New York’s Ava Luna is a six-piece collective that fuses soulful, multi-part harmonies with anxious post-punk angularities.
The band released Ice Level earlier this year, an album that finds the band’s sharp songwriting focused on their pop leanings. Their scattershot influences can lead to sonic chaos, but even when things get messy, a swooning vulnerability shines through.
After first hearing the band at The Circus CMJ Showcase, I was able to chat with vocalist/guitarist Carlos Hernandez and bassist Ethan Bassford amid the cacophony of the Lower East Side’s Cake Shop, before their gig at nearby Pianos, about their influences, their songwriting constraints, and the importance of vocal harmonies.
Like so many Brooklyn-born bands, Ava Luna began as Hernandez’s bedroom project. The current incarnation of the band has existed in the current form for about two and a half to three years. Apart from a love for classic soul harmonies, their influences are across the board. “We were listening to Bauhaus on the way over here. It depends who’s DJing in the car,” says Bassford. “We were listening to Aaliyah in the car after our last gig.”
“For a while, I was obsessed with Wire’s Pink Flag; that’s all I would listen to. There are the old classics I’ve heard since I was a kid; I put Al Green on a ridiculous pedestal,” Hernandez adds. “But my biggest joy is strange, avant-garde stuff; most of my favorites the last few years have been noise shows. Every chance I get when making music, my impulse is to make it a bit little stranger.”
“Texture is a crucial element for us; it’s often the starting point for songwriting. It’s like choosing a palette: we started with one synthesizer on one setting with the vocalists, and then added bass, then added guitar,” says Hernandez. “With having all these tools, it’s like building up a color scheme.”
But with six members manning guitar, bass, drums, two synthesizers, and multiple vocals, it takes more work to keep the colors on the palette distinct, something the band has keyed on as they refine the pop aspects of their sound.
“It’s largely a function of having more elements that have to work together. The sparser you are, the most freedom you have to add things. It’s contradictory: on the one hand, you have more things to choose from, but you also have more constraints,” says Bassford. “It’s like with capital A ‘art music,’ most of the composers I give a shit about, they’re very concerned with adding constraints on purpose. I think that’s what’s happening as we’ve moved in a pop direction: we’re exploring everything we all bring to the table.”
The most noticeable constraint is the use of vocal harmonies between Hernandez, guitarist Becca Kauffman, and synthesizer player Felicia Douglass. “Focusing on harmony was definitely a decision,” says Hernandez. “In the beginning, the idea was finding what we could do with just vocal harmonies and one synthesizer: very minimal, making the most out of a little.” Since the release of the band’s 2009 debut 3rd Avenue Island, the vocals have been “a really crucial element, the only thing holding it together.”
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Due in part to their nods to Stax and Motown, the band has attributed the tongue-in-cheek descriptor “nervous soul” to their music. While the origin is unclear, Hernandez believes that “It started as a joke but it’s kinda true.” Bassford says they’ve had a “horrible time coming up with our elevator pitch.” Rock and pop are close, but they’re not comfortable with the baggage of those genres. However, Hernandez is sure of one thing: “I would definitely not call it soul music.”
Ava Luna does not want to be grouped with soul revivalists. “I have nothing against those bands, but I’m totally not interested in that,” Hernandez says. “It’s just like anything else, when you’re appropriating music that begs to be appropriated — I mean, it’s the basis for hip-hop sampling and so on —it’s there to appropriate in awesome ways. But at a certain point, it’s nostalgia for its own sake and retro for its own sake.”
“If Chuck Berry came on the scene now, with Chuck Berry having already happened, it wouldn’t have the same import,” Bassford succinctly concludes. “You can’t pretend all those things didn’t happen. That music was made with composers, arrangers, and session musicians, so to try to put that format in a band where four or five people are doing everything isn’t accurate.”
As for the band’s songwriting process, it varies from song to song. “We’re definitely moving towards more collaborations, just after being together so long. It’s fun for me to write all the parts for every instrument, because I’m a control freak like that, but it’s not tenable,” says Hernandez. “Just like we have a variety of sounds, we have a variety of processes. We’re constantly trying to rethink the way we go about it.”
Bassford says that all the songs have one thing in common: “they all change in major structural ways throughout the writing. We’ll be almost done with one and then we’ll overhaul it.”
At their recent gigs at CMJ, the band underwent its own structural change, as regular drummer Julian Fader broke his foot less than a week before the festival. Thankfully, Jordyn Blakely of New York punks Butter the Children was familiar with the songs and was able to learn them in time for CMJ. As Hernandez says, “Basically, she’s been killing it.”
Clearly, expanding to two drummers isn’t in the cards. “We’d have to lose a member or get a bigger van. We’d need a bus.” Still, Hernandez and Bassford were obviously excited at the prospect, no matter how remote. Hernandez says he “used to have two drum sets in the basement, and me and Julian would just play together, making weird patterns.”
Ethan says, “It’s like the old Chinese dudes on the train: they’re all playing one melody in unison, but because of the different instruments and different articulations it expands the whole thing. If it was just one, it wouldn’t have the same effect.” Old Chinese dudes wailing away on one melody in the subway might not have much in common with Ava Luna, but perhaps they’re kindred spirits.
Ice Level was released in March on Infinite Best Recordings. Ava Luna is starting work on a new release, with recording tentatively scheduled for the spring. Before then, they will play New York’sBowery Ballroom on November 3, with a larger tour to follow in January.
