Ariel: “I’m Here To Tell You What You Don’t Wanna Hear”

I’ve been very anxious about the whole thing for ages but now I feel very calm about it. I’ve been thinking about this project for a long time. Even when I write songs I think about them for ages before I actually sit down and write them. When you’re working on a project you can feel a bit crazy because you’re the only person that’s in on the process, you’re the only person that’s in the ideas and all your friends think you’re mental because they don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes. It’s nice because there’s this thing I’ve been working on for so long and now it’s tangible and real, it finally exists. 

You know what, it’s funny because I don’t really give a shit about what the response is gonna be at this point. I don’t care if no one listens to it, it’s been much more of a process of figuring out in my own head how I feel about certain things and I now have this sense of knowing who I am in terms of my identity because it’s my own. 

Yeah it is! Personally I feel like there’s an evolution that’s coming to fruition that I’ve been trying to achieve for a while just for myself, so even anyone listening to the record is wild and it was never the point. But yeah it feels good, for the first time in a long time I feel like things are the way they should be. It’s not just this esoteric concept that I’m writing this piece of work, it’s out in the world now. It’s nice to relinquish a bit of control, whatever happens from this point on I’ve done my bit as far as I’m concerned, well this is album one of three but yeah that’s how I feel. 

I guess like in the way a novelist might, I wrote the last bit first. I was writing very different stuff at the time and I wrote this song which will be the last one of the project coming out at the end of the year. I wrote the chords and then just ad libbed, including the lyrics which I never normally do. I usually have a very solid idea of what I want the lyrics to be before, I have a map of what I want to do. But this song just came out of somewhere, I don’t know where, and I haven’t changed it since I first sang it. It was clearly coming from somewhere very different and deep, and I was a bit confused. I thought fucking hell, I really need to figure out what I’m trying to say to myself here. That song sort of unravelled a bit of a journey which made me realise I needed to work backwards to work out where this song was coming from. I was in the process of tracing the story back. At the time I was doing a lot of transcendental meditation and also gong baths — lol — which I loved. It was really hippy and I don’t consider myself to be particularly spiritual but I was doing that at the time because I found music therapy really interesting. I really trip when I go to gong baths, they really trigger something visual for me and I could tell that my subconscious was trying to say something. Every time I do it and get to that place it’s always the same trip, it’s the same place I go to, it’s the same little creature I follow around who I think of as my little muse, she’s a little ball of energy, she just giggles. It’s all underwater, that’s why I called the project Ariel because it’s the place — this sounds so wanky — but it’s the place that I see and go into that’s all underwater. I started really connecting to that narrative which incited that first song. 

I was reading the David Lynch book Catching The Big Fish, I was thinking about how to access my subconscious. I felt at the time that some of the previous stuff I was writing was surface level and wasn’t quite hitting where I really needed it to hit, so I was searching for that deeper connection to myself. It sounds lame but I just felt that was lacking in my writing, then that song happened and I just thought “fuck I need to follow this” and go down that rabbit hole. I guess almost what I’m doing now with these three records is taking them down that rabbit hole in reverse now I’ve come to the beginning of the story. The first and the last record are more linear but the second album goes down into that world, in my head it’s a Pan’s Labyrinth type thing where there’s this surreal space that explores themes extricated from the real world.

Yeah! Wow did I really write that, am I that much of a cunt? I mean it was the middle of a pandemic and I was sitting on my own writing this stuff, I think I went a bit loopy and so into it. It was a very special time to be creative because you could really get lost. But anyway yeah it should feel like that, as I said, the first album should have this feeling of post break up liberation, kind of on top of the world, also getting high and going out. Then I think the second record delves into those dead dreams and half memories — I’ve got a shit memory, the worst memory of all time and a lot of my childhood and teenage years I have complete blanks, I remember real snap shots of key moments but I have weeks, months and years that I don’t remember at all. My friends from music school will talk about anecdotes and I’ll be like “what, did that happen?”, I think that’s maybe a consequence of moving around a lot and having an interesting but difficult childhood. I don’t have a linear sense of my life and I think that’s what I’m exploring in the second record.

