Sometimes I wonder what point there is in taking time to write about music. Everyone is making it. Nobody is listening to it. The inbox bulges and creaks under the weight of it all. Every now and then, though, something extraordinary makes itself known. Some combination of words flickering away on the screen makes you think “yeah, okay, I’ll click on this” and before you know it you’re thinking that, oh well, maybe there is a point to it all after all. Why that is, I don’t really know… but this time I found myself drawn to this rather wonderful EP by an artist named Theo Bleak.

It turns out that Theo Bleak is the moniker of choice for Katie Lynch – a singer-songwriter based in Dundee. Immediately I was taken in by the ambient crackle, warm acoustic guitar, delicate piano, and Katie’s spine tingling vocal on the opening Peach Sky. It’s a really impressive introduction, constantly swelling and shifting, before landing on the repeated line “I saw myself in the best way”. There’s something enigmatic about the way the songs kind of wash in and out, like vivid images on expired film. A couple of them are especially fleeting, around the 2-minute mark, and I find myself drawn to thinking about a time long ago when I made the ludicrous decision of spending around £600 on some bulk experimental replacement Polaroid film back in the days when they were no longer making it. Long and extremely tangential story short, I became convinced that I could sell the individual film packs on eBay and make a huge profit. In the end though, the film turned out to be extremely volatile and there followed a deluge of angry requests for refunds. Anyway, the photos looked incredible for the short time they were visible. The problem was that they universally ended up entirely blue, occasionally with a brown smudge here or there. Much like Lynch’s songs, each one was vivid while it lasted. Unlike the shitty film though, the images conjured on Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers leave a more indelible mark.

Aside from the quality of the songs and Lynch’s voice, the production choices across the set are immaculate. There’s a real cohesion to these five tracks and an assured flow in the way they’re sequenced. Some are more fragmented, some like Said Like A Poet and Look Out The Window have a more widescreen feel, and then there’s the magnificent closer You Don’t Want Me that sounds like you’re overhearing something you shouldn’t be. All of it adds up to a beguiling thirteen minutes that hits harder than you’d think. Far from bleak, it’s a set of songs that drive home how uplifting and life affirming all this stuff can be.

ISY: Hi Katie. I haven’t felt compelled to write about anything for a while, but a few seconds into Peach Sky I knew that it was something worth shouting about. The first thing that struck me was the production choices, with the crackling ambient noise playing off against the almost muffled piano notes and the guitar. The same again for the closing song, which is very interesting in the way it’s presented… it almost feels a little voyeuristic. The songs are one thing, but can you talk a little about the recording process for you?

I guess a lot of the production choices come from love of soundtracking and soundscaping. The song ‘You Don’t Want Me’ samples the sound of deep ice cracking on a Loch in Perthshire, a lot of the time just subtle layers that maybe only I would know to be there. Our initial recordings were very DIY, and Mark who I work closely with basically learnt everything about production on the fly. Although we now work in a beautiful studio with Dan Gautreau, I like keeping some of that roughness that is reminiscent of the start.

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ISY: Your lyrics are quite enigmatic. I like that they kind of drift in and out of focus, with the suggestion of imagery rather than a clear narrative. I like that there seems to be a lot of space in there to draw your own meaning. Is this something you’re consciously thinking about, and are you more concerned about the ‘feel’ of what they’re saying or the words themselves?

My lyrics generally are the work of my unconscious mind. I do enjoy veiled meanings or more lateral thinking generally, so I think I do leave a lot open to the listener. I like how things feel but I still mean what I say if that makes sense.

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ISY: The notes for the EP go some way to explain where these songs came from, but I wonder if you could fill in a bit of detail around that, and your intention when you started working on it. Did you have a clear goal in mind in terms of it being a specific thing you wanted, or did it just go where it wanted to?

Once the songs started to come together, I understood what had been praying heavily on me. I didn’t really have to consciously decide the theme because what we’d made reflected it anyway. I wrote Peach Sky out of fragments of thoughts from my notebook, from when I’d lived on Skye last year. I moved there because I needed money to go to America, but I was also needing absolute peace to get over something. Once I started writing the songs when I was home though, I realised it all went far deeper than that and I wasn’t over any of it.

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ISY: I’m always curious to ask people what success looks like to them. I suppose it’s more a question quite closely linked to why you do what you do in the first place…

I’ve made music for fifteen years with no tangible ‘success’. But I have made music for fifteen years.

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ISY: What kind of stuff are you listening to at the moment, and are there any particular artists or records that you find yourself returning to again and again?

ML Buch, The Innocence Mission, MJ Lenderman, Bon Iver’s new album, Dean Blunt, Lotalo and Jadu Heart have been non-stop for me recently. However, I always return to Jeff Buckley, Grouper, The Blue Nile and a lot of classical.