Katrine Brosnan

Amelia’s Magazine | An interview with illustrator Katrine Brosnan

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Tricolore by Haiku Salut. Design by Katrine Brosnan
Tricolore by Haiku Salut. Design by Katrine Brosnan.

Illustrator Katrine Brosnan first came to my attention as the designer of the wonderful Tricolore album artwork: she then contributed another exclusive illustration for my interview with Haiku Salut, so I decided to find out more about how she collaborated with the band, as well as her work practice, techniques and plans for the future. Read on to be inspired.

hand_watch_booklet by Katrine Brosnan
Hand watch booklet.

What was the best bit about studying at Nottingham Trent University?
I loved working alongside people studying different disciplines; my housemates were graphics and fashion students. My fine art course allowed people to experiment with any medium to create their ideas, the freedom was liberating and there was a lot of crossover with disciplines, which was encouraged.

What have you learnt since you left university?
It really helps to have an art, work, life balance! Specialising can lead to more commercial opportunities but the joy of creating is only realised when you can be free with ideas and the medium you use. I try different techniques to make work and often feel inspired when I learn something new. Three years ago I went back to printmaking attending a few courses at a local print workshop and this really inspired the direction of my work.

Tricolore booklet page by Katrine Brosnan
Tricolore booklet page.

How did you hook up with Haiku Salut?
I’ve actually known Gemma from Haiku Salut since we were wee 16 year olds and I was always incredibly impressed by her amazing musicality. I remember a night when I came to see their uni band the Deirdres and managed to win the best jumper award, what I wouldn’t give for a trophy.

Piano hands tee & tote by Katrine Brosnan
Piano hands tee & tote.

I got properly back in touch when I saw Haiku Salut play in Nottingham a couple of years ago. They were really supportive of my new screen-printed and watercolour illustration work and I ended up making some tees and tote bags with the piano hands design to go alongside their EP. After a trip to the peak district with a visit to an expansive second hand bookshop, a fantastic Sunday roast and a lovely time with their dog Pi, I was asked to work on designs for their new album Tricolore.

What was the brief for the creation of your artwork?
The original brief was very loose to create something a bit detached from reality and using the primary colours associated with the band. They also suggested linking to a song title and I chose Leaf Stricken. I was pleased to achieve final elements which don’t sit realistically together, the leaves are hoovered up by the cloud rather than blown around by the wind.  

Pantoman booklet page by Katrine Brosnan
Pantoman booklet page.

How did the process work with the band members?
We first spoke about it at a gig and then through emails back and forth. I gave them some mock up ideas and developed these from their feedback. We chatted again at another gig about the songs and their direction. They are very creative as is their record label How Does it Feel to Be Loved? so there was lots to input and evolution to get to the final version. Drawings that didn’t make it onto the cover have made it into the online booklet that accompanies the album; like a cheeky panto chap with lampshade headwear and some patterned beetles.

How was the work produced?
The back of the album has a lino cut tree I printed, a bit reminiscent of Japanese woodcuts with far less detail, the leaves are hand drawn, watercoloured and then digitally arranged with a geometric patterned watercolour cloud. I wanted the artwork to be simple and a little bit messy with different elements coming together reflecting the variety of instruments which play alongside each other in the music.

Petite pastries by Katrine Brosnan
Petite pastries.

What else are you working on at the moment?
I started getting into using printmaking and design by working to briefs, which has sometimes meant that the medium and end result lead me. Now I’m taking some time to think about my personal project ideas and where they can take me.

I am working with a couple of artists to get together an unusual residency. We hope this will give us a bit of time and space to make some interesting ideas happen and share it with people in a nice setting probably with lots of tea and cake.

Folks that do coffee
Folks that do coffee.

I like to draw people I see and bring them together into collections. I’ve recently changed my pattern for getting to work and realised that the new people I see will soon become regulars on that little chunk of my morning; the lady with the lovely fair isle hat and rosy cheeks and the man who wears shorts over leggings who crosses the road at 8.11am. This collection of ‘new regulars’ could find themselves coming together as a print or zine like my ‘folks that do coffee’ and ‘homage to catalonians’ prints.

