Talking to: Casually Here
London’s Nic Nell, better known as Casually Here, has been carving out experimental electronic soundscapes for over a decade. Described as a ‘multidisciplinary artist, composer, sound designer and record producer with a background in art and mathematics’, Casually Here has just released his second solo album, Possible Worlds, on his own Algebra label.
Following up on his first album Kept (2015), as well as EPs Pelt (2011) and Large Hall, Low Ceiling (2017), this latest release is drenched in beauty: soul-stirring, danceable numbers like Apex and The Great Filter sit alongside soft, drifting dreamers like Rhubarb Skies. Across seven tracks, a kaleidoscope of visions roll out, fluid and fluttering. Glorious instrumentals, clarinets, rattling percussion, horns, and fragments of vocals conjure up human warmth and togetherness. And with cover art taken from La Ville Creuse; a painting by Luc Schuitan, and the vinyl available in both black and clear, the record is a treat for the eyes as well as the ears.
Casually Here spoke to us about the creative process, intersections between art and music, and a much-needed hope for our times.
How’s life in London these days and what have you been up to lately?
Good thanks. It's really nice to be able to go out and do things again with people and to make the most of being in the city. I went to hear the Jon Hopkins Music For Psychedelic Therapy album in Dolby Atmos last week which was really interesting and has definitely given me the push to set up a quadraphonic four-speaker set-up in the studio and experiment with making some music in the round. I've recently been getting back into doing life drawing and have been going to weekly fast poses sessions, which are a great way of being in an almost meditative creative flow as the poses change after just a few minutes so you really have to be in the moment. I've been doing a lot of mastering recently, which I'm really enjoying, and I'm starting to get my head back into artist mode and making my next album.
Your new album Possible Worlds is about to launch. Can you tell me a bit about the creation process?
The tracks from 'Possible Worlds' were made in a big outpouring of creative energy where something just clicked in my creative process and I found myself able to complete tracks in a way that I've often struggled with before.
One of the main tricks I used was to try and take a new idea for a track to the point of having it in some kind of structured form that I could render off the computer as an MP3 in the very first session of coming up with it. This can take quite a surge of energy as you're not necessarily planning on writing something new when an idea strikes, but it was a real breakthrough for me. I could then go away and listen to it as a piece of music, and react to it in that way, rather than as a file I'm working on within software on a computer. When you're first making something, it might not even exist if you don't push on with it, so in an odd way that really removes the pressure that you might feel later on a track you've become invested in. So I found the main body of the tracks came about really fast before I had a chance to judge them. I made Pale Blue Dot in a day, and I think the fastest was Rhubarb Skies, which took less than three hours from scratch. I also used lots of field recordings on the album from various travels which is a really nice way of triggering memories of times and places for me - almost like collaging time.
Although they might be thought of as very different disciplines, artistic and mathematical ideas seem to come together in your work to really interesting effect. How do these two areas of your practice complement each other?
I've always enjoyed the intuitive side of maths where you have a feeling about what the answer is which you then have to do the work to confirm or refute, and I like to approach music intuitively rather than analytically, so there's some synergy there. I'm not fussed about knowing the details of the music theory behind harmony that I'm using; I'm much more interested in how it makes me feel. I've always been interested in the more abstract side of maths and I'm sure that an inclination towards abstraction, space, geometry and patterns comes into play. I do find myself drawn to interesting physical patterns and relations in the shapes of chords whilst playing at a keyboard and enjoy cycling cross-rhythms that cycle at different rates, but I don't analyse what I do in terms of maths. If anything, it's probably my interest in physics that informs the music more - and some of that is the abstracting of space and time elements via sound.
In a similar vein, do you find that visual and sound art intersect or affect each other? How?
I have quite a visual connection with music within my head. I experience sounds as having texture, colour and shape and endeavour to create sonic worlds in production that have a clarity in my mind's eye. I find that the clearer the images my music creates for me, the closer to completeness things are and the better they translate to others. I try to make my music as stimulating as watching a movie, if you give it your full attention, at least for myself, and imagining the visual side of it like a screen in front of me helps with that. I enjoy making visual work to accompany tracks, but I also like leaving space for people's imagination rather than prescribing an exact narrative as to what's going on.
