Name: Hely
Members: Lucca Fries (piano), Jonas Ruther (drums)
Interviewee: Lucca Fries
Nationality: Swiss
Current release: Hely's new album Plode is out via Nik Bärtsch's Ronin Rhythm Records.

[Read our Nik Bärtsch interview]

If you enjoyed this Hely interview and would like find out more about the band, visit their official homepage. They are also on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud.



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?

First there's just the impulse to sit down and play, a natural attraction to our instruments. As soon as we let go of control when improvising, something elusive takes over. Some kind of body memory, something connected to our nervous systems.

The source of that expression can be literally everything, personal stuff, a movie we've watched, the political situation. We don't even need to know; we just have to allow that consciousness to take over and express what it needs to express.

The creation of an album is a different thing, but somehow, I've the feeling, that our goal is still to commit those magic moments of natural expression to tape.

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?

We rarely start with a concrete idea for a finished work, nearly everything starts with improvisation. After an inspired improvisation we are often full of ideas and that's the moment we're getting visions and start to discuss what we want to realize.

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?

Whenever we rehearse, we start by drinking Chinese Pu Erh tea. It's a source of energy and inspiration and the ritual of brewing and drinking tea is a nice way to connect and calm down from busy life.

And whenever we meet, we immediately start to dive into deep discussions about life and music. It also happens that we find ourselves talking for hours not even playing a single note.

What do you start with? How difficult is that first line of text, the first note?

As improvisers we can allow our bodies and hands to decide what to play first. It happens totally naturally.

Things are only getting difficult as soon as we start speaking about what happened and why and where we want to go from there.

Once you've started, how does the work gradually emerge?

When we found a piece, a concept that we think is worth exploring, we play it up until an hour in our rehearsals. It's a process of exploring possibilities, relaxing into the material, and connecting our time feel.

Sometimes we call those ideas “games” because they feel like playgrounds that we can explore and there are certain rules that have to be followed. Some ideas drop out during that process because they get boring.

In the best case we end up having kind of a distillate of a couple of pieces that we end up recording.

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?

We love to follow new roads that are opening up and we love to get lost exploring those roads. It's an essential way of how we create music and how we let our music evolve. After some time we find out which roads are promising, and which roads are dead ends.

I guess we handle it like the living legendary producer Rick Rubin once stated: "Try every idea, every thought." Otherwise you will never know if a particular idea would have been great.

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?

Two of our earliest inspirations are the John Coltrane quartet and the Keith Jarrett trio. We feel like we're trying to communicate with the same source of inspiration like them and it's very much about things like connecting with the present moment and the essences of being a human being.

Sometimes we call it spiritual!

Especially in the digital age, the writing and production process tends towards the infinite. What marks the end of the process? How do you finish a work?

Our music, our pieces don't have an end at all. We could play and continue to develop every one of them forever. It's just the moment of recording that forces us to create a document with the skills, the material etc. we have in that particular moment.

So, we just schedule a recording session and that will be the moment to end the process.

Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on? How much improvement and refinement do you personally allow until you're satisfied with a piece? What does this process look like in practise?

Many of the pieces of our new album are pieces that we've played for years and that are on other albums under different titles. The title track "Plode" for example is an evolution of the song "Trance" on our album Borderland. And it keeps evolving!



So, we're never satisfied entirely, we just can say: wow, this is a nice state of that piece, let's record it that way.

What's your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? How involved do you get in this?

We work very closely with our mixing engineers. Especially in this project sound is key to make our pieces groove and to help them unfold their hypnotic potential.

The visions for the sound on our recordings change from album to album and so do our partners. Maybe at some point we will feel at home and let it go more.

The mastering process, honestly, we don't understand entirely, so we just trust the master engineers.

After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

Not at all - when an album is released, we already have the next one in the pipeline. It's a constant strive to formulate our art and make it deeper, clearer, and stronger and we never get a feeling of emptiness.

This must be more a thing for pop artists that have been living with an album intensively for months or even years.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing 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 an interesting question. There's a lot of potential in making a great cup of coffee for sure! Every creative act or process can stimulate your imagination and help you focus in the moment.

But I think there is rarely a place where the possibilities of human expression are as broad as they are in music.