The futuristic tones of Vlossom help us look outward, not inward. With a focus on community, Vlossom’s music incentives stepping outside of ourselves.
Vlossom is a collaborative project, spearheaded by Alister Wright (Cloud Control) and Nick Littlemore (PNAU, Empire of The Sun). Together, the artists have been melding their influences to create upbeat bangers, in the realms of EDM, psych-rock, and pop.
It was a joy to speak with Al on their latest single, Open Your Mind. As the conversation flowed from Wordle to spy movies, it became clear that Al is an observant artist, channelling experiences from everywhere into his output. Take a look below.
HAPPY: Vlossom isn’t your first music project, as you’ve spent many years with Cloud Control and Nick has with PNAU and Empire of the Sun. So I was wondering, how did you two meet and decide to start a project together?
AL: We met, actually… oh yeah. I don’t even know how to tell the story. We met like years and years ago at Candy’s apartment. I don’t know if you know that place.
HAPPY: I don’t, sorry.
AL: Oh man. It was in the cross (Kings Cross). And they used to have indie nights there, and Cloud Control played and Nick’s other band Teenager played. I remember meeting him briefly there. I was like, ‘Huh, these guys are cool. That band’s sick, Teenager.’ And then I don’t know. I’ve always admired Nick’s work from afar, but I bumped into him more recently, like in 2017 or 2018 on the streets in Adelaide. Cloud Control was playing a show at the festival, and I was walking the streets with my brother, just checking out… soaking up the Adelaide vibes.
Yeah, checking out the op shops, that kind of thing, and we bumped into their whole band and I knew the whole band, and we were walking around together. I knew Timmy because I shared a studio with him and I was like, ‘Oh, hey, man.’ And then we all just kind of ended up chatting. And Nick was like, ‘Oh, cool?’ I was like, ‘Alright.’ And he was like, ‘I’m going to come to your show tonight.’ And then he did and then hit me up on Instagram later being like, ‘Hey, let’s make some music together.’ And the rest is history.
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HAPPY: Sick. Slid into the DMs.
AL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, I saved him… I saved his picture as… because I’m a pretty big fan of Nick’s stuff. And when I was kind of nervous about working with him, because I don’t write with that many people, so I saved his picture as the dog from Adventure Time. Do you remember that?
HAPPY: *Laughs* Oh yeah, yeah.
AL: Yeah, so when he called me, I’d be like, ‘Hey.’
HAPPY: That’s funny as. I love that you both come from different sonic realms like indie rock and EDM, and then you create something new. And it made me wonder what the songwriting process was like, at least at the start for you guys.
AL: Yeah, it was… Nick wrote a bunch of instrumentals and they got some really amazing session musicians to play on it. He wrote the instrumentals, I think, with me in mind and then invited me over and I just freestyled over the whole thing. There was six or eight tracks or something. Yeah, so I just kind of unloaded whatever was in my brain at the time onto the tracks and then gave it back to Nick and he was like, ‘Okay, cool.’
He was actually really excited. And that’s kind of been it. And that’s how the process has been since then as well. Like, I’ll come into the studio and they’ll have a bunch of amazing instrumentals and then I’m just kind of freestyling over the top. Then we workshop the lyrics together and record the final vocals later.
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HAPPY: Yeah, sick.
AL: The studio with those guys is crazy. You know, lots of stuff flying around, Nick tearing off his shirt and drawing on himself with Sharpie and that kind of stuff, you know, DMT trips.
HAPPY: *Laughs*, fuck yeah.
AL: And then somehow, in the middle of all that, we wrote an album and a bit more after that as well. So there are heaps of songs in the bank for when they come out.
HAPPY: Nice. So it’s kind of like Nick crafts a beat, you get inspired by it and let the melody come out?
AL: Yeah, just unload.
HAPPY: I read that Nick hopes that listeners of Vlossom get a ‘feeling of losing themselves in a moment or stepping outside of themselves in the best imaginable way’, which I thought was really cool. Has Vlossom also been a channel for you to escape to?
