Interview: Conquering Animal Sound’s first album was a DIY success - now they’re setting their sights a little higher

It’s a statement that supports the idea that he and Anneke Kampman’s joint project enjoys the most important characteristic of a really good band – that their combined efforts add up to more than the sum of their parts.

The pair met while on a popular music course at Edinburgh Napier University, and the way Scott describes it, it’s like they were destined to be together.

“At the time I was working on my own and I really wanted to start working with somebody,” he remembers, “and I think Anneke had a similar idea. But on our course I think we felt we were the only two people who were really into something a bit different. A lot of people there were into the Mars Volta, things with crazy guitar solos and wild drumming, but that wasn’t us at all. We wanted to write something a bit more electronic, a bit more interesting, and we were the only people there with those interests. So it was boy meets girl across the classroom, you know?”

Scott – who is 24 and from Callendar by way of Inverness – heads off the obvious question before it’s even been asked. “Not that there’s any relationship there, I hasten to add,” he laughs. “We’re like brother and sister.”

The way he tells it, the pair did absorb each other’s musical reference points like a newly dating couple. “When we first chatted she introduced me to a minimal German house producer called Stephan Bodzin,” he says, “who’s now one of my all-time favourites. That was when I stopped listening to guitar bands like Deerhoof and Pavement and started listening to electronic music. Once you make that break you discover all kinds of new sounds – Warp Records, Autechre, things like that. Our tastes came together.”

This was four years ago, and the pair’s collective efforts eventually resulted in the debut album Kammerspiel, released on Leeds independent Gizeh early in 2011. Nominated for the inaugural Scottish Album of the Year Award earlier this year, it’s a distinctive and impressive first work, all the more so because the pair recorded it entirely on their own. The music is a particularly frosty kind of electronic ambience, but shot through with Kampman’s resonant and mature vocal, the combined effect undeniably reminiscent of Björk in tone and musical adventure, although without the big-budget production values.

“I’ve been singing since I was a little girl,” says Kampman, 25, who was born in Edinburgh and raised in the Borders (“we’re keen to smash the myth she’s Scandinavian or Icelandic,” laughs Scott, “she’s from Peebles”). “I studied classical singing when I was a teenager, but I stopped doing it when I was about 16. I didn’t feel it was very useful.” Sixteen was also the age at which she started writing her own songs and rapping over friends’ hip hop tracks, an endeavour which clearly wouldn’t have fitted well with the classical training.

Armed with such a clear sense of individualism, it was Kampman’s major project at university which provided the genesis of Kammerspiel. Although the pair had significant experience of working in other contexts – most significantly, in Scott’s case, with his solo project the Japanese War Effort, and in Kampman’s with jazz composer Haftor Medbøe – they found that together they clicked best. At first they improvised in a rehearsal room at Napier with Kampman’s electric harp and, says Scott, “a couple of loop pedals”. Then they moved on to their improvised studio, the living room of Kampman’s flat in Edinburgh.

“The first record was all done in her house,” says Scott, “all recorded and mixed ourselves. People describe it as having a lo-fi quality and that derives from the fact it was all done by us. That’s not so true of the second album, which I think will change people’s idea of us, or at least that we’re a lo-fi electronica band. We’ve drawn it out a little more, we’ve written part of a song, taken it away and played it on tour, and then finished it off when we got home.”

“That room had a great acoustic, though,” reminisces Kampman. “The sound of that album came out of the fact we were really just using what we had to create it – lots of cheap keyboards, lots of found sounds. I’m drawn to music which has a lush, drawn-out texture, but we didn’t have an orchestra at our disposal, we just had what we had. So the fact it was recorded over a year in the same space really defined the sound of it.”

In which case, the forthcoming second album On Floating Bodies represents a significant departure. Following the pair’s move to Glasgow, they also recorded it in the flat they shared, but a chance meeting with Glasgow label Chemikal Underground’s Alun Woodward – when he booked them to play a date at Easterhouse arts centre Platform in his other role as booker there – began a process which will result in the record’s release on Chemikal early next year.

The label’s involvement meant the record was mastered by Paul Savage at their studio Chem19, and Kampman’s vocals entirely re-recorded. “When we showed it all to him he was slightly baffled by what we’d done,” says Scott. “It perhaps wasn’t the most straightforward way of doing it all. It sounds really, really good having been filtered through him, though. It’s got more synthesizers, it’s got a bassier edge, I think a lot of the songs are more dramatic, more beat-driven. That’s in line with our tastes and how they’ve changed again. We like higher tempo music and we’re more confident, certainly Anneke is in her singing. We’ve hinted at our love for techno in the past, but this album’s certainly more rhythmic and more percussive.”

It’s an idea borne out by Ultimate Heat Death of the Universe, an excellent taster track on the soundtrack of the multimedia project Whatever Gets You Through the Night, which recalls nothing less than the euphoric house edge of Florence & the Machine drawn through a glitch techno filter.

“I don’t think we could ever make music that was proper dancefloor music,” laughs Kampman, “but the new album is more urgent and I use my voice more rhythmically. Last time I only used a small part of my voice and it was very far away. Not this time.” It seems what we can expect from Conquering Animal Sound in future, then, is quite simply more.

• Conquering Animal Sound play the Old Town Jail, Stirling, on 1 September; and the Music Language festival, Glasgow, 2 September. Their second album On Floating Bodies will be released early in 2013 on Chemikal Underground. conqueringanimalsound.tumblr.com. Ultimate Heat Death of The Universe can be downloaded at www.throughthenight.net, as part of the Whatever Gets You Through The Night album.