Road Dog Blues: In Conversation with Droneroom’s Blake Conley

“It’s been a really slow year,” says Blake Conley during our chat over Zoon in the early hours of a November Saturday morning. The architect of the fascinating droneroom project, prior to our conversation, the Tacoma, Washington-based artist admitted that he tended to go “long and hard”, and almost three hours in, it’s hard to argue the point.

“After the aggressively manic Vegas years where I’ve made so much fucking material, part of me thinks, ‘Well, maybe I should just relax on it for a minute’,” he continues. “That’s the thing I do. I’ll get myself too overwhelmed if I’m not making something then I’m not worthwhile because that’s what I base my self-worth on. Putting all your eggs in your creative basket to be the definition of your self-worth is a fool’s errand because nothing can hold up to that weight for very long.”

Conley’s year hasn’t been barren by any stretch of the imagination, starting with one of 2023’s finest collaborations alongside Cincinnati experimental guitarist, Pete Fosco, as Rabbit Hash with their debut LP, Don’t Mistake My Enthusiasm for Impatience. The mention of this prompts Conley to share some stories and inspirations beyond the song titles, starting with Don’t Mistake My Enthusiasm for Impatience’s track, Another Rich History of Catastrophes.

“The Alan Sparhawk tune, How A Freight Comes into the Harbour. Because it sounded like a squawking sound like a wah pedal plugged in reverse, like in the middle of Pink Floyd’s Echoes, there’s some weird seagull noises; that’s a wah pedal plugged in backwards. They didn’t realise it.” Then there’s the album’s second track, Grizzled Man. “[It’s] named that because the guitar Pete was playing sounded like the Grizzly Man soundtrack. We’re also big fans of the Richard Thompson record.”

One of two collaborations Conley has been involved with this year – the other being Jesus’ Twin Brother alongside Nonconnah’s Zachary Corsa – we move on to dissect the droneroom oeuvre. Starting with the 2020 outtakes compilation release, Blood on Blood, the cover a homage to Six Organs of Admittance’s School of the Flower. Then last year’s The Most Gorgeous Sleep. “The most gorgeous sleep that I’ve ever had,” recounts Conley, laughing before delivering the punch line. “It’s a fucking No Doubt song!”

The conversation moves onto Conley’s 2020 release, …The Other Doesn’t “Agnès Vara, the film director has a song or movie called One Sings, …The Other Doesn’t. The Other Doesn’t is stolen from that because I don’t sing. If you notice the painting on [the cover] my friend did, it’s vaguely a microphone.”

These comedic vignettes provide a fascinating contrast to Conley’s emotion-heavy dronescapes. The droneroom experience is one that has been spoken about at length throughout these pages, and with good reason. Of all the new music that has landed across the desk since Sun 13’s inception, it’s hard to find a more enthralling project. Through Conley’s hazy meanderings and improvised guitar sketches, a blurry snapshot forms of both the past and present. The tonality, completely breaking you in two with heady atmospheres making the mind wander to interesting places.

“I’m really skittish of the term ambient, because I don’t feel like it describes what I do, but I ended up lumped in it,” says Conley. “I feel like 80 percent of the time when people say this sounds ambient, I say, ‘No, there’s just a delay pedal on it’. There’s too much movement in what I do to fall under what I consider ambient music.”

Conley is a student of experimentation, and it’s apparent during our regular email communication over the past 18 months. Since discovering his works via last year’s Whatever Truthful Understanding, the journey through his back catalogue has been a metropolis of high watermarks.

“Whatever Truthful Understanding won’t seem to die, and that’s really weird for me,” says Conley. “Experience wise, putting out a record and people are like, ‘Oh, that’s really nice job’. Then it’s on to the next thing. But that Bandcamp Daily write up earlier this year, the idea that a record you put out a year ago will still get random write up is not that common anymore. It’s been my most successful record, honestly.”  

