The joke goes post rock had its heyday 10 years ago (it’s when I discovered it at least), but how could it have been otherwise? It was the era of dark broody television, Game of Thrones was on and still acclaimed, the Last of Us video game had just come out, and there was an early dystopic air in the world most of us walked past. Now that the dystopia is materializing in evermore distressing ways and the mid 2010s feel like a sunny garden in comparison, the nuance post rock is gaining is that of melancholy – looking back in reflection at the good times and relief at what’s been overcome already.
It was sunny in Bristol when I sat down with Vincent Knight-Schrijver (drums) and Chris Core (guitar) from the band Din of Celestial Birds, right before their stunning show at Rough Trade Bristol, and we chatted about this pensive energy post rock brings.
Vince: I think there’s a lot that can be said without words. I think the moody atmospheric is something that we all relate to, we can express lots of things through the sounds we hear, whether it’s the melodic chords we play or a lot of nice textures to listen to and stories to tell. One of the instruments I really gelled with growing up was the piano. I had a piano in my house and I would just sit there for hours, just improvising really atmospheric, moody soundboards. I don’t know whether that instilled itself within me.
Chris: The scene in post rock is good right now, it’s very healthy. I think there’s a lot of really interesting bands around at the moment doing cool stuff with it.
Formed in Leeds in the late 2010s, Din of Celestial Birds blossomed out of the city’s musical soundscape, supported by independent venues and promoters, as well as their own musical upbringings.
Vince: I was always tapping on things, beatboxing, which is where a lot of my rhythmy rhythmness comes from. My mom is a violin maker and she was always doing music around me. I guess it was absorbed somehow. Then getting into a band, it’s organic. You meet people. You say “oh, you like music? I like music. Do you play music? I play music”. And then, “oh, let’s go back to my place and play some music”.
Chris: When I was super young, about six, I got an acoustic guitar. But the teacher that I had was quite classical, a very strict sort of teacher. It was very boring and I stopped playing, but then in, I think 1999, so I was like 12, my friend had this shitty electric guitar and a little Squire practice amp. I went over to his house and he was like “man, I’ve had this for like a week. I can kind of almost play Nirvana”. And I was like, “this is the coolest thing ever”. So I was like, “I gotta get in on this”.
The result being several EPs and their debut album, The Night is for Dreamers, released in 2023 to wide acclaim and a loyal following.
Chris: I really like it still. I think it’s easy for songs to become stale when you’re playing them often. You can get really fed up with some things if they’re not either fun to play or interesting to listen to. I think I’m really happy with how it’s done and how it’s been received.
Vince: I always enjoy playing them and try as much as I can to keep it consistent with how they sound on the album, but there’s always little quirks that I stick in either intentionally or unintentionally when playing live.
Two years of touring it later, it’s gotten them a quite surprising slot on the lineup of CAN Festival, in Zhoushan, China. They were heading out just a few days after this interview.
Vince: Receiving the email was random. We weren’t sure of its legitimacy to begin with, but we vetted it.
Chris: It was funny because we really have not got any idea, if anyone listens to our music in China. Apparently, someone does at least. We’ll see how it goes.
With their exhilarating blend of forward-driving drums and the soundscapes three lead guitars can build, it is no wonder the imagery and emotional connections audience make with the music can be profound and profoundly liberating.
Vince: I do think about that sometimes. It’s very difficult to think about your own music in that context, because you’re attached to it in so many other ways that external listeners aren’t attached to it. But I know from experience listening to post rock that it has framed moments in my life. I do think the music is that we play is quite emotional.
Chris: Because there’s no lyrics, there’s no well-defined thing apart from the title of the song. There’s some samples occasionally, but otherwise, you don’t really have an awful lot to go off of. A lot of the titles are a bit abstract and don’t really mean anything. I quite like that – not really being told or directed what a song is about, so it allows you to attach your own meaning to it, and that may or may not, by coincidence, happen to be the same meaning that the person that wrote it or the people that wrote it have attached to it, and that’s fine.
How they write music together has had to change too, with band members being lifelong friends and collaborators, but no longer in the same city.
Chris: We don’t really jam. Me, Tom, and Andy [guitars] live in Leeds. Vince is in Cambridge, and Matt [bass] is in Manchester. I don’t know how many practices we’ve had this year, I’d be surprised if the number is higher than five, so we don’t really get much time to do collaborative jamming. We actually end up using the Internet and using more asynchronous collaboration tools. Someone will submit maybe a piano motif or maybe most of a fully fleshed out song, and we’ll take it away, import it into our own Cubase, add some stuff, fling it back into the melting pot, and that kind of progresses from there. Andy has probably written the majority of most of our songs, I’d say. He’s very methodical and very good with arrangements, and I find he’s very good with putting emotion to paper, if there were any paper involved.
