Ruban Nielson's album *Multi-Love* continues making waves

Ruban Neilson continues to draw attention with his album Multi-Love, which, he says, grew from his awe-inspiring, scary year in a triad. On Wednesday night (August 12-13) he appeared on NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers (heir to David Letterman) and sang the title track. As Consequences of Sound described,

Polyamory is an uneasy topic for some folks, but not so much for Ruban Nielson of Unknown Mortal Orchestra. He made it a key topic in the band’s latest release, Multi-Love. Last night, he brought the topic to a national audience with a performance on Seth Meyers. Nielson tried to make the crowd as comfortable as possible by taking a relaxed position up on a giant white piano while he sang the album’s title track.

Lyrics. Musically, I don't think it's the most interesting song on the album.

------------------------------

Here's a selection from the many reviews, interviews and stories since my last roundup.

● In The Guardian: 'I can't tell what I'm supposed to keep private now' (June 9, 2015)

Not long ago, New Zealand-born Nielson embarked on a three-way relationship between himself, his wife Jenny and a young woman whom the music website dubbed “Laura”. The couple and their two children had moved out of a yurt and into a permanent residence and invited Laura to stay with them after a period of exchanging increasingly romantic emails. The three had a polyamorous love-in for the next year, until visa issues prevented Laura from extending her stay.

...Despite his laidback demeanor, his complicated love life looms like the elephant in the room. I want to ask more about what happened, how he fell in love with two women at the same time and, I’ll be honest, who slept where. To the cynical it sounds like life imitating Portlandia. But Nielson is still dealing with the very real emotional fallout.

“It’s hard …”, he begins, half-tired of fielding questions about it, half-nervous about what he might answer. Laura isn’t talking to him after the article was published last month. “It’s in a weird space at the moment,” he says of how they left things. “She’s really pissed at me right now; she’s never really had to deal with media [before].” Despite shooting the album’s cover, a shot of Nielson’s studio with a distinctive pink glow, Nielson suggests that Laura was taken aback by how, as a line of the titular track goes: “It’s not that this song’s about her / most songs are about her”. “I think she was just a bit shocked at how much of ...” – he catches himself and changes tack – “how important the album was to me”.

...Is she annoyed that he’s exploited their anomalous experiences for his own creative ends? “Yeah, maybe,” says Nielson, tentatively. “The way things happened might have made her feel that way, but that’s not really what happened. Maybe it’s a betrayal that I’m still talking about it to the press, I don’t know. I can’t tell what I’m supposed to keep private now, or what’s my responsibility to the people who listen to my records.”

...Nielson liked the idea of “a hip-hop DJ being able to play Kanye and then my song without it feeling like a total seismic shift”, but the truth is that UMO’s music has its own wooze-vision. And not just because Nielson tends to spiral off into theories about the universe and holograms. Multi-Love’s production is dense, burbling with an unhinged, squelchy pressure that could only come from escaping the stress of a three-way relationship in a basement studio stacked with old synths in the middle of the night. Multi-coloured parts bound in and out of focus like neon flubber, or else are muffled like a dusty, well-loved Otis Redding record lurking at the back of your bookcase. His style has caught the ear of Frank Ocean and Chet Faker, both of whom Nielson is said to be working with.

For now, however, Nielson is content to be UMO’s ringleader and shape them into one of the must-see live acts this summer.

The whole article (June 9, 2015).


● From a long interview in Australia's FasterLouder: Unknown Mortal Orchestra on Prince, Pitchfork and polyamory (June 2)

...That is a very personal thing to talk about and try to represent in a record — were you ready to talk about all this publicly?

...I wasn’t going to talk about it. And then when David — the journalist who wrote the Pitchfork piece — came out and hung at my house for three days. At one point he laid it out that he had figured it out, because he had got so deep into the record and he had done some research he had figured it out on his own and he was basically like, “Let me tell the story because if you trust me and think I’m a good journalist it will be better if I present it than if it ends up on Tumblr”.... It kind of forced my hand a little to be honest. But David was so respectful about it....

