Messengers of music
Kiwi band Yumi Zouma make music together, despite rarely being in the same place, writes Grant Smithies.
It’s a very peculiar problem for a band to have, right? To all find themselves in the same room together, you know… making music.
‘‘We didn’t know what to do at first,’’ admits Charlie Ryder, whose voice is as soft and warm as a freshly stroked kitten.
‘‘When we were making (new album) Willowbank, we all tried to work in the same studio together for the first time in ages, and it sucked! We were, like ‘should we all move into separate rooms and try to make songs that way instead?’’’
Ryder’s standing outside the American Embassy in Auckland with the rest of the band Yumi Zouma, waiting to pick up emergency work visas. They fly to London in about four hours to kick off their latest overseas tour.
After enthusiastic endorsement from Lorde and a host of influential British and American music sites, the former Christchurch band is now far bigger overseas than here at home. They regularly pull capacity crowds in Brooklyn, San Francisco, Tokyo or London while 100 locals shambled along to see them play a few weeks back at Golden Dawn on Auckland’s Ponsonby Rd.
But between tours, they barely see each other, even during recording sessions. Until very recently, Aotearoa’s foremost dream-pop quartet made most of their recordings while some members were, quite literally, dreaming.
‘‘That’s true. Most of our early songs were made by sending audio files over Facebook Messenger or Dropbox, then editing each other’s work while they were miles away, in a different country and time zone, sound asleep.’’
They had no other option. Singer Christie Simpson still lives in Christchurch. Sam Perry is a musical nomad, drifting between Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland. Ryder spent ages attending university in Paris, then bailed to London. And Josh Burgess lives in New York, where he works on collaborative Flying Nun releases for highly regarded US indie label, Captured Tracks. All play multiple instruments, and have a hand in the production and mixing, too.
‘‘On our first two EPs, Josh or I would write something, upload it to the internet, then work on it while the other one was asleep. It worked surprisingly well. It’s easy to present something back to someone after you’ve already spent hours and hours getting it to sound really good while they’re blissfully unconscious. They don’t have to listen to all your failed ideas and crappy mistakes along the way. You just present them with a finished file when they wake up, and they’re, like – Yeah! That sounds great!’’
Most of the band, alongside previous singer Kim Pflaum, used to flat together in Christchurch. They hung out, got drunk, went to uni lectures, made music together in various combinations in earlier bands: psychedelic pop band Zen Mantra, folk-pop act Sleepy Age, raucous punk outfit Bang! Bang! Eche!
I once saw the latter band play at the APRA Silver Scrolls in Christchurch, back when they were so young and fresh-faced you almost expected them to be wearing their school uniforms.
They made a tremendous din as they destroyed some other poor songwriter’s tender ballad, turning their guitar amps up to 11, jacking up the tempo and blasting the song into oblivion. It sounded like The Ramones on too much speed.
And yet here they are, a few years later: Aotearoa’s ‘‘Next Big Thing’’ pop band, making a name for themselves offshore with music so gentle, so calm, so smoothed out and toned down, it wouldn’t frighten even the most skittish of horses.
How did they go from loud and hectic to hushed and dreamy?
‘‘It’s been a gradual progression, I guess. For some reason our various bands got steadily more mellow. Maybe we just got a bit older and calmer about life over time.’’
Whatever the reason for the change, it worked. Yumi Zouma snagged a contract with highlyregarded New York indie label, Cascine Records, with their very first long-distance pop song.
‘‘One night Josh sent me some music he’d made in New York. I changed it a bit, then got our first singer Kim to sing on it, because we were dating at the time and she was sitting right next to me. Then I started a Yumi Zouma email account, found a random online image that seemed to go with the song and emailed it off to this label Josh and I both liked.’’
That song was A Long Walk Home for Parted Lovers, recorded at the end of 2013.
Jeff Bratton, the head honcho from Cascine, emailed back overnight, saying he wanted to release it immediately.
‘‘I lied and told him we had heaps more songs, and we signed a deal the very next day. But we had no other songs! We had a very manic few months, recording as much as we could. Then we started to get all these offers to tour and release things on other labels. It was a crazy and stressful six months, without very much sleeping going on.’’
Life has barely slowed down since. Yumi Zouma scored a support slot with Australian musician Chet Faker, a far-flung bedroom-recording band convening to play their first big gig in front of several thousand Aussies in Melbourne.