Graeme Woller's Repetitions! Graeme Woller's Repetitions! Graeme Woller's Repetitions! Graeme Woller's Repetitions!

Friday is about music. Today a hybrid interview/review/profile/plug/preview - you know since "music journalism is dead" the ghost of it all has congealed! You must hear "Repetitions" by Graeme Woller.

I want to share a great new album with you. I want to tell you about it, and introduce the artist. And get you to give it a go. Remember Music Journalism? It used to be a thing. It was a ruse where advertisements happened, and record companies got the promo they wanted while writers flexed their muscle and waxed lyrical. But the internet ruined that anyway, social media democracised it and now everyone’s a critic. But also no one wants criticism.

Every other week I have some whinge about that, and if I don’t, someone else does. New albums drop on a Friday, same time for everyone, and anyone can hear them, and no one has to pay.

So what to do in all of this?

Well, I’ve been meaning to give this album a plug for sometime. And today, it’s Bandcamp Friday. Which means, if you do want to cough up some coins, the artist gets the lot, and Bandcamp waives its fee.

I can think of no better candidate for your money than Graeme Woller.

His album Repetitions has been on my mind since I first heard it (that’s the title doing its work). But it’s also been on my stereo too.

I first heard (of) Graeme Woller when I heard the South Island-based alt-country band Into The East. I liked them. They wrote clever little tunes, and delivered them with ease and aplomb.

The band broke up, as bands do and Woller, who I have never met, but have interacted with via social media, popped up online in other bands and with other songs and projects.

But always “song-based”. I never expected a lush, beautiful and beguiling ambient album from him. But that’s very much my wheelhouse these days. I like loads of music still, but I adore an album I can play at 6am, or 11am or 4pm or 9pm or 12am or 3am. And Woller’s new record, Repetitions, fits those times. I’ve tried it at every one of those hours, and sometimes in some of the spaces in between.

It’s become something of a soundtrack in my house, and for my house.

But how do you “review” such albums, and who cares about reviews? And how do you publish interviews of such artists, because again, largely, who cares. Information gets shared. People scroll. If they can’t hold it — and if someone else isn’t yelling it at them also — they move on almost instantly.

I reached out to Graeme directly, because I wanted to know more about his album, and its construction. I asked for the motivation and influences, and anything he wished to share about the ‘story’ of the album’s creation. I told him I’d share his thoughts in a kind of hybrid interview/review - something I was imagining, but couldn’t quite know how it would go until I got to it. So, um, here goes…

For the purposes of this - I’ll also share the Spotify link, in case that’s how you listen to music over Bandcamp. It would be nice if you bought it — for the reasons outlined above — but not everyone does that anymore. And listening is the key. So if you want to try before you buy and and/or you don’t use Bandcamp, here’s the album again:

You’ll hear birdsong (Korimako) guiding you through. You’ll hear a John Carpenter-esque thrum of bass, or a Mike Oldfield (Tubular Bells-like) recurring motif to open (River Bend) that places you in the moment and drives the album (subtly) forward. You’ll hear gentle, guiding synth pads and sine waves and comedown, post-rave chill music (The Trance). You’ll hear delightful, dark squalls of bass subs in and around the nurture of soft keys (Contact) and the ‘nature’ of a crepuscular hum is woven all through this album.

If you aren’t into ambient music at all, you’ll find some remnants of late 90s/early 00s trance and chill and dub and sometimes all are fused together (Spin). But to me this is an ambient record for the ages. Something that moves with you.

Anyway, enough from me. I’ve been captivated by this record for a month or two. Or more. Let’s hear directly from the creator of the record and some of his motivations….I love that Graeme so candidly spoke about the depression that plagues him, and how he turned that into one of the motivations for the music, or the music was channelled through that.

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So, trigger warning: Chat about depression below.

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Now, everything in bold is written by the musician Graeme Woller in explanation of his new album. Take it away Graeme:

Repetitions started off in a state of couch-bound depression. I’ve always suffered from it on and off over the years and it’s a fucking pain in the arse, but it seems to be really common amongst us “arty” folk so I feel like I’m in pretty good company.

