Kuldīgas AO: A special bonus interview with Hamish Bloom, speaking about his latest EP. Recorded entirely in the town of Kuldīga in Latvia; in a concert hall residing next room across from the renowned David Klavins Piano Factory. An introspective look into the mind of the artist and how each song plays as a key moment in life, recording on tape and being content with imperfections.
HB: I’d never been to Eastern Europe until now. My cousin got married while I was over there, so I was half going over for that wedding, but also to go and record this album.
CF: Beautiful. That's brilliant.
Yeah, it was awesome.
Well, the first question I have for you is about the album title. I Googled it and found where it came from, but nothing came up on Google translate. How significant was it to go over there and record the album compared to doing it in your room? And can you give us a rundown of what the title means?
Yeah, sure. So the title is actually the name of the bus stop inside the village. When I'd go off to other places- I went to Poland for the weekend, or if I was going back to the UK- I'd always have to get on this big charter bus that went from this bus stop in Kuldigā, which is the name of the village. I would get on a bus from this bus stop and then go into the capital city, which was two hours away.
As for the idea for the name, I kind of just saw it as a little bit metaphorical. The whole thing with the EP is that it's all recorded in that village, and all the songs were written there. I didn't go in with anything pre-written. I went in with nothing, so everything that I recorded, I wrote over there. I was thinking about it more in a sense of that listening to it is like coming into this certain environment and certain space, and the metaphor for that is a bus stop- which takes you into this place, if that makes sense. That’s what I was thinking about when I was thinking of a name. I was just going to call it something like kuldigās, but I felt like kuldigās ao was somewhat more interesting than just the village name.
Cool. But as well, this is the first body of music that wasn’t recorded in your room, is that right?
Yeah, yeah, it would be.
How different was recording it in a completely different country? It’s a big step from your room, and instead of going to a studio or something, you go to another country to record. How significant was it to this EP in particular?
Yeah, definitely. It’s very significant because I realised how much the space that you write and record in can shape your sound in different ways. I was recording in this really big hall. On one side of this big compound there was a piano factory, and a big hall on the other. So I was recording in the hall, and what I realized was because the room was so big, I could really make a lot of noise. I would go in there at maybe 6:00pm, and then I'd stay there until 12:00 or 1:00am, because the people that worked in the compound and in the piano factory would go home around 6pm. I would go in after everyone had left and then I'd just stay there until whenever I wanted. Because it was so far away from all these houses and far away from everyone, I could just make so much noise. And so I think there's some songs that are a little bit more reflective of that. After the first song on the album on the EP, I kind of realised after I recorded it that there was a bit of belting going on, or stronger vocals that I don't think I've really explored too much in my room because I just didn't have the space to explore that side of performing. But it definitely was very different for sure, because it was all on tape as well.
That's the other thing I wanted to ask you about as well. So why did you choose to record it on tape? Was it because the resources you had, and how did that compare to how you normally would record something? I assume sound and background noise you would have to take into account as well.
So the first bit of your question, I think it was more so somewhat by circumstance, but probably a bit of a choice as well. I probably could have recorded stuff digitally and on my computer. I could have made that work, but my friend that I was staying with had a whole plethora of tape machines, and he was generous enough to let me borrow a couple. But the best thing about it that I keep telling people and thinking about, is that even though there is this kind of aesthetic sound, it's actually more about the process. And that process is that you can't afford to edit anything. Every part or whatever, you pretty much get one shot to do the whole thing right. I mean, you can obviously go back and rewind and then start again, but you can’t edit in between. If you do a good take where there's a little f*ck up, you have to live with that mistake.
In saying that, I've realised that my favourite thing about this project is that there's heaps of mistakes. For example, in the first song I've been really wrapping my brain around the fact that the piano sounds a little bit weird. It sounds kind of muddy and not super clear. There are things on other songs as well. You can hear tape distortions where it's clicking and all these weird things, but there's something really human about all those things and I actually think that is why it’s not only the tape aesthetic sound that makes people love tape music. When that was the approach in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, there was just so much more pressure to deliver something good because you knew that you couldn't edit it. You couldn’t make something really clinical- it had to be a real performance. That was probably the best thing that I took from recording on tape. I was really surprised. I wasn't expecting that to be what was going to eventuate. I thought it would just sound really nice, but it was this whole thing that I came to terms with.
