Carmen Villain: “The idea that everything has to happen in your 20s or early 30s, and then you’re too old – it’s nonsense.”

Carmen Villain: Oh, man, I don’t really know. I think I just like the way the word looked. It has no deeper meaning, to be honest. I don’t think of it literally in that sense. I just like the name. I think I saw a woman called that as a surname and then I was like, “that looks nice”. I don’t know why. But it was a long time ago and it has stuck and now I can’t get rid of it.

I think definitely it’s possible for anyone to make music now because you don’t need a big studio with lots of hardware and expensive recording equipment to do some really interesting things. I think the difference between people that actually do it and those who say they do, is that it takes a lot of discipline and effort to actually finish albums for example. So, yes, I think it’s perseverance in addition to access to technology. And having good ideas and being driven. It does take up a lot of time to really get deep into it and obviously that requires the ability to take that time and a lot of people can’t afford not to work. So there’s a bit of an economic boundary in terms of making it work on a bigger scale. There’s definitely a privileged aspect to be able to do it more than just a little bit on the side. But on a basic scale, anyone can make music for sure.

I think in the case with my continued collaboration with Johanna, we just feel really comfortable around each other and we have found ways to talk about what we want to do with the music and we feel comfortable just improvising. During that journey, we’ve also become really good friends. That’s not necessary to have a really good collaboration, of course, but that’s why we keep coming together. On this record the collaboration is a little bit more separated somehow from the final process because we did it the other way around this time. I recorded her and Ivan and myself before I had produced anything. I’ve recorded improvisations, which I then took in as a sort of sample. I’ve definitely sampled my recordings of her before, but on the previous releases we’ve done, she’s also played on top of, or alongside other sounds that I had already made. Whereas this one is very much picking tiny little snapshots of her flute playing and shaping them on my own. So there’s an interesting, slightly different way to do it together. But yeah we’ve collaborated over several years now and I don’t really see it ending. We grow together. We were curious about different ways of what we can get out of the instruments and the sounds and the music. I think, even if she doesn’t understand where I’m going yet, there’s still that openness and the willingness to go there and try new things. I think that’s essential in the way I work. I need to be able to try new thing all the time, because thats where I find new interesting ideas.

It was definitely the starting point of having loads of beautiful recorded material that wasn’t necessarily recorded specifically for a track. That was definitely a preconceived idea. I did book a studio and gave them some prompts and then they did all these crazy amazing things. I’ve always worked with reaching into my old sounds. My sound archive is crazy, it’s very messy, but I have quite a lot of different recordings: some stuff that I never used, some that I have used and some that I take from older tracks and completely repurpose so that it doesn’t sound the same at all. So I guess this has always been a part of my practice, at least for the last four records. I definitely knew that I was going to do that a lot because I knew, I didn’t want the traditional instrument playing on top of the traditional melodic thing on this one. It’s a lot more about taking things and reshaping them. That was going to be the voice of this album. 

I think sonically. I feel like it still comes from the same philosophy in a way. Except that there’s less overt melodies in this one. It’s more about frequencies and there’s definitely more abstraction in this one. I think that there’s definitely the idea of having references from like dub and like bass stuff that was all already part of the previous record as well. And it’s been part of my music for a long time. But I feel like I tried to go a little bit deeper into it. And I also felt that less is more for this one.

During the whole process, I was reading and thinking a lot about time and memory. Coming to terms with one’s own memories and also how memory and time work on a sort of scientific scale. Basically all these life mysteries. I don’t think I can even answer those questions. I just enjoy thinking or reading about it from different perspectives – from physics to philosophy to the combination of both. All these really interesting ideas that make us human in a way. I was definitely researching these things a bit more on this album than previously. It definitely influenced how I approached things and how I could hear things. I thought it was interesting to try to sort of open up the perspectives a little bit and not only have it be about sounds, for my own sake. I think, it doesn’t necessarily have to mean that for a listener though. It just helped me inform choices and ways to actually approach a sound and how I could listen to it and how it molded and changed and how I allowed for repetition or how I allowed for things to disintegrate.

Yeah, it was around January. I had finished eight tracks and one of them wasn’t working for me. I felt it had to be there because of this and this transition and then suddenly one day it just became really clear to me that I needed to cut that track. And then it was finished and I was like “okay, now it’s done”. So sometimes deducting can be very useful. Because I wanted to keep to this power of minimizing – keeping it as focused as possible – that’s what I needed.

