the Urban Artist Group presents...

When it comes to the modern singer/songwriters of this vast City Earth, Tim Holehouse, UK songsmith and sound-artist, is unquestionably one of the rarest and most interesting of the lot. With little more than an acoustic guitar and his voice, Tim Holehouse creates a dark and haunting soundscape of lo-fi blues and antifolk...that is, if a name can be attached to it at all. But names are decidedly less important than the songs themselves and what lies behind the songs. So in an attempt to get to the heart of the songs, as well as to what lies behind them, I asked Tim if he wanted to be featured in our little art rag here in the States. It wasn't long before he replied, enthusiastically accepting my offer. And it wasn't long after he and I discussed the basics of the article that I received an overseas press package in the mail. Enclosed was a pre-release copy of Tim's latest solo endeavor: "From the Dawn Chorus..."
           After listening to the record a handful of times, and having developed both an artistic and personal relationship with each of the ten songs on it, I felt it was time to take the next step and do an interview with Tim. Throughout an entire night of drinking strong convenience store coffee and chain-smoking generic brand cigarettes this past winter, I sat at my computer typing in an inspired frenzy to complete, one after another, the questions that served as my part of our online interview. In the early hours of the following morning, exhausted both mentally and physically, with the night's cold, lingering darkness still pressing against the windows, and with my writing room awash in the soft blue glow from the computer monitor, which made my eyelids even heavier, I copied the interview questions, transferred them to e-mail format, and sent them to Tim.
           Tim was very quick to send back the completed interview material. And, after reading his answers, it was rather evident that he had put a lot of thought and effort into them, as well as a much appreciated degree of openness and honesty.
Being that I knew very little about Tim Holehouse other than that he was a very talented and highly original singer/songwriter from the UK, I wanted to use the first question of the interview as a sort of introductory piece, with which to ask him: "Who is Tim Holehouse, not just as a singer/songwriter, but as a human being of this crazy City Earth in which we live?" And he replied...
           Well, I guess I'm a guy who was brought up in Portsmouth, the naval flagship city of the United Kingdom. From there I lived for a while in Exeter, London, and briefly in Edinburgh. I've been in bands since I was 14. I have played everything but drums (although that changed recently when I jammed with a band on drums).
           These days I'm a one man show under two different guises: Tim Holehouse the folk/country/blues acoustic guy, and Timothy "Drone" musician and lord and master of harsh noise.
           I am now a traveling musician living on the road (although that's going to change soon...but I'll talk more about that later). And I guess it's fair to say I'm a lover, not a fighter.
           Occasionally, when it comes to music, one happens upon an entirely new breed of animal---a singer/songwriter whose sound is nearly incomparable to that of his or her fellow artists---and Tim Holehouse is just such an animal. Of course, one could simply insert him into the folky blues categories where singer/songwriters like M. Ward, Taylor Kirk (Timber Timbre), Pete Yorko, Naomi Scott (Naomi Hates Humans), and Angelo Spencer reside, but even they wouldn't sum up his overall sound quite right. On the other hand, one could also place him beside the likes of: Strand of Oaks, the Mountain Goats, Octoberman, and Frontier Ruckus. You see, there's a notable beauty and eclecticism in Tim Holehouse's music that is largely absent in contemporary alternative and indie circles, and which strays well beyond the borders of blues and folk into other musical and artistic realms, some of which I haven't any names for. And that's one of the reasons his music appeals to me so much: there's nothing commonplace about it.
