Spill Tab: Playing Musical Chairs

To call LA-based French-Korean songwriter Claire Chicha well-travelled would be an understatement. Born in Bangkok, she spent her early childhood in the mixing room of her parents' post-production studio in Los Angeles before family ties sent her across continents once more – to Thailand and then Paris – absorbing diverse musical cultures along the way.

Upon returning to LA, Chicha sharpened her performance skills by competing in vocal contests across the US, later going on to study music business at NYU. Meanwhile, summers were spent interning in the A&R department at Atlantic Records while woodshedding her own sound. The debut single, "Decompose", marked her emergence as Spill Tab - a project characterised by genre-defying energy across a string of singles and EPs.

However, after signing to Arista Records, Chicha grew tired of “chasing the carrot” of commercial success and boldly left the label to delve deeper into what mattered most to her: experimentation and community. The next five years were spent playing musical chairs on Ableton sessions with friends, musicians and co-producers to craft her polished and deeply personal debut LP, ANGIE - a fearless exploration of jazz-inflected alt-pop and stripped-back, guitar-laced confessionals.

Your parents had a production studio, which implies that they had more than a passing interest in music?

My parents initially met in Bangkok, which is where I was born. My dad was a musician and composer who played saxophone and flute – he’s a jazz guy, and my mom taught herself how to play piano growing up in South Korea and had a huge love for classical music. They had a goal or vision of what they wanted to do, but also needed to make money so they created a massive sound stage where people could come and record 60-piece orchestras and record music for movies and TV. There was no nine-to-five, so a lot of my memories are of running around the studio after school and hanging out there, which felt like a very unique childhood.

Growing up in a world of instruments and tech, what drew you towards software production?

Producing came much later, when I was in my senior year of college and working with my friend David Marinelli. My productions were limited to just being able to track and lightly comp; pulling parts from vocal tracks and recorded instruments and moulding them together. He was in LA and I lived in New York, so we’d just send each other stems. Then I started to dabble in sampling and my really early intro was trying to figure out how to use Ableton. When you start it kind of looks like a spaceship, but once everything clicked I knew it was the only thing I would ever use.

Right from your debut single, "Decompose", you seem to have a solid grasp of audio production. You seemed to get proficient very quickly?

At that point, David was mostly at the computer and I was writing or adding instruments and doing stuff adjacent to him, but what was fun about that song is how a lot of the samples are field recordings. We went to a bar in LA and got a recording of a pinball machine or we’d play around with kitchen utensils and machinery and use those sounds as drum layers or textures. It was a lot of fun, but "Decompose" was a real discovery in terms of what you could do with Ableton. David taught me a lot during that period about how to make sounds that were unique or different to what was available.

During the pandemic, you signed to a major label but subsequently left. Was that a pivotal moment in your career?

I initially signed to Arista, which made a lot of sense at the time. I loved the experience, but it didn’t feel like the right fit because the nature of a major is to make really commercial music. You’d think I’d have known that before I signed, but I thought they’d signed me on the basis that I wasn’t making down-the-line pop music, so there was a disconnect in terms of where we saw the project going. We all want to think that the music industry is some beautiful, esoteric, creative thing, but you eventually realise it’s literally all about the dollar sign. There always seems to be tension between creative and business people - especially for massive artists at a high level, even though one can’t exist without the other.

Even so, it was a bold move. Did you want to self-release or move to a label more aligned to your vision? 

Eventually, I ended up signing to this incredible French label called Because Music and was delighted that they’d even see something in me because they've signed some of the coolest acts over the past 30 years. My ultimate boundary was to refuse to work with a new partnership until I’d finished writing my debut album because I didn’t want anyone giving me any sort of feedback. It’s important to know yourself and I'm a bit of a people pleaser – if I hear any kind of input, it's really hard not to let that spiral into my brain and affect what I'm doing. The solution was to create an environment where I could create freely, make the music I was excited about and then once the album was finished bring in whoever was excited enough to want to work with us.

You’re obviously talking about your debut LP, ANGIE. With some of the album recorded, what help did you think you needed to evolve the songs? 

Once I knew what the concept of the album, I got excited about creating more music orbiting around the idea of how many times we could throw things back and forth between the organic and digital worlds. After making the title track "Pink Lemonade", I got really excited about bringing more songs into the fold and began sifting through some of the music I knew I wanted to finish and writing more that would fit into that world. To your point about bringing people in, that was probably the most fun part. I tapped on my friend Mikey Freedom Hart - who’s an incredible guitar player - to add some great finger picking acoustic lines, and Danny Dwyer who’s a phenomenal trumpet player to add that across the record. He also plays strings, so we layered some violin and it was really fun to have non-traditional instruments from indie music incorporated into the project.

