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To celebrate the launch of the Quompliation on Thursday night, Totally Dublin talks to some of the bands involved at length about their contributions and more. The series begins with Cloud Castle Lake, a Dublin band making experimental, textured songs that hints at things on the spectrum from Liars and These New Puritans through to ambient music, all with an eerily perfect falsetto vocal over the top. We talked to Brendan William Jenkinson (guitar), Rory O’Connor (bass) and James O’Donohue (drums).
When you started out, were you making weirder experimental music or was it more normal?
Brendan: When it really first started, it was just me and James in a drum shed in school. I had tiny little amp. Luke O’Connell was on guitar and I was playing bass, and we used to just cover Nirvana all day, but all you could hear was James’ cymbals. From there, Rory came into the band and it was kinda rocky for a while, just trying to make a really aggressive sound.
Rory: First song I played with the band was The Cure, Boy’s Don’t Cry. Which was pretty solid.
Brendan: I was singing for a while, but my voice wasn’t that strong, so Rory asked Dan to come in, and he did this really quiet audition. We were like “yeah, okay”, and then slowly his voice started building up.
He didn’t just arrive in able to do all the crazy stuff?
Brendan: For a while, he won’t want me to say this, but he sounded really emo. But he sort of found his own voice after that. I think one of the first songs where we thought, “yeah, this is a really cool sound to go it” was Magicians. That was kinda pop-based. It had a really pop organ riff and the drums were syncopated and it had a catchy melody. But at the same time we wanted it to be really big and long.
Rory: We all took inspiration when we were younger from that Dublin band Twinkranes. We all seemed to fall in love with them.
James: I think we were quite isolated in boarding school, and Rory did work experience in Temple Lane Studio and met Anto in there. He was talking to Anto about bands and stuff, and that kinda opened our eyes to a lot of Irish music we’d never heard before. That was something that we really liked. Twinkranes are just probably the main example.
Brendan: But we didn’t sound like Twinkranes. We didn’t really know what we wanted. We wanted a really big sound, or I did anyway.
When did you start messing around with loops and effects and stuff?
Brendan: I’d say that was when Dan got his Kaoss Pad. He just started making loads of samples in his bedroom, through his laptop computer mic. He has this tiny little guitar, that he just did loads of loops on.
Rory: The ukelele thing?
Brendan: It’s not a ukelele. It kinda sounds like it. That’s when a lot of sounds started happening. It was really fun to create a little sound world and just listen to that for ages. But then the real challenge came when we tried to make that into a proper song with structure.
How much of your writing is improvised? Is that a part of it?
Brendan: Not a whole lot is improvised actually. We’ve never been that into jamming. It works for some bands.
Rory: It worked for Can.
James: We tried the whole jamming thing, but it just ended up with us doing something initially that sounded good, but would end up sounding like a big mess.
Brendan: Everyone would want to get louder.
Are you conscious of seeming like a school band? There seems to be a difference between bands that come out of school together, and bands that start later than that.
Brendan: I don’t think we really minded to be honest. Definitely the reason why we work, the reason we’re still music, is because of how we work together, our relationships.
Rory: Being with each other for six years in boarding school, you get used to mood swings and all.
James: We don’t really clash much at all.
Brendan: Well we do, but that’s part of it. It’s weird, I under-rate how difficult it is to play with someone you don’t really know that well. It can be hit or miss. Like, there was six months when we didn’t play at all, so I started playing with Ian a bit, just guitar-driven rock. Some of it was great, but when we started to change around who was playing what and stuff, it just wasn’t working at all. I knew we were all good musicians, but it just wasn’t working. So much of it depends on how you relate to one another.
So how do you feel about people mentioning you as a ‘Band to Watch’. You were mentioned in the Ticket, and even stuff like Drop-D online.
