Ambient From The Scottish Woods

An interview with the elusive producer Veryan

Just a decade ago, Veryan was living in hectic London, working the corporate treadmill. She had never actively made music in her life.

These days, she’s busy with gardening, baking, walking in nature and producing minimal ambient on the remote west coast of Scotland. Her fifth album One Universal Breath just got released on Quiet Details.

Veryan’s music reflects her introverted personality and her reclusive lifestyle. With its enchanting synth melodies and gracefully slow beats, it wouldn’t feel out of place in a mid-1990s chillout room set. There are traces of krautrock and early electronic music, of classic ambient and new age sounds.

I spoke to the late-bloomer musician about how an Ableton course changed her life, how she left the corporate world behind and moved from the bustling metropolis to the rural hinterland, and how her music is connected to the ancient Chinese martial arts practice of Tai Chi.

Veryan, photo courtesy of the artist

What are some of your earliest memories of music?

I grew up in a house filled with music. My parents were big jazz fans and collectors, and some of my earliest memories were tapping out drum patterns with my mum along to jazz records. Then my father started playing guitar, and we'd visit my grandparents and sing as a family.

When I was four, I remember being obsessed with Nancy Sinatra's “These Boots Were Made For Walking.” My parents had to record it on a loop tape recorder because I wanted to hear it all the time. I think it was the bass on there. I've got a real thing about a love of bass.

But you never received any musical training?

That's right. Life just got in the way. I was working. I never found the time to dedicate proper practice to the instruments that I was collecting.

At last night’s listening party, you said you never made music before 2015, when you attended an Ableton course near your workplace. Why did you even want to do that?

That was a particularly difficult year. My mother got very sick and then died. I actually worked in investment management at the time, but my job was turned upside down, and I ended up leaving. I broke my hand. It was just the worst year.

It felt like there were lots of spinning plates in my life and I was trying to keep my emotions stable. I thought I needed to do something disruptive that's going to distract me and absorb me, something to save my sanity, because I couldn't think. I saw this course advertised, and it sounded interesting.

So I went there in the evenings after work, to this dance music academy. I still had my corporate clothes on, and there were all these really cool, young people with tattoos. It was great though. I loved the freedom it gave me to create.

So what happened after that Ableton course ended?

I started to make noises and exploring sound, just purely in Ableton, with no external equipment at all. I managed to do a couple of tracks, and put them on Bandcamp. They sounded decent enough. And this musician Mark Peters – actually, one of my favorite musicians – just contacted me out of the blue and said he liked them.

That encouraged me, so those tracks evolved into my first self-released album Ebb + Flow [2020]. On the back of that, I got picked up by a small art projects label called Cue Dot for a CD series, and I did Here [2021] for them. Then I did the remix [Here//Now, 2022] and was signed to Werra Foxma to do Reflections in a Wilderness [2023], my first vinyl release.

By that time, I'd started to use a Korg synthesizer and my Fender bass guitar. In the last years, I've started to use more plug-ins, be it spring reverbs or certain keypads. It's evolved over time, but it's still pretty basic. I just create sounds. I might be hitting a ladder with a twig, anything that might make an interesting noise, and then manipulating it in Ableton.

Writing such minimal music, I’m allowing that space for people to fill in the gaps themselves with their own subconscious ideas and interpretation. That's kind of my intention, if I were to have one.

When I listened to your new album One Universal Breath, it reminded me of German electronic music of the 1970s, like Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze’s solo albums.

I take that as a huge compliment. That’s probably an influence I wear very firmly on my sleeve. You're not the first person to say there's a lot of Tangerine Dream in there, and they are one of my favorite bands. I adore them. I love a lot of the 70s German bands, like Neu! and Can.

Do you have a background in dance music as well?

Not at all. My main influence was post-punk, bands like Magazine, Wire, The Au Pairs, but also Malaria! In fact, I came very late to appreciating dance music. My husband introduced me to it. I was always an indie, goth kind of girl, mainly listening to guitar music.

The track titles are lifted from Tai Chi practice, aren’t they?

You're right. All the titles are from moves in Tai Chi, some that I remember performing, when I practiced myself a few years ago.

I was sitting in a Paris park many years ago after the death of my father, just trying to contemplate my grief, and I saw a lady just on her own, practicing Tai Chi under a tree. Just watching her perform each of these moves so beautifully and purposefully gave me comfort in that moment.

It made me think about this dual aspect of yin and yang. The hard and the soft, the yielding and the inflexible. I tried to convey those moods through the use of the music, the fluidity of the pads and the harder aspects of the drums.

I don't know if you've seen Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files. He talks a lot so beautifully and poetically about grief, and about what life is. It's this balance of love and loss, and that's your place in the world. That's how you know where you are. Everything is moving, everything evolves and comes to an end, but then starts again.

Were you practicing Tai Chi yourself already when you saw that lady in the park?

Yes, I was. I was automatically drawn over to look at her, because I could recognize some of the moves. Fortunately, it was the long form Tai Chi, which is very elongated, goes on for very many moves, into the hundreds. So I was there for some time, just watching her. And clearly she'd been doing this for many years, because she was so perfect. It was amazing to watch.

