Danny L Harle

So I just watched the film for your album, and I became obsessed with your duster jacket. For some reason, the video and the jacket was giving me a strong The KLF vibe. The jacket itself felt like a whole character.

I feel like I made the album so I can wear that jacket.

Yes! It was perfect. Are they popular in the UK? I know they are a whole thing in Australia.

It is definitely an Australian thing. It's unheard of over here, and I assume the same in the US?

Yeah I’ve not seen the around the streets of Los Angeles. Also you haven’t been to the US in while, right?

No, and the thing is… I refuse to have a nice time in LA. It's because I force it to fit my stereotype of it. What I do is I make sure I'm doing two sessions a day, and they are really stressful, and then I leave immediately. No fun social time, or seeing anyone I like. It sort of then fits in with my assumptions about what it's like there.

You're rolling with the aesthetic. How will you deal with playing here?

Well, in the way I just described, I cut those short. I was like, “Oh wait, I might have some fun.” No, absolutely not.

Not with the too much fun!

Yeah, exactly, yeah, no, absolutely. Please. None of that.

Going back to your film for your album, it did represent the record really well. They felt very connected, and the visuals befitted the mood of the album. There was a future past feeling to it all. Was it all real places? It looked quite surreal.

Yeah, it's a real place, and it's more insane in real life than it seems in the film. It was sort of like a H.P. Lovecraft book; a place where none of the boats would go there. There hadn't been people on it for 70 years, so there was just a real sense of the floor potentially caving when you're walking.

There were loads of rooms with upturned beds. The crazy thing about it is that it was mainly inhabited by birds, so it was seagulls and pigeons, but the seagulls were eating all the pigeons, and because there were no plants to make nests with, the seagulls were using pigeons' bones. If there was, like, a portal to hell, it would be that structure.

Wow, why did you choose a place like that?

I’ve always been fascinated by these sea forts all around the coast of England, because they just look like dream-like structures. They look like they're halfway between reality and a dream, and I've always liked things like that. The reason I chose it for the album is that they feel like these locations that sort of poetically align with this idea of a transcendental place. That kind of musical state you get into when you're about to ascend.

That feeling of floating in the middle of nowhere?

Yeah, but the fact that it's actually real as well. That was an important thing, because with this album, I really wanted to visually move away from the spinning 3D object, which I feel like has dominated electronic music for.

I agree with that. Speaking of dominate, the main theme for your record was obviously the colour blue. Historically it was also important motif in particularly dance music in the early 2000s. That idea of blue2K. Was this something you were thinking about, or was there something else that helped inspire this?

It connects. It just was too relevant to too many things to not use it. Like blue has been a thing for a long, long time, in association with music. But also the fact that cerulean specifically, is associated with the sea, and when I sat down to make the music of this album, the sound of the sea just kept on working really well in multiple tracks. It sort of made its way as a kind of key sonic symbol for the whole thing. I didn't want to give it too much of a figurative image, because it also encompassed this central idea that the emotional feeling that I associate with the colour is melancholic euphoria. This term really links all of these types of music, and the feelings that I enjoy. It is all of these disparate types of music that make the influences of the album. It’s this feeling that connects all of them together. It comes at an intersection of many important poetic links in terms of the making of the album.

"I was combining the classical side of things with the dance."

Did you also have a story for this album when you started working on it?

No, well the whole point of my previous album was quite a high-concept one, and it was almost in reaction to that I just decided to go intentionally low concept with this. I just wrote the music, and then wanted to see what the fuck happens. That's the route that I took. The only thing I was thinking about was the fact that I wanted it to be a statement of all of the things, rather than just one of the things. I want it to be a kind of portrait of me musically, rather than a laser sight-specific expression about one type of music, which is what Harlecore was. Like, for example, if you were a keen-eared listener would be able to hear my love for UK hardcore music in Cerulean, but it's only in certain bits, because there’s so much other stuff that's encompassed in it, so it's like a larger, grander scale of project, and that's why I call it my debut album, because that's what I feel like a debut album really should be.

So it was full representation of you. Are there any parts that were an experiment or particular interest in time?

It's not an experiment, it's like a fragment of me.

Oh ok, that makes it clearer.

Cerulean is the whole of me.

I did read some reviews and people were quite upset you are calling this your debut record.

I love that. I knew that was going to be useful. I literally didn't think about it for one second. The label just sent me the copy for the post, and I was like, “Yeah, fine, I'll post that, fuck it.”

