18.11.2024 by Remo Bitzi, Harun Gradascevic

Joanne Robertson—Catching It

Hailing from Blackpool in Northern England, Joanne Robertson has made herself a name as a painter and as a musician over the past two decades. Her recent output as a visual artist features abstract paintings, combining gentle colors and vague shapes. Her music in turn, is a more figurative affair, and comes into existence in good part through collaboration—for example with Dean Blunt or Sidsel Meineche Hansen. But only at first sight do these practices differ, as Harun Gradascevic and Remo Bitzi found out in their conversation with the Glasgow-based artist, which was initially published in issue #26 of our print magazine. The two of them met Robertson after an intimate performance at B-Sides Festival on top of the Sonnenberg mountain in Kriens, Switzerland, in the summer of 2022. While the artist’s husband Jasper Baydala (aka Kool Music) took care of their baby boy, Robertson shared insights into her practice as a painter and a musician. In the end, the two things are not that different, explained Robertson, as they’re about the same thing: catching it.

Remo Bitzi:     You are a painter and a musician. What came first? And how are the two things connected to each other?

Joanne Robertson:      I’ve always done music and I’ve done painting since I was about 15. For me it’s not really separate ever. I try not to say too much about the differences because it all feels connected to me on a very deep level. I think that things happen in the music and in the paintings. Maybe they don’t happen at the same time, but they influence one another a lot. It is my own vocabulary that I developed and worked with. So, it is quite specific to me and I know that vocabulary very well. One aspect that is different with music is that I collaborate a lot and you don’t always do that with painting. It’s an interesting subject as my whole world is based around those kinds of contradictions.

RB:     The music feels more specific to me—concrete in a way—while the paintings seem more abstract. That’s why I wondered if it feels different for you to produce these two things?

JR:      Well, I used to paint more figuratively. Painting always feels like that I don’t have to do it live. I don’t think that I am shy about it, but I like to just put the work out there in a space and not have to be there. I quite like that. I also like that about recording: There is a distance that is created. Performing is very challenging in the way that you have to perform. I think that the spontaneity in the paintings is similar to the music. In my paintings I see a lot of form and shapes. There is recessive space, one that goes back. So there is a psychological space in the work for me. I think about it in terms of composition and if it works as a painting. And I do think that I see that in music also. I am not looking for a resolved product that is over-produced. A lot of the music, for example, is done at home and in a way, it was never meant to be listened to. I leave that aspect of the process undecided.

I like that the music challenges the painting, and the painting challenges the music in terms of process. There is a constant back and forth. Maybe there are some things happening in the music that I can bring to the paintings. … I see the paintings as a glimpse. Like you’re looking at something very quickly. It’s abstract, but there is form there. With the music I like to have that glimpse or abstraction with that kind of blurring that is present in there. People ask if it is under-produced but it is part of my aesthetic that I’ve always worked with. … I used to make up words when I was younger, but without knowing that this was already going on. All of my early music from age 13 to 18 was very abstract.

RB:     That’s interesting—making up words makes the music less figurative so to speak. Is this still part of your songwriting practice?

JR:      Well, I improvise lyrics a lot. So maybe I have a few poems, but a lot of it is freestyle. A lot of times they are like diary entries. That’s how I see them. So they are very freestyle and I do make them up on the spot. I have tons of recordings that I make and the songs will shift and change. They can totally change shape as I can record for like five hours straight and a whole day passes by without me realizing it. I don’t like songs where the words are like words in a poem. I like the songs to be somewhere in between the poems and the paintings that I make. I don’t like the lyrics to be overly defined.

RB:     So your voice becomes some sort of an instrument, an extra layer of sound?

JR:      Exactly. That’s how I feel about it too. It’s almost meditative for me and spiritual in that way. I’ve always sung to myself but the music has to become a part of the world. In that sense I feel like people are listening to a part of a process. At the same time, there is a lot behind it that has not been listened to, like the other recordings.

RB:     How is it with performing? You don’t improvise on stage, right?

JR:      I like a lot of the seventies folk and county music. I love Neil Young and I love when people just sing and write a song from a very improvisational-based place. But at the same time, I feel like that the end product has to be something that can be played black. I find that really exciting. But every song is different so it’s really hard to overall judge what I do. When I am performing I am learning the tracks but I am not always learning them in the exact same key. With the recordings I make, I tune a lot. I just sit around and detune. But I can’t be on stage and tune every five seconds. I would have to have like ten guitars on stage to perform the songs in the original form.

RB:     That would be logistically quite a challenge.

JR:      Yes. But maybe really beautiful to try one day.

Harun Gradascevic:    You mentioned contradictions in your work before. I was wondering how your approach changes when working with other people? I feel like your solo material is very private and lonely, while the collaborations seem grander in production.

JR:      When I am alone, I get really weird and deep. But when I am collaborating, I am almost singing like in a band. Which I really enjoy. I love Linda Ronstadt and Stevie Nicks and I love to really sing just the songs and forget about the personality. It’s sexy in a way. It’s quite freeing and fun. It’s not quite like acting but you know you have to sing. And I also love playing the guitar in a band. I also love jamming because it’s like a conversation. … But I don’t collaborate with everybody. I think my collaborative relationships are very specific to friendship and that is very important to me. It is a shared language that is developed over time and that is really interesting to me. You know, it’s not just two egos fighting for something but something very supportive and very spiritual… When I do my music, it is alone and lonely in the sense that I am sitting there alone, but for me it is very spiritual too. So, it’s like going really deep and really digging around my brain in a way that I don’t do with somebody else. At the same time, I would say that the support and friendship from my friends has really helped me and given me confidence regarding my own music.

