. It’s really amazing to me is that no matter where you go there’s always a hip, rad record shop, an artisan coffee shop, gluten-free bakery. I feel like that’s everywhere now.

D: What do you really look for in a record shop? What would make a shop special for you?

KAS: I thought you were going to say “in life”! (laughing) Wow. I tend to go for African music, and I am always looking for mbira music, which is always hard to find on vinyl.

So firstly I look for that... Wow, does anyone answer that question with “Themselves”?

D: (laughing) That’s amazing! Like, where have you seen your record?

D: Well I had a shit ton of your record, also, there’s a shop in the UK called Norman Records and you were their Record Of The Year last year.

KAS: I was? That’s so nice. What!? I am so amazed with them.

D: Kidding, you didn’t know? They are called Norman Records and they are in Leeds in the UK. Good shop.

KAS: That’s so cool. I like Leeds. A friend and I were walking down the street there and someone came up and told her she looked like David Attenborough, which is one of my favourite memories of this last year.

She looks nothing like him, very far from that.

Photographed by Nick McKinlay

Julia Jacklin Julia Jacklin has the sort of voice to stop you in your tracks. The young Australian released her debut LP ‘Don’t Let the Kids Win’ in 2016, but vocally any section could have been recorded over the last 60 years. We had a hunch she was readying a follow-up, so we grabbed her (in a cab) to talk about home, influences and first purchases.

Deluxe: Julia, how and where are you?

D: Ah, nice. I noticed Temples were on the Park Stage, which looked great actually.

Julia Jacklin: Just got back from Glastonbury Festival.

JJ: It’s a really nice area.

D: Oh, how was that?

JJ: It was good… good, I was just quite sick the whole time.

So I was in a lot of pain but just kept saying “Must get through the fest and wait until you get back to London to go to the doctors.”

D: Oh bud, that’s awful.

D: Seems like a nice area. You tend to get a really good solid crowd. It’s not like The Rolling Stones-size crowd but it means you have people who are actually there because they have found you. They want to listen to you, rather than whatever is on in front of them.

JJ: Exactly. I had a really nice, attentive crowd. It was great.

JJ: So it was enjoyable but also quite painful.

D: How do you feel about playing music live, in general?

D: What stage did you play on?

JJ: The Park Stage.

JJ: I really like it. If I didn’t it would be really tough doing this job I think. (laughing) It’s one of those things I really

enjoy because, being a trained musician, a lot of the time it’s just being in cars and being stressed, and feeling bad physically. Like yesterday, I felt so sick, and I got on stage and played and, it sounds clichéd but I thought - oh this is great. This is what I am doing it for. So yes, I really enjoy it. It has taken a good ten years to get comfortable doing it but I feel I have finally worked my way to feeling really good on stage.

D: I wondered, because some people it seems like that side, performing, is just in them. Whereas others just sort of learn their craft and the confidence comes with that. Do you feel you have learnt how to present yourself?

JJ: I definitely feel it took me a long time to get comfortable, because I just was not very good at guitar for a long time. You know I used to get so nervous that my face would twitch. Like when I used to do classical singing, I used to get real physical effects from being really nervous.

So it has been a long process of learning my instrument and learning how to sing better and to feeling a lot more comfortable on the stage.

D: I did notice on ‘Eastwick’, because this is the first new material we have heard, it feels like there is a very familiar introduction in your vocal, which is actually very distinct, and when you suddenly open up on the guitar, that is thrilling. How did that come about?

JJ: I am not really sure. I think I always had that in mind for that song. Struggled to figure it out, but then when we got into the studio with my producer Ben we were able to add lots of layers. It feels really good to do that because sometimes, when I am singing things that I really care about, that are quite emotional, it can feel quite heavy and intense during the set. So it’s nice to play a song that is still quite emotional to me, but in the end you can just physically let out your emotions, have a bit of fun and go for it.

D: You really went for it!

JJ: Yeah. It’s nice to add that to the set, just for my sake.

