I don’t remember exactly how I get to this project – but it makes my head since the first hearing, with a singular mix of DSBM with shoegazer. It was not only great – was prolific too: in his Bancamp page I found 4 titles, all released this year. To talk with Lamond, the young one man behind everything, was a very special experience – a truly gentlemen’s talk, as you’ll se in the next lines.
(you can download it by ‘name your price’ here)
GM: I’m a brazillian fan and I’m getting deep into your music.
Do do you live at Scotland, right?
L: Yes, I’m from Edinburgh, but I’m currently studying in Manchester, England.
GM: What’s your age?
L: I’m eighteen years old.
GM: Do you release 4 titles only this year. This is your first musical project? How long are you working in this tracks?
L: This is my first musical project that only involves me, but before that I was in a dsbm project called Xanax, with a vocalist, and I’ve played in a few bands before that.
Yeah I guess I have been quite prolific this year. Basically I dropped out of high school in my final year which gave me a lot of time to focus on music. A lot of the material on Seven Tears was intended for a Xanax release, but that project disbanded, so I changed the songs to fit my own personal preference and released the album under the name of ‘Lachrimae’, but a lot of it had been written well before its release, so it was just a matter of recording it. I started writing In Loving Memory pretty much right away, which took me a few months, but because I had a lot of free time and my recording methods aren’t exactly what you’d call “state of the art”, so it didn’t take that long.
GM: Could you tell us about the title “Lachrimae”?
L: I got the name Lachrimae from a piece written by the renaissance composer, John Dowland, called the ‘Lachrimae Pavan’. I didn’t know what the word meant, but I really liked the sound of it and it’s a very somber piece of music, much like the sound I wanted to create with Lachrimae. I believe it means tearful or sorrowful, but don’t quote me on that.
GM: Amazing!
Great news until here!
In my opinion, ‘Seven tears’ have echoes of The Cure, specially in ‘Observance”.
L: A very good observation on your part sir! Yes The Cure are a big influence on me particularly the guitar style of Robert Smith. The verse riff has a kind of Seventeen Seconds feel to it and I guess I kind of do a bad impression of Robert Smith in the vocal line as well haha.
GM: No, it’s very nice!
L: Why thank you! Good to know my crooning is appreciated.
GM: I mean, this 80’s guys have a bad vibe that’s crucial to all sad music that come after, and in the DSBM, even in the other extreme metal genres it’s not always mentioned. I mean, historians says that Amesour is the first band to have an clear echo of punk / post punk.
L: I completely agree with you there. Even in bands that are more mainstream such as ‘Katatonia’ there’s definitely an 80’s goth overtone. I really like Amesoeurs but I woudn’t say they’re the first.
GM: I mean at the DSBM subgenre…
L: Yes I’d definitely say it’s relevant there as well. I’d say something like the Cure’s Pornography definitely has some elements that are applied to DSBM today.
GM: Now that we know that Seven tears is, in a certain sense, the epiloghe of your life until then, the ultra nostalgic vibe of the album is more comprehensible. The children playing, the futbol (soccer)…
L: Seven Tears is very loosely based on my childhood, and as you rightly pointed out the playground sound effects are meant to drive home that feeling of nostalgia, but what I also wanted to get across the feeling of being an outsider. For example in the opening track you hear the sound of the children playing and in a sense you get involved in that sound world, but at the end of the day you are just the listener observing whatever picture appears in your mind and you aren’t actually involved in the physical activity represented by the track. This is probably a pretty bad explanation, but its quite hard for me to explain it.
GM: Fuck!
Then, at the futbol (soccer), you should be the guy who always stays out?
L: Correct. When I was a kid I found it really hard to get involved with group activities. I had a rather strange internalised fear of other children.
GM: Yet about Seven tears: nostalgia is not necessarily a bad feeling, though DSBM uses to explore it; in your particular music, do you would like to get back to the past or run from it?
What is the feeling do you would like to cause in your listeners?
L: Seven Tears and Lachrimae as a whole is a way for me to gain new perspectives on things that happened in the past, so in answer to your question it is a way for me to not only face my past, but also to put into a way in which I can make peace with it.
I think what feeling you get from my music depends on you as a person, but I don’t want the listener to just get a depressive feeling from it. I think there are moments where the music is more colourful and there are even moments that I intend to sound soothing. True, overall the sound I have is quite a sad one, but I think there are different emotions that can be found within that.
GM: After Seven tears you have two little releases with a similar sonority, but then In loving memory is very different. Tell us about it.
