BY RACHEL BRUERVILLE, OPINIONS EDITOR
For performance maker and sound artist Leah Blankendaal, the studio is a bit of a foreign environment. Known for her extended live improvisations, when we asked her how she found the studio experience in comparison, her first answer was simple: “So weird!”
“Recording is not my first home,” Leah says.
“In a way, I have COVID-19 to thank for pushing me into that space whether I was ready or not.”
You could certainly assume from the stunning and polished resulting debut album Alongside, Amongst, Against that Leah is a veteran of the studio. We’ve been fortunate enough to chat to Leah about how her new album came to be.
Congratulations on bringing this beautiful album into the world! How long has it been in the making?
Thank you! The project has been about 18 months in development. It started as a series of site-specific improvisations for flute and loop pedal done at a number of venues across Australia.
When COVID-19 hit, plans to continue that project obviously had to be re-imagined, so instead of developing new works live, I turned to recording.
We’re incredibly lucky in South Australia to have the support of the Music Development Office SA, who offered COVID-19 assistance grants to musicians. I was very fortunate to receive one of those grants.
Amongst; Alongside; Residue; Wait Back, OK? Could you explain a bit about the titles of these tracks? How do words influence your improvisations?
The concept of Alongside, Amongst, Against comes from my work creating site-specific performance. When I do these improvisations, I’m thinking about how the sound sits in a space: it could be alongside artwork, amongst the audience, against a striking piece of architecture.
That’s where the first two titles come from: Amongst was originally improvised at Make It Up Club with a really receptive audience, and I felt like I could almost see the sound hanging in the air around them. Alongside first came to life at praxis ARTSPACE, alongside an exhibition called Good News from Outerspace by Nicholas Hanisch and Cassie Thring.
As for Residue and Wait Back, OK? they’re slightly different as they were studio improvisations. I didn’t come in with anything formed before we recorded them. I knew with Residue, I wanted something almost like an interlude — short, that kind of broke down and disappeared into nothing after the weighty layers of the first two tracks.
Wait Back, OK? is, on the other hand, a nod to my beautiful toddler Lucy. I love that track – it was the first time I’d ever played harmonium, and I really relished the suspense and stillness of the sound.
When Lucy was about two-and-a-half and she wanted you to stay where you were — for example, if she wanted to keep playing a game but had to run and go get a toy — she’d tell you to ‘Wait Back, OK?’. It was this gorgeous moment of suspension that I loved, where she desperately wanted to hold onto what was happening at that point in time.
The album artwork is stunning — did you work closely with the artist to create the image?
Not at all! It’s a licenced image from the absurdly talented Rowan Sivyer, aka @littlerowanredhead. I’ve coveted her work on Instagram for many years now.
When I was looking at album artwork and considering what to use, Rowan had recently released that image under the name A Heart in Bloom as a print, and it just seemed right to me.
The sound I make is a little bit rhizomatic in structure – it develops and grows until it’s difficult to figure out where the beginning and end is, much like the kind of plant in the image. I contacted Rowan to see whether she would be kind enough to licence it to me, and she was.
As a performer and composer, do you prefer performing/recording your own work, or handing the job over to someone else?
A bit of both, really! It’s been a pleasure working on this project as a performer again, having spent a lot of time in the previous few years in a more traditional compositional realm. I really like the intersection of traditional composition and sound art, and quite often that lends itself to improvisation, which I find a little easier to govern myself rather than hand it over, so to speak.
Would you encourage other composers — whether they are professional performers or not — to create and release albums of their own? What would your advice about the process be?
One of the best pieces of career advice I’ve ever received has been: ‘Throw your hat over the wall and figure out how to get it back later.’ Meaning, say you can do the thing, and then figure out how to do the thing. It’s occasionally foolhardy, but rarely disappoints.
If you want to record your work, do it. In my experience it’s intensely rewarding. If you’re a performer, mores the better because you have that leg up, but if not, it’s certainly still a very achievable process.
I’d advise starting with a recording studio run by someone who knows the industry – Wizard Tone was absolutely perfect for me in that regard – and ask lots of questions. Plan out a budget, including what it will cost to pay your musicians, record, mix and master, licence or commission artwork, and any fees attached to the release — for example, distribution fees for places like CD Baby, print run if you’re planning it, etc.
Budget for more time than you think you’ll need in the recording studio, and be prepared to listen and give feedback on what you hear. It’s a learning process, certainly — but a really valuable one, and something that I am so grateful to have been through this year.
Alongside, Amongst, Against was released September 14, 2020. Visit Bandcamp to hear this album for yourself.
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