Foto-© Tonje Thilesen

Endlich raus aus der Waldhütte: das Duo Sylvan Esso hat seinen Sound mittlerweile gefunden und kann es kaum erwarten, ihn auf dem neuen, heute erschienenem Album Ow ∞ mit voller Wucht auf die Hörer:innen loszulassen. Der Titel wirft Fragen auf? Das Cover auch? Und warum hat das alles so lange gedauert, wie sah der Entstehungsprozess aus? Keine Sorge, all das klären wir in diesem Interview. Wir sprechen mit Amelia und Nick über ihr, wie sie selbst sagen „bislang bestes Werk“, die endlose Reise zwischen Schmerz und Albernheit, die das Leben ausmacht, und ihren Wunsch, wirklich echt zu sein. Also so richtig echt, im Sinne von: alle Schichten abwerfen und sich selbst freilegen. Viel Spaß!

I am Max from Bedroomdisco, and of course we’re here to talk about your new album that will be released on the 11th of September. I’m trying not to really say what the title is, because honestly, I want to make sure if I’m pronouncing it right: how would you pronounce it?
Amelia: I call it Ow [au] Infinity [i.e. when you feel pain].

Ow [au] Infinity. Do you both say it the same way or do you have another way?
Nick: Yeah, we do say Ow infinity. There’s a little more wiggle room when we first named it, and it’s kind of settled into Infinity. What have you been calling?

In my head, I read it like “oh”. You know what I thought? When you say “oh”, you have so many different tonalities to how you can say “oh”, like an infinite way of saying it. Hence the infinity sign. That’s how I read it, but Ow Infinity actually makes more sense. How did you come up with that? How did you come up with that notation?
Amelia: When we were in the midst of mixing, I wrote a list of 50 potential names and I wanted something that was a little funny, but also a little irreverent, but also talking about the fact that the record itself is about a lot of ambient dread and silliness. I’ve found that Ow Infinity kind of wrapped everything in the right package for me.
Nick: I think there’s a lot of names. The themes that started to emerge were really kind of around being hurt over and over and over again and having to live is something that hurts. I think a lot of the titles we were talking about kind of were adjacent to that.

What were the other options? What were in the drafts?
Amelia: Let me look.
Nick: I haven’t thought about this in a lot. [gets handbook]

I’m curious.
Nick: A couple of song titles kind of fit, like Flood Season. I think that song says a similar thing that “our Infinity” ended up saying. but felt more specific.
Amelia: Destroyer. Kableuy. That was like too silly. Babies’ baby. Told you so. Downer.
Nick: What? I don‘ remember any of these.
Amelia: Universal Boat.
Nick: Universal Boat? I remember zero of these.
Amelia: Universal groan. They all just sound as good as Ow Infinity.

I find it interesting that you chose a sound as an album title instead of a word. What does that sound then represent for you?It’s like hurt and pain, but is that what it is?
Amelia: That’s what it is. It’s not like a big hurt, but it’s significant enough to make you say something.

If you hit your toe, it’s like ow, or sometimes it’s a very big ow.
Nick: There’s a range of oh’s, and there’s a range of ow’s.

I really like the cover of it, how do you think the cover emulates the title of the album? Is there a correlation between the two?
Amelia: Oh, definitely. Ow infinity is a championing of the idea; the way that I’m standing, I’m holding like a sledgehammer, which feels to me that you are prepared to face the potential hurt

It’s like a battle cry?
Nick: Yes, I think there’s a lot of referential pieces to that image. When we had that idea and we got that specific photo. To me, there’s all sorts of references to iconic images of both someone who has been pressed down and someone who is overcome. It feels like there’s both Jesus and Rosie the Riveter reference points there. It feels like a Greek statue. Then also having that radiant rainbow covering the center feels like both an exuberant and a censorship at the same time. I think that those dualities to me play into everything that made the title feel correct and that resonates in the record.

I thought the choice of this stripe was very interesting, because it isn’t that you hide it; it’s like the stripe is just there, front and center.
Amelia: If you buy the vinyl of the record, though, you can remove the stripe.

That’s good to know. The stripe is just very unexpected and abstract, because you have it looks like a very beautiful picture and then you just abstruct it.
Amelia: I’m so proud of that cover.
Nick: I love it so much. Yeah, that stripe, to me, it does so many things. It feels like a censorship stripe recontextualized into a weapon or something, you know what I mean?

It has the feeling of a beam or light refracting, and it’s a rainbow, which it’s always nice to look at. I also just love your visual language in general. I was looking at your website and your Instagram and I just saw these two cartoons popping up; who are they? Do they represent you?
Amelia: They are definitely us.

