MARTY WILLSON-PIPER

[ Interview with Marty Wilson Piper by Diego Centurión. Photographs: Olivia Willson-Piper. ]

MARTY WILLSON-PIPER : BUY A DECENT STEREO SYSTEM

His scrolls mention The Church, All About Eve, Noctorum, his solo career, and his website https://martywillson-piper.com/ where he performs a Pharaonic music research assignment at https://www.indeepmusicarchive.net/ We haven't talked to Marty for a long time and we know that his project with Niko Röhlcke, MOAT, has a new album, “Poison Stream” released on February 12 by Schoolkids Records. We take advantage of this new release to catch up with an artist that we will hardly find without a new project in his mind.

Hi Marty! Thank you for agreeing to conduct this interview. Before starting I want to thank Olivia for the information received and for agreeing to also manage this contact. To begin with, I cannot stop asking about this virus that has changed the planet in 2020 and still continues to fight us. How has the Covid affected your life?

It kept Olivia and me in one place for 9 months which is unusual and disconcerting. But it did allow us to work in the studio with my Noctorum project collaborator Dare Mason and finish different projects that came to us through my Songwriting and Guitar Guidance venture.

You are a person who is always traveling the world. Where are you currently living?

I’ve recently moved to Portugal with my wife Olivia and we live in Porto.

Give us an introduction about Moat for those readers who are not familiar with the project. Tell us, how was this project born together with Niko Röhlcke back in 2012? And tell us if there was a specific musical direction at the beginning of Moat.

MOAT was a project that was imagined by a mutual friend of Niko and mine. Sigge Krantz is a producer/ engineer, live engineer and bassist. He got the idea in his head that Niko and I would work well together, he was right. Niko comes from a band called Weeping Willows who are very successful in Sweden but he is a multi-instrumentalist and also works on a lot of soundtracks but he doesn’t sing or write words. There wasn’t really a direction, it was just get in a room and see what happens, although we did immediately start writing strange pieces of music. Most of the songs were based on Niko’s soundtrack moods, with us working on the music together where we needed to expand the idea, some we wrote together and two of them came mainly from me with Niko adding his flavour.

In 2013 they released their selftitled first album. Tell us what do you remember from that

recording?

It was recorded in the Swedish countryside and we had quite a few pieces by the time we were ready to record. We recorded some with drums, some with acoustics and some with keys to get the basic shape to tape and then filled in the gaps until they sounded right, I guess that’s a pretty normal way of doing things. But we had guitar overdubs, brass and string overdubs to add later on, then vocals. I remember we did the vocals quite fast.

This 2020 was a year with little activity in terms of shows in places with people, but it was very conducive to remote recordings. Is "Poison Stream" an album made during the pandemic?

No, it was pre-pandemic.

What differences and similarities do you find between "Moat" and "Poison Stream"?

Well, Niko and I are the same but with some different collaborators, and after you’ve done one album you get a better idea of your second album’s heartbeat and I think we paid a little more attention to detail and got the best out of the songs, a little more thought went into it.

Now I am going to appeal to your gaze as a musician with several decades of experience and, taking advantage of your critical gaze as a musical connoisseur, how do you see music today in this new millennium? What do you find good and bad about the way music is distributed today?

Distributed or made? If you mean streaming? Well, the album is called Poison Stream! That says something in itself, streaming is a double-edged sword. For me, as a record collector, I love the possibility to hear so much music online and the fact that small labels release small runs of hard to find records on vinyl is wonderful. The fact that I can listen to so many genres is wonderful. The problem is that streaming has made selling physical records much harder, only the hardcore fans buy them and if you are in a small or medium-sized band your sales are very small. But then in the past, a record deal with a corporation didn’t see you have a big cut of a record anyway as they would pay all the costs to make it and there used to be this thing called a budget - a major label budget. Nowadays you gotta be big already to get a big budget or fabulously young with hits in your and the record company’s eyes. Nowadays most musicians are a cottage industry trying to make back their costs with a core following on a small planet, mega-successful musicians are from Mars or is it the other way ‘round?