James: It’s really nice, it’s nice to have people finally noticing us. It’s also really weird that people are noticing us, considering we don’t have any releases out and we haven’t recorded much. It’s really nice, but at the same time we don’t want this to be something that happens now and then when we finally put something out, this phase of… I’m not gonna say hype because that’s too strong a word…
Brendan: I’d say it is a bit of hype. I don’t really like it to be honest. There’s an expectation there for what we have to do and when we have to do it by. Somebody said to us recently that we have twelve to fifteen months to make it. That’s kind of scary to hear. We like to work at our own pace. In terms of writing, it can take months for songs to come out. But we are working towards an album, and that album will be a culmination of everything we’ve been doing for the last three or four years.
Are you recording that at the moment?
Brendan: We’re in ‘pre-production’. The recording stage hasn’t started yet.
James: We won’t say too much about it though.
Brendan: It’s scary that, say if we weren’t happy with it when we recorded it and had to do it again, that people would be disappointed. Or else think that we’re fake. It’s weird in that regard. But it’s also exciting to see your name mentioned in the Irish Times. Especially when we did the Picnic and the next day I think we were mentioned twice in the supplement. That was the best feeling ever. There were hundreds of bands playing it, and our name is there.
Do you notice more people showing up, or different types of people showing up since?
James: Not really. We haven’t really done many of our own shows recently. The ones we have done have been things like the Ones To Watch festival in Whelans, or support slots or whatever. So it’s kinda hard to know whether those people are there to see you.
Brendan: As well, we don’t have any kind of promotional management, or booking agent. We do it all ourselves, so we’re learning about that aspect of things as well. But personally I’m not very good at taking notice of the people who are at gigs. I’m kinda shy in that regard. I just like to be on the stage and get into the music.
Is the Quompilation the first physical release you’ve done?
All: Yep.
Is that weird, no? A Kanye cover?
Brendan: We recorded a song last summer, and we learned a lot from that. The result wasn’t exactly what we wanted to achieve. I think we went about it all wrong. We recorded certain parts of it, and then a month later recorded more. We thought, oh, this is gonna work, it’s sounding good now so it’ll work. But it was a different stage in the whole evolution of the song. So there were slight differences every time we recorded things. So that’s why it didn’t work. It’s up online now, it seems to be released in a way.
This is A Wolf Howling?
Brendan: Yeah.
This was going to be the 10″ you were talking about last year?
James: Yeah, it was gonna be released on 10″.
One of the questions I had written down was just “when are you gonna release something” but I suppose “when you’re done” is the answer to that.
Brendan: Yeah, when we’re done. We really, really want to. And we want to make it really special. Everyone does, but we’re very conscious of releasing something that’s maybe sub-par. All the hype that surrounds it would make it like, “oh, this is shit.”
It is kind of a different approach. Cast of Cheers got a lot of attention last year having appeared with an album, it went up free, and that’s how they arrived. A lot bands seem to do that now because of the home recording thing. It must be strange to do it the opposite way. The old way, almost.
Rory: Yeah, it is old school. It’s kinda how The National went about it. They got a little bit of hype or whatever, released their first album, but just kept playing live and building from there.
James: Like the Walkmen too.
Brendan: I think the reason is that the songs come from so far back, it wouldn’t make sense to say, we’ll record them now and get them out quickly. Because it took a long time for those songs to take their form. And while they were taking form, we were gigging. So it just kind of built like that. If we wrote songs really quickly, it would have went the other way.
Sometimes people can tend to say weird things while trying to explain your music. The write-up on Heineken Music says ‘electro-rock’ but if you read that and imagined what it sounded like, you could not be further from what you actually do sound like.
James: Yeah, it’s so annoying. When we get asked what kind of music we play, I don’t think we can answer it. But when people try and explain how we sound, they can really fuck it up sometimes.
Rory: When we played in the Tivoli Theatre, Jim Carroll was there, that was the first time he saw us. And he had a little mention then in the Ticket saying ‘Ones To Watch: Cloud Castle Lake’. It was like, “oddball flourishes”, a really weird description of our music. Now it’s completely different.
Brendan: Jim’s got some codes I think. He said one thing, “1+1=7 psych dramatics”. Did you get that?
