FAULT FAVOURITES

DAYBED

FAULT: What inspires you to make the music?

Carla: I enjoy the possibility and freedom in working on a song. You can infuse mood into it, describe a setting, do a bit of storytelling. You can even treat it like the Surrealist Exquisite Corpse, like a game in subconscious creativity where the end product is a bit of a surprise. A quite pleasurable process! Tim: Music-making is one of the few things I do that feels healthy. I enjoy that moment when you try something and it sounds good.

FAULT: How did Daybed get started?

Tim: I started recording electronic music on cassette when I was 14. When I was at uni I got into 80s DIY synth music. I thought it was a higher class of electronic music than the nasty throwaway stuff I’d heard: it had actual melody. When I was about to move to Berlin, I put out a call to see if anyone was interested in DJing and producing Minimal Wave style music with me. Carla answered, and we found we had similar ideas, started DJing and recording immediately.

Carla: I am a listening fiend, but had never been active in trying to find a band to collaborate with. When Tim wrote to me, I was fairly skeptical – there are so many elements to consider in whether or not a group can work well together. Luckily, Tim and I found out quickly that we have very similar tastes as well as a highly critical eye.

FAULT: What sets you apart from other artists?

Carla: We have quite diverse music interests that keep popping up in our music. Although we have been described as being minimal synthwave, we bring many genres into our work: classical chamber music, 60’s folk, EBM, post-punk. We did a cover of “Girl Help Me” by 60’s sunshine pop group, The Zombies, for instance, just to show that there are many similar “minimal” elements between their songwriting style and ours. It was great fun to see how well a song like that translated into another genre!

Tim: I think most artists attempt to synthesize different influences but we have a policy to try a completely different influence in every track. We work these into a minimal synth base, which creates coherence in the project. So hopefully, it is a nice balance between flighty and grounded.

FAULT: What are you currently working on?

Carla: We are currently releasing our first EP on vinyl with the German label no emb blanc, a sublabel of genetic music. We are also touring a bit in the months of October and November, playing with minimal wave and synthpunk bands such as Nine Circles, Oppenheimer Analysis, and Digital Leather. Of course, writing new songs is always a big priority for us and we have many, many drafts that we will be developing further in the next few months. At the moment, our issue as a band is not at all lack of ideas, but simply lack of time!

FAULT: What is your creative process, when writing a new song?

Carla: It depends. Since the time we have begun working together, our process has been transforming. We have gotten pickier with ourselves and with our sound and, as a consequence, have spent a lot of time with our newest songs to edit and revise them. We create a draft, listen often – alone, together, during different times of the day, sit on it, pick it apart, think about how the music or the vocals propel the song forward. Often we think about one element to build upon in a song and try to create a musical frame around to make it the song’s focus. In “Lack of Light”, we framed the baroque-influenced synths; in “Journey”, the focus became more about the progressive “loudness” of the synths and the coldness of my voice as vehicles for expressing distance.

Tim: Our process is unusual in that we don’t develop a song while sitting together playing instruments. We mostly work on our parts independently and meet up to combine them. We have found that re-recording / re-factoring whole parts of a track can often develop it further than adding new stuff to it can.

FAULT: What are you currently listening to?

Carla: When summer starts to turn to fall and the weather slowly turns wintery, I seem to come back to the Scott Walker albums (Scott 1-4). I suppose it is a cold-weather ritual now. But as Tim and I both spin minimal synth and post-punk here in Berlin, we are always on the lookout for songs that the other has never heard before: an unspoken competition to uncover that which could potentially inspire what we do as a band.

Tim: I have a pretty small collection and don’t really listen to music much. I won’t keep a song unless it does something unique. If it sounds mannered, my attention shuts off. I have short, sporadic, focused listening sessions. I tend to find one or two interesting songs per month and listen to them on repeat. At the moment, my focus is Chris Carter’s ‘Beat.’ I’m trying to understand what he really achieved with this track. To discover new stuff, I have listened to Veronica Vasicka’s Minimal Wave radio show since the early days. Also, Carla and our friend Michael (A nurse called Mike) both have an encyclopedic knowledge of music, so I find out about lots of great tracks from them.

FAULT: If you were not a musician what would you be doing?

Tim: Sleeping. It is the best.

Carla: If I wasn’t producing music, I would probably be consuming more music. Music is something that is always on in the background; it is the first thing that I turn on when I wake up, always accompanies me!

FAULT: What is your FAULT?

Tim: I have overly-baroque tendencies and sometimes struggle to keep things simple.

Carla: Wanting to develop all of our ideas at the same time, which really comes down to a lack of patience. So, impatience!