Name: Annie Garlid aka UCC Harlo
Nationality: American
Occupation: Viola player, singer, composer
Current release: Annie Garlid's new UCC Harlo release Topos is out via Subtext.
Recommendation: I love the painting “Wind from the Sea” by Andrew Wyeth, who spent most of his life in Maine. A lot of his work is very haunting or haunted.
Speaking of which, I also highly recommend the book Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination by Avery Gordon.

If you enjoyed this Annie Garlid interview and would like to stay up to date with her music and her UCC Harlo project, visit her official homepage. She is also on Facebook, and Soundcloud.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

I don’t think listening is as quite as visual for me. Mostly I register the feelings in my body, which range from a tightening in my chest to tears in my eyes to goosebumps to a kind of transfixed stillness.

By default I listen with my eyes open, but I’m always pleasantly surprised at how much is revealed when I close them.

What were your very first steps in music like - and how do you rate gains made through experience versus the naiveté of those first steps?

My first steps in music were on the living room floor of my childhood home: dancing to my parents’ records. One of the earliest birthday presents I can remember was a small boombox with a Best of the Beach Boys tape in the cassette deck.

I started violin lessons at age 6 after seeing a violin in a shop window. My parents found me a teacher who used the Suzuki method—a method which is taught to feel intuitive.

Increasingly I have trouble differentiating my layers of musical education and my musical instincts. I think I started so early that the musical logic I’ve learned is just in my blood, at the same level as intuition. I guess that’s how education works.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music meant to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

It was in that age bracket (age 14) that I switched from violin to viola after feeling frustrated by the culture of virtuosity and athleticism in violin playing.

I think that was a big step towards establishing my own musical voice and personality, and in realizing that I can make decisions for myself regarding what I want and what suits me.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools and how have they shaped your perspective on music?

My most important instruments and tools have been violin, viola, my voice, DAWs, musical notation, musical community, and recordings of other peoples’ music. Classical music education has been a huge part of my musical development, but so has curiosity about non-classical music (pop music, experimental music, dance music).

These enthusiasms (playing classical music/listening mainly to non-classical music) have run in parallel since I was little.  

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?

I understand music as an outlet, a faithful friend, and as play. UCC Harlo grew out of my wish to wander around sonically and to get in touch with my own musical instincts rather than interpreting the work of others (which is also incredibly creative but doesn’t really get at the Ur-creativity that we each probably have in us).

When I first started making music on DAWs it was the most empowering and joyful feeling. Now that I just released my second album, it feels just as satisfying to experiment with my own sound as a counterpoint to the work I do in academia and performance.

One of the constant challenges is balancing the cerebral and the emotional, the experimental with the affective, the mundane with the dramatic. “Robert” is my best musical attempt yet at “remaining [emotionally] neutral.”

Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What's your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

I can relate to that. I don’t know what key a song of mine is in until I start performing it, so it should go without saying that I also never know anything about the chords. It’s all by ear thanks to my Suzuki training and I never notate anything.

It’s similar with the lyrics—the melody usually comes before the words, which usually come as a kind of afterthought or varnish. The exception would be a track like “Ocelot,” which was formed around words that were pre-written as a kind of poetic prose.



I’d define my personal sound as moody, sincere, fanciful. Some of those might sound like contradictions, I suppose.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

Most of my favorite non-human sounds exist within a watery orbit. For example, I remember and annually rediscover the sound of massive slabs of ice cracking on the bay across from my parents’ house in the winter. These cracks happen suddenly and then the slabs plunge into the water. I think that was one of the first field recordings I made. I find whale sounds mysterious and moving— a song in the depths. Burial also talks about this in an interview he did with Mark Fisher.

A third thing that comes to mind is a recording by Richard Devine of embers burning underwater. It’s ever shifting and so rich sounding. It boggles my mind that moments like these can be captured.

A last example is a delightful recording by the artist Brian House that converts non-audible NYC rat chatter to an audible range (for humans). That one is moving in that it kind of tickles you; you can hear the rats laughing. I think these examples are all musical, or at least highly gestural.

From very deep/high/loud/quiet sounds to very long/short/simple/complex compositions - are there extremes in music you feel drawn to and what response do they elicit?

I like composition that has rests and silence in it. I’ve experimented with that in “Riverbeds” and in “Robert.” I’m automatically drawn to dense, complexly layered textures (or at least that’s my MO) but increasingly I’m trying to work against that instinct.



Working with silence makes the sound that is there feel fresh and clear and direct.

From symphonies and traditional verse/chorus-songs to linear techno tracks and free jazz, there are myriads ways to structure a piece of music. Which approaches work best for you – and why?

My music is not classically influenced in structure, and this is related to the fact that it isn’t notated. I improvise onto the DAW, sometimes over linear loops, sometimes not.

This structure lets most of the ideas arrive fresh from my brain to the recording, without much mediation.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that's particularly dear to you, please?

I will use the track “Forest Floor” as an example. It’s a very dense 10-min dirge and I started working on it back in 2016 or so.



I came up with a melody, but I can’t remember which came first: the MIDI flute or the vocal version. In any case, I did vocal / instrumental unison doubles and then added harmonies to it. I looped this and created a narrative arc around it using field recordings. I thickened it up with other instrumental timbres. Over the years, I kept adding to it, with months or years going by in the intervals. I kept feeling like it needed “something else” but I couldn’t figure out what.

I added my own spoken vocals as a kind of rhythmic counterpoint and then asked my sibling Thea to contribute. They are an Alexander Technique teacher, among other things, and the phrase “Where do you sense a little bit of ease?” is sometimes applied in that practice and reflects the unobtrusive, suggestive mode of that somatic work.

Finally I asked my friends Rebecca Lane and Eve Essex to record the flute and sax parts (respectively) that I’d originally sketched out on MIDI. It is so nice to have the company of and energy of other (beloved) people on the track.

Sometimes, science and art converge in unexpected ways. Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?

Not really. I’m not terribly science minded. I consider my compositions experiments to the extent that improvisation is experimental and in the sense that I don’t have any plan regarding what the result will be.

I just add puzzle piece after puzzle piece, with the pieces emerging one at a time rather than being pre-determined.  

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

My music and my life are similarly maximalist, and also similarly nerdy. They both synthesize a lot of interests and loves, from the archaic and earthy to the artificial and futuristic (as does all music, maybe).

But I want to do everything, which makes me kind of a generalist, but then again “everything” usually involves very niche interests like playing Bach on gut strings, singing rounds through Autotune, and DJing dance music at a bath house in Maine.

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

That’s a good question. I had a student who recently completed a project with the thesis that cooking is a way of expressing emotion, and that through sound you can discern a lot about the emotional state of the person cooking. That is to say, I think mundane tasks can be charged.

At the same time, though, I do think of playing or listening to music as a more heightened and condensed kind of emotional processing—or at its best, it should be. Maybe I’m old-school but I still love it when music inspires feeling rather than just introducing an intellectual idea or concept. At its best I guess it does both.

Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you can't explain?

I think I always felt that way about Cocteau Twins.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

More sincerity and yet also more humor.