The Black Ryder’s debut album Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride is a revelation, with Aimee Nash’s haunting vocals and reverb saturated guitars creating tunes that are intensely moody and mysterious tunes. Ahead of its release on November 6 I caught up with one half of the duo, Scott Von Ryper, to chat about the album, collaborating with his famous friends, and his fierce resolve to hang on to those indie roots.
You and Aimee were both in The Morning After Girls. Why did you decide to break away from such a successful group and do something different?
I think it was just a case of people being together for a long period of time, and some degree of relationships breaking down, etc. After we came back to Australia, after a long period of time overseas, it was just some relationship issues which broke the band apart. I don’t want to get into any more depth than that, but it wasn’t a decision like “Hey, we’ve got our own thing going on.” There were a lot of other things at play. I guess we were just lucky in the fact that when that happened we had already started messing around with some stuff, Aimee and I, and we kind of launched straight into it.
How does it feel working as a duo rather than part of a much larger band?
That I have to say feels pretty good. There are so many great things in terms of the recording process in a project like The Black Ryder. It’s a kind of studio project with Aimee and I, and we sort of get other people involved when we feel like it’s appropriate. To have that kind of sense of control, and also immediacy to do things musically and whatever you’re doing. To only have two people to discuss things with, to make a decision on what you’re going to do, just makes things so much easier.
Having said that, it’s also really great to work with other people as we have in The Black Ryder. Sometimes that’s been in the studio and sometimes that’s been remotely. People that have contributed to the album have sometimes never been to our studio, and we’ve simply moved a track back and forth between here and overseas, and stuff got recorded overseas. Also the live thing as well. Aimee and I really enjoy playing with other people in the live scene, and those people becoming part of what we do live. To some degree I guess we get the best of both worlds.
You mentioned that you recorded the CD with friends from Brian Jonestown Massacre, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and a host of other bands. What did this collaborative approach bring to your sound?
I guess it developed our sound because the band, The Black Ryder, was so new that we were still experimenting in so many areas on this album anyway. At the same time we were both learning certain instruments that we weren’t playing that well beforehand. So it definitely brought a different element to the sound to have other people working on that. Ricky [Maymi] from The Jonestown Massacre was probably the earliest person we started working with. He was staying at the house for a period of time when we started recording the album. So he was not only great to have musically as a part of the project; he was a great support in terms of driving us and giving us confidence that we were doing something good and that we should feel good about what we were doing.
As things progressed later on we had other people involved; Graham Bonnar who used to play drums in Swervedriver was in the country and wanted to put some drums down. And that was actually really great. That was one of the few things we did outside our own studio. It was great to have some drums on there.
And also, right at the end of the project, Peter [Hayes] from Black Rebel came and put some stuff down. That was more at the end of the process, and really that stuff was more or less icing on the cake for me. We already had an album that we were pretty much mixing, that we’d kind of finished to some degree. We were simply talking about doing a few small things. And then we ended up putting a lot of quite significant parts on that he did. One was a duet that he ended up doing with Aimee. We really didn’t think about doing that until he heard the song and thought that he should put some vocals down.
So I guess the short answer is that the start with Ricky was incredibly crucial to what we were doing. It really helped develop the wall of sound that we had, and then at the end with Peter was really the icing on the cake.
You’re releasing your album Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride this month. How would you describe it?
Like a long road trip, I think. It was recorded in the way that it was like a long trip that we took. We started from scratch. We didn’t really know what we were doing. We had to assemble everything right from the start: it was learning what we were doing, getting instruments, building a studio, and just kind of starting the process. And then the process took such a long period of time. It think sonically it just sounds quite different from some songs, but at the same time fuller. To me it just feels like a road trip and a period in time for us. I don’t know that I’d want to put any musical labels on it, I think that’s kind of a bit dangerous.
You’ve made tracks from the album available to fans through MySpace ahead of the CD’s release. How important do you think the internet is in generating that early buzz?
I think it’s incredibly important. I think that the way The Black Ryder was born was through that medium. When we split from The Morning After Girls, I think within a couple of days time we had pretty much created a MySpace page for the band and had placed some early demos up there. And then immediately, people were finding it. We couldn’t believe it. It’s quite an amazing thing to write and record a song late on a Saturday night and then post it up on the internet an hour after you finish and then you’ve got someone from France sending you an e-mail saying “Hey, I really love what you did last night.” It’s just unbelievable that you can do that.
And when you think about what bands had to do 10-15 years ago to actually get their music out, particularly overseas, it not only speeds up the process, but it reduces the costs for a young band. In the old days you would have to work out who the contacts were, you’d have to mail out demo tapes all around the world, and then you’d hope that those demo tapes would get filtered out somewhere to the kids. It’s just unbelievable what it can achieve. So I think it’s incredibly important, particularly in this age where the sales of music are going down. And of course the internet is partially responsible for it, but it’s the only way that music is still going to get out there. Whether bands will still survive financially through recordings is yet to be seen. But it’s definitely an amazing way to get your music out there.
Your debut album was released on your own label through EMI. How important is it to you to remain independent?
I think it’s important for us to ensure that we still have control over decisions. That is what we’re doing, how the album sounds, how we want to market the album, or what we don’t want to do in terms of marketing, promotion, all of that. It seems horrible to me that you would spend so much time creating something that you’re very proud of, and at the end you have to hand it off to someone that you barely know and you put your trust and faith in those people to see and understand what you’re doing. And in most cases, it’s really easy to be disappointed with what happens after you hand an album over. Although we have a great relationship with the folks at EMI, it’s been really great for us. We started with control and we feel like we’ve been able to finish it with control.
You’ve played a handful of gigs to support the album in Sydney and Melbourne. Will fans in the rest of the country get to see you live soon?
I hope so. I guess that the shows that we’ve been playing have been very sporadic. We never set out to be a live band. It was really only the fact that maybe a year and a half ago Black Rebel were touring Australia and had asked us to support them, and we had to quickly put a band together and make it happen. Again over the last two years we’ve probably done a few supports here and there.
I think that we’re now getting to the stage where we would like to do a few more shows. We’re definitely never going to be the kind of band slogging it up and down the East Coast. It’s just not part of what we see ourselves doing. But we’ll definitely be playing more after the album comes out. Hopefully we get to Brisbane. It’d be great if we get to Adelaide. Our current drummer Adam Edwards lives in Adelaide, and played in Wolf & Cub, so it’d be nice to get to his home city and do a show there. And if the time permits, get over to Perth. It’s such a difficult thing for bands to get over to Perth because it’s so expensive, but it’d be great if we could make it.
I’ve noticed that don’t play a lot of live shows. Is there are reason why you resist getting up on stage?
I guess we just see our focus as being a studio project. I guess Aimee and I both played a lot as The Morning After Girls, although it wasn’t in Australia. I don’t know that we see the value in terms of what we’re doing. I don’t think that playing live and gigging around every weekend really supports where we see the band going. To us it’s a lot more special if you only play once every couple of months; it becomes a bit more of a special event.
You’ve worked with so many international artists on Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride and contributed to plenty of internationally released compilation albums. Are there any plans to release the album around the world?
Absolutely. We’re trying to work out some release deals for this album in a few different countries right now, and I hope that it doesn’t take too long. We’d also love to get overseas early next year and tour the album as well. So absolutely. I don’t think we’ll note release this overseas. I’d be very disappointed if we don’t do that.
Image photographer Stefan Duscio. Used with permission from Original Matters