He wrote the album on Mondays in seaside towns: how a Londoner built a record out of ebbs and flows

Catching Flies has released the album ‘Tides’ — a record about the cyclical nature of everything, made between London and the coasts of Britain and France.

The magazine C-Heads told the story in a long interview.

“It’s all about ebbs and flows. It’s been a very interesting few years, to say the least, both personally and in terms of the world. I always kept coming back to the concept of tides, the cyclical nature of everything, and the way sadness gives way to happiness… and vice versa. It all works out in the end, though, and regardless of what’s happening, the sea is still there, a constant in the madness,” the musician says.

A jazz pianist’s grandson and forty thousand samples

Behind the alias Catching Flies stands George King, a Londoner and the grandson of a jazz pianist. He started composing at 15, making hip-hop instrumentals for friends and cutting samples from vinyl bought in charity shops, guided by J Dilla, MF DOOM and Madlib. Electronic music reached him through the CDs he stole from his brother: Boards of Canada, Nightmares on Wax, AiM, Morcheeba.

The album’s first track, ‘GLY’, came together while he was living in Kitsilano in Vancouver, a minute’s walk from the beach. Back in Britain he got into the habit of taking a train to a different seaside town every Monday and working there for the day.

The album assembled itself.

“I never really set out to make albums,” he explains. “I just finish the last album and then start making new music. You get to a certain point where you’ve written six or seven songs you like, and then you start filling in the gaps.”

‘Diamonds’ took him twenty minutes — which he calls rare; the title track ‘Tides’ took months because of the sheer number of layers.

The strings were arranged by Thomas Lea, who has worked with Bonobo and Adele: he records every string instrument himself at his Los Angeles studio and layers them until they sound like a quartet.

Strings instead of words

“To me, the strings are the only other instrument capable of recreating the range and emotion of the human voice. My music is mostly instrumental, so I like to have something to replace where lyrics would be,” King explains.

The song ‘The Last Phone Call’ grew out of a spoken-word voice note his friend Dan — also known as Imaginary Friend — sent him in 2012. It sat in a folder for years: King did not know how to approach it, because the writing was too strong to spoil. Dan had recorded it on an iPhone somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Italy, so the mix took a lot of EQ’ing out cicadas — but the melancholy of that take could never have been recorded again.

One more detail about his method: his ‘Samples’ folder holds around forty thousand audio files, from recordings of whales communicating to solo harp records from the 1970s.