In Bloom

As he prepares to release a new album and celebrates a SAY Award nomination for his last one, Andrew Wasylyk chats with fellow Dundonian Kevin Fullerton about nature, collaboration and the unique pull of their home city

Dundee is rarely associated with transcendental beauty, its post-industrial architecture and the many shuttered windows on its high street giving it a ragged edge. But the prodigious multi-instrumentalist Andrew Wasylyk, who’s lived in the city his entire life, has forged a solo career which mines a unique romanticism from its locations. In doing so, he joins artists like SHHE in attaching mercurial and mystical soundscapes to its parks, buildings and burghs.

When we meet at a small café ten minutes from Balgay, the trigger for his Scottish Album Of The Year Award-nominated Balgay Hill: Morning In Magnolia, he describes the inspiration he finds in Dundee. ‘It feels like a healthy place for me to come back and work. It just feels like a good place to look at the world. What can I say? It’s home.’

When lockdown hit, Balgay was more than a place to exercise for Wasylyk. It was a lifeline and a source of creative potential. This picturesque park in Dundee’s west end contains a graveyard, an observatory, several play areas, and vast stretches of parkland, proving itself amenable to the vast canvas of a concept album. From the noirish saxophones of ‘Western Necropolis Twilight’ to the melancholic calm of ‘Blossomlessness #2’ or the ethereal wooziness of ‘Observatory In Bloom’, the album’s constantly shifting vignettes address the complexity of a space which contains centuries of history.

‘The album started with “just get out of the house, get out of your own head and into that medicinal green space”. It seemed like the more time I spent there, the more things were surfacing, from the history of the observatory to the Windy Glack used by smugglers, to the actual layout of the park itself being inspired by Père Lachaise, the famous Parisian garden cemetery where so many incredible writers, artists and musicians are buried. I was drawn to that idea of a little pocket of Paris in Dundee.’

Beyond its historical and topographical interest, Balgay holds a personal resonance for Wasylyk. ‘I have family in Balgay’s Western Acropolis cemetery. There are great grandparents on my mother’s side, the Mitchells, and my grandfather and grandmother on the Wasylyk side. So, there’s a lot of personal history in there as well. I think it’s inevitable that memories permeate your perception.’

Although Dundee has provided a rich creative impetus for Wasylyk’s blend of ambient jazz, his latest album Hearing The Water Before Seeing The Falls draws on very different influences, stemming from a commissioned response to Thomas Joshua Cooper’s The World’s Edge exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. After exploring the work further through conversations with Cooper himself, Wasylyk found his original concept evolving and new ideas emerging in folklore and floral symbols. This idea gained more traction after reading Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, in which a natural world the director cultivated in his garden bristled against the nuclear power plant located nearby. It’s an album which lives in the same enveloping sonic landscape of Balgay, revelling in the sheer poetic beauty of its compositions, and featuring contributions from Pete Harvey, Alabaster DePlume and Rachel Simpson.

Beyond his solo projects, Wasylyk has delved back into the rock world for the first time since he was frontman for mid-2000s cult indie rockers The Hazey Janes, becoming a touring member of Idlewild and watching as audiences revelled in the nostalgia and elation of ‘Love Steals Us From Loneliness’ or ‘American English’. ‘It’s such a deep privilege to be able to help share that with such an incredible fanbase. It feels like I’m a custodian in the role for the time being. We’ve been to Japan and America and created some memories that’ll never fade.’

Despite several SAY Award nominations, numerous collaborations, regular songwriting residencies and an association with one of Scotland’s most critically acclaimed indie bands, there’s an unassuming quality to Wasylyk that belies his incredible talent; his demeanour is one of complete gratitude that anyone might want to team up with him.

‘Collaborating’s got so many health benefits. If someone wants to work with me, it always comes as a bit of a shock. I’m not quite sure how to deal with it, other than being utterly humbled. I’m ensconced in my own world half the time just building ideas up from scratch in the studio alone; I think it’s important to put your head out the window and remember that there’s a world out there and that there are other folk doing really brilliant things. It’s important to feel that rippling effect.’

Hearing The Water Before Seeing The Falls is released on Clay Pipe Records, Friday 25 November; Andrew Wasylyk plays CCA, Glasgow, Friday 16 December.