AL: Yes, definitely. Yeah, the whole idea of it is to, you know, explore those cool worlds and then bring back feelings of togetherness and communality that I think we need for people to get together and dance to. And for me, that’s been yeah, such a release. It’s been a pretty hard time being a musician through all this crap. But yeah, it’s been a really beautiful thing to get together with friends and make music. And then when we can play shows as well.
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HAPPY: I love it. It’s so the time for some positive energy, hey.
AL: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Oh, it’s the time for all of the energy. I think, you know, there’s a lot of time for angry energy. There’s a lot of boundary-pushing music coming out. I think that’s really necessary as well. And I think where we fit in is bringing in like a place for people to come together and enjoy each other.
HAPPY: Huge congrats on your latest release, Open Your Mind. I was writing down some notes on my first listen and noticed a really body-friendly rhythm and some super slick vocals from you. You wrote the track in a ‘state of bliss and happiness, letting music open your minds to the same movement’. How was that experience?
AL: So nice. Yeah, I don’t know if when we’re in the studio, it’s always felt like we’re kind of just playing around and I guess it took me turning up and just like singing, having fun, playing with the music. I love the beats that are being brought because they feel… I don’t know. It can feel like I’m dusting off some kind of archaeological discovery of the melodies. And then it’s really just like hanging out, eating heaps of snacks and having fun.
HAPPY: Yeah.
AL: Yeah, I don’t even know how we get anything done. But apparently, yeah.
HAPPY: I’m such a sucker for lyrics, so I had to pull out a few to ask about. My house is a skeleton. I thought that was a really vivid image. Is there a story behind it?
AL: Well, it’s yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, there’s not really a story behind it. I kind of remember singing that. It was one of the ones for the first freestyle set at Nick’s house, and I can remember I was like, ‘This is going to make… This makes absolutely no sense.’ But I was just like looking out the window, looking at all the buildings and stuff, and thinking about the body as well, the human body and somehow just got mixed up in that.
I’m really just looking at stuff and singing about it. You know, when you’re like freestyling about something and you just kind of look around the room. It was like that. But then I guess bits and bobs from my subconscious kind of sneaked their way in there as well. Maybe that’s why my house is a skeleton. But I feel as well with this kind of stuff, the faster you go and the less you question, the more visceral and real it feels at the other end.
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HAPPY: That’s really cool. That’s such a good piece of advice for songwriters I think?
AL: I just think that everyone has different ways of doing songs, and I know from… you know, now I’ve worked with a lot of different people and I see how meticulous they can be in piecing together things. And I think my strength is in doing it really quickly and not really questioning it too much. And then, later on, discovering how it feels because, yeah, it’s a cool line. My house is a skeleton. I don’t know. What does that mean? I saw a burnt-out house the other day. I guess that’s like a literal skeleton of a house. A skeleton is your home as well because that’s in your body, that’s where you live in?
HAPPY: Yeah, that’s what I thought initially. But no, it’s so cool. Like, I love that idea of like, you write something that’s in your subconscious and you kind of know what it means, but you don’t know yet. Like, you sang it for a reason, but you don’t know why yet.
AL: Oh, totally. That always happens to me with lyrics. I feel like I don’t really make sense. And then someone will tell me something like a year later and I’ll think, ‘Wow’ It’s like… I’m really bad at cryptic crosswords, but you know how it’s that thing where to get the right answer, you sort of have to relax, and it’s just so complicated your brain might put it together in your subconscious. And it’ll like bubble up. And it’s like, ‘How did you get that?’ Who knows?
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HAPPY: I couldn’t solve a cryptic for my life. I don’t know how anyone does, to be honest.
AL: Yeah, they’re intense. Wordle though, I’m so addicted to Wordle. Like, I’ve been doing that every day.
HAPPY: Yeah, same. What’s your starting word? Do you have a go-to?
AL: No, I mix it up, all different ones. I think today I did ‘prang’. I don’t know. I try to do weird words because I guess you could go for ones that use E’s and A’s to knock those out of the way. What do you do?
HAPPY: Yeah, I’m a vowel man myself. You know, ‘alien’, ‘frame’, all of those ones.
AL: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HAPPY: I reckon they should… this is such a tangent, but I reckon they should take away one of the guesses because I think people are getting too good at it.
AL: I thought that. And then today was actually the first that I lost. I used my six guesses. I think… have you done it yet?
