Karl D'Silva: 'I ingested Bowie and Joy Division as much as I ingested Can'


“I worked with a big band which was based in Sheffield. That was people like Martin Archer and Mick Beck, who’s a saxophonist who’s quite well-known in the free-improv world, some ex-members of Clock DVA, Charlie Collins, and a guy called Mick Somerset. That was playing guitar, then I started learning saxophone when I was 19 and had ten-ish years of doing quite noisy music.
“Then I was in a group called Trumpets of Death with Ben Wetherill, a singer-songwriter from Leeds, and his wife Laura and a drummer, Alistair Neilson. That mutated into a different group called Bodywork, with the producer and recording engineer Ross Halden.”
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Hide AdIn the past eight years he’s also worked with the Hull musician Gareth Jones on his avant garde project Vanishing.
“It’s all sort of fed in,” says D’Silva. “The album’s pulling in two different directions: it’s quite structured, melodic and then how can I put something into it that’s not just someone playing chords.
“People within my world don’t really write songs, so I was thinking how can I do that? I grew up listening to Bowie and Joy Division and Bob Dylan and Neil Young – all that classic 20th century the art of the songwriter; I ingested all of that as much as I ingested Miles Davis and Derek Bailey and Can. I don’t really see the boundaries between it, it’s all just grist to the mill.”
The idea with Love Is A Flame In The Dark, he says, was to “try to create a record that hopefully feels the same way as I got when I listened to Bitches Brew for the first time”, adding: “It’s kaleidescopic, overwhelming, there’s loads of tiny details and if you blink then you miss them, but if you take any of them away that wouldn’t sound right...I very much wanted to make it a headphone record.”
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Hide AdThe lyrics were written intuitively. “That’s the most time-consuming thing is getting the words right; the melodies come really easy.” D’Silva says. “I chew over the lyrics. I’m trying to get images that I’m then putting into words. How can I create the strongest visual image?
“Lyrics exist within your ears as language and they’re transmuted within the listener’s mind as images – that’s how I interpret lyrics.
“In terms of the subject matter, if I were to feel uncomfortable listening to it in the presence of someone else, that means, that was the way of how I judged whether it felt right. I really wanted to excavate those dark corners that we all have.
“But there’s a fine line with songwriting, you want the listener to feel as though as thought they’re seeing themselves through the lyrics. That’s what I learned from all the greats, people lihe Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker and Bowie. I’m not really thinking of them when I’m listening to their songs, I’m thinking of myself. We’re always seeing our own story, aren’t we, within the music that we love.”
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Hide AdLove Is A Flame In The Dark is out on Friday October 4 on Night School Records. Karl D’Silva plays at No Bounds Festival in Sheffield which runs from October 11-13. https://noboundsfestival.co.uk/