INTERVIEW: Smoke Season never ends for L.A. power pair.

Electronic pop meets jazz and effect pedals meets a non-replicable sound. If it sounds like something you’ve never heard of before, then Gabby Wortman and Jason Rosen know they’re doing something right.

Then again, both New York natives had plenty of influences in their individual lives before making the move to the City of Angels. With Gabby being a classically-trained pianist and gospel-rooted singer and Jason being heavily influenced by jazz as a former student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the two acclaim themselves as such different songwriters and overall musicians that the music they create together either cannot be reproduced or it would be very difficult to do so.

Smoke Season released their four-track EP titled Hot Coals Cold Souls earlier this year, featuring their latest single-to-music video release of “Opaque.” The song itself has an underlying theme of being underwater with the defining concept of being non-transparent. The track itself is a product of the duo’s electro-pop hybrid, but each of the four tracks don’t quite possess the same kind of tone or feel as one another. For example, the reverberant vocal elements and hollow guitar lines in “Simmer Down” give the song an alternative-folk rock type of feel. Gabby and Jason, however, aren’t too high on traditional genres – and thus try not to limit themselves.

“Instead of being folk revivalists,” Gabby explains, “let’s bring an electronic drum element into it and that created this sort of dreamy pop but it’s more like dreamy Americana with a tendency towards beats – which was basically just a hybrid of all the musical styles we love as individuals.”

I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to have a phone conversation with Gabby and Jason about where their music has taken them since moving from the East coast out West, expectations for their latest EP, and where they want to go with the Smoke Season experience in the near future.

First off I wanna talk a bit about the root of your sound, an alternative brand of Americana if you will. Was there a common element between the two of you as far as where you wanted to take your music as a duet or in other words, what drew you guys to making music together?

Gabby: Jason has a very strong jazz background and I have quite a strong electronic background, so we kind of brought both of our influences together…like Americana but instead of being folk revivalists, let’s bring an electronic drum element into it and that created this sort of dreamy pop, but it’s more like dreamy Americana with a tendency towards beats – which was basically just a hybrid of all the musical styles we love as individuals.

So it’s progressive?

Jason: Yeah, like the slide guitar stuff…I just had a slide in our rehearsal space and I just started playing stuff on the guitar…and that sorta gave it that Americana feel as far as from the guitar’s perspective. Then there’s a psychedelic element which also comes through just because we love playing with pedals and love playing with effects, and so it’s having some tight chords progressions, and then also taking that and making it really wild and psychedelic, as well.

Gabby: I think the end point is we wanna create sounds that aren’t easily reproducible or easy to have heard before. So like all the pedals and hybrids, all of that comes from the fact that we kinda wanna stand alone in the noise we’re making so we take our time to kinda craft the actual song.

Hot Coals Cold Souls is in itself a title that certainly rolls off the tongue. What made it stick out to you the most from maybe the other EP titles you were considering?

Gabby: We actually kinda threw around mixable ideas and one day, there’s a very cinematic narrative element to the music that we’ve been writing recently. So kinda starting with that and throwing around titles and we just kinda felt that it really encompassed that story telling vibe and it also encompassed the old west which is kinda what the EP is a tribute to. It sort of rolled off our tongue actually.

At a certain point, all artists demand their own presence in a competitive music industry with the sound they’re convinced is progressive enough. Smoke Season definitely seems headed in that direction, but remembering back to when you were first growing as individual musicians, who were some of the other artists or musicians who steered you towards the sound you wanted the most?

Gabby: I think that that’s a longer question because as individuals we were both individually influenced by different artists, but as a band I’d say that we really have been falling in love with Alt-J and the way that they blend folk and harmonies and also electronic elements. It was kind of a happy accident because we had already started writing in that direction. Then heard – or were first introduced to them and we realized that we loved that combo because other than them I’m not familiar with other artists that are kinda standing in that realm right now, and that’s the realm that we definitely wanna be in. So they have definitely influenced us, but also we love Radiohead and their production style.

Jason: I’d say Beck is a huge influence for both of us; just his expressiveness in the alt-folk realm as well as the electronic realm so he sorta bridges the gap in both those worlds. One of my favorite albums is Mutation which is kind of an album no one really thinks about as much as far as Beck. I love that album. It’s very folky and has some cool interesting chord progressions. [Also] I love Beach Boys and Beatles and all that old school stuff…we’ve very harmony heavy.

Jason, where do your jazz roots come from?

