Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker - Tradition, modernity and empty spaces

On the occasion of this duo's first ever Italian date, opening for Riley Walker in Milan, we met the two artists in person, and they gave us consistently sharp and interesting answers, especially on the idea of looking to tradition without replicating it, and on the importance of empty spaces in their sound.

How did you meet, and how did you start working together?

Josienne: Ben was in an indie-rock band called Lights. A friend of mine was their sound engineer. He heard Ben playing acoustic guitar and liked it, so he asked him why he wasn't doing any acoustic projects too. Ben said he didn't know any singers. Meanwhile, I was playing my first songs on my own, but I played guitar badly, and I felt I needed someone else to improve my sound. Our mutual friend put us in touch, that was seven years ago.

How does your songwriting process work? Has it changed over the years?

Josienne: Basically, I have a basic idea for a song, then I bring it to Ben and he arranges and develops it. It's more or less always been the same method, though on the latest album there was a more collaborative process, with the two of us in the same room.

What was the work on building the sound like? I read that, especially on the latest album, a lot of musicians played on it.

Ben: Before, we used to put together a kind of demo, so we'd record a first version, and then other versions. For this album, we did something closer to playing live, so we still made demos, but with some of the musicians already there with us.

Josienne: There was a pianist, a bassist, a drummer, and most of it was done live, which was different from how we'd worked before. That changes the sound not just on record, but also in how we conceive it.

Did signing with Rough Trade give you the chance to have these musicians with you for longer?

Josienne: Yes, signing didn't change the sound itself, but it gave us more resources to develop it. There were things we wanted to do, like recording live in the studio, that we didn't have the means to do before.

Ben: We didn't have the budget or the space.

Josienne: You have an idea, but you need resources to actually get to a result you can be happy with.

You released an album a year for three years running, from 2012 to 2014, then nothing in 2015, and now this new one. Maybe having more resources and space also meant it took longer to finish the album?

Josienne: We'd already decided that an album every twelve months is quite hard to pull off, so I think we wouldn't have put anything out in 2015 regardless.

Ben: Basically, we told ourselves we needed to take a year off.

Josienne: It's not that we weren't working on it, but we'd decided to do it more slowly, with more care, and in a more relaxed way too, because getting one album finished and then finishing another within twelve months is a lot of work — we decided we'd take it a bit easier this time.

In our reviews, we wrote that your music looks to tradition without being traditionalist. Do you want to comment on that?

Josienne: I think that's a fair way to put it.

Ben: "Folk music" has always been a label applied to us, but it's a good observation to say that we look to something, because it is indeed an influence, and we're not trying to replicate it.

Josienne: We like jazz, electronic music, indie played with guitar and bass. Traditional folk is just one part of our collection and of what we want to do.

Still on the subject of looking to tradition, you're also known for your covers of other songs. Are you already working on more? Do you think you might release a covers-only album at some point in the future?

Josienne: Yes, we've definitely thought about it, I think it would work really well. We believe that if you do a cover, you have to change the song in some way, and bring something new to it, or at least try to — something that wasn't there before. We don't just want to replicate the song.

I read in the press release that with this album you're trying to look toward new horizons, whereas the previous ones were tied to folk tradition. But I think the leap between Fire And Fortune (2013) and Nothing Can Bring Back The Hour (2014) is bigger than the one between that album and this latest one.

Josienne: Yes, I agree, but there are a lot of things to consider. We put out a record in 2010, and there are very few copies of it, so very few people got to hear it, but if you listened to it, you'd hear that some of the things we did on this latest record were already there.

Ben: To be honest, "Nothing Can Bring Back The Hour" feels to me like a fairly steady folk record, but for this last one, we tried to make it as big as possible, and we wanted it to take us wherever we wanted to go.

As for the concept behind the record (the cycle of night and day), is this the first time you've built an album around a concept? And is the album's sound influenced by the concept too, or does the concept only concern the lyrics?

Josienne: I think we've always been gradually working towards the idea of records with a concept, but on the previous ones, the concept was there but it was quite broad. I think here we've simply narrowed everything down towards an album that has a clearer concept. I think we've gotten better at developing it.

As for your sound, when I listen to your music, I get the sense of how important it is to leave empty spaces in the sound, rather than filling it up. Empty space, in a way, can be very powerful.

Josienne: Spaces have always been important in our sound, there are so, so many spaces in it. Also, on this album, we've used four or five more instruments than in the past, but there are still plenty of spaces.

Ben: This idea is very important for the dynamics of the sound. Just because you can add a sound in, doesn't mean you have to. Leaving space takes just as much care as using an instrument.

Josienne: We're quite careful to make sure the sound isn't too much, or too little, but just enough.

A question about the tracklist, and in particular, about the moment when "The Waning Crescent" arrives. I think it's the perfect moment, because it's as if a tension that has been building up through the previous songs is suddenly released.

Josienne: The song is about the moon, and the intention was for it to be about the moment when you're in the darkest part of the night and there's a strong burst of moonlight.

This was your first time in Italy. If you come back in the future, maybe as headliners, what can we expect from your shows?

Josienne: Sometimes we play with other musicians, but most of our shows are just the two of us. There are versions of our songs that only work with just the two of us alone.

Ben: We always try to reinvent what we've done, and there too is the idea of spaces, it's an idea that influences what happens on stage.

Josienne: Yes, space is very important, our live sound is stripped-back, delicate, calm, but that doesn't mean it's sad.

With this record, you'll probably become better known than before, so you might get the chance to collaborate with artists you like. Would you like to tell me one or more names of people you'd love to work with?

Josienne: We've written to some, they haven't replied yet but we hope they will, sooner or later…

Thanks to Vassilios Karagiannis for his contribution to putting together the questions.

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