@ Pronounced ‘At’
As I write this, I’m listening to Mind Palace Music, sitting in a cafe with a coffee, it has just rained, summer rain, it's cosy and as I look out the window I smile, thinking how @ is the perfect soundtrack to today.
@’s music is warm, cosy, and comforting, feeling like the perfect emotional support, in a way similar to that old blanket you can’t get rid of. Pronounced “At”, the band as you’ll read in this interview was started basically by accident by Stone Filipczak and Victoria Rose during Covid after exchanging songs they were working on, eventually coming up with the idea to work on them together. Mind Palace Music, their 2020 debut which grew out of that era and has since gained a well deserved cult following. That album is best described as uniquely special, at its heart is an indie folk record but completely breaks the genre's natural and acoustic archetype being layered throughout with MIDI and software elements, including autotune. It's something which shouldn’t work as well as it does yet, blends together as smoothly as the harmonies of Stone and Victoria.
Now five years on from their debut, they’re both living in Philadelphia and working on their second album, which is set to be released by their new label, 4AD, who they signed with last year. The legendary label who are responsible for releasing some of the greatest alternative-rock albums of all time, with bands like Cocteau Twins, Lush, Pixies, The Breeders, and This Mortal Coil among their alumni.
I caught up with Stone and Victoria the day after they played at 4AD’s Milk A Bull event at London’s ICA to get to know the brains behind @.
The bio on the @ Instagram is ‘SEO wet dream’, what is the most annoying thing about being called @?
Victoria: Mostly that people telling us it's unsearchable.
Stone: Yeah, everyone wants to tell us that our name is unsearchable as if we don’t know already [laughs]. Especially early on people had the demeanour that they thought they were helping us out by pointing it out, we were just like ‘Okay, you found it, people are finding it just fine.’
Oh my, I could only imagine. You guys started making music together during Covid, after you had both left Boston and were sending each other bits you were working on. What sort of stuff were you sending each other at that time?
Victoria: Stone was originally sending me these drum machine tracks just to show me, not to work on and I’m not sure if I was sending you all that much. The first song I sent you was “Star Game” and said, ‘It’d be cool if there were some soft drums on this.’ And you were like ‘I’ll do that.’
Stone: Yeah, that’s how it started.
How long after that were you guys like we should work on something together?
Stone: Like a week later, it happened pretty fast.
Victoria: I don’t think it happened in the way where we had the idea for this specific project, we just organically worked on each other’s stuff for a bit and were like, ‘Let’s put out a split’ and that split turned into an EP and the EP turned into a LP just as we were working on it.
Stone, you were working on a lot of noise stuff at that time, right?
Stone: Yeah, that had been more what I was into at that time.
How did it evolve into this blend of pastoral folk with the use of autotune and computerised warping?
Stone: Literally by accident. It was also what we had available. The MIDI elements were out of necessity, we didn’t have access to a studio or anything like that, we just had our laptops and the pre-sets available on DAW’s. So, it was easy for us to record guitar and vocals, then add in software elements. Overtime that came to become the sound.
Victoria: All the MIDI elements were for the most part Stone’s doing. I was writing and recording vocals and acoustic guitar. I was listening to a lot of Fleetwood Mac during the pandemic, specifically Tusk, and a lot of other 70s folk rock too, I think that naturally blended into the music.
Is that where the aesthetics and visuals of the album covers that blend the natural with electronic come in?
Stone: It wasn’t that intentional, we just hit up that artist who is someone who I knew through music and that is what he came up with. We asked him to make an album cover that included an “@” symbol and had botanical and plant elements with it. It isn’t as intentional as you may think, it just happened that way.
Victoria: I do think that your musical interests and aesthetics veer towards an intersection of natural and electronic.
Stone: Yeah, and having that aesthetic is why we chose that artist.
Victoria: I remember us talking about it and it had to be very digital because we were in separate places.
Now you guys both are living in Philadelphia has your approach to making music together changed from what it was when you were living apart?
Stone: The recording is surprisingly similar to how it was. We still don’t record in the same room most of the time, we still mostly record stuff separately because that’s comfortable. I think the live and the arrangement elements have changed because we have band practice pretty regularly and work on songs in a pretty collaborative way now which was not the case at all previously.
How was playing the new songs live yesterday?
Victoria: So much fun, we had fun.
Stone: A lot of the new songs were written to play live and developed over years of playing them live. In contrast to the old stuff that was made on the computer and had to be reinterpreted for live, this was all organically written around us playing guitars and singing harmonies together.
Victoria: Also, it was a showcase where we got to play for a lot of people who haven’t heard us before which is always exciting for me. I get excited to play songs for new people. When it’s to people who I know have seen it a few times it's cool, but it feels special when they haven’t heard it before.
When you played the song you recorded for the split with Insides, you said it isn’t the same version that is on the split. Is it a regular thing that you are recording multiple versions of the same song?
Stone: Kind of yeah.
Victoria: It happens. They’re not all for release but it is just a matter of trying to get the right recording. There are a few songs on this new album that we’re working on that we’ve tried recording in different forms.
Stone: With that track specifically there are three versions, there’s the version we played live which is two acoustic guitars. There’s the version that’s on the split that 4AD released which is an electronic version with electronic drums and MIDI arrangements. Then the version that’s going to be on the album is a live band reinterpretation of the MIDI stuff. I programmed a bunch of drums on the MIDI track then we had a drummer learn and track real drums live.
Woah, that’s really cool. Have you worked with a full band on this next album?
