M
y first time seeing you live was in Amplifest 2013, in Portugal. I was amazed by everything you brought into your performance. Do you remember that show? Oh, yeah, of course! What did you like the most about playing that show? That show did feel really good... I think it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why a show is good, but I think it’s probably just a mixture of really good energy from the audience, the sound and a bunch of different things and maybe even some unseen spiritual things that we didn’t even know about, you know what I mean? It all kind of comes together and just creates the show where everyone is enjoying it and feels good about it. I don’t remember the specific things, but I really enjoyed the show. I think the venue is really cool and there were also so many great bands. I think it’s always more inspiring when you’re playing amongst bands that you really like. We got to play right after Kim Gordon’s project Body/ Head and also Russian Circles. That was a really good night and everyone was really nice. It was also my first time there and so it was really special.
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music&riots
Summer Issue
Pain Is Beauty was a remarkable record and it was another important mark in your career. Every record you release, you approach new ways to write your songs, but you always maintain your distinct and artistic sound. How does it feel for you to look back at all those transitions to what you have now? For Pain Is Beauty, there was a lot of these electronic songs that we’ve been playing live for a year or two and we kind of started to adding it more and more, and experimenting with it and that was kind of new for this band because typically it was either just rock or experimental folk music. But for that album, it was the first time that we really did a lot of programming - program beats and sounds - and then mixed live instruments with it to make it a little more human. I think that was a good experience for us as a band because that made us realize that we don’t need to put limitations or rules on ourselves and we kind of experiment with the genre, which is something that I’ve always done, but again that was the first time that we input those kind of songs on a record. Last year, you released the impressive 50-minute film titled Lone directed by Mark Pellington, which featured songs from Pain Is Beauty - such as “Lone”, “Feral Love” and “The Waves Have Come.” How did the idea for this film come up and how was it like to shoot it? The film started with the idea of doing a music video with the director Mark Pellington for the song “The Waves Have Come” and then as we started meeting together to talk about ideas and plans, he basically was listening to the album and just felt inspired to make it into a film and do five songs instead of one song, which for me was really an experimental thing because I’ve never done many music videos... So doing a whole film, five music videos included with a big endeavour... As much it has a lot of input in it, I also kind of wanted to give the director a free rein, because for him I think it was a cathartic kind of healing experience and he was really going through a lot of his own memories and reflections back on certain things and family members and I could relate to that, so I didn’t feel like it was too far from my own life or just from
life in general... His experiences are vast like he has always done a lot, he has a family... It’s a reflection back and a process of creating this surreal landscape where you can’t tell if it’s a dream or memories or if it’s really happening. That’s more like what I relate to, because I like that feeling of dreaming and kind of being unsure if you’re dreaming or awake. And that’s what you focus on the new record, Abyss. Yeah, I focus a lot on that. You explore the struggles with sleep paralysis - a disorder in which reality and dreaming are indistinguishable. It’s a very curious and enigmatic theme to write about. What led you to approach this theme on your new record? Sleep issues have kind of haunted me my whole life. When I was a kid, I would always burst out in my sleep or I would have insomnias, so my parents took me to a sleep center at one point. Then just growing up I would have issues off and on like anyone would, but for some reason that sort of day dreaming really started affecting the way that I wrote about reality and about things in the world and it became sort of a slightly surreal version of everything. For this album, I just wanted to go deep into things. I mean, the whole album is about sleep/dream issues and the approach from that point, but anything on the album is kind of going deep into something, whether it’s like your own mind or issues that you care about or someone that you care about, so it’s just about diving really deep and that’s where “abyss” comes from. How much of dreaming mixed with reality affects your mood towards your music? Probably... I don’t think I really realized it until my friend Brian [Cook] from Russian Circles wrote the bio for the new album. When we were discussing what the album is about and I told him about my issues with something called sleep paralysis and strange sleep habits over the years, he kind of made me realize how much that has influence on my music and I guess I’ve never thought about that before, which it’s kind of funny because I write about that stuff a lot. I mean,