Transcript of podcast with Robin Jax

MW	The guitar tones are so nice in this album how do you get those guitar tones are you using amps or are you using software?
RJ	For the most part this one was the first time I did a lot of the amp recording myself. So, I was set up at home. The setup for the most part was Fender Jazzmaster through pedalboard sometimes a Gibson Les Paul junior so I like P90s. P90s are this happy place between the single coil snap and the the crunch of a Humbucker, and I’ve never owned a Humbucker guitar, I had lipstick coils and I’ve done electro for a while—but it would go through the board… This kind of splits into two paths so it’s the clean—cleanish—which is a Neunaber wet reverb and then there’s the distorted stuff which for the most part was a fairly no-name distortion pedal, it’s called heavy metal by a company called Roberts, it’s made in Japan, it’s the first pedal that was ever in the house because my brother bought it he started before me and he got the distortion pedal and it was this heavy chunk of crap basically that has a scoop mid thing and it’s a bit weird to be doing that on what people call keep calling a pop record
MW	People are calling this a pop record?
RJ	That’s what it said in the Bandcamp review. The Bandcamp thing said aching pop songs and one of the comparisons in the Louder Than War review was Kate Bush like huh okay.
MW	I mean, yeah I I would take a comparison to Kate Bush although I guess I don’t think of her as pop either but anyway sorry I don’t want to interrupt you
RJ	No if I feel that there is a qualification to be made in that. [clip plays from Archipelago] But the distortion it has this amazing thing where it has kind of low-end woosh and it’s kind of pinched in the high so it’s really nice and that would go into a Roland Jazz Chorus JC40 and with that I wouldn’t run a chorus pedal like I used to do so the amps on quite low vibes—like vibe setting and for recording with microphones I would have one SM57 on one of the speakers and the Sennheiser 609 on the other, just drape it over the top and one to point—because I only had the ones stand and the space was as it was so I made sure I did that way and you just got this little bit of a blend just record one—like, the two individually mono and have a stereo spread as well, which after a while things just got really really big. So something like The Dream, the overdrive part in the bridge, that’s effectively nine tracks of audio which then gives you that kind of lift and the weightiness around it. [clip plays of The Dream] And I think that there’s a little bit of sim work. One of the first things I got in lockdown I think it was like Novation with the controllers where they basically gave away Guitar Rig pro 5 for free with it so a lot the bass tones come out of the sims and some of the guitar on the Tall White Fountain Played particularly and the the very end because I wanted to kind of try and replicate something with a bit more a bit more in the kind of way of lower end [clip plays of Tall White Fountain Played] But yeah for nearly everything on the record in terms of electric guitar was the Jazz Chorus and the board as it was.
MW	That’s cool it sounds, like, you know, as a you’re wearing two hats when you’re—well three hats I guess—when you’re doing these because you’re the guitarist, and you’re writing the music, but you’re also thinking about how am I going to mix this it sounds like because you’re really thinking about the frequency balance of the mix.
RJ	The mixing thing I knew was going to go to somebody else and in the end the whole record was mixed by my friend and bandmate Dan Knowler we’re together in a band called The Shining Tongues and I’ve known him for years through his work in the Infinite Three and his connections to people, acts like Cindytalk, Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo, and I knew that with the change of—it was a little bit of a change of sonic direction from the last one. So, the record before had a lot of that sound present but it also had a sense of gentleness that I hadn’t really kind of got to grips with or something to put aside to go to the louder place. Some of this record I knew that Dan was the guy who’s going to be able to kind of touch upon it but in terms of the layers it was more about building the world and the world was the most important thing and if there were edges to be sanded off then I knew it would be in good hands.
MW	I like that, edges to be sanded off. That is something, it’s a really cohesive world the whole album as you listen through it it feels like it all belongs together and I know that’s partly the mastering engineer also but yeah it’s it just the composition and the sound world is very very comprehensive.
RJ	When you listened to it what did you—what was the first thing that came to mind as like, “this is a parallel to this”? Because the range I’ve gotten from it, like I said, people were calling these pop songs, one of my friends referred to it as pastoral Mogwai, which I thought was quite nice but I I really didn’t expect there to be a lot of variance from what I thought was that “if you like this then you’ll like”—and I was quite specific with the bands I said if you like this you might like, and none of them have been picked up people’s reactions so I was kind of curious it’s just like what did you think when you heard it?
