Low Island on new album ‘bird’ and returning to Nottingham for a gig at the Bodega

Hi Carlos! Thanks for chatting with us today. Your new album bird was made live in the studio rather than building tracks piece by piece, alongside Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor. What drew you to working with him and how did his touch shape the guitar tones and atmosphere on the album?

We had all been fans of Grizzly Bear since we were teenagers. Beyond falling in love with the songs, there was something about the way they were able to make the familiar forces of a band - drums, bass, guitars, vocals - sound so strange and fresh that was very appealing to us. We also loved Chris’ own work under his Cant solo project which was altogether more electronic.

We knew that Chris had produced both projects, alongside producing artists like Moses Sumney and Kirin J Callinan for his label Terrible Records, as well as being involved in restoring some of Arthur Russel’s music, another hero of ours. All of this had made him someone we had always been desperate to work with, so when his manager replied to an email of mine saying that he would be interested, you can imagine how thrilled we were!  

Chris brought a very deep knowledge of not just recording but recording bands to the studio. It was very inspiring to watch him work with the different personalities in the group, sculpt all of these different sounds by synthesising a whole range of modular effects and outboard gear, and also bring a huge amount of dynamism and enthusiasm into the studio, all of which instilled confidence in the band and our songs. That kind of energy was something we really needed on our third album; the music industry knocks you about and spends most of the time making you feel insecure. Chris helped us to believe in our music and, more importantly, have fun. 

Songs like spit it out and machine lover tackle technology’s intrusion into human relationships. Do you feel writing about these themes has changed your own relationship with tech and social media?

Absolutely. There’s a story that David Foster Wallace tells in a speech he gave to some young graduates in 2005 where he describes two young fish swimming past an older fish who asks them ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’ The two young fish swim on a bit, and then one turns to the other and says ‘what the hell is water?’ I named one of the tracks, ‘this is water’ after that speech. There is so much you can interpret from it, but one of the things I think is particularly salient for today is the idea that there are things around us that become so embedded in our experience that we are no longer able to ‘see’ them.

I think technology is our water. It has become so integrated into our daily lives that to maintain a critical distance from it is almost impossible. Writing and thinking about it in song, and also in a master’s I completed at Goldsmiths in Cultural Studies, has helped me to put technology at arm’s length; what is this stuff doing to us? How is it shaping the way we relate to ourselves, each other and the world? The director Adam Curtis talks about how we don’t yet have a language to talk about how we are being changed by new technologies and media, and I think he’s absolutely right. Thinking about these questions has to be the starting point. 

Follow your direction was inspired by a Chatbot transcript. What was it about that exchange that stuck with you enough to build a song around it?

Yes exactly, it was inspired by a google engineer’s conversation with the AI chatbot they were developing at the time called Lamda; he was convinced that he had proved its sentience. I was very struck by the humanness of the exchange. At times you could have switched around parts of the conversation and you wouldn’t have been able to tell who was the chatbot, who was the human. And of course large language models are trained on human testimony; they are, in a sense, our own words that are being reflected back at us in the very warped, distorted and mechanised mirror of AI. The whole of humanity is there; our violence, our fears, our hopes, our dreams, and what I think is ultimately our desperate loneliness. All of these themes run throughout not just this song but ‘bird’ as a whole.  

Given the album’s themes, what’s your take on the rise of AI in music-making?

The general impulse of those developing AI is that it should make things as efficient and streamlined as possible: how can we get from A to B as quickly and cheaply as possible, and how can we do that in such a way that we are then able to scale up exponentially? The trouble with this kind of logic applied to any kind of artistic endeavour is that it assumes that the goal of optimisation and rationalisation is one that is shared by artists. The simple truth is that for most artists it is not.

Making art is about the experience of making it - what we are able to learn about ourselves, each other and the world as we pass from A to B, and the relationships we develop along the way. If AI can support artists on that journey then perhaps it has some value. But if all it does is seek to remove the journey, then art and artists will be poorer for it. 

Moving onto the tour, how does it feel to return to Nottingham, especially at a venue like The Bodega? Do you have any stand-out memories of past gigs in the city, including your appearances at Dot to Dot over the years? 

Dot To Dot was one of our first festival experiences as a band around 2017 (I think!). I remember the performance at the Bodega being one of the standout ones from the weekend - those kinds of shows were so important for us as they gave the band an opportunity to learn what it was like to play in front of new audiences, and also to get a feel for the independent venue scene.

We’ve been back since to support Gengahr at Rescue Rooms, and for another Dot to Dot where we played at the Student Union - both gigs we absolutely loved and felt a lovely warmth from the crowd. We can’t wait to be back. 

Since your last Nottingham show, how has your live performance changed? Are there new elements that you’re excited for people to experience?

I think the main change has to be that we must have at least two more albums since then, so working out a set list that takes the audience on a convincing journey through all of this music is a challenge, but one that we really enjoy working out in the rehearsal room together. I think (or at least hope) that we have become more confident performers, and are able to own all of the different sides of Low Island with more assurance; we have intimate songs, songs that are more guitar led, and songs that are more electronic led.

Leaning into that variety, rather than just committing to one, is something that we are pushing ourselves to do. It’s a much more challenging balancing act than just pursuing ‘one’ sound, but it’s so much more rewarding when you get that journey right at a live show. 

The live-in-studio approach for bird gave a certain warmth and cohesion. How are you translating that into the live show, especially in a venue like The Bodega which has its own acoustics and atmosphere?

With venues like The Bodega, because they have great PA systems, the real fun is trying to make them feel five times the size that they are with the heavier songs, and even more intimate with the quieter tracks. We wanted bird to be an album that had that scope; tracks that really explode alongside tracks that really draw you in. Only certain kinds of venues really let you lean into those two extremes, and The Bodega is definitely one of them! 

What do you hope the crowd in Nottingham will take away from the show, especially with the songs that ask us to put down phones and screens?

So much of this album is about the struggle to feel present in the modern world, and to find some relief from the heaviness of being. If someone leaves the show feeling like they were truly there, even if just for one chorus of one song; or if someone leaves feeling just a little bit lighter than they did when they came in, then we will have done a good job. 

Low Island will be performing at The Bodega on Friday 10 October. Their latest album bird is out now. 

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