           Aesthetically, Tim's songs have a rather wide range, though many of them tend to have a dark and brooding quality. And while that is so, it is also true that his songs don't hold true to any particular pattern and go from one to the next like the drastically changing seasons here in the northeast. The shifting temperaments are at times subtle, while at others much more noticeable, but never too extreme. And the various components of each song seem to revolve around the elements of not only Tim's surface character, but his innermost self as well, rising up from his center in bursts of artistic and personal expression, from the album's second track, "Good Morning, Mr. Vampire" (a somber soundscape of intelligent and moving note-play, instrumental echoes, and oddly timed percussion, with soft, trembling vocals), to the fourth track, "Everyday, You" (a slow-moving vessel of a song, dark and airy, with effective note bends and the sound of fingers sliding down the fret board to create a bluesy, country-esque atmosphere, with vocals that harmonize off and on with the corresponding instrumentation), to the seventh track, "Tree on the Hill" (a darkly beautiful song with brilliant layers of acoustic guitar and duet vocals between Tim and Naomi Scott of Naomi Hates Humans), to the ninth track, "Searching For" (a piano-driven piece with strong, almost spoken word vocals), and so on. (Note: I only mention a few songs in the above paragraph because to mention them all in descriptive terms would be overdoing it a bit. And besides, the listener of the record should come up with his or her own ideas on the material he or she is experiencing.)
           Just as I've already mentioned in the opening line of this article, when it comes to the modern singer/songwriters of thidss vast City Earth, Tim Holehouse, UK songsmith and sound-artist, is unquestionably one of the rarest and most interesting of the lot. Music isn't just an art form for Tim Holehouse; it's a lifestyle. Even more than that, it's a religion. It's a movement. It's something absolutely necessary. Something vital to his existence.
           When I first heard Tim's music, I was quite naturally taken in by it, and I told him as much. In fact, I told him that I thought his songs were brilliant, that his music was unlike so much of the music out there in the world today, and that he obviously didn't fashion his sound after the music of other musicians and singer/songwriters...or at least if he did, it didn't show. Frankly, I was curious about his history as a musician and singer/songwriter. And I was more than a little surprised, though only at first, to find out that his beginnings were not as the lo-fi blues and antifolk artist as so many know him now, but as something else entirely. He explained it like this...
           Well, the story of me becoming a solo artist is a weird one. Basically, I have been in many different bands over the years, from progressive rock bands to full-on metal bands. In fact, I spent the last 7 or 8 years around the DIY hardcore and punk scenes, playing in several different bands, the main two being: Soon the Darkness (a melodic hardcore band) and Among the Missing (a sludge metal band). The truth is that I came into doing solo stuff purely by accident. I had also been experimenting with electronic trip-hop stuff, kinda like Portishead, Tricky, and Massive Attack, etc, for a while, and we did the odd live gig as a sort of duo. But then I started writing some songs just for myself, really...songs that never quite worked for the project or bands I was in at the time. My first few shows came about as accidents as well, one being when my band couldn't do a show together, and others at friends' houses. It was all very casual for a few years, just something I did occasionally. Then, somewhere around the summer of 2005, when I was participating in about five different bands, I went to see a band called Funeral Diner, and I played one of my earliest, if not my first solo show with them (I can't remember exactly which). The singer Seth had said, "Oh, I'll put your solo album out!" To be honest, I thought he was just being nice. In my mind, I was a band guy, basically. But at another show, about two years later, Seth comes up to me and asks, "Where's that album? You promised me you were going to record all of your songs." He assured me that he had been serious and that he still was. So I told him I would do it. A couple of weeks later a guy called Jim (Millipeed Records), having seen me play at one of his friend's houses, asked me to play a place called the Homestead in Southampton. After the show, which was the first time I was on the bill under my own name (I think), he asked if he could put out my record in the UK. So I guessed it was time to record my songs.
           Luckily, my parents live out in the middle of nowhere. So I took my four-track (if was good enough for Bruce Springsteen to have recorded his Nebraska album on one of them!) to their place one weekend while they were away, and I recorded 7 of my favorite (or rather, the 7 that worked best together). Soon after, I went back and re-recorded a couple of songs, as they needed drums, so we spent 3 hours in a practice space and recorded the songs with my friend, Mark Braby, who's an amazing drummer. In the end, the recording ended up costing a total of about 30 pounds (and that was for the practice space). The album was titled: "Found Dead at the Shoreline." And the themes for that record were love, death, and the sea. All of the songs were deeply personal, but the way I write is very coded and one wouldn't know they about certain people even if one knew them oneself. Musically, I guess I took a lot of inspiration from stuff like Low, Codeine, and Galaxy 500 on that particular record. It was all very quiet, dark and brooding, with a lot of held chords. Part of the reason for the long held chords was because I struggled to sing and play guitar at the same time (to be honest about it). I had been a guitar player in bands, and I had been a singer, but never had I done them simultaneously. It was a lot to do with confidence, too. I still think, for what it's worth, "Found Dead at the Shoreline" is a very nice record, mainly because it's just an incredibly honest one.
