The Tides Keep Rising

Written by: Jimmy Wah - Sense Music Media

FUTURE STATE is a collaboration between Sydney vocalist Ally Oliver and Bristol artist Stuart Cam produced at Stuart’s very own Future State Studios in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Inspired by alternative trip-hop sounds with a breadth of experience on opposite sides of the globe, the music produced by these two talented artists has been compared to the likes of MASSIVE ATTACK and PORTISHEAD. Their new single Autumn is a great example of the diverse range that these two are able to deliver and there’s much, much more on the horizon. We had a chat to them via the magic of satellite to find out more.

The Interview

There is little known about who these two seemingly accomplished artists are; but one listen to their music makes it blindingly obvious that they know what they’re doing. Who are you exactly? We asked them to tell us a little bit about their musical history…

Stuart: “My name’s Stuart, I’m from Bristol UK originally and I started my musical career at the tender age of 15 years old believe it or not, which is probably highly illegal to be in nightclubs DJ-ing but there I was anyway right? I was deep into Drum & Bass, around the sort of mid-90s RONI SIZE REPRAZENT era. I’d go to school, then in the evenings go to nightclubs with my records and play to crowds of people. Then I did some DJ’ing around London – I moved into House Music – and at the age of about 20-21-22, having DJd for about 7 years I was like ‘you know what? I’ve had enough of this, I wanna write music’. So I wrote some music for film and I did some stuff for the BBC and that was really good but I always wanted to start a band. So about 5 years ago I moved to Australia with the intention of – you know obviously moving away from Bristol where it rains all the time to somewhere where it’s a bit more sunny – so  I ended up in Manly. I started a band, Ally then obviously joined the band and, yeah we’ve been writing and producing music ever since then.”

Ally: “My background is very different from Stu’s, I grew up loving to sing. My Mum and my Aunty had a drama/dance/musical theatre school , so I did a lot of musical theatre, which is very opposed to my personality – I’m not a very bubbly, super-outgoing person – but it was fun an it was a good way to get used to being on stage. As I progressed through High School – just doing music in school – I started listening to artists like REGINA SPEKTOR, [and] FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE and thinking ‘I really wanna do something like this’ but I didn’t really have the production knowledge to create soundscapes and things like that so I just played guitar and played folk songs until Stu found me on Soundcloud and same as Stu, we’ve been writing together ever since. It’s a very long-winded story (laughs), sorry.”

So being from such different backgrounds, what has it been like for them to work together?

Ally: So as Stu said, we kind of met in a very strange circumstance. I was studying music at JMC and I’d been posting songs that I’d written… nothing particularly innovative… I was only really posting them for other people at uni to hear, just for learning purposes. Somehow – I don’t know how but – somehow Stu found my page.  It’s been about five years of us writing music and we’ve really taken our time before we started releasing any of it; mostly because we’ve been exploring LOTS of different sounds. We have a whole album worth of songs that are really pop, like electro-pop; an then we have a whole album that’s like jazzy trip-hop; and then we have another one that’s more edgy industrial trip-hop. So we like to explore lots of different things.     

Stu: We’ve been writing for a long time, so we’ve gone through this whole musical journey already but nobody’s heard it so nobody’s aware of who we are or what we’re doing. We’ve been trying to discover what is our sound… and along the way we’ve kind of gone through all of these different phases and genres of music. So we’re in this sort of strange situation where we’ve got four albums worth of material but if you look at our Spotify we’ve got two singles and an EP. So representatively, what we have and what we’ve shown is completely out of balance.

Well that must explain why it sounds so amazing. FUTURE STATE’s first EP Rising Tide sounds like a perfect mix of artists like MASIVE ATTACK and PORTISHEAD. Which brought us to our next question; who are FUTURE STATE’s musical influences?

Ally: I think what makes our music so unique is that we have such different musical backgrounds; that’s how it’s come together to sound like a modern MASSIVE ATTACK or PORTISHEAD – we hope – I mean not to compare ourselves to them but that’s the dream comparison.

Stu: I made this joke the other day: ‘You can take the boy out of Bristol but you can’t take Bristol out of the boy’. I guess my serious interest in music started when I was 14-15; and that was the time when MASSIVE ATTACK and PORTISHEAD and the Bristol sound was taking off. So for me growing up, that was always the sound of my home town. I really wanted to bring that forward. There are other influences in there as well like NINE INCH NAILS, TALK TALK, RADIOHEAD… anything that’s kind of a little bit left of centre.

