Ahead of her performance at Spring Tones this weekend, New Zealand’s Bachelorette (aka Annabel Alpers) tells DOUG WALLEN about her solitary aesthetic, the perks of being signed to Drag City and why she’s never 100 percent happy with the finished product.

New Zealand multitasker Annabel Alpers recorded 2006’s Isolation Loops, her first album as Bachelorette, by herself in a cabin cut off from the outside world. A fitting title, then. The same could be said of this year’s My Electric Family, recorded with a range of collaborators in different settings. The title, however, is a remnant of Alpers’ original theme for the album, which was a girl alone with her many machines. And while she departed from that once she drafted in some outside help, there remains a steady focus on computer-made sounds, whirring armies of synths and mechanical repetition.

The song ‘Technology Boy’, with its hiccupped vocoder, even recounts the offbeat love story of a man and woman immersed in a sort of technological rapture. Considering Alpers studied computer-based composition at university before starting Bachelorette, she clearly knows about what she’s singing. Released on Mistletone in Australia and Drag City in the US, My Electric Family melds natural human warmth with the chilly distance of machines.

Your new album My Electric Family was recorded with guests in different locations, in stark contrast to Isolation Loops.
I thought that would happen with My Electric Family as well, so I set myself up to do the same thing. But I just couldn’t really focus in that way this time around. I felt like I needed more going on around me. It just had different requirements, which I wasn’t aware of until I started working on it. But everything involving the other musicians happened really naturally. It wasn’t something I set out to do. I let the process decide what it was, if that makes sense. I have a tendency to move towns quite regularly. I don’t really stay in one place very long. I started My Electric Family in Christchurch and then I moved up to about an hour north of Wellington. I had quite a few friends [in Wellington] who played music, [including] a couple of drummers. It was really nice, because they’re much better drummers than I am. And three guys from the band Cassette did different things on the album, purely because they were around and I had songs I thought would lend themselves to their style of playing.

And for ‘Dream Sequence’ you enlisted the Royal New Zealand Air Force Brass Band.
That’s right. I was doing a residency at a high school in a small town called Levin, and they had a brass band there. I got the idea of having a brass band on that song. I tried to get the Levin Brass Band to do it, but the conductor was really conservative and didn’t like the idea of playing on someone’s recording. He was more concerned with them being in the brass band competition that was coming up. I just hunted around for bands that were decent and would be willing to spare an hour of their time to record a piece of brass. It didn’t take very long. I’d moved back up to Auckland, and I came across the Air Force Brass Band. Their conductor was really helpful. They learnt it on the spot and I recorded it after a few runs through. So it was pretty unpracticed and the recording wasn’t a high-quality studio recording, but I did what I could with what little time we had.

A lot of the album seems like that: making the most of what you have on hand.
Definitely. I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t predict how you’re going to work. Creativity isn’t something you have total control over, for me at least. I’m sure other people can keep control of what they do. But I find I work best if I just let things happen, depending on where I am and what I have around me. I can’t decide at the outset how it’s going to happen.

‘The National Grid’ samples a lot from a song of the same name by High Dependency Unit. Did you just know that band and like the song?
Actually, Dino Karlis is the drummer for HDU, and he played drums on a few tracks on My Electric Family. He had asked me if I wanted to do a remix of ‘The National Grid’ and I ended up not really doing a remix. It’s just a reworking and sampling. I made a new song out of their song.

On the topic of making the most of your resources, Louise Clifton’s album art and video for ‘Her Rotating Head’ are really simple and complex at the same time. Do you two share a similar aesthetic?
Yeah. She’s the first person I’ve come across where we have the same aesthetic and approach to making stuff in general. We became friends because she took a few photos of me.

“To me, no album is ideal. No song that I’ve completed is in its ideal form, but it’s in the form that I could make it in the amount of time and with the resources I had.”