While he may consider 2023 a lean year, Conley’s output still overshadows most artists out there. Following Rabbit Hash’s Don’t Mistake My Enthusiasm for Impatience came droneroom’s Valentine’s Day release, You Drown Out the Crowd, followed by three releases within the space of a week.

“I’ve been putting out too much and not actually having proper time to promote things. I was particularly stupid this year with how everything lined up to hit in April,” says Conley, speaking of the wonderful three-pronged attack of Secondhand Failures, Life Ain’t Worth the Drown, and the pick of the bunch and one of the albums of 2023, the amplifier worshipping Rusted Lung.

The year has been rounded out with the October release of The Best of My Love (another reference as you’re about to find out). A release that, in its own way, encapsulates the droneroom story.

And speaking of that story, here’s some insight into more of it.

Cosmic Cowboy: The Month with Droneroom

Sun 13: I was thinking about Cormac McCarthy’s latest two books. Have you read them?

Blake Conley: “I finished them. It’s been a month ago or so. It took forever just finding the time, but I decided to do it back-to-back rather than pace it out and do one and then take a breather. Sometimes Cormac can be a weird headspace to be into for a prolonged period. It starts affecting my linguistic tics and I start pontificating in ornate ways. It’s a good thing to crib song titles from. You’ll always find a fantastic line that you want to then steal for a song title. It’s a cool thing to do with anybody I read; I find a line and crib it for a song title somewhere.”

S13: Like your song titles from the Jesus’ Twin Brother record and The Leftovers references. They were great.

BC: “Yeah, they were placeholders for a little while, and then I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’ll just I’ll roll with this’. It was done to just be really funny to Zachary when I sent the initial pieces over to… and then I was like, ‘Let’s just leave them. It’s funnier that way.”

“It’s funny when you take certain things out of context. The Body is always really good about [that] if you find the right line and you take it and divorce it from its context: it can be really strange. They named that record, Everything That Dies Some Day Comes Back.  It’s a Springsteen lyric, you know? It bugged me for a minute because I didn’t place it immediately, and was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s Atlantic City by Springsteen’. When you separate it from its context, and it sounds a lot more sinister than it you would have thought it in the context of the Springsteen song. They took Someday You’ll Ache Like I Ache from the Hole song, that was with the Uniform collab, right?

S13: Yeah, that’s right. There are probably more vignettes in there that we haven’t discovered yet.

BC: “Like, Blood on Blood is also from Nebraska. I stole that because I always liked that lyric, ‘Nothing feels better than blood on blood’. That was a really intense thing to say, so I took that, and it was funny to me to give a seemingly kind of metal sounding title to stuff that I do.”

S13: I read an interview with Cory Hansen recently, and he was talking about equipment and marrying old amps and guitars to produce the sound. I instantly thought of you. Is that something that you do?

BC: “Funnily enough, not exactly. More so nowadays, I’ve been really trying to find what works. I’ve got a lot of friends who are more gadflies with gear and have a new weird guitar of the week. Zachary will totally find some random Japanese guitar. He’s got this atrocious Russian guitar that seems like they had an idea of what a guitar is supposed to be, and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever played in my life. It’s far too heavy and it has a MIDI Jack before MIDI was a thing… like a weird five prong for what you plug it into the amp again. They just didn’t have an idea of what a guitar actually is because they couldn’t get them in Soviet era.

“I like the idea of finding one that you like, and then playing it long enough to where it moulds itself to you. Think about the wood on the neck, right? [Holding his guitar]. This is a newer one that I got, but if you’re the only person who’s ever played that guitar and you play it for 20 years… I don’t have my Telecaster that was my first real electric guitar. It’s the one that I actually spent a lot of money on at the time, and I bought it off the rack. It was the only guitar I owned for at least 10 years… and just through the only one to have and play, the neck, it starts moulding itself to your hands as your various oils and sweats embed themselves in the wood in the spots that you feel comfortable playing in.

“There’s something really beautiful about it becoming a not quite symbiotic relationship with the instrument. I don’t know… just your own body and the wood of it, over time you start slotting into each other in a weird way that makes it kind of just you. And so, I’ve always tried to find a guitar that does everything I want it to do… and then through playing, it becomes moulded to me in the same way.

