From her isolated upbringing in rural Wisconsin, combined with a passion for opera, philosophy and industrial music, Nika Rosa Danilova aka Zola Jesus has created a name for herself as being a successor to the great Diamanda Galas and Lisa Gerrard with her haunting, otherworldly vocal style.

Over the past three years Danilova has reached the point in her career where she is no longer an experimental, teenage noise-maker but an internationally celebrated electro-pop artist. Her third album Conatus is her most accomplished work to date, pushing beyond the dark melodrama of Stridulum II toward something that is emotionally breathtaking.

From Conatus alone, it’s clear that Danilova confidence to follow her instincts her paid off, but in conversation she remains tight-lipped, holding her cards close to her chest, as Static’s Chris “Man of 1000 questions” Berkley would quickly find out.

It’s only been 12 months since Stridulum, you’ve put out EPs and toured a lot. Do you sleep?

Um, not much. No. (laughs)

Have you found yourself out on the road these past 12 months especially?

Yes, I’ve been touring a lot this past year.

How do you find time to fit in tours with making records? You seem to cram a lot in.

Well, I just make it work. There are a lot of hours in the day. Not enough, but there are enough (laughs).

Have you always been this way? Were you a prodigious child?

I don’t know. I’ve always felt like there’s so much to do and there’s so much to get done and you gotta do it, you know? Now or never.

How did you discover that you wanted to be a singer?

It was very natural. I just loved to sing and would always be singing. As long as I remember I’ve always wanted to do this.

As a child were you having those ‘Sound of Music’ moments where you’re walking around the hillside singing to yourself?

Maybe (laughs).

You seem to be drawn towards opera or classical singing as a kid, rather than rock n’ roll, right? Was that your first love?

Well, just singing was my first love. I just wanted to be a better singer and I wanted to be able to do things with my voice that you needed training for, so that was just the natural course.

What point did you become aware of the power of vocals, or being a singer?

I don’t know. Like I said, ever since I was born I would just be singing. It’s not even something that I remember the impetus. Music has always been something very innate to me, like an impulse.

Were you shy of jumping up on stage and doing Zola Jesus stuff when you first began as well?

Oh yeah, I was terrified at the beginning. I mean, I’m still terrified really. It felt like if I wasn’t going to do it then I’m never going to do it and I need to get over that fear if I ever want to do this. So I just had to do it.

At the same time, your early recordings as Zola Jesus were obscured by murkiness or programmed noise. Was that your way of hiding behind a veil?

In a way, yes.

How much did you learn to program at the same time as learning to sing?

Well, programming and producing came a little later on when I felt like I needed to make songs and do everything myself. I didn’t have anyone around me to make music so I just did it for myself. I just had to learn the skills.

Did you have some bands that were touchstones then, that you were kinda discovering or looking to, to make the sound of Zola Jesus?

No, not really.

So when people have compared you to other bands have you been pleasantly surprised by what they’ve said?

It just confuses me. I don’t think about my music in that way.

Did embarking on some of those big tours last year then impact on how you wanted Conatus to sound? It seems like this album is definitely borne out of live shows?

I actually thought it was going to be a lot more poppier and a lot straighter. When I started making it, it became much more introspective and atmospheric and exploratory in a way. It wasn’t as much of an immediate pop record as I had envisioned it to be in the beginning.

So in the first place this was going to be a feel-good happy-go-lucky Zola Jesus album and something went wrong?

Not necessarily, but I thought it was going to have much more of an immediate impact as far as the songwriting went, but as I started working on music I felt like whatever came out, came out. For some songs it was that, but it wasn’t that completely. It feels a lot more subtle and introspective.

A couple of those big tours that you’ve done were with Fever Ray and The XX. Both of them have powerful female vocals and sparse instrumentation, did you find inspiration touring with a couple of artists who might be kindred spirits?

Not really. I was inspired by their work ethic and their conviction in what they believe in and everything but musically not so much.

You’ve certainly cut back the programming on Conatus. To use a lofty word it sounds more ’earthy’ than anything you’ve done before, there’s strings and pianos, did you find yourself enjoying some of those earthier tones on this record?

Well, actually I feel like this record is much more programmed because the beats are much more intricate and sophisticated in a way, but at the same time I wanted to bring in a lot of acoustic and organic elements and balance it out instead of it being a completely electronic record. But it feels more electronic to me than Stridulum. I don’t know, it’s kind of a strange dichotomy.

Some of the songs seem to have that breathing space where you can just hear piano and strings which might’ve been obscured in previous years on your records.

Yeah, I wanted there to be a lot of space on the record. I tend to write and put everything in the song and then weed it out and bring out the space in the songs just to allow them to be more breathing room, I guess.

A song like “Skin” is a total torch song. Some kid is gonna cover that on American Idol, I’m sure.

Oh god.

Does it feel like that? Does it feel like your power ballad?

It kinda felt like my point of no return in a way.

Why is that? Because it’s such a naked song?

Yeah, so stark and for me, very cathartic. When I wrote it, I felt very low.

Was it one of those five minute songs that came very quickly? It seems like such a great impulsive or spur of the moment song…

Yeah. It came very quickly.

Another way that you’re going to be infiltrating teenage bedrooms this year is the M83 collaboration ‘cos you’ve turned up on Anthony’s record. Was it a thrill to be able to team up with him?

It was wonderful. I’ve always been a fan of his work and I guess he’s been a fan of mine too, so getting to work with him was very exciting.

Was this one of those horrible 21st century things where you weren’t in the same room together, or did you spend time with him to make that song?

We went into the studio together and we worked on the vocals and did it together. It was a lot of fun.

Interview broadcast on Static on 10/11/11. Static can be heard on Sydney’s 2SER (107.3 FM) and via the Internet (www.2ser.com) every Thursday evening (AEST).

San Francisco’s Girls self-titled debut of 2009 garnered widespread acclaim based on its fancy-free and free-love attitude that offered irresistible pop gems bathed in x-rated video clips (“Lust for Life” anyone?). Sex and pop, what more do you want out of music these days? For their sophomore album Father, Son, Holy Ghost, the Girls duo of Christopher Owen and Chet “JR” White have upped the songwriter stakes to put together an album that’s impressive straight out of the blocks, from the rolling surf riffs of “Honey Bunny” to the epic Pink Floyd psyche-pop of “Vomit”. Static’s Chris Berkley spoke with Girl’s JR over the phone in the midst of a very suspect (if you’re to believe what he says) video shoot.

You’re in the middle of doing a film clip, huh?

Yeah, we’re doing a video for the song “Honey Bunny“, which I think is going to be the first single, even though “Vomit” came out before.

“Vomit”s already got a film clip as well, so you’re racking them up…

Yeah, I guess so. We want to do it, and the label sure doesn’t mind.

From past history of Girl’s film clips are there any penises on display in this one?

Lots of penises. Basically what we did is we casted the whole bands penises and put little moustaches and painted eyes on and stuff and we’re acting out scenes with our dicks.

I can’t wait to see it. This is obviously all part of the roll-out of the Girls album, which is pretty on time for exactly two years after the debut. It’s a pretty prolific work-rate you guys have got going on.

Yeah we started the recording of this album on the anniversary of the band basically, February 14th, Valentines Day.

Oh really, so you have a band anniversary?

Yeah. Well, of our first show, yeah. It worked out that it’s Valentines Day. I kinda do that with all the anniversaries of my life. I try and line them up with holidays as I have a really bad memory.

And do you and Christopher give each other flowers on band anniversary day? What do you do?

Yeah. But no, it sorta goes by without much notice to be honest. After the fact we realised it was the anniversary of the birth of the band when the record was begun.

It’s a pretty good work rate you‘ve got going on. Not only are you into the second album, you’ve got the mini album last year. Does it feel good to get this body of work together?

Yeah, it feels great. Definitely when you’re playing live and you’re touring for 9 months out of the year it’s great to have more and more songs to choose from. It’s a plus to getting more recorded material out there. I think if it were up to us, both of us would just work in the studio all the time and increase the output even more.

You really seem to have honed your craft these past couple of years. Did surrounding yourselves with the band to tour the first album sort of change the dynamic as well, from just being you and Christopher?