HAPPY: I haven’t done today. It’s all right. You can spoil it if you want.
AL: I won’t, I won’t, I won’t. But it was just one of those ones where it was like… one letter… I had five green and I was just switching one letter up and then I run out of chances.
HAPPY: Wild *Laughs*
AL: I hope it never happens to you because it’s pretty wild.
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HAPPY: I’ll pick out one more lyric. What about “reflection of a reflection”?
AL: Oh, no way. Yeah, I was thinking of… this is really dumb, but I don’t know if you’ve seen this video on the internet. It’s a montage of spy movies and other movies with every time someone says to ‘enhance’. You know, they’re in the Situation Room and they’re like trying to uncover the mystery, and it’s like an agent in Prague or something. And then they get like a blurry photo and they’re like enhance and they zoom in a tiny bit.
There’s a really good montage of all of their sequences and they go through like enhance, enhance, enhance and had so many people wanted their stuff to enhance. And then the second half the video is they’re like enhance and they’re like, ‘What’s that?’ And then someone else goes, ‘it’s a reflection’, and then they have to enhance the reflection. So that’s what I was thinking of there.
HAPPY: That’s cool. Shout out spy movies.
AL: Yeah, it’s funny how they all have the exact same sequence, and I’m a sucker for it. I love seeing that in the movie when the thing’s blurry and need to enhance.
HAPPY: Do you have a fave spy movie?
AL: Oh, spy movie. My partner and I just watched the Mission Impossible movies.
HAPPY: Yeah, nice.
AL: They’re pretty good. I feel like they’re the US’s answer to James Bond’s in the soft power states. It’s like James Bond, but he’s a bit more new world. So he’s going crazy. You know, James Bond’s more suave but Tom Cruise is more action-oriented, I think. Although they’re both pretty action-oriented people. I don’t know where I’m going this. But yeah, Tom Cruise is great. I love the first Mission Impossible and also the one that’s set in Sydney is really funny.
HAPPY: Oh, which one’s that?
AL: It’s the second one. And like Tom Cruise has long hair. How’s this for like an iconic intro? He’s like free climbing in this desert on a ridiculous climb. Like, it’s like hundreds of metres high. He gets to the top and gets his secret message in his sunglasses and he throws off his… you know, it’s like this message will self-destruct. The sunglasses explode and then it comes in with Limp Bizkit covering the Mission Impossible theme.
HAPPY: Iconic.
AL: It’s too much. Too much.
HAPPY: Oh man. Anyway, back to back to where we were. That’s right. That’s right. We’re talking about music! *Laughs*
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AL: Yeah, skeletons and reflection of a reflection. I mean, I’m sure that would have happened in the movie as well. It’s like ‘it’s a reflection of a reflection, which they have to enhance like three times.
HAPPY: You spoke before about wanting your listeners to have a sense of community and togetherness. Was there anything else, in particular, you wanted your fans to take away from the track?
AL: Yeah, I think that’s it. I just would love people to just dance to the music and enjoy this music for what it is. Just love it. Have fun.
HAPPY: Awesome. Your bandmate Russell, he led the visual direction for the single right?
AL: Yes.
HAPPY: The single cover was quite memorable. I read somewhere it was a slightly retro-futuristic look. Is this sort of a vibe you’re looking to continue with Vlossom?
AL: Yeah, I think we’re going to work with Russ for the next few releases, and we bagged a few cool photos from that day. We have a video shoot coming up as well. So I think, yeah, it’s going to be moving in that direction.
HAPPY: Yeah, cool. You’ve got a few in the bank saved up?
AL: Yeah, exactly.
HAPPY: Awesome. And yeah, just before we wrap up, you guys are performing at Yours and Ours in Wollongong in April, which will be fucking awesome.
AL: Yep. The home crowd.
HAPPY: Anything you want to let your fans know about the upcoming set? What’s the vibe?
AL: Just… get ready to have the time of your life. We’re going to absolutely blow the lid off.
HAPPY: *Laughs* love it. Well, thanks so much for your time, Al. It’s been a pleasure to chat.
AL: Cool, you’re welcome, Manning.
Photos Supplied
Interview by Manning Patston
