Late Aster

By Shanna Sivakumar

Late Aster are a San Francisco-based music group, primarily consisting of duo Anni (pronounced Ah-nee) and Aaron with additional musicians that help create a unique electronic genre that consists of a little bit of everything. I sat down with Anni and Aaron to discuss their latest EP, “Light Rail Session - Live,” as well as their journey from the formation of Late Aster to today.

How did the band form?

Aaron: Well, I think Late Aster formed during the pandemic? Anni and I are living in San Francisco and with the newfound time we had, from the remote work and Anni’s touring schedule kind of um—slowing down because of the pandemic, we had time—for the first time—to really dig into some music that we had been kind of performing a little bit prior to the pandemic. So we released this EP in 2021 called “True & Toxic,” and that was kind of the first time that Late Aster kind of “spoke.” But prior to that, we had kind of been some kind of previous iterations, different configurations.

What’s the significance behind the name, Late Aster?

Anni: You know—well—band names are hard. [laughs] But like, when we hike, I’m always obsessed with the wild flowers—to an absurd degree—Aaron’s always like, “Come on, Anni we have to keep going,” and I’m always like, you know, staring at the ground. And, uh, late purple aster is a common wildflower out West, and I was like, “What if we take out purple?” and what I liked about that was just “late aster” was a reference to these beautiful flowers but also [the word] “aster” is the latin root for “star,” like “asteroid” or “asterisk” and I liked how that referred to something celestial in the sky, which—Aaron is wont to stay up late and look up at the stars, but I’m already asleep because I’m too tired from looking at all the flowers, so. [laughs] We liked that it was both bird’s eye and zoomed in at the same time.

How would you guys describe your sound?

Aaron: Um, I think we have an eclectic sound, but this most recent EP, because of the limitations of—we performed it live—so we didn’t have any kind of chance to add anything after the fact. And because it was just Anni and me, we kind of leaned into this sort of… electronica vibe. So we’ve been calling it, like, jazz-tronica? Which is not my invention, but it’s kind of like—we have these elements—because we’re playing horns, we have elements from jazz and classical music, the more traditional musics. But because of the electronics that we need to fill out the sound that we’re making, we’re kind of creating this kind of ambient, electronic fusion with jazz.

Regarding the “Light Rail Session” EP, what kind of live performance was it?

Aaron: Yeah, so it was just a studio. It was like one take in a studio. This project is a visual album in addition to being a live EP. So what we did was we recorded ourselves p erforming with our rig. And our rig includes synthesizers, and a drum machine, guitar effects pedals, so we’re manipulating all of those things. We have control over all the sounds, like, while we’re performing. And we often do, kind of, fiddle with them. Everything you hear in the album was just like—we’re pushing “play” on the drum machine and hitting the keyboard synth—that was all happening in the moment. It was very stressful. [laughs]

What’s the process behind creating a track?

Aaron: I think it—Anni, do you want to go?

Anni: Yeah, I mean—I’m trying to think of what the most interesting answer is—but you know, I think the composition normally begins with… probably an idea? Like an emotion, or an experience, or something. But then, as it unfolds—in terms of music and composing music—it begins with a chord structure or finding cool synth sounds. Then maybe next is like a drum beat. Then probably melody writing, and lyric kind of composition. And then the horns are kind of, they kind of enter in at different times. Sometimes, they’re almost last? Not that we dislike them, but they are kind of the cool thing we can just like, throw onto things. Um, and sometimes, I think the better songs are inspired by the horns. But they are sometimes at the beginning and sometimes at the end. Like, it just kinda depends. Oh! And just for some background, Aaron is a trumpet player, I’m a french horn player. And those were actually our primary instruments—like, we both have music performance degrees. So when we went to college, we were music performance majors, specializing in those instruments.

Aaron: I’ll just add—what Anni described is a process where we’re just creating a song out of nothing—which we do. But we also, like, have music that we’ve already been… maybe recorded in the past. And some of the songs on this EP are just old songs that we’ve had to, kind of, retro-fit, in order to perform [as] the two of us? And so it’s been a sort-of reverse engineering of that song into kind of the components of the instruments that we have now. So it happens both ways, I guess.

What was the inspiration behind this EP?

Aaron: I think this EP, more so than anything we’ve done before, was just kind of this, like, spark of an idea we had that we then just executed over the course of a few months. And normally, our process is slow, methodical, deliberate and it was a little like that, since we were performing it live, and we weren’t slowly shaping the song over months and months, we just had to like—lay it down one time. We just had this idea, and we tried to bring this idea to life all at once. It was really exciting, I think, for us, because it’s just so different from the other way we make music and the way a lot of people make music now. You know, just kind of slowly building, over time.

What can we look forward to, regarding Late Aster?

Anni: Well, we have a whole album that’s… in the can, as they say. [laughs] So yeah, definitely lots more music. Really cool videos. We really love being thoughtful about the visual components that we pair with music. So yeah, more music, more visuals, that’s what’s coming for Late Aster.