The funny thing you mentioned about that is you can hear these small things because you're the creator and they bother you, but then it's like if someone else person listens to it, they might not pick up on that.
Yeah, that's always the thing, though. You’re always going to be your biggest critic.
Sure. Well, obviously you also released diana and harrison earlier this year, which was a great album. I think I messaged you about it and it had strong connections to your family and that subject of love. What was this particular EP about from your perspective?
Yeah, this one was a lot less thought out. I think when I was recording diana and harrison, I knew early on what that whole album was going to be in terms of what I wanted it to sound like, and the way each song would sit, because I always think about these things as the whole thing and not just a random bundle of songs. But in saying that, funnily enough, when I was recording this, I didn't have as much of an expectation on what I was going to make. The only thing that I was really thinking was, ‘I'm going to go in and stay here for a couple months, and whatever I’m thinking of at a given time, I’m going to make a physical body of work for it.’
Like a time capsule?
Yeah exactly. All the songs, they all mean very specific things. I can point to what they mean for sure, but it’s not really linked like the songs on diana and harrison. When I was making that album, I was making it specifically so there was this whole arc to it, and a story evolving within that. But with this, it's almost like a time capsule of the moment.
I want to speak to you about every single one of these songs one by one, because as you said, it's very personal to you and only you know the meanings of what each song is. I picked up there’s a bit of a war theme as well, like a battle on a couple of songs. Is that right?
Yeah- is fighter jet what you’re talking about?
I think there's one more, let’s see. playing with shadows as well?
It's funny- I’ll talk about playing with shadows first. It came about after a conversation that I was having with my friend about a philosopher called Carl Jung. He’s pretty well known, but he had a whole branch of thinking that was called ‘integrating your shadow.’ The whole premise of it is basically that all people have a good and a bad side to them, in really complex ways. You know, as we grow up, we take the good things about ourselves and we nurture that, and the bad things we kind of suppress that behaviour because you start to learn that you shouldn't act like that. What's really interesting about it is that this philosophy is trying to describe that even though that behaviour gets repressed, it doesn't mean that it's not still in you. What I take from it is that there's a real danger in thinking that you and the people around you aren’t capable of doing really horrible things. You can strive to do the right things, but everyone has a side of them that's really bad and ugly, and honestly, a little bit f*cked up. That song is about me trying to understand how I can accept that side and be aware of it. It’s more so about understanding.
There’s a line in the song where I say, ‘I could be capable of anything.’ I guess what I'm talking about is that I’m capable of doing good things- but also really bad things. If I'm not aware of that, then that's a bad thing. The next line in that part is, ‘will death through denial birth the brother of sin?’ If I'm denying the fact that I have the possibility of doing bad things, that is just going to lead me to situations where I won't even realise that I'm being a bad person, because I have this idea that that I'm not capable of being that. It’s more just an investigation into all the sides of me that I need to be aware of.
When I wrote fighter jet, I was playing around with the words and stuff. It kind of hit me when I was singing- it just sort of came out. The song is pretty clearly about some sort of situation of infidelity, and it was one of those things where I really was not setting out to write a song like that at all. I kind of was just inspired to make up this random story. It's kind of weird- a lot of the time, I write some pretty personal stuff, but I've not been in any sort of situation like that, so it was sort of funny. I wonder why that sort of happened, but yeah, the whole imagery about war was meant to be this whole juxtaposition about a really intense love with someone that you might be having an affair with. But then offsetting that with this idea of being at war with the people around you, and there’s the chaos and recklessness of all that.
Yeah. Obviously not something that you've experienced, but when we last spoke, you were talking about how you try and relate your listener with some universal experience that a listener can connect to. So, I wonder if it's maybe something that's subconsciously happened because there might be someone out there that's going through that and then you know something about it.
Yeah, you know, all these feelings are super universal. I guess maybe even though that specific thing hasn’t happened to me, it’s not hard for me to put myself in those shoes. That's actually a way better way to put it, to be honest. I can put myself in the shoes of someone that's engaging in an affair, and what sort of feelings that might have.
