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).

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).

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).

Baltimore’s Beach House first appeared in 2006 with their self-titled debut, a gorgeous collection of dizzying songs built around Victoria Legrand’s awash-with-reverb harmonies, church-style organ and Alex Scally’s languidly strummed guitar. It was their style and approach, reminiscent of Mazzy Star, Yo La Tengo and This Mortal Coil, that found favour with a like-minded audience. With their sophomore release, Devotion and follow-up Teen Dream, Beach House have retained the same essence and appeal that made their debut such a captivating listen, but pushing themselves beyond the realms of peer and influence to create a body of work that stands on its own.

Recently touring Australia and appearing as part of the travelling Laneway Festival, Chris Berkley caught up with Victoria and Alex of Beach House to talk about their gradual rise, and amongst other things, how to keep cheese out of the live set.

It’s nice to play those big outdoor venues and I guess it makes quite a change to the last time that Beach House were here, those shows for Devotion were so intimate.

Victoria: Yep.

Are you coping okay with the big venues?

Victoria: I think we are, I mean it was two and half years ago that we were last here and a lot happens in a year. I think we have definitely made a lot of adjustments and gotten used to playing quite large shows. But we also still really like the intimate shows that we play, like we played one at Mullumbimby.

I mean it’s not just something that’s happened in Sydney, it’s been a worldwide thing for Beach House I guess, in the twelve months since Teen Dream came out you’ve been doing these bigger shows and having probably more rapturous fans. Is that something that you guys saw coming?

Alex: We’ve toured the US maybe eight times and Europe six times and every single tour they’ve been bigger shows and we’ve tried harder to change our show. It’s been really steady. It wasn’t an over night thing, it’s been a very, very natural growth and you know it is still really fun to play intimate shows, but it kind of is better for us now to play to six hundred people than three hundred, it’s almost like the songs mean more in a bigger space, really loud. There’s something about the growth that has been completely natural, it’s not like we’re doing what we were doing three years ago but for some reason we’re now in front of twelve hundred people. They go hand in hand with one another, the songs have got bigger so the crowds have got bigger.

And you both coped okay?

Victoria: I think we’re both coping. It’s not even coping, it’s we’re lucky to be doing what we’re doing and we’re enjoying it. It’s extremely miraculous to be able to be on this continent.

Is that something you have asked yourselves, “Why?”. I mean obviously apart from your tremendous talent, is it something that you guys have sat around and talked about?

Alex: No, we’ve been doing this for six years now and I don’t think at any point we looked back and wondered why. We love making music and the goal has always been to play it and enjoy it and do it well and to get better and that’s what we’ve been doing.

Victoria: I think working and trying to constantly improve. I agree with Alex, I think that is the key to our focus.

Alex: I mean you always want to experience new things so if we were still playing in two hundred person places, that wouldn’t be bad but it wouldn’t be new for sure.

Have you felt yourself especially Victoria, you’ve had to grow into this role of being the front woman, are you’re making bigger moves on stage. I’ve noticed there is more hair swirling going on!

Victoria: All the physicality of it has been like as the music and as the size of the audience has sort of fed each other back and forth, I think the physicality of it is also back and forth with the music. I always think of our live show though as an entity so it’s not just my hair, or it’s the three of us, it’s Dan, it’s Alex, it’s all the bodies moving in space through the dark, through the lights, through the shapes that we bring with us, so it’s all about composition really. I think that’s a part of Beach House, it’s a contained wildness and it’s not like a Florence and the Machine – get out and do some cheesy hand clapping thing – I don’t think that’s ever going to be part of Beach House.

Alex: We’re never going to do audience participation.

Victoria: Sorry!

Alex: I just think that that’s the silliest stupidest thing, I guess for some things it makes complete sense, but when it’s forced it’s one of the most cringey moments.

You’re doing “Hello Cleveland” and stuff like that now?

Victoria: Yeah, “Hello Sydney!” I think it’s interesting to think of the idea of a front person because you’re not, you’re an entity, you just happen to be a person that’s in the middle who may just happen to be looked at a little bit more but really you’re all functioning, you need each other.

Alex: It’s the voice though, the voice is how everybody connects to music and it’s the centre point.

Victoria: Yeah, but you see what I mean, it’s never going to be that all of a sudden I leap forward and I start trying to be Kate Bush or something.

I’m interested in this stuff because it seems that Beach House is one of those bands where the two of you from the start created this private universe which is what Beach House feels like it was about, I mean even for the recording of Teen Dream, the pair of you went away to that church in upstate New York with Chris Coady to make the record, are you still reasonably protective of the way you go about your stuff?

