Since their debut in 2011, Wild Child has become a staple in the Austin, Texas indie scene, but stolen hearts around the world with their endearing ukulele melodies, honest lyrics, and charming live performances. Sweeping the festival circuit this upcoming summer to perform their latest effort, Fools, the folksy six piece is continuously on the rise.

Before performing their first of three hometown South by Southwest showcases, founding duo of Kelsey Wilson and Alexander Beggins (who may or may not be newly engaged) sat down with Transverso at local favorite, Swan Dive, for a chat about their latest album, touring, and the inspiration behind it all.

Director: Christian Sorensen Hansen Artist: Wild Child Album: The Runaround (2013) Label: The Noise Company Purchase on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-runaround/id689505418 New album 'Fools' out now.

TRANSVERSO: Fools came out in October, how’s that been going?

KELSEY WILSON: It’s going great, we have a lot of really good festivals lined up because of it.

I’ve heard third installments of anything, whether it’s an album, TV series, book, is typically harder to write. Was this true for Fools?

WILSON: Writing has never been an issue for us, that’s something that has always been there. With the first record we did it all ourselves. We rented equipment and figured it out. For the second record we did it professionally in a studio with a producer, like a nine-to-five kind of thing. This last record we found our favorite parts of both of those and just used them. We were in a studio but we could be there all night and we were just with homie producers, so at 2 AM if I was like, “I wanna do vocals right now!” I could.

How has Fools changed your live show?

ALEXANDER BEGGINS: Well, it’s kind of a curse because we just want to play all the new songs we just wrote, but we have to play a back catalog, but it’s been good and I think we’ve written a lot for our live show in mind. There are bigger songs, some more crowd friendly foot-stomping tunes. It’s weird how your live shows can dictate what you write.

What inspires Wild Child as creative individuals?

WILSON: Other people. It’s always about experiences we’ve had with other people, we can only write about exactly what’s happening. It’s always straight from the journal, which makes it kind of hard because it’s extremely personal and really honest but we cant write something that we don’t agree with entirely and feel entirely. So, yeah it’s always just exactly what’s happening which is funny because then you sing about those tiny ass moments for the next two years every day and it’s like, "I’m still talking about that?"

You’re forced in to remembering those small moments repeatedly.

WILSON: And you have to get right back in that headspace every time you sing it, and Fools is pretty extreme.

Wild Child came together as a band from writing about break ups and situations like that, so is it hard to perform those songs over and over again even after those feelings have passed?

WILSON: After awhile they start to mean different things. You can attach songs that we wrote four years ago to different people. We wrote a song four years ago and still to this day we’ll be playing it live and be like, “That’s what I meant - that’s what that means - I get it now.” So they’re constantly evolving the more we experience and the more that we play them. It’s not actually always the same, which is cool.

It makes the meaning change over time, so it gives it a whole new feeling towards it.

WILSON: And you get to celebrate these experiences through meeting other people who’ve had them and connected to the song, so the songs stop meaning a song about a bad thing that happened and now it’s a song that connects you to thousands of strangers you don’t know.

So how does it feel playing SXSW as a band from Austin?

BEGGINS: It’s really comfortable, this is like in our backyard and we actually only play Austin like once a year, so it's fun for us to get to play. But it feels like no pressure at all we already have everything we need, so it’s not like we’re trying to find this, we need this, this guys gonna be here. We’re just here and lets play some songs. It doesn’t really feel like a festival to me.

WILSON: Yeah it’s just that one time that our city gets trashed and super crowded.

Back in Chicago we have Lollapalooza, but it's more contained.

WILSON: We’re going to Lollapalooza for the first time this year.

BEGGINS: We’re stoked; really excited about that.

Are there any cities you are especially excited to go to for this upcoming tour?

WILSON: We have our favorites, I think we’ve played everywhere now so it’s kind of like what friends we have that are living there that we haven’t seen in awhile. It’s always nice to go to New York, LA, Chicago. Chicago has always been really good to us. Always.

BEGGINS: We’re doing a lot of stuff in Canada this year, too. Vancouver for the first time will be really exciting.

Wild Child has a sort of grassroots fan following. How do you think that will develop or evolve as you continue to grow as a band?

BEGGINS: I think that we have this secret weapon. We’ve developed this fan base that I think is going to be with us for a long time. It’s not this overnight success; all of the fans have grown with us for the past five years.

WILSON: It’s been a slow and steady build. For the past five years every single time we go through a city the crowd is 30% bigger, so it feels sustainable and real.

BEGGINS: I think that’s the way to do it these days. I mean, we would take overnight success if it came to us, but it's nice to know you can handle what’s coming at you.

WILSON: And with overnight success - how do you keep that up? You can’t, no one does. But it’s like we can keep this up all damn day.

How do you keep it up? Last year you were out on tour for about nine months, plus writing and recording a record.

WILSON: We’ll schedule. If we don’t have to leave the hotel room until 2 PM, we’ll wake up early and do some writing. We went to Savannah, Georgia to record Fools. It’s beautiful and we just needed to go somewhere where we didn’t know anyone except for the producer and the studio, so it was like, that’s our option. We rented a house and it was like summer camp.

BEGGINS: Our whole life is pretty much on a calendar.

WILSON: It’s in 48-hour sections. I know what we’re doing today and I know what we have to do tomorrow. At all times.

Fools is out now. You can buy it here.

From Airheads to The Grammys, DIY Duo White Mystery is ‘Outta Control’

April 1, 2016Music Interview, New MusicWeston PaganoComment

Rare are the bands blessed with the full package of a naturally iconic appearance, instantly classic backstory, and genuine DIY earnestness all at once, yet that’s exactly what Chicago-based brother-sister duo White Mystery have always had in spades.

The radiance of Miss Alex and Francis Scott Key White’s shocks of ginger hair somehow personify their fuzzy rock riffs better than you would’ve imagined possible, and backed by their appropriately Orange brand amps even a cursory glance tips you off to something special. But below the Iron Maiden t-shirts, denim, and lo-fi jams is a frontwoman who can shred with the best of them – when she’s not singlehandedly filling the roles of the band’s record label, PR, booking, management, and merch production all at once.

On top of being a completely self-sufficient music industry microcosm, White Mystery manages to churn out a full new album (or, in the case of last year, an entire feature-length film) like clockwork on the 4/20 date of each and every year, while Alex also daylights as the Vice President of The Grammy’s Chicago Chapter, leading one to wonder just how many different hats she can wear over her fiery locks.

To announce their forthcoming LP Outta Control, the raucous redheads took over Last Call with Carson Daly last night to debut singles "Sweet Relief" and "Best Friend," the latter a sunny, Jefferson Airplane-esque track that tells the tale of camaraderie and is stop-motion animated as an adorable canine dive bar to raise awareness of adoptable rescue dogs in a music video released today.

Transverso spoke with Miss Alex White about White Mystery's origins, Airheads, and how their next release is on a mission to make pop music good again.

Pre-order on iTunes NOW: http://apple.co/1RByTFR

How was performing on Last Call with Carson Daly?

[It went] really well! White Mystery flew out to LA and played this legendary club called The Troubadour in Hollywood where Janis Joplin, The Doors, Guns ‘n’ Roses, even Cheech & Chong got discovered, and we played a full concert, and Carson Daly’s current NBC late night show recorded us and it air[ed yesterday.] We’ve been on TV and we’ve been in movies, but this is our first time on network late night television.

You mentioned Cheech & Chong, are they an influence of yours?

[Laughs] Well Cheech & Chong definitely inspired the White Mystery movie That Was Awesome, which is a stoner film that came out last year on 4/20, and Cheech & Chong reviewed our album and helped premiere the trailer when it came out last year, so yeah, it was cool. Of course I love Guns ‘n’ Roses and Janis Joplin and all that stuff too.

What’s it like having an annual release date of 4/20 that coincides with the stoner holiday and is usually near Record Store Day as well? How much of that was planned?

That’s a great question. When we first started the band Record Store Day did not exist yet. So we really lucked out when two years later or so the record holiday came about and happened to always be within three to four days of our annual record release. So it really benefits our CDs and albums going into record stores around the world, and we do release it early to record stores depending on when the record store day is, so if it’s on the 15th the new White Mystery release will be in stores already.

What originally inspired setting that date?