Stone: Not really, that’s the only track that uses that process, but we did work with more auxiliary musicians on this album than we did for the last. On the last there were two guest musicians both playing piano, on this album, there’s going to be three or four playing all different instruments.
I thought it was cool you guys used pedals with the acoustic guitars, it gives a really nice sound you wouldn’t get with electric guitar and pedals.
Stone: Thanks, it definitely makes a weird sound, I like it. We started doing it a few months ago, it was just for fun, it sounds cool. It gives dynamic and makes things sound a little bit more interesting. It really isn’t that much, it's just a distortion pedal and a delay pedal set to a reverse delay.
It’s really cool. Stone, I read in an interview you mentioned 100 Gecs as an influence on your use of autotune. They were an unexpected reference; are there any other unexpected bands you get influence from?
Stone: There is this black metal band from LA called Agriculture, I think they’re the coolest band in America right now, maybe that’s unexpected.
Is that where the metal sounding chords you were playing yesterday came from?
Stone: No, I wouldn’t say our music is very influenced by them, but I like their aesthetic and vibe. I do think our aesthetics are pretty similar even if our music sounds really different. It’s not unexpected but I really love Chris Wiseman, he is one of my big song writing influences.
Victoria: I don’t know if our music sounds similar to this, but I like a lot of comforting guitar-based music.
Well, I think you guys do make comforting music.
Victoria: Aww, that’s nice.
Stone: Bringing up Chris Weisman again I was listening to his album The Holy Life That's Coming during the pandemic over and over. I loved how organic sounding and comforting it is. It’s a really warm album. That definitely influenced the mixing sound of Mind Palace Music.
Even having the software and electronic elements involved I find as a listener it keeps you actively listening helping bring it all together in a way that feels even more comforting. It took me a long time to realise how much software was in the album, it wasn’t until someone pointed it out to me, I started to realise.
Stone: Yeah, it’s everything other than the guitar and vocals really.
Victoria: There’s a few other instruments too like shaker, bass, piano, and flute.
Yeah, you play both clarinet and flute on stage. Did you guys grow up playing those instruments?
Victoria: I had clarinet lessons when I was eleven and then I put it down for a long time. Stone’s brother, Dane, gave me a clarinet for my thirtieth birthday, and I’ve been playing it here and there since. I’m still learning, I would like to take some lessons.
Stone: I started when I was 24, I got a shitty bamboo flute at a renaissance festival. I kept buying cheap folk flutes and that’s what on Mind Palace Music, just cheap $30-50 folk flutes and then eventually I got a real flute.
Okay, what’s the strangest instrument or element on an @ song?
Stone: There is an instrument which I’m not sure what it’s called but you blow into a gourd and there are three different flute looking shafts that come off it and you can set them to different notes. That track has three different flutes on it but that’s one of them. I wish I had a photo to show you, it is really strange.
Victoria: The percussion on “First Journal” is just me shaking my sewing box.
No way. That’s crazy.
Victoria: Yeah, if there is ever any percussion it’s literally from just an object because I don’t have any drums.
How do you feel working on the new album now after having a five year gap from the first album?
Victoria: For me on just a sheer volume level, I needed that amount of time to accrue new material and feel more comfortable and settled in the stuff I write. I have been writing music forever but never with a project in mind, so I had to get used to the idea of it.
Stone: It's daunting making another album, period. We made the first album basically by accident, it’s been five years and we’ve been doing the band ever since but there has been, would you say procrastination in the album?
Victoria: Yeah, adjustment and procrastination. Having to start the second album the process is more thought out, like we are making an album whereas before it unfolded so naturally. So much for what has happened with @ has happened so naturally, both musically and with the industry we weren’t really aiming for anything.
It is so nice how it all worked together for something where the only intention was to make one song.
Stone: There wasn’t even the intention to do that.
Yeah, like adding an element to that one song.
Stone: It was pretty much by accident. That can be daunting though, I feel a lot more pressure to get things right, which doesn’t mean we do anything differently but when we record a song, I want it to sound the best that we can do of that song now, which is not what I was feeling when we were recording Mind Palace Music, we were just like ‘Whatever here’s the song.’ We didn’t really over think it. Now, speaking for myself I’m overthinking it.
Victoria: Yeah, I think you are.
But you also know what you’re capable of, which is where perfectionist traits tend to come from.
Stone: Exactly.
Victoria: It is, but I also think it’s important to be a little looser, because you can get into a place where something never feels done. That’s not where we are specifically, but that’s a place you can be in. We do have songs finished for the album.
Stone: Yeah, some of them are old too, they’ve been finished for years, it has been a while since the first album. We have been working on stuff slowly that whole time. The whole process has been a balancing act of having no expectations and making something we’re happy with.
Victoria: It’s sort of a stressful experience. It’s cool because this album has more of a focal point around it, because it’s not developing as aimlessly. That is good because I think there are a lot of songs on the previous record that are short or could’ve been developed more, on this next one I think that every song that we have is going to be pretty well developed and feel like a complete song. I’m pretty happy about that.
Now knowing that, do you feel a bit weird about playing the older songs live?
Victoria: It’s not that but there comes a time where whatever I’ve previously written for me, I want to sing some new stuff. There are some lyrics that I’m embarrassed about, and I don’t want to present them to people even if people wouldn’t feel that way.
Totally, lyrics are such a personal thing. To wrap this up. Can you show me something from your “Camera Phone”?
Stone: Here’s some mushrooms that someone crocheted onto a mailbox.
Victoria: A baby kitten leaning on Stone’s girlfriend's Chihuahua. I look at this photograph every day. It’s so cool. It’s the best picture I’ve ever taken.