In part one of the Zopp interview Ryan Stevenson talked to Facelift about his own musical backgrouund and influences, and the events which led up to the recording of the first Zopp album. In this second and concluding part he moves on to talk about the ‘Dominion’ album, taking the music out on the road with band Zopp, and future plans for the project.
Ryan: ‘Dominion’ was more of a confidence boost. Every human being is based upon confidence and if you don’t receive feedback you don’t know how good your stuff is, do you really? So I had great reviews from the first album and it gave me that confidence. I finished the first release in April 2020, and as soon as these reviews came in, I was like ‘this is cool, I’m doing something good here’ and I remember writing ‘You’ (the album’s superb opener and probably Zopp’s defining piece) very early on, that was one of the first things, where the staccato piano came in, and then the whole track – that came about really quickly that song. And I was basically again just trying to write the best thing I could do incorporating the Canterbury thing but I wanted it to be more psychedelic.
I mention this word psychedelic, but not many people… maybe it’s not turned out psychedelic! That was the idea with ‘Dominion’ with the album cover, to have something that was a bit more of a ‘summer’ album. The first one felt a bit cold I think, although again we’re talking in abstract terms.
I’m really proud of the ‘Toxicity’ track (this is the track which both concludes ‘Dominion’ and also ends live sets) – there was like a puzzle, I was trying to work out this long song and so I worked hard on that – there are still elements from the first album in there. If you know a band called Tame Impala, an Australian band, they’re some sort of modern pop music but with a lot of psychedelic guitars and I was very much into that, still am, and I was trying to incorporate that into the music for ‘Dominion’: washed out guitars, delays on the guitars and you hear that on ‘Toxicity’ and ‘You’ quite a lot but then again there’s the Zappa element with ‘Reality Tunnels’ and this complex stuff and ‘Bushnell Keeler’ (where Ryan had written much of the track on midi) and I suppose a very Canterbury piano ballad thing like ‘Wetiko Approaching’, the shorter song before ‘Toxicity’.
But again for me the album flows well – I heard it a few days ago, a couple of songs and it still sounds all right. Again nothing is perfect, but a more confident album, and I tried the vocals too.
Indeed, ‘Dominion’’s greatest departure in comparison to Zopp’s debut album is that introduction of Ryan’s own voice, and the surprise 18 months on is perhaps that we hadn’t it before. My initial feeling on hearing it was that it was a clear attempt to widen the project’s audience to a wider prog crowd, but it has become such an essential part of Zopp’s sound (integral but not pervasive) that it’s becoming difficult to separate it from the band’s overall identity.
The earliest memory I have (of wanting to use vocals), is having an instrumental version of the song ‘You’, rehearsing it with Andrea and then me hearing vocal lines. So again it was intuitive, it was like, ‘let’s try this’. Originally the vocal line was a saxophone melody (the saxophone was another element I wanted to use a lot more like in jazz) – so you can hear that on ‘Toxicity’ and a few others.
I’m not a keyboard player, it sounds really modest but I’m not a keyboard player, not a singer. I’m just trying to make music that I want to hear. I think voices just become a part of the identity, even if they’re not like trained singers, it’s just becomes part of that sound, part of the palette. I try to get a blend of instrumental and vocal stuff, so it’s not all one format for every song.
I read one comparison online with the vocals of Richard Sinclair, which seemed to set the bar unnecessarily high. Ryan’s voice is certainly not as fulsome, but it does have that range, clarity, and works particularly well in harmony (he has found an admirable foil live with guitarist and backing vocalist Richard Lucas). Inadvertently, perhaps, he has also stumbled on the ‘Canterbury’ vocalists’ formula of being oneself, a tradition which dates back to Richard Sinclair’s Wilde Flowers demo of ‘A Certain Kind’, where he sang Hugh Hopper’s pop tune with choirboy rigidity, because that what was truest to his experiences up to that point.
On this third album I’m trying to sing how I sing. I’m trying to hear how I would sing, not trying to ape anyone per se, and I think that is again trying to be genuine.
That said, he’s not impartial to a touch of burbling Wyattesque scat singing as is heard live for the intro to ‘The Noble Shirker’.
You probably heard during Crescendo I did a bit of a scat thing – again that’s just an element that I thought would sound great and again I can’t help that! Who’s doing that type of singing? Not many people!
I asked Ryan about his lyrical inspirations for the brief number of tracks that have appeared under the Zopp name so far, primarily ‘You’ and ‘Toxicity’ and on the surface at least these appear to represent the ‘release’ he has found in forsaking a relatively mainstream, even dystopian existence, to pursue his musical calling.
