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RAW HOUSE #1: Yamir - Willingness to Experiment

Interview by Jakub Tabor, Saturday March 18th, 2017.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/house-for-musicians/raw-house-1-yamir-willingness-to-experiment/2212708738954864 [original article]

At times you see new faces on the various forums which struck you as something else entirely. When I first saw a vague lamppost in between some trees breathing a heavy light onto a distorted image I was in a stage where post-rock was beginning to plan a new seed in me and experimental music was deep into my subconscious. I put the release on and I could precisely remember when all gone black while music still remained in my ears... It was „I Stole This Riff”, the first EP by Puerto Rico-based musician Yamir. Today in the first ever Raw House we'll discuss the matter of his newly released LP „Mullväd” as well as dig into some background on his musical project, his ethereal love to Keiji Haino and a fear of failure on a small island in the Atlantic.

Listen while reading to the newest Yamir release entitled „Mullväd”: https://cbrcbr.bandcamp.com/album/mullv-d

I. EFFECTS OF WAR

RAW HOUSE: Firstly, I wanted to congratulate you for releasing „Mullväd” which I find, in my honest opinion, a worthy successor to your self-titled LP way back when. Immediately when I've heard that title I had to check it out. However, much to my surprise, I couldn't really find a proper meaning to that title. Should a listener feel this sort of unknown behind your album names?

YAMIR: Well, it doesn't really relate much at all to the album, mainly I picked it out because part of the inspiration for Mullväd and creating a five part track came from The Residents' album, Mark of the Mole. So I took the word mole and looked for a language it would look cool in, i.e. Swedish and I added the “ä” so it would look less plain. The Residents seem to be people I steal a lot of name ideas from, like Angakok and I Stole This Riff are both Residents songs as well.

RAW HOUSE: Would you say then that The Residents are one of these key artists that influenced you throughout your musical project?

YAMIR: Definitely, along with Branca and Haino, which are much more obvious influences.

RAW HOUSE: Your album starts with a very slow guitar-based „A Study In Noise” with a very bleak progression, slowly building up to become this sculpture of noise. That slowly build up track really reminds me of more experimental rock based bands; the first example out of the hat would be Swans. How much these experimental bands made you came to realization that you want to do music of that nature?

YAMIR: I'm not too big on Swans outside of their self titled EP, but they were one of the bands that drove me in this direction. There's a few tracks I scrapped from the album because halfway through making them I realized they sounded almost identical to Oxygen or some other track of theirs. What really convinced me to try this out was Sonic Youth and Glenn Branca. I was reading this SY biography a few months back, and it had a lot of interviews with Branca and his music, so I thought to myself: "Hey, there really hasn't been anyone that's done Branca's style of guitar composition that I know of, I should try it out myself!". And from there I made A Study in Noise.

RAW HOUSE: Now „For Keiji” seems quite obvious for me – as somebody who recognizes you on the various forums by the picture of Keiji Haino giving feedback to other's musicians. It feels like there is a deeper connection with this artist. Why did you decide to dedicate that particular track to Keiji? What is his overall influence on your musical perspective?

YAMIR: Well, obviously I am a huge fan of him, mainly because of his willingness to experiment with any instrument and genre from psych rock to noise to a capella to DJ mixes, and just this mysterious aura that surrounds him. I dedicated that track to him because it sounds pretty similar to something you'd hear on his collabs with O'Rourke and Ambarchi, plus that style of improvisation and the guitar tone come straight from him.

RAW HOUSE: Another thing which put me on guard immediately – drumming. Now Ryan Sinclair isn't a new name in your project, he has been there since the first releases on your Bandcamp. How does the collaborative work like your releases influences you as a solo musician? What do you feel Ryan puts on the record with his work that you wouldn't otherwise?

