The Floating World Interview: “There’s something about places that I find very haunting”

Hailing from Detroit, Michigan, Amanda Votta has explored far and wide. Currently residing in Liverpool, Votta’s nomadic impulses course through the compositions she makes, and on Impermanence, her seventh full-length release under The Floating World moniker, there is no better example of this.

Merging field recordings with doom-laden walls of sound, Impermanence is the kind of record that is presented through a unique lens. Sonic juxtapositions that are hard to place, while also taking you to one. Essentially, it’s Votta’s own sound world, built from years of travelling to the ends of the earth.

Impermanence is hypnotic in its own way, likened to a lost score to a William Gibson novel. There’s a darkness that constantly overshadows the listener; compositions like Entangled Time and Prescence – pieces where Votta’s muffled, ceremonial chants are like ghostly echoes from the void.

While there is some respite throughout, namely the warm ambience of Endless – Halcyon – Nothing, the rumbling synth drone of Immaterial Existences and the electric jolt of A Dislocation create an unsettling milieu where Votta thrives. A setting seemingly inspired by the vortex, smudged with black and whites that collide for something that is relentless, greyscale noise.

It’s something that Votta has been immersed in for some time; her project with long-standing collaborator Neddal Ayad as The Spectral Light, something that stretches slowcore to new places. Then there’s Votta’s latest collaboration alongside Ayad and Grey Malkin as Deep Fade, which saw the trio release their debut Line of Flight; the first of a trilogy with the second instalment, Further, set for release later this year via Cruel Nature Records.

For now, though, the light shines on The Floating World, and last month we caught up with Votta who answered our questions about Impermanence, her creative process, inspirations, and more.

World Building: In Conversation with Ex-Easter Island Head

Sun 13: Do you remember the first record you heard that influenced and steered you towards making the type of music you make?

Amanda Votta: “This is a weirdly difficult question to answer because part of why I started making music as The Floating World was because there was something I wanted to hear but wasn’t hearing. There were parts of it here and there, and probably in things that may not always make sense. I was big on darkwave and bands like Lycia, then some of my other friends were part of that early-mid 2000s wyrd/acid/haunted folk/experimental scene in the UK, the US, Australia, and were doing some really cool experimental stuff that I loved. Back then, it was projects like Xenia Emputae Traveling Band, The North Sea, Stone Breath, and a giant list more. The Floating World emerged from what, looking back, seems like this utterly impossible idea to meld that darkwave atmosphere with the sound I was hearing from the experimental folk people. The very first thing I released was part of a series called Folklore of the Moon, with some of the people I just mentioned, including Tara and Mike from Lycia, so maybe it wasn’t an entirely unprecedented idea. But how it came out is probably a bit different from my original vision. Especially by now.

“But honestly, I just love music. I love sound, really. I used to make up songs out of the noise of the city when I was a kid just learning how to pay instruments. And I’ve always done this thing I started calling ‘sounds of the day’ where I try to recreate what a certain day sounded like in my memory. Sometimes that ends up the basis for a song. The very first album I heard that made me go, ‘Woah, I have to make music’ was, though, Def Leppard’s Hysteria. I was really young, it came out right between my dad’s and my birthdays. My dad played guitar, and I was like, ‘Show me how to play this!’ Probably an incongruous starting point but later I threw a little Jesus and Mary Chain in there, so it might’ve balanced out.”

S13: You’ve recently moved to Liverpool. How are you finding it so far?

AV: “I love Liverpool. There’s something special about it, it feels very different than almost everywhere else I’ve been. Part of that is, I think, that I like wandering around the city, and have never felt ill at ease. I’ve gotten lost a few times, too, but ended up in places I liked. The shady streets around Liverpool Hope University one time, which I thought was so pretty I decided to hang out around there for the day. Another time I was out walking and took a wrong turn somewhere. Suddenly the streets are narrower, stone paved. I ended up on Matthew Street, got accosted by someone with a Bible, then with a Quran, both of whom were surprisingly polite about it. Then when I looked up to figure out where I was, I noticed a bust of Carl Jung just sort of staring out at the goings on around him. Later, I realised that was right where Julian Cope’s Liverpool ley line is. And there are a lot of different pathways for wandering around – different routes through the city that I’ve gotten to like walking. Places that I feel good being in.”