Ally: When I met Stu, I was introduced to this world of music that I had never listened to before. When I met him he started giving me playlists that I should listen to. These are some of my favourite artists now. My influences with my song writing are mostly people that I admire from a lyrical perspective. So it’s completely separate from something like MASSIVE ATTACK where it’s about the sound and music. I first stared writing songs because I listened to a LAURA MARLING album. She’s a folk artist and her lyrics are like poetry, so that’s where my background started.

Stu goes on to talk about how FUTURE STATE uses a collaborative approach like MASSIVE ATTACK by inviting different artists to contribute; but always maintaining the strong female vocal in the style of PORTISHEAD…

Stu: … to have a female vocal there gives a sweetness to the song and a femininity to the music – when combined with the edgy sounds, it’s like sweet and sour mixed together… it just works.

It feels like there’s a thematic element to FUTURE STATE’s lyrics and the sounds that they use. Ally and Stu elaborate on the way Autumn was written…

Ally: Stu’s first studio in Manly when I met him was really small. He lived on one of the busy streets of Manly, right above a big oval… and there were just dogs barking.

Stu: It’s interesting because that was one of the first songs we wrote together. We wrote that song about four and a half years ago now, so it’s a very old song to us. It was only the second song we’d done together and we were both in tune with each other; the wavelengths had combined. As I was editing I opened up the window and the dogs were barking and the wind was blowing and I thought you know ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to sort of capture this moment in the song that we’re writing’… it reminded me of the PINK FLOYD track ‘Dogs’ from their ‘Animals’ album…

Ally: In terms of the overall mood and what inspires the sound for our other tracks… a lot of the time Stu will create a vibe and get it to a point where I can draw some sort of emotion from it. Then I’ll come in and I’ll write a lyric line or two and we’ll kind of workshop it from there.

That brings about the next question. What is the creative process that these artists use to create their music?

Stu: It really does turn into a conversation through the music. As Ally says, I don’t really think about the lyric side of things, I think about the sounds that are involved. I’ll have a conversation with her through the music, she’ll feel something from the music, she’ll feel something and then have a conversation with me back through the lyrics. So we kind of work that way.

Ally: We’re both very passionate and we can be quite feisty with each other when we’re writing, which I enjoy cos it challenges us a lot. It would be easy to write about the same thing and say the same sort of thing over and over again; but Stu is someone who will challenge me and just go “You know what? You can do something better than that.”

Stu: [The way it starts is] One of us will get inspired and start channeling the music. In some ways we’re not really responsible for it, it comes from somewhere else. Our responsibility really is to interpret what the inspiration is and try to refine it. So yeah, that’s kind of how we work and how the sounds come together.

With such depth of experience and after working together over a five-year period; How does it all come together? What is their recording process?

Ally: We usually record the final takes as we’re writing the song. We did go to a studio to record the vocals for Autumn but most of the time when I’m writing the song – “We are recording the song” finishes Stu.

Ally: The benefit of being here [Future State Studios] is that we have studio access all the time. So we’re really recording as we’re writing – and its only when Stu’s doing a lot of the polishing that we might be like ‘You didn’t quite hit it with that verse, let’s just do it again’. So it’s quite – “It’s organic” Stu chimes in. Yeah we don’t write and then record to release; we do it as we’re going.

Stu: Yeah that’s right, I have Future State Studios where I don’t just produce our music, I produce other people’s music as well so we have the benefit of really beautiful microphones, really beautiful pre-amps, amazing synthesizers. We’ve got all of this stuff already at our fingertips; so we can literally just walk in and hit record and start on something, then work it that way. Things come together organically and totally unplanned sometimes.

For instance, I managed to find an old dusty record from a second-hand shop in Leura and it was called ‘Cleveland Library: Sounds of the Amazon’ or something like that. I thought ‘Oh, what the hell is this thing? Let’s have a look at this’ so I took it home and it turned out to be different field recordings of things like tribes in the Amazon and I thought ‘Oh this is really interesting; I wonder what it sounds like at 25% speed’. I listened back and thought ‘Oh wow, that’s really cool!’. So I started recording that and it became this weird sort of – It’s in 7/8 or something says Ally – yeah this weird distorted drum-loop and I thought ‘Oh I wonder what it sounds like with a synth on top…’ and you know, before you know it, you’re off!