YAMIR: Well, actually Ryan didn't really change much in terms of collaborative work, I'd just asked him for some drumming for a song on my s/t and he delivered. He actually didn't exactly contribute to this, either. I've been trying to message him since July of past year but he's nowhere to be found. He'd left me a few drum solos I had asked him for to use in another project I ended up scrapping. While making For Keiji, I came across the solos in my files and I realized they were perfect for the song. Drums is something I've always had a problem finding, so I'm really glad he left me some extra things to work with, because otherwise I would've just used a drum machine like on other tracks.

RAW HOUSE: Another contributor to the release is Prikc who I haven't heard before and his acoustic elements adds a very nice space in the release. In general you were trying to give other people some space on your releases. I remember some violin elements from Dear Laika, for example. How do you view collaboration, in general?

YAMIR: Well, Prikc is one of my best friends, and I've been meaning to make some proper releases collaborating with him. He is way better at doing improvisation in guitar so I decided to give him a space on the album to exercise it. I think collaborating, especially at these levels, is very important since it helps both of you gain more popularity from each other's fans and can give a very interesting twist to your music. I wouldn't say any of the people that have been featured in my music were "collaborations", but more that I just commissioned them to do some work that I needed for a track. I do hope to make some proper collaborations in the future, though.

RAW HOUSE: Then we come to „Mullväd” - what a beast! This almost look like something taken out the progressive rock band's book. It is staggeringly different from the first tracks you've made on your first EP. What was the intention behind pulling these five tracks together?

YAMIR: Like I said before, it was mainly the idea of creating a sort of small story around the album, which kinda came to me when I realized that three of the tracks I was working on at the moment would fit perfectly one after the other, and had a certain mood behind them that i could form into a story. And from there, I fixed those tracks a bit so they'd transition into each other and made the missing tracks fit into the missing parts of the story. I'd say they're very very loosely based on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, but that's because I used those interview samples.

RAW HOUSE: So, should we say that this album is about war? Or the suffering of existence? What did you tried to do say though these interview samples?

YAMIR: Well, I'd say that the Mullväd tracks are more about the after effects of war than war itself. The interview samples I feel just help add to the theme of the tracks and I guess shed a little light on what the songs are supposed to be about to the listener.

RAW HOUSE: „Mullväd”, in general, features an array of different genre mixes. Somehow it feels like a one cohesive release though. How do you find a way to combine what seems like a different songs formed with a very different mold in mind?

YAMIR: It usually wasn't easy to come up with ways combine the tracks, I rarely write down what I have in mind to make, so it's more just spontaneous ideas I get while working on them or just by trial and error.

RAW HOUSE: Was this spontaneous nature also present when you were making your music ever since the beginning of your project?

YAMIR: Yup, the only song I ever really "penned" would be A Study in Noise, and even then I would change the things I wrote and add new things as I made it.

RAW HOUSE: So it all comes from emotions of the current moment?

YAMIR: Exactly.

RAW HOUSE: I really love the finale of your release. A blissful post-rock ambiance filled with some sort of „magic” behind it; that's probably my favorite track from you. The bleakness, the atmosphere of it all is really speaking to me. In addition, the words about Nagasaki in the interview provides no foot to really stand onto. What do you think gives a release a great atmosphere? YAMIR: I don't think it's too hard to create a great atmosphere, as long as your song is really good and it has a lot of detail to it, you can make most people get really immersed in it.

II. MUSIC OF THE MOON

RAW HOUSE: Since we started talking about atmosphere, I want to track back to your beginnings. Yamir, as a name, refers to the moon which is featured on your profile picture and some glimpses of that moody, almost vague in my eyes, atmosphere is presented in your album covers. How did you decide to provide that art direction to your releases? Was it a conscious decision or more of the gut feeling inside yourself?

YAMIR: Okay, the moon profile picture was definitely a coincidence and not intentional at all, I never would've realized unless you'd told me! The art direction for my album covers is conscious, though. Up until this album, all the artwork were pictures I'd take and then play around with in whatever free editing program I could get my hands on. I always try to look for the best image that looks beautiful and at the same time lets you know what kind of music it's going to give you. I'm not as good with the latter, but I think it's very important, at least in my musical output.

RAW HOUSE: Has it been hard for you to start your music project?

