The ear method

Checking in with the new twee band about their debut album The Most Dear and The Future.

I was an hour late. I was an hour late because I’d spent the previous four in a LA high-rise getting an elephant tattooed on my chest. When I stepped out of the building, my rib cage stung, the show was just starting, and I still had to commute back to my apartment in Los Feliz. I spent the subway ride contemplating whether I should go at all or not, but staying in sounded like the responsible thing to do, so I grabbed a bag of chips for dinner and left for Westwood to see what the kids were up to.

The show was for a band called ear, an electronic duo composed of Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan. The group’s first single “Nerves,” was released last November and had a bit of a moment on Spotify after being added to their lazily titled Cph+ editorial playlist, slotting them alongside internet-savvy alt acts like ML Buch, Chanel Beads and Camille Keller. “Nerves” begins as a borderline ambient ballad about the intertwining of belief and love, until about halfway through when it erupts into a weird, memory-holed bloghaus banger powered by the single fattest bassline you’ve ever heard. 

Ultimately, though, it was their subsequent and much stranger A/B release “Fetish/Valley Serpent”—two structureless collages of hushed vocals, found sound snippets and hyper-clean digital percussion—that really caught my attention and prompted me to check out their first live performance on the West Coast.

The venue wasn’t a venue at all but rather an apartment complex behind UCLA’s campus. Walking up, I asked a guy in a black Atlantic Records hoodie if this was the spot for the ear show, he said yes and proceeded to try and fleece me for $100 (all in good fun). I made my way to the back lawn area which was packed with around 100 people. I heard snippets of conversation like “It was good man we had the Honeydew residency on Tuesdays…” and “Yeah i just linked up with the lawyers to copyright the name, now I’m working on the Instagram…” White noise of the fresh-faced creative class.

The stage was just some speakers, a folding table with a mixing board and a sheet hanging in the trees for video projections. It was impossible to see Jonah or Yaelle when they got up to perform, but the crowd whistled with delight as the opening of “Valley Serpent” began to play. The next 30 minutes were disorienting to say the least: vintage d&b breaks, monotone synth melodies and stuttering texture play came and went at random, all of it getting leveled by their massive, mind-scrubbing bass. Through it all, what struck me most was how much fun we were all having. 

A couple weeks later, I got the chance to talk with Yaelle and Jonah after their NYC debut at The Slipper Room. I discovered that most of what I’d heard in LA was off their recently completed debut record The Most Dear and The Future. Released on Sept 3rd, the album oscillates between moments of subdued intimacy and wild bursts of sound, as if the two pilfered their audio library and tossed whatever they found interesting in a blender. Surprisingly, and in contrast to the seeming erraticism of their live set, the songs still feel complete and well-formed, bound by a strange internal cohesion rather than traditional principles of composition. It’s one of the most beguiling releases I’ve heard all year, nerdy, erudite, and a ripping good time.

What follows is a conversation about their debut, the process of making music as ear, and the little things in life.

Nick DeMasi: How was the show last night?

Jonah: It was so fun.

Yaelle: It was a great turnout. We weren’t expecting it. It’s good to see electronic music, some tweaky shit lowkey, getting that kind of attention. We would never do a sceney vibe, or we don’t try to, so it’s cool having a sceney crowd for this kind of music.

So you were surprised by the turnout?

Jonah: Yeah, I was. I guess it makes perfect sense, but I didn’t know it was going to be all the scene heads. It’s crazy, they called the cops on the line outside because they had such a huge mob. And it’s like, bro, you’re literally calling the cops on the most low-key show.

Yaelle: Yeah, we’re inside and Jonah’s sitting down haha.

Jonah: It was so funny. But I think the funniest part is that we played all unreleased music so the people outside didn’t even know what was going on.

At your LA show you mentioned it being really wild to perform this stuff live. What’s been surprising about people’s response to the music in a live context?

Yaelle: For me it’s really nerve-wracking, it feels super vulnerable because it’s not like I’m re-reading something that somebody has already been able to understand, it’s immediately being contextualized for them as they’re listening to it, which is hard because I think you need time to form your own connection to the music before you see it live. But it’s also cool to reverse that, it just feels hostile sometimes.