Thinking in these days when everything is lived at high speed and, although I will ask you about this in another question, they have released an album with 10 songs, have there been any songs left out of “Poison Stream”?

Actually two songs on this album Judgement Day and Helpless You were recorded for the first album but we didn’t realise them and we already had 10 songs anyway. They were too good to leave off the second record. Of course, some songs were written that didn’t make it for various reasons, some didn’t work, some didn’t fit, some didn’t get finished.

In the introduction I mentioned that you are a musician who always has a new project brewing within your mind. Are you already thinking about the next step you will take?

I have lots of projects all the time, collaborations through my Songwriting & Guitar Guidance sessions (www. songwritingandguitarguidance. com), as well as projects with betterknown artists which you’ll become aware of as they come out later this year and next year.

To finish and thanking you for the possibility of this interview.

Close the interview with what you want to say to our readers.

Buy a decent stereo system.

Thank You Marty and Olivia! Thank you, Diego

MARTY WILLSON-PIPER www.martywillson-piper.com www.noctorum.band www.indeepmusicarchive.net

[ Interview with Karen Vogt and Steve Wheeler from Heligoland by Diego Centurión. ]

HELIGOLAND:

IT FEELS LIKE PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT RECORD THE BAND HAS EVER MADE.

After four years of silence, Heligoland have returned with a new album entitled “This Quiet Fire,” once again featuring dream pop guitar guru Robin Guthrie. It is an album that shakes off the dust from those years of silence and uses those specks to infuse delightful misty spaces with autumn hues. “This Quiet Fire” is a beautiful record and we asked Karen and Steve to tell us more about it. In March 2018, we conducted an interview with the band about their previous EP “Coriallo”; you can read it at the following link: https://issuu.com/revistathe13th/docs/the13th_n_44/30

First, I want to thank you for the possibility of conducting this interview. We have had Karen as a soloist at our NMER Festival, for which I am still grateful. Second, I want to thank you for this new record, which I do not stop listening to daily. We talked about “Coriallo” in 2018. What has happened in Heligoland since that time and this 2021?

Karen: Thank you for the kind words. We’re happy to chat to you again and thrilled to hear that you are enjoying “This Quiet Fire”! Since we were last in touch, finishing this new album has been our main focus. After we released “Coriallo,” the third in a series of EPs, we felt ready to make another album. Making those EPs was a wonderful experience and I’m happy that we went on that journey, but it was great to get back to writing a bunch of songs for an album. It took quite some time for us to finish the new record, but we are really happy with the result. While we were working on “This Quiet Fire” I was also making a lot of other music: collaborations, guest vocal appearances, production work, and various solo projects. But Heligoland always is my priority.

When did you decide to start writing this new album and what was the process like?

Karen: The initial writing process was not dissimilar to the way of working we fell into when we made those three EPs. The most important thing was to get out of Paris into the countryside and find a place where we could spend time exploring new ideas and writing songs. We did a series of writing sessions like this, gradually building up a collection of song ideas. What was different this time around was that I had my own recording setup, so I could work on the rough vocal ideas from the writing sessions and refine everything in my own time. The other difference with the previous album and EPs was that Robin was more involved in the initial stages of “This Quiet Fire,” offering feedback and suggestions on the songs as they developed. Because I had the time and equipment to work on the vocals separately I was able to get a lot done quite early in the process. As a result, I was sometimes a couple of steps ahead of everyone else, which gave me a different angle on the material and I could start to see some patterns forming between the songs. This proved really helpful when it came

to writing the lyrics. Of all the records we’ve made so far, this is the one I’ve spent the most time working on the vocals and lyrics. Steve: One thing I would add to Karen’s description is that not all the material was finished prior to the recording process. She wrote three of the songs on “This Quiet Fire” midway through the process when it became clear we needed a few more tracks for the album. “Palomino,” the first song we released from the album, was one of them. Recording the bass parts for the album was a lot of fun. I spent quite a bit of time going back and forth with Robin on all the parts, bouncing ideas around and discussing how everything should fit together. I came up with the bass for a couple of the songs in the studio, which led to some quite different results to what I tend to write when I’m working at home.

