Son Lux: a bright spot in a dark world

Feel like giving your ears a real treat? Then have a listen to Lanterns, the new album from Ryan Lott alias Son Lux. “To bring my music to the stage, it needs to be reverse engineered.”

"Don’t worry, today I’m going nowhere except by phone,” says Ryan Lott with a laugh, after describing how, from his apartment, he is watching Brooklyn disappear under a white carpet of snow. Soon, however, he will be off to Europe for live presentations in Brussels and Ghent of his third album, Lanterns, one of the subtlest indie-pop works of 2013, on which he further refined the art of combining electronica with pop and classical. “In the past I didn’t do many gigs, so it was always a big fuss to get a show right. But I’ve now put together an excellent band to bring the sound tapestries to life. There’s some risk involved, I have to admit. [Laughs] It’s not a direct translation, though. I construct my songs analytically, and that’s quite different from a live concert. I consider the studio as my main instrument and the recording as the artwork, and as such, in order to present it live, the songs need to be adapted, or better, reverse engineered.”

Minimalist maximalism
Lott, a 34-year-old who devours music of all kinds, spent years earning a living from music for commercials for, among others, IKEA, Coca-Cola, Absolut, and Audi. He has also written for dance and films, including Looper, and composed the soundtrack for The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, due out soon and starring Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy. Classically trained, he studied composition – and spent some time on the alternative hip-hop label Anticon. Like his good friend Sufjan Stevens – with whom he and the rapper Serengeti will soon issue an untitled album as Sisyphus (previously S / S / S) – Lott works his magic with a multicoloured palette of sound, ranging from the delicate to the baroque. “What I do is very scientific in a way: I use my music to facilitate a process of experimentation and investigation. I’m not really writing songs. I don’t like the word ‘songwriter’. It’s much more abstract. I really enjoy discovering new sounds and new ideas. My music asks the listener to make an effort, that’s rue. I guess I am what I eat, all the music that has stayed with me was music that challenged me, that made demands on me.”

Stravinsky was Lott’s first favourite composer, above all because of the way he embedded catchy folk melodies in classical pieces and juggled with texture and colour. “Actually I rate Béla Bartók much more highly: I fell in love with him when I heard his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. But I’m equally fond of African Seventies soul, I devoured every Radiohead album, and I’m still crazy about early Nineties hip hop.” Son Lux’s sophisticated sound palette meanders between the maximalism of “Lost It to Trying” and the minimalism of “Easy”. “I often hear it split up that way, but that’s a superficial approach. [Silence] ‘Lost It to Trying’ sounds more complicated; musically, it sounds richer and it’s more dramatic, but the text, the melody, and even the instrumentation are simple. ‘Easy’ sounds more stripped-down, but the structure is much more complicated. The rhythm is tricky; there are unexpected twists in the structure. In short, the complexity is subtler.”

“Easy” features a surprising marriage between a drum computer and a baritone sax. That kind of juxtaposition of electronica and analogue instruments is a favourite approach of Lott’s. “I love unexpected combinations. People often think I’m out to give electronica a soul by working with acoustic instruments, but for me it’s more about investigating sound. Sound is the basis.”

(© Brenden Beecy)

Brand new history
“I think it’s one of music’s unique strengths to transport us into another world,” Lott declares when we ask where the lanterns in his impressionistic “Lanterns Lit” are leading us to. “Music has the ability to create a reverent environment for our deepest thoughts and prayers. This album is about hoping for light at the end of the tunnel, with lanterns that light your way en route.” [Chuckles] One of the song titles, “Plan the Escape” reads like a command. Lanterns is in fact a call to let go of the past, burn bridges, and start anew. “Actually, several of my songs frame a request. In the song ‘Weapons’, off my first record, At War with Walls and Mazes, I sang ‘Let me in through your wounds’, and in ‘Flickers’, off my second album, We Are Rising, I sang ‘Take me out into the sea, lift me up, lift me over it’.”

“Plan the Escape” took shape after Lott had spent some time in Orange County, LA, and nearly suffocated in its petit-bourgeois, numbed, fake suburban world. Do we have to escape from that spurious security? Lott laughs, thinks about it for a long time, but keeps things cryptic. “Once I’ve sent my songs into the world, everyone is free to interpret them any way they want. My music is not intended to solve problems, but might help you ask the right questions. I don’t want to spoil the fun by setting out to proclaim the sole truth. A message is to be communicated independently of me. That excites me about music almost more than anything: that it only comes full circle when it has its own life in the ears and in the mind of others.”

OK, one last try: he sings “Leave the wasting world behind us/ We will make it out alive/ Leave the waiting world behind us/ We will not look back this time.” So, is he fed up of this world? Does he, as he himself suggests, want “A brand new history”? [Chuckles] “If you’re not fed up with something about this life, you don’t have a soul. We rely on our frustrations to drive us to make the world better, making our lives better and making better decisions for ourselves and for others.”

SON LUX • 18/1, 20.00, SOLD OUT!, Ancienne Belgique, boulevard Anspachlaan 110, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-548.24.24, www.abconcerts.be