There’s obviously a deep concept behind the idea of Possible Worlds. Can you explain a bit about the ideas that inspired it? What possible worlds are we talking?
Possible Worlds explores bifurcating possible futures at this precarious point in history, from darker surveillance AI paths, to wonder and flourishing, with an undercurrent of optimism running throughout. I'm generally worried that the nihilism that a lot of people seem to be feeling about the future might itself be what manifests into the negative outcomes that are so feared. For the first time in history, we have the chance to screw up the chance for people to even exist in the future, and at the same time, we have the chance to pave the way for trillions of conscious beings to exist in the future and potentially have wonderful lives. For the short term, it seems that living in closer harmony with nature is key to our long-term survival. Like everyone, I often find myself lost in my daily preoccupations and find that feelings of wonder, beauty and awe are really hard to keep hold of. Those kinds of feelings help give us perspective and to contextualise the big picture. Making this album has been like an ember of hope that I've kept stoked and I hope ‘Possible Worlds' helps listeners to look upwards and outwards, and to feel closer to those invaluable feelings of optimism for the future.
What other musicians around at the moment are you really excited about?
Ross From Friends, Caroline Polachek, Heavenly Stems, Wordcolour, Hinako Omori, Lake Turner, Danny L Harle, Charli XCX, Mr. Mitch, Floating Points, Ian Kirkpatrick, Pocket, Clark, Julia-Sophie, Emma-Kate Matthews, Oklou, Liam Hutton, Lapalux, Hyd, Fred again, Otus, BABii, Tony Jaguar, Barker, Hania Rani, Samuel Organ.
Growing up, what kinds of influences shaped your musical landscape?
As a young kid it was Michael Jackson and Bon Jovi that first got me really excited about music. Playing in a band as a teenager it was bands like At The Drive-In, Glassjaw and Deftones. Four Tet's Rounds was the first electronic album I bought, which was the start of a whole new world to explore. As a singer-songwriter it was artists like Regina Spektor, Joanna Newsom and Kaki King. Then, I think, as for many artists, hearing Burial's Untrue was a complete game-changer for me in terms of what an electronic instrumental record could do and started my process of stepping away from being a singer-songwriter and starting to focus on instrumental music. Jon Hopkins' Immunity album was another big one for me, which opened my eyes to the potential of dance music as an art form in ways that I hadn’t experienced before, with a combination of visceral physicality and attention to detail within a fully artistic space.
How has your classical training come to impact your current electronic work?
I think years of singing in choirs from a young age will have helped inform my understanding of harmony, as you're often following lines within the harmony rather than the root note, or the lead melody, which potentially tunes the brain into those movements with chord progressions. It also helps build up an intuitive sense of harmony as you're often singing stuff that you haven't rehearsed much.
I played the clarinet pretty seriously at school, some jazz/blues but mostly classical, and then had a pretty long break away from it after that. Over the past few years I've been playing and recording more and more, which I absolutely love. It's such an expressive instrument and is a great way of getting breath, movement and emotion into things, whilst still keeping things abstract to a certain extent, as opposed to, say, having a lead vocal. I'm really enjoying building textures out of layers of clarinets and exploring extended technique stuff.
Do you have plans for live shows coming up this year?
There's a London launch show/Algebra label party we're going to be announcing soon. I'm really looking forward to getting out to play the record as a lot of it was made with the intention of people hearing stuff together in a group. I think it feels quite different when experienced on big speakers together with the other people there, so I'm really excited about that. I'm also hoping to do some more ambient sets at festivals this summer accompanying guided meditations from my brother.
What projects are in the pipeline, and what can we expect from Casually Here in the future?
I'm quite far along with what will likely be album three and then there's a more ambient record that extends the world of Rhubarb Skies. I've always made a lot more music than I've released, and I made a lot of music in this period, so I'm planning for this to be the start of releasing music more regularly.
Composer Sami El-Enany and I have made good headway on a more experimental album together so I’m looking forward to getting some time in the diary to get that finished. I've also recently remixed [producer and multi-instrumentalist] Art School Girlfriend which will be out soon, and then there are a number of releases lined up on my label Algebra.
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