Interview: The Owl PART ONE
Having recently reviewed and adored The Owl's Odyssey One, I became intrigued by the person behind this prolific project. Paul Priest is someone with a wealth of experience in bands since the late 90s, and has been a part of some the UKs most exciting heavy acts of recent years (his Metal Archives entry is a long one!). In the last few years though The Owl has become the primary outlet for his extremely creative mind. The project varies from droning, sludgey post-metal, to harsh noise and glitch, and as of the time of writing has release 40 records since 2018.
In the first half of this interview we talk about his history as a musician, what inspired him to start The Owl and how the project has become so prolific in a relatively short space of time.
You can find Part Two of the interview here.
Tell us about your musical journey, how did you first begin creating music?
Around the age of seven or eight, I started playing keyboards and organs that my dad had in the living room, but the first 'releases' I ever made was around 1994, just some old school lo-fi keyboard, beats & ambient stuff. I did nine or ten tapes under the name Whoever.
My first band was a college indie grunge rock band called Bathroom City. We played a couple of gigs in 1996 and threw a few demo tapes out. I hadn't played bass before, but the guitarist just handed me a bass and said 'You're going to learn that and be in the band'. Thankfully I was able to play songs and riffs pretty quickly, and that was the beginning of my bass playing journey.
The first 'metal' band I was in was when I joined one of my favourite bands, Canvas, to do noise and samples in 1998 (a few years ago the band reformed for a few gigs with me on bass instead). That was the first band I did tours, festivals, European gigs and recording with, so that gave me massive confidence to play in many more bands and make many more riffs for the next twenty years!
Having played in a number of different bands over the years, what got you started making music as The Owl?
Throughout my time playing in bands I've almost always had various side projects for ambient, noise and electronic stuff. A lot of it never got released, or if it did it would only be one release and then I'd change it. Incandescence was one project that I managed to put a dozen albums out from (OWL26 is an EP of tracks from this project), but there's never really been one that felt truly settled as a name and as an outlet where I could explore more than just certain sounds or genres.
The Owl started around the middle of 2018, and it felt like a name that can fit almost any style, and even if it doesn't really I will find a way to make it fit with a change of style, logo, making the titles really pertinent to the sound. It's really liberating not being tied to anything specific in theme. I know that can be confusing for anyone happening across any of my pages, but it feels like some people have embraced the 'I don't know what is going to be next' ideology, and of course others just dip in from time to time when there's something that seems to their taste. I'm trying to work on things being a little less haphazard, and at least sticking on promoting one release for a little while rather than jumping back and forth and all over the place too much, but it's not all that easy in practice. My brain enjoys this wild zipzagging. (Ed. I love this portmanteau word, I think I'll start using it myself!)
The main thing was to push myself to constantly evolve, learn new processes, improve on getting the best from my sounds. After being a music obsessive for approaching forty years I've heard a lot of stuff across a lot of genres, so I'm pushing myself to make sounds that I have never heard and hopefully at the same time do something that other people will say (whether they like it or not) 'I've never heard anything like THAT before!'. This is my ultimate goal, but also to be consistent and make oddly listenable, understandable structures for those oddball sounds to live in.
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| A young Owlet |
Was there a particular direction that you wanted to follow with The Owl, or was it always intended to be a free expression of ideas?
At first I was thinking it was mostly going to be relatively chilled out stuff made with bass and a few layers of swirly sound, especially since I was still in five bands at the time that were all doing different styles, so my riff appetite was more than satiated. I'd just got delay and octave pedals and was playing around with those a lot, so initially I was going to make it quite cinematic and soundscape-y, but in the back of my mind I knew it was going to get weird and varied because Incandescence got like that pretty swiftly.
By the time of the 4th release, I knew things with The Owl were actually a lot more open to possibilities, and so now, without having the band setting, and me striving to push myself to learn about producing much more variety, everything goes!
I've always been into very varied music, ever since I was a kid, loving the Yellow Submarine and Koyaanisqatsi films and soundtracks at the age of five, feigning being sick when I was seven so I could stay at home from school because I knew my dad had got a tape copy of a new Sky album (prog rock mixed with classical and experimental), discovering John Peel's radio show (and the rock shows) when I was eleven. This was definitely a massive shaper of my musical landscape for life, with the amount of odd sounds I was introduced to, and now at the age of 44, I am still broadening the wideness and weirdness of what I listen to, of how much I am delving in to find obscure loud and quiet, fast and slow sounds from all over the world. Every single piece of music I listen to has influenced me somewhere along the way, even if it's something I heartily disliked. I take from it the knowledge of what I don't want to do with my own music, be it structurally, sonically or aesthetically.