Yeah, that's actually very interesting as well. It's hard trying to convey an emotion that you haven't felt, but I guess that's something interesting that you tried there.
It was so much fun. Songs might come out in these ways where you might go into autopilot, and it'll all just come out in this bizarre way. There's this real kind of synchronicity to how it comes out. You look back and you wonder how that just happened. It's really quite weird, but it just sparks from that idea. I was just playing around. I was thinking, ‘oh, that sounds kind of nice. Maybe I can build some kind of narrative from this.’
So how many takes did you do for the whole album? Are there songs that you just didn't put on there?
There were a lot of ideas. I still have the tape- it says Klavins on it because that's the piano factory that I was recording in. The guy, David Klavins, is this really successful piano maker and he's collaborated with Nils Frahm. But on this tape, there’s lots of ideas of potential songs that almost amounted to something and then some that I just bailed on halfway. But again, this whole idea of a time capsule. I don't want to really record over this. It will be interesting listening to these old ideas. I might come back to it and turn it into an actual song.
The intro song, heaven. What can say about heaven? From my perspective, it seems like it was a song about someone letting go and going to heaven.
Sort in a slightly similar vein to playing with shadows, heaven is about wanting to or trying to understand if you would be able to kind of go to some sort of place of enlightenment such as heaven, despite having done certain sorts of bad things. It’s this whole thing about morality. The whole chorus is repeating, ‘could I go?’ It’s really literal. Could I go to heaven despite doing these bad things? When I was writing that, it wasn’t about a super specific situation. It was more about the past. Even though I’ve done certain things wrong and I’ve made mistakes, am I still able to go to this enlightened place after death.
Was it intended to have that song as the first song rather than the last? Normally you associate that as the last song on the album, you know?
I think I was just thinking about it in the sense that it's a pretty fast paced, short song. It just felt like a good introduction to some of the stuff that I wanted to talk about. When I was there- and because I was away for so long- you’re forced to think about yourself and how you fit in the world. The sequencing of the EP isn’t exactly the order that I wrote it in, but it’s not far off. But I really wanted to have the last song- which is only a minute long- to be me and julia. I knew as soon as I wrote that it was going to be the last one on the EP. That song was probably still lingering around from diana and harrison, but it was funny though. I remember thinking, ‘I’m not going to make any more love songs,’ but in this bizarre way, it just sort of came. I was in the house and that was one of two songs that I didn’t record at the big hall.
I think there's lots of different people in my life that I've had experiences with that ‘Julia’ resembles. It's an arbitrary name, it’s not anyone in particular. I got really into this whole idea of clashing emotions. I was interested in looking at some kind of juxtaposition between machines and robotic things that don't have a consciousness, which was offset with ideas of love. I got really into this EP that I was listening to at the time by Keenan O’Meara, If I Could Leave. He has a song on that EP where it's a story about a man that makes a machine, and as he's making this machine, he loses faith in religion and God and Christianity. He starts putting his faith into this machine that he's made and his whole justification is that it is more advanced than him, so he has to start following it. But then this machine puts it back on him and says it can’t understand why he left his faith that is so innate with being a human. Basically, I was interested by that idea.
Next I went to talk to you about meddling. When I saw that album title, I was thinking about that EP Adrianne Lenker put out, songs + instrumentals. So talk to us about meddling.
Meddling is probably the most personal song on the EP. It's got a lot to do with my family. I don’t know how to put it, but it’s probably the most vulnerable that I’ve been with recording and talking about specific things that have happened to my family. In short, it’s about trying to fix or help a situation when you’re not really in a position where you can just fix things. I won't get into the specifics of it, but it's pretty personal in terms of the specific subject matter.
Would you say that's the song on the album that's the most important to you?
I'd say it's definitely one of them. That and playing with shadows possibly mean the most to me. All these songs I wrote at a real time of reflection, so they all mean a lot, apart from fighter jet to be honest, but that’s just because I felt more of being a storyteller at the time rather than looking really deeply into myself.
Beautiful. And there’s one more that we haven't spoken about, which is Garden?
