The Sound of Bristol: RHAIN
Posted on: 02 Dec 2016In this week's instalment of The Sound of Bristol we talk to RHAIN, the songwriter and self-ascribed 'bath person' from the Isle of Wight. Having caught the ear of Aled Chiverin before she had even penned a tune of her own, her time in the city has produced some stunning original music. Feast your ears.
We need to get something straight: RHAIN is not from Iceland.
This is not what a number of music publications would have you believe, with each of them positing the singer’s supposed Nordic heritage as rapaciously as they would draw comparisons between her and an actual Icelandic superstar. Whether it is this musical similarity between her and Bjork that has so confused critics, or whether her actual birthplace of the Isle of Wight had simply been garbled by a distorting game of Chinese whispers, Rhian Teasdale is unsure.
“It's probably because there's a secret tunnel that runs right through from Reykjavik to Sandown, there’s a little entrance where Woolworths used to be,” she jokes, with a playful glint in her eye. “But seriously, Iceland and the Isle of Wight are actually pretty similar in terms of cultural heritage.”
While the Isle of Wight shares with Iceland its tranquil beauty, this can prove an austere environment for a young musician taking the first fledgling steps of a career. “There aren’t really any music venues on the Isle of Wight and there are hardly any people that would want to go to a gig anyway,” she admits. “There are no universities so there isn’t a pool of young people milling around, or looking to invest their time in anything arty. It's a shame really because it's a stunning place to live.”
It really is a pretty place, all plunging coastlines and ranging horizons. Both of these receive artistic representation in the artwork for RHAIN’s recent singles ‘Humdrum Drivel’ and ‘Josephine’, which feature her atop its dramatic headland, funnily enough, in a bath - “I am a bath person:” she explains, “I see a bath. I get in bath.”
The songs they illustrate reveal a simple production, that sees only sparse keys tinkle beneath RHAIN’s beguiling falsetto which lands somewhere between Kate Bush and, yes, Bjork. In her voice, as we do in those of these distinguished forbears, we hear the haunting coalesce of childlike naivety and premature maturity. It is with the former that she identifies to more closely: “I definitely tend towards naivety, because if I wasn’t entirely naïve then I doubt I’d want to try my hand at being a pop star princess,” she jokes. “If I was prematurely mature then I would probably be sensible and get a real job!”
She is more modest in her own description of the noise she makes, confessing, after a brief hesitation, “It’s just me singing and playing piano.” She goes on, “It's quite vocal lead and then the piano part is just there, usually following behind so I never really play in time! It’s quite raw sounding, maybe a bit folky?”
The indecision with which she labels her own music stems from a self-confessed difficulty in identifying music in terms of genre: “For me, it’s either good music or bad music. Well, not bad music,” she quickly clarifies, “but music that doesn’t speak to me.”
The music that does speak to her reveals little more about her own, with the sibling-inherited mix that occupied the gigabytes of her teenage MP3 player completely eclectic. Apparently a brief shuffle through it would have treated you to cuts from A Tribe Called Quest, Arcade Fire, The Bees, Devendra Banhart and, of course, Bjork; and while there is no consistent thread in their output to tie these artists together, the DIY ethic championed by these and other musicians is something that RHAIN appreciates hugely: “The attitude towards making music is something that I find very inspiring amongst the kind of people that have just picked up an instrument, used their ears and made something that sounds good to them,” she posits. She adds Joni Mitchell and Scout Niblett to her list, before adding that Bjork was, at one point, in an all-girl punk band called Spit and Snot.
Though she adheres to the same philosophy in song writing, she finds comparisons to the above to be premature. “I know that there's not exactly a formula to writing songs that musicians can study but I certainly spend a lot of my time feeling like an imposter,” she admits. “It's funny when people attach the title of ‘songwriter’ to me because that feels too legit! It's other artist’s attitudes towards songwriting that has been of most importance to me feeling inspired to write songs. That kind punk attitude that means you can make music regardless of how technically accurate it is.”
While the songs which result from this ‘punk’ process would hardly sit comfortably in a Gang of Four back catalogue, they were enough to draw the ear of local mogul Aled Chiverin, who in turn drew her to Bristol. “Without Chiverin I’d still be working in a café on the island,” she says, adamantly. “Aled and I met ages ago, I must have been 16. I hadn’t even realised that I was capable of writing a song at this point and Aled hadn't started the label.”
RHAIN is as similarly complimentary about the Chiverin family as her label-mates Cousin Kula, Tamu Massif and Body Clocks, and the like-minded community that has been fostered under Aled’s umbrella: “It's nice to identify as part of something and be among other guys and gals who are just like me, plodding along, making music. Being in Chiverin means that I had a ready-made friendship group before I’d even moved here. It’s cool how a scene has sprung up from just a group of friends being in the same city doing music things.”
The city in question has proved an incredibly fertile breeding ground for musical creativity, which spills out beyond the reaches of Chiverin. RHAIN agrees, “There’s so much going on here, I could probably find a gig to go to every night - Bristol is great.”
So great, in fact, that it looks like it will draw her back again after period of floating - as she puts it, “’like a plastic bag,’ from that Katy Perry song” - between London and the Isle of Wight. Let’s hope we can keep her here for good this time.
RHAIN's new EP Oscar November Echo, cover above, is out today (2nd December) via Chiverin.
Article by:
An ardent Geordie minus the accent, Sam seemingly strove to get as far away from the Toon as possible, as soon as university beckoned. Three undergraduate years at UoB were more than ample time for Bristol (as it inevitably does) to get under his skin, and so here he remains: reporting, as Assistant Editor, on the cultural happenings which so infatuated him with the city. Catch him at sam@365bristol.com.