Well it’s funny because Francis and I – my brother that’s the drummer – we had both been in a lot of different bands separately but also together with other band members. I traveled the world with my old band Miss Alex White and the Red Orchestra, [and it’d] be like, “Okay, bye Francis, see you later!” and [I] kind of left him at home and would be on my merry way with my bandmates, and when I graduated college and moved out of my childhood home here in Rogers Park in Chicago we started missing each other. We almost started hanging out more when I moved out then when I lived at home, and we started jamming and developing new songs. Myspace was available and Garage Band had become a program that allowed musicians for the first time to record a song and put it up on the internet immediately, and that really changed the environment for musicians, so here we were experimenting with Garage Band and that kind of thing, and we were like, “Wow, let’s start a band!” and we did. And we looked back at our Myspace and were like, “Oh, we started it on 4/20, I guess that’s our band anniversary!” and you know, ever since then we’ve used that date as an annual, cyclical milestone that makes sure we stay on track and are always producing new music and pushing boundaries for creativity in the music industry.

What can you tell us about this year's 4/20 release that will happen later this month?

It’s one of those things where everyone knows we put a new album out every year and have been since we started as a band, but it still surprises them somehow. It’s our best work yet, and we want to drop it like a big bomb. So basically the new White Mystery album - which is to be released on April 20th and the single [today] along with the stop motion animation music video - is called Outta Control which is inspired by White Mystery Airheads, which we had based the name of our band on back maybe 20 years ago when we got an Airhead taffy candy that said "White Mystery Outta Control" on the wrapper. [That candy’s wrapper] no longer [says that today], but that’s what inspired the name of our band [and] album. It’s really important to us to stick to our original vision. So anyway, it’s our 5th album; it is our pop masterpiece that we spent a lot of brain hours on developing it into the best possible album ever, where in previous years we did not have the luxury of time that we did for Outta Control. For instance, our third album Telepathic we recorded in two days while we were on tour in Oakland, [and] we recorded Dubble Dragon our double album at a live show in one take at a studio, so for this album we were like, “Okay, let’s take some time and really dial this album into a masterpiece.” It covers a lot of mood, but it definitely has the kind of dark witching vibes of a lot of White Mystery albums, but it has a lot of really great upbeat pop songs.

Outta Control cover art — *Outta Control* cover art

As someone with a DIY rock background what is the ideal pop song vibe to you?

A pop vibe is sort of ironic because while the album is called Outta Control it’s probably our most controlled work yet, which is how you create pop music. For instance, a lot of times when we made albums the drumming and guitars are just everywhere, you know, it’s like exploring over here and exploring over there and just like wailing and shredding and pounding, but in order to create pop music like every single stroke and note needs to be very methodical, and once you listen back if it’s not something that sounds absolutely perfect you have to actually revisit it until it is. So that’s what we did with the new album, we tried to make it [a] perfect masterpiece and that was a very fun challenge for me, you know? I love The Monkees, I love The Rolling Stones, I love Patti Smith, and I listened to a lot of their seminal records and it also really inspired me to try to make the cleanest album possible. When you listen to record like modern garage records I like Ty Segall, for instance. A lot of times the producer will put a lot of fuzz or a lot of reverb on the record to give it this kind of lo-fi sound, but we actually wanted this record to be more of a hi-fi sound that, for instance, could be on the radio and perhaps expand our audience more so.

You seem very connected to your DIY Chicago identity and have a sort of a cult fan group. When you say you’re looking to expand what are the boundaries or lack thereof you’re looking to transcend?

Well we’ve traveled worldwide to Hiroshima in Japan and Karlsruhe, Germany or Queenland, Ohio, you know, we’ve played a lot of pretty obscure cities on Planet Earth, and there will always be an audience of people who have seen White Mystery, and in some cases multiple times. We’ve been a band for 8 years and we’re extremely grateful for our fans because they are the backbone of what we’ve been able to achieve all these years, and what we’d like to do is make mainstream music better. So right now when you go to the Grammy’s or watch the Grammy’s it’s honestly a lot of very contrived sort of tame pop music, and a lot of times I kind of envy my parent’s generation when bands like The Who and The Rolling Stones and Deep Purple were actually popular and on the radio, and I think that the White Mystery mission would be to try to make pop music good again with this new album.

You're also the Vice President of the Grammy’s Chicago Chapter, do you often feel like you’re one of the craziest, rawest, indie-est people in that circle? How do you reconcile those two worlds, are you trying to change the system from the inside out?

Well I’m not sure how much I can actually really comment about it but I would say that the Chicago Chapter is full of amazing working class professional musicians who are on a mission to basically help musicians make a living in a world or industry that has changed a lot in the last 20 years. You know we’re in the streaming age now and people used to make money off of album sales. It’s a diverse group of people and I wouldn’t really consider myself… they’re all unique individuals and we’re all working towards shared goals of advancing music in the Midwest.

To go back to your origin story, you have a photo of you at an Airheads factory. How did that come about?

Yeeeahhh! So basically - and that was years ago too - we received an email from the marketing department of [Perfetti Van Minelle] - which makes Airheads and Mentos - that said, “We’ve been watching you for a long time and we saw that you’re playing Cincinnati which is just right over the river from our factory where we make Airheads in Erlanger, Kentucky. We would be honored to have you visit our factory and we will make sure that we are producing White Mystery [Airheads] that day.” So we went and we put on our little Laverne and Shirley cloak and toured the factory and they gave us tons of free candy and it was one of the best days of my life.

If you order vinyl from Polyvinyl they include Airheads in with the package; have you ever considered including White Mystery Airheads in with yours?

Yeah we have done [that], and we’ve passed them out at shows, and you’ll see there’s even a picture of us in a giant bathtub full of Airheads and we passed those out at Halloween. I like Polyvinyl and they’re in Champaign, Illinois which is kind of funny, but I think that the thing they and we have in common is that Airheads are kind of the unofficial candy of record stores. When I was a teenager and I worked at Laurie’s Planet of Sound in Lincoln Square, [Chicago] Airheads [were] the only candy we sold ‘cause it’s not like chocolate where it goes bad or melts or gets gross, it’s taffy so it just sits there and it’s kind of, you know, like a Twinkie where you could eat it today or in five years and it’s gonna taste the same. So a lot of record stores would sell these Airheads and that’s partly why we really love them and why Polyvinyl love them too; they don’t go bad, they’re flat and they ship without getting smooshed or broken, and if you ship a Snickers bar it’s gonna be, like, melty or fall apart or get smashed, where an Airhead is [a] flat sugar, non-expiration kind of candy. And they’re cheap, they were like 20 cents when I was a teenager, so it’s like you could literally have 50 cents and still get change back after you got candy, you know, so I think that [since] they’re so inexpensive and made in the USA they have the feel. Made in America, baby! And I think that that’s partly why we love ‘em so much too, that’s the secret. [Editor's Note: I had to eat an Airhead while transcribing this, and though I didn't have White Mystery on hand, the cherry red flavor I did have was probably the next most appropriate option.]

It seems throughout your career you tend to end up in duos: The Red Lights, Miss Alex White & Chris Playboy, and White Mystery. What is it about this dynamic you like best in music? Do you not like the idea of too many cooks?

Well I guess a lot of the time I would want to start a band with whoever was my best friend at the time, and, you know, it was just easy. So if there was someone else out there who’s your best buddy, who you hang out with all the time, then you start a band together; one of you plays drums and the other one plays guitar. So it just kinda worked out that way. And with The Red Lights, Elisa was my really good friend in high school and she had passed away at a really young age, and then Chris Playboy who replaced her also passed away, and Eddie [Altesleben] who was the drummer of The Red Orchestra who was a four piece band, he passed away as well, so it’s like even when you’re super heartbroken from the passing of your friends when your passion is music it helps you get through rough patches. So I like playing in two pieces ‘cause there’s just a really special dynamic that happens between two people and it allows you to be creative and collaborative, and then you never need to buy a van, you can always tour in a car.

Will White Mystery ever be solved?

[Laughs] Well back on 4/20/2008 Francis and I agreed we would do the band for exactly 10 years, so technically the riddle will be solved 4/20/2018.

You can preorder a physical copy of Outta Control here or a digital copy here.

Aidan Knight Talks About Overcoming Trepidations and His Ultimate Triumph on 'Each Other'

March 21, 2016Music InterviewSean McHughComment

Every once and while, there's an artist that operates "under the radar" - a rather tired notion, I know - where the majority of an artist's journey goes unknown by the masses, making things all that sweeter for those privy. I'd say it's a safe assumption that Aidan Knight is such an artist for many, but not for lack of trying. One of the most unflagging and insightful guys working in music today, the Vancouver Island native took a moment during his tour in Italy to speak with Transverso Media about his most recent effort, Each Other, the politics of recording, and Ennio Morriconne.

TRANSVERSO: How’s the tour going?

AIDAN KNIGHT: It's been going great so far. We’ve been having pretty good luck – no flat tires, nothing too crazy so far – so knock on wood it continues.

