YOUTH LAGOON
A longing look at the wider world through a bedroom window.
As our phone call to Boise, Idaho connects, there’s a part of us expecting the voice at the end of the line to be a distant, tuneful murmur. So distinctive is the delivery of Trevor Powers as he purrs and mumbles over Youth Lagoon’s enthralling soundtracks to invisible pictures, it’s hard to image the physical individual behind it all.
What’s more, our preconceptions suggested someone timid, reticent to share, forcing words about himself through a pursed mouth as his face flushed beetroot. Yet we encountered a young man of increasing confidence and assurance, finding his place in the world.
Powers is still helplessly self-deprecating. “I’m not the best at using my words to describe things”, he insists. “I focus on making my music, and it’s weird that after it’s all done you have to go back and try and explain why you did what you did. I know I’m not good at this, but I guess I’m used to not being good at it.”
These sentiments are something of a hangover from the Pitchfork- indebted rush of attention that greeted the wholly unexpected success of Year of Hibernation in late 2011. Powers was suddenly in demand from all and sundry. Considering he’d written it by himself, recorded it with the help of friends and was expecting to post it online for free, it’s fair to say he wasn’t prepared to have to explain. The album was a document of a period in his life, a period which it’s now impossible to recapture. “I think that’s why I’m so happy with both records” he suggests. “There’s nothing I would change. Even going back to Year of Hibernation, I see that music as a timestamp. Sonically, that record speaks for who I was and where I was at that time.”
One of the most intriguing aspects of that release was the alternate world captured on tape. It was the voice of someone looking out from a deeply unique viewpoint on a wide world around them, the vocals as indecipherable as the exact emotions behind them, yet still somehow relatable; intense yet ephemeral. Songs glittered, glowed and swelled, noses pressed against the window.
“I think it’s very much where I was at that point in my life” is Powers’ response to this juxtaposition, “but that was of course massively influenced by Boise. It’s a place where if you want to disappear, it’s easy to. There are so many remote places, I like going hiking up to the mountains, and if I want to be alone it’s easy not to see anyone.” He continues. “But that record was a very inward record, where the whole sense of hibernation wasn’t a physical thing, it was a mental hibernation, an isolation. You can be surrounded by people but still have that sense of feeling lonely.”
A record built around such loneliness, indelibly marked by Powers’ struggles with anxiety, served to make him a very popular figure. And whether an increase in confidence, or experience, or simply the passing of time is the cause, follow up Wondrous Bughouse is defined by a distinction in assurance as pronounced as that between the figure we anticipated speaking to, and the one we did.
The first sample for most came in the form of the sublime Dropla, an ideal microcosm of the progression from one album to the next. As its chimes and droplets fill the air, the first reaction is how familiar it sounds, how immediately evocative it serves to be. “I take that as a compliment”, is Powers’ reply. “A lot of the themes I’m expressing, the idea of mortality, they’ve been wrestled with since the beginning of time. The themes I explore and the universe they’re being explored it, anyone can relate to them, they’re endless.”
Were Dropla found at the heart of Year of Hibernation, there’s no doubt it would gradually expand around a muffled vocal and swelling atmospherics. Yet here, on Wondrous Bughouse, the change is palpable. It strides boldly into a rhythmic stomp, and before the song is one of its six minutes old, vocals are intoning, “you’ll never die, you’ll never die” in momentous, triumphant fashion.
The album is fleshed out, richer and grander in a more conventional full- band sense. The idiosyncratic worldviews are as clear as ever, but instead of being expressed by a barely-there focal point, to be coaxed out, it comes overflowing with psychedelic flourishes. From Mute’s encompassing expanses, where unplaceable sounds whirr around your head, to the surreal Syd Barrett-esque fairground waltz of Attic Doctor or the woozy, morphing lullaby Sleep Paralysis. Youth Lagoon Mark II inhabits a bolder and more immediate space in which Powers can express his thematic depths. “I’ve been focusing on trying to build a sonic world I could see myself living in”, he agrees. And where the first album’s juxtaposition was between the insular and the expansive, here, the clash comes from the most real and human of emotions being expressed in such surreal fashion. “It’s that struggle between humanity and our problems, and getting a hold of that” he says, “and at the same time making something that sounds like it’s from another place.”
