Wedding Ritual #19: Novelistme

Novelistme  

is a musician unknown to this blog until he emailed me out of the blue earlier this year. This is why, if you are an artist of any kind who wants your own Wedding Ritual, you too should get in touch. Formerly championed by Steve Lamacq on BBC 6Music, Novelistme has several albums under his belt, and this month released 'Noise Daydream' (for more on which, see below). Novelistme is as DIY as they come - he writes, plays, sings, records, mixes, masters and promotes his own work. "Through necessity", he tells me.

Here is Novelistme's Wedding Ritual, in his own words:

Something Old

"I've picked my song It’s Hard (To Be In Love) as my 'something old'. I think it’s probably one of the best I’ve written, and for a long while it was certainly the most popular - largely as a result of getting a few plays on the radio. My actual favourite track is probably one called Youth on my first album The Long Wait, but I think that’s a little bit more of an acquired taste. With Youth I love the repetitive guitar riff, the lyrics which are about a magical night meeting a girl in Buenos Aires back in 2007, and the chorus which kind of strikes this interesting note that sits somewhere between contentment and melancholy. Anyway, that’s not the track I’ve picked, but it’s always fascinating to me what songs other people will like. It’s always pretty difficult to judge. You hear lots of stories of artists never being able to “pick the single” to launch an album - and I can completely understand that. You are just too close to it. And you have to remember that everyone's musical tastes are (or can be) massively different. I’m pretty sure I don’t know anyone with my exact same tastes - I rarely if ever listen to commercial radio - and with the well-publicised “death of rock music" I’ve found myself largely going backwards to search out new sounds in old records. Things like Captain Beefheart, CAN, Brian Eno etc. And whilst I know my stuff doesn’t sound like any of these things, this is largely the stuff that’s inspiring me these days. It’s amazing how some of those artists can still sound so new and vital despite being decades old (I guess in part this is probably because current pop music is just so over produced and manufactured - but that’s a whole different topic)!"

"So what always comes first for me is the music and 9 times out of 10 it’s a guitar part that gets things moving. Whenever I pick up a guitar these days I’ll noodle around and as soon as I find something I like the sound of I’ll record it. And then I’ll move on. And then whenever it feels like I’ve got a large bank of ideas that might justify an album, I’ll go back through all those recordings and see which ones actually still sound reasonable when played back. It’s fair to say 90% don’t! The music for this one was tapping into a vibe that sat somewhere between The Strokes and Queens of The Stone Age for me. The inspiration for the lyric was the Buzzcocks' brilliant Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've). As you can see I’ve even stolen the parentheses! At the time of writing the song I was in a relationship with an Australian girl and we’d been switching our living arrangements between London and Sydney - not the easiest or most convenient! And looking back now I can see there’s definitely snippets of those emotions filtering through into the song although I’m not sure I was fully aware of that at the time of writing. So anyway here’s the song, hope you like it."

"As a postscript - a few months ago I was approached by someone who produced 'Nightcore' versions of songs on YouTube. At the time I wasn’t sure what 'Nightcore' meant but it’s pretty funny and it turns out in just a few months that video has stacked up more views/listens than any other music platform! You can get your Nightcore fix here."

Something New

"Noise Daydream: my new album just released on December 1st 2020. It’s my fifth so far, and represents a bit of a departure from the previous ones in a few subtle ways. The previous ones have all, to my mind, been deliberately eclectic in terms of sounds, moods and tempos. Whereas with this one I wanted every track to be "noisy” and have distorted guitars. There were two main drivers for this. The first was the realisation of how much I love live music and rock and roll specifically. In the summer I managed to indulge my love for live music a little bit by going to see a few gigs at small jazz clubs that had opened up again - but when it comes to alternative / indie guitar rock type venues (that are typically a lot bigger) they remained closed. So I needed to somehow try and redress that balance! The second reason was that in today's music market, it seems it’s easier for rockier tracks to get heard. The more eclectic stuff that doesn’t really sit in that bucket seems to struggle to get listeners. So, if I’m going to spend a year creating something, I thought lets double down on the rockier stuff and see how that goes down. And all the slightly weird stuff I’m writing I can save for the next one! LOL! For those who’ve not heard the album how would I describe it? Well in terms of influences I’d probably call out Sonic Youth, Blur, Pavement, Queens of The Stone Age, Led Zeppelin, My Bloody Valentine, and The Stooges. 

