My blog became the official media partner of the 5NDREAS Festival and my task is to fill in the remaining 3 weeks of wait with something interesting. And what could be more interesting than reading about the bands that are about to play on the stage at Feierwerk Kranhalle in Munich? Today, let's learn a thing or two about a non-post-rock addition to the line-up.
Pete Lambrou makes his music as VLMV for over a decade now. Even if his style is perhaps as distant from the crescendo-centred guitar post-rock music, he often joins the genre-focused festivals, promising intense live performances that may come as a surprise for anyone familiar with his soft and slow compositions.
I spoke with Pete about this difference between the albums and live events, intimacy of the project's sound and about the optimism in a poem about humankind's end. Let's start.
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ŁŚ: You've been making music as VLMV for over 10 years now, are there still people asking you how to say “flmf”?
PL: Yes, there are people who don’t know what it means or where it came from, but they just tend not to say it out loud. It's not the most interesting story, but the point is that the name is still pronounced “alma”. It's just that we weren't allowed to spell it with A's. There was a certain rather big Finnish pop star called Alma.
It definitely wasn't her who contacted me and it's very unlikely that it was any of her team. It was the team around the labels and then the people that were uploading all the music to Spotify and everything else. So it was basically just such a horrible mix-up. I didn't want to change the band name, I was so attached. It’s the perfect name for what I wanted to do with the project. So it's still “alma”, it's just spelt badly.
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| Not the ALMA you're looking for |
ŁŚ: I think it makes it more unique, right?
PL: I'll tell you the thing I've noticed: when it was Alma with A's, I was on the top of all the posters and when it's with V's I’m at the bottom.
ŁŚ: In all seriousness, “alma”, of course, means soul, so I take it that you're focused on spirituality.
PL: I think so. I was in bands before and it was more political, the themes were very much more directed outwards. And I wanted to do something inward instead.
It was the right name for four reasons. Obviously wanting to be very inward being the main thing. Second, my best friend had just made a film called The Soul of Flies, but in Spanish, I helped with some of the music on it. The third reason was this giant telescope called The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) made at the time, which was then the biggest telescope ever built. And then it's my wife's middle name.
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| El alma de las moscas aka The Soul of Flies |
So it's because of these reasons together, I was like: “I'm not changing it!”.
ŁŚ: I was posting about your music quite a while ago already and I remember writing about VLMV being a duo.
PL: Since COVID, it's been just me. But it was my project from the start. COVID made things difficult when you're in the music making business. It’s the second album now I’ve done alone.
ŁŚ: Is it easier for you to create as one person? I understand that sometimes it may be easier because you don't have to have a collective agreement on so many things. But on the other hand, sometimes it's the disagreements that develop the sound of a project.
PL: I think the majority of people probably get together with at least one other person, if not a few, and just play and jam together. And out of that chaos comes something unique. I miss that, but that's not how I've worked since VLMV. I've always been here in the studio, planning and making noises and trying to piece them all together.. It's very difficult to get time to collectively go and jam in a studio together unless you're specifically doing it for a project.
The difference really is that it takes longer for me now to come up with something, because you have to give everything quite a lot of breathing space. You write something and then you have no idea if it's any good or terrible. You have to give it a bit of time and come back.
ŁŚ: You said that one of the reasons to have the VLMV as your name was that you'd like this project to be more inwards…
PL: Yeah, exactly that. That was kind of the plan to get away from depending on other people, I suppose. Not entirely, but that was probably subconsciously what was happening.
ŁŚ: I briefly went through some interviews that you did in the past just to know a little bit more. And I saw one in which you listed the albums that actually sort of shaped your taste in music. And I believe you mentioned things like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, I Like Trains, This Will Destroy You. So basically very big post-rock names. But the music that you're creating is quite far from the usual loud guitars, crescendo stuff. What is the element of post-rock that influences your music right now?
PL: It must’ve been quite an old interview, that's sort of where I came from musically. My post-rock background. I’ve always liked electronic music and songwriters as well, if they're doing something I thought was really interesting. I’ve always loved post-rock, but I don't feel like I make post-rock music. It has been done quite a bit already, so I don't really want to add too much more to it. I want to try new things: I like playing with the electronics and the sounds and seeing what happens and then shape from that. It's quite a nice and rewarding experience instead of writing a song. I mean, post-rock’s never been about writing a song either, has it? It's been about building something. So I kind of like that as a philosophy, I think that's the thing I take from post-rock.
ŁŚ: Judging by who you sometimes perform with, I feel like you've been sort of adopted by the post-rock community.
PL: I think it's probably more the case that I've never let go rather than been adopted.
ŁŚ: You're going to be a part of another post-rock festival in Munich. Andreas speaks very highly about your music and he always mentions that the music of VLMV sounds differently live than it does on an album. Do you know what he means?
