April + VISTA: Making Traditional Noise

April George: We met right after college. I was pursuing a career in marketing, but realised very quickly after working a nine-to-five life that I wasn’t happy. Music has always been something I've done in my life but was never pursued professionally. When I was growing up, I played piano, sang in church and was made to join the choir, and throughout college I studied classical violin.

Matthew Thompson: Prior to us becoming a band, I’d been producing independently since high school but hadn't recorded anything at all. I went through a phase of working with singers in my community, including a lot of rappers, but my interest was changing. I was discovering new music that I wanted to try to create myself, and I also wanted to challenge myself by composing around a singer rather than a rapper. I began that journey around 2013, which also led me to learn instruments and dig into music theory. After a few trials working with folks here and there, April found me on SoundCloud and we had an immediate chemistry.

MT: Every project feels like a reset for us because we're always delving into new sounds. We get bored very quickly, are always listening to new stuff and see our prior projects as eight-song EPs. I’d say Traditional Noise is our first attempt to have an album mindset. We spent a long time creating a theme within a world and are really proud of that – now we just need more people to hear our accomplishment.

MT: We try to world-build in whatever way we can and love how music and film interplay. We also do a little bit of scoring on the side, so we’re trying to move closer to that. One thing that we love about Satoshi Kon shorts like Magnetic Rose is the depth of that world. You look at it, but also hear things as you’re watching. There's so much complexity in the characters and we try to convey that in our music too. When I'm making beats, I've always got pictures on the screen and video games are the escape we turn to when we need a break to refuel our inspiration and create more things.

AG: Obviously, you can hear some of those musical references we have. We really love Radiohead, Gorillaz, Gnarls Barkley and a ton of other bands that we could talk about all day, but we’re also fans of storytelling. There's a graphic novel called Stages of Rot about a whale-looking alien that died and feeds the ecosystem. Throughout the book, you can see the different alien species that depend on this rotting carcass for life, so we were thinking about how transition and death feed into each other and that really helped me figure out the message I was trying to convey.

MT: In 11th grade, FL Studio was my portal into production and for the first few years of my development I was diving into samples and studying people like Dilla and Madlib. Then I found Flying Lotus, which totally expanded my world. At that point, I was trying to figure out what these producers were using and really got into the Bandcamp beat scene where my entire brain was blown by hearing all these production techniques implemented.

I found Ableton when it was Live 8 and the first thing I noticed was that I was so used to using FL that I didn't know how to sample on a DAW. Because of that learning curve, I stopped sampling and decided that I’d have to figure out how to learn production in a different way. Ableton’s Clip View was totally foreign to me, but the fact that you were able to cycle through clips and DJ in this super-weird way was incredibly fascinating. 10 years later, I found out that it's actually pretty easy to sample on Ableton, and now I'm way too deep!

MT: Honestly, transitioning to Ableton is what catalysed my journey into composition, instrumentation and production. Once I began working with singers, I began to think of production in a more linear fashion and went from creating loops and clips that I would arrange into a beat to doing everything in the Arrangement View from left to right. I’d create an intro and a verse and try to compose a hook and a bridge. Once I met April and we started working together, my thinking changed entirely to that, but she’s also an instrumentalist and was way more advanced than me in terms of theory, so April started teaching me sheet music.

AG: Meanwhile, Matthew was teaching me how to use Ableton to create string arrangements. We downloaded the East West library and if I had an idea that I wanted to bring to the fore, I’d use those strings to build it out and arrange for cello, bass and viola.

MT: We were trying to integrate this very electronic-focused DAW into April's organic sensibilities, so the arrangements are very linear but they’re based on us recording performances. We start off separate, with April in her corner of the room writing lyrics and I'm sitting here at the desk making sketches and beats. Most of the time I've got the speakers on, so April's listening to what I'm working on and if she likes it she’ll emote and I know whether I need to continue. From that point, we’ll get a skeleton of the arrangement together and start to talk about how we can build on that. April writes the most beautiful string arrangements on top of the things I do.

MT: Funnily enough, that track was something I wrote for a score in a very literal way. It was meant for something visual and didn't land, but I still really liked it and thought it could be a perfect introduction. We have a field recorder and keep a ton of voice memos on our phones, so we thought it would be really cool to bring our friends and family into this part of the project and reintroduce April + VISTA with a new sound.

AG: Hence the ‘Hello’ samples. That's my mom, my sister, my godson and people we’ve known for a very long time. It's like a sonic collage with very clear and intentionally recorded strings alongside off-the-cuff phone recordings initially sent via text message because my mom didn't know how to send a voicemail. That’s something that we’ve integrated into our live setup too. Matt has a Blooper device, so we put all the hellos on that and remix them at the very beginning of our performance. It creates a great ambient setting by quietening the crowd, but it's also comforting for us to hear the voices of people that we want to carry with us.

MT: That track is pretty much like all the other ones in that I used Ableton in a very straightforward way and then slapped a sea of effects and plugins on things, but the reason we really wanted to share Bless My Heart is because we put that song out last October and have been aching to talk about it. It's one of the songs where I was trying to wrestle with learning guitar – I'm truly a beginner, but when you listen to it I sound pretty good because there’s a clever use of layering and pairing of guitar with some of my favourite effects and reverbs. It's also one of those songs that doesn’t really sound like anything we've done and I wanted to honour some of our early MTV influences from when we were kids. We basically wanted to make this pop-punk emo thing with lots of dirt and static and turn that distortion into something that supports the melodic harmonies.

MT: For sure. We did a project called You Are Here a while back and learned that quantise was not king when I started to study Dilla while working on a song called How to Get By. That was our first time working with a drummer called Bradley “Foots” McDonald. I remember when we were recording it I was trying to get into that drunken Dilla pocket as much as I could. I still quantise everything because, oddly enough, I have no rhythm [laughs], but one Ableton function I really love is that you can dial in the percentage of quantisation. I just try to move things around enough so they feel more human.

MT: I've been considering getting EQ Eight tattooed on my chest because I’ve been using it since forever, but I downloaded FabFilter’s Pro-Q and recently started messing with Universal Audio’s Pultec plugins, which are amazing. But the first thing I always do is drop EQ Eight on literally everything and start to broad-stroke EQ things. Valhalla reverb used to be my go-to, but now my standard reverb is FabFilter Pro-R and then I send everything through my Strymon NightSky to add a bit of colour.

In the really early stages, I might make something on guitar or do some stuff on keys and chop it up on Simpler to see if I can find a new melody. Oh, and I love Ableton’s stock Compressor anytime I need to sidechain compress because it’s so easy and intuitive to use. For this project, we recorded a lot of live piano, but then once Live 12 dropped and I saw it had the Childhood Home piano, I ended up replacing a lot of the live piano with that. It even beat out my Alicia Keys!

AG: It's not really influenced by what the industry is moving towards. We've always gravitated towards short songs because, in the past, our resources were very tight and we’d get exhausted after finishing a song and think that's as far as we can go. We went into Traditional Noise with a little bit more writing experience and Standing in Place is actually one of the longest songs we've ever made.

MT: It could be six minutes or two, but if we feel like we’ve said what we need to say, we'll just put it down. When we're adding layers and my computer starts locking up, that's another indicator that we need to stop [laughs].

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Text and interview: Danny Turner
Photos: Foster K. White