So, the collaborations feed back into my solo work. Because I spend more time on my own than with others, I think that the inputs from my time alone also feed back into the collaborations. So, there is a back and forth. I see the contradictions in these two fields, and I don’t think that I have the same goals with the solo stuff and my collaborations. It just sort of happens and I catch it. It’s not very planned basically. So, there are natural contradictions and paradoxes that work their way into my productions.

RB:     How do you manage these different practices—painting, solo music, and collaboration?

JR:      I don’t have fixed schedules. It’s very much by feeling. But I do try to have a good studio practice. For me it’s about having good spaces. I like having a really good studio to work in. It’s really important for me to be able to be alone and to record myself. I can record with my microphone from my bedroom. So, a lot of my collaborations aren’t done in an actual space together. They are done separately. So even when I’m collaborating, I collaborate a lot on my own.

HG:     That’s interesting, because your music has a similar vibe as in loner folk. Are you aware of the genre and the tradition?

JR:      No, not really. Byron Coley [who runs Feeding Tube Records out of Florence, Massachusetts] really encouraged me to write music. We work really closely together and he knows a lot about experimental underground folk and he gives me stuff to listen to. He is one of my best friends. But I have not heard about this. Is loner folk a thing?

HG:     Yeah. It was very prominent in the sixties and seventies: People without a record deal were recording themselves and pressing privately. This music later surfaced and is now quite sought after by collectors.

JR:      Oh wow. Can you send me some stuff?

HG:     Yeah, for sure. Your music has a lot of similarities with loner folk. It has the same vibe, very minimalistic and unpolished in the way it is recorded. Can you talk a bit about your recording process?

JR:      I see. I always find it hard to know when I’m supposed to be recording a song. I do have the equipment to record more “high” style—whatever you want to call it. But a lot of the stuff that I am releasing at the moment is music from the past. I have hours and hours of stuff that I am going through. It’s so weird and so much fun. I might release a record with Byron. We will probably do a small run of 500 copies or even less than that. I am really behind with my releases but my husband, Byron, and Dean [Blunt of Hype Williams, Babyfather, …] encourage me to put out the weird stuff. Often, I’d be like: ‘That’s terrible because you can hear seagulls in the background.’ But they are all like: ‘Put it out!’ I think it is about getting that perfect performance of the song in a recording. I spend hours and hours on a song.

RB:     When you work, you keep recording everything?

JR:      Yes, there are a lot of recordings. That’s how I always worked since I was about 13.

RB:     That means you have a lot of versions of your songs? How do you know which version is the right one?

JR:      Yes, lots of them. I have a lot of files and it scares me because they could just disappear. I’m not a great archivist. That’s why the internet is great in a sense. You can send somebody something and it is there, it exists. This week I put together an album and while going through the files I noticed that a lot of the songs are quite concrete at the beginning and towards the end they get very weird and abstract. That often happens with me—I write a hook and then I go off in strange places. That is often how I write a song. So I am probably sticking to the weird and abstract parts for the next project. I think that Joanne from like ten years ago would have been like: ‘No, that’s not a song.’

RB:     This sounds like a very relaxed relationship with the work you have created in the past. Is it easy for you to listen back to material from your past?

JR:      Yes, because they are songs. They are not actual things. I think a good song can exist in different parts of your life. It can work in different moments of your life. You can put on a song, and it will make sense that day. Usually I find it very hard to listen to a song back immediately, unless it’s really catchy. Often, I will bury it for years and then go back to it because otherwise it is too immediate.

RB:     And when you go back, you can remember what the song was about?

JR:      Well, no. Because I am almost like in a trance when I write music. It’s not very specific. It’s not tied to ever-changing feelings. I am hooked to the melody and the lyrics. I start to paint paintings in my mind with the lyrics.

RB:     That sounds beautiful.

JR:      It’s quite psychedelic in a way. I travel in my mind when I am playing music a lot. And that is how I paint, too. It has very much to do with the imagination and the emotions, all coming together in this big space. And then you have to catch it somehow. That’s why pop hooks are good. That’s why good colors are good. It brings you back into everything… But that loner folk—I am very excited about it as I love to listen to other people’s music.

HG:     Yeah it is such an interesting genre. There are so many musicians that never made it in a sense, but have still put out amazing music that went completely unnoticed at that time.

JR:      I see. I love the underground. That’s my stomping ground. I am not interested in the mainstream really. I love people like Loren Connors and Jandek. I’ve seen them live and I was totally heartbroken. It was just so moving. I feel like they live for the music whether people are into it or not. It’s music for a small group of people that have always been around… It’s funny I had an interview with a guy from a mainstream magazine who said that a lot of young people gravitate towards this lesser produced music. Which makes a lot of sense. I think with Covid and the lockdown there was a need for emotion and that intimacy. I’m really interested in the intimacy of singing. I think it is a connection that you can get quite deep with someone.