YLVA // The Hardest of All Noise

YLVA means she-wolf, and if you listen with intent, it’ll devour you whole.

Painted in swatches and grey and other-worldly sounds, Melbourne’s post-metal/sludge/whathaveyou band YLVA’s (pronounced ILL-ver) debut album M E T A is a marriage of despairing humanity and our headlong rush into the mechanical. M E T A is an analog to the lost pasttime of settling in with a good novel and letting it take you on a long, winding journey. Talking with vocalist, guitarist, and producer Mike Deslandes, what pours out of speakers isn’t that big of a deal. Of course, he’s just being modest. We got the lowdown on what hovers above M E T A.

Hysteria: META is a very layered thing. How do you sort of layer upon layer and how do you build up a song?

Mike: I’ve certainly approached this record like I would anything else. This was quite a simple approach. If you’re hearing a lot of layers and so on going on in the record, I guess there is to some extent, but at its core that is just the fundamental performance of the band and obviously we’ve overdubbed vocals and a few extra bits and pieces but it was, at the guts of it, the bare tracks are the one performance from the band.

Taking that or documenting that in the studio setting, taking that back, sitting with it for a little while and then working on the extra bits and pieces. As I said, vocals. There’s a couple of extra little guitar parts and so on like that on top. Yeah, it’s really quite a simple record in its core and I guess the size and layer and all of that comes from the mix process. I’d like to think it’s not a giant production, it’s not a complex thing knowing how it all came together, I guess.

It’s interesting that you say it’s a “simple” thing. That’s an insider looking out point of view, I’d say.

Absolutely. I’d like to think, again talking about the work side of things, that it would translate on a tiny mono computer speaker as it would on a large, quality hi-fi system or headphones or anything like that. That’s always my aim as a mix engineer. In terms of the record, it is something where you can, if you’re getting a lot more out of it from a larger system, I’d like to hope that that’s still achieved in a smaller system, a smaller setting to be able to check in and check out from start to finish rather than glance through like any type of more maybe digestible pop sort of music or rock and roll or something like that.

It is certainly something that was conscious to try and have that wave of … I don’t know. Just being immersed by a song, I guess, not just the whole record but if it was in a rock and roll song … four, four, verse chorus, verse chorus, bridge, in and out … Obviously we were trying to create something a bit more … “Atmospheric” is probably an awful word to use but something where you can switch off, check in and check out. That’s kind of the approach, I guess. I’d like to think you can achieve that from any medium that you’d listen to the record on. Yeah.

True, “atmospheric” is a publicist’s cry for a thesaurus. Pop music is interested in tweets and sentences, this record is more interested in forming paragraphs. Each song is a chapter of a novel.

One-hundred percent. It’s basically how I know I certainly have, as a writer, always approached my music and that’s how we have as a band and as a collective as well. And in terms of writing the record in full, it wasn’t, “We need a song to go in chapter three.” But it was a book end approach once we had the material that we were happy with. It was quite clear as to how it would go from start to end and how that would, I guess, how the listener should react to that from a start to finish listen. So I think, yeah, you’re quite correct in that.

There’s some really fucking cool shit going on which I feel is, especially being a veteran of music and it’s my life’s work, to see that kind of stuff happening now in mid-late 30s is fucking awesome.
[MIKE]

Aside from production, how do the songs come together?

I’m always a writer and I always have been. This band is definitely that as well. I’ll bring a whole bunch of stuff, whether it’s a song that I feel quite clear and staunch in my approach or, “This is how it should it go.” I might bring things like that to the band and then we’ll flesh that out and it’s an easier process or there’ll be other things that I’ll bring and some things might have been worked on very slowly but over months to basically get it all together.

YLVA is very much more of a collective approach even if I have rocked up with the song and the arrangement and so on, we certainly all have our two cents in the jam room and that’s how it all comes together.

Another bit of publicist fluff is saying Melbourne is the “capital of underground music.” Is it?

I don’t know. We’re not 20 years old. We’ve been doing this our entire lives with numerous bands. The slotting in kind of thing … I guess what Chris wrote is obviously publicist hype but it’s very true as well and I guess, again, in terms of my work, that’s the world that I work in. Whether it’s new bands doing their first recording or existing bands and so on. And Melbourne is extremely healthy for it. There’s so many obvious sub-genres of the heavy kind of world but there’s some incredible bands that I’ve been able to know and work with and so on that I guess YLVA does fit perfectly in.

There’s lots of this stuff happening at the moment, whether they’re known to that many people or whether it’s 50 people at The Old Bar; the quality of the said scene is certainly there. So, for us to be a part of it, we clearly know and are involved socially and work with a lot of these types of people and scenes so it’s certainly not a new thing and … Yeah. I don’t know where to … I could go on about it for ages how a whole bunch of bands that I’m really excited about. Whether you want to call it “post-metal”, “doom” … All of this kind of stuff; there’s some really fucking cool shit going on which I feel is, especially being a veteran of music and it’s my life’s work, to see that kind of stuff happening now in mid-late 30s is fucking awesome.

What’s the best setting to experience YLVA? Live or on record?

I guess you’d have to ask somebody who has seen the band play. What it is on record is what we play. We play almost everything. We’ve only played a handful of shows but, yeah, what is on the record is what we play.

And, again, to see-saw on the whole “work versus the band” kind of thing, sometimes it’s great to just do a fucking ripper of a record where there’s huge production and just make a great record. The M E T A record is … I’d like to think we’ve achieved that, we’ve achieved a great record, but it is very much what we play. So there’s not really too many tricks going on there to be honest. Again, it’s a question for someone who has seen the band and heard the record.

YLVA will launch M E T A at the Tote Hotel, Melbourne on the 15th of December with Lo!, SUNDR, and Protection. Tickets available here. 

M E T A drops 17th of December via Pelagic Records.

Read our review of M E T A here!