The cover was created by Jenny Nielson, front man Ruban Nielson’s wife. Recorded by Joel Taylor Mastered by Ji Golden Jr. Cover artwork by Jenny Nielson Front cover designed by Ruban Nielson D//D logo by Susan Kim @sck9891 Back artwork by Arthur Katrina @rot_radio Album art designer @chris_reeder You can stream it or pre-order on vinyl. New Zealand-born Ruban Nielson recently revealed how a polyamorous relationship spurred UMOâs latest album, Multi-Love â and landed him in hot water â but the LP is much more than the sum of its body parts, Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 06.27 EST. âJake [Portrait, the bandâs long-standing bassist] and I would get into town and would immediately find the people that were getting up to mischief,â he says of that time. Eau Claire, Wis. — The second day of Eaux Claires celebrated the legacy of The Grateful Dead with a special “Day of the Dead” tribute. Jenny Nielson – Unknown Mortal Orchestra – SB-03 (single cover) Unknown Mortal Orchestra tour the US to 21 June. Not long ago, New Zealand-born Nielson embarked on a three-way relationship between himself, his wife Jenny and a young woman whom the music website dubbed âLauraâ. Only loosely alluded to in the record’s lyrics—Nielson tends to voice his ideas in abstract, poetic phrasings—the story was sniffed out by an intrepid reporter, David Bevan, who turned it into the focus of a Pitchfork profile. Because of the portable recording setup Nielson had come to rely on to craft his music, this afforded an ability to make this music all across the globe. Does the fact that she’ll be growing up in a world with your music in it impact the way you approach your art? They eventually brought supplies into the park and after not having food or water for 12 hours, a truckload of stuff came. I started randomly choosing places that I thought might be fun. Heâs gained something of a reputation for chasing adventures. We hung out at some clubs and met a lot of people. There was a big monsoon and we got stuck in the Airbnb for a few days, but we had a mobile recording setup and the house had a nice Yamaha piano so we recorded some extra ideas in the apartment. The three had a polyamorous love-in for the next year, until visa issues prevented Laura from extending her stay. GQ: It’s interesting that most of the talk around your last record was about the relationship between your and your wife’s polyamory. © 2021 Condé Nast. âThe way things happened might have made her feel that way, but thatâs not really what happened. Ruban Nielson and his wife, Jenny, engaged in a polyamorous affair with a younger woman shortly before Nielson released his third LP under his Unknown Mortal Orchestra moniker, Multi-Love. Or did that help breathe new life into the work? It’s nice to be able to do that because you can really get a feel for what’s working and what isn’t. All rights reserved. They have two children, Moe and Iris. She goes on to takes a, face full of drugs and dances in a club without a bra. She goes on to takes a face full of drugs and dances in a club without a bra. It wasn’t until the third day that this theory was put forth about the record, that maybe the album was about this polyamorous relationship I had. Ruban Nielson (Mint Chicks, ... Ruban and Jenny’s firstborn. It definitely affected the way I talked about it, but it didn’t affect the way I wrote the lyrics. Ruban Nielson has 1 sibling in His family: Kody Nielson. He met Jenny during his time at the Elam School of Fine Arts, and the couple moved in together within a few months of their first date. Things picked up a little bit by then because I had friends and I had a bicycle, so I could get around town. âI think she was just a bit shocked at how much of ...â â he catches himself and changes tack â âhow important the album was to meâ. Multi-Loveâs production is dense, burbling with an unhinged, squelchy pressure that could only come from escaping the stress of a three-way relationship in a basement studio stacked with old synths in the middle of the night. âSheâs really pissed at me right now; sheâs never really had to deal with media [before].â Despite shooting the albumâs cover, a shot of Nielsonâs studio with a distinctive pink glow, Nielson suggests that Laura was taken aback by how, as a line of the titular track goes: âItâs not that this songâs about her / most songs are about herâ. This meant stints in Portland, Berlin, Mexico City, Hanoi, South Korea, Auckland, and Reykjavik. The National Unveil Massive Grateful Dead All-Star Tribute Album Flaming Lips, Jenny Lewis, Wilco, Stephen Malkmus, Courtney Barnett and dozens more cover jam legends on ‘Day of the Dead’ âIt makes me think: where does the music and life kind of end?