It was always going to become increasingly difficult not to talk about it – because you could already see people picking apart the lyrics and pushing you to give a reason for what this record is about.

Yeah that’s the other thing about it. The record becomes sort of confusing and unnecessarily obscure if you don’t know some of the things that went into it.

● In the New Zealand Herald, where Ruban is from: Album review: Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Multi-Love (June 4).

Once you know the story about Unknown Mortal Orchestra frontman Ruban Nielson's experience with polyamory while this album was in creation, it's hard to forget. Except if you'd never heard about it, it's entirely possible that you could listen to Multi-Love and never have any inkling of that story, because though that experience infused Nielson's outlook and writing, and gave the album its title, this isn't an album about polyamory.

It's an album about the confusion of love and life, of emotions, endless questions, and a search for contentment....

● When it was released on May 26, Spin made it their album of the week.

● In The 405 (May 28):

The glimpse into Ruban Nielson's studio that adorns the cover of Unknown Mortal Orchestra's third record, speaks volumes about what is contained within the album. Analog consoles and tape reels stand out among a variety of instruments and knick-knacks, but all of it is cast in darkness.... But this gloomy chamber of reflection is being invaded by an amorphous, psychedelic blob coming out of the ceiling. Its purple-orange hue is cast across the room, providing relief to the melancholic spirit of the room. It is this feeling that Nielson uses to set the stage of Multi-Love's cathartic and complex examination of polyamory.

● In Flavorwire: An Unflinchingly Honest Account of a Polyamorous Relationship (May 26)

In addition to being one of the year’s best psychedelic records, Multi-Love may just be the first album to honestly explore the complications of an increasingly common relationship arrangement that remains both fetishized and taboo....

As Pitchfork notes in a recent profile, Nielson said one pal responded to his admittance of the three-way relationship with the following comment: “That’s rad, man. Maybe you can go to bed with both of them.” Instead, Nielson bristled and told his friend, “I wish I wasn’t in this emotionally terrifying situation.”

“Think about the two most serious relationships in your life so far, and then experiencing them simultaneously,” Nielson offered as an explanation. “It makes you wonder: How much can a human being deal with emotionally? How well-adjusted are you?”

● Interview in Coolhunting (June 23).

Q: The album art for Multi-Love is a photo of your pink-lit basement — I wanted to know the story behind the two skulls on the shelf.

A: The gold one and the crystal one — one was a gift from my wife and one was a gift from my girlfriend.

● In the Salt Lake Tribune, while on tour: Unknown Mortal Orchestra grapples with overwhelming weight of love (July 26).

● In the Phoenix New Times: Unknown Moral Orchestra Details Singer's Polyamorous Relationship (I wouldn't say so). (July 29.)

● Lots more, currently.

● The Multi-Love official video (4:15):




New video for the album's "Ur Life One Night":



...and Rolling Stone's article about it (August 13).


[Permalink]

NPR picks up on new triad-inspired album *Multi-Love*

This morning I posted about Ruban Nielson's album Multi-Love and its origin in the bedazzling triad that fate delivered him into. The album will be officially released next Tuesday, May 26, though you can stream it from various sites now.

This isn't just another Portland indie record for some small fanbase. It just received an excellent review on National Public Radio and notice on the website of The Guardian, one of the world's major newspapers.

● On NPR:

First Listen: Unknown Mortal Orchestra, 'Multi-Love'

Ruban Nielson (left) with other band members. (Photo: Dusdin Condren)

By Andy Beta

In 1967, while still in The Byrds, David Crosby wrote "Triad" about a ménage a trois, inspired by the counterculture notion of "free love." It was left off the band's next album, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, and became a point of contention when Crosby left the band. Recorded by Jefferson Airplane and performed later by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the song scans as overly simplistic at its chorus: "I don't really see / why can't we go on as three."

