Rhian Sheehan - Observations In Sound
Author: Lydia Jenkin (photography by Gareth Moon)
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Music and imagery have always been strongly intertwined for Wellington musician Rhian Sheehan. The richly evocative music on his first two albums - 'Paradigm Shift' and 'Tiny Blue Biosphere' meant Sheehan finding himself frequently licensing tracks to TV shows and advertising. For his latest album 'Standing In Silence', Sheehan has taken the approach a step further and produced a work which is a stunning journey through moments in our world, captured simultaneously in photos, film and music. During a fleeting trip to Auckland he sat down with Lydia Jenkin to discuss the inspiration and the delivery of this multimedia project.
Rhian Sheehan released his last album back in 2004, which may seem like a long time between drinks for a full time musician, but Sheehan has been anything but twiddling his thumbs. He keeps the income flowing with a variety of corporate commissions ("…things for TV ads etc. Like for example NZ On Air, they've rebranded, and I wrote the new sting which is five seconds long"), and licensing of his music to soundtracks and compilations. He's also been raising children with wife Raashi Malik (of Rhombus), travelling, playing shows, completing the soundtrack to a book of NZ landscape photography by his father, and, oh yes, writing a heart wrenchingly beautiful new album.
These various aspects of Sheehan's life have contributed to the resulting work of art, but perhaps none more so than his travelling experiences, and the imagery and observations of foreign lands he came away with.
"The idea was to do something that really reflected the world we live in at the moment, and after some of the experiences that I've had in places like India and Japan, and Asia and Europe, I just wanted that feeling to come across on the album.
"It was all actually inspired by the [album] cover photo. It was just a shot that I took while I was in India…Just the idea of this lonely person on a hill just staring into this polluted landscape kind of sparked it off for me. This sense of innocence and being at one with yourself and so on."
In 2007 Sheehan tagged along on a trip to Japan when Malik went on tour with Rhombus. It was his first time in Tokyo and he found himself utterly mesmerised by the city. As a composer often driven by soundscapes and noises created in everyday environments, Sheehan always has a recording device at the ready.
"I spent hours just sitting in the subways, recording sounds, recording people putting money in the ticket machines, just all these crazy quirky sounds that are going on around you. And there's something quite naïve and childlike about Japanese culture, all the sounds you hear are quite childish, like little tinkery children's toys. That's what it sounds like to me with little smiley faces everywhere, and everything is very happy.
"But I was kind of fascinated by the idea that you can be in such a massive city of 15 or 20 million people, and you can still feel quite isolated."
He contrasts it with India where he'd also spent three months with Malik, recording Indian instrumentalists, mainly in the bigger cities of Mumbai and Delhi.
"Everyone stares at you in India. It's kind of horrible at first but you get used to it. But in Japan it's the opposite. In Japan no one looks at you, so it's like you're invisible. So I did feel quite isolated there, and I guess it was the contrast between those two experiences that started off the music. The idea was for it to sound a bit isolating, or to sound like those environments, or what might be going through your head if you're walking around those places."
Music to travel by, if you will, and the album is something of a journey itself. The 14 tracks or parts, are distinct in character, but meld together as the album slides through various emotional states and observations. The sonic palette is a veritable treasure chest of everything from organic guitar tracks to recorded ambient noise, flittering percussion to the smooth purity of wine glasses.
"I usually just start by tinkering away, I'll play with things. A few of the tracks on the album came from playing with things around the house, like ripping our piano apart and plucking the strings and bowing them, bowing them for a long time, and putting them in samplers. Trial and error really. I have an eight year old daughter and she had a music box which played What a Wonderful World or something, but I took it apart and sampled it note for note, painstakingly into a sampler, and then I recreated a different melody.
"There's a lot of field recordings, so there's a lot of 'urban atmosphere' too, you'll hear it coming through the tracks, in and out. I guess the idea was subliminally to marry those two sonic palettes together, have a childlike sonic within this serious industrial soundscapey world."
Sheehan was also keen to incorporate a more 'live' sense into this album than his previous works, and to get away from the laptop a little. To do so he drew on the talents of Jeff Boyle, guitar master behind ambient experimentalist three-piece Jakob, who has a reputation for being able to induce unlikely sounds from a guitar.
"I actually met him through Paul McLaney who kept saying, 'Oh you've gotta meet Jeff cos you guys would just get on like a house on fire, you're into the same music'. Then about a year ago I got asked to play at a music festival in Spain (which was when this music kind of began I guess). I was quite surprised, cos they wanted all the new stuff that I'd put up on MySpace, which was very atmospheric, and I was thinking, 'How's this gonna work?'
