Interview with Boa Morte – Signal: Lost
by Killian Laher
No More Workhorse caught up with three-quarters of Boa Morte, ahead of the release of Signal: Lost
No More Workhorse: How did you go about recording your new material?
Cormac Gahan (CG): Paul wrote a lot of songs, and I had a few songs, so we had enough to do a serious amount of recording. About 3 years ago we were just starting to get these new songs together and then came up with a plan to go into Hellfire Studios in the Dublin Mountains, where Lankum record. We did a load of demos, worked out all the parts, then went into Hellfire Studios for about a week and recorded a load of stuff. It was more freeform, in terms of improvisation and working around themes and things like that, trying a slightly different approach.
Paul Ruxton (PR): We tried to move away from the conventional song structure — there’s a number of tracks on the first of the two albums (Signal: Lost), and on the second album as well, that have in some cases as many as four sections. We figured out how to stitch those together with some instrumental pieces – some that Bill (Twomey) did, and some that we all collaborated on together. We’ve done some of that in the last record, but this time around, we wanted to just push it even further.
CG: After playing together for 20 years or more, it’s time to mix it up a bit, try playing things in a different way than the way you normally play them. Make it sound slightly more… surprising.
NMW: It sounds like a progression from The Total Space.
Bill Twomey (BT): We messed around with time signatures a bit. In The Total Space, everything was either 4/4, 3/4, but in this there are some more… might sound jarring maybe at first, but some of the time signatures don’t just fit into your normal kind of 4/4 pattern. And then we learned a whole bunch of new chords as well.
We just wanted to get away from the same musical palette and mess with different instruments, also playing those instruments in different ways. There are new instruments on this album; there’s the tongue drum, and we’re also using a good bit of brass, trombone and saxophone. There are probably more synths on this album than even the last one. We tried to push away from just playing guitar and just playing bass to trying different things.
NMW: Do you guys write separately and bring the material into the studio?
PR: Not in all cases, but in terms of the songs or the musical pieces, Cormac and I would do that. The last song (The Garden Pt 2) on the album that’s being released this month originally was a song that I wrote during COVID. Quite a short folky type of song, but we added a jazz-style intro and then a second section, and the song itself then was stitched together. The fourth section was the second section but just extended with piano and brass and all kinds of things. So what started out as a song that was about two and a half minutes ended up about a six and a half, seven-minute piece of music.
CG: You write the basic parts at home and then come in, and it might change completely. So that’s kind of the way we work. We’ve always worked in this way, but we pushed it a bit further this time.
PR: The song per se is becoming less important, but pieces that go along with it are more to the fore now than would have been previously; that’s another way of putting it. You can have a really nice melody without it being sung as well.
NMW: And there’s a second album in the works?
BT: Yeah, there’s a second album being mixed at the minute. It’s parked a little bit while we’re getting our rehearsals together for the gigs, but we’re hoping to release it next year. It’s very much a companion piece to the first one. It’s going to be called The Following On, even though there’s a song on the first one called The Following On! The name of the second album is going to be called The Following On because it is very much a ‘following on’ to the first one. Even in terms of the graphic design, thematically there’s a link design-wise, but sonically there’s a link as well. But they’re two slightly different albums.
PR: The first one is probably more immediate; the second one is probably a little bit slower and more ambient. Probably more of a slow burner, more experimental as well.
NMW: Were you listening to anything in particular in the run up to making these albums?
BT: We all listen to slightly different stuff. Through Cormac and through friends that we mix with, I’ve been introduced to a lot of the contemporary jazz scene, especially around London where there’s a lot of great stuff happening. There’s this lady called Nala Sinephro who is probably my favourite musician of the last four or five years; I really admire her. But then there’s International Anthem stuff. It’s a label out of Chicago that releases a lot of contemporary jazz. I really admire a lot of people who mess with conventional musical form. People like Juana Molina, who’s been around for a long, long time.
Richard Dawson is another guy, more contemporary. But then there are people like Radiohead as well, who I’ve only really gotten into in the last 3 or 4 years in a deep way. They mess around with song structure and having so many different flavours on the one album, so many different types of tracks. Some traditional songs but surrounded and embellished with instrumentals and longer pieces. So it’s very wide-ranging.
PR: I’m not as much of a jazz fan as the two lads are, but I like people like Jeff Parker and Tortoise, and there would be jazz influences there. I’ve always been a huge ’70s music fan, Neil Young, Big Star, bands like that, that you go back to those melodic sensibilities. A lot of the more experimental stuff kind of twinned with the older…. the Beatles, Nick Drake… All over the place, really. Maurice (Hallissey), the drummer, has a different taste in music, he is huge into hip-hop and noise.
CG: I was going to mention These New Puritans, I like a couple of their albums. They are really interesting experimental albums, but still very much with singing and melodies. They would be a good touchstone for me, but I don’t really write like them. Just in terms of how they mess with the song structures and so on.
