Diaphane
Portraits
2022 | Rock
— track 1: “Always Out of Time”
Kyle Blessing: There's some really great bands around here. I love Mildred, The Wake Singers, Dead Marthas, Someday Best. There are plenty of talented people in Rapid City, but it's definitely a smaller bowl, right? Philadelphia is the greatest city in America for rock music for the last 10-plus years, I'd say. When I when I first moved [to Philadelphia] I didn't even know that, and then I started going to basement shows my first week there. Modern Baseball was blowing up. I got hip to Spirit Of The Beehive, I saw them in a warehouse, no one knew who they were yet. Mannequin Pussy. Sun Organ. I got to see Japanese Breakfast just before they blew up, it was when they were putting out that [2017] record with "Boyish," and I actually left that show early to write [the final song of Portraits] "No Depression," I wrote it in the back of my car while that show was going on.
That's actually part of why I had to leave [Philadelphia], though. I felt, as a person I'm kind of — other people can have a big influence on me. And I think I get so lost in other people sometimes that I lose track of myself. And that's kind of how I started to feel, especially with some of the people I was playing in bands with, they were just these huge personalities, these amazingly creative people, and there was a lot of people that are older than me, right? I met them [when I was] 19, 20, they're all 23, 24. And they're all like, "We've been playing in punk bands since we were 14." And I came from Long Island which has no music scene for that at all. It was just shitty pop-punk bands, and ska, and one cool metal band that my friends were in. And so I just felt like everyone was way cooler and more experienced than me, I felt like I was always trying to impress them and fit in with them. And then people were just so talented around me, and I just couldn't figure out who I was, or what I wanted anymore, what I wanted to sound like, because I was so impressed by what people around me were doing. I wanted to come here to Rapid City to hole-up, and be by myself, and figure out what I want to sound like.
//\\//\\//
I grew up on Long Island. I started playing viola in orchestra in fifth grade. My dad has always been a gigging musician. He's a guitarist and a singer. Ever since I was a kid, he was always gigging on the weekends and playing in bands and stuff like that. He tried to teach me guitar a couple times, but in my experience, now that I'm a teacher too, I don't think parents teaching their kids music hardly ever works [laughs]. It didn't work for me. Even if you're a really great musician it just doesn't work. So yeah, I started on viola and a year later I picked up guitar and I started getting private lessons. The same guy who taught me those was a bluegrass fiddle player and a mandolin player, so he taught me those a little bit. His name is Brian Chabza, back on Long Island. So I was doing that, and then I just kept picking up instruments on the way, like, in eighth grade I got a lap steel and a banjo and I tried to teach myself both. Didn't make it far with the banjo but I still use the lap steel now and again, I think it's on the album on one track. Picked up piano in high school.
So I was in orchestra, but I always more gravitated towards rock music. Actually, what got me into music was Green Day. In fifth grade, I saw them on American Idol doing "Working Class Hero," the John Lennon song, and I was obsessed. I went to go buy their album and I couldn't remember the one my dad told me to get, which was American Idiot, and I just bought Dookie because that had a cooler cover. I'm glad I bought that one first [laughs].
So I was always into rock music: Green Day, Tom Petty, Wilco, Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground, in middle school and stuff. And then I started joining bands in high school, as well as playing in orchestras. One of the most formative things for me was I played in a new music orchestra, Face The Music, in New York City in my last two years of high school where we only did music by living composers. We did a lot of weird performance-art shit. It was really cool. I got to play with the Kronos Quartet at Carnegie Hall when I was 18. Lots of cool shit.
But anyway, in 2014 I ended up getting into college at Temple University [in Philadelphia] for viola, and realized immediately after that I did not want to study viola in college After I got in, I didn't practice at all. I wanted to go for composition — songwriting, that's always what I liked. So I switched one semester in, went to school for composition. I did a couple of study-abroads, because I was on a full-ride, so I was able to have these stipends — I had four grand every summer that I could use to do a study abroad or something. So I went to Montreal, and I studied the ondes martenot, which is the earliest electronic instrument. It was used by Olivier Messiaen a lot, he was my favorite composer when I was younger. And then I took composition lessons with this guy at McGill University, Bob Hasegawa, who really changed my life. He got me into spectralist music. It's this French school of music that came about in the 70s with the invention of the spectrograph. It uses timbre as the guiding principle for the composition. So they derive their scales from the overtone series of various things. The most famous early piece is "Partiels" by Gérard Grisey. It's just this recording of a trombone playing a low E-flat, and then he takes the whole overtone series of that and orchestrates it with a whole symphony orchestra. So it's all microtonal and it uses the overtone series even to guide time and stuff. So I got really into that.
