Interview: UMA on Bedroom Recording, Classic Songwriting, and Their Debut Album
Given their status as husband-and-wife duo, a natural proximity underscores the work of Ella and Florian Zwieting as UMA. Their cerebral brand of electronic pop radiates a distinct, comforting warmth in spite of its brooding tones, suggesting a deep contentment with love’s ups-and-downs. Gearing up to release their self-titled debut LP on Austria’s SEAYOU Records, we jumped on a Skype call with Ella and Flo from their Berlin apartment, to get the lowdown on their most accomplished effort to date.
How long did you work on the new album?
Ella: Forever. A year-and-a-half. It was done in October already but the whole preparation towards the release took quite a while.
What did the recording process look like?
Ella: Basically after the release of our Drop Your Soul EP, we went to the countryside in Austria for a month or so. Then we started writing separately from each other and then after two weeks we started exchanging stuff. I do sketches, Flo does sketches and then we pass them on to each other. After that we exchange them back again. If all goes well, then at some point we start thinking it’s a song. How many songs did we have, Flo? Around 50?
Flo: Yeah, 50-something.
Is there a particular type or style of sketch that each of you starts out with? Do you draw clear lines of who is responsible for the melody or the lyrics or whatever?
Flo: It’s kind of all over the place. I wanted to limit this record to a particular sound aesthetic. I didn’t want to go all over the place with every sound possible. I mainly wanted to use analogue drum machines so I didn’t dig into sampling that much this time and mix that with real recording of percussion and stuff. Then I wanted some guitar sounds and some analogue instruments that would repeat themselves throughout the album like the Rhodes piano for example.
“My sketches are always very sloppy.”
Ella: I do some beats, but my focus is more on the vocal harmony stuff. My sketches are usually quite confusing because I don’t use a metronome. Personally I just start at some point and Flo … When he starts getting my stuff he has to sort it somehow, because it’s not very easy to see through at first if you’re not in my brain. Flo’s sketches are really pretty. They’re always already well-produced. My sketches are always very sloppy.
Flo, you mentioned using drum machines and analogue instruments on this album. There’s really a very crisp, coherent sound throughout. Can you talk a little bit more about the technical process?
Flo: We tried to record as much as we could on to analogue tape. I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time. It is sort of an old school recording approach. We already had everything written. Once we bounced the files back and forth, we’d make the arrangement. At that point we went one step back and basically re-recorded the whole song to tape.
Ella: We used things like an 808 and a Rhodes piano. What else did we use?
Flo: We use a Prophet synthesiser, a Juno synthesiser, an old Korg synthesiser which we mainly used for percussion and noises. Basically everything you hear is analogue instruments – either sequenced or played live. Once we had recorded it all on to tape, we only did very little edits on the computer. I think that is something that makes the sound so crisp and so dynamic because I was really looking to keep this analogue feel as long as possible and not to ruin it with too many digital effects.
You mentioned that the writing process began in the countryside. Is that also where you recorded the album?
Flo: We actually produced and recorded everything here at our home studio. We used to have a really big studio here in Berlin but unfortunately everyone in the house was evicted, so we had to move all this stuff into our living room – temporarily, we thought. But then it turned out that it’s really hard at the moment to find studio space around Berlin.
While we were looking at expensive studios, we started recording at home, and it turned out that we had all the gear and everything we needed here. We also have very, very tolerant neighbours. We recorded everything at home. The room that we sleep in was basically the recording booth for all the amp recordings and all the percussion recordings. Then our bathroom, we remodeled that with acoustic panels to become a recording booth for vocals. For six weeks the whole flat was a proper bedroom recording studio. I think what you hear on that record is the best you can do without a professional studio. I was really proud to hear how it turned out.
Ella: I think it took that long because we did everything on our own. We did the production, the recording, the engineer’s job, the musician’s job, the singer’s job. We had like ten jobs. That’s why it took so long.
We have very, very tolerant neighbours.
Flo: That’s why it took so long and that’s what was also really stressful sometimes. With ten thousand cables all over the place, troubleshooting can be hard if you don’t know exactly where the problem is. And when you find it after a half hour of searching, then you have to go back to the room and record the guitar… Because there was no one else to help us this time. That was stressful. On the other hand, we could do it exactly the way we wanted.
So how do you take breaks in a situation like that when your home is turned into a recording studio and you’re working on an album for one-and-a-half years?
Flo: We didn’t really take breaks for a while. We…
Ella: We did take little breaks.
Flo: We divided the time into blocks. We had blocks where we were writing really intensely and then we took the material back to Berlin and took a little break. We also had these six weeks of proper recording and production here and then we just said, “Let’s leave for one-and-a-half weeks” and we went to the countryside again and just took some time off. During that process, all the breaks we had were basically just going out for a coffee or so.
Were you in touch with other musicians at all during that time?
Ella: Yeah, we were in touch with a lot of RBMA people actually. Phoebe [Kiddo] is also playing our release show. Stuart [Claude Speeed] and Doc Daneeka did remixes for us and Yosi [Horikawa] did a remix for us. All of the people I just mentioned are doing instrumental music actually, so it’s good for us to talk about sound stuff. But to talk more about song stuff, there is no one in particular yet I could think of. I’m really interested in folk music so I’d like to concentrate on that a bit. I’d like to meet people. There are a lot of Americans now in Berlin who are doing this lo-fi folk pop and I love where they come from because it’s so different to Europe. It’s very hard to find Europeans who are intuitively working this way actually.
Flo: As you might know Berlin is not such a band city. It’s not such a song city, it’s a track city and a nightclub city and a dance city and that really shows. It attracts these kinds of people. There are more clubs than concert halls. It’s rather hard to find a huge crowd that is into songwriting and into songs in general. A lot of people are into DJing.
Ella: There is a very vital instrumental music scene. There is a lot of those drone nights going on. Weird electronic stuff but … we’re both really interested in classic songwriting actually. It’s about the song; it’s not only about the feeling of the music and about the instrumental. It’s about that as well but we want to bring all of those elements together. We’re not afraid of pop.