Interview: Vnder A Crvmbling Moon
Aging & Formless was much more where I was in my head. The transition from the first one to the second wasn’t really difficult though if you listen to them next to each other you’d probably think they were two different bands, in many ways. But to me, this is a very true representation of where I’ve come from to where I am.
Originally a solo vehicle for Scott Taylor of Garganjua to explore his heavy side during lockdown, Vnder A Crvmbling Moon has progressed from a home project, to touring band, and with their second album II: Aging & Formless to something else entirely. Greater in scope in every respect, it’s a lush and sometimes harrowing listen that hearkens back to his roots while pushing his songwriting into territories that he has never fully explored before now. With the record’s release finally on the cards, David Bowes spoke to Taylor about the project’s gradual development and what might come next.
E&D: Congratulations on the album, it sounds killer.
Taylor: Thank you.
E&D: I was curious where the writing and recording of this album slotted in within the timeline of the band.
Taylor: A lot of this stuff was mapped out before the first album came out so that’s probably why the timeline feels a bit skewed by normal circumstances. It’ll be slightly less than a year from the first one coming out that this one is coming out. That all comes down to the fact that I didn’t expect the first album to get picked up or put out on a record label at all. I expected it would just be a random Bandcamp Friday thing, no one would listen to it and then I could focus my efforts more on this next one. They were sort of written around the same time but I do think some of the ideas for this one came before the debut album. The first album was done completely by myself, including the vocals, and at some point I spoke to Ray and said, “I’m doing this album, and I also have these songs but I sort of don’t want to do vocals any more, and we do have a lot in common musically”. So when the first album was coming out, he already had his hands on the bare bones of this album. It does feel a bit wild to be having the second album out quite so soon.
E&D: Was the band originally intended for you to be doing everything yourself?
Taylor: It’s strange, really. I was in another band, Garganjua, and we’d been kicking around for about 10 years. I’d moved away from where I used to live and was about 3 hours away from where the rest of the guys in Garganjua were. I was still writing music at about the same rate I ever was but because of the distance between me and the guys, and they’ve all got kids and stuff, so there just wasn’t a lot going on with the band. I was still writing a lot of music and didn’t really know what to do so initially yes, the plan was that I would start this one-man thing. This is going to sound weird but I didn’t know if I wanted to be in a band again. It’s quite difficult in regards to making Garganjua work and the COVID happened anyway so there was a couple of years where no one could do anything. The downtime was quite good in a sense, and I thought that maybe I didn’t want to do the band thing anymore. Maybe I could just have this one-man recording project and do it for myself. That was how it started but then Ray got involved and I sent Andy, who plays bass for us, over a couple of ideas, and those guys collectively pulled me into the idea that maybe I wanted to try doing this as a live thing. It was only a bit of an experiment, really. With the first album I thought, “Let’s get a couple of shows booked and then I’ll see how I feel about it when we’ve done them”. It turned out to be quite a success and it lit the fire in my belly a bit to get out and do it again.
E&D: You said that you expected Oblivion to be a self-released Bandcamp thing so how did Church Road’s involvement come to happen?
Taylor: I knew the guys from Church Road from working with Garganjua. I think a part of me thought that, regardless of whether or not it came out on a label, I loved that first album, I think it’s a great collection of songs. I was very chuffed with it as it was the first time I’d ever ventured off on my own. I didn’t any way to gauge, or anyone to bounce off whether or not it was any good to anyone else. Because of the ties with Garganjua to Church Road, those guys were always someone I had in my mind. I thought that if anyone was going to like something like this it would be them. I don’t have many contacts at other labels, truth be told, so it was an easy way out. What did I have to lose? I can just ping it to Justine and Sammy and say, “I don’t know if you’re interested or not but I have this thing”. They were so pumped for it that it really took me aback. We didn’t do a whole big release on vinyl and all that but it didn’t really matter to me, I was just blown away by the fact that they liked it enough to want to put it out on the record label. They’ve got a really good reputation, I’ve worked with them for years and I love them as people, they’re very trustworthy people. We’d chatted back and forth because of the Garganjua thing so, and I hate saying this, but it felt like an easy option for me to reach out to a label. I thought that if I was going to do it, it would be with these guys. It worked out alright in the end!
E&D: Given how long the songs on Aging & Formless had been bouncing around, how do you feel the music has grown over time and through the involvement of everyone else in the band?
Taylor: This one has grown very slightly in a collaborative direction. All the tracking of the instruments themselves was still done by me and this is purely because the songs were there. The cool thing is that I still have voices to bounce off this time. We’d gone out and done a couple of shows and they went really well. Everyone in the band was really into what we had done and I said, “Well I do have more songs but they are in a slightly different direction”. Whilst it was a case of the songs being very much there and written, with one time in particular – Nomad, which we have played live now – there are little nuances here and there. In the early days the guys would say, “Why don’t we try this here or that there”.
