Reykjavík Grapevine - nov. 2021, Side 10

10 The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 11— 2021
the moment and the environment, you have
a really great audio memory of what's just
happened, and immediately it becomes very
abstract. You can really work with that. It
was a great process. But then quite far into
that process, the pandemic started, and I
was kind of severed from my timeline to
make this orchestral piece."
Esja, the giantess
From there, it was back to the UK, to try and
piece together what he had recorded into
something more coherent.
“What did anyone gain out of the Iraq
war? Massive refugees, the Taliban,
ISIS. None of that's gone away."
‘The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure
The Stream Flows’ releases digitally on
November 12th, and you can pre-order it
here: ffm.to/da_tntftmpts or order a
physical copy at shop.grapevine.is
"I went back to London, then I went back to
the countryside, down by the sea, and left
it for about eight months,” he says. “Then
I thought, 'I really want to articulate this
somehow.' All I had was rehearsal record-
ings of the orchestral stuff so it wasn't
a huge amount of use, but I was able to
salvage some of it. A lot of the melodic
ideas I came up with I played around with
in this room. The lyrical ideas, for exam-
ple in a song like “Royal Morning Blue,”
are literally playing and then rain turning
into snow, it's as simple as that. Esja is very
much my confidante. I imagine a giantess
laying on its side. So 'the road was its snow',
It's a nice process. Most importantly, it all
started in here. Everything on the record
started here. The orchestral bit follows the
outline of Esja.”
The Amish, trains and capi-
talism
One of the things that makes a conversation
with Damon fun is the almost stream-of-
consciousness way he has of telling a story;
one subject sort of bleeds into the next,
sometimes unexpectedly, but it’s never not
entertaining.
When discussing the Quakers, I bring up
that I was born in Pennsylvania, a state rich
in Quaker heritage. Damon knows Pennsyl-
vania because of the Amish, though, and
proceeds to describe a train journey he took
from Boston to Chicago.
“It was amazing really, for two reasons,”
he says. “Firstly, I was suddenly intro-
duced, from a nice perspective, to the city
of Albany. That's a whole different kind of
America, isn't it? All the Amish out at the
train station with their horse-drawn-carts.
In that context they'd seem like straddling
two realities. Secondly, the guard who was
running the night cabins happened to be
a massive Gorillaz fan and lost it when
he came to my little cabin, and ended up
letting me go and smoke weed in the mail
car with the doors opened up in the middle
of the night. So I'm just sitting on the side,
with my legs dangling down, smoking
weed and it was a really bright moon, going
through the forest. That's sort of the thing
about America, all those expanses that you
see in movies, I felt like I was in that for a
moment."
This leads to: "It's a real shame we don't
have trains here. You could really sort so
much stuff out here just by getting a train,
an electric train that's run by geothermal
energy." Like most Icelanders, the lack of
trains means Damon gets around primarily
by car, which is a new experience for him.
Expressing the freedom that having a car
brings, he admits that he now rides his
bike less and feels guilty about it. When
I point out how much emphasis is placed
on our individual choices while polluting
corporations are let off the hook, he says,
"That's capitalism for you. Where did all
that start? I guess it's not fair to blame
America, because the Victorians were arch-
capitalists, weren't they?"
Our interview is cut short by Einar. There
are more reporters coming that day, and
one is on his way at the moment. With that,
we say our goodbyes, and I head out into the
wind and rain—a feature that, while usually
unpleasant, somehow now has a certain
charm after an hour spent with an artist so
deeply in love with this country.
I mean, once you abstract that, it can mean
anything, which is what songwriting's all
about, really."
This living room we’re chatting in is, it
turns out, the key to understanding the
entire process of creating the album.
"You get a very good sense of how it was
made being in this room,” he says. “I had
these fragments of words and melodies
that had come in situ here. So I just turned
them into something that felt coherent. For
example, the song “Particles,” that came out
of flying here and being put next to a very
chatty old lady. At first I was like ‘oh god,
she's going to talk to me the whole of the
flight.’ Which is my idea of hell, because at
some point they're going to ask me what I
do, and then I just hate that. I hate the jour-
ney of that conversation because it's not
something that you can put simply into a
conversation. If they don't know who you
are it requires a detailed explanation.
“But she was fantastic, she turned out
to be a rabbi from Winnipeg who lived in
Montreal. We started talking about life on
an atomic scale, and how there are certain
particles in the universe that will find you,
and you cannot avoid them. That was some-
thing I really wanted to articulate.”
After arriving again in Iceland, the inspi-
ration continued, sometimes in the most
unlikely ways.
“There were all these things I'd accumu-
lated while being here, and they became the
bedrock of how I wrote the album,” he says.
“Like the song ‘Daft Wader’ was from me
and my friends one summer night, at low
tide like this. It looked possible to get [to
the small island offshore], we were drink-
ing, and then Einar Snorrasson, who's a
break dancer of some repute, he decided he
wanted to do some naked break dancing. So
he started off, and I joined him, and some
other people got involved, and we had this
big Viking break dancing. Then we decided
to go down to the island. That was the start
of ‘Daft Wader’, but it ended up in Iran.