"One thing that always becomes apparent whenever you finish an album is just how difficult it is to really articulate what it’s about, where the ideas came from etc. There’s a famous quote I like that sometimes gets attributed to Frank Zappa and other times to Thelonius Monk that says “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. That really resonates with me, and I think it’s something the majority of song writers seem to struggle with. Over the last month-long lockdown, I wasn’t able to watch any terrestrial channels (for prosaic reasons I won’t go into) so I ended up watching lots of YouTube videos on bands and artists I like. And in pretty much every interview you can be artists will get asked the same two questions:

“where does the inspiration come from” - nobody knows, and nobody wants to talk about it, in case they somehow lose the muse

AND

“what’s the song about?” - most of the time I’m pretty sure they’ve not got a clue

"I tend to think great lyrics kind of have to surrender themselves to the song. If you have too rigid an idea for the lyrics and you kind of brute force them in there, then it’s never going to work - at least not for me. It becomes quite humorous watching these questions come up again and again and watching all of the artists sit there squirming uncomfortably trying/not trying to answer the same questions. You can see they don’t want to however you know they know they somehow have to give the journalist some great copy! So anyway the best distillation of what this album that I’ve managed to come up with is as follows:

"It's an album about noise. About music, particularly live music. About guitars, particularly loud guitars. About the happiness and freedom you can find in those sounds. About the uncertainty of life and the strength and direction you can find in seeking out truth, considering things, confronting things, and creating something.

"I hope you like it!"

Something Borrowed

"There’s a million musical gems I’d love to share but in keeping with this piece I thought the best one would be the album Loveless by My Bloody Valentine (MBV). For anyone who’s not heard it before what a gift! It’s hard to really articulate how hard it is to come up with a sound that’s truly original and timeless but on this album the band absolutely nail it. And for those people who have heard it before and know it, well then what better excuse to have another listen?

"Coming back to the 'borrowing' theme, you may notice track 5 Ascend on Noise Daydream borrows heavily some of the feel and guitar techniques that MBV made their own - a shifting in and out of pitch of the guitars and a general 'shoegaze' feel. Although to my ears, my song is a lot straighter and orthodox - kind of like the bastard child of MBV and Motown!"

"In addition to being an amazing album in its own right, this album also resonates with me on a few other levels in that Kevin Shields (the principal songwriter) also contributes a number of songs to one of my favourite movies ever, Lost in Translation, and that movie is set in Japan, which I think is also my favourite country I’ve visited. So the collision of those things makes Loveless the winner (for this piece anyway)!

Something Blue

"For 'Something Blue' I could only really come up with two options. The first, my song F*** Digital, which as the title suggests is a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) critique of what was happening to the music industry back in 2014 - which now of course in 2020 has fully come to pass. The second option, which I decided to go with, is my song Sonic Youth On Bad Drugs (SYOBD). It gets the nods over the other one for a few reasons:

"I like it more (and think its a better, more original song) 

"This one allows me to name check Sonic Youth

"The fact that the music industry is killing artists and itself is, by now, I think understood by all, and sadly I don’t think there’s much new or insightful I can say on the matter

"In terms of SYOBD I can distinctly remember recording it in my old flat, and the main riff and lyrics all came ridiculously quickly. In fact, almost too quickly, as I filed it away for a couple of years before returning to it to finish it. I don’t know if anyone else suffers that problem - that unless something involves toil, blood, sweat and tears then you sometimes think it’s not worthy. When in actual fact I think some of the leftfield things that pop out of your mind seemingly from nowhere without much obvious effort are often the most interesting. 

"The lyrics are pretty much one-take stream-of-consciousness. And I kind of like its random playfulness. I certainly don’t know many lyrics that cover similar ground.

"If you fancy checking out the lyrics in full you can find them here:

"As for Sonic Youth, you can probably guess I’m a huge fan of their music. They still seem to stand front and centre at the heart of alternative music through the 80’s and 90’s. And that era definitely dominates my record collection. Musically I loved the way they always avoided obvious rock tropes (with weird alternate tunings and abstract noise)  and weaved no end of interesting art and cultural references into their 15 studio albums. A feat few, if any, bands can rival. My gateway into Sonic Youth was the fact that their song 100% off their album Dirty was adopted as the music for MTV’s Alternative Nation show. Back in the day this was where you’d tune in to see what all these crazy sounding bands (the likes of Dinosaur Jr, Pavement, Smashing Pumpkins etc) looked like in the days before the internet! And to find new crazy sounding bands of course! 

"So Sonic Youth on Bad Drugs is my paean to those same crazy sounding alternative bands of the 90’s. With that relentless beat, the distorted droning guitars and weird stream-of-consciousness lyrics.

"If you missed the blue bits then there’s a throwaway “fuck them all” line at 3:45 and “just recording shit that comes in my head” at 4:00. It seems pretty tame by todays standards but was enough to earn 'explicit' status on Spotify! ;)- 

"Thanks for listening, reading and coming along for the ride!"

-

You can follow Novelistme for updates on their website, as well as Soundcloud, Twitter and Instagram.

-

Wedding Ritual is an ongoing series of artist profiles curated and edited by Wes Viola. For updates, follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook - or subscribe to get one update in your email whenever a new post goes up. The blog is open to submissions from visual artists, sculptors, musicians, writers, dancers, sculptors, filmmakers and indeed all kinds of creative practitioner. For more details of what's going on here, and especially if you'd like to feature yourself, check the always-popular 'what on earth is going on here?' page. For links to the Wedding Rituals performed by every artist featured to date, see Every Ritual.