It’s all about my own experiences and in life – not trying to be sci-fi – not trying to be too fantasy. It’s more about existential things. I have had a lot of very unusual experiences, like spiritual experiences. The last few years have been very profound and I tried to write about that: things like synchronicities (meaningful coincidences), reality manifestation realisations, and basically believing in yourself to change your reality. For example ‘You’ is a basic song about – it’s about many things – it’s about being an individual and the importance of being an individual and being who you are, not trying to be part of the crowd. (‘There’s a victory in knowing who I really am’ is just one lyric in ‘You’). As you picked up upon, being introverted in a positive way, being comfortable in your own skin and understanding who you are as a person. Those type of lyrics are very introspective – I’m not trying to discuss politics or anything like that per se, it’s more about my personal experience…
The Zopp project to date has been largely a one-man band with Ryan composing all pieces and playing the majority of instruments himself (the notable exception being drumming from good friend Andrea Moneta, an Italian expat who now lives in Derbyshire). This means that behind the dominant keyboards you hear on all Zopp tracks, the bass and guitar elements are also ones recorded by Ryan. But in 2023 tentative plans took hold to put Zopp into a live context, and a number of gigs have materialised since, two of which (the initial gig at The Sumac in Ryan’s home town of Nottingham and their most recent at Crescendo festival in France), I was lucky enough to attend and review. I asked Ryan what the criteria had been for various musicians joining the live band and he talked us through his connections and a little history of each member, starting with Moneta, with whom the connection goes back further.
The obvious criteria is can you play this song?! Can you handle the odd time signatures because when I’m writing this stuff I’m not thinking in terms of the time signature or how one part is offbeat – these are very unusual things which somebody with a musical training can read in the music by listening.
I met Andrea through an ad in 2017, a Gumtree ad. Andrea has done many things, he’s probably played the most professional gigs – I think he’s even played with or he shared the stage with Tony Levin the bass player (from King Crimson). He toured America with a bluegrass musicians, and many shows with his band ‘Leviathan’ who played a lot in the 80s – some sort of neo progressive Genesis sounding Italian music
It was the same with Ashley (Raynor, on bass), he also replied to an ad. He used to do functions, weddings and stuff like that so he’s got a lot of live experience. As many people have said he is a very natural guy on stage – he just very looks very comfortable and he can learn these complex lines so kudos to him.
Richard (Lucas, guitar, backing vocals) I knew through a friend and got him on board. He’s more from a soul and funk background. Richard is good in the sense that he’s open-minded musically – he knows what’s good and bad, he’s got an open mind.
Rob Milne is the sax and flute player who played with us for Danfest and who has performed with Guranfoe. Miles Noble is going to play with us hopefully for the next two shows, at least, and he’s involved in many projects, but we had a rehearsal yesterday and he’s a very good fit, he’s an amazing player.
As noted in both Zopp live reviews on Facelift, the band appear to have seamlessly taken a studio project into the live arena both in terms of sympathetic personnel and some tweaking of arrangements. The clearest manifestation of this is the extension of ‘Uppmärksamhet’ from ‘Dominion’, a reflective piece which has developed a new element, the improvisational extension ‘Prospectiv’.
I’ve always had an affinity with Scandinavia for some reason – I’ve been there many times, I like a lot of the prog music there too like Dungen and Anekdoten. Uppmärksamhet means ‘attention’ in Swedish, paying attention, and I just wanted a song that had that title. It was sort of a link with the first album with ‘Sellanra’. I liked the version on the ‘Danfest’ recording – we did a really nice version of that and then I basically split it into two with ‘Perspectiv’ (being the improvised element). I like those two a lot, we do that a lot, people say that’s one of the highlights of the show – the jam in the middle, so we carried on doing that…
As a band I wanted more improvisation so on ‘You ‘ there were more solos in the middle, there’s just room with that bassline in the middle, so probably that idea came early when we had a band together the Zopp band. I think Tom Penaguin (the French multi-instrumentalist who was interviewed at the start of the Canterbury 2.0 series, who Ryan originally put me in touch with) mentioned, because he saw the clip at Danfest – he said ‘it be good if there was a break in this’ – so now there’s a break in the middle with Ashley where the riff is in 7/4 and I told him to play in 7/8, so that’s like a break in the middle of the song which I’ve incorporated. So things happen organically I suppose, or ideas develop – that’s the great thing about the band format, and that has helped me to write for the third album (the band have already performed live a number of new pieces which will appear on future projects) in a healthy sense because you hear the new songs in a live format, and you hear what works and what doesn’t work. And I think that’s very healthy again and it helps the understanding from a different perspective.
Ryan is also expanding his familiarity with improvisation in other ways.
I’ve joined a band – it’s called the Nottingham Soul and Jazz Collective – we turn up every few weeks and we just get together and the songs are very jazz in the sense that you’ve got a theme at the start, and then it’s free for all in the middle, everybody’s jamming and then we return to the theme at the end. That’s sort of the loose format and that would be a good experience for me to develop as a musician I think. I’m on keyboards – I’d love to play something else than keyboards, because I think I’m a better bass player or even better guitarist than a keyboard player but I’m happy to play keyboards..
Which leads us on to future projects. When we spoke in France Ryan made free reference to both ‘third’ and possibly ‘fourth’ Zopp albums.