Victoria: I would say yes we are extremely protective, we’re hyper aware of the things that could possibly damage a universe that is extremely important, it can be very fragile and it’s the thing that feeds the entity – The Beach House.

It’s also that thing you were saying Alex, like with the shows you want to do bigger shows every time round, I guess you don’t want to make the same album every time around either, do you?

Alex: It’s not bigger, it’s for instance we took an immense amount of care putting this record together and I don’t mean to say this in a snooty way but larger venues have really nice systems and really good things and you can do really precise quality work and I think that that is a big thing, we’re growing artistically so everything has to go up. It’s not just “bigger is better”. We don’t want to get into an arena where everything sounds like shit, we want everything to be pristine and perfect and have the right feeling and have the right sound. So that’s what it’s more about, knowing exactly what you want and knowing how to get it. We also don’t like huge venues so I think there’s a huge part of us that is set that wants to keep….like you can still have an insanely close experience with a thousand people, but it’s all about choosing the right venues talking to anyone booking you and say we don’t want to play this kind of place and making sure, we don’t ever want to lose that intimacy, we don’t ever want to lose the feeling of feeling really connected to the music. I don’t think we ever want to make pop songs and just slam them out, get a bunch of Gatorade commercials!

Victoria: Bigger is fine as long as it’s done with care and I think when there is a lot of great care then you can have that intimate experience with twelve hundred people because it resonates it’s like when you make a record or a song and you put a lot of care in every moment I think that that energy hopefully is, not reciprocated, but it reverberates.

Have you both sort of had to keep an eye on each other as well, I mean how is your relationship? I would like to think that a song like “Take Care” could almost be about the pair of you in terms of making sure that each others alright the bigger the band gets and the more intrusions that come along to Beach House.

Alex: I think we are a whole touring family, there’s a core of four of us but then some tours will have six people just helping out and doing tour managing and whatever, but we always keep it very, very family like, everybody helps with everything, everyone takes care of one another.

No one who doesn’t have the secret handshake is in?

Alex: Yeah exactly! But it has to be about love and it has to be caring, it can’t be just do your job, that can’t be what this is about for us.

Victoria: It’s not quite secret handshake, but it kind of is because there are a lot of people that you come across and you brush by, but I think that there are few people that you can actually feel something with, feel protected by or feel safe with.

So with all this touring that you guys have the last twelve months how much have you been thinking about album number four, Alex, have you mapped it out?

Alex: I think about it almost constantly (laughs) because for me touring can be really hard but one of the best things about touring for us has always been that when you play your old songs hundreds of times you know what you never want to do again and you get really excited to be playing things that aren’t those songs so like that again we’re thinking a lot about it all the time we have tons of songs already started and as soon as we get back from this trip it’s going to be full on so we’re extremely excited about it.

It must be exciting to be getting off the road.

Victoria: Yeah, and then it’ll be exciting to get back on the road with a new world.

Transcription: Caleb Rudd
Photos: Matt Palmer (from the Brisbane Laneway 2011 festival)

Interview broadcast on Static on 27/01/11. Static can be heard on Sydney’s 2SER (107.3 FM) and via the Internet (www.2ser.com) every Thursday evening (AEST).

Barely eighteen months since the release of one of 2009′s dark delights, the epic Sun Gangs, Finn Andrews the New Zealand bred, England based leader of The Veils has released possibly one of the highlights of 2011 with Troubles of the Brain. Over the course seven songs Finn and his band mates explore less grandiose and orchestral avenues than those on Sun Gangs favouring instead acoustic guitars, simpler arrangements and a lighter air in general. From the upbeat indie-pop describing love’s first rush in “Bloom”, to the bitter flipside of the same theme with the folk/glam rock of “Don’t Let the Same Bee Sting You Twice” to the more familiar Veils emoting in “Wishbone” and “Grey Lynn Park”, it may well be The Veils’ most accessible record yet.

The EP also marks The Veils’ first release on their own label, Pitch Beast Records, after a nine year, three LP tenure on Rough Trade, and forsaking the professional recording studio for Finn’s home studio with production duties handled by Finn and indie producer par excellence Bernard Butler. Chris Berkley tracked down Mr Andrews just before the release of Troubles of the Brain (the title of which is taken from Macbeth) to talk about the differences in recording at home, the reasoning behind an EP instead of an album, going out on his own label and having a fervent fanbase to help that transition.

Why an EP this time around, did you kind of want to break the album cycle? How did you end up with a seven track EP for The Veils?

