“Cello and pedals is a whole world”: Lili Holland-Fricke and Sean Rogan on letting go of sonic perfectionism in the image of Arthur Russell
Many albums pass us by without a second thought. We pick out a song or two to add to another playlist, then move on with our day, turn off the radio or queue up another record. But sometimes, an album completely stops you in your tracks. Something about it changes your entire perception of music and, perhaps, even your view of the world. For Manchester-based cellist and recent Melodic Records signee Lili Holland-Fricke, that transformative album was World of Echo by Arthur Russell.
On New Year’s Day earlier this year, Holland-Fricke took a big walk accompanied by some equally big headphones, allowing the sound of Russell’s strange, distorted cello and echoing vocals to pour through them. By the time she returned home, she had been “fundamentally” changed, she tells me over a slightly dodgy Zoom call. She immediately texted her friend Sean Rogan, a Manchester-born-and-bred producer and guitarist, in hopes that, together, they could create something similar.
“Cello and pedals is a whole world,” she told him, “Should we try and make something with cello and pedals?” There wasn’t much of a pause. “Yeah, sure,” he shrugged. The result of that New Year’s Day conversation is Dear Alien, an improvised collaborative album between Holland-Fricke and Rogan that collects a series of transient, textural recordings from a five-day period spent in a Greenwich home studio. “The birthing of it and the finishing of it was all sort of the same process,” Rogan explains.
But that process Rogan refers to was really more of a period of unlearning, unpicking the traditional route of songwriting and allowing songs to form freely. “The first session was not even with a computer, just with an iPhone,” the producer recalls, “We’d just play for like 45 minutes, just acoustic guitar and cello, and then see where that leads us. Often it was a mess, but sometimes it wasn’t a mess. And when it wasn’t a mess, we’d save it.”
“It was all very much from play,” he explains, “There was no trying to write anything or trying to really achieve anything.” This freedom of play certainly comes across in the end product — which is an achievement despite not trying to be. Strange, swerving cello notes swirl around Holland-Fricke’s vocals, sometimes distant and almost robotic, occasionally warm and close by, accompanied by harmonies provided by Rogan. But nothing ever feels forced; everything moves as one.
“We didn’t try to make it anything,” Holland-Fricke explains, acknowledging that they were unconcerned with picking the best takes or pushing material in a certain direction, “We had this vague reference of Arthur Russell as an inspiration that we both shared. But I think what was really lovely about the process and what made it so easy was that we let every idea just be what it appeared to us. We didn’t want to make anything be a song that didn’t want to be a song.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Holland-Fricke and Rogan abandoned ideas if they weren’t working in the traditional song format, but that they allowed those ideas to flourish as something else, as harsh, intermittent, drawn-out, bowed notes, as quiet plucks that eventually lead to strange twists and turns, or just as a recording of two friends chatting in the studio. “I think that if we’d tried to make them into songs,” Holland-Fricke explains, “They wouldn’t have the energy that they have. These fleeting things that just happened in the room.”
This method of songwriting and recording was an entirely new experience for both Holland-Fricke and Rogan, who each had to unlearn their musical backgrounds in order to shrug off traditional structures. Rogan comes from a band background, playing guitar for various different “terrible indie bands” over the years. He also studied popular music performance at music college in Manchester, which focused entirely on “how to be good for the song and for the band.”
For Holland-Fricke, the transition to unrestrained improvisation was even more difficult. The cellist studied her instrument classically for years, practising for six or seven hours every day. “I got classically trained within an inch of my life,” she recalls, “In my own practice, I’ve had to unpick a lot of the baggage that comes with that, which is this relentless perfectionism in everything, not only music but every part of your life.”
Alongside the perfectionistic tendencies of classical training, Holland-Fricke was also left to grapple with the idea that improvisations, created in just a couple of minutes, could be just as good as compositions that had been pored over for months on end. “Something can be really good and have come to you really easily,” she acknowledges, “That doesn’t decrease the value of what you’ve made. But for me, that was a huge thing — how can these things stand on equal ground?”
Russell’s work was partly responsible for this simplification of her sound. Before she discovered World of Echo, Holland-Fricke had been taking her solo material to other musicians, padding it out with full bands or penning guitar parts despite not playing the instrument. But Russell’s music stood up with just cello, electronics, and vocals, so why couldn’t her’s?
