Ross Couch bides his time ‘Night And Day’

Ross Couch bides his time ‘Night And Day’

1 July, 2009 | 8.37AM

• Written by: Body Rhythm
• Filed under: Music News: body rhythm, body rhythm black, ross couch

Ross Couch crawled for eight years to squeeze his debut album ‘Night And Day’ out of his Glasgow studio.

Some hares might laugh, but like a true house music tortoise Couch believed that persistence and a commitment to high quality ideas would eventually lead to a brilliant win. He was right.

‘Night And Day’ is one of the most competent and well rounded house albums of the year, with a sound that bridges dancefloors and home stereos with warm soothing chords, serene vocals, funky rhythms and chunky house grooves.

With his LP quickly winning over the house camp, we decided to meet Ross Couch to find out why he waited so long to produce his debut, and to find out more about the process that went into making it.

With a discography that stretches back to 2001, and considering that your particular brand of house music seems well suited to the album format, it’s perhaps surprising that you haven’t released an album before. What made you wait until now too do a project like this?

It’s certainly something that I’ve had an ambition to do for a long time but I was willing to wait until I felt the time was right. 

A couple of labels I’ve worked with in the past brought up the idea of me doing an album but the first time it was early in my career and I felt like I was still a relative newcomer and hadn’t earned the right to do one. 

A few years later a label I was working with closely at the time were keen for me to do one but when I tried to come up with some ideas for it I just wasn’t feeling inspired. It felt like I was doing it because it was too good an opportunity to turn down rather than because I had a strong urge to do it, so I ended up putting it on the backburner again. 

Lately though that urge has been pretty strong. For the last couple of years I’ve been releasing pretty much exclusively on my own Body Rhythm label which I’ve really enjoyed. It’s given me the freedom to write exactly what I want without any outside influence and that seems to have worked out well. 

Towards the end of last year, around the time of the ‘Second Nature’ EP in September, I was feeling in a good place musically and the overall sales for the label and general support for what I was doing seemed to be reflecting that. 

There was a definite sense of momentum building and it was then that the idea to do an album finally started to make sense in my own mind and became something I was excited about doing.

To my mind an album holds more significance and when done well it can stand the test of time.

Do you think albums are still relevant in the digital age?

I still have a lot of respect for the format. Often at times, dance music is seen as disposable – EPs can be celebrated one week and forgotten the next. 

To my mind an album holds more significance and when done well it can stand the test of time. I think it’s also important for an artist to have a platform like this to be able to further develop their own identity and sound beyond just a few tracks on an EP. 

In terms of sales though I’m not really sure how well it works – I guess I’m about to find out! There is definitely a worry that people will only cherry-pick tracks from it rather than buy the whole album. Whilst I’m not completely against that - it’s good that consumers have more choice over what they buy - I do think it is a shame that an artist might spend a lot of time and effort working on an album as a whole, thinking about the overall balance and flow of it, and then a lot of people will never hear it in that way. 

Ideally I’d like to write more albums in the future but I guess it will depend on how this first one goes as it takes a lot of time and effort to produce. Whatever happens I won’t regret doing this first one though, it’s been a good experience.

Did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to do with the album from the beginning?

I had a few basic ground rules laid out. I knew for sure that I wanted to stay true to the sound I had been developing on my Body Rhythm label. I didn’t want it to be one of those albums where the artists go too eclectic and steer away from the sound they are known for. 

Sometimes that can work but often people are just left disappointed. My other main goal was to keep a level of consistency and quality throughout. There’s nothing worse than an album that has a couple of strong tracks and then the others just feel like they were quickly slapped together to fill up space. 

Were there any artists or albums that you drew on for inspiration?

I did spend some time listening to other albums from house music producers over the years, but for the most part though, I found myself gravitating towards old albums, paticularly from the 70s – soul, jazz and funk ones.

I’ve always loved how musically rich they were in those days, often with full orchestral sections and a strong focus on melody and mood. 

I felt that was the closest to what I wanted to do myself. There are several tracks on the album that were strongly influenced by that period.

It sounds like you took your time on the LP.

It ended up taking longer than expected. I started off writing tracks around Christmas time last year and had hoped I would have had it finished by March but that wasn’t to be. 

To keep the Body Rhythm label ticking over I had to come up with another release ‘Night At The Casino’ in between working on the album, and I also had a few remix commitments as well during that time. So really I ended up working on it right until the last minute which was earlier this month.

Was your approach to writing the album the same as if you had been writing a normal EP for your label?

Normally I tend to just write one track at a time but I approached the album differently. When I started it I decided that I just wanted to get down as many good 30 second ideas, what you could think of as the main ‘hooks’, as I could. 

That’s the hardest part of writing a track I think, and for me also the most enjoyable - just coming up with a strong idea, and I wanted to make sure I had enough of them to fill an album. 

I spent a lot of time on this and I must admit when I was finished doing that I kind of regretted not finishing off some of the tracks first as there was a heck of a lot of work left to do on each of them! 

In hindsight though I think it was the right thing to do – I don’t think it would have been good creatively for me to get bogged down in the small details of finishing one track at a time, it was best to write lots of ideas whilst I was feeling inspired.

How many ideas did you come up with in the end?

In that initial month or so I came up with a number of ideas that I felt could be the foundation of the album.

I think there were around eight or so that I was happy with. That gave me confidence that I was going in the right direction but I had decided the album should have 12 tracks so I still had a ways to go. 

At one stage my plan was to add a few of my favourite tracks from recent EPs on Body Rhythm, or possibly even one or two from way back in my vinyl days to round things off. However, being a glutton for punishment, I decided that that would be the easy way out so instead I decided to write all new ones. In the end I think I had as much as about 18-20 different ideas to choose from.

What happened to the ideas you didn’t end up using?

Some of them were good ideas but unfortunately either I just didn’t have enough time to get them sounding right or they just didn’t quite fit into the overall theme of the album. So I have plans to release a few of them at a later date.

Did you hit any stumbling blocks along the way to producing the final product?

The main one happened after I had finished off a number of the tracks and it seemed like everything was pretty much on course. 

I had set a release date for the album and had selected three tracks to appear on the album sampler. For some reason at this stage I started to doubt myself, and some of the tracks I had written.

Really I think it was just that I had heard them too many times over the course of the last few months and with the release date fast approaching I was becoming overly critical. Whatever the reason I ended up making the decision to scrap several of the tracks and write new ones in their place.

There was only a few weeks to go until I had to send out the finished album so things got pretty frantic at this point! 

In the end it worked out for the best as some tracks that I’m happy with that made the album like ‘Spaced Out’ and ‘Last One Home’ came out of that period. 

With the album now out, what comes next for you?

Well first things first, I’m taking a couple of weeks break from making music to recharge my batteries! I am however currently in the process of bringing in some producers to be a part of the remix package that will follow the album so that’s definitely going to be something to look forward to. 

I’ve also got some remix work that’s piled up whilst I was concentrating on the album to get through. 

Then it’ll be back to writing more tracks and continuing to develop both the Body Rhythm label and its sister label Body Rhythm Black. 

Body Rhythm will reach its 20th release later in the year so I’ll be doing some sort of retrospective at that stage. I also want to bring in more artists to the labels to give people a break from having to listen to my stuff all the time.

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