Foto-© Jamie Shipston Mourn

Aus der Isolation hinaus in die Welt: Overmonos mit Spannung erwartetes, zweites Album Pure Devotion (erschienen am 7. August) geht aufs Ganze und übertrifft ihre bisherigen klanglichen, physischen und mentalen Grenzen. In unserem Interview sprechen die beiden Brüder Ed und Tom Russell über Versuch und Irrtum, das Experimentieren mit dem Unbekannten und das Bewegen zwischen verschiedenen Welten. Toms und Eds Instinkte bilden das Fundament des Albums und führen durch zufällige Feedback-Schleifen und funky zerschnittene Vocals, bleiben dabei aber stets vollkommen authentisch. Wie sie selbst sagen: Lass dich ganz von dieser Klangwand mitreißen, achte nicht zu sehr auf die Hunde und fühle einfach, was du fühlst. Geheimnisvoll und faszinierend, oder?

We are here to talk about your upcoming project, Pure Devotion that is out on the 7th August. I have already heard it and it’s a perfect mix between high energy bangers and lower energy tracks that work as a breath of fresh air, but all with an optimistic flair. What is the world that you’re trying to achieve?
Ed: It is difficult to define it in words in terms of the sonic landscape. We have no fixed ways of achieving that. It’s something we talk about a lot, something that we both know really instinctively when we achieve it. I’d say with every song we achieve it in a completely different way because that is just of how we write. The way we approach music changes all the time.

What is your mission? What is something you want to communicate to people with your music?
Tom: The music that we are really drawn towards in the music that we listen to and in the music that we make, is a sense of in-between emotions, a bit of ambiguity. We try not to be too descriptive in terms of what we want to convey emotionally with the music. We’re looking for the space in between. When I listen to a record from one of my favorite producers, it makes me feel all sorts of emotions, for instance and I couldn’t necessarily pin down what those emotions are supposed to be and that for me is the magic of music and art; if you are hardly sure what that is. That’s something that really reinforms us in the music that we make.
I remember seeing a Rothko for the first time in real life and that really got me. I wasn’t expecting it. I wasn’t fully able to describe what I felt looking at it and I don’t think people would listen to our music the same depending on the situation they are in.

I really like that comparison to Rothko, because initially you’re like “oh, this is a block of color”, but then if you’re standing there, looking at it, then you realise it’s a lot deeper and more layered than that. Do you have that thought a lot? For example, people think that electronic music is superficial, but then when people are experiencing it live, they start to understand it.
Ed: Yes, definitely. They are seeing the massive block of color in front of them. There is a lot to be said about that. Like Berum, halfway through everything gets really out of tune. That is always what we try to push; pushing how far you can take it out of its normal harmonic world and snap it back in. It’s kind of like a nightmare, I suppose.

Exactly. I read that this album is obviously about devotion, and that it has a lot of happy accidents and experimentation. Are those happy accidents something you look for or did it just happen, like an actual accident? It reminds me of Bob Ross, in a way.
Tom: The way our studio is set up – we are always changing the set up anyways – we will always leave room for stuff to happen which we didn’t necessarily intend to happen. So, we can start off with an idea and sometimes you end up realizing that idea fully, but most of the time, along the way you happen to have another idea and you run with that. That is something that I think is inspiring in the studio.
Ed: It’s this idea of the adjacent possible. It’s how the system, and it can be any system from biological to mechanical, but innovation occurs naturally in these systems based on whatever is available in the adjacent possible within that system. It is not pulling from outside that system and that’s something that we think about a lot in terms of how we organize or set up our studios. We set up the studio in a very specific way for a certain period of time, which within its very nature forces us down particular ways where happy accidents form directly. It’s almost getting something defined musically out of the way that you might have the studio set up. In those times you explore all the things that you would never naturally think of doing and try to create an environment where you’re likely to make mistakes or you are likely to accidentally push feedback into something else that you weren’t intending on doing. You can get so molecular with that whole theory, but it just boils down to how you organize and how easy to cross-polinate ideas with eachother. So, we think about that quite a lot and that just helps guide us when writing. We created a defined framework when we started writing this record. It was quite important to us to define that framework so that we knew what the boundaries were and to be able to bend them. That goes back to a lot of the equipment that we’re using, which is very simple basic equipment, but when you have much less control over something, it is much easier to figure out how you can make it do something that it doesn’t naturally do, because you’ve only got 10 controls in front of you. You just see what happens. It’s easier to try and get the thing out of it that maybe someone else hasn’t thought of doing before. We’ve been amazed at how many good garage basslines you could get out of TSE.