The use of horns on "Adore Me" and "Hold Me" gives them a very classy, classic sound. What was behind your decision to use live horns rather than software emulations?

You can always tell when horns are recorded live because they’re pretty hard to fake, partially because they’re such hard instruments to play. There's also human error, which is the part of what makes playing an instrument so beautiful. I didn’t want to waste anyone's time by having a friend spend three days in the studio and realise later down the line that wasn’t the vision we wanted to actually go with - I wanted Danny to improvise and be able to say, I like what you did right there, can you do that again then add these three notes on top and ascend. It’s a conversation – and you can’t have a conversation with a VST plugin.

Were you writing demos in Ableton before fleshing them out with session players?

The process varied. I’d often do a session and have an instrumental part that I liked, but didn't really know what to do with the rest of it. In that case, I’d bring the stems home, tinker with them in Ableton and add little vocal lines or move parts around. Otherwise, when I‘m working with people on sessions I kind of find it hard to write melodies and lyrics with someone in the room. I usually wait for people to go for lunch before tracking my vocals, which a lot of producers seem to love because we can all rotate around the computer.

Are there any songs that typify that process?

When we made "Pink Lemonade" it was a bit of a hurricane in the room. Essentially, it started off with Jared, John and I sitting in the room jamming with a drum kit, bass and guitar and playing musical chairs for 45 minutes. We’d go in a circle, each playing an instrument for 5-10 minutes in a jam sesh and take 10 seconds from it, pitch or speed it up and use that as the foundation for a song. Then we added some 808 drum samples, electric guitar, a distorted top line and a bunch of more weird stuff before I pitched and layered some vocals. It was crazy because my friend David joined in that afternoon too and the four of us all use Ableton, so it turned into a really fun thing where somebody would run up to the computer and add something. There are two layers - the soul of the song, which is 80% of it, and finishing a song, where we probably spend another two weeks toiling away to make sure everything is hugging the right frequencies.

Can you tell us about the vocal processing on the track "by Design"? It begins heavily auto-tuned before transitioning into what is quite a soft and natural-sounding vocal…

I'm such a big fan of Alex G and he has a song where the synths just go buck wild, sawtoothy and really aggressive and I wanted to emulate that using my voice in a way that felt really angry, using synthesisers to mirror that emotion. The song’s a great representation of happy accidents. Initially, the vocal line I tracked wasn’t supposed to be heavily Auto-Tuned, but we were doing vocal passes that were a little pitchy, dragged Auto-Tune in and the default setting was very high and quite harsh but sounded really sick. On the back half of the track, I wanted to re-harmonize and recontextualise what I thought was a really beautiful melody from the first half of the song. I'm a Fleetwood Mac fan, so I feel like that section is a bit of an ode to their influence.

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What element of working in the box gives you the most satisfaction?

Where I have the most fun is manipulating Ableton clips by pitching or speeding them up, or playing around with Ableton’s Complex Pro to create weird textures. I also use a lot of third-party UAD plugins because they seem to best fit the kind of music that I want to make, but Ableton is the only DAW that allows me to work with clips in the way I want and still has the most user-friendly layout. I use its automation controls like I breathe air – it’s all I do! There was a moment where I thought about learning Pro Tools because I do a lot of vocal tracking and comping, but once Ableton incorporated take lanes I was like, damn, this is literally everything I could ever need in music-making software.

It’s rare that a song of yours is over three minutes. Is that a generational thing, perhaps relating to the algorithmic nature of Spotify?

I know it’s a really screwed up thing to do, because I’d hate someone to do this to my music, but when I'm driving in the car I’ll often listen to the first 90 seconds of a song and then skip to the next one. I think I have undiagnosed ADHD - a lot of the earlier songs I put out were only 90 seconds to two minutes long because that’s as far as I could focus on a song that's mine, and if I can't even listen to my own music for two minutes I'm not going to make anyone else (laughs).

You’ve discussed having imposter syndrome. Do you think resolving those feelings will come through the strength of the work itself, or critical acclaim?

It’s hard to say because the most imposter syndrome I’ve felt is when my career was blossoming. In the early days, people were so complimentary but I always felt as though my success was a mistake or a beautiful combination of things coming together that I wouldn't be able to recreate. I think it has less to do with the outside world and more about the world that's inside of me and how I perceive myself. I don't think I'll ever truly resolve those feelings because there's always someone doing better than me. Then again, I don't want my art to be anything other than uniquely my own. 

Follow Spill Tab on Instagram, Bandcamp and her website

Text and interview: Danny Turner
Photos courtesy of the artist