Glissando Interview
This is an interview with Glissando done before their show at the freebutt on the 2nd February, 2009.
The country was buried under the heaviest snowfall that’d been seen for years but slightly miraculously Glissando were able to navigate their way down the icy roads from Nottingham, to continue their tour at the Freebutt. Trudging through the streets to get to the gig was hard work and the weather undoubtedly put some people off, but those who did make it found the snowy atmosphere outside matched perfectly by the band’s ethereal set.
The Leeds group consist of two core members, Elly May Irving and Richard Knox, but collaborate with many other musicians both in the studio and live to create the kind of epic, cinematic soundscapes that are the perfect accompaniment to winter evenings. Their music could be compared to Efterklang, Bat For Lashes and Godspeed You Black Emperor; it demands patience, but rewards you with an experience that’s warm, intimate and soothing to the spirit.
Sitting in the cosy, dim-lit upstairs bar of the Freebutt, they talked about the tour, their album, and Richard’s label, Gizeh.
What made you decide to tour now – are you still promoting the album last year’s debut album, ‘With Our Arms Wide Open We Walk Towards The Burning Sea’, or showcasing new material?
Richard: A little bit of both. It’s probably the last tour for this record, certainly in the UK…we’ve done four tours in the last 9 months.
Elly: In Europe and in the UK. And we’re hoping to go to Ireland.
R: It seemed like a good time for a final tour before we start writing some new stuff. We have a couple new songs on this tour. Also it was an opportunity to take a full band with us as well. We’ve taken 2 before, now we’ve got 4, cello, violin and an extra guitar. It seemed like the right thing to do. But then today I was like ‘why did we come out?! It’s the end of January, the country’s covered in snow!’
E: But it’s difficult to know when to tour, because you can’t tour from May until the end of October because no one’s going to gigs, they’re all going to festivals and stuff so it seems like you have to do it around this time. But also after Christmas is not a great time either. By the end of January it’s cold and you kind of thing people have been paid and there’s not much going on in January. It’s been cool so far, we’ve done 4 shows and they’ve been good so hopefully tonight will be ok!
The album got great reviews, were you happy with the reception?
R: I think so, yeah. A lot of people seemed to pick up on it
E: I think more people got it than we thought were gonna get it. It’s strange, you put something out there and you just wonder if people are gonna understand it.
R: You never know what it’s gonna be like. But I think it’s got a certain element to it which probably satisfies a few different areas of people’s tastes, so you know we did get a lot of good reviews. There’s no particular influence as such to the album but I think certain areas of the press picked up on elements of it, I guess the more post-rock side of it seemed to get picked up by a lot of people. It made a few of the end of year polls which was nice. There was one where we sandwiched between Beck and somebody else… it was like, ‘fucking hell, our albums got voted better than Beck’s!’ A little bit scary but also kind of cool.
I was happy with it. Because I run the label as well it’s always difficult to do press and stuff for your own band because you’re more humble about it. You’ve gotta split yourself in two, put your label and P.R. head on when you’re doing that and pretend its not even your band. But the reception’s been good and it’s kind of kept going, hopefully it’ll just lead into the next thing that we do. We’re gonna do some writing when we get back off the tour, maybe do some shows in Europe and hopefully by the end of the year we’ll have something new on the horizon.
Elly, in the album’s lyrics there are a lot of references to natural elements and fire in particular. What compels you to write about that?
E: It just comes from heart really; it just seems to all pour out of my head. I haven’t purposefully chosen it to be like that, it just seemed to develop like that. I like nature, I spend a lot of my work life away from it, so I think it’s the thing that comforts me, to be in nature. So maybe that’s where I reference from. But I don’t purposefully pick anything like that. It’s not a conscious decision; it’s just what comes out of me.
R: The album became its own concept as we recorded it. I guess to an outside listener it sounds like it’s themed but it’s not intentionally… but I think it kind of worked out that way, especially with the artwork.
You guys used to do the band’s artwork completely yourselves – have you stopped that now or are you still involved?
E: We tried a bit for the album, we tried a few things but we decided to pick something that was more professionally done.
R: We’ve always done a lot of handmade stuff, and CDRs. But there’s only a certain amount you can do, when you’ve got to press a few thousand copies of an album you can’t really. But the artwork, we had the album title and were searching around for some artwork for it and bizarrely enough we were sat at Elly’s house and just googled the album title to see what came up. This guys flickr photo page came up, because one of his photographs was a few words out of the album title.
Straight away it was just like ‘that’s amazing’, all of his photos were just perfect. So we emailed the guy and were like, ‘your stuffs amazing, would you be interested in working on our album?’ and he said sure. He was great, me and him worked on it together, over email and a few phone calls, and it’s perfect… for me it’s better than I ever thought it could be.
Do you think it’s a shame that itunes and downloading have moved people’s focus away from album artwork?
E: Yeah very much so. We know from being consumers ourselves that we prefer something that’s got some substance to it. It just gives you another face for the expression of the piece of artwork that you’re doing.
R: I think people are growing less interested in the artwork side of it. I wish we could have done the album on vinyl, that would have been amazing but money wasn’t there.
E: I think with music it’s really important to be visually stimulated. I love seeing bands that have got visuals. It’s something that we definitely work towards.
R: I think album sales are obviously diminishing a bit in physical form. I’d love to do digipacks and gatefold sleeves but honestly the money’s not there. Doing a digipack costs twice as much as doing a regular sleeve.
E: I went to see a guy called Bobby Privy and he’d actually written a set of music based on pictures. To me that’s brilliant because it’s two different types of stimulation.
Richard could you tell me a bit about your record label, Gizeh, and also about the sort of criteria that a band needs to meet to get on the label.
R: The label started out six years ago, releasing CDRs, putting out our own stuff and friends’ bands. We met various people as we were playing shows, and we just got more serious about it. It’s been a long time getting to the point it’s at now. The label’s in a really nice place now, we’ve got a bunch of bands that are all great, they’re all set on the idea of the label.
E: The label seems to attract a certain type of band…
R: The main thing for the label is, I have to like the band. It could be the most amazing band you’ve ever heard and you could sell thousands of copies of their album, but if they’re dicks I’m not interested. A lot of the bands come from friends of friends, or bands we meet touring. There’s no specific angle to the label but i think it’s developed a sound over the years. We’ve got a really nice bunch of bands on it and its more like a family setup, all of the bands have a say and I’d never dictate and say ‘the artwork needs to look like this’. We’ve got three new records coming out, it’s going to be a good year I think.
Finally: you guys are big on collaborations. On the album you collaborated with people like Dave Martin (iLiKETRAiNS), Angharad Cooper (Held By Hands) and Tom Morris (Her Name Is Calla). Who would be your dream collaboration?
R: Tom waits
E: Tom waits?!
R: He’s my absolute hero!
E: I’d not pick something too big because I’d be too nervous.
R: The bands that we play with and musicians we play with are brilliant, we’ve met a lot of good friends over the years.
E: It’s nice to collaborate with friends because you learn a different side of them
E: The Constellation bands from Canada like Godspeed and A Silver Mount Zion, are a big inspiration in terms of a collective thing. That’s what I want for the label as well. It’s always what I’ve wanted over the years, to build up something like that. I think we’re just an extension of all of that.
Graham Pembrey