INTERVIEW: BLEACH DAY
Photography by Jon Testa
It’s one of those rare anomalous, yet annual, winter days in Vermont. The skies are mostly overcast, the temperature is well below freezing, and absolutely everything is encapsulated in a thin layer of ice. The pointiest part of every bare tree limb and each bud on every bush is glossed over, frozen still in a completely mesmerizing, beautiful manner. We walk up a narrow flight of stairs in Jon Kraus’ Old North End apartment and are greeted by the smell of a big pot chili cooking on his stovetop. Today was supposed to be the day where we get together with Bleach Day to have the first listen of their forthcoming LP’s test pressings, but a broken leg and a bout of sickness kept Lou and Amelia at home and out of the cold. We were a few minutes early so we patiently waited on the couch for Vinny and Mitch to arrive while Jon stirred the chili in the kitchen.
At this point, we hadn’t heard all too much of anything from the folks in Bleach Day in a few years. They’d remained quiet after the release of their debut, Where to Dream, and only played out live sparingly. A few weeks prior, Vinny sent me the music video for their yet-to-be-announced sophomore LP’s first single and it blew me away. Everything about it was so much tighter, more complex, well thought out and orchestrated comparatively to their first album (which I still love). A lot had changed over the course of around 4 years; the duo of Vinny and Lou grew into a 5-piece band, they dedicated much of their lives to studio work, they thought much deeper about the band’s vision, and the world around them didn’t stop either.
A night or two before our scheduled hang with Bleach Day, their publicist forwarded me as if always in full, in preparation of their press campaign launch. Although I was eager, I held off on listening. I knew how exciting receiving a crisp new vinyl LP would be for the guys. I wanted to see their reactions to each track on wax, and experience the whole thing with them. Together we put the record on, talked about each track, listened with and without headphones, discussed the many sounds that they created and slipped in throughout the album, and drank seltzer.
Bleach Day’s second album, as if always, is set for release tomorrow, March 6th 2020. It’s a short listen, clocking in at around 30 minutes, but each song is meticulously layered and designed with fixated intention, giving the album somewhat of an gargantuan, maximalist feel. It’s a record that the band poured their hearts into, and it might end up being Vermont’s best release this year. After the needle reached the locked groove the listening party was over. We all went our separate ways, but reconnected weeks later to talk at length about their writing and recording process, stories hidden inside the record’s songs, and life as a whole.
hope: Obviously we’re friends of yours and also fans of yours — and we have been for a while now… But we’re wondering why was there such a long wait between LP’s? 4 years, right? What took so long?!
Vinny: Oh, burn! Over the last — ok sure, let’s round it up to 4 — years, apart from working with a few other artists on their tunes, we’ve also been building a studio for ourselves. As you know, we’re obviously fans of the foggy, ultra lo-fi textures you heard on Where to Dream, but the whole time, we’ve also wanted to have a broader sonic palette with which to express ourselves. For example, the ability to use clarity or definition at will. Building out the studio allowed us to do this, but first we had to learn how to use some of the new equipment, then how to best express ourselves with it. It took a while to get really comfortable. Then, of course, the songwriting/composition and mixing itself took some time.
hope: You’ve both spent a good amount of time engineering other people’s records over the past few years too. Tell us about those experiences a bit!
Vinny: For Sparklesaurus’s record, we traveled to Ottawa, ON with a Tascam 388 and a trunk full of compressors, effects, and mics. The band had outfitted their apartment’s living room with quilts and blankets over every surface, and we had the amazing opportunity of working with Megan Miller (And The Kids) as a producer on that project. It was kind of unique because they were the first band I’d ever worked with who invited friends over for tracking. There were like 20 people in the room coordinating bathroom breaks so as not to flush the toilet while we were recording. Everyone was holding their breath until each take was over. The crowd of friends totally hyped the band up for their takes though. It was like a low key party atmosphere, but we crammed a lot of work into 7 days. It was a great time!
For cellar belly, Ashley (wished bone) and Brian (instrumentalist on cellar belly, and otherwise known as Wandering Lake) stayed at our house. We were basically short term roommates, pulling 12+ hour days in the studio. That record was made in 10 days, and we produced and played various parts on it as well. Maybe it was a function of doing the tracking in our own space, but cellar belly was made in a similar way to how we generally work in the studio as Bleach Day — isolated in a basement with sounds going wild. Although we did stay up later. At one point, Bernie walked by our house and talked to the neighbor kid who was playing basketball. The kid handed Bernie the ball, and he took a shot. Swish! I swear, it was nothing but net.
Both of the records we engineered were super fun to make in their own way, and in both cases, we made dear friends in the process!
hope: Do you think that working on the Wished Bone and Sparklesaurus records influenced the way you workshopped and fine tuned the songs on As If Always?
