I make a lot of different types of music, I write weird folk music, and punk rock and dance music. And when I was making this record I didn’t know what type of record it should be and then at some point I thought, well it’s a record inspired by empty cities at two o’clock in the morning. And when I am not making music in empty hotel rooms at two o’clock in the morning I listen to a lot of weird, old, electronic music. So I thought, oh, I guess this album should be an album of weird old electronic music. 

So the song ‘Sevastopol’ it’s an instrumental that originally I thought I was the only one who was gonna like it. And I played it to my manager and few other people and they liked it. Which made me think that I should actually put it on a record and the more I lived with it the more I really liked it. 

It’s hard to speak positively about my own music but what I really like about this song is, it’s quiet driving, it’s ostensibly a dance song, but the music is really mournful with quiet a lot dissonance in it. It’s sort of big, enveloping, cinematic, electronic, melodic component with quite cold, repetitive electronic drum loops underneath. 

When I was in the Ukraine, there is a town in Ukraine called Sevastopol and I just thought it’s the coolest sounding name for a town. So there is literally no correlation between the name and the track except that I like the track and I like the name and I thought they somehow make sense together. Maybe in the future I will say that the song was written in Sevastopol except someone could check and realise I never actually been to Sevastopol.


Sevastopol

‘The Low Hum’ was another broken down electronic, instrumental track and I gave it to my friend Emily Zuzik and what’s funny is, I didn’t even tell her what the album was about the theme of music for empty cities at two o’clock in the morning and she basically wrote these lyrics about being in a hotel room at two o’clock in the morning in an empty city. 

So maybe she is psychic. I don’t know but it’s a song without a chorus, which I like. And her voice has this quiet sort of disembodied quality to it, which was really hard for her because she is a big singer. If it was up to her, she would have sang it broadway style but I wanted it to be that sort of disconcerting, warm, womb like quality, where the vocals are almost like someone singing to themselves instead of projecting for all the world to hear, it’s sort of like someone in a bath tub, in a hotel next to the Stuttgart train station at three o’clock in the morning singing to yourself in the bath tub. So vocally I think that’s what I was trying to get her to do.

The Low Hum

I’m not allowed to pick favourite songs because it sounds self serving and also I run the risk of offending the songs that I don’t pick, but at present ‘Rockets’ is my favourite song on the record because it just got a winsome, resigned, melodic, emotional quality to it that I really love. 

I also like the way it appears in the record because it’s sort of like the record is building, building and all of a sudden pulls back with this very broken, messed up piece of quiet, pretty, electronic music. 

My friend Inyang sang on that and she sings in about 4 or 5 songs on the record and she is particularly interesting because she is this very tall statuesque African-American woman and she has a perfect, almost like Mahalia Jackson style gospel voice but she grew up listening to Punk Rock. And when I met her she was working at Carnegie Hall in the world of contemporary classical music. So before she and I started working together, she didn’t really know Gospel and Soul that well. So the irony there is like nerdy, middle-aged, white guy introduces tall, beautiful statuesque African-American woman to Gospel and Soul. Because she grew up listening to the Dead Kennedys. 

The moment she starts singing, it just feels like it’s 1945, and you are driving along an empty stretch of the road in Nebraska, listening to some gospel radio station. 


Rockets

The Day was written in a hotel room in Spain at dawn when I hadn’t slept. It was a beautiful hotel room, a beautiful perfect hotel room and it was six or seven in the morning. I wrote it on a acoustic guitar and recorded it on my phone, brought it home and re-recorded it with old broken down electronics that I have in my studio

The Day

The song ‘Lie Down In Darkness’ is named after a William Styron book, and the song, at least for me is a very emotional, sort of mournful, piece of symphonic, electronic music, my friend Joy Malcolm sings on it. 

Right before he died I got to hear William Styron speak at a Paris review dinner, he read from Lie Down In Darkness, I was watching him read and it was beautiful and emotional. I remember looking around to see if anyone else was having the same reaction I was having, and I looked around and it was all this jaded, cynical New Yorkers who were checking their blackberries or their iphones, and not paying attention. It made me so disappointed. I was thinking, here is William Styron, who is this remarkable writer and he is sort of bearing his soul and you could tell he didn’t have much longer to live and most of the people were not paying attention. But I feel really fortunate that I got to see him and meet him right before he died.


Lie Down In Darkness

First to start with the title, Victoria Lucas was Sylvia Plath’s pseudo name when she wrote ‘The Bell Jar’. I keep going on bay, trying to find an original copy of ‘The Bell Jar’ written by Victoria Lucas and they show up every now and then but they are very pricy. 

A lot of the titles in the record are inspired by either my favourite writers or works by my favourite writers and this one it’s an instrumental. So there is always that question when you write an instrumental, what do you call it? So why not name it after one of my favourite writers? 

The way I write, composing or compiling a song, I start with one arbitrary, decontextualised element and in this case it was a backwards guitar loop. I have a foot switch where you play something into it, you push a button, and it takes what you played and plays it backwards but really lo-fi. I was playing guitar onto it and I ended up with this really weird sounding guitar loop that doesn’t sound like a guitar loop, I recorded that and started adding different elements. 

