Listen to their self-titled debut album, released in February, and you might pick up traits of folk, post-rock, and Midwest emo, but witness caroline live and you’ll find that here is a different beast. We caught up with the London band on Vlieland to discuss their approach to performance, and how it is the space that, more than anything, defines their sound.
Written by: Ruben van Dijk
Photos: Marieke de Graaff
By the time the bunker on the cover of caroline’s debute album finished construction, it had already been lost to history. Built in 1941 in anticipation of a seaborne German invasion that never came, it seems to have never been used. The last few decades, it has spent slowly sliding down the clay cliffside on top of which it once sat, falling victim not to human discord but to gradual coastal erosion.
Knowledge of the fortification has barely reached beyond Kent’s Isle of Sheppey, or even Warden, the quiet holiday village near which it can be found. Local residents are much too preoccupied, and understandably so, with their own lived-in homes under threat of disappearing into the North Sea. Nevertheless the bunker caught the eye of visual artist Selina Bonelli and, through their work, caroline.
Bonelli’s work on the bunker deals with the “tidal nature of our histories” and “fossilised mourning”. The explanation offered by Jasper Llewelyn, one of caroline’s three founding members, is much simpler: “We were attracted to it. There was always a thing about the caroline aesthetic that involved these surreal objects sitting in places, hanging around somewhere, floating. That was the style we always ended up creating.” Similar images appeared alongside the two singles, ‘Dark blue’ and ‘Skydiving onto the library roof’, that preceded caroline, showing a stepladder on the brink of falling over and a deck chair sliding down a hillside. “We thought this site had so much in it already. All we would need to do is just go and improvise some actions there with some objects.”
"I’m excited by the idea of people just stumbling into our set and being like: ‘What is this racket? This is rubbish!'"
Casper Hughes
If there is one thing that has stood out during the brief time I have now spent with caroline – wandering around the dunes of Vlieland with Mike O’Malley and Casper Hughes in early September, then catching up with Llewelyn over Zoom right after their North American tour a month later – is that none of the founding members seem too interested in any textual or literal approach to their music. Rather, their passion is deeply rooted in spaciousness and texture. They play not to an audience, but with an environment, wherever they perform.
Which on Vlieland is among the slopes of the Netherlands’ second tallest sand dune, looking out at a bright red lighthouse and a scattered audience seeking shelter from the scorching sun. Though part of the Into The Great Wide Open Festival, the stage is in a remote, quiet location, the only real ‘disrupting’ sound coming from the ferries signalling with fog horns their arrival to the island. “But that was cool,” O’Malley reflects after the show, looking out over the Wadden Sea. They’re not so easily distracted, says Hughes: “We’ve played so many festivals where noise from other stages has protruded and… I never like to say ‘interfered’, because wherever people listen to the music, whatever bleeds in becomes a part of it.”
It's a liberating approach to be sure – inhabiting your locale without necessarily demanding its attention. Their previous performance on Dutch soil demonstrated just how far the band are willing to take that. Part of their residency at showcase festival Motel Mozaïque, caroline played an improvised set at Rotterdam’s Museumpark that caught quite a few casual park goers off-guard by dialling up the dissonance from their album set with frantic screaming, violent string plucking, and endless repetitions; disseminating a sense of chaos in what is ordinarily an urban oasis.
O’Malley: “We’ve done improvised things before and normally everyone who’s watching is a willing participant. Before we played, I was like: this is a very risky thing, because some people might really not like our sounds. In retrospect, it’s almost more exciting doing it like that, because it’s a very randomized experience.”
Hughes, chiming in: “I think we’ve all had experiences of coming across a sound and just being totally flabbergasted by it. You just stumble across something, whether you’re at a festival or just walking around and you hear this amazing noise, like: what the fuck is this? In a way, I’m excited by the idea of people just stumbling into our set and being like: ‘What is this racket? This is rubbish!’”
Describing their audience as participants is but one way through which caroline is trying to move beyond the (often physical) barriers that can isolate them as a performing artist. They are a band of eight and insist on playing ‘in the round’, or at least facing each other in a horseshoe formation, which has often led to them being put on large stages in even larger rooms. (Like when they played a near-empty Rotterdamse Schouwburg.) O’Malley, Hughes, and Llewelyn are quick to list the type of venue where they feel much more comfortable playing. Like the living room in which they performed in Washington D.C., or (Le) Poisson Rouge (formerly The Village Gate) in Manhattan, where they met their rowdiest room yet, yelling and cheering all throughout. Llewelyn: “It validates the thing you’re doing is worth doing. It’s not even really about there being sounds as such, but there being a strong ambience of people close and around; not just standing in lines looking up at a stage. It’s the whole atmosphere of some people listening, some people playing.”
As such, caroline like to play parts of their set unamplified, directly into the room – like the vocals on ‘Engine (eavesdropping)’. It’s a habit rooted in the founding members’ shared suburban past, when they played and listened to folk music almost exclusively. Llewelyn: “When we were teenagers, we played outside a lot and we played unamplified. We realized the music didn’t have to be folky, and it could actually be a way of approaching sounds. We started exploring the edges of acoustic instruments, of ‘acousticness’ generally, creating juxtaposition with electric instruments and amplified vocals, pushing the distances by having some things very close and others very far away. A lot of that has come from having experience performing in folk contexts. It’s part of the same thing. For so long, I had no idea how to use a PA or a microphone, any of these things. I could just play a guitar and sing.”
In a way space, and the space between the space, is caroline’s most vital instrument, one that the band is never entirely in control of. But far be it from them to seek control. Both their disruptive nature onstage and their giddy hijinks off-stage, however different in tone they may be, are proof that a certain degree of disorder and unpredictability is just right for caroline. So if predictions are in order, now that the band is working on their sophomore record, Llewelyn reckons “it’ll be a little bit less clean. I think we’re more interested in messiness now than back then. We’re less interested in minimalism, so I feel there’ll be more going on aesthetically.” So go on, when you can, and bear witness to stepladders and deck chairs falling; old bunkers slowly sinking into the North Sea.
