Notes on the Archive: Signs of Saint-Léon (2016-2019)

ALISTER WAN HILL ~Instruments~

This project was born out of wanting to reconcile my love for texture, ambience and the tactile nature of my experimental music (Lortica / When We Never) with my desire to learn how to write within the traditional pop format that always felt a little hemmed in across my various experiences playing in bands (Low Lux / Sooners).

Ryan and I have been friends since childhood, but for some reason we have never lived in the same city other than for a flash six months a decade ago. We’ve never made music together until when Ryan moved to London, and I started writing songs that didn’t fit between my band and my ambient projects.

While on a trip through the south of France, I surprisingly stumbled upon a small village called Saint-Léon d’Issigeac. Ryan came to visit, and this is where we started recording in earnest together. We record there every year, and a rumour even started with kids in the village that there was the ghost of an opera singer haunting the place as we would record vocals on marathon sessions from 3-3. Once, we were recording and suddenly a horse was right up against our window! Anyway, we’re kind of the resident band there and play to the villagers once a year. The album cover is a photo of our studio back in the 70s that we found in the kitchen.

Ryan and I have always been fascinated by artists that carry a natural, timeless mystique - many try to fabricate it, and it always fails. We soon realised that we were onto something special, with an ability to talk to each other and confide in things without actually explicitly communicating anything - just by making the music together, back and forth over daily emails until we’re in each other’s countries once again. I’ve been through a lot in recent years, and the music has saved my sanity from some moments on the brink. I’m very private and don’t usually discuss these things due to a complete disdain for pity and respect for others involved, but I felt quite isolated. On the flip end of the spectrum, my Dad and I nearly physically fought each other a couple of year ago in a fairly spectacular disaster following years of simmering tension. But we held each other and cried together on the floor, and our relationship is better for it. Ryan and Emily (who took the photo of us on the back cover) were there for that time. I feel like this is where the music comes from.

The result of these experiences changed me, my brokenness and love for Ryan and the music we make together holds everything together in my life. This isn’t a sob story or any form of stoicism, but it took me a little while to realise that what we do together as Saint-Léon holds a personal mystique, ethos, and its own code and life for Ryan and I that feels magical, its a world I can disappear into, and is where ‘Big Minimal’ exists, where Nick Cave and Earl Sweatshirt go jogging together listening to The Blue Nile, with Q Lazzarus faster than them all.

The other beautiful result of SL is the number of adventures its taken us on, how its brought me closer to Ryan than ever before, how its changed my relationship with my Dad, how we met the Lubois Brothers who make most of our videos, and even some of the ridiculous tour adventures we’ve been on, going to cities that I would have never seen otherwise. It also finally brought me to working with mixing engineer Jonathan Gardner, probably better known as Jonboy Rock through his days with Wolfmother and now as a live mixing engineer for Empire of the Sun. All of these references sound incongruent, but we first met at an ill-fated rehearsal for the beginning of the end of Low Lux, and when we finally started working together years later he’s essentially become the third member of our little group and a very dear friend - a symbiotic sense of creativity, philosophy, and enough humour and foresight to endure Bono’s rants with me to watch an absolutely sensational U2 concert. For us, we don’t care if something is cool, niche, experimental, or traditional, we have a mutual faith in the 'Big Minimal' umbrella ~ a term Jonboy coined ~ and the Post-Sophisti-Pop universe we all dream in together.

Ryan and I will continue this band until we’re in wheelchairs, I’ll still be re-writing his lyrics, making them more devastating in my silly mind, and he will wring out the most melodic directions, continually reminding me of my teenage love for Daniel Johns in the process!

ALISTER'S LIST OF THINGS THAT INFORMED SL IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER 2016-2019

- Daniel Johns’ register
- The Blue Nile / Tears For Fears / Roxy Music’s Avalon
- Directness
- A sense of losing control, helplessness and what happens when you’re on the brink
- PTSD, suicide, disgusting male behaviour
- Unbound friendship
- The Dordoigne
- Doing things that you can dramatically fail in
- Nick Cave & Warren Ellis’ renaissance since Push the Sky Away
- Existing outside the coolness rotisserie and any scenes
- Whisper vocal tracks
- I’m obsessed with lyrics that can seemingly make time expand and contract in a single sentence, eg‘Boys of Summer’ with the line:
“Out on the road today
I Saw a Deadhead sticker on a cadillac
A little voice inside my head said
Don't look back, you can never look back”

RYAN NICOLUSSI ~Vocals~

Alister has been listening to me sing for as long as I can remember. I don’t know why we never thought to do something creative together when we lived in the same hemisphere, but honestly, it never occurred to us. When Alister did finally reach out and suggest we try something, it felt like the right time. We needed our own histories of successes and failures in making music with others to know exactly what we needed. And exactly what we didn’t need. As a result, SL is without a doubt the most prolific creative collaboration I’ve ever been a part of. It’s also been the most rigorous, but that’s because it slots into our lives so seamlessly.

We work autonomously most of the year, getting together for a whirlwind recording session everything 6 months or so. We both need time alone with the songs to give them our best. Alister will send me something which I won’t hear until I wake up in my time zone. Then I’ll work on my vocal parts and send it back while he’s asleep. Al will wake up to my ideas and he can ponder them and keep producin' while I keep snoozin'. In this way, we’re constantly ‘sleeping on it’.

As the project progresses, I keep surprising myself. Vocally, Alister has pushed me to sing in ways I didn’t know I could – be it Whitney Houston-wails or hushed Daniel Johns’ whispers. Singing in falsetto was not something I’d really taken seriously before, despite me being a huge fan of Jeff Buckley since first hearing his voice on my mum’s car CD player. There are countless times when I've been listening back to SL recordings and I don’t initially like what I hear – be it the sound of my voice, the tone of the delivery, or just the way I’m singing in general. It stems from a lack of self-confidence and too often I doubt myself. A big part of it is that every song is a journey into the dark of the unknown. We’ve never play anything safe. But I trust Alister.

We have a few musical touch points we agree on (The Blue Nile being the most pervasive), but as rule we have quite divergent tastes, so have a developed a sort of creative shorthand we can use to describe what a song needs…though it often boils down to Alister saying ‘it needs to sound more emotional!’ Some of it is simple to explain (e.g. the Daniel John voice), but the most of how we work is now based on instinct and impulse, with our friendship being the anchorage that keeps us from getting too lost.

RYAN'S LIST OF THINGS THAT INFORMED SL IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER 2016-2019

- iPhone memo recordings
- Distance
- The impulse rather than the idea
- Running
- The temporality of live performance
- Working full time
- Marathon vocal recording sessions
- The map before it's lost or discarded, never being too concerned with the destination
- We keep moving to create, to keep searching, discovering, when really it’s because we haven't realised (or refuse to accept) our terminus.
To quote Jonboy: ‘The journey is pretty much everything’.

CREDITS

Written, Recorded & Produced by Saint-Léon in Sydney, London & Saint-Léon d'Issigeac 2016-2019
Mixed by Tim Whitten
Mastered by Carl Saff
Intro Vocals by Christopher Cooper on ‘Paradise’
Backing Vocals by Lisa Montgomery on 'Paradise'
Saxophone by Marcus Whale on 'Day with a Drum Major'
Band Photo by Emily Harris
Artwork by the Lubois Brothers
Spiritual Guidance from Jonboy