Liam & Felix of Yaatri on debut release ‘Lucid’
Yaatri perform live at The Yard on 14th February
We’re pleased to be spending Valentine’s Day down at The Yard with Yaatri - a band that we already love and know that you will too - who, quite aptly for the occasion, masterfully manage to marry the multicultural sounds of band leader Liam DeTar’s upbringing with offsettingly serene psychedelia & the ethereal air of such a fusion.
Inspired “by the momentum of the rhythms of India, immersive timbres of electronic music and energy of rock and roll”, the band formed in 2018, and - with the support of organisations such as Leeds Conservatoire, Manchester Jazz Festival and Jazz North - self-released their debut EP last year, accruing more than 125,000 streams and earning considerable international press coverage, plus positive reviews across the board. In November 2020, the quintet were also presented with the prestigious Peter Whittingham Jazz Award, which has previously helped to propel promising jazz musicians such as Soweto Kinch and Xhosa Cole to acclaim.
With their debut LP, Lucid, due for release in February 2022, we’re pleased to present an intimate evening with a band whose audiences are all but guaranteed to start getting much bigger before long.
Q. Do you remember how you first got into jazz?
Liam: I moved to Belgium when I was 16, and up to that point my experience with guitar had been playing Beatles and Red Hot Chilli Peppers songs in my room for two years. My high school in Brussels had a shortage of guitarists (imagine that), and the Symphonic band/Jazz orchestra teacher got wind of me and talked me into joining the school jazz band, which terrified me. It took a while, but I learned a lot and really began to grow as musician there. I can never thank my teachers Carolyn and Mark enough for pushing me at the beginning, I owe a lot of who I am today to them!
Felix: As a self taught musician, jazz was a natural music form to be drawn to due to the emphasis on listening and reacting in the moment. I’ve always thought of music through a chordal lens so the harmonic complexity of the music, along with the odd time and rhythmic element, are what I was instinctively drawn to as my ear searched for more exciting and nuanced sounds.
Q. Tell us more about the inspiration behind your unique blend of genres.
Liam: The original concept behind Yaatri was to explore my international upbringing and Indian heritage, and to incorporate characteristics associated with music from the subcontinent into our own compositions. As we’ve become more confident in our musical identities as individuals, little pieces of the music each of us love and grew up listening to have seeped into Yaatri’s collective identity. I think you can definitely hear how music like psyche-rock, drum’n’bass, folk, and contemporary jazz have made themselves an important part of our sound.
Q. Your compositions create a unique ambience, always lush and layered, simultaneously dense yet delicate. How do they tend to take shape?
Both: In short, over a long, long period of time! We’ve identified the recording process of our music to be a big part of shaping our compositions; the type of music we write needs time to subconsciously figure itself out in our heads. A lot of the time, the details that go on to become our favourite bits of our tunes fall into place a year or so after the song was originally written. Over the past year we’ve been exploring the relationship between our recordings and our performances, searching for unique textures and means of creating sound through electronics to make us sound bigger than your average five pie.
Q. • What can you tell us about your debut album, Lucid?
Both: Lucid is such an important piece of work for us; it’s through its creation that we really came to understand what it is we do. It’s a collection of songs written between 2018 and 2019 that explore themes of introspection, internal struggle and self-discovery, that quite conveniently paralleled the insides of our own heads over the challenging last couple of years. We owe a lot of the sound to our incredible producer Sam Hobbs, who understood our music better than we did, and really opened our eyes to what we’re capable of.
Q. Despite having only formed in 2018, you’ve already received considerable support from the general public, from international press and radio and from cultural organisations such as Leeds Conservatoire and Jazz North. What does all of that mean to a relatively new band on the rise?
Felix: As a very self-conscious person, knowing people are listening to the music and enjoying it means so much to me and is a great source of encouragement and reassurance. The support from organisations and institutions has been invaluable and without it we simply wouldn’t be in the position we are now, with exciting things to look forward to and the prospect of being able to continue doing what we love.
Q. What can our audience expect from your performance at The Yard on 14th February?
Expect an immersive, expressive, spiritually transportive exploration of groove, texture and time, and a lot of new music!