Transcribed by Alex Rednaxela
Interviewed by Omotara Edu
Video edited by Yu Kakinoki
On a cold Friday in November, I got the opportunity to interview Hannah Lev, the first of our uncl unlabelled artists. She'd just released her second EP, Unaligned, most of which came together during the chaos of the first lockdown back in March last year, so taking a moment to sit down with her and unpack the process behind it whilst in the throes of the second lockdown felt poetic, almost. Taking influence from artists ranging from Deem Spencer to Dean Blunt/Babyfather to Fiona Apple, her output of gently brooding melodies and insidious lyrics whose meaning only hits you two lines later, Hannah is, to put it simply, a unique talent.
How's lockdown treating you? Are you actually sticking to the lockdown rules?
Yeah, I mean, I’ve been pretty strict with the rules - since the beginning as well - just, because my family and things I’m trying to be careful. It’s been alright, I mean, I still get to see my parents because they live really close by. Obviously, it’s not the best and I miss my friends a lot, but what are you gonna do, really? But yeah, it’s a mess.
Congratulations on the release of Unaligned. Is there anything in particular that inspired the project or is it more lots of different things?
I wouldn’t say something inspired it necessarily, but whenever I have free time - which the lockdown gave a lot of - obviously I just like to make music because it’s something I love doing. So I feel like it quite organically grew and I was working on quite a few different tracks throughout the months and they all had a similar theme, a similar sort of vibe, and they all fit together quite nicely so I thought - a few months in - well, seeing as I have a collection of tracks I’m creating, I’d like to have an EP done by the end of the lockdown season.
It’s just because lockdown is such a weird time and just quite dreamlike.
Do you think that your environment played a part in the music generally - and the things that were going on around you?
Yeah, sure, I mean maybe not the physical environment, but the things that happened - I mean, I think the fact that the lockdown - every day was blending together and there was a dreamlike quality in a good and a bad way at the same time - I think that definitely feeds into the sound of the music and the way that it’s kinda dark, but also kind of - I can’t think of another word apart from dreamlike.
Kind of ethereal and kind of floaty, but also has a bit of a heaviness and anxiety to it as well. That’s definitely related to the environment I was writing in.
What’s your creative process like, just generally, and was that different in the first lockdown or is it different now?
Yeah, I mean my process is quite random to be honest. A lot of the time when I feel like creating music, I’ll either have a vague idea where I have something I want to try out. So there have definitely been times where I’ve downloaded some new sounds or found a new synth and then I'm like "okay I want to try this out". Then because I have a new specific thing I want to try, I’ll just experiment with it, basically just improvise with different instruments, different ideas and then it pretty much always, through improvisation, grows into something different.
I’m also generally quite a slow songwriter *laughs* - I know people who can write a whole song in one day or multiple songs in one day. For me, I’ll have the original idea sketched out in a day or two and then it takes a lot longer to get lyrics figured out and structure. I’ll definitely go and change things and definitely mess with the mix for a really long time just as an excuse for something to do. It’s like "this volume doesn’t sound right, let me move it around for like two more days..."
I’d say generally there’ll be like a sound or an instrument or a style that I want to try out and from there I’ll improvise and that’s really the process, for me.
So the sound is a completely different section to the lyrics? When do you put the two things together?
I’d say that usually, I have the instrumental before the lyrics, but I think they always go together in terms of style or sound. I obviously choose carefully what lyrics will go with which song, but I feel like the lyrics barely ever come first. I usually will write my notes up in my phone - kind of ideas - they won’t necessarily be lyrics, they’ll just be a few lines in a kind of poem style. Then often when I have an instrumental basically laid out and I want to start building it more into a song and start adding lyrics to it, I’ll go through my phone and see if there are any ideas that go into it. Sometimes I’ll just improvise lyrics on the spot. I’ve definitely had times where I have an initial idea for a song and I think oh this is cool, let me sing over it and see what sounds good. Also to figure out which melodies will sound good as well. Sometimes lyrics that I just improve on the spot end up going into the final song, so it really just depends.