The disc contains a tear wrapped in silk, that is, a difficult year 2020 and a brilliant result. I feel like they have achieved a fantastic fusion between dream pop and strange times for humanity, with introspective songs and hopeful sweetness. What have you wanted to convey with these songs?

Karen: It makes me really happy to hear that people have found the album to be comforting or reassuring in some way. When a song, or any other type of art, resonates with you on a personal level it’s a beautiful feeling. I hope that listeners can find some sense of connection or acceptance among these songs. It’s never easy to describe your own music, but we have always felt like we’re somewhere on the fringes of dreampop. It’s not really an easy genre to define and I’m not sure we have all that much in common musically with some of the other artists people often mention. My main focus when writing songs is to use that three or four minutes to express a mood and find some way to connect with the listener, even if it’s just a single line, or a few words that go to the heart of things. I try to come up with words and melodies that leave space for the listener to associate them with their own feelings and meanings. All these songs were written prior to the pandemic so perhaps there is some strange sense of timing at work here. We’ve always tried to make the kind of music that takes the listener someplace else for a little while. Any sense of escapism or transcendence, however brief, has probably never been more important for many people that it has been during the last year or so. If we’ve been able to bring any of our listeners some small degree of comfort, or even just a short respite from everything else that’s been going on the world, that would be wonderful.

“A tiny café in one of the cavernous terminals at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris was the somewhat unlikely location for the band's first meeting with producer Robin Guthrie.” This phrase appeared in the press release for the band’s 2010 album, “All Your Ships Are White.” What do you remember of that first meeting and how has this collaboration grown since then? Karen: The thing that I remember most about that first meeting was just how warm and genuine Robin was. We also had the connection

of being from somewhere else and having moved to France. There was immediately lots to talk about. It was an exciting meeting, but, at the same time, I also felt quite relaxed. It wasn’t at all intimidating, or anything like that. In hindsight, this was a good indication of how we would work together. It’s really important to have the right sort of energy between everyone involved, so we all feel comfortable discussing the songs and Robin can also be honest with his own impressions and ideas. When I look back on that first

meeting it’s a nice feeling because it was the start of something really wonderful.

Steve: I remember being extremely paranoid about arriving on time for that meeting! If I recall correctly, we’d spoken on the phone maybe once or twice about him producing an album for us, but nothing had been agreed and we hadn’t had a chance to meet up in person and discuss the project in detail. Robin had a few hours to spare at Charles de Gaulle airport before catching a flight to South America for some concerts, so we arranged to meet him there. Initially, it felt like a bit of an odd place to be meeting to talk about making a record, but he very quickly set everyone ease and we had a great conversation. Since then we’ve made a number of records together and the process has been slightly different each time. When we made “All Your Ships Are White” we put together the basic tracks at a recording studio in Paris and then did the vocals and mixing with Robin at his studio. For the EPs that followed we recorded a lot of the different parts ourselves at the locations we wrote the songs and he then recorded the vocals and mixed the songs at his studio. “This Quiet Fire” was mostly recorded at home, including the vocals. We recorded parts for a few tracks with Robin, but the time in the studio was spent,

for the most part, assembling and mixing the songs.

For Karen’s song “We're Floating” the vocals were recorded by Robin. There is a different way of recording it, something that we hear on their album “I Just Want to Feel” and that is also heard a lot on the new Heligoland album. How much has this collaboration helped you unleash your vocal musicality?

Karen: Over the last few years I’ve gradually managed to get to the point where I feel confident recording my own vocals. It took me quite a while to figure out how to get a result I was happy with. Robin was really supportive throughout this process, helping me get started with a simple recording setup and showing me that I could learn to do this for myself. The vocals for “We’re Floating” were record a little earlier, at a time between the period when I recorded all my vocals with Robin in his studio and when I was up and running with my own setup. I’m still catching up with a lot of the material I’ve recorded in recent years. Once I figured out how to record my own vocals and the basics of mixing, my creativity went into overdrive and I recorded lots and lots of different material. There’s a number of projects I’m working on finishing up and releasing.

