A short talk with Argo Nuff on musical diaries, rituals of finding music, and "angels in real life".
Diogo: Annebolyn is a very intriguing album, sprouting creative ideas and even some bursts of brilliance. The sonority grows, slows down, climaxes, never returning to its original form. What's the story behind it?
Argo Nuff: annebolyn was worked almost exclusively in chronological order (with only a couple parts in "annabolena" being worked on out of order) and as a result happened to just turn into a sort of musical diary that more or less followed what I was listening to (including all the samples across the record) throughout the whole recording process. I originally planned for the first two or three tracks to be just one song in a more conventional song-by-song album, but I kinda just kept working on it and the concept kept getting bigger and bigger until it eventually became what it is.
Diogo: What can you tell us about the decision of separating the album into two long, progressive tracks?
Argo Nuff: While the concept of the whole album was becoming more solid and concrete, the idea originally was to have it as one entire piece. But the more we worked on the concept and themes, we thought about splitting the album into a "Side A" / "Side B" format to connect it to a time where music used to be exclusively physical things in the world and contrast it with how the whole technological revolution has changed both music itself, and how we approach music. There's a whole ritual of finding and listening to music that has been gutted, and most (if not all) of my generation were born in a world of music where it feels like the entire musical ethos is just a click away.
Diogo: How does Annebolyn compare to previous material?
Argo Nuff: It's definitely our most ambitious and "out there" album. The rest of our previous output was, although cohesive projects on their own, more collections of songs that only really form its themes in hindsight, as more of a subconscious side effect of where my head was when writing it. But with this album, we went into it making something fully instrumental, so for it to sound cohesive and not a hodgepodge of ideas, we really had to map it out conceptually with all the themes and the tone. I actually had a bit of fear that, especially with it not really holding your hand throughout and being much more of a commitment than more normative music, the music wouldn't really connect with people, but the longer its been out, the more it feels like our first real big statement in the music industry, and the more I'm surprised with how well it's been received.
Diogo: All the elements that surround Annebolyn have a somewhat mysterious feeling to them. What's the origin of the project's name? What about the album cover? Does it share a connection with the music or is it merely an Aesthetic decision?
Argo Nuff: I first came across the title in Google when I noticed that "Anne Bolyn" was higher on the search results than the correct spelling of the name, "Anne Boleyn". And the more I slept on it, the more I connected it to this idea that... we have this image, this soul that we have on the internet, being a big culmination of all the data you've put into the ether, and how over time it morphs into this hazy doppelganger that isn't always reflective of who you are. I wanted the album to feel like these melodies that invoke a sort of weird nostalgia of a little part of a song you remember that got stuck in your head and has warped so much in your mind that by the point you listen to that song again, there's that dissonance there, between what's actually there and what you've created in your mind. The lines between your digital soul and your real self get blurred, and it's getting to a point where most of us are finding out that we don't really know whether "Anne Bolyn" is just as real as "Anne Boleyn" was. The cover art tries to capture that too, with the digital soul (a clickbait red circle) capturing only a ghost of who we are (fun fact: I took the original image from an internet rabbit hole I went down about angels in real life; I ran it through an AI upscaler to make as hi-def and clear as possible, but as it often is with AI, it only really serves to blend everything into itself, which I'm sure you could connect thematically somewhere).
Diogo: How does one end up in a rabbit hole about "angels in real life"?
Argo Nuff: I go through a lot of internet rabbit holes in my spare time. Go through enough abandoned GeoCities websites and you're bound to find some occult conspiracy stuff. It's almost the hallmark of esotericism on the internet. There's always some "deeper truth" that's hidden beneath the surface, and personally, I find it just really interesting to see what people come up with. There's surprisingly a lot of thinking that goes into it. You kind of have to... to explain the unexplainable.
Diogo: "[...] this idea that we have this image, this soul that we have on the internet, being a big culmination of all the data you've put into the ether, and how over time it morphs into this hazy doppelganger that isn't always reflective of who you are". This sentence intrigued me. However, with the expression "doppelgänger", do you mean a digital "Other" that possesses a distinct consciousness from the Self? The way I see it, this "entity" represents a projection of ourselves into a computerized reality; one that overloads with information, immediateness and connections.
Argo Nuff: Basically. With everything we put on the internet, all the soul we bear into this void, there has to be something there. It's always being added onto, and the nature of the Internet makes everything in a semi-permanent state. And it's the souls that we converse with. Every interaction online is filtered through these souls that aren't ours. So what is it? Who is it? It's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately.
Diogo: In my opinion, "Annebolyn" feels like Post-Rock perfectly adapted to the Digital Era. Currently, there's a narrative going on that "traditional" Post-Rock is succumbing to its own structure and dynamic clichés. Yet, if we decide to fit your album into the "Post-Rock" tag, it sounds incredibly refreshing. As Simon Reynold's predicted, "Perhaps the really provocative area for future development relies in... cyborg rock". What are the advantages of absorbing the current spirit of the times before experimenting with the sounds from the past?
Argo Nuff: I've definitely felt the wear that "crescendo-core" has had on Post-Rock, but I think as the culture grows more adjusted to the Internet age, we're finally beginning to open back up to the essence of Post-Rock as a genre that prioritizes atmosphere over everything else. And as with everything else in this world, it's all getting more digital, and one thing that a lot of people overlook in Post-Rock is its roots in Krautrock, which incorporates a lot more Electronic elements than you usually see in Post-Rock, and the same as how the era of Futurism (not that big of a coincidence that the first Can album came out the same year we went to the moon) has had its effect on music, I think the era of the Internet is going to put us full circle in incorporating more Electronic elements in Post-Rock, and it's that same way of thinking that pushed through the record.
Diogo: I'm not going to lie: I'm extremely curious about your taste, considering the wide variety of sounds you incorporate in your work. Would you be kind enough to present us with three obscure names whose music you've been following lately?
Argo Nuff: I think argo nuff shares a lot of ideological similarities with panda rosa (The Kinspiral was one of my albums of 2020), and as of late, I've been getting into the digital Existentialism that SALEM brings to Electronic music (only ten years later does it really reveal its true tones of digital dread and apathy), and same goes for iANO, who makes Trance music so crushed and digitized it reminds me more of Shoegaze than anything you'd see from someone like Tiësto.
Diogo: Is there a "scene" happening in Oakland, California? What's it like for an underground musician to live in the city?
Argo Nuff: I feel like argo nuff has always been more of an Internet band rather than an Oakland band, although I do think the city does paint a sort of tonal varnish on the music more than anything else. Ruairi, my other band member, lives in the Los Angeles area, and we only had one session where we were actually working on the album with each other (which ended up on "annabolena", if you were wondering), and the rest took place through emails and dropbox links we exchanged.
Annebolyn | Argo Nuff
Argo Nuff is currently working on a new EP named Big City: it's going to be a split between the band and "someone special".
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