Seven tracks wasn’t the initial intention but, as is often the case, you just start writing and find it hard to stop once you start. That was kind of it really. They’re just little experiments, all done at home for the first time, and we’re putting it out on our own label so it’s kind of an experiment in complete independence.

So did you wanted to test the waters with an EP?

It could’ve ended up being an album but it just felt like it was a nice structure, a new structure to try, as opposed to the standard ten song commitment.

Were Veils’ productions getting more elaborate as well, is that why you did this at home? I mean Sun Gangs was quite an immense piece of work.

Yeah, I guess it was an experiment really. I wanted to see what it would be like to do it at home and to do it in your own time and without the pressures of money and time and just to make it very organic. I think it’s turned out great.

Did you kind of feel that you were reeling it back in a bit though? The songs themselves are quite short, there’s no “Larkspur” (Sun Gang’s close to nine minute epic).

I suppose it’s a lot more concise and it’s a lot poppier than anything we’ve done before as well so that was kind of fun. Maybe a little gentler too.

Do you say to yourself I’m gonna write some short pop songs, or did they turn out that way? Which way around does that stuff work?

It tends to go completely the opposite way that I intended to go. I think I have gotten better at that as well — trying to be less and less involved in it and just write what you feel you need to and then put it out. Because of the way it was recorded you have less option to go make this huge kind of sprawling song, so I think it’s a slower, more intimate and experienced EP to anything we’ve done.

Did you manage to keep the band line-up for this Veils EP then? Was everyone that played on Sun Gangs involved in this EP or is this much more just a solo project?

It’s kind of a mixture I suppose; I played the drums on a few and Ray’s my relatively new drummer, he plays on a couple, and the other guys came and guested, I suppose, it was more that kind of arrangement.

And their egos are okay with that?

Yeah, they have the best egos really, they were very good about it, it was something I felt I really needed to do as a songwriter, to work in this way. It’s an EP as well so the whole thing’s a little more relaxed.

Because you had taken to releasing home demos on your blog, a year or two ago as well, you’d done this with at least one song, are you kind of enthralled by that idea of having things out more quickly?

Yeah I love it, I love that kind of turnaround and just being able to spend a few days on something and giving it away as well, I’ve been doing quite a bit, just like a Christmas, or a wintery kind of song, just write and record it immediately and you’re not dependent on anyone giving you the green light or needing to get lots of money off someone to record it. I love it.

It’s not a completely solo Veils thing as well, because you’ve reunited with producer Bernard Butler who worked on the first Veils album, right?

Yeah, he did one track on Sun Gangs as well. It was literally because I was learning to record things myself and I wanted someone I trusted and had worked with before to come in towards the end really and make sure everything was sounding okay.

So was Bernard just a glorified instruction manual then or did he have input into the way these songs ended up sounding?

Yes, I’ll try not to phrase it like that. He is great. You do very much run the risk of disappearing out of your own arse, we’ve got a MIDI thing and all that, it’s very easy to never stop working on songs when you have no time limit. He was good to come in and get to the core of what the songs were, really. It was a very simple, we only worked for maybe three or four days.

I guess all those songs were shorter so there was less work to do, Finn? Most of them actually clock in at very close to similar times that are around the 2:30-3 minute mark.

Yeah well a lot of my favourite songs are around that length and I didn’t see any point in swelling them bigger than they needed to be.

As you’ve mentioned earlier, this new Veils EP marks the departure of the band from Rough Trade. It’s a bold new world, was that something that was on the horizon or you wanted to do, or how did that come about Finn, that you guys left the label?

This whole EP has been more like an experiment with the idea that, that if you could do it all yourself and have that quick turnaround and no dependence on other people, that things would just be a lot easier, a lot less complicated and you won’t get bogged down in the album cycle which I always found really counter-intuitive.

And so you’re going okay as a label mogul as well then? Pitch Beast is your label.

I don’t know, it completely remains to be seen. It’s an experiment and we might well go running back to the big fat arms of a record company at some point, but I’d always really regret it if I never tried it.

Also with The Veils you seem to have that luxury now where you have a very fervent fan-base, so there will be people that follow you no matter what label or where a piece of music of yours comes out right, because they’re waiting for it?

Yeah, we’re very lucky with that. It’s totally something that seems wise to make the most of and everything’s changed, you know. The record industry is imploding on itself and no one really knows what’s going on and it seems like a good time to be experimenting a little and not being tied to the old ways.

It must shock to someone like your dad who was in Shriekback and XTC and signed to labels for years to see you working like this, have you spoken to him much about it?