MW	The immediate thing I thought about just listening to the first track I was like this reminds me of a lot of like of the shoe gaze genre you know so like—oh boy my brain, I had tickets to—My Bloody Valentine you know, Mogwai definitely tracks, I didn’t think of that, but that makes sense. I’m not very good at this and this is something I struggle with in my own music career is like this sounds like that you know? I’m not very good at that I do kind of rely on other people to tell me like what does this is sound like? um but yeah I mean I guess I would not have said oh this is a pop album um it’s easier for me to say what it wasn’t but yeah I mean shoe gaze, or I know there are like a ton of variations of that kind of genre of like longer songs expansive guitars um piano you know so.
RJ	It’s really interesting though with—you say My Bloody Valentine—I still kind of get the thing with Loveless because it is a great record and  um some of that kind of really glidey stuff got into things that I was listening to around the time I was starting to kind of piece together the sonic architecture of this record you can hear it in bands like Slow Crush who then really take it into that kind of pop-y thing where they have the glide but they also have like some real—I guess My Bloody Valentine were just a very loud pop band at heart but I think Slow Crush they do that kind of like 21st century sensibility of just to drive it really hard and they do it really well so yeah they’re great. Aurora was really important record. I do a same kind of guitar thing but not the the same way where you have a tremolo just floating and kind of every chord is a dive bomb but it’s not a dive bomb feeling.
MW	So when you were coming up with your “if you like this then you’ll like my album” what were the things that were that you were thinking of the bands and the sounds.
RJ	I put a playlist together for this and it still didn’t feel like it kind of touched the sides so I mean the early writing for this would have been 2018, 2017 maybe the earliest and there were elements of things that came out from that songwriting process. The early version of Miraslava was definitely rooted into something that was approaching like guitar historionics and for that I’d have to go away and kind of think of like how do you put a solo into this and not make it sound like Spandex which was very difficult [clip plays of Miroslava]. Generally I went about to um a list of the alt-rocky stuff that was coming out at the time—you said shoe gaze, the Twilight Sad um they were really nice like they’re one of my favorite bands going at the moment and that kind of thing, that coldness that sometimes echoes out into something that feels like fire that was quite important for me to have something like that on the record and but like the longer stuff uh it’s really hard to actually pin it down. I would’ve said there were elements of heavier records as well that came into that—Playing for Burial, YOB, it might not seem the most obvious one but Clearing the Path to Ascend and when that came out that was a big deal just because it had something like marrow which it’s the perfect sense of structure and flow and this sense of air being crushed between your lungs I wanted something like that to come once in a while. Swans, My Father Will Guide Me Up Onwards, The Seer, To Be Kind were kind of touchstones anything that’s in the usual like window of the influences we’ve listed publicly so Placebos, Euros, Cocteau Twins I don’t think there was anything specific in those that I was thinking of when I made the record they were just there ever present. Low released Double Negative in 2018 and that was huge.
MW	Yeah I was going to say Low.
RJ	Because that one when it came out it’s like okay you can do the things where you can just break the reality of time and space and there’s something that you can hold the song together with at the same time so that was really important. Something like Rome (Always in the Dark) because it really isn’t that song it’s like oh we’re going somewhere with this so that was a biggie and there’s another, there’s a song it’s an artist by the name of Stasik she’s a Ukrainian musician, Anastasia Shevchenko I think? I’ve probably got her name wrong and I feel awful if I have, but her history is that she’s a former—formerly in the Ukrainian army in the east when that was the only part of the war at the time and then came back and started the project Stasik which is just very avant garde, let’s say pop but it’s like an electric pop thing with incredible visuals and it’s very inspiring in terms of how the works are put together but there’s a song called Колискова Для Ворога which translates as A Lullaby for the Enemy and I remember playing this song and I can’t remember how I came into finding it. But it’s this kind of very ominous low bass hum there’s a flute kind of going over it falling there isn’t a chorus per se but you then get to this point where everything just breaks and it’s air raid sirens and it’s incredible and it tucks it back in again and I remember showing my wife [who is Ukrainian] that video and she was like this is a really Slavic kind of pain and I see that every time I think of that song and I watch the video so I think something about that sound that deep impression was something else I wanted to get across as well and it wasn’t going to be in a way that I was gonna lift a song or an album and say that this is what I want to do with it had to come through me so it’s going to be transfigured and transformed infinitely by the time that I like strummed the first chord and when that happens you get something that is nowhere near the source material but it is what it is.
