Ion Engine #3: Still House Plants Q&A

Fast edits and lockdown reflections with the Glasgow and South London based collective.

It’s been beautiful to watch Still House Plants develop over the past few years. They left me giddy when I first saw them at Glasgow’s Glad Cafe in 2015. Fusing slow and deliberate post-punk with dreamy r’n b and rickety free improv, they were totally magical. Since then the Glasgow and South London-based trio of Finlay Clark, David Kennedy, and Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach has refined and expanded their approach, opening up song structures through improvisation and chance procedures, collaborating with dancers, and releasing two fantastic tapes on GLARC. They issued their full debut, Long Play, on the superlative Bison Records in 2018. Now comes Fast Edit, recorded in London off the back of adventures in Hungary, Hong Kong, Chile and Argentina. Weaving rehearsal tapes and field recordings into beautifully present studio sessions, it’s their most focused and affecting effort to date. I chatted to the three-piece collective via Google Docs, allowing them to respond to each others’ answers and drop in a UK Garage gem for good measure.

Photo: Lizzie Urquhart

Firstly, I wanted to ask how lockdown has been treating you?

Fin: It was a challenge to channel the fear of the possibility of depression, an overwhelming sense of anger at the incompetence of the government, and loneliness into a force for positive change, while concurrently learning how to accept this global trauma at face value without feeling a sense of guilt at not using this time to work or be productive.

There was an unsettling contradiction between the beautiful and hazy summer air, increase in wildlife and clearer skies than I'd ever seen in London with the daily news reports of how many more hundreds of people had died.

I made a decision to perceive this obstructive event instead as a doorway into new alternative possibilities. I began to write piano quintets. Both a string quartet and a piano are each sort of like miniature orchestras, which gives them a wide scope within a relatively contained form. Imagination played a huge role in helping me during this time. The music could not be performed acoustically; the difficulty of securing funding notwithstanding, live music was facing almost complete uncertainty, which led me to instead use the harsh MIDI strings sounds of my scoring software as a musical device in itself. Another example of viewing an obstruction as possibility.

I also experienced a new kind of loneliness, and I appreciate and am glad to have felt this new, albeit difficult, sensation. I also loved to go on my state-permitted runs, I would listen to club mixes and pretend that I am dancing or in the cities that I was supposed to be performing in at that time. I also went to the cemetery by my house most days and listened to French language tapes. It was peaceful there and I could speak it out loud without anybody hearing.

Now I have moved into a new house and it is a wholly different experience. I even went to a socially distanced outdoor club night which was amazing. It is so important to use your body in an ecstatic way, as well as be seen and welcomed by so many people. I also have a part-time job gardening, which feels like my exercise, income, and well-being rolled into one; I am grateful to be able to be outside and in nature all day, even if it is sometimes so hot and so tiring.

Jess: had a really weird time. just been trying to stay sane. it was a very hard few months, between march and june, trying to come to terms with what had been lost (that means a lot of things !) but have been trying to be more levelled and active and solid since then.

been doing a lot of playing. recitals of sam beckett plays and playing dungeons and dragons. so doing a lot of voices of really ancient bodies. i was given a bike by a friend so also been trying to learn to cycle on the road- i can’t share with cars very easily but am getting better at turning right.

David: I was in London as lockdown started and last minute I was able to move into a really nice flat in Glasgow so I spent the whole time up here. It was such a change because in normal times I was planning on staying at my parents’ for the first part of this year and then making the move down to London in June or July. Instead I ended up in a flat in Glasgow again, which I was so glad to have happen, as I couldn’t have had a better place to stay in the lockdown. 

