Psapp - Toy-pop Without Borders

We catch up with Galia Durant and Carim Clasmann to get them to tell us what lies beneath such an eccentric sound. Between references to England's turbulent post-Brexit present and an in-depth look at the band's songwriting process.

G: Hi! Yes, we drifted away from our project for a while, but we finally have a new album. We settled on the tracklist just a few days ago! The record should be out by the end of 2019.

C: We've never had a set plan for how long it takes to record an album, we keep going until we feel we've closed a chapter, a natural ending determined by the quantity and type of songs we've finished. We feel the need to fully explore our ideas and new influences, so as to convey the mix of feelings present in the room during recording, without making individual moments - like the slower, more abstract or dense tracks - stand out too much. As happened with "What Makes Us Glow", it can take several years before our songs are truly ready to be released. Some combinations of tracks might not work well together and end up sidelined - something we only realise once we start working on them in depth. Every song is born on its own, without any relationship to the others, and it's only when we decide to make them coexist that we realise some of them don't sit well together, a bit like people. We don't take breaks to work on other projects, we're just a bit slow.

Tell us about your musical background and how your project came about. I've always been very curious to know where such strange, distinctive music as yours comes from.

C: It was January 2001, and my friend Tim Whelan brought Galia to my King Cross studio in London for a recording session without warning me, because she worked at his girlfriend's company and kept pestering him to get her some recording time. At the time I didn't think much of it, especially since it was a rather inconclusive day involving several musicians and singers, but she asked to come back again. Galia kept coming back, and I liked that a lot, because she was someone naturally inclined to create, and I realised she was really good. She turned out to be very sharp, we had a lot in common besides sharing ideas. It wasn't exactly love at first sight for either of us, but I suppose we felt there was something worth nurturing. I'd always been fascinated by the use of unconventional musical instruments - like a wooden board or an old chair - or sampled sounds, but she was the first person who shared these instincts and was also able to work them into an actual song rather than just an abstract piece of music. I suppose that slightly naive approach worked for both of us. Fewer rules, more attempts, risks, and maybe failures.

C: All the songs come about when we're together in the studio. It just takes a small seed, a speck of dust, to form a snowflake, which could be anything. Galia plays a theme on the piano, the excitement of new sounds recorded in the forest, the rhythm of water dripping from a tap. Any instrument or sound carries the same weight and is a potential musical moment, so we don't make a conscious distinction between real instruments and strange sounds - they can both find their way into a song regardless. Even a conceptual idea can spark a song - for instance, I might wonder what a song with only percussion and voice would sound like, and then we add some guitar. These flashes of inspiration have set off a whole new songwriting process.

C: I always have ideas floating around in my head about sounds, rhythms and melodies, they drift in there randomly but they never actually turn into a Psapp track the way I imagine them. Since we always start from scratch when writing every song, no amount of preparation before recording sessions is ever really useful to us. The important thing when we work together is recognizing each other's contribution. We improvise, we catch fragments and snapshots of these ideas and develop them further. Each of us brings something new to every recording session, for instance some ambient sounds that work as a rhythmic element in a specific pattern, an instrument like the Hohner guitaret (an instrument invented by Ernst Zacharias in 1963, ed.) that I'd been hunting for for years, or some words or chords that obsessed Galia for a while. I suppose those sparks are the inspiration that, together with all the music we've listened to, filters through our subconscious. Personally I love sounds, things that sound new to me and that I've never heard before, combinations that interact in a new way, melodies that combine with passing chords and then vanish again. The satisfaction for us lies in creating, in bringing to light something that didn't exist before and that surprises even us, even though we made it ourselves. Inspiration can be anything, like the rumble of a car passing half a mile away that changes pitch because of the Doppler effect, but you need to be in the right frame of mind to know what to do with it, how to manipulate it, whether to use it as the closing sound of a track, exploit its harmonics and textures, squeeze it until it sounds like an organ, or drop it into a rhythmic pattern. In the end, our work has to be something we ourselves love listening to, a sincere song capable of conjuring up an unusual atmosphere, a collage of sounds that tells a story. I'm certain that if we'd set out a work plan or a method from the very start, we'd have given up being musicians a long time ago.