It would change the band a lot, and sometimes because people wanted to move on, sometimes it was personality things. This time we kinda started the record with a whole new band. We came out of a hell of a lot of touring with a specific band and when most bands do that, the smart thing to do is keep that band before you go in the studio but we kinda flipped that and decided to get rid of everyone except for our keyboard player and get a whole new band. It was a fun process. It makes the band feel fresh definitely. It’s not necessarily something we want to do every time though.

Did it mean that you had a break from the music you’d made before to going into this new record? Did it feel like you were making this fresh start?

In a way it makes you look at the older stuff in a different light when you’re playing with different people and their interpretation of it as well. Definitely it feels like the band has moved on a little bit, getting farther away from what we did on the first record. But that said I actually still enjoy playing the early songs. There’s a definite difference between the new stuff and the old stuff when we play it and I appreciate the old stuff as much as I appreciate the new stuff.

For this new Girls album you worked with an outside producer for the first time. You got this guy Doug Boehm. Did you do that with much trepidation, because you had always been the one that had the hands on in the studio?

With Doug, the intention was he was just going to be the engineer. We chose him because he had worked on a lot of records that were part of my childhood — he worked on Beck’s first record. My whole view of what Los Angeles was in the 90’s when I was a kid, Doug basically worked on those records that formed that view for me. It was kind of a cool thing. Definitely my role wasn’t played down but Doug’s experience doing records over a long period of time and working on bigger records came into play where we felt like he had invested enough of himself in it to deserve the co-production credit that we decided after the fact. He kept the sessions moving much better than I could do it, you know.

He’s also got a bit of an Australian connection as well. He’s done Powderfinger and The Vines records, so if he’s got the Australian dollar touch, you guys might have a hit record here.

Yeah, he’s done a lot of Australian records he was telling us, and The Vines record he did with Rob Schnapf is a great, big sounding record.

This Girl’s record is a big sounding record too. The songs seems to have gotten bigger and more epic. I guess the nature of the new Girls album probably hinted at on the song “Carolina” from last year but did you guys decide to draw the songs out and really go for it on this record?

The big embellishment on this record is using back-up singers on parts of some of the songs. I think when we went in originally we had intentions on taking it farther, so I think it shows a little bit of restraint in some sense. I’m the one who’s always trying to pull back and use less guitars and create space. My view is we did hold back, and spent a lot of time making sure things sounded big and clean, making the sounds and tones more immediate.

Father, Son, Holy Ghost is a very fearless record. There are a few nods to some of your icons on that record. The female wails on “Vomit” sound like Pink Floyd. They are big songs.

Yeah, definitely. That’s kinda where that came from in a sense, letting her go. That came from an amazing back-up singer by the name of Makita that we worked with in Los Angeles. After we tracked the basic back-ups on that song it got to the point where I wanted her to just riff, I wanted her to, we would say, “take it to the church”, take it to the dark side of the moon, you know? That song definitely has that influence in it. Those influences a lot of the times are found halfway through the process, you realise as you’re working the song it’s going some place and as we see those parallels with other music, or create homages to other things, it’s not something that starts out when Chris writes a song, it’s not something that starts out early in the production process. Usually about halfway or three quarters the way through we start adding the nods.

Another great nod on the Girls album is “My Ma” which has got that George Harrison-esque guitar solo in the middle of it.

(laughs) Oh yeah, I love that solo. That’s probably my favourite song on the record.

Definitely, but also there’s no tongue in cheek or pastiche to what you guys do. It seems very sincere these nods.

Yeah, I mean it’s all we have. It’s not really a joke.

Do you think a lot of bands fall into that trap though, of trying to ape their heroes and end up just covering them?

Yeah, a big thing I do if I work with another band too, for putting away stress for young bands, is realise what those things that are that make your band your band. Like the way you do things that are different that change the result of your record. If you go on trying to do something or sound like something there’s always a filter which is the people in the band. The more you get to work you start to notice what kinda makes your band your band. The weird little things you do within your working process. This is our third sorta record and we’re very aware of those things. We really relish in them and those are the things that give our music a signature sound.

And so does that mean you’ve read descriptions of bands these days being Girls-esque? Is that a phrase where other bands are being compared to you now?

I don’t know, that’d be pretty cool though. I hear it, though I don’t think it’s necessarily intentional. Like our first record came at a time where a lot of people were trying to do similar things. I hope so. That’d be cool. I wanna be that band that some older brother or sister plays to their younger siblings and says “this is cool, you gotta listen to this”.

Interview broadcast on Static on 15/09/11. Static can be heard on Sydney’s 2SER (107.3 FM) and via the Internet (www.2ser.com) every Thursday evening (AEST).

Quietly released last year was the first proper solo album by Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier. A touching tribute to her sister, who in Sadier’s words “went on a million year trip/and left everything behind”, The Trip saw Sadier step out from the shadow of Stereolab to make a very revealing album, not only in the way she dealt with her loss, but in how she paid tribute to artists that influenced and inspired her. An album that sparkled in its minimalist approach, The Trip showed a side of Sadier unseen, one that was filled with warmth and emotion, and those little philosophical quirks that you’ve come to expect.

Whilst in London to play a show at Cafe Oto on what was to be the hottest day of the year, Webcuts pulled up a couch with a very suntanned Laetitia to find out what a trip for her it has been.

How have things been for you since Stereolab wound down? You’ve been keeping yourself busy since the release of The Trip, playing the odd solo show here and there. Have you been enjoying yourself?

It’s been great. I didn’t know what to do when Stereolab stopped. I thought that’s it, I’m finished, but things didn’t quite happen like that. First I was offered some money to do a record, and then I lost my little sister and I needed to put all this grief into my art. So I had a reason to do a record, a very sad reason, and although I was really questioning if the world needed yet another record, somehow the universe decided that yes, I should, and then Facebook had people saying ‘Hey, do you want to come and play in Portugal or Belgium?’. All sorts of places.

It’s quite easy to do these things, to pack up a guitar and go, when it’s just you.

Yes. I went to Greece and that was my first show and I could barely play the guitar, and I can still barely play it. Then I went off on tour and supported Mice Parade on their European tour and that was really good to have the momentum of every night playing a show for ten days and then I toured Spain for ten days, and Germany for seven nights in a row. I played in New York and Brooklyn in June and then South America to Brazil and Chile.

Being a left-hander I’m fascinated by the way you play guitar, because you play left-handed but you don’t change the strings around. Is that the way you taught yourself?

Originally, I turned the strings around and realised that whenever I saw a guitar I couldn’t play it, because it was right-handed, so I got fed up with that and thought ‘Sod it, I’m playing right-handed guitar and I’ll play it upside down’. I’m not like a proper musician, a trained musician, so it’s (my playing) is all by ear and ‘oh, I like this chord’ and I don’t know what I’m playing, but they all have names apparently…

You’re playing solo at the moment, how do you feel being alone onstage after decades playing with a band bashing away behind you? Is there a certain clarity in being able to hear yourself think while on stage?

I can hear myself sing, which I enjoy very much! It’s a very different experience but I did find it was hard not being able to hear myself. It was really hard and it made it very frustrating at times because I wanted to hear myself and a voice cannot compete with a loud drummer or a loud amp, and a lot of singers in bands have exactly the same thing. So I did feel a bit crushed and alienated I must say, although I loved the music we were playing, really loved the music, and I still do. But now it’s very, very different. The responsibility is mine and I really enjoy having to fill up the space with a minimum amount of equipment. I always had a frustration with Stereolab that it couldn’t be simple, yet the songs were so beautiful they could’ve stood with just guitar and a voice, but with the dynamic of the band it was always full on, full on, full on… and I thought “How about sometimes we pare it down, and then go full on” but there wasn’t a question of that. I guess I’m repairing certain things with playing alone which I really enjoy at the moment, but I think once I’m stronger with this alone, I will be better prepared to play with new people.

Is that something you’re looking forward to doing in the future?

I think the future is more modular. It could be one, it could be two, it could be three. I’d really like to be a trio. I’d really like that.

As you mentioned before, recording The Trip was a means for you to express your feelings toward the loss of your little sister, but had you made plans to record an album before this happened?

As I said at the time I was wondering whether I should or not, whether there was a reason. A raison d’être, you know. My view on working in the creative field like this is that things are going to have a raison d’être, and Tim was like that. You just don’t do things because it is time, or it’s in the contract. For me it’s more with an emotion there, or a desire. I work really with a desire to do something. So I was questioning whether I wanted to, and things kind of fell into place, and it became a means to act therapeutically around a sad event, and it’s amazing how it worked as well. When I received the final object after it was made, with the sleeve and everything, I just burst into tears because there it all was.

