Embracing the realities of bedroom pop, Utrecht collective Dayweaver’s trio of new singles carve out a pocket of calm within a particularly stormy year. A standout is Hurricane - a dreamy synth-pop number that explores themes of human endurance and difficult decisions.
Marcel Young’s mellow vocals glide gently over a backdrop of progressive synths and beats. It’s music to get lost in - hypnotic and warm. The occasional chromatic note reminds the listener not to get too comfortable; that while you’re being given space to stop and think, there will come a point when a move has to be made.
I caught up with the band to find out more about how they’ve continued to make music during the pandemic, progressing from guitar music into electronica, and why they make a point of prioritising self-care before anything else…
Words by Annie Rew Shaw
Discovered via http://musosoup.com
Annie) Hey, Dayweaver! You've hit the ground running this year with three beautiful new singles. I particularly love Hurricane. What's the story behind the song?
Dayweaver) Thank you, that’s very nice! Hurricane is a song about making tough life decisions, or not making them and waiting for that point where these decisions get made for you.
Allie suggested we should loosely base it on the book A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara so both the lyrics and vibes are stemming from that, really.
You self-describe as an inter-dimensional synth-pop quartet. Can you tell us a little more about how you met and decided to make music together?
Sure thing! Three of us share our roots in a past life: Yari, John and Marcel were involved with a different project a few years ago. We were quite stressed back in the day, often downright unhappy, really.
If there is anything we learned since then it is that you sometimes need others to help you get out of a rut. We met Allie, who completely transformed our mentality. These days, when we’re writing music, we try to take care of ourselves first. By repurposing our living rooms as home studios we started to capture just the right kind of vibe. The result was Dayweaver.
If you listen closely to our songs you can sometimes hear us watching football or playing video games, while Marcel is doing his vocal takes. Our music will always have a certain melancholy to it, but there is no need to fetishise your own unhappiness in the creative process.
This year has been a little... different, to say the least! How has your creative process been affected by the pandemic?
These days we mostly work on tracks from home. We come together every week though (masked up and everything) to work out our separate ideas in Ableton.
We are pretty lucky in the sense that we were already moving towards a bedroom/living-room type work environment to create music. So other than the addition of masks, our process didn’t have to change much to deal with the pandemic.
I can hear influences from the likes of Caribou and Jon Hopkins in your sound. What's your production process like and where you find inspiration?
We all come from a more indie, band-like background. To be clear: we still LOVE the bands that inspired us back in the day to pick up guitars and drumsticks, but we were also curious to work within a framework that was more electronically-minded and even pop-like.
That does not mean that we just want to make club music - we are also fond of the more Aphex Twin type layered weirdness - but it does mean that we try to give centre-stage to rhythm and a good hook before we start thinking of textures. We try to find inspiration in visualising how things would sound and feel when experienced at a festival at 2:00 AM.
If you could collaborate with anyone in the world (dead or alive), who would it be and why?
This one is hard! Only one? Hmm... How about Recondite? He mostly does instrumentals as far as we know, but maybe he can make a small exception for us. He has such a way of building up a track, the sheer patience is incredible. Pretty sounds, sad moods. He also works in Ableton so… perfect match?
What are your plans for the rest of the year / 2021?
We will be releasing a new single every last Friday of every month (with the exception of December, look out for an early Christmas gift!). Maybe we will bundle some of these singles into an EP, but we’ll see. It is difficult to say, really.
As you may understand, these times are not really suited for long term planning so we’re just making the best of what we can do now and we’re having a blast in the process. We will, for example, start doing some live streams on Twitch where we spin some of our favourite records, play a couple of games and just hang out for a bit. Best we can do these days is offer people a friendly space to hang out, right?