How does the cartoon represent you?
Nick: As we were going through it, working with Eric and Graham and Aaron on the artwork, I think all of these avatars started showing up that were emphasizing an aspect of the thing that was happening. So those two central cartoons showed up a bunch of different times,with different aspects to them. But I think at least speaking for mine, when I look at that, I see a buffoon and a monster and a destroyer, and a teddy bear all in one thing.
Amelia: It is the same as the Ow infinity-thing where my avatar has a sword, but she’s also really cartoony and silly at the same time. There’s lots of humor wrapped into this.

You work with a lot of contrasts, I suppose. Why does that interest you?
Nick: I think musically, I’ve always found contrast to be really compelling. Even if it’s just something as simple as dynamic contrast, I feel like that’s always been kind of a cornerstone thing that we’ve used. It can feel cheap in the wrong application, but I think dynamic contrast is just something I’m always yearning for in music. I want to feel like the release of a big rise or the release of a big fall.
Amelia: We need contrast because it’s so easy when you’re making music to make it sound very beautiful and I find exclusively beautiful things to be offensive and not true. It’s a denial of reality or a denial of the humanity of things. With our music, I want to reflect the life we lead and that is not an exclusively beautiful event. That’s the most important part of the way that we produce together. It’s that we’re constantly trying to figure out how to add the grit back into something or how to highlight many different aspects of a feeling and not simply the easy and beautiful one.
Nick: I think our band has always been about how complicated being a person is, and that just inherently is about those contrasts. We’ve never really been interested in making a pure love song or a pure angry song. Those things aren’t really ever it. I feel like it is always more complicated than that.
Amelia: We don’t live in a fantasy world.

Perfection is boring, as they always say.
Amelia: It’s boring. It’s so boring. Which is also why we leave the tales of the end of our recordings in the final product; we like keeping the reality of the fact that we’re making recorded music inherently messy.

You say that “it’s messy, hellish, and free. It’s Scotch tape, collage of memories, ephemeral Y2K era burn CDs and backseat makeouts.” Especially the Y2K era recalls this sense of nostalgia, why do you explore nostalgia or this feeling?
Amelia: We never set out to do something that is nostalgic. There’s enough nostalgia. It’s so easy to make something feel perfect in the back mirror, but we were really into specifically radio hits from that era that were played when we were kids.
Nick: There’s something about that era. For me, I realized it was the first time I was cognizant of a worldwide anxiety. We were all kind of terrified, like, everyone’s terrified right now.There was like Y2K, September 11th, Iraq, and that entire time was really terrifying in America. It was the first time I remember feeling like I had no idea what was going to happen in the place I lived, which is an extremely lucky position for us to be in, but I identified that period as my first experience with that feeling. It’s like one that comes back up in times of increasing anxiety. Every peak, I feel like there’s a part of me that goes back to the kid I was then, and so I think that just made sense. The act of sampling also is something that has fascinated me, especially when somebody really nails it. Even if you can’t know what the sample is, hearing something where the artist is giving you an indication that you have heard it before, or that it has happened somewhere else at a different time in a different context, and it is being removed from that context and placed in this one, there’s such an emotional journey. It does a very specific thing to the way I’m hearing and experiencing a piece.

I think a lot of people now would say that the songs back then are perfect songs, so that’s why I find it interesting that you say it’s from a time of anxiety.
Nick: Difficult times bring out great art. I’m not trying to say that this is great art or anything, but I do think that that’s a hallmark of difficult times. That was the reason I was excited that the one big sample drop we have in here is from that exact era.
Amelia: I do think it’s the best thing we’ve ever made.
Nick: Oh, me too. Me too.

You said about how you recorded it, it felt very radio-esque. You used your first stakes and you didn’t overly process it. Isn’t that part of nostalgia? A lot of songs right now are very produced than songs back then.
Nick: I wonder if that adds to it? I didn’t think about that cognizantly, or consciously, as a choice that would lean into that, but it all fits in that same zone. There’s almost no tuning on it.
Amelia: No, we tuned stuff.
Nick: But only like a couple of stuff. I don’t feel like we did very much at all.