Homage to catalonians by Katrine Brosnan
Homage to catalonians.

I have recently experimented with making screen-printed laser cut jewellery including slug brooches, which people really like or really hate. Useless things and or sad creatures like slugs often become my subjects. I have also used food in quite a bit of my work and breakfast has taken over with my petite pastries jewellery. I am working on a range of screen-printed jewellery in this way and hope this will be ready for public consumption by the summer.

Slug brooch by Katrine Brosnan
Slug brooch.

I am also working on private commissions including some special screen-printed wedding invitations.

Written by Amelia Gregory on Friday April 19th, 2013 12:09 pm

Categories ,Deirdres, ,Haiku Salut, ,How Does It Feel To Be Loved?, ,illustrator, ,interview, ,Japanese woodcuts, ,Katrine Brosnan, ,Leaf Stricken, ,Nottingham Trent University, ,Pi, ,Tricolore

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Amelia’s Magazine | An interview with Haiku Salut and review of debut album Tricolore

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Haiku-Salut-by-Christine-Charnock
Haiku Salut by Christine Charnock.

They may have an exotic band name, but Haiku Salut are in fact a multi-instrumentalist trio of girls based in the Derbyshire Dales. Gemma, Louise and Sophie met at university in the mid noughties, but only started creating music in their current form during 2010: a first show was infamously booked before they’d written a tune, and an intense period followed during which they wrote the songs which appear on their debut EP. Haiku Salut combine influences from a bewildering variety of sources on their inventive new album Tricolore which features electronic bleeps and squelches galore with melodies played out on accordion, synth or guitar. It’s a sound that follows in the footsteps of mournful modern folk such as Beirut and the jaunty Folktronica of Tunng. A quirkily beautiful video accompanies single Los Elefantes, filmed in forest and city and featuring a forlorn male character, confused and befuddled by the females who outfox him at every turn.

Haiku Salut Press Shot
Firstly, what’s the idea behind your name? I had imagined you were far more exotic than you actually are (no offence) when I first heard it! (as in maybe Icelandic or Japanese)
We actually had the name before any of the songs! As a band we write many lists, we spend more time writing lists than we do writing songs and that’s how it started at the beginning. Firstly there was a list (a spider diagram to be exact) of what we wanted to sound like. A lot of the influences were from French and Japanese cinema and it soon became apparent that whatever we were going to create it was going to be outlandish, niche and definitely something our parents wouldn’t understand. We wanted a name that suggested these things so we went on to write a list of many words. Words we liked the sound of and words that reflected what we thought we were going to sound like in our heads. There were many contenders but Haiku Salut seemed to encompass it all. Annual Snaffle Tank, however, did not.

Haiku Salut by Katrine Brosnan
Haiku Salut by Katrine Brosnan.

You describe yourselves as “Baroque-Pop-Folktronic-Neo-Classical-Something-Or-Other” which is pretty amazing.
What are your influences, and do you all have quite different tastes?
That’s a difficult question really, at first we had a lot of influences which helped us find a direction but more recently when we’re writing, one of us will play something and the question is “does that sound like Haiku to you?” rather than “I’d like this one to sound like so and so”.
 
Haiku Salut press shot
At the very beginning the reason we started Haiku Salut was because Louise got an accordion for Christmas and at that time she had been listening to a lot of stuff like Beirut and Jonquil and so it seemed natural that the music would have a folk element to it. Gemma has played classical guitar since she was little and she leaves many homages to classical pieces in our songs and Sophie being an avid listener of glitch mainly (but not always) tends to add the electronic stuff. So we threw that all together to see what would happen. Our music tastes are constantly shifting and are all so varied but there are some areas of crossover, the Spice Girls being a prime example.
 
Haiku-Salut-illustration-by-Shy-Illustrations
Haiku Salut by Shy Illustrations.

Where did you all learn to play so many instruments and genres?
We all play piano on varying levels and the skills from that are all transferable to the melody horn, glockenspiel and accordion. We all play a bit of guitar and if you can play guitar you can play ukulele! We seem to have learnt the instruments as we go along, some songs just seem to need a certain sound so we learnt it and did it. One song needed trumpet so Gemma learnt that particular melody on the trumpet. We wanted some beats so I learnt how to make some beats. The drawback to this being the only things that we can play on these instruments are our own songs, no adlibbing!