I have been touring this record for a year and a half, so adding things like that to the set just keeps you going and keeps things exciting and fresh for me.

D: Talking about music being emotional, and people listening carefully to the lyrics of your very honest and direct writing - when you factor in that very direct and human element of the music, and how it is received by people, they are likely going to add their own agenda to the music.

D: I noticed you worked with Ben Edwards. It feels like Ben is a connecting factor in the refocused light on the antipodean scene. Does it feel connected?

JJ: Yeah, I think so. I think there is a way that Ben produces that is quite different. The music we all play – me, Nadia (Reid), Aldous (Harding), Marlon (Williams), it’s all pretty serious stuff, pretty heavy and emotional. But Ben is kind of the opposite of that. He is incredibly funny and very inappropriate and jovial and very passionate about your performance, which is something I had never had before. He will take the time to make sure you perform that song to the best of your ability, or at least get the take that feels the most genuine. He has this really incredible way of pulling that out of you. He is dedicated to the artist, and if he is making your record he will be there for you for three weeks, to the detriment of all his other relationships.

He lets you have this space to put your head down and really focus on what you are doing, which I feel shows in the work.

D: What do you think changed in terms of people looking toward Australia and New Zealand? Is it coincidence, is there something linking all of you, is it the internet?

What’s your take on it?

JJ: From my perspective I see it as, kind of, Australia gets these waves of interest. It was a big wave of interest for us when Courtney Barnett and Tame Impala broke out.

That’s how I felt. They broke out a few years ago, just as I was starting to become a musician, and people began to look into the scene that they are involved in around Perth and then Melbourne. I think it just takes a couple of people cracking through in America or Europe and then people wonder what else is going on down there. Suddenly Australia is cool again for ten minutes. I think that lasts for a while. I think all the artists that come out of Australia and New Zealand work really hard to get out. Once we are out we don’t stop, because it costs so much money to leave. You can’t just pop over to Europe and play a couple of shows, and then go “Yeah, I’ll go home now.” It’s like, I have paid a lot of money to get over here, I need to tour my butt off, work so hard to make this worth it. So I think that says a lot to artists down there as well.

D: If there were not factors like it being on the other side of the earth, and it costing such a whole amount of money to get here, does it feel unfair and like it’s been a neglected scene? For a long time it felt like there was INXS, Crowded House, AC/DC and Nick Cave to a degree… It feels like it was some white men and that was it, that was all that happened?

JJ: A lot of dudes, yeah, totally.

JJ: Absolutely, for sure, because it’s not all relying on my words, and what I am saying. A different way of expressing, I guess.

D: Do you feel there were people who were missed by circumstance?

JJ: Yeah, probably, and now that I see how hard it is it crack the international market, and how much work that has to be done, and how many people there need to be around you to get you out of Australia and get you on the road over here or the US, I am like – oh my gosh, I can’t believe anyone makes it out here. You think when you first go into the music industry, it just works where surely those who are talented get the attention they deserve.

Obviously that’s not true at all and a lot of it just comes down to circumstance, and if people are paying attention to Australia at that time, and if people want certain Australian artists to tour. It also feels like we don’t get many people to Australia. We don’t get many big acts touring there and it’s a neglected scene in that respect as well. I do feel very passionate about Australia and how many incredible artists I know back home and I am just rooting for everyone.

“As much as I love this life I am really looking forward to having a space of my own, and being able to have a record collection and to actually sit down and listen to records.”

D: I guess I have harboured romantic notions about it – like the cream rises to the top, or everyone has their moment, but in reality I guess it is pretty hard.

JJ: Yeah it really is hard. You have to have a lot of ducks in a row, and lot of people who are willing to work hard for no money for you, and there’s not a lot of people out there that are willing to do that. I am talented and people like what I do, but I am also incredibly lucky with the people I have around me who were willing to put a lot of

financial risk into letting me have a career, or giving me opportunities.

D: Yeah, that’s great. Keep rolling, keep playing as much as possible.

