Music
5 things you should know about Elderbrook
The rising star tells us about himself and offers up a remix of Pablo Nouvelle’s Take Me To A Place.
Alexander Kotz, aka Elderbrook
© [unknown]
As Elderbrook, Alexander Kotz makes minimalist, song-based electronica with tender vocals and ambient beats. Heard it all before? Not quite. There's a richness of texture to the tracks on his new EP Travel Slow that he says he owes to naïve experiments with everything from morning coffee to reading glasses, and catchy torch ballads lurk within the low-key melodies of tracks like Good Enough. But if Rudimental and Kidnap Kid's labelmate had to put his finger on it, Elderbrook's hallmark is that he likes a bit of bounce: "A kick and a snare and a funky bass," he says. "I like this EP because it has just the right levels of bounce. The bounce just appears, and you've got to roll with it…"
Check out his remix of the new Pablo Nouvelle single Take Me To A Place (feat. Liv) and find out all you need to know about this rising star in his own words.
He prefers to record off the cuff and on the cheap I'd rather work from places I know rather than going to a big metallic studio with lots of buttons. It's good to be able to go to the computer and start recording whenever I have an idea. I work whenever inspiration strikes. The house I'm living in in Bath at the moment is a really old 1700s-y place with tall ceilings, which makes for excellent natural reverb. The EP captures a time when I'd moved from Bath to London and was just left alone writing music and being sad.
This isn't his first musical incarnation I started off in an indie band when I was 16. When I was 19, I did the whole singer-songwriter folky acoustic thing, which everyone seems to have done at some point in their lives. It wasn't until university that I really started listening to electronic music. I'd previously dismissed it as 'just electronic music', in a very obnoxious way. Elderbrook was originally intended as a hip-hop thing, with me singing soulfully over the top.
London-based electronica artist Elderbrook
© [unknown]
It was electronica's infinite sound palette that won him over With indie music, there's a guitar and a bass and a drum kit and a singer. With electronic music, there's an infinite amount of sounds to be made. Because I'm originally a live instrument person, my knowledge of synthesisers is limited. Where someone might just put in a huge EDM synth for a drop, I record strange sounds.
You heard the man: he records strange sounds In the morning my black coffee is always a little too hot, so I have to put ice in it. That makes a cracking sound, which is really nice. Sounds like that crop up a few times in Travel Show, which is full of little clicks and loops. I've also recorded my reading glasses snapping and my housemates just chilling together. One time I was recording a vocal and got so into it I spilt a glass of water over my laptop. It sounded like a normal metallic drum sound and happened just at the right moment. Luckily the laptop survived, too.
Yes, he knows this is a crowded field It's true, there are a lot of singer-songwritery, minimally electronic-y people out there at the moment. It's fantastic being on Black Butter because, although it's got a great family vibe, the people they sign are so different. It's a very eclectic mix of electronic, full-on singers, grime gutter… and they do it all so well. The stuff I'm working on for my album is much more live instrument orientated, which switches it up a bit. There've even been a few distorted guitars involved. I'm working with lots of cool producers, trying to really involve all my influences. It's going to sound really, really good – in every way you could possibly imagine.
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