I want to start by talking about ‘Free Energy.’ I actually just heard the album for the first time a couple of weeks ago because I was catching up on all the records I missed from last year. I was really drawn to the album cover. Could you talk about the artwork and what the visual inspirations were?
Joe: So Emma, the singer slash organ-synth player, does all of our artwork from our EPs to albums. Every piece of art has been by her. For the cover [of Free Energy], we wanted it to look kind of futuristic and it's a bubble that's in mid-pop. We felt like it represented the visual energy of the album which was trying to be futuristic and euphoric, but also in a state of collapse.
I think that's perfect. That's definitely what made me actively want to listen to the record too. Another part of the album I really like is that it just swallows you whole. When I first listened to it, it was very much a full body auditory experience. The tracks that stood out to me the most were “Sudden Flutes” and “Nine Clean Nails.” Could you speak on how those songs in particular came together and specifically that transition in Sudden Flutes?
J: With “Nine Clean Nails,” I feel like I had a more straightforward version of the structure of the song in terms of the guitars, the guitars were just strumming the whole way through. We were constantly trying to figure out how to subtract in the songs to create more space and not have every song be filled to the brim on ten the whole time. With that one, it just felt like the verse needed more space. We also wanted to use the guitars in a more rhythmic way in terms of the call and response between the guitar and then letting the chorus be the more big pop moment where everything kind of comes in and explodes. Also the bass line is a big part of it. The bass line doesn't do what you necessarily would expect it to do. It goes to a kind of weirder note a couple times in the riff. That was very much influenced by Nine Inch Nails, which is why the song is called “Nine Clean Nails.” You know, anybody probably wouldn't pick up on that, but that's the kind of joke I guess of the song that pops through. Nathan came up with the whole bridge section, which is the guitars building on top of each other until it goes back into the very end. Then “Sudden Flutes,” that one, the song right before that, “Dip In The Lake” and “Sudden Flutes” used to be one song. Over the course of playing that song live, it evolved into a very droney, slow, almost a Velvet Underground-sounding song that progressed into this more punk-sounding song. From playing it live, we realized what worked and what didn't work and we eventually wanted to make “Dip In The Lake,” be more of a modern composer, repetitious, Steve Reich kind of song, Phillip Glass influenced, along with a little bit of Cluster. But then the second half, we thought it would be fun to have a song on the record that was like this minute long more punk song. That's where that came from. But the flute, Alex just always had this idea of having a song suddenly stop and then going through a wall of flutes. Random ideas are often what happens. Like how can we have a song go from this blisteringly fast punk song to flutes? Our friend Cole achieved that for us by layering a bunch of wind synths. We also kind of let them just go off on their own towards the end. They added this whole other kind of drifting nebulous, expressive playing for the initial wall of flutes. Oh and “Sudden Flutes,” comes from– it's ripping off a Yo La Tengo song title called “Sudden Organ.”
You're speaking a lot about these like very musical inspirations, when it comes to songwriting, do you have any sort of non-musical or even non-artistic influences or inspirations?
J: It's funny, my husband who plays drums in the band, he and I were talking about this last night. We were talking about film and I was just talking about how film…I'm not really influenced by anything outside of sonic stuff and then just anxiety. It’s just kind of those two things. It's music and anxiety. I guess if anything mental illness is the biggest influence that's not music. For me, what makes you want to create and express is just anxiety, tension, and panic. That's why a lot of our music has a kind of propulsive energy because all of us are kind of anxious people in some way or another and we just want things to constantly be moving forward. Alex might have non-musical influences and I'm sure Emma does because she's a visual artist, so she probably has a lot of things that influence her lyrics that aren't directly to do with music. But for me, since you're the one talking to me, just mental illness unfortunately. Fortunately? I don't know!
I've been reading a lot about how you tour a lot and seeing that you're going on a lot of long tours this year–What is the band dynamic like on the road?
J: I guess because I kind of act as a tour manager, I'm the most organized. We also are insane in a way that we all kind of avoid drinking while we're driving, like drinking water and fluid, just so we don't stop as much, which is obviously bad. But you try to avoid stopping as much as possible because you're driving four to six hours a day usually. But yeah, on tour, we all have the same common goal, which is that 30 to 45 minutes [we’re playing], the whole day revolves around making those moments the most important of the day. Because people are spending their money to come see us or buying our merch and out of respect for them, we want to do the best job we can for them and obviously out of respect for ourselves too, of course. That's just how we've always operated. But we do try to eat interesting food on tour and Alex and I, the drummer, we're very into going to coffee shops that we've never been to because we're both kind of really into coffee.
What's been the best coffee store or place for coffee on the road?
J: There was a place we went to that is world renowned and I can't remember the name of it because Alex is the one who knows all the names of things. But it was in Oslo. We played in Oslo on our last European tour. The show was kind of a disaster, but the coffee we had was incredible. This was a place that Alex wanted to go for like a decade. It's been on his coffee bucket list. That place was incredible. There's a place in Germany called Five Elephants, I think. That place is really great. There's a place that's a converted gas station, I think in Redding, California, that has extremely great coffee, and also has a vegan brownie that I still think about to this day.
I know you're based in Los Angeles– what do you look forward to the most about coming home from long tours?
