Ruban Nielson: ‘I Don’t Want to be Using My Life for Clickbait’
Ruban Nielson is sitting outside a cafe in Paris when he suddenly pauses mid-sentence, somewhat perplexed. A number of deafening police and ambulance sirens have momentarily halted our conversation with the Unknown Mortal Orchestra frontman, who apologises for the disruption.
“It’d be the most UMO thing ever if I got stuck in a terrorist attack, or something,” he says, laughing.
While Nielson may make light of such a situation, he is no stranger to drama – as the past few years, and particularly the making of his band’s new album, Sex & Food, have demonstrated.
In search of a new direction after three critically acclaimed psychedelic indie rock records, the 38-year-old New Zealander took to to the road to write and record album No 4 in various locations around the world with his portable studio and bandmates (including brother Kody) in tow.
In Mexico City, he was caught in the midst of the catastrophic earthquake that struck in September 2017. He travelled to the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea (later spending some time recording in the nearest studio, which was in Seoul) and then there was the trip to Hanoi, Vietnam, where he was briefly detained by police for attending a gig that was “kind of like a protest thing”. “That was a very interesting experience for me to go through at the time,” he says. “It didn’t give me any answers to anything.
It just helped to make everything more ambiguous than ever. But on the way back, I started writing on the plane and I had most of the lyrics that I needed for the rest of the album by the time I landed.”
One thing’s for certain; he never would have thought that he’d be here, figuratively and literally, eight years after he anonymously uploaded Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s first song to Bandcamp.
“We joke about it all the time, Jake [Portrait, bassist] and I,” he chuckles. “When the band started, we had funny dreams about what might happen – but we kind of passed those dreams quite a long time ago. At some point we sort of felt like we were just kind of making the whole thing up as we go along.”
courtesy : irishtimes.com
photo : Pitchfork
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