L: Well after Seven Tears I did an instrumental cover of the Courtesans song ‘Dirty Killer, which is personally my favourite thing I’ve done with Lachrimae. Then came the See Me EP, which is basically just two tracks that didn’t make it onto Seven Tears, because I wanted it to be a seven track album. However, I wanted the songs to have a different feel, so I added in some rather badly performed “funk” sections haha…
The change in sound on In Loving Memory is mainly due to the fact I was listening to a lot of the bands I loved listening to as a kid at that time e.g. the ‘The Smashing Pumpkins’, and ‘The Smiths’. I was also listening to a lot of indie rock and shoegaze bands from the U.S, which I also think might have had an influence, and most of all I think I just wanted to make a melancholic sounding rock album as a pose to a depressive one.
GM: In fact, I imagine Jesus & Mary Chain, it seems that the shoegaze have supplanted the DSBM in this album.
L: Yes, you are totally right in noticing the Jesus and Mary Chain influence and yeah it is more of a shoegaze album, but I’ve never really thought of shoegaze and dsbm as being all the different. I mean I still get the same kind of feeling from a Trist album as I do A My Bloody Valentine album.
I guess you could argue that thematically the two are pretty different, but sonically they have never seemed that far apart to me.
GM: Fine. What about the title and the lyrics?
L: It kind of goes back to what I was saying about Lachrimae being a way for me to gain new perspectives on the past. I guess you could say the whole theme of the album is about romanticizing the past and putting into a way that you can look at it from afar, kind of like your own movie, which is one of the reasons why I decided to call it In Loving memory. I also gave it that title, because both my grandparents had passed away this year and the album is in some ways a homage to them. The album cover is a picture of Portessie, which is where my grandparents lived and the title track contains some Scottish folk influences.
GM: Yeah, I thought that you have passed by some lost…
L: Yeah, My grandma helped me out a lot in terms of the money needed to get the equipment I need to make music from home, so I’m forever indebted to her. She really was a truly awesome woman.
GM: Fuck! This is hard…
Are you working in new material now?
L: I haven’t really had a lot of time to start something new. I have a few small ideas drifting around, but definitely nothing solid.
GM: What about the future?
L: I’m not sure. I think it’ll be a while before there’s another full length, but I’d love to do a split sometime in the future.
GM: We’re talking about music and I love albums. Please, tell us what’s the album you have listened more in all your life and what’s the best release of 2015.
L: Gosh that’s a hard one. My favourite release of 2015 has probably got to be Peripheral Vision by ‘Turnover’. As for the album I’ve listened to the most I’m not really sure. I think the albums that changed how I viewed music are Meat Is Murder by ‘The Smiths’ and Transilvanian Hunger by ‘Darkthrone’, so I’d probably go with either one of them.
GM: One more: what’s the underground band/project of today you think should get more attention?
L: I believe Impale the Llama should definitely get more attention, but I’m in that band, so I think I should name some others. I think Grey Souvenirs is pretty great, and I’m looking forward to his new stuff, I’m also really getting into Shadowland, so I’ll go with those two, otherwise we’ll be here all day.
GM: How it is your writting process? Do you diy or play at a studio? If it’s a home, can you give us a picture?
L: I don’t think I have anything too interesting in terms of pictures, but this is the original cover of the See Me EP.
L: My recording process is completely DIY. I record pretty much everything in my bedroom, though I recorded some of the guitar leads for ‘In Loving Memory’ in the hallway, because of the nice echo it has. The writing process has been pretty different for each album. For ‘Seven Tears’ I did all the music and then did the lyrics, but for ‘In Loving memory’ I did the reverse. As for writing the music I pretty much get rough sketches of the tracks by recording myself playing over a drum machine and then I’ll use that as a base to put all the overdubs and vocals on top, and then finally I’ll record the drums. Sadly I have no pictures of this exhilarating process.
Lachrimae
GM: The effects in ‘Seven tears’, the nattural voices, how do you get then?
L: I originally wanted to get the sound of children playing from the park not far from where I live, but unfortunately I couldn’t get a day where it wasn’t windy or raining, so I had to settle for samples that I got offline.
GM: Great!
Did you ever try to release your music in a label? Do you want to have physical releases?
L: Yeah that would be really awesome. I can’t say I have ever really approached labels with my music, mainly because I’m never really sure if its good enough, but It would definitely be a small dream come true for me.
GM: Sure you don’t want to give the world a picture?
L: Well I have this picture. Which is the tram line close to where I live. This is going to be pretty important for the next Lachrimae release.
GM: Trully nice!
L: Thanks for taking the time to do this man, it’s been truly humbling for me.
GM: It was a pleasure and a privilege. I hope your fans enjoy it and, above all, that your music becomes known by more people.