To hear New Zealand native and Portland resident Ruban Nielson sing it in "Multi-Love," the lead song on Unknown Mortal Orchestra's third album, said triad is decidedly more confusing, thorny and wrenching. Nielson's falsetto frays into a rasp and plea: "Multi-love got me on my knee / We were one then become three / Mama, what have you done to poor me / Now I'm half-crazy." Polyamory, which translates from Greek and Latin as "multi-love," lies at the heart of Nielson's album, documenting a moment in his life wherein his longtime marriage found itself opened to an outsider. Ecstatic and graceless, loving yet threatened, comforted yet alienated, Nielson explores these complex interactions on his strongest album to date.

Names aren't named, but the intimacy, awkwardness and emotional nakedness on display might have been hard to take were they not wrapped in the sweetest, catchiest, most impeccably crafted music Unknown Mortal Orchestra has made....

Previous UMO albums wandered into strange psychedelia and folk as ways into Nielson's mindstate.... But on Multi-Love, such foggy, wandering sounds wouldn't serve these songs about love and the emotional maturity needed to navigate it....

Read the whole review (May 17, 2015). At the top of it are links to the whole album (41 minutes) and the individual tracks.


● At The Guardian's online music section:

Unknown Mortal Orchestra — Multi-Love: Exclusive album stream

The band

For Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s third album, bandleader Ruban Nielson decided to do things a bit differently. We’re not just talking about the music... we’re talking about the relationship that inspired it — during the making of the album, Nielson and his wife both fell in love with another woman, who moved in with the couple before leaving them both confused and heartbroken.

That unique experience is poured into Multi-Love, only to be decorated with a futurist, technicolour pop palette. Have a listen, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

The original (May 18). Listen and leave a comment.


● Spin commentary, followed by a brief interview:

The title of Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s latest LP, Multi-Love, may be an explicit reference to the complicated three-person live-in relationship frontman Ruban Nielson spent a year exploring, but it could just as easily be a reference to the album’s lush, layered sound. Appropriate to its name, UMO’s third album is bursting with affection for a variety of musics, both past and present: disco, power pop, prog-rock, hip-hop, and soul all among them....

Read on (May 14).

[Permalink]

*Multi-Love:* album inspired by an awestruck triad will be released next week

Pitchfork

Portland musician Ruban Nielson, leader of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, releases his third album on May 26th. It's Multi-Love, about the unexpectedly dazzling live-in triad that he found himself in with his wife and her girlfriend. Nielson and the story behind Multi-Love are featured in a long profile in Pitchfork, "the leading voice in independent music and beyond." Pitchfork claims "a fiercely loyal audience of more than 5 million unique visitors each month."

Update later in the morning: This is getting bigger — Multi-Love is reviewed on National Public Radio and is written up in The Guardian. More to come soon....

Ruban Nielson of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, performing in Spain in 2013.

Love Is Strange: The multitudes of Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson

By David Bevan

...While Multi-Love, UMO’s third full-length [album], marks a thrilling departure from the bedroom psychedelia that has earned Nielson an unexpected following, it’s also an album whose backstory speaks to the manner in which he views his art, his life, and the connection between the two — a leap of faith and a leap forward. It teems with lush synths and futurist textures, hallucinogenic funk and R&B, but emotionally and lyrically, Nielson needed a light....

After touring behind his first two albums for nearly three years, Nielson arranged to take a year off, so that he could write, record, and spend more time at home with his family. But as work on Multi-Love began in earnest last year, Nielson and his wife found themselves reconsidering the outlines of their relationship. As we eat and laugh at their tiny wooden dinner table, I’m sitting in a seat that, up until very recently, was occupied by someone else, someone whose absence is palpable and whose influence can be felt throughout the record she helped shape. “It’s not that this song is about her,” Nielson sings in the album’s hypnotic title cut. “All songs are about her.”