Haiku Salut Live
How do you write songs together?
Generally one of us will bring an idea acoustically, often a phrase on the guitar or a ukulele loop and we’ll go from there. We very rarely write a song in one sitting. It took us months deliberating over “Sound’s Like There’s a Pacman Crunching Away At Your Heart”. Some people have said that our songs are unpredictable and that’s probably why! We’ve all got different ideas of what music we wanted to make at the end of the song to when we started it. Sometimes we’ll have a part that we can’t shoehorn into the song no matter how hard we try and these parts can be ignored for what seems like forever until we begin writing something else and suddenly that other bit drops in perfectly. The beats and electronics come after. 

haiku salut samantha eynon
Haiku Salut by Samantha Eynon.

Why have you decide to remain mute when you are performing?
It was never really a conscious decision, none of the songs have vocal parts and it just seemed weird to be saying anything at all between songs. We don’t have anything of interest to say that will enhance the set so we don’t say anything at all. We swap instruments a lot on stage and at the beginning the silences made us feel awkward so we introduced the glitchy interludes to ensure we didn’t feel under pressure to babble a load of utter rubbish at people. It works!
 
Haiku Salut Live
Apparently a defining image of Haiku Salut live involves the three of you playing with six hands at a grand piano, how does that work in practice? (any violent clashes?)
We have a song called “Watanabe” where all three of us play the piano (not often a grand one though unfortunately!). We all have a range of notes and generally keep off each others turf, no altercations yet! But if ANYONE steps on my f# by Jove will they know about it. Actually, we have a T-shirt design with an illustration of six hands on a piano. It was done by Katrine Brosnan who did all the artwork for our album. She’s an incredibly talented artist and she really brought the whole thing together. Check her out if you’re that way inclined. 

Haiku Salut Press Shot 2013
You met quite awhile ago at university – what were the ties that bound you together then and kept you together until you decided to create Haiku Salut?
Amongst others we lived together for a couple of years in Derby, which was quite a beautiful and turbulent time. At that point we played in a different band that chronicled all this stuff and was very, very different to what we’re doing now. Also Louise and I DJed together weekly in Derby. The band came to a natural conclusion when Gemma and I went travelling for a few months but when we came back I returned to DJ with Louise and Haiku came along shortly after.

Haiku Salut Tricolore by Katrine Brosnan
Haiku Salut Tricolore by Katrine Brosnan.

What is it like being on tour with Haiku Salut?
We tend to talk utter, utter nonsense. But I suppose that’s a by-product of spending long periods of time with each other. Our last tour included me entering a hotel in a suitcase. Twice. With that act of debauchery behind us there was the minor issue of the nervous breakdown in the service station over the lack of bananas and the misdemeanour of accidentally driving the wrong way down a slip road. 


Your current free download is called Los Elefantes – why, and what’s the story behind the video?
It was a name we had in mind for ages. Other songs were written and Louise would be like “No. This is not Los Elefantes”. The name originally came about when Louise was au pairing in Spain and one the little boys was shouting “LOS ELEFANTES! LOS ELEFANTES!”. Profound, I think you’ll agree! With regards to the video we gave the guys at Albion Sky productions our thoughts on how we wanted the video to feel and let them run with it creatively. We told them we wanted something a bit creepy and inconclusive and they wrote a storyboard, found the locations and ultimately made something absolutely stunning. They’re very talented people.

What next for Haiku Salut?
We’ve got our first album Tricolore coming out on CD and 12” vinyl on March 25th on How Does It Feel To Be Loved? which is available for preorder now here. We’ve also got our album launch parties, one in London on March 28th and the other in Derby on April 13th, where we’ll be unveiling our mega lightshow!

