Artist Interviews

Q&A: Tristram

By | Published on Wednesday 3 February 2010

Tristram

Tristram is a London-based country and folk singer-songwriter. He put on such a good show at the London-based club night Oh, Inverted World recently, that the people behind the club have set up a label just to put out his debut EP. His imaginative use of words and gentle encapsulation of folk has been likened to artists such as Conor Oberst, Daniel Johnston and Nick Drake. You’ll be able to hear him for yourself when that aforementioned EP is released next week. Ahead of that we spoke to him to ask the Same Six.

Q1 How did you start out making music?
I’ve been making music since I was eleven, when my mum and dad bought me a little nylon string Spanish guitar. The first song I ever wrote consisted of one chord strummed over and over again. I only started playing in front of other people last year, at open mics and stuff.

Q2 What inspired your latest EP?
Little things that are indicative of bigger things. Bicycle theft. The joys and malfunctions of a long term relationship (in the process of coming unstuck). The feeling of jealousy. The fact of being in London, in a population centre of modern society, which combines an immense range of possibilities with an array of negative attributes, for example the sense that everything we do is commoditised, bought and sold. Old school hip hop, especially Public Enemy. All the little thoughts you have when you’re sitting on a bus going nowhere. James Dean in ‘Rebel Without A Cause’. Zombie films. Astral travel (from a sceptical perspective).

Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
All the songs on the EP I wrote by piecing together words from notebooks I carry around with me. They’re simply reactions to different aspects of my life at the time. The instrumentation evolved over a period of time, as my friends Greg, Tom and Becca became involved in playing them, too. Now we write songs a bit more co-operatively, where-by I come up with the bones of a song and the words, and then we work out a structure for it together as a group.

Q4 Which artists influence your work?
Jeffrey Lewis (lyrically, and the idea of not being afraid to expose your deficiencies), 60s folk revival things like Bert Jansch, Ann Briggs, Richard Thompson and Nick Drake, Johnny Cash, Johnny Flynn, Alan Lomax and all the songs he collected, Tom Waits, Conor Oberst, Silver Mt Zion, Godspeed and Constellation Records, Daniel Johnston, Nick Cave, Bill Callahan, The Low Anthem, Willkommen bands (Brighton folk collective), Fionn Regan, Coco Rosie, Cat Power, Sufjan Stevens, Beirut, Devendra Banhart, Jens Lekmann, The Smiths. I like a lot of other things as well, but I don’t know if the influences are discernable.

Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
I’m not sure if I would say anything. But if I had to, I’d say: “Make of this what you will, thank you very much for listening”.

Q6 What are your ambitions for your leatest EP, and for the future?

I don’t really want to jinx anything by speculating. In the future, I would like to play music as much as possible to large groups of people on a regular basis, and just to carry on this process we’ve started of evolving new songs as a group, exploring different characters for songs. I’m quietly excited, but I’m not sure what’s going to happen.

MORE>> www.myspace.com/tristramsongs



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