News Mix #007: Spectral Park

It doesn’t come as a great surprise to learn that much of Luke Donavan aka. Spectral Park’s output is the product of a stream of consciousness. How else do you come up with an artistic vision so haphazard, so bursting with life and teeming with energy? The songwriter took a break from being in a band, applying ‘L’appel du Vide’ to a motion-heavy video and uploading the song to Bandcamp on the quiet. A year later and he’s just released his debut, eponymous full-length on the Mexican Summer label.

In our interview, Luke insists that very little’s changed in the past year, that he’s still obsessing over the meticulous, D.I.Y approach that makes his music what it is today. But just what exactly constitutes his unique, semi-throwback, semi-futuristic approach to music is harder to pinpoint. The new mix - compiled exclusively for DIY/Neu - offers more poignant clues. United alongside fellow small-scale successes like Gross Magic and Unknown Mortal Orchestra in wielding something original out of a rough-edged sound, he might be. But we still aren’t any closer to finding out what contributes to the sheer lunacy of his recordings. Luke declares it to be ‘throwing ideas and chord progressions down as quickly as possible before things start to feel too fragmented.’ We’d suggest it’s all part of his character. Influences needn’t have a direct effect. Spectral Park is something belonging in its own headspace, untarnished by surrounding trends or inspirational peers. If anything the sound gracing Luke’s debut will spill outwards and lead to a whole new wave of artists replicating his scattershot punk approach.

When Spectral Park began you did everything yourself - from the videos to the recording, everything was very meticulous. How’d it feel to share something so personal with the world for the first time?
I didn’t really think about it. I wrote, recorded and mixed ‘L’appel Du Vide’ in a couple of days and made that first video for it straight after. For a long time I had this sound/aesthetic in my head that I’d wanted to pursue but that was the first song where I felt like I’d gotten close. I sent the song/video round to the band that I was in and our manager and no one was really in to it so I put it out as Spectral Park expecting no one to pay any attention. The feedback blew me away, some blogs and zines posted it and a few days later I was having meetings and talking with labels. But nothing’s really changed, I’m still making the videos/artwork and recording the second LP at home.

Have you had to surrender any autonomy in terms of expanding to live shows, or do you still like to control things?
I can be a control freak in that I get frustrated when things don’t sound how I imagine them to, but I’m not in to telling people what to play. In the ‘Let It Be’ film there’s a part where Paul’s telling George what he should play and George is like ‘ok, I’ll play what you want or I won’t play at all…..’. That footage always stuck with me as being such a miserable atmosphere to be making music in. The people in the band are really good musicians and friends, they understand that the hooks from the record need to be there live, but there’s space for them to add their own stuff as well and I’ve been stoked on hearing them throw things in that I hadn’t imagined before. It’s nice to be surprised by other musicians after spending a year just trying to accurately express my own ideas, when you play with other people you don’t always have that subconscious forewarning that precedes a noise or a melody.

You seem to have a very distinct vision musically and aesthetically - has it always been an ultimate aim of yours to stand out in a crowd?
It’s not really a conscious thing. What I’m doing now just feels like a natural progression from things I’ve done before and all the influences and obsessions that I’ve been in to at different times. I’m not thinking about it fitting in or not fitting in. I’m just keeping myself interested…for whatever reason at the moment that means doing this. I’ll probably get tired of it at some point and get excited on doing something simpler for a while.

What’s the thinking behind your music? Is it a spontaneous process, writing a song, or do you see yourself as a perfectionist (or a cross between the two)?
Probably both in equal measure. I just play around with things until I have something that I want to hear again and then try to make the rest of the song interest me as much as that first piece. I should probably leave more space in songs but it hasn’t been my natural inclination lately so I’ve been cramming stuff in wherever I can. It’s quite random, normally beginning with some chords or a sample or a melody/riff and then it’s just the stream of consciousness thing, just throwing ideas and chord progressions down as quickly as possible before things start to feel too fragmented, singing incoherent words and melodies and stuff. Normally all the different parts to a song will come in an hour or so, then however long it takes to experiment with sounds, arrange it all and write lyrics. Sometimes I’ll go back and do better takes but normally I like to keep the first useable takes and not get too precious about that stuff.

Where do you see this project going in the future? Do you see this debut album as the first step of many in the future?
Yeah, hopefully the first of many. The next album is nearly finished and there’s a lot of stuff waiting to be worked on. I’m also going to be writing an album later this year with the band being more involved. And there are some songs laying around that don’t fit Spectral Park so there’ll be a couple of new projects to house those songs when I get some time.

The mix you’ve made for us deals with a very wide-ranging set of sounds - could you tell us a little bit more about it, and your specific choices?
A lot of the time I’ll get obsessed with just one part or one aspect of a song or recording that I hear but these are some songs where I love both the songwriting/melodies and also the production or the weirdness.

Spectral Park’s S/T LP is available now through Mexican Summer. Spectral Park plays London’s Sebright Arms on 28th February with Girls Names.

Stream Spectral Park’s exclusive Neu mix, tracklist below the player:

Neu Mix #005: Spectral Park by Diy on Mixcloud

01 - The Pastels - Nothing To Be Done
02 - Os Mutantes - Panis Et Circensis
03 - The United States Of America - The American Metaphysical Circus
04 - David Bowie - Up The Hill Backwards
05 - The Red Krayola - Transparent Radiation
06 - Teeth (Gross Magic remix) - Flowers
07 - Unknown Mortal Orchestra - I’ll Come Back 4 U
08 - The Zombies - What More Can I Do
09 - Can - Father Cannot Yell
10 - Kaleidoscope - The Sky Children