Balmorhea is the beautiful instrumental ensemble curated by Rob Lowe (no, not THAT Rob Lowe) and Michael Muller. I sat down with the two soft spoken musicians at Rob’s lovely home in Austin during SXSW to talk about their latest album Stranger and what’s on the horizon for the brainchild known as Balmorhea.

Kristen Blanton: For Stranger, tell me about the recording process and how it differed from your last record.

Rob Lowe: Our previous albums had been recorded here in Austin at a studio that was previously called Premium Recording Service. We had decided we wanted to try recording in some different locations just to see how that would affect the process in the sound. So we drove to Chicago and recorded the first two tracks of Stranger at Soma that was engineered by our good friend Andrew. Then we came back to Austin and did some more recording at Estuary and then at Church House Studios with David Boyle. The sound on the record is a little more varied. It doesn’t have quite as specific of a room sound – it’s a lot more layered.

Also, in just the process for writing the album we were spread out across the country. We use to all live here in Austin but then Michael moved to Brooklyn, I moved to a small town in West Texas called Alpine. Our cellist Dylan was living in Seattle – so we were all over the country but knew we needed to start working on this record somehow. Obviously we couldn’t fly everybody in all the time to work on stuff so I was writing a lot of music here in Austin and had to use some tools – loop pedals, etc to start working the ideas out.

KB: Is the album’s title reflective of that? Being in separate places and working through music not as a band in space but as individuals?

Rob: I think so. We had a really hard time coming up with the title for the album. I remember sitting at Mike’s house for a whole night…

Michael Muller: …we were on the back porch like, “What about this? What about this?” And for the song titles too, we usually do that.

Rob: Nothing has been named before we write it. But Stranger I think it does fit in a lot of ways in the change in the sound of our music and what we were going through as individuals and as a band at that time. I think it works on a couple of different levels.

KB: When you have instrumental music, it is a whole different writing process. Do you ever write lyrics?

Rob: I haven’t ever written any lyrics, definitely not for Balmorhea.

Michael: Nope, never.

KB: Well right but in the process do you ever have a word that comes to mind, or is it just sounds? What triggers the writing process?

Michael: Emotions and relationships. Seasons, like weathering. On the opening track “Days” and a few others as well, they’re evoking bright summery, beach kind of feelings purposefully.

KB: Do you go into a track with an intention and are surprised by the end result?

Rob: yeah definitely. You always set out with an idea and I don’t think I’ve ever arrived at the end of it and felt like I had completed what I had wanted too. Usually I’m surprised with what I end up and that’s a little bit more interesting. We’ve done some pretty dramatic music, some somber/sad within this Western realm. So we wanted to do some songs that are reflective of a different side of who we are and the type of music we like to listen to.

Michael: And trying different instruments and techniques in the studio.

KB: Are you all originally from Austin? I know you met here.

Michael: Two of the six are from here. And now everybody lives here again.

KB: Do you feel that the theme of place plays into the music that you make?

Michael: Definitely in older recordings, but it’s not quite as apparently in this new one.

Rob: It’s funny because I lived in Alpine for a year and that was right around the time that a lot of the ideas for the album were generated– and it’s a small town in the middle of nowhere. The album that ended up coming out of that, there’s so many urban and metropolitan sounds on this album that was conceived on while I was living in a town of 5,000 people in the middle of West Texas. It’s funny that that’s what came.

Michael: Probably just being really intuitive to your surroundings.

KB: Tell me about the cover art for the album.

Rob: That photo is taken by a Danish photographer that I have been following for four or five years – I remember when I first saw the series she did, it’s called Strewed, it’s a bunch of portraits of Danish people on a remote island. They’re dressed up in traditional garments and every person’s is different and made specifically for them to represent a part of their history. When we got to Stranger I felt like that image reflected the mystery of what we were trying to capture but also the joy. The image is strange but it also feels really positive to me.

KB: The word stranger has a bit of a negative connotation to it – there’s an uncomfortably, unfamiliarity, but it’s quite the opposite when you listen to the record and see the album art.  Perhaps that’s just how art plays itself out, but it is a really nice juxtaposition. It makes you think differently about that word.

Rob: Yeah, thank you. I think so too. This guy Mario Hugo, he’s a designer in New York, he did the full layout graphic on the inside and did the writing on the front and the back and he’s really great too. So there was a lot of collaboration.

KB: What’s next?

Rob: We just found out our first remix off Stranger is in the works.

Michael: And we have a music video but it’s kind of a film for a track on Stranger. All the sound design is still in the shots. I’m not going to say anymore because it’s about to come out.

Rob: And our tour, it’s in Western Europe, at most of the capitals. Then at the end of the tour we’re going to a few places we haven’t been before. We’re going to Croatia, Istanbul, Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg. So the end of the tour is farthest east we’ve ever been.  I have no expectation of how it’s going to be or know how the audience will react, but I’m excited.

Photo by Trine Søndergaard