Tell us about the album release challenge you set yourself recently...
It was one of the biggest turning points of my entire creative life, in April 2020 when I gave myself the challenge of releasing five records in five days, with three weeks to prepare for it. I had dozens of folders full of bits and pieces, and I had some stuff that was complete but I just couldn't accept that it was, or didn't realise, or didn't have the confidence to put it out there. I also had nothing for some of the releases that made it, so the challenge made me overcome all of these things and was one of the biggest learning jumps and confidence boosters I have had, and it pushed me to get more organised with my work
I finally knew that I was able to trust my judgement and my capability in producing finished recordings and aesthetics for them too, because for me, getting that right is a huge part of it all. The five I released were OWLs 9 through to 13, and they are all very different. Some of the sounds existed for many years in various states or just as ideas in Notepad. Since that week the proverbial floodgates have well and truly opened, and nine months later, OWL39 had flown the nest. I currently have eight more releases (of my own or splits) complete awaiting planned dates, and about a dozen things in the In Progress folder.
Obviously by the time this is printed and being read some time in the future, those figures will have changed, but it's just an insight into where I am with things, and how important that challenge was. But even before that challenge was the knowledge that I had to really learn and focus in on improving my confidence of letting things go.
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| A fully grown Owl |
There are a lot of important factors in this one. I'm not touring or rehearsing with bands any more as it was starting to get pretty detrimental to my physical and mental health playing in five or six active bands. So by early 2020 I had called it quits most of all the bands, with Sloth Hammer the only 'band' that remains, but it's all improvised live and on record and we don't rehearse.
A big catalyst for wanting to 'go solo', was because for many years I had been storing up folders worth of ideas, bits of music, songs and collaboration ideas that never got worked on. My brain was full to bursting so it felt like the time was right to make that decision after nearly 25 years of playing gigs with bands on that level.
Importantly, I simply prioritised this project. In the last six months I've been 'working' full-time hours on it, making hours of sounds and videos, organising the sound, video and social pages a lot better, learning more about sound production, mixing, and just going deeper into my own sounds and ideas than I ever have been able to before. Learning about making videos for the music has added a huge extra dimension to things that I always felt was missing before but I didn't have the time, energy or focus to do anything about until now.
Since a big majority of it is not the 'full band' approach, what I do is generally quicker to make, so this is also part of it, but that in turn is a reason why I am making more of this sort of thing, because at the moment the ideas are getting even more crazy, varied and interesting. I am just riding that train to see where it goes.
There are a lot of things in the works away from the noise and glitch realms, but I've really had to learn the art of patience and know that it's alright to spend months and months on something, even when it can feel finished, to just hold back, keep crafting and sculpting before stepping back and doing something else, then revisiting and making small progress with fresh ears and new knowledge. Odyssey One was very much the lesson for that. I had it 'finished' in my mind quite a few times, but the last four or five sessions and mixes pushed it a long way further.
Also, it comes with experience I think. The more you release, the more you learn the art of 'letting go' of your music, the quicker you get at knowing when something is actually complete, and you can bypass some of the back and forth you have in your own mind about things. Obviously trying to balance this with the afore-mentioned 'being patient' part is a minor minefield, especially for those with minds similar to mine.
Also, an understanding and also very driven music playing girlfriend very much helps. She understands completely my need to do this at this time which is amazing, and there has been collaboration with her on the page (and another in the works).
I guess the way my existence is set up at the moment lends itself fully to being able to do this, and it's something I've always wanted to be able to put more into, but 'real life', work, and band stuff has been the priority. After a few very long and heavy periods of re-evaluation and changes in my life over quite a few years, my brain was screaming at me that this had to be the new priority, especially in my creative world anyway.
I feel like I am genuinely only just getting started now with what I can and want to do with The Owl. There are so many more styles of music, much more 'full band' sounding releases I want to make. There are also a lot of people I really want to work with, in collaboration or splits or remixes, and I would also love to take this project into making music for film and animation (so if anyone wants some weird dark noise soundscape glitch doom drone bass piano whatever things doing, I'm here!)
Oh, and caffeine!
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