A short interview with Portico

Portico play Prague's Lucerna Music Bar this May 5th. We chatted with them about not being a quartet and about studying music.
 
 
Was it challenging to tell people “we are no more Portico QUARTET” and how was tee transition to becoming a trio?
Jack Wyllie: Yea it was quite difficult because we developed such an identity as portico quartet. it was so rooted in the jazz world so coming out of it was a very big move. I think people expect you to stick to the style of music your making and maybe feel a bit disspointed if you change. But for us that very change is part of what makes things artistically interesting and challenging. 
 
 
How did you become signed to Nina Tune?
They had been interested in signing us for a while and as our music changed the label we we're on (real world records) we're becoming less and less appropriate for us. Then we just had a few meeting with them and they seemed like a good fit. They had a history in jazz but had branched out into electronic music which was quite similar to us. 
 
Unĺike many other bands, you actually studied music in school. Do you consider that an advantage? 
Only one of us studied music, that was milo the bass player. I think learning the basics can be useful to help develop some technique but i think once you get to certain ability its way more about what you do with it and your artistic outlook/development. I think that once you know how to do what you want to do then you don't really need to study more technique unless you feel that tequnique is really part of your artistic development. It becomes more about looking and listening to other music and trying to situate yourself as an artist in relation to that. I It depends on what you want to do but i think studying the technique of one particular type of music leads you towards making music that is more either more virtuosic/ technical or possibly more of an historic examination (like a lot of sort of post-bop stuff around) than necessarily artistic.
 
How long does it take to record - or to write and record - a song/track?
It depends on the track, often the best ones come the fastest. A lot of writing the album was about developing a sound and the themes of what we wanted to write about. Then it was about dfiniding the singers we wanted to work with etc. that was probably the longest part, then we wrote the album and 4 additional track in the following 10months, all mixed and mastered.
 
I really like your last album’s cover… how did it develop?
Duncan, the drummer has done all of our artwork. This one was a photo of a small sculpture that had a very personal meaning for him and . When it was photographed it blurred a bit and had ghostly presence that seem to fit with the music. I think he developed the colours around it in photoshop. 
 
You travel quite a lot. How do you stay fresh on the road and how do you pack all those thing, not losing expensive saxophones on the way? 
We generally travel in a splitter van we just put all the stuff in the back and drive around. If we fly we hire a lot of the equipment were we are playing. I do yoga in my room band try and go on the occasional run.
 
 
What should we expect in Prague when you come to play?
We're going to play the living fields album. Jono Mccleary will be featuring on vocals. The tunes have a new life when there played live, there some extended passages and an energy to them that you don't get on record.