J: Honestly, just kind of just the things I think most people would be–the routine of your life, just going back to normal and the kind of groundedness that being home is. Alex and I play a lot of video games, so I think that's a big one for both of us. Then when you're on tour, you don't really write or work on music. It's really difficult to be creative, aside from the improvisational moments that we have while playing. So when we're home after tours, I always have this gnawing anxious energy to work on new music. So that's something I guess I look forward to, just expelling that out of me. Then also just listening to more music at home. On tour, a lot of times when we're listening to music, it's more passive in the van. It's not really focused listening. When I'm home, obviously I'm alone at the house or alone with headphones and I can listen to new things and do that. Also reading is a big one. I can't really read on tour, it’s really hard, so I always look forward to coming home and being able to read more.
Are there any new albums you've heard at home or any books you've read recently that have stood out to you?
J: Oh yeah, I heard this new artist, or maybe they’re not…I genuinely don't know if they're new or not, but they're from Denver called Sun Swept and their album is called Germinations. It’s like ambient new-agey flute music that I really enjoy. Also recently there's this band called, I don't even know how to pronounce their name. It's like S-C-H-E-M-A. I don't know how to pronounce that at all. But they're a band from the very late 90s that a writer on Bandcamp wrote about this past week on this piece about Pacific Northwest psychedelic music. I think it’s people from Hovercraft and Mary from Stereolab and they have this kind of one-off release. It’s this very exploratory, weird, spacey rock. And rock, I say that in the very, you know, it's not really like rock, but it's just very out there and weird and exploratory and I've really enjoyed that quite a bit. I'm currently reading a Laird Barron short story collection called Occultation. And I'm really enjoying that.
You are sent into space to start new life on a newly discovered planet. You're allowed to bring one album, one movie, one book, and one instrument with you. What do you bring?
J: One album. That's tough. God, it's such a boring answer I'm going to give, but MBV, Loveless. Of course. That's just, you know, some alien-ass music anyway. One movie, probably Nausicaä, of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki. One book, probably A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. And then one instrument… A drum machine.
Any particular drum machine?
J: Yeah, Korg Electribe.
Do you guys use that to make music?
J: Yeah, all the drum machine stuff on our albums are either off of that or we've sampled ourselves.
What synths do you guys use?
J: We have Arturia– we use a lot of their stuff. There's the MicroFreak and the MiniFreak. Those are the two that we use the most on the record. And then we also use a Yamaha Reface, which is like an organ and a Casio organ as well, that's what Nathan uses for a lot of his stuff. But a lot of the last record, we kind of shunned synths because our first record was very heavy with retro synth sounds and we really wanted to avoid doing that again. So a lot of the weird sounds that people might think are synths are actually just guitars that we've manipulated in some way or another. And there are other songs where we ran a guitar through a synth. So it's like the synth isn't actually being played, but like the guitar is being processed through the synth. That's something we experimented with. That was very much influenced by this band from Austria called Hydroplane, as they did that.
What were your first experiences with electronic instruments and synths like that? How did you get into that?
J: Honestly, Alex, when he and I started dating, he was making new age ambient music and was very much into synths. He's kind of… if there's a secret weapon in the band, it's definitely Alex. He's very much into sound design stuff. I can spring chords together, but when it comes to creating really interesting sounds, he hears things in his head or like, if I hear something and there's no way I would be able to do it, he can pretty much do it almost immediately. For me, the first thing that really opened up my world was the drum machine that I was talking about in the last question. That was the first piece of electronic gear I ever owned. That really changed my world in terms of writing music. I finally had a way to make a beat that I can write something to instead of just saying that it was a guitar, you know, playing chords and not really knowing how it would sound once it's connected to a beat. So early Dummy stuff, the very first EP, all the drum beats that are on that were based off of drum machine beats I made myself. I feel like all of Dummy, the whole genesis of the band comes from that drum machine in a weird way.
I know you were talking a lot about, you know, straying away from synths on this record and leaving more space as opposed to going, you know, all the way to 11. What are you guys working on for whatever music is coming next–
J: Yeah, in between these tours we're working on demo-ing stuff for the next record. When we made ‘Free Energy’, right at the tail end of making that record, Alex and I discovered this whole plethora of bands and artists that we had never heard before and it really informed the mixing and a little bit of the songwriting on the record. We still have all those in our back pocket right now. We still have a lot of juice and ideas. So we're working on that, just demos for that. And it really is just like furthering the electronic element of the band, but in a way that we’re still a quote-unquote rock band, making electronic music in a way that a band like Seefeel made electronic music or Scala or even Bowery Electric and obviously MBV to some degree. But also folding in more true electronic stuff. We’re trying to make guitars sound even more alien and weird and not like guitars and have more aggressive rhythms and explore that more. Also at the same time, while doing that, using space more and using, I don't know the best way to articulate it, I guess, in a funny way, kind of erasing any last vestiges of indie rock in our sound and just fully going into sampling and making instruments not sound like instruments.The thing that's really influencing us right now are bands like Scala and Transient Waves and Speedy J and a lot of IDM, like music that has rhythm as the big focus and then using the elements around the rhythm to create the dynamics.
I have one last question and I'll say this, I'm finishing up issue five right now and so this interview is probably going to go in issue six, which will be out in the summer. Do you have any messages for your future self or predictions of the future for the readers?
J: Oh, man. I guess to yourself, chill out, Joe. Just relax, dude. Then for predictions for the readers, I'm sorry everything is so bleak. That’s how I'm feeling currently. Everything feels really bleak right now.
I agree. But yeah, hopefully there'll be something good. That's what I'm hoping at least.
J: Yeah, all the touring stuff is good for me specifically, but not for any readers or anything like that. We will be on the East Coast in the fall though, so we’ll be heading your way then.
