Interview to ARLISTON

Hi Arliston, welcome to AFX. Please describe your songwriting process and if is there a particular place where you feel most creative.

It's not really about the place for us, but there are definitely patches of time where it just flows, and we spend the majority of our time trying to get one of those patches. Our process has changed recently, it used to be that we would create all the music with a mumbled melody on top and then at the end replace the mumbles for actual words and hopefully meaning. But now the lyrics are written first without any music in mind and then the songs sort of appear and come together in a bit more of a fluid and holistic way, we think it's making some of our best work yet!

Do any of your songs based on personal experiences? If so, can you tell us about one that’s particularly special to you?

There's fragments of personal experience in every song of course, but more often then not we write them around a theme such as a book, like our song 451, and this allows us to bring in different experiences and perspectives and hopefully makes it a little richer than a simple love song. Not knocking those though, we have plenty of them!

Do you write with a specific audience in mind?

Ourselves! It would be a lie to say we don't have an eye on the sorts of audiences our favourite artists have, but we're really trying to write stuff that excites us and is a bit different. Hopefully this will pay off and we'll have a community of likeminded music fans, but if not we can always chuck it all in and start writing full on pop!

What does high quality sound mean to you?

We have a big cross section of sound quality in our work to be fair, we work with Brett Shaw to mix/master all our work at the moment and he has an absolute treasure trove of a studio in Peckham. Every vintage mic, synth and plenty of tape machines means we can capture the records in super high fidelity with plenty of added warmth and character from all that lovely gear. However, we do also love to use super low quality tech like old cassette recorders and busted amps as well as digitally mangling the audio, it all adds to the atmosphere of a record, so although we have an appreciation for high fidelity capture sometimes its the imperfections and happy accidents of low quality sound that can add the unique element to a song. So from a scientific point of view, i think we know what "high quality sound" is, but you need more than that to make a song matter to people, just look at the classic Bon Iver - For Emma EP, one of the biggest and most influential releases of its genre all recorded in a a super lo-fi way with just the one mic.

What has been the best performance of your career so far? And what are some of your favourite songs to play live?

We sold out our headline show this year in Camden, that's was a really beautiful moment for us, it super affirming to see and meet real people that are into the music we make. It's very easy for us to get locked into our little bubble of writing and putting the music out, you can see the streams and that people are listening, but it was so nice to see faces rather than numbers listening!

Arliston shares latest track 'Thawed', creating an arrangement that is a joy to be swept up in

Are you planning anything exciting that we can look forward to?

Yes, there is something on the horizon that we're excited about. We'll hopefully be able to speak about in the new year!

Where do you see your career in a couple of years as a musicians?

Hopefully we're still making music and people are still listening! Can't really ask for more than that. It would of course be lovely to progress to bigger venues and all that, but it's still amazing to have people listen and support us, even at this level!

Social Links:

Arliston are South Londoners Jack Ratcliffe (vocalist & instrumentalist) and George Hasbury (instrumentalist & producer). The duo burst onto the scene in 2018 with their critically acclaimed EP ‘Hawser’. Recorded in Dock Street Studios in East London with Chris Blakey (Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Lloyd Williams, Death in Vegas), the release was originally a studio-only project, but slowly began to move to a fully-fledged band, winning over an army of loyal fans with their mesmeric blend of spacey production and dreamlike rich harmonies. Thawed has been mixed and co-produced by Brett Shaw (The Foals, Florence and the Machine), and you can tell because every thread of the swirling soundscape is expertly balanced.

The band closes out 2023 with another gem to confirm their creativity and authentic sound. 

Catch 'Thawed' on Spotify and AFX Radio.