“Particularly in my post-loop period. I tried to figure out what I need to really do what I do, and how can I find everything I want out of it… giving yourself walls in a way that then forces you to have to find innovation through it, rather than having innovation at the touch of a button. Does that make any sense?”

S13: Sure.

BC: “It’s almost too easy, and it’s a weird trap of getting into gear where you can go down rabbit holes forever, finding everything it does. After a while it can create option paralysis because you can play one guitar at a time, right? There’s that Rowland S Howard thing about why he likes Jaguars being that any part of an electric guitar is playable because it’s amplified. You can do something, and it creates a sound and then it’ll be amplified through there. It’s forcing myself to figure out stuff within the realm of what I have.

“I have six electric guitars, most of them are back in Tennessee. I own a lot of things, but I really tried to winnow down and focus on what I have available and figure out what I can do with less. That’s been a big focus of mine post-loop period at the end of 2019. When I really started trying to figure out improvisation and not having 14 or 15 effect pedals in front of me for just utilising for, like, half a second. It’s become more, ‘Okay, if I have five of them, or four of them that do the main things that I like getting done, what can I do with less?”

S13: Your tones and sounds are very different to most in the experimental space. Do you use any specific strings?

BC: “I do. I used to use ernie balls. Through Desert they had a string company, Black Harbor Strings, that was an endorsement thing. I use the heavier on the bottom ones, but that’s a holdover from my metal days of having the extra thicker ones on the bottom.”

S13: Before you begin making an album, do you have a particular idea in mind of how it will sound? For instance, Rusted Lung seems like an angry album to me…

BC: “There are bits of that. There’s a combination of that and just a timeframe. I will think, ‘Okay, what’s something I haven’t done before?’ Like Whatever Truthful Understanding, that was done because I hadn’t done an acoustic record before. The acoustic guitar had never really shown up in anything I had done prior to that, so sometimes I’ll have an idea.

“Easy Payday was one where I was like, ‘Okay, I’m a dude that just plays guitar, solo and I don’t sing: What are my options here as far as the types of records you can make? A solo guitar player, a funk record. How would one do that? We don’t have like a rhythm section’. There’s an extent, I’ve got a limited palette, not a genre to have to slot into, but the type of thing I do, what can I do with it in a way that it still feels organic and true to the concept, but not just another record of that? So, you end up with a lot of the stuff I did last year with the acoustic record, and then Easy Payday, which is what we discussed before, the idea of destruction of concept in a way… and then Most Gorgeous Sleep was all lap steel guitar.

“Rusted Lung’s a weird thing. That one is funnily enough more of a Zuma idea. Neil Young records 80 per cent of the time are a lot more hodgepodge than you think they would be, exempting, say, Tonight’s the Night, which was all done in one session or Dead Man all one session. But Zuma or On the Beach, they are actually cobbling things of different sessions stuck together in a really interesting way. Look at Home Grown, that one took forever to come out. It’s a weird mix of different times and recorded things that happened… and then he found a place for these things to come together.

“Rusted Lung is almost the antithesis of a more concept record. One of them was done when I was still living in Louisville in 2018. The one that’s got The Distance from Myself with all the backwards step that was done was done early 2020. But that was still a Louisville one. That actually has less of an idea behind it. It was a few different times, recording wise, and then they just synced together. The last one was the one thing that was written for the record once I knew that it was going to be happening and it had the other two. I just didn’t have anything that would fit timewise, because the restrictions of vinyl are so weird: you can only do 20 minutes a side.

“And so, I made the title track, that’s the one I made for the record, and there’s a bad section in it, which is where the bird spot was. (laughs) I needed to get rid of this this section where I lost the plot a little bit in it. But I had that recording of some birds, which I think may have been a holdover soundscape from Whatever Truthful Understanding, actually. I wanted to mask out the spot where I clearly lost the plot in the improvisation, so I had Jason [Lamoreaux] from Somewhere Cold, who mastered it and did all the soundscaping insertion for Whatever Truthful Understanding, say, ‘Hey, can you cover this spot up with something else? Then it can come back when it gets better again’.”

