After two EPs (2008’s Andy Bull and 2010’s Phantom Pains) and a long player (2009’s We’re Too Young), the wheel of life has clicked a few notches forward and delivered the world a new Andy Bull album.
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Four years since he released Phantom Pains, Bull has been working on the album, Sea of Approval, recorded over a period of 10 or 12 months.
“So I haven’t been working on it for four years, or anything like that,” he says. “It was an all-consuming 12 months though, that’s for sure. Sometimes of creativity and sometimes anything but creativity. But an intense period.”
Branching out from more familiar territory to learn how to use the range of electronic technology at his disposal, this intensity is reflected in the final product. There are a lot of different moods to the album, from fragile to beautiful, complex to subtle and straightforward. It leaves you wondering about the different mindsets Bull must have been in when he laid the tracks down.
“When you are in a room on your own working – and I’m primarily on my own – you end up having this long silent conversation with yourself,” he says. “And your mind works in really strange lateral ways.”
While in this state, thinking is not clean, he says, but overlapping and inefficient and weird and divergent.
“It’s like stream of consciousness, this conversation. And then I think it’s only natural, if you’re working on your own, that that becomes reflected a little bit in what you do.”
Bull says that one struggle he had was trying to satisfactorily reflect this meandering conversation musically, but then to also structure the work, arranging it so it was not ambient or messy but articulate, and with a defined form.
Allowing parts of the conversation into the mix that were slightly frayed at the edges, meant that not everything survived the organisation process, Bull says.
“There is something interesting in imperfect structure. Songs that seem to go longer than you might expect or take a turn that you might not expect,” he says. “It’s very satisfying to me to just kind of let things run, otherwise your heart gets very constricted trying to make things fit into pop structure. As satisfying as pop structure is – hooks, melodies that come back, that kind of finessed approach – there is something also really satisfying to balance it out, to have something that is a little bit more stream of consciousness, a bit more interesting. It’s refreshing for me to do.”
Asked if there was a specific feel he was trying to achieve with the record, Bull says he was after an album that was between things like hope and despair, or anxiety and relief. “Something with a bit of push and pull between being as tough and beautiful as possible,” he says. “Ambiguous stuff – the in-between stuff.”
It was important for him that the record was something that was compelling for him to work on so that he could remain interested, but also compelling to listen to on repeated visits.
“I definitely wanted to make as much of a complete world as possible,” he says. “As far as you can, you can listen to it again and again and feel like you are in a world, and discover things and be immersed in it and not just have the same experience ten times.”
It was also important not to get into self-indulgent territory.
“You’ve got to be careful, because I wasn’t trying to make a rock opera or a concept record. I was just trying to make a really interesting alt pop record.”
Who: Andy Bull
When: 11 September
Where: Transit Bar
Tickets: $25 + BF