YAMIR: At first, it was pretty easy, it was just me messing around with Audacity and having fun seeing what I could make. But as time went on, I started to get a bit more serious about it. I began to get very ambitious with the things I wanted to make, which has led to a lot of frustration. Making this album was pretty hard, especially with me now having pretty much only the weekends to record, but in the end, now matter how hard it is, it's definitely worth it just to see everyone's reaction to it, which is what's kept me going.

RAW HOUSE: Puerto Rico feels to me like a place which might be more open to experimentation than other countries. Yet you are placed next to Jamaica – a giant music juggernaut with it's reggae movement, and the US which, to be frank, was a culture pot producing a thousands and thousands hours of music daily. How one does find himself musically in the environment like this?

YAMIR: Here in Puerto Rico, the music scene is very similar to the US, since we were taken as bounty from Spain and then colonized. I think I'm stuck in between the two current underground scenes going on, one being the punk rock and metal scene, and the weird experimental electronic/noise scene. I don't exactly fit into either of those so it can be a bit hard to market myself to either side, plus I don't often get the chance to go to their events and get to know the scene, because everything's going on on the other side of the island and they like to do their events at odd times like 2AM on a Wednesday.

RAW HOUSE: So you think it is easy to cope with being an experimentalist there?

YAMIR: Yeah, there's definitely a market for experimental artists here, as small as it might be.

RAW HOUSE: What do you think about failure? Is this something which you consider within the realms of your musical passion? How do you cope with it?

YAMIR: Oh yeah, I think about it a lot. It worries me that I'm wasting away months on end working on something only for nobody to listen to it. I don't really have a ways to cope with it, I just try to push the thought out of my head and just look at my stats for comfort haha. RAW HOUSE: What do you think of live performances in general? Do you, in general, prefer them over the studio environment? Do you want to present your music live in the future?

YAMIR: Living in a tropical island in the Caribbean, I don't get to see a lot of live shows often, cause all that comes over here are huge pop stars and old 80’s metal bands looking for a quick vacation and some tour money. The few that I've been to were mediocre Latino rock bands (Maná and Los Enanitos Verdes, for example) and they were definitely way more enjoyable live than on a studio recording. I don't really think that's the case for all artists, though, depending on what they do live, if they play only new material or just their hits. I would love to do my music live, but I'd be stuck to a pretty limited song selection, plus I'd need to find someone to help me out with all the other electronic noises while I'm playing guitar.

RAW HOUSE: What are you listening to right now? What would you personally recommend?

YAMIR: Recently I've been getting into electronic music, mainly just techno and most of its more minimal or ambient subgenres. Jazz is also something I'm quite big on, I'm digging through the ECM label and they have so much fantastic stuff. The other thing I've started getting into is my people's music, reggaeton. Now while Americans just see it as some lame fad from the early 2000s, there's a lot of backstory to it and it's even had a renaissance in recent years. I'd hate to recommend a reggaeton album, so I'll just go with Ricardo Villalobos - Fizheuer Zieheuer. It's what got me into microhouse and techno stuff. Definitely not for people who don't like repetition, though.

RAW HOUSE: As an artist, overall, how would you say you have progressed so far?

YAMIR: I've definitely progressed so much in terms of mixing and production. Looking back at those first songs I made, they were so cluttered and muddy, which was one of the biggest critiques I'd be getting. In general I've just gotten better at songwriting, guitar playing, and being a lot more resourceful with the limited amount of instruments and programs I have to work with.

RAW HOUSE: Finally - what's in store for Yamir in the not too distant future?

YAMIR: Right now, I don't have any big plans for a follow up to Mullväd. I want to focus on getting my music around, especially here on the island. I have a few ideas and some side projects to toy around with, though. I'm hoping to put out a collaboration or two with Prikc, whatever we make is probably going to be the next thing I put out. If all goes well, I might even try to do a live show.

RAW HOUSE: Thank you for your time!

Interview conducted on 18th March, 2017 For more Yamir go to: https://yamir.bandcamp.com/

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