JJ: Yeah, I am working hard.

D: I am looking at your days and it’s a pretty formidable set of dates over in this part of the world. Obviously Glastonbury has the legacy, but is there anywhere you are particularly looking forward to seeing, or artists you are looking forward to playing alongside?

JJ: I am really looking forward to Newport Folk Festival in America, which seems to be a really communal festival, a real musicians’ festival. Sometimes these big festivals do not feel particularly good for musicians. That sounds bad, but what I mean is you are just shuffled in, put on a stage with ten minutes to sound check.

D: Besides being in London temporarily, you are currently a Barcelonan. How has that come about?

JJ: I just wanted to check it out, and I had moved over to Europe because I was playing all these festivals and whatnot and I thought Barcelona sounded pretty cool.

D: Damn right.

JJ: I learnt a bit of Spanish when I was 18 and I really felt bad about only knowing English. I really wanted to learn another language and I thought it would be a good time to move somewhere Spanish-speaking so I could refresh.

So yeah it’s been pretty amazing to go to the beach a lot, having a lot of miscommunications, but still trying.

D: It’s the greatest city on earth right?

JJ: Yeah, it’s beautiful and pretty amazing. Obviously I have been away a lot but we have had a few weeks there and done a lot of exploring.

D: It’s a fair old move from Australia. I am guessing you can’t bring a load of records with you, so how do you pick what you bring and how do you collect records over here?

JJ: Yeah, it’s tough because we also fly budget airlines, like Ryanair, so moving over here I was only allowed to take a guitar and hand luggage. So I have hardly anything on me as a person right now. So you probably see a lot of festival photos over the summer where I am wearing the exact same things (laughing), which is fine… People give me records and I am really like - I would love to have this but I can’t. If I get another bag I have to pay more for my luggage each time we fly, so I just have to refuse things at the moment. As much as I love this life I am really looking

forward to having a space of my own, and being able to have a record collection and to actually sit down and listen to records. That’s something to look forward to after this record cycle.

D: Do you have 12” friends that you are looking forward to seeing again?

JJ: Yeah, I have quite a few back at my Mum’s place, which is where I am storing all of my stuff. Sorry Mum! D: Good old Mums. What records in that collection might surprise people?

JJ: Umm, gosh, can’t think of any right now. What have I got? Well this might not surprise people but I bought a new Solange record last year, which happens to be one of my favourite records ever. I got to see her at Primavera Sound, which was amazing.

D: It’s amazing, isn’t it.

JJ: I’m a pretty new record person because it’s been hard because I haven’t really lived in the same place for a while, so it’s been hard for me to accumulate any kind of belongings in the last couple of years. I don’t actually have anywhere to play them.

with on my Dad’s side. Then my Mum introduced me to Doris Day, the Andrews Sisters, Aretha Franklin. So I have a real mix there.

D: That’s interesting vocally, because I feel there is a real timelessness about your vocal, it’s spooky in a way. You are a hard one to place.

JJ: I like that. I have always hoped that was how the music would come across. Not locked into a certain time period.

I think that came from doing a lot of vocal training as a kid, which I think took me out of how I naturally sound. So I think having the training in the end made it easier for me to fall into how my voice naturally sounds, and then work hard at making that sound as strong as it can be. When you first start singing you are definitely imitating everyone around you. I remember feeling jealous of girls who could sing in that sort of breathy British female style when I was in my early teens. Which I also wanted to sound like but I had this big, soprano voice. Now looking back I am glad I got the voice I have got.

D: What was your first record shopping experience?

JJ: It would have been my local CD shop and I would have bought a single CD and it would have been a song called Butterfly by Crazy Town.

“I ran into the CD shop in town and asked the guy to put this song on. I stood there in the CD shop listening to the lyrics and thinking oh my god, this is amazing.”

D: How about growing up. What were your key musical influences?

D: OK, right, I remember. “Come my lady, come come my lady”… That one?