Is your practice of Chinese martial arts part of a wider spiritual worldview?

Well, I don't follow any real belief system. In a previous life of mine, I was drawn to paganism and nature spirituality. I had many friends in that circle, be them druids, Warlocks or Wiccan witches. That was interesting, but never something that I completely embraced. I didn't want to be tied down or labeled to any particular type of spiritual form.

I take what I call this Bruce Lee approach. I'll do lots of reading and diving into things, like Taoism or Zen Buddhism. I might not get behind it 100%, but I can relate to some aspect of it, so I'm going to take this bit and apply it, but reject the rest. That's the beauty of what Bruce Lee was talking about, how he develops his practice and philosophy. Take what's useful, what resonates with you, leave the rest behind – that's how I approach spirituality.

You’re living in remote western Scotland now. How did that lifestyle change happen?

My husband and I both got to this stage at the same time with our careers – we were just not happy on this constant treadmill. We thought, there's got to be something better to life than doing this every day.

My mother had just died, and it sparked this conversation. The one thing my parents had in abundance was a lot of time with each other. And my husband said, we don't get that because we're so busy working and traveling for work.

So we asked ourselves: Can we walk away from this? Fortunately, because we'd worked for a long time in the city, we'd saved up some money, so if we really simplified our lifestyle, we’d be able to go and do something completely different. And that's what we did.

The first move we made was to Yorkshire. We were in a small hamlet of five houses, and it just didn't work out. We felt it was too enclosed. We really wanted to be remote and away from other people and live the life that we wanted to without interference, which is a luxury, but that's what made us look for and find the house in Scotland.

And now you live in the middle of the woods?

The village is about a mile away, and the nearest town is about an hour's drive from where we live. So it's all forestry, which is beautiful. We've got private water supply here, so we're not even on mains water. It comes straight off the hills, right into the house. It's brilliant.

It has its own challenges of course, but I wouldn't swap it for the world. We've got an old farmhouse that we're renovating. One of the challenges is that because we are so remote, we can't easily get workmen or tradesmen to come. So we've had to learn to do it all ourselves.

Would you say that lifestyle is reflecting your personality more accurately than your former life in the city?

Absolutely. I’m quite a shy, private person and a bit of a recluse. I don't tend to have that many contacts. For example, I couldn't ever see me doing anything live, because I just value my privacy so so much. I've got massive admiration for people that can put themselves out there. That takes a great deal of courage, which I probably lack. I don't know, I just find it all a bit uncomfortable.

I don't put my pictures or show myself on social media. You'll never catch me on Tik Tok. I'm not a natural performer in any way, shape or form. The other day I was looking for a recipe to cook on social media, and I was grumbling to my husband: “Why does everything have to be such a performance? You know, people spinning onions or knives… just cook the food!” (laughs)

I've got the same snobbery about music. Just listen and take it on its merit. You either like it or you don't. Great if you do, but it’s not mine anymore. Once it's there, it's gone.

What does a typical day in the Scottish woods look like?

Wet. (laughs) One of the lovely things that we do every single morning is make a coffee, put it in a carry mug and go for a walk, rain or shine. That's joyous in itself, just walking and talking and experiencing all the different seasons and the changes around us.

When we first moved here, people were warning us, saying we’ll get cabin fever or we’ll go crazy. But it's the complete opposite. I make music, I read, I cook and bake and do gardening and renovations on the house. My days are very full. But full of lovely, pleasurable, fulfilling, soul-enhancing stuff. It's a simple life, but a very privileged one.

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Media Diet

Listening: Holy Tongue meets Shackleton – The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now (2024)

Holy Tongue, the experimental dub trio of Valentina Magaletti, Al Wootton and Susumu Mukai, collaborate with Sam Shackleton, one of electronic music’s most versatile and unpredictable producers, for six tracks of hypnotic, psychedelic outsider dance music.

The trio gave Shackleton access to a collection of raw material and recorded tracks that he used to arrange and produce this album. The material lands closer to old Skull Disco tunes than his recent forays into free jazz or Hindustani classical. If you’ve been craving a dose of wyrd, ritualistic dub(step), then you’re in for a treat.

Reading: Ayşegül Savaş – The Anthropologists (2024)

One reviewer said they didn’t want this joyful book to end, and that’s exactly how I felt during the last 20 pages.

The documentary filmer Asya and her husband Manu live together in a city in a country foreign to both of them. They’re in a transitional stage, trying to settle down, looking for an apartment to buy where they can imagine a future and basically just find out how to live.

Savaş, who grew up in Turkey and Denmark, went to college in the US and now lives in Paris, said she wanted to write a “happy book”. The Anthropologists explores the importance of routines and rituals, and the notion that the idea of a home can be equally defined by a place and the people you share your life with.

Watching: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi – Evil Does Not Exist (2023)

Not as epic as Drive My Car, which is one of my 10 Great Movies of the 2020s, but another prime example of Hamaguchi’s immense skill to craft enchanting images, with another exceptional Eiko Ishibashi soundtrack.

The film starts like a slow eco-thriller about a Tokyo company trying to exploit a peaceful rural Japanese village for profit. It completely changes gear in the last third though, and the opaque ending rejects any simple interpretation you might have came up with at this point.