For Black Hours' sublime, new EP 'Saccharine', Dave Malkin recorded and produced the musicians separately in intimate domestic settings around South East London. Drawing inspiration from this process and his passion for traditional storytelling, we caught up with Dave and invited him to talk us through the tracks one by one.

Black Hours is a seven-piece band led by the multi-talented Dave Malkin featuring, amongst others, Mercury-nominated drummer Corrie Dick. Initially starting as a project with long time collaborator and friend Ben Corrigan to explore different ways of musically framing the human voice, it eventually grew into a larger ensemble. With an affinity for late-night sessions, they assumed the Black Hours moniker. 'There's this innate mystery and romance around it. Our first experience of this is probably being scared of the dark as children. Then there is the witching hour - we're most susceptible to apparitional experiences and sensed presences due to a peak in the amount of melatonin in the body at this time. Perhaps that explains why at the time I felt like all of the music I was making worked differently at about 3 am!'. 

Malkin has been able to maintain some degree of normality during the UK lockdown and find optimism and positivity. 'It's an anxiety-inducing time financially, but I'm really fortunate to have quite a lot of variation in my career from day-to-day, and I've managed to take a good chunk of it online. I'm relishing the time it has afforded me to press on with projects which have been languishing for years. I hope this doesn't seem too glib, but I feel nourished by the peace, and I'm encouraged by the way we all have been forced to check on our appetites. In some ways, I'm optimistic that we might reflect on what lockdown without records, or films or art might have been like. Maybe folk will start exchanging actual money for records again'. 

Petrichor

Petrichor, the smell after rainfall is something we can all connect with, and just the thought of it can conjure distinct memories. Did you set out with a clear idea of what you wanted to explore when you wrote this song? 

On the surface, this song is about ignoring all of these warning signs and being a little too headstrong for one's own good! But it's also a linguistic exploration; that word, Petrichor, is a portmanteau of 'petro', relating to the rocks, and 'ichor', the liquid that the Greeks believed flowed in the veins of the Gods. The second verse really makes a metaphor of the story of Talos, who was killed by Medea when she released his ichor, in Greek mythology. The third verse is all based around a word play which I don't want to ruin by explaining it! But I think it's clear that there is a certain amount of heartbreak involved.

How aware are you of involving your personal experiences into your creative process? 

Black Hours has afforded me with that. There is nothing to hide behind when the process begins and ends with you. For a long time, I didn't think I'd had an interesting enough life to write good songs; then I read a piece by the comedian Stewart Lee, where he employs this technique of taking something true, and something untrue and triangulating a new truth from those two things. I employ that technique a lot; my personal experience is always obscured, in order to avoid the tropes of the bedroom singer-songwriter!

Saccharine

Saccharine is an uplifting, optimistic song, but there's also a sweet melancholy. Can you tell me a little more about the story behind this piece and why it's the title track? 

I think Saccharine became the centre of the recording because it encapsulates all of the themes, and the other tracks felt like they branched out from that point. It's primarily occupied with how memory is a fixed point in the past, but something ephemeral that can change in our present and future. Proust explores this paradox in 'In Search of Lost Time', which provided much material for the text. The word 'saccharine' seemed paradoxical to me also; something so unctuous and delicious it is undesirable. It's also my take on language choice for it's aesthetic alone; meaningless lyrics in popular song have been done to death. Saccharine uses a lot of unusual language relating to scent and perfumery, and my ambition was to employ such niche lexicon that the text would ultimately be meaningless, and you could only really get to the bottom of it if you were a perfumer or willing to spend some time with a dictionary. This way the listener is forced to consider the words for their aesthetic alone and imagine their own meaning.  

How important is it to be able to play these songs in a live situation? 

We're still figuring out how to play much of the record and I think I've inadvertently written our next release to be much easier to recreate! But I think it's important to make the best record you can - regardless of whether it can be recreated. That might not mean loads of multi-tracking or unusual equipment. Sometimes it's the immediacy of one microphone and the sense of a real physical space. But if a really dense record translates into quite an intimate, delicate live performance that's just a different experience, which is surely more satisfying than hearing a perfect recreation of an album at a live show. Black Hours was always intended to be a 'modular' band as well. So we could recreate the tracks with anywhere upwards of three musicians, and you're never quite sure whether you're going to get a guitar-driven rock band, or voice, guitar, bass clarinet and trumpet.

 The Place Was A Wilderness

The EP has a deep sense of narrative and storytelling, tieing in with the folk music tradition of telling stories and describing surroundings, places and people. How focussed are you on this in your writing and composition? 

This will always be engrained in me, I think. My father was a journalist for 35 years, so my education was how to find the angle on a story. Part of my practice will always be focused on traditional music too; since I've been old enough to consider it, I've always felt like I have a duty, not just to pass on the music I've inherited, but to offer my own inventions. At the same time, Black Hours definitely feels like a departure from anything I've done before, a reinvention, which I think is really positive.

Secret Garden

The beautiful vocals from Hungarian soprano Timea Gazdag add a fitting contrast to your voice. How important is the human voice in your work? How does it differ from working on instrumental pieces? 

Absolutely. It was Ben Corrigan who initially suggested we get Timea involved. He has an amazing ability to match sounds on a really elemental level. I can't speak for Timea, but I've always wanted my singing voice to sound more or less like my speaking voice, but pitched, with as little artifice or affectation as possible. The voice should be sincere if we are to believe what it is speaking or singing about. Timea's voice has this incredible purity which matches my approach, but the result for her is far more beautiful! I think rather than thinking about the differences between a vocal-led track and an instrumental it is more useful to me to think about the similarities; the musical building blocks and my priorities are the same. 

Is the concept of contrast something you consider when composing? 

Yes, but not always consciously. I usually experience the composition of the music as sort of feeling for the light switch in the dark! When I finally find it, it's usually a balance of light and dark, or dissonance and consonance, which are illuminated. It feels more exciting and less formulaic to forget the rules when I'm writing and just deal with organising sounds. The text is always very considered on the other hand, and usually fairly researched based. The project has intentionally been designed to fulfil both of these ways of creating.

Ophelia

There's a sense of contemplation and wistfulness in this track. When writing, what comes first, your voice and lyrics or the music?

It varies. This song happened really quickly, within about an hour. I wrote it the day that the sky turned completely orange over London during Storm Ophelia, so that came first as a couple of lines and then an exploration of the scene in Hamlet where Ophelia gifts the other characters flowers before her tragic demise. The guitar came at almost the same time, and then the arrangement for the band slowly emerged. 

Is collaboration an essential component of your music? 

Yes! There would be no joy in a solo project for me. When you meet someone and just know that you'll work with that person in some context forever. Building a band brings out this excitement, like designing a fantasy football team or an imaginary dinner party. I maintain the rule that I won't make music with anyone I wouldn't go for a beer with!

‘Saccharine EP’ by Black Hours is Out Now.