I was working the whole time so did not have the same initial problems of having to adjust to staying a home for extended time that a lot of people had. I had one of the coveted TESCO jobs so I guess I was a key worker haha. I was working during the crazy panic buying time when there was no toilet roll and stuff and no one knew what was going on or how bad it was gonna get. It was definitely a strange time but I got a lot of retail experience (if any supermarkets are looking for staff i’m here!)  My favourite shift was doing 6-12 on a Sunday morning. I would come in, get the cages from the deliveries as the sun rose then I would listen to music while doing the bakery for an hour or so. Then I would get a coffee, put out some stock, then by 11 I would go on the tills, then I would be finished as the shop got busy; all while getting Sunday bonus pay. The people were good too, we would talk about computers and 3D modelling and games n stuff, It was kinda great.

So personally, in a strange way the lockdown has helped me to get out of the bottom of my overdraft and I’m now the most financially secure I’ve ever been, but it’s important not to forget the absolute disaster the whole thing has been - it’s fucking horrible. So in a way I’ve had more work and everyone in my personal circle has been ok, but it’s impossible to forget the wider cost.

You were due to perform as featured artists at Glasgow’s Counterflows Festival in April.  You must be disappointed that it had to be cancelled. What did you have planned for your residency?

Fin: We were going to put on an installation at the CCA's Intermedia Gallery. We planned on printing out the image which we used in the gatefold of the US release of Fast Edit and pasting them across the walls, using the bend in the wall like the bend in the record sleeve. We were also going to do a Q&A with Frances Morgan as well as perform a show. Frances wrote a really beautiful piece in response to our album for the Still House Plants online intervention for the Counterflows website.

David: I was gutted Counterflows was cancelled especially since I saw it as a really nice way to finally play in Glasgow again because we haven't played here in a long time. I know we had some changes to the live show we were going to try, like having some ultra distorted drums parts using contact mics and implementing some of our recordings and some demo string parts from Fin into us playing.

Jess: it was so shit and sad as it was a lot to work towards. it was exciting. it's hard to summarise it all cos it was all going to happen - come together - when we were in glasgow together . but i know that our conversations about it were really animated and we were hungry for it. i miss glasgow loads - it was gonna be such a blessed reason to be there and being active in making while in the city .

Now two of you are based in London, what's your relationship with Glasgow? You never defined yourself as a Glasgow band. Would it be fair to say you've never quite fitted into that scene (not that that’s a bad thing!) ?

Fin: I would love to go up again to see my friends, but my life is in London now.

We were not not involved in the band scene. We played at Transmission once at a queer punk night called Spite House, and funnily enough stayed with the band that we supported at Transmission when we played in Buenos Aires last year.

We play shows and record music - that's all I want to think about rather than whether we fit in with certain scenes or people or places.

jess: difficult to describe as a Glasgow band when we were in Glasgow for such specific circumstances - going to art school does not a local make etc. David could be more insightful here probably.

but i don’t think we could've done it anywhere else, but then again it's also because we met there and fell in love with each other. cheap big rooms meant rehearsals could happen any time and all the time. west princes street being as noisy as it was meant we didn't have to worry about getting too scratchy. and being around the people meant it was ok not to fit into the glasgow circuit. without glarc we wouldn't've been pushed to get anything released so quickly. loads to say about what being in Glasgow allowed us to do. i think our not fitting into the circuit was natural and not so much intentional. i owe a lot to making real friends honestly.

David: Yeah we've never been connected to the 'band' scene in Glasgow at all. I don't think it’s deliberate either, but I don't mind it. I went through a phase for a long time of never wanting to be a Glasgow band because it just seems like a trap. I used to get so embarrassed about playing in a band, but now I don't know anymore, I'm very confused haha. I think I have this big abstract image in my head of Glasgow bands that makes me sort of sick to the core. Its a bit of a complex maybe, the same way I never want to drive and hate cars but I secretly am into street racing lol. I’m still like that really, but it’s so important to mention how lucky we are to have met all the people and friends here with music.