Lou: For sure! We were definitely inspired by wished bone’s songwriting. Getting to be a part of those records was really key in making as if always that much better. It was great to get that outside perspective where you could see how other people work and what they get fixated on. It lets you see music through another person’s eyes, which is invaluable. I think it helped us make a more coherent record, and it helped us arrange the instruments and sections in a way where it can feel and sound like a lot is happening at once, but everything still has its own place in the mix.
Vinny: Working with Ashley (wished bone) was a really interesting experience that came at just the right time during the making of as if always to really have a profound influence on the final product. Many of the songs we were working on early in the writing process were tilting more to the R&B side of our influences, and we were having trouble writing lyrics that felt genuine and meaningful to us within the melodic structure of that aesthetic. Louie and I both have deeply folk-based roots in music, and watching Ashley come into the studio with those thoughtful songs in their raw form was very inspiring. I think that shifted the entire trajectory of our own album thematically from a sonic statement to a more personal tone.
hope: The new record sounds so much fuller than Where To Dream — it honestly feels like a huge step forward, sonically. How did you approach the writing and recording of the new record differently?
Vinny: To be honest, although we really tried to approach it differently in the beginning, at the end, the way the songs formed ended up being really similar to Where to Dream — at least production-wise. We’re way more comfortable in our songwriting now, but the methods we used to convey those ideas and layer sounds were pretty similar. One big difference was experience and studio resources. On Where to Dream, we started with a completely blank slate, with no recording knowledge whatsoever and just made all the decisions with our ears. Everything we created was the result of so much trial and error. This time around, at least, if there was a sound in one of our heads, we had a basic concept of how to make it happen, and then use our ears to judge the next step.
Lou: Most of my demos for the last record were done on a 4 track portastudio, but for this record I made most of the demos on my laptop. I got to flesh the songs out quite a bit more before recording them on tape. We also had a bit more of a concept in our heads while making as if always.
hope: There’s a lot going on in each recording. And I know you guys can get pretty fixated on certain sounds and perfecting your vision… Around how many tracks would you say are the average in each song?
Vinny: You know us all too well. Anywhere from 24-48 tracks is pretty normal for us in a finished song. A lot of those tracks are just momentary bleeps and bloops that only happen once though. 48 is probably the upper limit on our old Mac Pro’s processing power with all the plugin automation going on. Not every song needs to be at that level of layering though — “solo” probably only has about 12 tracks.
hope: I feel like whenever a record is this layered there’s always some funny instruments or ideas that get buried in the mix. I think I heard that MGMT infamously had a tuba line throughout ‘Time To Pretend’ that the human ear can’t pick up on. Is there anything buried in As If Always? Any good stories behind some of the instrumentation that we’re hearing? Also, you gotta fill me in on some of the found recordings that were used. There’s some old voicemails in here, right?
Vinny: There are tons of little fragments of our lives buried in the fabric of the record. To begin with, yeah, some of the songs are recorded over a tape from my family’s answering machine in the 90s. For the most part you can’t even hear that stuff, but we totally recorded over a message from my doctor about me puking through my nose. On a more somber note, and quite audible, our beloved cat Squishy who passed away as we were finishing the album, can be heard on one of the vocal tracks at the end of “no wonder” meowing at the studio window to be let into the house. Other elements I can remember include a small synth flourish of the first song Amelia Devoid and I ever recorded together, a train arriving at a station, and we used one small part of a noise track from our last album to emphasize the cyclical theme.
Lou: “tru north” has a kick drum I made by pounding my fist on a desk that had a mic sitting on it, and the hi hats were made with a ballpoint pen. There were some fortuitously timed moments where you can hear my partner, Kylie, opening and closing the door to the basement really quickly when she realized I was recording on “in limbo”, and another time when she’s vacuuming during “no wonder”. Luckily they blend right in and almost act like a bit of a riser into the next section.
A lot of the crazy sounds came from normal, acoustic sounds and we manipulated them into an unrecognizable version. We also have a tiny snippet from a video of people walking up to the front door of my grandparents house in Charlotte to interview my grandfather, Dan Kiley, about his design philosophy and landscape architecture career.
hope: What’s with the sound at the end of ‘In Limbo’?
Vinny: Finally! I’ve been shamelessly trying to get someone to ask me about this sound for months. It took quite a while to design this, because it was basically made from super run of the mill instruments. It’s a highly altered combination of a cymbal crash and a brush swipe on a snare. By passing those sounds from tape to digital, digital to tape, and back to digital (I honestly don’t remember how many times) we were able to use analog and digital technology on each pass to shape the sounds into what you hear on the record. It took about 3 days. I remember it being a very sweaty 3 days we spent in a very cramped room ducking and moving amongst spiderwebs of cables and tape loops.
hope: Lou’s voice really stands out to me on the new record — I feel like it’s just so much more prominent here than on Where To Dream, where it was sort of cozied up in the mix. Lou — was this a conscious effort, or are you just more comfortable with singing these days?