People don’t talk about it enough though, I certainly didn’t, but if John Kirwan was good for anything I’d say it was nice to see a “tough guy” talking about mental health when it affects so many of us. These days I can tell it’s coming a bit because everything goes weird around the edges and it’s like my head is in slow motion. That and I start enjoying the couch a little more.

That’s pretty much where I was mid-2023. Enjoying the couch a bit too much.

In the middle of some horizontal YouTube self-medication I came across some docos on Philip Glass’ stuff and, by extension, Steve Reich, Terry Reilly, and La Monte Young. I’d been introduced to Glass’ 1982 album Glassworks a bunch of years ago and I really loved “Floe” in particular at the time. It’s meditatively bonkers in the way it builds through its repetitions. Then it fucks off to basically nothing, builds back, and on and on. It all sounds so chaotic but it’s absolutely not. It’s all composed, all repetitions. All important.

By the time YouTube threw Glass back at me I hadn’t listened to it for years, so it was nice to have it pop back into my consciousness at a time when my mind was pretty repetitively odd.

I watched a bunch of clips and performances of all these classically trained dudes who were breaking this new ground in art music back in the 60s and 70s and it just started sparking off some neurons.

Things like Reich’s “Clapping Music” and Glass’ “Opening” just rhythmically blew my mind. It’s not like I didn’t have a bit of an idea about polyrhythms and stuff, I’m a big fan of Tool, and Juliet, my wife, is an accomplished composer, it’s just that I’d never HEARD them as such a hugely important part of a composition before I dug into the minimalist peeps’ stuff.

The same is true of Terry Reilly’s “In C”, it’s just fascinatingly engaging! You can hear a bit of that influence coming through in “Clockwork” (the name gives it away a bit), “Contact”, and “Djemba”. All those overlapping ideas spinning away into the universe and then coming back together before buggering off again. I wanted to be on the couch still, but it also made me feel like I wanted to go into the music room, fire up the computer, and tinker.

So, that’s what I did. I just started with simple little motifs of two, three, or four notes, and looped them over and over for ten minutes or more. Layering them on top of each other but stretched out, or timed oddly like a 8 and a ¼ beat phrase that loops over a 13 and ¾ beat phrase, so it would take them a long time to come around to syncing up again.

That’s where tracks like “Contact” & “Korimako” came from. Simple parts that interlink at times but most of the time they’re out of sync with everything else. A little like record companies. Most days for weeks, when there wasn’t something absolutely pressing to do, I’d sit down in the morning after the kids’ lunches were made and they went off to school and I’d put little phrases together. Overlapping them and recombining them, and creating textures from the confusion that sort of thing makes.

The first thing I built up was an orchestral sounding thing, which might, maybe, perhaps, one day see the light of day some time in the future, but as I keep going I found myself gravitating towards REALLY simple synth sounds. Basic sine waves usually. They worked heaps better. Most of the album is just that. Sine waves and the occasional square wave with a bit of filtering, and a smattering of FX, a little piano on “Clockwork”, but really mostly just those simple waveforms playing simple little beepy boopy melodies.

I actually toyed with calling the album “Beep Boops” instead of Repetitions because that’s how I referred to the tracks when I was working on them. Beep Boops. That’s what they sound like to me. Maybe I missed a trick there, because it’s a really cute name!

Anyway, I just loved the way sine waves were creating this vibe that had so much space around it. There’s basically no extra frequency content with a single sine wave, so it doesn’t take up much room in a composition, and I found that was a god-send when you’re putting complex rhythms together. Less fighting in the mix, unless you want fighting, and often really pure sounding. Even the little stabs and percussive background noise loops in “The Trance” are made the same way. Simple waves. For those I’d just grab the reverb tales from random bits of what I already had in the track and reversed them, or distorted them, or glitched them up (cut and paste styles) and then looped them into repeating textures. They end up sounding like voices and breaths and found sounds, but they’re nothing like that at all.

