News / / 05.04.13

DOLDRUMS

A WORLD OF WARPED, ANDROGYNOUS POP FROM AN INHERITED LAPTOP

Airick Woodhead is the cosmic cluster of creative energy known as Doldrums when he takes centre stage. And as Crack caught up with him ahead of his long awaited debut album Lesser Evil, we found this Montreal-based experimentalist is anything but down.

Bands and solo artists, whether synth or guitar-wielding, are fast emerging from Montreal’s close-knit community. Within this network, twenty-three year old Toronto-born Airick has found his own personal utopia and a deal with the local imprint Arbutus Records, who are putting out gems from his friend Grimes, Braids and the silky indie poppers TOPS. So we can’t help but ask Airick from the off, what’s it like living in Montreal? Is it the artistic holyland it’s portrayed to be? He laughs. “I think I’m doing a lot to propagate that, but I try to because I’m so stoked on it. Maybe if you went there you wouldn’t feel the same way at all, but for me Montreal is a community. The people I’ve met are very, very devoted to their own artistic works and efforts. I’ve been traveling so much and every time I get back there it’s like, ‘Yes! Fucking inspiration!’”

“I mean the funny thing is that it’s so utopian that I just don’t want to leave, ever,” he muses. “If I was a visual artist it wouldn’t be a problem, but because I’m a musician I’m obligated to tour and stuff. But then I’m also addicted to traveling. I’m only saying that because I miss Montreal.” And just as Airick’s not mad keen on being away from his beloved home, he’s not mad keen on doing the press rounds. “I did this performance on Pitchfork TV, on my own, and I was just singing a song into the camera and thought ‘woah this is crazy!” he laughs. “There’s just this big green screen and really bright lights, it was kinda awkward.”

Woodhead’s media shy attitude is hard to fathom if you’ve ever seen him onstage. He totally goes for it, arguably stealing the show at last year’s Iceland Airwaves and The Great Escape festivals, and no doubt many more Crack didn’t make it to. He owes his energy to Coca-Cola apparently (“Have you tried that stuff? It’s crazy!”) and despite his soaring electronic soundscapes being largely laptop produced, he utilises a full band when recreating the songs live. Would it not just be easier to tour alone? One man and his MacBook? He protests. “I’ve never done that. I’ve always just jammed with rotating casts of my friends. I’m very lucky to know so many talented people. I’ve always kept Doldrums as open as possible. It’s easy to confine yourself to only doing a certain thing, but I don’t see naming a project or branding it as limiting at all. I’m trying to create something that’s completely at my whim.”

Capturing the release of live performances on an album can prove to be an unmanageable quest for some. Not Doldrums. Lesser Evil is a rollercoaster of different energies, sides and styles. This may be because he recorded the album himself (mostly captured on a laptop gifted to him by his old pal Claire ‘Grimes’ Boucher) or perhaps because after 18 months in the brewing, he’s had enough time to make it just right. One thing’s for sure, you can hear Airick jumping four feet in the air on every track; his heart pumps through each beat. And he still seems pretty amazed that he’s made an album at all. “I’d just been really into live performance and song by song recordings and different kinds of projects, so to come back and do something more traditional was, like, novel to me”, he explains. “And I didn’t really have any resources or time to do it. I was travelling and my backpack had my sampler in it, and I just started recording like that.” Touring with Grimes and Purity Ring gathered Doldrums some swift momentum and before long, what had started out as solely bedroom recordings blossomed into a much bigger project. “Yeah, things have been going well and I’m happy to have opportunities now to do it more professionally. I ended up going to a studio in LA and going to a studio in London. It’s cool because it’s still very much my production, but it’s also touched so many different places and been through so many different states. By the end I was in some multi-billion dollar recording studio in the mountains.” Quite the journey then? “Yeah, I know that the album sounds pretty scattered in a way, but I think that’s what’s nice about it; it’s more of a narrative. Like the way that Bjork’s early albums have a personality that changes through it.” We point out some definite Bjork sounds in Lesser Evil, particularly the ear walloping single Egypt. Was the Icelandic faerie queen a big influence? Airick owns up. “When I was in high school the triumph of music was Bjork, Radiohead and Beck. Which is funny, because now when I look at what I’m making musically it’s like, “Oh, it’s a combination of Bjork, Beck and Radiohead!” he laughs. You could do a lot worse than those three though; all acts who’d do anything before releasing two albums alike. Airick agrees. “Yeah those artists were huge for pushing boundaries, obviously. And I really like how every one of them loses all limitations on their projects. Like, Radiohead wanted to do live stuff on OK Computer, and wanted to record it themselves. That’s fucking DIY.”