Jonah: At the LA show it was like, “Okay we’re gonna bob our heads,” but at this one we kept saying beforehand “This has to be the Gen X function, we have to be really really adult,” just because the last one I got traumatized from somebody saying that it looked like an episode of Skins, which was maybe not what I was intending. So I was sitting down on stage and stuff like that. But then there was one moment when I looked out into the crowd and saw my dad in the front row, and I literally took a dive on stage, I hit the floor really hard.

Wait, from a sitting position you just fell over?

Jonah: No, I was dancing, opened my eyes, made direct eye contact with my dad, and immediately hit the floor.

In your music there’s a lot of these small moments, a glance, a look, that lead to these large things, like in the music there’ll be a breakdown or on stage you collapse. Could you speak to what you think makes a small moment significant?

Yaelle: I like that question, I think it’s a conceptual question which is the way we think about this music most of the time, if not all the time. A lot of our music is about tension, and I think tension doesn’t have a size because it’s this constantly outstretching thing. So you can say that there’s tension here [puts hands close together] just because these two things are closer, but there could be just as much tension here [moves hands apart] in comparison to the size. That’s more interesting to me because it’s not about the actual length but it’s that interior substance that’s pulling or contracting. It’s very organic in the way that it moves.

Jonah: We also produce on a moment-to-moment basis, we go section by section and sometimes bar by bar, and then that leads to a lot of moments in a row. We spend most of the time on sound selection, because once you know the thesis of the song it’s basically just collecting evidence.

What type of sources are you generally looking through to find sounds? I know in a previous interview you said you really like the Ableton stock stuff Jonah, and Yaelle you do a lot of YouTube digging, are there other sources as well?

Yaelle: There’s also our own sounds that we find in our phone. That’s the sentimental part I guess, making the song and my sister can hear her voice in it but she doesn’t even know. It’s like sampling real life.

Jonah: Yeah my best friend’s dad is speaking in “Fetish” at one point and it’s like, “Nobody’s gonna know that that was the day we lost power.”

Sort of like a secret message to yourself.

Yaelle: That’s our favorite thing is sounds that are secrets, even from each other. There was certain stuff that I sent Jonah where it’s like, “You can’t know where this is from, just listen to it as a sound.”

Jonah: So much of the sauce for us is intentionally not telling each other what we’re doing on the track, and then we end up with a fun lexicon of stuff that we work from because there’s a lot of stuff that we haven’t said out loud.

You both made music before forming ear. What’s been the experience of working on music together? How do you change as musicians when working with one another?

Yaelle: When I make my own music it’s dedicated to something, the songs are for a specific purpose, and I’m doing all these things because they’re things I would do, but then when we make music I’m doing the things I wouldn’t.

Jonah: I think that’s what’s so awesome. I end up doing stuff that I would probably never do in my own solo music because so much of it is saying “yes” and “no.” Do you know that Chainsmokers interview where they’re like, “One of the guys plays a sound and the other guy’s job is to say yes or no.” I mean, maybe that demonstrates questionable taste on their end, but so much of it is literally, “Don’t do that. Do that. Yes. No. Yes. No.” If you listen to our own music, none of it sounds like ear, I literally can’t make an ear song by myself.

Yaelle: I was just thinking about the fact that I would never do vocals the way we do them for ear, I’m not okay with the way that they sound.

Jonah: I produce differently in my own music coming back from ear. I play jazz guitar, and there’s certain things about the methodology of jazz music that you can apply to production. Everything’s circular and chords are supposed to go into the next chord and tension and release, but when we hit it the “ear method,” it was so intuitive. I have to fully trust when Yaelle says no to something, or when I say no to something, we’re like, “Okay. That’s it.” Our solo projects are so chopped, they sound so ridiculous. I have a Soundcloud playlist that’s me and Yaelle’s solo music and it is unlistenable. It doesn’t feel like that when I make it, but then when I go back to it I’m like, “What?”

