Strangers By Starlight is the avant-garde pairing of Anthony Saggers (Stray Ghost) and Eugine S. Robinson (Oxbow). Two unique musicians who, in a testament to the global nature of the modern world, have overcome geographical boundaries to create a truly unique album. A combination of dark jazz, ambient electroniscs, distinctive vocals and noir lyrics is what makes Chalk White Nights (Bad Paintings) such a stunning listening experience. Sean M. Palfrey caught up with Saggers and Robinson to discuss the ins and outs of this musical collaboration.

Where did the idea to collaborate on Stranger By Starlight come from?

Eugene S. Robinson: Well, Mr. Saggers had contacted me about contributing vocals to a Stray Ghost release, I think is how we came to know each other. After listening, I wholeheartedly agreed. So suddenly just one song didn’t seem to make any sense. Or like Lydia Lunch once said to me, “no need to dig any graves before we need to.” But it was not me who was smart enough to think that we should do a whole record/album. However, when Mr. Saggers offered, I again readily accepted since it just seemed to make sense to me. And musically there was something there that I was not hearing anywhere else really. So the prospect of being able to make my voice make the music even more black and magical, well that made even more sense to me. Plus it came at a good time for me. which is to say, a very bad time. One of the many times I believed I was losing my grip on life and circumstance. So it served a lot of masters.

Anthony Saggers: Way back in 2009, I think, I had finished what is now the opening track of the album and wasn’t sure what to do with it; it didn’t fit in with what I was doing at the time with Stray Ghost so it just kind of sat there unused waiting for me to come up with a way to make use of it. The more I listened to it, the more I had these visions of Eugene’s vocals fitting perfectly. At the time this was just a pipe dream as for me Oxbow were well above my level; but eventually I decided, on a bit of a whim, to send the track to Eugene via myspace. We had met once previously at Supersonic Festival in Birmingham and I had been in touch a few times as a fan of Oxbow. I didn’t at all expect a positive response, but thankfully Eugene loved it and recorded the vocals almost immediately. The rest as they say, is history.

You’re both known for very different musical projects, did you go into this with any preconceptions as to how the end result would sound, or was it more organic?

ESR: Lyrically and vocally it was very organic. I mean preconceptions are useful if you know what you’re doing but since much of what we end up doing we end up drawing from this well of the unconscious, well, it would make sense if we were a cover band. But we’re not. But also I am not writing the music. So the process could be different depending on who you’re talking to.

AS: Well, after the idea to do an entire album came about, I suddenly realised that I had no idea how to go about making it a reality; I mean I had no idea that this was going to become such a huge project when I sent that first track, and all of a sudden I had the responsibility to create something of a fitting standard… I remember that it was pretty terrifying.To be perfectly honest, the two years of my life that I first spent working on the album were a blur of sleepless nights and heavy substance abuse, so all I can remember clearly about my intentions is that I told myself to stay away from everything I had been doing with Stray Ghost. I suppose in a certain way this meant that the process was a very organic one, in that there were no pre-decided artistic goals or guidelines set out between the two of us, it was more Eugene saying “show me what you come up with”… and me going and locking myself away until I had something. Thankfully he liked everything I sent, we had two other tracks that were going to be used as a vinyl release, but nothing that was planned for the album was scrapped or abandoned.

The collaboration has been hinted at for a few years. Why has it taken so long to see the light of day?

ESR: We’re notoriously passive marketers of genius. So this is how long it took for us to find like-minded geniuses in the form and company of the folks at Bad Paintings.

AS: It’s an understatement to say that we encountered numerous frustrations with trying to get it released, including one that got so close to fruition that after it fell through, I became pretty dejected about the whole thing; and for a while after I was too bitter to try again for nearly a year or so… there’s only so much rejection you can take before you don’t want to go through it any longer and just sit there brooding like a moody fucker. I mean the album was finished nearly two years ago, although I would go back every now and then to do a “final mastering”, which rendered the previous 10 final masterings obsolete… I once spent an entire month just mastering the clean vocal tracks…it became a bit of a running joke.I think this over emphasis on mixing/mastering the album might have put a slight hold on the release process too…but in the end it was worth it. The album that’s about to be released is far superior, in terms of sound quality and production, to what would have been released a year or so ago.

The album will be released on Bad Paintings. How did that partnership come about?

ESR: I think I sent them an email. With a song. Very simple and not a lot of extra misery.

AS: Eugene just came out of nowhere and told me that a label were interested, I think he had met them somewhere and it just immediately worked; they seemed like very dedicated and above all very cool guys who were just getting a label started, but who seemed pretty obviously headed toward a bright future. We all were on the same page, and I think that it just felt as if it was going swiftly in the right direction.

What was it like to create this album with both members on opposite sides of the world, and did you find it to be a practical way of working?

ESR: Well, I travel a lot. Like my pornstar friend Mr. Marcus likes to say about me, “He gets around.” So whether it’s an Oxbow tour, a book tour where Saggers played with me and Craig Clouse from Todd, or me being over for the London Jazz festival thing I did with Barry Adamson, we’ve had plenty of times to meet and do the kinds of things “normal” bands do. Or don’t do.