It must be an obscure Radiohead reference.
Brendan: To 2+2=5?
Yeah, it must be.
Brendan: But it doesn’t make sense.
Jim’s beyond having to make sense at this point.
Brendan: It sounded great.
So the Radiohead comparison.
Brendan: Yeah.
Like that, don’t like that?
Brendan: Well we were really conscious of it early on, because to be honest, they were a massive influence. Although I think we’re kinda moving away from that and coming to terms with our songwriting and process now, so it’s changing.
Rory: We’re all listening to really different stuff. We’ve moved away a lot and kind of matured in our music taste.
James: I was never a huge Radiohead fan.
Rory: It’s more Brendan and Dan [McAuley, singer]. They had a kind of obsession.
Well there are Radiohead kids. You can kind of tell them from afar. There’s no shame in it.
Brendan: No there’s not. I’m sometimes conscious of performing and looking like Radiohead.
Yeah I was going to mention that. The voice is what gets mentioned, a lot, but you actually have the mannerisms of Jonny Greenwood when you play the guitar.
Brendan: Yeah, for a while I tried to escape that, but I don’t even think about it now. I just think about the guitar and doing the job. I think loads of guitars have it actually. Jonny obviously took his style from… I suppose the Pixies maybe? You have to be inspired by bands sometimes. Even by stage mannerisms. When I see Radiohead play live, it’s just amazing. I saw them play in Berlin in 2008. One of the early songs was Nude [from 2008’s In Rainbows] and I just remember looking at Jonny for most of that song and seeing how comfortable he was. His guitar was all he was focusing on, despite this massive crowd and this massive sound rig. He was just there with his guitar playing it really softly. I was just like, how are you that calm?
That’s kind of a cool seminal moment. So why Kanye?
James: The challenge.
Rory: It was Dan’s choice really.
Brendan: No, it was collaborative. Obviously the album came out and there was lots of talk about it. Dan really liked it. He was in the Ticket last week talking about it, actually. We were listening to it, and I love Bon Iver too. He’s on the track we did, Lost In The World, so we were drawn to that. But there was more to it than just Kanye. Do you know that Morning Benders video, For Yours Truly? They get loads of musicians in a room, all their friends, it’s all done live. I really wanted to emulate that idea, so we went to Regent House in Trinity where the acoustics are just like, clap and there’s a ten second trail. We got some of our friends and some members of the Trinity Orchestra to play, it was lots of fun, but suddenly when we started to play we realised “shit, we haven’t actually rehearsed this.” It was that idea, to try and take this Kanye song which has this really massive joyous feeling about it, and try and create the Morning Benders thing. When that didn’t actually come out very well, we decided to layer it. That recording actually is on the compilation, but massively layered.
So it wasn’t a decision to consciously different. You must have known that a lot of people were going to pick Irish bands.
James: I didn’t know that, I thought it was going to be a lot of high profile artists.
Brendan: There was a bit of challenge in it as well, because we don’t play that kind of music. But it wasn’t like, oh, let’s do something really different.
Rory: We were originally thinking of doing Tightrope by Janelle Monáe.
Brendan: That’s still quite different.
What Irish bands do you identify with?
Brendan: Well, the Jimmy Cake. I love the way they’re constantly evolving.
James: Twinkranes and Channel One for me.
Brendan: Leagues O’Toole mentioned us as part of a generation of Irish bands influenced by the Redneck Manifesto, alongside Adebisi Shank and Enemies. I don’t know if we are, I love them, but it’s cool to be compared to them. I don’t know if we’re necessarily influenced by them.
Brendan: Thread Pulls are great as well.
It’s interesting, all the bands you mention, except Thread Pulls, are a generation above you in terms of music. They were where you are, five years ago.
Brendan: Well, we love Irish music, but the Popical Island stuff, it’s loads of fun, but it’s not really what we’re going for. We probably look abroad more, for bands we identify with.
James: I don’t, I find myself looking more and more at Irish music. Irish music is amazing at the moment.