Because of this, do you find it hard to listen to?

No, to me it’s not a sad record. I don’t particularly enjoy listening to my own stuff. Sometimes it comes on the ipod, or sometimes someone will put on, but no, I don’t listen to my own record particularly, but sometimes it’s nice. I’ve rediscovered my old Monade record, A Few Steps More recently, and I thought ‘Oh, that’s quite a nice record. I made a really nice record’, and I didn’t realise at the time that I made a really nice record. Maybe because there was a bit of a complex because of Tim, and he’s a genius and all that, and because of Stereolab and somehow my work could not possibly have the same value. It’s not the same value, it’s different, but I did realise it really has a value.

Your choice of covers on the album are quite interesting and diverse. Gershwin’s “Summertime”, Les Rita Mitsouko’s “Un Soir, Un Chien” , and Wendy and Bonnie’s “By The Sea”. Were these favourite songs of yours or ones that you felt fit within the emotional core of the album?

They all had different reasons to be on the record. “Un Soir, Un Chien” I loved and I always wanted to sing it, so it’s me completely indulging in a long-time fantasy. Richard Swift helped putting that together. With Wendy and Bonnie, I wanted to do a cover version, but it would have to be very different from the original. That was the idea. So I thought this is a really nice poppy song if you speed it up. So it’s a very silly little thing that we knocked together in an afternoon, and it was also honouring Wendy and Bonnie working together at a very young age doing really quite mature and beautiful stuff, and a record that fell into a trap with a bad contract and the record never came out properly until two years ago or something. And “Summertime”, one night I found these chords and I just stated singing “Summertime” over the top of it. When it came to picking tracks to go on the record, I didn’t want this one, because it’s so uncool (in a mocking voice) “Summertime”… but the song was like “Look, I want to be on this record. Let me be on this record”, so I thought “Well, Ok”. The idea about my work is to be guided by it, rather than over-controlling everything to suit my ego.

I would imagine that recording your own music is quite different experience, a more freer and involved one, than with Stereolab. Do you enjoy having that autonomy?

Yes. It’s funny how it’s being in charge, but it’s also letting go and not wanting to control the every aspect. The people I work with, like Richard Swift and how that happened and fell into my lap. It was like the most gorgeous thing that happened to me, getting to work with this guy and his bassist, Yuuki Matthews. Richard supported us in America, and I had asked them to come on tour with us but I could not enjoy them because of some trauma I was going through. Just right at the end I managed to speak a little bit to Richard and go for a walk and somehow we must’ve said ‘Let’s work together one day’. A few months later they come to play in London, the bass player played one note and I nearly fainted. He was such a good bass player. I’ve never really felt that about any bass player. Just one note… They were fabulous, and after the show, Yuuki gets off-stage and comes straight to me and is like “ So I hear you’re going to record with Richard and I would like to be part of this project’ and I was like ‘Oh really? Yes, yes!”, and it happened. So that process I found so enjoyable and I’m really ready to work with Richard again, and Yuuki if he wants to.

Where did you make the album?

In his studio in Cottage Grove near Portland. It was such a fun time. I met a community of people there that was so super, intelligent people, no big egos, people were down to earth, who get on with their lives, who are in charge of their lives rather than sitting and moaning on their asses complaining it’s not good enough or whatever, or having nervous breakdowns or taking drugs, well, they do take a little drugs, but they just do things. Life’s not easy. They understood that, they’re responsible for it. It put me in such a really beautiful space, so I’m ready to go back there.

Was there really once a musical sub-genre called ‘Shitgaze’? I mean, somebody actually sat around, coined that term and hoisted it on a few unsuspecting bands who by fate or ill-fortune found themselves trapped under its audiophile repelling umbrella? Think about it, shitgaze. Would you buy into that? Thankfully it’s only a memory, but some of those bands still remain, including Columbus, Ohio’s Times New Viking.

On the eve of their first Australian tour Chris Berkley of Static spoke to Jared and Adam of Times New Viking, fresh off the plane from New Zealand promoting their most recent album, the discordant but progressively tuneful, Dancer Equired. Since both Jared and Adam tend to speak over the top of each other, finishing each other’s sentences and generally agreeing with what the other says, we’re just gonna make things easier and attribute all responses to JaredandAdam.

It’s a bit of mission to get here, especially from Ohio. Is it a roundabout route to get to the other side of the world?

You just have to go through LA and then it’s another 12 hours. 6 hours to get to LA. It took a day.

I’m guessing where you are in Ohio is probably good for touring though. You’re half-way to the mid-west…

It is. It is the crossroads of America.

Does that make picking and choosing the route of how to get home a little easier?

Yeah, it does. It’s easier just to do little one-off shows and weekends. It’s harder to get out west though, because there’s a big expanse of nothing to play, so you have to drive 24 hours to get through a wasteland of Montana and all that stuff.

I’m guess when the band started you were just happy to get out of Columbus?  

Yeah, that’s an amazing thing for Columbus bands to go to Cleveland. We really didn’t get out of Columbus till the record came out. We only did one show out of town. When the first record came out we finally went to New York and all that, you know, big time stuff.

Did you kinda feel like you were on your own when you started out?

Yeah there were but it was mostly either just bar bands or noise bands. I don’t think there was much inbetween. At first starting out it was easy to get art spaces and basements and stuff like that, which was normal to us, but when we finally went places and they gave us free beer that was pretty awesome.

That was the real yardstick…

That was before we sold out and couldn’t go back to the basements.

Have the show trajectories been at a similar rate to the recorded material trajectories? I guess so much always gets made about the lo-fi history of your band, but I’m guessing it must be the same as you get better studios, you get better gigs, as a band goes on.

We get better gigs. We get to open up for some amazing people. That’s usually the cushier ones, because you’re sorta riding on someone’s coattails and play places we’ll never ever play. We’ll still do the bar that fits 50 people. We’ve sorta plateaued. We sound better in those places anyway.

Have you deliberately been keeping the recorded side of Times New Viking sort of on that lo-fi tip? Or was it something that you didn’t necessarily do out of choice?

It was both, but it just sorta happened. It was natural for us to sound like that, and a lot of the bands we liked recorded on their own and sounded like that. We really liked the idea of recording ourselves and being able to do it in our practice space and having no outside people to affect us in any way.

I’m guessing when you come from Columbus, Ohio, there’s not a lot of those people around anyway? It’s not like coming from Brooklyn where there’s some hip producer around the corner that wants to work with you.

Yeah. All the studios there are pretty-much really bad studios for really polished stuff. All the legends of Columbus, Ohio that we knew pioneered home recording and DIY stuff like that.

How much of an aesthetic thing was it for you when you were recording yourselves on those first few records?

It wasn’t like what we purposely wanted to sound, and for people to think it’s lo-fi, so we’re gonna record this way.

I think it’s really a deliberate thing, right?

Our first record was demos. It was just things we could record on the 4 track in the basement. We were excited to make them. We thought they sounded good, and they do sound good. We were sorta cajoled by other people that it’ll work. There’s this idea we could’ve record on Pro-Tools, but no, we would’ve had to have a computer to do that. It was a lot easier to get a 4 track. It was more to do that people were actually amazed that we would say ‘yes’ to the way it sounded. That’s where I think the deliberacy is. We just do something we say ‘that sounds good’ and print it, you know?

Lo-Fi gets held up so much it’s almost like a punk movement where I think people do that to want not to be accessible. Because you guys at heart are a pop band in Times New Viking.

Yeah. We just have elements that aren’t accessible I guess. When it comes down to it, it’s still pop music. The bottom line is that isn’t necessarily lo-fi people hear, especially on the new record, but more being somewhat inept or being able to go with mistakes and not worrying about auto-tuning your vocals.

I like the fact that when you went hi-fi on the last album it meant that you guys recorded on VHS.

VHS is just 4-track on steroids, pretty much.

As you were saying Jared, it’s not a new argument either, and especially for you guys coming from Ohio, a band like Guided By Voices went through these same trials and errors 20 years ago.

That’s what we always tell people, it’s not some new idea. I don’t know, ask Lou Barlow. Oh wait, I thought Lou Barlow was the King of lo-fi… isn’t he the one who has to answer all these questions about lo-fi?