How does it feel to have Each Other out in the world for a few months now? Cathartic?

Yeah! It feels great to put anything out, but especially something that takes a long time to make. It’s hard to convey all of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes when making a record, if that makes sense, but it feels like... I don’t want to use “cathartic” because it kind of sounds like a fancy word. [Laughs]

Right, sorry about that!

[Laughs] No! I just try and dumb it down when I talk about these things. But yeah, it's kind of like there’s a bunch stuff that no one really sees but I think the end result was really great. And I’m glad that its out now, because there’s a lot of stuff that happened in between the recording process to the release date that kind of was like “I don’t know what’s going to happen here.” So it’s nice to make it definitive that its out now.

I saw that you did run into a number of obstacles during the recording process for Each Other. Did that come to influence the album at all?

Most of the sort of struggles came after the recording process. Around the time that we were doing the vocals and the mixing and stuff is when some things started coming together. Our bass player was starting to have his hearing issues and eventually our drummer just had to go back to school. So we pretty much lost two of the five people who were instrumental in sort or putting the record together, but it didn’t really affect the songs that you hear. I think it just mostly affected my sort of - how to put it eloquently - just my thoughts on how to keep going, you know, whatever the future was going to look like. And that seems really dramatic for me to say that now, but at the time it really felt like, “Oh, maybe I just kind of hang up the towel here." We had already spent the time and already spent the money on recording it so we would have needed a bunch more money to produce the songs and release the record and all, so maybe we cut out losses? Then something just kind of turned around – and I wish I could really put a finger on what that was – but I think it was sort of the support of the people who I work with, and my family and friends, and the people I was sharing the record with, and they were saying like “No there’s actually some really good stuff on here!” [Laughs] Surprise, surprise.

That’s great, I’m sure that support was an awesome thing to have.

Yeah, well that’s sort of the frustrating thing about working on music – is not having the perspective to see what’s good or bad anymore – you’re just seeing this stuff go off the rails or wondering whether or not there’s still enough good stuff on the rails to sort keep the stuff moving along. So it felt like that for a very small chunk of time – I don’t know – a month or two? And then it just kind of, eventually I just snapped out of it and realized that it was something worth releasing at the very least and at the very best, that there was actually good stuff on there. And now with being able to actually step back and listen to it, and to be able to play it now every night – I’m just really enjoying the songs. So I feel very fortunate that there are people in my life who can sort of direct me away from my bad decisions.

How has it been performing it live? It sounds like that’s changed your view even further?

Yeah! Yeah it has. I think that it’s a really great live. Again, I don’t want to be too… sometimes I feel like I’m being too over the top saying, "It’s a great live record!” But by the nature of us, all five of us: Colin, Dave, Julia, Olivier, and myself all playing these songs really together in a room and more or less making that the sort of basis of the recording. Now that we’ve taken those recordings and put them up on stage, the translation is better than anything else I have ever worked on before, because everything else I’ve ever done has really been a studio record. Like multi-track recording, where you go in and you record the drums and the bass and the guitars, and this was more. Everyone was kind of feeding off of each other, and so its easier to do that on stage, but also, I just think the songs are some of the strongest stuff we’ve worked on so far. So yeah, I’m really liking it so far. That being said, we’ve only played it really for Europeans, not a whole lot of North Americans yet. So we’ll see what North America says about it.

Do you think you’ll continue the “off the floor” recording as opposed to studio?

I think I’m going to do a blend of things. It's nice to kind of know what works in both approaches. There’s a lot of records that I love that were made in a short amount of time – live off the floor. But I have a real love for great studio recordings – I mean like Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of the best studio records that I can think of. And in Canada, Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot Their People, is an amazing record. So those are two good indie-rock examples of great studio recordings. But I don’t know, there are also these two other little bands called The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. You know, there’s a power to both of them, and I’d like to investigate and sort of explore melding the two. I don’t know what that looks like yet, but I already have the desire to do some more recording, but I don’t have any time this year, because we’re busy with touring right now, which is great.

There’s a lot of great minute detail throughout the record, “Funeral Singers” in particular. What was the process in creating that track?

Yeah, that was one that we had the idea for that song off the last record in 2012 called Small Reveal. It was one of the songs, or a song idea that we had, that we tried to develop, and it just didn’t pan out. So we kind of kept it and kept working on it at sound checks, rehearsals, and jams. And when it came time for this record, it was probably the first or second song that we knew that we were going to do for the recording. And it was like, again, it was hard to explain when you can’t see the behind the scenes of how the songs came together, but that song changed so much from the original idea and was rewritten many times. Eventually when it came time to record it, we spent the first two days of recording time getting set up and just working on that song. And that was maybe the hardest two days of the whole recording process where Marcus Paquin (The National, Local Natives, Stars), the producer of the record and I just sort of got together on the second day and were talking together and saying “What’s going on here? It seems like there’s a lot of tension going on between the control room and the tracking room.” I was just like “I just don’t think the song is turning out the way I thought it would turn out. I don’t know it just doesn’t seem right.” So there was this moment where it really felt tense, almost to the point that we were going to walk away [laughs] in a similar kind of way to the two months after we had finished recording.

It was like, "Okay, we’ve already flown all the way out here, we’ve booked all the studio time. Maybe we can just cancel it and get some of the money back and revisit it in two months when we have a little bit of a better idea.” But Marcus, he’s just got incredibly great ears, and he has all the best attributes of someone whose sympathetic and can compromise but also has a vision for what he thought things could and should sort of sound like. So he just said “Look, its your record. You have to be happy with it. I have this idea and I think its going to work, and I think what’s going to make this sound really great is if you guys all get into the studio and all record together at the same time.” And I was just kind of taken aback at that, I didn’t think we were making this live recording going in. I thought we were going to put on a click track and the drums were going record, the bass was going to record, I was going to record my guitar part, and we were going to tweak out on some stuff. He just had this other idea and we hadn’t talked about our sort of approach to the recording. So for “Funeral Singers,” it was like two days banging our heads against the wall and on the third day we just got it all recorded in this one, maybe two-hour session. And then from there we just added a couple of overdub and background sounds, but for the most part that song is just the right off the floor. It was just really captured really well, which really made the detail. And the clarity that you hear in the song is actually us realizing what was going on, really getting behind it, really playing together, and Marcus and Niles at the studio really just nailing it on the recording.

Director: Ft. Langley Producer: William Wilkinson Cinematographer: Oliver Brooks Actress: Shannon Emery Key Grip: Justin Steele Colour: Mikey Rossiter @ The Mill Production Assistants: Rowan Mackenzie & Madeline Collier Special thanks: Todd Hooge @ Hooge Studios Don Knight

As far as the overall structure of the record, was that mostly your final decision? Or did Marcus have some influence as well?

I think for the most part, I came up with the track order. I just sort of had a general idea. I kind of have this bizarre process of listening to the recordings in a bunch of different orders. What I like to do is either walk really late at night out on Vancouver Island which is where I was when we finished up the recording - it's definitely not a big city at all, it's more rural in parts - but there’s an urban center. So you can walk through a lot of different landscapes and I like to sort of walk, run, and drive with the record on and sort of see how it makes you feel in motion. For this record, it was mostly driving – I think it’s a really great 34 minutes of music- if you’re driving somewhere it has a great sort of wave that happens to it where it builds and comes back down, and goes up and down in the right places, and it sort of takes you - again, there are some words I really hate to use – but it sort of takes you on this emotional kind of crest. I think that’s really important in a record, that it directs you, or at least that’s my intention, and I know not everyone is going to listen to all eight songs in order, or maybe they come up with their own sort of playlist of stuff, or maybe they only listen to three or four. But I think if you really listen to it, particularly if you’re listening to it… well, I don’t think you can drive with a record player, but if you could, side A side B is another thing that I think a lot about. So side A ends with “What Light Never Goes Dim,” and then side B ends with “Black Dream.” So its two very different sort of feeling sides, but I like it.

I noticed that! It seems that side B kind of has a more disparate tint to it, and in particular going from “St. Christina” straight into “You Are Not Here.” I assume that was done intentionally? Would you be willing to elaborate on how those two songs became connected?

It became intentional, but at first it was not. [Laughs] “St. Christina” was actually a longer piece of a song that sort of devolved into a lot of noise and static, and sort of turned into this more soundscape-y thing, but we just could not figure out how to make that piece of audio and how to make it work. At that time, Colin and Dave had sort of stepped away, and I felt like the conflict for me was that I didn’t want to make more audio without the input of those two guys. So “St. Christina” just somehow ended up being harmonically – in terms of the chord structure – just worked really well, and just had a little bit of noise that perfectly segues into “You Are Not Here.” Its one of those great things that I just love about making creative stuff – you can plan, and plan, and plan, and plan but sometimes the unintentional, the accidental work so much better than anything you would have thought. So those two songs are a great example of that happening.

