This week on the HSR blog we delve into the wondrous musical and sonic mind of Scott Solter. Scott’s stunning album One River was re-released by Hidden Shoal in 2011 and ended up on a number of end of year best of lists and scooped some deservedly glowing reviews. Scott is of course also one half of the amazing Boxharp along with Wendy Allen and their band of merry contributors. And let’s not forget his work with Balustrade Ensemble and his ridiculously awesome list of production credits.

Hidden Shoal’s Cam Merton recently dropped five questions on Scott.

CM: How did One River come about? Your previous release under your own name, The Brief Light (Manifold Records, 2003), was markedly different in its pallet and aesthetic.

SS: The pieces began as improvisations with guitar and tape loops. There was no agenda at first. The Brief Light, on the other hand, was music that grew out of teaching myself how to record audio. I had collected a number of instruments over the years that I was too lazy to practice, but when I got the itch to learn record making I pulled out everything and started banging away.

CM: There is a level of compositional complexity at play in One River that may not be immediately apparent depending on your listening mode. Can you talk about this and perhaps expand on your compositional process for One River?

SS: Compositionally it was impulsive and improvised in its technique. I was looking at various images of water and wondered what sort of music they would make. Simple idea. Technically speaking I would build a melody slowly and continue adding harmony until it felt musical. From there it was about how shallow or deep, calm or volatile to take it. After each piece was constructed I’d look for more undercurrents using various tape machine playback speeds. Eventually all the machines were set in motion and mixed live.

CM: I believe that works such as One River require a special mode of listening to fully appreciate. Do you think that it’s important for music to ask something of the listener?

SS: Maybe the proper mode is really just giving space and time for listening. Hopefully the work is compelling enough to firstly draw someone’s attention. I do like a certain open landscape or emotional neutrality to exist in the music so as to offer a listener the chance to plug in their own narratives.

CM: You’ve produced, mixed, engineered for indie (I apologise for the term) artists like Mountain Goats, John Vanderslice, Superchunk, Pattern is Movement and Erik Friedlander to name but a few. What, if anything, do you take from this work into your solo work and also your work with Boxharp? Inversely what do your bring from your own work into these sessions?

SS: The methods of approach are always a work in progress. I like to bring as much of my sensibility to the event as I can but it depends on the variables of the project. On the surface, a lot of these records sound drastically different in tone. Some of them have allowed me to build from the ground up, giving me a great deal of creative license. Others have very limited schedules or resources, requiring me to hit the ground running. Maybe there’s a connection between them that sits deeper. I’m not sure. However, as I move forward in my work I do feel that certain methods have begun to thread themselves through all of the projects.

CM: What’s next for you in solo mode and also for Boxharp?

SS: Several records in the works… Grant Miller and I are close to finishing a new Balustrade Ensemble record that should be ready in soon. There’s also a collection of dark dubs I’m putting together with Rohner Segnitz that I’d like to see released. Boxharp has a great deal of material assembled and recorded that should result in a full length and some singles. There’s also a follow up to One River that should be finished in a few months.

I guess that’s it for now, thanks :^D

“Twins and Wives: a film for One River” by Mark Solter and Laura Solter (DVD release coming early 2012)

We have a special treat for you with our first blog post for 2012. Salli Lunn’s masterful 2010 album Heresy and Rite gets a track by track exposition not only by the band but also by the man behind its stunning production, Jonas Munk (Manual, Causa Sui). This really is a wonderful window in to what is a very special album and also a lovely pre-cursor to the recently released A Frame of Reference which sees a selection of tracks from Heresy and Rite remixed and reworked by the likes of Scott Solter, Manual, Markus Mehr,  City of Satellites and TV-Baby.

Continuing in our love of all things Salli Lunn we’re also giving away a CD copy of Heresy and Rite. All you have to do is send an email to contact [at] hiddenshoal.com with “Salli Lunn Giveaway” in the subject line. We’ll draw a winner at the end of January.