AS: There are two sides to that coin for sure… It was difficult in that communicating ideas when not in direct contact with someone can be quite stressful, although I do enjoy and somehow need a lot of space and privacy while working on something and so that was never an issue. Whatever problems we encountered were ultimately negated by the fact that being in different countries probably stopped Eugene from killing me a few times… ha-ha!

Chalk White Nights is an album that quite effectively fuses a lot of musical ideas together including dark-ambient an jazz. What were the main inspirations behind it?

ESR: This is sort of like asking the magician how they did that trick with the rabbit. But in a very general way I’d say that I was inspired by my novel A Long Slow Screw, I was inspired by insoluble emotional difficulties, I was inspired by deep and irretrievable loss. I was inspired by small moments of joy. But maybe you mean musically? Well, I’d hope the music in our heads is what inspired us.

AS: Well, I listened to Your Funeral, My Trial by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds almost everyday back then (it still is possibly my favourite album…) and listening back to Chalk White Nights it obviously became one of the dominant influences for me, musically and in terms of atmosphere…thankfully I think I avoided being derivative. Raymond Chandler was also a huge influence on how I approached writing; I wanted to create a mystery that unfolds in that typical film-noir atmosphere of cigarette smoke and shadowy violence. It has to be said that Angelo Badalamenti’s scores for David Lynch and Bohren and the Club of Gore’s moonlight jazz found their way in there somehow…all these things, blended up and filtered through my own sensibilities and techniques.

In terms of lyrical narrative, there is a very noir atmosphere reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and even William Burroughs running throughout and indeed the release flows on from Eugene Robinson’s own novel ‘A Long Slow Screw’. How did you approach writing the lyrics?

ESR: Very much akin to automatic writing. I came up with the band name, which Saggers hated. And the record title. And then we were off to the races. I listened to the music he had written with pen in hand and wrote while I listened. And between novels…the finished A Long Slow Screw and the next, but as of yet unfinished LOVE? LOVE!…my lyrical preoccupations sit soundly in the arena of sex and terror. Twin engines for all kinds of good/not so good things, I would guess. But I was not consciously thinking noir at all. That’s a genre. I don’t know that I think in genre terms.

AS: It’s true that I didn’t like the band name, but it sits easier with me now and I’m beginning to even like it… I never suggested anything that was better anyhow.
It’s a testament to how long ago we started working on this that I thought I had originally come up with the album title… ha-ha, the clouded waters of memory.

Outside of Oxbow, Robinson has leant his vocals to a variety of bands in the past. How did this project differ for you?

ESR: Well this is different from even the song I did for Stray Ghost because this was Saggers and I working together on something that was consciously something we were working together on. it’s much closer to my own. but all of my collaborations are pretty close to my own. if I am just doing one song for someone that’s very different. but I am not spending time on a whole record if it’s not something I am not feeling super strongly about.

AS: For me, I consciously wanted to avoid the overt aggression that is often central to most of the work Eugene had done previously; it was tempting to just have an entire album of flailing guitar and feedback, but that would have been too close to Oxbow. In order to distance the project from preconceived notions of who we are as artists I wanted to give Eugene a vessel for something subtler, and in a way far more sinister…and push myself to make something that was less classically-influenced and openly melancholy than my work as Stray Ghost.
I think the album still ended up being a very melancholy affair, but in a far more psychologically disturbing way. I’m also very happy that Eugene used the music as a stimulus to channel something slightly different to what I had heard him do before, far more restrained and terrifying, with a real deathly poetry to it.

The album, despite its avant-garde feel, is visually very evocative. Is there any chance of a promotional video or short film to accompany it?

ESR: Oh yes. Anthony Saggers is not only a musical genius but his visual sensibilities are genius as well. So there is a promo video. And I love it as much as the song it was designed for.

AS: I just made a very short teaser video, which to my surprise was very well received by everyone else involved with the release…If anyone were to offer to make something longer, a short film for example… I would not be opposed…. but it would have to be done right.

Despite being a two-man project, is there any possibility of Stranger By Starlight making it onto the live stage?

ESR: We don’t do anything without the expectation of doing it live. but this must be done right. Dirty shit clubs? Not right. Non-traditional stage spots, with decent lights and good sound? Much more right.

AS: There have been plans for a long time to do live shows, I played guitar for a reading of Eugene’s last novel at the Old Blue Last in London, and that went very well… so I’m optimistic for the future. There are however complications in that I am very short on equipment. I don’t think it’s ever been made clear that I work with very limited resources, my laptop for instance would die a slow death if pressed into live music making services, and Eugene is usually very short on time… and there’s the fact that we live on opposite sides of the world.
There are plans however, and hopefully somehow the funds needed to make it a reality will appear… there is also the problem that the album was written a long time ago, and I never figured out how to play the songs live. Thankfully I recently un-earthed all of the chords and song structures, which I had long thought lost… so things are looking up on this front I echo Eugene’s statement about it needing to be done right, so fingers crossed.

Sean M. Palfrey

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