â he says. There’s a bit of pressure to encode that song with advice or wisdom, which was kind of a neat thing. But Nielson is still dealing with the very real emotional fallout. I think about it more and more. You say it sounds more distinct which is interesting to me, because it’s hard for me to imagine what it sounds like. New Zealand-born musician Ruban Nielson’s story starts typically enough: married-with-kids dude in a buzz band meets an intriguing young woman while touring abroad. Led by Aaron and Bryce Dessner from The National, the first ever “Day of the Dead” tribute featured Will Oldham, Phosphorescent, Jenny Lewis, Bruce Hornsby, Ruban Nielson, Lucius, Matt Berninger and others. You recorded this album all over the world. Speaking with Pitchfork, he said that despite his reservations regarding polyamory at the relationship's onset, that “I feel like I’m gonna spend … I realized that with my DIY setup, I could go anywhere I wanted and do anything I wanted. Nielson is a former member of The Mint Chicks, a band he started with his brother Kody Nielson, Paul Roper, and Michael Logie. It’s the most freewheeling Unknown Mortal Orchestra album to date, the result of Nielson’s globetrotting expeditions and rootless approach to Sex & Food. Sex & Food is richly diverse in sound. Or has it all blended together? Multi-Love is out now on Jagjaguwar. We dropped a vintage mic into the piano and it sounded really distorted, so maybe it was the wrong thing to do, but we thought it worked so nicely, capturing the mood of that day, so it ended up on the record that way. I definitely found myself working out a few things that were the most basic rock things I’ve ever done. Both of those places inspired me a lot differently than spending time in my basement. DIGITAL TRACK LISTING: “Thunder” (Vol.1) 01. Their third album, Multi-Love, however, has been defined by a different kind of journey altogether, one that was dissected in eyebrow-raising detail in a recent Pitchfork interview. Multi-coloured parts bound in and out of focus like neon flubber, or else are muffled like a dusty, well-loved Otis Redding record lurking at the back of your bookcase. It was a nice break from the U.S., a really interesting contrast. All of these themes are discoverable by listening to the lyrics. Was it difficult continuing these songs with so much time in between sessions? “Multi-Love” is the first song, lead single, and titular track from UMO’s third full-length studio album, Multi-Love. Sugaree - Phosphorescent, Jenny Lewis & Friends 03. Eau Claire, Wis. — The second day of Eaux Claires celebrated the legacy of The Grateful Dead with a special “Day of the Dead” tribute. Each layer is like a memory. To the cynical it sounds like life imitating Portlandia. The couple and their two children had moved out of a yurt and into a permanent residence and invited Laura to stay with them after a period of exchanging increasingly romantic emails. I’ve done a lot of recording in my home studio, which is just a basement that I built out with my own equipment [in Portland, Oregon]. âAm I allowed to write about anything that happens to me, or am I allowed to just let anything happen to me because I can always turn it into music to protect myself from the chaos of life? The first two albums I made [Unknown Mortal Orchestra and II] were written on the guitar, and on the third [Multi-Love] I grew more interested in synths. There’s face-melting capital R rock ‘n roll (“American Guilt”), unabashed dance floor bangers (“Everybody Acts Crazy Nowadays”), and strange concoctions of lo-fi yacht rock (“HunnyBee”). Candyman - Jim James & Friends 04. GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. At first it sounds like a storyline from a indie-world soap opera. Live, the disco shift becomes even more blatant as their beardy psych-rock fans attempt to dance, and their Primavera performance the next day becomes a bleary-eyed scene from Footloose. I was in New Zealand and Jake, Kodi, and I started jamming and on the second take we got something I felt good about. Iâm reminded of this scene when talking to Ruban Nielson, linchpin of Portland psych-funk band Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Thereâs a scene in the second season of Girls where Lena Dunhamâs Hannah Horvath says she needs to âexperience things for the storyâ in order to write the book for âher generationâ. Ruban Nielson and his wife, Jenny, engaged in a polyamorous affair with a younger woman shortly before Nielson released his third LP under his Unknown Mortal Orchestra moniker, Multi-Love. These are the kind of catchy-yet-credible songs that Bruno Mars would probably shave off half his quiff for. Since 1957, GQ has inspired men to look sharper and live smarter with its unparalleled coverage of style, culture, and beyond. That worked well and I went back to Portland. I’ve always loved that story of David Bowie and Iggy Pop going to Berlin and recording all this stuff there next to the Berlin Wall, so I went to the DMZ, the border between North and South Korea, which feels like the modern equivalent. Multi-Loveâs aftermath has made Nielson more reflective. That inspired the instrumental part on “American Guilt.”