He’s got a plaque.

Yeah, he’s like The Godfather. People ask us about the stuff that happened in New York and LA, I don’t know, I’m not speaking for them, but they’re totally coming from a different place from us. For us, it’s ‘You’re in a band, here’s a 4 track. Go see what you guys got’. We weren’t recording to be millionaires. We just have nothing better to do on a Friday night.

You’re even a few albums and even a few labels in now, do you see a progression in not only the gigs you’re getting and the way you record but also in your song craft? Was there a song on Dancer Equired that you really thought that we crossed another boundary here?

I think we’ve given up on the idea that we’re ever going to be very popular, y’know. If people don’t get it, they’re never going to get it. So we just did it to please ourselves. It’s more of a challenge for us. I’ll admit I’m not the greatest singer in the world and our old records we’re like “yeah, maybe lower the vocals, make’m fuzzier!“. That was more because of my insecurities. On this one, it was kinda let it be a little more naked, you know? And we’ve all grown up a little bit.

A song like “No Room To Live” is this proper jangle anthem, right? Would the Times New Viking of 7 or 8 years ago found it impossible to write a song like that?

I think so. Just to be that quiet, maybe. (disagreement breaks out) We didn’t know what we were doing then, so I don’t think so.

I guess you guys being at Ocean Way (Famous Hollywood recording studio) is a long way off from the way you’ve been talking. There’s no big plans yet?

No, not really. We try to stick to doing things locally.

You keep the industry within Ohio. There’s no reason to move to Brooklyn or LA.

No, there’s absolutely no reason. There’s many reasons not to.

That’s higher on the cons list than the pros list.

Oh, that’s not even close, yeah.

Interview broadcast on Static on 25/08/11. Static can be heard on Sydney’s 2SER (107.3 FM) and via the Internet (www.2ser.com) every Thursday evening (AEST).

You must be excited and relieved that the album is out?

Yes, very exciting. I started work on it about a year ago, so I’m really excited people can hear it and buy it and come and see us play.

When you were touring here with the band in December, you were obviously working on it, but there wasn’t that much of a temptation to take the live band into the studio to make the album? Is that still your own sacred domain when it comes to Washed Out?

I think so. Mainly because that’s just the way I’ve always worked and the creative process for me is a very mindless thing. I just sit down at the computer and just kind of get lost in the recording and the layering of things. It would be much harder to do that with five other guy in the room, I think. Maybe one of these days I’ll bring’em in, but not yet. (laughs)

I guess taking them out on tour must be enough to stretch your people managing skills?

Exactly. I definitely have to take on the role of the dad of the group. There’s a couple of youngsters in the band, and my wife tours with us as well, so we’re the mom and dad keeping tabs on the other band members.

Was it challenge enough then to bring in the outside producer to help out on Within and Without, ‘cos Ben Allen came in to sort of, help you finish off the record. Was that his role?

Exactly. I had those songs recorded to the best of my ability and I knew that I needed help to sort of take them to the place I wanted, which was much bigger, sort of anthemic sounding songs. I was a huge fan of his work and luckily he had about ten days off inbetween a couple projects he was working on, so we did 12 hour days in the studio here in Atlanta to wrap everything up. He’s an amazing guy and an amazing producer.

It’s interesting to hear you use a word ‘dynamic’ when describing the record because it seems like you’ve probably taken with relish the chance to spread your wings a bit and try some stuff you hadn’t been able to do on those early Washed Out singles and EPs. Did it feel like you had a broader canvas for the album?

Exactly. Having played a years worth of live shows really informed this material as well. Just playing in front of an audience there, a couple of things I picked up that make the entertaining side of playing music much easier and so there are a couple of moments on the record that were written specifically for the live show. So we’re really excited to get out there and start playing again.

The first taste we got of the album was that boy/girl duet of “You and I” that you did with Caroline from Chairlift. Was that a thing you could cross of your list, to be able to do a boy/girl duet?

Yeah, well it’s funny that I never really collaborated with someone on writing a song together and a TV network here in the States, Adult Swim, commissioned us to work on a song and it really opened my eyes to that side of songwriting. I had the chorus structure of the song written and took it to her and she took the song to a completely different direction that I probably would never have thought of and made the song that much better. So I’m excited to maybe work with her again, hopefully, and if not her, other musicians maybe on this next record.

Writing songs like that seems to have brought out a bit of your songsmith side, because another track on the album like “A Dedication” is practically your Billy Joel/Elton John piano ballad.

That’s probably the closest I’ll get to that type of song. I grew up playing piano, so that’s really how I learned to play music and think about music. But I definitely hadn’t used a piano before on a Washed Out track and I sort of liked ending the record on a much different note. It was the last song I worked on so it fit to be the last song on the record.

Are you ready for lighters aloft for that song in the live show?

(laughs) That’d be great. I’d have to work it out. It’d be great to bring out a bunch of horn players to pull off the final section of the song. Maybe if the budget gets a little better we can pull that off.

In amongst the power ballad moments there are the more atypical Washed Out tracks, but I like how disco you’ve also gone on a song like “Soft”. So even with the dancier stuff you’re trying on a few different genres than you had before.

Exactly. That again probably has a lot to do with playing live shows. I really don’t like the idea of boring people at the shows. We try to play more of the upbeat numbers and maybe up the tempo for some of the slower numbers. The live shows are meant to be, I wouldn’t say necessarily a dance party, but it’s upbeat enough to dance and have a good time to.

It also seems that apart from being informed by the live show, the Washed Out album has been a good way to show off all these influences. It’s something that you seem to get asked about a terrible lot.

Yeah, I kind of grab from a number of different genres and that also sort of shaped what the record sound like. I didn’t want it to be a dance record or a hip-hop record. I wanted it to be somewhere inbetween all of these places, so that type of thinking really shaped things. I wanted everything to sound really balanced, and if I used a really heavy kick sound that is really dance music indebted, I wanted to balance that with more live instrumentation to sort of make everything balance. That was a big part of the record as well.

Also telling is this recent BBC 6 music mix that you did. In amongst all the cool stuff, the seminal artists like DJ Shadow, you did have the block of cheese that is 10CC’s “I’m Not In Love”.

That’s a great song through and through. If that’s not cool then that’s the listener’s problem. I love that song and I like to think that my work is sort of in that same mindset of it’s definitely a pop song, but also a song you can get lost in, and so I like that quality about it.

You also said something interesting about that mix, when sampling you’re looking for a noise or a texture, so you’re more informed by the feel of samples than say beats or rhythm.

Definitely. And that came out of just trying to do something different with sampling. When I started out making proto-typical hip-hop songs I quickly realised it had been done a million times before, like sampling old breaks or James Brown songs, so I was really interested in using non-traditional sounds and that sort or led to much weirder either ambient or disco stuff that I was into. I’m always listening for interesting sounds to use.

The other component of the album of course is its packaging. Have many people come back to you about the raunchy artwork for Within and Without? Are you getting sold in a brown paper bag in Walmart?

It’s really funny to me. I never anticipated that, and I can totally understand that interpretation now but to me it was more innocent than that. I wasn’t thinking about it being this provocative, shocking thing. It’s really funny seeing the response and that was definitely the initial response from most people.

You put skin somewhere and people jump up and down. Your response then sounds like you’re in front of the PMRC or something. It sounds as if you’ve already got your response rehearsed.

No, no. It’s a lot of fun. Actually my label in the UK has gotten together an installation at Rough Trade in London and they’re going to have a bed-in, where they have an actual bed in the store where you can lay down and listen to the record, so I thought that was kind of poking fun at that as well.

People are actually going to be recreating that sleeve in the middle of a record store.

Exactly. That’s the idea. That would be great.

Do people keep asking you if it’s your back? Do you have to keep telling people it’s not you?

Yeah, I have. I have been asked that quite a bit and it’s not my back. Maybe it would’ve been a better story if it had been my back, but no, it was just an image I saw in a photography magazine I really liked.

You can save your nude run up for album number two…

(laughs) Exactly.

Interview broadcast on Static on 14/07/11. Static can be heard on Sydney’s 2SER (107.3 FM) and via the Internet (www.2ser.com) every Thursday evening (AEST).

