MUSIC INTERVIEW: TAMARYN

Riding 'The Waves' of Dark Duality and Extreme Symbolism

By: Team Buzzine

February 3, 2011

Tamaryn and Rex John Shelverton first met back in 2001, when Rex was still a member of the Sub Pop band Vue, and when they lived on opposite sides of the country. Despite that physical distance, a musical connection was made, and after the successful release of the Led Astray, Washed Ashore EP in 2008, Tamaryn moved to join Rex in San Francisco and record their wonderful darkcore debut album, The Waves. Buzzine sat down with Tamaryn in the equally wonderful Origami Vinyl store in Echo Park, California to discuss the ins and outs of musical collaboration, the intertwining of sound and vision, and the value of reducing a live crowd to staring in silent rapture…

Stefan Goldby: How did Tamaryn the person become Tamaryn the band?

Tamaryn: Rex and I have been making music together for several years now, and we released an EP in 2008 that was sort of a collection of music we had made between New York and San Francisco. Then, after I put that out, I decided that I didn’t want to spend several years making the next record. I ended up only spending about two. [smiles] So I moved to San Francisco and we worked on The Waves together. 

SG: Two people as a band can be an interesting working dynamic…

T: We’re two people, but I think that’s pretty common these days, with all of the technology that people have to make albums—it seems like there’s one person, or hardly a person… But Rex is really talented and he can play everything, so we co-write everything, but I leave that technical ability to him. He’s an amazing guitar player; he’s an amazing producer, so we both bring different things to the table.

Music collaboration is really hard. It’s like dating or something like that. It’s really hard to find somebody, and at times there’s always trials and tribulations, and there’s times where…I think everybody thinks about who you’re supposed to work with or you question what you’re doing, but I think it’s a very rare and special gift to find somebody that I have the compatibility and that we make the kind of music that Rex and I do, and I just try to treat that relationship with respect and let it be what it is and not think too much about what I can’t get out of it or…just do the best with the parameters of what our relationship is and what our instruments are, and what our personal rules about what we will and won’t do, and all those things—you sort of create limitations and then you try to challenge them, and I think that’s really important to the outcome of the way the music is.

SG: How does your relationship work in terms of germinating the music?

T: For this album, for most songs, we sat down together and worked from the beginning, but we’re at a point now where we’ve been working together for such a long time, our incubating and figuring out what it is we do…we have a good understanding now, where I trust that he can be by himself and be creative and give me something, and then I take it and will write melody to it and rearrange it and send it back. So sometimes we don’t even have to be in the same room and there’s kind of a back and forth creative process with that, and it allows a very emotional, personal feeling to enter the music, I think, because of that…because we spend a lot of time individually, by ourselves working.

SG: It seems very hard for me to talk about your music without also talking about imagery: When you think of sounds, do you also think visually?

T: Images are very important to me. If you look at our MySpace URL, it’s www.myspace.com/imagesmusic. The original band that I started was called Images, after the (Robert) Altman film. That movie was inspired by the [Ingmar] Bergman film, Persona. It’s about loss of female identity, and kind of like a Black Swan thing. So it’s always been about duality and cinematic, big, iconic symbolism. It is very visual to me.

SG: Music video is traditionally where the visual and the audio come together. How big of a role do you play in the creation of your music videos?

T: I play a really big role in the music videos. I’ve co-directed most of them. The last two were directed by this really great girl, Christin Turner, and I was definitely really hands-on with them, but she’s really got her own style and she’s very rooted in things like Derek Jarman and Angus Cameron, and psychedelic stuff.  She had made stuff for Crocodiles and Dum Dum Girls, and I had seen them and felt like we had a really good match. So I was definitely involved in all the casting, and I was there for the shooting of pretty much everything, but the style is very much her style.

SG: Turning back to the music and your album The Waves, what is about the recording sessions that most stands out in your mind?