“Liverpool has a particular energy that I’ve tried to describe to a few people and failed miserably at. But it’s alive in the way a river is, this ebb and flow, an undercurrent swirling in and around it that sort of pulls you along as you move through the streets. A quiet, anticipatory feeling like you stumbled on something outside of the usual, something there but also maybe not entirely here – maybe partly elsewhere. It could just be all the winding wandering I’ve done, but it has this pleasant, inviting mystery about it. There’s almost always a wind, too, coming off the sea and that helps with its atmosphere, the strange sense of familiar it has. Not in the geography sense, as my getting lost a few times should show, but in the way it feels being there. There have not been many places that feel to me like somewhere I could stay and be happy, but Liverpool does.”

S13: You’ve travelled all around the world. Has this informed a lot of the music you create as The Floating World?

AV: “I think it’s fair to say that place plays a large role in what I create, as The Floating World and otherwise. It’s probably more noticeable with TFW than with anything else I do, because I use field recording and record in ways that include the environment in the sound. It’s probably also fair to say that the memory of places informs the music I make. Sometimes, a song starts from my desire to recreate the way a place felt, or how it sounded. Moon Full of Stars, for one, started as an attempt to put into song form the experience of driving along one of the roads in Detroit I’ve often travelled, that stretches from downtown, near where I grew up, all the way up north of the city through posh suburbs. Along the road, everything changes. You begin near the downtown core, right in the middle of everything, surrounded by tall, old skyscrapers. Then you move through the neighbourhoods just outside downtown, where I lived, along the Detroit River and past the Belle Isle Bridge, and finally up to and across the border of Detroit and into one of the Grosse Pointe suburbs. Which are these ultra wealthy little cities along Lake St. Claire where the Ford family and other magnates of the auto industry have and had their mansions. The divide between the city and the suburb is so sharp along that road it’s like the border between nations. Giant mansions backing onto incredibly poor neighbourhoods. Jarring and extremely maddening. At some point, the wealthy suburbs wanted to build a wall to keep us city scum out. Past there it’s a winding drive through middle class residential areas before the road finally terminates near a lakefront nature preserve and beach. Travelling the length of that road, you traverse a wide array of architecture, landscape, history, class, and basic everyday experiences of life. But they all happen along the same road, in the same state, in the same country.

“I always best remember taking this drive at night, when for whatever reason the sharp contrasts you encounter along its route see more pronounced.

“But a lot of the other places I’ve been and lived work their way into songs, too. Either as environmental ambiance or as another attempt to capture what it felt and sounded like to be somewhere in particular. The echo in a certain hallway, the way a door sounded as it closed. In Liverpool, I’ve made a lot of music, maybe more than I have in over 15 years at one time and a lot of that has to do with the way I’ve felt about it. The nearness of the sea, the wandering around the city, the sound of the rail station, people walking home at three, four, five am drunkenly arguing about their band.

“I think sometimes that making music is a way to catalogue the sensory memory of a place, or that it starts that way and as it becomes a song, solidifies, other things work their way in there. It’s never something that I can put into concrete words right away; there’s a lot of imagery and sensation that has to happen or be recalled before the words that explain it come.”

S13: I get the feeling that your music is inspired by a lot of things outside of music… the environment and open space been the main two. Is that the case?

AV: “Yes, definitely. It’s that sounds of a day thing where a song starts as sitting by the sea on a certain day, a walk through the forest, or a stroll down the busy Main Street of whichever city I’m thinking about. Sometimes it’s just sitting in a café listening to all the noise around me. But environmental sounds are important to me, the wind and the way it howls like a banshee around the corners of the house my grandparents lived in, and how it does the same at my Liverpool flat, or how it almost knocked me down walking out a town and to some standing stones in Northumbria, and how it whistles out across the ocean on a stormy day by the shore. A hurricane from years ago, moonrise over a field in Scotland. Watching the rain fall sitting in a train car hurtling through open countryside. I think that even in the city I’m thinking about the field, the forest, always the ocean.

“Maybe some of this is transposing the one onto the other, melding them. When I was making Impermanence, that was another part of the thought behind it. There are these areas I think of as ‘pastoral industrial’ zones. Places where you have a factory, a paper mill, out in a rural area, surrounded by river and forest. Yet there it is, having an egregious impact on the environment around it. With Impermanence, a lot of that made its way into the sound through the mix of field recordings I made in out of the way areas and in the middle of the city.

