Paul Roland talks about his latest album ‘Nosferatu – The Curious Case of Jonathan Harker’ and his collaboration with Mick Crossley ‘Through The Spectral Gate’ .
It has been a while since we spoke to you, since then you have released several projects including a gothic ballet (!), the ‘fantasy’ album you mentioned in our last interview (‘Lair of the White Worm’) and a psych/space rock (double) album with Mick Crossley (‘Through The Spectral Gate’).
Paul: Yes, I have been rather prolific, haven’t I? I just can’t stop writing whether it’s songs or the ‘contemporary classical’ pieces I’ve been composing lately. I have this compulsion to create and I’m also curious to hear what might come out if I try different things. I can’t keep turning out 3 minute psychpop songs, as much as I love writing them. I guess I’m a late developer!
Even the songs are getting longer as I see the potential in extending them and I’ve been prompted to do that by having Mick Crossley and drummer Violet the Cannibal who are both willing and capable of taking a song into a psych-prog direction as we did with ‘Lair of the White Worm’. But whatever direction I go in, the overall theme remains consistent – horror, the historical or the supernatural.
Tell us about the ballet, ‘Nosferatu – The Strange Case of Jonathan Harker’. How does it differ from the other ‘Dracula’ ballets that have been performed?
Paul: Firstly, my music is a lot quirkier and rhythmical than the modern classical scores you would expect to hear. It is similar to that of the minimalists Philip Glass and Michael Nyman (a favourite composer of mine) and yet different to those. Coming from a rock background and being unable to write music I was forced to ‘write’ only what I could play. So, each segment grows from a short musical phrase which is layered with other instruments to create counterpoint and counter melodies and rhythms. The result is very baroque and yet also something you could imagine a small chamber orchestra playing while the dancers act out the drama using a mixture of dance and mime. I was very fortunate to find a talented choreographer who translated my ‘script’ into steps and two male dancers who brought their modern styles to give it a very contemporary look – not the traditional movements of ‘Swan Lake’ etc. Thematically, it tells a very different story to Bram Stoker’s gothic melodrama. It centres instead on a fevered dream in which a guilt ridden Harker experiences the events in Stoker’s novel as a nightmare, so it’s a psychological drama rather than a gothic melodrama.
It was premiered in Italy in April in a small but packed theatre with people having to stand or sit on the floor with another 80 or so turned away for lack of space. And those who saw it were transfixed so I was absolutely delighted to see what had been just an inspired idea come to reality in front of my eyes. My recording was played so we didn’t need live musicians though they had to translate and re-record my original narration in Italian.
Your collaboration with Mick Crossley ‘Through The Spectral Gate’ earned 5 star reviews. How did that project come about and will you make more albums with Mick in the future?
Paul: I was very pleasantly shocked by the response to that album, I must admit. I thought it was very strong, but I really didn’t expect others to react as they did. It was a fun, side project that I made primarily to encourage Mick to pull out all those unreleased recordings he had made but shelved simply because he didn’t want the hassle of releasing them. I knew that no one would ever hear them if I didn’t offer to ‘finish’ them and put it out under our joint names. And it was a new kind of challenge for me to take someone else’s songs and spacey instrumental tracks and to reverse engineer a front end or coda but also to play additional instruments as if I was a guest musician and not the composer. So, we ended up both playing a lot of instruments with the layering building up a soundscape that reveals new details every time you listen to it. It was only when I played it on a discman one day sitting in the garden that I heard it the way those reviewers had heard it. I hadn’t heard it for a year since we’d finished it and bloody hell, was I impressed!
I am now encouraging Mick to come up with some acoustic riffs so we can make a witchy acid folk album which I think will be something really special.
Nosferatu – The Curious Case of Jonathan Harker is out now on Bandcamp.
See also paul-roland.bandcamp.com and paulroland.info
