Q&A: Arthur Moon
THE MUSIC IS LUSH AND ELECTRO POP TO SAY THE LEAST - Danish Artist Oh Land and Brooklyn avant-pop musician Arthur Moon worked together to create Replanting Family Tree, their collaborative EP out this Friday. As if that wasn't a treat in itself, the EP comes just in time for the pair's upcoming national tour together. Lora-Faye Åshuvud, the talented artist behind Arthur Moon, brings her creative and unique style the project combining effortlessly with Oh Land's smooth sound to create a project that keeps your ears engaged with each note. Åshuvud gave us an insight on the creative process of Replanting Family Tree, the importance of collaboration and the story behind "Open".
LUNA: What was the process like of making this EP like? Especially compared to when you’re making music just by yourself?
ÅSHUVUD: Honestly, it was pretty much the same process as when I’m making music by myself, except the generative material was of course made by Oh Land. She sent along the “stems” (all the different recordings of the different instruments, separated out from each other) from the Family Tree record, and I played with them alone, usually in my PJs, in my little home studio for a couple of months until something interesting started to emerge. This is pretty much the same thing I do when I’m writing, except instead of remixing someone else’s music, I’m generating the original “stems” myself and then totally pulling them apart and reworking them.
The nice thing, of course, about the Oh Land remixes was that I got to enter into the magic world of her original recordings, which is really different and unique from my sonic world. It was a cool process to kind of interpret and analyze her intentions in the choices she made and see how I could be in conversation with that in the remixes, sometimes redirecting, sometimes subverting, and other times just seeing what would happen if the lyrics and melody lived in a different space.
LUNA: Do you have a favorite memory from this creative process?
ÅSHUVUD: On one of the last days of our back and forths as we approached our deadline, Nanna realized she wanted the first verse of one of the remixes to feel more—in her words—“anarchic,” more like the most haywire moments from some of the Arthur Moon releases. I was exhausted from working 14-hour days for a couple weeks, and in a last-ditch effort late that night, I did a pass at the remix that was completely dissonant/in a really weird-feeling time signature. The next morning, I listened back and thought “oh, this is waaaay too left field,” but I sent it over to her with a couple other approaches to the “anarchic” vibe that felt a little safer, expecting that she’d choose one of those. She immediately got back to me and wanted the weird one! It was such a delight to be surprised like that, to have the farthest, strangest reaches of my brain actually translate to her. That’s the remix “After the Storm.”
LUNA: For any artists that are hesitant to step outside their comfort zone and collaborate with others, what advice do you have for them?
ÅSHUVUD: In general, I find collaboration to be really scary and really humbling. The best collaborations I’ve been a part of are the ones where I acknowledge that it’s scary, where I’m able to let go of my ego and really just figure out how to share a common goal with someone, and when the other person is able to meet me there, with that same humility. In this particular case, Nanna had already put herself out there with such a beautiful vulnerability on these songs—it felt like my responsibility in collaborating with her on them was to meet her in that deep vulnerability and really be outside of my comfort zone as much as possible as well.
LUNA: What’s your favorite song off of the EP & why?
ÅSHUVUD: A lot of the time, making music can feel painstaking, labored, difficult. It’s work. That’s okay. But every once in awhile, it feels like something just pops out of me from nowhere, so easy, completely coherent, a full thought, already formed and ready. Those moments are extremely rare, but they’re also the ones that keep me coming back, the moments where I feel like I’m tapping into something outside myself, something bigger than me that I’m really channeling more that I’m actually authoring. That happened when I was remixing “Open”—the breakdown section in particular, with the chopped vocal. It just came out of me. It felt so, so good.
