With a sonic guise that lifts him beyond his contemporaries into a musical orifice only inhabited by himself, Blanco White is a striking talent.
The well-travelled Brit draws inspirations from his discovery and infatuation with Latin American and Andalusian folk music, and with his newly released sophomore album, Tarifa, explores his artistic progression in the most refined and expressive way to date, sprinkling in electronic tendencies into his sublime folk style.
Across the album, White bares himself emotionally, with personal lyricism scattered across vast yet intimate soundscapes, drawing its listener into a reflective and vivid world. It is mature and dreamy, intangible yet humanistic.
To celebrate the release of the new LP, the artist offered us some exclusive insight into Tarifa, explaining the thought and process behind each individual cut.
Listen to the album…
“Giordano’s Dream, Pt. I (feat. MAVICA)”
Giordano’s dream is the oldest song on the record and it evolved a lot over time. I went through three choruses before finally settling on the mastered version. Adding MAVICA’s voice to the chorus felt like the missing piece that meant it was finished.
The song questions whether we are alone in the universe. I had always assumed that there must be other life out there, but that conviction was shaken after reading the ‘rare earth hypothesis’ and watching some lectures about the possibility of life on earth being unique. Although unlikely, the fact that that was a possibility at all terrified me and made me think a lot. It also interested me that songwriting could reflect our current state of knowledge and the questions we have about reality.
“Giordano’s Dream” refers to Giordano Bruno who was burnt alive by the Church in medieval Europe for suggesting that the stars in the night sky might be other suns with planets of their own, and perhaps other worlds like ours.
“Giordano’s Dream, Pt. II”
This began as an ambient outro, built around an improvised recording of the organ I used in Giordano’s Dream, played by myself and my housemate/bandmate Cameron Potts. We were just messing around on the synth, experimenting with the glide/portamento which became much more extreme because we were using two pairs of hands across octaves instead of just the triads I had used in part I. The recording was a happy accident, one that would be impossible to re-create in the same way so thankfully the record button was on. I loved it so much I decided to build something around it as an outro for the song.
The whole section was reinvented later after a recording session with drum legend Sebastian Rochford. He unexpectedly improvised over the ambient track I had made on his first take through the song, and I was completely blown away by what he added. I ended up chopping up the drum solo into a kind of usable loop, which is what you hear in the final master, before adding strings, played by Charlotte Schnurr.
“Tell Me That You Need Me”
The idea for this track came out of a jam with my band in a soundcheck before a show on our last headline tour, and was something I worked up later with Cameron Potts at my home studio. It’s in 6/8, a time signature I’ve always found really compelling and rhythmically interesting with a circular feel to it. We worked quickly around a guide drum track I’d made, and the guitars and bass were the only takes I recorded for the whole song. Listening back to them, it felt like they captured that initial moment of discovery and excitement that comes only in the writing process. We later recorded live drums with Fred Claridge who tours with me in the band, working in co-producer Pilo Adami’s drum den in south London. Fred’s performance was amazing and we captured a really tight 70s style drum sound taking my recording rig to the drum room. Pilo had been dialling in his room for some time and it felt really exciting to be recording in that way. It felt like we were getting the most out of our shared gear instead of relying on a big professional studio setup and desk. Working like this throughout the album process meant I learnt more about engineering and production in the making of it than I ever had before.
The song grapples with rejection in the lyrics, and the ensuing battle between acceptance and denial that can follow it. When you go through moments like these in life, they can dominate your daily thoughts and it becomes impossible not to write about them if you are working on music.
“Una Noche Más”
This song helped me make sense of the end of a long relationship and was part of the grieving process that comes with a break up. It’s often very difficult to let go during that time, and you find yourself clinging on to all the memories. “Una Noche Más” translates as ‘One More Night’ and tries to encapsulate some of those feelings of not being able to let go. The making of the song felt quite solitary and it was the first time I wrote, produced and mixed a track alone. I think the very personal nature of the song contributed to that kind of process, and made me feel more protective over it than normal. I let go of that in the final stages when MAVICA and Charlotte Schnurr added their voices to track, bringing out a depth and vulnerability that had been missing without them. Their voices have added so much to the record as a whole.
Rhythmically the unusual time signatures of 11/4 and 10/4 are what drew me to the musical idea in the first place. I think they give the song a lightness and wandering feeling that never quite resolves.