There seems to be a personal aspect to your lyrical approach – almost a verbalization of an internal dialogue. Do you ever wonder how those would be interpreted once they’re let out into the world?

I’d say that’s a pretty good insight… kind of freaky for someone that’s never met me. [Laughs] Here’s what I will say – I don’t have a lot to say on lyrics – I think of myself as on any day being and extrovert or an introvert, but I hope that I’m becoming a better performer. Through touring and playing music, but the thing that I like the most about music is having nothing expected, nothing in front of me, starting with nothing, and there being really no pressure or ego, or anything in the way. And then stepping back when something has been created, looking at it and seeing myself and the stories and people and things that are in my life. But I don’t think about them in the process of making them so much. So I think that when you hear it when talking to journalists and other musicians, and people who are asking me about my music, they say they kind of come across as confessional, and I think like “Yeah, of course.” I don’t know what else there is to write about. And even if I mask them, and I’ve tried writing from other perspectives, but I think there’s always something that sort of leaks out from your own history that has to go into the stories. So yeah, I’ve been saying a little bit more often that I don’t keep a journal, but the journal that I do keep just happens to be a very public one. And that’s the songs, and they get released out into the world, and people get to hear my little stories and little songs, and I’m becoming okay with it. I didn’t love the aspect of releasing music at first, but its hard not to get caught up in the echo? Or something on the other side – having people come up to you and be like “Your songs meant something to me,” that’s a great feeling. I don’t mind that at all. It’s still embarrassing to have people read so deeply into your lyrics, but I get it as well. I do listen to other people’s music and it means something to me. It’s a great thing.

How does the record compare to your previous releases: Small Reveal and Versicolour?

I think there is a line that goes through all of the records. I mean you could just say that’s just myself, my sort of lyrical perspective. But I think Each Other is to me in some ways the first record, and the other ones were developments, like a learning stage. I still think there’s lots of value in them, but I think of this record being one of the first ones where I’m not so concerned, I’m not so precious. To me this is sort of my letting go record, where I sort of just really play with my friends in the bands, and make music together, and not have to be so fingers in everything. I was listening to this podcast with Albert Hammond Jr. from The Strokes, and he was saying his most recent record, he was also feeling if he didn’t hold everything, the whole thing would become fucking awful. And I was just like, man, I felt the same way, and now I don’t feel that way so much. It was like now I don’t have to micromanage every little thing. This is kind of a glimpse into my history, I wasn’t able to let people come in on the thing, but now I think if you let people do the thing that they do really well and can let them feel good about it, then I think the result has to be better. It actually sounds and comes across as more complete and more human, and better over all if you just let people do things where they’re really excited about it, and they have more free reign to do interesting, unexpected stuff. So that’s the biggest change between the records.

That sounds like a very liberating experience.

Oh it feels good, man, it feels good!

Who informs Aidan Knight’s style?

I mean, its kind of corny, but my parents have a pretty huge influence on me – they’re both musicians. They’re not professional musicians, but they both enjoyed music and I was sort of able to grow up in a really uninhibited house. I was able to really listen to any music that I wanted, and sort of learn any instrument. We never really had a lot of money, but that was never really a barrier for me. If I wanted to play drums, my dad would be like, “Alright, lets find you a drum kit,” and my mom would be the first person with sticks and say, “Okay, go for it.” So to have that kind of access, I mean, I could downplay that and say some famous musician, but I don’t think anyone’s been more influential on me than my family.

Dream bill of people you’d like to perform with?

Yeah. I like the idea of sort of more reclusive artists. Here’s the thing, there’s a bill of artists I would like to see perform, because I don’t deal that well with the pressure of playing with living legends or anything like that. But I’d love to get on stage and perform a couple songs and just watch like, I don’t know, Kate Bush, Tom Waits. I’d love to see Tom Waits and Run the Jewels play a show together. I think that they’d be really political, but then musically just super out on the fringes. I think that could be really awesome.

That’s about as good an answer as any that I’ve ever heard. So do you have a dream venue you would like to play at one day?

We’re getting to play a lot of them, to be honest. A lot of them are on this tour we’re doing right now with Half Moon Run. We got to play at Paradiso in Amsterdam, which is historic, and we’re playing at Roundhouse in London. Its got to be over 3,000 people. It’s a great venue in the capital city. On our last American tour we got to go to Lincoln Hall in Chicago. That venue was awesome. It wasn’t huge or anything but it was probably one of the best shows of our American tour last time. That one was really great. We’re doing a really small venue in the town that I grew up in Victoria called Lucky Bar. It’s just this little, like 200 person bar that I haven’t played at in six or seven years. That one just feels like a really fun venue to play at. I mean, I’d love to play at Carnegie Hall or somewhere like that. Here’s what I will say – I never would have thought that I would have gotten to play at places like Paradiso and Roundhouse and Lincoln Hall when I was first starting. When I was sixteen and had a little guitar and working on my first songs, so really, any venue that we go into that has an audience that’s ready and wants to see us play music feels like a huge accomplishment. I’m looking forward to just pursue that.

I saw that you’re a fan of Italian composer Ennio Morricone. Were you excited to see that he finally won an Oscar for best score this past year?

Yeah, [laughs] after what, like 60 years or something? Yeah, we were over here when that happened, so the Oscars were happening a little too late for us to stay up all night and watch it live. So I missed it live, but I watched a recap of all of it, and everyone was excited for Leo to win. I was most excited for Ennio to win, because you can feel however you want on award shows, but we should be recognizing people who are... I can actually say that he literally generated a genre of soundtrack music. He created a style that is maybe the most cinematic of music. This moving style of orchestral soundtrack music, so it seems insane that he wasn’t recognized when he was in sort of his prime, but I haven’t seen Hateful Eight to really comment on it, but I’m sure that its amazing, because he is a great composer and thinker of sound. So yeah, I’m totally excited.

Have you had a favorite meal so far on this tour? I understand you’re a pretty big fan of good food.

[Laughs] Yeah. We are about to go into France this week, so I guess I’ll tell you then. I mean, we just got into Italy, so we haven’t gotten a chance to really eat anything too crazy, but we’re in the region where like polenta and gorgonzola cheese [are from], so we’re in the area where there is a lot of good food. I’ll have to catch up with you after I’ve had what I’m going to eat in the next two weeks.

Read our review of Aidan Knight's Each Other here. See his tour dates here.

The Magnetic North's Simon Tong Discusses Past, Present, and 'Prospect of Skelmersdale'

March 16, 2016Music InterviewSean McHughComment

When The Magnetic North first formed they set out as a one-off, planning for their debut release, Orkney: Symphony of the Magnetic North, to act as the consummate collaborative culmination between UK indie staple Simon Tong (blur, Gorillaz, The Verve, The Good, the Bad & the Queen, and Erland & the Carnival), Erland Cooper (Erland and the Carnival), and Hannah Peel (John Foxx and the Maths). Despite the trio's initial desires to run the full lifespan of a group with a single release, demand for a follow up grew (as usually is the case when fantastic records are made), and the band reconvened to contemplate their focus for a potential LP2.

The group's cartographically inclined debut focused on motifs surrounding The Orkney Islands in Scotland (Cooper's home), and turned out to be far more influential than the group had initially expected, opting to orient their sophomore effort on yet another locational premise, this time the Tong's enigmatic hometown of Skelmersdale, England, via Prosepct of Skelmersdale.

I was fortunate enough to speak with The Magnetic North's Simon Tong about the trio's upcoming release, Prospect of Skelmersdale, which consists of a series of vignettes centered on the town where Tong spent some of his most formative years.

Taken from the new album "Prospect Of Skelmersdale" out 18th March 2016. Pre-order CD / LP / DL here: http://fulltimehobby.sandbaghq.com/the-magnetic-north-prospect-of-skelmersdale.html

TRANSVERSO: Are you looking forward to getting Prospect of Skelmersdale out into the world?

SIMON TONG: I think so, yeah. I don’t know, I’m slightly worried about it.

Why is that?

Well the album [is] kind of about where I grew up. I’m kind of wondering what the people of that town will think about it – whether they’ll like it or they won’t like it. I don’t know.

With that in mind, most people in the US may not be familiar with Skelmersdale. What’s it like?

