OH WONDER
Music. Defined as vocal and/or instrumental sounds combined in such a way as to produce an art form, harmony, and expression of emotion. Safe to say that the entire human population appreciate music in one way or another. It could be anything about it. The lyrics. The voice. The rhythm. One single song can be heard by 1,000 people and they will listen for 1,000 different reasons. That is the beauty of music. Of all the millions of artist creating music, one, or two, depending on how you see it, caught my attention as I was randomly searching for some new tunes on YouTube. I found one of a video released by Oh Wonder. It had been a song entitled Landslide. I was instantly a fan and tore through the website to search of each of their songs. Spent the week obsessing over them, really.
The very first song that won me over.
Unique. That's what best describe Oh Wonder, a London-based alternative-pop duo, of which its members are Josephine Vander Gucht and Anthony West. They had gained worldwide recognition after their very unorthodox way of letting their music be heard. They had launched a project where they released one song each month for a year on the music-sharing application, SoundCloud, This had been a very risky, albeit successful way of diving face first into the modern music industry that shamefully prioritize profit. SoundCloud is a free-streaming music program yet when Oh Wonder compiled all the already-released songs into an album it was also sold at incredibly high demand by fans. Oh Wonder had unknowingly risen into stardom without ever performing live, an amazing feat that has never happened to other artists.
The two halves behind the magic that is Oh Wonder.
Here's an interview that feature Oh Wonder on their history and sound ;
EM: How did you two meet?
OW: About five years ago Anthony was in the audience of one of Josephine’s gigs, and went to introduce himself after the show. A year later, Josephine was inadvertently at one of Anthony’s gigs and again, said hello after the show. A year after that we found ourselves working together in the studio with a mutual friend, and consequently decided to stop having random annual meetings and started writing together on a more regular basis.
EM: What is your process of songwriting/composing/producing like?
OW: Typically we write a song in about an hour. It starts with Josephine writing some chords on the piano; we then both contribute melody ideas and write the lyrics together. The recording process begins with a rough piano demo, which Anthony starts layering up with a beat, and then we’ll both chip in production ideas and collaborate on mixing the final track. We do everything ourselves- apart from the saxophone on “Lose It”, which was Josephine’s brother. It was the day before release and he was really hungover, but managed to play it flawlessly in one take. He’s that kind of guy.
EM: Do you use a mixture of instruments and digital elements, or do you have a preference?
OW: We love using rhodes and piano in our songs because it really humanises the music; there is something wonderful about capturing – in one take – a person playing an instrument when they’re totally in the moment, on a real acoustic instrument. For us synthesised or digital instruments fail to create the emotion that only real instruments or voices can capture. Equally Anthony is a wizard at creating his own original digital sounds, and we wanted to try and incorporate both of our own styles to give our music two different sides.
EM: So, it seems like every song you’ve released has become a hit! Rightly so, how has this experience been for you?
OW: To be honest, it’s incredibly overwhelming. We always set out to release a collection of 12 really good songs, (rather than 3 big songs and a bunch of album tracks), but we never thought our music would resonate on such a wide scale. We are genuinely staggered each time we release a new song and hundreds of thousands of people listen in the first week or whatever. It’s crazy! We were aiming for 1000 plays on ‘Body Gold’ in the first month and now we generally get 100,000 in the first day!
source : http://earmilk.com/2015/03/04/oh-wonder-shares-insight-to-their-massively-popular-project-interview/
