Hjalti Interview and Album Release

It’s here. It’s finally landed. The third Hjalti album, If Once We Lose This Light, is finally available to the general public. We’ve been teasing you about it long enough! Go take a look, and head over to Bandcamp to stream the full album, and purchase it on CD and a variety of digital formats, including FLAC and high-quality MP3.

If you’d prefer to buy in person, come out to the Lo-Fi Gallery tonight, where Hjalti and Miniature Airlines will be bookending a showcase of our pals on Pleasureboat Records tonight. It’ll be the first time the album is available, but there’s an official release party coming up later this month. Stay tuned!

Since the new Hjalti album is finally available, we felt it was about time to give you a little bit of insight into the album from the man himself. We sent him a few questions while working out the final release details, and he sent back some great responses that give you a sense of the personality and history behind this unique release. Dive into the interview after the jump…

d.iscontent: How did you get your start making music, and how did the Hjalti project come about?

hjalti: Since I can remember I was always listening to music. However I started playing music in the 4th grade on the Alto Sax and was part of my Jr. High marching band. I thoroughly disliked marching band, and other than when we played Mozart or Bach (which didn’t have much to do for the alto sax) I was not too fond of Orchestra. My neighbor and I tried to start a noisy punk band around that time which we called Sodomized Woodchucks. We even recorded a song on my brother’s old boom box. It was horrible.

But my love for actual music composition came from a High school class I took. Not only did I learn the circle of fifths and all that classical stuff, it was where I first encountered sequencing programs (Cakewalk I believe). Later, when my friend Danny wanted to start writing industrial music, I would go over to his house every day and just fuck around with synths, MIDI, sequencers, and Cubase. I then started my proto-industrial project, Medikal Klinik 5150 (I only used Windows native sounds and a simple tracker, it was horrendous!).

After a few years and a shift of music taste I moved on to a new project, more IDM and glitch-inspired, called TimmyB (what can I say I’m creative) which is the true Genesis of hjalti. Most of the TimmyB songs, with a bit of polish, could have fit onto the first hjalti album. Hjalti began after I moved to Seattle and was ready to take the whole music thing more seriously. The rest of my projects had some sort of stupid gimmick and I wanted a clean break from all of that and thus hjalti came about.

d: Your third album, “If Once We Lose This Light”, will be released soon. While you’re working with similar elements, it sounds like you’ve been using a different approach for composition. Was this something you set out to do, or did it develop as you worked on the material?

h: Both the process I used for this album and the way this album sounds are part of a long evolution my music has been going through over the last few years (you can really hear this evolution in the three remixes I did for Miniature Airlines). At the most basic level I switched from composing on a PC to a Mac. This may not seem like that big of a deal, and while I still use the same basic programs, many of the VSTs I used previously are difficult [read: I’m too lazy to figure it out] to use on a Mac. This was actually a good thing in many ways because it forced me to rework my writing process. Instead of having the go-to VST I had been using for years I had to invent new ways to make the sound I wanted. More often than not I failed, but that failure caused me to go in a different direction than I had intended.

As this is now my third album I was also very aware of working out kinks, frequency conflicts and album structure before getting to the mixing and mastering stage. However while the technical aspects are important, the most significant reason this album sounds so different from the previous albums is the mentality I approached it with. I had become a little bored of the style I had been writing before. It didn’t feel like a challenge any more. I also began to fall in love with long stretched out and distorted sounds. Among other things I remember listening to a podcast where they had stretched out Beethoven’s 9th out to some ridiculous length like 24 hrs, and it just spoke to me. It totally expressed the way I was feeling at the time. I began experimenting with different techniques to replicate the elements of these sounds I liked, and through that process came up with the album. I would say there is much more intent and thought in the process and structure of this album than my previous work. “If Once We Lose This Light” tells a personal story that I hope comes across to other people.

