Stubbornly Original: The Nocturnal Fantasies of Ember Rev [Interview]

Ember Rev came together early 2016 to play the songs of Cambridge singer-songwriter Dan Ecclestone. Initially ploughing a folk-rock furrow, debut album ‘In Super-8’ was all ukuleles and brushes. With their sophomore offering, ‘Premonition and Ruin’, the sound shifted up a gear, and the complex asymmetrical rhythms pushed the band in a darker direction.

2019's ‘From the Country to The City To The Sea' was the first of Ember Rev's albums to be released on German Shepherd records, and was named ‘album of the year' on Cambridge Radio. Lockdown slowed everything, but ‘Isolophilia' appeared in 2022, from which the insanely tangled single ‘Dives and Lazarus' was taken.

And soon to drop is ‘That Night I Dreamt a Forest Grew’; the nocturnal world of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are cut with the dislocation of WH Auden’s Refugee Blues; the soundtrack to an imaginary journey through a night of dance.

We sat down with Ember Rev to talk about Esprit de Corps, their new album and lots of other stuff.

Where do you come from? What brought you together?

Ember Rev are based in Cambridge, UK. Dan had been playing jazz piano for years and found himself writing songs for the first time since his teens, so armed with his ukulele and accordian-playing friend Chris, started playing the pubs and bars almost ten years ago. The line-up settled fairly quickly and we found a shared love of early Genesis, Arcade Fire, The Cure, Peter Gabriel, and various points in between.

Tell us about one of your tracks and the process behind it.

Esprit de Corps is the second track from the new album and we've been playing it live for a couple of years now. The lyric emerged from the feeling, during lockdown, that we needed to get together, to go clubbing, to press flesh like we did way back when… The spirit of the crowd was something we really missed and so the song needed a really driving pulse; as we developed it the tune we kept referring to was Bowie's Boys Keep Swinging, a truly persistent groove.

How could you describe your music?

I would describe our music as a fantasy, or a series of fantasies. Maybe in the 19th century Romantic sense of fantasy: a dream, or a journey. Although we're music nerds and really love getting wierd time signatures, complex fills and freaky timbres into the mix, often it's the lyrics that come first, and the overall arch of the album, the sense of where we're going and what we're gonna experience. You'll be taken somewhere when you hear our stuff, and there'll always be compelling groove and dynamic timbres, but not always the groove or timbres you might at first expect…

If you had to write a theme song for a movie, which movie would that be?

Requiem for a Dream is the film we should have scored and the opening song of our new album, I Dreamt of Forests, should have been the theme. The film tracks two parallel descents into addiction and a lot of our music moves vertically: either towards the sky or deep underground, getting muddier and murkier as it goes. Our music rarely stays in one place and is full of jump-scares, it's the perfect soundtrack…

What is it you would like people to do while listening to your song?

When I was a kid I used to listen to albums lying on my back with my head equidistant between the two speakers, and read the lyrics from the liner sleeve…. I remember Led Zep’s Houses of the Holy aged ten this way. Then every other listen from that point on would involve pogo-ing around the living room. I guess I’d like to think people would listen to our stuff that way; either dedicating fifty minutes straight or perhaps listening to ‘side one’… the first half… and savouring everything they’ve heard! I'd hope they get what we're singing about and find they care about the protaganists…

What instrument would you like to add to your band?

As it happens we’re almost always thinking about this, and have had guest violinists, guest clarinetists, a pianist… all sorts. We have an internal struggle going on in which the question of what to add when playing live is constantly debated. We’re a four piece and yet our albums feature massed guitars, synths, samples. So an extra musician would be seriously good but we’re quite a tight clique with weird in-jokes so anyone joining us would have a bit of a job on their hands…

Does your band name define your band and music?

Ember Rev came from a long list of random names generated via Automatic Writing, the idea of producing content by bypassing conscious thought, allowing a spiritual or subconscious force to guide the hand. I then imagined it to mean an abbreviation of Ember Reverie, a dream of embers. I think it fits because embers can suggest worlds in microcosm and songs that are full of detail and texture can often seem like miniature worlds…

What’s the best piece of advice another musician gave you?

The best piece of advice I got was to ‘play what you want to hear’ and I think we’ve achieved that, especially with this new album. It’s exactly the music we want to hear and has elements that suggest all our favourite bands and styles. But then again the advice I wish I’d got and that I tend to give others is completely the opposite: ‘play what your audience want to hear’. Loads of people follow that advice and they do really well, getting booked time and again simply because they play what people want. We’ve made our lives harder by being stubbornly original, ha ha!

Describe your favourite and least favourite part about being a musician.

Well the best bit is getting to express yourself via an abstract medium; not always having to talk in order to communicate; not having to bottle things up, not having to wonder how long that great feeling will last – will it fade away? Finding ways of channelling is akin to finding ways to stay sane.
But I guess the worst bit is trying to find the time and means to execute this performance if, as is usually the case, it requires the assistance of others, whether band members, promoters, audiences, label bosses and so on. This album took us three years and it’s a long old slog… ultimately worth it!

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