Jonny Dawe is one half of Oskar, an outfit that toys with perceptions of horror in a gentle and rather lulling way… The new album, LP2 is a melancholic meander with orchestral embellishments atop more playful, bouncing structures. It’s an odd album, more like a sound track to some errant 50s Disney film than an album of traditional songs; it’s insidiously nice. Against the discordance there’s a childish mischievousness; against the ruts and valleys of the depressive chords are the peaks and summits of a quiescent innocence.
In a back room of a coffee shop in Stoke Newington I meet up with Jonny Dawe, who himself is quietly gentle, unassuming and charming.
BCR: How are you feeling about LP2?
Jonny Dawe: Good. Good actually, it’s taken quite a while. We’re not the most prolific of writers, so I think it might be four or five years since we first did an album.
BCR: Since Air Conditioning?
Jonny Dawe: Since Air Conditioning, yeah. And it’s come along. It’s gone through many different changes really. Along the way, we’ve moved a bit more into a song territory on this one I think. Air Conditioning’s much more ambient.
BCR: Well you’ve got four traditionalish songs…
Jonny Dawe: Yeah, whereas we probably didn’t really have any on the last one. We had songs but they weren’t, weren’t sort of structured.
BCR: So how come you’ve decided to have it more… I don’t want to say accessible but…
Jonny Dawe: It just kind of went the way it did; we just became more interested in sort of song structure. Even though we’ve always been like journeymen on tracks, you know with sort of a beginning and quite…you go on a bit of a journey before an end. This time we’re more interested in chopping that journey up, and that soon became, ‘well we’re chopping that up, why doesn’t that become the verse and that become the chorus and that become the middle eighth’ Even though it might not appear like that, that is kind of how we’re thinking. And I just think it was just moving on. We had more, probably content - more to say I think.
Last time it was more about the aesthetic whereas this time it was a bit more… I was going to say ‘conceptual’ but that’s wrong, scrap that! ‘Considered’ I think – we left a lot more open in the last Air Conditioning whereas this...at least structure wise was more considered.
BCR: It seems chaptered, you know? The songs are quite distinct so it feels like you’re really sort of turning a page.
Jonny Dawe: I think chaptered is a good description. I think in the past we’ve tended to sort of kind of flow quite well. And there’s been sort of little undulations and it’s been quite nice, whereas this is much more… like we covered different terrain, and almost different subjects and different senses of place.
BCR: We were saying it’s like New Zealand… troughs and valleys.
Jonny Dawe: Yeah! I think that’s true, I think if you look at it in a terrain kind of way I think that’s it, there’s lots of sort different feelings and emotions but as well as more abstract aesthetics as well. You know you’ve got it all in one little island, which is nice.
BCR: You’ve got like three different languages if you count guttural utterance.
Jonny Dawe: We definitely count that yeah!
BCR: What is that exactly? Because it seems… it’s Reichenbach Falls, isn’t it?
Jonny Dawe: Yeah, that is a recording of a version of a Hugo Ball Dada poem from 1928. Talking Heads’ I Zimbra was a Hugo Ball track, from then.
We found I had this recording from an album of Dada poetry from the early eighties, which we cut up and used, we basically had the music first and we were just never quite happy with it. Actually, tell a lie, I was always quite happy with the music written about Ball’s. Nick was never quite sure. We just decided to chop this piece up and put it on.
BCR: So that’s the original recording or…
Jonny Dawe: That’s partly the original recording. We have sort of added to it other bits of vocals and stuff, that sound the same – you wouldn’t know. But yeah, it’s pretty much the original. So that’s one of our kind of ‘cross-fingered’…because we tried to trace it, and we just couldn’t trace it. It’s complete nonsense. It’s all phonetically based. I think it’s a Dada kind of ideology, like birds in cages and noises and the idea of performance, guttural performance. I think it’s just his vision. I mean basically it is. Hugo Ball, he just wrote the words and then it’s up to anybody to interpret it as they wish.
BCR: So is there like a story arc to the record, I mean I know that you’ve shied away from the very conceptual early work.
Jonny Dawe: I would say there isn’t an overall.... like you say chapters, they’re not chapters of the same tale. They all have, literally, starting points, the fact that it doesn’t have anything to do with sound and then that slowly does become a sound in our heads and gets drawn out. So you’ll have an idea of something and that will kind of drive us forward in a musical way. Whether we leave that behind at the end. It’s a bit like you what we just talked about - sampling and stuff, you know, using a sample all along like Massive Attack might do that’s a really recognisable sample and then using that as the drive, and then at the end, they get rid of the sample, and they’re left with, well, what’s left. So, story wise, each track probably does have a tale, but the key thing is that it’s not necessarily a tale that I need to tell you, to get the track, because it’s moved on from that now.
BCR: Sanitorio is a really interesting track. [Nick Powell has said of Sanitorium: “One day, when I was recording the workshop, a group of previously uncommunicative patients in their 60s and 70s started singing songs from their childhoods, and, maybe even more amazingly, applauding each other when they had sung.”] I find it fascinating that music can be used to help mental patients like that.
Jonny Dawe: Yeah that is quite interesting because it started quite cool that track. It was a recording that Nick [Powell] made. He’s the theatre workshop in a mental asylum for patients, and he’d done all these recordings. I think the starting point was he just wanted to play me a tune that someone had sung, one of the songs that they’d had to sing. And we sort of listened to that and then it sort of went on from there. To take it musically where it began, it was obviously quite languid and quite dark really. More sorrowful than dark, and then… the key point came – and this is a good indication of how me and Nick work together - he was really interested in the words that he knew they were singing, he speaks Spanish, I don’t. And we were trying to see whether we could drop some of these musical passages into the track. But I was really interested in just the applause…
BCR: Yeah it sounds like a live track with the applause coming in.
Jonny Dawe: And so between us - he was pushing the music, their singing, and I was pushing their applause and then we came to a compromise. So, yeah. That’s really how that sort of all came about – he had much more idea of that sort of concept whereas I worked a bit more abstractly with what the recording is. As it were. That is quite often the way we work together. He is much more musical than I am. And I sort of tend to think a bit more in the abstract when putting things together.
BCR: Well I know you did a couple of things with CCA and you met while working on a score for an art project….
Jonny Dawe: Yeah there’s a show at the CCA now which we’re in, in Glasgow and I co-curated a sound show at the V & A a couple of years ago. That’s sort of where I come from, much more an art background, discovering music. Whereas Nick was of music and theatre and then he went off the track a bit and discovered rock music and then he’s sort of come back a bit, he’s a bit more serious again.