Yes, I think he was delighted with it. It’s something he’d always wanted to do, but it was a lot harder back then to do something like this. I found it quite surprising how easy it is with the technology now to do this, to set up your own label. It’s the thing I think he always wished he could have done, he just hopped from label to label his whole life.

So is this a new beginning then? Are you thinking about making another Veils album and are the rest of the band involved in future plans, or touring or things like that Finn?

Yes, that will be the next thing, I think we’ll be going somewhere very different again for the record. I think we’ve kind of said what we needed to with the EP now, and I guess we need a bit more experimentation before we decide what we’re doing for the next thing. I’d love ideally, you know, it would be great if we could keep it on this label and never look back.

So there are still some ten minute songs left in you as well?

No, I think that’s enough of that as well.

Oh really?

You have to try these things, you know, you can’t pretend like you’ve got it all figured out. You’ve gotta try.

As long as brevity won’t always be the order of the day. You know you’ve never made an album in Australia Finn, so that’s something you should consider as well, maybe number four could be made here?

I’d love to, you’ve got some lovely studios there.

Interview broadcast on Static on 13/01/11. Static can be heard on Sydney’s 2SER (107.3 FM) every Thursday evening (AEST) or streamed at your convenience at Static’s Mixcloud site.

The first time I heard of Foals was in early 2008 when an old friend mentioned the name “Foals” when talking about new bands to listen to adding, “I think you’d like them”. As he knew my tastes, specifically my shoegaze/Britpop obsession, I took notice and promptly sought out Antidotes from the Oxford quintet. Ostensibly an indie rock record it took cues from the weirder sides of post-punk: the danceable bass lines of Gang of Four, the shouted/sung vocal style of Wire, the skeletal guitar lines and brass of early Hunters & Collectors and the rhythms of Talking Heads combining them with more modern maths rock timings and percussion, unsettling synthesizer and obtuse lyrics with a predilection for avian creatures, flight and insects. It wasn’t an easy listen but it was a totally unforgettable one.

So to say expectations were high for their second album Total Life Forever, both personally and from the listening community at large, would be stating the exceedingly obvious but from the grandeur and exquisite melancholy of “Spanish Sahara”, the frenetic indie-pop of “This Orient” to the dance funk of “Miami” it met and exceeded them with uncommon ease. Total Life Forever elevated Foals into the rare league of artists who maintain credibility with a more accessible sonic palate, and thus gaining a larger listening base, whilst still remaining true to their experimental pop principles. Chris Berkley spoke to bassist Walter Gervers while the band was in Australia for the St. Jerome’s Laneway festivals and as it turns out some recording on the sly.

Is the Australian summer heat is treating all you poor pale boys in Foals okay?

Yeah, it’s factor fifty plus at the moment! It’s kind of killing us but, it’s amazing. Couldn’t have picked a better time to come over, actually.

You guys in Foals actually snuck back into Australia a couple of weeks ago and not to soak up the sun, but to do some work. You’ve sort of been ensconced in Sydney in the studio, right?

Yeah it’s been great, we’ve been just doing some work with a pal of ours called Jono at this studio in Sydney just for a couple of weeks. We thought basically we’d come out early before the shows started, not only to get over the jet lag but actually get some stuff done, get back to the studio before we forget any new bits and bobs that we’ve got going for the next record.

This pal of yours, this is Jono Ma from Lost Valentinos right? Who had done remixes and stuff like that in the past for you guys.

The very same.

Was he at you to come over and get you in the studio or did just work out that way?

Well it kind of worked out that way. His brother, Dave, has done the majority of our videos and photos and various things with us and we’ve known him for years so it just made sense to go with someone we knew and we’d met Jono a few times. It just seemed like fun and a good opportunity for him to do some engineering for us and we’ve been really pleased. It’s kind of cool to be recording bits and pieces already, it’s very early stages, everything is in it’s infancy, but it feels like we’re buying ourselves some time which is great.

I mean the last Foals album Total Life Forever came out less than twelve months ago, so this is not a proper actual recording of an album, this is you guys just getting some ideas down is it?

Yeah, it’s getting ideas down, just recording some bits before we forget them because we have a tendency as a band to jam new things and quite often in sound checks when we’ll be in a rush and we’ll be like “Oh you’ve got to remember that thing that we did!” and stuff gets lost. So it’s kind of important to document these things.

Come on, there’s even those voice recorders on iPhones now, there’s no excuse for not recording something all the time!

True, that is very true. Yannis has just got Logic going so we can actually fiddle with parts and actually do things proper!

So you’re slowly joining the twenty-first century are you?

(Laughs) It’s taken us a while but yeah. You see us walking around with those boom boxes!