That is the beauty of music, because music is endless. You have certain melodies, but what you can do with sound technology, digital or analog, it’s like an endless toyshop.
Tom: It’s a neverending quest of new ways of building a track. We don’t have a set way of making music and that’s sometimes frustrating because it would be nice to know when you get in the studio and what to do, but also it’s really liberating when you really embrace it. It’s really exciting because you step in the studio and you never know what’s going to happen.

Do you sometimes like to look for that kind of frustration or uncomfortable feeling? You have an initial idea, but it doesn’t really pan out like you wish it were, but you’re continuing on. Is that something you sometimes do on purpose?
Ed: Yeah, it can be. Sometimes we would have a very defined idea from the start, but we are always open to let it develop in the way that feels natural at the time. Similarly, we would often have days in the studio where we have no idea and just explore and create. Those are often the most productive sessions. If you can get into that headspace, and that is so good; the best time to work is when everyone is having fun. It’s the weekend or the evening or bank holiday, it is when you feel like everyone else is doing what they enjoy doing and you’re in the studio enjoying what you’re doing,it just feels pure: I don’t want to be doing anything else. That is always for us when writing happens most naturally. This is why we do a lot of remote writing. You just feel disconnected from everything; real life doesn’t exist anymore, I wouldn’t rather be doing anything else right now anyway. We often have very intensive short writing sessions in which we write a lot of the music, then work on it for a couple of months. We have these seven day long intensive writing periods and then another one month later we piece it all together.

You’re doing a lot of creation in isolation. Why is isolation such an inspiring place for you?
Tom: Throwing routine out the window is really healthy. You’re in the same studio and in the same environment, you do naturally settle into a rhythm. You have meals at the same time, whatever else. When we go on these writing trips, we just sleep when we’re tired, eat when we’re hungry. Those are the two golden rules. You start getting in this headspace, which is quite unusual for you to be in because you might end up being sleepdeprived and you don’t even know it at the time, because you’re just so involved in making music. You just don’t realize that you haven’t really slept for 24 hours and then you start getting into these unusual headspaces.

Is the flow that strong? You just forget to sleep?
Tom: That’s the magic spot to get into. It’s the easiest to get into when we go on these kinds of trips.
Ed: Disconnecting from reality, for as much as possible. The more you can do that, the more you can create completely freely, not thinking about anything else. It was something really important for us when we first started this project. No one knew that we started this project. So, the first writing trip we did, we had complete freedom because no one knew we were in the studio together. We hadn’t planned to make a record, but after 5 days we had 14 tracks. It all happened in a blur that I don’t seem to remember. So that level of disconnecting is incredibly helpful to just get the idea that feels the truest to yourself. Both of us would find it very difficult to know what we wanted to make, if we were listening to every new dance record that was coming out. It can knock your compass. Of course, a lot of the time, particularly when we are writing, we block out as much as possible. It’s really helpful and the path you are trying to follow seems much clearer and that’s when all starts to flow.

It does make sense. When you’re blocking out everything else, you can focus on yourself pretty much. Have you always written like that? Or is this just the way you eventually found out that this works for you?
Tom: It was. It was the first ever writing trip that led to forming this thing, Overmono. With the first writing trip that we did, we didn’t have any idea releasing the music, let alone, becoming this thing that it has. There is something really special about that mindset, that we tried to carry that on with us. That’s something that’s very important that we can keep coming back to.

Because of this trip, to Iceland, right? You created this album, Pure Devotion. What was the process like coming up with this theme of complete conviction and devotion?
Ed: Iceland, maybe, actually was where most of it happened, and the studio sessions in the North of Spain. I’d say the ideas for what we wanted to achieve, what the framework should be, was all of us talking about it before going. We do quite some preparation before going away, so when you get there, you can get into this not-thinking space. We spent a lot of time planning, and we are limited to the synths, drum machines, whatever else. We were thinking of how to set that up. We do loads of sample hunting and everything else in the pre-writing sessions, so when you get there, there’s nothing to conceptualize at all. You’ve got all the tools. You’ve got the map and it’s just like “okay well let’s just be free and do whatever we want to do”. That’s the best thing, but it’s really hard getting that headspace, I think, to get into it, but it’s something we’ve done for a long time. It’s always when we come up with writing our best music, I think.

