When it comes to dance music’s many identifying factors, it can become a tenuous task to catch up on it all. Whether it be genres, parties or whatever trends are percolating at the moment, the over-saturation can drive one to think different about how they perceive dance music.
Enter Polish producer and graphic designer We Will Fail whose sound has enveloped festivals such as TodaysArt and Unsound. Her latest album ‘Dancing‘ is an inventive representation of her feelings towards dance music and her sonic resolutions towards what she’s inferred from it.
To discover more about her music we caught up with Aleksandra Grünholz ahead of her performance at this year’s Unsound Festival to dig a little deeper into what brought upon this unique sense of ‘self’ into her work. In addition we are happy to present a track premiere from the album, “Put Your Hands Up In The Air”.
Interview by Mitch Strashnov
"I don’t need to follow expectations or trends to construct the best art I can make."
Congratulations on the release of your new record – it’s incredibly personal and relatable in terms of creative difficulties and cathartic breakthroughs. What sparked you to make an album about these particular experiences?
Well, it’s part of my job to still be out because of gigs! However, the feeling of going to the party as a person who is playing it makes it less fun — that includes waiting for your time to play, and then the time afterwards; perhaps feeling disconnected from the experience that surrounds it.
The album came from being in a state of constant frustration and working too much; but there’s only a small amount of time you can have for yourself and this album was the result of it.
The album is wonderfully indelicate – various bits of genre-building and breaking all at once – tunes range from the vibes of rave to morose, chunky industrial – was there a method to the lack of cohesion in terms of structure, or was the structure being so different actually the cohesion you were striving for?
There are ravey paths that connect the tracks on the album, as well as particular arpeggiations, but I don’t think I could make similar tracks; constructing the tracks were more about how I was feeling at the time and showing that as honestly as possible.
Do you feel it’s easier to get disillusioned by the cyclical nature of electronic music scenes more than ever?
Yes the scene lately is more privy to trends, and you can try and mimic them, but trends tend to fade fast. When I’m at my office in Warsaw, I just live my life — I don’t need to follow expectations or trends to construct the best art I can make.
Software is making things easier to make things more trendy, or perhaps even more generic – we are living in the age of “OK music.” Personally, I could never really make dance music — I try to make it and then half-way through the process I break and bend it.
Is there something you hope listeners to get out of this album that you wanted to personally convey?
It’s about transference of emotions; a lot of artists want to convey their emotions in their music and the emotion I wanted to embody was my strength. There is power that I want to channel through this record and I wanted to do that with a strong album that would hopefully make whoever’s listening to a little bit stronger; especially in these troublesome times of distractions and over-saturation of media.
Finally, let’s talk about your design work – your immaculate sensibilities have been at work in the last couple of editions of Unsound Festival – with this year’s theme “Presence” represented perfectly amongst the regalia of the festival’s acts and overall tone. When presented with the task of creating the design language for this year’s edition, what was your approach like?
It was definitely a process; the festival founder – Mat, gave me a lot of direction. This time was very complex — and the poster went through several phases. When you see it for the first time throughout, you get to see the narrative of how current times are only a paradise for the few and far-between. Being present is just about living in the moment, which is tough when you have a busy life. You just need to pace yourself, and not run yourself down.
Dancing is out now in vinyl, CD and digital formats, order a copy from Bandcamp.
Featured photo by Theresa Baumgartner
Discover more about We Will Fail on Inverted Audio.
We Will Failrefined.productionsElectronicExperimental