We took the opportunity to ask Landini a few questions about the record, so read on below for a more detailed exploration of radical, from the path to a new album that started in reluctance, to the influence of Kelly Hayes, Mariame Kaba and, yes, Herman Melville.

The title seems a pertinent place to start, especially in light of… *gestures at the state of the world*. radical, or, all the good revolutionaries are dead (cuz we killed them), to give the full title, feels like a real statement of intent? Did you have the title in mind while working on the songs? What were the origins of the record?

I cannot emphasize enough that I didn’t want to write a record last year, and didn’t set out with that intention. 2025 was always going to be a year of transition. I left New York City after fifteen years, moving with my wife and cat an hour and a half south to Philadelphia (she is Philadelphian and her family is all around here). It was my first relocation as an adult to a totally new city in the USA, and it happened without the excuse of work or school, so it’s been hard to feel like I’m not starting over as I get to know a new scene and community in my mid 30s.

But after a month in our new home we finally took our honeymoon in December 2024. We went to Chile, a journey to celebrate love which I found (maybe unsurprisingly) inspiring as a writer. I felt I was setting out on the next big chapter of my life and was immersed in the street art of the liberatory political tradition of Chile, an odd combination of forces maybe but ones that ignited my imagination. Sprinkle in the associated shame and reflection of being an American visiting the society and territory ravaged by Pinochet’s decades of atrocities, and you have a fertile ground for writing political songs, I’d say.

So yeah, I didn’t want to write and record and release an album, but I did, because I am a firm believer in working with inspiration when it arrives, even if other conditions are unideal. It’s a risk to let inspiration sit, especially when it feels as urgent as this one did; you never know when it’ll move on from you.

The title did come to me quite early on, in fact, I think I was doodling the full title around some early album artwork ideas in a notebook on the flight back home from Santiago. It certainly shaped and organized the songs and the aim of the release.

Songs like ‘firebrush’ draw on your own experiences pretty directly. Would you say this is your most personal record to date?

I think in some ways it is more personal than previous collections of songs in that the listener’s recognition of the personal side is more immediate, I’m sharing details of my biography and heart in ways that require less “spelling out,” so to speak. But I also think of “radical” as my most imaginative record, where forces of nature and world history clash and metaphors and characters interplay with great freedom. I’m not too big on formal overarching literary gestures but I like that the thematics of the songs do not feel confined to one song or one set of ideas, even, but move with freedom throughout the release. An embodiment of a borderless terrain, perhaps.

We’ve previously noted a “blend of earnest emotion and deprecating humour” running through your work, and I think the description still holds here, though more than ever it’s the former which wins out. Humour and wit are features for sure, but there’s no hiding behind irony. You say what you mean pretty clearly. Was there a conscious decision to embrace sincerity in this way? I mean, could a good revolutionary be anything else?

Irony will always be a part of my songwriting, or at least an element of playfulness that invites the listener in, that tells them they are allowed to mess around and try stuff within the space of interpreting this music. But yes, I think that the subject matter demands a clarity and truth telling that isn’t funny or clever or holding a shield. That’s what humor can be, right, honesty with some armor to it, medicine with some sugar.

So yes, you are very much correct that it was a conscious decision to embrace sincerity so often here. With so much of the writing in this album inspired by mutual aid organizing around prison abolition and Palestinian liberty, well, it doesn’t allow for half measures against the people (us, all of us) complicit in perpetrating the great horrors of our age. If anything, I sometimes still chide myself for not being more direct, more explicit; on the other hand, I did want “radical” to feel like a work of artistry with political underpinnings rather than a work of straight agitprop (a medium which I have much admiration and think is also super useful).

On a related note, there’s long been a conversational tone to your work (parts of Wins Above Replacement felt like sitting in the bar watching the game with the central figure of the song), but parts of radical push this further than ever. The near-spoken word introduction of opening track, for example. Could you talk a little about this side of your vocal style, and how it fits into the (earnest?) thematic intentions of the album?

Thank you for asking about this, I do try to shift the listener into different relationships (spatial and otherwise) with the narrator and I’m glad this is coming across. ‘about the author’ is a funny example where the song is explicitly from my perspective, about me and my actual life and beliefs, but musically it functions as an introduction to the band and some of the sonic styles of the album. I was lucky that we were able to record much of the instrumentation for the record as a four-piece band about an hour north of Philadelphia. We were in a beautiful studio that was a converted stand-alone garage of a friend of a friend over a weekend last May, where the bay was converted into a rehearsal space that could record live drums. The band includes a couple really dear friends of mine who have been playing shows with me around the Mid-Atlantic region of the US for a couple years now.

I’ll speak a little more on collaboration below, but in the studio or in the rehearsal room I never give folks a ‘part’ to play, I’m not a ‘composer’ … I love getting talented folks I trust—as people AND artists—in a room with lyrics and some chord progressions and then ask them, over and over again, “what do you want to do with this?” I believe I rarely have the best idea in the room, and ‘about the author’ reflects this part of the process with the different voices (different me’s, in a way) chiming in to challenge or antagonize the main narrator. I find dialogue infinitely more satisfying and ultimately more productive than monologue and it also feels more true to our current pixelated existence. Capturing this multiplicity can involve a bit of push and pull, if not thematic conflict, and can be somewhat thorny, messy, non-linear, inefficient, non-hierarchical … but it’s, well, more free?

Likewise, we’ve written about the duality of hope and despair through the amazing Lorenzo Landini albums in the past, and the themes push this balance to the forefront of concerns here. The whole optimism vs. doomer argument is too often abstracted into theoretical ideas of identity, but I’m most interested how you position the dynamic as a source of potential action. As though total hopelessness might be its own form of motivation? “no one is coming to save us / oh boy do we know that,” you sing in ‘kindness’, which to me seems to capture the nub of the situation. The good revolutionaries are dead, there’s no help coming, therefore the onus is on us?

This is definitely part of what I am on about, yes! I think we can push the severity of the problem even further, especially in the art world, in that I am not really discussing the political outlook or the left’s chances of victory; it’s not an intellectual exercise anymore, where it might have been for the white-passing cis het educated folks like myself, who have benefited most of our lives from the spoils of empire. Rather, when we are rightly horrified by our history of complicity—i.e. our willingness to let others suffer for our comfort, our desire to outsource justice to craven institutions, our tacit endorsement of for-profit pipelines of violence – when we look at all this and say “I can no longer morally excuse this in myself” … when we see the truth of these things, then we uncover in ourselves a responsibility and a love for what is being harmed that makes positive corrective action inevitable.

All honor to Renée Good and Alex Pretti, unjustly slain brave residents who refused to continue prioritizing their own safety while Black and brown neighbors suffered brutalization upon the altar of white supremacy and global empire. We can no longer say “this is not who we are” and draw increasingly intangible lines between ourselves and the bombs our taxes paid for. Put simply, it is our mess and we must at least attempt to clean it up, because that’s the right thing to do.

I suppose it all sounds a bit Catholic when I put it like that, doesn’t it?

Can we speak a little about influences? Who/what do you consider the major touchstones for the album? Be those musical or otherwise?

Ack this is almost too big a question as I am indebted to so many great artists and activists for radical! Trying to be concise here, believe it or not…

Sonically, I thought this was going to sound mainly like a quite spare punk rock album at first, but as an indie / alt band like Pavement or my favs The Weakerthans might record it. Songs like “complex” still retain some of that character. I thought that, within that general aesthetic, ‘signs from the static’ and ‘peace’ would then stick out as country and folk counterpoints, respectively.

Then I got in the studio and started playing with the band and I didn’t let myself be dogmatic about any of it. I’ll never be a puritan about style or sound or anything like that, and I relish the things that emerged. I was pleasantly surprised by the flashes of Interpol and Sylvan Esso scattered amongst the Bright Eyes and Neko Case.

Lyrically, when I began writing these songs I was reading Moby-Dick; or, The Whale for the first time, and I think that among other things Melville’s prose added a certain (forgive me) size to the scope of the language and the perspective, which I treasure. Also, after I had the title and solid sketches of 3-5 songs, an informal organizing book club I am part of began reading Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, two of my favorite liberatory writers, and no surprise I loved that work too. Many of the chapters articulated and dovetailed with ideas I was trying to capture in song and fiction, affirming what I was writing while still challenging me to do better, as a person and an artist

While writing the songs themselves I listened to Jose Larralde and South American New Wave, Patagonia is still quite obsessed with New Wave, which I didn’t realize before visiting, did you?

I also noted how you thanked a variety of friends and collaborators for bringing the record to life. What role did they play exactly? Is it important for a ‘solo’ artist to have this kind of support?

For me, that support is essential. It’s such a vulnerable, potentially foolish thing to earnestly make art that no one specifically asked or paid for, and I try to surround myself with collaborators that are friends first and colleagues second. I’m also not at all precious with my draft material, I’m constantly asking friends if they would read something, or listen to a phone demo, if they could then tell me what it made them feel, what they thought it was about. I hope it’s a loving lean on their expertise and critical eyes, one that invites them to ask the same of me. I love my friend’s artwork with all my spirit, experiencing it in whatever form it takes informs my knowledge of their interiority in a way that is so rich and wonderful that it almost doesn’t matter what the ‘product’ becomes.

This record in particular I sent many of these song drafts to folks whose character and politics I admire, and I am so grateful to their insight and encouragement. Then for the final recorded version of ‘peace’ I asked many of these same folks and other varied friends and comrades to record themselves singing the group vocals remotely and send them to (my producer) Vadim and I to mix, I am so pleased with how it came out, Vadim had all his little cousins sing it as well. And when I asked for the group vocals I also invited anyone who wanted to share a story about organizing to include it, and that’s how my friend’s narration that ends with “it’s possible to build the world that we deserve” came to exist. No coaching or direction there on my part, seriously! When I heard it I thought it was just so perfect that I wanted to end the record with it.

To conclude, I won’t be as ham-fisted as to ask whether or not you are hopeful re: the current political climate of the US and wider world, but I am interested in your own personal experience of the present. How does it feel to live in America today? To release an album into such a world?

As I write to you I am in daily contact with a handful of friends in Minneapolis, the area which could be described as our current front against the traditions of white supremacy and fascism that have always infested the political concept of the United States of America. I do not know if I am hopeful, but thanks to the aforementioned Kaba, I know hope is a discipline to be practiced for it to exist at all. And I am always inspired by communities coming together, as they are, to an unprecedented degree in the Twin Cities, which already had its share of activation after the murder of George Floyd, only for the locals to now be occupied by a paramilitary force with goals entirely contrary to the vast majority of the residents.