Music definitely was. It was definitely a much more active part of my life growing up. I played instruments and I played in the marching band. I was really into singing as well. I was quite good at singing as a teenager and kid. I was definitely more interested in music. The modeling thing happened to me or for me. I got the opportunity to do it and then it sort of went quite well straight away. I mean, luckily, ’cause I don’t know how anyone can do it if it doesn’t. It’s heartbreaking. 

So I just ended up doing that for a few years. That definitely sort of happened to me, but I made a choice to go and live in London and go work, travel and do all these things. And then towards the end of that, I started thinking more about music again. I picked up the guitar again and started dabbling very badly in logic and writing songs. One thing led to another and it became very easy for me to make the choice of leaving the other job behind so I could focus on music. So I think music is definitely more of a choice than modeling was. 

No, that’s an impossible question. So I can’t actually answer that. I have a few that I go back to and listen to. And then there’s a few that were incredibly important at a certain time in my life, which I don t necessarily enjoy that much anymore. But they still mean a lot. I can t really choose one, it’s impossible because I’ve listened to so much different music in my life and it all has meant a lot. It’s impossible. 

Johanna Orellana. I’d say check out her solo album Las Camelias, Tres Esquinas. It’s so beautiful. It’s only flutes. And I think it deserves to be listened to by more people.

It was definitely me on my own in many ways, but my partner Ben came home one day and gave me a guitar. I guess I must have talked about it. At that time I had no knowledge. I wasn’t going the pure electronic way yet. I was definitely experimenting with sound but my knowledge was very limited. I got some guitar pedals and then I started learning some stuff in logic. I learned about chopping and looping. Just very very basic things. I didn’t even know what pan left and right was yet. 

After I wrote a few songs, I played a show at my friend’s gallery exhibition. This guy was there and he introduced me to some people, one of whom ended up co-producing my first album. From that process I also learned quite a lot because his approach was quite experimental. And whilst that was definitely more in an in-studio environment and he used more hardware than I do, I learned a lot. So it was a very natural, lucky encounter for me. I was already interested in that sort of approach, but then the potential was shown to me. It was very illuminating. From there, I evolved and learned and did everything by myself. 

Although, I definitely had a bit of theoretical groundwork, even though I don’t use it in that traditional sense, because I played the piano and clarinet as a kid. I don’t write scoring but I do know some terminologies and I know the names of notes and that has been quite useful when I communicate with people that I work with. So in retrospect, I think there’s definitely a lot of value in musical education, which I think society doesn’t really appreciate enough anymore, sadly. 

 I think I probably weirdly feel the most at home in Oslo out of all the places I’ve been. I did live in London for 10, 11, no, almost 12 years. And whilst my home there felt like home, the city still felt a little bit impenetrable to me. So I think Oslo feels the most like home for sure. 

Yes, in London I miss the pub, the Sunday Rose pub vibe. I think that’s really nice. And of course there’s a lot of really amazing music happening in London. I think there are a few things that I miss about living there. But mostly getting together at the pub, having a chat and having a nice roast. I think that’s a really nice part of living in the UK. 

I think what I tell her is that life is very long, if we’re lucky, and that there’s no rush. This idea that you need to know what you want to do at such an early age is very stressful and not really useful. Obviously, the reality is that you have to get a job and make a living and survive because life is expensive. But that doesn’t necessarily have to stop you from, investigating things and being curious and being open and really looking into things and trying to understand and learn and travel. Try to do different things to see what actually gives you interest. Partake and be active and meet people. Life can bring things in many different ways. But I think you also have to be very proactive and curious. Keep educating and gathering knowledge. I think that’s the best thing about being alive: all the stuff you can learn. There’s so much time. You don’t have to decide on one thing and do that for the rest of your life. I mean there’s a lot of people in the world that don’t have the luxury of any of these things, of course. But either way, even if you have to work, you can still spend some time on opening your mind to other things as well. There’s loads of time. The idea that everything has to happen in your 20s or early 30s, and then you’re too old – it’s nonsense. It is absolutely crazy. You can Change the way you think or change the way you approach things even if you are old. 

I do have a few different things I want to do, but I don’t think I need to go into details about those yet. I guess the key is to keep doing interesting projects and to keep growing and keep doing new things and learning about different perspectives. That’s basically it, to keep going.

Not really, not specifically right now. I mean, I think there’s a few things that I wanna learn more about. Right now I just have to focus mostly on producing a live show and on releasing this album. I’m excited that it’s gonna be out in the world. And spending as much as time as I can on the mountains or in nature before it gets too busy again.