Music Q&A:
Remember Remember

Led by Graeme Ronald, Scottish instrumental rock band Remember Remember were nominated for the Scottish Album of the Year for 2011’s The Quickening. The group’s excellent follow-up, Forgetting The Present, is out this week.

This is your third studio album. Do you still get excited and nervous ahead of release? 

Oh, definitely. I saw the actual CD for the first time today and that’s the exciting part for me – actually seeing it in physical form and having something that you can hold.

In what ways does this album mark a progression from its predecessors? 

This is going to sound contradictory, but it’s simultaneously more live and more electronic. Whereas before I’d brought in friends to play strings and trumpet, this time we decided to just do it all ourselves, which means that you have to find different ways of making those kind of sounds.

As an instrumental band, how do you choose song titles? 

That’s why titling instrumental music can be so much fun. It’s the closest that we get to writing lyrics, so quite a lot of thought does go into them. A lot of the time, titles are private jokes between the band or they are inspired by films, books or what have you.

Unlike a lot of instrumental acts, you largely avoid the quiet/loud dynamic. Was that a conscious decision? 

The quiet/loud crescendo thing is really closely associated with the post-rock genre, which I don’t have an issue with, but there are certain clichés there that I have always tried to avoid. To some extent the way our music sounds is because we have chosen not to do those more obvious things, so it has arrived at somewhere else.

Does the absence of vocals make it harder to create variety when compiling an album? 

Elvis Costello was quoted as saying something along the lines of instrumental music is far more difficult to write just because of that reason. We rely a lot on repetition, but I’d like to think that there is variety within our music. Between us as a band we have quite eclectic music tastes, so we’re all taking it in slightly different directions all the time.