S13: Talking about losing the plot there, I remember you said to me that you get nervous when you play. Is this the case even when you’re recording?

BC: “Well, I don’t know if the playing makes me nervous. It’s whatever headspace I’m in at the time that inadvertently comes out in what I’m playing. I’m an anxious, compulsive type of person, and so I can hear what I’m doing, the jitteriness, or the trying to play something really peaceful as a way to either smooth that out or just work it out of my system.

“It’s funny, I was talking to Brian Case when I saw FACS in Seattle about what I liked about FACS was that their music sounds like an anxiety attack to me. It’s all fucking tension. There’s so little release in that band, and even when there is release, it’s not a euphoric release. There’s no completion or satisfaction in it. It’s all nervousness, but by listening to that it creates this weird phase cancellation. In my head by listening to something nervous while I’m feeling nervous, the two cancel each other out in a weird way.

“Have you ever heard that thing about people with a lot of trauma, or say PTSD in life, can get really into horror films?”

S13: Yeah, sure.

BC: “The idea is that you can watch a horror film and it’ll stir up the same feelings, but you’re in your house, somewhere safe, so you can process those feelings or feel them, in a way that rewires your brain to understand safeness in where you are experiencing those feelings as opposed to the unsafe spaces that you’re in when you’re feeling them in another context. I think there’s something to that, and I find that maybe correlates into the way that I listen and make music is that then by playing something that feels anxious or searching, it clears my brain.

“Joseph Allred told me recently that they always thought that the music I play comes across a lot more like how I probably am underneath the surface, versus how I try to present myself or appear or behave in public. That what’s underneath how my head is processing things comes out in music in a way that I wouldn’t express in the real world, for lack of a better word.”

S13: Your album …The Other Doesn’t. Was that the bridge moment for you? Was that like a through line?

BC: “Yeah, that was the one that I really thought, even at the time and in hindsight… I view that one as the tabula rasa of what droneroom is. So, the first thing I ever really put out was that Piss Poor single, that being the name of it as piss poor.”

S13: It’s a phrase that doesn’t get used enough…

BC: (Laughs) “It doesn’t. I was really partial to it. And funny enough, it came out of a show that I also did with Joseph in Nashville that no one came to, and it was originally a weird cover of Love Hurts by Gram Parsons that went on for 20 minutes and just had one chord to it. (laughs) I realised I probably couldn’t conceivably release a 20-minute cover of that Gram Parsons song, but I could take the idea that I was doing with it and rework it a little bit to become its own thing. And then I got the looper and I got really into loop construction, which was funny enough. I also realise in hindsight it is very much a tendency of mine to have 20 thoughts at once. So, through looping, you’re allowed to throw 20 ideas at something at once and have them all be there. Then I burned myself out on playing 100 to 150 shows in two-and-half-years, which is also just a very fucking compulsive thing of mine.”

S13: Did you tour all over the country?

BC: “No, that’s the dumber part. Anytime I’d get a local show offering I would say yes. It was over couple of different projects, but if I saw someone and they needed someone to play the show, I’d be like, ‘I’ll play it!’ Even though it made no sense on the bill. Although I found doing what I do, I can fudge it around the edges on a show. You can do what I do and open up for some singer-songwriters and it kind of makes sense. Or a metal show, it makes enough sense. Metal dudes seem to like this. I think it’s a weed thing.”

S13: Yeah. I could see that.

BC: “Punk shows, it’s a little weirder, but I’ve still made it work. Then I did …The Other Doesn’t. It felt like a weird opportunity to do it. I didn’t have the means to really record it like I did the loop stuff. I’d been listening to that Alan Sparhawk Solo Guitar record a lot and got a pedal that made some sounds that reminded me of that record, so, I thought, ‘Oh, well, I can explore this’. It weirdly worked out to match the early months of COVID.