For me, in many ways, the making of this record was the vocals. It’s never been my strong suit. I did it for a time in my previous band but it’s never been where my strengths lie, that’s more with the songwriting itself. I had these songs and I did really like them but I felt like it needed something more. By this point, Ray’s listened to it and thought “I can probably do something here”. I remember him demoing one or two songs in the early part of us talking about it and… it’s hard to explain. I felt the songs were pretty good in their own right but they’d come on massively just by having a vocal throughout in that they had a story. Ray had a story that he’s telling throughout it all and because the music feels quite journey-esque – not, as in, the band Journey! – but it feels like a journey, musically. I’ve always strived to do that, maybe not on purpose, but there is something to my music in that there’s a beginning, a middle and an end. He quite liked that as his vocal and lyrical style is very much like that. So to go from these barebones demos and then through these embellishments from other people and having his voice on it has surpassed my expectations. It’s very hard to explain but having a vocal on there, and more importantly a vocal that isn’t mine, felt massive.
The first album is cool and a lot of that is down to necessity as I wrote a lot of that during lockdown but the second album has worked because of the people on it. As I said before, it’s made me want to be in a band again which is a really positive thing. The vocals have really brought this whole album to life.
E&D: Did you have any hand in the lyrics for the record? You stated that you see this album as being a journey and the lyrics have a lot of imagery that reflect that – ideas of movement, travel…
Taylor: I didn’t at all. One of the good things with this has been saying to Ray, “This is your area”. He spoke to me about his themes in the lyrics, asking if this was the kind of direction I wanted with the music that had been written and truth be told yes, I could instantly see it working with this music. But I didn’t really have any input into that theme. What’s really strange is that there is one song on there that I do still sing near the end, called ‘Fall…Still’ and that was written separately to the rest of what Ray did. It wasn’t until we sat and looked at it all as a whole after he had done his bit that it still made sense. I was thinking that maybe I had to rewrite the lyrics for that one or have a different approach but it still just seemed to work. That whole lyrical mapping out and theme is all down to Ray but it’s all powerful stuff and it goes really well.
E&D: How are feeling about trialling the material? I think you have a show next month?
Taylor: We have a show in March in Exeter and there’s probably only going to be one track from the new album there. That’s the plan, we’re working on some April shows but from then onwards it’s new material all the way. I’m stoked! I’m probably more excited about going out and playing material than I was on the first album. I think it’s because this music had been written for so long, it’s more representative of where I am, more so than the first album which was a bit more doom-oriented, leaning more towards what I had done with previous bands. This feels much more where I am. The music on this album is very new to me, less doom and more post-metal, I guess you would call it. I’ve never really done anything like that. The thought of playing it live is massively exciting. There’s loads of synth throughout them which we’ll be bringing with us live, and I’ve never been in a live band where we had synth with us. I’m very excited.
E&D: You can hear on the early singles and on that first album the British doom influence, stuff like My Dying Bride, but when you compare it to a song like ‘Procession’, there’s a massive shift. How difficult was transitioning to that great an extent?
Taylor: I didn’t struggle with it at all but I think there’s a little bit of me that, when the first album was written, I put it to the guys in Garganjua. I don’t know if you know the band but that was much more doom. In my head, when I was first conjuring up the songs for Oblivion, I was thinking that this could be a new Garganjua album, technically. I spoke to the guys about that and we’re all in completely different places in regards what we want to do at the moment that I don’t think any of the other guys were in a situation to do another album. I thought, “Fair enough, but I quite like it so I’ll go off and do this anyway”. The second album, because a lot of the songs were forming a couple of years ago, I think it got to the point where “I’ve got this other album, it’s very doom and I didn’t expect it to be released”. It’s all about that again, really. No-one’s going to hear this but it’ll be a good starting point for this project, but then I’ve actually got this other thing going on here that could be a good follow-up. It sounds completely different but if we’re going to start anywhere, let’s start here because this one’s ready. But Aging & Formless was much more where I was in my head. The transition from the first one to the second wasn’t really difficult though if you listen to them next to each other you’d probably think they were two different bands, in many ways. But to me, this is a very true representation of where I’ve come from to where I am. It was a natural progression but I do get that sonically they are very different.
E&D: Where does The New Sun fit in with all this? I did see that some of the material from that did make it onto the VACM Bandcamp.
