Melt Exclusive: Jayan Bertrand of Seafoam Walls

Photo Credit: Christopher Nazon

This week I sat down with Jayan Bertrand (pictured middle right), the frontman and mastermind behind the Carribean Jazz-Gaze band Seafoam Walls. Their new project, “Standing Too Close to the Elephant in the Room” combines the mixed cultural roots of Miami with a thrust for genre-expansion and ascendence, oscillating between progressive and psychedelic guitar progressions and shoegaze-esque vocal meanderings.

Bertrand, along with bassist Josh Ewers, guitarist Dion Kerr, and sampled drummer Josue Vargas,  have created one of the most interesting sonic experiences of 2024. The conversation below is meant to delve deeper into the project and the man behind Seafoam Walls.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Just to get us started, let’s talk about your journey into music. How did you get started? And how did you develop from there?

My parents used to be in a band in the 80s, early 90s. It was a Rasin band. Rasin in Creole, and in French, means roots, and that's meant to signify the roots of the African culture that Haitian people stem from. It's part of the style of music; they utilize African rhythms and mix it with the rock sounds from the 80s, and they were also influenced by jazz.

They were my earliest introduction to live performances. I was always around at their shows but I was more of a visual artist as a kid, so I drew a lot.

It's not until I got to high school that I started pursuing music as a career. My senior year I started taking guitar more seriously. The daughter of one of my parents' bandmates, Inez, asked me to join her band, and that was one of the first projects I ever started as a musician. Ever since then I’ve been playing throughout different bands in Miami, at one point playing in like five bands at once but all just kind of sonically different.

That was building my versatility as a guitarist and just training my ear for various sounds and genres. That helped build Seafoam into what it is today, this mix of all these different genres that just became Caribbean Jazz-Gaze.

This might be a longer story than you’re willing to tell, but how did Seafoam ultimately end up as your primary venture?

I guess, life. I mean, there's only so much time to dedicate to your craft and the things you love. I started a lot of these projects when I was younger, and, in that time, I didn't have a lot of responsibilities. I wasn't paying many bills, I didn't have a bunch of jobs to go to, or a job that took up most of my day; I could dedicate a lot of time to music. That kind of changed with, you know, growing older and everyone else growing older around you.

Some people can't afford to do music anymore, and some people just have to take up their other jobs full time. We all kind of lose the time to dedicate to other things and then we have to focus on the project that we feel the most pride in. For me that was Seafoam.

How did you guys come up with the name: Seafoam Walls?

So, this is around the time when Tumblr was really popular, maybe in like 2010 or 2011. It was also around the time where I'm just leaving high school for my first years of college.

I was really getting absorbed into guitar, just staying in my room and playing a lot, but also discovering new music from these blogs and the aesthetics of Tumblr. One of those things that usually popped out on Tumblr was the pastel colors, the whole color palette, and the one that always stuck out to me was seafoam green.

That was a really nice color to me. I loved it so much, I started wearing it a lot and it was the way I imagined my place of peace; it was this room of seafoam green walls.

So, I'm just in a room creating music. I mean, not only music because I felt like my room was like my sanctuary. Everything that I went through, whether good or bad, it happened mostly in my room. It was just like, this is where I want to be, this is where I want to be creating, where I want to be thinking, this is where I lay my head at night. This is my safe place.

So, I named the band after a safe place, and that could be anybody's safe place. It doesn't have to be seafoam green walls, but it became kind of conceptual in that sense.

Let’s return to the genre-tag of Caribbean Jazz-Gaze. It’s very attention grabbing, so I’m curious to hear your description of it.

Playing in all these different bands, I got tired of things really fast. When I was coming up in the music scene, there was a lot of garage rock and indie rock and hardcore or punk bands.

I felt like every time I was going to these performances I was like “Okay, this band's good, but why do they sound like this other band in the scene?” I wasn't hearing too much distinction between people within their own genres. I didn't like that these things were sounding so oversaturated, so I really wanted to stand apart from everything by just kind of going against what everyone was doing. I was just trying to mess with things and still keeping a little bit of familiarity, blending in a bunch of things to make this unrecognizable new thing.

In our sound, there’s so much happening at once that some people hear something that they are familiar with, but they're like “What is all this other stuff, like, I can't really place this?”  I really get a kick out of people not being able to put a finger on it because I don't want to get pigeonholed.