You say this is your best work, so you’ve found the sound of Sylvan Esso? How do you have the feeling that you cracked that code of how you want your music to sound like?
Amelia: I think the reason why I say that this is the best thing that we’ve done is that it feels like a report of exactly how I personally have felt in the past two years, three years. It’s not self-conscious in the same way that some of our other records are. After we had our initial record, which was just a bunch of experiments, I got wrapped up in the cipher of trying to create music that followed a certain path. I started ignoring my natural impulses to try to make something sound bigger and this record feels just much more honest. That is my personal responsibility as a songwriter is to try to continually be as honest and vulnerable as I can be. That’s what I’ve decided to do with this job.

I assume that putting out how you feel right now in the present is very difficult to put into music. I mean, I’m not a musician myself, but I can assume that that’s very difficult. Why do you think that process took so long or developed in this way?
Nick: I think it’s a pretty common journey. There’s a very cliche thing that happens where you make something without thinking too much about it, or without thinking self-consciously too much about it and that elevates everything to a level where you become self-conscious about it. The entire next job is stopping thinking about yourself. I know of so many people who have gone through that exact arc and they havent emerged out of it. I hope that there’s even further levels of selflessness that I can get to, that I don’t even know about yet. That sounds great!
Amelia: The shedding of the concept of self sounds fucking great.
Nick: There’s a famous quote from a painter. It was something like how when you first start painting, you are in the room and all of your enemies are in the room and all of your teachers are in the room and all of your trauma is in the room. Slowly, those people all leave, and then it’s just you in the room and then you even leave. I think about that. That’s the whole ordeal is to get out of the fucking way, you know?

Did you get out of the fucking way when you were making this album?
Amelia: I think it’s the most out of the way. But we’re still there. We have a lot of learning to do.
Nick: I have not yet fully embraced the teachings of Buddha and there’s still me here.

I also understood that it took four years for this album to be made and you wrote it mostly in the woods. Did that aspect help out that shedding away of things?
Nick: The time helped. I don’t think I ever felt that pressure to make a thing on a given day. I think because of that, it started arriving really slowly and then slowly ramped up and ramped up and had a natural momentum that felt like it was its own and not driven by anything externally.

So that’s how the environment informed your music, because you were so far removed from everything else. Or, how did it inform your music?
Amelia: No. I love the idea that the environment influences the music, it’s something that people have always wanted to talk to me about, but, in actuality, the real environment that music emerges from is your head, your mental space.
Nick: It’s the time that was more the thing to me.
Amelia: I’m sure the fact that our studio is in the woods really influenced it, but I think the time was more of the thing.
Nick: The space to be able to have friends in and out. Our friends were always just hanging out there. It was a logistical influence

I relate going to the woods as going back to the basics, back to nature and especially because you didnt do any production on your vocals, you have this clarity in the humanness to your voice. Why do you think this humanness is important in your music?
Amelia: I’m just much more interested in the real thing that’s happening. What I wanted the vocals to sound like was as if I was talking to the listener as opposed to being some mythic or larger than life thing. I hate recordings. I love making them now, but naturally, my impulse is not. I’m much more of an in-person guy. The more that we can kind of create that feeling and use reporting to create that, the more the thing that we can deliver is a curated reality.

Would you ever be down to do a live recording, but not the live performance type album, but an album in which you record the songs for the first time and that would be the album?
Nick: I think there’s some version of that that I would be interested in. I’m generally not super excited by a concept record like a production decision, unless the material is enhanced or made more clear through a choice like that, which I think is almost never the case. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced listening to something like that myself and not had it feel kind of gimmicky. I just feel like we’re not a gimmick band. But that’s to say, I do think there’s like a world where we could come up with a set of songs and then record a live version and then be so taken with it to be like “that has to be it.”
Amelia: Most of the vocals on this record were the first take. The minute that we recorded it, when I would try to go back to re-recorded, it would just feel too performative. I’d try to recreate the thing that we’d already made, which doesnt work for us.

It needs to be instinctual. Just like you said, it’s more true to yourself in a way. Thank you so much! Maybe if I can squeeze the last question; what advice would you give to new musicians and producers?
Amelia: It’s always the same, which is keep on doing it. Don’t stop. If you can think of anything else that you could do that would make you happy, do that instead.
Nick: The bigger one to me is, invest in your scene. I think especially as everything gets more isolated, musical scenes are the most vital and important thing ever. Just going to the places that you want to be playing in all the time and seeing shows and meeting all the people who work there and meeting all the people who go there and all the people who play there. Just being invested in your community musically. It just makes everything better and it makes you a better artist. It makes everything better for everyone. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as assholes are on the rise everywhere, community and fellowship is just historically the ultimate antidote to fascism. The more that you know people and are known, the more we all resist that oppressive force and that tendency within ourselves; it’s like the best possible thing to do.