I’m writing the third album – there are three songs I really like from it. There’s one that we played for the encore (at Crescendo) and I really really like that song – I think that’s going to be called ‘Intuition Made It’. Again, the intuition thing again is powerful. It’s a bit poppy but it’s got proggy bits in and complicated bits – so that’s an eight minute song. There’s another song called ‘Bizarro’ – actually the album is going to be called ‘Bizarro’ too – but this is a really good instrumental song which gives me goosebumps actually listening to the demo in the car, and I know I’m on to something good when I get the goosebumps. So the Canterbury people will love that because it sounds like Soft Machine but it’s got the Zopp take on it. And there’s a song my dad wrote when I was a kid, that he said sounds like Greenslade but to me it sounds more Zappa, a bit like ‘Hot Rats’, simple but very melodic so I’ve reinterpreted that in my own way and that’ll be on the record.
And then there’s the ‘Living Man’ song which I’m still trying to perfect. We’ve been playing that for a year and I’m still not happy with the bit in the middle. I find it cheesy and it sounds very prog rocky, you know very cliched, but the guys in the band love it and I don’t really resonate with it.
Yesterday the band were like ‘no, we’re not going to change this because we got a gig next month’. That’s fine, I respect that but it doesn’t feel right yet – and this sounds really pretentious but I really am being sincere – I’m trying to make the best thing that innately, intuitively feels complete. That’s what an artist is. One of my idols is David Lynch, the American director, the avantgarde post modern, whatever you want to call him. Not just in his art, but who he is in interviews is a big inspiration – the thing is done when it feels complete, and that can drive you mad, insane, because I really am trying to do that with everything. I could make an album quickly, but it would be crap. Andrea yesterday said that the ‘Living Man’ song is the best thing I’ve ever done. I was like ‘thank you, but it just doesn’t feel right’. I know that is the main thing, if I’m not happy with it, it can’t be on the album. I do raise the bar high for myself which is good.
And then there’s other little pieces now which I’m working on every day to try and finish and then we’re hopefully going to record the drums next year sometime.
The fourth one is called Zomm and we recorded the drums for that two years ago now, and that’s the stuff I wrote before Zopp in 2015-17, so this was a band that I had and it broke up but I wrote a lot of music for it. We’ve got a Venn diagram here of Magma and Mr Bungle (an American experimental rock band) – avant garde dark weird doom stuff!
Ryan also assiduously documents his live performances so far, and a couple have already seen the light of day, snippets from the band’s debut gig in Nottingham (https://zopp.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-the-sumac-centre reviewed here ), and in the last few days, a much fuller reflection of the band’s live repertoire, captured at Danfest in November 2023 (https://zopp.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-danfest)
I’ve recorded most of the gigs with Zopp so they’re going to be released eventually, either bandcamp or maybe another CD so people get that fresh perspective on the live format versus the studio.
Finally, one of the primary themes within the whole Canterbury 2.0 series in Facelift has been to ask musicians their thoughts on how they see themselves fitting (if at all) within a wider Canterbury scene.
This is an important question. A neo-Canterbury movement? In one sense yes, in another sense no – that sounds contradictory! The DNA of some of these bands I observe and acknowledge is being carried forward with Tom Penaguin’s music, with my music and with many other bands you’ve interviewed such as Amoeba Split. I acknowledge that, and it’s true, and I don’t hide that fact.
But when I’m making music I’m not thinking, ‘I’ve got to be a part of a scene’.
So there’s two different perspectives, two different ways of looking at it when I make music. As I’ve said, I’m trying to please myself all the time to make an album that I want to listen to. That’s it. But I don’t want to be boxed in or continue making the same album forever. Those elements are always going to be in Zopp, whether that’s the weird melodies, the fuzz organ, some scatting like Wyatt, these things will always sort of be in there somehow. But I’m going to try and shake it up, which might upset people, and that’s fine because fans go, some come in. I try not to think too much about it.
But even talking about it still helps promote the (original) music and it’s a romantic thing about a scene and I get that, I totally get it. And I love it too because this legacy is important in one respect, because otherwise these bands would just be forgotten.
Thanks to Ryan for his ongoing support for Facelift and related projects and for all the wonderful music he produces.
Live at the Sumac is at https://zopp.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-the-sumac-centre
Live at Danfest is available at https://zopp.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-danfest
Zopp’s bandcamp page is at https://zopp.bandcamp.com/ where you can also buy the first two studio albums, T-shirts and merchandise and rare artefacts such as gig posters, early demo versions.
Zopp’s next two gigs are at HRH Prog at Great Yarmouth https://hrhprog.com/line-ups
and in Southampton on 15 December https://www.ticketweb.uk/event/haze-zopp-the-1865-tickets/13423464
This feature is number 6 in a Facelift series interviewing ‘ne0-Canterbury’ acts which started earlier this year. Read earlier interviews with Tom Penaguin, Lunophone, Fabio Golfetti, Amoeba Split and Carla Diratz
For other interviews in the Canterbury 2.0 series, please click here
The Canterbury scene(zine) continued.... 
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