Hot Press meets Unknown Mortal Orchestra

Interviewed by Alec Baldwin for his Here’s The Thing podcast on April 1 (no really), Thom Yorke expressed his dismay at how the constant barrage of music in our lives means that new releases get lost amidst the white noise.

“It’s like this huge fricking waterfall,” the Radiohead singer surmised. “You’ve just thrown your pebble in and it carries on down the waterfall. And that’s that.”
Ruban Nielson might see things differently. From New Zealand, he spent a decade playing with his brother in the marginally-successful-at-home Mint Chicks before upping sticks for Portland with his young family and supposedly leaving music for good.
“I thought I would be able to get back into doing visual arts,” he tells me in soft Kiwi tones. The lure of playing proved too strong, however, and he had soon concocted a secret, psychedelia-tinged solo project. An inauspicious upload of ‘Ffunny Ffrends’ to Bandcamp in 2010 and a blog frenzy later and, he says, “everything went out of control from there. I’m still riding that wave really”. A wave that’s swept through the US, Europe and Oceania, taking in festivals, TV talk show appearances and now, two albums. The 32-year-old hadn’t realised that breaks don’t come in that out-of-the-blue fashion for everybody.
“At the time, I thought that was the way things worked now. It seemed like the blogs were really vibrant and people were recording one song and starting their careers off the back of that being good. But it doesn’t seem to happen as often as I thought.”
What makes the swift rise of Unknown Mortal Orchestra a contradictory one is the fact that he’s a man who doesn’t fancy being on first-name-terms with fame. It took time to coax him on stage.
“The whole point in the beginning was not to clutter people’s lives with extra information about myself, but there are pressures in the way these things work. I like the way [enigmatic Swedish duo] The Knife manage their anonymity, but I’m not committed to it.”
The Mint Chicks fell apart for that classic ‘musical differences’ reason.
“It turned into a thing where I was doing all the work while everyone got equal say in what was good and bad. I’d be pitching ideas to three other people that were just like ‘meh’...”
So UMO can be read as a reaction, and Nielson maintains that its whimsical, kaleidoscope sound couldn’t have blossomed in the spotlight. He continues to write solo, though he might open up the process the next time: “That just seems too lonely otherwise.”
A sense of isolation and loneliness pervades II as he sifts through a whirlwind 18 months where gigging and travelling was “the only stuff” that he did, though he deftly sidesteps woe-is-touring pitfalls.
New elements of soul and R&B have crept in, with D’Angelo’s Voodoo on heavy repeat of late.
“That’s my nostalgia! People talk about ‘60s music and my music being nostalgic. I don’t have that feeling for the ‘60s. All my nostalgia is for the ‘90s!”
The songs were written in between revelry. If the band went to a bar or house party, Nielson would invariably “take a breather” to work in the van.
“It was the most exciting time in my life, but also I’ve never been so exhausted before. That was when we were doing every show we were offered and not thinking about it. We did a month with no days off, and I know that’s dumb now.”
You do worry about a guy who has discussed the problems his jazz musician father once had with addiction. That Syd Barrett clearly influences his work doesn’t allay fears as he faces a world tour.
“It’s a very strange lifestyle. There is no way I’m going to be a ‘good boy’ because... that’s the way I am. The longer I’m out in the world, the crazier I get. I just have to not be out for that long and take good breaks. Otherwise, I just go off the rails.”