Each Foals album has been recorded far from your Oxford home, I mean you did Antidotes in New York and you did Total Life Forever in Gothenburg. Do you need to go away to think about recording Foals now? Is it hard to do it at home?

It’s not that it’s hard to do; I just think it’s really healthy for us to go away on an expedition somewhere with an aim to not come home until we’ve finished the record basically. It’s nice to be away from distractions, it’s nice to let the environment where you go to have an effect on the record, which it definitely has in the last couple of albums and it just gives you an opportunity to work elsewhere and meet other people and be out of your comfort zone.

I think that’s what you need to be doing when you’re making an album because then the studio becomes home, it becomes headquarters and it’s more productive rather than going down the road to London a couple of days a week and then breaking out of studio mode as it where. You’re just completely engulfed in it which does make it hard work and it does mean that sometimes you do lose focus as well because you’re listening to too much and you’re there too much but it’s worked for us so far.

For both those first two Foals albums you guys used outside producers, both of whom coincidentally enough had been in other bands like Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio did the first record and Luke Smith from Clor did the second one, are you thinking about using an outside producer again for the third Foals album or are you ready to actually go it alone?

We’ve actually been talking about this already, but it’s always good to have an outside influence and an outside perspective and someone to stop us over working things and point us in the right direction. Because as much as we’ve learnt as a band we don’t know everything by any means and it’s really healthy to have somebody there who can say “Trust me, this song needs to go in this direction, let’s strip this out, stop noodling around” that kind of thing, and I think that if we were to do it amongst the five of us we’d never be satisfied and we’d just keep re-working songs and we wouldn’t leave things alone. So maybe in the future when we learn a bit more restraint then we’ll do that but I think definitely getting a relationship with a producer and with the engineers as well is incredibly important and it affects the records, usually.

Even if sometimes that can be fraught, because I know famously that you guys didn’t end up using the mix that Dave Sitek did for Antidotes, but it’s still healthy to have that person in there initially offering ideas and being the peacemaker sometimes when you guys in Foals are making a record?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Dave was so valuable for that and for advice to how to operate as a band. We hadn’t even made a record before and it was all quite alien to us and we felt the pressure a lot as well as people were waiting to see if we could actually make a good first record so he was really good at kind of tutoring us in the right direction. With Luke as well doing Total Life Forever, he had such good ears and a good head for sound and he was all about the quality of the recording like the input going into tools, or going into the desk, it needed to be of a high quality so we’d do a lot more live takes with all of us in the room and actually trying to nail it, play the song all the way through rather than going into a booth one by one which can be little bit soulless at times. He really made us work hard for it and it was quite tough graft but it was great. Without people doing that we’d probably just operate in a sphere that we were comfortable with.

And to that end, how cerebral an experience is putting a Foals album together and how much of it is gut instinct? I mean, you guys are probably quite a thinking man’s band, do you put a lot of thought into the way that Foals’ music turns out on record?

Yeah, definitely. We have quite a weird relationship with each other, the five of us, without being able to articulate to each other we really know what kind of direction we want once things start rolling. Yannis obviously writes all the lyrics and he’ll explain things and we’ll be on board so it’s really sort of a group thing but it’s always very difficult to explain, if that makes sense? We say to each other we all know what this song needs to do; we just may not be able to do it yet.

I’m quite envious that you guys in Foals get lyrics explained to you by Yannis, he should be doing that in a broader term. There should be lecture tours!

(Laughs) Yeah, I know! It’s very important to be on board with everything like that.

I think also lyrically though he also likes being that little trapped in an enigma as well, doesn’t he? It must be nice sometimes to not have to explain himself to the broader populous.

Sure, I think things get diluted a bit if they’re explained too much. Some things should just be left for people to make of them what they will. Often the lyrics don’t have huge messages behind them, he uses a lot of imagery in them which is just helping paint a picture. I think sometimes people read too much into things, but that’s fine.

(Laughs) Well you guys must be doing something right because you’re nominated for five NME Awards so people are getting it in some way.

Yeah I was thrilled about that; we’ve never won anything before so maybe we will this time.

I reckon this is your year for prizes, let’s make it happen!

Let’s hope so! To be honest it’s been such a good year anyway and we’re just so pleased that the album has been so well received that kind of stuff it’s not what makes it for us at all, but it would be funny if we got something!

Photo: Lee Gwyn (slideshow, thumbnail) from Brisbane Laneway.

Interview broadcast on Static on 03/02/11. Static can be heard on Sydney’s 2SER (107.3 FM) every Thursday evening (AEST) or streamed at your convenience at Static’s Mixcloud site.