Jason: Well I studied Jazz in college, I went to Berklee College of Music. I just really amerced myself in the language of jazz, studying Coltrain and [Charles] Mingus. Thelonious Monk is my favorite; just his use of seconds and using dissonant tones and the interesting tonal qualities you get [from piano] – because I play piano as well – so it’s kind of transferring a lot of those piano and sax lines and things like that and taking them to guitar; it’s an interesting thing to take those sounds and put them onto a guitar [which] creates some interesting variation. I also like alternate tuning on guitar because it also creates those tensions, and it does some interesting things like it takes you in a totally different direction. There’s a lot of build up a lot of tension and then kind of releasing it. For awhile in college I strictly listened to jazz for a few years and I didn’t listen to anything else. Then eventually I kinda came back around so remembering the Beatles and even Coldplay when that [new music] came out, I was like “Oh okay, I like songs.” and I took all that jazz I had learned and applied to more pop alternative rock like that.”

What about you Gabby?

Gabby: Well, I’m a classically trained pianist so I tend to be a bit more dramatic in my melody writing than Jason does; he adds the textural layers to the music and I add the voice in a way…I add the top line melody a lot so my melodies tend to move towards the more dramatic minor heavy. I bring that darker element. Vocally I was trained as a gospel singer, like soul singer. So we kinda skipped stones into the Americana realms just because of the textural quality of my voice, but that was all my first beginning singing was through gospel. Kind of just a period of different styles and that’s how we came up with Smoke Season. I think the other funny thing is they kinda call me the Mad Scientist of the group because, like Jason said we love pedals and effects, but also I love strange production qualities on to our tracks, strange production, strange beats and so that really comes out a lot in the final products of songs.

Talk about the chemistry between you two as collaborators. What would you say your individual strengths are and what do you believe the other person brings to the table?

Gabby: In terms of my strengths, I tend to pull us out of traditional a lot of times, or convention. I have a seriously serious, deeply rooted revulsion for things that have been used too many times. I’m always just like, “That sounds too cheesy!”, so I have an ear for that and it will push the people in our band to try things that they haven’t tried before. Jason has a really really great ear for chord progressions, textures, and overall virtuosity. He’s sort of the police officer of all of our playing techniques because we play live a lot. He catches it when people are off slightly or when our melodies don’t quite mesh with the other people in the band. So he really has the strongest technical ear of the band and kind of holds us all to that standard of playing.

Anything you wanna add Jason?

Jason: I would say I have a knack for coming up with riffs or and things on the guitar and then Gabby takes us out of the typical, into the atypical realm. She also brings a lot of the lyrical content and the ideas as far the lyrics and melodies go.

I understand you’re promoting your new music video for the song “Opaque” off your latest EP Hot Coals Cold Souls. What was some of the symbolism or imagery you used in the video that you feel was of the most significance in connection with the concept of being nontransparent? (What was the liquid in the bathtub?)

Gabby: That was actually milk. You kind of nailed the theme on the head; like the whole idea was to tell the story in a clandestine way, through metaphor. It’s actually a love story, a love triangle, and it’s basically just about reading between the lines. So what we’ve started to do because the cinematic element of our music is so important to us is we take our time with our music videos. We started to take some artistic themes and apply them across the music videos. So like a perfect example would be the milk. In the “Badlands” music video, we used white blood and throughout the “Opaque” music video we bring motifs of milk. When we decided to shoot underwater, basically we wanted there to be an underlying theme of liquid throughout all of “Opaque” – and basically I just figured “what’s the most difficult and awesome thing to pull off in this music video?” and kind of decided to shoot it underwater, naturally. We wanted to show…swimming just feels like dance, or it just feels like ballet. People move underwater in such a miracle way that it was just so visually stunning so we took on the task of taping that. We basically wanted to recreate reality with a little bit more art; like it’s not just a normal bathtub, it’s a bathtub full of milk; and it’s not just normal singing, it’s a mirror box with an infinity effect on it. Our idea was to create something as visually simulating as possible.

Outside of and besides music, what are some of the things that keep you leveled and centered when things in life get crazy?

Gabby: Honestly, I think each other. We are really really really close friends and we keep each other grounded. The love of our lives is both music, and [it’s not just about] the music, it’s about the art. All the other stuff like follower counts and play counts is all kind of jus bullshit to us. At the end of the day what we really love is just making art in the form of a music video or the form of a song or album artwork and that’s what really keeps our feet on the ground.

