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.