I don’t really think art is ‘enough’ in any moment, let alone one like this, or that any one piece can ‘change the world’, and the culmination of this line of thinking is, unfortunately, where I am now as I write to you Jon: a place where it is hard to want to make things at all, especially joyful, fulfilling things. I want to think of myself as someone who understands when it is time to be on stage, and when it is time to be on the street. But, as one of my literary heroes Tony Kushner writes, despite the ‘fraudulence’ of attempting to be an explicitly political artist, “those who are involved in the struggle to change the world need art that assists in examining the issues at hand,” and I think that includes all of us, not least of all myself. Writing the record itself was a process of becoming, of examining my values and my actions and actually actively transforming.

So right now yes, it feels bad to be an American, a people who “suffer from collective amnesia” (more Kushner) … To borrow clumsily from an Italian countryman now, while the new world struggles to be born, the monsters are very much here. And I want us to survive.

radical, or, all the good revolutionaries are dead (cuz we killed them) is out now and available from the amazing Lorenzo Landini Bandcamp page.

The post the amazing Lorenzo Landini – radical appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Though Natural Science is ostensibly a solo record, Lindsay Reamer enlisted an array of talents musicians to not only perform the songs but actively shape them. “A variety of collaborators bring Lindsay Reamer’s sound to life,” as we continued in the preview, “with Tyler Bussey (guitars, banjo), Artie Sadtler (bass), Lucas Knapp (synthesizers, percussion), Juliette Rando (drums), Will Henriksen (fiddle) and Eliza Niemi (cello) all lending their talents, and appearances from Victoria Rose (vocals), Michael Cormier-O’Leary (drums), Peter Gill (guitar), Frank Meadows (bass) and Jon Samuels (vocals) on specific tracks too.” The collective allows for a sound plastic enough to encompass the album’s range of moods and backdrops, be it evocations of the (not so) natural world on tracks like ‘Figs and Peaches’ to more urban snapshots such as that of ‘Red Flowers’.

We took the opportunity to chat with Lindsay to push a little deeper into the ideas behind the record and the process which brought it to life, so read on below to find out more.

Hi Lindsay, thanks for speaking to us! How does it feel to have your debut album out in the world?

It feels wonderful. Some of these songs were among the first I had ever written, so I feel really lucky to get to share them this way. I love hearing about how people interpret and receive the songs and that only comes from releasing them.

Let’s start with the title—Natural Science. Presumably this is at least in part a reference to your time as a field researcher? What exactly does the title mean to you and what significance does it hold for this collection of songs?

The title came about while I was thinking about the way I put together song ideas. It feels like my process is very much to observe, question, collect, and then come to some conclusion. I’m sure this isn’t unique to me, but it feels like a scientific approach. I love that “Natural Science” is a bit of an oxymoronic phrase as well. I’m interested in what comes to light when humans try to make sense of natural phenomena, sometimes it reveals more about us than the thing we are attempting to understand.

There’s so much detail packed into your lyrics, be that differing shades of emotion or the small observations accumulated day to day. I’m thinking of the John Bon Jovi hologram and smell of rotisserie chicken in Tupperware on ‘Necessary’, or ‘Red Flowers’ with its heat and sex shop and virtual farm simulator. How do you go about recording and remembering these details? Do you have a trusted method of preserving the details before they are written into the songs themselves?

I think this is super common amongst songwriters, but my iPhone notes app is my biggest tool for this! It works so well not only because we always have our phones in our pockets, but it’s also less serious than writing in a journal. I love the physical act of doing that, but it also feels too much like — I Am Writing— than I’d prefer. The iPhone notes are quick and not so attached to an outcome. I’ve also experimented with a long running Google doc that I always kinda have open. I drop images or phrases in there when they come to me.

On a related note, I’m struck by the balance between sincerity and playfulness in your work. The examples I listed above show your willingness to engage with the absurd side contemporary living, and it is so impressive how you pack the songs with these strange little images and wry humour without ever undermining their emotional resonance. Is this something you are conscious of when writing? I mean, does it take work to ensure the Bon Jovi hologram doesn’t take over?

Thank you so much. I don’t think I’m conscious of it really or trying to do anything, there are just certain images and feelings that I’m drawn to. I try to honor my natural impulses instead of discarding things because they don’t fit in “sad song” or “funny song” boxes. I love laughing and I find being alive really funny most of the time, so that sort of stuff tends to come through. I think someone like John Prine is a master of this in a way I could only dream to do. He’s painting with all the colors at once and he’s found the perfect spot for them in the picture. That’s why the songs feel so complete and timeless. The humor and sadness and everything else can stand together because that’s how life really is.

The ex-zoology research student in me has to ask about ‘Figs and Peaches’. So many representations of our relationship with/effect on the natural environment are presented in (justifiably) stark terms, where nature is presented as some static thing humanity changes almost inadvertently and to its detriment. But while the overall picture of the environment on ‘Figs and Peaches’ is concerning, the tone is a little more nuanced. There’s the suggestion of agency somewhere, the idea we can enact change in more than one direction. Like, not every human action needs to end up like the cane toad, you know? Could you expand a little on the background of the track and the ideas it orbits?

I think you hit the nail on the head! And I love the way you put that—‘the ideas it orbits’. The song came about while I was working along the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi. That’s a fascinating area because it’s a travel route that has been in use for 10,000 years. People travelled down the Mississippi river and walked back 400 miles north on the trail. There are a lot of tales and stories surrounding it.

In general, being around such a massive river will have you thinking about big things. While I was there, I was reading about invasive plants and the American Chestnut tree extinction, which was caused by a non-native fungus. American Chestnut trees were everywhere and then within 50 years the population was close to extinct. This is to say that things change quickly and things change over geologic epochs—but it’s always changing. In the mess of all of this, I’m always inserting myself and asking “where do I fit in?” It’s easy to think that nothing you do really matters…but I rather think that it does! And we know this because we can see the way that our actions have impacted things in a big way over time. I think the song is about remembering individual agency?

Despite recording under your own name, you have enlisted a pretty stellar cast of Philadelphia musicians to create a full band. Why did you decide to move beyond your roots as a solo acoustic musician and form a band? And what do these collaborators bring to the album?

I only started making music around late 2019 and then by the time I could think about collaborating with anyone COVID happened. So, I went on solo throughout quarantine and recorded my first EP alone in my room like everyone else. When I started going to shows again and seeing how fun having a band was, I slowly started adding folks in. So that’s what they bring— fun and camaraderie and more musical ideas than I could ever come up with on my own. It started small—just me and Lucas Knapp and we did some of our first shows that way as a duo. It’s my impulse to just let the band do whatever feels right on the songs, because that’s what I do. I feel confident that the songs stand as strong foundations to be added upon.

When I play the songs solo now, I play them like we do on the record, informed by all the choices we made along the way. I think that goes to show the impact my collaborators have had on the songs even though they began as solo ideas.

You grew up in what sounds like a very musical family. Does this have a lasting influence on your music now? (And what did it take to have the confidence to step out and make something of your own?)

I think it must have a lasting influence. The biggest way I can think of is from the voice lessons given to me by my grandmother. The time we spent at the piano in her basement was so special. It shaped my voice and the way I sing.

Nobody in my family is a songwriter, so that feels unique to me. My dad plays guitar and my mom sings… so I’m kinda a mashup of the two of them, naturally. It did take a lot of confidence to make something of my own, though. Playing my songs for people made me shake so much that I couldn’t really breathe properly. Luckily this has improved over time!

To follow that thread further, there’s recurring theme of self-acceptance running through the record. “I’m trying and I am sure / Despite what I like to tell myself / Today I’m better than before,” as you sing on ‘Spring Song’. Is it fair to say this is at least in part a record about overcoming doubt?

I think that is fair to say. I used to feel a lot less sure of myself than I do now, and making music has been a huge part of that change. Songwriting felt like something that wasn’t for me for a while, but I can trace back my interest in it to a very early age. A lot of the songs are about this path to greater self acceptance. Being able to do something that once made you afraid is one of the best feelings.

I don’t know if this makes sense… but now that I’ve jumped over this hurdle I’m looking forward to writing songs that don’t feel like they are about wanting to write songs haha!

Natural Science is out now via Dear Life Records and available from the Lindsay Reamer Bandcamp page.

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but Young Jesus offer a model of coping, a way to remain hopeful and human within their jaws. Both the lyrics and instrumentation preach a kind of relinquishment, a cessation of over-analysis and self-reflexive thinking in favour of something more natural, even if the space feels empty or alien. Push forward instinctively, they seem to be saying. Push forward with doubt.

Writing about follow-up The Whole Thing Is Just There, we described how such a project might be never-ending. “Young Jesus have put their hope in a spontaneous, endlessly recursive form of questioning,” we wrote, “where every hard fought answer only exists to be questioned further. The endeavour might well take a life time.” Only after 2020’s “mathy, jazzy epic Welcome to Conceptual Beach” and the pared back quasi-solo pop album Shepherd Head which followed two years later, this lifelong quest began to wobble. Or rather, it took a path away from music. The pressures of touring had seen the original Young Jesus band slowly disintegrate, and the mosaic pop of Shepherd Head demanded hours spent alone in front of a computer. Exhausted and disillusioned by the process, Rossiter pined for something less abstract. A way to express his creativity rooted in the real world. So he turned to gardening, studying permaculture and the slow process of nurturing it demands.

Only then came a chance encounter with Shahzad Ismaily, originating in a shared interest in the work of Milford Graves, and a slow process of coaxing. Rossiter would work on music then tend Ismaily’s New York garden between sessions. At home in LA, he did the reverse, planting trees and laying paths with Alex Babbitt and Alex Lappin before gathering around the piano to play and sing. Slowly the compulsion to make music returned, though now informed by the lessons learnt whilst working on the natural world. The resulting album The Fool feels like another milestone for Young Jesus. A continuation of the searching style which has so long marked the project, but one armed with a new array of tools and techniques to perhaps arrive closer to a satisfying end.

We took the opportunity to ask Rossiter a few questions about the album, so read on below.

Thanks for speaking to us John! It’s great to see Young Jesus back, especially as we read you decided to step away from music for a period. How does it feel to be putting an album into the world again after all?

Hey y’all—great to chat again. Especially since VSF has been supporting this band since I wrote about David and Eloise many years ago.

I’m happy it’s out. This was a particularly heavy one to carry and I can feel, each day, a little bit of the weight lifting. Can feel it start to float away a little. Feels a little like I cleared some of the garbage away and music is flowing more naturally in my life. Fewer blocks, or I might be aware of them a bit more, watching out.

Reading about the album’s origins, there are two figures who feel important in its conception. Producer and collaborator Shahzad Ismaily, and drummer/artist/genius Milford Graves, a shared interest in whom brought you and Ismaily together. Could you speak a little about the influence of these two people on The Fool?

