Part 2

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

Josh: Very unromantic, but my Laptop. It’s literally the basis of everything. Instead of treating it as an ‘Email machine’ I think a strategy is to look at it more as box of infinite possibilities because seriously there's so many plugins / presets / software instruments that you can choose from and create with.  

Amy: Books! I try to read as much as I can and even write as much as I can. I am trying to write a fiction book at the moment and I do writing exercises in a note book every now and then to keep my brain stimulated. These exercises help me write our own music when I am feeling a bit off or have writers block.

I also like to play my favourite songs and sing along with them / harmonize with them. I feel like it’s good practice for when I am trying to find nice harmonies and ideas for our own music.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

Amy: I try to wake up at around 8am. I’ll make my cacao or matcha and tidy up my apartment and room. Light some incense. Then I will get started on any work admin stuff. I go to the gym / exercise around lunch time and then after that I start to write until dinner time. Then if I am lucky / feeling creative I’ll write until the early am (which usually results in a late sleep in haha).

Josh: I start my morning by making a matcha usually. It’s an immediate practice of mindfulness making it in a bowl with a whisk and feels like a quick win for the morning before you’ve even begun your day. I try to keep quite active during the morning and go to the gym first before I start any work.

I tend to work better at night anyway when I’m making music. I feel like I can relax and create the best then as the world feels the most quiet and still at night. Also no one is texting me then.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

Josh: I suppose it would be fitting to choose Perfect World and the creative process behind that.

On the music side of things we usually write separately. I’ll make a bunch of demos in my own time and show Amy once I feel like the ideas are good enough and Amy will also write and record in her own time whether it be a demo on ableton or just piano chords and vocals. We then combine what we’ve been working on and build upon each other's ideas. Sometimes it’s a matter of just adding Amy’s vocals to an instrumental, other times it’s completely fleshing out an idea again so that everything works together well.

We did do a week-long writing trip which we hadn’t really done together before which was quite fun and a few songs from that week have made it onto the album.

The name for the album usually comes later in the process once all the lyrical content is added to the songs and we can find a general sense of what the album is about and what it means to us. This part is really challenging but also very exciting because it sets the framework for the visual creative.

We love the visual side of the album making process and enjoy moodboarding and creating what we think best represents the music in the album.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

Josh: I think both yield great results but in different ways. I personally prefer working in private because I’m not technically a gifted musician and find a lot of what I think are great moments in our music by accident or by experimentation. Most of our work is actually collaborative though in the sense that we work privately then bring it together later. But this changes all the time.

We don't have a set rule of how we write together and the writing trip that we did do together was actually a really fun process and allowed us to make music unbothered and not distracted by the usual ‘life’ things.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

Josh: Over the years of creating music, touring and travelling to different cities you really do begin to see the healing nature of music and get a beautiful sense of community that music creates. Giving an individual a sense of belonging and a commonality with a complete bunch of other random people in a room really is a beautiful thing. You could be total polar opposite people but be brought together for your love of music or a band.

Not only this every now and then we’ll receive personal messages from fans and new listeners about how our music has helped them through difficult times, depression, anxiety, break ups and that really gives us a profound feeling of accomplishment and happiness and that what we’re doing actually matters.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

Amy: Our new album Perfect World was like a diary for myself. All of these songs are very personal and writing them definitely helped me through the last few years. They helped me deal with love, loneliness, mental health, heartache and life.

Even though writing this album helped me through much, so many other artists' music helped me get through my rough patches too. I think the best music moments in life are seeing those songs live years later and realising how far you’ve come since you first heard those songs.

I think that’s the beauty of music. It lets you see your growth, and that’s exactly what writing our next album did for me too.

Josh: Music in general has helped me through some of my hardest times and soundtracked some of the greatest moments of my life. For me I don’t remember exactly what day it was or what the weather was doing. But whenever something profound has happened in my life I generally remember the song or artist I was listening to at the time. That says a lot because I literally can't remember anything ever.

I don’t know if music has helped me more than any other media in helping me understand life / loss / death etc but it has definitely helped me cope during these times and generally soften the blow of certain situations.

Even just the creative process of making music is enough of a distraction for me to forget difficult moments or work through times where life does get very hard.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

Josh: I’m not sure if we’re being asked this because I studied science or if it’s because I’ve reached the tough portion of the questions. I’m not sure how deep to go on this but I think fundamentally the connection between science and music is that music is sound waves and vibrations with some sounds and frequencies being more pleasurable to the ear than others. I hope our sounds are pleasurable to peoples ears haha.

I think further to this point is how music affects people biologically in their emotions and mental states. Certain sounds evoke senses of happiness or melancholy and in general the lyrics evoking an emotional response in the listener in how they comprehend the lyrical content.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. 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?

Amy: I would have to say that performing a piece of music is slightly more terrifying than making a good cup of coffee haha. There’s a lot of adrenaline, anxiety, excitement when we perform live. The energy you feel from the crowd when you’re playing a song they’ve all been listening to in their own time is otherworldly, music really brings people together in the most beautiful way.

Josh: I’d argue that maybe making a great cup of coffee is equally as important if you consider who the coffee is for. Maybe the coffee is for a surgeon about to go perform heart surgery.

Sometimes creativity is just a bunch of mundane tasks done well. I think creativity is only really important if another person can feel something from it as well. Too complex then people are left not understanding, confused and maybe in a worse predicament than they already were.

But I feel like when new ideas are presented in a way that’s understandable, exciting and thought provoking that's when they can have a profound effect on someone that yes maybe a cup of coffee might not bring.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our eardrums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it is able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

Josh: Like I said above I do believe music is a powerful vessel for transporting deep messages to evoke a response in the listener and it just depends on what kind of message the artist wants to send and how.

It might not even have a clear message lyrically but a lot of music is made to be felt and I think that’s really evident in a lot of instrumental and soundtracking music where there’s no words but you still ‘feel’ something.

Amy: Music has been around for a very long time. It goes way back to when we were singing folk tales. It is used for healing, storytelling and bringing communities together.

As much as I love silence and my alone time sometimes you just crave music or to hear someones voice chatting in the background. When I think of voices and sounds I think of comfort and connection. Just think of when you sigh, you let everything out and it feels so nice and relieving. Or if you yell at the top of a mountain, it feels really good.

I think singing is used as a form of release. You can tell when a song is written from the hear when someone is performing with passion. You can hear the emotion in someone's singing voice or the way they are playing an instrument.