The Sound of Bristol: Elder Island

The Sound of Bristol: Elder Island

Posted on: 04 May 2017

The next instalment of our Sound of Bristol series finds local trio Elder Island on the crest of a wave of hype that is dangerously close to breaking. We speak to singer Katy Sargent ahead of an exciting summer for her band.

Elder Island Bristol

Katy Sargent’s description of Elder Island’s recent car journey down to London reveals an amount about her band, with the recent travelling beyond the walls of their native Bristol testament to the hype that is beginning to bubble around the Metropolis-signed trio.

 

“It’s very exciting,” says the singer, of the group’s recent proliferation, “but I do get nervous. It still feels like we’re at the bottom of that ramp, but we’re all enjoying the prospect of carrying on pushing. We’re all still working obviously and trying to fit the music around our day-to-day lives, but it’s great to have that buzz. That feels really good.”

 

This pushing, she reveals, is born in and of itself: “We want to step our game up because we’re continually striving to keep on improving ourselves. We have always tried to get better and better just for the sake of doing so, to move the music up to a better standard and just improve, improve, improve.”

Elder Island

This has paid visible dividends, in the growth of audiences in Bristol and beyond, in cities like London. More telling about their trip to the capital, however, is how they got there; and, more specifically, what they were listening to as they did so.

 

“There was a bit of contention over the aux cable in that car down to London,” Katy remembers, with a chuckle high in her throat. “Some of my ‘brummaaay’ taste didn’t go down too well, but Luke [Thornton, drummer] managed to get into most of it. Dave [Harvard, guitar, keys] was sulking in the back about some of the choices though!”

 

The vastly differing tastes of the Elder Island trinity serve to consolidate that which they agree upon: “We all have very eclectic tastes in music, so there is a huge variety to our listening habits. We obviously all love artists like David Bowie and The Beatles, but it is very rare that we all completely agree on a band. I think this helps to refine our own music though - if you imagine us as three different circles in a Venn diagram, then the bit in the middle where they all overlap is the music we like and want to make.”

Elder Island

And, aside from diminutive comparisons to artists as run-of-the-mill as Bowie, Lennon, McCarthy and the rest of them, what exactly do Elder Island sound like?

 

This is a tricky question to answer, due to the aforementioned crosspollination of disparate genres and strands, which renders the trio’s definition difficult to grasp and defiant of the pigeonhole.

 

 In Sargent’s own words, “It’s slightly poppy, with soulful influences in the vocal. So, pop-soul-funk-electronic-live-dance music! Or naturally-made dance music. Or organic dance music…”

 

 

This proposal, however, is only arrived at after a length of hesitation and a couple of stabs, a stuttering nod to the slipperiness of their sound. Though each of their songs to date are linked by an underpinning, overarching groove, they also take themselves off in wildly different directions – charted with help from a vast trove of diverse instrumentation which they plunder variously.

 

“The whole basement studio is full of instruments, widely-sourced instruments, which is always exciting when you’re making music – even if we’re not very good at playing them!’” she admits. “We’ve got a big crate – like those ones that you keep Lego in for kids – which are just full of strange percussion instruments. So if one of us is looking for a really specific sound, we can have a dig in one of those crates and usually find what we’re looking for. It’s halfway between a toy box and a treasure chest.”

 

Hoarder-in-chief, she reveals, is Luke, who often returns from sojourns to exotic climes with weird and wonderful instruments from across seas: “He comes back from places proclaiming, ‘I’ve bought this… insert strange name here.’ He’s got an ear for unusual sounds, particularly percussive stuff.”

 

This perhaps isn’t surprising, given his role in the band, which Sargent describes, in its simplest terms, as “drums, bass and adding the interesting textures.” Dave, meanwhile, “is in charge of the synths, guitar, keys and some bass.”

Elder Island

Together, the three of them tease their songs out of elongated jam sessions, picking up the dissimilar threads of influence and tying these into their own pieces of music.

 

“Oh it is a lovely looong, loooong process,” she says of song-writing, elongating her ‘o’s to augment her point. “It can be tough to try to condense something that’s three hours long into something that’s three minutes long. There is a lot of bashing it into shape, whilst trying to retain so many elements – it can be tough but it’s a great process. Especially when you get it.

 

“When we all listen to the final mix together, it’s nice how after hearing something for so long, we can still tap their toes to it and actually enjoy it. That’s when you know that we’ve hit on something good.”

 

Another formative influence to the music of Elder Island is their location, with their noise firmly anchored in their hometown. “Bristol has influenced our sound in a big way, going back to our days at uni here when we went out a lot to different dance shows,” she remembers fondly. “We caught the back-end of dubstep, as well as the germination of house and techno in the city. The electronic scene was our fuel for nights out, but then you could always go and see a folk gig or catch come world music at Colston Hall, for instance. There’s just the right amount of music and it’s very accessible, which has definitely helped us in our eclectic tastes.”

 

And though the future holds plenty more trips to London and further afield – the group are supporting the mighty Glass Animals for a string of dates across western Europe – they won’t lose sight of where they come from, with a homecoming gig at Love Saves The Day representing an unmissable chance to prove this.

 

“I just hope we do Bristol proud!” says Sargent. “This is our city and we’re playing for you.”

 

Catch Elder Island at Love Saves The Day on 27th May or, even sooner, at the Thatchers Haze Sessions this weekend.


Article by:

Sam Mason-Jones

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.