Swimming Bell squeezes onto a makeshift stage inside Oblivion, a Highland Park shop with a rack of surfboards propped up against a wall painted beach shack white and a cascade of houseplants falling over the front entrance. It’s a tiny space, where the crowd is gathered between racks of clothing and tables of accessories, while the sound board is set up behind a changing room curtain. Still, Katie Schottland has assembled six other musicians to join her for this Friday night gig, where they play shoehorned between drums, congas, keyboard, pedal steel and a bounty of pedals and cables.
“Of course, after making the EP, I was like, I need someone to play percussion. I need keyboard. I need pedal steel. Harmony. I need it all,” Schottland says on a video call the day before the show. It was a tight fit, but the band played well, reflecting the breezy, oceanic sound of Swimming Bell’s latest EP, Somnia, in songs like “Found at the Bottom of the Ocean” and “I’m Always Down.”
With Somnia, Schottland wanted a more percussive sound than on previous Swimming Bell releases. “I had an image in my mind of how I wanted to play live, because I think that actually indicates what do I want to record,” says Schottland. “I had this image of wanting to sit in a semi-circle, even though I never sit when I play. I stand. I just wanted everyone to sit and be chugging away on acoustic guitars and have a bunch of shakers and this different feeling of playing these songs live.”
She had demoed the songs for the EP with a friend to find the right vibe before heading into the studio with producer Rob Schnapf, well known for his work on Beck’s Mellow Gold and multiple albums for Elliott Smith and Kurt Vile. In the studio, they brought in musicians as necessary. “It’s a much slower way of working, but in my mind, it feels more genuine to what I want to be doing because I can kind of start to see the picture being painted,” Schottland explains. “versus everyone trying to paint together at once and then I’m like woah, what is this.”
Somnia opens with the gentle swell of “Found It at the Bottom of the Ocean,” where the percussive element is most pronounced. When Schottland first brought the unfinished song to the band, it morphed into a heavier, psychedelic piece. “It was cool for a minute but listening back to the voice memos, I was like, this is not the vibe. This is not me,” she says.
So Schottland put the tune aside for a while, then returned to it, figured out a chorus and brought it to Schnapf. “Sometimes I get phrases stuck in my head,” she says. “I just kept saying Hawaii Five-O. I don’t even know what that means. I just wanted it to feel very— I don’t want to say beachy— I just wanted the feeling of water and so then he started messing with pedals when my pedal steel player came in to try and track the parts. He really did capture that kind of watery feel.”
Throughout the EP’s five tracks, Swimming Bell cultivates a style that’s Gram Parsons-tinged indie pop with a coastal edge, where guitar strums recall rippling water and percussion mimics the roll of the tides. To keep the oceanic imagery going, listening to Somnia is more like investigating the tide pools at your favorite, secluded cove than crowding onto Zuma Beach.
Water became an unintentional theme for the album. “It kind of developed itself as we were tracking things. I would hear a sound that I really loved and be like okay I want more of that,” she explains. An example that Schottland mentions is a guitar strum on “95 at Night” that remains one of her favorite sounds on the release. “It feels tropical, even though that song is about the East Coast and it’s not tropical at all,” she says. “That strum, even though it feels tropical, it also feels nostalgic… There are all these things coming together and I realized that this is a very soothing, watery, oceanic vibe. I ran with that and leaned into it.”
Coincidentally, Schottland’s friend, photographer Lisa Bolden, happened to be experimenting with underwater portraits at the same time. Schottland brought in the oversized flowers and weighted them down for the shoot. “I wanted to have more of the flowers and I had some greenery and stuff, feeling like you’re actually in the ocean, like flowers under the water,” she says.
While Swimming Bell does not have a tour currently scheduled, the band will be heading closer to the Pacific for their next gig. On Saturday, June 14, they’ll open for Sugar Candy Mountain at Venice West.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates.
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