MW	Yeah that’s the thing is you know it’s hard to it’s hard for me to at least to pin down this sounds like whatever because it is it does come across as very much you, you know like, there isn’t this like oh okay you know there were and it’s I’m not against this at all but there are bands that you listen to and it’s like ah yes this is a version of something else you know and again like no no judgment I love that kind of music but then there are you know there are artists who can only create music that is them you know or not not that they can only do that but that it’s just a natural process you know when it goes into them it comes out as them.
RJ	I’ve had this since I was—so, I first joined a band when I was in secondary school and to be asked to be a band with two of my friends was a really big deal and it’s okay let’s start writing songs, And one of the members of the band, the most proactive in terms of what he wanted the band to be he said we like these bands and we like these songs, write songs like those songs. And it’s like well ok it’s a thought exercise it gets us started and there were a couple of things that I ran into that made this a lot harder for me than it should have been. First of all the friend, he passed away a couple of years ago but bless his soul like he didn’t practice which is what got me into playing guitar it’s like we came away from like six, seven weeks where we were on school holidays and I lived on the other side of the county so I didn’t see him and then we came back for the first rehearsal it’s like you ready to play the songs, he’s like yeah I’m just gonna have to go get back what the chords for it. It’s like you’re the guitarist you should know, he’s like I don’t know I haven’t practiced, like, I mean, give me strength but also within the thought process is that once I started getting out of that like window of thinking that this is going to fit this exact exercise and genre sound I find it really hard to kind of relay it back in again it wants to wander out it wants to be its own thing and it wants to be something very different from what my friends are kind of expecting of me and it was very hard to kind of like level these things with—or, how do you do that and being in a band? So I started writing my own stuff and that was where—I mean another time you know when you’re 16 the record that you want to make is literally the last thing you heard so it took, it did take until my like 20s to actually kind of really let go of these things and make RobinPlaysChords sound like RobinPlaysChords.
MW	So there was like a yeah I mean that makes sense like a growth, growth as an artist. Yeah when you’re when you’re younger like that extracting yourself from the music you love is very, not extracting but understanding where the two are separated, you know because yeah.
RJ	If you played something to me when I was 17 I would be very impressionable to find myself within it, maybe the same thing for you as well, where it’s the kind of, you go for that thing where like this record is so formative it is literally changing the way that you think and the it feels cellular?
MW	Yeah well our brains don’t stop forming until we’re 25 so it makes sense that when we’re young like that it is kind of a cellular change that’s going on there.
RJ	And I found it kind of hard to resist that cellular change so, and the records I would be listening to in my teens, and you have such glorious records to be listening to around that time in terms of like mood enhancers like Elliot Smith and Manic Street Preachers Holy Bible. But yeah I think that was really, that was me when I was 17 was putting Either/Or on and learning it front to back that was, that’s why now the standard thing is to do the standard tuning down a tone and then capo it up it’s all Elliott Smith.
MW	Oh yeah I had my Elliott Smith moment where I was doing a lot of traveling and I had my Walkman you know with the CD and over and over and over again yeah.
RJ	Yeah for me like, Elliott Smith came in, it’s quite subtle because I bought XO about a year after he died and I didn’t know he died I didn’t even know who he actually was it just came in as one of those two for £10 kind of things and one of the other ones was Ágætis byrjun, Sigur Rós, which was massive for me that was life changing. But XO was, came in a little bit more subtly than that, which I didn’t have the same listening span for it that I did for the Sigur Rós record but then I got into that and it’s like this is front to back genius and then Either/Or came next and I fell hard for that record, Angeles is probably my favorite song of all time.
MW	Yeah that’s the worst when you fall in love with an artist and then you learned that they’ve passed too young you know it’s heartbreaking.
RJ	I feel like there’s this division of like time and space where people who grew up with their artists in the 90s and the early 2000s their heroes would die on them. Now it’s just they do something so inexplicably horrible that we have to kind of get them out of like public rotation.