The ethos he mentions is hugely prevalent in the music coming out of Montreal right now. Some would have you believe that the contemporary definition of DIY equates to having no fancy producer hauled in, the rise of Ableton and the tech savvy musician who’ll stay up all night to record their own EP and release it on Soundcloud the next morning. Airick sets us straight. “It’s funny that it gets called a DIY ethic all the time, but I think it’s not really about doing it yourself, it’s about not compromising. You can still work with tons of people. You can have something larger than a home made artifact, but the tools we have now are so competent at replicating larger productions that you can also just make it at home. It’s really sweet.” His disregard for big production in his own music extends to the music he’s into now, as we are hit with a burst of what’s currently floating his boat. He cites Blawan, Moon King (from Montreal, obviously) and Daphni as current favourites, explaining that “I like stuff that seduces you into it, rather than pushing itself on you. So much music is just ‘LIKE ME, LIKE ME’, whereas I find the good techno stuff likes itself enough that you want to like it, which is a much nicer feeling.”

Unknowingly, Airick sums up why we find him and his music so appealing. He’s really not trying to win you over. He’s intently doing his own thing, and that thing is good. But making a great album can’t be as effortless as all that, surely? He’s happy to reveal his process. “Basically, the way I work is I ‘mine’: I intake materials, which in my case means going through iTunes and finding tons of loops. Then there’s the ‘play’ aspect, which is the really inspiring part, where I start shoving different things inside each other and get lost in my process. Then there has to be this perspective thing, so I curate out of my own stuff what goes together and what I want to present as part of my aesthetic. It’s kind of interesting having this schizophrenic process.” What we’re presented with are snippets of a dreamy world, where chaos rules and the beat is king, all the while narrated by Airick’s awesome vocals.

Much has been made of Airick’s high soaring falsetto; you’d be forgiven for assuming he’s employed a female guest vocalist on some tracks. “I love vocals that are completely androgynous”, he states. “Like My Bloody Valentine – it’s just air blowing in your ear, but it’s human. But I also just love it when people just rip themselves up and go for it. There are a lot of really good vocalists like Sean Nicholas Savage from Montreal – he sounds like Roy Orbison – Raphi from Braids, and Claire (Grimes) is such a good singer.” Even among his illustrious Montreal peers, Airick’s voice is truly distinctive. So how did he find his own vocal modus operandi? “I used to be in a band called Spiral Beach, where I shared lead vocal duties with a girl, so I started singing really high with her all the time. I did that for years and years and wrote songs with her in mind.” Early releases from Doldrums like I’m Homesick Sitting up Here in my Satellite featured a far louder and feistier style, though there’s little shouting on Lesser Evil. “I still shout a lot live, but I think it’s because I was recording a lot of this in small rooms or bedrooms and I never really felt comfortable shouting. But with …Satellite, I did it in my Dad’s basement.” So did he have a vocal engineer assist with those complex vocal loops? “No, I do all that stuff myself, I have a Kaosspad, this crazy box you play with your hands. It’s a very intuitive gestural device and I’ve been using it for years.”

We note our surprise no one has warned him to take it easy on his voice. Too much shouting and wailing could do him some damage. “I do have a vocal condition from shouting to much. It’s called muscular tension dysphonia: I actually have a song called Dysphonia, it’s the B-side of She is the Wave. I lose my voice because it’s not very strong. It’s an anxiety related problem, when I’m really freaking out about something, my vocal chords don’t work and connect properly. But it’s been fine recently,” he laughs. So it should be, as this lad has nothing to be anxious about. With his album released last month and a seemingly endless tour on the cards, his star is on the rise.

 

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Lesser Evil is out now via Souterrain Transmissions.

Words: Lucie Grace

endlessdoldrums.com

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