Yeah, I don’t think many people in the United Kingdom know about Skelmersdale [as well]. Its been strange. We’ve just been doing some press in Paris and Berlin as well, and its been very strange talking about this small insignificant town in England that we made a record about; its very surreal.

Does that put the onus on you to direct the dialogue about Skelmersdale?

Yeah, I suppose so, but the other two members of the group, Erland and Hannah, they’ve been there quite a few times, so they know the place, and they were very much involved with the making of the record – the lyrics and the feel of the whole thing. They kind of have an idea of what they’re talking about as well. But yeah, because our first album was about the Orkney Islands, in Scotland, where Erland’s from. So the onus was kind of on him for that one. So yeah, for this one, it feels like the weight is slightly on my shoulders. [Laughs] It’s a good weight to carry.

Does that mean if there’s a third LP, the onus will be on Hannah?

Very much so, yeah. [Laughs] I hope she’s ready for it.

What was your initial reaction when Hannah suggested visiting Skelmersdale, in regard to the album?

I just wasn’t sure, because we made the first album by accident almost. I don’t know if we got it written in the press release, but the first album was inspired by a dream that Erland had – he was visited by a ghost in his dream who had told him to write a record about where he came from. So, that was kind of the starting point of the group; that was how we kind of formed and made a record, because of this supernatural dream. It’s a strange project, really, and we didn’t think we going to do another album. We just thought we were going to do one album about the Orkney albums, and we thought that’d be it, we’d just leave it at that. Lots of people kept saying, “Oh, you’ve got to do another album, you’ve got to do something else,” and so we kind came around to it thinking, “What can we do it about? What can we do it about?” And Hannah just kind of said “[Simon] Where do you come from?” and I said “Well, I lived a long time in this town called ‘Skelmersdale,’” and she says “Ah, tell me about it. Tell me about the town.”

It was a new town, it was built in the 60s, as kind of an overflow from Liverpool. A lot of the poor people in the slums of Liverpool got moved to this new town. And then in the '80s, the Transcendental Meditation (TM) community set up there and she was like, “Wow! That’s a good plot for an album,” and I said, “Really? Do you really think so?” And she was like, “Yeah, come on, we got to!” So she was kind of the driving force behind getting project off the ground really. In terms of getting me to think about what an album about Skelmersdale would entail. So I basically wrote about ten or eleven track titles from my memory of places in Skelmersdale, just kind of things connected to it. [Then I] sent it over to her and Erland and they were like “Wow, these titles, they’re inspiring us already.” Titles like “Pennylands,” is one title and “Silver Birch,” is another, and it was kind of like “Oh, these sound like such beautiful places.” And then I thought, “Well actually, why don’t you go see for yourself,” so I sent them up there to Skelmersdale, which is sort of Northwest England. I gave them a list of places to go, and they went and visited these places. A place like Pennylands is a not particularly nice counsel estates, you know it’s the housing estates. So a lot of these places sound really nice, but when you get there. It was kind of a good adventure for them to go and see what this place was like, what kind of, its good for them to get a perspective without anything coming from me influencing their mind. They could just go and take some photographs of these places and stay there for a few nights to see what they think of the town. So that was just the starting block to sort of kick the project off.

Was that a significant turning point in regard to getting the album creatively oriented as well? With you being the most familiar with Skelmersdale – did a lot of the creative intuition come from you, or was it largely collaborative?

It was very collaborative, actually. Maybe initially, it came from me – just a few little song ideas and lyric ideas. But they very quickly picked up on things and developed their own ideas. And that was very much what we did with the first album as well, and Erland kind of let me and Hannah write about his town/homeland quite freely, and how we felt while visiting there as an outsider. So I kind of gave them that opportunity to write about it as an outsider, and then I would write about it as someone who actually has experience in there. Yeah, that’s kind of how we do it – we sort of trust each other’s view and intuition, I suppose. We all know what our sound is – we all kind of have a definite sound of what instrumentation we use, and what kind of way of recording and making a song. We kind of all know the general color palate of The Magnetic North.

Did you ever find yourself gravitating toward certain aspects or vignettes of Skelmersdale when Erland and Hannah asked you describe the town?

Yeah, I suppose it was a series of little snapshots that I had drawn from my memory of people and places. Well we knew we kind of wanted to bring in the Transendental Meditation Community, because that was where I kind of grew up in the middle of it. That was all part of Skelmersdale. We had to kind of touch on that, and we used some old audio footage from a friend of my dad’s [who] had recorded when they started building the community. So we have this sort of opening ceremony of this person kind of inaugurating the Golden Dome, which is this sort of place where they all go and meditate. And then we found, when Hannah and Erland went up the first time, they found this woman in the library who had like a local writers group in Skelmersdale, and she gave them this DVD that had these old 1970s industrial kind of promotion videos which were made by the council and the corporation that run the town to kind of promote it for industry. It’s a very funny kind of stiff upper lip kind of British BBC documentary [that was] slightly patronizing of the local community like “Welcome to Skelmersdale, look at these new factories we’ve built; we’re just crying out for industry,” and so we kind used a lot of sound bytes and interwove them with the music and really gave the album its backbone, and kind of backdrop, I suppose; a kind of late 60s, early 70s kind of lens on the music and everything.

Taken from the new album "Prospect of Skelmersdale" out 18th March 2016 on Full Time Hobby. Pre-order CD / LP / DL here: http://bit.ly/1PiF3qp

So is the footage used in the videos for “Signs” and “A Death in the Woods” from those early promotional videos?

Yeah they’re these promotional videos, but they’re great. There’s this kind of sheen of slightly, well its slightly cheap film. Its not high quality Hollywood film; its really kind of faded. 60 mil or… God knows what it is, but its got this sort of grainy look, kind of mostly British look to it.

Where does a song like “A Death in the Woods” come into play when creating the album’s tone/direction?

I suppose that was one of the first songs we wrote, I think. Its kind of a mish-mash or an amalgamation of different memories of mine thrown together; its not particularly one story that runs throughout the song. Its just a lot of images and kinds of things that I remember, like in a dreamscape almost; just thrown in like a stream of consciousness. So that kind of set the feel of the album. Because the whole project was started by [the] supernatural dream that Erland had. Our creative process is sort of the process of trying to revoke ghosts of the landscape of wherever we’re writing about – whether it’s the Orkney Islands, Skelmersdale, or wherever it happens from. That’s kind of what we’re trying to do: we’re trying to find the magic that’s buried under the landscape. With the Orkney Islands it was really easy for the first album, because the Orkney Islands are a beautiful, beautiful place next to the sea, its got cliffs, and it has so much history. Its got Neolithic monuments, five thousand year old villages; its really just soaked in history. Its got great poets and writers have come from there, you just can’t fail to be inspired by the place.

How did Skelmersdale compare to Orkney?

Skelmersdale is the complete opposite of that. Immediately, there’s nothing and you think “Oh, hell. How am I going to write about this place?” Its almost like – it's very brutal – the architecture has lots of concrete, it almost looks like something out of the Soviet Union that’s sort of been picked up and plunked in the middle of England; but in its own way, that’s sort of very inspiring in and of itself. It's sort of modernist, and I’m sure that plenty of people that study architecture and town planning would look at it and go, "Oh, look at this, its fantastic.” You wouldn’t necessarily want to visit there.

So what angles did you find in regard to writing songs about Skelmersdale?

It was funded by the government, so a lot of the houses there are kind of what we call “Council Houses” or sort of rented houses, but over the years people have eventually bought them as they changed the law, but they’re still predominantly rental homes. It was quite a poor place in the '60s, '70s, and '80s; it was very depressed. The industry came initially and then just as soon as any government grunts came out, they just disappeared off to Brazil or wherever it was cheaper to work. So you were kind of in this ghost town of people. There’s no train station there, just lots and lots of roads, and people just kind of couldn’t afford the cars, so people were just kind of stuck in this town. What interested us, we realized quite early on in making the album that we can tell these stories of people and we can try and musically represent the landscape, but we have to give some kind of hope, we can’t just make a depressing album about how shit this place used to be – we had to give some optimism and hopefulness. Going back to the town, I kind of left 20 years ago and I haven’t really been back until the past couple of years since I’ve been doing this album, and it feels kind of like its getting better. It feels like the people themselves are kind of making it better. Its almost like a community needs a long time to develop.

Has the community begun to change at all, or have things just remained the same?