MW	Oh yeah Layne Staley didn’t live long enough to do anything horrific that we know of so. Yeah, like, Alice in Chains man that was a band that I just…
RJ	Dirt was a kind of semi-formative thing for Unmasking. I came back to that record for a while cos [my wife] Slava is a big grunge fan and we always go through the listening phases of things, and she, but she never heard the Unplugged session before so I I found the clip for Down in the Hole which was take number—have you ever seen the setlist FM entry for it?
MW	No I haven’t.
RJ	Look it up, it’s constantly doing sort of like six takes of Sludge Factory cos they just couldn’t do it, and most of it’s Layne just forgetting the lyrics and just—like even the broadcast version there’s this bit where he messes up within two lines and is just like “fuck!”
MW	That was really fun on Unplugged to see these bands like freaking out having to do it unplugged and you know like Nirvana was awesome, Pearl Jam was awesome but yeah the Alice in Chains yeah, I guess I had kind of forgotten that Layne was sort of floundering but that’s funny.
RJ	But it’s amazing when you go back at that band and people look through the lens of American grunge and hard rock and a lot of people would hold things against Alice in Chains because effectively the lineage from them to nu metal are—literally there was a band called Godsmack that kind of came out of that, that you got that kind of like, the American like heartland voice that would be kind of like singing about pain—but they had no craft compared to like Layne Staley, Jerry Cantrell and you hear the way that record’s put together the harmonies in the vocals, in the guitars as well. The studio version of Down in the Hole that’s incredibly well put together. Then you have things like Angry Chair, Them Bones, again, the other bands that came in that wake were lesser imitators and there were a lot that followed from Alice but they didn’t have that musicality they just went by blunt force.
MW	Yeah it’s sort of taking the style and diluting it a bit to be replicable because yeah it’s true that grunge has kind of a bad name nowadays because yeah in the wake of the original movement so much kind of questionable music came out of it.
RJ	Yeah I feel that a lot of imitators were there. I think now we’re in a bit of a swing where those bands are somewhat more fashionable again in terms of what you hear in parts in the last four or five years and it’s interesting that the way that it’s become that more focused and you have, I can think of acts like beabadoobee with the song “I wish I was Stephen Malkmus” that definitely comes to kind of—maybe—it’s less of the kind of the Britpop like snarl that you know British-based artists would be kind of expecting in the 90s and it now looks towards the more US side of things which I think it’s quite interesting. I had the theory and this might be a hot take that one of the low key most influential bands in America for a number of years was Breaking Benjamin because I feel that they took that—they had the Alice in Chains thing of the of the riffs and the downtune-ness and they definitely wanted to kind of make a thing of having vocal harmonies and they wanted to be tough and they wanted to be tender and that then got into the kind of thing that your gym bro can basically it’s like “yeah I pump iron but I also tell my like partner that you know we’ve got to save our relationship” kind of thing whilst watching like montages of soldiers coming back from Iraq or similar. It was definitely that vibe that they had and I genuinely think they have some great songs too, The Diary of Jane is a really well kind of put together piece of music and but I thought that was really weird that their this massive entity that sort of slides in because they weren’t cool but I thought that was more impactful or more representative of the American psyche for a while than what was coming out of Nashville or like the west coast… I—that’s a very hot take on my part but—
MW	I like it! [laughs]
RJ	I’d say towards the late 2000 so I found a British web store called Boomkat they operate out of Manchester and when I found this place and they’re not just selling you know the same kind of like digital store in the same way that the iTunes thing was but they were specifically saying that this record is incredible and you go and listen to it it’s 40 minutes of microtonal noise or this is a field—a guy who used like a remix of a field recording it’s 25 minutes here’s some cello on top. Okay interesting. But through that I found out about labels like Type which is based in Birmingham and was home to a band called—for a while—to a band called Zelienople based in Chicago and they are one of the biggest influences RobinPlaysChords in the way that I wrote riffs and uh could play with repetition as well so that was, like that was a find there was definitely the kind of a thing where I then go and talk to people about it “have you heard of this thing?” like, no, and it’s not like—it hits an instant brick wall in terms of can I convince you about this cos just it’s it’s too far down the rabbit hole. The rabbit hole for people of obscurity even if it’s like in the circles that I went to when I started working at a record label or in a music venue then I go around to these people and they were even more niche than what I thought was the niche that was acceptable to be able to sell 50 tickets on a Wednesday night. I feel like Austrian shoegaze, it’s  maybe same, it’s kind of the same thing with the records that I really listened to this year like, MOLLY the band from Vienna that do—they’ve been compared to Swans as well but I feel that they’re a bit more like stargazey I think it’s more of a it’s like Pong but a bit more long form.
