{"id":6818,"date":"2013-04-26T14:26:23","date_gmt":"2013-04-26T14:26:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stylusmagazine.ca\/?p=6818"},"modified":"2013-04-26T14:26:23","modified_gmt":"2013-04-26T14:26:23","slug":"blue-hawaii-untogether-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2013\/04\/26\/blue-hawaii-untogether-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Blue Hawaii :: Untogether, Together"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"blue-hawaii1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Adrienne Yeung<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blue Hawaii are Alex \u201cAgor\u201d Cowan and Raphelle Standell-Preston, who live in Montreal and play electronic music. If their sound can be described as dream pop, then their first full length album <\/em>Untogether is a dream neither nightmare nor sweet, but introspective and amorphous. It\u2019s a dream lit by strobe light, where people from your past flicker in and out of the narrative of your subconscious. <\/em>Untogether sounds like the kind of dream which you wake up from, lie still, and think about.<\/em><\/p>\n

Instrumentalist Agor and vocalist Raph wrote <\/em>Untogether in physically separate spaces \u2013 and the sound of many songs are likewise disjointed, drifting, pensive, and fragile. <\/em>Stylus was curious about Blue Hawaii\u2019s songwriting process, so on a spring day in Winnipeg, drinking coffee and wearing three sweaters, we called Agor (who at the time was in San Francisco record store \u201cAmoeba\u201d watching label-mate Doldrums play an in-store show) to chat.<\/em><\/p>\n

Stylus: Can you tell me about the aesthetic of the album art? How do you think it fits with the sound of the album?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Agor Cowan:<\/strong> We were originally going to have this image of people in an Australian swimming race. But then we realised we wanted to do something we had thought about a bit more. And we decided on this image of both of us hugging, reaching out, but then kind of falling through each other, rather than actually landing on each other.<\/p>\n

We had been composing this thing separately, taking turns night by night and [we] would cut it up and move it around. In any moment it could have just not worked out. At the same time, in Montreal, people we knew were moving in and out a lot. And between us, we were kind of drifting apart. So it felt really appropriate that once we did finish this album, it would have this constant feeling that it\u2019s so delicate, it might not even exist. A lot of the songs are really light, and there\u2019s this image of \u201cwe\u2019re there, and we do see each other, but there\u2019s this disconnect\u201d that you can hear through the music. It is complete, but [the album] accepts and addresses a certain kind of failure.<\/p>\n

Stylus: In what ways did the cutting and pasting affect the sound you wanted?<\/strong><\/p>\n

AC:<\/strong> [We\u2019d] rearrange things to a point where they barely resembled the original: maybe put a different feeling underneath [a track], change it from minor to major. \u00a0We reworked the thing so much that by the end, the songs were so far away from what we had originally planned, but I guess in an ultimate sense they were a lot closer to what we really wanted. [The vocals are] like evidence from our creative process. We had this one vocal take done on a crappy microphone, and we can barely hear what Raphaelle\u2019s saying. We\u2019d kind of just make the lyrics up after. And it\u2019s interesting, because for me, a lot of the songs never really were fully realised until we started to play them live. We realised that there really is songwriting underneath it. It doesn\u2019t quite sound like a song, it\u2019s so cut up; but that\u2019s just how the songs were composed. Not on a piano, or guitar – it was synths and melody and then we\u2019d jot down some lyrics or something.<\/p>\n

Stylus: So you and Raph spent a while apart after [your EP] Blooming Summer<\/em>. While Raph went on tour with Braids, you went to Germany. How did your time in Europe change the way you make music?<\/strong><\/p>\n

AC:<\/strong> Definitely the main thing that Europe did for me was show me that there was a proper form for electronic music. But I wasn\u2019t really playing very much. It was almost like research or something. Often I\u2019d go to clubs by myself or with my German friends, and wouldn\u2019t even party [in the sense of getting drunk and partying]. Sometimes I\u2019d show up at like eight in the morning; people had been partying all night and I\u2019d watch for hours as the night reached its new fate.<\/p>\n

When you first know somebody, it\u2019s so exciting and easy. And your life builds up. But [Raph and I] took a break for such a long time from making music, and a lot of stuff happened. We lived alone in a lot of different places, and [the album] really shows how quickly things get really complex and how that complexity can have a weight and sadness to it. [But] making the album was like shutting all that baggage away \u00a0and understanding what we meant to each other, not necessarily romantically, but as people.<\/p>\n

Stylus: So are there underlying lyrical themes here?<\/strong><\/p>\n

AC:<\/strong> A lot of them have to do with Raphaelle\u2019s past, but \u201cTry to Be\u201d<\/a> in particular is a really simple song which I think speaks strongly about not realising your potential, wondering why you\u2019re not the person that you\u2019d want to be – then realising that you can just be the person that you are, and then things will fall into place. A lot of lyrics are about lacking something or needing something else.<\/p>\n

Stylus: I thought of an exercise that might be fun. How would you describe Untogether<\/em> in terms of all the other senses besides hearing? Can you give me a word for vision, smell , touch, taste?<\/strong><\/p>\n

AC:<\/strong> Hm. For vision, I would think about it as being like that kind of obscure transparency that you get when you look through a windowpane, and you\u2019re reflected back at yourself, but you\u2019re also looking through it. It\u2019s distorted and unclear, but you see, ultimately, what is on the other side of the glass. Smell … smell\u2019s a sense that you could lose and still sort of be okay. But maybe it\u2019d smell… sour. For touch, it would definitely be soft, like velvet, or like a bed that\u2019s really like so deep that you don\u2019t really want to get up from your sleep. And taste would have to be … bittersweet.<\/p>\n

Catch Blue Hawaii with Purity Ring at the West End Cultural Centre May 1st.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Adrienne Yeung Blue Hawaii are Alex \u201cAgor\u201d Cowan and Raphelle Standell-Preston, who live in Montreal and play electronic music. If their sound can be described as dream pop, then their first full length album Untogether is a dream neither nightmare nor sweet, but introspective and amorphous. It\u2019s a dream lit by strobe light, where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[56,116,632],"class_list":["post-6818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","tag-arbutus-records","tag-blue-hawaii","tag-montreal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6818\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}