At first it was this very slow ballad like song and then I added house music drums to it, and house piano to it and ended up with this weird hodgepodge of quiet, disconcerting, atmospheric elements with house music elements. I hope it works. 

The guitar loop for Victoria Lucas was recorded here in New York. I was just living with the guitar loop listening to it over and over again. I had this terrible case of insomnia in Los Angeles. I was staying in a hotel there and so I started adding the quiet atmospheric elements to the song when I was in L.A. and I brought everything back to New York and turned it into a weird messed up, house music song.


Victoria Lucas

The song ‘After’ is another one of those many songs, that starts off with a vocoder and it’s also another song about messed up relationships that have stopped working.

What I really wanted to do with this song is have a middle section that goes on way too long and I hope I have achieved that. The song starts quiet and strange and then gets propulsive and energetic. And then about half way through the song it sort of stops for about a minute and a half and then it all comes back in. Whether anyone will notice this or care I don't know. 

On this record I played around with making things just a little bit longer than they should be, I like that with certain movies and books and pieces of music when something plays with people’s time expectations. You expect something to resolve at this point and it doesn’t, it sort of creates almost like a sense of tension and the person who is experiencing the movie or the piece of music. So when it does finally resolve, you’ve created more tension so it almost feels better. Hopefully I won't irritate people too much with some of the long songs on the record. 


After

The song ‘Blue Moon’ is one of the only other songs I sing on the record and it’s basically a really simple new wave, new romantic song that I was tempted to not put it on the record. 

I was talking to Daniel Miller, who started Mute Records and he got very passionate. He saying, 'you have to put this song on the record'. I really liked it but I was thinking 'it seems a little straight forward because most of the rest of the record is little more atmospheric and experimental'. So Daniel Miller was the one, who basically put a gun to my head and said, if you are gonna make this record, you have to put this song on it. 

I love late 70s, early 80s, new wave, synch pop. You know, the new romanic era. The one thing that’s hard in talking about the new romantic era is a lot of my favourite bands from then or favourite artists went on to make not very good records. But in 1980, ‘81, ‘82, Heaven 17 and Ultravox, and Visage, and early Simple Minds, that’s the inspiration, and New Order. The song ‘Blue Moon’ is solely inspired by that period. It’s what I grew up with and I still love it. 


Blue Moon

Now we enter the purely instrumental part of the record. So I have no idea how to talk about these songs. Except for basically how they are made and the title like ‘The Violent Bear It Away’. Flannery O’Connor was one of my other high-school crushes. I only had crushes on dead women and I love southern Gothic literature. Of all the southern Gothic writers I like, she is certainly my favorite, her writings where dark, and poignant and filled with grace, and funny at the same time. 

I had a little recorder in my living room and I was playing piano and I recorded three chords on the piano. Just little arpeggiated three chords, took this bad recording of piano into my studio, put it into pro-tools, looped it, looped it, looped it, and started adding all the other elements on top of it. 

One of the things I particularly liked about this song is it starts very simple and innocent and it gets bigger and it keeps getting bigger, it keeps getting bigger. I mean, I have no idea how anyone else might respond to the music that I make. So someone else might listen to this song and be like, oh you know what, it’s repetitive and boring and you might as well have left it off the record. But I personally love the way it develops and just when it gets to a certain point, it then gets a little bit bigger. It’s almost like the opposite of the Russian doll. Starting with the tiny doll, and gets bigger and bigger, and bigger. 


The Violent Bear It Away

Lacrimae is where my sense of history falls apart. I should have memorized the scene that I named it after. 

There is this a Latin quote which is ‘Lacrimae Rerum’ and it means ‘the tears of the world’. I am going to speak in generalization because if I try to be specific I’ll make a fool of myself. I think it is in the Aeneid, a warrior or someone was looking at a painting of a scene of a great battle and he was filled with pity and compassion for humanity, for the fact that humans live in this state of constant struggle and sadness. 

So the expression ‘Lacrimae Rerum’ means tears for human suffering. Tears as in appropriate reaction to the human condition. I just like the title, and I think there is a Finnish goth band who are called Lacrimae Rerum as well. So me and the dark Finns, we like the title. 

One of my favourite guitar player is Tom Verlaine from Television, and my entire life I’ve been trying to sort of play electric guitar like Tom Verlaine. And so this one, I think I was playing the riff from ‘Marquee Moon’ and then I was sort of playing around and I recorded a little guitar riff and looped it, and then was almost an effort to add musical compositional elements that didn’t fit. So adding sync parts that didn’t fit, adding drums that didn’t fit, and to try to take a whole bunch of slightly awkward, ill placed elements and craft something cohesive from them and that was the idea from the song. 

Again, I’m not allowed to pick favourites, but it’s probably my second favourite song on the record because where it starts and where it ends up are so different. When I listen to the opening of it, it just sounds odd, melodic and winsome and then by the middle it’s this male strum and then it ends quiet and winsome again. 


Lacrimae

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GIAN - Skyward

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