Lou: I’ve gotten more comfortable singing, but I definitely wanted to push myself vocally on this record. I really wanted to use the voice in more interesting ways too. There’s so much that’s possible with the voice I feel like we barely scratched the surface of how to use and manipulate it.
hope: I remember even a bit before Where To Dream was out, y’all were getting really into Homeshake — maybe a year or so before he really blew up. I’m wondering whose music was in heavy rotation for As If Always? Any particular sounds or ideas you wanted to replicate or channel?
Lou: There’s been so much great music out recently. I love Solange, Weyes Blood, Noname, Frank Ocean, Clairo, The Alabama Shakes (especially Sound & Color), Angel Olsen, Tyler the Creator, Bowie, and also soundtracks and visuals from Ghibli films like Totoro and Princess Mononoke. My Dad is a musician and he plays guitar and sings every day, so whenever I’m home I get a lot of ideas listening to and watching him. Although, the more we get into writing and recording the less I tend to listen to other people’s music. I’d rather try to recreate the feeling I get from a moment, song, or record rather than going back and referencing them really closely.
Vinny: My heavy rotation from 2016-2019 was probably: Weyes Blood, Melody’s Echo Chamber, Clairo, Beach House, Khruangbin, Hoops, Homeshake, and wished bone. I’m sure all the music I’ve ever listened to has had an impact on what kind of album I’d want to create. At the same time, it’s often the case that when I do have another artist in mind as I make my own music, that song will never get finished. The next song that does get finished might eventually borrow from my earlier track, but I feel the need to be at least once removed from my influences.
hope: Thematically, the whole record kind of has this grand grappling with life and death, heaven and hell. And you’ve spoken a bit about some of the things happening in your life that factored into As If Always. Can you elaborate on some of the overarching themes of the record and real life instances that influenced this direction?
Vinny: Right after we released Where to Dream the entire world changed. The 2016 election was just a few months later, and we were feeling a lot of contrary feelings at once. On one hand, we were getting some of the first positive recognition and praise we’d ever received as musicians / artists. On the other, the dark underbelly of absolutely everything from our government down to parts of our local music scene was on display so very prominently. We learned a lot during this time. Among other things, it forced us both to do a lot of self reflection and spiritual searching. The bulk of the album was created during this period of self reflection. Louie and I both experienced some really significant personal losses while making this album, alongside other important positive milestones. I think it’s fair to say we both transformed quite a bit during this time, and the album itself reflects those transformations, and the non-linear, chaotic way that they occurred.
Lou: Growth, change, cyclicality, and exploration of the subconscious are some of the more fibrous themes. There is a type of growth that happens when you throw yourself into something fully. Between 2016-2019, six or seven people passed away in my family, and there was a 6 month period where 5 of them passed away, so that was a lot.
The themes also manifested in the imagery we used for the album cover and the music videos: the flower, the fish, and the TV. The flowers are a cyclical symbol of life and death that we see every year as they go from seeds in the mud to a fully realized flower. The fish is the natural explorer of the subconscious waters, and the TV is a symbol of all of the outside influences trying to capitalize on your attention and keep you from reaching your goals and potential.
hope: That’s heavy… A lot has changed in the world since 2016, but on a smaller scale, I’m curious of what your guys’ view on Burlington is these days. We all sort of got involved in the same scene at the same time, and have seen so many friends and so many bands come and go. Anything that you think is lacking more so now than before? Anything you’re really excited about?
Vinny: I wish we could figure out a way to keep folks here, but that’s also a broader problem across every industry in Vermont. At the same time those who leave do end up creating a network across the country with resources and experience to share with Vermont-based artists. It’s amazing when you can be talking to someone in LA who gets psyched that you’re based in Burlington because they’re a Vermonter. I’m very excited about tons of new and old, tiny and large Burlington acts, some who have stayed and many who’ve left. I don’t want to exclude anyone by making a list so I’ll just name one we can all agree on: Caroline Rose.
hope: The record is about to drop. The release show is about to happen. And y’all are about to play some shows on a nice little tour… After all of that what’s the next move? Where do you go from here?
Vinny: It’s almost time to plant the garden again.
Lou: ;)
THIS ARTICLE WAS GRACIOUSLY CONTRIBUTED BY:
Carson Ehlert, co-founder of hope all is well and just a guy, in general.