Camille Davila -
beyond pop
Camille Davila is a Pop Glamatron extraordinaire. Producing her punkpop magic for several years now, almost single-handedly, she’s releasing a third album into a time of that most ambiguous of beasts – a music ‘movement’ or at least, a pop pigeonhole.
2007 was hailed as a year of Glam resurgence with some Neo-Glam artists such as pop tart Mika evoking The Sweet and a more progressive Pop Levi stirring up the spirit of T Rex. Camille Davila agrees with the latter, saying ‘when I listen to Pop Levi I think of Marc Bolan’s feather boa’. I can also hear a little of John’s Children in Levi, Bolan’s earlier incarnation… as well as a few dozen more ghosts of influence and infection. For me the sounds of Levi and Davila are more of a Dirty-Glam than the disco delectica of Mika or The Scissor Sisters; the ghosts of Glam are there in Levi and Davila but the mutation is more evolved. They’ve dirtied up Glam, hence, my coining a sub-genre label of Dirty-Glam (hey kids! It might just catch on. T-shirt royalties are all mine). But it’s less a category to slot someone into than a feeling left behind after the last note of a track has sounded.
The Dirty-Glamosity of Levi and Davila is not entirely coincidental; the two have had a more direct connection over the years, working together in a band called Vibration White Finger and Camille sings on the track ‘Flirting’ on Pop Levi’s album ‘The Return to Form Black Magick Party’. And despite the heavy electronica vibe of both artists, the two also played a few acoustic shows together last year. But Camile Davila isn’t sitting on the shirt tails of a Neo-Glam revival. She’s been producing DirtyGlamElectronica for some time now. Her electronica isn’t cold; it’s achingly gorgeous, pulse-beatingly, heart-stoppingly exhilarating.
I first heard of her about two years ago when I received a MySpace request from her page of second album ‘World of Gliding Monsters’ which was conceived of and recorded in the UK and Norway. The crush was instant and the full-blown love soon followed. ‘Corduroy’ seeped into my blood-groove immediately and has never left. Purchasing the album took me to so many more treasures like the lilting glory of ‘Knightingale’ and the electro-rock of ‘Lovesong’ with its Blondie-esque vocal vivacity.
But I won’t insult her further by muso-comparisons. Like most distinctly identifiable artists, there is a hint of this and that there but mostly it is beyond such comparable-compartmentalizing: she is her own pop woman. Her voice is versatile and beautiful, a husky depth-charge she works perfectly into every song. She doesn’t showboat her vocals; they are as much a part of the soundscape as a mandolin or a synthesiser. With a different tale to tell, many a mood, inflection, style, her voice is a tool of sonic communication. Her minor key is haunting, her major key soars. And the woman knows how to work a waltz beat and a bossa nova.
The past year for the electronica queen has been a transitional one. Relocating from Liverpool back to her native California, playing with a new band, finding a musical home with a new label and producing the new album. Her family and music are fully soaked into the Californian soil and air. Her maternal grandfather moved the family from New York to L.A. to play Jazz sax in local clubs. Her uncle is a studio violinist in Hollywood and has ‘played with all the greats that you can think of’ she explains. Her brother also composes for film scores. ‘My mother did nothing but play me amazing music from the 60s’ Camille tells me, so along with the practical musical heritage ‘I was spoiled from birth’.
After shinnying between L.A and the U.K. for a great chunk of her life she eventually moved to Liverpool where she studied music technology from 2001. I asked her how having the knowledge of the nuts and bolts of music co-exists with the more visceral creativity. She told me ‘I find it to be invaluable to the creative process. It changes the way you listen and opens up so many more options in terms of understanding some of the more chaotic ideas’.