T: Recording The Waves was really a long process, and it was a lot of time spent alone living in a city that I didn’t really know that many people, and spending a lot of time letting it develop, so it evolved quite a bit as we worked on it. I couldn’t really pick out one individual moment because it was very much like a very slow process.

SG: Was there a sense that where you were physically affected the music you made?

T: I think San Francisco really affected the music in the way that it has this beautiful, melancholy, foggy feeling to it, in some ways…it’s kind of murky and has that thing San Francisco has, but obviously there’s a lot of talk about using oceanic symbolism and stuff like that, and I definitely didn’t get that from New York.  Rex is a surfer and he’s very integrated in that lifestyle, and I think all that stuff took part in it, but I think there’s ‘living in New York’ there too.  If I think about it more than I should, it’s definitely about duality and extreme symbolism on both ends…

SG: If I could keep you thinking about it more than you should just for a second longer, what’s the single thing that you’re most proud of about your first record?

T: I’m really proud of the record as a whole. I think, individually, all the songs are strong, but I wanted to make sort of that old-school album start to finish, to listen to it over and over again from beginning to end—that’s the feeling.  It’s supposed to have continuity and flow throughout it. And to me, music has always been something that I turn to for everything and for escapism and to feel consumed by, so my ideal goal for making music is to be able to make an album that somebody else has that same experience…where they just want to crawl up inside it and lose themselves, and I really feel proud that some people responded that way to it.

SG: Wanting people to crawl inside such a layered album is very apt. But layering is a very studio-based kind of a thing… How do you go about trying to bring that into the live setting?

T: Live is always gonna be different, and we play the songs pretty similar to the album, but the actual sound is always gonna be different, especially when you’re not an incredibly rich band that can control everything. We still don’t have a sound person or anything like that, so I try to bring in all the elements that are important to me. There’s visuals and projections, and Rex is really amazing with gear and modifying amps and taking things apart and really putting a lot of thought and detail into that end of it. He’s always been like that, and I think, as time progresses, that is less and less a thing with bands. We’ve played a lot of things like CMJ and SXSW and some things in Europe, and I’ve come to notice that more and more people will be shocked that we have a space echo [laughs] or shocked that we don’t have pedals that we use, tape delays, or just the little details that, to us, are very much important to the overall sound. It just seems to be like that’s becoming lost, and also more and more people are trying to tell us to turn down [laughs] so it’s a new trend to be very quiet on stage, and then they make you loud in the house, but it’s not really our style. We try to feel it on stage too, so we’re trying to find the balance between that… Those are just the little details. I think Rex and I are both more perfectionists and we’re harder on ourselves than anybody else would, so I hope that creates a level of professionalism, even with all the odds against us at this point. [Laughs]

SG: Let’s indulge that perfectionism for a second, and this may be aspirational at this point, but what would come together to make for the perfect Tamaryn live show?

T: I think an ideal show is just to be able to control the space for us, and to have good sound and have our visuals and… I’m not really interested in playing a whole show where everyone is going wild or anything like that. Through all of our experimentalism and evolution as a band, every time we’ve played, it’s always the same response—there’s a few mega-fans that go crazy, but it’s usually just that the room is commanded by it, and whether they like it or not, they’re kind of just staring silently, which I think is really gratifying. [Laughs]

SG: After a nice hour of quality silent staring, what do you hope a new fan walks away with?

T: I don’t really want to know what anybody thinks about it at all, but I definitely want people to feel something, whatever it is. I don’t want to make music that’s serving people their emotions: “This is a happy song and you should feel happy; and this is a sad song so you should feel miserable,” or whatever. It’s about duality and it’s about being human, and it’s supposed to be, in some ways, played louder, and in some ways rock & roll, so whatever anybody gets out of it, as long as we work hard to present the best version of the songs and the best atmosphere we can create… and then it’s received how it’s received…

Tamaryn’s ‘The Waves’ is out now on Mexican Summer/Kemado Records.