That's a genuinely inspiring explanation, and it mirrors your music. What will we find on your new album? Will you be touring? Do you plan on coming to Italy?

C: I don't want to give everything away before the record comes out, it'll be a surprise, what I can say is that there will be an evolution but it will still sound very much like Psapp. As for touring, I don't think we'll be playing shows in the near future, we've always been a studio band, we fall in love with the details and the individual bits of the production, things that unfortunately get lost in a live performance. Still, nothing's set in stone, who's to say we won't go back to playing shows around Europe? We might change our minds. We've never played in Italy and it would be really exciting, but, as I just said, the chances of that happening any time soon are pretty slim. I hope everyone can enjoy our music with a pair of headphones in their own mental space.

The inclusion of "Cosy In The Rocket" in the "Grey's Anatomy" soundtrack was a really important moment. What impact did it have on your career?

C: That was a long time ago. That song came from a period well before our first record "Tiger, My Friend", and when we were asked if we were okay with using it as the theme for an American TV series, we hadn't given its use any thought at all (the track was never included on an album, only on the "Trycicle" single, ed.). Our manager played the song for a music supervisor and six months later let us know they wanted to use it for television. It's a lovely song, but it didn't really reflect our sound at the time. With our second album, we played a lot of shows in America and noticed a lot of interest because of "Grey's Anatomy". It was always the first question in almost every interview we did, but we never really had anything to say about why "Cosy In The Rocket" ended up in a TV series soundtrack. I'm convinced our music has always been too strange to fit into the mechanisms of mainstream TV or radio, so, apart from some media exposure and a bit of royalties, our career wasn't really affected. We've always thought proactively about the next song and the next album, rather than dwelling on the past.

G: The whole Brexit business is heartbreaking. It's exposed all the divisions within our country. All I hope is that a new government can recognize this and try to eliminate the horrible inequalities that exist in our society. Sometimes art has managed to emerge even in the most difficult times. Right now, like half the population, I'm hoping we don't leave the EU. Those who voted for Brexit in 2016 were badly deceived by a false utopia. Not to mention the issue of climate change, a subject close to my heart that's been overshadowed by all this chaos.

C: I'm not a British citizen, actually I'm German and moved to the UK many years ago, though that doesn't make much difference. I have nothing positive to say about Brexit, but I've gathered a few impressions from some musician friends of mine around London. The referendum result wasn't a huge surprise, since the media spent months focusing on narratives about the EU that were in some cases justified, in others exaggerated, and in others made up entirely. Back then, blaming Europe for everything was a national sport, across the whole political spectrum, because bad news sells more papers. It'll be interesting to see who becomes the next scapegoat once the whole separation process is finally over. Unfortunately blaming someone else for your own troubles isn't unique to the English, it's a widespread, universal behaviour, and it's astonishing how people keep doing it without noticing how ridiculous it is. History has shown that too much ignorance and lack of mutual understanding lead to cultural, economic and military conflict, so hopefully someone can tone down all this bad rhetoric before it spirals out of control.

None of this has had a significant impact on the world of art and music yet. If anything, it's brought together all the musicians and artists who travel for shows, work with people abroad, export records and so on. Their opposition to these looming restrictions has made people more aware of all the cultural benefits they're about to lose. It's very easy to say "no" and very hard to cooperate and reach compromises, a social skill that has served humanity very well. Brexit has changed the UK enormously; nobody used to talk about politics, now everyone does, and nobody agrees on what's happening.

C: It's probably a far cry from Psapp, but the album I've listened to the most lately is "Twer Nyame" by Ebo Taylor. It's basically a 17-minute song from a time when West African artists would routinely write songs as long as a whole side of a 12". I found a 5-minute excerpt on a CD about ten years ago, which is great, but the original 17-minute version is a real gem.

G: I'm listening to compilations from the Smithsonian Folkways label as usual! Specifically the record "Classic African American Gospel From Smithsonian Folkways": absolutely magical, it never gets old.

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