My first solo EP, “I Just Want to Feel,” is a bit of an outlier in this process because I didn’t sing on it. This was a conscious decision. For that release I wanted to focus all my attention on the writing, mixing, and production. I’ve also learned a lot from working Robin about these other aspects of the recording process. I now feel comfortable diving in, getting started, and even if I make some mistakes along the way, I learn from that too. Robin is not at all snobby or precious about gear or recording equipment, and is always more interested in getting the most out of whatever is at hand. I’ve tried to adopt that same approach and just focus on the tools I have available to me. Given how tentative I was about getting started recording myself, I was really proud that I was able to record all my own vocals for “This Quiet Fire.” Recording everything myself saved a lot of time in the studio and also meant that I could spend as much of my own time as I wanted exploring different ideas. It’s really important to have people in your life who encourage you to learn new things and believe in you.

As for the lyrics, tell us about the writing process. Do you have a working method or does it change according to each song and the feeling you want to convey in conjunction with the musicality?

Karen: When I start working on a new song, the vocal melodies always come first. The words are never the starting point. In those moments when I’m first listening to a song, I begin hearing vocal ideas. As the melodies settle in my mind, the words start coming to me. Sometimes the very first lyrics emerge fully-formed, at other times they’re just a sketch. In some cases, I might feel drawn to a particular word that just intuitively feels right for the song. That word might then lead me somewhere, or it might become a departure point to go down another path entirely. I try to trust my own intuition and be open to

different possibilities. In the past, I’ve often enjoyed sitting outside at a café with a pen and paper listening to a song on headphones and trying to figure out what the words need to be. I haven’t been able to do that during the pandemic, so I’ve tried to find other ways to create the right space where I can really dive into a song and try to understand what it’s saying to me.

Talking about the songs themselves is a very difficult task, albeit charming, but how would you summarize in a few words the first feelings when listening to what they had composed, the result, with the Robin mix?

Karen: Being in the room when Robin is working on a mix is always a really special experience because you hear the song coming to life and all the parts starting to shine and sparkle. When a new mix is finished, I often feel like I’m hearing the song as a whole for the first time, rather than a collection of separate parts. It’s a very different perspective. During the writing process, I am always totally focused on trying to get all the individual parts right and thinking through all the step-by-step choices involved in that process. When a song is being mixed, I feel like I can finally step back and take in the big picture.

Finally, thanking you for this space that you have given us. To our readers I recommend Heligoland and their new album “This Quiet Fire”, which will undoubtedly become one of my favorite dream pop albums of this 2021. I leave this space for you to say the last words to close this interview... Thanks Karen and Steve!

Karen: I’d just like to say thank you for inviting us to take part in this interview. We’re really happy to talk with you again and are grateful for your support over the years. I also want to thank all the people who have reached to us on Bandcamp and through social media about the new album. It’s always wonderful to hear from a listener that they were touched in some way by the music, felt some sort of connection with the record, or that a particular song resonated with them. These feel like really important connections to make. Please be sure to let artists know if you connect with their music, it’s always really lovely to receive messages like that. Steve: I’d like to thank everyone who has supported our music over the years and continues to support us with the release of this new album. “This Quiet Fire” is a really personal and meaningful record for both of us. In some ways, it feels like perhaps the most important record the band has ever made. We’ve been thrilled to hear from people that this record struck a chord with them too. Thank you.

[ Interview with Nick Hudson by Diego Centurión. ]

NICK HUDSON: THE HUMAN HEART IS DRAWN BY LOVE

We have the opportunity to ask Nick Hudson a few questions, who in addition to being the lead singer of the band The Academy Of Sun, is about to release a solo album called "Font Of Human Fractures"at the end of April. But first, since you will be performing at the NMER Festival, we have several questions to ask you at this time. To begin with, I would like to thank Shameless Promotion PR for this opportunity and thank you for your involvement. In 2020, we spoke to you Nick about your latest album by The Academy Of Sun. Readers can find it at : https://issuu.com/revistathe13th/docs/the13th_n_62/18

The first question has to do with these rare times that we are living in. How are you making it through this pandemic / lockdown?