Ally and Stu go on to talk about how each other’s style while recording in the studio challenges their musical composition…

Ally: I’ll walk in and Stu will be playing something and I’ll think ‘There’s no way that I’m going to be able to write something to this. It forces me to write vocals in a different way that I otherwise wouldn’t.

Stu: Then your lyrics obviously inform the recording process. I tend not to think in terms of verse, chorus, bridge; my brain doesn’t work like that. I think more in loops, vibes or by imagining a soundtrack. The vocal structure then forces me to make it more accessible for people. So we’re always writing, arranging, recording all at the same time, all of the time.

Ally: I’ll often sing the best when I’m first writing a song because the emotion of whatever I’m trying to say is at its height. There’s been a few times where we haven’t been bothered to plug in the proper mics and I’ve just picked up a dynamic mic and I’ve sung it in, then I’ve tried to replicate the performance that I did the first time and it just is not happening. So now we always take the extra five minutes to set things up properly because the final take we end up using is usually the first take we record.

Stu: Mark Hollis from TALK TALK said something like this which I think is very true and it’s exactly like Ally said; ‘The first time a note is played, the first time you play the chord, the first time you sing the lyric, that’s the magic moment.’ – That’s the point at which the idea is being born and – ‘Every subsequent repetition of that is trying to get back to that magic moment.’

What about playing live?

Stu: We’ve played at the Hotel Gearin in Katoomba back in 2018 with live musicians and a combination of computers and synths. The venue has subsequently closed but the gig went down really well.

Ally: With the onset of Covid we decided to scale back our live set to just the two of us, which makes it easy to put together live streams. We’ve done two live streams to date with just us but in the next few weeks we are planning on releasing a pre-recorded live set shot and produced in the studio with DEEPSEA LIGHTS.

Finally, the question that’s on everyone’s minds. Do FUTURE STATE have any future releases planned?

Ally: Our next release is going to be the first song that we ever wrote together. It’s very different from Autumn but it was wrtten around the same time. It has more of a James Bond, trip-hop kind of vibe. Following that we’re going to be releasing an EP; which will be leaning even further into the dark, edgy, industrial style. So we’ve just given people a taste of something sweeter but we’ll slowly pull them back over to the dark side.

Stu: Yeah there’s some really challenging stuff on that EP. It’s in a very odd tonal mode - B Frigian mode - which is reminiscent of the Eastern European style of music. Then it’s in 7/8 time signature which is almost like jazz, so It’s very challenging to listen to. Then with Ally’s voice on top it suddenly becomes easier to listen to but it’s still complex.

Ally: We’d love to go on to create an album from there and we definitely have the material to do it but it’s hard to make the judgement call right now with covid given that we won’t be able to tour it live. So we’re just going to be releasing it track by track with beautiful music videos to go along with it.

Single Review

Do the Ministry of Sound: Chillout Sessions still exist? If so, this song definitely deserves to be on there. It begins with a very chilled out, soft and steady beat that is layered with jazz piano as though you’ve just sat down in a Las Vegas lounge bar. Then in comes the sax, accenting the spaces left by the piano and bringing a steady calmness to the sonic landscape while speaking in that passionate expression that all sax’s do. With bass adding the necessary body to the piece, the sax is effectively replaced by guitar in the live clip below recorded at Retro Rehash.

As the music swings us in the figurative hammock of our minds it is accompanied by the expressive, angelic vocal melodies of none other than Ally Oliver. The recorded version of the song is peppered with subtle accompaniments such a the barking of dogs in the distance but this doesn’t put a dent in the soaring vocals. Rather, these sounds add to the evocation of the autumn landscape; which is emphasised through the lyrics that personify nature and expression of the changing seasons in the first person. The music ebbs and flows along with the lyrics along with the breeze sampled in the background.

Ending with the rhythm of a beating heart that’s exactly where it will take you.

The Verdict

This song does an incredible job of transporting the listener to the world of Autumn that it creates. Listen to it on loop and your mind will be better for the experience.

8/10

Download

You can download your very own copy of Autumn on all your favourite platforms here

Social Media

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FUTURE STATE on Spotify