Pariah – ‘Orpheus’

“I think my tastes really show that I’m naturally very drawn to “sad” music.”

The first half of the EP seems more dancefloor-orientated than ‘Detroit Falls’, but at its heart it sounds quite melancholy to me – those haunted vocals and that. Is that fair?

“Yeah I think that’s a very fair assessment. I think my tastes really show that I’m naturally very drawn to “sad” music. Alongside Burial, I’ve been massively influenced by artists like Boards of Canada, Brian Eno, and bands like A Silver Mt Zion and Godspeed! You Black Emperor… generally anything to do with the Constellation label. I think it’s fair to say that all these artists make music that is embedded with a deep sadness and I find that it’s a vibe that a lot of the more ambient jungle, before it got too jazzy and “intelligent”, absolutely nailed.”

Without trying to put words in your mouth, is that something that informs your music in general – the melancholy, nostalgia? I mean the name Pariah suggests that too.

“I’d say that its nostalgia rather than melancholy that effects me emotionally. I find that I can be quite sentimental about relatively unimportant and minor memories of my life. Strangely, tunes like Jodeci’s ‘Feenin’ (LTJ Bukem Remix) or Source Direct’s ‘Secret Liason’ make me feel very nostalgic, which is odd because I wasn’t even aware of jungle when it was around – I was only about 6 or 7. It makes me yearn for a time in music that I never got to experience and I think that’s something that definitely seeps through into my own music. I don’t know if that makes any sense at all… I find it quite hard to explain. [laughs]”

“The name Pariah is actually taken from one of my favourite bands called Cursed. They split up a couple of years ago but they were this Canadian hardcore band and on one of their records they had a track called ‘Pariah’ and I wanted to call myself that, kind of, as a homage to their music.”

“Safe houses are supposed to be places where you are out of harm’s way but people only end up there as a direct result of some sort of forced upheaval of normal life … It’s a terrifying thought.”

The track titles, and the word Safehouses – they’re quite evocative. Any specific meaning behind them?

“The idea of a “safe house” is something that has a particular resonance with me. They are supposed to be places where you are out of harm’s way but due to the fact that people only end up there as a direct result of some sort of forced upheaval of normal life, in my mind, they strike me as being cold and lonely. It’s a terrifying thought that in a flash you can lose your identity, your family, your friends.

“I thought that Safehouses was an appropriate name for the EP because I think the vibe of the music is quite comforting (the warmth of the synths/textures) at the same time as being quite lonely and isolated (the recontextualised R’n'B vocals).

“Most of the track titles don’t mean mean as much as ‘Detroit Falls’ or ‘Orpheus’… I usually end up titling tracks by how they sound in my head – without wanting to become too pretentious an example would be the synths in the breakdown of “Prism” which, to me, sound like light being refracted through glass. There’s another hardcore reference in there too: ‘Crossed Out’ were another band that I was a huge fan of.”

What’s your writing process like? Where do you write, what sort of stuff seems to inspire you most?

“My writing process is scatty to say the least. I’m the least consistent producer in terms of how often I make beats or how often I finish them. I’d say about 70% of my stuff never makes it past the 16 bar loop phase.

“For that reason, combined with the fact that I’ve only been producing for a relatively short amount of time, the only finished tunes I have are the ones already out or the ones that are forthcoming. It’s a strange feeling and, in a way, it means that occasionally I put myself under too much pressure to make music: that I constantly need to prove to myself that I can still write half decent tunes. I’m slightly envious of producers who have a bunch of really great finished tunes that they can gradually release and even though I can imagine that having a massive backlog could, at times, be frustrating it does ease the pressure.”

What’s your plan for after Safehouses – what releases do you have on the horizon, and where do you plan to take your sound?

“Well, after Safehouses, there’s going to be another 12″ single on R&S which will feature a Detroit meets Berlin techno tune with a couple of people doing remixes of it on the flip. Then, after that, there’s going to be a three track EP on Black Acre but I’ve yet to start writing it so I don’t really know what it’s going to be like.

“Hopefully, by the end of next year I will have written an album and I’ve just started thinking about what I want to do with it. Although I want to continue writing more dancefloor material – because I love writing it and I love DJing – when I come to do an album I’d like to write a record that is influenced by but, at the same time, almost entirely removed from the dancefloor with tunes that have a more song-based structure to them.

“Ideally, I’d like to work with some vocalists too. I don’t think that it’s a particularly profound or new thing to say but the reason for this is that albums that derive from dance music often don’t seem to work as albums… it will be a collection of 10 mixable tunes that are more suited to the DJ than to the home listener. That isn’t to say that the tunes aren’t great but often it can be quite a challenging listen without any clear narrative.”

Tom Lea

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.