Do all your songs have elements of everything - so a little bit of improvisation, a little bit of planning, a little bit of poetry?
Yeah, I’d say so. A few are more improvised than others. It definitely varies. For example, Thin Air on the EP started with a sample that I just loved from this really sick Bilal track.
I have loads of songs that I’ve downloaded from my family’s iTunes catalogue. A lot of them are kinda old or just general songs that I think would be quite good to sample. Every once in a while I listen through and see what I’d like to sample and start from there.
What’s the Bilal song called?
I forgot the name... I’ll find it and remember it at some point. Essentially there’s a section with strings, so it was just that string melody that I played around with in sampling. I sent it off to Mel Hines and was like, "hey, I’m a bit worried that this sample is a bit long and it might be a copyright issue." I basically just wanted him to feel free to mess with the sample, if he wanted. He ended up sending me back a version of Thin Air with the sample taken out and a similar strings melody replacing it. So, in that way, it started from a specific loop that I had created and transformed into something else because of the way his production influenced it.
Do you feel like your music is heavily influenced by the artists that you listen to - and your family?
My family generally has really good music taste so I’m sure that’s influenced me a lot. Also - for example - we have one particular family friend who sends us music all the time and I owe so much to him just because he has incredible music taste and he’s really influenced me a lot in that way.
But also just me listening to music on my own. There are so many artists who I owe so much to.
Could you tell us a bit about the artists who've influenced you or whose styles you'd like to emulate or experiment with in your own music?
I’d say Tirzah is someone who I really appreciate - I think I kind of sound more like Tirzah than I do Dean Blunt, obviously because Dean Blunt has a very different voice to me. And Mica Levi's production on Tirzah's album Devotion - I really like it, I really admire it so much. It’s really simplistic, electronic, quite influenced by hip-hop, but also features weird synths and heavy drums. And then Tirzah's voice is so perfect: it’s very emotive, but also delicate which contrasts with the production element. So I love Tirzah a lot.
Also, when I was writing/making Unaligned I listened to a lot of Fiona Apple, especially her new album and her. I admire a lot of things about her, but her songwriting and lyricism is something I especially admire. It’s incredibly poetic in that it encompasses these huge themes with very specific images and there's just some lines you have to read around to understand.
It sounds like poetry plays a part in your lyrics and the things you aim to achieve with your songs which is very cool.
Yeah, I think so!
Do you write a lot of poetry? Have you ever tried writing poetry?
I don’t write a lot of poetry, no. I write every once in a while - I have a lockdown diary which is basically me writing about snippets of every few days if something interesting happened. Or if I wanted to encompass the weird feeling of the day, I would write something about it - I’ve done that for quite a few years where I’ll write things every now and then, but I definitely don’t write in a structured... I don’t do it very often. In terms of poetry, I have written poetry before, but I am more comfortable writing in really small sections on my phone as I said before - basically just a few lines. I think it’s one reason why writing for songs is - I wouldn’t say easier - it’s more in tune with the style of writing that I do. Because it’s more allowed to have repetition and you can use more elements of the song. The words feed into a bigger structure of the song, it doesn’t have to exist on its own.
In the sense that your lyrics - as opposed to being the main part of your songs - they’re kind of intertwined with your production - is that something you like to achieve?
Yeah, I think that’s true for sure. I do produce pretty much all of my own music so everything starts with the production and then the lyrics usually do come after - after I have the initial idea. So even though I really do try to make the lyricism important in the song and I think for some songs the lyrics are more important than others. Maybe that’s bad to say *laughs*, but for example on Scaffold, on Like You Care, which was the most pop-y song - it’s more catchy than the others. That was the one where I just improvised all the lyrics, so I can’t say that the lyrics are profound to me because I just improvised them. But the song is still good I think, I still like that song. But the other ones I definitely spent more time crafting the lyrics, rewriting them, making sure they’re really good for the song. So it really does depend.
I found it really interesting that you do a STEM subject at UCL, so do you feel like that plays a part in your music or do you think that the dichotomy between your musical self versus your academic self - do you think that plays a part in your music?