Written by Amelia Gregory on Thursday March 14th, 2013 12:29 pm

Categories ,Albion Sky, ,Annual Snaffle Tank, ,beirut, ,Christine Charnock, ,Derby, ,Derbyshire Dales, ,Folktronica, ,Haiku Salut, ,How Does It Feel To Be Loved?, ,interview, ,jonquil, ,Katrine Brosnan, ,Los Elefantes, ,review, ,Samantha Eynon, ,Shy Illustrations, ,Spice Girls, ,Tricolore, ,tunng

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Amelia’s Magazine | Haiku Salut: Japanese Poems Steal Brains

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Haiku Salut book_cover_1
Ian Watson is the manager of cult Derbyshire band Haiku Salut and they also happen to be signed to his label How Does It Feel To Be Loved? Ian has a very close relationship to the band and was the person who prompted them to make their new book Japanese Poems Steal Brains. Here he tells the tale…

haikusalut_portrait
‘The first time I took Haiku Salut out for lunch, they pretty much ignored me for the whole of the meal. They were a week and a half into a tour with folk legends Lau and, unbeknownst to me, knee deep in a quest to write 100 haikus in 24 hours. My memory of that day is of these “three mute girls”, as they sometimes call themselves, with their heads down, scribbling frantically in notebooks or jabbing at the screens of their phones.
That evening, after a typically joyous and emotional show in a church in Sandwich, we drove back to a friend’s fisherman’s cottage in Broadstairs, where – fortified by red wine and the relief of having completed their task – they insisted on giving a recital of their creations, over the course of a surreal and increasingly hilarious hour. For a band famed for never speaking onstage, they were entertaining in a way that their fans never get to see.
After that night, suggesting we turn a selection of the many hundreds of haikus they’d written over the last year into a book seemed obvious. Featuring wonderful illustrations by Katrine Brosnan, Japanese Poems Steal Brains tells the story of this quite unique band, as they trundle around the country in their red postal van, playing their gorgeous instrumental music in churches and interesting spaces, scribbling haikus as they go. Like them, it’s funny, poignant and contains the occasional piece of good advice. Just the thing to take on your next unusual lunch date.’


When did you start writing haikus? Was it just for fun or did it serve another purpose for you?
We were fans of haikus before we formed the band. When I first discovered and started reading them I found them very humbling, a reminder that there is so much happening everywhere all the time. I tried to slow down and take notice of things, tiny things. I started to write one every day to record snippets of potentially forgotten moments and I found it a lot of fun, I enjoyed reading them to Gemma, some of them were funny – like an anti-joke in poetry form. I don’t write one every day now as I don’t have the time but when I think back to the six months or so when I did I can remember things with such clarity! Not just the content of the haiku itself, but I can remember what I was doing before, after, who I was with, what music I was enjoying around that time. Unintentionally the haikus were documenting that period of my life. I can’t remember when Haiku Salut as a band started writing haikus…it sort of crept in I suppose and then somewhere along the line we decided we’d all write one for every day we were touring. When you’re on tour there’s a lot of none-time, we’re always waiting for something, to arrive, to soundcheck, to eat, to play, there’s a lot of time to fill and writing haikus is a way to keep each other entertained. We’ve branched out to univocular poems now too (poems that only use one vowel).

You famously don’t talk on stage. Why not? Is writing haikus a way for you to communicate something that you can’t with your music?
I can’t remember a time that we ever spoke on stage, it was never a conscious decision not to do so but it always seemed out of place. Like it would ruin something. Communication to the outside world wasn’t our initial intention when we started writing music together and the haikus that we’ve written weren’t written with an audience in mind either (except for each other).

Haiku Salut book_Lamps_1
How did you go from writing haikus backstage to publishing a book? How was it put together?
We were talking with our manager about them and he asked if we had ever considered releasing them in a collection. At first the idea seemed absurd and silly, but eventually it felt romantic and exciting, and we’re very excited that we’re going to be published poets. Our first port of call was our friend and illustrator Katrine Brosnan to see if she would be interested in working on the book with us. Her style is so naive and unique and so full of character that the idea of coupling her work together with haikus seemed like the perfect match. We had a lot of fun collecting together all the old haikus we’ve written and remembering incidents that would have otherwise been lost.

