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A Lily
(James Vella)
What inspired you to write the songs on wake:sleep?
The entirety of wake:sleep was for my girlfriend,
and was inspired by her. I
thought I should try and make something that's just
for her, and writing songs seems to be what I'm best
at.
How did you go about recording them?
I record everything in my bedroom/studio, which is
a laptop, a hard-drive recorder, ambient mics and as
many instruments as I can find. For wake:sleep, I used
guitar, bass, piano, accordion, drums, glockenspiel,
lapsteel, and vocals, as well as a few programmed synths
and recorded samples.
Tell us a bit about the
last two "ambient" pieces.
The last two pieces were originally recorded just for
her private listening – for whenever she
wanted to sleep to something I'd written – but
I ended up liking them enough to include them on the
release. They were both played live, with improvised
guitar through a few delay pedals.
How does the writing process for A Lily differ from
your other band, Yndi Halda?
Yndi is a much more gradual process. With that band,
we tend to have a 'finished' version of a piece that
differs so drastically from the final arrangement we
end up recording, it might as well be a different song.
We work on songs so much even after we've decided to
stop doing so. With A Lily, though, I prefer to just
listen to my head for a while, until I can create something
in theory, and then I try to re-create it with real
sounds. So it's less about experimentation and more
about translation.
Do you think your environment influences your music?
Definitely. I doubt A Lily or Yndi would sound anything
like they do if we hadn't all grown up in the halcyon
summers of south-east Kent and never had to hear police
sirens at night or dodge cars in our playgrounds. |
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