The October Game

We recently spoke to Nick Zozuch, guitarist and producer with fast rising Bedfordshire collective The October Game about the creation of their new album ‘Wildblood’, calling in favours from musically minded friends, and the advantages of working from home. 

Rock Pulse: Hi Nick, thanks for taking the time to speak to us today. How’re things for you at the moment, what’re you all up to? 

Nick: Things are all very good; we are very literally just about to put out our album so we’re doing a lot of the promotional stuff for that, and we’ve got a couple of gigs coming up over the next couple of weeks so we’re practicing a lot for those too, getting ready to put the album out. It’s all very exciting.

Rock Pulse: Yeah, your second album ‘Wildblood’ is digitally released in a couple of days, with a physical release to follow soon (on March 1st)... how’re you feeling about the album’s release, I suppose that after expending so much time and energy on the record it can be a little daunting to release it onto the world, but also exciting? 

Nick: Yeah absolutely, it’s taken a good while to complete, we started work on it back in the middle of 2008 so it does feel like we’re finally getting to the time that we’ve made it all for. We didn’t make it just to listen to it at home, it’s supposed to be out there. Now’s the time to start, now’s the time to do the hard work I guess. 

Rock Pulse: The album seems to have a naturalistic, organic feel that’s carried through into the instrumentation, artwork, production and so on. What would you say were the major influences on the way that the record has turned out? 

Nick: Well the tracks themselves pretty much all start with just acoustic guitar and voice, they start as folk songs. So when we take it to the full band and try to work at it from there, it’s hard to completely lose the natural element of it. We try to present it in a different way, to add more to it, but ultimately they sound folky and natural because they start off in the most simplistic, natural way that we can do.

Rock Pulse: Ah, cool. Could you tell us a little about the recording process for ‘Wildblood’? There are so many layers of instrumentation on the record, and you chose to produce the album yourselves, with much of the recording done in your own homes... how did that approach go? 

Nick: Yeah exactly, well we went to a studio for a few days just to lay down some drums and bass, but for the rest of the year we did everything else at home. The advantage of doing it at home is that you’re not watching the clock so can spend as much time as you want on anything; we called in favours from all of our friends who owned an instrument and got them to come and do something at some point, so that’s why there’s loads of stuff on there. It was great to have it completely pressure free, to do it on our own in our own time... there’s no reason that it can’t be as near as you can get to perfect. (If it didn’t work out as we intended) we’ve got no one to blame except ourselves, we kept pushing and pushing as hard as we could for about a year at home, and we’re pretty chuffed with the result. 

Rock Pulse: Absolutely... the record was mastered by Frank Arkwright (Arcade Fire, The Smiths, Belle and Sebastian), how did he become involved in the project? 

Nick: Well, he owns a studio called Metropolis, they’ve mastered a lot of good things and are a really good studio, and having recorded most of the record at home we hadn’t really spent anything, hadn’t really gone out and spent. We’d all saved up our pennies for a year and so we said ‘let’s go and get someone who knows what he’s doing to do the final bit’; the fact that he’d worked with Arcade Fire in particular was appealing because we have a similar approach with our sound, a natural but rock sound, so that’s why we went for him really. It’s been great. 

Rock Pulse: As you mentioned earlier there’s an extensive cast of musicians who contributed to the recording alongside yourselves; did you incorporate these musicians’ parts into the songs as they went along, or map them out before they came along to record? 

Nick: The songs started off as just acoustic guitar and voice, but we quickly demoed that with, at the time, the four of us, and then we’d program in electronic loops or we’d program in the kind of things that we’d want strings to do, or the kind of things that we’d like another musician to do, and so on. But when it came to getting an actual musician in and it wasn’t just horrible midi, Casio keyboards down anymore, there was definitely a lot more that we could do with it. Although there were these kind of ‘skeletons’ that we’d made for them they all had their own interpretations, and we were quite up for letting them do their own thing, they know how to play it better than us so we let them interpret what we’d given them. Everyone involved in the album was a friend before in one way or another, so we didn’t have to go to an agency to search for session musicians, it was just meant to be fun really, to work with our friends at home. There was no money in it or anything like that so we called in favours (laughs), we couldn’t afford to go and get the London Symphony Orchestra to come and record (laughs). 

Rock Pulse: (laughs) Cool. So, over the last couple of years you’ve been picking up some major recommendations and plaudits from the music media, fans etc, are you hoping to elevate your profile further with the release of this album and in 2010 overall? Is it a case of just seeing how it goes? 

Nick: Our aim has always been never to stop, but we don’t aim to be famous or anything like that... we also realise that in order for this never to stop we will need to sell some copies so that we can eventually get some money back on it. So it’s going to be just keeping going, keeping doing what we can. The fact that people like Tom Robinson and Guy Garvey, who’re probably the biggest names that we’ve met, like it, is great, we’re chuffed to bits, and if more people like it whether they’re big names or not is excellent. We’ll do everything that we can to get that out. I guess that this is part of it but we’ll play what we can, make the most of what we do and try to make it the biggest thing that we can. 

Rock Pulse: Absolutely. Regarding your live show, how do you go about recreating the kind of expansive but intimate sound that you achieve on record? 

Nick: When we made the album we were a four piece, but we’re now a five piece, with our new member playing viola and keys; our line up live is acoustic guitar, electric guitar, drums, bass and vocals. We’ve got a harmonium as well for organ stuff, with loops and samples, visuals and projections... we’ve got quite a lot of gear to carry (laughs). I guess that it’s a little more stripped down but we try to get as many of the layers from the album in as we can. The loops, the keys, the viola, the harmonium and the acoustic all help with that. 

Rock Pulse: You’re releasing ‘Wildblood’ through your own label Carmandie records... how did that come about? 

Nick: Well, Carmandie is the label that we started for ourselves back in 2006 when we released our first album (‘Box of a Billion Lights’), and it was literally just so that we could own the album properly, and now that all the work’s finished on this second album we’re now putting out this one through Carmandie too. We’re also working with a label called Scylla who’re helping out with the album’s distribution, it does mean that it’s going out to a bit of a wider audience than before really. 

Rock Pulse: Great stuff. You guys also put on multi art nights and shows in Hitchin under the banner of ‘Fuzzy Face,’ so to finish up could you give us some pointers as to an artist or artists that you’ve worked with and have really impressed you, that we should perhaps be checking out? 

Nick: The first live band this decade to have blown me away, who we’ve been playing with for quite a while, are a band called Toodar. We’ve known them for a couple of years through playing with them and we’ve become friends because we’re mutual fans of each other’s music, rather than it being the case that we’re fans of the music because we’re friends with the band; they’re excellent, well worth checking out, with really beautiful, soulful songwriting and a bit of an electronica twist to it as well. 

Rock Pulse: That’s great, thanks. 

Nick: No problem, thanks. 

For more info on The October Game, as well as for future tour dates, visit:www.myspace.com/theoctobergame.

The October Game’s second album ‘Wildblood’ is available through the usual digital outlets, and is in shops now.