Introducing: Ryan Vail

Ryan Vail is preparing to step out of the shadows. A slew of impressive achievements over the last year, such as releasing new single ‘Free’ in October and supporting the likes of Jon Hopkins and Jamie XX, have sped things up for Vail and now there’s a much anticipated debut album finally on its way.

Working alongside musical partner Katie Cogrove, the Derry-based duo is looking forward to the success seen by their peers this summer and ‘Free’ has gone a long way in reinforcing their reputation for producing stunningly intricate and pulsing soundscapes. Clever in its execution, the pair combines their respective backgrounds as a classical musician and a sound designer to create an intriguing new breed of electronic beast.

What we’ve heard so far has been foreboding. ‘Free’ was a dark piano-led track that guided the listener on a journey charting the protagonist’s up and downs. Sarah Joy caught up with Ryan Vail just as things are set to get too busy for the pair.

Prime Planet: It’s certainly all been starting to happen for you guys! How’s your year been?
Ryan Vail: We’ve been supporting Jamie XX in Austria! We also played with Mount Kimbie in Dublin, so it’s been almost flat-out gigging all year. We played with Jon Hopkins too, so yeah, it’s all been pretty busy for us. We’ve just finished our first tour now and are getting down to record the album. It’s been great.

PP: You’ve just released your new single ‘Free’, can you explain a little bit about the track?
RV: ‘Free’ is quite strange. We’re in the studio now doing the album and we were re-recording a lot of the older tracks. The album itself – it’ll make more sense when it comes out – is story-based, like a film script. A lot of the tracks are about certain experiences that people have in life, so ‘Free’ is supposed to be about when you are young and immature. It’s a typical heartbreak song. Unfortunately it doesn’t really fit with the story of the album but we thought it was strong enough to release… or the label did. It’s something to tie us over and we were really happy how it came out.

PP: The video for ‘Free’ is quite artsy; did you come up with the creative idea?
RV: It was about heartache and lost love. There is a filmmaker called Giles Labarbe and he has been looking to work with us for a while, and he’ll probably work with us on the album videos, so it was just a way of the two of us connecting. I always tell him my take on a song that we’ve wrote and he’ll have a theory of what he took from the song. It was quite nice. I didn’t give him too much direction because he’s an artist. Straightway he came back to us with a storyline that suited the vibe we were going for.

PP: So the album is on it’s way, are you enjoying the process of making it?
RV: We’re halfway there. It’s all in full swing and our manager is hoping it’ll be out some time early next year but we’ll see as these things take time. We don’t put out hit singles all the time; we put out things that will hopefully stand the test of time. From doing three short track EPs, where you can only just get a feeling across, we’ve now got a whole ten or twelve track album that you can delve deep into.

PP: Can we expect all new material then from the album?
RV: There are five new tracks and I think maybe two from previous releases – they’ll be rerecorded though so they’ll sound much better. It was hard to leave some tracks behind, obviously, but the album is evolving constantly and if it’s not going to tie in then we’re not going to force it.

PP: Would you call it a concept album?
RV: Yes it’s definitely a concept album. It is following the life of a bass guitar player from a punk band. It’s kind of about after his success; he was a punk artist who fell ill with cancer. It’s following that point in his life when he is famous but there is a life threatening illness hanging over him. It’s quite a deep album but we didn’t want to write songs just for the sake of trying to be cool or writing music for cool people. We wanted to do something more meaningful and hopefully he’ll like what we’ve done and it’ll tell the story truly how he tells it. I hope that he’s going to feature in it and do some spoken word between tracks. It’s the bass player from The Undertones who did Teenage Kicks, that’s who it’s going to be about. We’re basically telling the story of a punk in electronic music. We’re not sure how it’s going to go down.

PP: You work with your collaborator Katie, what is her role in making the music?
RV: Katie writes as well, she’s classically trained whereas I’m more of a sound designer. I’ve filmed a lot of sounds and Katie would take the sounds when I was finished with them and show me how they can be used in a track. She helps me develop it from there. I come up with the roots of a track and she pieces them together. She does as much of it as I do, although she likes to stay in the background a little. On the album she’s got quite a lot of parts as she sings a lot.

PP: Have you managed to translate the tracks into a live performance yet?
RV: The live show is quite complex, there’s a lot of equipment we’re using. When we’re on stage we’re not using computers at all. Everything is played and looped live. We’ve been practicing everything a lot and I think that comes across, especially at festivals as everyone see’s the amount of effort it takes to set up. We’ve been building a visual show all about audio mapping and on stage we can go there as we can do the full visuals.

PP: You’ve been compared to Jon Hopkins and James Blake, do you think they open up doors for artists like yourself?
RV: It’s always quite strange when people make those comparisons. I can see what they meant but I think any producer thinks that about any genre, that umbrellas them. I look up to Jon Hopkins and people like Jamie XX, but we’re completely different. It’s nice though to have a label if people have never heard us before.

– Sarah Joy

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