It’s partly through the art school or Green Door maybe or Joel [White] and Gordon [Bruce] [of GLARC], but we've always been surrounded [by] a whole crew that I've felt more comfortable with. I feel like people didn't really know what to do with us when we played shows or where we would best fit. I loved playing at club nights and stuff and really drastically changing the atmosphere haha. I think that's what I liked about Glasgow is that its small enough to for it to feel natural to work with people you get on with rather than getting lost in categorisations.

On Fast Edit, the writing process is aided by dictaphones, mobiles, live recordings, conversations etc. Can you shed a bit more light on that? Do you send ideas to each other and work things up from there? I guess you're into listening back to gigs/rehearsals too?

Fin: We record our rehearsals on our phones so that we can remember what we have written. Sometimes we will find a sample from these recordings and try to replicate it live. Also, I was listening to ‘Speedway’ by The Prodigy one time and loved how it opened with the sound effect of a car. I also download music videos from YouTube onto my MP3 player, which means that often songs start with 1-2 minutes of atmospheric build up or some opening narrative. I remember mentioning this to the others and we were all on the same page about feeling excited about using recordings from the street or other places as a musical device. When Jessica recorded the start of September on the way to the studio I felt like the motorbike in the distance was meant to be!

David: We've gathered years of recordings all the way back to our first practices. It was always a good way to remember what we played before or single out nice bits to build on. I would always play a beat and change the phrasing slightly over and over then fin and jess would like one bit and I would have already forgotten what it was or how to play it haha. So the recordings became really useful even just for that.

Its more recently over the past few months that outside of pure memory the recordings became a bit more important for composing. I think that really began to ramp up in the last 6 months of last year.

With Fast Edit these handheld recordings started to become part of the album process. We recorded all of our takes with our own recorders. I had my crunchy laptop recording everything and then my Zoom and phone all picking up the drums individually. So I guess in a way there is a secret lo fi version of the record. The drums on the first track and start of second track are through my laptop. For ‘Pleasures’ we had the task of trying to translate that song into a recording as when we play it live the drums sound is made by me moving the kit all over the stage and running to hit everything at uncomfortable angles hahaha. So the recordings helped to translate that. I think the drums on pleasures were of me warming up setting up the drums - it was recorded in Tradeston on July 12th last year. I know it was then cos I remember on those recordings I kept on picking up the sounds of the Orange Walk going past on the street below.

jess: we've always listened back and messed around. we used to run things through garageband and speed and slow things and pitch videos up so we could see how things would work at different paces. think that was how we used to build a lot of sets in glasgow as well - i remember playing one song for 20 minutes but changing the key every 5 minutes. it was fun and exercise and also really emotive and playful.

so while we've always recorded and messed around, with this record it was important to hold onto all our ideas. but we respect that all these recordings have their nuances and we'd really try and copy and paste them into songs physically as well as just relying on the recordings. we have a wicked archive that isn't really catalogable but is extensive. and there's jokes on there, there's mistakes, there's weird edits and samples and plays and disagreements. some of it is really beautiful. also cool knowing that they've come from all over the world - we've managed to borrow rehearsal spaces from hosting bands or friends and so got these weird versions of songs that are drenched in jet lag and sort of giddy glisses.

How do you go about piecing together these different takes and sound sources?

Fin: Tracks like ‘Choppy Nice’ came about by David using his mobile or laptop to make fairly crude, chopped up versions of rehearsal recordings. He made a lot of these and we listened through them all in order to make a list of the ones that we liked. We gave them titles just so we could remember which ones they were, such as 'Jess muttering briefly', or 'Drums fast and slow with talking and guitar', or 'Choppy Nice'. After we had recorded the album in the studio we would listen through and see where we could place these recordings. Sometimes they appear at the end of a track such as at the end of 'Crreeaase'.