Well I wanted to meet Milford Graves from the moment I heard about him. I’ve never thought of music as a purely aesthetic or passive form of entertainment. Maybe because the first music I heard was in church. It’s always full of meaning to me. Full of energy. Full of potential. So I was searching for people who take its power seriously, not as a form of control, but as a way to heal and grow. So people like Milford Graves, Anthony Braxton, Sun Ra, Terry Riley. Milford used music as an avenue into healing and friendship and community.

Shahzad played with and was mentored by Milford. After Milford passed Shahzad emailed me to talk about Milford. We became fast friends. When we play we are instantly connected, improvising very emotional, very physical music. We were touching our hearts at the end of our first time playing together, playing a beat. This was all unintentional, we were just holding the beat with what we had—our bodies. And if you know Milford, he studied people’s heartbeats and their connection with rhythm. Magical moment and we’ve been friends ever since.

Ismaily is just one of a pretty large cast of friends and collaborators who feature on the record. What does this collaboration bring?

Shahzad is a fast worker and has a lot of ideas. He stirs shit up. For someone like me who can be very methodical and controlling, it was a good energy. There was great balance with me, Shahzad, Phil Weinrobe, Lag Babbitt, and Albon in the studio. Everyone is very intense! Not a “chill” zone, but a good zone. Deeply creative and challenging and open.

The press release describes the record as a collection of “songs about shame and grief, love and redemption,” and I also saw a social media post where you warn people that the lyrics might be upsetting. Yet there’s also a self-deprecating line running through the album, something present in the very title. Could you speak a little further on this struggle between unguarded emotion and self-awareness? Has the balance changed from previous Young Jesus albums?

Oof yeah that is a beautiful question. Finding the balance between unguarded emotion and self-awareness might sum up my life in music. I think music has tremendous potential to hold unguarded emotion but it also has within it the potential to be completely ego driven. What I mean is, you might want to let go but there’s always some fear, some vanity, some anxiety that can hold you back. For me, making great music comes from creating the conditions where you can be unguarded, wild, unprocessed. Like travelling into the underworld and bringing back some information to share with people. It is risky and it doesn’t often work, but I think it is possible and I work on it every day I play music. Letting go of vanity. Becoming a fool.

As a follow-on, the press release also mentions a joke/comment from someone asking if you have ever been to therapy. Do you ever feel a healing or therapeutic effect in writing and recording songs? Can we ask that much from art?

I sat down for about two weeks each day and wrote at the top of the blank page something I’m ashamed of. Then I wrote a song about that. That’s how the album started. It was freeing and scary and exciting. I think the process of making this album has opened up some space in me, allowed me to see music’s power a bit more clearly. Allowed me to see the ways in which I can live alongside it, rather than be destroyed by it every few years. In making such a “serious” and dark album, I think it’s allowed me to play much more with music now. I don’t think you can expect art to heal you, but you can be involved in an art-making process that will change you. The process will reveal things but I’m not sure if it makes life better or worse. Same with therapy. It’s just one way to live.

Long-time followers of the Young Jesus project will notice the return of some familiar faces. Characters who first cropped up in your work over a decade ago. Did you ever expect to return to the likes of David and Eloise? Have they continued on in your mind in the interim?

I definitely did not expect their return. In fact for awhile I was actively running away. But I’m glad they came back. They show up when I need some help. They help me investigate, let go a little, explore the depths, leave my Self.

Finally, when you’re not making music you are working on gardens, and I’m interested in what parallels you see between the two endeavours. Did anything you learnt when studying permaculture come to inform the way you think about your music?

So many. It can take a long while from designing a garden to installing the garden to seeing it grow. And if you want plants that are going to be really strong and last awhile, you wanna grow them from when they’re tiny or from seed even. But when you do that the garden is gonna look like shit for a little while. But eventually, you’ll have this beautiful, self- sustaining place because you’ve been patient. Of course, you need to maintain it, help everything stay balanced and not overtake one another, harvest what needs to be harvested, share the surplus, ask for help, help others. The same is true of ideas in songwriting.

We talk about natural succession in permaculture. How weeds pop up first, grow really fast and die really fast. Then bushes are in the middle, then trees grow very slowly and live a very long time (by our standards!). The same is true of people and of ideas. Some you get very excited about but they leave almost immediately, and some develop over a lifetime and sustain you. Some people will be super enthusiastic and helpful and then completely disappear. Some might not seem so helpful, they might even be quite stubborn and slow to change, but they’ll stick with you. identifying those aspects of yourself and of your collaborators is extremely helpful. Don’t take it personally, just tend to it as it happens and observe.

The Fool is out now via Saddle Creek and you can get it from the Young Jesus Bandcamp page.

Photos by Caitlin Dennis

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We took the opportunity to speak with Citron about the album, touching on the pros and cons of studio recording, the changing face of bedroom pop, the subtlety of the best political songs and the balance between escapism and engagement.

Hello thanks for speaking with us! Congratulations on the release of pack your bags the sun is growing. How does it feel to have a new record out in the world?

Now that we’re a little over a month out from the release, it feels pretty awesome. For the first time in a while, I don’t have anything musical lined up. No shows, recordings to mix. I have some songs I’ve been working on at a snail’s pace, but that’s my norm. I feel… lighter.

You previously described your last few releases (starting with if got smaller grew wings and flew away for good and ending with life like moving pictures) as a book, with common themes and direction. What differences does this new period of bedbug bring? How have you changed as a songwriter since then?

I think in a way, I always fall back on some of my old habits. Beyond that, before I even start writing a song, I think about where it will be in the context of a record. If I write a softer sounding guitar part, could it be attached to a louder guitar part I’ve already written in order to add some dynamism? Should it be standalone? It’s probably a silly way to write music, but I’ve always had a lot more fun putting those puzzle pieces together than writing a catchy single. So it’s a little inescapable. As for how that’s changed, I think it’s become more of a science. I’m more comfortable with the process, which has let me create songs that feel more complex. Pushing that even further is probably what I’m most excited about going forward.

When writing about your previous record, we talked about how even at its most personal, your music implicitly carries an empathy and political weight. As we put it: “It recognises that anything truly personal written in the age of late capitalism kinda has to be.” Do you set out with the intention of exploring these wider themes, or does it occur naturally within the process of writing more personally?

I think if anything I try to tone down how explicitly I explore political themes. Sometimes they just don’t fit the vision of the song. That’s not to say I avoid political themes, but I think there’s a level of artistry that is difficult to balance when incorporating politics into a song. Union songs have their place. Everyone knows modern trap/hip-hop is extremely political. But when I do it, it feels hamfisted. I think a lot about the Advance Base song ‘Trisha Please Come Home’ when I think about incorporating politics into songwriting. The overall song is about someone watching a friend who moves town without warning. In the song, the narrator hypothesizes the frustrations their friend was having that could’ve led to the move. They talk about friends making stupid jokes, the landlord raising the rent, and quitting her job because too many customers at the restaurant were hitting on her. These are political lyrics! But they’re also very human, they fit the genre and add to the songwriting rather than feeling like a jarring tangent. And sometimes a jarring tangent can be more powerful! It’s all about intent. When I write, I try to keep all of this in mind.

There’s an apocalyptic backdrop to the new record. The sense of some drastic thing unfolding just outside the frame of the songs which occasionally reveals itself as a striking image (there are tsunamis, tornados, roaming spirits, the world is ending in the opening track). But it’s not exactly a speculative concept album either, because often such phenomena feel secondary to the immediate emotional thread of the track. Could you talk a little about this side of the album?

I’m glad you picked up on that! There’s a few answers to this question. The first is that I really wanted to create self contained stories that felt fantastical. That type of escapism gave me more room to write different types of stories! The second is political. Our world is pretty unpredictable and chaotic. For many, like those in Palestine, there is never any security from that chaos. Or how the blockade in Cuba prevents many goods beyond the bare necessities from entering the country. Or at the schools I’ve worked at, how unstable and challenging life is for so many families. I think there’s a very human beauty that in such a chaotic world, things like heartbreak, sentimentality, hope and loneliness are not only universal, but often more powerful than whatever apocalyptic scenario is being thrown at us. So I tried to explore all of that, in a sense.

bedbug is a full-band project now, which is a pretty big change from your early days. What’s the biggest difference in working this way? Has this transformation from a solo project of synths, loop pedals etc to a bona fide indie rock band altered your songwriting process at all?

Honestly, not much has changed except I’ve given up some control over the individual puzzle pieces of songs. For example, it was really cool to see how songs like ‘leave your things…’ and ‘the great bonfire’ changed with the introduction of drums. “Leave your things…” in particular is a song that could’ve only been written for a full band. The biggest change is that when I write the foundation of a song (on guitar), I try to leave more space for drums or a second guitar. Not the most interesting answer, but it’s been true enough!

The new album is also your first recorded in a studio–how did you find this process and what difference did it make to the final result?

I feel two ways about it. First, it was incredible working with Nick Dussault at Big Nice in Rhode Island. A really incredible studio, comfortable and Nick is super talented. The recording days themselves went very smoothly. That being said, I’m not used to having that kind of timeline. When I record, I take probably a full dozen guitar and vocal takes on each song. After that, I start mixing, wait a few days to see how I feel about the track, and then re-record parts as needed. Then repeat for each song until I feel like they’re done. It’s a bit obsessive, and impossible to recreate in a studio because of basic time limitations. So I’m not sure about my plans for the next record (nor do I really have any finished songs yet) but I think a combination of home and studio recording might be best.

Finally (and kinda related to the previous couple of Qs), I have to ask about genre and the term “bedroom pop”. You were very much a pioneer of the genre and played a big part in its popularity. Do you feel you have left that tag behind? Or is what you’re doing now the next step in its evolution?

It’s hard to say. I do still love bedroom pop. But I think I mostly like music that feels authentic to me. When you listen to some of the early indie rock pioneers from the 90’s, they sound so lackadaisical and effortless, it lets the heart shine through. Bedroom pop was the same way! I think it’s a bit of a rebellious response to the clean, heavily processed production styles of music that sound expensive when they hit your eardrum. I think that bands who embrace their scrappiness have a longer shelf life. So in a sense, I’ll never leave that behind, since I have no intentions of changing my process and replacing little musical blemishes with perfection. On the other hand, after three albums of acoustic music recorded to cassette, I needed to let myself grow to keep things interesting for me. Realistically, my evolution will probably be to incorporate elements of bedroom pop as I introduce new elements as well. Or maybe I’ll just pick up a new hobby, like painting.

pack your bags the sun is growing is out now and available from the bedbug Bandcamp page.

Photos by Dustin J. Watson

The post When This World Ends I’ll Be In My Room: A Conversation With bedbug appeared first on Various Small Flames.