MW	Well okay so we’ve already gotten a little bit into this but my second question that I had which is kind of a broad question and maybe not fair but like recently I did, I you know I made an EP, released an EP, and I was like, as I was making it I was tucking away little things like “oh this was hard to do” or “oh that’s how I fixed this problem” or “that’s where I got this idea from” and then I did like a little 10-minute video going through each of the three songs talking about like the details just to give like an insight because I this is what I want to hear is the insight into people’s process you know you hear the final thing and you hear the influence but all the tiny decisions that go in to like making a song I was just wondering if you wanted to touch on some or all of the songs in the album with that kind of, you already have done a little bit of that but—
RJ	I think the starting process for a lot of it began with practice and that sounds as a very strange way but I would do things like leave a loop running and just play over the top of it for the longest time. Archipelago is the one where that really shows through because it does start with that one arpeggio then another and then you’re just building and building and building and then they all go away and you can sort of produce that away but when I was practicing it in the initial phase that started out from playing over and over again through—so for looping I use the TC Electronic Ditto and the Ditto is I would say basic and supplies my needs. It’s one click, I don’t need to be kind of tap dancing on a single pedal I’d have to go through the rest of the board anyway so it does what I need it to and that is great. If anyone wanted to kind of hook up on the—I know someone who got a Boss deal and that’s the most up-to-date one, um if they want to hook me up on that that’s great but Ditto works for me and it’s how a lot the writing process came about, The Dream would have been another one that was done that way um, Able Archer also came from that. [clip of Able Archer plays] So four or five were significantly done on looping, a part of Miroslava came out of that, but it wasn’t the key one, it started in more, um acoustic territory and then just developed as an electric song. But yeah, that’s the bulk of it, it’s: get a loop, find one chord, and then from that make a loop and then make it sound like it’s two or three and build and build and build so that’s this that’s the kind of the starting point and as I kind of touched upon earlier, I am the guitarist and the vocalist primarily, I play bass on my records and I even write out drum parts but I am not those instruments; piano on Achirpelago was added in, so I go, “we’ll do that, and here’s a field recording as well”. I took—the field recording came out of maybe the first week of lockdown, so, ok this is my walk for the week, I’m going to make something of it. So the looping gets down and the other bits get put in like that. And I have a very strong idea of what a song is quite quickly from when I start, so once I know that, “oh this is flowing into this, this is flowing into this” this is where the initial bricks and foundation of the song are done and that’s great. And then the recording process of what I could do at home at that time was done pretty quickly by my standards, it felt pretty quick at least, and there’s no need to rush cos no one’s going anywhere at this point in human history so and I can take my time I can tune this up I can send these sort of ideas. And then around August 2020 I sent some files to—there’s a friend of mine call Mason Le Long um I’ve known him for the best part of 13 years through association with Tin Angel in Coventry and it’s various guises as a venue a label on the side, and he gave me some like notes on mixing of where guitars were sitting right now and the bass was sitting, and the vocals and he would just say like well this is how it is so far we’re gonna add drums to it and see how the whole thing comes together and fast forward over a year later and I didn’t have any drums on the record because I didn’t know how to write it down in the way that I thought I’d be able to communicate it to someone who could. So it just kind of sat in—so the record did sit in limbo for a little while and then at the end of 2021 I was basically like this is gonna be an impasse, I’m gonna do something really quite brave but I haven’t really done before so I’m gonna just go in to a recording or rehearsal space I’m gonna hit a kit with whatever things I can hit it with and the ideas that I had. I basically spent most of my life like maybe playing a drum kit once a year anyway and that’s the thing that’s going to give people the guide, and then that was done and that’s kind of like ok this is where I want it to go to. I took it to a friend of mine who, um “what dates do you want to do I’m not available until this point in history” and it’s like “it’s okay we’ll go with, find someone who might be available cos I don’t want to wait on this too long now” cos at this point, like the record is starting to become the thing that’s bubbling—for those who didn’t know Unmasking came out six years after Teardrop Girl-Star which is the first one so waiting that long and then having a project that close to finishing it gets you a little bit antsy? So I brought it to Max Doohan a friend of mine I’ve known for a number of years he plays drums for a band called Another Sky, who, also in their own way, very influential for the new record, and have him play it in the way it made the most sense, so we booked a session that was, I had to then postpone, because of the war [in Ukraine] causing me to, so I had to kind of go away for a while and then come back again and then we booked it then we recorded in the studios in the converted church crypt in South London. It apparently used to be a Sunday school that they used to kind of hire out. And then it just came up for them their old space had been flooded and they needed somewhere to go and this is what they’ve done now and it’s a really nice space you still have the kind of the stone work that gives you a nice kind of sound. We put a microphone out in the like outside the actual studio space to kind of get the kind of sound of I don’t know religiosity maybe? [laughs]
MW	[laughs] Right yeah yeah nice.
