Former indie-popster crafts lush ambient jazz inspired by the North Sea coast, in our APRIL 2023 issue of Uncut, available to buy here.
Andrew Wasylyk’s mostly instrumental music exists in the soft borders between jazz, post-rock and classical music, with field recordings, minimalist and ambient elements underlying quietly grand arrangements of bittersweet, beautiful tunes. His work is rooted in his native Dundee and the Scottish coast. A key member of now defunct indie-pop band The Hazey Janes and current bassist for Idlewild, Wasylyk has also played with School Of Language and The Electric Soft Parade. Since debuting with 2015’s Soroky, his seven solo albums to date form a cohesive, increasingly impressive world.
Once, though, he had very different dreams. “When I was younger, I was obsessed with following in my brother’s footsteps to play football professionally,” says Wasylyk (whose given surname is Mitchell – he uses his Ukrainian grandad’s name for his music). “Then music left this door ajar to another, euphoric world.”
His first influences were auspiciously broad, from Olivia Tremor Control to Fairport Convention, The Beatles to The Meters. “There’s a thread through all those artists of melody and groove,” he explains. Indeed, a love for Philly soul and disco gives a rhythmic kick to his otherwise meditative tunes. “We used to bunk off school to watch Ironside because we loved the Quincy Jones theme tune so much!” he laughs. “Then that pushed me into [David] Axelrod territory. I can be shooting for Axelrod and Talk Talk, but because I don’t have their ability, I always miss. You end up in this grey area that you make your own.” Wasylyk is similarly diffident about his relationship with classical music. “I’m drawn to it because I’m not classically trained. So I don’t have any idea of what I’m listening to, and it washes over you in this beautiful, immersive way.” He could be describing his own indefinable sound.
Wasylyk focused on a sense of place after a commission to write about parts of Dundee led to his second album, Themes For Buildings And Spaces (2017). “The idea of exploring outwards to better understand things within yourself was there already,” he recalls. “The North Sea’s presence and the particular light here in Dundee has an intoxicating quality that gets to you.” 2019’s The Paralian (which means dweller by the sea) resulted from an artistic residency along the coast in Arbroath. Scrambling onto some rocks to tape the sea’s roar, he was almost literally consumed by his subject. “I didn’t realise that this wave was getting bigger and bigger beside me,” he laughs. “It nearly swept me away!”
Collaboration has remained crucial to his solo albums – witness “Dreamt In The Current Of Leafless Winter”, the 16-minute opener to last year’s Hearing The Water Before Seeing The Falls, where Alabaster dePlume’s questing tenor sax interweaves with Wasylyk’s minimalist piano in a mesmeric, jazzy suite. That record was another multimedia commission, responding to an exhibition by Scottish photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper. “I found his work melancholic, but the photos were quietly euphoric as well. That all fed into the album.”
Wasylyk’s latest, Parallel Light, is an “alternative mix” of 2020’s Fugitive Light And Themes Of Consolation, a title that could sum up his music. “It would be incredible if my work does console anyone,” he says modestly, “but I was thinking more of consolation prizes. I like themes for the underdog.”
Parallel Light is out now on Athens Of The North.