Even though I’m interested in science, in the sense that I’m studying it, the things that are most important or central to me as a person are definitely not rooted in science. Music and art are much more integral to who I am as a person. But I’m sure there could be some links between them. I kind of do like to keep science separate from my artistic side: not because they don’t go together, because I believe that they definitely can and there are overlaps, but for me, I don’t know, I feel like it allows me more of my own space to keep it separate personally.
I think it’s such a myth that people are only good at art or science. You must know as a BASc student, as well! It’s so possible to have talents in science and art and basically everything. As of yet, I haven’t really put them together too much - just because I like my music to be the more personal side of me whereas I guess science is more of an intellectual interest of mine.
As you said they’re not as easily separated and not completely different things. Society treats them in ways that they seem separate, but they can definitely influence the way you think about the musical process, or in the opposite way influence the way you trying not to think about the music. As opposed to being methodological, you try to be a bit more fluid.
Yeah, that’s a good point. I think it definitely does go more the other way than it does from science to music if that makes sense.
So I definitely - I mean I don’t know if it’s related to music necessarily, but I try to see science in a more fluid, pluralistic way and I really don’t like it being seen as kind of the absolute intellectual authority because science is just another social activity that humans do and although there are obviously merits to it and experimentation gives it a certain precision and authority in that way, it is just another activity that people do and I don’t think that it should be placed above or below anything else really.
Did you grow up in London?
I wasn’t born here, but we moved here when I was like 1 so I’m quite a Londoner through and through. I’ve always lived near Camden and obviously that’s quite a music hub and I’ve been very lucky to have gotten to go to lots of gigs from quite a young age. So obviously living in London is such a cool thing just because of all the art and the culture that you can be exposed to. And also other cultures and different kinds of people.
Has music always been a big part of your life?
Yeah, the way that I started making my own music is very non-positive in that I didn’t really enjoy guitar lessons and I remember because I didn’t like reading music notes - I hated that you had to remember what the dot meant in a sense of sound - so what I would do was I would just learn by ear instead. I remember in this guitar lesson, there were three of us and we all had to read music and play it by eye and read it as you’re playing it, and instead of reading it I was just copying what the people in front of me were doing - so that’s pretty much just learning it by ear instead.
And it was also quite gendered I remember - I remember in primary school I was the only girl in guitar club and there were like 20 of us. I have so much to say about female producers; there’s barely any of us. So I really wish there were more - I’m sorry I’m going into such a tangent with female producers - let me go back to the guitar story.
Later on, I had a guitar teacher - shout out to Alberto who’s probably never going to see this - but he’s great - who gave me a lot more space to play more music that I liked listening to and it was less focussed on practising by memorising and much more learning by ear and so he taught me a lot of blues and jazz on guitar which I think actually had quite a big influence on Scaffold especially.
I really love blues chords: how it’s beautiful and moving, but also sad and quite dark at the same time. Blues as a genre is definitely very influential for the music that I started making. I don’t think you really hear enough about it, as a genre.
Agreed - obviously blues is one of the fundamental genres and you see the influence in everything, but I don’t think that people usually cite it as a direct influence in their music.
But anyway, did you stop playing the guitar or do you still play it?
Good question! I haven't played the guitar in such a long time. I picked it up a few times during lockdown, but to be honest I enjoy music production much more than physically playing guitar. I don’t really know why - I kind of wish I enjoyed it more. I think it was very important for me to learn it and I’ve been playing the guitar for about ten years, so I should be good at it by now. But I really gravitate towards electronic production more than I do playing guitar.
I can still play guitar and I should in theory be able to, but it’s not really something I do that often. It’s been useful in the same way that science has showed me a lot about how I want to approach music - playing guitar and having the lessons and theory has really shown me how I might want to try and learn things in a bit more of an improvisational way. I think production leaves a lot of room for that - with electronic music production you’re able to play around with so many different sounds and instruments at once instead of sticking with just one instrument.