Then at the same time, I was getting really into the punk scene in Philly, I was throwing DIY punk shows out of my basement, and I got to this point in my junior year where that felt like it meant more to me than what I was doing in school. I ended up dropping out. That was 2016, like within a week of Trump winning the election. It was a weird week. Then I kind of just lied my way into some teaching jobs [laughs], started teaching music and played in punk bands. I toured up and down the East Coast in a bunch of artsy punk bands, a country band, joined an Irish band for a second. And then I ended up in South Dakota in 2020 because I was teaching online, and I realized I could live anywhere. I had a buddy who had moved to Spearfish for a while, he convinced me to come out to South Dakota with him. He was like, "The East Coast is fucked up right now, man. Let's go to South Dakota, it will be way more chill." I was like, "Yeah, sure."
//\\//\\//
This album [Portraits] took me forever. The first song I wrote is "To Break Your Own Heart," I wrote that a little before my 19th birthday in my dorm room the first year of college. So I wrote everything between 2015 and 2017. Not every single song is a portrait, but the first song [“Always Out of Time”] is a portrait of this girl I lived with in Montreal who I had a crush on. The verse on that song kind of lays out the concept, "What's the point of a picture if it don't tell you just how I see it?" So by painting portraits of other people, you end up painting a portrait of yourself, really. It says more about you than it does about them. And then there's a couple songs that are more like self-portraits. A number of them are portraits of other people. One's of my dad and my grandmother, the last song on the record [“Know Depression”]. “How” was always one of my favorite ones. I love the guitar riffs on it, and just the structure of it. I would say that summer in Montreal really changed how I was writing songs. Before then, I would try to write songs all in one sitting. So like "To Break Your Own Heart," "Portrait no. 2," "When You're Young," those were all written in that spring of 2015, and I would write them in one sitting. Now, "To Break Your Own Heart" is this whole convoluted epic, because I never knew how to finish it, and I did a bunch of crazy shit to it. But, the core of that song I wrote in one night, and I used to subscribe to that [philosophy]. And then over the summer, I started writing "Always Out of Time," I wrote the first half of it in Montreal, and then I finished the rest when I got back to Philly. That was the first one where I wrote in sections over a month or two. And then "How" was the second one of those. So that was where I really feel like I started to come into my own with my songwriting. Understanding that the process can be more than just this, like, "You have to sit down and finish the whole thing at once." And it's interesting, you hear where you are when the song starts, and then by the time you finish writing it a month later, you've kind of worked through those issues and you can hear it. Which is how I very much approached it for a while: it was a therapeutic, cathartic thing a lot of time.
The core band was just a great group of musicians. We rehearsed all the time. It took me a year to teach them all the songs, because there were all these little timing things I wanted to get just right, and little dynamics. So it took a long time to really get the whole record rehearsed. And we were playing shows that whole time, pretty much playing the same set the whole time because we were just working on these songs. And then everyone else I brought in was people I knew from music school. I wanted lots of horns and harmonies, that was most of the collaborators.
//\\//\\//
I started recording [Portraits] in 2018, in earnest. But the problem was, I also started recording two albums with my two other bands I was in. So I was working on three records at once. One got done, and mine eventually got done, the other band broke up and never finished that album. So I learned my lesson — but only a little bit because I'm doing the same thing right now [laughs], but only with two bands.
So that first real record I put out was with a band called Line Leader. And that really changed me as a musician. Right after I dropped out of school they brought me in. They were signed to this record label at Drexel University, so we got into this world-class studio, Studio A at Drexel in Philadelphia. And we had, like, unlimited time, unlimited funds to record as much as we wanted. I got to record on real grand pianos, and rhodes, and I did big orchestral arrangements, and we got synthesizers in there. I'd say that's where I really learned how to produce and how I approach making records, in terms of how I think about orchestrating everything. It was just a really great, creative group of people. Sadly, Line Leader broke up a couple months after the album was done. The record is called Houses of Water. Really proud of that record.