‘Shy Song’ was a different story. We wanted to use the rehearsal recording as part of our live performance of the song. Jess would hold her iPhone up to the microphone on stage and me and David would listen to the guitar and drum parts and use that to play in and out of sync with. When it came to recording this song, however, we just used the original phone recording of the rehearsal and overlaid it with the studio recordings of the vocals and instrumental parts, rather than using the iPhone speakers through the microphone as we would have done on stage.

jess: i think for me it's about using all the stuff we make in a nonhierarchical way or something. as in, we wanted all our schemes to be accessed, half-done or not. i'm not saying that it's more generous work because some fidelity is forsaken, or pardoned. it's more that when thinking about recording, the final cuts aren’t always more valuable than the stuffing or insulation. so some of that core work being on show is necessary.

with fidelity, i think it's funny that often with more clarity comes more intimacy. i’m not sure i think in this way so strictly at all - in my mind the intimacy comes from having more to bear/ bearing more.

You've really honed your take on repetition over the years - you'll all work over a phrase or riff or vocal idea. How do you keep it exciting? Would you say it has anything to do with minimalism (as a concept rather than a genre)?

Fin: Music, regardless of how repetitive it is, needs to have a shape to it in order to make it engaging. It would sound awkward and lifeless if it was repetitive without direction or progression. I wouldn't say that keeping it exciting is something that I think about, but rather how to keep the listener or audience engaged, captured, and never apathetic.

We don't directly talk about the concept of minimalism as a group in regards to our music, but I can see why you would ask.

David: One thing I really like about the record is how it all sort of has the same beat give or take one or two. Most tracks have the same beat but with a diff phrasing. I remember after on the last night of our OTO residency that Laurie from Slip called me 'King Quaver' and I thought it was one of the best things ever.

I have these ultra self-conscious, maybe delusional but kind of true images in my head of what drums are all about and what I don't want them to be. I think that it’s so easy to overplay drums and whenever I’d try to play any embellishment like a fill or something I'll get this image in my head of a sort of sport-jock drummer with sweatbands around his arms and a t-shirt with 'fuck guitarists' on it or something, playing rudiments, and it’s just not what I want to be. Drums look really over the top already, they are a bit like vintage cars - covered in chrome and round shapes and loads of old blokes surrounding them. I don't think drums are that beautiful to look at. So I think the drums in fast edit aren't conceptually or academically minimal, its a sort of delusional minimalism that comes from being a really scared and antagonistic kid. I think this is a good thing though because usually with minimalism its logical conclusion is to stop doing anything, it sort of ends itself. But I think im my case it is limitless and exciting as its part of how I cope with myself.

I remember Charles Hayward laughing cos I used my spare beater to hold up my drum stool and he said 'being a drummer is a lot like being a scaffolder you know', I thought it was bit stupid at the time but I think its quite a cool idea actually and I'm looking forward to seeing what's on the way. Onwards and upwards.

jess: i've just read david's reply n i really get that oppositional thing. it comes from a different place for me but yeah there's a sort of friction in using as much as you can in as little as u can. or, all u can mobilise in a single mouthful.

You've kept things focused on voice, guitar and drums this time - no piano or violin pieces. A deliberate choice or just where you were at?

Fin: It was a deliberate choice. The sound felt more cogent as a whole.

jess: bit of both yeah. touring means economy, but also that streamlined take made for a wholler sound

Can I ask about the lyrics? Are they all Jess's doing or do you all have input? Any particular themes running across the album?

jess: the lyrics on this one are all mine but sometimes we've shared notes or fin has given me a piece of paper asking, ‘is this something you could work with?’ - like ‘coco’ from one of the other records is very much fin's words. i love sharing in words sometimes, it's cool to try and mould someone else's thoughts to your palette or to your understanding. i guess it's a bit like acting.

i don't know if there's a theme exactly but a lot of the words have an element of learning in them. 'september' is sort of about coming to terms with having to motivate yourself. 'ccrreeaasee' is sort of about being autonomous. i ladel in moments of dialogue and the language of devotion into what i choose to say. everything sounds a bit like a love song. they never really are wholly. weird affirmations or spun stories.

i remember telling you a while ago stewart that i write a lot and then edit down words in the process of making songs. melodies force out certain sentiments. it's quite co-dependent. so of course things become a bit fragmented, but in a kind of pop way i think. like, the slick phrases remain and become sort of choruses.