BT: It’s great trying to incorporate all those influences, but you end up with a kind of sound that’s hard enough to categorise as a result because it is a bit of a melting pot. On first listen, it might not sound as immediate, maybe, but then that’s what we’re hoping: that the album will reward repeated listens. My favourite albums are albums that take five or six listens to get. I’ve got a sense that it might be the same with this. Obviously it’s hard to be subjective, but that’s my sense of it.
NMW: You have a couple of live shows coming up?
PR: We’re playing Curveball in Dublin on the 15th of October — we’re playing Spin Dizzy the following weekend (23rd October) and Music Zone here in Cork. And then we were playing in Coughlans in Cork on the 29th of October, and a little bookshop in Kinsale called Prim’s Bookshop. There’s a guy down there, Simon (Prim); he puts on everybody and anybody. It’s a lovely little venue. That’s on the 22nd of November. That’s what we have so far.
NMW: Do you enjoy playing live?
BT: When we get going, yes, but we’re well practised. It takes probably a gig or two to really get into it and to kind of shake off the rust. So by the time we’re a gig or two in, we’re typically finished! Actually, Dublin will be first, but we’ll be well rehearsed.
NMW: Have you played much outside of Ireland?
CG: We played in England a couple of times in 2020. Just before COVID we played a couple of gigs. Actually, it was the week before lockdown, so we were reading the news and everything was coming across. But for our first album (Soon It Will Come Time To Face The World Outside), we did nine dates in the UK, and that was good fun. 2002. That was a while back. And because we have the UK label, we really should get over more often, use the London connections. But it’s quite… It’s a lot of time involved.
PR: Personally speaking, I’m just a bit old for it, I think. Unless you’re going to go and play half a dozen gigs, it’s an awful lot of effort for very little return potential. Unless you got on something that was curated or something like that.
CG: It would be worth putting 5 dates together or something, just driving around. We’ve got a van now, so put everything in the van and just do that!
NMW: But you enjoy the process of creating music?
PR: I like recording; I really like creating music together. I like the recording process. And as Cormac was saying, when we get warmed up, I enjoy gigging. I used to be very nervous performing when I was younger. But as you get older, you don’t take yourself as seriously, and you just kind of say, if you make a mistake, you make a mistake. The main thing is that you get this right. If you get the singing right, everything else you can forgive, whereas before you would be worried if you played a sharp note or something like that. But now it’s not really an issue.
CG: Because you don’t play wrong notes. I love that!
PR: Less likely to play wrong notes than maybe I was before! We play with some really good musicians as well. We’ve Justin Grounds, who’s a multi-instrumentalist, and Hilary Bow, who’s a really nice singer. She’s more of a performer than any of us are. She lifts what we do live. She won’t be there, unfortunately, in Dublin, and hopefully Justin can make it, but it could be just the four of us in Dublin yet. We don’t know, but we’ll cut our cloth accordingly, and our setlist will reflect that.
CG: We have some great brass musicians. Trombone player Jack Mahony. He arranged some of the brass sections. There’s even more brass on the second album. These New Puritans use that approach as well. It’s added a different sound, and it would be great if he could do a gig or two with us. It’s great to meet these new musicians; they can change the vibe a bit.
NMW: You are big music fans, aren’t you?
BT: Total nerds, probably! When we come to practise, sometimes the first hour is spent talking about what we’re listening to rather than playing music. There’s so much great music around at the moment and so much great music being released. We’re lucky in Cork as well; there are some amazing record shops, Plugd, Music Zone, Bunker (sadly this has now closed). In the last five or six years, this scene has sprung up around the music shops, which is great.
PR: I’ve been buying older stuff. I’ve been buying Jason Molina stuff and especially the Magnolia Electric Company records. I really like those. Cormac put me on to one that he collaborated with a guy called Will Johnson (Molina and Johnson), and that’s really good.
CG: Eight Gates is good as well, the solo one that was released posthumously.
BT: There’s a new Alabaster DePlume album that I haven’t got yet. Actually, the Cameron Winter album is very good. I know it’s probably out nearly a year now, but there’s some great stuff on that.
PR: There’s a band from Maine called Friendship. Their current album is actually really good.
NMW: What can we expect from the live shows?
BT: We are going to play songs off all the albums. We were wondering if we should put on the new one, but we’re probably not going to. We’ll probably play 3 or 4 from the new one, or 3 or 4 from each album, something like that.
It’s good fun going back in and rediscovering old songs again and trying to relearn how to play them. We’re probably going to maybe mess around with some of the older ones in terms of going with some extended intros or outros, or maybe toying around with them a little bit just to make it a bit more fun for us as much as anything else. It’s great to get back in there and relearn them again. It’s like trying to do a cover almost.
CG: We’re playing a few off the first album, so yeah, we’re going back. You’ll be able to compare and contrast the styles slightly.
Boa Morte are playing Curveball in Dublin on 15th October, and Signal: Lost will be released on 23rd October