The track names would always come later once the vibe of each track had come together. “Korimako” was definitely like that, same with “Contact”. “Korimako” had these little synth pings that were put through a manipulated tape delay that makes the pitch go bonkers and they ended up coming out sounding like Bell Birds, or Korimako in Te Reo. There were extra bass things that I had going on and a lot of other unnecessary stuff so I cut all that and it left this little forest scene that I added recordings of Korimako to. It’s just so atmospheric!

The other thing that was really obvious as I progressed along the path was almost no desire to add drums. A couple of tracks have them in there, but I didn’t feel like they needed some sort of rhythmic prop-up, it just felt like, compositionally, it was the right move. Where I did use them it never felt right to just slam them in like traditional electronic music so, more often than not, they’re not what I’d consider a particularly “normal” use of percussion.

It’s not track after track of four on the floor kicks, snares on 2 and 4, trap hats, and the Amen Break skittering it up until the breakdown. I just felt it needed to be simple synths, and not beat driven. I think whatever groove there is comes straight from the interplay of the beeps and the boops. The only exception to that is the last track “Spin”, but even that track is almost a pastiche of dance music style drums. I’m not “hip”, and I’m nowhere near “with it”, and none of this stuff sounds “modern”, but I hope that by approaching it in my own weird way it’s ended up telling its own story. A little down-beat, a little uplifting, a little outside space and time, and a little bit inside it too.

In the long run the album ended up as a sort of compositional meditation with sound and I really think it helped keep me sane. It felt like I could myopically focus for a few hours and then carry on with the rest of the day a bit better and then do it again the next day. Much like the music itself. Repetitions. Some of the feedback so far has been similar. An album that helps to align the brainwaves. I just hope people really get some joy out of it in one way or another.

I’ve got this idea to do it all again, not the depression bit, but the beep boops, and get my mates to write and record vocal parts based on the vibe that’s going on. Really atmospheric stuff. I’m primarily a singer/songwriter but I don’t want to do that with this stuff, I can do that any other time. I’m just super-lucky to have some really talented songwriters in my most-loved-mates circle who will be able to do a fucking epic job of that side of things so I’m pretty keen on getting that off the ground. Plus I have [my band] the Sex Dad stuff keeping my angry & bonkers side ticking over nicely. The beep boops are just stories without words, and I can’t wait to hear what a story with another story on top of it will sound like! I think it’ll be magical!

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Who says musicians can’t be articulate when discussing their music eh? Who needs stupid old outmoded music journalists? Well, if we can help to share stories, that’s us also helping to tell stories.

Repetitions hit me like a ton of bricks when I first heard it, and it continues to move me into many mornings and through several days. After listening to it a lot, I threw down my money on Bandcamp this morning, so Mr. Woller gets the full amount that Bandcamp can pass on. It’s small. A wee gesture. Nothing special. But it’s a help perhaps, and it’s a recognition in some small way of the value I’ve felt from this music; of wanting to give something back in the direction. Just as some people do when they pay a subscription to me here at Substack for my writing. They don’t have to. They can still access most of the writing for free but it sure warms the heart, as well as helping to keep the actual heat(er) on when someone donates. So that’s the final plug for you to do the same — and buy Graeme’s album on Bandcamp.

But, I’ve given you the Spotify link/embed and some YouTube clips for reference too, or maybe that’s your preference for music-listening. I love those mediums also.

But my main thing was getting Graeme to tell his story around the inspiration for creation.

So, happy Bandcamp Friday for those that celebrate.

And happy (hopefully) Repetitions Discovery Day if this is your first time hearing about (and hearing) this ambient album. And maybe it’s your first time with this type of music, or maybe it’s a return to this space for you.

I’d love to know what you think.

But, of course, it’s Friday, so you’re getting something totally different too. This week’s playlist is very New Order/Joy Division/Gary Numan-era/s focussed. So you’ll hear a load of synth stuff in a different but complimentary way to Repetitions. I didn’t even plan that, but may this week’s A Little Something For The Weeekend playlist could be what you play first, then Repetitions is a nice comedown after, or maybe you give Repetitions a go (or two or three…) and then come (back?) to the playlist to lif you back up.

My thanks to Graeme for allowing me to share his words and music.

My thanks to you for reading and listening.

Happy weekend all.