RJ	Some kind of like holy ambiance down the line but it yeah it was—so he played drums on The Dream, Able Archer, To a White Phantom Played and he like hit them all with precision and beauty, we put everything together sent it to Dan who did the mixing as named, and then from there it was about sending it to someone for mastering, and for mastering I wanted to kind of step it up to someone who’s more accustomed to uh the harder stuff—in the past I used to send a lot of Tiergarten material to Angus Wallace at Far Heath he’d done stuff on Tin Angel releases and I knew that he would sometimes, like he’d always delivered the goods but I thought that this was probably a little bit on the heavier side, I needed someone with a bit more experience in that area and in the end it went to Peter Junge who is someone that I first met through a promotion in London called Chaos Theory and he did live sound and he mixed a video of me playing a very—personally I thought it was a quite shaky version of Lost At Sea from the last record in one of the concerts they had which was for the quieter end of their listening. So, I came back to him, he was instantly like yeah—I loved what he did in the past and I think this is really interesting project so he came back and he did this, he did a series of masters everything was like on point and that was all out of—he works out of a castle in Saxony it’s called, it’s actually called Castle Studios because it’s in a great big fucking castle. But yeah it’s a pretty internationally renowned studio Stella Massey who’s got credits as long as you know there are hours in the day right she uses it she goes there on the regular and it’s like I know this is a good place I know he’s that—Peter’s a fantastic engineer he’ll be able to do a beautiful job of it and he did and yeah the sound the end sound of that record hinges a lot on the work of Dan and Peter I owe them a lot for that. Dan, again, I’ve known for many years and we’ve played music on bills and now in the same band so we have a very good understanding of when, in terms of the musical concept he’ll know to react on something, he knows how to get certain elements out of that and again Peter’s seen me play live he knew like the way the performance is and then found it in the record as well so that helped a lot and that made a massive difference. And that’s like in the way that the actual record would have come together, for the actual—to go back and say where there were challenges yeah the drums was a challenging thing a lot of times basically down to the environment of the time because again to go into a rehearsal studio was an incredible privilege when things would be able to open up, but I always knew what was needed for them. The fireworks section in The Dream for example was just play around and see how loud you can get and what you might want to kind of make into a kind of like a sound of explosion and that came together quite nicely. And the feedback in Able Archer and The Tall White Fountain Played, there’s kind of like long stretches where they kind of like go on single notes but those notes had—were almost written that if they—when they were found they became written into it and to then go back and record it, it’s like I need to find this note again, which when you want the single bit of feedback in a certain frequency and when you have neighbors gets very interesting, so to explain to someone like it’s okay just give me 5 minutes to find the A above whatever hertz.
MW	Rght yeah I was wondering when you—because you said you recorded the guitars and various things and I think you said in rooms around certain areas, I was like how much was he having to negotiate you know sharing walls with other people during this time?
RJ	With the stuff in Long Itchington that one actually is not too much of an issue uh mostly I was like negotiating with people like less than a wall away but—well that wall felt like it was less than a wall away that stuff was paper thin. It was very weird to go between all these different spaces and try and find a consistent vision of how each room is going to come back to what the record was meant to sound like. But it held together just enough yeah so that was the most important thing. The record that I wanted from day one wasn’t gonna be the one that I was going to get the end but I needed to know that it was in the same world. [clip of Archipelago plays]