Water From Your Eyes: “Even when things seem random, they’re tied together”

David Lynch has developed a concept he calls “catching the big fish”. He imagines humans having an ocean of consciousness, within which ideas are like fish. The smaller ones live near the choppy surface, but deeper down, that’s where the prize catches are to be found. According to Lynch, finding your way to the biggest fish is a vital process for true artists to undertake. 

Water From Your Eyes seem to effortlessly trawl the furthest depths. The New York-based duo boast a wholly unique musical approach, drawing equally from indie-pop, techno and modern composition, reeling in an endless stream of catches from the sea floor. 

“A lot of what makes music like this work is creating a system or box to work within,” explains the group’s songwriter Nate Amos. Nate and his bandmate Rachel Brown are discussing their creative process with me from their Paris hotel room, midway through Water From Your Eyes’ recent UK and EU tour. “You have to choose at what point it becomes a limitation that’s helping you or is hindering you,” he continues. “There’s always this point where it switches from being kind of scientific to something you feel out emotionally or instinctively.”

Listening to Water From Your Eyes, you get an immediate sense of Amos’ and Brown’s skill at envisaging, generating and arranging seemingly disparate musical ideas in accordance with one another. The results are often disarmingly unpredictable, but make sense according to their own warped internal logic. The band’s latest full-length Everyone’s Crushed sees the duo delve further into abstraction. These nine tracks blow apart recognisable song craft conventions, a bedrock the duo then rebuild upon in their own playful image. 

Most striking are the tracks that draw on modern composition, such as the album’s more experimental cuts like ‘Open’ and ‘14’. “I was doing a lot of experiments with serialism,” explains Nate. “My loose understanding of serialism is that it’s a system for writing atonal music that replaces keys. The idea is that you choose a series of numbers that represent parts of a scale, then create a series where no other note can be played until the rest have been played. That’s the only guideline. However, in most cases where I used it on the album I also broke that rule.”

This exchange encapsulates the duo’s personality. They tilt from serious and insightful to daft and self-deprecating in a dryly endearing manner. Asked to define their sense of humour, Rachel giggles before the two throw out various suggestions. Nate goes with “dry and dark” and Rachel suggests “dark but also really silly”. Rachel adds: “I feel like our sense of humour is tied to the sense of dread but also the lightness that exists in the world. Something about existing right now is so odd. It’s really sad, but it’s also funny because there’s no reason it should be sad.”