Jason: I was just thinking additional things like going for a hike, running, exercising; sort of just getting out some energy and getting some fresh air because we could get locked inside the rehearsal space for hours and it’s good to breathe some fresh air sometimes…and then things like watching American Horror Story, I mean you gotta have some relief and things like that.

Have you been following the Freakshow series?

Gabby: Yes we have! Actually it’s so funny because now that I’m thinking about it, I’m sure that American Horror Story had an influence on our music video.

As you’ve continued to build the reputation of your name, what has your Los Angeles fan base meant to your growth thus far and what will having them behind you when you begin touring a larger and wider mean to your continued success?

Gabby: Well, they say that L.A. is the most difficult city to start in and we would probably, definitely, 100% agree with that. L.A. is a very difficult city to win over. Any given night there are a million awesome things going on, many many awesome venues to go to. It took awhile to start to get people to turn their heads towards us in Los Angeles, but I think that that is the best value that we could have gotten from this city, which is that their standard is so high that by the time you actually start to get their attention, you know that you worked your ass off for it. At the end of the day, I’m really glad that we were held to that standard early on rather than a city where it’s a lot easier to get a ton of fans then you get to the bigger ones and people [just roll their eyes]. Los Angeles is honestly an art haven right now. Jason and I are both from New York, like 10-15 years ago that was the art haven but there’s so much…going on in the L.A. art community that just being here just influences us so much and we’re just absorbing the energy. So at the end of the day L.A. is our home base now; we were New Yorkers that feel at home in Los Angeles, so this fan base is our home base.

“Fools Gold” seemed like it was the outro track of the EP. With the eerie tone it possesses, what type of imagery is painted in your head when you play through it or more importantly when you were producing it?

Gabby: I don’t think “Fool’s Gold” could be replicated because it was literally an improv, really emotional reaction to the end of “Opaque”. Jason played on probably ten pedals that his sound was running through, and our bassist played with a wrench on his bass and a couple pedals. So it was just a very emotional one time creation that we fell so in love with that we wanted to keep it apart of our EP in some way. We called it “Fool’s Good” – Jason do you want to tell part of that story?

Jason: Yeah (laughs). First thing I wanna say real quick is that this song sorta…goes with the lyrics [of “Opaque”], “something introduced to you inside of me” kinda washes into “Fool’s Gold” like sort of an aquatic feel to it. The name “Fool’s Gold” we came up with it [when we] took a trip up to Lake Isabella and it was the Fourth of July weekend. We happened to just be in the water and kind of just checking out the rocks that are kinda just set in [the ocean floor]. Having looked at it and seeing gold kind of come through, I just thought “Fool’s Gold” and then I thought of the Gold Rush, like people moving west to the western frontier and it kind of works with our whole theme and vibe, as well as the band. I was able to name the last track, like I was dubbed that guy to name that track sounds like “Fool’s Gold” and it kinda works with it and kinda the imagery of it.

Gabby: Yeah like fake is an illusion anyways like transparency and “Fool’s Gold” is just an illusion.

Now that you’ve dropped your latest music video off the EP, do you plan on making another one for “Simmer Down” or what would you say are one or a few of your short-term goals for Smoke Season?

Gabby: We have some ideas for “Simmer Down” but they’re still in the works so we’re kinda keeping them close to the chest at the moment. Actually last time we had gotten back in the studio with the same producers who did the Hot Coals Cold Souls EP, they were really excited about some of the new stuff that we’ve been writing. Unfortunately me and Jason can’t stop writing because it’s uplifting so we have a lot of new songs that we’re excited to get to people so in early 2015, people might be hearing some new tracks for us.

Finally, Smoke Season. Is that a time of year or does it have a deeper meaning behind it?

Gabby: It has to do with Hollywood. We moved out here…and there’s just this top coat of Hollywood, like the highest-most level where you have to penetrate deeper than that to find the art and that level is the part where it’s all smoke and mirrors and people blowing a lot of smoke in your ear and talking a lot of illusions about wealth and about connections and power and stuff. It’s very easy with seeing a lot of people…a lot of sad souls get caught up in that smoke season, we call it Smoke Season. So just moving to L.A. has had such a big influence on both of our lives that this is what the band is about; the band is about the art, inspired by our Western adventures, and it means Los Angeles is the smoke season.

Check out Smoke Season’s latest music video “Opaque” on YouTube: