LA Priest’s Fase Luna is an album born from diversity. Will Griffin had the pleasure of talking to Eastgate about being stranded in South America, forced to tune into his jungle surroundings and creation of an album that whilst seems dissimilar to his previous work, isn’t far removed from his usual creative process:
‘The last record was similar at the start, I was in America at the time and only had a suitcase of stuff, so with this one I knew I could do it on really limited amounts of gear, and the irony of the last record is that when I was trying to finish it I got all of my stuff out of garages, and had this huge set up, and really the only way I finished that last record was getting this tiny keyboard out, a little Yamaha synth and powered through and did all of the singles using it’. It would’ve been easy in the depths of Mexico and Costa Rica to create a sound inauthentic to himself but Eastgate never fails to retain a sense of individuality on Fase Luna ‘It can get a bit like, ‘What kind of music do I make?’, because if you’re in somewhere that really reminds you of all this kind of tropical music, how do I do this without being cliche about this environment. But it’s better not to ignore your surroundings, I couldn’t make a British sounding record in a place like that, it would be fake really. It’s a balance, just don’t go too far one way’. Eastgate continued on the idea of whether it would be inauthentic to write a Bossa Nova album in his South American surroundings: ‘I could do that in a way that is genuine and interesting, but I don’t know that music and I’d have to know that style of music for more than a few months to know if you’re making it really badly or not’.
The album is stripped back to wandering guitar, and drums provided by a local Mexican drummer, Favela: ‘I never say his full name, because he just introduced himself as Favela. I found his YouTube video of him playing drums in these amazing places. The first one I saw was him playing in a field, to a Bjork or a Bob Marley thing. Either way I preferred that kind of drummer compared to all of the other things I was getting trying to look for a drummer in that area. I was getting, not bad music, but it was all Ska drummers and Metal, and mostly really heavy hitting styles of music, and I liked the fact that he was doing his stuff quite softly, even on some disco records, and I thought, he can revert to any of these styles and I’ll be fine with that’. Favela was seemingly key to the album, with Eastgate finding the imperfections of his early drum takes to suit the album stylistically:
‘A lot of the drum tracks I used were him trying to find the right feel for the song, and they ended up sounding like interesting takes, because there was a development, he’d start off with one beat and then change it half way through. He didn’t really want me to use those takes, because for him that’s like revealing the bad ideas, but I thought that’s the good stuff for me, the bold choices’.
Eastgate made a conscious choice in the jungle not to listen to any other music in the recording process, to avoid losing authenticity in the writing process: ‘When I’m really in the middle of the recording process, I stop listening to all other music, if i can help it, because that can slow you down, because you go ‘Ah man, I want it to sound more like that’, then you’ve lost loads of enthusiasm. But you can’t help it, out there making new friends and the people that we stayed with, the guy who did the front cover, you can’t stop them playing music, so he would play the perfect stuff that’s not exactly what I do, it’s heavy, psychedelic rock, so it’s just outside, so I don’t have to worry about not living up to that.’ While Fase Luna may have represented a departure from Eastgate’s writing process, his music sonically remains familiar, his inimitable vocals impossible to mistake. ‘There’s a lot of music that I like that I’ve never made. I still would say my favourite band is the Pixies and I’ve never done anything like that. Maybe that’s a good thing to have your music not try to be your favourite.’
Will Griffin
Edited by Olivia Hannant
Images courtesy of Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Video courtesy of LA Priest, Youtube
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