In this way, GABBY SWORD lives up to its title. A record to be wielded against previous iterations. To clear the ground for new growth. Smith’s work has always stood out in its honesty and vulnerability, but aided by collaborator and spouse Barrie Lindsay (AKA Barrie), the new material is more forthright in nature. More succinct in its path to the truth. Smith first took on the name Gabby’s World for 2018’s Beast on Beast, though if that album offered glimpses of the titular landscape, then GABBY SWORD is the first proper invitation to the listener to take a step inside.

I had the pleasure of asking Smith some questions about the record. Read on for a deep dive into its influences, imagery and accompanying visual art.

Thanks so much for speaking with us Gabby, and congratulations on the new record. You are no stranger to putting albums into the world, but is it fair to say the experience of releasing GABBY SWORD felt a little different?

Thanks so much for having me! Releasing this album definitely felt different in so many ways. First of all, I hadn’t released anything in quite a while. When my last album, Beast on Beast, came out in 2018, my life looked almost nothing like it does now. To name a few differences, I was living in Brooklyn, I had set personnel in my band, Gabby’s World was touring all the time, but also I was in undergrad full time. Now, I live in France half of the time and the other half wherever, I’m married, I’m out as queer, I don’t have a set band, and I haven’t toured Gabby’s World in a long time. It has felt really different to write and record under these new circumstances. 

Also, over the past five years the music industry has shifted so dramatically! Ways of promoting oneself and touring and releasing and making money… it all looks totally different and it changed so quickly. So in response to all of these things, I decided to do an experiment. Instead of releasing music the usual way (maybe two or three singles and a full album release date), I put out one song each month for all of 2023. By December 1, the whole album was out. 

I thought it would be a good idea to shake things up a bit and see if I could generate new interest in the project by making it feel like a subscription, but without the commitment or something. Fans could have something to look forward to every month and new listeners would have more opportunities to be exposed to the music.

There’s a tangible sense of rebirth across the record, something which feels as hard won as it is affirming. As though previous versions or imitations of yourself had to be vanquished in order for something more truthful to finally break through. In many ways this feels like the first literal dispatch from Gabby’s World?

TOTALLY! That’s such a good way of putting it. Even though this is the second album under the moniker, I feel it’s a lot more representative of my taste, sonic palette, and decision-making. 

Could we talk a little about the influence Barrie Lindsay had on this process and the record more generally? It’s interesting how something so inherently personal can owe so much to outside influence, and how different ways of seeing both music and the world can both break new ground and reveal older truths.

I think Barrie’s influence comes through in two major ways. The first is that she’s a profoundly good listener. This skill can manifest as an overall productive energy or as addressing something specific I’m trying to achieve. I can communicate a vibe or a really vague idea of what I’m going for and she’ll get it immediately, sending me off in the right direction. I can also have a really specific idea of what I want, like an exact drum sound or a particular synth sound, and she’s able to make it happen. She’s very skilled as a producer and musician and knows her way around her very organized library of sounds and plugins. It’s really cool and it makes exciting things happen in the studio. 

The second way that Barrie influenced the record is her unique way of encouraging me to keep chasing my vision. Anytime I get off-track, she’s right there to gently nudge me back toward the goal, whether it’s in writing, producing, or overall career woes. I guess that’s also part of being such a good listener, but she is so motivating and motivated and it makes her a great person to work with. 

She’s also an incredible visual artist. She took several of my press photos, co-directed and filmed some of the many music videos that accompanied this album, and produced even more videos and photo shoots throughout the album cycle. Barrie is amazing!

Has it been difficult, revealing a more intimate picture of yourself? Dropping a mask is often held as an empowering action, but of course there’s comfort in a certain level of concealment. There must be something daunting in songs like ‘Sank’ with its personal picture of grief, or the examination of identity on tracks like ‘Closing Door’?

My songwriting has always been pretty diaristic and felt revealing, but I think this album has a lot more straightforward language. Writing more directly was a challenge I set for myself, starting with when I wrote ‘Sank’. I tried to apply that ethos to all of the songs on the record as best I could. I think now I’m addicted to writing this way and would probably struggle to go back to my old, more cryptic ways!

I have to ask about the title. A sword is both an object of attack and self-defense, as well as something with ceremonial weight. Could you speak a little on what it represents for you?

To begin with, it’s really easy to misread Gabby’s World as Gabby Sword, especially when it’s mashed together in a hyperlink, like “gabbysworld.” Oliver Kalb pointed that out to me and it made me laugh. I’ve kept it in my back pocket as an album title for years, pretty much since the project adopted the moniker. 

Separately, my friend Luke Jenner once said that every artist is carrying around a metaphorical sword that they use to get ahead in their industry. He said that even if you think other musicians are your best friends, they’ve always got their sword ready on their person and are likely willing to use it against you if they have to. Even if they don’t mean you any harm, it’s just how one keeps their precarious position in the industry safe. 

I don’t like that I see the merit in such a cynical approach to interacting with one’s peers, but it’s especially applicable in such a precarious industry as the music world. I see it come out sometimes in others in professional social situations and, admittedly, sometimes in myself, despite my best efforts. I think about it a lot when I’m navigating professional events and try to remember to leave my sword at home, or if I forget, in the green room.

Lastly, an album is such a powerful vehicle through which to announce who you are and what you’re about. The title GABBY SWORD is like, here I am, here is my sword that I poured all of my recent energies into. I’m going to use it to show you what I’m all about. It’s tangible and it’s the beginning of its legacy. If I ever had to own a sword, that would be its name. 

Can we turn to the artwork a moment? It sometimes feels album art is neglected these days, often relegated to a thumbnail on a screen, so it’s always a pleasure to come across a record where the art feels such an intrinsic part of the release. I’d love to hear more about that side of things.

Part of the joy of releasing a song every month was that each one had to be accompanied by artwork. I had a blast figuring out the visual vibe of each song. I often felt so inspired that it led to several music videos to accompany the songs, way more than I expected to or than I’ve had on any previous albums.

I also had the pleasure of working and collaborating with so many visual artists whom I’ve come to admire over the past several years. I was just waiting to have a reason to reach out to them. One of those people was Allie Oldfield, who I’d been following on Instagram for a while, and who made a beautiful landscape illustration for “Powerful.” I ran into Zoë Greenway at SXSW last year who ended up making two of my favorite videos, for “33” and “Theme from Gabby’s World.” I’d always wanted an excuse to work with Sang Patten, Ginger Leigh Ryan, and Mae Stark, who photographed, made up, and styled me, respectively, for the photo shoot that I’ve used for a lot of the artwork and press. And, of course, it was such a treat to collaborate with Grace Weir, a true human multitool, who schemed with me on four music videos and the graphic design for most of the single art. 

And lastly but most importantly, is Kirini O.K., my childhood best friend, who painted the album cover. We reconnected in the past few years and I was absolutely floored by the work she was making. She makes these hyper-realistic, absolutely stunning oil paintings. We worked together on the concept for the album cover and I could not believe what she made. It was way beyond my expectations. She’s such a genius and I’m so lucky to have gotten to work with her. 

Do you know what the future looks like for Gabby’s World? Do you feel you have laid concrete foundations with this album, is change always going to be a part of the process? 

The beauty of Gabby’s World is it’s reflective of whatever I’m going through and whatever I’m into at the moment. I hope to continue to change and grow and have that reflected in my work. What’s immediately next is focusing on a live show for a while. I haven’t gotten to perform Gabby’s World in a while and I’m really looking forward to it. 

GABBY SWORD is out now via Carrot All Records and available from the Gabby’s World Bandcamp page.

Photos by Sang Moon, album artwork by Kirini O.K

The post As I Restore You Disappear: A Conversation with Gabby’s World appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Growing at the Edges, the new album from Jordan Lee’s Mutual Benefit, is concerned with such phenomena. The growth that occurs in the aftermath of disaster, where small shoots of life sprout from seeds long dormant after a patient wait for more favourable conditions. The thought is comforting in times like these. The antithesis of a prevailing system which only takes. Ours is a society built upon overextraction, a fact of contemporary living so ubiquitous as to be invisible. At least, that is, until a point of rupture occurs, be it the violent imagery of the animal pyres in 2001, the ever-worsening calamities related to the breakdown of our climate, or indeed the collapse of social systems such as healthcare and housing that is leaving increasingly large swathes of the richest populations on earth abandoned and destitute. In order to be productive, capitalism must destroy. With wealth, comes wastelands.

With Growing at the Edges, Mutual Benefit sets out into these perceived dead zones in search of the life which breaks through regardless. That which exists in spite of the hostile environment, or blossoms in something like opposition. “Past the path that was laid,” as the title track goes, “growing at the edges / peeking from a seed / Where there was a wasteland / something new.”  The metaphor extends right through to the music itself. To be an artist in a world which hardly values art is to exist within a wasteland. But as Jordan Lee shows, there will always be those saplings, waiting to spring forth.

The title seems like a fitting place to start. It reads as an encapsulation of the record’s themes, and the title track expands this into something of a mission statement. “Past the path that was laid / Growing at the edges / Peeking from a seed / Where there was a wasteland / Something new.” A process of reaching beyond the borders of what we know, daring to imagine other realities. How did these ideas first present themselves and come to inform the album?

When it comes time to start gathering ideas for a new record I become a voracious reader and let my curiosity guide me to the questions I want to explore through the music and lyrics.

The path to Growing at the Edges probably started with the book Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing which on the surface is about the enigmatic matsutake mushroom but keeps zooming out until it is about “cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.”

I became especially interested in her idea that our current version of capitalism is extractive to the point of constantly leaving behind spaces stripped of value which she calls wastelands. She argues that so much of the earth is a wasteland now that we must redefine our idea of value itself to live within these spaces. That idea and the accompanying imagery was so provocative that it gave me the foundation to build a musical world on top of.

Sticking with themes of growth, the record feels like a clear step forward from your previous releases, both in terms of your creative vision and sonic palette. A product, I understand, of trips far from home for residences, and the period stuck within your home during the height of the pandemic. Could you talk through how these very different experiences helped to reimagine the sound and style of your work?

I was very lucky to get two residency opportunities in between tours in 2019. One was a month in a defunct watchtower in rural Northern Ireland and the other was several weeks at Pulp Arts in Gainesville, Florida for writing and recording. In a way the experience of these trips and the months of lockdown in NYC were similar in that I was allowed time to unapologetically focus on my music which is a true gift.

But what I found is it was actually the lockdown that completely transformed my songwriting. In the months where my calendar was completely empty I could just sit at the piano with an open, childlike mind. In fact, I picked up some piano books and started teaching myself classical piano to break myself out of patterns and introduce the feeling of those unpredictable chord changes and shifts.

Each afternoon I would “visit” these half-written instrumental folk songs I had been writing and mess with their forms and their chords and start delicately drawing out the potential melodies and lyrical motifs. I did this for maybe five months and then spent a couple weeks at home making demos on guitar, piano, bass, and voice. I remember finishing the demos the day I got the vaccine which was such a cathartic feeling.