Your lyrics are performed in a very low-key, under-the-breath way, and there are a lot of times when you can’t even make them out. I have a vague recollection of Thom Yorke talking about the lyrics on the song “Kid A” being too difficult for him to sing so he had to bury them in a vocoder, which is why that track sounds that way. Is there any kinship with that and what you’re doing on this record?

Yaelle: I think we always do what is required. It literally feels as though it’s required for the sound to come out that way. Usually we try vocals one or two times and if that doesn’t work we change the melody or the pitch or the way it’s spoken, and then if that doesn’t work we’re done with it.

Jonah: For the song “The Most Dear and the Future,” we wrote out a page of lyrics but we only kept the “I missed you when you walked away” part. We would sing them and be like, there’s no point, they’re already implied by the rest of the song.

Is that typical of your lyric writing process? Starting with something large and then whittling it down to these fractions of things?

Jonah: Our process has kind of changed over the past summer making the record. It used to be that we’d have an idea for a song about blank, but it’s really spectral and we’re not even exactly sure what it is.

Yaelle: We talked so much about that conceptually and then at the end the sound proved itself after like, eight versions.

Jonah: It used to be that we were in the process of figuring out how to best articulate this thing that doesn’t exist yet. But for the record we were like, “Okay, we have to make a song that says this exact thing.” What did we say for “Most Dear?”

Yaelle: We were in the car talking about how with some people I only miss them when they’re leaving and then I never think about them, but the moment they walk away from me the next time, I’m gonna miss them in that moment.

Jonah: It’s a literal idea and then we have to make a song that sounds like that. It’s like those Instagram reels where someone says, “This song is about when you’re in love with an emo girl” and the lyric is literally, “I’m in love with an emo girl.”

So you made the record this past summer?

Jonah: Oh my God we just finished it. And now it comes out in a week haha, or, as of this interview.

Yaelle: It’s classic, we have to do that, we can’t sit with these things for too long, it’s just too meta to stay with the same concepts in that way. I can’t even think about where my head was at making “Nerves,” it’s a blur.

Do you remember what the first track was?

Jonah: The first one was “Real Life.” I had the idea for “Real Life” while we were apart, because I was like, “What if we had a song that sounded like the songs that we don’t want to make?” That song has 80 classic parts, just using sounds everybody knows and stuff like that. But then I was playing the melody on the MacBook keyboard over and over again and I was like, “That’s lowkey fire.” Then we kind of just knocked out all the others. Our favorite song—or, I don’t want to speak for you—I was going to say is–

Both: “Ceremony.”

Jonah: Yeah, “Ceremony” and “Aim” are the two.

Yaelle: I love “Aim” so much.

Jonah: That’s what we want to keep making. I love “Ceremony,” that one has guitar on it which is something we said we’d never do.

Yaelle: We didn’t even talk about it. We were working on it and the whole time I was thinking, “We’re gonna do the guitar song,” but I wasn’t gonna say anythin, and then Jonah just put down a guitar line and I was like, “Right right.”

Jonah: Also all the drums are Ableton stock noises on that one. Like the clap sounds so chopped in such a cool way to me. Ableton’s drum synthesizer for the clap has this built-in stereo aspect where it’s like the two hands hit in different parts of the ear at the same time. I really like that sound. “Ceremony” has all the sounds I like.

The last question I wanted to ask also has to do with sound. “Nerves” has this huge bass line that comes in and rips the track in half, and that sound continues to make appearances in different ways on your other singles and throughout the album. Where’d you guys find that and what do you like about it?

Yaelle: The bass was completely accidental in a way. When we were first working on “Nerves” we actually had that on the side and then we dragged it in. It was like there were two parts and then boom. Now it’s just knowing that there’s a moment of collision that we can drag in and out of the songs.

Jonah: It’s just a square wave, you just really saturate a square wave and you get that kind of gritty sound. That’s what I use for writing melodies a lot of the time because it’s just pure sound. Whenever we’re writing I’m like, “What about this?” and you just change the noise. It’s literally the easiest noise for a computer to make.

It sounds like bits.

Jonah: It’s literally bits. It’s such a lit bass because it cuts through everything.

Yaelle: Your brain is already there I think, you just need that force.