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Interview with iambic

  Tobias Fischer

How would you rate iambic and The Moving Dawn Orchestra in terms of importance for you personally?
Iambic has always been the main thing for me. It's really a constantly evolving project that is very reflective of my current influences and actually what I truly want to be writing at whatever point in time. I started writing very electronic ambient music, that naturally evolved to post-rock, this was followed by a jazz influence, but I'm currently at a point of combining everything.
The Moving Dawn Orchestra is kind of a bi-product of iambic. I've always enjoyed writing a quite heartfelt ambient style and it's something that I feel I can continue to do, just not so much with iambic. It took me about six months to decide that creating another project was a good idea, but I am enjoying the divide between the two. iambic can go and progress into whatever it does, The Moving Dawn Orchestra can evolve slowly in it's own genre.


Nocturnes is said to have been inspired by an interest in a more live oriented sound.
I love live music, but I wouldn't say it has a massive impact on what and how I write music. The shift was brought on by me wanting to experiment with more acoustic sounds, processing them and seeing if I could recreate human-like performances through artificial means. This is definitely evident with my drum programming on Nocturnes. I think there is something very special about hearing a real human play on a recording and as I can't physically get a drummer to record parts I need, I try to recreate that human element myself. Coming to these genres from an electronic angle just gives me the workflow and control I need to write, perform and arrange my songs in a really quick way. I suppose I am just searching for the ultimate compromise - being able to have live sounding tunes without needing to record real life musicians in expensive studios.


Because of the rhythmical nature of the pieces. I'm assuming the title of the EP refers to the time of day rather than the classical form.
The EP title indeed has no reference to the classical term. I chose the name as I picture the EP as a chronological sound track to an evening. I find the evening time, around dusk, by far the most inspiring time to write music as well as to be influenced by other music. It's odd, for me everything sounds better then!


What makes Jazz interesting to you?
I'm not entirely sure. There is a lot of Jazz I really love, and a lot that I don't like so much. I like Jazz that has some kind of emotional level to it, the same kind of emotion you'd find in say, an early tune by Sigur Ros. I find it fascinating, how the colours these musicians paint in their songs are created and how the instrumentation can evoke such feeling in the listener. I find this really evident in Jazz music.


Was Jazz also a benchmark in terms of the production?
I've never been too inspired by Jazz production, more so electronic production. I just mix songs how I'd like to hear them and hope it sounds ok! It was all made with Logic 9 on my Mac with minimal external hardware. I'm definitely a fan of the "in the box" production style. I record parts as I need them in my flat and once it's all done I master stuff myself - mainly to save money.


The swing and funk of a Jazz band are usually the stuff of many years of experience. How did you go about creating it on your own in the studio?
I think a lot of it is down to the drum patterns I created. On this record the drums are the heart and soul of it. All of them were programmed, but I'd often put more of a human feel into it by, for example, adding an egg shaker loop I recorded over the top of the drums.
I also tend to play real saxophone and guitar parts over the top of the songs. This really helps to get that human-swing. I always tend to play finger picked patterns on my guitar with this odd sort of swing, so this is often imprinted onto the song and helps contribute towards the overall groove.


How would you describe the creative process at the heart of Nocturnes?
The majority of the EP was just the same as all the other songs I have written. I normally come up with some chords and a drum beat and see what happens. The final track on the EP entitled 'Nightfall' was heavily inspired by orchestral Japanese film soundtracks. I'm not overly into watching films as I seem to spend every moment of my free time working on music, so this was the first one actually inspired by film.
„Keep Your Hold“ took a bit of a twist when I decided to get Hannah Cartwright to sing on it. We were originally going to lay down some vocals for another tune that didn't make the EP, but I just happened to have a copy of „Keep Your Hold“ on my memory stick. We decided this was a better tune and started to work on vocals. Some rough drafts were recorded but it wasn't until Hannah was down in Brighton a few weeks later that we fully recorded the vocals. They we're pretty much improvised and we ended up ditching what we had previously written.


That song only really starts after a long instrumental introduction. How will ideas like this come up?
The original idea I have is always at the start of the tune as I tend to write music chronologically, rather than writing the main hook and building around it. I'll normally be working on this first part for ages - then one day the main part of the song will just 'happen' after the time has been spent exploring all the possibilities. The instrumental backing of Keep Your Hold took weeks to write, not due to any level of music complexity but just down to exploring what works and what doesn't.


So the songs and orchestration always go hand in hand?
With all my tunes, everything goes hand in hand - I find it very difficult to add more to a basic template of a song at a later date. I produce and write music in layers, looping certain parts to build texture and so on. As a result of this, I often have to rewrite songs three or four times before I get anywhere.
I come from a very electronic based musical background, so these long arrangements definitely come from that - it's what feels most natural to me. I don't really like it when a song finishes too early, it needs to have it's natural life span so the listener can pick up on the vibe of things. I suppose this is why I'm still classed in the ambient genre, due to a lack of rigid song structure and my use of more evolving melodies.


Sandwiched in between the grooves, there is an incredibly intense piece of music: Barely two-minute-short „Dusk“, which at first seems a stranger here, but, on closer inspection, appears very important in terms of the overall flow of the EP. How did the piece come about?
This is probably one of my favourite tracks from the EP. It was written last and completely finished in an evening. I felt that the EP needed something   more heartfelt to tie the songs together. I wrote Dusk to grab hold of the melancholy sound I'm know for from very early iambic and Moving Dawn Orchestra songs, and apply it to my new music.


You've recently been involved in a couple of remix projects. In how far do these inform your work with Iambic and The Moving Dawn Orchestra?
About 90% of the remixes I've done recently were ideas for iambic tunes to start off with, then adapted accordingly to who I was remixing. The only exception to this was the Codes in the Clouds remix, which was inspired just from the stems they sent me. So in a way they are generally a reflection of where I'm taking iambic and in some cases, The Moving Dawn Orchestra.



After the incredibly packaged „Dials“,Nocturnes is download-only. Quite obviously, this does not seem to be a question of the quality of the material. So how do you arrive at the decision which format to choose for a particular work?
It normally lies in the timeframe I have to release music. Dials had been written for over a year before Dan at Fluid Audio released it. Unfortunately the Nocturnes EP, in it's digital form, had to have a release date a lot sooner to tie in with various remixes I've done that are getting released.
Saying that though, there have been plans for a CD version of Nocturnes so hopefully it'll be available not too long after the digital release.

By Tobias Fischer

iambic Discography:
Under These Stars, We'll Sleep Again (Laridae) 2007
As The Snow Fell (Laridae) 2008
Move EP (Iambic Music) 2008
Echos (Maternity, Frisk) 2009
Through The Trees (Iambic Music, Frisk) 2010
Nocturnes (Iambic Music, Frisk) 2010

The Moving Dawn Orchestra Discography:
Dials (Fluid) 2010

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