It felt like people wanted to be if you know, you know, about the first record [laughs]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. It actually serves as a really useful talking point.

Listening to this record, and the features, and knowing your past production and collaborations, how did you curate the features you worked with for this album?

I approached it from a music-first perspective. It's all different with the different people, though, because with the Caroline [Polachek] tracks for example, I wrote them with Caroline in a way that was actually quite similar to how we go about writing her music. She kind of knows my references and my music better than I do, and so she kind of knew how to write my music equally to me, so we just continued with our 50-50 split of everything, including production.

With “Crystallise My Tears”, that was much more of a thing where I sat down with a songwriter that I have worked with for a long time called Nate Campany, and in fact, we were writing about a recent experience, or that experience that we both had, where you want to work for somebody and then they just don't respond. I haven't actually told anyone that, but this feeling of being validated, even validated in sadness. I just sent that track to Okou asking her if she wanted to sing on it. She agreed and sent back the vocals, and basically nailed it the first time. I’ve worked with them all before, so I knew the vibe. So in that sense, it wasn't an act of curating vocalists, it was more spending a lot of the time writing the song and then thinking about who the best person is to sing it. Another example is Julia Michaels, though she was one of the more recent collaborators, so that was an interesting one.

How so?

It was more an act of generosity on her part. Julia was open to experimenting with different things that could be done with her voice, because as far as I know, I hadn't heard her sing such a plainly sad song that didn't have a kind of sting in the tail. Usually with her songs, there's a sense of emotional intelligence beyond just a kind of a flat expression of an emotion. There's usually some kind of advanced thought going on that is perfectly summed up by a turn of phrase. For her to sing this sort of song, and then specifically asking her to do this certain style of singing, which I’ve only heard her do in a Dua Lipa session. It’s kind of like the voice that she uses when she's experimenting with an idea to herself. When I heard her do that, I almost burst into tears with how beautiful it sounded. I needed this sound. It was a profound mixture of fragility and strength simultaneously to it. I couldn't get over it. She co-wrote some of them with me as well, but they're sort of reminiscent of an Elizabethan lute song or whatever. I wrote the main lyrics pretty quickly, just gave them to her, and then showed her the melody, and she just executed it perfectly, which shows a kind of understanding of what I'm after. It's almost like a communication that's beyond words, and then after she recorded it, she said, “Okay, I see you.”

That's amazing you had such great connections to produce these songs. Did you feel you had to give them some direction, or understanding of what your direction is?

No, because it was kind of my issue. I was combining the classical side of things with the dance. I'd sort of done all the problem-solving of combining the references. A thing that I realised is in this sort of classical harmony, it's always moving around, and modulating. You can't really do that in dance pop, because the whole thing is you need that repetition to get you into that sort of trance state.

Where did you get your inspirations from?

I have no fucking clue. That’s why the word cerulean was so useful, because I always just thought my influences. I mean, you'll be the same, we just like all sorts of music. It was kind of a challenge I set myself to think if there was something that actually connects everything that I listen to. A through-line one can draw between all this stuff, it's not actually random.

Did your classical background, and hence knowledge of the rules, hinder your writing in any way?

It's really hard to look back on something and understand whether it was good or bad for you. Bad experiences actually inform you far more than good experiences. So, I was actually quite infuriated at my whole classical training, and I felt like I'd wasted a lot of time, because at the moment, I was DJing with Sophie and going to club nights. I was far more interested in electronic music, and then it took me till the end of my second degree to realise that it was actually perfectly legitimate music. Just because there’s not big stone structures built for it in London, it doesn't mean it's not an equally legitimate thing. Looking back on it, lots of stuff that I sort of resented about was actually really useful for my development, and I learnt a lot. I mean, it's really hard to know. It's a process that sort of built me to the way that I am today, so I guess it was all valuable.

With most studies, they will prioritise their methods and devalue others.

Yeah, exactly. The funny thing is that I've been an outsider in every single musical environment I've ever been involved with. In the classical world, they think of me as a cheesy pop guy. In the pop world, they think of me as a classical guy. The electronic world, I don't know if I am even thought of it at all. It's really hard because I've always had to kind of make my place in these environments. Thinking back I couldn't believe how naive the classical composition department attitude was towards electronic sound and music. It emboldened me to pursue it.

Was there anything of note you saw that was frustrating?

There were many lectures about process, and people banging on about how interesting the process of writing something was. I don't want to know how you wrote it. There are composers who I really like, and if I ask them about their process, they probably wouldn’t know. There is a sort of element of obsession with process, and not enough interest in the fucking end product, and how it makes you feel. It was an epiphany of mine; it's not even about the music, it's about, what it means and how it makes you feel.