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Note: Stream the album in full at the bottom of this post

#1 The Frame of Reference

SL: Though all of us come from different musical outlooks and take in different inspirations, we’ve always had the common interest in exploring rhythms as the musical takeoff. Right before we started the recordings this song wasn’t finished and it was therefore close to not making the final cut. The whole track basicly came together from the same rhythmic patterns and the moods it spawned. In the eleventh hour we luckily found the right balance between the repetitious structures and atmospheric arrangement and the outcome remains a favourite today.

JM: Probably not the easiest track to get into on the album. It was still very open when we started recording so it basically came together in the process of recording and mixing. I think it’s an interesting mix with the mood of the song being kinda cold and dark and the layers of drums and percussion having an ethnic, exotic kinda vibe. The band let me play around with the last instrumental part while mixing – very unusual for me to do something that noisy, but somehow this track demanded to be taken all out.

#2 Parachutes Forever

SL: The oldest song of the record and at the same time it’s most immediate pophook. It was written after a concert with Speaker Bite Me – an earlier Danish bandfavorite and source of inspiration back in the days. Their respective mixtures of noise and minimalistic pop-melodies left a certain, though not that obvious, mark on the composition. Jonas did very well in picking up the shoegazy tendencies and pulling them out of the cupboard both here and throughout the album.

JM: This song is so well put together. The instrumental part in the middle of the track is amazing. We wanted an atmospheric, shoegazy feel for this one while still emphasizing the punch and heaviness of the rhythm section. Generally we wanted a very natural sound for the album but still with a lot of layers and details in the mix, and I think this track is a good example of how nicely it worked out. It has the raw vibe of four people playing together in a room, but here and there some dubby echoes creep out of the soundscape. There are also synths and lots of guitar-overdubs in the mix but they weaved into the original framework very discretely and add a certain depth to it.

#3 The Invention of Steel

SL: Another track centered around repetitious patterns, but at the same time undergoing subtle musical developments creating these slowly building crescendos, which Jonas’ production really helped in shaping. The “intervening” parts separating the verse structures together with the noise sections are probably one way of enticing people to reference post rock when reviewing our music, but we’ve never really been trying to inhabit this set of musical idioms. For us it’s always just been about experimenting with the juxtaposition of different musical moods and movements.

JM: I love the guitars in this track – there’s a very nice interplay between what Lasse is doing in the right side of the stereofield and what Christian is doing in the left.

#4 Fast Cars, Clean Bodies

SL: In a hotchpotch of lyrical references this is the one proper love song of the album laid in a rewritten poem by William Carlos Williams. The film noir-narrative stages the progress of a relationship as a walk one late night. Compositionally, it is ironically also the heaviest track on the album with both postpunk- and stonerrock-aspirations, which in conclusion unites in a long descending spiral. Again Jonas did an amazing job producing and really brought out the sheer frightening cold of psychological mechanisms at play in the human spirit here.

JM: This is the first track I fell in love with back when they sent me some recordings from their rehearsals. I was definitely attracted to the Slint-like feel of it and wanted to maintain that aspect of the track in the album version. But where Slint’s guitars usually sounded very sharp and thin, we wanted the peaks in this track to sound earthy and heavy. I love Jan’s bassplaying – he has a style that reminds me a lot early/mid 1990s Chicago/Washington post-hardcore bands such as Jawbox, Unwound and Unsane. Very few people play bass like that anymore. I ran Lasse’s vocals through a small Fender amp to get that creepy lo-fi vocal sound.

#5 Mirror Girl

SL: Paradoxically this is a track that demanded us to play really tight but still letting go and play loose at the same time. Musically the song origins in a fascination of the French composer Olivier Messian’s use of, amongst others, octatonic scales coupled with the early noiserock of Blonde Redhead and 70s King Crimson.

JM: I think this track was the hardest one to nail. It has a super complex structure and it was tough getting each part right as well as keeping a logical continuity overall. The track has that wonderful 1990s northern US-vibe like the rest of the album but there’s also a prog-rock feel to it. The band references King Crimson but I would go all the way and say it sounds a bit like an indie-version of Tool. We used a Leslie/rotating speaker-effect on the vocals in the breakdown section, which works marvellously. To be perfectly honest, I got that idea from Korn’s 1999 hit “Freak on a Leash” – a guilty pleasure of mine.