The book tells the story of what happened to you in 2013 and some of 2014, but actually starts in Sweden in 2011. What were you doing there, and what made the trip so memorable?
When we went to Sweden it was the first time we had played abroad which in itself made the trip memorable. We flew with Ryan Air and had to buy a seat for the accordion (Geraldo). The plane was hot and busy and two or three irritated people asked me to move Geraldo so they could be seated. Their irritation turned into bafflement with the response “He’s bought a ticket, that’s his seat“.

Haiku Salut book_Hummus_1
A lot of the book covers your experiences playing live, either doing your own tours or playing with Lau. What would someone learn about life on the road by reading the haikus?
Things go wrong. You will get lost.

One of the most striking haikus is about almost being sick through a trumpet. What can you tell us about the night before and the morning after that inspired that?
That’s my favourite haiku of the whole book! It’s one of Gemma’s. We were on tour with Lau at the time and we’d all spent the previous night drinking till the early hours in the kitchen of a Youth Hostel Association in Salisbury. Me and Louise had gotten off lightly and went into Salisbury the next morning to buy special olives whilst Gemma sicked muchly at the hostel. A few hours later we were soundchecking in Bexhill (Gemma in slippers) and…well…have you ever tried playing trumpet suffering from the worst hangover of your life?

Haiku Salut book_Graveskipping_1
At one point in the book, you almost seem overwhelmed by the need to write haikus. Did they take over your life?
Our friend Tim Clare is a poet and every year he writes one hundred poems in a day. We were on tour at the same time he was doing this and as we’d been writing haikus for the fortnight previous decided to match his goal with a hundred haikus. That day we spent a windy day in Canterbury, played a show with Lau in a beautiful old church in Sandwich and stayed in a fisherman’s cottage in a bleak seaside town called Broadstairs so there was lots to document. The title of the book is taken from the middle line of one of Louise’s haikus from that day “Japanese Poems Steal Brains“.

The book contains illustrations by Katrine Brosnan who also designed the sleeve for your debut album. Did you give her any pointers on what you’d like the illustrations to be? What’s your favourite illustration in the book?
No, we trust Katrine Brosnan completely. She had a free reign to do whatever she wanted and it’s turned out beyond anything we had imagined. My personal favourite is the lady with the inside out umbrella. I wrote the haiku that it relates to and I remember sitting in a Mexican cafe in Canterbury and looking out of the window as a gust of wind threw a lady’s umbrella inside out and she looked about her to see if anyone had noticed. I like that she will have no idea that two people have documented this occasion in poetic and illustrative form.

lampshowpic_haiku salut
Will you doing any readings from the book?
We’re doing a launch party on November 1st at Scarthin Books in the Peak District which is a stone’s throw from where we practice. Scarthin Books is the best book shop in the world (the 6th best according to The Guardian), it’s so spindly and there were rooms I didn’t know existed until a few months back. There’s also a vegan/vegetarian cafe that you can only get into by pulling out the correct book case. It’s going to be a fantastic evening with red wine and some surprises.

What are your hopes/ambitions for the book?
As the book has an ISBN number it that means that we have to send a copy to the British Library, that was a hope/ambition that we didn’t know we had! Our other ambition was to get it stocked in the best book shop in the world. Anything else is a bonus!

The book is published on November 3rd, but some advance copies will be onsale at the band’s forthcoming Lamp Show tour. The dates for that are:

Weds Oct 8, Nottingham Contemporary
Fri Oct 10, Victoria Baths, Manchester
Sat Oct 11, St John On Bethnal Green, London
Sun Oct 12, Four Bars, Cardiff

Ian continues, ‘The Lamp Show is quite something. It features twenty vintage lamps which are programmed to flash, fade and flicker in time to the music. There’s a video of it in action here if you’d like to take a look.

One of the things I love about Haiku is that they find so many ways to be creative – they don’t just write fantastic music, but they think of startling ways to present it live, and now have written a book too. It’s quite nice wandering around their creative world…’

Written by Amelia Gregory on Thursday October 2nd, 2014 6:30 pm

Categories ,Broadstairs, ,Haiku, ,Haiku Salut, ,How Does It Feel To Be Loved?, ,Ian Watson, ,Japanese Poems Steal Brains, ,Katrine Brosnan, ,Lau, ,Sandwich, ,Scarthin Books, ,Tim Clare

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