How did you get started in production? And did you find it hard - I remember when I was younger I really wanted to produce music, but I couldn’t get started, I found it really difficult teaching myself.
I barely remember the very beginnings of making music, but I do remember GarageBand. Everyone who has a Mac knows GarageBand. It’s quite a basic, beginner-level music-making app on Apple computers and I definitely used that quite a lot when I was maybe sixteen, seventeen.
Prior to that I would write songs on guitar, but the music I was listening to was not singer-songwriter stuff, so moving to electronic production made a lot more sense in terms of what I wanted to make. So I definitely made quite a few of my first songs on GarageBand just messing around with the very basic audio recording and you could loop things and add reverb - it was super basic.
After maybe a year or so of that, my parents got me Logic Pro X as a present which, obviously, I’m very grateful for. Since then I’ve just been using Logic and over time I've learnt more and more about how to use it - all the intricacies. Because it is really quite complicated and there are so many possibilities with Logic. I also have to give credit to my friend Elli who was studying Music Tech and she knew a lot more about the technical side of things, so she definitely helped me quite a bit by teaching me a few of the different techniques.
I haven’t studied music in school since before GCSEs so I haven’t done it institutionally at all, but I did take some music tech lessons at my local youth centre which definitely helped. I didn’t know how to sample things on Logic until then, so there's a few important techniques which I learned from there. So it’s been quite a gradual process, but that’s the story! I feel like there’s lots of different elements that go into it and as your music continues to grow - the story’s never really over and there’s lots of things that are going to play a part in your musical journey.
Who are your favourite artists outside of the ones you cited as your influences ? If you could put everyone you know onto one artist, who would that artist be?
Oh my gosh! Big questions. I listen to so many artists - I haven’t mentioned Smerz yet, but I found their stuff about a year ago and their music is really really really cool. Deem Spencer, who I actually got to feature on one of my songs, he honestly has been one of my favourite artists for the past two years or so, I’d say. It’s honestly unreal that we got to work together in that way.
How did you get to work with him?
Obviously, it was collaborative in that we kind of worked together and I think the song is definitely - he fits really well on that song. It was more that I sent him a demo and was like ‘hey, would you be willing to feature on this?’ and he was like ‘yeah this is cool, I’d be happy to do it’.
He’s a really amazing lyricist, I’d say, in that he has a really strong sense of imagery and his lyrics are quite poetic and cryptic which I felt fit with that song really well.
Do you think you’re going to do more music with him in the future?
I don’t know... I mean, possibly. Obviously, I would like to, but collaboration is a new thing for me that I hadn’t really done before and I think that the lockdown in a way allowed that to happen in that everyone was more isolated than usual in terms of music and because it’s something to do, it allowed me to have more confidence and reached out to people who I admired as musicians. Mel Hines who helped me out so much with the project... I was just like ‘oh, he’s really cool, I like his work, I like his music, let me just hit him up.’ and surprisingly he liked my music and we collaborated on Thin Air, but he also helped me master the whole project as well, so shout out to Mel Hines! I really like the song with Mel Hines on it - I think that’s my favourite song.
Do you think you'd like to continue collaborating with a lot of different artists, or do you think your next project will be more solo-focused?
I mean honestly, either I’d be happy with. I think collaboration definitely brought different sides out and different aesthetics or themes out of my music which if you’re creating by yourself you don’t get so much diversity or like expanse in the styles of music you can make so definitely going forward I think I’d be interested in collaborating more. But to be honest I don’t really know about the next project yet. It often just happens on quite an ad hoc basis, like I’m not planning anything in particular that’s coming next.
Do you have many other ways, outside of music, where you're able to express your creativity?
I’d say that writing and music are the main ways of expression for me - I love art and film and I always have but I don’t really create visual things ever by myself, apart from photography though which I really enjoy. So creating a short film or music video would definitely be new territory for me - I haven’t really done anything like that before, so the way that I express myself is mostly through music and writing.
And your diary as well.
Yeah that’s kind of writing I guess.
Follow Hannah at @hannahlevmusic on Instagram and stream her music. Yes.
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