It also meant that the transition from the punkette pow of first album ‘Not for the Disco’ to the more blended, glorious electronic-seascape of ‘World of Gliding Monsters’ was a revolutionary one. For the first album, naiveté led the way; she didn’t know what she was doing. Camille explains, ‘My choice of being “raw” was only half voluntary. I was 20, I did not know how to set up a mic stand, let alone know anything about production and so when I worked with Luc Berger of Below Records I thought “His approach is raw, trashy, I like it, lets do it!” but there were times when I wished we had more options available, for example we worked with analog tape and I love using that approach but I’d rather have it there as an alternative choice rather than the only means’.
Discovering these choices through her music technology education expanded her music palette in much more fulfilling ways. ‘When I started studying different methods of recording and producing’ she explains, ‘and started working with other producers and musicians my options branched out and I was able to choose more objectively my next direction which I’m really thankful for.’
That next direction was the lusciously produced ‘World of Gliding Monsters’ and has carried through to the forthcoming ‘Hi-C’. Camille confirms the progression telling me, ‘I feel like this album, in a very strange way is an extension of WGM. They are like peanut butter and jelly to each other (although I'm sure you are cringing at that analogy as I'm aware that is not a very happy pairing in Britain!)’. Ok, Camille so I’ll think of peanut butter and chocolate and other listeners can insert their own yummy combination.
She explains that the feel of ‘Hi-C’ is a melding of two distinct stylings. ‘What I am trying to do with this album is divide it in half. The original idea was to have an A side of entirely bouncy analog-synth-distortion-guitar rock and a B side of nylon string bossa nova’. Creativity overcame rigidity though and she describes some ‘in between tracks which still have electronic elements, are acoustic but are not bossa’ and others that are ‘largely acoustic with nylon strings and mandolin but I still can't help using synths’.
Camille sees a definite departure from the peanut butter of ‘WGM’ to the Jelly of ‘Camille Davila’: ‘I would say the main difference would be that this album is very emotional’. Life took care of this and in a way explains the duality of the stylistics of the album. ‘It has been made under insane circumstances. The first half came from a break up with the love of my life, recorded under alcoholic DT's in a run down house in Liverpool where I'd moved to. The second half recorded in my new studio on the beach in southern California made while training for a marathon. Guess there is an "I will survive" thing going there. God how cheesy!’ But cheese it is not. For besides the right to kick some emotional ass through your chosen creative outlet, the training she speaks of was for the San Diego half marathon. After losing a close friend to lymphoma she decided to raise money for The Leukaemia and Lymphoma Team in Training, explaining that she’s lost two friends under the age of 30 to ‘a disease that does not discriminate’.
On the new album she not only plays each and every single instrument but produced each and every track too. This is a renaissance woman of the highest, glammest order. This, however, was not an Artist-Formally-Known-As-And-Once-Again-Known-As-Prince ego rage though; it was a self imposed life-lesson experiment. ‘To be honest I think the one thing I am the most happy with is that this album is the first thing I have recorded entirely alone. On ‘WGM’ I collaborated with many other artists and felt, in many ways, like an apprentice to the people I was working around. With this album I am playing all the instruments myself and just working completely solo, not because I don’t love working with others but because I want to know what I’m capable of’. To a certain extent this might be that ground-breaking musical moment that women songwriters throughout the ages have shared with us; ‘Hi-C’ with its emotional investment and cathartic outpourings might just be the twenty-first century, electronica-equivalent to ‘Tapestry’ or ‘Blue’.
She is already looking beyond the isolation of this creative process: ‘After I finish this album I am immediately working on the fourth which will be a collaborative project, not only involving my live band but also all the other people I’ve played with over the years. Hopefully it will make up for my isolation during the making of this record’. But before we think of Camille sitting through lonely months upon months of Liverpudlian and Californian seclusion she says, ‘the one saving grace of working alone so much is that I get to play with my live band nearly every night after these long isolation studio sessions and get to see how what I work on in the day translates when other people are playing the parts with their own interpretations’.