And you guys have started sampling your drums, right? How did that come about?

Towards the end of 2019 we kicked our old drummer out of the band, and we were in the middle of starting the recordings for our first album. We didn't want to have that person's work still on the record, so we scrapped everything.

So we just laid out the skeleton tracks, and Dion and I stayed behind to work on the drums. We both took turns on the drum kit just kind of going through each song, and we were both thinking “Man, how do we enhance some of these drums? How do we beef it up?” And we had the idea of adding some sample drums to it, and that's pretty much how it started.

Adding the digital drums was kind of a new sound for us. My friend, Josue, had a few records online, and I asked him, “How'd you get those drum sounds?”, and he was like “Oh, I kind of programmed them into my synth and then I played them out.” I asked him to jam with me because I wanted to see how I could implement them into our live shows.

Our first jam session went so well that we invited him to join us for a live session. From then on, he has just been our main drummer, so we've been going on tour without a drum kit and just a sampling machine. He would play drums that way.

It ended up becoming more intentional as an instrument in the second album because the first time we did it it was just kind of an experimental thing for us. But we saw how well it worked that we decided to try to create this in a way where it’s worked into the composition as opposed to an afterthought.

Do you think it's helped you to kind of push forward that antithesis mindset you were talking about earlier?

Definitely. I mean, even the visual of having all four of us lined up in a row where most people would have their drummer in the back. After most shows, people would say they’ve never seen any band with a drummer like that.

And the sound guys were all happy because they don't have to mic it up. So it was beneficial in that sense of the space we didn't have to occupy with a full drum kit, but also the visual of having these booming drum sounds come out of this little compact machine.

Can you talk a little bit about the concept behind your new project, “Standing Too Close to the Elephant in the Room”?

I've been trying to simplify it in my mind. I hope I'm getting closer, but it's meant to symbolize the power within ourselves as a collective that we keep overlooking to deal with very personal problems, personal problems that are relevant and should get attention.

I think where we prioritize our personal issues results in overlooking the collective, and I think the collective of humanity is way more important than any individual. I think we're losing that because of people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who are these quote unquote “self-made billionaires”, and people are grinding to get to positions like that.

They're grinding and grinding, almost unnaturally, to the point where they're forgetting about the people around them. That's kind of what I was trying to get at with the music, just kind of having people take a look at their behaviors and asking them, is this humanitarian? Like, is this really what it means to be human, a good human? We have to look at how we're consuming things and what we're getting out of this consumption, you know, what do we want? Do we only want for ourselves or do we actually want better for others?

It's just kind of asking these questions to people and just kind of asking people to take a look within themselves and really evaluate themselves.

do you see any developments in this project, either individually or collectively, that you’re proud of?

If anything, I'd probably say I'd have to give more credit to Dion, our guitarist. A lot of the techniques that I would implement to create this ambiance within the music, I feel like I've kind of taken a backseat to that and  allowed him to be more creative with sound design. I think in letting him do that, he's done some really interesting stuff. I feel like every production person has their little secrets and tricks that they try, and it's just allowing him to get experimental and kind of grow that way. I think that was definitely one of our moments of growth.

And, finally, do you have a favorite song on the album?

Ah, man, I've been trying to figure this out too. It's mostly thematic, the things that I like about each song. But I guess the best one would be “Ex Rey”, the last song on the album. I mean, I love the guitar solo on that song, but it's also just the range of topics that I covered in that song.

Some of it has to do with the kind of overcoming doubters, people that were close to me that were unsure about the route I was taking with music as a career path. It’s also about how some solutions to the world's problems, if they seem like they could be fixed easily, there's probably  someone somewhere holding it back to protect business interests. For example, a car company that wouldn't immediately move towards electric vehicles because their money's still tied up in the oil industry. Like, we're inhibiting progress just so we can keep making money in this one sector.

You can see that example of greed taking place in multiple industries; anywhere there's room to make money, you're going to see someone doing that. So it tackles a bunch of different topics like towards the end I'm talking about racial stereotypes and racial injustice in this country and police brutality. Some people would never know that because the music sounds kind of nice. It sounds really pleasant on the ears, so people don't sometimes realize I'm really delving into some serious topics.