#6 Belongings

SL: Belongings represents some of the more eerie and insidious sides of our songwriting placed in a short and compact format. Helping to bring out both the sinister and the pop-elements of the track was the coupling of both Lasse and Line’s vocals, which we hadn’t really tried before. This was also a tricky one to record because of all the skewed rhythmical shifts and we ended up using a take that featured an unintentional but really well-functioning transition near the ending.

#7 Birthmark

SL: Probably the song with the most obvious Unwound-inspiration and at the same time the most uncompromising song among the bunch featuring propulsive drumming in 5/8, atonal guitar patterns, clusterchords and Lasse’s frenetic over-the-top screams. The ending is a favorite moment on the record; the sudden and very unnatural sounding complete silence came up coincidentally, but somehow it fits the intense and psychologically surreal mood of the song perfectly.

JM: This is probably the track where the post-hardcore influence is most apparent. I love the guitars in the outro – again I’m reminded of Jawbox. And Line plays some awesome drums. Great track.

#8 The First Cause

SL: With The First Cause we set out to merge swirling soundscapes with ongoing, almost floating rhythms and distinct melodies in the midst of it all. Taking place in this setting of speed, the song evolves around the relationship to the past and the journey as rite. With the ending reaching a near-transcending effect it seemed very appropriate to let the song be the final statement on the album.

JM: This track has a wonderful motoric groove from start to finish and the band manages to weave all the aspects of their sound into one homogenous piece. Again, there’s a lot of different sounds in this track, but it doesn’t sound too artificial or polished. It still sounds raw and natural even though there’s a lot going on in the soundscape all the time.

This week’s featured track see’s us land at the feet of some purely sublime dreampop courtesy of Boxharp and their stunning track ‘Rainbirds’ off the Loam Arcane EP. The wonderful video accompaniment to the track comes to us via the talented Mark Solter.

We’ve been slowly building up our SoundCloud streams and YouTube Mp3 streams so we’ll drop a featured track regularly here on the blog for your delectation.

First cab off the rank is the awesome Manual (aka Jonas Munk) remix of the Salli Lunn track ‘The Invention of Steel’. The track is lifted from the wonderful Salli Lunn remix album A Frame Of Reference I which features remixes from the likes of Scott Solter, Markus Mehr, City of Satellites, TV Baby and Manual along with previously unreleased tracks. Its a gem so do have a listen if you’ve not already. Those in the know will realise that Jonas Munk actually produced Heresy and Rite, the album that the remixed originals spring from. Jonas is also one third of the wonderful Causa Sui along with Jess Kahr and Jakob Skott (Syntaks).

Enjoy!

Salli Lunn – ‘The Invention of Steel (Manual Remix)’

People we have a treat for you. Chamber-pop experimentalist extraordinaire Liam Singer walks us track by track through his critically acclaimed 2010 album Dislocatia. Lots of wonderful insights and fun factoids from our man on the inside.

Before you go on, we’ve provided a full album stream via Bandcamp at the bottom of the post. You should also head here to a) download the three free (!) singles off the album and b) buy the album on CD or digital.

To co-incide with this lovely little expose Hidden Shoal have two copies of the CD up for grabs. Answer one stupidly simple question and be in the the draw to win. Send an email to this address with “Dislocation Comp” in the subject line and tell us which Cat Power song Liam Singer covers on Dislocatia. We’ll contact the winners on the 4th of November.