And collaboration with the likes of Gabriel Birnbaum and Concetta Abbate played a role in this too? 

Once the demos were completed I wanted to collaborate as much as possible since I had deeply missed the feeling of playing with other people. I knew Gabriel Birnbaum a bit from various collaborations and I always enjoyed seeing his band, Wilder Maker live. They are so tight and you can just feel how much they love music, it is infectious. So I got it in my head to ask Gabriel if he could co-produce the record and infuse these songs with some of his jack-of-all-trades skills in jazz, country, and rock n roll. He is a really good listener and the songs benefited from his outside perspective, even though it was occasionally scary to get outside my comfort zone.

I met Concetta pretty randomly at a park in Queens. Soon after I went to a show to see her big ensemble piece, Laminaria, and I was blown away by her arranging. Our process was Concetta making demos and then her, Gabriel, and I would sit around my dining room table and discuss what we liked or wanted to change and after many dining room table sessions and bowls of lentil soup we had our parts. It was a lot more work but I enjoyed the process of “composing” all the parts instead of multi-track recording the violin on the fly like I have done in the past.

Can we talk a little about wastelands? I mean, if the growth is at the edges then desolation must be a central feature of the record? It brings to mind the situation here in Wales, where we’ve got these rolling green fields and mountain ranges that are intrinsic to the national identity—landscapes which feel natural and alive, when in reality they are relatively barren zones created by grazing livestock and various forms of mining. The wasteland has become what people know and protect, to the point where attempts to ‘rewild’ or increase biodiversity are treated with hostility.  There’s an analogy with our current cultural situation too, where over-processed, over-familiar ‘content’ seems to be valued more than anything else. It’s safe, it’s recognisable, it’s what we think we want. But when people are allowed to look to the edges, it’s clear where the real value exists. As though art breaks through regardless, just as shoots follow a winter die back or in the wake of a forest fire. I read you were inspired by Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn in this regard? The idea of rebounding from disaster or ruination?

I agree with your analogy, besides the literal wastelands created by over-extraction, waste, and climate change, I think winner-takes-all capitalism effects every facet of life from supermarkets being filled with poisonous junk food to music becoming more formulaic to get more streams to breakdowns in communal empathy that lead to polarization and loneliness. I mean, so many people have the majority of their human interactions on social media platforms that are literally meant to addict and extract behavioral data. I find that to be so spiritually damaging!

This is all to say that I see the way things are here in the US as already totally broken. Before I had the framework of this album I would get so hopeless and depressed it would be hard to get out of bed sometimes, but I love the idea of the little sprouts that can pop up after a disaster. I am so inspired by my friends and peers who have chosen to live their values and try to help their communities. I have lost my faith that very much transformational good can happen in the mainstream but I have renewed appreciation for mutual aid projects and work being done on the margins. To an extent, I think that is where the interesting art can be found too. Part of writing this album was coming to terms that we are already living in a disastrous time but instead of glossing over it to keep a delusional peace of mind, it is more meaningful to try and find the small ways to resist.

There’s an interesting thread of messiness across the album. It’s right there in the titular image of ‘Untying the Knot’; this sense of picking at that which seems complete and elegant to get closer to a lived truth. It’s refreshing, I think, for a record that broaches nakedly political themes to embrace this more disordered view. There’s an understandable pressure to be complete in our thinking on such topics. To have answers fully formed and ideal. But it’s also an impossible pressure, especially for any one person. And it stymies the often risky and chaotic creativity which is required to truly confront the biggest issues. Have you considered this productive or even virtuous aspect of disorder?

Making music that is even a little political is a difficult balance for the reasons you say. One of the hardest parts of the lyric process for Growing at the Edges was writing about forest fires, which are obviously devastating but also, when controlled, are a key way of keeping the ecosystem in parts of California healthy. I didn’t want to seem like I am rooting for people to get hurt, or that I am some kind of accelerationist but I do see value in imagining our current systems as broken and wondering what better ones might look like. It is kind of like exposure therapy.

The act of trying to say something meaningful but not be pedantic makes the lyric writing process excruciating for me. My favorite strategy is to change statements into questions. I find that it makes the song feel less preachy and gives the listener more room to engage with lyrics without being defensive.

I felt like ‘Untying a Knot’ had to be on the album because it doesn’t make sense to think about external politics if you are not willing to put that same scrutiny towards yourself with a truly open mind. I wish it were more normalized to admit you are wrong about something and have a process of support while you learn better.

I think the record serves as both a statement and an invitation. An act of playful, instinctive creativity which invites others to join in. And one which also champions collaboration as the way to hone and ultimately realise these visions in ways which might not be possible alone. It opens up a kind of collective dreaming that merges the playful and messy experience that is creativity with the potential for large-scale change that comes with connection and collaboration. Do you see art and creativity as tools to challenge ingrained thinking and instigating systemic change?

I absolutely see art and creativity as tools to challenge ingrained thinking. That is the idea that keeps me going. I think of my art practice as collaboratively finding good questions that lead to answers and hopefully more questions.

By the way, thank you so much for understanding the intent of the album. During the promotion cycle, I was afraid I had made everything a bit too subtle but your questions have really gotten to the core of what I was trying to say so thanks for the deep listening!

Growing at the Edges is out now via Transgressive and available from the Mutual Benefit Bandcamp page. Lee is about to take Mutual Benefit out on tour, first across the US and then the EU/UK. See full dates below and grab tickets here.

Mutual Benefit US Tour Winter 2024

1/31 Baltimore, MD / Normals
2/1 Roanoke, VA / The Spot on Kirk
2/2 Durham, NC / The Pinhook
2/3 Asheville, NC / TBA
2/4 Athens, GA / Buvez
2/6 Gainesville, FL / TBA
2/7 Atlanta, GA / 529
2/8 Knoxville, TN / The Pilot Light
2/9 Nashville, TN / The Basement
2/10 Cincinnati, OH / TBA
2/11 Columbus, OH / Dirty Dunagarees

Mutual Benefit EU/UK Tour Spring 2024

8 March / Paris, FR / Le Pop Up Du Label
9 March / Brussels, BE / Botanique, Rotonde
11 March / Cambridge, UK / Portland Arms
12 March / Brighton, UK / Green Door Store
13 March / Birmingham, UK / Hare & Hounds
14 March / Bristol, UK / Bristol Beacon Cellars
16 March / Birkenhead, UK / Future Yard
17 March / Glasgow, UK / Hug & Pint
18 March / Manchester, UK / YES Basement
19 March / Leeds, UK / Brudenell
20 March / London, UK / St.Matthias Church
21 March / Dublin, IE / Workman’s Cellar

Portrait photos by Annalie Bouchard, album art + layout by Natalie Phillips

The post Where There Was a Wasteland, Something New: A Conversation with Mutual Benefit appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The compositions which bring this to life are every bit as detailed and intuitive as this suggests, Kitba’s vocals simultaneously intimate and haunting alongside the sound of their renowned harp work. Songs like ‘Peel Away the Rind’ and ‘Tied By Strings’ are at once welcoming and disquieted, full of tender compassion and simmering unease. It’s as though the listener has been invited into Kitba’s search in real-time, left to drift without the strictures or comfort of prior expectations. Other musicians lend their talents to further this sound, with Zubin Hensler (flugelhorn, drumset, drum programming, synths, guitar, piano), Gregg Belisle-Chi (electric guitar) Ryan Weiner (electric guitar, electric bass) Carmen Rothwell (upright bass), Jason Burger (drumset, percussion) and Joanna Schubert (additional vocals) all working to accentuate the songs’ richness and ultimately give the album a distinctively communal feel.

For what is an inherently personal record, this sense of community is central to Kitba. A symbol of openness which mirrors the album’s underlying processes. A receptivity to change and new directions, a willingness to become something otherwise unexpected. What emerges is proof that art can offer a picture of identity more nuanced than simple labels. A deeper understanding reached via an embrace of confusion. Identity as an ongoing thing.

What took the opportunity to chat with Kitba about the record, touching on everything from their creative process and influences to the joys of local music scenes and deep dives into Twin Peaks.

Congratulations on the release of Kitba. It seems especially fitting for the record to be self-titled, as it offers such an intimate examination of your relationship with yourself. Did you initially set out with this idea in mind, or find yourself drawn to such themes in the process of writing and recording?

Thank you! I actually initially set out to write a record about nightmares. I had this whole concept that I was going to write songs about these vicious nightmares I was having and it would help cleanse them from my system. It worked a little too well—the second I started writing, they disappeared. I tried to continue with the concept but was having difficulty, so I decided to arrange a song-a-day week with friends to sort of force them out. On the first day, I was still struggling so I let go of the nightmares in service of getting anything that day. I channelled what I was feeling in the moment and ended up with the entirety of ‘Tied to Strings’. It felt so good that I did it the next day, and the next. I just kept bringing myself into the moment and I had a third of the record by the end of that week. I fully let go of the nightmares (two did make their way onto the record however—’My Words Don’t Work’ and ‘Spilling Out’) and kept doing song-a-day weeks until I had the album.

True themes really came out in the process of recording though, as Zubin and I would pull apart the meaning of each song to get to their depths. Since they were song-a-days, I hadn’t thought that extensively about any of them, but in bouncing them off someone else I peeled and peeled and peeled until I got closer to their cores. There are still a couple I’ve left not fully explored though because I felt it would ruin their magic.

The sense of self-discovery on the record is most interesting because of how it feels so authentically lived. As reported in situ, while questions were still unfolding, let alone answers, meaning the picture of identity is inherently incomplete. Was it difficult to commit such personal ideas to something halfway permanent like music while still working through them? Or did it help broach the confusion and fluidity of such things?

I think writing it was my way of finding an access point to processing things that were really hard to sort out in my mind, and that all felt totally instinctual. I wasn’t conscious of what I was doing when I was doing it, I just opened up the channel (as per the Martha Graham letter to Agnes de Mille, something I read at the outset of every day I wrote). But I do think it’s what made the bulk of the release process so difficult. I felt naked and not fully formed throughout it. I struggled with talking about the meaning of certain songs (like ‘This Body’) because I was, and am still, working through these questions and it felt hard to take up space in areas I wasn’t necessarily ready to. In some ways, I think that’s what made this material feel so potent and what drew me to working on it—the songs feel alive because the questions are still being asked and some of them are probably going to be life-long struggles. But it definitely made the release an even bigger emotional rollercoaster.

Can we talk a little about ‘My Words Don’t Work’? In many ways it plays as the introduction of the album’s themes. The discrepancy between our actual interior state and what we are able to communicate to others, and how art might perhaps fill the gap. But I’ve also read you had doubts about including it on the record, seeing it as too direct and vulnerable. What was the process around the song, and what eventually convinced you to include it?