. Is she annoyed that heâs exploited their anomalous experiences for his own creative ends? It was this theory they dropped on me and I guess they decoded the album. Jacob and I hung out there and recorded. The art accompanying the song was made by Jenny Nielson, Ruban’s wife. With that song, I was trying to think about how that song could be something she could go back to in her adult life. âItâs hard â¦â, he begins, half-tired of fielding questions about it, half-nervous about what he might answer. By the time the band plays Multi-Love and Canât Keep Checking My Phone, the crowd is enthusiastically knee jerking, emphatically clapping and drunkenly crooning to itself. As such, the album is a collection of puzzle pieces, jumbled, mixed, and teeming with memories of distant cities, highly personal tales, and a vision of the future in which Nielson’s daughter is the world’s biggest Unknown Mortal Orchestra fan. Lucius, Will Oldham, Sam Amidon, Richard Reed Perry, Matt Berninger, Justin Vernon, Bruce Hornsby, Ruban Nielson and The National, who all appear on the record. When we listened back we thought there was definitely something there, but we didn’t really finish it until we got to Hanoi five months later. When I tell people about what inspired me to write a song, I’m worried that it’ll make the song weaker in a way. I wanted to go back to the guitar a little more, lean on that as my main instrument again. I was so impressed by how people looked after each other. According to the press release announcing this album, you spent a lot of time listening to your older works to help inform this new record, which strikes me as odd considering Sex & Food is your most distinct sounding in a lot of ways. The child in the photo may be herself when she little or someone else entirely. I only told one person, but it spread. I canât tell what Iâm supposed to keep private now, or whatâs my responsibility to the people who listen to my records.â. Did it make you uncomfortable? We got trapped in the park. Jacob and I only had our credit cards and the ATM machines were shut down, so we were just stuck in the park with all of these peoples. Ruban Nielson: The funny thing is that doing this press trip, I was reminded that during the last record I didn’t even speak about my love life. Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Multi-Love review â a breakup record with a difference, Unknown Mortal Orchestra: 'I can't tell what I'm supposed to keep private now'. But it’s nice to think about how to add to it without taking a step back. For this new one, I wanted to get back to some of my roots—rock guitar. I figured I’d need a year-and-a-half on this record, and when I got into it, I thought I wouldn’t be able to make it because I’d work at night and sleep during the day. The National will be joined by Vernon, Jenny Lewis, Phosphorescent's Matthew Houck, Will Oldham, Sam Amidon, Richard Reed Parry, Lucius, Bruce Hornsby, and UMO's Ruban Nielson. At home with Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson and his new album, "Multi-Love." We were hanging with a bunch of Vietnamese musicians at the studio, too. After that I started thinking more about Jimi Hendrix and getting more guitar on the record, and how the first time I’d ever heard Hendrix was while watching a movie about the Vietnam War—how a lot of the ‘60s music I love was linked to the war. I wanted to get my brother [Kody Nielson] and my bandmate Jacob [Portrait] to come and hang out with me in these places and try to make something of that. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. I was tooling around with synths as a hobby, so it’s where I moved to for that album. Listening to “All Along the Watchtower” in Hanoi, this record that’s both very wild and very well performed, a sort of energy you can’t ever capture, was really special. It’s a lot more like the Vietnam I remember from the movies than I expected. What really sets Unknown Mortal Orchestra apart from from their bandana-toting contemporaries like Tame Impala and Foxygen, though, is their sense of soul. His private life provided the conditions under which Multi-Love came together. Nielson stirs his bloody mary with one tribal ring-topped hand in the lobby of a hotel (he also sports a third-eye tattoo at the bottom of his neck that is circled by wooden Buddha beads), the day before theyâre due to play at the Primavera festival in Barcelona. When I was doing that initial interview, I thought I was going to keep it to myself. Nielson is married to Jenny Nielson, with whom he was previously in a polyamorous relationship with alongside a Japanese woman; this courtship was the main inspiration for Multi-Love. All of these buildings collapsed and building inspectors weren’t letting people into buildings. She’s seven now, and she thinks it’s cool that her middle name is the title of the song, but when she’s 25 she’ll view it differently. It was a feeling that I needed to clarify rather than leave it to chance. He is easy to talk to, cracks jokes about tour life, and gets embarrassed when he catches himself being pretentious about spirituality or music being his âreligionâ. I was thinking about Jimi Hendrix and things I was interested in as a teenager. His father was a longtime musician, but also a recovering addict. I write songs exactly the same way I always have. So I went to Vietnam to see what it’d do to me. They eventually got on top of things and felt like they had enough supplies for everybody, and one of the volunteers just screamed at the top of his lungs, ‘Viva Mexico!’ Everyone in the park kind of lit up after a really hard 24 hours and it was just really inspiring. The band’s most freewheeling album to date. For one, Nielson defines âmulti-loveâ as not being âabout romantic love necessarily, but that love can be a lot of different thingsâ. Unknown Mortal Orchestra front man Ruban Nielson is still feeling the effects of an intriguing, artistically-inspiring experience. I really don’t know, but I like her creative flair nonetheless. I remember specific things. You got trapped in Mexico City during the big earthquake there, right? For instance, family bonds â his musician father Chris contributed brass parts, such as on the introspective Necessary Evil, and his brother Kody, with whom he was in New Zealand punkers the Mint Chicks and who now produces under the name Silicon, played most of the drum and keyboard parts on the album. As Nielson told GQ over the phone from Paris, “The thing that makes me interested in... a lyric is if it looks too weird to be true.” His concept of “multi-love” fits that bill, but in the run up to his latest LP, Sex & Food, he wanted his new songs to do all the talking for him—he wanted his travels across the globe with his bandmates and a portable recording set-up to speak for the styles and sounds he outfits his work in. Touch of Grey - The War on Drugs 02. His fiancee is Jenny Nielson. There was one young dude in his twenties, and he was into jazz, avant-garde shit, and rock ‘n roll, and we even made an album’s worth of material we may put out later in the year. It was interesting to go to a Communist country that’s maybe the only country that ever maybe defeated the U.S. militarily. Despite his laidback demeanor, however, his complicated love life looms like the elephant in the room. We went to New Zealand where my brother lives and where I grew up. At age 35, Nielson is a father of two and a faithful husband. By the time the album was released, it engrossed the record’s themes whole, turning Multi-Love into a record about that one time Nielson had two lovers and it almost ruined his marriage. Heâs keen to steer away from it coming across like a tie-dyed, 60s-esque vision of free love, which is why a lot of the production sounds so futuristic. The four members met at Orewa College in Orewa, New Zealand, although the band starting moving between Portland, Oregon and Auckland. “I realized that with my DIY setup, I could go anywhere I wanted and do anything I wanted,” Nielson explains. But the album is much more than the sum of its body parts. And not just because Nielson tends to spiral off into theories about the universe and holograms. Part of his rehabilitation involved making amends to those affected by his struggles, so he bought Ruban an electric guitar. Ruban Nielson came to playing music relatively late, picking up a guitar at age 19. Just don’t ask Ruban Nielson to talk about it. The band broke up following Ruban's departure. Did that influence or affect the way you approached this new record? We didn’t do anything really fun there. Laura isnât talking to him after the article was published last month. Was that odd to talk about in public? So I have these different layers that I was lucky enough to experience to help the record. Their previous album, II, had kindlings of groove but Multi-Love is lit up by it like a fairground at night. It’s a story that informs the album’s title and its title track. I had a budget for this record and I could do anything. Work on the album also distracted him from repairing their romance once Laura had been forced to leave the country for a second time (the first time it happened, he âwent kind of crazyâ and turned his frustration into the sunny disco-riffed song Canât Keep Checking My Phone). Ruban Nielson … Maybe itâs a betrayal that Iâm still talking about it to the press, I donât know. âItâs in a weird space at the moment,â he says of how they left things. It’s funny, because I only really told the story once and then it took over the narrative around the album. As provocative break-up album fodder goes, itâs surely up there with Rumours. And as for that sense of adventure? Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Your California Privacy Rights. We couldn’t get back to our Airbnb. 231 talking about this. 2015. Directly related to the album’s central narrative of the polyamorous relationships between UMO leader Ruban Nielson, his wife Jenny, and a woman codenamed Laura, … There was nothing to do, so we helped them bring food and water to old people and children. The album's title refers to a relationship that Nielson and Jenny extended to another woman. Nielson is married to Jenny Nielson. After a breakthrough album that exposed his personal life, Ruban Nielson is back with his best work yet – and some hard-won life lessons to go with it. Q&A: Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Nielson Explains His Super-Fi, Hard-Edged Multi-Love. You mentioned “HunnyBee” being about your daughter. For now, however, Nielson is content to be UMOâs ringleader and shape them into one of the must-see live acts this summer, with Portrait, trucker-like drummer Riley Geare and a new keyboardist, Quincy McCrary, in tow. Everything we do is a collaboration. His style has caught the ear of Frank Ocean and Chet Faker, both of whom Nielson is said to be working with. Also, on a technical level, I think that pop music and rock ‘n roll work a lot better if you leave space for the person who’s listening to the songs to take the music and make it theirs. Yeah, we were in a park. It’s a wild tale, enthralling in the way a simple line came to represent an entire album, but it also allows anyone interacting with Multi-Love to gloss over its layers of precise, intimately detailed arrangements. Ad Choices, Ruban Nielson Traveled the World to Make the New Unknown Mortal Orchestra Record. His first and second albums