“There was a certain point where, and I know that it’s totally ludicrous to say this about a 20-minute-long song, I was like, ‘This isn’t self-indulgent,’” smiles Jas Shaw. “Which it obviously is. And yet, I was absolutely certain that it had to be this long.” We’re discussing Because We Know What Needs To Be Done, the contemplative and sweeping composition released for tQ subscribers today, which sees Shaw reunite with former bandmate Simon Lord. “It’s nice to have a challenge, as well,” Lord adds. “To be given a track like that, in our climate of things being quick, if I hear a song and it’s four minutes, I feel short-changed. I want more! I want the time and space to let it sink in for a bit. I find that’s affecting my writing, I want it to be a bit of an exploration rather than a snapshot of something.”
The pair began making music together as Simian – with James Ford and Alex McNaghten completing the line-up – as university students at the turn of the millennium. Following their split, Shaw continued with Ford as Simian Mobile Disco before venturing outside of their partnership to pursue solo work and other collaborations. Lord, too, has remained productive as Lord Skywave, one half of The Black Ghosts, and alongside Lukid as Arclight. Coming to compositions with different primary focuses (lyrics and vocals for Lord, dynamic production for Shaw), Because We Know What Needs To Be Done arrived at an opportune moment.
Their mutual appreciation for ample time and space in music is apparent from the moment Because We Know… begins. It immediately twinkles with a cascading synth motif, conjuring a vast celestial setting in which Lord can deliver the central refrain drawn from the song’s title. From there, the unhurried tempo is subtly layered with dynamic electronic flourishes that deftly ebb and flow, with Lord’s vocals weaving through the pockets left open for them to explore. “The long-form approach we took with the song had been brewing in me for a while,” says Lord. “I’d spent many years writing pop songs that were more condensed, which is an art form in itself, but then I started playing in a band that did longer tracks and I suddenly found it quite freeing.”
Along with adopting a more explorative element to his songwriting, Lord had also been intrigued by some of Shaw’s material which was breaking from the norm. “It was also from being aware of Jas’ project with Alev [Lenz]. I hadn’t heard him working with vocalists for a while, and I really liked that atmosphere that they created. I got in touch with Jas on email after hearing this because for years, I thought of him as loving techno and almost being a bit anti-vocalist. He got back to me and sent over some things that coincided with the way I was going, so it all came together quite nicely.”
“I have a totally dysfunctional relationship with vocals,” laughs Shaw, before considering the challenges that were presented with incorporating a vocal track into the arrangement. “Initially, there was actually a lot more content to it. There were more vocals which I’d no intention of removing. If anything, usually when I get vocals back from someone, I tear the instrumental to bits and fit it around the vocals, but all of the things that Simon sent back to me, it felt like he was having the same kind of struggle with vocals that I was having with the synth. I didn’t really want the synth to just play a melody and then play a different melody and end up with a standard verse-melody thing. What was really appealing, when I was engaging with the vocals, was that I couldn’t do it with any normal musical strategies.”
He continues: “There’s all these kinds of things that you do as a producer, normally to make a song work like a song, and none of those things were going to work. Which was terrifying and exciting because when you don’t have a clear technique to make it better, you’re basically just guessing, then there’d be a lightbulb moment by accident and I’d have one little section going around locked in my head. It was only that I know Simon well enough that I wasn’t too scared to tell him that from the 10 minutes of vocals he’d originally sent me that it was just that one little bit relentlessly going around in my head!”
Adopting a less is more approach, and embracing limitation and objectivity, was key for both Shaw and Lord in presenting more scope for both the tonal and thematic elements to expand effectively, and to create an engaging space for the listener. “You get people who have made something that’s totally got a vibe but they haven’t gone back and done the gritty bit where you’ve got to step away from yourself and look at it as a third party and be really cold and go, ‘This whole section here doesn’t need to exist’ and such,” says Shaw. “It’s a really hard thing to do, I find it really hard with my own stuff.”
Lord agrees. “Subtraction is the hardest thing to do. I heard this thing about how psychologically, we all really struggle with subtraction being the solution to a problem, which it often is. There are loads of examples of complicated problems where all you need to do is take something away and it will work much better. Everybody usually adds things or tries to solve it by changing something or reorganising something when really, all you need to do is remove it and chuck it away. In music, that’s a huge thing, especially now where everyone can record and add an infinite number of tracks,” he says. With that, he argues, a culture of over-complicating or over-compensating has crept into some artists’ attempts to add depth. “People think ‘This is a better melody if I’m singing a really high note, because I’m really trying’. There’s obviously loads of music that works on that level, which is like, ‘Check out how hard this is to do. Isn’t it amazing?’ But all it’s doing is being difficult.”
This also applies to the lyrical side of Because We Know…. The variations of Shaw’s production manipulations, applied to Lord’s cadence as he somewhat ominously intones the central refrain – with the addition of lines like “Because no matter what needs to be done / We do not do it” and “Because the daylight’s gone we can see through it” – illuminates the many ways an audience might interpret their weight. When asked what the refrain meant for him, Lord says, “I’m really obsessed with Slavoj Žižek, he works a lot with psychoanalysis and applies it to politics. I suppose the lyric captures the idea of “we don’t want what we desire”. If we get what we desire, we find we don’t actually want it. It felt like that’s applicable to the climate challenge. We all know what to do about it, but because we know what we need to do, that’s preventing us from actually attacking the problem. It’s like a weird psychological issue.”
Bringing that tension to life on Because We Do… and ensuring that it has an allure to hold onto the audience’s attention, Lord credits Shaw’s flair for enriching a track’s essence. “Jas has an idiosyncratic thing with synths where they’re more than an instrument. For lots of people it’s more about genre and sound, but with him, there’s something very organic and musical about the way that he programs them or plays them and gets their character out. For me to write with, it gives a lot of room and a lot of nuance. There’s also a warmth to it which I think really does lend itself to having lots of ideas coming through. Working with his music is a very enjoyable process because it does have a lot of life to it. A lot of human touch and a lot of detail. It spans that gap between the synths being this artificial otherworldly thing, then they’ve also got a lot of character and they seem like little creatures. He’s able to coax that out of them, which is a lot of fun. It’s a real skill.”
Referenced artists
Simian
You Hum It, I’ll Play It: James Ellis Ford Interviewed
To listen to Jas Shaw and Simon Lord’s Because We Know What Needs To Be Done (and get access to the previous three releases), become a Subscriber Plus tier supporter of tQ here
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