Vessel’s Sebastian Gainsborough on the fusion of the orchestral and the electronic that sits at the heart of his new album, Queen of Golden Dogs.
“It’s curious how we’re often drawn to sensory experiences that unsettle or unnerve, yet simultaneously offer a certain intoxicating hedonism. Something which Vessel’s music has perpetually offered through the wealth of warped and disquieting arrangements they’ve crafted within their records, eliciting a kind of eloquently distorted reverence.
“‘The only thing I ever really look for is to feel strange when I’m making anything,’ Vessel, aka Seb Gainsborough, expresses, musing on the fusion of orchestral and electronic sounds on Queen of Golden Dogs. ‘It’s funny, I haven’t really listened to electronic music in years now and all I’ve listened to is classical music because that’s what I find really thrilling or exciting or strange, because I’m an outsider to it. I know experimental music and I know electronic music but, actually, I came to a point where none of that music was telling me anything new. So to listen to classical music was like a whole new world of language and expression and feeling and, to me, that actually seems really punk.’
“Gainsborough continues, ‘That seems really, really, really experimental – even the more conventional stuff – so I guess the desire to work with it wasn’t even a desire. It was just something that felt like the language I could use to express what I needed to express.’ Further contemplating this organic way of composing Gainsborough adds, ‘The sounds you’re drawn to, I think you can’t really choose them. We have an actual physical response to sounds and, as a musician, that’s your language.'”
Watch the video for ‘Paplu’ below and catch the Dutch debut of Vessel’s new audiovisual collaboration with Pedro Maia at Rewire x Korzo on 16 February, 2019.
Learn more at Rewire x Korzo: Vessel & Pedro Maia, Lucy Railton
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