Yeah exactly, I feel like the whole thing is a bit of a jigsaw and I’m going backwards from a very present moment of this is where I’m at, the record is me working out how to piece it all together and make it a whole narrative if that makes sense! I think the idea of “narrative” is such an interesting one in today’s world because everyone is encouraged to tell their truth all the time, and I wanna play around with what is true, what is real — if you remember things, are they true? Narrative weaving is a huge thing of our day. The docu-filmmaker Adam Curtis talks about this a lot, in the absence of grand ideologies and wider narratives we’re all searching for our internal narratives, our story. I find that fascinating, maybe because they’re often half true or half real. 

Yeah, I think in a very wide sense people are searching for things to make sense of a world that doesn’t make sense. It’s the psychological process that I find really interesting. 

The 3 albums have very distinct personalities, I think partly because I get bored if I write the same type of thing. By the end of the first album you feel like you know the kinda stuff I’m putting out and you know the sound well but I completely flip it on its head on the second record, and the third. I’m interested in moments of big change and conflict, I’m interested in nuance at the end of the day. As a listener myself I love it when artists fuck with me a little bit, I wanna be made to feel something and have that spun around, I wanna be upset. That’s what art should do. 

Yeah! It needs to be full of risk and full of danger, it needs to be full of the worst of humanity. A depiction is not an endorsement, I definitely delve into some of the darker reaches of what I see humanity is doing you know throughout the three records. I think that if you’re an artist now and you’re not doing that, if you’re just towing a very monocultural line and you’re saying the right things online, you’re a traitor and you’re not a real artist. Art has a very special place in society, you’re kind of above everyone else’s rules. You can say and do things that other people can’t get away with because you’re holding up a mirror. People are too afraid to do that now, they’re too afraid they’re gonna get cancelled or their label’s gonna drop them and that’s bullshit.

I think that artists have a role of asking questions, putting out different ideas and having a debate about it. Ultimately some people think I’m doing it for a shock value and that’s not actually true. I do genuinely have a problem with the way liberalism is playing out these days and I find it very authoritarian and closed minded, people think that they’re being open minded but they’re not — and I was one of them! I had this epiphany that actually this is stifling free speech and that we have a right to ask and say things that aren’t comfortable without being sent to a fucking internet goulag because you’re saying something different from someone else. Artists can’t exist in a space like that, they can’t! What great art comes out of towing the line, you know things that are mainstream are mainstream for a reason. They’re usually mainstream because they’ve been co opted by a corporation or political movements for their own benefit and they exist to retrench themselves in that space in a mainstream way. I think my intention is to be much more contrarian than that. I just find most music and art at the moment extremely boring and I wanna see something a bit deviant that isn’t towing that line. I mean why the fuck are we looking at celebrities to comment on the Israel/Palestine conflict? It says something about whose opinions we’re listening to and why is that important? 

Yeah, for my role within it I’m much more interested in how people respond as opposed to how successful the music is going to be. With my live show I try to break down the barrier between me and the audience. I want there to be a conversation between the two and I wanna challenge that relationship. I want people to be pissed off — at least that’s something. I’m not interested in the brain dead, carry on with your day thing. 

So I have two different live shows. One is very raw and stripped back, it’s just me and it’s cheap. The other one is a higher level, conceptual and interactive art piece. I’ve built a set for it with my friend and people are encouraged to participate within it — so for the first half an hour there’s stuff on the stage and the audience telling me what to do. All my lyrics basically relate to food, drink and drugs. I’m interested in the idea of consuming and being consumed, it’s voyeurism, it’s the internal versus external space — I’m so interested in that and I love performance art so I wanted to marry all that together to have a bigger conversation about complicity. The first half of the show is people texting in what they want me to consume off a menu based on my lyrics, I end up snorting coke, eating three burgers and downing whisky. At first it’s got this fun party atmosphere and by the end of the hour I’m obviously worse for wear. It’s so interesting doing that show because it has the exact desired effect as people realise how dark it is, and for me it’s a question of who’s doing this to me, is it them or me?

Yeah, it’s that question of who’s got agency here, is it you, is it me? Do I stop this? Putting yourself in that dangerous risky space in front of people to me is fascinating. Being on stage is an incredibly vulnerable place to be.