positioned him as an acid-tinged gear freak who didnât sleep and liked to party hard, with songs inspired by insomnia and self-medication. To an outsider it seems like she fulfilled a Manic Pixie Dream Girl-like role in his life, though it was clearly more than that. Ruban Nielson, frontman of the indie-rock quartet Unknown Mortal Orchestra, does not like Thanksgiving.In fact, he hates it so much he took his wife and two children to a remote log cabin in Oregon this year to escape the festivities. And talk they do. From award-winning writing and photography to binge-ready videos to electric live events, GQ meets millions of modern men where they live, creating the moments that create conversations. Ruban Nielson of psych-rock band Unknown Mortal Orchestra has gained something of a reputation for chasing adventures. The worst thing that can happen is that you get something nice and ruin it later on. Jenny and Laura then began corresponding as well, starting online and then moving to handwritten letters, which worried Nielson. At the time, Ruban Nielson was in the early stages of his first tour with his new band Unknown Mortal Orchestra, a psychedelic sequel to his work with art-punks The Mint Chicks. Jennifer Rubin writes reported opinion for The Washington Post. When you look at the tracklist, can you trace where in the world each song comes from and what you pulled from each experience? Once that happened, I figured it’d be best to talk about it since everyone already knew what the album was about. However, he shared a deep connection with a fan in Tokyo in 2013. In places Nielson sounds like a warped Stevie Wonder; in others he channels Princeâs strutty delivery. The idea of being in my basement for that long just sounded so boring. I put that into one of the songs to remind me of that moment. Was that an intentional decision or because of circumstance? Thereâs a reason why, in the early days at least, the band got through three tour managers and just as many drummers. âYeah, maybe,â says Nielson, tentatively. hereâs a scene in the second season of Girls where Lena Dunhamâs Hannah Horvath says she needs to âexperience things for the storyâ in order to write the book for âher generationâ. The album was considered to be, by far, Nielson's most personal; thematically, it was centered on a polyamorous relationship he and his wife Jenny had with a Japanese woman, and the feelings of loss when the relationship ended. Not long ago, New Zealand-born Nielson embarked on a three-way relationship between himself, his wife Jenny and a young woman whom the music website dubbed “Laura”. In what ways did re-visiting those old records—almost treating them as a distinct influence on your sound—play a role in Sex & Food’s style? I want to ask more about what happened, how he fell in love with two women at the same time and, Iâll be honest, who slept where. I wanted to find a recording studio as close to the DMZ as possible [laughs], and that ended up being a K-Pop studio in Seoul. General enquires: divideanddissolve@gmail.com Booking UK/ Europe vincent@odysseybooking.com Divide And … Itâs definitely something I have only thought seriously about after this experience.â Hannah Hovarth would do well to take note. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Led by Aaron and Bryce Dessner from The National, the first ever “Day of the Dead” tribute featured Will Oldham, Phosphorescent, Jenny Lewis, Bruce Hornsby, Ruban Nielson, Lucius, Matt Berninger and others. Unknown Mortal Orchestra: a sense of soul amid dense production. It’s a krautrock record. Nielson liked the idea of âa hip-hop DJ being able to play Kanye and then my song without it feeling like a total seismic shiftâ, but the truth is that UMOâs music has its own wooze-vision. But the first two records had moments that were influenced by Hendrix or The Stooges or something—any number of rock bands I used to listen to a lot. When the Pitchfork article happened, the journalist came to my house and hung out for five days. The family continues to live in Portland, Oregon, America, and Nielson, despite being a New Zealander, has said living in the … “SB-03” follows “SB-01” and “SB-02” which were released at the end of … While II was made when Nielson was raw in his recovery from a stretch of drug abuse, a recent feature on Pitchfork revealed that the inspiration behind Multi-Love’s songs was a polyamorous relationship that Nielson and his wife, Jenny (also the mother of his two children), began with a woman he met in Tokyo while on tour and who then came to live with them, … View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 2021 Vinyl release of "Gas Lit" on Discogs. I would never let anything like that affect the honesty of my words and music, but as far as press goes, I suppose sharing things about my personal life makes my personal life harder. Interviews February 5, 2015 10:25 AM By T. Cole Rachel. I hung there for a while and then decided I wanted to go to Iceland because it reminds me of a bizarro version of New Zealand. Did being in many different places play a role in the way Sex & Food sounds? It’s just inspiring to be with all these different sorts of musicians. We just had an apartment we’d walk to the studio from everyday. “HunnyBee” on the record is about my daughter.
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