Live shows are very much part of her musical development and exploration and with the move to L.A. is a fresh live collaboration. ‘I love playing with them and I think is the best band I've had so far. I love them! I am in love with every member individually. Seriously! What I am most excited about is when we play live we actually have two different sets, our main set with synths, drums/drum pads, bass, electric guitar etc and then a second set for "special" gigs with only mandolin, nylon string, accordion, melodica and violin’.
As well as the live experience - mainly in the US now, but with plans to play the UK in September - old fans and new converts alike can experience Camille Davila online. Along with MySpace pages dedicated to ‘WGM’ and a preview of ‘Hi-C’, if one looks very carefully one can also find the MySpace profile for ‘Camille Davila Bootleg where a tremendously marvellous version of ‘Brand New Key’ nestles between other rare treats. In addition to a presence on YouTube and chances to purchase ‘Not For the Disco’ and ‘WGM’ on itunes, the launch of her Website CamilleDavila.com sees a whole world of online goodies for all things Camille.
Where most artist Websites are disappointing, flat, uninspired affairs, CamilleDavila.com has a playful, super-colourful, spiffy design and opportunities to listen, see and purchase many Davila Delights (Camille Rubik‘s Cubes anyone?!). Considering her prolific online presence, being a musician online - or even an online musician - I asked Camille if she finds the Web a useful tool in disseminating music and connecting with an audience. ‘It’s a love hate relationship’, she told me. ‘I am so happy that musicians now have the power to find their own markets, as opposed to relying on a few coked-up execs at a label trying desperately to chase trends and tell them what’s what. You now can do your own research and say “wow, Sony said no one listened to Hawaiian polka anthems anymore but after locking myself in a dark room with the Internet I have found 500,000 people on MySpace that like it!”. It’s a nice way for artists to challenge labels’. However she warns, ‘one has to remember that you can only exist so much on the Internet, i.e. nothing beats a great live show’.
Resisting the urge to look up Hawaiian polka anthems on MySpace, I asked what she feels the Web has brought to the music industry. ‘I think it’s a great thing to force them into overhauling some of their older structures’ she said. And she won’t hear of the Web as the death knell of music either: ‘I get very tired of people blaming Internet piracy and/or low Internet sales costs to the downfall of labels. In my opinion the music industry has been one of the most cost-inefficient industries out there and has only gotten away with some of their more frivolous spending because no one has really been there to compete with them. When I see Lilly Allen's CD being sold for $17 dollars at Starbucks I think “that is not expensive because of Internet piracy, it’s expensive because it’s EMI who think you need to spend $100,000 and up for a music video”. Indies don’t have money like that to waste and are forced to be more realistic with their budgets. Because they did not blow their budget hiring out the most expensive recording suite in the country to try and capture something someone could make in their bedroom, they can sell their CD’s for 10 dollars instead of 17’. She also sees technology as the friend to the independent musician, explaining that ‘some costs have been set so high because there were no other modes of production. With technology, process becomes cheaper and cheaper. At some point larger labels will have to realize this and I think that is around the corner’.
‘Hi-C’ is living, breathing proof of this. It’s highly polished production values suggest the most expensive, shiny, knob-twiddley production suite but Camille did it all herself. The sound is lush, complex and refreshing. First single ‘Wireless World’ is a call for an existence full of all the pleasure of progress and technology without all the clutter, a driving list of life’s disorder and detritus. ‘Spring’s Shadow’ (the second single) is a delicious synthesized ode to the dark side of love once it’s faded or been thrown away. ‘Cortez’ is blistering, distorted, and ends in rapid clapping and melodica maddness: who could ask for more? The soft beauty of ‘Where’ and ‘Blinding’ lulls the listener, the latter with a bossa nova beat so groovily gorgeous you can’t help but shuffle along as you sigh.
I wondered, if Camille lived in a wireless world, would she go acoustic? ‘Absolutely not. I love acoustic but I think mainly I just want there to be electricity without wires. It’s 2007 for god sakes, I am so annoyed that I still trip over wires and have to drive and fly to get places. What ever happened to star trek?!’