Orla Conway| Music Editor
Ahead of their set at Meeting House Square as part of the Hard Working Class Heroes festival, Aaron Smyth (vocals) and Phil Costello (guitar) of VANN MUSIC had a chat about their journey thus far and their writing process. After meeting through the internet, the Irish foursome set out together and they’ve been busy playing their synth-pop to crowds across the country for nearly two years.
Their single Tina really took things to another level, getting plenty of attention and opening them up to a whole new audience. “Tina was one of the first songs we put together as a band and I think we always thought it was special.” Aaron explains, “We really wanted to put it on ‘Electro Shock Dreams’ which is our first EP, but in the end we ran out of time [and] we also felt it wouldn’t really fit on the EP with the other songs. We made a decision to leave it off and to maybe put it on another EP or just release it as a single. Then just how everything went we just decided to put it out.”
With one EP and Tina under their belts, VANN MUSIC are far from slowing down, with an EP coming out in February next year, for which there’s already 25 songs written, they promise that the new songs have something new, without swaying too far away from the sound that has gotten them here, Phil elaborates: “It’s still VANN MUSIC but we’ve gone at it with a different vision than we did with the last EP. We’ve put more of a groove in to the music .” Aaron continues by saying that they’ve “slowed it down a bit, the other stuff was very french-house, it’s bangin’. And we love doing that,it was built for festivals really. When me and Phil were working on tunes, the first batch for the band it was always “We’re going to be playing festivals,” and that’s the kind of atmosphere that their music captures. Aaron goes on, “This [next EP] has more groove. But I think as a band you develop, and your other influences start to bleed through. Otherwise you don’t really progress as writers or band.” With “a lot more guitar going into this EP. There’s a lot of synth obviously but we’re putting a lot more guitar.” adds Phil.
Their sound is a bit different to other things around at the moment, when asked if they ever set out to sound a certain way, they explain how it just happened: “It just kind of falls out. There’s a song that me and Phil started writing called ‘Neon’, [I don’t know if it will make the cut but] we were having a pretty serious conversation about a couple of things that had been going on, and we sat down to work on something else and then within 45 minutes we had a start, middle and end. We’ve found that the songs that we put a lot of time into, that we’re trying to make work – they’re the ones that fall by the wayside and it’s the other ones that just naturally happen in the moment, that just come together, they’re just leading the race for the record.” Phil agrees and says that “It’s all about excitement. It is. If Aaron started playing something and it was boring I’d be like “fuck that” and we’d move on. And vice-versa. Aaron will play something or I’ll play something and the ears perk and it’s like “this will sound good there”…[…] it’s like building blocks, we’ll add something, it just grows until we’ve got like 3 or 4 or 5 or 10 minutes of something that we’re like “yeah, let’s knuckle down on this one”.It just comes together.” Aaron then points out “And then we don’t bother going back to the other one that we spent six months on.” Which Phil agrees with “Actually that’s what happens a lot of the time! We’ll go in with a task like “Let’s finish song A” and we’ll come out with like 2 songs that have nothing to do with it. It’s a good process, it makes it fun.”
With regards to the writing process, everyone in the band contributes, as Aaron clarifies, “We all write. Music comes first all the time. With this EP, everyone is bringing songs to the table and we’re getting through them one by one.” Phil continues that “9 times out of 10, one person has an idea whether it’s a synth line, a guitar line or a bass, whatever and then that usually incites someone else in the band and then… it comes together and gets developed.” VANN MUSIC do have a pretty signature sound already and even if everything happens pretty naturally, Phil points out that there are sounds that they’re aware they use more than once, “we have one or two particular synth sounds that we’re really fond of. I’d go as far as saying we love them. And we try to implement those into whatever we’re doing because it’s part of us since day one. “
For the up and coming music, Aaron explains that there is a range of themes but it’s mainly to do with experiences that the band have had whilst knowing each other “ I think the theme that’s running through the record at the moment is… it seems like a series of speech in that each song tells a personal story of something. So it’s kind of like, it’s a collection of incidences or situations over the last while. Each person or each song has a story to tell about a certain point in time. That’s the theme that’s running through most of the songs when they come together. […] As a band we’ve kind of lived through some of those songs together, even in two years. So that’s what I think it’s more of a band record. It’s more of a VANN MUSIC record than anything else because everyone can take from the experience and can take from the history of what’s happened. “
VANN MUSIC have been building up a steady following in the last two years and this summer they had a decent festival run and they mention that Electric Picnic was a highlight, “Picnic was amazing, we got a really big crowd in the tent. It was mind blowing. It was great, the crowd worked with us, they were really receptive to the new songs.”
They also mention that at Electric Picnic, meeting fans afterwards it was the new songs that people were talking about. As far as new music goes, their latest video for ‘Gold & Silver’ was released at the start of October, and it’s pretty different from their previous videos in that the band feature in it and there isn’t a storyline. This was a very conscious decision explains Phil, “It’s a performance. it was to get across who we are as a band. Because one thing we found was that people who liked ‘Tina’ didn’t know anything about the band. They didn’t even really know the band name We thought we’d make it to put a face to the band. I think most bands go through that, they go “Right, people need to know who we are,” and what the band is about and stuff… It adds a character.” Aaron continues in saying that the video shows who they are in rehearsals, “We just don’t stand around watching each other play. It’s a representation of the energy that we have when we’re in a room or n a stage. And like Phil said, we put two videos out and there’s a story behind it but no one knows the band behind the stories. So we just thought “Let’s just do a video where we’re doing our thing”…And there’s lots of flashy lights… we brought the festival to the video”. The video definitely shows the band as they are and you can check it out on their YouTube page as well as their previous two. Here at Utzine, we suggest that you check out these videos and get to know VANN MUSIC sooner rather than later, because it looks like they’re on to big things.