Cold Cave’s debut album of 2009 Love Comes Close was a unique display of synth-oriented mood disorder, venturing out from the bedroom to the dancefloor, filled with idealistic tales of romance and disillusionment. Band leader Wes Eisold’s spin on the world appeared to share a voice (in both dour baritone and content) with Magnetic Fields Stephin Merritt, if he’d spent his adolescence listening to The Cure and Depeche Mode instead of showtunes.

On their second album, Eisold moved beyond the testing of the waters that was Love Comes Close and turned its successor, Cherish The Light Years, into his dark dream made manifold. Speaking with Static’s Chris Berkley back in April, Eisold talked about his vision for Cold Cave and the experiences that informed and were explored when writing and recording the new album.

It kinda feels like there there’s noticeably more of you on this album, especially vocal-wise. Does this feel like much more of a ‘Wes’ record?

It does and it doesn’t. I would say it doesn’t because there isn’t any less of me on the last record actually. There was just one song that wasn’t sung by me, and it was very new for me to sing, to actually sing instead of yelling or whatever, and I think I hid a little bit behind effects. Touring over the past year and a half, two years I’ve gotten much more comfortable with myself and less self-conscious and didn’t care as much. So that’s why it sounds drastically different.

So it was a bit of baby steps, and not only learning to sing but also to embrace the music you were making as Cold Cave?

I think a little of both, yeah. I just knew this time I wasn’t scared to kind of own the record. In the past I would kinda put disfigured people on the cover or feature people on the cover, or just disguise myself or other people, and this time I wanted to be more in the open and understood and more clear as to what the project is, and you know, still the sole songwriter and all that.

You must have learnt that over the years as well. You’ve clocked up a lot of time in a lot of different bands and probably seen the machinations of the way you want to present yourself now. It sounds as if you want to hide behind things less.

To me, aesthetics is one of the most important parts of any presentation in any band, any medium, and before I was always, for better or worse, at the mercy of someone else’s vision. I wrote lyrics and sang on music that other people had already written. Now that it’s my band, I don’t have the hurdle of trying to explain what I am envisioning in my head to someone else to interpret to turn it into a song. I can just do it all myself now. There’s no reason to hide, you know?

Is Cherish The Light Years also a result of a different environment too? Did I read that you relocated to New York between the first album and this one?

I did, but I don’t want to put any emphasis on glorifying New York. That’s not something I care about.

There’s plenty of other people to do that…

Yeah, or it’s been done. I don’t want to be the person who moved here in the late 2000’s and talking about what a great place it is, because I don’t care. But to me, it is a strange place to feel lonely in because there’s so many people and there’s so much going on, and it might actually be one of the worst places to feel lonely in. One of the good things about that is that you walk everywhere here, and for me, just walking around the city with headphones was a big part of the record. I would make a demo, and to test if I liked it or not, I would walk around and listen to it and see if it made sense with my environment. I wanted the record to be this culmination of the present, the past, and the future and I think that’s what it is, sonically and aesthetically. It kinda refers to bands I’ve been in, it refers to music I listened to as a kid in different cities I grew up in, and I just wanted it to be a really accurate representation regardless of any pre-conceived notions about what Cold Cave is or was, like minimalism or lo-fi recording was not something that I was ever really interested in. It was just the means in which I had to do it in the past. I was recording my own music and I didn’t know how to record. I was writing my own songs and I didn’t know how to write a song. Just over the last few years I’ve worked out exactly what I want to do and maybe what I probably always wanted to do with this project.

I guess you’ve moved as far east as you can, as well. For someone who started out on the west coast, metaphorically you’re as far away from your past as you can be, and physically as well now.

Sure. I’ve lived on the west coast a few times but I grew up moving every two years, so I don’t consider any specific city or town or location as a home. So it’s kinda always moving, always changing. It’s a lot of what the record is about.

It feels like a braver record than the first Cold Cave album was. Dare I use the word ‘glossier’, but there is more of a sheen about this record. A track like “Confetti” is this pretty disco song which I can barely imagine having existed on the first record. Were you looking for that kind of stuff this time around?

Yes. I think that’s very true. The last record was kinda strange for me, because I had originally released it myself as a pretty limited record, and then Matador reissued it and every release has had intent to it, and that record was never really intended to be this statement like “Hi, I’m this band called Cold Cave, this is my record that I’m very proud of and I want this to represent the band“. That was never the case with that record. The last record was a group of songs that were more about the fluidity between industrial music and synth-pop music. It was just a statement actually. I feel like that didn’t come across, but that’s ok. This time I wanted to make the bridge between traditional synth-pop, with actually more pop-oriented music, and was probably more influenced by other bands that I grew up listening to, like The Cure or Echo And The Bunnymen, Psychedelic Furs or something like that. It is a braver record and a bigger record and it sounds more like a full band than before, whereas in the past it was just a computer and myself.

You’ve even got the brass stabs on “Alchemy And You”. You’re skanking, Wes…

I know. Ska is not something I’m fond of. I do like Dexys Midnight Runners and I like playing a lot of more new wave bands that incorporate synths. It just felt like the right thing to do then. It just seemed like horns would be appropriate.

It sounds like you’re having fun branching out on this record. It probably would have been easy to be the prince of dark wave forever but it seems like you are actually having fun too.

It wasn’t that much fun really (laughs). It was this extreme terror of two months recording. I went to the studio with no vocals and without any lyrics so it was kind of stressful. Going back to other bands I’ve been in, I was used to having songs already done where I could only think about vocals and lyrics. Going into this session with the songs only 85% done and I had all this music to make up in the studio and then I couldn’t even think about putting vocals on them until after the music was done. I think that’s why it ended up taking so long. Listening to it now I don’t recall that much fun being had in the studio (laughs). I kinda feel that it’s a darker record than the old one, even though I understand that it doesn’t sound that way.

You also keep busy with your own publishing company Heartworm and you’re a published author. Is music still the main thing you do or do you multitask pretty well these days?

These days I’m doing more Cold Cave because it’s kinda taken over, and it’s what I want to take over, in my life, anyway. There is a difference between writing poems and prose and writing lyrics for songs, but they are fairly similar too. When you write a poem, it’s you and a piece of paper versus the world. When you write lyrics to a song, the song comes with an inherent mood already, so you don’t have to come up with this idea or this statement or some intuition from yourself. You get to incorporate these sounds that already exist. Words aren’t enough to get across the message in a song. You need the music to do that as well.

So does that mean writing songs is a harder task or an easier task?

I don’t know if it’s harder or easier. It’s just different. I would think it’s maybe a little easier for me than writing a poem but I don’t know what it’s like for other people.

We’ll see how you feel after the next 12 months on the road with Cold Cave. You might be just dying to sit in a dark room and write poetry.

There’s a good possibility of that. That’s a very true statement (laughs).

Interview broadcast on Static on 14/04/11. Static can be heard on Sydney’s 2SER (107.3 FM) and via the Internet (www.2ser.com) every Thursday evening (AEST).

Destroyer
Heaven, London
June 28, 2011

How strange to be more than fifteen years into a career and to finally achieve growing, and now glowing, recognition for the music you make. With bands today, the inverse applies, they learn to walk before they can crawl, record a debut they’ll never repeat and disappear as if they never existed. Real artists will maintain and nurture their craft regardless of an audience, which more or less, is the story of Dan Bejar. Better known as the wild-card songwriter in Canadian power-pop supergroup The New Pornographers, Bejar’s work as Destroyer is like mainlining into Bejar’s psyche, which prior to you only got the briefest taste of.

With his ninth album Kaputt, Bejar has set up camp in the 80′s, drawing on his own favourite albums and artists as reference to produce one of the most effortlessly charming records you’ll hear all year.  Noticeably reticent when it comes to touring, it’s been a long time coming for Destroyer to take his “European Blues” to European shores, but with an accompanying 7 piece band and touring what is undoubtedly the album of his career to date, all thoughts of ‘what took you so long?’ are renounced. Opening with Kaputt’s “Chinatown” and “Blue Eyes”, the transformation from record to stage is flawless. Each nuance is perfectly recreated as Bejar eases into his role as poet/performer, imbuing his lyrics with such a creative use of language that it’s a delight just to listen to him speak.