At this point, in all honesty, it’s really starting to drag, for all of us I’m sure, so it’s really a dayto-day appreciation of present-tense joys that are keeping me going through each day. I’m grateful to have creative projects with which to keep me focused, and for friends, loved ones and my community of artist friends around the world. I have a magical entity dwelling with me at the moment which is definitely softening the exposed nerve-endings in a manner for which I’m exquisitely grateful.

That and drinking, cooking, and reading Herzog’s memoirs.

I have done some research on your solo career and it is so wide and dispersed between Bandcamp and Spotify that it is difficult to put together a chronological order, can you give us a brief review of your work and those that have meant the most to you?

My first solo album proper was TERRitORies of disSENT in 2009, which Julian Cope, in a profanely glowing review described as “highly fucking beautiful”. Then I issued four others in rapid succession - the best-executed of which I think is Letters To The Dead (2012) - verging on neo-classical - which was also a short feature film (and my only vinyl thus far until the imminent Font Of Human Fractures). In between the solo records I’ve also written and recorded hundreds of songs that remain either unreleased or scattered across a raft of “Basement Tape”-style digital releases.

I have been particularly fascinated with the 2020 album "Night Sweats And Fever Dreams" that you have made with Oli Spleen. Tell us what this album is about.

Ah, Oli is a dear friend. And he won’t mind my saying that twenty years ago he was very close to dying of AIDS. Fortunately for us all his diagnosis fell on the cusp of a turning point in terms of medication and thus he is still with us today. He asked me to compose and arrange and co-produce the music for Night Sweats And Fever Dreams and the writing partnership has become one of the most joyous, freeing creative collaborations of my life. Oli is a rare jewel. We aim to make more records together.

2020 was a Lockdown year. But you have taken the opportunity to release accumulated material from your archives. In the midst of all these releases, you also released an album as The Academy of Sun, which we have already talked about in another interview. Tell me how much saved material do you have that has not yet come to light?

Enough to fill three juggernauts, the pit of Sarlacc, the Mariana Trench (which incidentally would be my drag name), the Yamal sinkhole and The Sorbonne.

I keep finding truffles I forgot I’d foraged. For instance there are around six tracks we recorded for The Quiet Earth that have yet to see the world.

You have just released the single "Surkov's Dream", the first taster of your new album. Can you tell us about this song and the video?

I’d long fetishized the notion of pitch-shifting the most robust of instruments. A church organ is architecturally integrated, so to make malleable something so anchored in solidity held a compelling charm for me. We did it - by creating a MIDI instrument out of the organ bass pedals. I wrote, recorded and mixed it at home over a 24-hour sleepless period of intensive obsession. The lyrics are patchworked from accumulated poetic fragments that may not even have anything to do with Vladislav Surkov, in much the same way that he denied authorship of his own novel. The video was filmed in Bulgaria. I spent a month there writing my novel and took a transcendent road trip with friends across mountains and monuments. I’m definitely channeling Andrzej Żuławski here.

Your music is very eclectic and very exquisite. But you write so many different

songs for each of your projects. Do you think of songs specifically for each project?

Yeah, I write specifically for each project. Some songs are definitively for the band, some obviously solo, and some less-easily housed. And thank you.

How does it feel that you’re close to releasing your album? Has it been a challenge to get the word out about this new solo music (or your latest TAOS album for that matter?

I finished the record a year ago. Music moves so slowly. I’m excited to liberate it.

When you make art that cannot help for the insistence of its conviction but go against the grain and the zeitgeist it is always a challenge to have it connect with large groups of people. Instead, smaller communities are forged, and with a stronger and more meaningful resin. I couldn’t be more excited when I hear from people with whom the work deeply resonates. Like some samizdat, backroom faction of wonderful, strange people. I’d like to have a drink with each of them.

