ETERNAL/RETURN
Prelude to our Eternal/Return: in Conversation with Rose Laurel
This interview was conducted online through emails, google docs and instagram DMs, as Rose Laurel are not only anonymous, but separated by quite a distance. It is quite challenging to introduce someone who is anonymous, especially when it comes to music, but we hope this serves as a way of finding and following Rose Laurel and MYB.
PALAIS SINCLAIRE:
So, here we go, we have an interview with an anonymous duo. We are extremely lucky to have ended up opening the editions series on ÊT/RE with the work Bereft of Flesh—as soon as we heard it the first time, we felt an affinity with it, as if written in a musical language we recognise and that related to what we were thinking in relation to this new label project. It’s not entirely electronic dance music, and it’s not entirely stage music either, whilst containing a lot of the cherished aspects of both. Technically it’s your third album as Rose Laurel, could you, for the record, contextualise this release?
ANNA:
The three EPs were originally conceived as three parts of an album entitled Trilogie which we were in talks to release through a black metal micro-label (which ended up folding before we got off the starting line). Another interesting twist and turn for a project which has been rather odd all over, is that the first two are released through a label which no longer exists, all after being accepted and then rejected by two labels, and now coming out through your publishing house. The first part was recorded in person, together [the two of us], and the second and third parts recorded across the country from one another. I had moved to NYC, while Sam stayed in Colorado, so we pieced it together as Ableton sessions. We generally start with a production that I make, getting it to a bare minimum state of, say, an A + B section, which I then ship off to Sam to record some vocals. We push them back and forth until we either finish it or lose interest, and probably only 1/10th the beats/songs I make even end up that far. In the end each EP is pulled together from a folder of probably 20 “songs”; we just pick the 5 best ones, finish them up, and then call it a day. Music works best in the context of our relationship as a thing which is done and then moved on from. It is never a conscious effort to labour on it.
I think this is reflected in the production, which is remarkably workman if you really get to the heart of it. The production is 100% sample based, drawn from archival classical and folk recordings which I work with. The first and second EP have tinges of some live guitar I played (a child's guitar which only had 2 strings left), but when that had finally broken, I decided it was time to leave the world of instruments behind. The songs which people respond to the most tend to take an hour or so to make, the works of labor which take me a day or two, tend to languish.
PS:
This third installment, then, Bereft of Flesh, released June 1st on ÊT/RE, has this hybrid feel, and I say this in reference to what we might call the tension within electronic music, between the logic of dance music/raving, and the logic of, say, the concert and experimental electronic music. As we know from people like Ibrahim Alfa Junior, who is due to release the next album on ÊT/RE, people have done what DJs do, live, with drum machines and so on, since the 90s, yet today the overlap between these two patterns seems almost paradoxical.
A:
The general dichotomy of the music we make is the dissonance of digital experience and the tactility of longing, romance, transcendence, and immanence. There is a sense that we have never been further from our heart, and yet it is relentlessly pounding in our chest. In that sense, your dichotomy of a concert vs a DJ set works as a perfect extension of that dichotomy into the world of performance. The DJ set, in its original formulation, is purely tactile, it is meant to be music played for a collective social experience, without particular egos and trace lines of authorship drawn (of course in reality...), but a concert is an authorial experience, it inspires emotion much the way a screen does, but the intention is to create walls. The blurring between DJ sets and performances in the contemporary era is a perfect replication of this clash where two impossible to rectify facts are true simultaneously. I have been to concerts which felt much more like raves and raves that felt much more like a concert, lest we forget Charli XCX’s recent weaponisation of boiler room as AN EXPERIENCE. In this sense I think lots of music being made, and this includes what we do, ends up splitting the difference between the two, and in many ways fails at both. I tend to resonate with much of this third space music being made though, stuff which could be played at a rave, or performed at a show, but a little too finicky at both, so it only pops up in either context occasionally.
We have talked about live performance, but realistically there are quite a few barriers that have made it tricky to conceptualise. There's of course the distance between us, but also the fact that we are not musicians by any metric, and realistically what we have made together is pop music, not dance music. It's easy to lean into our anonymity and say “we won't play it live ever because we don’t want to be tangible faces”, but honestly, if we felt confident that we could do it, we probably would have.
PS:
Who have you found influential on your style?
SAM:
Dan Bejar and Jamie Stewart.
A:
Lol—When I assembled a playlist of songs around the release of our second EP, which I had entitled something like “Our Influences”, I did two things fundamentally wrong. The first is that I did not ask Sam what their influences as a singer were (I knew the answer would have been Dan Bejar (from Destroyer) or Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu) and I know that), but also that I tended to focus on artists who I enjoyed and who I thought sounded similar to what I was trying to make as a producer, as opposed to actual influences. While I deeply love the works of Grouper and Dean Blunt, they aren’t necessarily what I’m actually thinking about when I make music. Certain preferences, especially around rhythms and chords, tend to peer out of someone's work regardless of context. A recurrent motif for my production work is that I lean into major keys without ever even choosing to do so, and I can’t escape it. My other true love, repetitive and martial elements, especially sub bass, tend to always crop up again and again regardless of what I set out to do. I couldn't tell you what the source of either thing really is, when I was a child, I would sit by my grandmother’s little standing piano and hammer a single note over and over until I would be hypnotised and she would yell at me. When I sit at a piano now, I can’t help but do the same thing. As a kid I was listening to a lot of Kanye and Green Day, not particularly shocking for middle America, but there was some other deeply felt yearning towards particular musical elements. Lately I’ve been almost exclusively listening to these very sparse and repetitive musicians. I think the greatest influence on what I'm trying to do as a producer is 20th century composers, especially Arvo Part.