With such a wealth of material to draw from, Bejar sticks largely within the lounge-jazz realm of Kaputt, with random selections from his back catalogue, with “My Favourite Year” from Trouble In Dreams and Rubies with “Painter In Your Pocket” and “3000 Flowers”, the latter with assistance of a lyric sheet to help Bejar along. It’s rare to be at a concert where the sax player almost steals the show, as did saxophonist JP Carter during “Suicide Demo For Kara Walker”, who really knew how to work the old ‘saxophone as weightlifting’ trick, leaning down and hoisting it triumphantly in the air at the climax of his solo to rapt applause. For encore, the scene stealing “Bay Of Pigs”, in given its full 12 minute outing, which on record sounds like Bejar ad-libbing over an The Orb-like trance track which then morphs steadily into a disco reprise to Kaputt and ultimately the perfect closure to the evening.

Setlist: Chinatown, Blue Eyes, My Favourite Year, Downtown, Savage Night At The Opera, Kaputt, It’s Gonna Take An Airplane, Painter In Your Pocket, 3000 Flowers, Suicide Demo For Kara Walker, Song For America // Bay Of Pigs

An act that many have been holding their breath for the return of for as long as they’ve been absent from the stage are Haledon, New Jersey’s The Feelies. Arriving in the late 70′s, and releasing one of the first great new wave/post-punk albums of the early 80′s (truly. no hyperbole here) in Crazy Rhythms, The Feelies were the Velvet Underground and Television’s Jersey geeky cousins. An enthralling percussive ride, full of jerky rhythms and wild melodic guitar interplay, the sound of The Feelies would evolve over the years, drifting away from the arty CBGB crowd toward a more refined pastoral ‘college rock’ sound that typified an era when bands like R.E.M. and Camper Van Beethoven loomed large.

The last Feelies album Time For A Witness was released in 1991, with their albums remaining out of print and highly sought after over the years, with occasional rumours of reissues, that would eventually gather momentum when word arrived of the band reforming, seemingly at the whim of Sonic Youth, who like everybody else that adored The Feelies, felt enough time had passed. Proving that this reunion was no cash-focussed nostalgia jaunt the band took time out last year to enter the studio to record their fifth album, Here Before. Speaking with Static’s Chris Berkley at home in New Jersey, Glenn Mercer of The Feelies explained the events that lead to the reformation and the eventual recording of Here Before.

Did you ever think that in 2011 you’d be sitting back talking about a new Feelies album?

Didn’t give it much thought for a while, no.

Did it ever seem like the band would be reactivated?

Well it could’ve gone either way. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. I think the fact that we never had a big fight and never really broke up in a traditional sense, we just kinda stopped playing. We never burned any bridges, so that possibility existed. The only real stumbling block was that Bill (Million) lived in Florida. So we stopped playing then.

It’s an interesting thing to think about even now, Glenn, as most bands can exist in different cities, thanks to the internet and Skype and all those kinds of things. It seems to stop less bands rehearsing and keeping together.

They do, but it is difficult though. We don’t play nearly as much as we’d like, but when we do we try to be pretty efficient about it.

You guys all weren’t ready to move to Florida yet? You weren’t going to have The Feelies playing retirement homes down there?

Maybe some day, I don’t know. Not yet.

The signs that you guys were getting reactivated were kinda easy to see. You did those Sonic Youth supports a couple of years ago, and then the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, so was it a nice ease back into being in the band to say ‘yes’ to a couple of shows and see how they went?

Well, when we first discussed reuniting, we were all in agreement that was wanted to have something other than pure nostalgia. We realised that would be an element to it, a big element, but we didn’t want it to be the only element. We wanted to make sure we were a fully functioning band, and the only way to exist like that is write more songs and record. So it was something we talked about right from the beginning and I think for the first couple of years, we were pretty content with just playing shows, and we started writing songs when it looked like we had enough and had to make a decision to put the live shows on the back burner so to speak, so that we could focus all of our energy on recording another record. It didn’t seem possible to do both at the same time.

It must’ve been interesting for you to look at a lot of other bands, and I guess people who were probably your contemporaries at the time who did get back together just for the sake of nostalgia, and must‘ve had much better paydays than they did when they were together the first time.

Well that’s ok if that’s what they wanna do, but for us it’s always been about creating music and recording music. It’s really our favourite part of the whole thing. It’s what drives us and motivates us to do it.

It certainly seems for all the name-checking The Feelies have gotten over the years being a cult or underground band hasn’t paid any bills, so you have to be in it for the right reasons, I guess.

Yeah, pretty much. Nowadays the way the business is, nobody’s buying records anymore. They don’t want to pay for music, so we’re not in it for the money.

Part of the charm, or maybe even the secret, with The Feelies stuff seems to be a bit of naivety about the way you guys played, when you first started out on those early records. Were you a bit worried that it might be like trying to capture lightning in a bottle, trying to get back to where you were or even a Feelies sound once you guys all got back together?

We didn’t give it much though, but once we started playing we knew that the sound would be there. We pretty much approached our instruments in the same way we always have, so if even our playing has gotten any more refined it’s still the same approach we take to how we play and how we interact. So I don’t think it could’ve helped sounding any other way.

So is there a different mindset you get in when you go to play a Feelies song or is it just the fact that it’s those certain people in a room. Did you have to kinda prepare yourself for how The Feelies were going to sound when you started to do this record?

No, there wasn’t much thinking at all. It was very intuitive and organic and natural and effortless, really.

Was there also less pressure in the fact that you had had a reasonably disjointed timeline before anyway, because there was six years between Crazy Rhythms and then the follow up. So you were kinda used to work what not all bands would consider a regular pace?

I think that’s part of it and also that each record we made had a slightly different sound to it, so we knew it had to reflect where we were at the time we mad it so, likewise this record reflects where we’re at now. The basic approach is just to be truthful and honest about how we did it.

There are a few references to the passing of time in the lyrics on Here Before. Were you conscious of marking that lyrically?

I think as the more time goes on, the more you have to reflect on, and I guess thinking about the fans and the friends it’s only natural it would come through in the lyrics.

There seems a bit more of a contentment as well, I guess. Like what we were saying early, you can’t be in it for the money, really, and the fact that you guys all got back together, and as hokey as it sounds, did it kinda mean that you were making a record for the right reasons and you feel that when you were listening to the album?

Well I think that comes through. Hopefully that comes through, the excitement that we felt when we were making it. I think also that it does have its moments of edginess too, not all kinda mellow.

Did you deliberately try and leave some mistakes in so that it wasn’t all ‘sitting on a porch, finger-plucking?’

Yeah, I guess on our Time For a Witness record we had started to use pro-tools a little bit and we were very careful to use it sparingly and with this record again, with the advancement in technology, it just made more sense to do it that way. We just tried to record it the same way we would with analogue.

You can’t be a complete luddite. Time’s moved on and I’m sure tapes were a lot more expensive than when The Feelies were making their first record, so you can’t not use pro-tools either.

That too, and just the time, we were very limited in our time and in our budget. It was certainly a lot easier to queue things up. We knew we probably would be able to finish the record in the studio, so I was able to do some recording here in my house. I have a studio in my basement, so I was able to record here and then transfer those tracks to the master tape and we wouldn’t have been able to do anything like that in previous situations.

It must be weird thinking back to the way you might’ve made, especially the first record, did it still seem now that it was made pretty quickly and intuitively as well, or does it seem like a very different era?

That was probably our longest record to make, at least close to the longest, and it wasn’t that easy. We used a studio that really wasn’t suited for rock n’ roll. It was a real big place that had recorded a lot of jazz and big bands, and the engineer really wasn’t that savvy with recording electric guitar. We had a lot of problems getting a good guitar sound, so consequently we ended up recording a lot of it direct with the idea that we would feed it back through an amp when we mixed in a different studio, we found that it had a certain edge and a certain tone I guess that kinda fit, so we decided to leave a lot of the direct guitars as they were.

So almost by default on that record you got The Feelies sound…

That’s one component of it, there’s a lot of things that contribute to the sound. The interaction of the rhythm is the main thing, probably. The role that the drums play, the interaction between the guitars. A lot of different elements really.

The other things is that on nearly every previous The Feelies album, you guys have rolled out a cover, you’ve done The Beatles, The Velvets and The Stooges, if the 20 year gap between this one and the last one, had you saved up enough songs that you didn’t need to have to do a cover version on this record?

Yeah, that’s pretty much it. In the past we put covers on mostly to fill up the record because we didn’t have enough songs, but this one we did.

