Bad Bones: Making her own kind of music the DIY way

The birds are singing in a sunny back garden of a quiet house in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin. Inside, Sal Stapleton takes an inventory of the music equipment in her bedroom.

“Drum kit, a few synths, an MPC classic sampler. My Novation launchpad for playing live to trigger my clips so you can do it on the fly. This Kaoss Pad for manipulating sounds, this pad for triggering samples live. This is my Akai synth – it’s amazing. Roland SPD-S for playing drum samples, then a TC-Helicon vocal processor that pitches down my vocal live. Bass guitar, electric guitar, acoustic guitar. There are some decks down there, but they’re broken.”

Stapleton, who is also a visual effects artist, writes and produces exciting electronic music under the name Bad Bones. This year she has released five tracks with five accompanying music videos: Worship, Beg, Come, Lang and Games. The pieces arrived so well-conceived and well-formed, it's almost surprising that her first gig as Bad Bones took place only last January, as part of the "Seasons" showcase at Mart in Rathmines.

The immersive nature of Stapleton's Bad Bones tracks demands attention. Worship, for example, has shades of a Mike WiLL Made-It production and Peaches attitude. It takes some intriguing and unexpected turns, with chopped up trance-y chants veering into playfully threatening vocals, and brilliantly confusing beats.

Lang opens with monastic chants before descending into something that evokes Third Eye Foundation as much as it does Zebra Katz. Beg takes its hook from a twisted sitar sound. Games plays like an FKA twigs demo.

Confounded by success

You can make all the comparisons and cite all the references you want, but there is something unique about Bad Bones. And Stapleton, dressed in black, chilled out and boiling a kettle, seems refreshingly confounded by the reception her music has received. As listeners buzzed about the tracks, the phone started ringing. This summer Bad Bones appeared at Body & Soul, Longitude, Knockanstockan and Beatyard.

Stapleton received her first drum kit after her confirmation. She was always in bands. One of them was The Spungos, born from the formative Wicklow DIY music scene that orbited Paddy’s Hall in Greystones. Another was Wunderbra. (“That was just a joke at the back of the bus,” she says. “‘Why don’t we sing about boobs and call ourselves Wunderbra?’”)

Stapleton's influences are varied, but the 1994 album Sacred Spirit: Chants and Dances of the Native Americans Vol 1 remains a touchstone, along with Shiva meditation music and choral chants. On the morning of the day we speak, she's been listening to a lot of Fela Kuti.

But the track that started it for her Bad Bones project was the eponymous Bad Bones, included on a Toast Office Records compilation a few years ago alongside Kate's Party, Liza Flume, Wunderbra and the excellently named Middle Class Disaster. It's a stunner of a tune, with the type of pop sensibility that also lies at the core of Stapleton's friends, Heathers, and a chorus that asks: "What you gonna do when my bones start cracking?"

After that, she spent a couple of years getting better at the music production software Ableton, and trying to figure out how she wanted Bad Bones music to sound.

A complete view

“People seemed to like them,” Stapleton says of those five 2016 tracks. The addition of a visual accompaniment helps her view the pieces as complete. “It’s a full artistic expression for me. I see it as a piece of art, I guess. People have been saying there’s a sort of mystique to it. I like to leave it open to interpretation, what it means or what the visual means. I guess it’s not like shoving it down someone’s throat.”

As for “the sonics, the sounds that are used – I don’t really know. It’s just what comes out of me. It’s really nice that people are responding to it, but I could not pinpoint why that is.”

Stapleton’s process of making music is equal parts inspiration and technical repetition. She comes up with a lot of ideas in the shower, and keeps her phone ready to record whenever an idea strikes. Then it’s into her bedroom, where she records.

“It’s kind of unpredictable. I probably won’t touch something for weeks and it’ll just be a ‘bit’. And then I’ll be working on something else and maybe I’ll think about that bit and be like ‘these might work together’. So it’s like piecing things together for me.”

The work is solitary, which Stapleton enjoys. “I like being alone in general. I’m not that social. I get quite awkward socially. I like being in a cave for days on end.” Still, in a live setting, there’s comfort and depth to having others with her on stage.

Accompaniment comes in the shape of two male dancers (one of them her cousin), who are free to interpret the sound as however they feel. Over winter she plans to build a lighting rig so that her vision regarding the visual elements can be transformed to stage.

Ultimately, Stapleton’s DIY ethic is perhaps the most central philosophy to her work. The videos were also filmed in her bedroom, using a green-screen technique hung on the back of the door or on the floor. She shot them using a 7D camera, then taken into Adobe After Effects software, and made “in a rush because I don’t really have time to make them, but I know how I want them to look, so I’ll bang them out in two days, or something like that”.

The diversity of Stapleton’s previous musical projects are “like stepping stones,” she says. “You learn from everything you do. But I do feel the best about this one. I don’t know if it’s because I’m in control of it or something like that, but they’re all stepping stones to what is now.”

That “now” is very much an intriguing musical present.

[ badbonesmusic.com ]