News Still Corners

There’s not deliberately a dearth of information available about London newcomers Still Corners, it just happened that way. The five-piece have quickly become blog darlings following the spread of track ‘Endless Summer’ across the internet earlier this year, and by now the double A-side 7’ featuring ‘Don’t Fall In Love’ and ‘Wish’ on Great Pop Supplement will have sold out entirely. As the band’s Greg and Leon explain (they’re completed by vocalist Tessa, plus bassist Luke and drummer Paul), they didn’t think about what people knew, and concentrated on making music.

Leon: ‘Originally, we were just trying to make a record, we really didn’t think about it. It’s not something we ever really approached at all’. Greg continues: ‘We don’t want to put out a huge amount of information out there about us, but it wasn’t really deliberate, we never sat down and decided not to tell anybody anything, we just never did it. We set about to create the songs that we could, and it was based on things that inspired us, so we put that together and just decided to let the rest fall in to place’.

Still Corners’ dreamy pop landscapes have more than a whiff of the 1960s about them (along not entirely dissimilar lines to Broadcast, if we’re talking comparisons), but the fuzziness of the recordings thus far fit them right in the middle of summer 2010. It’s entirely coincidental. Greg begins: ‘We like all that sort of music, so we’ve always listened to it, the fact that it’s now popular is kinda lucky’, Leon continues ‘It’s the right time. Back when shoegaze was cool, we really liked that as well, it has the same sort of vibe, and I guess that it’s lucky that we’re ready to release music in such a cool time when there’s so much about. It’s been a while, but we really do like a lot of contemporary bands like Washed Out and Wild Nothing, they’re great bands, and it’s a good time to play this sort of music’.

And the 1960s sound permeating their songs, in particular ‘Don’t Fall In Love’? It’s Greg’s insatiable geeky obsession with recording methods. ‘I don’t know if it’s necessarily sixties music, though it’s recorded in a sixties-like manner. Just the way you apply EQ, using things like mono, overhead drums, the way you mic up the drums, recording everything together. Using certain bits of equipment gives it a certain sound, like ‘Remember Pepper’ was recorded all through tube gear, the whole thing, it’s all analog sound’. There’s also a filmic influence to proceedings, as Leon elaborates. ‘It’s the atmosphere that the soundtrack guys like Morricone instil, like David Lynch and Twin Peaks, the atmosphere they conjure is very much in line with that we see and enjoy within music. And while it’s not necessarily influenced by the sixties, it’s more influenced by the same thing they were influenced by, which is a blurry sort of dreamscape weirdness, which is found in sixties pop songs, but there’s something weird about it. That’s what’s influenced us with the sixties stuff, because that was going on at that time; taking a great pop song but blurring it a bit, making it a little more interesting’.

They’re also not only aiming to make you listen to their songs, the fact their main inspiration comes from film soundtracks is important - it’s as much about the mind’s eye as it is the ear. ‘It’s like capturing one of those little moments, little micro-moments like when you’re sitting under a tree and the sun bursts through the leaves and washes out everything, ti’s about trying to get that little blurry memory in to a song, that atmosphere’, says Leon, Greg adding ‘a reflective, eerie, weird memory that you’ve half forgotten. We’re really inspired by film soundtracks to create these visual things that we see, however a song is written, whatever it’s about, it’s not as important as how someone listens to it, what they’re thinking, feeling, visualising’. Does this mean in this world of headphones they’re up for creating an ongoing life soundtrack? Leon: ‘Yeah, one of my most favourite memories of times listening to music, when I first started really getting in to the soundtracky, atmospheric music, I was walking back from a friend’s house and I put on an early Air record or something, I was just walking down this suburban street, and I pretty much felt like I was in ‘Lost in Translation’ or something, there was somebody watering the garden, kids throwing balls, everything slowed down, and I realised this was the sort of vibe I wanted to make in music, to get this sort of feeling. It was amazing’.

If it’s all about visuals as well as music, are they big on making videos for their songs? Greg: ‘When we were trying to decide how we were going to do it, we just decided to find somebody who we thought had a like-minded look on art, her name’s Lucy Dyson, and she’s done a fantastic video for ‘Wish’, she’s captured it perfectly, the vibe, the look. It’s shot on 16mm, it’s all really lovely, the colours are all… it’s beautiful. We’ve started talking about doing videos ourselves, but we don’t want to take too much on’.

Single ‘Don’t Fall In Love’ / ‘Wish’ is released on 20th August via Great Pop Supplement. There’s an album launch at The Drop in London, with Hong Kong in the 60s and ‘probably one of our favourite bands around at the moment’, Oslo-based Je Suis Animal. What of an album? ‘It’s ready, it’s all written’, says Greg, ‘it’s all demos, we just need to record it properly’. Leon adds ‘we have about 20 or so songs ready, we’re just recording them and we’re hoping to put out a full-length later this year’.