Guest List: Amor de Dias

Amor de Dias is the duo of Alasdair MacLean, frontman of longtime Critical Mob favorites The Clientele, and Lupe Núñez-Fernández, singer-songwriter of the Madrid-meets-Brooklyn duo Pipas. After five years of off-and-on work, they've just released their first album, Street of the Love of Days (out now on Merge Records). In a Critical Mob exclusive, here's how Alastair and Lupe put the album together and some of the songs that inspired them.

Alasdair MacLean: There's hardly any electric guitar on our album, we played Spanish guitars and steel-strung Martins. The thing with playing acoustically is that you aren't as loud as if you had drums and amps, so you're tempted to overplay, to over-project, in order to grab people's attention, and it can end up sounding a bit forced and ugly. Last year I saw a guitarist called Tom James Scott in a nearly-empty venue in London. He played so quietly and with such exquisite restraint, the concentration required to hear him almost hurt. It was breathtaking. People say we are currently the quietest band in existence, but they haven't heard him. He has an album out called Red Deer (Bo'Weavil Records). It's classical guitar, Spanish guitar, which is my first love, the first instrument I learnt to play. There's no instrument in the world more beautiful.

Erik Satie was another influence on our record. He wrote these spare, frugal, haunting tunes on the piano. He directed his musicians to play "with shame" or "from the tip of the tongue". He founded his own church. I think his melodies are beautiful. I used to listen to him on the train going to work, staring out of the window. He once said "boredom can be mysterious and profound." I played piano on the first song on our album, and I tried to hit the notes with a kind of eccentric, Satie-esque rallentando, just slightly in front of or behind the beat. To give it a hesitant, haunted feel.

I suppose that we've made a folk record. I don't like the current crop of so-called "freak folk" musicians - they seem like phoneys to me: too many of them used to be in bands that sounded like The Strokes. Then I think about Jandek, who made a song called "Nancy Sings" back in the 1980s. He's mostly known for weird, atonal stuff, music that really challenges the listener. But this song is different. It's still deeply odd, but it has a more conventionally melodic feel. A mysterious woman sings about the rain; there's a weird, pleading tone to her voice. It's as spooky and disturbing as any folk music I've ever heard.

Lupe Núñez-Fernández: Over the last four years we've combined making this record with a long list of other things but they've sort of come in cycles - traveling, going to hear amazing music in all kinds of venues, and going foraging whenever we can, according to the season. I remember meeting up with Alasdair one Saturday after he'd gone mushroom picking with mycologist extraordinaire (and talented composer) Louis Philippe! He'd brought back a huge bag filled with birch boletus, which is ok, just not that tasty. Among the crop, like a trophy, was a single cep [ed. note: that's another name for porcini mushrooms]. We grilled and ate it and went out for a walk. Soon we were giggling and both saying how good we were feeling, light...you get the picture...could it be that these are the real magic mushrooms? We decided to name our own record label Porcini Music in their honor.

In the late '90s, I used to live in New York and habitually went out specifically to dance; I only wish I'd been there in the '70s instead and been able to dance to early disco in The Loft too. While we were recording Street of The Love of Days, Alasdair and I were being fed a steady diet of disco by me reading Tim Lawrence's Love Saves The Day and having the pleasure of working with some truly disco-crazed colleagues. Anthropologists have explained the importance of group dance in the evolution of language and culture and we can only just imagine what a huge role it might have played when words weren't around. Disco dancing may not seem like the most obvious influence on the record, but it's definitely there, underneath it all and even in some of the lyrics. We love Brazilian music too, from the bossa nova of Antonio Carlos Jobim to the Tropicalia of Gal Costa and Caetano Veloso, to Jorge Ben, Milton Nascimiento, the mellow sadness of Os Novos Baianos and Marconi Notaro's enveloping psychedelic guitar playing.

Here are some of the songs we were listening to while we made this album: