Swear I Love You | Interview | “Psych Meets Coldwave”
Swear I Love You is a Swiss band formed in 2019. Their sound is expansive, equal parts heavy and ethereal, stained with an alpine kind of psychedelia, inspired by forests, mountains and (magic) mushrooms, flying clouds and a golden translucent low-angled light glowing through the dark foliage and prairie wildflowers.
The band is highly influenced by Brian Jonestown Massacre and early Black Angels. Novelty comes hand in hand with a renewed collective enthusiasm channeled through the music composition and performance of their hypnotic and captivating tunes.
Pacifique Vuillemin: Lead Vocal, Guitar & bass
Mehdi Benkler: guitar
Joël Bovy: drums & vocals
Simon Genoud: bass, guitar & vocals
John Silvestre: keys & guitar
You recently announced a new 12 inch maxi vinyl for the single ‘Down The Stream’ including remixes by Anton Newcombe (The Brian Jonestown Massacre), Amscon featuring Claire Dromelet and Die Wilde Jagd. Tell us more about it?
Joël Bovy: I’m a big fan and very nostalgic about 12″. We used to found them in big quantities in the record stores in the 80s and 90s. Bands like Depeche Mode or Bjork much later, always released two 12″ records. Single with many different versions remixed by the cream of the music producers of that time. So I have talked about that with the band and they told me, “go, enjoy yourself”! (More or less, haha).
After their agreement, I contacted friends like Anton Newcombe and Sebastian Lee Philipp from Die Wilde Jagd and also friends from our small and beautiful city Vevey. I asked them if they would be interested in the project and they all said, “yes”.
How was it to work with Anton Newcombe?
Joël Bovy: Easy. We have sent the tracks to him and he send it back some weeks later, having replayed all the instruments by himself. In a way telling us that the track was good, but not good enough, haha.
“The music that make us feel appease”
So there are three releases on Exag’ Records. Let’s talk about your debut self-titled album. What kind of album did you want to make?
Pacifique Vuillemin: It’s been a while since we did music together (Joël , Mehdi and me at least). Our previous projects were quite different, more noisy and intense. It was all about the performance. Maybe at a point we grew tired of this intensity and violence in the music. We wanted to play the kind of music we enjoy to listen to at anytime. The music that make us feel appease and reminds us on our childhood. This album is about the comfort of nostalgia and melancholy. It is about melodies that stays in the head and making a homage to the music that
made us who we are now.
Your sound is a fusion of Brian Jonestown Massacre and coldwave … it’s really hard to describe it. How would you describe your sound?
Pacifique Vuillemin: You’re quite right in your description! We can’t deny Brian Jonestown Massacre influence. We have always listened and admired this band. Anton is a master of using references and extracting the essence of it to make brand new tune. And you feel that you already know it. Majority of our album was composed with that very intention. For the coldwave part, it is definitely something we want to include in our music. From David Bowie to The Cure and many more. We refer to this reference with nostalgia and melancholic feelings. But to answer your question, between us we just say our music is pop because we used to play much weirder stuff, haha.
You’ve been on the scene for about two years now. When and how did you all originally meet?
Pacifique Vuillemin: Mehdi is a quite famous musician and concert photographer in Switzerland with super social skills unlike me, so inevitably he met Joël who was programmer at RKC and Nox Orae Festival. They soon started a band and Mehdi who I barely knew from photography school, asked me to join. That became our first band together. We were called Forks. It was 8-9 years ago. Back then we did different stuff and Simon appeared a little later. He was a friend always helpful, the guy of every partys, mixing music with Mehdi. At a point it was obvious we should made a new band with him. It really happened when a friend programmer asked us if we were up to play at his club, but at that time we were having a break from our last project called MK-Ultra. We said ok but with a totally new and different project including Simon. Swear I Love You was born.
“We have a deep affection for analog”
A peek into your creative process please, digital or analog?
Pacifique Vuillemin: We have a deep affection for analog and would have loved to do it on tape, but we picked the easy way. We had the opportunity to access a super nice place for free up Vevey in the mountains. It was not a studio but an empty wooden classroom with a fireplace and the most delightful view. We used my recording gear which consist of Focusrite Clarett sound cart and a pair of Yamaha NS-10. The mics were borrowed from different friends, nothing fancy but some good Sennheiser 421, Octava mk12… The 8 day live recording session was lead by our dear friend John Silvestre who has a good knowledge of recording and now plays keyboards live with us. Vocals, keyboards and some overdub guitars came after.
We sent the raw recordings but well arranged to Jari Antti at Monoton Studio Berlin for the mix. He is a good friend and we really enjoyed his work on his band album (‘Mr. Ray’). Then the mastering was done by Dan Suter.
Is your approach to laying down music a building block process?
Pacifique Vuillemin: We can say it that way. For this first album I have brought most of the tangles of melodies but the real work was to build together from that. We discussed a lot about how we were hearing each tune, what kind of a feeling and ambience was it supposed to evolved in. Each of us proposed and bring new ideas from personal references making our music more complex, breaking the cliché that we might have thought, that’s why it’s so hard to define our style. We try as much as possible to put egos aside and serve the tune, it is very enjoyable to work this way!
How would you compare ‘Under The Pines’ maxi to your latest album? Do you feel that the band is getting more mature with each new recording?
Pacifique Vuillemin: Actually we just have done one album recording as Swear I Love You. ‘Under the Pines’ maxi and ‘Down the Stream’ maxi are remixes of tracks taken from the album. But we are currently working on new compositions and we will certainly do some things differently in the production process, it’s very important to try new stuff (gears, places, peoples) to have an identity on each album I guess.
Joël Bovy: I don’t think that the band is getting more mature album after album. We eternally will stay young teenagers, haha, but on the other hand we know better now what we want as a result of our musical work together.
How are you coping with the current world situation and what are some future plans for you?
Pacifique Vuillemin: We do the best we can out of this shit like most of musicians I guess. We were not able to play concerts for the release of our album but we tried to keep it alive doing music videos for almost each track! And also we had the chance to be played quite a lot on Switzerland’s radios. We didn’t took a break. We are working on new songs and lately rehearsing for the upcoming concerts, finally!
Joël Bovy: Personally, I’ve planned to make this world less stupid, but I’ve already abandoned.
Klemen Breznikar
Swear I Love You Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp / YouTube
Exag’ Records Official Website / Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / Bandcamp / YouTube / Spotify
Headline photo: Swear I Love You by Titouan Massé
