Interview with Errors

Steev Livingstone is the frontman of the Glasgow four-piece band the Errors. We caught up with him about being a musician in an electronic age.

How would you describe your music?
A key thing to it is the whole layering thing. When I start a song, there’s a version that exists recorded and then things get added on top of that. On the computer every instrument gets a channel, and within some songs there are 80 channels. That means there can be 80 different sounds on a track at any given time.

Sounds complicated. How does that affect the dynamic within the band during the creative process?
It depends on different tracks. It can be a pretty brutal process. Big arguments can happen because obviously if there’s a part you feel is important then you’re going to fight for it to stay there, but we’re all quite mean about criticizing each other if we disagree. Some of the tunes work better if I’ve got a loop, and I get the band to come into the studio and play around with it. I think it’s quite evident on the couple of tracks we’ve done like that, because they sound more live and jammy as a result.

There’s a lot of variation between tracks.
Yes, and no song is the same. Our process is quite long: the track ‘Supertribe’ on the current album took us nine months to complete, and the starting point of the song and the end of it are just so radically different. There were so many changes that you could probably get about 20 tunes out of its evolution. Although the starting point eventually disappeared, there’s stuff hidden deep down in the mix that we thought was an important element to begin with, but became less important the more parts that we wrote on top of it. The difficult thing about making music like that is it’s difficult to know where the end point is, where you finish, because you could go on forever.

It must be hard to be satisfied when you can alter things so easily within a digital format?
Yeah, but then I wouldn’t be happy putting something out on record that I didn’t really, really like. With most songs, after a few months, I’ll think of something I could’ve done better. But then during each song’s conception there’s a lot of sitting with and listening to it. It’s amazing what leaving a room and coming back ten minutes later can do for you. If you’ve been sitting for 5 hours listening to the same piece of music and you go out to make a cup of tea or something and come back to it, suddenly you see it in a completely different way.

Aside from your own stuff, how does the music you listen to influence you?
What usually happens is that I’ll be listening to a whole bunch of tunes that I like over and over again, then I’ll move away from them for a while, and when I go back to listening to them I’ll realize that one or two of them have influenced the music that I’ve been making lately. Not to the point that it’d be super-obvious to anyone else, it’s usually structure-wise or the way something moves about in it. It’s also interesting, particularly in interviews, when people say they hear influences in our music and you’ve never even heard of that band before, or you’d never thought to make that same connection.

That’s because different people hear different music differently right?
Totally. That’s what makes it brilliant, in my head.

To what extent does technology itself influence your creative process?
It depends what you mean by technology. The computer is totally essential to what we do, because it’s a good way to document the decisions that we make as it provides a permanent record of each stage. If you sit down and start making a piece of music and you don’t have any recording facilities, then the next time you want to add to that from the last time, you’ll lose loads of things. With our music, which is built in layers, there’s no way I would be able to sit down and play that every time and remember each part. In that way, the computer is the crux of the operation. But then there are so many factors in what we do, and there are so many things that can affect those factors, that also have nothing to do with the technology. For example, things such as mood, whether you drank the night before, whether you slept with your window open that night, what room you made your piece of music in, or what the weather’s doing outside. All these things have an effect on the final sound of the song you’re making.

Do you think increased personal access to musical influences via the internet and being able to promote yourself online has impacted your music in a positive way?
For us, it just means that our music is more widely distributed than it would’ve been before. In a more general sense though, the arbitrariness of what I can gain access to, that aspect of being influenced by these aleatoric factors, makes me worry about little decisions, like whether if something slightly different had happened I would never have made a tune as a result. I think, “What if I’d never stumbled across this obscure blog and happened to listen to this tune that then later filtered into the music I was making?” When you start to think about things like that, it gets really interesting.