At first I feel pretty bad chatting with Angel Deradoorian. Conducting her last interview for the day, she’d no doubt be itching to get back to the real world, and it turns out I am also preventing her from enjoying a pretty great night out.
But selfish as it may be, I quickly become enamoured of talking with the experimental singer-songwriter. From her work with former band Dirty Projectors to her debut solo album, The Expanding Flower Planet, Deradoorian makes music that defies description. Yet it is her observations on performance, reality and writing that truly fuel our conversation.
“I was planning on going to see Megadeth, but they’re playing right now,” she says. “I had to choose Megadeth or interviews, and I tried to reschedule it, but then I fell asleep and by the time I woke up it was too late. I was tempted to try and do both, but then I’d be outside at a Megadeth concert, screaming at people down the phone, not hearing anything so making up answers.”
That idea actually has all the hallmarks of an amazing interview, but we bravely overcome having zero conversational obstacles to talk about the development of the album some seven months after its release. Back then, Pitchfork described it rather picturesquely as “an album full of trapdoors” that plunged the listener down sudden sonic shafts. It’s an apt sentiment, and while the songs still allow Deradoorian space to expand, when it comes to her live show we’ll be hearing a very considered set.
“Well, I’m very impatient, so I want to change it all the time. This is the most consistent I’ve ever been playing live. But I have opportunities to play the music by myself, and there I can change it a lot. I just did a couple of solo shows in Brooklyn and rerecorded all of the songs and then bounced them onto a cassette, made them sound really lo-fi and fucked up. Really gritty. Songs can always evolve. It’s like, when you’re recording them you’re kind of putting them to death in a weird way. It’s not bad, but I think for live situations, you get the opportunity to change that. At least for now, though, I’m trying to be consistent. I’m also at a point in my career where people are just getting to know me and my solo music, so I have some freedom there.”
The concept of death has an unexpected prevalence as we talk. Deradoorian is by no means morbid or particularly grim, but the essence of experience – including our grasp on mortality and the finite – seems a recurring concern.
“If you’re geared towards the melancholic aspects of life, you tend to write them out. I think to a lot of people I seem negative or sad, but in my mind I’m a realist. I also think I’m much more optimistic now than I’ve ever been. But I’m still sensitive that when things are heavy, I have to explore why I feel that. Like, what part of my childhood made it so much harder for me to deal with it now? I think that might actually be futile. I think I always had some semi-sinister understanding that the world was not really the place I wanted to be. I wanted to be in other worlds, and so I lived in my imagination for the most part. Or read books, seeing beautiful places that I couldn’t go to. Trying to do something that was artistically linked to a way to get to these places.
“[Looking back over] journals now I wonder, ‘Huh. Was I just always sad? Did I ever have a happy day?’ I should start writing some of the happy times, too. ‘I had a delicious orange today. It was so fresh and wonderful!’ But usually it’s just, ‘Wow. I feel like shit.’” She breaks off, laughing.
Deradoorian’s output has already won over many listeners both within the industry and without, and though the development of her craft has ensured her sense of creative freedom is largely unchallenged – after all, the sheer variety of Expanding Flower could see subsequent albums move in countless directions – there remains a troubled core. She is very open about the emotional and philosophical struggles that have shackled her in the past, and of those that continue to cast a pall.
“I’ve been thinking about music a lot lately, and how it’s kind of like a conduit,” she says. “It can serve you completely differently at different times in your life. I don’t know. For a time I had a bit of a jaded view of what music is, and that’s changed a lot lately. I feel like I’m much more open to listening, but I’m still very critical of what I hear. It’s hard to talk about.
“I think making [the album] reflected my mental and emotional state, which I think is how every record is going to be. I like that the songs are different and that they’re finding a way to work together. I like hearing that in other records, too, where there’s not ever the same tone twice. Sometimes you feel monochromatic as a person; sometimes you have many different things going through your personal life and that can manifest into the music. So, I don’t really shape out what something is going to sound like, but I like the element of not knowing, the unconscious aspect of any form of art.”
The Expanding Flower Planet is out now through Anticon, and Deradoorian appears atNewtown Social Club on Saturday April 16.
