Juno Daily – In The Mix plus interview: Szun Waves
The ever obliging trio treat us to a chat and a mix
Szun Waves – or producer Luke Abbott, saxophonist Jack Wyllie and drummer Laurence Pike if you prefer – have just released their third album Earth Patterns, and a more uncompromising collision of experimental electronics and avant jazz freedom you really could not wish for.
To mark the occasion, Wyllie has created a mix for Juno Daily that’s every bit as hard to pin down as their own experimental sound, spanning everything from Don Cherry and Miles Davis to Jon Hassell, Terry Riley and Szun Waves themselves.
And as if that weren’t enough in itself, Abbott answered a few questions we had for the band on the album, lockdown and the help they had from one James Holden, among others.
The Mysticism of My Sound – Don Cherry
Bra Joe From Kilimanjaro – Terry’s Tune – Don Cherry
Exploding Upwards – Szun Waves
Paris II – Jon Hassell
Echoes of Earth – Laurence Pike
Across the Lake of the Ancient World – Terry Riley
Lifespan_IV – Terry Riley
Our scene – Luke Abbott
Utopia – Paradise Cinema
Evergreen – Deep Learning
Lost Fawn – Forgiveness
In a Silent Way – Miles Davis
So, Earth Patterns started life when you spent three days improvising in a studio at the tail end of your European tour in 2019… What do you remember about that time…. What do you think having been on tour brought to it – does it make you braver, more responsive to each other….
I think people refer to it as ‘the before times’ now? The pre-pandemic world seems so far away now, but I remember that tour pretty well. We played a real variety of gigs, from the Hammersmith Apollo supporting Nils Frahm to the back room of a pub in Cambridge for about 20 people – both of those shows were amazing by the way. Playing gigs definitely gets us into a flow, and we’d worked out some nice themes to improvise around during the tour, it definitely makes us tune into each other well. But also the studio is a really different environment to a gig, so it brings out different ideas an approaches.
You did, however, create Earth Patterns while working in different countries – how did that process affect the sounds, approach etc… The press release talks about it being ‘’more realised’ than the previous two LPs.
It was just having the time to really consider which takes we used really. The record is still all recorded live, no edits or overdubs, so it’s a pretty straight forward document of us playing. But when we record we generate a lot of material, hours and hours. So taking the time to really reflect on the recordings and work out how to turn that into a record was really useful.
What input did James Holden and (producer/engineer) David Pye into proceedings. How did the link with Holden come about?
James and I have been friends for over a decade, I’ve released most of my records on his label Border Community. The Szun Waves project started in his studio, and our first record ‘At Sacred Walls’ is named after the studio. Those first sessions were all engineer by David Pye, he’s also been a friend of mine for a long time, and he has engineered most of our recordings to date. For Earth Patterns we had done the first sessions at a studio called Urchin, but we felt like we didn’t quite have enough, so did an extra day at Sacred Walls which is where we recorded New Universe which James engineered for. When it came to mix the record I handed it over to David, so the sound of this record is in large part down to his mixes.
You’ve also worked closely with visual artist Dom Harwood to create accompanying visual landscapes for the track, with lead track ‘New Universe’ being an obvious example. How do you go about translating from sound into vision, with their different languages of expression?
Working with Dom was a real pleasure, his work is really incredible. He’s brought so much to the table and really understood what we were after. The video work he’s made, as well as the imagery he created for the artwork was all based off the cover photograph by Trainanos Pakioufakis. Dom really managed to extrapolate a whole world of ideas and it all tied in so well with the music
You’ve spoken about this album being more ‘grounded’ and earth-like than its predecessor New Hymn To Freedom… How come?
New Hymn To Freedom just felt like it was in space for some reason, like all the music was happening far away on the other side of the universe. I don’t know if I have a rational explanation for that, but that’s how it felt to me. Earth Patterns just feels very grounded, like when you walk barefoot on the grass, or when you lay down in a field to look at the sky.
You all have other projects, some of which are bigger and more pressured projects – does it feel like relaxing, holiday time when it comes to Szun Waves?
Kind of, it feels like play time. Szun Waves is a side project for all of us and it really is just an opportunity to explore musical ideas together, it’s pretty pure in that way. No one is trying to make it more commercial or dilute it in any way, it’s sort of protected from the world like that. It’s great fun really, playing music in a totally free way is really how it’s meant to be I think. We’ve no one to satisfy but ourselves, so it feels genuinely wonderful when people connect with the music.
Anything new in the pipeline for Szun Waves that we should be looking out for?
We’ve got a couple of good tracks that didn’t make it onto the album that we might drop on Bandcamp sometime before the end of the year, if I manage to come up with the right track names for them.
Ben Willmott