In Conversation With.. Frozen Shores
For our next ‘In Conversation With..’ series, we chat to Ruari Barber-Fleming, the man behind Frozen Shores. Ruari is an independent songwriter and producer hailing from Dumfries and Galloway. His music is passionately ambient and fraught with emotive lyrics and has been described as, “absolutely stunning” (Charlie Ashcroft, BT Music / Amazing Radio) and if you’ve been lucky enough to catch him live, you’ll know his shows are unique in their collaborative quality as he works closely with a host of other local professional musicians to achieve the best performance possible.
For those who know nothing or very little about you, please introduce us to Frozen Shores.
Frozen Shores is a project I started a few years ago now that I’ve been able to grow and learn from. I began trying to produce my own music and thought I needed some sort of title to release it under. Deep down the project is really just a way for me to collaborate with people and have no boundaries or set ideas when it comes to creating music. It's quite liberating in a sense that the music is created not necessarily to be heard, but rather for the process of making it.
You are a very competent musician. Do you recall when you first picked up your instruments?
I played the chanter in primary school for all of two weeks, I was pretty crap. I picked up the guitar seriously for the first time a couple of weeks before I turned 18. My dad had always played, so I took his strat down from the attic and brought it up to my halls at Uni.
I had a whole lot of free time during my Uni years, which I used to fill by playing guitar for 6 hours a day, pretty sad when I think about it! I loved learning anything by the Chili Peppers and Hendrix. I’ve tried noodling on piano and drums but thats too much multitasking for my noggin to handle. Mad respect to drummers.
Frozen Shores playing at the DMC launch of Help Musicians Scotland.
A very poignant time, but do you remember the moment you discovered how cathartic making music could be?
I can’t remember a specific moment, but it was definitely around the time of playing with Liam and Morgan in Gracefell. We were really good friends beforehand and had quite a diverse taste, so making music together was extremely fun. For me, I felt such a huge reward hearing the recorded versions of our songs, even if they might have been rubbish. We thought this thing into existence and now it's permanent . . . Pretty neat.
Some musicians are influenced by every aspect of life, what influences you and what you create?
Pretty cliche of me, but the places I’ve been and experiences I’ve been through hugely influence my creativity. I am also a big, greedy, consumer though. I’m always watching new films and listening to new music. I'll often see/hear something I like and think: I want to make something like that. I suppose I try and create music that I myself would like to listen to.
The Frozen Shores Collective playing at the DMC 2018 Showcase (L-R: Kate Kyle, Liam Russell, Ruari Barber-Fleming, Michael Uphill and Jenna MacRory).
You have kept a very ‘bedroom’ feel to making music: with writing, producing and recording all from home. How important do you find this process?
This process is hugely important to me. Mostly down to how challenging and how fun it can be. I’ve sadly became a little tired of playing guitar. Producing my own music allows me to learn so much while going through the process. The intricacies of creating a song from inception to ‘radio’ completion are endless. I think I just like learning while doing.
Frozen Shores has recently just released a stunning brand new EP, ‘Golden’, just some two weeks ago. Again you have delivered another eclectic record of so many sounds – tell us more about that whole process of writing/recording this EP?
I wrote two of the songs, ‘Golden’ and ‘Whole’ quite some time ago. ‘Whole’ a very long time ago. I was never really sure how I could turn them into fully fleshed out songs with added production though. I wrote both on guitar, ‘Whole’ after listening to Sam Fender ‘I believe’, and realising he tuned his guitar a whole step down. This seemed to suit my voice pretty well as I often have to strain to hit any sort of listenable note. The lyrics for ‘Whole’ were largely inspired by watching a video called ‘The Millennial Question’. Turns out we’re actually not that bad.
I had demos of both songs. I sent ‘Golden’ to Liam Russell and ‘Whole’ to Fergus Henderson. I’ve always struggled coming up with decent rhythm sections, so these guys helped out a lot. Liam wrote and produced the beat for ‘Golden’ and Ferg wrote and produced the drums for ‘Whole’. Both in their own home studios. It was so nice to have other people work on these songs, as they managed to make them so much better than I could have imagined.
The latest release doom Frozen Shores ‘Golden’ is available to listen to now. Click here.
I tend to think Frozen Shores conjures up so much visual imagery when writing songs, am I right?
I tend to try and write using heavy imagery, probably because I’m too scared to write in a more literal sense. I’m also no where near as clever or interesting as Alex Turner. Much of the music I listen to conjures up heavy imagery in my head, so I think that has probably ingrained itself into my writing. I also like being ‘transported’ somewhere when listening to music, so I’d say I try to achieve that same effect when writing my own.
COVID-19 has brought our beloved music industry to its knees, how have you been making use of quarantine, creatively?
I’ve had so much free time to work on projects that had been put on the back burner. It’s the first time in ages actually that I’ve had time to work on any sort of music, which has been nice. As mentioned, the music industry is in a really scary situation right now - with myself and many of my peers being completely out of work. As much as I’ve loved working on my own projects, I’d really like to get back to collaborating with folk asap.
From an artist’s perspective how do you view the Dumfries music scene and is there anything in particular that you feel would help build and prosper it?
I think it’s class. There’s so many folk from here that are widely respected within the industry. It’s such a neat little pocket of talented folks and we all seem to get on well. I think within Dumfries and the UK as a whole, there’s a huge issue with getting people to attend grassroots gigs. Not many people seem to be willing to pay to see an artist/band unless they’re already established.
I was lucky enough to go on tour with 13 Crowes earlier this year in Germany. There was people coming to the shows just for something to do, saying: “oh there’s a band on that we’ve never heard of before, let’s check them out”. So the band then gains new fans, snowball effect. I feel like that just doesn’t happen in the UK anymore. I don’t know if it’s down the public not having as big an interest in the music scene, or maybe something else. Perhaps we should take inspiration from the punk/ska scene; all those gigs and festivals are so heavily attended even when folk don’t know who’s playing. They just go for the love of it.
Once we step out of these uncertain times, what is next for Frozen Shores?
I’d love to go to the pub and hug my friends. Warzone is getting a bit boring. I’m probably going to have a little break from writing music for a while since the EP came out. In time though I’d love to record some songs I wrote alongside Liam Brook and Michael Uphill. We have an EP/album worth of songs that I’d really like to record with them, as they’re absolute monster players!
