Interview With Blindness & Light

Interview With Blindness & Light

What was the recording process like? Was it in a studio or do you do it all

yourselves?

A bit of both really. The lines are a bit greyed out these days. The house on Anglesey is pretty much taken over as a studio. All recording takes place here apart from some backing vocals in other peoples houses. Mixing and mastering is done by a commercial studio in Germany.

How do you guys write the songs?

It always starts with acoustic guitar. Then structure, then vocal melodies and lyrics. This is then built up into a full band arrangement. It takes months if not years. Song are purposely left unfinished before recording. The studio is an instrument in its own right and allows the creativity to finish off a track.

What were your main influences while writing?

A lot of reading and people watching. Digging into our past and seeing it from a different perspective.

What is your favourite song on the new release and why?

Every song is on “I Dreamt I Had Insomnia” is incredibly important to us. Every day a different one is in the spotlight. Butterfly though is super special, it’s about the eventual death of my mum after years of mental illness.

How did you come up with the name of the release?

I Dreamt I Had Insomnia of course came to me in a dream. What more can I say? ;-)

How did the band get together?

Redundancy led to us having a lot of time on our hands. Unfinished songs filled the gap and gave us new life and direction.

How did you come up with the name for the band?

Joy Division’s track Atmosphere was initially released on the French label Sordide Sentimental as an art package called Licht und Blindheit, which translates to Light and Blindness. We decided to swap it round. In fact Blindheit und Licht is etched on the run-off of our 2nd album “I Dreamt I Had Insomnia”.

Have you got any gigs or a tour coming up where people can hear the songs

live?

We’re busy in the studio recording our 3 rd album at the moment. Hopefully we’ll have time for some acoustic stuff later in 2025.

What are your plans for the next few months?

We’re trying to get away from our reliance on Spotify. We were burnt by their heavy handed behaviour recently due to being added by some stranger to their bot ridden playlist….totally unknown to us. The playlist was rightfully taken down but also the artists were taken down too….. including us. This is hardly supporting emerging artists and of course it’s grossly unjust. There are better people out there running companies in the music

business that actually like the fresh feel of new music. Music would be dead without this new blood and they realise that.

All of our music is now on BandCamp and SoundCloud. The major platforms are now secondary to the more ethical outlets but I guess they’ll always need to be involved at some level. We’ll continue to connect with better companies that have a passion

for music and not just money. We understand that these are businesses but some just get the balance totally wrong. Sorry for the rant but it’s amazing how heartless the industry can be. It may sound obvious but we just naively want to write songs we care about.

Look after y’selves,

B&L XoX