Dylan Wall: An Interview

Dylan Wall plays artlessly with his tuna, his long and peeling index finger poking and prodding the bleeding lump. The ghost of a smile dances around his withered lips. A sore weeps quietly on the side of his neck. The silence is deafening. With one eye still on his meaty fish, he casts the other up to me (how does he do this!?) “ummm … yeah … so this place is so great, I come here all the time … you know, when I’m in town. This tuna’s a new one for me though, it’s a bit … you know”. He smacks his lips and they make a dry sucking sound. It’s disturbing.

Wall, lead singer of Emperor Shapes, is sat opposite me in London’s Pudendia, a fashionable fusion restaurant that serves the sort of preposterous towers of food that sickeningly skinny men like Wall would mainline if you only looked away for five seconds. It was his choice to come here. How could I say no? It’ll cripple me with expenses but at least it means I’ve secured an interview with this frustrating elbow of a man. As I watch his tuna lying stinking in a pool of exquisite death, I suddenly realise I haven’t said anything for almost ages. I look back up at him and, as if to emphasize our silence, a flake of skin detaches itself from his chin and floats down onto his dish. I swear I can hear it land with a plip onto his tuna. He doesn’t seem to notice.

“So Dylan” I say, spluttering out my words in a rain of phlegm, hoping to direct some towards the tuna which is now irritating me tremendously, “Emperor Shapes have a new album out, And The Blood Fell Like Rain O’er Fields and Gardens. How about a few words on that?”

“Oh yeah, man. I’m really happy with it. Me and the band have been working on it for like, four years. The whole thing’s kind of borne out of where we were writing it. You see, we decided to write it on this farm, like way out in the country, like properly isolated you know? The nearest convenience store was like, twenty minutes’ walk away. The idea was to keep it as a working farm, but the thing about farming is that it’s like, really hard, you know. I mean, it literally never stops. All year round. You get up at dawn then work until night time. There’s hardly any time to write and record an album. That’s why it took us so long. We’d rehearse and write at night but we’d all be so tired that we’d be falling asleep. Viv the drummer actually collapsed during the recording of the track Polyphonic Spectroscope. You can hear her clattering into her drum kit about halfway through. I wanted to re-record it but Simon the producer wouldn’t let us as he was on milking duty in the morning and one of the cows had an inflamed udder.”

I nod along to this little story but Wall catches me slightly unawares when he stops so abruptly. Although, as is abundantly clear, he’s not the sort of man to be bothered by conversational gaps, I  pursue the role of interviewer regardless, my mouth forming words almost by instinct, “I think you can hear it in the playing, you being tired I mean. It’s of a uniformly low standard throughout the album really. I’m sure you’d be the first to admit that …”

“Oh totally, man, yeah. It’s appalling. And it’s not just the playing either, the lyrics and the songs are extremely poor too. As I say, what with the farming, there really was no time to concentrate on any of the necessary processes for writing or recording music. But you know what? After only four years we produced something. I think that’s testament to our determination in the face of almost overwhelming odds. And the fact that it was largely our own decision to inflict these odds upon ourselves only adds to that, as I’m sure you’d agree.”

A shard of salted lamb caramel catches in my throat and I croak out a noise which I hope Wall doesn’t take for agreement. I scan his face to check but he just stares impassively back at me. Eager to change the subject I spit out a question too banal to repeat here. Wall nevertheless gives an answer, perhaps out of some misplaced loyalty to this tired interview format.

“So the first music I ever got into was just stuff my parents would play around the house, mainly musique concrete. It was basically just the commercial stuff but I still loved it. I remember my parents would invite their friends over and we’d all dance to Schaeffer’s Intermezzo or Henry’s Danse Electromatic. It was crazy, I was only four years old but I knew all those songs off by heart. It was around that time too that I started building my own instruments. I was making them with anything I could find lying around, like bones and crazy shit, breezeblocks, whatever. I used to wire up crickets and get them to chirp in time. Sure, the stuff I was recording around then was basically just bad imitations of Schaeffer’s tunes but it got me started you know? I've probably got some of those instruments still lying around in my parents’ cabin. Most of the crickets would probably be dead now though ...”

Wall trails off and looks through me. He seems lost in reverie as he delicately excavates his ear with his fish knife. I prompt him – “So then at college you got into the tape loop scene right?”

“Yeah, yeah. It was really big at my college. We’d be up for days cutting and splicing. There were a lot of drugs around of course – crab apples, two-bit theatemines, benzideath. They helped us keep the energy levels up you know but they took their toll in the end. I completely lost control of my arm for a week and a bit. It was like, totally independent. It used to make phone calls to Methodist preachers without me knowing. Of course it could only wave down the phone so it wasn’t too much trouble. I made friends with Peter Onions too. He now records under the name Chocolate Haircut of course. He was crazy. He was picking up all these alien broadcasts on these little receivers he’d make. He’d transmit back, talking to the aliens about his favourite types of Japanese tea and how to scavenge furniture and things. I think the aliens stopped responding after a while though…”

“Great” I say, hoping to impose a sham of finality on the interview, “so I suppose you’ve got a lot of ideas in the pipeline, touring perhaps, or maybe thinking about a new album?”

“No, not really” he says as he gets up to leave. His chin is flaking badly now, leaving a snowstorm swirling over the table. I cover my mouth as I wave him goodbye. He grabs what remains of his tuna with his translucent fingers and lurches towards the exit. I watch him leave. His scarf catches in the door and unravels itself from his shoulders, but he is oblivious as he wobbles onto the pavement. I would say he was inscrutable, but I’m not entirely sure what it means.