When it’s put to him that due to the relationship between Youth Lagoon and the ‘Youth’ of its name – its focus on innocence, formation, uncertainty, discovery – it could become increasingly difficult to maintain as a concept as his youth becomes more distant, Powers sharply puts us straight. “It’s not an idea about being young or wanting to stay young or any of that”, he insists. “To me it’s purely an idea of exploring, it’s not something that ever ends. It’s the opposite, actually; it’s an idea that however old you get, even way later on in life, there’s always things which appear that you never knew existed. You can never stop exploring. It’s not something that could ever feel dated.”
There’s no ignoring an increased level of instrumentation on the current album. While there was the air of a bedroom project innate to early Youth Lagoon material – albeit an extraordinarily ambitious one – Wondrous Bughouse feels like the sound of a band moving forward as one. Despite this, Powers insists the album-making process wasn’t actually all that different. “With the first record I hired in some people I knew to do certain things”, he says. “And this was similar, but to a higher degree.” One individual who surely played a key part was producer Ben H. Allen, whose previous credits include Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion and Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest. Whereas before Powers called in a friend to help with a certain sound or technique, Allen was on hand to make Powers’ more sonically zealous visions a reality through broader musicianship. “Ben’s just marvelous to work with” he states, “He was totally onboard with my vision from the beginning and made it so easy to communicate what I wanted.” When forming such distinctive visions, communication became the key. “I think it’s something that can take time,” he elaborates. “These things can’t necessarily be explained away in a sentence, but even emotionally, or through hand gestures or whatever, you learn to understand each other.”
This is made particularly challenging by the fact much of Youth Lagoon’s music stems from a visual mode of thinking. Of “seeing things in my mind and trying to translate that into a piece of music.” As such, the visual element of each album is of utmost importance. While his first album sported a photograph taken by himself on the cover, a rainbow in a valley shot whilst on holiday, Wondrous Bughouse has a vivid, surreal image on its front. It presents a colourful, topsy-turvy world where the land, sea, sky, the universe and the human body form a glorious collage. It’s beautiful, and very, very apt. Powers’ enthusiasm peaks when the subject is raised. “I’m so excited about this cover,” he says. “I stumbled on it. I’d been doing research into 70s and early 80s art. There was this book published in West Germany back in the 70s, where this guy had been researching teenage drug patients, people who’d been taking lots of psychedelics. None of them were professional artists, and he had them do artwork to see where their minds were at. I saw a few pieces by a lady called Marcia Blaessle. At the time I was finishing the writing of the record and I saw this piece and it just fit so well, I couldn’t believe it. So I started tracking the image down. It seemed that she had passed away, and I finally found the publisher who released the book, but they had folded and passed the rights on, and finally over a period of months I got hold of the right people. I was freaking out cause it almost felt like the album wouldn’t be complete without that cover. It was crazy how something created by someone so distant, so long ago, spoke to me so much.”
This determination to perfect his vision is a reflection of Powers’ emotional investment in each record. With his albums tackling such deeply personal themes, can he truly lock into these feelings at the drop of a hat? “I can switch it off and have a good day, but there’s something weird that happens when I write” he says. “Because the things that inspire me most are the things that are haunting to me or things that are darker in feeling, it can be hard to snap out of it sometimes.” It certainly involved a degree of sacrifice, as well as release. “When I’m writing or recording and getting stuff out of my system it’ll almost be therapeutic, but at the same time it’s saddening, because that’s a part of you that you’re putting down, something you’re taking out of yourself and placing somewhere else. So, I’ll go through these periods of … I guess you’d call it depression, shortly after I get something out.”
It’s this ability to plumb the depths of honesty, which speaks so clearly to an ever-expanding audience. In an early interview, Powers spoke of his ambition to one day visit New York. He now gleefully shares anecdotes of his favourite international destinations, pinpointing Amsterdam, Byron Bay in Australia, and regaling an evening spent in Tokyo with the now-defunct Wu Lyf. What’s more, this June will see him supporting The National at New York’s Barclays Centre, a monumental event on the horizon which has Powers and his newly formed four-piece live band working to become “not just tight, amazingly tight.”
With each new enterprise, the extremities of Trevor Powers’ mind grow broader. Every time he witnesses places that “I knew existed, but never thought I’d see with my own eyes”; every time he thinks, “at that moment, I wish everyone I know could see what I’m seeing.” With each shared experience and exploration of the world, the view from his bedroom window keeps on expanding.
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Wondrous Bughouse is available now via Fat Possum.
Words: Geraint Davies
Photo: Josh Darr
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