(Pause)

“The pandemic thing feels weird to really make it the focal point of anything given it was what everyone says about any of their records that they made at that time. It feels cliché, and it’s not like I was even thinking about it in that way. I feel like it came out around the edges on it, but the pandemic record overtones feel cliché. If you’re going to be honest in your music making, then yeah anything you’re around is going to seep its way into what you’re doing. So, to me hanging a worldwide experience on to your personal thing, for me, feels a little grandiose and it puts a weird weight [on things]. I’m not saying anything profound because there are no lyrics.

“I told a friend of mine about making music where I’ve said this a few times; why I don’t write lyrics or sing is because the world doesn’t need another sad sack white dude whining about his problems over his lyrics. There are people that do that fantastically and I love singer-songwriter music, but I don’t feel like I have anything new to say to the conversation that’s helpful or any more relevant than someone who is a true singer-songwriter couldn’t say better or more impactfully than, say, a non-white dude. Other voices are more important than mine, so I’m not going to muddy the waters with whatever my little sad sack panic attack musings are. I’ll play sad sack musing guitar instead and just let what everyone else’s mind draws from it.”

S13: With the …The Other Doesn’t, to me with The Best of My Love, there feels like a link between the two records. Is that something you’ve thought about?

BC: “Yes and no. It wasn’t quite the intent, although funnily enough both were done in like a very short timeframe. The Best of My Love, weirdly I was living in Memphis at Zachary’s house. I was house sitting for him when he was changing houses, and so I had the whole place to myself and wanted to utilise the space while I could. He’d given me an amp him with a really fantastic tremolo which is what you can hear all over there and like the weird throbbing going on and everything.

“But I did notice that. [On] reflection, I wouldn’t say it was intended to be a sister record. I don’t think it is, but I think that some of the ideas did circle back… and I think the idea of having what I would consider the interlude pieces came back for The Best of My Love in the same way they are on …The Other Doesn’t.

“In the Ambient Country podcast, I don’t remember if that actually made it on the air, but we talked about long-form pieces, which is never really intentional. I don’t intend everything to end up between 10 and 15 minutes long, that’s just what happens. You play ’til the ideas run out is my general modus operandi. I’ll play and then don’t realise that it’s gone on for as long as it does. My intention for that would be two minutes of drone before anything comes in. When I’m making it, I feel like, ‘Okay, it’s been laid out and now to come in’.

“But yeah, the interludes were one of the bigger things that made me think about having a couple of weird short pivots. The banjo number felt like that, although that’s funny enough. I’d gotten a hold of a banjo and wanted to do a banjo thing. Like a Daniel Higgs idea, because I’d listened to him a lot. And then the drone under that’s actually an airplane getting de-iced”.

S13: Oh, wow.

BC: “I mean, a plane getting de-iced is just a weird, like, raaaaw noise. I was sitting on a plane, and people were jabbering, and I just thought, ‘Oh, this sounds really cool. I should record this’. I think I slowed it down and it’s probably reversed. There’s chattering in it, but I think they’re running backwards, if I recall correctly. And then just glued the two together. I don’t know if it’s funny, but it’s funny to me.” (laughs)

S13: That’s the thing about field recordings. They are completely unique.

BC: “Yeah. They always tickle me. There are a lot of jokes in droneroom, but they’re like jokes that only I would get, and you’d have to follow my train of thought to get to where the joke is. I imagine if you don’t have my exact same sense of humour with how my brain works, you probably would also be like, ‘That’s not funny’. I don’t know why it’s funny, but it is to me. Like the naming of the record, The Best of My Love, it’s funny in a weird way. It’s a Mountain Goats lyric. One of the ones on Tallahassee, which is one of his more brutal records to me.

“It’s got that line, ‘The way I feel about you baby can’t explain it. You’ve got the best to my love’. But he stole that, he admittedly took it from that disco number, so the fact that I took it from him taking it from there is funny to me.”