This was one of the “nightmare” songs I wrote and it was based around an inability to communicate myself. It felt so easy and simple to write it was almost obvious, and that scared me into thinking it was redundant and cheesy. I brought seventeen songs into the studio on day one, and Zubin and I listened through everything together to decide what we’d work on. His reaction to the song was stark—he insisted it was good/worthy and it started to bring my confidence up a bit on it. The first attempt at recording the song was essentially just harp and voice, tracked at the same time because Zubin had seen me perform it that way. He was struck by a difference in tone when I played it live, that I was bringing more power to it than I typically had on other songs and he wanted us to explore that.

We sat with that version for a long time, convinced it would be the final one, but I had demoed out something closer to what we ended up with and that never left me. The “live” version gave me the confidence to continue with the song and we found another home for it on a benefit compilation, then went about getting the sound I couldn’t give up from the demo. Through this process of doing, undoing, and doing again, I began to believe it was good. The meaning of it too felt so fitting for my first single.

I think one of the striking features of the album is how, for all of its positive searching and dreamy textures, a certain unease worms its way into the sound. I mean, I know this comparison is overused, but there’s an almost Lynchian tone lurking under the surface of tracks like ‘Peel Away the Rind’. Does this resonate with you, or have I watched Twin Peaks: The Return one too many times?

Completely resonates and is seriously true (also you could never watch Twin Peaks too many times). I went through my first Twin Peaks experience while writing/working on the album. I’d watched Season 1, Season 2, Fire Walk With Me, The Return, and capped it off with a phenomenal six-hour long explanation video on YouTube. The video dissecting the series was mind-bending (who knows if it’s true, but it felt like a pretty good read) and I kept diving further into the world of David Lynch. That vibe ended up creeping into a lot of the record, ‘Peel Away the Rind’ being the most explicit one, but also ‘Waiting’, ‘Untie the Binds’, and ‘Doing It Wrong’. ‘Doing It Wrong’ has undercurrents of reversed speech/singing, as well as the original voice memo piano demo coursing through it, peaking in dissonance with the actual lead vocals. I loved playing with music that felt one way on the surface, often “sweet” or “beautiful”, but had layers underneath that slightly eroded that.

Alongside this personal thread of the record runs a sense of collaboration too, and this spirit of community is so often apparent on releases from Ruination and the adjacent labels in that New York scene. Could you go into the collaborations on the album, and how they came to shape the result?

This New York music scene is everything. Truly everything. This record featured all the original players from the EP I’d done previously with Zubin Hensler Break Through Arrive Here—Jason Burger on drums and Carmen Rothwell on bass (both members of Scree, another Ruination band), and Gregg Belisle-Chi on guitar, in my (and many others’) opinion one of the most beautiful guitarists in the city. I added Ryan Weiner this time around as I had become obsessed with Tiny Hazard, a band he was a part of—he added a really unique and versatile texture (he ended up playing both guitar and electric bass on a few songs). All of these people know and have played together in some combination, so even though everything was tracked separately, it had the energy of being played together live in the room. I think that feeling was one of the biggest things to shape the sound of the record and created a throughline on all the songs.

Joanna Schubert, who plays under the name Oropendola, had been working on a record with Zubin at the same time as me and is stunningly good at vocal arrangements, so I had her work on a song I couldn’t break—’Untie the Binds’. She wrote the arrangements and eventually I realized that she should be the one to sing the background vocals. I feel like it made the song come alive and compelled me to keep it (another one I considered cutting).

Then there’s Zubin, someone I will never be able to say enough about—the unifier and the glue. His own band included Ryan Weiner. He grew up with Carmen Rothwell. He knew Gregg from Seattle. He went to school, lived, and played with Jason Burger. He and I have talked many times about how the record feels like a love letter to both the New York and the Seattle music scenes. And Ruination Record Co. is an absolute champion of some of the most incredible musicians all over the country, including a lot of friends—I’m very lucky to have been able to cap off this record by releasing it with them.

Who/what would you point to as your main influences beyond the local scene? Are there any musicians or songwriters you feel have particularly shaped your work? Do you draw from any forms or disciplines beyond music?

Oooh, interesting question. The bulk of my influences are truly local, because I didn’t come alive in writing until I’d spent a few years here just listening. I would say The Weather Station and Julia Jacklin are two artists I listened to a lot when working on the album – there’s a steadiness in both of their work that I believe influenced me. Mitski is also definitely someone I draw inspiration from, though I would say a lot of songwriters feel that way as she’s making some of the most compelling and enigmatic music of this generation. I studied some Judee Sill and Anais Mitchell in my voice lessons and I think of them as guiding lights in my vocal delivery. Beyond music, I am always in a book, though it oscillates between fiction and non-fiction. And, as I mentioned before, I refer to the Martha Graham letter to Agnes de Mille whenever creating. It’s a constant reminder to stay open and not judge myself.

Kitba is out now via Ruination Record Co. and you can get it from the Kitba Bandcamp page.

Cover photo by Sara Laufer, other photo by Moriah Ziman. Cover artwork by Annie Del Hierro-Jost with layout by Benedict Kupstas

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The album spins off this idea in a number of directions. ‘Appetite‘ explores the conflicting pressures of modern living, “where the urge to live an exciting life is always present,” as we put it in a preview, “yet some dissatisfaction sits at the edge of every experience.” ‘Airglow‘ takes on the information age and ways we might lose ourselves in its constant deluge, ‘Gameshow’ a surreal melding of TV and reality, while ‘Overdressed‘ explores cynicism within social interactions and a desire to move beyond superficiality into something deeper. Then there’s ‘Tire’, the most obvious reference to the title, which returns to the puncture metaphor directly, searching for the hole through which life is escaping, as though to locate site of the damage might be to stem the sense of loss.

This mood is brought to life with a decidedly American aesthetic, following a lineage rising in the 90s from songwriters like Mark Linkous and persisting through a myriad of contemporaries from Alex G and Trace Mountains to Field Medic, Free Cake For Every Creature and Hovvdy. But one which draws parallels between the US and Rea’s hometown of Milton Keynes. A city with a short history inside a country with a long one, designed purely for modern living and possessing the strange balance between potential and hollowness of any ahistorical space.

We took the opportunity to speak with Rea about the record, touching upon its themes, imagery and inception.

Thanks for speaking to us, and congratulations on the release of Slow Puncture. How does it feel letting the record out into the world?

Thank you! It feels good, the record definitely reflects what I wanted Symbol Soup to be when I started, including the artwork and everything. Curious as to what people are gonna get from it too!

I guess the title is a good a place to start. There’s plenty of metaphorical baggage to unpack with Slow Puncture, some of which is especially pertinent. The sense of being chronically damaged, tending towards eventual ruin, yet nevertheless existing within a functioning state so that you can ignore the damage day to day. How does the image of a slow puncture figure in your view of the songs? Did you start with the title in mind?

Some of the songs, like ‘Gameshow’ and ‘Appetite’ are pretty old and predate the title, but the majority came after I had Slow Puncture in mind. I tried to have the arc of a puncture across the album, with the early songs being a bit more energetic, and the later songs in general being more subdued. The song ‘Tire’ is more explicitly about that theme, trying to pinpoint where that background sense of loss comes from. I also wrote a really long song called ‘Slow Puncture’ which didn’t make it onto the album!

Can we talk a little about nostalgia? The record seems to sit at the strange juncture so many of us find ourselves in. Where the promises of the past didn’t quite manifest in the present, and the future feels like it could easily be filled with looking back on better, especially childhood, days—something manifest in the album art. Do you think Slow Puncture is a nostalgic album? Or an album working against nostalgia?

I think it’s very nostalgic yeah, and my preference for folky and fuzzy sounds definitely is because it feels like something lacking in my environment, rather than reflecting it. My sense is that the world is just a lot more complicated than any of us can get our head around, and so we’re necessarily taking part in a ‘make believe’ version of reality. So it’s kind of acknowledging that your situation won’t ever meaningfully mirror that over-simplified version of life we’re taught to work towards.

The balance between the real and the surreal is a striking feature of your work, be it the blurring of reality and the internet (‘Airglow’) or television (‘Gameshow’), or just in its playful style more generally. You’ve described ‘Appetite’ as “thematically… about feeling totally overwhelmed and totally underwhelmed at the same time,” which seems to capture this mood in some way. As though the world is both amazingly weird and numbingly dull simultaneously.

Exactly, every moment of reality is seen through our own lens. The experienced mundanity or mystery is a bit of a choice there. So you can know that the internet ‘cloud’ is physically a big room full of server boxes, but also confront the phenomenon of it, as this invisible mass of data between us, hanging in the air like pollution. Both perspectives are true!

There’s an interesting duality of locales on the record, with the lived experience of English suburbia (in this case Milton Keynes) processed through a semi-fictious small-town Americana represented by the picturesque Pacific Northwest. Could you talk through these ideas a little more, and what these places mean to you and your work?

Milton Keynes does mirror those places visually. There’s the grid system and warehouses and Costco, and also a lot of beautiful wooded area. Because it’s only sixty years old there’s a lack of British cultural baggage there, so driving around it’s easy to imagine you’re anywhere. You’re conscious of being on the outskirts, I wasn’t aware of much of a scene while I was there, and that made me more interested in making recordings rather than things which would immediately go down well live. The imagined vision of the Pacific Northwest comes mostly from Twin Peaks and Mount Eerie I guess.

Can we talk a little about influences? There’s a clear link to the US indie/bedroom scenes of recent years? Who do you consider the biggest influences on the Symbol Soup sound?

Absolutely, the approach to songwriting and production that’s come about there just hits the spot for me. Some biggies are Spencer Radcliffe, Hovvdy, Jodi, Runnner, MJ Lenderman. And an extra biggie is Trace Mountains—Dave [Benton] mixed the album, and the song ‘Tire’ came out of a songwriting workshop he was doing in lockdown.

Slow Puncture is out now via Sad Club Records and you get it from Bandcamp.

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The name Genevieve carries a particular image. Take the legendary Genevieve of Brabant, a virtuous wife falsely accused of infidelity and sentenced to death, only to escape and raise her child out in the wilderness of the Ardennes. A chaste, maternal figure who did not waver through years of gross injustice. Or Saint Genevieve, a woman at the other end of the family spectrum, devoted to no man but God Himself. A consecrated virgin taken to asceticism and mortification of the flesh. Two women very different in their lifestyles but linked in their ability to maintain dignity when faced with discomfort or persecution. Perhaps one definition of the feminine. Through a series of vignettes and fictional reflections, Fust craft their album around such imagery, offering a picture of love as a persistent yet uneven thing. Something to be fuelled, protected, practised and ritualised. Modest in its own way and sacrosanct because of it. A painting never quiet finished, an ongoing crisis. A quiet thing performed in the grey hollows of the everyday.

