Closer

Chances are Liam Daly’s music is unlike anything you’ve heard in a long while. Spanning around 10 minutes for each track, they unfold on themselves and are filled with layer upon layer of sound. We had a chat to the musician about why he creates what he does.
Hey Liam, how are you and what are you up to right now? 
Hi, I’m great thanks! I’ve just finished making coffee all day once again, been for a run and am looking forward to a beer with my friends. I’ve been listening to Sleaford Mods all afternoon. Seemed apt.
So for those who mightn’t be familiar with your music, how would you describe your sound?
Underpinned by hefty sub bass. Driven by emotively charged melodic sounds. Intense pulsating drones and drenched with white noise. Music that warps time and makes you feel without choice.
It is quite an ambient style of music, are all of your tracks heavily influenced by your state of mind? 
I can definitely only write music for Closer when I’m in the right frame of mind for it. Having said that, the frame of mind has to be quite an open one, not overly driven by specific mood or intent. Whatever noises present themselves are the ones I have to use. Whatever form the song takes, then so be it. This causes a lot of artifacts and other hidden elements to become more prominent as I build a song. It’s actually usually terrifying until a track is complete. You really have to trust that inner state of mind to know it’ll work out eventually.
Did you start making this type of music straight away or did you go through a couple of different ones to get you to what you currently create?
I’ve always dabbled with electronic music. I started out using Fast Tracker writing really terrible hardcore techno and jungle! Now everything is done like a mess in Ableton Live. After I finished playing and writing for my band These Hands it took a while to settle into something that worked. It seems pretty natural now. I guess you can hear the progression of ideas from the album In Search of Life to the latest EP as fairly indicative of that.
I saw that you seem to be a fan of using “static tape hiss”, what made you start using it?
I like the idea of melding different artifacts into individual tracks. White noise or street sounds or whatever give things a spooky sense of being somehow “big”. You know how you hear really old music music and you can kind of sense the place where it was recorded? How that is sometimes quite chilling? For my full length In Search of Life it was kind of an artificial embedding of that concept. It’s just kind of stuck as part of the sound for me since.
You seem to do a lot of the production, album design and promotion yourself, do you prefer to have that hands on approach to your music? 
Honestly, I would love to work with more people on all these things. It can be a little bit hard to reach out to people with Closer so far, but it’s definitely warming up. I think a lot of artists know how incredibly hard it is to find some recognition when they can only represent themselves, by themselves. Opportunities such as this really do mean a lot!
You sure keep yourself busy too with four releases since 2013, are you someone that’s got so many ideas you just have to get them out?
It’s important to keep moving and creating to me, that’s for sure. I am writing demos for a new band that sounds too much like Gang of Four, or maybe Talking Heads. I will be recording my solo album for Liam Daly very soon as well. I have no doubt it will sound too much like Sun Kil Moon – I’m totally okay with that. Closer though, continues to be exciting because each new thing I do with it feels truly original.
Seems like you’ve already set to work on your new LP, but what else can we see you get up to in the future? 
I’ve been doing more live lately, in dark rooms with strobe lights and smoke machines! It’s been getting ravey. I’ll probably put out a couple of rave tunes. Slowrave. drone and bass?
Keep up to date on future gigs with Closer’s Facebook page.
Release: Heartache/Lifted is available from Bandcamp now.