Yumi Zouma
Musical nomads making big tracks around the Earth
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 highly-regarded 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.
Then Lorde chose them to open her 2014 homecoming stadium tour in New Zealand.
‘‘It was very intimidating. We’d gone from playing in little bands in Christchurch in front of 50 people to opening for Lorde at Vector Arena, with a crowd of 12,000 screaming fans! It’s been a real baptism of fire.’’
Before the new record, there have been two EP releases, and a debut album, Yoncalla, recorded at Burgess’ New York apartment, came out in May last year.
Between recording sessions, the band has ‘‘been touring on and off for four years straight,’’ says Ryder, playing support for cult acts, including Swedish indie duo Air France and British producer/DJ Jamie xx.
‘‘We must have crossed the world 10 times, I think, and the fact that we’re signed to an American label has helped get us onto the bill at some of the bigger festivals in Europe. This time around, we’ll also be touring and recording in Asia, then back to New Zealand in December, then off to play in Brazil around January.’’
Global interest looks certain to ramp up even further with the release of second album, Willowbank. While the basic building blocks of the tunes remain relatively unchanged – drowsy dance beats, wistful melodies, reverbheavy guitar, whispery vocals – the songs have been mixed by an outsider for the first time: Jake Aron, who has previously worked with Solange Knowles, Yeasayer, Grizzly Bear and Beth Orton, and made the songs ‘‘a lot more hi-fi’’, reckons Ryder.
Their first offering recorded as a band here in New Zealand, Willowbank was strapped together amid the rubble in the Christchurch CBD around Christmas time last year, and you cannot tell that it was a hard album to make.
After the initial weirdness of having to build their songs together in the same room, the band began to relish responding to one another’s musical ideas face-to-face, in real time.
The songs are airy, intimate, softfocused and pretty; they’re light and poppy as a box of balloons. ‘‘Serene disco’’ is how UK newspaper The Guardian put it, and Ryder says he’ll take it.
‘‘I’m OK with that. There’s certainly a dreamy melancholy to some of the songs. We never purposely tried to come up with that sound, but all of us are songwriters, and this is just what started happening when we all began playing together.’’
If UK mope-merchants The xx would cheer up a little more, they might sound this good. It’s hazy, sundappled electro-pop with a sweetness to it that challenges your cynicism.
‘‘But we thought this was our darkest record yet!’’ wails Ryder. ‘‘Christie always wanted to write these tragic sad songs about people dying and so on, because she hates the idea that people would find us, I don’t know… too cute. But she’s a very relaxed singer, and Sam’s very particular about our melodies, so all the hooks in the songs are very clean and smooth and easy to listen to. Even so, Willowbank is the album where we really tried to break out of our very chill, very sweet mould. Perhaps we need to try even harder. On our next album, we might surprise everyone and just do huge distorted guitar drones for an hour or so …’’