We took the opportunity to speak with Dowdy about Genevieve, touching on everything from the idea of a ‘quiet life’ and latent religiosity to the significance of the cover art and the importance of film, not to mention the team of collaborators who helped bring the record to life.

Can we talk a little about the title? The name Genevieve carries a certain image. Feminine, familial, humble, virtuous. Is Genevieve a real person? And why did you decide to give the album that name?

The name Genevieve doesn’t reference anyone in particular—it’s more trying to conjure that image of marriage and family you’re getting at. Our last record Evil Joy took the point of view of a couple’s crack-up, and so I wanted to try something a bit more agreeable this time. That title referenced an ecstatically selfish feeling whereas this title references someone else’s name, so there is a marked shift in perspective toward someone or something other than yourself at play here. And it might sound strange but Genevieve is, to me at least, a marriage record. It has at its core songs about commitment. But that doesn’t mean it’s free of the kind of darkness I tend to like in songwriting, because the lesson of commitment is that one ultimately commits to the things they dislike in another person: not just to the charms but to the grievances, resentments, to the ego blows that can never be curbed. I got married during the period I wrote the songs that went into this record and I wanted to find a way to write about marriage in my own way. My partner is at this point used to me writing songs that are quite pitiful when it comes to presenting relationships. But I think there’s something really valuable in narrating from the other side of whatever is going on in your life—trying to get at something loving in a roundabout way. 

The song ‘Genevieve’ was the first song that to me sounded right, that made me excited for the album. It became the key song for me, not conceptually but as a recording, as the compass for how the rest of the record should sound. Conceptually, it’s probably a strange choice for the title track. Whereas a character like Sarah Lee in ‘Town in Decline’ is a marriage figure in a stable relationship, Genevieve figures a much more complicated kind of relationship. In short, it is a song about two people who have inbuilt into the very nature of their relationship a vow of silence. It’s the same couple, I think, in the album’s last song ‘A Clown Like Me’. I am really struck by such a relationship, considering that the common sense approach suggests that your partner is the one person you’re truly open and honest with, or is I guess ideally such a person. The characters in the title track for whatever reason don’t talk to each other in a way that could sustain them living together: something is unshareable even if a desire to share may exist. There is a dissonance that is exciting to me in a song that uses the name most evocative of marriage and family to describe a relationship that falls apart for lack of communication. Or if not lack of communication, two people who simply cannot for the life of them put into words their commitments.

Genevieve is one of many names strewn throughout the lyrics—none of them real in any direct sense. I think giving character to certain ideas and problems was really helpful for me in writing this record, throughout which there are a number of I guess female archetypes. For instance, in ‘Violent Jubilee’ there is the girl in black who—apart from having a long history in the gothic tradition—is a figure in Appalachian folklore where I am from in southwest Virginia who would visit and requite unfaithful husbands. A figure like that works for me because that song is about having children and there is a certain tension between the woman in black who is pregnant and ‘Angel’ who has no children. It’s this kind of combination I really like to write into songs. Genevieve is an archetypal “wife” I guess but she is also a saint and so a figure absolutely outside of the family. You often see her holding a loaf of bread, which is just lovely, and I’m moved by the kind of poverty that comes with saintliness but also I know it’s a hard thing to sustain in a marriage. So I like that combination. And a small thing that led me finally to decide on it as the title was that she is often called upon as the saint of disasters such as widespread fever and this is a record made in the aftermath of the pandemic.

There was an interesting relationship with time present on your previous record, Evil Joy. The classic yearning of country music juxtaposed with the anxiety of a finite life, dreams of better days challenged by the sense that the months and years were accelerating—there might not be a future after all. Is it fair to say Genevieve is more settled in its outlook? No less wistful, still full of longing, but maybe making peace with time’s habit of passing? I think the artwork captures the mood perfectly?

The cover is a painting by Sasha Popovici, who also painted the Evil Joy cover. He is really exceptional and known for painting a kind of magical realism, for landscapes that harbor something that doesn’t belong, usually shapes or geometries that somehow cut open or interrupt the grandeur of the view. I obviously really like this tension, but for both covers I asked for something else. With Evil Joy it was a kind of a natural non-place, something like a nowhere Eden where you might spend a night on the lam. That painting fit the themes of that record, the ones you mention: finite life, longing, temporariness, leaving, a kind of normalized malevolence.

With Genevieve, I asked for a domestic scene that is unfinished. We looked at Pissarro a lot, rural scenes of daily life and labor. And I especially wanted a painting that, even if it was incomplete, still showed that it was nonetheless committed to a perspective, to a scene that could be completed or that once was completed but is no longer in full view. I taped up the image and hand-wrote the name as if it belonged to a scrapbook or work journal, as if even this inaccessibility of the implied image is itself a memory or wishful thinking, not something that claims to be anything more. It is this kind of sense of being “settled” I really like: you have an image of domestic life that can’t itself really come to completion and so it is this very inability that you settle for.

And of course unfinishedness has everything to do with time as you describe it: a time suspended, uncertain, in progress, ongoing. We struggled with the cover. I don’t think it was easy for Sasha to paint an unfinished painting without taking the image too far. I love that most about the cover, that Sasha didn’t want it to stop there, that there was a more fully formed future that he wanted for it but which for me would have been wrong. It turned out to be a very still, quiet image that can nonetheless evoke this kind of crisis. And for me this is all very close to the kind of situations whose point of view Fust tries to take up. 

As a related question, there’s a certain… I’m hesitant to call it smallness because some of the tracks have an almost sublime weight (I mean, just listen to ‘Violent Jubilee’), but some modesty or grounded quality to the album. It stands out on tracks like ‘Town in Decline’, which takes on a subject matter so often portrayed in a tortured, desperate light and leavens it with an understated, everyday quality. Post-industrial America as a place of getting by and making do. Did you approach the record with these ideas in mind? 

Yes, there is a certain attraction to what ‘Rockfort Bay’ names “small life” on this record. This can mean so many things and I probably project too much on to it, but I think it means a life that doesn’t attempt to be historical, that may even be seen as ineffectual. How do you defend having a small life today? What imagery do we have of small life? Is it simply recourse to something like pre-capitalist imagery? The themes I work with in this regard probably come across as something like the division between town and country, especially because there is historically a defense of the latter in music like this. It’s difficult because there is a kind of conservatism that seems to immediately accompany the country that the city and its vanguard get to avoid. But I actually think tending to the imagery of smaller lives and the country themes that feel appropriate to it grants a greater sense, as you say, of the effects of deindustrialization today. 

Visual references to the present state of the US economy is nothing new. Beyond the whole of the folk tradition, we can even say that most of the music I really gravitate towards from the 70s and 80s was music determined by a time which we can now identify as the start of this crisis in industrialization. This is some variation on a return-to-the-roots music in this or that way. So thinking about the way a song can express the state of things and also that country imagery becomes important for that, I think, is embedded in the very fabric of this kind of songwriting practice I am hopefully a part of. Beyond that, I am also attracted to literature and films that signal a kind of retreat of both the radical and earthy 60s, the settling down of radicals or hippies, having kids, getting jobs, always trying to keep the pulse even as it is clearly fading away. Small stories about small life in a dying and stagnated country. 

‘Town in Decline’ is in many ways a reflection on my hometown and on my parents. I grew up in Bristol, in southwest Virginia, which was never a serious industrial center—kind of a stopover at the foothills of coal country that was built up as a railroad junction. But my father has worked all of my life in the major chemical plant in the area, which is a good provider but he always seemed to me someone also trying to keep the pulse on something more utopian despite the job. My mom taught at the elementary school and through her point of view I came to realize just how poor the area is. It is that kind of industrial context alongside a certain sensitivity to small town dynamics and to the economic difficulty of that region that I think drives certain songs on the record. 

Could we talk a little about the track ‘Searchers’? The idea there’s some inherent value or meaning in the act of searching for something, even if the act is performed without quite knowing what you’re looking for. “Drag the river, feel alive tonight,” as the lyrics read. The song seems to encapsulate so much of what the album, and indeed Fust as a project, is all about. Harnessing the tension of an unanswered question as an energizing force. But then of course, there’s an irony to the concept of a search party, because, depending on the circumstance, they might not necessarily want to find what they’re looking for… 

Thank you for this—I think you’re right. In all honesty, I am probably more drawn to a certain religious dimension of things than I care to admit. Above all I tend to romanticize collectives, and in particular collective practices. The religious aspect I guess would be a collective plan to pursue that which is for now beyond grasp or which seems to slip away just as you notice it. This kind of thing seems today to be a very secular or quiet act and I wanted to think again about its more communal forms. ‘Searchers’ started as a collection of poetry trying to describe a “search party” in various ways, as a political party or house party but also as something that looks like a regular search party but which isn’t sensationalized, isn’t a media spectacle. Just people out together looking very carefully. And the thought just took shape around the possibility that maybe they weren’t really looking for anything in particular, or didn’t know what they were looking for.

The attempt to turn it into a song started as a thought around what one loses in a given experience, that so much of our life is blocked out or forgotten almost immediately in order to forge ahead. This would mean we have a kind of identity that is composed of these negative attributes, things which never had names, which can’t be remembered based on our or at least my default kind of attention. This also extends to processes that run in the background. Sometimes I wake up and don’t know where I am or what stage of development I am at and it’s so devastating to realize how responsible my own narrative is for keeping everything in play that pertains to me. And so much gets lost to that narrative, but also comes back in flashes. So searching became a way to describe actively looking for those kinds of things. 

The way you bring Fust as a project into this is really nice. I think it’s totally right: there’s never a plan to make music, just a project in place with a general horizon that music will be made. Having that structure in place means music could be waiting at any point with no dictate on what it will be. I try to do this with as many things as possible: having a number of “search parties” out whose only precondition is the search itself, be they music projects or writing projects or whatever. These are what undergird the “greater kind of looking” I am talking about in the song. I think I suffer from inattention so having ways to look in place is crucial. It’s an ethic maybe, one that is tied also to having low expectations. If anything is found, that should be exciting. It should also be said that the title references John Ford, so I think there is a sort of effort to conjure the American West here in some way but also to update it. Something like a group of American searchers without an object, without a goal. Seems to me the case, in a way…

Who or what do you consider to be the biggest influences on your work? Would you say you draw on artforms beyond music? 

The simplest answer is that the people in my life are the biggest influence: my friends, especially those who also make music, my family, etc. I’ve been making music for so long without any label or music culture behind it that having a few people interested and who themselves also make things that largely go unnoticed is enough to feel like I am contributing to something. This is something I think a lot of people relate to, and goes into what I was saying earlier about making a kind of music that is proportional to having a “small life.”

