The musician who draws on Jewish soul music

On&On takes the approach further with a song cycle that repeats its title track. When the album loops back to the beginning, you’re not quite sure if it’s the start or the end of this dreamlike piece.

“Well, that’s great,” he says, with genuine relief. “I haven’t spoken to many people who have heard the record. We spent so long trying to make a sequence that can work. Every time we play a song, it’s different.”

The process of live recording does, of course, make way for unexpected sounds. One was the cat getting stuck in the amplifier room on a version of the album’s main motif On&On.

“I thought, ‘that’s a weird sound in my headphones’, and then suddenly Billy [Steiger] was playing this meowing sound on his violin. But he was playing along to the bloody cat.” Unsurprisingly, it didn’t make it on to the record.

What did make it on to the record, however, was the unmistakable clunk of something being dropped at the beginning. Later, on the eerie Silence Breaker, double bassist Tom Wheatley spotted a Cretan lute on the wall of the Welsh studio where they recorded the album and decided to play that instead.

“To me, that’s improvisation,” says Blumberg. “People use this term ‘improvised music’ as describing a genre. For me, it’s making decisions in the moment.” The spooky feel of the song was created by the auto-tune effects the singer Elvin Brandhi added to her vocals before sending them to Blumberg. “Weirdly, the tuning of her vocals actually related to that Cretan lute. Looking back, I think it really works.”

When asked about the unnerving effect of that song, Blumberg won’t be drawn into discussion of theme or inspiration. “I’m not very good at describing our music,” he states, “And I don’t need to. But what you just said was really exciting for me.”

Minus was created during a difficult breakup with his long-term girlfriend, the actress Stacy Martin (the couple have since reunited) , and recorded a week after his hospitalisation for mental illness. While he won’t elaborate on lyrics such as “it was a mistake to put that ring on your finger”, on the new record’s moving song Bound, it’s all there in his anguished music.

There’s a connection between the Jewish music that Blumberg has heard since childhood and his solo output. His upbringing didn’t involve an educational array of classic records played in the home, instead it was musicals and Magic FM (“It was not a record collection sort of house, we didn’t listen to Fleetwood Mac or anything,” he snorts disparagingly). However, singing Jewish songs was a big part of it.

“It has been a massive influence,” he says, pointing out the many cassettes of chazanut he’s bought from the chasidic shops at Stamford Hill near his home in Stoke Newington, in particular when he was recording his second solo album Liv in 2014 (later released in 2019). “I am very interested in the niguns, the wordless songs.”

He sings “nie nie nie” to ensure I’m familiar with them. “They’re passed down, but they’re also improvised. I’ve always loved them. And if you listen to Liv, there’s niguns in there. With one of my projects we’ve been looking at a lot of Noh theatre in Japan, just because the music in that is sort of related to it, and then it brought me back to the niguns again. It’s ever present.”

While Blumberg met his first CDP bandmate at cheder at New North London Synagogue, he feels closer to his roots now than ever before. “I’ve definitely become more aware of my Jewish heritage as I’ve grown older,” he muses. “I was quite dismissive of it before, but I’ve definitely realised it’s a bigger part of me.”

In what ways? “I mean, when you land in another country and they say, ‘Where are you from, England?’ then I say, ‘no, definitely not England. I’m from London.’ And then if I’m pushed I’ll say my family’s Jewish.”

I wonder if he feels more aware of his Jewishness in the light of Black Lives Matter and Brexit. “Yeah, I do,” he says hesitantly. “I guess I don’t tend to talk about politics... in this kind of context. I hate nationalism full stop, basically.” His resolution builds. “I hate the idea that there are countries. I think it’s disgusting to be proud of your country. It makes me feel sick,” he says.

In addition to the album, Blumberg has scored the film The World To Come, starring Vanessa Kirby. He is also a visual artist, currently exhibited at Rotterdam’s Kunsthal, in the show Black Album, White Cube about the link between art and music. Drawing, he says, “means everything to me. It was one of the most important things in my life for many reasons.” He is drawing as we speak “because it helps me to focus”.

He has an astonishing 4,000 of his works stored in filing cabinets. He realised quite how many there were only when a London gallery owner came to view them.

Aside from doing all the cover artwork for his releases, his drawings became closely aligned with the new album itself. While the drawings happen spontaneously, the lyrics take more editing, so this time he put his words on to pictures.

The video for On & On features him riding his motorbike in circles.“I really do love riding around London actually,” he says with a smile. “One of the things I like about it is that I’m completely trapped on it because obviously it’s not safe if you start drawing or playing the piano while you’re on it.”

But you can be sure he will have paper with him wherever he goes. Whether it’s drawings or music, this artist just can’t stop creating. “I’ve made sure there are pencils sharpened everywhere,” he says.

 

On&On is released on Mute on July 31