HELIGOLAND:

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

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.