"I just wrote the music, and then wanted to see what the fuck happens."

Do you think process is so important with classic music because it’s not light-footed for want of a better word? You need to justify time, expenses, musicians and what not?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's so much baggage with classic music. A lot of the music of it was back in the original periods that it was written, the context around it was so different, and the orchestra was actually a changing thing. It froze in the late 19th century, so it's like we've just had this sort of frozen idea of what classical music is, and it's all just sort of flattened to the same level of high culture. Donors to an opera house, for example, aren't interested in anything sounding new, because they want to associate themselves with the old tradition of opera. There's actually, like, an active interest in it not being interesting from a financial side. There's this baggage of history and not actually the one that I'm interested in as well.

People forget that the music when it was written, was experimental and new.

Not only experimental! For example, Strauss’ waltzes were really sleazy dance music, because you were really close to somebody. Now out of that context, it is just beautiful, timeless music, chiseled in stone.

Much like the classical Greek statues found in the 19th century.

Yeah! Things lose their context in time, and just get reframed. However, the fact of the matter is, some of that music I absolutely love.

You truly have a real mix of interests. How did you make sense of it all for your music?

I found it hard. My taste is both eclectic and esoteric, as well as really specific, but also all over the shop. Like at a point I just got virtuosically into playing the bass guitar, and faced another dilemma with that, because I started to listen to music because it sounded great on the bass guitar, but wasn't good music. I realised that's a big musician’s problem, where they don't actually have any taste, they're just listening to music that they like to play. It's not from a taste perspective, but more a fetishistic technique perspective. Understanding that that was a turning point for me, as it made me realise that I don't like this music.

Did making electronic music feel more freeing?

It was always fun and free, and I just made it for fun, just on my computer. I'd play it to my family or whatever, and there'd also be a sense of it being just silly sometimes. It allowed me a total free rein to experiment, and I'd always make people birthday songs, and looking back on it, it's all just ways of, auditioning things that you're actually secretly quite serious about. It's just a zero-pressure thing that's also, like, very creative.

I feel sometimes people, especially people in the creative industries, expect that their jobs will totally fulfill their creative needs. I always think you need your own little thing that makes your happy, somewhere you can truly express yourself.

You really do, yeah. That's really important, and also, like, I think it's really important to understand what your role is in the field that you're doing. If you're working in a pop music environment, if you're working in a film music environment, you are working in basically a service industry, hired for your contribution, but ultimately, providing your services for something else. If you go in knowing that, you won't get burned. I remember [producer] Ariel Rechtshaid said to me once, which is so true, "If you write pop music, you work with pop stars, and your own personal project isn't popular, then boo fucking who?” If it's your own personal project, it should be, like, that is where you put all your creativity, that’s your statement. It doesn't necessarily have to be popular, but what it has to be is true to you.

I feel people will be less disappointed if they think that way.

I agree, but some people live off that stress. That's another complex element to it, because I've worked with a lot of LA producers who are fucking hit makers, and this stress kind of fuels what they're doing. It’s clearly part of their process, and they’re looking for a reason to throw the chair at the wall.

It seems you are practicing what you preach, and are creatively satisfied with this release?

Yeah, I am. I would be doing the same thing, if I was self-releasing this on DistroKid, but probably without the features [laughs] I'm just really happy to have this kind of statement of mine out in the world. I really do believe that you need to put out an honest statement of what you love and what you want to hear in the world. It just feels really good to put out an honest statement of the music that I love to listen to, and just to receive the feedback of, like, people that I respect, and it's just, like, one of the most amazing things.

Can you relax now? Do you immediately start writing new music?

There's a lot to be elaborated on with this record, that is sort of is yet to come out.

Oh, interesting?!

I've had various ideas about how to expand on material, because I'm aware that my music is very dense in the way I put it together, and I've been really enjoying this divergence idea of where I give the stems to an artist who works in a more expansive field make a whole album out of just one track. There's a divergence forever.

A tentacled album!

Yeah, exactly, like a kind of Akira-like mutation. I do like the idea of these tracks being material that's elastic, that can be expanded and contracted. What it does feel like when I'm listening to one of these divergences, is like these artists expand the track into a cathedral-like space that you can sort of walk around and admire. It’s been an amazing part of the process, and there are even more ways of elaborating on the material that's yet to come out that I'm very excited about.