FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Bedchamber Are Dreaming Up a More Mature Full Length

The Jakarta-based indie band is working on a 10-song full length that breaks away from the chill, reverb-heavy formula of their debut EP.
Photo courtesy the band

Bedchamber's reverb-drenched debut Perennial was painstakingly pieced together during a university break. The resulting EP is a dreamy mix of U.K. post-punk, 80s pop, and treble heavy beach rock. Now, with the Jakarta-based band in the studio for their debut full-length, Bedchamber is working to produce a record that sounds a bit more "mature."

VICE Indonesia's Marcel Thee spoke with singer/guitarist Ratta Bill about the pressures of releasing a first full-length after a period of local indie hype.

Advertisement

VICE: Bedchamber started to make waves with a five-song EP three years ago. You were all still in university then. How has the band changed? 
Ratta Bill: Bedchamber is three years old now. It might still be too young for a band to settle down, but having the same line-up since we started has really helped us bond in a way. We were able get to experience all these cool new things together. Having two releases out also challenges us to be progressive by not getting stuck in the same musical direction. We feel like the band was created as an embodiment of fun, and we'll try to keep it that way by doing a lot of experimental stuff in our music. It's no fun if we're just cracking the same code over and over.

How do you describe your music to those who've never it before?
Well it isn't easy. We're not even sure of what sort of music we're playing most of the time, so we just throw the most popular name people may be familiar with, such as The Cure, or we just call it indie pop. But then there will always be follow-up questions or I guess we could just walk away and let it be a perpetual mystery.

What's the secret to your reverb-drenched sound?
There's not much of a secret really. I like to put up a thick plate, spring, or sometimes shimmer reverb on a longer delay for guitar and vocals. Abi is more into shorter delay time guitar effects to fill the gaps with room reverb. I guess the key points are in the mixing process, where we sometimes have to push things a little more so that it would meet our artistic vision. We make sure to already have a demo of the song recorded before we go into the studio, so that way we have time to consider what works and what doesn't. We don't worry too much about how hard it is to play the recorded version live because they both sit in different worlds.

So you have been writing and recording new songs. How would you describe them?
Yes we've been writing some new songs for our upcoming release, which we suppose will be a full-length album. The songs were written in different periods of time so they might sound different from one and another. But aside from that, we feel like it somehow sounds more… mature?

Are you experimenting more?
Well, aside from the fact that we still write the same way as we did on our first record—we call the process pseudo-jams—we feel that now we have to break the boundaries a bit more, especially since we are working towards a 10-or-more-track release. Basically we don't want to bore ourselves so we experimented here and there, trying to come up with some new possibilities and moving away from what we did on our first record. Some people that have heard it have said that our new songs sound 'mature.' We don't know exactly what that means, but yeah, I guess we'll see.

So is there a certain formula you want to move away from?
We are trying to explore things we didn't get to do on our first record. We are trying to make the spectrum of the songs wider. Some songs that are so poppy and sing-along friendly, while others are pretty long and distorted—they have this 'mad' feeling. We are also trying to have different members sing on some songs and also sometimes let another instrument, aside from the guitar, be the major element of the song.

Do you have song titles yet?
No, we haven't titled them yet. Right now they're stored in our phones with nonsense titles to help us remember like 'CBGB' and 'CABE.' It sounds like we're not being serious but nah, they are just chord progressions.