Q&A: Marina Zispin On Highly Acclaimed Debut Album, ‘Now You See Me, Now You Don’t’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY FAITH LUEVANOS ☆
Photo By Elena Isolini
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, DEATH IS INEVITABLE – and experimental synth-pop duo Marina Zispin has captured the essence of it all in their debut album, Now You See Me, Now You Don’t. A hypnotic journey through a vast and shape-shifting soundscape, Marina Zispin delves deeper into themes of life, death, and the spaces in-between, crafting each track as an open-ended narrative meant to be felt rather than defined.
The Luna Collective received the opportunity to chat with Bianca Scout and Martyn, the brains and heart behind Marina Zispin, about the creation of the album, their visual ideations of the tracks, and more. Read the full interview below.
LUNA: How did you two come together to create Marina Zispin?
MARTYN: We were playing on the same bill back in 2017 and really liked each other's sets, so we started chatting with a view towards making music together.
SCOUT: We had both just played at The Old Police House, an experimental noise venue in Gateshead.
LUNA: You’ve mentioned that themes of life and death loom heavily over this album as well as your previous EPs. In what way do you feel you’ve embodied that specifically for the album?
SCOUT: Death is life.
MARTYN: Our songs are about moments in life, and to quote an old Gregorian chant, "In the midst of life we are in death.” The first track is like the point of birth, birth bringing with it the inevitability of death, hence the title “Death Must Come.”
“The Scythe” is waiting there at the end, only there is no end. It's like a continuous cycle, and then on returning, you'll notice that the first track has all these veiled references to the other songs on the album.
LUNA: The album feels like a soundtrack to a dark fantasy movie. Where did you two pull inspiration from for the album?
MARTYN: It's just all the stuff that's floating around in our subconscious. We didn’t really question it at the time. We don't pull inspiration directly from the outside world; we project our inner worlds onto the environment around us so reality becomes more like a canvas. When Scout and I are together everything is Marinaland.
SCOUT: I don't think we've ever had a discussion about what the album would even sound like, so it has never really been about “what shall we use as inspiration.” We talk about things we love or find weird, and we both share a passion for the brutal truths of life which are dark in nature, or at least the pursuit of uncovering that, so I think that kind of atmosphere is naturally within us and it comes out when we are together.
We’ve never actually had a conversation about what the music should represent or mean, but I guess “Penthouse Samba” is the closest thing to pulling inspiration from an outward source because we realized super recently that we both have had a deep love for Astrud Gilberto. After Martyn had made the instrumental to “Penthouse Samba,” we both thought it could be funny to make a song that feels like a response to her music. Writing the lyrics I wanted to sound like the person she had turned down in one of her songs.
LUNA: Does the constant changing of perspectives between songs hold a larger meaning? If so, what would that meaning be?
MARTYN: I never really noticed a change in perspectives, but maybe that’s because for us all of this stuff feels unified. What seems like opposing forces are really just two sides of the same coin. For every idea there seems to be an opposing idea that would negate the other, but it's all connected and necessary.
SCOUT: Yeah, the songs are all within the same thing. You can be talking about love, or the removal of love, and also about living in England, how the past affects us now and often how our love lives are dictated by the social climate, the pressure of oppression in and around us. I think we often look at these things as separate studies, but the human heart and its ability and depth to love is something I feel we are expressing, just slightly different aspects of it. Or, is it the same aspect, just a different setting?
Meaning is something in constant motion and always continues to reveal itself in time. It’s something me and Martyn have in common about sharing music…the meaning to us is something secondary to the act of making, and we are far more interested in hearing what it means to others at this point.
MARTYN: I think a lot of artists aren't as fully in control of the meaning of their work as they would like to think. There are all sorts of subconscious factors at play, for a start. I often dislike it when art is used as a vehicle to elicit a prescribed reaction from the audience. It can come off as a bit one-dimensional and myopic. We see the listeners' interpretation as a valid part of the overall picture.
LUNA: Between “Venus Decadence” and “Venus Opulence,” was there a special tie between these songs that you can share?
SCOUT: Aye, it’s all in the lyrics.
MARTYN: Scout wrote the lyrics to “Venus Opulence” and I wrote the lyrics to “Venus Decadence” using “Opulence” as a springboard. There are actually three versions of “Venus” and they're all different from each other, but share the same mood. I like the idea of a song that's in eternal development. Maybe this song symbolizes what we were just talking about: ideas being in a constant state of flux.
SCOUT: The first version was a demo we did in 2019. Martyn sent me the instrumental and I very quickly came up with the vocal melody and recorded my vocals right there and then as I had five minutes before I had to leave to catch a train. We recorded the other “Venus” tracks later on in 2024.
LUNA: When you think of the album, what type of visual scene do you picture in your head?
SCOUT: Every song is a different place for me. “The Tudors,” I'm on the River Thames looking at the tower of London. “Mimes Calling In The Dark,” I'm in the shadow room in one of the places I lived in Catford. “The Scythe,” I'm in a field like where the Tess of the Derbavilles is set, “Penthouse Samba” I'm on a ‘60s TV show. But I do love listening to it when I'm moving and traveling around, so the scene adapts to the music.
MARTYN: Every song is a different place for me too, so I'll limit myself to describing one song. “Venus Decadence” is like a mix of things that come from visions I have of these locales that I feel I've either been to in the past or am yet to visit and they are strikingly similar in look and feel to Old Eldon Square in Newcastle, known locally as Hippy Green. This place itself is a recurring image for me, it's like a call from the past and the future. it's more of a feeling than a vision though. A concurrent visual I have of this song is myself in a Huysmans-esque vignette, bored and restless in my luxurious mansion drinking brandy and staring into the glowing embers of the fireplace as I contemplate life.
LUNA: What do you hope listeners take away from this album?
MARTYN: We don't want a specific kind of reaction, we're really more interested in how the listener experiences it and how they respond to it.
SCOUT: We welcome so many different interpretations.
LUNA: What were some of your favorite aspects of the album? This could be specific songs, lyrics, or production techniques.
SCOUT: That I can dance to it, and walk really fast when I gotta get somewhere.
MARTYN: That it shows a wider range of what we do.
LUNA: What’s coming up for you two in the future?
MARTYN: We're very excited to begin recording again. Whatever direction the music takes will come naturally.
