Subsonic Eye is an indie pop band from Singapore. Their latest record, Singapore Dreaming, is out now on Topshelf.
Ryan Hemsworth is a producer and DJ based in Halifax; Nur Wahidah and Daniel Borces are two-fifths of the Singaporean indie pop band Subsonic Eye. The band’s new record, Singapore Dreaming, just came out (via Topshelf), so to celebrate, Ryan, Nur, and Daniel got on Zoom to catch up about it, and more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Ryan Hemsworth: Hey, guys.
Daniel Borces: Hi, Ryan. Thanks for wanting to talk to us.
Ryan: Of course! Is it just the two of you?
Daniel: Yeah, it’s just two of us. We live together.
Ryan: Are you guys married?
Daniel: Yeah.
Ryan: Cool. When did you get married?
Daniel: Last year.
Nur Wahidah: In August.
Ryan: That’s great. I know you guys have a lot of bands in your orbit — it’s sort of like a Marvel Cinematic Universe of your bands. [Laughs.] I’ve been a fan of Subsonic and Sobs, and then I know you have Carpet Golf and CURB and Vegtable. So when you guys got married, who played?
Nur: We wanted to do it like a regular DIY show, but then you have to book the venue and pay the backline, and it was just way too expensive.
Daniel: You probably need to get a license as well, right? And if not, you go to jail.
Nur: It’d be a dream though to just do a show, and then it’s like, “Now it’s our wedding!” But, yeah, we couldn’t do that.
Ryan: And then you get arrested and you go to jail.
Nur: Yeah, crazy wedding night.
Ryan: That would be a good way to go, honestly.
Daniel: In Singapore, now there’s a shortage of venues, but back when I was in high school, there was this one venue that every Saturday there would be a show. We’d just show up and you wouldn’t even know what it was, but you just knew there would be a show. So one of the weekends we went up, paid the door ticket, and it turned out it was an actual wedding. So it was weird because the bands were all kind of old, and the everyone was dressed formally. We were thinking, “What is this, a Halloween party?” But it wasn’t October. Then eventually, we found out it was a wedding show.
Ryan: And you stayed and hung out?
Daniel: We just caught a couple bands and were like, “OK, this is not the vibe.”
Nur: So you paid for a ticket to the wedding?
Ryan: That’s the way to do it, make money off your wedding.
Daniel: Is it the same in Canada? You used to play in indie rock bands — you have the Quarter-Life Crisis thing.
Ryan: Yeah, a little bit. I mean, I came from East Coast Canada, and I had a couple of bands in high school. I played drums just because we needed a drummer, even though I wasn’t good. But that’s kind of the rite of passage for high school bands. I started playing guitar when I was 13, so that was always my main thing. And when I think about music or visualize it, it’s thinking about it through a guitar. I started producing more so late high school, early university, just because I just prefer to do stuff on my own and be in full control. But at the same time, it definitely felt lonely after a while. So that’s when I started reaching out to singers or rappers or anybody who was easy to remotely work with, because I never really found much of a scene in my city that made what I wanted to make. This was Myspace days, so it was just hitting people up and making stuff that way, and then starting to get on blogs. But with bands, I’ve always probably listened to more stuff in that world than electronic, but it just has worked out that I’ve lived more in the electronic world for whatever reason. I think because I just am on my laptop every day, so it’s the easiest thing to make in that capacity.
But, yeah, when I made the Quarter-Life Crisis stuff that came out through Saddle Creek, that was just kind of a dream that fell into place luckily at the time.
Daniel: Do you still approach electronic music that way? You mentioned you still think about music in [terms of] guitar.
Ryan: I think so. It’s hard to turn off. I think the stuff that you grew up on, the stuff you loved in junior high in high school — no matter what, even if I’m playing stuff on keys, I end up making stuff that is in a blink-182 pop punk melody. Even though I always want to make stuff more complex, I think there’s just something ingrained in your brain from the stuff that you first really fell in love with. And it’s hard to get out of that.
Daniel: Yeah, I get what you mean with the blink-182 stuff. Nur, I don’t know if you’re—
Nur: I’m My Chemical Romance. I’m on the other side.
Ryan: I think that’s actually right, it’s kind of one of the other.
Nur: Yeah, because you [Daniel] don’t like My Chemical Romance. I’m not really into blink — I mean, it’s OK, but… I’m not going to say anything.