PS:
I know that you’re busy people, with some pretty major things going on in the background, Ph.Ds and so on, but I’m glad to find that nonetheless you are able to find time to invest energy into music.
A:
Sometimes I wonder what I do with all my time, days just disappear and you can barely recall what any actual moment consisted of. I feel like I have no sense for what I do as a musician, whenever I have a chance, I just sit down and crack at it like an obsessive, making beat after beat after beat. Due to the realities of life, there are weeks where I don't make anything at all, and to be honest, there is nothing that I have made which has made it to Sam’s singing stage; not since finishing work on EP 3, but the maybe folder is always growing.
There’s this professor who works at the university where I currently study, who has this immense library which consumes their entire office. Sometimes, when he leaves the room, I look at those books and wonder if he remembers reading them (if ever at all). Could he tell me what each book covered and what really mattered from it? Maybe I’m not living the life I should be, but to me it feels like we are all stumbling through each day as it comes. Creating little structures in the wind. My advice for a musician wanting to make more music is that it's hard to start with the final library in mind, you just gotta keep reading books.
S:
Singing and writing are really just natural aspects of expression, it’s a matter of putting it into the proper box at the proper time; that’s a diligence.
PS:
People who are “involved” in music tend to feel split down the middle, where on the one hand they must always be optimistic about the situation they are in as a musician, while simultaneously being in a better position than any to understand what is happening to our “idea of music” and our “way of music” as a consequence of the conditions that music is produced within (say neoliberal capitalism). So, while a working musician in the industry is in the best position to analyse or describe the music industry, they are also in the worst position to actually speak against it because getting booked largely depends on going along with the industry. Anonymity changes the dynamic quite a bit here.
A:
I was having a thought the other day about why it is that artists in so many other mediums tend to release their best work in their 30-50s, and yet commercial musicians seem to fall off precipitously after the age of 35. Realistically there are two explanations, either it's some reflection of the medium itself (of making music in the popular music form), or it’s a reflection of the industry around it. I honestly couldn’t come to much of a conclusion about it, the second option is certainly easier and less controversial to say, but there's something to be said that popular music seems to struggle against experience and defined ambition, the defining attributes of career artists. As someone who knows musicians on both sides of that crest, youthful and exuberant at the beginning, and those on the older side who have crested out, it has to be said of course that this industry is poisonous, replete with the poor lifestyle choices, unstructured work conditions, and over-supply that everyone in the industry loves to talk about, but it’s also strangely not so much different from other careers and lifestyles. There's probably a mile long list of comparisons that could be made between music and academia, where the social web of it all immediately strangles any of the original vitality.
Music operates at an incredibly high functional speed in terms of its integration with capitalism. It is a pure flow of desire and novelty, the driving force of youthful consumerism, and so I think the speed catches people's eye. At the same time, I think the late nights, ecstasy, and detached pretence of it all mask that it’s all so fucking boring in the exact same way as everything else.
S:
There’s a difference between the people making music and those structuring music’s interaction with the world, and those two classes of people are in a conflict with no mediating body.
PS:
If we are about to get a massive influx of music when AI music production hits the market in the next years... we'll have so much music being produced that it will likely be the first major shift since sampling/drum machine/synth technologies... what do you think we need to hold onto during this time? what should we hope not to lose when the dam breaks?
A:
As with most AI fears the initial concern is not unfounded, per se, but in my mind, thoroughly misplaced. When people think of the things being replaced by AI they are thinking about a robot making Burial songs and William Bevan the artist no longer existing. In reality, AI struggles with the core tenets of what makes music interesting: context and reinvention. AI cannot read a room and therefore cannot ask “what if U.K. garage was a foggy memory played into a lonely city space?”. It cannot assemble video game samples and R&B acapellas to make a commentary on post-modern cultural collapse. What people forgot is that the music industry, is still an industry just like any other. While we see high level creatives, music is assembled by thousands of labourers who trade their work for wage. Loop-makers, drum sequencers, mastering engineers, audio engineers, social media workers, DAW and VST engineers, session musicians, etc. These are the people who provide the raw material from which artists can sculpt, and their work is most susceptible to replication and replacement because it is inherently functionalisable. The concern this raises should be huge if not for just the simple fact that such functional roles are how most people actually survive as creatives while working on their own art, and serve as a pipeline to direct young children down who are interested in the arts. People shouldn’t be concerned that we will no longer have a need for William Belvin, but that William Belvin would never have a lifetime of work in underground music to synthesise into a novel artistic statement, and that he would simply be another suit in the London tube.