“I’d never heard of polyamory before and I wasn’t interested in the idea of it,” Nielson tells me after dinner, during a long walk through his neighborhood. “I just wanted to pretend that no one had ever thought of it before, to stumble into it blindly.” He scratches nervously at his chest, over a tattoo of an open eye etched between his collarbones. “I feel like I’m gonna spend the rest of my life trying to live last year down. It was such a beautiful time.”

In February 2013, while exploring Tokyo on a day off from touring, Nielson wandered into a club. From across the room, he remembers spotting a strange, singularly beautiful 18-year-old woman [Laura] and then awkwardly and inexplicably waving to her the moment they made eye contact....

After taking repeated notice of their blossoming friendship, Jenny asked her husband to have Laura send along a selfie. “Wow,” she told him when it arrived. “Let me talk to her.” Nielson introduced them. Before long, Jenny and Laura started corresponding on their own — online at first, and later, through handwritten and increasingly intimate letters. It was at this point that Nielson began to worry. “They had turned into love letters,” he says. “[Jenny] told me that I could read them if I wanted to, but I didn’t and I still don’t. It’s kind of terrifying to think that she was being intimate with another person. I didn’t get angry or upset. I just thought, ‘Oh, what have I done?’”

------------------

...Jenny approached him with a plan: Laura was going to come to stay with them for a while, and the five of them [including their two kids] would try living together.

“I had two thoughts,” Nielson says, revisiting that moment. “The first was, ‘Holy shit, I I’m fucked. I’m no match for this girl.’” His second: “‘This is fate. This is what I’m supposed to be doing. If this is the end of my marriage, then this will be the album that documents it. There are a million ways for this to go wrong for my life — but there’s no way for this to go wrong for me artistically, as long as I keep my eyes open and I’m brave.”

Nielson says what followed was like “a crazy awesome dream.” The three of them bonded almost immediately, and the kids, whose response was always a major concern, took to Laura just as quickly. “‘Let’s do this forever, this is the ultimate state of being,’” he remembers thinking, that first week they were all together.

Ruban Nielson in his basement studio in Portland. (Photo by Leah Nash).

...After those first few weeks together last May, the relationship between Jenny, Laura, and Nielson began to show signs of strain. As a relative newcomer, Laura couldn’t help but feel excluded when faced with the history and understanding that Nielson and his wife had developed over more than a decade together. But some mornings, Jenny would wake up to the sound of her husband and Laura on the couch, laughing and binge-watching a television show that they started without her. Talking about his own insecurities, Nielson says, “They would discuss something feminist, and I would just sit there, like, ‘Well, I think men are shit, too, but I’m the man in the room.’” For days, he would sulk around the house while Jenny and Laura carried on, toiling in the basement rather than confronting them both with his feelings. “Think about the two most serious relationships in your life so far, and then experiencing them simultaneously,” he tells me. “It makes you wonder: How much can a human being deal with emotionally? How well-adjusted are you?”

All of it made its way into the music, just as he had planned. In August, Laura’s tourist visa expired and she was forced to leave the States until she could obtain another. For six weeks, Nielson and his wife pined for Laura as she worked on a project in the Peruvian rainforest, while also trying to carry on with their lives....

When Laura returned in September, unannounced, Nielson was committed to the idea of continuing the relationship. They all took trips together and celebrated Halloween with the kids. They told their neighbors and close friends in Portland, a few of which reacted unfavorably, out of fear....

Shortly after last Christmas, as Laura’s visa expired again, her attempts to renew it were denied and she was forced to leave once more — this time indefinitely....

When the kids ask about Laura now, Nielson and Jenny tell them that she was forced to leave. “It just got suspended in no man’s land,” Nielson says of the relationship. “It’s brutal. The reason why she’s not here is out of our control, but we’re trying not to be maudlin about it. It’s hard to say that you’re sad because there are only two people in love now instead of three. But we were all in love. It was a real thing. It worked. I’m more alive now because of it.”...

Read the whole article (May 12, 2015), with links to more of Nielson's music.

The article got him a short writeup in newspapers in New Zealand, where he grew up and used to play in the Mint Chicks.

[Permalink]