NZ Musician

NZ Musician
2009 (Vol: 14, No: 8)

By Lydia Jenkin

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 naļve 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."

The recording process took place in Sheehan's Wellington home studio, tucked away in the attic, an escape from the rest of the house. He was also responsible for the production, engineering and mixing, occasionally taking advice from friends or collaborators.
"I had a couple of suggestions from Simon Rycroft and Thomas Voyce from Rhombus, cos those guys are around a fair bit, and really just from playing ideas to people. So I mixed it all at home… there's no time pressure when you're recording at home. But there's still a lot that I'd love to learn about engineering. There's so much I don't know about recording techniques so I'm always learning in the process."
Mixing in an attic did create its own set of problems though.
"I did have one last freak out session where I'd realised that because the attic has a v-shaped ceiling it was giving me a false bass response, like about 10db too much! So when I took it to someone else's studio to listen through the monitors it all sounded completely thin. And that was about a week before I was booked in to master it, so I actually relocated the studio into the lounge for a week and remixed the album. That saved it I think, because I'd tuned it to a room and it sounded great in that room, which is what happens. But that was a big lesson for me, the attic is now completely sound proofed, with bass traps."
Despite that minor hiccup, Sheehan clearly knows how to tease the best from his own material. The album sweeps between majestic grandeur and poignant fragility. His influences are wide ranging, but perhaps one of the most evident on this album is that of Icelandic post-rock ambient act Sigur Ros. Although 'Standing in Silence' is without vocals, there are echoes in the way tracks build towards an emotionally driven climax and in disguising regular instrumental sounds with live processing.
"I guess it is Sigur Ros-esque in a way. They probably have a close sonic in that it's all quite guitar-based, but it's guitar with a lot of reverb and delay so it's very ethereal. There's probably tracks on the album on which you wouldn't even recognise a guitar."
Sheehan also feels affinity for the works of minimalist composers such as US luminary Steve Reich whose influence comes across in the likes of the recorded tap dancing and shifting accents on the second track.
"There's something about repetitive music like Steve Reich that a lot of people don't get, but I think a lot of people don't give it the time. That music's not meant to be a blatant melody that's just delivered to you like a pop song. You need to relax and probably almost not think about it, and then it will take you on a journey because it's so subtle and goes on for so long. That kind of style really fascinates me, music that you have to listen to quite carefully to in order to enjoy."
He happily admits this album is more experimental than his previous work, less geared towards the delights of a crowded dancefloor and more about conveying a particular sense of time and space. He credits a particular moment during a live tour with convincing him to change his tack.
"In order to do gigs I had to make the music a bit more upbeat, so I ended up remixing my stuff in Ableton Live. But then one day, just playing a show in Melbourne, I had this epiphany that I did not want to be in smoky shitty clubs at 2am ever again, and that it wasn't really the music that I wanted to be doing anyway. So I tried to avoid any blatant electronic beats on this album, no four to the floor or anything."
It's music for reflection, contemplation and absorption, and because of its vital connection to imagery the album will be released at an exhibition rather than a live show. Guests will be offered a pair of headphones through which to listen to the album as they make their way round a gallery of photographs by Andrei Jewell (whose work also features on the album sleeve). They will also be treated to a preview screening of excerpts from a self-funded non-dialogue film being shot by Mike Busy and Gareth Moon of Wellington based Nektar Films, which is intended to be an accompanying piece to the album.
"I worked with them very early on when I first started releasing music but we've always wanted to do something that involved film. For this album I had this idea of actually going to locations and shooting. So Gareth and a small crew went off overseas, and essentially it's all portraits of people in slow motion up close, for example a homeless man in Shibuya who's walking across this huge intersection at night, and there's all these suits and people around him, and just the expression on his face is amazing. It's a series of shots of different random people existing within mega cities. And you can see the isolation in their eyes almost, they don't fit in."
It sounds like a fairly enormous project to take on, especially self-funded.
"God it was like opening a can of worms getting into that one. We all love films like Koyaanisqatsi, non-dialogue films, but they're not easy to make. Not that we were trying to replicate those, but the footage was definitely inspired by those films. But unfortunately we didn't have multi-million dollar budgets and years of experience."
Sheehan seems undaunted by seemingly mammoth projects though, and is particularly excited about putting together an impressive sounding live show for later this year. The show is to be held in theatres, and will involve a full line up of live musicians including a 16-piece string section, Thomas Voyce on drums, Jeremiah Ross on keys, Jeff Boyle on guitar and potentially any number of other musicians, including the audience.
"It took me a long time, but we found this place in China that would put the melody of track three onto a music box. So we've had 600 of these made, and they actually play the music box part on track three of the album.
"So we're gonna give away about 200 of these with the first 200 albums [through Real Groovy and CD & DVD stores], and then we're gonna save the next 400 for the live shows, and the idea is to get everyone playing them in a track, winding them up. Cos they're all in the same key it will just be this music box cacophony."
Sheehan certainly seems to embrace the notion of music as an art form that has to be shared, despite whatever financial implications there may be for that perspective. His arrangement with long time record label Loop allows him to retain independence, so he's able to share his music as he sees fit.
"You just want people to enjoy it for the sake of it. You spend hours and hours writing something and the ultimate goal is that somebody will get something nice out of it."
'Standing in Silence' is much more than nice, it almost qualifies as a religious experience. And combined with images, live musicians, and music boxes, I'm convinced it will be.