“Tarifa”
This was the first song I began working on during a writing trip to Tarifa (Spain) in November and December of 2022, where the bulk of the record was written. I booked the trip because I had begun to feel more confident in my body’s ability to work intensely on music again after a nerve and chronic pain condition had stopped me from playing and recording altogether. Although I still had symptoms during that time, my pain levels had improved a lot from where they had been in the previous few years, and I wanted to begin pushing myself to see how my body would react. It turned out to be an amazing decision to make the trip. I was so happy and grateful to be there working on music in such a beautiful place, feeling healthy for the first time in so long. Combined with a daily routine of swimming in the Atlantic and the excitement of writing again, all of that positivity contributed hugely to my ongoing recovery, and I was able to work with an intensity that surprised me. I felt able to really lose myself in the process of songwriting again for the first time in years, something that is so important when you are channelling creativity and exploring your subconscious for ideas.
I wanted “Tarifa” to try and capture all the joy I was feeling at being there, working on music again with freedom. It was also written as an invitation after meeting someone new, so it’s meant to feel very open and hopeful. In that way it felt like a reflection on a time where I was just beginning to open myself up again after a break up, getting lost in the excitement that comes with new connection.
I also wanted to try and distil some of the energy of Tarifa as a place into the song. It’s the southern most point of mainland Spain, only 5 miles from Africa and is famous for being very windy, either levante coming from the Mediterranean, or poniente coming from the Atlantic. There was a lot of wind throughout my stay and that constant presence of energy and movement around the house definitely left its mark on the music and on this song in particular.
Pilo Adami who co-produced the song with me came out for the last week of the writing trip and helped me finalise my ideas. We tracked the final percussion in an amazing music studio in Punta Paloma run by José María Sagrista, 10 minutes from the house I had rented. It’s an incredible space right next to the beach with views across the straits to Morocco; it was brilliant that we were able to get drums and percussion recorded in such a remote place, and a lot of fun too.
Back in London I teamed up with Nathan Jenkins (Bullion) to add some final details to the arrangement and production, adding some extra synths and a chorus of hums in the first verse that had felt a bit bare up to that point. The song continued to evolve piece by piece in that time, making small changes to things like the bass line all the way up to the mixing stage until I couldn’t hear anything I wanted to fix or change anymore.
“Green Eyes”
This song was written with Oscar Jerome in early 2023 back in London after I had returned from my writing trip to Spain at the end of 2022. We wrote and recorded all the music in a day at my home studio, and I worked on the vocal parts intermittently over the following months. Oscar is an astonishing guitarist and artist. I was blown away by his musicianship and timing, and it was a real privilege to write and record with him. I had wanted to collaborate with other musicians much more on this record because in many ways my first record felt like a very solitary process, especially in terms of the writing. Listening to stories of how other people make records on podcasts like “Tapenotes” made me realise how important collaboration is to growing as an artist. Podcasts like “Tapenotes” and the “UBK” audio podcast were huge sources of inspiration and comfort during the time where I was unable to work because of my nerve condition through 2020-22. It felt like I was still learning and educating myself even though I wasn’t able to write or record during that time, and I applied many lessons from those podcasts into the album process once I had recovered.
Green Eyes reflects on obsession and heart break in the lyrics. Although it’s mournful in that sense, I wanted there to be a feeling of mysticism and hope in the minimalism of the arrangement. Whenever I tried to add elements like more percussion, it felt like they were clouding the impact of the song, so in the end I left it very bare, staying true to the initial day of writing with Oscar.
“Don’t Go Hiding Now”
I’d had a sketch of this idea for years before finding the space to work on it. I had always liked the cyclical descending nylon pattern, with a more chromatic style of harmony that nods to flamenco music. During rehearsals for a previous tour back in 2019 I had played the sketch to everyone in the band, and we jammed it through a bit and I remember thinking it felt good in the room and knew I’d want to dig it back out at some point. I built the final version around the nylon guitar recording, captured in a barn in Herefordshire with a church like acoustic. I wanted to try and capture that kind of ambience and reverb direct into the microphones, and I was really thrilled with the results, using microphone placements I hadn’t tried before and focusing on the room sound. It was between Christmas and New Years though, so I was recording in the cold at around 7 oC which made things interesting! Never easy to play guitar when your hands are really cold!
