Belfast band And So I Watch You From Afar are back melding brute force and beauty on their new album Jettison. Guitarist Rory Friers talks to Alan Corr about escape, film work and being big in Ukraine
"At the end of the day, it's dangerous being in an instrumental band and to talk about writing our concept album. Haha," laughs Rory Friers, the unassuming guitar hero of Belfast mavericks And So I Watch You From Afar.
"Great music, great bands, the people I love the most are the people who provide a place I can go that is different from my life," he adds. "That’s what we’ve tried to do with Jettison. It isn’t a concept album."
The band, whose name either sounds like a stalker’s threat or a lover’s lament, were never in danger of having a Spinal Tap moment.
Jettison is an escape pod, a quick clean exit from the strife of the last two years and whatever may lay ahead, and it follows the same winding and uncompromising path ASIWYFA have followed since they formed in 2005.
Past masters of exhilarating instrumental build and release, the fourpiece have previously dabbled in African highlife and Irish trad within the framework of their wigged-out polyrhythmic math rock. But even for an act who are all about catharsis and euphoria, Jettison really does let it all out.
The new multi-media project was conceived by Friers, who has done extensive soundtrack work, and brought to life by the band, orchestrator Connor O’Boyle, Belfast’s supremely talented Arco String Quartet, and Sam Wiehl, an artist and live event designer who focuses on the relationship between sound and image.
Friers’ work scoring films - he composed the soundtrack to the Elliot Page film The Cured, which was filmed in Dublin - proved a jumping off point for Jettison.
"I loved the idea of reverse engineering a score, flipping it on its head, and having Sam create the visual narrative to the music," he says, speaking from the band’s studio in Bushmills.
"It kinda came off the back of the scoring work I had done for film and there was something about that alchemy between the visual world and the sound world that made me feel as though this would be something fun to try and do with the band.
"I’d been working with string quartet and other instrumentation, and I thought why not combine them? Originally it was meant to be a ten or fifteen-minute piece, but it grew into something more over the months."
Opening with Dive Pt 1, a spectral and elegiac overture of guitar chime and strings, Jettison voyages through 40 minutes of sonic exploration juxtaposed with cryptic dialogue by American singer-songwriter, guitarist and visual artist Emma Ruth Rundle and Neil Fallon of US act Clutch.
The presence of actual human voices is a departure for the band and Rundle’s careworn but strong words may put the listener in mind of Prefab Sprout’s magnificent tone poem I Trawl the Megahertz, and Fallon, who is possessed of a truly marvellous baritone rumble, echoes something of Rutger Hauer’s soliloquy in Blade Runner.
"I remember the last show was in Kyiv and we had an amazing day but the promoter told me, `war is coming. You don't understand. We’re enjoying this so much now but it’s not going to last very long’."
"I love albums that help you escape to another world and your imagination is left to fill in all the gaps," says Friers. "Getting Emma Ruth and Neil on board was great and the first moment we heard Neil’s amazing baritone come in it was great.
"That little bit of dialogue shows the nerdy side of things because there is a whole story that runs underneath the whole album, and we haven’t even told Sam what it is, so we left loads of Easter eggs. There’s a little nerdy thing going on there and we think that further down the line we’ll release a limited-edition vinyl that has the full narrative drawn out in the artwork."
But as ever with ASIWYFA, it’s all about the music and their distinctive combination of brute force and beauty.
New track Hold has the kind of cavernous sounding intro that you might have found on Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest album, while the title track begins with a weird arabesque of strings by The Arco Quartet like the classic film scores by Maurice Jarre or John Barry, before Friars and Kennedy shred the whole thing in a pyrotechnic display of axe prowess.
The multimedia element of the album and their collaboration with Wiehl will be revealed at the band’s upcoming live shows and speaking about what’s in store, Friers says, "The full show, all bells and whistles, is us with a string quartet performing behind this kind of giant gauze screen which is pretty much transparent until you project imagery onto it.
"There’s a cool juxtaposition of us playing and the images projected onto the screen. At times you can see everybody and at times you just see the imagery.
"I’d been spending all this time interpreting the visual world in film and tv so I thought wouldn’t it be cool to do it other way round and make a piece of music to be interpreted visually.
"We’re not trying to say anything profound with the live show but what we are trying to do is create a place that is exciting and to get away from your life for a bit."
Away from Ireland, ASIWYFA’s largely instrumental music has carved out quite a following in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. They’ve toured there several times and Friers has been anxiously watching the geopolitical brinksmanship unfolding there right now.
"We’ll be hopping on the next flight for a spot of diplomacy but in all seriousness, the last time we were there was probably 2015," he says.
"I remember the last show was in Kyiv and we had an amazing day. The promotor look us around and we had some great food and saw some lovely historical architecture, played a sold-out show.
"Afterwards, we all went back to a big house with a sauna and we were all in the show afterwards and I sat down to have a heart to heart with the promotor and I said, `this is incredible. You have an amazing scene here, the kids are so down for live music . . . ' and I remember so starkly, he said, `war is coming. You don’t understand. We’re enjoying this so much now but it’s not going to last very long’.
"He told me that he because he was promoting music like ours, he had been taken in by the authorities and questioned. I was so shocked because this was a 24-year-old kid just trying to promote a show in a city like anyone else.
"I often think about him with all the stuff that is happening in Ukraine now."
Jettison is labyrinthine stuff and full of songs of sublime grandeur and rock abandon and they’ve come a long way from early songs like Clench Fists, Grit Teeth...Go! but ASIWYFA have always been in a constant state of flux.
"That would be fair to say," says Friers. "I think rightly so. I think again that comes down to the fact that there are bands that I love who have released the same record every year and that’s perfect and that’s what they want to do and that’s what I want from them and that’s a mutual agreement between us and it’s fantastic.
"But I suppose with us ASIWYFA is the conduit or outlet for wherever I am in the moment. It’s not a place I go to play a riff. You’re a different person every day."
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
Jettison is out now