The town is about 50 years old now, and it feels like people are finally building that community and kind of [have] a sense of identity themselves and it just feels like there’s hope there. When the Transcendental people moved there in the '80s, I think they kind of changed the town by bringing optimism in. They had this belief that – the Maharishi is dead now – they had a belief that they wanted to set up a little village in every country that would meditate and people would gather and meditate, and affect the countryside around them. Wherever they were, they gave off good vibes. So they moved to Skelmersdale to set up this community, and there’s probably five or six hundred people there and they meditate every day in the Golden Dome with the view that they were going to improve the town simply by meditating; that they were going to give off these good vibrations. They had lots of scientific evidence to show that they were doing this. Whether that really did happen or not, I think that the fact they moved to the town itself sort of way. It brought these sort of middle class people who brought this attitude, and I think it has made it a more interesting town culturally. The identity of the town changed.

You mentioned the Transcendental Meditation community of Skelmersdale – did TM have any significant impact on the creative process?

Not really, only because it was there. I mean, I don’t do it anymore, but my father was a fanatical follower – and he still follows the Maharishi even though he’s not alive – so its always kind of been in my life. And if I was going to write about a town like Skelmersdale, it was going to have to be there in the background somewhere. I have a love/hate relationship with it, and I’m not going to slag it off and say its terrible, but I’m [also] not going to promote it. Now the Maharishi died ten years ago now, but now David Lynch has taken the mantle, and he’s kind of the leader in waiting, which makes it even stranger.

That’s where my only familiarity with the TM movement stems from, is the popularity of it within Hollywood/creative circles.

I mean they’re having an active push to try and get creative people and artists involved in doing it, to get as much promotion as it can. I mean, the Maharishi used The Beatles in the 60s, he definitely used them to springboard the movement in the West.

Speaking of The Beatles, is your track “Run of the Mill” a reference to the George Harrison song?

Yes! It actually is [the song].

Any particular reason as to why?

Initially it was a coincidence. Erland and Hannah have a studio over in East London, and they were working one day and a friend of theirs, Laura Groves – a beautiful singer from Yorkshire, actually an old friend of Hannah’s just came by and she started playing on the piano [the George Harrison song] and we thought “Oh that’s fantastic, let’s record it,” and we recorded like a simple kind of piano version which is actually the way it appears in the album, and we just put the guitars in after. Initially they just recorded it, and it wasn’t until later that we thought “actually, this would fit so well with this album,” and that’s just kind of the, obviously, the George Harrison connection with the TM. But the song itself, “Run of the Mill,” it has connotations to the north of England anyway, it has mills and stuff, so it just kind of seemed to sit really well. It was one of the last songs to go on there, because we weren’t really sure we were going to put it on. The album was just kind of there and we just plonked on at the end and then listened to it and thought it just kind of closed the album. It was just a bit of serendipity really, and we just kind of ended up using it. It just really fits with everything else, and it was a beautiful way to close the album.

Are there any sort of over-arching motifs or themes you would like to be conjured up for the listeners?

You know, I think you can enjoy the album without knowing anything about the concepts within Skelmersdale. I hope people would just enjoy it as a piece of music whether its just listening to single tracks here and there or listening to the album as a whole – I obviously hope people would listen to the album as a whole album, thought people very rarely ever do nowadays – just to invoke. Its really drawing on childhood memories anyway. Kind of the feeling of looking back on your childhood and seeing these memories that have been buried in your head, I suppose anyone can relate to that. Just kind of having that magical kind of way you remember a Christmas or whenever you remember playing on your front lawn or a holiday. Its just sort of looking back in that 70s lens or whatever era you grew up in, just looking back at it like an old photograph, or an old grainy bit of film. Trying to give that impression while listening to the album, you’re traveling back there into the midst of your sub consciousness.

Read our review of Prospect of Skelmersdale here.

AudioDamn! Discuss Wearing Suits, French Toast, and Jeb!

March 13, 2016Music InterviewWeston PaganoComment

With their curious name, sharp attire, and German accents, AudioDamn! stands out amongst the current crop of upstart debutants hitting the tour circuit this year, but below the blazers burns an energetic mixture of pop, rock, and soul demanding to be heard in its own right.

The Germany-based, Austria-bred trio consists of frontman Oliver “Oli” Wimmer on vocals and guitar, Ali Grumeth on backing vocals, guitar, and bass, and Daniel "Mudi" Mudrack on drums. Affable and eager, their tight suits and polite demeanors don't detract from the rambunctious rock and roll performances they provide, somehow exuding even more energy than the few recordings they've released via an eponymous EP through EPIC Records earlier this year.

Though still largely unknown to broader American audiences, their short headlining tour last year and current opening slot for Highly Suspect have allowed the band to begin quickly winning over new fans with their charm.

Sitting in the dimly lit underground green room of Chicago club Double Door as middle band on the bill And the Kids played over our heads, AudioDamn! sat down to talk with Transverso next to vandalized wallpaper posters of fellow falsetto Maroon 5 and fellow German Zedd.

Download "Radar" on the AudioDamn! EP at iTunes: http://smarturl.it/AudioDamn Amazon: http://smarturl.it/Audiodamn_Amzn Spotify: http://smarturl.it/Audiodamn_Spotify Google Play: http://smarturl.it/AudioDamn_GP Deezer: http://smarturl.it/Audiodamn_Deezer https://www.audiodamn.com/ https://www.facebook.com/audiodamn https://twitter.com/audiodamn (C) 2015 Epic Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment

TRANSVERSO: So you say you just approved the final master for your full length debut today. Congratulations, how does it feel?

OLI WIMMER: It feels amazing because we’ve been working on it for quite some time. I mean, this feels like a lifetime of work from back when we started the band. Actually, I feel like the starting point of the band was this album. We had our first gigs, but then we decided let's record a full length, Ali produced it, and we just started off with this crazy idea of playing everything live in one room. I think that was three or four years ago or something, and it grew so much over the years. I did this demo for the song “Radar” and we always played more gigs than we intended to.

ALI GRUMETH: Our manager once said something that’s coming [true] now, “You have your whole life for your first record; you have a few months for your second.” [Laughs] That might apply for us too but there were some songs [made] during this album we’re already pushing to the second album.

But this is definitely a super special moment. How many times [was] the album almost released or we had almost deals? We were talking to so many people in Europe already and it all didn't work out, and to be true, it felt kinda like maybe having an English speaking rock band in Germany just does not work out. People kept telling us “Yeah, you’re doing great, but do it in German.” We refused. Those days I really felt like maybe we really should let go because it’s so fucking tough to even keep a band alive so everyone can pay their rent, and it was funny because those were the days where things took off in America. We met our management, we met our publisher, and three months later [EPIC Records CEO] L.A. Reid called and wanted to have us signed. [Makes explosion sound]

WIMMER: Transcribe that as the sound of a car transmission. [Makes sound of car taking off] We were on full throttle all of a sudden, it was crazy. Now we are on this American journey seeing the whole country, playing all of the cities like Chicago, and going to the south, going to the small places and the big places, and it’s crazy. Ali said it started out in a basement in Germany, this album, and it came to life in a van in Chicago.

You said you refused to make music in your native language. Is there a reason why you strictly speak in english?

GRUMETH: Yes, because it just felt better for us. We were listening to English music since we grew up. We were so much influenced by Green Day, by Foo Fighters, by Nirvana. That was most of the music we listened to, and when we founded this band we decided to found a band that is about the maximum fun. Let’s just always do what feels the best. And we discovered it feels the best for us to do it in English somehow because it sounds more familiar, and so we did. German lyrics are a bit different than English ones.

WIMMER: Yeah it’s so funny how people listen to music differently in different languages. We both feel like [with] German music people care more about lyrics, I don’t want to generalize it, but it feels like the songs are always a little more about the lyrics and less about the melody, so hooks in Germany can be phrases, can be words. Hooks in America [are] changing now, though, with all the urban, what’s it called, trap or something. [Laughs]

GRUMETH: That’s a good point. English sounds different, it’s a matter of sound and that English speaking sound appealed more to us.

WIMMER: And English has more of a melody than German, generally.

GRUMETH: That’s a good description.

WIMMER: You know it’s hard to say, some people might disagree, but for me English was a better language to sing, just as a singer I enjoyed that much more.

So speaking of the culture gap, I remember the last time I saw you you spoke about playing a Jimi Hendrix cover to an Asian audience that didn't know who he was. How did that happen?

GRUMETH: [Laughs] We met a university in Germany, a really small university named PopAkademie, and they supported us so [much]. They sent us to China, and the city of Mannheim, where the university is, they had an exchange program going on with the Expo [in Shanghai], so they sent us there. They sent us to France and Norway, all over the place.

WIMMER: [But] China was crazy. The funny thing was we didn’t even have to play and people were going nuts. We went up on stage and all these people were like “Oh they look different! What are those guys doing? What’s happening?” And we’re just setting up, you know? And then we played and I think [Ali], you said “You guys know Jimi Hendrix?”