I’d written the charango part, bassline and a sketch of the drum groove which we then recorded for real at Hoxa HQ in north London with Sebastian Rochford on the drums. His performance was fantastic and he brought his beautiful kit to the studio which paired very well with the track. Pilo Adami and I then set about developing the beat from there, adding textures and details to fill out the groove. I also did some work with Nathan Jenkins (Bullion) on this track which was a lot of fun, adding some quirky synths and tape delays to the production.
“Silver Beaches”
I began writing this song with Pilo Adami in the summer of 2022. We’d done some recording sessions as instrumentalists in the past on Malena Zavala’s Abbey Rd sessions for her album La Yarará, and once on my own music, and I’d always thought it could be really interesting to try and write something together. I brought the verse organ progression from what would become “Silver Beaches” into the session at Pilo’s studio, and we started working on the arrangement from there. I was really impressed by Pilo’s instincts, and I felt our taste overlapped in a really interesting way. Pilo is a multi-instrumentalist and producer from southern Brazil. Although he’s a phenomenal guitarist, his percussion playing and drum style left the biggest mark on the whole album. This was the first song we worked on together and it was incredibly exciting for me because I felt I had found a collaborator who could really help me develop my ideas and take the music to a new place. This first song was a catalyst for finding an identity for the whole album, and it became a gateway track leading to new ideas that might fit alongside it.
Lyrically the track changed and evolved over time, but the lyric ‘Silver Beaches’ appeared early on. I was imagining a dream like space of a beach at night. That surrealist image fed into the production and identity of the song, and I always felt I was picturing somewhere on a planet different to Earth.
“We Had A Place In That Garden”
Written in Tarifa, I was trying to find a synth part for another song experimenting with the arpeggiator, but landed on something that felt like an entirely separate idea. The tone of the synth reminded me of an oboe, and in that way felt strangely organic. I added nylon guitar and bass quickly to try and create a waltz like rhythm for the instrumental.
In the lyrics I was imagining what it might be like to be reunited at the very end of your life with someone you had lost along the way. In spite of that separation, the song is joyous and describes a meeting where both people might share in the happiness of each other’s memories in the form of a final goodbye. It was meant as a love letter to life, and also to the Earth as the garden we share.
Music is perhaps our greatest universal language, and sometimes when writing I feel a deep connection with the human story that is harder to access in everyday life. Working on this song put me in touch with those feelings, so I wanted to include that sentiment of human solidarity and connection in the final few lines.
“Cornered Tiger”
“Cornered Tiger” began as synth and vocal sketch which I then worked up with Pilo Adami, adding rhythm from his collection of weird and wonderful percussion instruments. I wanted the rhythm to follow the walking pace of the synth and feel a little baggy and loose. The lyrics were inspired by the Argentine writer Jorge Luís Borges’ short story La escritura del Dios: and are about a dream of escape. In the story an Aztec priest Tzinacán is captured and cruelly imprisoned by the Spanish Conquistadores alongside a jaguar in the adjacent cell. It’s a fascinating tale, one that I first read many years ago, but the image of the man and jaguar imprisoned alongside each other in the labyrinth always stayed with me. It was an image that for some reason appeared during the writing of this song, and so I decided to respond to that in the lyrics and music.
“Riding On The Wind”
I never pictured this as the last song on the album, but when I was finalising everything at the end of the album process, it suddenly seemed to fit. It was inspired by a late night conversation at a party with my friend Nick Wallis who has played in the band with me many times as a guitarist. We were thinking about how old humanity actually is, and got a bit carried away reflecting on that idea! It suddenly seemed terrifying that we knew so little about pre-history, only that humans very similar to ourselves had lived and died on earth for at least 100,000 years. That history felt like a huge shadow which we could only speculate about, and one that we rarely consider as we go about our lives. We were talking about how difficult so much of that human experience must have been, with immense suffering in the fight for survival, alongside moments of love, joy and friendship that would have been very similar to those we enjoy today. I wanted to write about that in a song, and to try to make something that would honour and remember those countless ancestors who must have had lives so much harder than my own. It was also a reflection on recent loss in my own family, where I wanted to celebrate the preciousness of life.