The most poignant feeling I get from this album is a sense of longing-not necessarily a specific longing targeted at one person, but rather for all sorts of different things. It’s interesting, it almost feels like all of it was never really supposed to be part of the same thing, but for all the reasons that we’ve described-and because a lot of the content on the album-is kind of why we called it Untogether.īEUSMAN: Something your albums and your songs are so good at doing is creating a very specific, enclosed emotional world. Then, fast-forward a couple of months and we have this album that we just put together. I’d work on something and arrange things and make synth parts and stuff, and then Raph would come in a couple of nights later and do something, and we would exchange ideas that way, through the songs. After that ensued this long process of sending stuff back and forth and also spending long periods at night working separately. There were a lot of differences, but the main one was that we did this one a lot more broken and separately, and was more concise and done at once.īEUSMAN: How did the “recording separately” work?ĬOWAN: We met up in Vancouver for, like, a month, and we recorded a couple of songs. It resulted in this eerie, through-composed, very delicate sounding album. What originally started out as a whole song, maybe we only used a little bit of a chorus bit from, and terms of a vocal melody from another song, with some chords from a different song, all pieced together. As we were going through different things in our life, they felt a lot more broken. But, with this recording process, the songs transformed a lot. There were a lot of lovey-dovey kind of songs, and they were pretty and dreamy and stuff like that, and they really stayed that way. The very process of collaboration became something done apart, resulting in a strangely intimate sense of alienation that shapes and structures each song.ĬALLIE BEUSMAN: I’d like to speak generally about the process of recording the album and how it differed from your first album, Blooming Summer.ĪGOR COWAN: The main difference, really, is the last album we recorded together in a shorter amount of time, and the songs were composed as whole units. Written after Raphaelle and Agor had spent a year apart, Untogether involved a unique arrangement: although they lived together while creating the album, they both worked solitarily they would alternate nights, during which they’d write from 10 pm to 5 am alone. Untogether, the duo’s somber follow-up LP, is the result of one such dark, introspective period.
When discussing her tendency to dwell in melancholy while writing songs, for instance, she says, “I’m a sensitive person,” and laughs immediately afterwards, because she realizes the truth of the statement doesn’t stop it from sounding trite.
The dynamics of Blue Hawaii become apparent within the first few minutes of our conversation, during which Cowan is insouciant and amused and Standell-Preston is charmingly unfiltered. Their (unofficial) first album, Blooming Summer, was recorded after the couple returned from traveling together in Central America, and each of its eight songs about love and yearning radiates tropical warmth.
The ethereal electronic duo from Montreal is comprised of Raphaelle Standell-Preston, who is also the frontwoman of the much-lauded dream-pop group BRAIDS, and Alex “Agor” Cowan, a former philosophy student-cum-producer-cum-multi-instrumentalist. To the casual observer, it might seem that Blue Hawaii was spawned from some sort of alt-utopia.