I thought you might’ve been running out of classic artists to get round to covering. I thought the list might be getting shorter and shorter.

We still do cover songs and we still learn a new one at least once a year, I think.

Well I’m hoping that if you guys are back in business then there’s still room for an Australian band to covered by The Feelies in the second half of your career. You should be looking at doing an Easybeats song or something like that.

Maybe. Like INXS maybe…

We’ll draw the line there, thanks.

Ok (laughs).

Interview broadcast on Static on 28/04/11. Static can be heard on Sydney’s 2SER (107.3 FM) and via the Internet (www.2ser.com) every Thursday evening (AEST).

It’s been said by Webcuts in the past that Destroyer’s Dan Bejar is the Woody Allen of pop music. His idiosyncratic, poetic touch is less that of a lyricist but a storyteller with a revolving cast of characters (mostly women), and picking up on the ripples and waves they create to make them a part of his own interior monologue. An essential eighth of the mighty New Pornographers, Bejar has been recording as Destroyer since the 90′s. Kaputt, his ninth album is a sumptuous, rhapsodic slice of 80′s melodrama, immersing itself entirely in the era from the vintage instrumentation to Bejar’s own penchance for seeking the sublime out of what some might find the ridiculous.

A wordsmith second to none, taking a ride on record with Bejar is one entirely absent of dull moments. Given the list of many themes and inspirations Bejar revealed that may or may not have contributed to the making of the album, including “fretless bass… the hopelessness of the future of music… the pointlessness of writing songs for today… the Linn Drum… Avalon and, more specifically, Boys and Girls…”, Kaputt is Bejar recast as Bryan Ferry searching for his own Avalon. Static’s Chris Berkley (a man who’s love for the 80′s also knows no bounds) caught up with Dan Bejar on the road to talk Kaputt.

How have audiences been taking to the Destroyer live show this year? You’ve been out for quite a while.

I usually have my eyes closed but it seems that people for the most part are into it and more importantly the band seems pretty into it, so I take those as good signs.

Do you have your eyes closed because you’re nervous or something, or that‘s the way you have to be to do the performance?

Sometimes I open them. It really depends. It depends on what I’m hearing. Sometimes it helps me sing. It’s not ‘cos I’m nervous.

It’s just because you don’t want to look at all the ugly people in the audience, right?

The ugly people? Yeah, I have a hard time staring at those ones.

I was kind of curious to know what audiences had been thinking of the Kaputt live show. Was it a record that was designed to pull the rug out from under a few people?

I didn’t really design it with any specific intention, excepting at some point I designed it to be a record that it would be so impossible to tour I wouldn’t have to go on tour.

Well that didn’t work, did it?

No, it didn’t, and in fact it’s actually been pretty fun music to play. As far as people’s reactions to it, I don’t know.

It just seems with each Destroyer record you tend to really try something different and perhaps maybe want to confound expectations. Did you feel like you wanted to do that with Kaputt?

No, I’ve never really done that. I kinda just try and do things I like and the records change depending on who I’m collaborating with. I don’t think there’s that many expectations to confound. At this point I’ve made enough records where if one album sounds really different from the last there’s still not that much confounding going on.

So you said you designed this album as something you didn’t want to tour. Is that because, like you say, you have made a hell of a lot of records not only as Destroyer, but whether it be The New Pornographers or Swan Lake, do you feel much more at home in the studio, or is being live still exciting for you?

I think it can be really exciting. I do like tooling around in the studio a lot, but that also comes with its own set of dread, imagery, and also excitement. It’s all just about trying to make something that’s good, that’s not garbage. I would never make something specifically so that it was un-performable, because then I would just probably lay a sine wave to tape for 45 minutes and hand that into the label.

So you kinda do feel, I guess, the necessity to go tour an album?

I don’t really think about those things when I’m making music or in the studio. It’s the furthest thing from my mind. It’s only when things are done that I start to think about how it’s gonna work out on stage, or if it‘s gonna work out on stage.

To that end, how was it like making Kaputt in the studio?

Really casual. It took a long, long time. Way longer than anything else I’ve ever done. I kinda wandered in a couple nights a week for a while. A lot of meandering. I had a few demos that we used as templates. A lot of building things up from scratch. Then towards the deadline things got more intense. People started coming in to play as hard on their leads, and that‘s when the sax and the trumpet and the lead guitar and background vocals. All that stuff happened pretty quickly, and then just the madness of mixing and trying to make sense of it.

So how much of a vision do you have for an album like this? You say if you were calling up saxophone players and folks like that, you must have an idea of the way you want each Destroyer album to sound and in particular, Kaputt.

I had specific people in mind that I wanted to play, but at the same time I gave no guidance to anyone. No one had ever heard the songs before. No one heard what anyone else was doing. They just kinda came in and just really laid into it for an afternoon. That was kind of the working model that we had. We did have a template, we did have a palette for specific instruments and sounds that we had in mind from the get go. We tried hard to stick to that, you know.

Were you bandying words and phrases around? It feels like parts of Kaputt are soft-rock or sophisti-pop or whatever you want to call it, which are dirty words to a lot of people. Did you have certain records in mind, or like you say, a template that you wanted to base yourself on?

Some stuff, but I’m pretty fearless when it comes to things like that. There’s no genre that I find abhorrent. I don’t really see things in terms of genre. If there’s actual instruments that people despise, that has a knee-jerk reaction to, that’s fine, but I’m not like that. People hear like, a saxophone, or a treated trumpet, or a certain drum sample, like a linn drum sample or softer synth sounds, and when you pull it all together, it adds up to soft-rock, that’s cool if they think that. I personally don’t think that anything that Joseph played on the sax sounds like “Careless Whisper”. I don’t think that JP played anything that sounds like Simply Red. You just have to listen to the music for 30 seconds to figure that out, but there’s all sorts of shorthand that people use to get a point across.

You also seem to approach all this material in a very sincere way. It probably suffers at the hands of people trying to being ironic. Whereas apart from a few lyrical jibes, the playing is top notch and consummate on Kaputt.

Yeah, I think that’s a good point actually. The playing is really good, it’s not hack, and we’re all older so it’s not mining uncharted territory looking for something that was considered horrible and then holding it up to the light in a new way. I’ve done that when I was a kid, and that’s cool and it’s good that it happens, but that’s not what was happening here. John Collins who did a lot of the mixing work and a lot of the synth stuff, he was buying Kraftwerk records and Avalon and things like that, when they were coming out as proper albums.

So you were using guys that lived through it the first time?

Exactly, yeah. You know, I’m getting up there. I remember that stuff.

You said you referenced a few of those albums already. Did you grow up on some of those records you mentioned, be it even George Michael or Simply Red. A track like “Suicide Demo For Kara Walker” wouldn’t sound out of place on Prefab Sprout’s Steve McQueen. Were they all records that you already owned yourself?

Yeah, I did own those records. What happened was when I first started getting into music in the early 90’s, I kind of put all that stuff in a box and stopped listening to it for a long time. For some reason I started thinking about it again. Even if I wasn’t actively listening to it, like Prefab Sprout records or New Order records, and also things like people that I always listened to lots, but kind of abandoned once they hit the 80’s, like Roxy Music and Bowie, and then I started thinking about what they did when they got older and started listening to Avalon and Boys And Girls and stuff like that.

Well a lot of those English bands for someone like you growing up in Canada were probably a bit more exotic or underground. I guess if you grew up in England they would’ve been chart bands, but they were probably bands that not everyone from where you grew up would’ve come across.

Yeah, I think you’re right. I started thinking about pop music for the first time making this record and examples of pop music or radio music that I actually liked, because it’s pretty few and far between and I couldn’t really think of American examples. All I could think about was for the most part maybe English examples from my youth, whether it was, like you said, a Prefab Sprout song or a Style Council song or a New Order song. Stuff that would’ve made it to the radio over there, but over here it was still considered new wave or college rock. That’s mostly what started this going.

There’s this great line in the song “Kaputt” which says “Sounds, Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME, all sound like a dream to me”. Did it feel like that when you were growing up? Did it seem like another world?

I wasn’t really thinking in those terms. I was thinking of like someone on a sick bed who was thinking about things that had died.

So it’s almost like a bygone era or something?

Sure. Words that barely mean anything to them, but just trying to remember what it was that they even were.