d: Creating titles for instrumental music can be very open-ended, and you seem to have developed a unique and consistent style for this. Can you tell us a bit about your approach? Where do the titles come from, and how do you know when you have the right title for a piece?

h: The song titles I’ve always liked are ones that have a poetic, almost lyrical quality, like Proem’s “I Hold You Like I Hold a Job” . When I choose a title for a song it is almost as important as the audio. The title prepares people for what they are about to hear or gives context to it afterwards. Like I do with potential samples, I always keep an eye and ear out for song titles. Inspiration for titles of hjalti songs have come from all sorts of sources: Medieval poetry, cheesy fantasy books, TV series, overheard conversations, obscure 18th century poetry, a mistranslation of a Norwegian black metal song.

(Warning: this is going to sound horrendously pretentious, and I swear I am not!) One thing they have in common is a depth that lies beyond the initial meaning of the title. For example, the title of the last song on my last album ‘Until the sea’s…” is originally from a Robert Burns poem. However that is not where I first came across it. Where I encountered it was in the Russel Brand autobiography (My Booky-wook). In it he tells a story of being blindingly drunk and alone late at night in Scotland [Burns is a national hero in Scotland]. Suddenly Brand encounters a fellow lonely drunk. Before anything else the drunken stranger starts yelling out at the top of his lungs the lines to this poem. Russel joins him and they end the poem together, which is the part I took for a song title. The words have meaning, but at least to me the context that I have taken the title from colors the meaning even more. The song attached to the title is about pain, blind bawdy despair, and final expectance, just like the poem and the story where the line comes from; each complimenting each other. If I could imbue all this meaning in one or two words I would. I just never have been able to.</pretentiousspew>

d: You combine ideas from a variety of genres in your music. What do you usually listen to, and what actually influences your writing? Are there non-musical influences that affect your music?

h: When growing up I used to be labeled a music nazi (I generally think anyone who is passionate about music is a music nazi to some extent, some are just better at hiding it than others) and had specific likes in very specific genres. Now in my advancing age my music tastes have become rather broad. The majority of what I listen to can be classified as “Electronicish” . That tag covers a wide spread of genres from industrial, to synthpop, to eurotechno, to IDM, to ambient. However in the last few years metal has been increasingly taking up my iPod space. Especially power metal and black metal. Recently I even have been listening to a bit of old school ska and rocksteady bands like Desmond Dekker and the Ethiopians.

Although to some extent everything I listen to influences what I write, some music influenced this last album much more than others. Specifically I can point out Proem and Gridlock and more recently Ben Frost , Seefeel and Dead Texan as looming large over everything I write. Also the plethora of obscure Black Metal bands I have been listening to of late, such as Weltmact and Funeral Mist, have also been highly influential.

Are there non-musical influences that affect my music? Yes. Pretty much everything. I write music for the same reasons I listen to music. For joy and solace, to fill the time, to discover something new, to have something to share with friends, to be transported somewhere else, to remember old moments, to wallow and to overcome. Although the music I listen to shapes how I express my self through music, my experiences in life are the over riding influences in my music.

d: Do you have any ideas or plans for your next album? A direction, a mood, a creative approach?

h: Oh good god! Next album!? I have not given it much thought to be perfectly honest. I’ve been far too busy putting together “If Once We Lose This Light” to even think about it. Plus d.iscontent has a pretty full spring in which my album is just the beginning! Getting back to the question though, I feel like I want to explore down this avenue a little bit longer. I love the stretched out sounds that I have come up with and have a few more ideas I want to try. That being said I’ve been wanting to do a cover album for a while now. There actually was a cover that was supposed to make an appearance on this album (with vocals!) but logistics got in the way so I’ll just keep it in my pocket for now. I have been also moonlighting with a friend to do a black metal inspired side project (tremolo picked guitars and ghostly vocals). I also have been wanting to do a synth-pop project since I started writing music, so who knows what I’ll end up doing. Though I can pretty much grantee what ever comes out next, it will be dark.