a conversation with… SON LUX
Kayla had a chat with Rafiq Bhatia, Ian Chang, and Ryan Lott of Son Lux about their upcoming album Tomorrows II, the second of three installations in the Tomorrows trilogy.
I come from the dance world and was lucky enough to witness your 2017 collaboration with the dance company Shaping Sound. Seeing their show that exclusively used your music was a powerful experience, as was seeing you all perform live in 2018.
Yea, that was a great experience. Travis [Wall] is obviously a gifted mover and director, but he’s also a sweetheart and a very humble dude. —RL
You have such a unique and genre-defying sound that layers a variety of instruments and is composed so articulately. It invites listeners into detailed and intricate “alternate worlds”, no pun intended. What is your process of creating these layers—do the lyrics come to you first, the composition, or a combination?
We don’t have a formula, except that I think we each try to approach the process with an openness—even a thirst—for disrupting any routine we might have been starting to fall into. In general, we often come at it from the perspective of dealing very specifically with sound or rhythm, finding kernels that inspire us. Sometimes it’s just a rhythmic feeling that draws us in, while other times it is ephemeral bits: recordings that contain small traces of human presence, the type of thing most people might scrub clean. Lyrics often come near the end. —RB
Tomorrows II has many emotions woven through it, from desperation and anxiety, to hope, encouragement, and more. What were your main influences for the sound, and how would you all describe the "world" listeners will be brought to when taking in this next album?
We’re always on the search for sounds we’ve never quite heard before, but that feel like sounds we love. It’s hard to explain. It’s maybe a bit like stepping into a new city and saying to yourself, “I could see myself here.” We want for listeners what we want as maker-listeners: to feel at home in a new place. —RL
Your record Tomorrows II will be available digitally on December 4th. How do you feel it correlates to Tomorrows I, and how will the both of them tie into Tomorrows III? Had the concept for this expansive group of albums been on your mind for awhile, or was the Tomorrows body of work created exclusively during this year involving COVID?
We’ve been brainstorming ways to move away from the traditional album model since well before COVID, and I just want to give credit to our management Michael Kaufmann and Hannah Houser for really spearheading that conversation.
Fortunately, we already had several sessions together before the first wave of COVID locked down the US in March. One of the last things we did collectively in person was list all of the different gestating musical ideas we had, and figure out a potential sequence for the three part album. This was something completely new for us because we typically sequence our albums after the music is done. In doing it this way, we were able to have a bird's-eye view of the project, and make creative decisions based on a larger interconnected structure. This has manifested itself in themes that recur across the three volumes. Sometimes it’s obvious and other times it’s more subliminal. It really speaks to a fascination that we share with presenting the same musical idea in different and contrasting ways. —IC
Your sound is very unique and identifiable across your diverse body of work. Have you employed any new devices or instruments in Tomorrows II that would be new territory for Son Lux?
While there are certain constants—our own instruments and those of collaborators like yMusic come to mind—texturally speaking, I think the biggest common thread in the music of Son Lux is actually the hunger for experimenting with new sounds and devices. As in, perhaps any sense of consistency comes more from our outlook on working with sound than from uniformity in the palette itself. But in that respect, one of the things that feels unique to the Tomorrows cycle is the use of long, relatively unsculpted, improvised takes of performance with pretty conventional instruments. For example, both “Prophecy” (from TII) and “Only” (from TI) were built around recordings of us just playing together in the studio. That’s something that is common for other bands, but it’s a new thing for us, and I think it only works because we’ve internalized so much of how we approach making music from a studio perspective into the way we perform on our respective instruments. —RB
Your song ‘Easy’ featuring Lorde has been a long-standing hit. On Tomorrows I, the first album of this three-volume set, you released a collaboration with soul singer William Bell, who brings depth and texture to the track. How did you conclude that his was a voice that needed to be included? There aren’t any obvious features on Tomorrows II—are there any that are more under the radar? For example, is the “feminine” chorus of voices often present in Son Lux tracks achieved between the three of you?
We’re honored to have collaborated with the legendary soul artist William Bell on an alternate version of “Only” from Tomorrows I. It’s the first of a number of alternate versions of songs from Tomorrows that feature artists coming from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. For Tomorrows II, we released an alternate version of “Live Another Life” featuring rapper Nappy Nina, who’s verses added a poetic depth to the song, and who’s angular-yet-smooth flow inspired a reinterpretation of the slippery beat from the original.
In addition to that, every volume of Tomorrows has a number of collaborators that impact the music in deep and meaningful ways. In terms of the feminine chorus you’re referring to, we have Nina Moffitt’s wild arrangement and performance on “Prophecy”, as well as Hanna Benn’s angelic sweeps on “Apart” and “Bodies”. I also want to give a shout out to Nick Dunston, who laid down some devastatingly beautiful upright bass on “Molecules”, and Riley Mulherkar, who pretty much brought us to tears in the studio with his trumpet playing on “Leaves”. —IC
You’ve been vocal about wanting to leave listeners to use their own imaginations and interpret your music on their own, but what is one message you would hope that people contrive from this next album, Tomorrows II?
I have a personal aversion to music that feels didactic, so I try to avoid making it. There isn’t a “message” per se, at least not one that I’m trying to teach or convey. That’s one of the reasons I avoid telling folks what a song is “about.” But the other reason is because I don’t really know what the song is about. My perception of a song is just the perspective of a single set of ears, and one of Music’s virtues is it lives its own life in the ears of each individual.
Over twelve years ago, at the album release show of the first Son Lux record, a dude came up to me afterward and told me how a song on the record brought him out of a suicidal state. He explained to me what the song meant to him, and it was not at all what I had intended. At that moment, I was glad I hadn’t robbed him of that perception of the song by broadcasting its “meaning.” Since then, I’ve had dozens of similar conversations with fans. —RL
Ian, I‘ve read how you grew up studying music and composition but didn’t feel that you could access your voice until later. How was the journey from discovering that you wanted to use your “different” voice as an instrument, to sharing such powerful songs like “Dream State” with a live audience? Are there any tracks on this album that you'd vocally be particularly excited to bring to the stage?
In what you read, I was referring to my voice as my artistic perspective on producing my own solo electronic work. My identity and voice as a drummer and band member of Son Lux is more developed and is a related but different journey. I will say that my playing has never been more fully integrated into any recording than it is on Tomorrows, and that I’m really excited to play songs like “Live Another Life” and “Leaves” live someday. —IC
Everyone has had a different experience during this rollercoaster of changes in the past months—Has this time of “lockdown” led to anything creatively that might not have come otherwise?
In a lot of ways, we count ourselves fortunate in terms of being able to forge ahead with our creative projects during the lockdown. Ryan and Ian moved away from New York a few years ago, so we’ve gotten very accustomed to working remotely and are fortunate to have already had the means and the groundwork in place to do so. But it’s eerie—and honestly unfortunate—how the kind of overarching theme of sustained frictions that we had been exploring in those years found its home in the atmosphere of 2020. —RB
In the past, you’ve gone beyond making albums and touring—you’ve worked in advertising composing pieces for commercials, as well as partnered with visceral artists at Shaping Sound and So You Think You Can Dance. Do you have any other upcoming projects for which fans should be on the lookout?
Absolutely! If you can believe it, on top of putting together this ambitious three part album, we’ve also been collaborating on a movie score, which will hopefully come out early next year. I can’t share many details, but just know that the excitement level is high! —IC