Hi! So that our readers can know a bit more about you, please introduce Late Aster
A: Hey, thanks so much for including Late Aster in Broken Color! We’re based in San Francisco and our sound is situated somewhere between jazztronica, ambient electronic, and chamber pop. In addition to synthesizers and a drum machine/sampler, our live performances feature Aaron Messing on trumpet and Anni Hochhalter on French horn, so there is a wind instrumentalist, DJ vibe.
Congratulations on the release of ‘Light Rail Session’! The EP sounds fantastic. What inspired you to do a live-in-studio record?
A: The idea was borne out of a desire to have video and audio recordings of what the group looks and sounds like live. Our typical studio recordings (like for “True and Toxic”) include all sorts of instruments and arrangements that we could never achieve in a live setting, so actually performing our songs for an audience requires considerable creativity to retrofit our studio-recordings to the instruments we have available. That ultimately results in songs that are very different from the ones we recorded, so we wanted to have that out in the world for people to hear as well!
We were also immediately inspired to try to conquer all of the challenges of capturing our performances live, from the visual aspects which we care deeply about, to the confidence of being able to knock out the performances in one or two takes, to the recording techniques required to clearly track all of the sounds we make. That last part was especially challenging, so we worked for countless hours with our engineer, Charles, to map out all of the inputs and outputs we’d need.
For example, we decided to use the same microphones to capture our clean trumpet and French horn sounds AND run those same sounds into our effects pedals. So our horns were recorded clean, run to the mixing board, mixed down to a single input, run back out to the pedal board, and run back into the mixing board. It was crazy!
What is your favorite track on the EP and why?
A: Tough to choose, but Safety Second may be the winner because it really encapsulates the vision for this EP and for the vibe we’re trying to achieve with our live performances. It has trumpet and French horn duets running through loopers and effects pedals, an ambient electronic house jam, dreamy vocals, and hard shifts in genres. It shows the dexterity we can achieve with our set-up and it turned out really beautifully.
Honorable mention is It Never Entered My Mind, which is a jazz standard that we love and we’re so happy to have been able to put out our own modern twist on it.
Where did you record it?
A: We recorded at Light Rail Studios, an excellent San Francisco recording studio. The studio has an amazing live room with a massive sound stage, which we were able to use to its fullest extent by projecting visuals onto our setup and getting mesmerizing live video recordings.
Your music interweaves so many different styles and sounds. If you could collaborate with anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
A: As classically trained musicians who spent most of our musical upbringing in practice rooms buzzing our lips into pieces of metal, the electronic side of our music is still somewhat new to us. It would be glorious for us to get to work with true experts of the craft of electronic beats like Sam Shepherd (Floating Points), Arthur Hnatek (SWIMS), Nigel Godrich (Radiohead), or Thomas Russell Jenkinson (Squarepusher), to name a few.
What’s been your favorite musical experience to date? Can you describe your most memorable career performance? How do you recall it?
A: Our release show for this EP at the Bandcamp Record Store in Oakland, CA was very special to us. It was our first featured performance since the pandemic and we were able to share the stage with our label-mates, SLUGish Ensemble. The record store is truly one of the hippest spaces I’ve ever been in that could be considered a performance venue. Bandcamp treated us so well and we were able to get a lot of our family and friends to the show. It was an amazing evening.
We hope Bandcamp can pull through this rough patch because they’re an incredibly important outlet for musicians and fans of music.
Where are you based? Can you tell us how the music scene there has inspired your sound at all?
A: We’re based in San Francisco. The EP was co-released by a local record label, Slow and Steady, which is primarily a hub for west-coast jazz. That angle was really appealing to us given the jazztronica-vibe we were going for and also sort of a kick in the pants to level-up our improvisation and soloing chops as we were crafting the EP.
Finally, do you have any updates on upcoming gigs? What are your plans for 2024?
A: We are rounding out our EP release tour in Brooklyn, NY at the Owl on November 19. We’re super excited about getting to share the stage again with SLUGish Ensemble.
For 2024, we are working on getting out a full length album. We can hopefully announce more about that and our performances in support of that release in the coming weeks.
The band has a show in New York City on November 19 at The Owl Music Parlor.