There are millions of guitar players on the planet but only a handful whose touch on the instrument is instantly recognisable. Jakob’s Jeff Boyle is one of those players. He makes a brief but dramatic cameo on the new Gramsci single ‘Ourselves’ - that’s him at 2.30. As a man of few words, it’s not often Jeff waxes lyrical about his craft but he is in fine form here. Enjoy.
P: Thanks for taking the time to dive into this conversation. I think it's fair to say that you are a musician who has added their own distinctive voice to the conversation of guitar playing. Your vocabulary of expression within the post-rock lexicon is immediately recognisable. I’d like to start by asking how that vocabulary developed over the years - was it the avoidance of certain things? Johnny Marr talks about actively avoiding any blues phrases etc. Further to that, I’d like to know how much the vocabulary informs the composition process; do you always write with an instrument in your hands?
J: I think it has, originally, a lot to do with the music that I grew up listening to from a very young age. My father listened to artists such as Mahavishnu Orchestra, Alan Holdsworth, Jimi Hendrix, Al Di Meola, Paco De Lucía, Steve Hillage etc. so I think right from the start I was always looking for something progressive and new just from constantly hearing these guitarists trying to find new sounds and sonics. Certain albums/songs resonated with me and basically laid the blueprint for what I do now. It really is an accumulation of influences over the years that I’ve taken specific ideas from each guitarist along the way and moulded them into something, hopefully, unique. After an early obsession with Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler’s playing style and then discovering Van Halen and learning every song of theirs that I could (at the age of 10 or 11) I said to my father, very seriously, that I was going to be a guitar player like Eddie Van Halen and what he replied with had a lasting affect on me, he said, very seriously “you’ll never get anywhere copying other guitar players, you need to find a sound of your own”. Since then I’ve kind of had that in the back of mind as I’ve progressed through the stages of learning guitar, through different styles, genres and techniques, taking my favourite bits from each of them. Culminating in the approach I started to take when I was living in Auckland back in 1996 when I first started putting together demos of song ideas that eventually morphed into the origins of Jakobs first few songs. In regards to Johnny Marrs's quote I definitely agree, I think why what we and a few other bands did ended being called’ Post-Rock was because we were consciously eschewing overly used cliches. Towards the middle of the 90s I felt, personally at the time, that the Rock format had pretty much run its course and the dead horse had already been flogged to a certain degree. So I wanted to try and push my “style”, somehow, into a new direction, staying away from anything too obvious, staying away from the standard verse/chorus riff-oriented techniques. Creating textures as opposed to riffs, still trying to include and incorporate strong melody, became the new modus operandi. The use of delay was obviously a big part of that and if I was to try and pinpoint one particular influence that lead to that (amongst the many, Van Halen, The Edge, Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Vai all used delay in very interesting ways) it would have to be Steve Hillages album “Open”. That was an album my father listened to a lot right from my earliest memories and it kind of haunted me for years after that. A lot of those ideas, the delay skipping, bouncing off the delay repeat, come directly from that album, probably more from a subconscious point, but as a result of haunting me for so long. The volume swelling techniques originally came from that obsession with Dire Straits, Mark Knopfler used that technique, without delays, frequently and then I discovered how much further you could take it using delays and reverbs, pushing notes and chords for long phrases and overlapping harmonics. That also led me to another obsession I had which was trying to make my guitar sound like a cello, I finally figured out how by tuning the guitar down to Bb and volume swelling notes using delays and reverbs to emulate a cello being bowed.
As for how much the vocabulary informs the compositional process, it’s kind of hard to pinpoint as it’s become so inherently how I play guitar that I don’t consider it to be particularly influential on how I write at all. I generally start most ideas on either an acoustic guitar or an electric guitar unplugged so the delay techniques often have nothing to do with the initial ideas at all. Then I’ll play those ideas through the whole rig and see how they translate using those techniques. Sometimes they will take on a whole new shape and direction and evolve into something entirely different and sometimes it’s clear it just won’t work at all and is best left as it is. More often these days I will start ideas on a piano and then try playing that through the rig just to try and break away from my own playing cliches. I’m still trying to find something new on the guitar, and I guess the longer you do that, the more limited finding something new becomes. So I find that the techniques I have developed over the years are becoming like the cliches that they were once a reaction to.
P: I love how candid you are namechecking such a wide and disparate gallery of player influences without any snobbery; that the engagement or interest in each of them is fundamentally recognising aspects of your potential self in all of them. It's not an issue of amalgamating a bunch of influences into your own identity but glimpsing aspects of your own identity in all of them. All of those plates you have mentioned are hyper-melodic too. One conversation we have had in the past was in regards to players like Knopfler, Beck, Gilmour, Richard Thompson, etc and their knack for ‘storytelling’ in their playing; narrative arcs. When you combine that with a textural approach and influences like Fripp and Eno collaborations (‘No Pussyfooting’) you are really stepping into a cinematic space. How much do visuals influence/provoke/steer your compositional process?
J: To be honest they don’t overly influence or steer the compositions much really. From time to time I will see something that will provoke something that makes me want to write something to fit that visual
P: I know you’re a voracious reader. Is it more like you are expressing something in your mind's eye? Perhaps not even something specific or is it more an emotional space you are building? I mean what's going on in your head when you are playing live and when you listen back to what you’ve recorded? What is it you want to recognise in the music for you to deem it a success? I know you have very high standards so what are they?
J: It is definitely more of an emotional space most of the time. I’m after something that’s going to take the listener somewhere, to another place and somewhere that’s going to leave an impression of some kind.. And it starts with how it affects me, if it takes me somewhere while I’m playing it. I remember hearing Albatross by Fleetwood Mac for the first time, I remember it like it was yesterday, one of my earliest memories in fact. It was the first piece of music I remember really taking me to another place and it had a seriously profound effect on me from then on. It had a kind of melancholic darkness but uplifting feel to it to me and I guess I’ve been subconsciously chasing that feeling in what I write ever since. I recognised that feeling in more songs over the years following that were like that, like Drifting by Jimi Hendrix, Where Do You Think You’re Going by Dire Straits, Something by the Beatles etc. For some reason I really connected with these songs and they kind of set a blueprint of where I’m trying to go with some of the songs I write. Then there are the songs that are created from an organic space, where they happen out of a result of the 3 of us bouncing ideas of each other as we jam on an idea, they tend to be the best songs for sure, where we all push the songs in the direction we hear them going and creates something that is greater than the sum of of its parts.