“I think that was, fundamentally, a change in the way that I work because now I do all my writing at the cello,” she explains, “I just write one cello line and one vocal line. And if that can stand up on its own, then I’m like, ‘OK, now I can fuck with it.’ Before, that was kind of the other way around, I would fuck up sounds and try and think too much about the bigger picture before the skeleton was really there.”
The lyrical process for Dear Alien almost mirrored Holland-Fricke and Rogan’s work on the instrumentation. Rather than focusing on particular themes or attempting to return to certain memories for lyrical inspiration, the pair allowed words and phrases to come to them. Writings were lifted from Holland-Fricke’s journal, “lost sentences that needed a new home,” before they were cut up and expanded upon.
Neither Rogan nor Holland-Fricke were particularly worried about conveying a specific meaning to audiences with their words, but, in the process, they found that this only increased the honesty of their songwriting. “I think letting your subconscious actually do most of the putting together is weirdly more honest than if you really try and be like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna write about this,’” Holland-Fricke comments, “Sometimes that does work, and sometimes it does just feel like you’ve tried a bit too hard.”
“Actually, sometimes,” she continues, “When you just sit and wait for an image to come to you rather than you going to it, you end up being a lot more truly honest about where your head’s at in that moment. You’re letting one thing lead to another and you’re capturing stuff that can only happen in that very moment that you’re writing the song.”
That honesty is only enhanced by the raw textures that surround Holland-Fricke and Rogan’s vocals, the strange sonic stabs and gentle ambience that match up with those emotions. Although it’s all improvised, recordings of Rogan and Holland-Fricke following their impulses in the studio, it comes together through layering and textures, creating vivid meaning and emotions unintentionally.
This style isn’t just integral to Holland-Fricke’s sonic creations. Her visual artwork, which she contributed to the album artwork, is also textural and layered. The black-and-white cover art places static-like rectangles over the disorienting imagery of a frozen lake landscape. Handwritten titles, loopy and cut up in strange places, rest just atop.
The inspiration for the cover stemmed from a recording session spent piecing parts of Holland-Fricke’s journal together. Little couplets, written out and cut up, were strewn around the room while the duo attempted to pair up rhymes within them. “We arranged a song out of all of these different lines from different times,” she remembers, “And I took a photo of Sean playing guitar, and all of these slips of paper out all over the floor. And I just really liked how the slips of paper looked.”
That photo didn’t make it to the album artwork, but a snap Holland-Fricke took while visiting a friend in Sweden did. “We went on this walk one day,” she recalls, “And the lake had frozen in these incredible layers and cracks. I took a photo, and I also took an audio recording of the broken sheets of ice moving on the water.” The latter found its way into ‘Dear Alien’, while the former provided the first layer for the album artwork.
A chat between Holland-Fricke and Rogan provided another layer, initially recorded in the image of Russell’s song ‘Barefoot in New York’. “It’s this repetitive thing. At the beginning of the song, you’re like, ‘What is he talking about?’ And then, by the end of the song, it just weaves its way into this profound message…” Holland-Fricke explains, “And so we were like, let’s just chat and record it and then put it in. And so we just sat with a microphone. Then we just chatted shit for god knows how long.”
The improvised chat was one of those few ideas that didn’t quite work on the first try, but true to her word, Holland-Fricke repurposed it. “We cut it up, put it in the song, and were like, ‘Oh no. We’re not into this. We just sound silly.’ so we knocked it into the background. I copied out the conversation and used that as the paper to cut up to paste on the album cover. And that’s the end of the story.”
Not quite. Following the release of Dear Alien, Holland-Fricke and Rogan are hoping to play it live, but they haven’t quite figured out how just yet. They didn’t consider the performance element while recording, a choice that freed them up to create such strange, textural soundscapes, but one that might not best prepare them for taking it our on the road.
“I think this is something that people rob themselves of often when they’re in the cycle of recording and gigging,” Rogan comments, “Thinking about them both at the same time can stunt you a little bit. There’s things that maybe you would stop yourself from recording if you’re like, ‘Oh, I would never be able to do this live.’ But we’ll figure it out. It’ll be fine.”