Dislocatia Track by Track

1. On Earth a Wandering Stranger Was I Born

I wanted this piece to have the feel of an old movie’s opening credits – that overture-like, technicolor sweep.  The title is paraphrased from an inscription by the side of the road that Werner Herzog recounts in his journal “Of Walking in Ice” – “On earth a restless stranger was I born/In mortal danger, though in the midst of life”

2. The Brief Encounter

This was a fun one to record with the children’s choir – having them sing the line “you are wasting your life” over and over again.  They were curious what the song was about.  One sort of spazzy boy came up to me afterward and said “It’s true, isn’t it?  What are any of us really doing here?”  So I think I gave him his first existential crisis.  I wrote the melody for this song while driving up the California coast from Half-Moon Bay to San Francisco, meaning that first line (“I was driving up the coast”) did, in fact, happen.  Not that the rest of it didn’t…

3.  Leave the World to Those Who Care

I could listen to Wendy Allen’s voice forever.  She should be famous.

4.  Mold Me Torn Fan

A very Nino Rota-inspired track.  I was happy with how this piece worked out arrangement-wise… Scott Solter and I played around with a lot of sounds in the studio.  The title is an anagram for Morton Feldman, who is a recurring character on this record.

5.  Winter Weeds

As this album was starting to take shape, I noticed that there weren’t many pieces based on musical loops… everything was very harmonically forward-moving, and I thought it would be nice to have something that was structured more in the addition/subtraction of elements.  I was very into the M83 album Saturdays=Youth at the time, so I thought I’d try to take the quality of the 80′s contrapuntal action I was hearing on that album and transport it to a 19th century quaker meeting…

6.  Dislocatia/Mouthmoss

I think a lot of people skip over this track, though it’s one of my favorites on the album – I love melodies that exist at the edge of tonality.

7.   Bellingham, WA and the Four Green Doors beyond

This song is about a road trip I took with a friend.  The Four Green Doors in the title are a reference to a piece I later saw at the Whitney Biennial by Adam Putnam called “Green Hallway,” which uses light and mirrors to project four green infinite passageways onto the four walls of a room.  The room felt to me like like a meeting place of past and future events, and of possible lives.

8.  Morton Feldman Holding Notes for Eternity

I honestly have no idea how I thought of this song… It’s a strange one.

9.  Dead Old Friend

I’ve been surprised by how many people really like this track.  With some distance, I can see that it has a sort of Edward Gorey-esque quality that sometimes seems to show up I my music.  I wanted body sounds for the percussion – I liked the mental image of a couple of old guys dancing around and clapping – so most of the noises are generated by Dave Flaherty, the percussionist, clapping his hands and slapping his belly.

10.  Victory Steps

One of the more difficult things for me to do is write a simple pretty melody without getting too clever or strange with it.  Thus, the main melody of this piece is a victory for me.  I did let myself get a little clever and strange in the middle section.  “Victory Steps” is a nonexistent victorian-era dance/strut that one does to this song, at least in my head.

11.  Cross Bones Style

I’ve always loved this Cat-Power song, and started playing it for myself on the piano.  As it evolved, I started bringing in Philip Glassy polyrhythms, and then envisioning the close harmonies that you hear Wendy Allen singing so beautifully.

12.  Words Make the Master

This is one of a couple pieces on this album that I wrote while living on an island in Maine for a little while.  You’d think a quiet place might result in quieter music, but I found the opposite to be true – my own thoughts became amplified, and I started indulging in the heightened craziness you hear here.

13. Erat Hora

Another piece that is very Nino Rota/Ennio Morricone inspired.  The title is the name of an Ezra Pound poem:

‘Thank you, whatever comes.’ And then she turned

And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers

Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside,

Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes

One hour was sunlit and the most high gods

May not make boast of any better thing

Than to have watched that hour as it passed.

I like that, in between everything that’s difficult and impenetrable and cranky about Ezra Pound’s work, he wrote beautiful sentimental little things like that.

14. Into Tendril and Vine

I almost didn’t put this song on the album – at the time, I think I was a little embarrassed by how theatrical it was.  Now I really like it, which is a good lesson in not being afraid to go a little bit over the top.

15. From Fast to Slow/ Behind This World

Thanks once again to Wendy Allen’s vocal acrobatics, the tumbling counterpoint lines here really shine through.  I feel like this song contains the seeds for an entire approach to songwriting – one that I haven’t continued to explore, but would like to return to one day.