In terms of musical influences, I would say Fust really comes out of an attention to lost, forgotten, privately-produced music, particularly songwriting. I am definitely indebted to the big, big hitters like Van Morrison or Gram Parsons or the Basement Tapes extended universe, but I think what I really like are songs that are so clearly homemade by people who are so clearly… unmarketable. A big influence for us on this record, as an example, was ‘All of It’ by Circuit Rider. It’s bewildering, a kind of southern rock slow burner without much of a structure, an inebriated rant of a song that feels like they couldn’t for the life of them be helped to make it sound quite right. And yet, it’s an ideal recording of a band for me, which is what Genevieve was: the first time in my life that a working band went into a studio to record itself, to record songs I wrote.

I am definitely someone who likes to be influenced and wears his influences proudly. Outside of music, I would say I especially rely on cinema for a sense of things. Similarly with music, I like films that reflect a certain homemade quality. Take Jon Jost’s films, for example. He succeeds in his films at capturing an American sensibility that I aspire to with such minimal means. They look and feel impoverished while also providing really small narratives of poverty that he is so sensitive to. He works with a degree of independence that determines the narrative experiment, is full of non-actors, and is committed to regional filmmaking. While his narratives are gestural, they also arrive out of massive historical stakes. For instance, in Bell Diamond a marriage is torn apart due to the husband’s sterility from exposure to agent orange in Vietnam, a story whose backdrop is unemployment in a post-industrial mining town. It’s the perfect combination for me, someone who has a small community of collaborators and wants narratives both quaint and colossal. Jost also writes his own country songs and puts them in his films. I don’t know how exactly but you can tell film and music are somewhat flattened in Jost’s world, like one doesn’t take precedence over the other. And this kind of flattening of forms is something I really take seriously. Finding a song you actually love can be just as rewarding as writing a song. Both feel so rare.

I have to ask about the collaborators on the record. In many ways Genevieve plays like a singular personal creation, but there was a wide cast of talent who helped bring it to life. How do you go about working with others, and how much do they shape the final sound?  

I started writing songs twenty years ago this September. Whatever the name or aim of the project, it has always been variations on a bedroom recording project, so largely a solo effort. But I would always bring people in or find ways to involve people in whatever I was doing. Genevieve is the first time I have recorded my music in a studio, and so this is the first time I’ve really resigned to anyone else’s judgment. Going into it, I had in mind something like Dylan’s New Morning, not only because I always thought of it as a marriage record, but because it sounds so haphazard, thrown together, like he himself was in full strange control but couldn’t tell you what the musicians actually played because the whole point was surrendering to their habits. That’s what I wanted ultimately: my songs at the whim of people I’ve come to trust. 

So first of all, the band is made up of people who are all in other bands and those bands are all bands I actively listen to and am overwhelmed by. John [Wallace] makes music as Colamo, and he has been my partner in all things music since high school. It’s his distorted intensity on guitar that makes Genevieve feel like a legitimate rock record, which is so exciting for me to hear. Justin [Morris] fronts Sluice and has one of the most gentle senses for music I’ve ever heard. His record Radial Gate just came out this year and it is so masterful. Oli [Child-Lanning] is in Sluice but also fronts the avant-traditional project Weirs, which is a well kept secret that if you know about then you’ll know the careful degree of history he brings to the music he is part of. Avery [Sullivan] drums with Sluice and Indigo de Souza, and the band version of Fust really feels to me like a long collaboration with him: endless conversations about what the point of all of this is but also how important small details are in making music listenable. I think he is a true supporter in all things he is a part of and he definitely feels like the support structure for the band. Frank [Meadows] plays piano in Fust and has been my most consistent and most active collaborator in music over the past decade. He also works at Dear Life, the label that releases our music, and we are where and who we are because of him.

I definitely embraced the studio format and invited as many people to be on the record as possible. It’s ultimately a very North Carolina record. Courtney [Werner] plays fiddle on the record and is in Magic Tuber Stringband, a now legendary folk experiment from Durham. Indigo [De Souza], who is from Marshall, sings on the record and it goes without saying that she is one of the most powerful voices in music today; she is also genuinely such a sensitively kind person and every time I hear her voice on the record I light up. Jake [Lenderman] and Xandy [Chelmis] are part of the MJ Lenderman/Wednesday universe from Asheville and are just exceptional players, it’s ridiculous how talented those guys are. Jake released music on Dear Life as well so it felt like a necessary collaboration. We recorded in Asheville—where I used to live a decade ago—with Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios. I knew Alex from back then but had lost touch and didn’t really know what he was up to. The record sounds the way it does because of him. He also worked with Jake and Indigo, so it was all very easy to bring these collaborations together. Beyond his skill, the best thing about Alex is that he works intuitively: he makes decisions as he goes and so he really is a member of the band in that way, someone who just guides the music home. And I must add that John Winn, a filmmaker from Durham, has been one of my major collaborators. He has directed all of the videos for Fust. I’ve never met anyone who understands the landscape’s relationship to the cinematic image more than him and its an honor to have my music heard through that vision. Lastly, though sadly not from North Carolina, Michael [Cormier-O’Leary] recorded vocals on the record. He has been the biggest supporter of Fust and I really owe him everything. He is one of my favorite songwriters—a true contributor to the great weirdo American songbook—and drums in Friendship, perhaps the smartest band out there today.

Genevieve is out on the 16th June via Dear Life Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Album art by Sasha Popovici, photos by Charlie Boss

The post Fust – Genevieve appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Though Mellow Submarine might offer calmer tone to the Borito sound, it also sees Yael S. Copeland engage with such worries far more directly. A decision to face up to the things which prove so unnerving within the contemporary moment, be it the collective helplessness experienced amid the unnatural heat of Tel Aviv’s recent summers (‘Over’) or more personal themes of social anxiety (‘metoo’) and relationships (‘Death to My Ladies Man’). But thanks to her intimate, dusk-hued sound, Copeland emerges through everything with a sense of hope intact. Unable to lose the romantic notion that things can be different, can improve. Mellow Submarine looks for good thoughts amid the chaos, and might just have you believing they are just around the corner after all.

We took the opportunity to speak with Yael S. Copeland in order to delve a little deeper into the album:

Hi Yael, thanks so much for speaking with us, and congratulations on Mellow Submarine! How does it feel to be letting your debut album free into the world?

Hello, very happy to share a little about my debut. Love Various Small Flames so this is extra special

I feel good releasing my solo debut. I’ve been creating and performing more seriously for the past couple of years so I felt ready for this moment. Especially after experiencing it with my band Borito. Being a musician during a time of a release can be tough so I’m happy to move back to a more creative space while still caring for and sharing Mellow Submarine.

How did the process of a solo album differ from that with Borito? Did you feel you were exploring new ground with this project?

I love being in a band and the special connection we have when playing together in a room. Like the other members I have different aspects that I wanted to explore as an artist. If it’s moving more towards producing on my own or musical genres and sounds I haven’t yet created with. I wanted to make music that reflects a more intimate side of myself. The side that exists in my room. Maybe a bit more melancholic, more anxious but also has a romantic view on the world.

Borito was released in the midst of the pandemic and it has a more escapist quality. I find that super important but like everyone else sometimes we just want to dance and forget and sometimes we want to face life, the world, ourselves.

Despite what the title might suggest, I think it’s fair to say Mellow Submarine is an anxious record? From the personal social anxiety of ‘metoo’ to global pandemics and the climate emergency, uncertainty is baked into each song. Could you speak a little on why you choose to face up to these worries so directly, especially with a sound that’s so wistful and warm?

I haven’t thought of the record in that way but I completely understand why that comes across. I do deal with anxieties. Social ones, ones that stem from the climate crisis and ones that stem from the issues that we deal with in Israel.

I do think that the album is very much my point of view on these issues. My way to deal with adulting in a world with an unknown future. I think for a lot of songwriters, the process of writing is therapeutic. It is a way to process these fears and anxieties, to control the narrative and to express fantasies that are not possible in real life. Maybe that’s why the album is also warm and wistful. Maybe I’m romanitizicing these problems, because it makes it easier to deal with.

Do you feel differently now, having written the songs? The final line of opening track ‘over’ really caught my attention. “Why should I care of the present,” as you ask, “if I don’t have a future to remember it as my past?” But the fact that it’s the first song seems important too. As though the rest of the record is trying to answer your own question, find reasons to live?

As I said in the previous question, I feel differently after each song I write because it allows me to view the situation from a spectator point of view. When I wrote ‘Over’, which was written on a very hot summer day in Tel Aviv, I was dealing with the thought that the climate crisis is going to be devastating for my generation and future ones. Writing the song gave those thoughts a clear voice. It focused on what was scary about it. I do believe in that line I wrote but I would like to offer a more hopeful message, that is an understanding that: I should be present in my life, cause right now I am here. As Lenny Kravitz said “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

Could we talk a little about influences? Is it fair to say there’s an American flavour to the sound? What artists do you draw on when making your own music? And are you inspired by non-musical things too?

I am currently based in Tel Aviv and I grew up in Israel. My parents moved here from the US when they were younger, wanting to start a family here. My identity is very much influenced by the American home I was brought up in. I grew up on American classic rock. some might say “Dad Rock”. Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Randy Newman are just some of the storytellers I would listen to at home. This album and hopefully future songs under my solo project are a way to get back to folk and the amazing songwriters I heard in a new modern way.

The changes and uncertainty that are a part of our lives nowadays affected music and brought some new interpretations to the world of folk and Americana which I love. I am drawn to mix these classic influences with new voices, new sounds that lean more towards freak folk/lo-fi aesthetic. Alex G, Elvis Depressedly, Car Seat Headrest are some of the names that lead these trends. I’ll also mention Adrianne Lenker (Big Thief) who in my mind is one of the best songwriters of recent years and Natalie Bergman who put out a beautiful album called Mercy.

Which brings us onto Ghost Mountain Records. How did that relationship come about? And do you know what’s next for your music?

I actually started talking to Andrew from Ghost Mountain on IG. It’s amazing that today it doesn’t matter as much where you physically are. Andrew is wonderful and helped me a lot with the release. In terms of the label—the main focus is cassette tapes, and that’s what we did for Mellow Submarine! On April 7th they will be released on Bandcamp and they are shimmering gold and perfect for the twilight vibe of the album.

In terms of what’s next – I am travelling with my band Borito to NXNE, a showcase in Toronto, Canada this June. After I am planning to travel to NY and maybe some other places in the U.S. Would love to be where a lot of my inspirations create their own music. I feel like now that the album is out I am able to start writing again so hopefully new music soon. Also a new album from Borito this year. You are invited to follow on social media and stay updated

Mellow Submarine is out now digitally on the Yael S. Copeland Bandcamp page, with cassettes coming via Ghost Mountain Records on the 7th April.

Photos by Edo Asoulin, album art photo by Yuval Rozin, album design by Yael S. Copeland

The post Yael S. Copeland – Mellow Submarine appeared first on Various Small Flames.