For our readers, perhaps also tell them why they should listen to "Font Of Human Fractures". Tell us what feelings does the new album "Font Of Human Fractures" generate in you?

Catherine of Siena once said “the human heart is drawn by love.” This of course lends itself to many readings.

As for what feelings the record generates in me - on an emotional level it embodies a cathartic and brutal self-scrutiny. On a musical level it’s one of the few of my records that I can actually bear to listen to for enjoyment. So that’s something.

To end this interview, we’d like to thank you for the time you have spent with us.

Thank you very much indeed!

http://madwaspradio.com/

[ Interview with Charlie Nieland by Diego Centurión. Photografs: Nancy Nieland and Jason Geering ]

CHARLIE NIELAND: "DIVISIONS" IT’S A DOCUMENT OF THIS WEIRD TIME.

I first encountered the music of Charlie Nieland with his Lusterlit project and now it is time for his solo stage, although I wasn’t aware that he had actually started in 2013 with the album “Under Dark”. His new album, “Divisions”, released on March 5 brings us a group of 13 songs where we can see the finest and most accomplished work of his entire career. Elegant pop and flawless production. Thanks to Shameless Promotion PR we have the opportunity to ask Charlie some questions and this is the result.

Hi Charlie, thank you for agreeing to answer these questions. To begin, I would like to know how this lockdown affected you by Covid?

As the first wave arrived here in New York City a year ago, I was sheltering safely with people I loved. But we were all caught up in the surreal horror of so much suffering. Then came the rising tide of Black Lives Matter protests marching across the Brooklyn Bridge every night. All against the backdrop of the previous president mounting an attack on democracy and callously botching the response to the pandemic. The helplessness fired my urge to record this album. It was the only way I could respond.

Your first solo album is “Under Dark” in 2013. Tell us how was that first album under your own name?

I was in a band called Her Vanished Grace with my ex-wife Nancy Nieland for a couple decades. We made 16 albums of post-punk and dream pop between 1991 and 2012. I didn’t realize it at the time, but by 2013 the band was over. As a replacement for some gigs we’d canceled, I did several solo sets of improvised music using loop pedals and an array of instruments, including guitar, guitar synth, lap steel, trumpet and transistor radio. I edited the rehearsals for these shows into a collection and called it Under Dark. All the pieces were spontaneous and have an unpredictably weird and cinematic feel. I would like to get into doing that again. It takes a lot of practice.

A lot has happened from that first album to your recent album “Divisions”. Tell us how you think your way of working and composing grew?

In 2013, I started to participate in a performance series here in Brooklyn called the Bushwick Book Club. Each month, a book is selected and a rotating group of artists write songs in response and present them all at a show. At that time, I was slowly working on an ethereal acoustic EP called Ice Age and was looking for another approach to writing. I became more involved, eventually producing an EP of songs for the BBC founder, Susan Hwang, and an album of my own songs about books called Hopeful Monsters. I found it liberating to allow styles of music to arise that suited the songs rather than concentrating on writing from a genre. Since 2016. I co-produce Bushwick Book Club with Susan and we also have a band called Lusterlit. We’ve done events from London to New Orleans to Los Angeles. So I write new songs every month and have learned to trust my process. Something real always comes through even if it sounds bad

at first. I’ve loosened my grip and I feel more creative.

We are in a time of uncertainty and I think the best way to cope is to move on as you have with your new job. Tell us, what was it like to record in such a strange situation?

I was able to try new things. One of the drummers on the album, Brian Geltner, recorded his tracks at home and sent me the files. It was unusual for me not to be in the room with whomever I’m working with, but we developed a nice method of him sharing early takes and me giving a few notes before he finished recording. I was able to record Billy Loose, the former drummer from Her Vanished Grace who played on the other half of the album, at my studio after things started to open a bit in September. We both get COVID tests right before and wore our masks. I prepared tracks for both of the drummers, first, at my apartment, with guitars, vocals and programmed drums. The vocals were not meant to be final takes, but I used them anyway because they had a nice energy that I knew I would struggle to recapture at the studio, even if I could use a better mic there. So I allowed the limitations of the strange situation to shape the recording process and I think that gave it a kind of urgency. It’s a document of this weird time.