Vincent: I love jamming. I would every Saturday go out to my friend’s house in Cambridge and play music for hours. And it’s something I very much enjoy, that improvisation. And I find it very hard to play the same drum pattern twice for every song. With the jams, there is an intention. But with the songs, there’s often a theme and I try to convey that message and keep it in my thoughts when playing, so maybe it carries through.
Sometimes it’s deep meditations on depression or how hard it can be to keep caring for someone (as their song “I love you, but it’s killing me” suggests). Sometimes, it’s about a heavily rained-in ArcTanGent, as in their magnificent “Downpour”. In 2023 and 2024, the Birds were invited to play ATG, one of the UK’s biggest alternative rock and experimental music festivals. And they got lucky – no rain in sight.
Chris: The first year, we were on Thursday, first official day, eleven in the morning, quite early for a festival. We’re like, most people probably won’t even be there yet, they’ll probably be setting their tents up and then they might not wanna see us because there are other stages. So we’re [expecting] a couple of hundred people maybe. We got there. We walked around the corner and up the steps to the stage. Vince is like, “oh, shit. That’s a lot of people.”
Vince: There was a sea of faces and I hadn’t seen that many people looking in anticipation at oneself before.
Chris: It was a huge deal for us. 2024 was a bigger stage, and it was the only stage at the time, so we were forcing crowds to listen to us rather than letting them make a decision. Before that point, we hadn’t really done anything at that scale. We hadn’t done anything even remotely approaching that scale. It went from twenty people in a room to several thousand. It was weird. I was expecting to be a bit stressed or feel pressure about it. I feel like it actually gave me a bit of confidence. I was like “okay. Cool. Let’s do this”.
Vince: It’s like when we go to conferences and give a seminar: a conference with over 50 people is a little bit scary, because you know they’re all gonna be experts in their fields. [Whereas with] loads of people, everyone will feel it slightly differently, you’re not staring them straight in the face, to reach out and give them a little scruff on the head, so it’s less pressure.
If the usage of words like “asynchronous” hadn’t yet given it away, the band is mostly comprised of computer scientists. Where do their day jobs show most obviously in their work as a band?
Chris: Stage setup. You can tell from how our build has evolved that we’re basically a bunch of engineers. Everything has been optimized, we’re on the fourth iteration of how little faff can we make this? We recently added lights, which we’re using this tour, so the question is how can we optimize all the other stuff so that we have time to add nice shiny new stuff? I think the engineering mindset shines through, and a lot of attention to detail.
A mindset also showing in a pragmatic approach to the band as a business. With the disheartening news of many independent venues closing around the UK and streaming services changing the ability of bands to become financially viable, the Birds focused on keeping their project as self-sustaining as possible.
Chris: Our approach to it is we really enjoy doing it, we want to do it as much as we can. But we have other commitments to make. So we try and maximize the return on our time spent doing stuff like this. We try to take the good gigs that we know get a lot of people down in places that people can make it to, kind of strategically placed around the country, and try make the most of the time that we put forward into it. The idea is really if we can be self-sufficient with it and pay for the cost of doing this and the cost of buying the gear to support it, then we’re happy.
Vince: We simply just don’t do it for the money. It’s something we enjoy doing.
Bristol got treated to an early release of their Dunk!Festival live recording on vinyl, but a completely new album is also on the horizon.
Chris: I think we’re planning on doing some studio time September-ish.
Vince: We’ve got a theme for the forthcoming album, which is adventures, journeys. We’re trying to choose themes in the newer songs which are related to adventures, whether it’s adventures that we’ve had or adventures that humanity faces or adventures that collective groups of people face.
Chris: We’ve got a big folder on the Google Drive with about 15 or 20 songs, most of them are pretty much fleshed out. But we’re going through the period right now of voting on whether or not we actually like the concepts of the songs that are in there, voting on whether or not we think it fits the theme that we’ve decided we wanna do for it. And then, if a song gets through that kind of vetting period, if you will, we’ll take it into a practice room and start actually changing it a bit to make each person’s part more their own.
Once again, a huge thank you to Din of Celestial Birds for this chat and putting on an amazing show, together with Solars and FORT, at Rough Trade Bristol.
Bonus question: any fun facts about your setup?
Chris: I like to press the least amount of things possible, during a show. So I’m, like, not touching my pedalboard.
Vincent: I recently got a shiny new snare drum that I’m enjoying.