“There’s something about places that I find very haunting. The crush of memory that occupies a space whether you’re aware of it or not. This is just as true of an open field as it is a city apartment building.”

S13: Impermanence was released in June. Can you tell us about the process behind it?

AV: “This one came about a bit differently than usual. Before when I was making an album, I’d basically get through a song a day as far as recording goes, then I’d spend a couple weeks messing with things in the mix. When I made The Wood Beyond the World, and then The Spectral Light’s Secrets to the Sea, that started to shift a bit. Both of those took a few months to make. Impermanence took almost a year, and many versions of the songs that you hear on the album. Mostly they began as entirely different sounding things, then gradually I built them up into the album versions you hear. Usually, they started as those tangles of field recordings with the idea each was representative of some story I was telling through sound. Not really something with a plot, per se, more like that impression of something, a fragment. Usually a place, and a disembodied event that happened there. A walk that felt odd or on which I got a bit lost, sitting in a strange town watching clouds pass out the window.

“Once I had those in progress, I started experimenting with altering the sounds through different kinds of processing. Some things I converted to midi and used different synths to turn them back into some of the sound you hear. Other times, I’d warp things in the mix using plugins and effects. There are actually synths in there, too, and guitar and voice. But those all came in layers over time, after the initial field recording bed was made and some basic synth added. I always do vocals last, after I’ve had time to sit with a song for a while and figure out where it wants voice to be, and how it should sound. There comes a point in making a song where it feels less like I’m crafting it with a specific intention than I’m uncovering it bit by bit, like using a tiny brush to dust off a fragment of bone or pottery or what might be a structure in an archaeological excavation.

S13: What was the most important aspect you wanted to achieve with the record?

AV: “When I started Impermanence, the only thought was that this one needs to be different than The Floating World of the past. It had been a long time since I made an album at all, and especially under that name. It had to be enough of a difference that it was jolting if you knew the older music I’d made. So, one thing I wanted to do here was make it noisier, less delicate, more insistent. Before, it was always about a pleasant drifting away, creating this time outside of time with sound that felt dissociated from the everyday world. I still wanted to do that, but it needed to reflect in some way the huge gap of time, the disruption and dissonance it felt like were part of the reason I took a long break from The Floating World and from releasing music. And the stages of that disruption, until we finally get to the end of it all with After Life, the last song on the album. Some of this was helped along by the pandemic, and working on these songs during that first winter and summer when we had no idea what was going to happen or for how long or what the world would look like after – if there as an after. But it was marking the break from the way I had done things, working in a new way, using different sounds, wanting things to be more obviously dissonant that were important for me to convey here.”

S13: The track, A Dislocation, is one of the darkest pieces you’ve written, really tapping into that greyscale drone. It feels to me like the centrepiece of the album and maybe its starting point. Was this the case?

AV: “A Dislocation was actually a holdover of a song that was going to be part of the follow-up to The Wood Beyond the World many, many years ago. After that album came out, I started making songs for the next one, but left off at some point. When I came back to it after a long time, this was the one song I kept and transformed into A Dislocation. Not a lot remained from its original form, I think just some background field recording ambiance of a storm morphed into a quiet layer of the track. It is by far the most drone, and the one that underwent the most alteration over the course of its evolution. I just put it on to hear as I respond to this question, and I can still see in my mind the sort of scene I was trying to set with it back then. Dark shoreline, wild, black glittering waves, someone on the shore with ambiguous intent, probably some other world, somewhere far away. My friend Roy [Korperschwache] added some guitar to it when I was just about done working on it and somehow got what I was doing there without any explaining. Which is probably why he’s one of the people I’ve been collaborating with for a very long time.

“In that sense, of being the eldest song here, the album did grow up around it. And it was, then, the starting point for it all. I’m wondering now what about it made you think that, especially since in running order it’s near the end.”

S13: Does your writing approach change with this project in comparison with, say, The Spectral Light?