Do you see any affinity between your musical practice and art practice? E.g. both formal elements like repetition, patterning, collage, as well as broader approaches to presenting the work.

Fin: I suppose that there is a collage-like aspect to the writing of the music, although this isn't directly talked about in the process. Art is about ways of seeing, which can be applied towards any form of communication such as dance, writing, or music either consciously, or,and I would imagine that this is closer to how us as a group think about art and music,unconsciously, as we are used to interacting and engaging with ideas in a lateral and often indirect way.

jess: i find this question really hard, and silly. it had been an extension of work while we were at school may be but it's also our own thing. it's cool to set your own parameters and to know that something is your own .

A number of American reviewers have talked about the emo influence on your work. What do you make of it?

Fin: I suppose that a clean guitar sound is quite commonly associated with that genre. I can understand why genre is a necessary aspect to music reviews, but it can also cause friction between journalists and listeners considering the variety of ways to interpret a genre, which is often underpinned and therefore distorted by one's personal attachment to a particular artist or interpreter of that genre, which, in turn, can lead to reductive conclusions based on a disagreement both as to what constitutes the genre which is being spoken about as well as the cultural significance or value of the music in question.

David: I think there's is maybe some comparison to a lot of midwest emo, particularly in the really clean guitar sound maybe and I guess its sincere. But I think a lot of that music has a lot of silliness to it as well, and it well known for having these singers with kind of hilarious voices. But they also are usually really technical and tight bands, kind of mathy, and I don't think that's really where I'm coming from so much at least. I really like the kind of intentional winding in and out of each other that we do and I think there is a humour to the way we work too, but it is in a different way. I think the influence is there and I totally get why American reviewers would go to that.

jess: emo to post-hardcore is transformative or may be locational. they are not so distant to me. the confessional or strong emotional or earnestness that describes emo works with us i think. those clean shimmer guitars of the midwest scene like the kinsella brothers, and the yowling of cap'n jazz. and overflowing drums also. i think it's all blurry, but all born of a scrappiness and a sway towards DIY and really pushing out words with all your lungs.

i like it as a reference but i don't know if it's always wholly right. i don’t think that we've ever sat down and spoken about the influence, nor purposefully listened, especially since i think i was the only one who really grew up with lots of these emo/punk/hardcore bands. fin and i went to see american football together in 2014 though, it was really weird.

it's interesting though because emo is very much a boys game and we don't fit in with that at all . but maybe that's partly why it's nice to be seen as a twisted version of it.

There have also been a few references to UK Garage. Is that a genre you've spent a lot of time with?

jess: i grew up with lots of uk garage, grime and d&b and think that there's a lot to say about using the language of these kinds of music to help write and communicate - at least for me. i felt able to talk about building sounds, using time shifts and samples and breaks as reference. i owe a lot of it to my brothers and to croydon probably, there's really good pirate radio .

we've listened to this a lot. not that it's super instrumental in our work but still, big tune:

to be honest though i listened to a lot more grime than garage. but structurally, with repetition, returns and malfunctions and twists, really elemental drums and those sharp sounds, it's an important reference to hit.

What else were you listening to/reading/looking at during the making of the album?

Fin: I was reading two short books that I picked up at the festival we performed at in Buenos Aires. The first was a series of conversations between Pauline Oliveros/Miya Masaoka, Clara Rockmore/Robert Moog, Laurie Spiegel/Dena Yago, and Beatriz Ferreyra/Jason Gross. The second was a collection of musical manifestos: Advice for Young Musicians by Robert Schumann, Manifesto for Futurist Musciains by Balilla Pratella, The Art of Noises by Luigi Russolo, and The Liberation of Sound by Edgard Varese. Other than that I can't remember listening to or looking at anything in particular. It was quite a focused two weeks,taking the overground each morning and meeting the others at the studio in Shadwell and then getting home and going straight to bed.