From what I understand, and I don’t know if most electronic musicians have this, but you are very sonically driven, and I was wondering how you come up with the lyrical content of your songs. Most of it are samples, I suppose, what makes you choose that sample? How do you lyrically conceptualize what you want to say?
Tom: For us, vocalists are another instrument; a very powerful instrument. A lot of the time we’ll catch a vocal and it’s fairly unintelligible in terms of the lyrical content, but we like the way that it can sort of lead you into thinking it’s saying something and that will be different to different people. That’s something that we always find quite fascinating how different people hear different things. There are some vocals that we have that are intelligible, but we don’t want to be too descriptive about the chords, the melodies and what emotion it’s supposed to give you. If anything, if the lyrics are quite overt, we try to then maybe dial it back with the instrumental behind it.
Ed: What I was thinking then is, you might have a synth part with a particular lyric that becomes a bit too overtly trying to give something or present a specific thing. We will often just change the very first syllable of a word, and then the sound becomes completely different. A word becomes something new or something completely unintelligible. I couldn’t tell you what it is that we are trying to achieve, though, as we just like the way it sounds. It’s first the voice we are drawn to, first and foremost, and so the lyrics are the trickier thing. It’s more the hook, but we are not trying to say what we want to convey.

You just want to keep it vague?
Tom: No, not purposefully even. We know exactly when we hear it, like that is what we want, but then what it means to someone else, is not on us.

Art is subjective, as they say.
Ed: Exactly, that goes back to what we were talking about earlier, about isolation and blocking everything else out. That is where it really comes honestly from whatever it is that is inside you. We clearly have very similar music tastes from when we grew up and that informs what we like.

I really feel your music is very optimistic sounding. It sounds happy, why is it important for you to bring this sense of euphoria? Do you think that this is the role of electronic music?
Ed: What is really nice, is that you say that it feels very optimistic and it’s really nice that you are picking up on that. We had an interview with someone else last week and they said that they were quite emotional and they had a stronger emotional response to what they were expecting. They were listening to this record at 11am and now their whole day felt different. That comes back to exactly what we were talking about you picking up on different properties than other people, like happiness or rage. That’s really nice. For us, it feels like there is often an optimistic element, but again that is just the music we like and came out of it.

It is very interesting that I got the happier side of the coin and then someone else gets the darker side of the coin.
Ed: Exactly that! It is often not intentional, but sometimes we do push that further. We intentionally mix two elements together that possess so many different feelings, just in some chord progression.

It’s funny how people prescribe an emotion to those sounds and that every sound has a different emotional resonance.
Ed: It’s as simple as a decending melody turning sad. It’s weird how people are wired up, and not that we are thinking like that when we write. It really is how humans are….It is probably conditioning, but I don’t know.

Maybe I can tie this to it: you’re from Wales, right? Has that environment played a role in your sound and maybe how you’re crafting it? Because if you’re thinking about how different people are maybe conditioned to feel this way, has your environment impacted you on how you experience music?
Tom: Maybe from the point of view of where we grew up, we did not have any record shops or clubs, or anything to massively inform us. There wasn’t a scene. Everything was up for grabs when we were growing up and there wasn’t any snobbery about you listening to this particular genre or anything being cool or whatever. We just consumed it all and looking back, I feel really lucky to have had that musical education without feeling like I had to be into this particular thing because it’s the cool thing at the time. I think that’s something that is really important the way we approach music.

So the key here is diversity. People should listen to all types of music, of course.What is next for you in terms of tour, what kind of projects are coming up. As per my final question, what is some advice you can give to beginning producers?
Tom: Don’t get too wrapped up in what other people are saying. Just write, write, write.
Ed: Ignore all the rules. You have to find out what works for you and not stick by what other people tell you. What we are doing; touring, some other stuff coming out later in the year, which is something we can’t really talk about.

Overmono live:
12.11.26 Berlin, Uber Eats Music Hall