Interview #5: Alice Boyd on field recording, "humans are nature, too", part 2

Blue Bucket Of Gold is a free weekly newsletter from me, the musician Catrin Vincent. If you pay, I also offer long-form content, like interviews with your favourite artists, new music and songwriting prompts. This newsletter is a passion project; a deep-dive into the human psyche from someone whose life was transformed by discovering how art can heal. It started as a way to digest my favourite music, then turned into a vehicle for change, a beautiful way to understand myself and the world through writing. Please feel free to share and support in any way you can. Thank you for reading.

Here is part 2 of my interview with sound artist Alice Boyd.

In 2020, Alice was selected for Sound and Music’s New Voices programme and was granted their Dimensions Award, carrying out an artist residency at the Eden Project to write a collection of songs performed by her and five other singers in the epic Rainforest Biome. She received a DYCP (develop your creative practice) grant to build Arduino devices, an ‘open-source electronic prototyping platform enabling users to create interactive electronic objects’, to tap into bioelectric signals from plants in order to generate material to compose with.

She then secured an artist residency at The Eden Project, where she spent a week in August 2021 capturing data from the plants. In January 2022, Alice was selected to perform new compositions for voice and electronics using the data she collected during her residency, as part of a state-of-the-art 360 audio and video livestream, part of a digital project called “Rainforest Reconnect”, the project where she met her bandmate Daisy.

All this hard work culminated in her own music. In early 2023, Alice released her debut EP ‘From The Understory’ with support from PRS Women Make Music, and in 2024, she released her second EP, ‘Cloud Walking’, which I had the pleasure of playing piano on, and supporting her at her EP launch in Brockwell Park.

After sitting on a bench in front of the marsh, we find ourselves in a bird watching treehouse, looking out over a body of water. The heat is baking, so we open up each window, slits in the structure meant to obscure us from the unsuspecting birds. As we eat our lunch, the conversation about technology continues.

A: I find my imposter syndrome tends to be about instruments…I’m not the strongest instrumentalist. And I like to have time to, when I’m making something, figure it out in the way that I’m gonna figure it out. I could not be a session musician. I don’t have that skill set.

But I look back at some of my sound design for stuff where I could be quite experimental, and there were certain contexts where it did allow me to go down quite weird routes. And it wasn’t because I knew all the music theory for my guitar or whatever. It was just through playing and being like, “this sounds cool”, and pushing it.

Sometimes I think I’ve worried about not being good enough at those things. But I try to remind myself, “this is meant to be about having fun”, or expressing myself. You kind of said in your last Substack that you don’t need to be the best at something. You just need to do what’s true to you.

C: Because it’s for everyone, right? Also, you’re so professional. You’re so organised, you’re so hardworking. And to me, it sounds like you know exactly how that technology works.

I think…I find as a woman that I know how things work but I’m so afraid of being put on the spot. If I feel put on the spot, I will forget something I know I know…because I’m so scared of getting it wrong. I think as women we get more of an influx of scrutiny and questioning, we’re always put on the defensive, we always have to justify what we’re doing.

I might be generalising a little bit, but it feels like there’s this major competition with men, sometimes, and then the point of what is being made gets totally missed. I always struggle with ego in music.

Women deserve - and I think it’s a lot different now than when we were growing up - but women deserve the opportunity to ‘fail’ at technology. Because that failing is how you learn. Like, with my album, there are some things now that for my next album I won’t record in the same way, because I know it produces an un-mixable problem, an unfixable problem. But you can only learn by doing it.

I always found growing up that men would just be the ones with the microphones, or the first to rush to the equipment. And there was a point where I just thought, I need to make an active effort to make sure I get experience with technology, and had to push myself to get experience with it.

A: Yeah.

C: And I made a pact with myself, I was like, right, I’m gonna learn. And it was really hard. And I felt really bad at it for so many years. But it was sheer desperation that forced me to learn, at points. I was like, “Catrin, you need to know this”. And then I just hit a point where I thought, oh, I kind of don’t care about the technicalities anymore. I’m more interested in making something ‘weird’ than knowing the correct way.

A: And you pick it up anyway. Just by mixing your own stuff and making your own stuff. With your record, in the Crypt, didn’t you record everything yourself?

C: Yeah.