Part 1

Name: Fran & Flora
Members: Francesca Ter-Berg (cello/vocals/electronics), Flora Curzon (violin/vocals/electronics)
Nationality: British
Recent release: Fran & Flora's Precious Collection is out via Hidden Notes.
Recommendations: Hárr by Benedicte Maurseth; Black Ox Orkestar - Everything Returns

If you enjoyed these thoughts by Fran & Florai and would like to stay up to date with the band and their music, visit their official homepage. The duo are also on Instagram, and Facebook.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?
 
Our impulse to create starts with our shared love of folk music and playing tunes together, in particular music from Romania, Transylvania, Hungary, and Ukraine, as well as Jewish and Roma music.

We initially bonded over 10 years ago, over a shared range of extremely niche interests and decided to make a point of seeking out this music by travelling to visit different mentors and specialists in these styles. This included several visits to Tcha Limberger in Belgium, Marcel Ramba in Transylvania, Marin Bunea in Moldova, and attending music courses including Yiddish Summer Weimar (Germany) and KlezKanada (outside Montreal) which specialise in Yiddish music & culture, a place to jam, meet like-minded folks, learn and party with our fellow Klezmer loving freaks.

Most recently we travelled with a group of Klezmer fiddlers from the UK & USA across the Carpathian mountains to listen to treasured elders, stuff our faces with incredible local foods and immerse ourselves in the Translyvanian way of life (a place where old-style mechanical farming techniques and moonshine brewing are commonplace).

Back home we spend a lot of time listening to archival recordings and exploring collections of tunes by revered ethnomusicologists (Moshe Beregovski, Ruth Rubin collection and many more), as well as listen to a wide range of other musics that inspire us across the contemporary-classical-jazz-experimental-electronic-sphere. We are both nourished by adventure and deep listening, and take a lot of pleasure from constantly introducing each other to new music.

Improvisation plays a big role in our collaboration, so we take time to try out ideas, mess around, throw things away if they don’t seem like they are working and also go with the flow if something is sounding good, even if it doesn’t come from a particular lineage at the point of inception.

We want our music to sound like ‘us’ and this is a way of achieving a special aesthetic and creative process that we are proud to own and share.
 
For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

The friendship we have cultivated over years of working and travelling together is integral to our collaborative process, allowing for great amounts of vulnerability, experimentation, and spontaneity.

Our collective interests and collaborative creative process has been nourished by our friendship over and over, and we both recognise how precious this kind of long-standing collaboration is. There is an expansive area where our aesthetic choices overlap and it is a continual dance between working with the sounds and ideas that come naturally to us when we are together, and pushing beyond these into new worlds.

As well as improvising and seeing what comes, we often brainstorm colours, words, textures and feelings that we want to incorporate in our next body of work. We find an intention helpful, but we never feel bound by it if ideas seem to be pulling in other directions. We constantly ask ourselves, what is needed in addition to what has already been created? Is there something missing?

So we might end up somewhere quite different from where we set out, but if it feels good, it feels good.
 
Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

Breaking bread together is a big part of our relationship. So essential to our process is making sure we have a food plan. We also need plenty of time for conversation - to share and catch up on everything going on in our lives, nurturing our friendship.

Depending on whatever else is happening, we arrive to be creative in varying states of preparedness - sometimes just completely open to what might happen, and other times with specific pieces of music we want to share with each other and ideas we want to try. We also both prioritise looking after our bodies and while it’s not always possible to be well rested we always give each other space to exercise and stretch before starting to work that day.

The environment of the space we are working in feels very important, and if we don’t each have at least 3 mugs of different teas and coffees, thermos’ and water bottles we will never be ready.


Fran & Flora Interview Image by Dom Thompson

What do you start with? And, to quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?

Our actual creative process often starts with setting out our instruments and electronics and improvising together. We record everything and see what happens.

Sometimes one or other of us will introduce a particular tune we know into the improvisation, but often it’s just free. We will also spend a lot of time playing through tunes from different collections and seeing which ones land and resonate, and then just play it over and over until it starts to feel like it is ‘part of us’.  

The process can feel a bit like whittling. We start with something quite simple and attempt to carve it into something more subtle and nuanced, following where that initial starting block wants to take us. It’s like we are discovering the music together, slowly slowly chipping away until it feels complete.
 
Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

We definitely do a lot more ‘following of where things lead us’ than controlling the outcome. The pressure of a ‘perfect product’ and, in the case of the traditions from which we take our inspiration, the pressure of playing the music ‘correctly' can be stifling. However, while we always strive to honour the essence of the music and want to create and play music to the best of our ability, we constantly push against perfectionism, and choose expressivity, spontaneity and curiosity over a glossy finished product.

We were deeply inspired by the ways of the producer of our first album Unfurl, Sam Beste (The Vernon Spring / Hejira / Kano) who strongly encouraged us to trust the feeling of a take or performance, rather than striving for “perfection” (whatever that means!) which opened our eyes to new ways of being with music and being in the creative process.

In the making of our new record Precious Collection we were able to take much more control over the creative process and outcomes, knowing where we could head with our tunes in the studio - this was part of the ‘taking ownership of our work’ process, a role we wanted to step into with authenticity and strength in taking on the responsibility of not only writing/arranging the record but also producing it.
 
Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?

The creative mutuality of our collaboration is very important to us. We are very grateful that the space between us is one where we can share many ideas, but we both have to agree on ideas for them to go forward. If a new road fascinates us both we will take it and see where it leads; if it only inspires one of us, we accept that perhaps that the idea is not for this project.

We approach our shared creativity with great care, both knowing how fragile and precious it is, and how it is about the overlap between us that makes Fran & Flora what it is. Improvisation and an open mind are as much part of our process as trying out pre-planned ideas, and we are constantly navigating our way between these spheres.
 
There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally? Is there an element of spirituality to what you do?

Timeless, flowing, energising, peaceful, light, childlike, transcendent …. It can feel like we are stepping outside of the world of things and tasks, so in that way it can feel spiritual. This is possibly also helped by the fact that we like to create transportive sound-worlds, be that through repetition, or modal exploration, or using electronic effects, so when we are exploring ideas it can become quite trancelike.

We like to follow what feels good - whether that’s going to deeply peaceful states, the deepest darkest depths or highly energised driving riffs, and sit in those places for some time. It can be easier for us to go deep into our work in nature, secluded away from every day distraction.

In making Precious Collection we hid away in a rustic cabin in New Hampshire (USA) (where we quickly realised we weren’t as hardy as we thought we were) before going into the bougie Great North Sound Society studio in rural Maine to track a lot of the record.