PL: I think it's probably more intense live. But definitely I'd never try and repeat the record live. That's kind of the opposite for me. I always love it when a band plays in a way that makes you feel like the live experience is a very different thing. That's very important. An VLMV live gig, I think, is more about seeing what I'm doing on the stage: all the instrument swapping and the looping and the solo one-man band thing is hopefully quite interesting to watch. It's still ironic, and I'm never sure I get this right, because the idea of VLMV is making very slow, patient, ambient music. And then on the stage I’m rushing around trying to play loads of instruments at the same time and keep it really interesting.
So I'm aiming to be on that sort of perfect knife edge between patience and interesting, but you never know.
The albums are always written first and I don't think about how I'm going to play live. I just want to make them as good as they are on their own. And then once they're finished, it's quite a big job to work out how to make a live version that I'm really happy with. I’m doing as much live as possible, especially with the new stuff. There's loads of electronics, at least half of those sounds on the last album, that were from the modular rig that is just impossible to recreate live. You can't find that sound ever again. So I've got to try and find a way of playing that sound live.
ŁŚ: On the stage, you perform solo as well, right?
PL: I do, yeah. The pressure is much higher, but the reward is much higher as well. When it goes well, it's much more soothing. When there's so much going on and you're just doing it by yourself, the audience is quieter, much more attentive. When there's more than one person, it seems maybe less impressive even if you're doing the same amount of work on stage.
I still need a crew to help me set up, though, because it is a monster of things to set up, usually, especially if I have my lighting.
ŁŚ: I've been to some quieter music concerts that really suffered from the audience not really expecting that kind of music and not being as attentive and focused as you described. Have you ever experienced a situation like this?
PL: There is one thing I found out: as soon as I start singing, people know that there's someone playing. Whereas if you're playing and there's no vocals, people may think it’s background music or a DJ. I've opened for a few bigger bands on tours and everyone's talking while you're playing, but as soon as you start singing, people start to realize what's happening.
There are certain countries where the etiquette is that you can talk through the concert and it doesn't matter. And you just have to know that when you're playing there and not take it as an insult, because it's just different cultures. But I've been quite lucky so far, I think.
There was this tour with Lonely the Brave, lovely guys, a great rock band, and the first show was in Leeds. I'm not particularly suitable for them as a support, but it worked really well and they're lovely and they're obviously very open to all music. But at the first show I started playing very slowly before starting singing and someone shouted something like, “you're…”... Can I swear on this? Yeah? Someone shouted: “you're a f***** c*** really loudly. I went: “oh wow, this is going to be a really bad tour”. But it actually turned out to be an amazing show. And at the end of the night, that guy came over and said “I'm so sorry if you thought that was for you. I was saying it to my friend, we didn't know you were playing. We thought you were the sound engineer who's come on testing stuff”. I think they bought some vinyl as well to say sorry, so that went well.
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| Lonely the Brave performing live |
I like festival shows a lot as well, like Dunk! in particular. I remember playing there and everyone's talking because it's sort of really quite early in the day. And as soon as I started playing, people just started lying down and just enjoying it. And that's quite a wonderful moment when you're on stage.
ŁŚ: I always wondered, for an artist like you, is it not annoying that people are lying down?
PL: I like it. It tells me that they know what's going to happen. Although, I'm not sure I would lie down on some of those sticky venue floors.
ŁŚ: If you weren't a musician, who would you be? I’m asking because in your songs, you're saying you're so many things! You're a pilot, you're a navigator, a gardener, an officer.
PL: (laughs) I've never had that question. I can't give you an answer for that because I don't know. I never had a backup plan. Definitely not a gardener, I wouldn't be very good. That was my first part-time job as a kid, as an actual gardener's assistant.
ŁŚ: So you'd say you'd be a better navigator than a gardener?
PL: No, both terrible. Maybe a pilot would be okay. I like driving.
Those are songs that have grandiose titles instead of having a line taken from the lyrics. So, in my head, they’re more like a book title, if that makes sense. They're kind of my thing, I suppose.
The other thing as well is that when you've done as many albums and as many tracks, you can't be writing about the same things that you were before, unless you find a new way of saying it. So a lot of them in the last few years have been more about moments in time and reflections than presenting an overall philosophy on something. The first two albums were aiming to be more worldly philosophical about your own place in the world. But I think now they’re a bit more personal, maybe a bit more true, if that makes sense. Real experience instead of imagined escapism.
But without giving it away too cheaply too. I think there's quite a lot of mystique in lyrics, which I've always loved. It might sound conceited to say it, but it's one of those things I love about the lyricists that you don't really know what they're talking about until it suddenly hits you. And it's so much more rewarding when you get it or when you've taken your own interpretation. So I'm trying to do that, trying to be pleased with how I say things instead of being too obvious or literal, I suppose.
