Loop pedals, tape delay and songs about surveillance and schizophrenia – LUKE HORTON and ANTONIA SELLBACH discuss Love of Diagrams’ dreamy third album, 'Nowhere Forever'.

‘Static information’ (Antonia)

Sometimes you think you’re writing lyrics about one thing and it kind of morphs into a couple of opposing ideas. Originally I was thinking about the boring, blue-rinse suburb in Tassie I grew up in, where the only interesting thing to do was smoke pot and how a friend of mine, who also grew up there, now has schizophrenia. Hearing things in the wires and in the wind etc. ‘Static Information’ is kind of a reference to that. White noise that could be whatever your paranoia wants it to be. Then the line, “There’s a lot goin’ on/In our neighbourhood”, that was an ironic reference to the fact there wasn’t anything to do when I was that age really. Then I thought about how there’s a lot of creative cross pollination and amazing stuff going on now. So I guess the song also became about that too.

‘Forever’ (Luke)

Some astute listeners have picked up on how much lower in the mix the drums are on this track, that’s because I wanted this song to be a big wash of guitars. While mixing, I was persuaded to raise the level of the vocals at least a couple of times, so it has come out a bit poppier than maybe I first intended, but that’s OK. [Producer] Ryan [Hadlock] had some nice Echoplex tape-delay boxes which made me more comfortable with my vocals.

Guitar loop interlude:

For the first time ever we put songwriting credits on the sleeve of this record, because Antonia and I wrote the songs in quite different ways that gave some of them a very different feel. Because of this we struggled with the track order a bit. It was difficult to get the record to flow because of these noticeable shifts, which is why when people call it a “shoegaze record” it seems so weird. How can songs like ‘Static Information’ or ‘Mountain’ ever be on a shoegaze record? Anyway, this guitar loop came from another track (can you pick which one?) and helps break things up a bit. We want to do more of this kind of stuff on the next one.

‘Lookout’ (Antonia)

We first started playing this song live when we were on tour with Enon in the states in 2007. So it’s one of the older ones on the album. The themes hark back to an ongoing interest I have with the politics of surveillance. It’s kind of about paranoia too. I remember really loving playing this song from the get-go because of the outro. I think we enjoyed playing this outro so much that we went on to write quite a few more songs with outros that have a similar vibe. Where you can just rock out, y'know?

‘Mountain’ (Antonia)

I first got the melody to this song stuck in my head when I couldn’t sleep and we were on tour in London. It just went round and round. At the time I was also thinking about how when someone dies, sometimes you keep looking for them everywhere. Something somewhere deep in your mind (beyond the rational) doesn’t understand the loss of someone dear to you and so you keep looking all over the place – in the weather, in the trees. You can't help it. You see them everywhere. In a sense, thinking about this stuff is where we got the album title Nowhere Forever. It’s like an oxymoron. “Nowhere” is the negative, but “forever” is the positive.

‘A Part Of You’ (Luke)

I think we did this pretty well with Jack Farley on the demos, so we put it on a split 7” with Songs, even though we were very unhappy with the pressing of that record. This demo was also given to M+N as an exclusive MP3 that comes without the muffled scratchiness. The album version is slower which I think is better. The long outro was a nice opportunity for me to play with different guitar sounds and parts and I spent a long time on it on the demo version. In the studio I used the demos as a reference, and thankfully we had three weeks, so I could get everything done. Trying all the guitars, amps and pedals we’d gathered in the studio took up a lot of time, however.

‘Stones Throw’ (Antonia)

I remember Luke and I struggling a bit to find common ground with this song where we were both into it. The line, “I've never seen shapes like this before”, I wrote after reading Helen Garner’s The Feel of Steel about visiting Antarctica. As you can imagine icebergs melt and morph into some pretty amazing abstract shapes. I’m not sure what the rest of the song is about – you'd have to ask Luke. Then again, maybe neither of us know for certain. We like keeping things ambiguous sometimes. Not over-analysing. But I daresay there’s some sort of travel theme; something about the world being smaller than it seems. Hence the “stones throw” line.

‘Winding’ (Antonia)

The bass part in this song just repeats and winds round and round the guitar and drums. I think that’s where I got the lyric “winding” from. Minimal vocals here. Pretty simple really. I kinda like how it sounds like the lyrics could be, “It’s my den”, or, “My town”, or, “Let’s wind down.” Small thrills for a part-time lyricist! Yes, these are the things that amuse me.

‘Magnify’ (Antonia)

I came up with this song in the bungalow at home using the Headrush loop pedal to layer parts. Luke does this more than me. Usually I prefer jamming things out, but this is an exception. We wanted it to sound kinda hypnotic – lots of tremolo etc. Listening to it now, we could have even put some spacey Juno keyboard effects on it if we wanted to get really hypno on you. These are the finer details and I always realise this stuff like six months after the recording is finished, when you get the ultimate luxury of distance and perspective.

‘All You Know’ (Luke)

A pretty guitar part that sounds good with lots of tremolo on it. We jammed this song a lot and I like that it’s kept a looser feel. There’s some pulsing chorus feedback coming from the bass that was unintentional, but we left it in there because it sounds like a submerged organ part that occasionally surfaces. Maybe we should have had the keyboards sitting around the studio on this too?

‘On The Breeze’ (Luke)

Finally, we have a song that Antonia and I sing together. Antonia also sings some bits by herself, which are among my all-time favourite parts of hers. Hopefully they’re not too buried. This song was initially called ‘Heavy’ and it probably is the heaviest, dirtiest track on the album. It also tackles one of the most urgent, heavy issues of our time.

‘It’s Professional’ (Luke)

This song was left to the very end of the session with Ryan. We were thinking of dropping it if we ran out of time, but he got such a beautiful sound out of the drums and bass in the big acoustic room with this – which you can hear so much more here because it’s so pared back – that we had to use it.

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Nowhere Forever is out now through Unstable Ape/Remote Control. It’ll be launched in Melbourne at the Northcote Social Club on September 11, Sydney’s Annandale Hotel on September 17 and at Jade Monkey in Adelaide on October 2.