AV: “Very much, yes. With The Floating World, I always start a song, and 90 per cent of the album is just me. Any contributions others make end up going through a ton of morphing before they’re as you hear them. I get particular with minute sounds, too, adjust things quite a lot and spend way too much time on the mix, getting it just right – whatever that happens to mean in the moment. When I work on The Spectral Light, it’s most often Neddal who begins a song, sends the parts to me, then I go from there until it’s a finished track. If we have anyone else add to a song, it all goes to me and I mix and master it, but I’m less likely to completely transform what I’ve been sent. We started TSL with the intent of it being less abstract, more structured. That works better when individual parts go through less processing. Step by step, it’s almost the same, though. Vocals always last, probably after mixing. Any low end, drums, that happens right after the base of a track is done. I like layering, and I do it on all my albums, it’s just a little less obvious on some. I still somehow manage to find places for field recordings on TSL.

“We have a new Deep Fade album, Further, out in September on Cruel Nature. That’s almost the same process as TSL, expect I recorded all my singing in or outside of lighthouses. The only effects on my voice are whatever reverb the lighthouse generated, the sound of the outside – wind and wave and sometimes bird. Sometimes the tapping of debris on the tower or windows, light rain. The first Deep Fade was basically the same as TFW because it’s almost all me, and the third one is all me except for a couple parts on two tracks, so that’s also very TFW in process.

“I think, though, there are a lot of similarities between working more and less collaboratively for me. I have my themes, just like everyone else does. You might express them differently through different projects, highlight one aspect over another, but it all comes out of you. Just like lyrically I have my themes, there’s probably a sound that these and my other projects all share just because I’m making the music, regardless of the approach.”

S13: Continuing with your approach, do you need to be in a certain headspace to think about writing and creating songs, or are you an artist who adheres to strict routine?

AV: “I’ve tried having a routine. Set aside time every day to work on songs, set goals for how much I want to accomplish in a given timeframe. The third Deep Fade [record] started as me wanting to get an album done in a month (what a fantastic goal) in mid or late February. I spent a long weekend making about four or five songs and was really excited. I can do this! Yes! Back to old times making an album in a few weeks! But then I got into adjusting things, moving stuff around, removing, replacing, changing…. and here it is August and I’m still not quite done. Not quite, almost though.

“I’ve learned that I can’t really set myself a timetable for an album and be happy with it. I can for sure get it done if I did, and I’m sure it would be fine. I don’t really want to do ‘fine’, though. If other people are going to hear this and it isn’t just me taking some field recordings and splicing them together with a few effects to recreate the atmosphere of some particular day, and only I’m going to listen to this, then I want it to be worth other people’s time to hear. So, timetables and daily progress goals work well when I’m starting an album, especially for at least getting the basis of a few tracks going. But I tend to linger on things and revisit and rework a lot.

“The further along I get on the album, the more I start to work on it when I’m in a certain mood, when I’m thinking about things that seem like, yeah, these are album thoughts. Certain times of day end up being album time. Impermanence was always evenings, as the sun was setting. The third Deep Fade I’m making now is happening either at night or first thing in the very early morning hours before there are a bunch of people out and about. It needs some kind of isolating quiet. That’s how it seems to go these days, this mix of structured practice with that ineffable need to work on songs right now. I try not to ignore that need, it’s usually when good things happen.

“I’ll say that recording when it feels like something I need to do is the only way I can sing. I do and have tried just getting it done, it’s just singing, the same as playing notes on an instrument. Except it isn’t. You’re making notes that are you, literally you, and will reflect you at the time of singing those notes. You can love the song, feel great about the lyrics, want to hit that record button and throw yourself at it with everything. Sometimes it just isn’t going to happen, your voice will sound flat your tone will be off, notes not quite right, and you can feel it, just like it can be heard. Trying to keep going like that just makes it worse. This is probably why I always do vocals last of all things.”

S13: Do you think the compositions you produce as The Floating World best represent your personality?

AV: “I think Impermanence has been the album I’ve made as The Floating World that best represents in sound whatever it is I’m trying to do. It is as perfect as I could make it, it has everything I wanted to put into music but hadn’t, didn’t know how to, or was afraid to for some pointless reason or other. It best encapsulates all the themes I’m obsessed with in songs. It is probably the most ‘me’ thing I’ve made in the sense of it being very personal, beneath all the outward facing conceptual aspects. Here, even those are the ideas closest to me, personally. It’s strange to think about this, it’s starting to seem like an archaeological site as album, uncovering some long-buried secret forest home. If you peel back the layers of the album, find all the things hidden down at its base, I’ll probably be there in detail.”

Impermanence is out now via Fiadh Productions. Purchase from Bandcamp.