ŁŚ: Talking about poetry, your last album is called There Will Come Soft Rains, and when I read the title at first, I thought that it’s again an example of a title that is meant to give hope to people. This year there's been some albums like this, like Lost Kyiv’s We’re All Going to Be Fine. But then I read that the phrase comes from a poem by Sarah Teasdale…
PL: Sarah Teasdale and then Ray Bradbury, yeah.
ŁŚ: And it's not that hopeful at all!
PL: Well, it depends whose side you're on! It's hopeful for nature and the planet. Not so much for us. Is that a problem?
A long time ago I decided sad music was very easy to make, but happy music is horrible. It’s way more difficult to make hopeful music that doesn’t sound shitty. So that's what I was trying to do.
And in that poem, that short story, there's lots of hope in them. Maybe not for humans, but for the planet still. And I thought the timing was so perfect for it. Sometimes you read a line like that and you can't make it your own words or take inspiration. I just want to credit that line and say it like it is, because I think it's perfect. I don't think I can do it justice by trying my own version.
ŁŚ: But you’ve just said that on the last albums, you're more focused on commenting on the events around you than stating general truths.
PL: On my two last albums, there are a lot of double meanings about the state of the world, but also of whatever we're going through. I'm not going to go into too much detail about each song because I don't like doing that, but there are certain songs like There Are Mountains Underneath Us that have two meanings joined together. And one is macro and one is micro.
On this album, there's a lot of personal things, but that doesn't mean that you have to ignore what's going on in the world and the threat that we're all facing. You know, you can have your own personal fears at the same time as global fears and hopes. VLMV as a project is very much more solo and inward-looking, but that doesn't mean that the inward problem isn't also a political problem at the same time.
ŁŚ: There Will Come Soft Rains feels different sound-wise as well. I think it feels more intimate than the previous one, maybe a little bit more minimalist than your music used to be.
PL: Lots of this album was just making loads of beeps and noises until I found something that I thought was really interesting. Unlike in the old ways of trying to write a song and then trying to make the song sound good, I'm very much the other way around now and make noises that I think are really interesting and then try and turn them into songs.
The intimate thing I think is just about how the vocal fits and how the sound is. I want the vocals to be clear because I want to be speaking, it's not quite spoken word, but it's sung like that. And you need the space and the intimateness for that. So it wasn't planned, it was just how they came together.
And that's the only way that it can work, really. In VLMV’s music, there's lots of ambiance and there's loads of little things happening underneath and then there's the voice on top. So you've got to have the space and the intimacy for that.
I have to give it, as I said earlier, a bit of time to come back and rework it and reshape it and keep working on it, adding and taking away things and then seeing what I really like. In that time, usually everything forms the theme, the lyrics, things like that usually. Well, at least the idea, maybe not the fully formed lyrics, but the idea of it. And then eventually how it fits with the album.
ŁŚ: And you also like working with other people, at least when it comes to remixing your works.
PL: Yeah, I love that. I think it's really interesting to just see what someone else does with it. To hear a different version of something you've made is just a really nice experience, hopefully also for the audience.
Especially if it's someone you've asked because you're really a big fan of what they do and then they do something that you don't expect. It's a very rewarding thing. The songs live on. You don't have to forget about them once they're out.
ŁŚ: Is there any particular remix of your composition that you feel like is even better than the original?
PL: I certainly think that Tom Hodge’s rework of The Lighthouse is probably better than the real one. There's also Simeon Walker’s rework of one of the ambient tracks called Flora, and he's basically taken it and he's just played a piano version and I love that minimalist version of the song.
On the other hand, Charlie Barnes did a rework of To the Stars and turned it into a big full band semi-jazz thing. It's just so… “What? What's going on?!” It's so interesting to hear such an introverted song that's very much about whispering into a microphone in a big grandiose version. It’s quite surreal.
ŁŚ: It's always better to have covers or reworks that are as different formally as possible, I imagine?
PL: Yeah, it's so interesting. Makes it so varied.
ŁŚ: But you don't have a metal version of any of your songs, right?
PL: Not yet, no. But if anyone would like to, then I'm definitely game.
ŁŚ: Are you going to be part of the audience at the 5NDREAS festival too? Who are you excited to see?
PL: Yes, I’ll be there for the Friday only, we're playing in Dresden on Saturday. I'm very much looking forward to One Last Moment’s concert because they're old friends from Goodbye Meteor and I've known Laurent for a long time now. I've heard some of their music already, they've sent it to me secretly. So I'm actually sure that I'm going to enjoy that. 🦢
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VLMV will perform at the 5NDREAS Festival on Friday 27.11.
Save your ticket now (limited availability): https://rausgegangen.de/events/5ndreas-postrock-festival-0/
Check the event on FB: https://fb.me/e/8cyEexXaV