How long did you work on “Divisions” beginning from the moment you conceived of this album?

Songs from the past two years make up the material that became Divisions. Some were written in 2018, but most of them were written in 2019 and 2020. While I write in response to books, the songs always stand on their own. I often let the books suggest a backdrop or an idea that correlates with what I’m thinking and feeling at the time. As my reaction to the dehumanization going on in the world grew, these songs began to appear as a cohesive group to me. The production process was an interesting challenge. I’d initially performed all of them in a stripped down setting for Bushwick Book Club, but as I began fleshing out the arrangements I had to discover what was the best way to extract the most feeling and color from each idea. For instance, the title track, inspired by The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, was composed with a lap steel guitar as accompaniment. It became obvious after I tracked it, that the dense sound of the steel guitar was too much for the whole song. “Twisting on the brink of what’s to happen.” That feeling of anticipation led me to drop the steel from the entire first half and build it up slowly with electric piano, quietly pulsing synths, atmospheric electric guitar and lots of space over Brian’s tribal drum beat. When all the feedback guitars and keyboards arrive by the end, it’s shattering. The way I rebuilt the song Divisions became a template for the method of producing the rest of the tracks.

Tell me if there is a concept behind “Divisions”?

While the songs come at it from different angles, I feel that this album is about exploring the duality of our nature even as we are actually just a wave of energy. As we dive so deep in our silos that we feel justified in demonizing anyone we think of as opposing us, we are still made of the same stuff. The dust from stars. From the first track’s seeds in Brooklyn concrete to the last track’s murder to the sounds of trumpets, we have to embrace it all even as we fight for humanity.

They often compare you vocally to Michael Stipe from REM. Do you like comparisons or do they bother you?

Oh, I find them wonderful. Everyone hears something different. I love to encourage that by refusing to stay within the guardrails of genre. I love finding new combinations of styles. I definitely wasn’t thinking of Michael Stipe when I sang Tightrope. I won’t even say who I thought I was channeling, but after reading that reaction, I can hear what they mean. It really travels somewhere else by the end of the song though.

I know you are very active with videos. Do you have any way to present the new album in mind?

We are still in this live show-free zone for at least a while longer. So I will be doing some livestreamed shows each week while experimenting with the presentation. Maybe mingling electronic and acoustic sounds, and messing with the visuals sometimes. I do plan to make a few more music videos as well. I can hopefully bring some attention to more of the songs that way.

What has it been like to promote this new album and the advance singles?

I’ve known Shauna McLarnon since we crossed paths promoting our bands ten years ago. She was always the best and has really honed her skills over the years as she formed Shameless Promotion PR. So it’s been a pleasure working with her on this. I would have just flung it over the wall and tried to somehow get people to listen. She helped me see that being patient and slowly revealing the material was going

to get a much better result. And the most gratifying thing is the wonderful connections I’m making along the way, getting to know so many amazing people who take the time to curate all these diverse and cohesive radio shows and music sites. Look – I get to talk to you today too Diego!

Thinking back to 2021, what do you have planned for your solo career or what will be your next step?

I’ll keep writing, playing and recording and find some new way to meet the moment.

Thank you for the time you have dedicated to answering these questions and to close this interview, please tell our readers why they should listen to your new album “Divisions”? and tell them where can they find your music?

I think these songs have a bit of the sound of the wheels turning. The sound of the earth and the sky. The sound of a story being told and broken down only to be told again with a new vocabulary. I was just the medium. Everyone can buy the album on Bandcamp or stream it at Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon or the many other places.

Thank you Charlie!!!

Thank you Diego!

The13th

UNA REVISTA IMAGINARIA