David Thomas Broughton is a man who takes spontaneity to new extremes. Unlike other artists, he’ll willingly let the tapes roll in the knowledge that he’s leaving everything to chance. Stranger still, he’ll wait until his mind has gone completely blank before getting up on stage to perform. Yet we’re not talking about someone trying to wrestle with epic swells of post-rock distortion and feedback; rather, this is someone who believes that to assemble a choir of your own voice interlinking harmoniously is to move that little bit closer to a fleeting instance of artistic purity.
Armed with just his acoustic guitar, a loop pedal and his voice, Broughton has made an art form of finding something special in the spur of the moment. Though still in his mid-twenties, his voice has a certain soulful, sage-like quality that can create a comforting atmosphere within the first few words of a song. While cyclical and meditative, the tracks sprawl out blindly, still searching, and lugging with them a trail of dark optimism and heavyhearted insight. The results are often so stunning that independent labels have gone into business just on the premise of putting out his work.
His debut album The Complete Guide to Insufficiency was recorded in a wooden-framed Yorkshire church over one continuous, improvised take and, through a slew of star-laden reviews, was heralded in some corners as a lo-fi masterpiece. The release of It’s in There Somewhere, a compilation of home recordings spanning six years, was released in February and has been followed up by dates in Barcelona’s Primavera festival, the UK’s Greenman folk-fest, and even an appearance in Japan.
The week your latest album came out, I happened to see two old structuralism films and couldn’t help noticing a similarity with the way you compose your music. How would you describe the approach yourself?
“I think you approach building anything from the bottom up, putting down each layer…but the way that I do it, nothing’s planned. I may have had a song structure there, a basic set of lyrics or an idea I wanted to pursue, but the actual way it builds up is kind of accidental. It’ll just come to me on the spot, and it fits. It is that structuralist approach, but it’s not completely thought through. I think it’s more organic in a sporadic sort of way.”
When you reach a certain point in the songs, do you start thinking about dismantling it or do you just let it go?
“It’s more or less to do with the length of my attention span! When I feel like I can’t add anything else, I’ve lost whatever it was propelling me to produce that particular song. Then it’s time to start another idea and to get there, you literally have to press stop, to loop out. By then the next song has already begun.”
Does it ever feel like you might lose control over the song after you’ve reached a certain climax?
“Yeah, I mean that’s the thing. I don’t know where it’s going to go, so hopefully that makes it exciting for people – that it could all go crazy. You’re walking a tightrope, that line between something going wrong and exactly how you hoped it would.”
What does your live show involve?
“Essentially what you hear on The Complete Guide…I really can’t make any personal interaction with the audience, I just run through a whole set of ideas as they come. I think ‘maybe I’ll do this certain song, or introduce some of these sounds.’ But when it actually comes time for me to get up on stage, I forget everything. That means starting from scratch, so I begin improvising noise and then I start to remember some bits of songs and lyrics and different melodies that people may recognise. Whatever happens, happens. Every show is different.”
I notice you use some field recordings now and again; what do you think they add?
“I think my attraction to that comes down to my love of nature and the environment. I like to be able to embrace that. I mean the real music of the world is the sounds that you can hear all over the place, everyday – and they mean different things to people. To be able to hear the birds singing, the waves crashing…Nature is inspiring.”
Speaking of which, I believe you’ve worked as a Conservation Officer…
“Yeah, that was taking volunteers out to do conservation work – planting trees, building footpaths in nature reserves, constructing something that will be beneficial to the environment in a way that increases people’s awareness. It’s the kind of thing that I’m into.”
I recently read that Jana Hunter – with whom I believe you’ve played with – takes people’s pizza orders for a living, which surprised me. Do you think it’s easy to forget that musicians have day jobs?
“Yeah, it’s a strange thing…but beyond that, the division between artist and listener can be so great that people kind of assume they know what a musician is like after seeing them live or playing their record. But it’s funny because you never will know the actual person behind the music or even understand them.”
How do you feel about comparisons made between your voice and the likes of Antony?
“People said that when they first heard the record and at that time I hadn’t heard of Antony or Devendra Banhart at all, so it made me think. I wondered if people might reach the same artistic conclusion if they’ve grown up absorbing the same music. I would have heard a lot of the same records, I presume, that he would have; maybe some kind of way of singing or vibrato could have stuck subconsciously in the mind. As for those making the comparisons, I think everyone judges things from a baseline of knowledge from which they refer back to, so it’s impossible for anyone to take something as a fresh impression, completely ignoring everything they’ve heard before.”
So what music would you have been exposed to, and what do you think has had an influence?
“It really could range from everything because I grew up listening to English blues, through my dad, and there was a thing for ‘60s folk going on in my home town. Everybody that I’ve ever heard has had an influence in some way, but if I go through what I’ve collected the most I’d think it would be Tom Waits or Smog. I don’t know where that would fit in; maybe it’s the experimental side, not sticking to one thing. I think blues comes out quiet a bit though, that kind of traditional American folk song veiled in despair and tragedy but with an underlying feeling fighting on towards the perspective that everything’s all right – it’s all under there somewhere.”