Yeah. Garden is probably the song I had the most fun writing. It's probably more so coming from a place of having had a hard time accepting yourself. This figurative garden is a metaphor. The hook and chorus is about a garden having weeds that have overgrown. Sometimes, when you're in social settings, you're trying to keep your garden clean and you're trying to make things look as presentable as possible. These weeds are metaphors for bad things that you don’t want people to know about or show anyone sides of your personality or things that interest you that you don’t want to show people.
The whole first half of the chorus is about collecting your weeds and plucking them before anyone can see it. You're rushing to make sure that no one sees these interests or sides of yourself. But then the second half of the chorus is thinking that maybe something really beautiful can come out of letting these weeds grow into this abstract vine and saying maybe I can actually explore where these things go and what that might look like in terms of accepting myself. I feel really strongly about that song because recently I've been coming a lot more into myself and not having to put on these different faces, when you're in social settings. I'm feeling more comfortable with not having to do that. It literally is about being yourself and accepting who you are, and not something that you should get rid of and kill.
Yeah. I think that's a very important message that I think people should be listening to now. I think everyone preaches it and tells you to, ‘be yourself.’ But they don't follow through.
Yeah, exactly. All that sort of stuff. And I have really struggled with not saying what I think sometimes. It's more about that acceptance of what you think and feel matters. It's a great conversation about psychology and how the brain works, and in a lot of ways just being okay with yourself.
Yeah, brilliant. I've got a couple more questions for you now. So you spoke about that one song earlier, but what other inspirations have you had for this?
Definitely. So the EP that that song from earlier is on by Keenan O’Meara is a great example of less is more. I think last time we spoke, I was talking a little bit about that. I wanted to focus more on the content of the songs rather than all the instruments going on, so that was great to listen to. It gave me an idea of what is possible with only four, for lack of a better word, instruments- one might be vocals, one might be guitar, one might be another guitar and one might be a piano. You can get really creative and then start being like, ‘well, I’ll just use one microphone to record vocals and guitar, and one microphone to record vocal harmonies and egg shakers,’ so you can combine a few instruments together. That was definitely one.
I would have been listening to another really great EP by a guy called Julien Chang, who I think is from America. It's called Home for the Moment and it's just another four song EP that I'm pretty sure was recorded on tape. I could be wrong, but the thing that I took from that was I really wanted to break the standard structure that I’ve always gone for, which is sort of verse-chorus-verse-chorus. Some of the songs don't really have that, and the structure of them is a bit more random. I'm exploring that because I wanted to make something like that.
I think probably the last big influence was definitely songs by Adrienne Lenker. Staple album of tape recording. It's so much more about the performance, and the quality of the songs. If you can nail capturing that, you often will have hit on something really special. Instrumentals as well, I’ve never really heard instrumentals done that way. It’s just a continuous loop of sparse instruments for 20 minutes.
And that's all leading to my last question I've got for you today. I know you have an ambient album coming out later this year as well. Last time I asked you for words of wisdom, but this time I’m going to ask what's the biggest thing you've learned from making this album, and what's next?
Ok, right. Biggest thing is my approach to recording with the whole tape aspect. It was so much more rewarding than the approach that I have always known. Mistakes are good and obviously you don't want something that's just littered with mistakes, but I've always felt like with performing you're not reciting a song. Even when you're recording, you're doing a performance in the same way that you're doing performance at a gig. And people connect with that much more than really clinical song, where you make sure everything is perfectly in time. I remember feeling that when I was listening to it. I almost liked this approach way more, because I've always had this thing where I record demos on my iPhone and they always sound better to me than the finished song. I think what that actually is, is that there are no restraints when you’re recording a demo. There’s no anxiety about doing it right or any of this stuff. And so you connect with this initial idea. I think that was by far the biggest thing. It's completely changed how I want to approach capturing music because the more I can do it like that and do these takes, I become more focused on the performance than making sure everything is right.
I'll be playing more gigs, but I think I'll probably take a little bit of a break on recording. I was actually saying this to a friend today- I really want to come back to writing and recording with a fresh idea of what I want to do, because I really don't want to subconsciously make another diana and harrison. I want to make something new and different. Maybe I might need to wait until my mindset changes or my approach to writing changes, but I don’t want to do a repeat of what I’ve done before.
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