GRUMETH: I thought it’s a joke that works every time, but everyone was just fucking looking [confused.] [Laughs]

WIMMER: It wasn’t as funny, it was just absurd.

GRUMETH: It was funny! Imagine you bringing a joke that always works then all of a sudden you see 400 faces staring at you, with no expression in their face! [Laughs]

What was it like playing rock music for people who had no preconceptions, people who didn't know the genre. Was it interesting to perform with that kind of clean slate?

GRUMETH: I can't tell but all I know is they appreciated it so much. They were partying hard. They loved the music. We love playing for them although they didn't get that one joke, that’s okay. [Laughs] It’s just a different world.

WIMMER: It’s an interesting question. I’ll think about it and call you later when I’ve thought about it.

Is there a notable difference when performing for European audiences versus American audiences?

GRUMETH: Yes, I would say how it’s amazing how we get the most appreciation in America which is the greatest honor for us as well. I mean, we’re sitting in the backstage room with posters from Biffy Clyro, Kings of Leon, Maroon 5. We traveled all those places like our heroes, the people who made us play music, we even worked with some of them, like mixing engineers, mastering engineers, management, whatever, and it’s such an honor to be in a country where all the music comes from that influenced us and play for an audience that is freaking out on our music. I’m even missing the words to describe that.

MUDI MUDRACK: Absolutely.

In a Twitter Q&A that you guys did I saw you said the American food you love most is French toast but the German food you miss most is bread. How do you explain that?

GRUMETH: [Laughs] There’s just a huge difference between what you get as regular bread here on every corner versus what you get on every corner in Austria or in Germany, that’s just a different bread. That’s the whole story and we are used to that bread, some of us for almost 30 years, others just 20 years. [Looks at Oli, the youngest band member, and laughs] Just used to that bread, that's the whole story. We’ll bring you some!

It’s just funny because French toast doesn’t sound American and is made of bread.

GRUMETH: But it’s not French, right? [Laughs] I haven’t been to France a lot but I never saw French toast anywhere in Europe.

WIMMER: I think all around the world French toast has the English name so it’s got to be British or American. But we have to find that out, there’s no French name for French toast.

GRUMETH: But there you go, that’s one of the basic differences, French toast is sweet and super soft. That’s cool, I love it. But it’s the opposite of the bread that we used to eat when we grew up.

While we’re on the subject, what’s been the strangest thing about being in America?

GRUMETH: The sizes. It’s all bigger. It’s amazing. When we came here we thought we could walk. When we looked up where’s the label and saw it on the map on our iPhone we thought “Oh, we could walk there,” but it turned out, oh my god, you can’t walk that distance! I mean [Mudi] does, he walks for hours. But also the sizes of the coffee, of the cars, of the streets. Oh my god, remember when we crossed that one street in LA without a traffic light and we just ran over there and, fuck, there were cars as high as my head and the street seemed so wide? [Laughs] It feels really unfamiliar.

WIMMER: Since then we haven’t crossed the street once, we stay on one side. [Laughs]

GRUMETH: And the fact that can live our dream over here. That’s the huge thing.

Download "Lights Out" on the AudioDamn! EP at iTunes: http://smarturl.it/AudioDamn Amazon: http://smarturl.it/Audiodamn_Amzn Spotify: http://smarturl.it/Audiodamn_Spotify Google Play: http://smarturl.it/AudioDamn_GP Deezer: http://smarturl.it/Audiodamn_Deezer https://www.audiodamn.com/ https://www.facebook.com/audiodamn https://twitter.com/audiodamn (C) 2015 Epic Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment

I don’t know if you guys know, but we recently had a presidential candidate named Jeb! with an exclamation mark at the end of the name just like you guys do. Do you think that that’s the way of the future now, punctuation at the end of brand names to distinguish yourself?

GRUMETH: We know [about Jeb!]. I don't know, but if so then we started it off because we did it six years ago already, he stole that idea. We’re going to sue you! Be prepared! [Laughs]

WIMMER: Maybe he wanted to hide his last name, I don't know, it’s speculation.

GRUMETH: Maybe!

Do you have a story behind the name?

WIMMER: Yes we do have a story behind the name. We were called Amsterdamn! for a few years actually, it was just kind of a weird joke and it just stayed our band name. When we got signed to EPIC Records lawyers and attorneys came and checked the trademark and it turned out somebody else had it, so we changed the name.

I noticed you guys have a thing going on with the suits. Have you ever not been the best dressed band at a show or festival?

GRUMETH: I don't think so. Just kidding. [Laughs]

WIMMER: I don't know, it’s a matter of opinion.

GRUMETH: It’s not about the rating, the reason why we do it, it’s some kind of respect for the audience, to show “Hey guys, we’re here for you,” we go on the stage and look nice for you guys.

WIMMER: We want to play nice music for you and we want to look nice.

GRUMETH: It also feels good to be honest. It’s also kind of a ritual, no one of us is wearing suits in our common life. It’s a special vibe, you know? When you put on the suit in the backstage room, like yeah I’m going on stage and trying to look good. It’s a ritual I would say.

WIMMER: You put on the suit, you’re AudioDamn!

So it’s like a costume?

GRUMETH: It’s not a costume, we’re trying to be as authentic as we can be, that’s what the whole band is about. When we recorded the album we tried to find the maximum realness, but we can just make ourselves beautiful for the audience.

It’s kind of old school thinking, like a theater thing. It’s a matter of attitude. Some bands have more of a “Rock ‘n’ roll, fuck you” attitude which is also a cool thing, I love a lot of those bands, but for us we found out our attitude is kind of the “Thanks for being here, we respect you, we’re really grateful” attitude.

Oli, you had the number one hit single in Austria at age 17. How did that affect your career from the beginning?

WIMMER: Well I think it did a few things that I am grateful for because it’s a weird experience, managers running away with money, you know, it just made me realize I really wanna make music in spite of all that other stuff that I had to deal with. I met Ali which I’m grateful for, because we had the same manager and he actually connected us to play in a band together for that project back then.

That’s actually how we met, we had a different band, and actually our live sound was way too rock for all those kids that were at those concerts. The kids during these concerts were, you know, progressing to the back of the room and the parents would coming to the front of the stage to start dancing. That seriously is what happened a lot of times. That kind of thing, it didn’t feel right, so we made this band a few years later, fortunately.

GRUMETH: A few years later that same manager that Oli was talking about called us when we lived in Germany (that all happened in Austria). We [hadn’t spoken] to him for years, and he called all of a sudden like, “Guys, I just discovered AudioDamn!! [It’s] Oli and you and a German drummer, right?” [Laughs] Like yeah, that’s what it is! [He said] “I’m so proud! I’m the one who convinced you [to first work together]!” When we were both refusing to work with each other, we were both like, “No, you know I have my own crew, it’s all good,” but he kept talking to us like, “Just meet up! Just meet up!” and we met and thought, yeah that makes sense, and didn’t think of it that we still have the same band he forced us to have five years earlier.

I noticed you guys have a brass section in your recordings, have you ever thought about bringing that into the live performances?

WIMMER: We actually do incorporate the horns sometimes. Not on this tour but we play with horns sometimes and it’s great. I think it’s different experience. To have AudioDamn! as the three piece is something cool as well because it’s more rock, it’s more gritty, and with the horns it’s a little more polished, you know what I mean? It’s nicer, and the AudioDamn! three piece experience is more down to Earth.

GRUMETH: But that is something that I think is awesome, we need to change, we enjoy so much to play our songs in different arrangements, we enjoy so much playing the acoustic sets, and Mudi is doing this amazing brush thing and going all the way with the dynamic when we play acoustic guitars, and I even play a nylon string guitar, and then on the other hand we have this super rock thing that we play as a trio, and we have this funky horn section thing going on, but I honestly really feel like we need to vary, because it just feels good, and yeah, it’s just fun.

Anything else you want to add?

GRUMETH: Stay true. We found out that is the only thing that will work out ever. We tried so much, all of us tried so much, and then we found this band, and we always said it’s about the fun guys, it’s about the reason why we make music. Let’s just always do what feels best. Of course you get distracted a lot along the way and people tell you, “Do this, do that, and you will have success,” but we always came back and we said we can do this and do that to have success in other bands, this band is about fun and the reason why we make music, and it’s the best thing that could’ve happened to us and the thing we want to share with everyone out there. Stay true because you will do best in what you love the most, and we discovered it’s the one that will take off.

You can buy AudioDamn! here.

