Blush

This transcript has been lightly edited from the original recording for readability. Speaker labels and brief audio notes have been added for accessibility.

Transcript

Cold open

Blush: We started this project so organically, not with the intention of being a band or releasing any music, but just us hanging out and sharing a common interest and a way to spend time with each other.

[Music excerpt from Blush plays.]

Main episode

Eric Chan: I’m Eric Chan, and you’re listening to Inlet Wire, your direct line to BC artists.

In this episode, I’m joined by Blush from Victoria. What started as friends making music together slowly turned into a band with its own shape and sound.

So let’s wire in.

Blush: Blush is a four-piece rock band from Vancouver Island, Victoria, British Columbia. We’re just a couple of friends who started jamming together, and we progressively got louder and better at making music.

Eric Chan: Friendship plays a big part in Blush, and here’s how they first met.

Blush: I met Eric before we all worked together at the same workplace, at a different restaurant, and we jammed a few times with a friend of ours. Then when we all came together at this other restaurant, I think it was like, you play an instrument too? Like, let’s jam.

Eric and I would jam on our guitars, and then Renata was like, I can play piano. I would love to come jam. And Rosie is an amazing fiddle player. We kind of got together in this acoustic atmosphere, which was a lot of fun.

Eric Chan: From the friendship behind the band to the song “Dear Building,” bass player Rosie says a big part of Blush comes down to texture.

Rosie: I feel like all of our songs, or a lot of them, are quite different from one another. So something that could apply to all of our songs and projects, and yeah, that’s kind of the through line for me.

I think a lot of that comes from Renata’s synth magic and all of the cool weird sounds that she makes and adds. I think that’s something that makes our music kind of unique. And also weird, crunchy, cool guitar stuff coming from Anton’s gajillion pedals and stuff.

That’s something that I really like about the music. I feel like a lot of the time there are things going on that I don’t even hear until I’m sitting down listening to it.

[Music excerpt from Blush plays.]

Eric Chan: Not long after coming together, Blush found themselves doing something a lot of bands don’t: recording their first EP before ever playing a show.

Blush: We actually, funnily enough, recorded our first EP before we played our first show together. It was a couple months of just jamming bi-weekly in my auntie’s shed in her backyard.

We saw this thing from Barnhouse Sound that was like an artist development program of some kind where you just had to submit some music. So one day I just put my iPhone in the middle of the room and I was like, all right, we gotta play like five songs. We sent those five songs off, and Rosie went off on a two- or three-month trip to Europe, and we got accepted to it.

We were just like, all right, we’re gonna do it, and I hope that when Rosie gets back, she’ll want to play bass in the band.

Eric Chan: For drummer Eric, that time at Barnhouse didn’t just help make the first EP. It also helped shape how the band worked on a new release.

Eric (Blush): When we recorded at Barnhouse, it was an awesome experience, but it was a very compressed experience. It was really quick.

So having those full five days to kind of spread out and redo takes and play with mic positioning and play with tones and pedals and stuff, that was really cool. I think what stuck out most from that experience was just the fine-tuning that went into it, and then also the emphasis of production.

So how something sounded when you first recorded it to where it ended up, and being flexible with that sound being completely different than what you expected, sometimes for the better. You record something one way and then you put it through a bunch of different pedals and it comes out so much more textured, to use Rosie’s word, than you had planned initially.

So it was cool just to see that evolution that a song could take from start to finish. I think we got to experience that a lot more fully with this most recent project.

[Music excerpt from Blush plays.]

Eric Chan: We also talked about their single “Seasons.” It was the first song I heard from Blush, and it really left an impression on me.

Blush: We just released a single called “Seasons.” That one’s more like speaking to our roots as a band. It’s very laid-back, acoustic. I think that one really speaks to our past and our journey.

Yeah, it does have a very nostalgic feeling. And I think part of that, for me personally, is nostalgia for the jams we had at the beginning of when we first started playing together. Yeah, the kind of unhurried feeling in it. It didn’t feel like we had an agenda, like we were rehearsing for shows or trying to iron out things for recording or whatever. It was just making music for the sake of making music because it felt good and it was fun.

[Music excerpt from “Seasons” by Blush plays.]

Eric Chan: It’s clear Blush have bigger plans in the works, and this new EP feels like something people should keep an eye on.

Blush: We just came out of recording, I guess, our sophomore EP at The Hive Studio with Colin Stewart here in Victoria. I would say that that’s our first proper in-the-studio, for multiple days, multiple hours, focusing on this project. And it was a really amazing experience being there.

Eric Chan: Here is synth player Renata talking about the new song “Wrong Answers Only.”

Renata: This song, I feel like, is the one that makes you feel kind of dancey, which is kind of new for our music because I feel like our music is very shoegazey, and some of our stuff is a bit slower and moodier, makes you just kind of sway. So this one kind of gets you moving.

[Music excerpt from “Wrong Answers Only” by Blush plays.]

Blush: It was us creating a time capsule of Blush in that moment. And yeah, like Eric was saying, that’s something we can hold forever for the rest of our lives. It’s just like a little timestamp.

Eric Chan: That was Blush. I’m Eric Chan, and you’ve been listening to Inlet Wire, your direct line to BC artists.

Transcript note

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