British singer/songwriter Puma Blue opens up about his latest album ‘antichamber,’ a dreamy and ambient departure steeped in vulnerability and spiritual surrender, where music feels less composed than transcribed from the ether.

Stream: ‘antichamber’ – Puma Blue

London-born singer, songwriter, and producer Puma Blue beckons a summery night, thick with darkness and heat in the sounds of his latest album, antichamber.

Jacob Allen, who is known in the music world as Puma Blue, released the album as a surprise for fans, but found himself surprised to even have created this specific body of work.

“I was working on what I thought would be album three on the back of the last one I did, Holy Waters, feeling really inspired,” Allen recalls. “Usually, I’ll finish a body of work and my brain will just go really quiet, scarily quiet for a while, and I think, ‘Oh God, maybe I can’t write music anymore. It sort of feels like the gift is gone and I’ve taken it to mean that I just need a bit of time to process and then eventually after more life experience, you kind of have things to say again and new sounds excite you and that is usually the way that pattern goes.”

This time, the comedown never happened. The high Allen felt from spending time with his band and creating Holy Waters left him buzzing with inspiration. Until winter hit.

“I put that stuff down and started writing stuff that it thought was just for me – a lot more personal,” explains Allen.

In the solitude of his residence in a wintery Atlanta, Allen began putting together the picture that would become antichamber.

“I was trying to make [music] to sleep to or [music] my friends could sleep to. I really enjoy albums that will kind of come up and down, stuff that’s very dynamic where almost no song is the same,” he says. “But on this album it was kind of the opposite approach, I wanted to make something that was kind of lulling you to sleep. Almost on the brink of being boring.”

“Dreamlike” is a perfect way to describe the feeling of these songs – like a sleepy nighttime drive, on the way to a faraway destination.

The stripped back nature of the music is new territory for anything Puma Blue has done. Songs like “hotel room” or “in my wildest dreams” stray from the spheres of jazz and blues Allen’s music tends to inhabit.

This newness created some trepidation when it came to Allen’s confidence in how these songs would be welcomed into the world.

In an act that he likens to being a child, showing off a drawing with wide eyed anticipation, Allen let his loved ones listen to what had come out of his very intimate creative experience.   

“I got so much encouragement from friends and from my girlfriend about it. The reaction was, ‘This is really beautiful and meditative and I think your audience would really like it,’” Allen says.

The positive feedback wasn’t quite reflective of how Allen felt about the album at first. There was a part of him doubting the connection the songs would have to his audience, whom he knows have gotten used to his established sound.

“To put something out with no drums and acoustic guitars and completely ambiental pieces, I was thinking no one would want it or that maybe it didn’t make sense under this project,” he explains. “There were times where I just felt like, do I want to share all this? It’s been put on my heart time and time again by God or whatever. [Vulnerability] is a really important thing to [have] in the world.”

Making music and spiritual belief seems to go hand in hand for Allen.

Apart from seeing God in everyday things like birds, trees, and laughter, God shows up most in music.

“It always occurred to me that there were still things that were really pure, in music. There was something that was very divine, that could make you feel high without any of the negative consequences or side effects. It was like something really true,” Allen says.

Allen recalls stories of John Coltrane and his very spiritually heightened creative process, saying he understands how these things could exist after the creation of antichamber.

“With this record, there was a really open channel where I kind of felt like I was receiving and then transcribing the music more than I was sitting down and composing it like a scientist mixing potions,” he shares.

The simple state of being Allen tapped into is audible in the composition of the album.

Writing track seven, “in my wildest dreams,” gave Allen a valuable lesson. Despite it being the shortest track on the album, it took the longest to write, due to Allen’s temporary inability to feel it was finished. After toying with the idea of writing a bridge and an outro, there was acceptance that the simplicity of the idea was the idea itself.

“Honestly, all it really needed was to be finished in the state that it was in and I really like how it’s turned out.”

The grounding force of certain songs on the album was adding layers to them, while still maintaining their simplistic nature.

When listening to “dying as a note,” the soft patter of rain pads airy, slightly distorted piano chords. Inspired by the avant-garde classical/musical genre, these elements were intentionally placed in an effort to fully welcome the listener into the world Allen inhabited during the recording process.

“[I wanted to] immerse the songs in my surroundings. The songs sounded like they were kind of in a vacuum, which I really liked. And I kind of let that be on a few of the tunes –it’s almost like they’re in space,” says Allen.

“For the ambient tracks, I wanted them to feel like postcards or something. Or like moving pictures. I wanted [listeners] to feel the rain and feel the cicadas and the breeze and the kind of hot air of evenings here in the sounds.”

Some songs on antichamber were fully “sounds.” The opening song “debris” is a wordless invitation into the balmy haze of the remaining tracks.

Starting the album off with something a bit more left field for Puma Blue was an intention Allen set. There were previous moments in his past projects where songs with less words and more sound were featured, but nothing so blatantly instrumental. The structure of a song like “montealegre,” for example, helped make the decision.

“Because it wasn’t guitar music, I wasn’t like, ‘Oh there’s an option to sing on it.’ I was specifically sitting down to write ambient stuff. I didn’t think any of this would end up together on an album. Like this is not Puma Blue music, this is me making ambient stuff like Aphex Twin or William Basinski, where it’s kind of just to listen to in the dark while you’re traveling. I’m not gonna ruin it with my voice or with words, I’m just gonna let it be a color or a scene.”

Giving these scenes a collective name was another hill Allen had to climb over.

During the creation of Holy Waters, Allen had the name picked out early in the process, making it “a sort of end goal,” he describes. This time around, the expectation of an album wasn’t there from the start, so the name came about as the songs began to form themselves into a body of work that Allen planned to share.

He tried picking a song title or lyric to name the album after, but nothing stuck. He then turned to his tried-and-true method.

“When I can’t think of a name, I’ll just write out a hundred names and it’ll just come to me slowly. It’s almost like a test. There’s like a hundred names. At this point, I understood what the album was and it kind of had a world and a color and a shape,” Allen explains, scanning the long list of names he wrote down with an amused smile.

“In my head it kind of had a scene, even if it’s hard to explain. So I was just trying to find a title that sort of locked all of that in and made it make sense.”

Although an antechamber is traditionally an entryway or waiting room, Puma Blue’s antichamber evokes a similar feel.

It’s a rest before a journey, a fuzziness one can lie on, which may be a certain shade of orange or brown, or maybe no color at all in Allen’s mind.

After the creation of antichamber, the door into the next room for Puma Blue has no ceiling.

“I kinda wanna stop being so rigid about how I define myself. It would be cool if fans could just expect anything from me. Obviously it would still be under the umbrella of me, but it felt like a really freeing and non-limiting thing to be like maybe this really personal stuff could be a Puma Blue album too.”

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 © Liv Hamilton

antichamber

an album by Puma Blue