“Music for me is the language that I learned to speak” : Best Fit meets Doldrums

- Photo Credit – Aaron Stern

It’s a sleepy Airick Woodhead that greets us at the Shacklewell Arms, having just been disturbed from slumber to come and partake in our interview. We’ve been keeping a close and keen eye on Doldrums ever since featuring him on the Oh! Canada 10 compilation back in 2010, and with the news that his debut full length is now finally ready to see the light of day, we’re intrigued to catch up with the Montreal musician to find out about the path that led to the record’s creation.

“We spent yesterday in the countryside recording, which was nice,” Woodhead muses in his sleepy state, “in a small town called Chatham in Kent. It’s beautiful – the studio was right beside a riding instructor facility so there were horses heads at the window as we were making music.” Aside from plenty of recording, a year of heavy touring and much creation would be a good way to sum up Doldrums’ 2012, it would seem. An acclaimed performance at The Great Escape was among the first of the year’s shows, with an exceptional show at Iceland Airwaves enchanting the crowd towards the year’s end.

And now, Woodhead and band have arrived in London fresh from wrapping up a tour with Purity Ring which took Doldrums far and wide, across Europe and then back again. “It’s always nice to come over here and have people actually give you some respect at shows,” he says. “Although i’m not actually referring to the UK! I’m referring to Europe – but the UK is awesome because people have so much energy and excitement about music. People love bands so much here and a lot of kids come out too, which is nice.”

It would seem that Amsterdam’s heady charms had the greatest impact on the artist during this most recent tour, evident in the impish grin that creeps over Woodhead’s face when asked to name a highlight. “It was great, we were on mushrooms, playing the biggest show of the tour in front of a thousand people… The Amsterdam vibe is that everyone goes there bringing energy, not expecting the band to bring everything and I think that’s the best kind of crowd there is. You’ve got people on stage dancing, you’ve got us jamming, it feels like something’s really happening.”

A solo project which incorporates the collaborative input of like minded individuals would probably be the best way to describe the work of Doldrums, in the live arena at least.”Even though Doldrums is my thing, my umbrella that I carry around, it’s always been more of a conversation between me and whichever musicians I’m playing with,” Woodhead explains. “I’ve played solo tours, but my focus is always on making the band as good as possible, and using the players for what they’re good at.”

“Kyle, who’s playing with me tonight and also opening the show as Flow Child – we moved into this grungy DIY venue, we were living in the jam rooms and throwing parties in the main space – creating a lot of music by being in an informal situation where it was so casual that you could do whatever you wanted. There was a lot of improvising, a lot of performance stuff. A lot of our music is two sided because it’s about performance art and things beyond songwriting, and then it’s also about experimental music. Together, they form something that really interests me whereas each one on its own, I find less engaging.”

Is performance a natural part of Woodhead’s character then, or has it been a struggle to find the confidence to get up on stage and perform his tracks to attentive, potentially critical listeners? ”So difficult. Especially playing solo. But I guess I’ve done it a lot by now, so it’s pretty natural. It’s a strange feeling, it’s such a mixture of pushing yourself to do something you like while not disacknowledging the other people there.”

With Lesser Evil, the much anticipated debut album due to appear in February, Woodhead is aware that people’s expectations are high. ”I’m trying to not think about it too much,” he states protractedly, “putting anything out always makes me self conscious. And the fact that I continue to do it fills me with this weird sense of catharsis, that’s almost masochistic. But I was recording some new stuff with this new band yesterday, so I’m always just working. That’s how I keep going.”

For those who take a vested interest in the movements of Doldrums, it’s fairly common knowledge that Woodhead is a man that has a multitude of projects on the go at any one time. But how did it all start for Woodhead and Doldrums, what was the first music that this mind created? “I think it was a song about masturbating,” he replies wryly. “Me and my brother wrote it. The song was called ‘Scrubbing the Baby’. We had this crew of people at a folk festival – my parents are folk musicians so I used to travel around with them – and one of the most formative nights of what I’d later seek out in my life was when we met these two lesbians named Joe and Bob, this guy with hair down to his knees named Jesus, me and Daniel were Brother One and Brother Two and there was Sarla, who we called SARSla, as it was during the whole SARS thing. And there was Cough Syrup, he was just drinking cough syrup all the time – we were all like 12 years old, but we stayed up all night playing songs and fucking around with this weird hippy crew of kids. So yeah, that’s when I wrote my first song.”

“I have so much respect for people who don’t have any background in a discipline in which they find themselves, I think it shows a huge amount of passion towards that thing,” Woodhead reflects when questioned about growing up in a musical environment, one which he would eventually turn into a career. “Music for me is the language that I learned to speak, so it feels natural for me to express myself with it.” So his parents were supportive of a move into music then? ”Yeah, my Mom told me I could be anything I wanted to be except for a potter, which is what she is. So I became a musician like my Dad instead, the next worst financial choice I could’ve made.”

Visuals have always come across as important to the Doldrums aesthetic, and the artist’s latest video, (created by Emily Kai Bock, also responsible for directing Grimes’ ‘Oblivion’) is further testament to this idea. “She did the last Grizzly Bear video too,” Woodhead comments of Bock’s work. “Very similar to the way me and my friends work musically, she’s able to match high production values with very little, just a lot of raw inspiration and ideas – she can use the same tools as someone else, regardless of budget, and make something really special. I think it’s interesting because the whole playing field has been levelled, and the players emerging don’t have to climb their way to the top over all of this bogus infrastructure.”

After what seems to have been a pretty exciting year, travelling the world and working with some of Canada’s finest artistic minds, what’s stood out as a particular highlight? ”The top moment of the year for me would be going to Burning Man, which I didn’t expect to be doing but I went down with my friend and spent four days in this fucked up Utopian desert society. And when you realise that there’s a 70,000 strong city being built by acid heads and you’re there all of a sudden, nothing really beats that. The worst time was probably a few days after that when I had to readjust to society! I refused to buy anything for a long time after that. I had this real hard streak of self righteous hidden punk in me after that, I was like ‘Fuck Society!’”

And while we’re on the topic of reflection, Woodhead dreams up a few recommendations of sounds to listen out for in 2013. “Flow Child!” he states animatedly. “I guess I could also throw in Majical Cloudz as well, he’s great. He’s another one of our guys on the block!”

And one final thing we want to clear up – in a recent interview, Woodhead was reported as having constructed a kind of sci-fi narrative for Lesser Evil… “Are you talking about the Pitchfork article?” he interjects. And yes, we are. “Well that came from an hour long conversation I had with Pitchfork, who forgot to record it and scraped something together that didn’t make any sense. I’m always working on different projects and that project is completely isolated from Doldrums or the album, and even though all my art is made in the same world, one’s a sci-fi story, one’s a music album. That wasn’t clear in that interview at all and every fucking person i’ve talked to since has asked me, ‘So what’s up with the concept album, bro?!’” Case cleared up and closed then.

Lesser Evil will be released through Souterrain Transmissions on 24 February 2013.