           After that I got better at playing and singing at the same time and I learned, and I'm still learning new tricks, musically. Thematically the songs are still fairly personal but sometimes still run with a different kind of theme. One of the tracks on the new record, for example, is about Spike Milligan, one of my favorite comedians ever. Over Christmas I watched a program about his struggle with mental illness and depression, so as a subject very close to my heart, and he being an idol of mine, I wrote a song about him. Lately, other themes have been very rural based, film based, and...well, I also seem to be writing a lot of traveling blues songs. These days, musically, I guess I mix doom metal spacings with blues scales and tuning (I play in d-g-d-g-b-b almost exclusively these days), much of which is accompanied by traditional folk melodies. I always feel like I'm learning things from other writers. And I know that I still have a long way to go on my journey.
           On Tim's new record, "From the Dawn Chorus...," he admittedly stepped into a more experimental realm of songwriting, and I was more than a little curious as to what caused that shift in his process. Not only that, but I was also curious as to which style he thought represented him better as an artist...unless, of course, he felt that both represented him equally and were simply two separate facets of his artistic self. When I brought these thoughts to his attention, he said...
           Well, "From the Dawn Chorus..." is a strange record, certainly the most ambitious thing I've ever attempted. Visualizing the songs with strings and then actually adding strings and full band arrangements and such was a big undertaking. I suppose it's kind of experimental that in some ways I made up my own rules for the way I approached the writing and arrangements. It's also the first record to feature what has currently become my preferred tuning (d-g-d-g-b-b), although I did some of the material in standard tunings. Most of the songs were written for the album, though I did end up taking some of the older songs that I had never been quite happy with, at least not happy enough with them to record them, re-worked them a bit, and ultimately I felt they fit thematically with the rest of it. While it took maybe about two months to write the whole album, putting it together and recording it took nearly a year and a half. Even then, there were still bits I would have loved to have re-done.
           Yes, I guess it's pretty bleak, like a lot of my other material. I don't know if it's quite as bleak as "Found Dead at the Shoreline," though some of it is definitely a bit more euphoric. It's true, I don't do many upbeat numbers. I guess I have a pretty deep and sad voice. And I was also going through a rather dark period when I wrote the songs for this record. A lot of personal change took place while recording the album, too, which may have affected the overall sound. "From the Dawn Chorus..." was me writing and recording a full solo album as a solo artist for the first time, and I think I was very conscious of that fact. And I ended up thinking to myself, "Well, if I ever make another solo record, at least this one turned out pretty much how I imagined it would."
           Having gotten to know Tim through our extensive correspondence, I am very much intrigued by him, and I can say without a moment's pause that he is undoubtedly the kind of artist I admire and respect above most others. I mean, this bearded, shaggy-haired young man, looking like some sort of Euro-poet, casual artist, Undergrounder and meditative bodhisattva wanderer of the great Highway World, lists his favorite bands and singer/songwriters in an order which ranges from Godspeed You Black Emperor to John Coltrane, from Tom Waits and Nick Cave to Neurosis and Murder City Devils and Ink and Dagger, and so on. As far as his own music is concerned, he doesn't see the point in writing and recording songs he never intends to play live. He is a restless soul of the traveling world, going place to place to share his extraordinary and wonderful songs. And what's more, he lives his life by Bill Hicks' words: "Play from your fucking heart!"

www.myspace.com/timholehouse