S13: Who’s going to take it from you?

BC: “I didn’t realise there was an Eagles song called it, too. And I was just like, ‘Oh, no, it’s not [an Eagles reference]’. So originally the record was going to be called Times Arrow, not from the Martin Amis book, from the Bojack episode. And then I realised there was a Martin Amis book called that, so I felt like I had to read it to make sure if it came up, I would be able to speak to it. It was about this guy that ages backwards, but then it turns out he was a Nazi at some point and started making me really uncomfortable to use that as a title. And then Martin Aims died he was a bit of a right-wing nut job anyway.

“So, the title being called The Best of My Love was a month or two before the record got into there. But I liked the idea that the best of my love is sort of an ambiguous idea. It sounds optimistic, you’re giving someone the best of your love, and that’s fantastic, right? But what is the best? What if your best is the worst fucking thing ever? You could try your best at something and still completely fail or destroy it, or it may not be the best for someone else. I like that weird ambiguity in a title. Like when I named something, I’ll Make It Up to You, I Swear, which was not a Slint lyric, although I realised later it was a Slint lyric. But I’m okay with that.

“It’s up to you and your own mindset to read whether I’ll Make It Up to You, I Swear…. [whether] that person [is] actually going to do it? Or do they just think they can and they can’t? That’s where I try to think a lot of times with titles is that they are cribbed from somewhere weird. Depending on whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic, or hopeful or cynical, they can go either way. That’s what I like about language and words and how your mindset can colour that completely.”

S13: Sure.

BC: “In an indie rock band, the singer in that band was a really optimistic, up kind of guy. I did write him a lyric once that was, ‘What a waste to waste your time on me’. And then he ended up using it in a song and changed it to, ‘What a waste to waste my time on you’. I always thought that was a fascinating demarcation of our personalities. The way we think about things is that I would write a lyric that cut myself, and he would write one that branched out in a different way. I like that in things. Again, that’s the idea of instrumental music. It’s up to you to determine what this is saying to you, or how it makes you feel. I don’t think there’s right answers. [If] you tell me something I did is the happiest thing you’ve ever heard in your life, and it makes you feel really safe and comforted. Cool! Sounds like I’m having a panic attack, but if you feel that way on it, that’s awesome! I totally support that interpretation.”

S13: Do you see droneroom as a political endeavour?

BC: “No, it’s a personal thing for me. I’m happy to provide tracks for causes I believe in, but again there are people that are much more studied on politics and people whose voices are much more important and need to be heard than mine. It’s the lyric thing, another white dude talking about this when, say, a person of colour is speaking about their experience – their voice is more important in that scenario or topic than mine is. I’m happy to bolster it and support whatever they’re saying, but I’m not studied enough in a lot of it, and it’s not my personal experience a lot of times to speak from.”

S13: You’ve moved around a lot. Do you think that that gives the droneroom project a better outlook in order to move it forward?

BC: “Do you mean does it affects the music in some way?”

S13: Yeah.

BC: “To an extent, but not exactly. I think it’s less the location than the process of movement. I think I’ve expressed to you in a few different places of coming up being a truck driver kid, it’s about movement rather than the destination.

“A thing I’ve really been contending with for years is an inability to trust stability. The idea that something is stable for some reason makes me really weary and nervous, and having this feeling of ‘This is going to blow up on me’. So, there’s this constant sense of instability, which delves into movements and constantly moving around. It’s probably why I’m so fucking anxious, to be honest. (laughs). That movement comes out in the music, and the idea of constant motion, and that there’s very little ground to stand on, particularly anymore in what I do. It’s just one note. It’s a sustained drone underneath it. That’s the one thing that’s holding it all together. So, I don’t know that I can really tie place to much of what I do in a way that a listener might be able to hear better than I could.

