I Tend the Light breaks down “One Need Not be a Chamber,” exploring how 19th-century poetry, creepy YouTube archive footage, and EVPs fueled the sinister, slow-burn doomgaze sound. The artist also opens up about taking cues from psychological horror, their Sheffield DIY roots, and why they aren’t afraid to make music that demands patience in a fast-forward world. Read our discussion below!
Describe your sound in 3 words
Dark Experimental Heavy
Tell us a few things about the One Need Not be a Chamber. You borrowed the song title and central concept from Emily Dickinson’s poem. What was the initial spark that connected her 19th-century work on internal ghosts to your modern soundscapes?
I came up with the main melody about 18 months ago. I didn’t immediately know what I was going to do with it but what I did know was that I wanted to push the tension as much as I could. I wanted to almost trap the listener by not giving them the release that feels like it should be coming. I use a lot of spoken word samples in my music and that’s what helps me to take a song forward from an idea or a single riff into a full concept. On previous releases I’ve used cinematic dialogue, for example Now You are Dangerous is built around two scenes from Brick (2005). For ONNBAC I wanted something more unsettling that would add to that feeling of tension. I’d never used poetry in my music before so I thought it would be cool to try. There’s a very strange video on YouTube from 15 years ago where someone has set a reading of One Need Not be a Chamber to be Haunted to a still photo of Emily Dickinson and used an effect to make it look like her mouth and eyes are moving. It’s really creepy! That’s the thing that made my mind up to use that particular poem and I challenged myself to make it even creepier. As soon as I dropped it into the track I knew it was a perfect fit. I then had a lot of fun creating the atmosphere and effects for that first section. All the sounds are made with guitars apart from the drums and one synth line that comes in at 04:20. I sent the three guitar parts through various effects. Some are freaky delays and reverbs and some are synths. The cool thing about sending the guitar through a synth is that it’s extremely unpredictable, any slight movement of the fingers or light touches of the pick on a string can lead to some amazing sounds.
The next problem was to work out where the song was going to go when the tension finally breaks. I decided I wanted to use an EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) recording and I went through a lot of those to find the right one. I ended up using the only one I found that fitted and I love it. But I still didn’t know how the second part of the song would pan out musically. The traditional thing to do would be to bring in some distorted guitars and I messed around with that idea for a long time but it was too predictable. One day I was listening to Have a Nice Life (which is a pretty normal thing for me to be doing) and contemplating how they break the tension on songs like Cropsey, which I think is definitely an influence on ONNBAC. I had the idea of using electronic drums and putting all the heaviness into the drums. Once I’d made that choice and got the sound I wanted (by saturating the hell out of the drums) the whole thing came together very quickly. I think the distorted voices from the EVP and the heavily saturated drums work so well together.
Dickinson suggests that confronting an external ghost is far less frightening than facing the darkness within our own minds. How do you capture this sense into the track?
The song is tense and deliberately sparse. It’s a 5 minute song and there are no drums until 3 minutes in. I wanted the listener to feel trapped and there’s no worse place to be trapped than within your own thoughts. Every time the melody goes round, just when you think it might be about to change, it starts again. The final notes only change at the very end of the song which creates a sense of being permanently on edge. There are long spaces between the notes. I could have filled the spaces with a bunch of other notes in a “spooky” scale but the silence is scarier than anything that I could fill it with, just like how what the brain conjures is often much worse than reality.
You’ve described I Tend the Light as providing the soundtrack to the “corridors surpassing material place.” Is this single a standalone exploration, or does it signal the direction of a larger body of work on the horizon?
This is the fifth song I’ve released so I’m still finding my sound. However, I’ve really enjoyed exploring psychological horror and creating unsettling soundscapes with ONNBAC. I’m very much into early cinema and particularly enjoy hearing modern soundtracks to these old films, my favourites being the Edison Studio soundtrack of L’Infierno (1911) and KTL’s work for The Phantom Carriage (1921). I’d love to have a crack at a silent movie soundtrack one day. ONNBAC was supposed to be the first track for an EP but I was too excited by the final result to sit on it so maybe I will explore this sound for another few songs and see what happens.
Why The Cremator? What made a 1969 Czech psychological horror film the ideal counterpart to your current sound?
I watched The Cremator a few years ago and the scene used in the video where he takes his family to this horrific waxwork (or is it?) sideshow blew me away and stayed with me ever since. This was before I’d started making music but I kind of knew that I would come back to it some day. Just like I knew I would use the Pearl’s Dream sequence from Night of the Hunter (it became the chorus for A Pitiful Applause). As soon as I finished ONNBAC I knew that this scene would be perfect for the video. That ambiguity as to whether these are waxworks or real people fits the vibe of the song perfectly. I’m finding a lot of inspiration in making non-scary things scary. For example the opening scenes of the family enjoying the fairground are not particularly unsettling in the film but I slowed them right down, cut them differently and with the music added the effect is totally different. Unfortunately YouTube has flagged the content as 18+ and restricted any advertising for the video so it’s not getting many views. I don’t make things easy for myself!
In which place or state of mind do you imagine people might listen to your music?
I would say my music demands patience and active listening. My intros are long, the structures are unconventional and each song tells a full story from beginning to end. I don’t make music that meets the 30 second cut-off point for listener retention on streaming platforms. If you’re looking for something that takes you to another place for up to 10 minutes at a time and hopefully sounds unlike anything you’ve heard before then I think you’ll enjoy I Tend the Light.
Artists and people that have influenced you?
Have a Nice Life I’ve already mentioned. Sadness, Holy Fawn, Alcest, Bell Witch. These are some of the more contemporary influences. I’m a bit older than your average new artist so I have a lot to pull from. Sometimes I wish I’d started making music earlier but then I realise it would have likely been shit. 🙂 My formative years were the 90s when things like Burn My Eyes by Machine Head and Demanufacture by Fear Factory were coming out. I had a very intense few years in the UK and Spanish hardcore scenes where I saw bands like Refused and His Hero is Gone in their prime. I listen to a lot of hip hop and I think I bring some of that to I Tend the Light with my approach to sampling.
I feel I have to shout out some of the heavy Sheffield bands doing the business at the moment like Hidden Mothers, Stahl, Baosbheinn, Ba’al, Mouths and everyone at the DIY venues like Lughole, Yellow Arch, Sydney & Matilda, Hatch and Delicious Clam keeping things alive.
What is the story behind your name?
My first song is called I Tend the Light and samples The Lighthouse. “I tend the light” is a line from the film. I thought it would be cool to set Willem Defoe’s curse monologue to doomgaze riffs and I was right! I didn’t have a name when I was making it and I didn’t even think I was going to release it; I was just having fun learning songwriting and production. It seemed like a good name and it didn’t make me cringe when I said it out loud so I stuck with it as the artist name too. Plus I get to have a cool logo where the “I” looks like a lighthouse.
Thank you!
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