Flynn Wallen: "Things Always Come 360"
Written by Nathan Evans
Flynn Wallen has had a patient come-up, and doesn’t KEYMAG know all about it. This interview was actually conducted on 28th October 2018 as part of the celebratory first issue of KEYMAG, and the man from Peterborough, UK, stood tall in the understated knowledge of his talents in hip-hop beatmaking and bluesy guitar work, but lacked a crystalised direction for now.
Since then, it’s been a scattering of singles that formulated his rich blend of King Krule-ian melancholia and Loyle Carner-loving just rap. And in December, after many delays and self-aware jokes about the start-up artist who keeps saying the EP is coming, his first collection of song was released under the playful title Just Wanted Presence, Not Christmas.
Labelled as a triple single, the bundle shows three different sides of the same artist, with hazy musings on managing love (‘Slow Down’) and a bar-heavy tribute to his mother (‘Thomasina’). The pick of the bunch has to be the ambient soul on the aptly-named ‘Warmth’, but all three have been spotlighted by BBC Music Introducing in Cambridgeshire.
Anyways, allow me to set the scene of the interview. On a night organised by design collective RGB & Friends titled ‘NIGHTS: Summer’s Over’, before Wallen was set to perform a freestyle slew of tunes around a backyard campfire, he and I chatted about live music, improvisation, and the nature of sampling…
How would you describe your music?
Well, it’s a bit of a weird one, because I started off as a hip-hop artist. I used to learn sampling, cutting beats, things like that. Recently, however, in the past two years, I’ve started to gravitate more towards jazz [as] I started to learn to play guitar. I would definitely call myself nowadays more of a jazz artist, but that’s all in the works.
Which artists are inspiring you at the moment?
Obviously, modern-age jazz. King Krule, Feng Suave, alot of the bedroom pop artists as well, like Cuco, umm...
Clairo?
Clairo’s a G, I don’t listen to as much Clairo, but I like her production a lot. Nick Hakim has been a massive influence for me recently. Found him out on Spotify, then watched his Tiny Desk Concert, I do bum NPR Tiny Desk Concerts crazy. Anderson .Paak, just for the drums mate, love Paak always, always.
What would you say your favourite Tiny Desk Concert is?
Can’t ask me that! For the whole concert, I’d say Nick Hakim. However, “Sublunary” on the King Krule OOZ album is a completely different arrangement to how he does it in the NPR. The NPR is brilliant.
That’s the thing, if you want to get to know an artist, what they’re about, look at their live performances.
Yeah, that’s the crux of it, it’s got to be live. Anyone who tells you that playing something off a CD or off a vinyl or off your phone is better, they haven’t been to a gig or concert.
How do you write a song? Is there a set process or does it flow out?
It depends what I’m going for. Usually, if I go back to when I was making hip-hop beats, and I think most hip-hop producers do this as well, you’d sit down and just scour. If you’ve got loads of vinyls, which most hip-hop producers would have tonnes of vinyls. I know that my stepdad used to be a hip-hop producer, [he had] hundreds of vinyls, because there was no internet back then. What I do is I go on YouTube and I scour the internet for that sample, that one sample that clicks, I’d go through everything, go through Erykah Badu’s stuff, Miles Davis, Delegation, Stevie Wonder, Kamasi Washington, anyone who’s about it. Usually you don’t look for things that are hip-hop-based. Most of the time, when they say “digging in the crates”, you’re looking for gold, which is usually some old, 70s, 80s, even 50s, jazz sample, it could be just a little cello B-line, a double bass, whatever. I start from there. If I’m going down the jazz route, I usually noodle a lot, I’ll sit and play guitar, eventually I’ll come to something that’s like “oo, that sounds nice, I like that”, a progression or something. And then I record it, and build upon it.
Taking it back to an older time, with jazz improvisations and hip-hop crate digging.
I think that’s the way the world is going nowadays. My mum always used to say it to me and I never got it until now, and that is “things always come 360”. No matter what it is, it’ll come back around. I was talking about this the other day, jean chains, when I was like 10, I had a jean chain, everyone thought I was a loser for it. I still have the same jean chain, and now I wear it, and people are like “that’s so cool, wow, you have a jean chain!” When I was 10, I got bullied for it, and now it’s the cool thing again. Back in the day, your Pelle Pelle, your Fila, things like that are the cool thing again. 8 years ago, Fila wasn’t cool, you had to have the Nike, and now, everyone and their mothers are wearing Fila Disruptors. It’s the same with music. It was trap for a very long time. Hip-hop, West Coast, and then you had trap, and then Kanye came in, things like that. And now all the kids nowadays listen to King Krule, they’re listening to Cosmo Pyke. All these artists, your Mac Demarcoes, who are coming with a foundation that is very musical and very old-instrumental, but it’s got a modern spine on it. There’s effects we could never use before, everything’s a little bit more produced, but it’s still got the foundation.
You could even take it to a mainstream level and say To Pimp A Butterfly.
100 percent, there’s so many samples in To Pimp A Butterfly, there’s YouTube videos about it. I always say to myself, whenever I pick up the guitar, that nothing, even if I play one note, nothing I play on the guitar has not been played before. The guitar’s been instrument for thousands of years - are you telling I’m gonna pick up the guitar and discover something really cool? Not gonna happen mate. I watched an interview with Cosmo Pyke a little while ago, and he was like “realistically, all we just do is take chords from old jazz artists and reuse them”.
It’s that quote of “good artists create, great artists steal” sort of thing.
100 percent. Steal like an artist.