I was recording [the songs on Portraits] that whole time. So I had my band Diaphane in Philly. One of the members of that was also in Line Leader. We were all in a couple bands. Like, there's one point actually where me and my buddy Adam were in five bands together at the same time. So [Diaphane] got in the studio, started recording stuff in 2018 with this guy, Dan Angel, at this warehouse in Philly. There were three sessions we did: two of them were at that warehouse, and one was at Big Mama's in Philly, which is a sick studio. That's where Spirit Of The Beehive recorded. They're my favorite band. One of the guys who was in that band recorded a couple of the songs on my album, Tim Jordan, he is amazing. He left Spirit Of The Beehive after their second record, Pleasure Suck, which is one of my top 10 albums of all time. And now he has a band Sun Organ that's amazing. So yeah, we did live-tracking for pretty much all the songs, where it was just guitar, bass, and drums. We would just track it all together in a room and put up baffles. And then I love overdubbing way too much, just kept overdubbing. So I'd say I worked on it really hard for a year, from 2018 to 2019. Then I just, yeah, I had this nervous breakdown at the end of 2019, where I quit all the bands I was in. Actually that was that was the first time I thought about moving to South Dakota. I just didn't get any work done during that period of time.
And then I decided to crack down at the beginning of 2020 — this is before the pandemic. I had one song left to record which was the "Interlude," the second to last track, the acoustic one with the choir. We did that one with my buddy Ethan Farmer at The Metal Shop in Philly. That was a really magical experience: I got all these people I knew, I had opera singers I taught with and people I knew through the DIY scene, there was four or five of us that recorded live in the room, and then we overdubbed everybody else. We got, like, 20 people on that track. It was just really awesome. We had people coming in all day long. Really special. I love listening to it, it takes me back to that day. Great energy in the room, everybody was throwing ideas at each other.
I recorded it really slowly because I was just doing too many other things. That was a big part of why I moved here, I wanted to focus on one thing, and I felt like there were too many things pulling me in a million directions in Philly. So I was like, "South Dakota, middle of nowhere, I'll go there, isolate, and finish my record." So I finished recording it here, doing most of the lead vocals here and some guitar overdubs. Then we were mixing it, and then the pandemic hit. We started learning how to mix remotely, finished it mixing-wise in 2021. So it was a-year-and-a-half of just mixing the record. But I would constantly be re-recording things. It was my first album, I didn't really know how it was gonna sound, or how to do it, I was just learning the process. So there's a constant back and forth, not efficient at all [laughs]. And then I sat on it for a year because I didn't really know how I wanted to release it. I wasn't with my band anymore in Philly. And I tried to start a new band here in Rapid City, but I felt weird calling it the same thing, so we had this whole other name, Siren and the Ivans — it was this persona band where we all came up with fake Russian personas or something, it was a whole thing. And then I don't know, I just wasn't feeling that. I was like, "I'll just make it a solo thing so I can do it how I want to do it, because I'm super anal about that stuff. And I'll just call on people when I want to and I can do stuff on my own when I want to." That's what we've been doing since the summer when I decided to put it out.
I was able to figure my stuff out while I was holed-up alone [in Rapid City] for a while finishing this record. And then I joined Modern Folklore in 2021, playing synths, guitar, violin. Being in that band has made me feel a lot more confident in myself. As a band, we have kind of like a bravado when we're all together, we all just egg each other on, Like, "You're awesome, man! No, you're so awesome!" And we just build each other up. I feel like I found my confidence here.
KYLE BLESSING’S ESSENTIAL SOUTH DAKOTA ALBUMS
The Wake Singers — The Wake Singers (2021)
Mildred — ep (2022)
Dead Marthas — Volume One (2020)
Someday Best — III (The Empress) (2019)
SOURCES
Blessing, Kyle. Interview. By Jon Bakken. 10 January 2023.
