Heart to Heart: we catch up with electronica duo Jadu Heart before their show at Rescue Rooms

 It's been a busy few months for you, first with the big release of Post Heaven, and then your tour in America, supporting Fontaines D.C. How has it all been for you both?

Alex: Yeah it’s been amazing, first time we’ve done a support tour in seven years or something, so it's quite a funny dynamic for us to get back into; playing to audiences who don’t necessarily know you, but you know, they’re (Fontaines D.C.) such an amazing band and what they’re doing for guitar music is so exciting. Just to be along for that journey in the US has been exciting for us.

Diva: Yeah it’s been super hectic but really fun, and we basically get to tour with our favourite band!

You’ll be coming to Nottingham in a few weeks to play Rescue Rooms, for the album cycle tour of Post Heaven, having previously played JT Soar here. What are your musical experiences of Nottingham?

A: Yeah, that [playing JT Soar] was an acoustic set that we were doing around winter. It was like a pub tour… JT Soar wasn’t exactly a pub, but it was the closest thing we could find in Nottingham.

D: We wanted to do small, intimate gigs, basically, where you just have pints and hear an acoustic set, sing some Christmas songs. I love JT Soar.

So, Post Heaven, your latest album. Could you tell us the story behind it?

A: So basically, when we started making music, we were from the Soundcloud era of producers but we were really excited about guitars and songwriting. When our first EPs came out, there was a big mix of interesting production techniques and songs, you know. As the scene shifted, we were in our early twenties and maybe not trying to fit in more, but we were working a little bit more towards what was going on in the UK. We would accidentally slip away from experimenting with production techniques. 

With this album, me and Diva, we’d been in a relationship for ten years, and we broke up before we wrote it. It was this kind of weird emotion of ‘Let’s just have fun with production, and have fun in the studio and not worry about if anyone’s even going to listen to it or if everyone will engage with it or understand it’. You know, if we want five instrumental tracks on the album, then let’s put five instrumentals on the album. If we want songs that don’t have choruses, let's just do it; I think it's just that sense of freedom for us, tapping into maybe the kind of Soundcloud records that we always wanted to make and were trying to make when we first started making music.

So, you could say it was a bit of a return to form or a return to Wanderflower or Ezra’s Garden?

A: Yeah, I guess so, but even more before that, because even that got taken away from us. That was very music industry heavy, you know - the original demos, those EPs - would’ve sounded a lot more like Post Heaven. Then we tried to form them into songs more, because the industry was like you need choruses and you need this and you need that. I think this album is like us going, ‘You know what, we’re just gonna do what feels fun and interesting to us.’

D: I think, because of the circumstances as well, everyone just kind of left us alone. Which has been great, it's kind of what we wanted from the beginning. We wanted it to sound like a weird 90s beat tape, we wanted instrumentals, we wanted love songs on there. The whole album is kind of like a journey of transition, in a lot of ways. I think that's the general feeling of it.

How has it been translating Post Heaven into the live setting?

A: For us, it’s been really interesting, because this album - way more than previous records - is really experimenting with electronic music and computer music, and we had been thinking about a way to do this for a really long time. Previously, we had many, many confusing ways of playing, with drums machines and stuff. At the end of last year, we got invited to play a DJ set at Berghein for Life from Earth. We did that, and we met all these amazing German producers and I also went to a few of their gigs, and I noticed that whenever these electronic producers were doing gigs - even though they were way less guitar based than us - they still just had the laptop up on stage with them. 

We were watching it and thinking that’s how I always used to imagine we would perform, when we first started… So, instead of trying to mess about with hiding it, we just have the laptop up, and we perform with a drummer and a violinist, who goes through all these pedals, and I play shoegaze guitar over everything. Diva plays bass and synth, and then we even go through autotune units as an effects unit with our vocals, because there’s a lot of autotune in (previous album) Hyper Romance, as an effect. When it comes to the songs that use a laptop, I literally have my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and plugins open, and I mess around with reverbs and effects, on the channels and on Ableton… and then I go back to playing the guitar again. 

D: And it's really fun because we move about on stage; we’ve got Theo on the drums who will come up to the computer and do some stuff, and then we have Nina who will come up to my synth, and we all like moving about, sharing different things together – and it’s great! It’s been great translating the music to live for that reason; we’re all up for experimenting.

A: I think that recently, a real thing that is coherent in pop music and culture - ever since it became pop culture - is authenticity. Great music is always trying to come from a place of authenticity, and I think that people try and consider authenticity to be singing about your small culture that you're from, and playing instruments almost acoustically or, if you're in a band you can’t play to a click track. I think there’s a level of us maturing to the point of realising that the authenticity towards us doing the type of music that we’ve done involves using the technology that is there. Be authentic to yourself, there are no set rules for it (authenticity). That was something we embraced with this album, from its sound and performance point of view.

Jadu Heart play Rescue Rooms on Monday 9 June. New album Post Heaven is out now.

jaduheart.com