Well, I’m glad you’re not on the sick bed just yet. I’m glad that Destroyer is an on-going project. If this thing has been a real chore to tour, does that mean an Australian tour is looking pretty unlikely for this album?

No, there’s been talk about it already. It’s just a matter of going to Europe for a few weeks in June, and then go back and play some festivals in August, but after that we don’t really have anything planned for the States or anything. There’s been some initial talk of trying to get over there. Just trying to figure out how to do it, when to do it.

Well if you can’t manage to bring the full band down, we have some consummate professionals I’m sure could be dialled up down here. There’s a lot of sax players who’d be chomping at the bit to get out on stage with you.

I think you guys would like these people. I think you would get a kick out of them. It would be good if all of us could make it over.

Interview broadcast on Static on 21/04/11. Static can be heard on Sydney’s 2SER (107.3 FM) and via the Internet (www.2ser.com) every Thursday evening (AEST).

The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horses. A fitting album title for these Montreal, Quebec, Canadians, as much as it was a challenge for a band who’ve skirted success but in turn garnered acclaim for their lush and psychedelic sound. Their most recent album The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night appeared in early 2010, and once again it was that intimate and expansive sound, coupled with vocalist/guitarist Jace Lacek’s Beach Boys-like falsetto that saw the band release their most definitive collection of songs yet. Touring Australia for the very first time, Chris Berkley of Static caught up with Jace and drummer Kevin Laing of The Besnard Lakes to talk about the slow rise of the band and their move into film scores.

Welcome gentlemen. It only took you three albums but we got you here.

Kevin: It’s a long way. That’s a crazy plane ride… That’s like 36 hours of travelling with stop-overs. That’s really crazy.

It’s not like you were coming to Hell or anything…

Kevin: No, paradise. It’s upside down Canada… (laughs)

I guess the fact that it took The Besnard Lakes so long to get here is a bit of a metaphor for the band’s career anyway, is it not? Is it definitely a case of slow and steady wins the race?

All: Exactly.

Not coincidentally you named your last album … Are The Dark Horse? Do you still feel a bit like that?

Kevin: Definitely. I think it’s been a bit of a slow-burn for us, and I think that’s fine too. It lets us sit back and concentrate on the music we want to make.

It was almost the fact that you called your record that that got you attention. Did you feel that the tide did begin to turn with that last album?

Jace: I don’t know, maybe…

You don’t still get mobbed walking down the street do you?

Jace: Oh no, oh god no (laughs). Not even close. Montreal was a pretty interesting time when that all came out. We had a friend in Montreal who called us ‘the dark horse’ because all of our other friends were becoming well-known and going off touring all the time and we were the only band going (in mopey voice) “we’re a really cool band, does anybody want to sign us?” (laughs).

There must be Seattle bands that have those stories too you know. I’m sure you need to sit around with Tad and talk about why it was Nirvana and not them…

Jace. Totally! But like Kevin says, I love a slow-burn, I think it’s wicked. We can just take it easy and figure out how things work as it goes along instead of jumping into it and getting lost in the shuffle.

You guys have learnt how to step out of the shadows a bit, I mean, heaven forbid, you’re showing your faces in press photos…

Kevin: We’re not that interesting… (laughs)

Jace: Yeah, we are, totally! (laughs)

Kevin: We don’t sit in the genre of what seems to be happening. We’ve always been on the outskirts of what’s considered hip and what the young kids like. It seems now that everyone is starting to come to us, which is nice.

Jace: I think even …Are The Dark Horse, we were pinching ourselves, even the moderate success that it had. We were like “well, I hope we sell a couple.. a thousand records, would be nice”. It was pretty much gravy.

It also seems to be the thing though, in a 21st century age of information, I like the fact that there’s still a bit of mystery about The Besnard Lakes. You haven’t pulled away the curtain too much.

Kevin: I’ve always liked that. I remember when I was a kid, growing up in a small city in Canada, and it was hard to get magazines and there was no internet, so you would know very little about the bands you were in love with. All I could do was stare at the artwork. I was really enamoured by that, and still am. It’s the information age and everybody got to consume and know everything about the band, but I love the fact that there’s always a bit of mystery.

With that slow-burn of the band, have you felt you’ve been gradually arriving at a sound for The Besnard Lakes, or was it something formed in your heads from the outset?

Kevin: We just get into the studio and do it, usually.

Jace: We don’t really rehearse material, we just go in and put some ideas down and the studio kinda helps us construct it. Usually when we make a record, we’re just waiting for a block of time where we can go in and do it, and it just comes together that way.

But I guess there’s certain ingredients. For example, have you always sung falsetto, Jace, or was that something you found out you could do and apply to The Besnard Lakes?

Jace: I sang falsetto when I was a kid and everyone made fun of me, so I stopped. On the first record, Volume 1, I didn’t sing falsetto at all. It was natural for me to sing in that range, so I felt comfortable then. When ….Are The Dark Horse came along, I was ‘you know what, screw it. I’m just going to do it and if everyone hate’s it, I don’t care”, but I gotta be comfortable doing what I do, so that‘s how it happened.

Were you guys snickering at the first rehearsal when that happened, Kevin?

Kevin: Not at all, actually…

Jace: He’s got a better falsetto than I do! (laughs)

Kevin: I don’t know about that, but uh… We love the Beach Boys and Roy Orbison… I was really listening to a lot of Beach Boys when I first met Jace. I was doing some recording in his studio and I heard Volume 1 and there’s a little bit in there, but when you said. …Are The Dark Horse coming out more with the falsetto, the vocals are in the background on Volume 1. It was a nice change to bring the vocals upfront. I liked it, actually.

So do you have a lot of discussions about how a record is going to sound or is it literally what happens when x number of you get in a room?

Jace: It just comes together.

Kevin: A skeletal structure, put our heads together, into the studio with the songs and then rehearse them later (laughs).

Jace: That’s a great formula. I don’t know about these guys, but I hate rehearsing. I just wanna play shows. Normal band plan would be like, you know, rehearse songs on tour, rehearse new songs for about a year and then go in the studio and record them and then again play them for another two years on the road. We have the luxury of being able to just go into the studio and make the songs and then we have to figure out how to play them. And then so our rehearsals before we go on the road to go do them, they‘re working out these songs that are totally brand new to us. When we start playing them live they’re still exciting and fresh, instead of dead and worn out because we‘ve been playing them so long.

Is this because you’ve got that luxury that you run a studio in Montreal called Breakglass that puts you in a unique position do you think, to be able to work out songs?

Kevin: Definitely. Well, the studio has to have time for us sometimes.

But, you must hang around the studio and hear a lot of bands you don’t want to sound like.

Jace: I always say that I’ve been very lucky with bands coming into the studio. I pretty much love all that comes in. The people are amazing. But I always find that being stuck in a studio and working with so many bands sometimes somebody will do something I’ve never really thought of, so then I’ll just make a mental note of it and then just steal it and use it for our records (laughs).

Another adjective that gets bandied around for The Besnard Lakes is ‘cinematic’ and now you guys have done some of that. I was reading that you did a Mark Ruffalo score?

Jace: We did a score for Mark Ruffalo, his first sort of directorial debut, a film called ‘Sympathy for Delicious’, a film that is still … I think it’s still coming out. I had a short little email conversation with him about a week or two ago and he says it’s coming out at the end of April, finally. And then we just finished another one from a director in France and she contacted us, the film’s called ‘Memories Corner’ and we just finished scoring that, so we’ve done two films now.

Kevin: It’s awesome, wicked fun. You really have to practice restraint.

No seven minute songs…

Kevin: We love to layer shit. It’s a really cool task to be able to make you music seem like it’s not there. It’s super fun.

And a lot of bands think they’re scoring imaginary movies, but you get to do that. So does this mean a load of budding Australian directors are going to come out of the woodwork now that they’ve heard you say that.

Kevin: Bring’em on. It’s a lot of fun.

Jace: And maybe we’ll come score it… here. Just fly us down.

Kevin: Just film us on Bondi Beach, we’ll play the music to it.

Hopefully it won’t take you another three albums to come back here.

Kevin: Oh no. Now that we’ve been here, we’ll be back every month (laughs).

Jace: I might not leave… (laughs).

Interview broadcast on Static on 10/03/11. Static can be heard on Sydney’s 2SER (107.3 FM) and via the Internet (www.2ser.com) every Thursday evening (AEST).