Lousy With Sylvianbriar is Anything But: A Conversation with of Montreal

April 29, 2014Music InterviewWeston PaganoComment

Having performed in a ten-foot dress adorned with hallucinatory projections, completely nude, and with everything in between, enigmatic and eccentric frontman Kevin Barnes has guided of Montreal through a kaleidoscopic 18 years, 12 albums, and countless reformations in cast, spanning genres from vaudevillian twee pop, acid-soaked electronica, glam rock, and funk.

In their newest incarnation, a unique take on Dylan and Stones-esque 60-70s psychedelic Americana, Lousy with Sylvianbriar is anything but. Eschewing the glitter-covered, other-worldly, and androgynous sex-charge of their past few records, Barnes and co. have returned to their roots, recording without the use of computers on the 24-track in his home studio and emerging with yet another undeniably successful left turn.

Known for their flamboyant and high-energy live shows, of Montreal have incorporated elaborate stage acts, costumes, fruit, and once even a real-life, all-white horse into their musical performances as they convey Barnes’ meandering and shocking narratives articulated in his characteristically voluble diction and delivered in his simultaneously jarring yet soothing croons, shrieks, and falsettos.

Transverso Media spoke with Barnes about his beginnings, the new album and more.

TRANSVERSO: What was it like starting out in the Elephant 6 Collective in Athens, Georgia?

KEVIN BARNES: It sort of came together very unexpectedly when I moved down to Athens. I just knew one person who happened to connect me with all those other people, so it was really fortunate the way it happened. [It was] basically just a bunch of people who were making cassette four track recordings in their bedrooms and listening to Beach Boys’ Smile and [other], at that time, sort of obscure 60s music. Young people weren’t really listening to that stuff, so I needed to find a bunch of people my own age that were listening to those classic 60s records. It was great because, where I was living before in south Florida, there was nothing like that, basically everyone just listened to what was on the radio and dance music and things like that, so it was cool to meet all these likeminded people and to be inspired by each other and kind of create this new alternate universe together.

But you created the new record more or less isolated in San Francisco. What motivated this move and how did it affect you?

I’m not sure really what motivated it besides just wanting to get out of my comfort zone and go somewhere that sounded sort of exotic. I didn’t really know that many people but I knew enough people that I wouldn’t feel completely alienated in the new environment and [I] just sort of wandered around and spent a lot of time by myself and in my head thinking of ideas. I did a lot of reading, writing, and all that, so that’s cool, just to be focused to have nothing else going on other than focusing on writing. I think it inspired me because I was sort of romanticizing the concept of San Francisco and the different important cultural movements and events that happened there over the decades, [thinking] about the beat generation, the feminist movements, gay rights movements and all the important events that went down there. It’s cool because it’s a very culturally diverse city as well, so there’s so much ethnic diversity and cultural diversity and all these new places to discover, [whereas] in Athens, Georgia it’s a small town and there is not much mystery there. I’ve been [in Athens] so long that I kind of know everything, so it was cool to be in some new place that I could just go explore and discover new things.

of montreal is a bit of a revolving door in terms of members. How does it feel to be the solitary mainstay? Does that give you that sort of freedom you need to go to these places and do these things on your own?

Yeah, it’s cool to not have to answer to anybody because I’m very restless creatively speaking, and so it’s hard for me to really be attached to people in that way. I kind of need to be free to make decisions to help me go in different directions and realize different visions and so it’s just the way it is.

Your lyrics seem to fluctuate over a blurred line between personal and fictional. What can you tell us about that?

I think if you only write about yourself and your personal life it feels maybe a bit narcissistic, but I think it’s inevitable that there will always be some aspect of your personal life or your personal emotions or whatever coming through, even if you write about something that would seem like fiction. I guess I just made a decision early on that I wanted songs to be directly connected to my personal life and to reality, but I’ve gone through phases, like early on where I got kind of I got some bad reviews, and so I freaked out and [thought] well, I don’t want to put any of my personal life in there ‘cause it makes me too vulnerable. Then I’ve come back around to writing from a more personal perspective over the last six or seven records. If you write from a personal standpoint it’s likely to have a more timeless quality, just because you’re writing about universal themes that everyone can kind of identify with and they don’t really disappear.

Most of your early work is absent from your live shows, though. Is it because of those negative reviews? How do you go about picking a set from such an extensive discography?

No, I wouldn’t say that my decision making is affected by negative reviews of the early work, just because I’ve really sort of moved on, you know? I’m happy [those records] exist, but they don’t make any sense to me anymore; they came from a part of my psyche that’s either in hibernation or in a coma or dead or whatever. I don’t identify with them anymore, but the songs from the last six or seven records I still identify with, and it doesn’t seem foreign at all to play them. It’s really just wanting to play songs that I can connect with, ‘cause otherwise it’s just like doing some cover song or something. As far as putting a set together, it’s usually just a matter of thinking about what would be fun to play, what would feel good to play or would be therapeutic to play.

Drugs and other chemicals are often mentioned in your lyrics. How have these substances affected your artistic process?

Everything affects the creative process and your reality and your day-to-day outlook on things. I’m so focused on writing and everything it’s sort of centered around that, everything I do is gonna influence that on some level, but I’m not really a recreational drug user or anything like that so I don’t really have that same sort of relationship with recreational drugs that maybe some people have. I don’t really use drugs as an inspiration. If I do drugs, which I don’t that often, it’s normally just to see, okay, how’s this gonna feel, but it doesn’t usually make me more productive. I tend to be more productive when I’m just genuinely excited about the thing that I’m working on. I don’t really need anything artificial to boost that because the whole thing happens organically, and its not something that I can make happen through this combination of different things, it’s just something that kind of mystically happens without much effort, or it doesn’t happen at all.

What can you tell us about the upcoming of Montreal documentary “The Past is a Grotesque Animal”?

Well it’s basically done. I think that now it’s at the point of post production, [going through] color correcting, making sure the sound is solid throughout and little things like that, but yeah, it’s basically done. It just got picked up by Oscilloscope, so it’ll have a decent distribution. I’m not sure exactly when it’s coming out, but I’m assuming sometime this year.

Is it more of a documentary on you or the band as a whole? What exactly does it cover?

Well it’s not so much about the music. I had no real involvement with the way it was edited or put together or directed or anything, so it’s definitely not my project. It’s probably more about me and [my] personal relationships over the last 15 years or whatever more so than the music and the live show and the artwork and things like that. It’s slightly more behind the music than something that would be more objective.

Speaking of the artwork, Lousy with Sylvianbriar has the first album cover in a while that wasn’t done by your brother, David Barnes. How do you go about selecting the visuals to accompany your music and what is the relationship there?

Growing up I always had a strong connection with albums and album art. Whenever I hear a song I instantly have the album cover in my head if its something that’s like a classic album that I loved. It’s a weird thing, just staring at the album cover while you’re listening to the album and having that really strong memory connection with the music. I always wanted the album covers to have some presence of their own but also to feel like a visual embodiment of the spirit of the record. The new record [with] the motorcycle on the hill represents a sort of wildness and freedom ‘cause I was reading a Hunter S. Thompson book about the hells angels when I was writing the record. [The] motorcycle represents, maybe not so much anymore, but what it represented in the 60s and 70s, [was] that sort of outlaw culture. The record, to me, is sort of hearkening back to that time period, [and] it seems to be a sort of icon for that time period.

What are some of the album covers that made such a strong impression on you growing up?

Well a big one is the Prince album Sign o’ the Times where he’s on the cover with his big, kind of, like, Randy glasses, or whatever, and just looking very androgynous. That one, and also the cover of Lovesexy. Prince album covers I’ve probably stared at the most, just ‘cause he was so serious and perplexing, this strange, androgynous, beautiful creature that was so talented and so versatile and different; each record he was a completely different person. Same with David Bowie; [I spent a lot of time] staring at the cover of The Man Who Stole the World and Ziggy Stardust and Low, and things like that.

What ever happened to your rumored collaboration with MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden?

We’re still close friends and we still talk about it, so I think it will happen eventually, it’s just a matter of finding a moment where were both open and available.

What’s next for you and of Montreal?

Well I started work on a new record and we’re talking about getting together in a country house out in Tennessee this summer, so basically just sort of collecting ideas and chasing different inspirits and trying to find some spark to create a new wave for me artistically. I think I have actually discovered it, but I don’t really want to talk about it yet because it’s sort of in this vulnerable state right now. I just keep looking and keep touring; we have a lot of shows happening over the next couple months. We’re going to Europe, we’re going to Moscow in June, which is the first time we’ve ever gone out there. Yeah, I’ll basically just keep looking and keep producing things.

Lousy With Sylvianbriar is out now on Polyvinyl