“I feel like the only thing where location played its hugest part – well, twofold – would be Secondhand Failures, just by sheer nature of that having been recorded literally in a little fucking desert ridge. (laughs). And Whatever Truthful Understanding just by sheer nature of the field recordings. Those crickets were in a bush at a place I worked. I walked out from work, and they were just chirping up a storm. The rain sounds are literally a rainstorm coming. I don’t know if it’s placed more than just the concept of movement in general.”

S13: To me I feel a lot of open spaces, and there’s a minimalism to it. Where the time moves slow, which kind of gets me feeling of the environment I grew up in…

BC: “I get that. The main thing I liked about my short time living in the desert, and honestly, I think given my druthers, I would be very happy to be back. Not in Las Vegas, but in that type of environment. The density or the lack of density is something that has always spoken to me. It’s really calming to me. You could always feel the difference when you left south and started hitting West Texas into New Mexico and Arizona, and then everything suddenly opened up; just through lack of trees and lack of greenery. That space would just suddenly be there in a way that a more densely vegetative area feels [like it’s] closing in on you.”

S13: Claustrophobic?

BC: “Exactly. So that is a thing I think about. It clears my mind out in a weird way. It feels like there’s nothing to think on, and so you don’t have to think because you can be in a way. I do feel like that inevitably does work out into what I do, because I’m pretty anti-density at this point. I don’t overdub anything because I don’t want to choke or make it feel more complicated than it needs to.”

S13: Does that same approach apply when you collaborate with someone?

BC: “Yeah. So, Rivers of Glass, which came out last year was basically either I or A.J. Kimmel would have a start thing, although A.J. would go through and embellish it a bit more with guitar parts. He’s a bit more methodical than I am. I tend to be kind of first thought best thought. If I did the three-take approach, usually the first one will be a little loose; the second one will inevitably be too tight, and then the third one will be me trying my best to remember the parts that seem like they worked from both of them to line up together. And inevitably, I find something new, or I’ve completely forgot something, or they go completely in the wrong order, because I’m not writing it down. I’m winging it.

“But Rabbit Hash was one where it was actually the opposite of any other collaboration I’ve done, where Pete sent me everything that he did… and then I sorted just winged it on top of it. I’ll listen and go, ‘Okay, this little guitar lick here makes sense at some point’. Then I’ll figure out the rest as I go. So, admittedly it’s not very worked out or as active listening in collaborations when I do things. I’ll listen to it a couple times, find at least one thing that’ll work at some point, and then do my own take of whatever the track feels like.

“Now Rabbit Hash had a few more layers because I somehow became the producer on that, which is a role that I never want or am particularly adept at, but there’s at least a couple of random bits. There’s more than just one guitar idea going on that one. There’s probably a guitar track and maybe like a lap steel idea, but both are improvised.”

S13: Bandcamp has been a vital source for you. With the news over the last couple of weeks of the takeover, is it a case of waiting for something better to come?

BC: “I mean, it is, but at the same time, I’m in such a weird point in my life. I haven’t extended the proper amount of thought or concept into it. The layoffs are super worrying, and I hope the unionising shakes out, but I don’t know. I’m knee-deep in lot of life shit that makes worrying about that seem trivial to the scope of things. I worry more for the people who run labels or who make an active living off their art. “It’s a thing I can’t add to my worry plate. I’m sure something else will come up, should it shit the bed. Because it’s as ideal a concept as you’re going to get in the type of world that we live in, I feel bad that maybe it has never got the notice that it has in the world to people who aren’t active music listeners or active music purchasers. I’m sure if you told your average person on the street who’s a Spotify listener or what have you, they would have no clue of Bandcamp. It still feels like it’s an underground thing.”

The Best of My Love is out now via Somewhere Cold. Purchase here.

Rusted Lung is out now via Echodelick Records/Ramble Records. Purchase here and here.

Life Ain’t Worth the Drown is out now via Imploding Sounds. Purchase here.

Secondhand Failures is out now via Marginal Glitch Records. Purchase here.

You Drown Out the Crowd is out now via Histamine Tapes. Purchase here.

Don’t Mistake My Enthusiasm for Impatience is out now via Marginal Glitch Records. Purchase here.