With Squeaky Pigs and Milk Frothers

Wooden Elephant is one of those rare ensembles that fill the term crossover with life in a completely independent way – to be experienced in two concerts at the festival 2024, where their earliest (Björk’s »Homogenic«) and the latest (Aphex Twin’s »Drukqs«) work will take to the stage. Beethovenfest director Steven Walter talks to Irish violinist Aoife Ní Bhriain and Scottish violist Ian Anderson about how they are reinventing string instruments and pop albums.

Steven Walter: Aoife Ní Bhriain and Ian Anderson, you are two fifths of Wooden Elephant. What’s Wooden Elephant?

Ian Anderson: Wooden Elephant is a contemporary string quintet, the instruments are a classical string quartet plus double base. We take electronic based albums and turn them into totally acoustic contemporary classical works in their entirety. So, we don’t rework individual songs, we take entire albums.

SW: You also use all kinds of extra instruments to make all kinds of funky sounds.

IA: Yes, that is part of the interest with the ensemble. In order to make all these weird electronic sounds, we find ways of manipulating the strings. Because all electronic music is made by just manipulating sounds. You can do that on a computer or you can do it acoustically: by attaching something to a string, or making the string vibrate in a different way.

SW: How, where and why did you meet?

Aoife Ní Bhriain: You definitely had something to do with that, Steven. We met each other at PODIUM Festival Esslingen in 2017. That was where we played a concert of Björk’s album »Homogenic«, which was the first album we played together as an ensemble. Thanks to you, Steven, we were put together in a group and the constellation worked really well. We managed to find extra time to rehearse in days that were already packed with other music, which goes to show that we were very enthusiastic about the project. I think, what shocked us the most after that concert was the reaction from our friends and the audience – that they enjoyed it so much. We thought we may as well keep going.

SW: It was an instant success, I would say. It was like an explosion of something really awesome. Everybody in the room felt it. Did you feel it immediately, or where you unsure about how great it was?

IA: I think we were also lucky, because the first album we did was Björk »Homogenic«, and that is so effective. As soon as I heard the album, I thought: it could be a symphony orchestra. I know we are smaller than that, but it struck me as that it would transfer really well. If we had started with our second or third album, Radiohead’s »Kid A« or Beyoncé’s »Lemonade«, they were a lot harder to make work. 

SW: Was the Björk album the easiest to arrange?

IA: Yes, because the vocal lines have a lot in common with classical solo lines. They work so well on string instruments. You can just play a Björk melody and it sounds incredible.

SW: Ian, you are the chief arranger. How do you work in the ensemble? Ian brings a score or a rough draft and then you get together and you work it out in a collaborative process?

ANB: Yes, that is the basic idea. I look at Ian’s score without listening to the albums first. To see it in a non-biased way, as though you are looking at something completely new that has never been played before. Then, as the collaboration comes together, you hear the other instruments, the sounds you try to create might not be exactly in line with what Ian has in mind. Then, somewhere in that process, I will go and listen to the album myself and see what it is that I was doing. I always find that is the only way I can really approach it, because otherwise I feel like you are trying to imitate something, that is impossible to do. As much as they say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, you still are your own person, musician and sound. 

IA: What you say about imitation is very important, because our biggest aim is to create something that stands for itself. So if you don’t know the original album, it works – as a contemporary classical piece. In some ways, it’s the wrong way to begin by trying to imitate, because it needs to be it’s own thing.

SW: It is cool that you guys are bunch of quite unique musicians. Aoife, you are deeply rooted in classical tradition but also in Irish traditional music, your father Mick O’Brien is a legend in the genre. Then there is Hulda, who is a classically trained Icelandic violinist. Then the bassist Nikolai, a genius in his own right…

ANB: He also is into folk music. He plays folk music with his dad, and Stefan the cellist has a great interest in Bulgarian music.

SW: Yes, he is into all kinds of stuff and has this Balkan vibe. It is a cool set of musicians and I think that is noticeable in the performance.

ANB: Yes, it is definitely a group where we are being able to take liberty and find our own voice, but also still being part of the ensemble.

IA: That took us quite a while to find as a group, to be individualistic but also a unit. As you said, we are all very different people and performers. And that is great for this kind of music.

ANB: I think it is more than that even. It is about finding a state of mind where the music is bigger than your education. That you are not afraid to make noises that are uncomfortable. It is all about being outside your comfort zone, taking risk, creating something new. When you are one of five, every sound you make matters. You really have to listen to yourself in a new way. That has for me personally not only taken me out of my comfort zone, hitting my nearly 200€-violin with various bits and pieces, like with plectrums or with milk frothers or whatever, but it has also actually allowed me to search for sounds in classical music, that I wouldn’t have looked for before. It is really fascinating, liberating in many ways, but also frustrating. Any time I play with Wooden Elephant, I need to do a week of scales afterwards, just to refocus.

SW: How do you choose the albums you do?

IA: It has to be an album I have a real connection to. I have to be blown away by the album. Then, it has to have a depth of musical ideas. I am not talking about quality here, but the way the music is constructed. That often comes from the layers of electronics. That is usually why we choose electronic based albums.

SW: What is most frustrating and most rewarding about playing this music?

ANB: The crazy thing is: If you play an instrument on stage, you feel somewhat in control, because it’s something you are trained to do, something you have done your whole entire life. The minute you add a squeaky pig toy or a bell or a kazoo or a milk frother with paper, anything can go wrong. Because it’s completely out of your control. You are totally inexperienced in this kind of performance practice. And the more you perform, the better it gets. That’s for me probably what’s most frustrating, because I criticise my own performance constantly. You want it to be a learning curve. My favourite moment for us was, we played »Homogenic« and this elderly woman came up from the audience and asked: »Who is the composer?«, because she assumed that it was just a contemporary classical piece we were playing. Reaching our to new audiences like that, that’s so rewarding and makes all the frustration absolutely worth it.

IA: Also this works both ways. We are all professional classical musicians and present the music in a classical way. But then people who have never been to classical concerts do come to our shows because we are playing Radiohead or Beyoncé. That has the effect of introducing people to classical music and to show it is not this massive scary thing. And the flipside, people who only know classical music and don’t think that pop music is good, we can introduce to amazing music. I find this very exciting.

SW: I know nothing like it. It is a unique model of chamber music. I encourage everyone to check it out!