Today we’d like to introduce you to Vessel.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Hey there! Thanks for reaching out to us with this interview. I’m Dan Pulido, the bassist of Vessel, and I’ll answer this question. Vessel started, like a lot of DIY music projects in the last few years, as something born out of the Covid quarantine in 2020 and 2021.
I moved in with Alex Tuisku (Vessel’s drummer and vocalist) who was already roommates with Keron Robinson (Vessel’s guitarist), in mid-2019 and got introduced to the underground rock scene in Atlanta through them. Alex, Keron, and Isaac Bishop (Vessel’s saxophonist and percussionist) already had years of musical experience and several projects under their belts, including Alex and Isaac’s two-piece band Fun Isn’t Fair and Keron’s prior band Feverest (along with his long-running solo project). I went to most, if not all, of their shows in that six-month period and felt deeply inspired by their musical talent and passion, even though I wasn’t a musician myself at the time. When Covid quarantine began in early 2020, I had just finished my college undergrad program and ended up on Pandemic Unemployment Assitance as I waited to start a job that had been offered to me but which I couldn’t start until they finished switching to a remote work system. So for the next four months, I found myself with alot of time on my hands. I decided that I should try learning an instrument since I loved music and was surrounded by musicians and instruments already. The reason I chose bass over other instruments I had access to, like drums or guitar, was because it seemed more intuitive to me and because it was consistently my favorite instrument to focus on when listening to music. I taught myself bass by listening to the bass parts from songs that I liked and then figuring out the part on my own a little bit at a time (I still looked at tabs sometimes though!). I practiced that way for about two or three months. I also experimented with writing my own bass parts but found that much more challenging. Eventually, that method of practice and playing grew pretty stale, and I reached a point where I started to consider the idea of playing with other people.
As luck would have it, I already lived with a drummer (Alex) and a guitarist (Keron). I suggested that we try doing a cover of the song “Cannonball” by The Breeders, and they agreed on a day to do it.
When we gathered in the practice space of our house on the day of the Cannonball cover session we had talked about, Alex and Keron almost immediately suggested that we discard that idea and that we instead try to write original music. I was sort of stunned at the suggestion and told them I wasn’t sure if I was skilled enough, but they encouraged me to try anyway. Since I already had some original bass parts in my back pocket from my solo practice sessions, I tried those, and they jammed along with me until we landed on something that resembled a song. By the end of the first day, I recall that we had at least 2 or 3 solid original song ideas to work on for the next jam session. It ended up becoming a regular occurrence, and after a few of those jams with just the three of us, Alex invited Isaac to join in since he was also stuck at home with nothing to do. He chose to play saxophone in the group instead of guitar because he had never been a dedicated saxophonist in any musical project, and he wanted to give it a shot. We all clicked super well musically and ended up writing a bunch more songs together so that by the time that live music became an option again, we had more than enough songs to fill out a 30-minute set. Our first ever show was at our friend Chris’ house in Knoxville in 2021 under the name “AKDI” (the initials of all our first names). The show went great but the name didn’t stick, and we ended up picking “Vessel” out of a hat and started playing shows in Atlanta. We haven’t looked back since.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
This project has felt relatively smooth and stable from the beginning. We’ve approached alot of the project with the philosophy of “if we think it sounds good, let’s just roll with it”, and we’ve all had a lot of fun with both writing music together and playing shows. That isn’t to say that we haven’t hit some snags or more difficult moments, but I think the split between smooth and bumpy has been 80/20. To talk specifics, we agree that deliberating on decisions during the recording and mixing process has been the biggest struggle so far for everyone. The length of time to finish our first full-length album has been a challenge as well, which is partly due to how much we have deliberated, and partly to do with scheduling needs to account for everyone’s jobs and life responsibilities. The process began in October of 2022, and at the time of writing this response, we are very close to finishing the album but are not quite done.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Our work is to write songs that we all like and then perform them together on stage for people who will hopefully like them too. I think the goal, musically, is to write songs that strike a balance between simplicity and complexity with the added benefit of being danceable. The general formula goes like this: a relatively simple and repetitive but groove-oriented rhythm section of bass and drums that lock in with a promiment vocal melody to set the song’s emotional core/feeling, which all together gives the guitar, saxophone, and percussion a stable foundation to shine through and experiment/improvises on the established vibe. This approach has worked for our minimal, dancey tracks, like “Balance”, and also for our more maximalist, noisey tracks, like “Some Say”. I don’t think we always follow those conventions, but that’s sort of the general songwriting process, and when we land on something that hits those marks, we typically try to develop it until it becomes an established song that we do at regular practice, or it gets stored in the digital catacombs of Alex’s voice memos app until further notice.
What are your plans for the future?
Currently, our most immediate future plans are to finish and release our album and to play shows outside of Atlanta! We hope to do a few out-of-town shows before the end of 2023, and ideally, we would like to do a longer tour next year, but that’s too far out to start planning yet. We also want to work on new material and start performing new songs live because we’ve been working mostly with the same song catalogue since 2022, so we want to give our performances some new sounds to keep things interesting and fun.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: vessel.atl
- Other: https://vesselatl.bandcamp.com/
Image Credits
Ben Griggs Terence Chiyezhan
