Music, Style & Culture

First On: Mix #002: Jewellers

We threw some questions at Welsh pair Jewellers, and got them to put us together a mixtape.

Around 12 months ago, Gareth Leaman and Gareth Young uploaded an album they'd made together in their bedrooms to bandcamp. The pair from Newport, south Wales just wanted a few people to hear the music they'd be working on - but they certainly didn't expect the attention they'd received. Blog after blog picked up on 'Sleep Education', as well as local radio stations, before the ever-impressive Sounds Of Sweet Nothing offered to release the album on vinyl for them.

While the Gareths might have been surprised by the popularity of their music, most listening to it wouldn't be. It's a beautiful album of delicate and intelligent electronica - an excellent listen on a long, lonely night. We threw some questions at the pair, and also got them to put us together a mixtape - find it below.

Hello Jewellers - first thing's first: how long have you both been making music?
We’ve been making music for about 6 or 7 years, but we’ve making music as Jewellers for just over a year. We’d been jamming for years, recording little sketches, but we didn’t really have the equipment or the know-how to actually finish anything properly. It wasn’t until the end of 2010 that we dedicated ourselves to writing and recording complete tracks that we were happy enough to release – the 'Sleep Education' album came out of those sessions.
 
Did the popularity of your debut album - and subsequent release on The Sounds Of Sweet Nothing - come as a surprise?
It was pretty big surprise yeah, when we first put the 'Sleep Education' album online we just hoped that people might want to listen. We didn’t ever send it out to labels or anything like that, we just wanted to get our music out there as directly as possible. Anything more than that has been a massive bonus, so for it to end up getting a physical release with a label like The Sounds of Sweet Nothing is pretty great.
 
Do you have a 'plan' for your music, or do you just take things one track at a time and see what you're left with?
We’ll start off just sketching out tracks and playing around with different sounds and ideas, though we do think in terms of albums rather than individual songs. Once we’ve got a handful of songs sketched out we like to start thinking about how they’d work on an album, and try to go about completing them with that in mind. We start to think about things like tracklistings and structure pretty early on in the process, so it is quite planned out in that respect.
 
Do you ever find your music is being influenced by less-electronic bands, and if so which in particular do you find inspiring?
Actually, for our first album at least, we weren’t very influenced by a lot of electronic music – most of the electronic stuff we would listen to now came after the release, when people were recommending stuff to us and comparing us to certain electronic artists.  We didn’t set out to make electronic music, it came about from not wanting to just make instrumental guitar music - we both started out just playing guitar - so we started sampling, for example, drums loops or piano parts because we didn’t have a piano or a drum kit. So we were more influenced by how electronic music is produced rather than listening to the music in particular.
 
A little while back, The Guardian ran a guest article on the need for music-makers to "get out of the bedroom and off the internet" - what did you make of that?
We actually think it’s amazing that we can produce music on our own in our bedrooms. Personally we can’t afford to go out and pay other people to use their equipment so we have to make do with what we have at home, and it works for us. Also it’s a bit negative to suggest that just all bedroom music is dull and depressing just because it was made by one person sat at their laptop. The same goes with the internet, if we did get up off our computers and made music outside we wouldn’t have completed anything and would probably be busking in Newport city centre freezing to death singing Radiohead songs.
 
It's fairly easy to visualise how electronic artists make music on their own - but how does your set-up work as a two-piece?
To us it feels more like a permanent collaboration than being in a band, as we usually work individually to begin with, rather than us both being sat in the same room working together. One of us will start the basis of a song and then pass it on to the other, who will then work on it on their own. We work on stuff pretty separately, but we’re constantly swapping songs back and forth and discussing the direction and progress so that we both have equal input on everything we make. We’ll do this pretty much one track at a time until we know they’re finished. We have similar ideas about how our music should sound, so while other people might prefer to work as solo artists we really enjoy collaborating the way we do.
 
Electronic music seems to have grown again in the last few years, with the rise of 'chillwave' etc. Do you think kids will see it as cool to make music on your laptop as it is with a guitar?
It’s probably already as cool and popular as guitar music – more kids seem to be into dubstep and stuff like that than guitar music.  It’s far easier and cheaper for someone to download some music software, make a track and upload it to the internet than it us to try and form a band and make a record that way.
 
What have you got upcoming with Jewellers?
Our second album has been finished and ready for release for a while, so that should be coming out fairly soon. We started work on the album as soon as we finished the first album, so it’s exciting to have another release lined up, and for people to hear something new and different from us.

And we also asked you to make us a mix - what do the songs you've picked mean to you?
For this mix didn’t just pick albums and tracks we’re currently listening to - we wanted to dig a bit deeper into other genres like dub, blues and hip-hop. It’s a good mix of stuff we were listening to at the time of 'Sleep Education' and a hint of where we would like to take our own music in terms of sounds and ideas. A lot of the tracks in this mix have a soulful feel to them, which is something we’ve always loved in music and tried to transfer into the music we make.