Ryan: [Laughs.] Yeah, we don’t want beef with Tom DeLonge.
Daniel: [Laughs.] But, yeah, no one else has done it as good as them. Or maybe it’s just the bias from when you’re young. Because even now, it’s kind of hard to discover new music. It doesn’t hit the same.
Ryan: I know what you mean. It’s funny to talk about now because it really ages you — because I know for a lot of younger people, I can’t imagine blink-182 being very appealing. It’s old guys now still singing about their dicks. I mean, obviously from that era there’s a lot of pop punk that really crossed over. But some of those bands like blink had so much personality and charisma and sense of humor, while at the same time having really basic catchy stuff. And I feel like there’s such an overwhelming amount of artists that make amazing stuff, but to equally crossover showing off your personality and charisma, it’s harder to stand out in that way now. I feel like there was just less stuff reaching the top at that point, in the late ‘90s or early 2000s. But it’s an interesting thing to think about. They made DVDs and stuff — people don’t do that as much. Actually, that was one thing I was thinking about when they asked us to do this conversation, because I really liked your tour video from a few years ago for the US.
Daniel: Oh, thanks.
Ryan: I’m nostalgic for that. I understand people just want to see 30 seconds on Instagram, but I really still enjoy the longer format. Also, just seeing people struggle through that — like when you guys lose your gear. It’s not an enjoyable thing to live through, but to watch is interesting.
Daniel: [Laughs.] It’s cool you brought up the DVD thing — I know you have a couple of the—
Nur: OK, so I was the biggest Green Day fan growing up. I have all the Green Day CDs and all the DVDs. I’m a big fan of Muse also, so I have all the DVDs. And I didn’t have a phone or computer until I was, like, 17, so I would play the CD on the TV — and it doesn’t even have a visual, it’s just black. And then I would just listen to the album front to back and read the lyrics. So the DVD was crazy because it was like, “Wow, I can watch something.” It sounded different from the album, and it was a whole different experience. I love the DVDs and all the b-sides.
Ryan: Yeah, I was totally into that in the same way too. I was 13 or whatever, starting to really buy CDs and DVDs, and then I feel like within five or so years that just stopped being a thing. It was sort of a golden age of that. I had a Weezer one. They had this DVD of all their videos and then some b-sides, live footage, studio stuff. I feel like that’s how you create an obsession with an artist — you get to see stuff that maybe feels like you’re not supposed to see it.
Nur: I think I started a parasocial relationship really early on. I’d be like, “Yeah, they’re my friends now.” [Laughs.]
Ryan: Yeah, maybe there is kind of a dark side to that. But I feel like everything is very curated and sculpted now on social media, and I feel like for those, it was just one person with a camcorder and they just caught anything good or bad that happened.
Daniel: Yeah. I do wonder, is it an attention span kind of thing? Because for me, I can’t watch a YouTube video that’s more than, like, three minutes. And I have a bad habit with music — when I’m showing a friend a song, I’ll just show them 10 seconds, which shouldn’t be the way.
Nur: He’ll turn on a song and be like, “That’s a good song,” and then immediately go to the next song. I’m like, “We just heard literally three seconds.” It’s crazy.
Ryan: [Laughs.] Well, it’s good to have an ear that’s that trained, I guess.
Daniel: I think that’s also why it’s a struggle to discover new music. Like, let’s say I want to try get into jazz—
Nur: Worst music for your attention span.
Daniel: Yeah. The whole thing is a journey, right? The solos, and then they play the head. But I just want to get to the chorus. [Laughs.] It’s a ongoing issue. Do you have that kind of problem now as well?
Ryan: I’m trying to get better at designating time with music in that way. I have two kids, and I got this little toy speaker for one of them. It’s kind of just for reading children’s stories, but you can connect to BBC on it. So I’ve ended up just using my kids’ toy speaker to put on the radio and make dinner and just listen to BBC Radio 1 or 6 for an hour or two while I’m doing stuff in the kitchen. I kind of forgot that not controlling what you’re listening to is a really great way of listening to music. But, yeah, the attention span thing is hard. So I’m trying to allow myself, through whatever way, to give up a bit of that control and just allow things to happen.
Daniel: On that control thing, I don’t know if you feel this way, but when I listen to music, part of my brain is always going, How did they write that? Can we write something like that? Especially because a lot of the music I listen to is just music that I would play. It’s hard for me to detach myself from my writer brain to be in my listening brain. You play a lot of genres — do you encounter the same kind of issues?