David: In Buenos Aires After we played, me and jess went to a night put on by Hiedrah Club de Baile and saw Tayhana, Aggromance and Brea and that music really stuck with me. I really liked hanging out with AyA too they were really good at Hyperlocal I love their music. I feel like that night really started me down a path of getting really excited in electronic music again and I was listening to/discovering a lot of this sort of intense, shiny, high tempo club music before and during recording.

Also in that time I was trying to make a sound piece, so I was spending a lot of time listening through hours of archives and getting to grips with using Ableton and Max, so it feels like that whole period was me jumping between listening to intense club tracks and lots of my own recordings. I have a bunch of Zoom recordings of me flicking between the drum tracks and different bits of music when I couldn't get to sleep a night in between days in the studio.

jess: in january i was reading london fields by martin amis but i'm not sure that gave me much insight to anything but definitely set in a passive paranoia and deep panic :-P

during recording me and david played a lot of games and walked around the park loads.

Can you tell me more about your tour of South America? Where did you play, what kind of experiences did you have and how did they inspire the new album?

David: It seems like a different world now but the whole second half of 2019 was completely mad. I was on a residency thing in Venice for the Biennale for the whole of August. The day after it finished I met fin and jess and we flew straight to Budapest to play at UH Fest. We had been asked to play a show at empty gallery in Hong Kong, so straight after Budapest we played and stayed in Hong Kong for five days or so. We then flew to Lisbon and played in ZDB and the Sonoscopia in Porto. I remember being back in time for Halloween in Glasgow before going to Santiago at the start of November.

It was a very inspiring, uncomfortable but very special experience to have accidentally found ourselves in the political turmoil of Hong Kong and later the protests in Chile. I saw some of the most uplifting scenes and some pretty distressing things. Chile in particular was a bit of a crash course in the hangovers of mid century Geoplitics and US involvement in Latin America. So much happened that it is very hard to put into words how it felt.

We were with Glorias Novales, who are some of the warmest people I have ever met, and we met soo many great people. We pressed an ultra limited 7inch, lathe cut by nes at Bym studios (He cut it while we played live, it was the first time he got it to work) We got chased by tanks, tear gassed in restaurants. We drove through forest fires that surrounded Valparaiso and got shouted at by some hairy dockers at the port. Soo much stuff happened.

We had a bunch of shows booked across the country that were all cancelled or rearranged . So we spent most of our time in Santiago, rehearsing and messing with mixers at Bym studios and going to protests with Glorias Novales in the evening, most days for 4 weeks. We wrote some songs there and some clips in the record were made there too.

Then we played at Hyperlocal in Buenos Aires in December. It is such an amazing city and the people we were with were soo good. There is really gd club scene there, lots of hard, shiny electronic music. A lot of what we saw there really stayed with me.

jess: south america was us mostly in Chile. because of the unrest there, we spent 5 weeks in santiago and didn't get to travel the country very much. maybe having the insight of our companions and hosts meant that we didn’t want to frivolously lurch around the country, seemed particularly dismissive to not try and hear and understand what was going on. we had gigs to play at random intervals around santiago so it was cool to stay put and learn. walked around everywhere getting hot in the sun, and a lot of time listening. it was mad eventful. i was having a hard time being away because i was really concerned about a loved one. so it was mad being drawn in and out of it all: yeah being teargassed and watching documentaries learning about neoliberalism and going to museums about the dictatorship - and then also being tearful because i felt a strong pull to be useful at home.

then we went to buenos aires for hyperlocal festival and enjoyed 9 humid days there, running around and getting quite rowdy. it was really fun and the people who run it, ale and bruno and emily (and our friends who hosted us, rocio and nico) kept it beautiful. the festival was so sick. we were a definite interruption of all these clean widgit sounds - a lot of the other acts were hXc electronic .

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