Taylor: So this is all just me finding myself, you see. Anyone that pays any attention to what I’ve been releasing over the past couple of years will probably see a confused individual that doesn’t quite know what they want to do. The New Sun was a part of that. It was going to be my new heavy thing and then at some point I thought that I can’t really have two things that sound like they’re trying to do the same thing. The New Sun’s first album, I put up on Vnder A Crvmbling Moon’s page as Prelude. That was probably the first thing I wrote in lockdown, and then ended up collaborating with a friend of mine on some of the vocals. I thought, “I like this, this is going to be the future” and then of course I write Oblivion and think, Wait a minute! Then I write acoustic music, and electronic music. I’m fortunate in the way that I’ve been quite creative and lockdown is a big part of that, so I do feel fortunate that that happened, having an outlet for those 18 months as opposed to just wanting to get out and gig. It’s meant that I do have an abundance of material and a very confused head about what to do with it. I think as A Crvmbling Moon developed into what it has, The New Sun had been there for quite a while with me not really doing much with it. I took the leap of faith eventually so now The New Sun scratches that itch for doing more mellow, electronic kind of things. If I’m going to do something heavy it has to be separate from that, and that’s for my own benefit, really. It sort of doesn’t fit in but it’s because I’ve got quite a lot of love for various music that I feel like The New Sun is going to be the home for miscellaneous stuff. I’m too old to be forming a band for every album I write. I think I just put out five albums under The New Sun that I’d sat on for years and they’re all in different styles of music but I just haven’t got the time or energy to be like, “Right, I need a band for this, a band for that and a band for that”. Going forward, The New Sun will definitely be my chilled electronic and acoustic music now. Everything I write that’s heavier, well I’ve now got a vehicle for that. I guess it must be confusing for anyone that actually listens to it.
E&D: Given that this came out of lockdown, which was a pretty dark time, do you feel that much of that darkness and negativity slipped into Vnder A Crvmbling Moon?
Taylor: I think there’s always a darker element in my head anyway which has fed a lot of the music I’ve written, certainly in the past few years. I can’t lie, I’m luckier than a lot of people at that time. I was able to knuckle down and I was fortunate enough to keep my day job during that period, I had a space where I could record, but I know it was different for a lot of people. There’s a part of me that embraced it for what it was. I know that sounds a little weird but it was out of my control. There’s not any point in getting too hung up on stuff if it’s not within your control. I can’t speak for Ray as he wrote the lyrics for the new one but I can probably tell you that a lot of the themes around that are a metaphorical journey of the mind, overcoming certain difficulties. You’re never too far from the darker elements when you’re writing music like this anyway. It’s about having a more positive vehicle for that and I’ve always felt that way. Some people can talk more openly about things than others, for those that can’t having an art form that can drive things like this forward is pretty positive. That’s a long way of saying it played its part but it probably would have been there anyway.
E&D: How did you end up working with Charlene and Ripcord? Was that a result of you contributing to the You Matter compilation?
Taylor: That had a part to play in it, I suppose. Andy, who plays bass for us, is in The Grey who had released music through Ripcord. Andy knew Charlene quite well and when the new album was written, I thought about approaching some labels. It was a bit different this time and Church Road was my first port of call, as they always will be. They did say after releasing the album that when a new one was written they would have liked to be the first to hear it. They absolutely loved it but because I was keen to get it out this year, they just couldn’t schedule it themselves. I thought that wasn’t a problem as there are loads of other labels out there, and I’ve heard some great things about a lot of people. Andy was at the forefront of that, saying “You have to get it in front of Charlene because she’s a great person”. I’ve not met her, just emailed a bit over the last 6 months, but Andy couldn’t speak highly enough of her. I’ve known him for years, we’ve toured together and I trust him implicitly, so that was enough in and of itself for me to ping it to Charlene. I had put it out in front of a lot of labels, as you do when this sort of thing happens, but Charlene showed the most enthusiasm, and that’s not a slight on anyone else. We got some cool feedback from a few other labels, which was humbling, but when I sent the email to Charlene, she said she would give it a listen and get back to me. I thought, “That’s it. I might hear back in a week or so” and literally that evening, I think it was three hours later, she got back to me and said, “I’ve listened to it twice. It’s brilliant. I really want to put out this album”. That enthusiasm was really encouraging. What really made me laugh was when I went back to her and said, “Let’s do it.” She said “Now, I’ve heard you have some other music. Could you give this album some time to breathe before you go doing another album?” I guess Andy gave her the brief about me, that I have a lot of material. I can’t argue, I do have a lot floating around but I’m certainly not in any rush to get that out. She instantly seemed to have my sense of humour and communication with her has been great. It’s been a really good experience and a new one for me as I’d only really worked with Church Road and Holy Roar. It’s been really cool.
E&D: You already mentioned album number 3 so how is that going? Do you have much set down or a direction for it?
Taylor: It’s demoed, I’d say. Things have progressed a bit more with us actually having a band. The first two albums were written almost concurrently and then it was only over time that we had plans for live stuff and Ray came in to do vocals on this album. Obviously, anything we do going forward I’d like to approach a little differently. Not just say, “Guys, I’ve got this album. Do you want to help me play it live?” It’s more a case of, I’ve got an idea about where it’s going, but now I can focus on it being a bit more collaborative, getting together and sharing ideas. It’s been so long since I’ve been part of a band where everyone is into it. That’s my hope for the next stage anyway. I have an idea and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a lot of material written, it’s like it never stops with me sometimes. I feel like the next set of songs that could make the next phase of the band lend themselves to the music of Aging & Formless, so I don’t think it’ll be quite as heavy a shift as between Oblivion and Aging & Formless. This was probably the album that I had wanted to make for a while in that kind of vein, and what I know of the guys in the band, I think they’ll be into this new material but we don’t need to worry about that at this time. There’s plenty to go on.