JJ: My Dad was very into Billy Bragg and Bjork and the classic Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple. That is what I grew up

JJ: Yeah, I would have been about eleven, when singles were totally the thing. This was before my first album

purchase. Singles felt a little less like you were committing as much to the artist.

D: They don’t count as much, so what was the first album you put your name to?

JJ: The first album I cannot remember. I remember going to the CD shop with my Dad and he was like – you can have two records. So I have two. This was a time when I was confused about what I wanted to listen to, or what I liked. I knew I liked ‘All Star’ by Smash Mouth, so my first album was ‘Astro Lounge’

by Smash Mouth. But I knew if I wanted to be cool I had to The Vines.

I think the Heavenly label did ‘Highly Evolved’ over here. So I bought those two. An interesting mix of full-on top 40 chart music and rock music. Wasn’t really sure I liked either of them. I knew I should like The Vines and I liked dancing to Smash Mouth – it was a confusing time.

D: I love seeing the process of musically what connects with young people, what makes somebody have an experience.

JJ: For me, and I think a lot of people around me, age 12 was a really interesting time, because you are just coming into high school in Australia.

D: Yeah, same here.

JJ: You are at this interesting point where you are still listening to your parents’ records, but you are starting to listen to pop music on the radio. You might also have this cool neighbour who listens to Radiohead or something, so you are this completely confused mix of listening to Doris Day along with Radiohead and also listening to Christina Aguilera or something. And you are all – I don’t get it, I don’t know what I like, I don’t know what I should like.

You like things but end up thinking – maybe I should not like this because it’s not cool. It’s an interesting time.

D: Nobody tells us the rules man – (laughing) we all need the rules…

JJ: (laughing) I love getting over that feeling of feeling like I have to like something, which is definitely how I felt as a teenager.

D: I think it’s really important to, for whatever reason you pick something, is just to pick it.

JJ: Yeah.

D: Record shops - which one do you have your strongest emotional attachment to?

JJ: I would say my local CD shop.

I am sure they sold vinyl, but it wasn’t really a format that I was in to. It was Springwood CD shop.

Nothing exotic. I used to go there and ask them to put songs on, if I wasn’t allowed to buy them, or could not afford them. This was before YouTube or anywhere where you could look them up yourself. I have some great memories of going into that shop and asking the very grumpy owner to put this music on, and he would always do it and I would never buy them. It was an interesting time too. Just the thrill of going in there, asking him to play stuff and me standing there listening and saying something like “Cool, so that’s what that sounds like.” I remember being 13 and falling in love with this boy who told me that a song by this band called Thirsty Merc and the song was ‘Someday Someday’ - “This song reminds me of you”. So I ran into the CD shop in town and asked the guy to put this song on. I stood there in the CD shop listening to the lyrics and thinking oh my god, this is amazing.

D: Julia, of all the stories we have heard from people about record shops and their connections to them, I think yours might be the best we have ever had. I love that you made the guy stand there and get all “emosh’ with you about something somebody had said.

JJ: (laughing) Oh it was so funny.

I was standing at the counter and this guy was going “Oh God”, and I am there clutching my chest as a 13-yearold - god, this is love.

D: I think 13-year-old Julia Jacklin might be my hero, I am not sure.

JJ: And then of course it closed down.

D: Oh damn, I was really hoping I could look them up. That’s what happens, right. Us record shops for the best part are fleeting in nature.

We change lives and then we go.

What, for you, makes a record shop feel special?

JJ: I personally like record shops where there’s a bit of space to get in your own little zone and look through records, without feeling like anyone is watching me do it. I like ones with little nooks and crannies or even get down on the ground to flick through crates underneath. Having space and having places were you can listen.

Obviously that’s important for me, because I don’t get to listen to them that often because I am away so much.

So when you have really nice spaces to listen to, on tour that’s really the best thing in the world.

D: Time out. Record shops being a sanctuary.

JJ: Exactly. Which is what I am constantly looking for on the road.