You’ve lived in a lot of different parts of New Zealand and worked with various people. Has the New Zealand music scene been supportive from your perspective?
I think it’s pretty supportive. Sometimes I think – I don’t know if it’s like this in Australia – New Zealand has this culture of an old boys club, from British colonial ties that are still sticking around. At times I’ve come across that attitude, where you’re not really one of them if you’re not a boy. But that’s only a small element. More often than not, I’ve felt really supported by most of the people. People like to have other people around them who are doing similar stuff. You do just end up grouping together with other musicians and being supportive of each other.

And you were in a few bands before Bachelorette, right?
Yeah, I was in a band in the ’90s called Hawaii Five O. We were pretty slack. We were just into playing and didn’t really have a game plan. We didn’t really care if we became successful or not. We just played shows when people asked us. We recorded songs, although we never bothered to put them out on an album. That was my first project that I was really into. And then I played in a couple of other bands in Christchurch briefly. There was a band called Space Dust. They were kind of psychedelic art-rock maybe. [Laughs] Also a band called the Hiss Explosion, which was the band of a guy called Mikey Hex, who used to be in Squirm. He died a few years ago of pneumonia, but he was a really important figure in the South Island’s music scene during the ’90s. Around 2000, I decided to go to university and study music composition. I wanted to get into computer recording. That was Canterbury University. Then I did honours at Auckland University. I took a break from any kind of pop music while I was at university. I didn’t start Bachelorette until I’d finished.

So you mostly studied composition?
Yeah. At least for my degree, they were pretty strict about what constituted academic music. You couldn’t make anything that follows traditional forms, be it rock’n’roll or pop. The focus was on making music that was totally your own process and unique to your way of hearing and seeing things and not copying anyone else’s style. I think it gave me a good grounding for approaching pop music after I’d finished. The music I’ve listened to has always been indie music, I guess, so I was itching to get back to doing something poppy once I got out of there.

There are pop elements in Bachelorette but it’s also quite repetition-based, more like electronic music. Is that the influence of those different worlds colliding a bit?
I guess so. What I probably did learn at university is you start off with an idea, like a melody or something, and you can just try to imagine what it wants or needs in order to become a song … And then it just becomes its own thing. My limitations and the amount of time I have to work on it will dictate how it ends up. To me, no album is ideal. No song that I’ve completed is in its ideal form, but it’s in the form that I could make it in the amount of time and with the resources I had.

In the US you’re signed to Drag City, a well-known indie label. Did that give you a leg up when you toured the States?
It definitely did, because Drag City has such a good reputation over there. My manager used to tour bands in New Zealand, and I’d supported Will Oldham at a show in New Zealand. She searched around for ways of getting my music out in America, and she found Drag City. So it all happened through her, and through Will Oldham as well. I think he was pretty helpful in getting Drag City to take me on.

What’s the Bachelorette live show like?
I play solo and I use a computer that has visuals synchronised with some of the beats that are played off the computer. So I play along to the computer. I play keyboards and guitar and I sing. That’s the way the live show will be when I play in Melbourne. When I toured America, I did tour with a band, which included Evelyn Morris from Pikelet. That was great, but it’s a bit expensive touring with a band. Also, I think playing solo has its own merits. I don’t try to play the songs exactly as they are on the record. I play them differently, so it’s a different experience from just listening to the album.

Is it tricky juggling everything, or do you have it down pat by now?
It is quite tricky. In some ways it’s like rewriting a song in order to make it come across live. It’s definitely not like it is when you have a band and your songs are already worked out before you record them, and you just play them live. It’s the opposite. I write the songs as I record them, so I don’t think about playing them live until the songs are written. [Laughs] They’re not written until they’ve been recorded. It’s always a bit of a challenge, but there’s something enjoyable about it as well. Like I said before, I’m never 100 percent happy about the way things turn out when they’re recorded. So I like playing live because it gives me an opportunity to take a different approach to the same song.

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BACHELORETTE AUSTRALIAN TOUR

Saturday, September 26
Spring Tones @ Roxanne Parlour, Melbourne, VIC

Sunday, September 27
Newtown Workers Club, Melbourne, VIC
w/Royalchord + Flying Scribble