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| Experimental ambient musician Marc Kellaway makes atmospheric soundscapes inspired by swimming pools. I've always appreciated a good swimming pool. Not only do they provide the space for aquatic exercise and leisure, they provide of a feeling of being caught between times; the modern and the ancient. They represent human feats of engineering just as they do old tradition, with one of the world's earliest known public baths being built in the Indus Valley around 2500 BC. Someone else who has a soft spot for swimming pools is Danish ambient musician Marc Kellaway, whose new album Body of Water was inspired by such places. As he puts it in the press release, swimming pools represent: "A kind of impossible architectural dream of quiet and nature." After discovering his music, I reached out to him for an interview. |
You’re from Copenhagen, somewhere I’ve never been, can you tell me a little bit about life there? Would you consider your lifestyle urban? What’s a typical day for you? Well, it is not really that big a city, but close to the water, which is nice. Lots of green areas too. Reluctantly urban, I’d say. I really dream of moving to somewhere quieter at some point. I have an administrative full time day job at a university, so this takes up most of my day time. In the evenings I usually work on the music, and in the weekends I cautiously emerge from my home studio for a walk or a biking trip with my boyfriend. It sounds like a cliché, but we both really like long walks - often with the added goal of making new field-recordings or finding interesting images. Your most recent album Body of Water was inspired by the utopian nature of recreational swimming pools. Do you see swimming pools, and thus music inspired by them, to be a sort of refuge from urban living? Oh definitely, though I am not sure only from urban living. I am quite sensitive to noise, so living in a big city sometimes is a bit tough. For Body of Water part of the fascination came from the quiet of the empty pools, the utopian aspect here definitely also being the absence of people. Which also could be seen as dystopian, so it is sort of two sides of the same coin. Another way of saying this is, that I think there is a utopian nature to the architecture of most indoor swimming pools – a sort of idealized idea of communing with nature – but filled with people it usually gets drowned out by noise and movement, so the emptiness allowed this aspect to come into focus more clearly. When taking the photographs, I was also interested in the reflections in the windows, further blurring the difference between inside and outside, and this way making the space even more impossible or utopian. (People seem to think the images are made in Photoshop, but none of the images are composites, everything is just reflections as they happened.) The album initially started as a photography project, what is your background in photography and how do you feel it relates to music? I have no formal background, but has always worked with images – drawing, screen-printing, photography. I think it blurs and feedbacks into each other – it’s all about things you can express directly in words, no matter the media. An image may be the starting point for a piece of music, but an unrelated series of tracks might also first gain coherence when assembled under a specific image as cover art. Can you tell me a little bit about the music scene in Copenhagen, or Denmark in general? Who are some artists we should be listening to? My background lies in the experimental rock scene of the 00’s and 10’s, so this is mostly the kind of local stuff I know. I do know there is a lot of interesting electronic music being made currently here, but it is mostly from a younger generation of musicians and a scene I don’t really have any connection to. My bandmate Tanja Vesterbye Jessen made an incredible and overlooked experimental folk/noise LP some years ago called “Feeling Love” which more people definitely should know about. And the electronic pop of my friend and visual collaborator Søren Meisner should also be know by more people – his last album “Midsummer Island” was criminally overlooked. If we are we talking more electronic (and non-Danish) stuff, I have recently listened a lot to the beautiful new album from Carmen Villain (“Only Love From Now On”) “Puutarhassa” by Lau Nau has also been on my stereo quite a lot recently, and Perila's amazing debut LP "How much time it is between you and me?" from last year is also still a big favorite. How do you find the process of releasing your music independently? It is a pleasure and a privilege to be able to realize projects exactly as intended without any compromises. Bandcamp as a platform has also made things a lot easier here than when I started back in the 00’s. But there is lot of practical work in running a small record label which subtracts from the time available to making music, and the physical reality of my small flat being slowly filled with unsold records is a bit of a pain too. It is of course always an option to go purely digital, but I am so old as to think of this stuff as albums, and for me that still means some kind of physical thing you can hold in your hand. (I did start the Exquisite Test Center in 2020, as an off-shot for small digital only experimental EPs though.) The hardest thing releasing independently is actually getting people outside of your own circle to listen to the music. The quality of the music does not really matter if no one know it exists. So thank heaven for independent music blogs!  What are your plans for the rest of the day? Work and music. Always work and music. And then a cup of tea and a few hours with a book in the evening.  Body of Water by Marc Kellaway, is a beguiling collection of ambient soundscapes and well developed worlds. Released March 15th 2022 in a limited edition run of one hundred, 8 panel CD digipack and digital download. It is released independently by the artist and available to purchase from his Bandcamp page. |