100%. When I did start writing it I was trying to figure my shit out but then I realised that actually this is not just my shit, this is everyone’s shit. These records are not about me, they have a personal narrative element to them but they’re actually about you, they’re about everyone else. That’s where I feel really comfortable saying shit that’s gonna piss people off because ultimately it’s not about me and not necessarily even my opinion, I wanna know how you react to this. By watching my show everyone recognises their own shit and that to me is way more powerful to me than banging on about my life, that’s not interesting to anyone, I can do that in therapy you know what I mean.

I wrote that so tongue and cheek. That song is revisiting a story about Boris Johnson when he was working at The Telegraph and he and his pal conspired to have this News Of The World journalist beaten up. “***I REALLY MEAN IT***” is a secret recording of this phone call. 

Yeah! I ripped it off the internet, I’m probably gonna get in loads of trouble but I don’t care. For me it sets the tone perfectly of what I’m trying to do which is create a sense of infallibility. “*** TOO BIG TO FAIL ***” sets a wider mood of where power comes from.

Which I do! *laughter* To be fair I’d never fucking heard of the term before but a guy I was seeing last year sent me a voice note one day saying “get you and your godpussy over here” and I was like “what is that?!”, so I guess I’ll take it. God how do I answer this… Listen I was in that headspace of recently being broken up with and I think refinding your sexual power when you’re newly single is kind of nuts and frightening. I read this Camilla Paglia quote the other day, “feminism, coveting social power, is blind to woman’s cosmic sexual power”. Women wield their sexual power all the fucking time and in that song I was just having a laugh thinking about all the times I’ve used my sexuality to my advantage and loved it. If you have a good pussy, you can get shit done in the world. 

A lot of trial and error. I’m gonna say something really wanky. I think when you first start writing music you sort of copy things that you like and you use it as a bit of a template. When I first started writing songs I couldn’t produce and had to rely on people to do it for me and I always felt they weren’t nailing it in the way that I wanted it to sound. When I write a song I have a very clear idea of the sonic world I wanna embed it in, there’s so much nuance and creativity that goes into creating a soundscape that reflects the meaning of a song. A lot of my songs are very different from each other. I’ve always been fascinated by how to marry thematic intention with the sound world and that just takes time. I had an amazing human being in the form of a man called Laurie who’s a producer in Brighton, he taught me everything he knew about production. Quite frankly many of the male producers I worked with previously had such a massive ego and wouldn’t let me touch the sound or sit in the chair. It was just about growing my own technical ability so that I could reach the sound that I wanted. 

Schizophrenic. 

I don’t really know what genre means in terms of creativity. I don’t feel like I’m part of any kind of movement… hang on I’m just gonna order another pint… *orders another Stella* You know I’m very much a lone wolf when it comes to making this stuff. 

I love it, exactly! That sums up the whole project and the G-Drive is supposed to be a reflection of that.

Well my manager was like you need a website and I was like “I don’t want a fucking website, what’s the point in a website?”. The G-Drive is a manifestation of the process of making the whole thing, it’s a massive jumble of shit but in there somewhere if you dive deep enough there are some little hidden gems. All three records are in the G-Drive if you can be arsed to find them, if you wanna look hard enough they’re there — everything’s already in there. It’s about uncovering stuff, again this is very wanky but everything I do needs to reflect the point of why I’m doing it which is to peel back layers and find out shit about yourself and other people. Everything needs to replicate that. It’s a proper labyrinth. I just wanted to create a weird little scrappy universe. 

My CGI goddess, yes! We made a 360° google earth inspired fully-immersive video which is unlisted and you have to find it in my G-Drive, I’m not making it public. I just think it’s more rewarding when you have to find things that way. I don’t expect anyone to give a shit now but maybe as the story unfolds… I’m interested in how people experience my art rather than my art in itself. I got introduced to Masha and I just love her work aesthetically, but I also felt that a lot of what we’re talking about — worlds within worlds — I find when I look at her stuff that she weaves subtle, implied narratives. So I reached out to her and sent all three albums and we really understood each other. It’s such a genuine creative collaboration. 

I’m just here to tell you what you don’t wanna hear.