Bluedot Volume1

RHAIN
It took me over a year to finally see RHAIN perform
live, after hearing about a newly arrived star from
many highly enthused musical confidantes. Months
of near misses and perpetually unaligned diaries
followed until, finally, we were in the same room.
Mine just two of four hundred or so eyes frozen upon the
glittered, piano-gliding geisha who had just stunned a
room full of noise and techno heads in Bristol’s Arnolfini
art gallery to silence.
Serpentine and often dizzying song dynamics are
tempered with crystalline vocals that can flit from
emphatically empowered to fragilely brittle in the blink of
an eye. The live session of Humdrum Drivel that has been
on YouTube for a couple years now is a great introduction
to this, but when you are in her presence it really hits you.
Stirring falsetto just doesn’t grab the back of your neck
through laptop speakers.
Although brief, the artist formerly known as Rhian
Teasdale acknowledges that her time living in Bristol was
an important one in terms of how she now thinks about
being able to balance work and art. “It was great being
surrounded by people my age, interested in doing more
than just going to work, then eating dinner and then bed,”
she explains. “People who had loads of aspirations away
from their job and were very self-motivated… I found the
whole scene very inspiring.” She is now back within her
creative womb of the Isle Of Wight, from where she is
Skyping me.
Fittingly, festivals are on the agenda when we speak.
She has just returned from Barcelona’s indie Mecca
Primavera Sound and is understandably frazzled from a
week of sun, sea and… well, sound. Her catchment meant
she cut her teeth at Bestival and the Isle Of Wight Festival,
so the late-starting, city-dwelling set-up of Prima’ was a
bit of a departure from sprawling countryside happenings,
where the music wakes you up in the morning. “It felt
completely different to me in terms of that it all starts a lot
later, you’re not on site all weekend so get to touch base
with reality a little bit, although the reality is Barcelona,
which is not quite reality.”
“It’s like you’re going fishing and you
cast your net out, some people just
walk past and stop and take a listen”
We discuss how she usually spends hours wandering
around the fields stumbling upon new acts, and how her
most recent festival experience didn’t really lend itself to
that. “I slept a lot,” she concedes through laughter. “At
UK festivals you’re kind of forced out in the arena at
midday onwards, there’s no choice but to watch people!
I don’t think I saw and discovered as much new music as
I normally would do at a festival. I think you’re reliant on
using your friends as arbiters a little bit.”
When the shoe, or flip-flop, is on the other foot,
though, she knows that she can benefit greatly from the
collective thirst for new music at a festival such as bluedot.
“It’s like you’re going fishing and you cast your net out,
some people just walk past and stop and take a listen.
If they like you and they take the little bait that you give
them, then they stay for the rest of the show [and] hopefully
they like you forevermore.”
There is also a sense of ‘pressure off’ for a new artist
playing at a festival. Gig-goers at a standard gig, where
a new artist may be supporting a touring act or headlining
a local bill, are often more likely to have done a little
research to find out who they are paying their ticket money
to see, whereas in a tent in the
middle of the countryside, you
could literally be anyone.
Rhain is playing just a handful
of festivals this year – enough
for her develop and get used to
playing consistently and also just
the right amount for her not to get
sacked from her job for taking too
many weekends off. Her fellow
Caulkheads and frequent collaborators, Plastic Mermaids,
are also going to be there for most of them, giving her
the chance to perform on stage among their kaleidoscopic
magic, which she embraces as it gives her a chance to
be on stage without the sole focus on her. “When you
perform on your own it’s very raw,” she says. “It’s nice to
look around on stage and have your friends with you.”
Hopefully, there will be plenty of friendly faces staring
back at her from the crowd as well
rhainmusic.com
WRITTEN BY JOE HATT,
FROM HOWLING OWL
NEBULA STAGE
SUNDAY
17 | DISCOVERTHEBLUEDOT.COM