"I didn't just wanna do it in front of a laptop, I wanted it to have a live element. So I got Jeff's number - I'd never met him before - rang him up and said, 'Do you wanna come to Spain and play a show?' He'd just had a child two weeks prior, so he was a bit apprehensive, but then he agreed. So we went off to Spain for three days, played the festival and came straight back. It was a pretty crazy trip but we really hit it off. And I'd always had this idea to replace synthetic sounds with sounds that were similar, but analogue or real, and Jeff was really good at that. So I would give him the chords and he would sit down and lay out some beautiful lush soundscapes."
These various aspects of Sheehan's life have contributed to the resulting work of art, but perhaps none more so than his travelling experiences, and the imagery and observations of foreign lands he came away with.
"The idea was to do something that really reflected the world we live in at the moment, and after some of the experiences that I've had in places like India and Japan, and Asia and Europe, I just wanted that feeling to come across on the album.
"It was all actually inspired by the [album] cover photo. It was just a shot that I took while I was in India…Just the idea of this lonely person on a hill just staring into this polluted landscape kind of sparked it off for me. This sense of innocence and being at one with yourself and so on."
In 2007 Sheehan tagged along on a trip to Japan when Malik went on tour with Rhombus. It was his first time in Tokyo and he found himself utterly mesmerised by the city. As a composer often driven by soundscapes and noises created in everyday environments, Sheehan always has a recording device at the ready.
"I spent hours just sitting in the subways, recording sounds, recording people putting money in the ticket machines, just all these crazy quirky sounds that are going on around you. And there's something quite naïve and childlike about Japanese culture, all the sounds you hear are quite childish, like little tinkery children's toys. That's what it sounds like to me with little smiley faces everywhere, and everything is very happy.
"But I was kind of fascinated by the idea that you can be in such a massive city of 15 or 20 million people, and you can still feel quite isolated."
He contrasts it with India where he'd also spent three months with Malik, recording Indian instrumentalists, mainly in the bigger cities of Mumbai and Delhi.
"Everyone stares at you in India. It's kind of horrible at first but you get used to it. But in Japan it's the opposite. In Japan no one looks at you, so it's like you're invisible. So I did feel quite isolated there, and I guess it was the contrast between those two experiences that started off the music. The idea was for it to sound a bit isolating, or to sound like those environments, or what might be going through your head if you're walking around those places."
Music to travel by, if you will, and the album is something of a journey itself. The 14 tracks or parts, are distinct in character, but meld together as the album slides through various emotional states and observations. The sonic palette is a veritable treasure chest of everything from organic guitar tracks to recorded ambient noise, flittering percussion to the smooth purity of wine glasses.
"I usually just start by tinkering away, I'll play with things. A few of the tracks on the album came from playing with things around the house, like ripping our piano apart and plucking the strings and bowing them, bowing them for a long time, and putting them in samplers. Trial and error really. I have an eight year old daughter and she had a music box which played What a Wonderful World or something, but I took it apart and sampled it note for note, painstakingly into a sampler, and then I recreated a different melody.
"There's a lot of field recordings, so there's a lot of 'urban atmosphere' too, you'll hear it coming through the tracks, in and out. I guess the idea was subliminally to marry those two sonic palettes together, have a childlike sonic within this serious industrial soundscapey world."
Sheehan was also keen to incorporate a more 'live' sense into this album than his previous works, and to get away from the laptop a little. To do so he drew on the talents of Jeff Boyle, guitar master behind ambient experimentalist three-piece Jakob, who has a reputation for being able to induce unlikely sounds from a guitar.
"I actually met him through Paul McLaney who kept saying, 'Oh you've gotta meet Jeff cos you guys would just get on like a house on fire, you're into the same music'. Then about a year ago I got asked to play at a music festival in Spain (which was when this music kind of began I guess). I was quite surprised, cos they wanted all the new stuff that I'd put up on MySpace, which was very atmospheric, and I was thinking, 'How's this gonna work?'
"I didn't just wanna do it in front of a laptop, I wanted it to have a live element. So I got Jeff's number - I'd never met him before - rang him up and said, 'Do you wanna come to Spain and play a show?' He'd just had a child two weeks prior, so he was a bit apprehensive, but then he agreed. So we went off to Spain for three days, played the festival and came straight back. It was a pretty crazy trip but we really hit it off. And I'd always had this idea to replace synthetic sounds with sounds that were similar, but analogue or real, and Jeff was really good at that. So I would give him the chords and he would sit down and lay out some beautiful lush soundscapes."