Ryan: I feel lucky that my brain has never been too competitive in that way. Usually, even in that way where I’m listening to the radio, it’s more just inspiring me. I used to try to make music and be like, “I love this song by Daft Punk, I want to replicate it.” And then I realized I’m also not good at directly copying stuff. So in a way, I just use that as inspiration to try, and then something completely different happens. I realized I just need to use that spark to start doing things, especially if I hear something that sounds sick and I know I can’t create anything close to that, at least it’ll get me to go and open up my computer and try to do something.
Daniel: When you’re trying a new sound, do you approach it differently, or do you have the same template?
Ryan: When I started producing, I was editing stuff the using the drum audio files and everything straight up in the DAW. Like, not using samplers and stuff. It was a very archaic way of doing it. And then I started using plug-ins for everything and doing it the, quote-unquote, “right” way, or professional producer way. And now I’m fully back to using laptop speakers, just dragging everything into the DAW, chopping it up or whatever. Going back to that original mindset of not overthinking every single aspect. Because the duration of working on a thing, I feel like it just starts to kill the initial good idea that you had. So I just want to be as quick and efficient as I can, keeping that idea crystallized and not breaking it and trying to put it back together.
Daniel: You mentioned laptop speakers.
Ryan: Yeah.
Daniel: That’s crazy.
Ryan: [Laughs.] That’s because I have the MacBook from a couple of years ago, and it’s got pretty good bass. With the modular stuff a few years ago, I had my monitors and everything set up, like, “Yeah, I’m doing it right!” But then I was actually not really loving what I was making. So I was like, “Actually, I think I just need to sit in bed under the covers and make it on my laptop and not use headphones.” Because I think I get a little lost in the literal headspace of that. A lot of people just listen to music on their phone or their laptop speakers, so it’s trying to sort of meet people halfway there.
Daniel: Jared [Lim] mixed our upcoming record, and he’s one of the best mix engineers that I know — he just mixes on his laptop with headphones, and it sounds a lot better than places that have full on acoustic treatment and big speakers. It’s a great reminder for me that it’s really not the gear, it’s how you approach the thing. When we started, we were a lot more shoegaze-y, a lot more reverb, a lot of pedals. So I had a huge pedalboard, but then when I’m trying to write, I gotta take it out of the bag and it’s really heavy and there’s a lot of buzzing because the cables are pretty cheap, so I gotta figure out, “Why is this buzzing?”
Ryan: You’re chasing the buzz for an hour and then you forget what you were doing.
Daniel: Yeah, literally. And by the time everything’s set up, I don’t even feel like writing anymore. I just want to buy another pedal so I can replace the pedal I had buzzing. [Laughs.] Jared just has a ZOOM multi-effects and he sounded great. His guitar tone still sounded as big as someone with a big pedal board.
Nur: Jared is really the guiding beacon.
Daniel: Yeah. Whenever I’m in “GAS” — Gear Acquisition Syndrome — I just think about Jared and how he does stuff on his laptop. That was a big inspiration. I also just got down to a small ZOOM multi-effects. But in exchange, I got more guitars.
Ryan: Something has to fill the void inside you. [Laughs.] So this new album is your fifth, right? Like, officially.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ryan: Has it been with Topshelf this whole time?
Daniel: The last one we did was with Topshelf — which is just crazy. They were a label that when I was in high school, I was listening to their bands. I can’t believe they replied to my email. I was freaking out. It’s been a good journey. Five is a good number.
Ryan: Yeah, I mean, that’s super productive for an indie band. And I think it’s unique for any artist nowadays to be growing a relationship for that long with the same label. Even keeping a band together for this long sometimes is rare. So I was curious, to reach this point, how has it been working with an international label?
Daniel: I think generally the reach helps a lot, because if it wasn’t for them, we’d still be focusing a lot more on regional stuff. But since we’ve gotten to work with them, it’s got me to think beyond our area. We did the US thing, which was something I never would have imagined. It just pushed me to make it happen. It’s quite inspiring, because there are almost no excuses anymore.It’s easy to fall back and think, Oh, we’ve got no opportunities and blah blah blah. But working with them just helps to expand our general reach. And I was shocked that they’re just, like, dudes. It feels like just working with friends.