16.  Stinson Beach

Like “Dislocatia/Mouthmoss,” “Stinson Beach” is a track that is not immediately accessible and doesn’t get a lot of love, but that I’m personally very proud of.  It’s abstract and slow, but ultimately melodically driven.  Stinson Beach is a beach town north of San Francisco.  When I lived in SF I took a lot of trips there, and have some great memories of the place.

Boxharp’s superb new single ‘The Green‘ was released last week and is currently available for free download from the Hidden Shoal Store. Snap it up – it’s an incandescent tune, rich in Scott Solter’s trademark production details and swimming in the dreamy vocals of Wendy Allen.

Ahead of the release of the album of the same name, I had a brief email chat with Scott and Wendy:

Tim: First up, how did you and Scott end up working together? You both have pretty extensive musical resumes…
Wendy: How we came to work together is really the story of how we met. Scott had just started engineering and was working on his first album, The Brief Light. He was looking for a singer and my roommate, who was working with him at the time, recommended me. We just kept working together in various capacities from then on.

What are your main sources of inspiration, musical or otherwise?
Wendy: Both melodically and lyrically, I most often start with a question; what would happen if I…? or What would it be like if were…?
Scott: I’m often moved by visual references from Francis Bacon, Joel-Peter Witkin, Brothers Quay, and Joseph Cornell. For music, I’m drawn towards the very dense or very minimal.

How does a Boxharp song come into being? Do you write separately or together? Is it a simple division of labour, with Scott covering all the music and you covering all the vocals? When do the lyrics come?
Wendy: We usually start with one of us introducing a very simple idea or element. We ping pong back and forth over a period of time, then sit together and collaborate to complete the piece in a few days. Sometimes lyrics come first; sometimes a rhythm comes first and the lyrics come last.

With The Green due for release very soon, do Boxharp have plans to tour?
Yes, we plan to tour.

Finally, coffee or tea?!
Coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, Jameson in the evening.

Boxharp – The Green Boxharp – The Green

Last month the gentlemen from The Caribbean headed down to Austin Texas for one of the biggest music conferences in the world, South by South West, with their US label Hometapes. So we thought we’d take a moment to catch up on all the news, post festival.

First and foremost, how was SxSW? Stories to share?
Saw a lot of comics walking around: Brian Posehn, Sandra Bernhard, Eugene Mirman. Saw a lot of dickheads walking around, too. Dave tried to throw a beer bottle over the Emo’s Annex tent just to see if he could… Turns out you can.

Who in your opinion is a must hear artist today?
Besides us?

Of course.
Hairy Pussy, Wolf Eyes, Van Dyke Parks.

Describe for the readers the music scene over in Washington?
Like everywhere else, I suppose, splintered and complex. More stuff going on than you can keep track of. Used to be pretty monolithic, with Dischord being kind of the source for everything, but lots of other interesting stuff going on now, too.

Who or what are your main sources of inspiration and why?
Mostly, things we mishear. The best songs are the ones misheard from a distance, through crowds of people, and entire elements are misplaced sonically or drowned out due to acoustics. Or inadvertently combined with other songs playing in the same space. Happened at SXSW a lot. The original song is never as interesting as the one misheard.

Can you please describe to the lovely people your writing process.
One of us will hear a weird sound somewhere, record it on cassette or whatever is available, then we all keep adding to it until it takes a shape we like. Then we spend hundreds of hours listening to it and talking about it, then add parts in quick takes until we feel it’s what it should be.

How did the remix EP by Scott Solter eventuate?
He had done a remix record with some Hometapes labelmates of ours; we loved his style of tactile, analog deconstruction, and had to work with him. Met him at SXSW ’07 and hashed it out.

What are your plans for the foreseeable future?
Release this next record, Discontinued Perfume, on Hometapes in mid-2010, then tour relentlessly to support it until everyone knows who we are and either loves us or hates us. Also gonna drink some fortified wine in a little bit.

The Caribbean – Color Television (Scott Solter Remix) The Caribbean – Color Television (Scott Solter Remix)

Jamie Barrett