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LIARS

— LA! LA! —

Plus:

TOTAL SUCKERS FRANKIE ROSE CONVERGE SONIC YOUTH ELECTRIC TICKLE MACHINE MNDR COLD CAVE PHANTOGRAM HOT CHIP YEASAYER OWEN PALLETT

LA!

From left—on Julian Gross: Suit Shipley & Halmos Shirt ELC Boots Billy Reid On Aaron Hemphill: Shirt and Pants Shipley & Halmos On Angus Andrew: Jacket KZO Shorts General idea Boots his own On the cover: Sweater General Idea

Liars photography Alexander Wagner

Editor-in-Chief / Publisher Andrew Parks, Pop Mart Media aparks@self-titledmag.com Art Director / Senior Editor Aaron Richter arichter@self-titledmag.com Managing Editor Arye Dworken adworken@self-titledmag.com Photo Editor Sarah Maxwell smaxwell@self-titledmag.com Staff Photographers Travis Huggett, Alexander Wagner Contributing Writer J. Bennett Contributing Photographers Emir Eralp, Cassie Marketos, Turkishomework, Elizabeth Weinberg Contributing Stylist Katharine Polk Special Thanks Aisha Speirs Advertising, Submissions & Other Iquiries Andrew Parks / self-titled 685 Metropolitan Ave. #1 Brooklyn, NY 11211 718-499-3983 aparks@self-titledmag.com

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Display through forever—we’re digital, remember? Published by Pop Mart Media. All self-titled content is property of Pop Mart Media. Please do not use without permission. Copyright 2010, Pop Mart Media.

BLOG CHATTER

the 16 best comments on self-titledmag.com — I still remember the night I chose to go to see the Meat Puppets (on tour with their Up on the Sun release) instead of going to see the Exploited. One of the best choices I made in all of my concertgoing experience. — This shit is the truth. — I have some awesome ’60s library musc on vinyl (repressed). — Eh. Sort of slow and long… Makes me sleepy — I can’t believe he’s gone so suddenly. He wasn’t the nicest person but his music is great. — LOVE IT MAYNE! — Reminded of an Insane Clown Posse gathering of the Juggalos guy or something. — I’m pretty sure their show was better than your blog. — KILL YOURSELF HATER — Fuck this 2009 nonsense—that year sucked. On to 2010. — Jessica simpson, where has your love gone? It’s not in your music, no. — Alisdair sounds exactly like the person I imagine him to be. — Good ol’ como d00ds — Slumberland is such an incredible labor of love and has had such consistent quality over the years, it’s kind of insane — Moose is my favorite thing in Indianapolis. — My ears are still ringing/voice is still gone. //

EXTREME KLVT-OVER

black-metal’s leading logo maker gives us the emperor treatment

When we heard Christophe Szpajdel—who’s worked with Wolves in the Throne Room, Emperor and Nachtmystium, among many others—was releasing a weighty Lord of the Logos (Gestalten, $55) collection, one thought came to mind: What if he applied his Depressiv’Moderne techniques to self-titled? As you can see in the above illustration, the Belgium native nailed our new frostier-than-thou logo. He also wrote about the records that influenced his design. Here are a few, and you can read the rest on our daily site.

— Process of Guilt: Renounce (Bubonic/Major Label Industries) No flowery, romantic music here. Process of Guilt is genuine funeral doom. “Crawl” sounds like serpentine creatures creeping in a thick and sticky

mud. “Falling” describes perfectly the slow collapse of a once-brilliant fortress humans built on their own dreams. — Profan: Bestial Awakening (Bubonic) This is the missing link between funeral doom and dr(((((((o))))))))ne—a style that’s practically nonexistent in Europe. Every song is a masterpiece. When you put a picture of Tulsa’s Boston Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church next to it, the music clearly makes sense. — Wraith of the Ropes: Ada (Total Rust) Filled with totally haunting atmospheres of absolute horror, this album will lead you on a ride you might not return from…like if your bed was floating on a long and silent river—haunted by the mellifluous howl of the sirens and slowly, but inexorably, leading you to your final journey with no one to hear you scream.

CONTRIBUTORS

When he’s not missing A Massachusetts-born, Malibu native Katharine deadlines for such Brooklyn-based portrait Polk graduated college publications as Decibel, and documentary with a degree in fashion Revolver and Thrasher, design and moved to NYC photographer, Elizabeth J. Bennett is busy being Weinberg captures three years ago to design tall, charming and enduring images filled and style at Badgley handsome. He also enjoys with true-to-life character Mischka Couture. She’s pork products, WWIIand welcoming intensity. now a freelance stylist, era sidearms and long She has seen her work building her own brand walks on the beach. This appear in the pages of by melding a technical past year, we sent J. to Rolling Stone, Spin, Nylon, and creative background Memphis for a cover story Death + Taxes as well as with her eclectic style on the late Jay Reatard. many other publications, to create unforgettable His report captured an and there’s a good looks. Katharine—who’s honest, hilarious—and chance you’ve seen her worked in TV and print, now, sad—image of the widely circulated press and with celebrity artist at the height of shots of such acts as clientele—styled Liars his career. In addition to Passion Pit, Dr. Dog, for this issue, blending being one of the finest John Vanderslice and the showroom pieces into pieces of writing to Dodos. Elizabeth—who the trio’s arrived-in appear in our pages, it this winter spent 10 days wardrobe for a look was also selected for Da traveling throughout that’s both effortless, Capo’s Best Music Writing Israel, where she took natural and undeniably 2009. J. is currently some incredible photos classic. With her drive to working on an authorized create based purely on a that you can see on her biography of renowned blog—enjoys riding love for what she does, monkey gladiator Jacco her bicycle, and she is Katharine possesses the Macacco and lives in an constantly on a quest for rare and valuable quality abandoned missile silo the perfect cold-brewed of “getting it.” Which, as on the outskirts of LA. iced coffee. always, is quite refreshing.

Photographer Emir Eralp grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, where he regularly cut school, listened to the Smiths on the Euro-Asian ferry and drank cheap wine on the side streets that Henri Cartier-Bresson once lovingly photographed.

The tendencies that got Emir in trouble in high school made him well suited for the film program at Northwestern University, where he directed and shot movies, and became obsessed with post-war European cinema. He now lives in Brooklyn and travels the world photographing equal parts beauty and madness, wherever they may appear. Above is a recent X-ray of his pneumonia-inflicted lung. And yes, Emir is feeling much better now, thank you.

forward 10 malachai

ugly side of love

four TeT

There is love in you

owen PalleTT hearTland

These new PuriTans hidden

rewind 09 animal collecTive

merriweaTher PosT Pavilion

arcTic monKeys humBug

dirTy ProJecTors BiTTe orca

wild BeasTs Two dancers

www.dominorecordco.us

350 WORDS OR LESS I

can pinpoint the exact moment when I stopped caring about music criticism. It was right at the release of Liars’ 2004 LP, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, an album that Spin and Rolling Stone dissed like a stack of Hootie & the Blowfish reissues. While the former gave it a flatout F, the latter—notorious for avoiding one-star reviews—finished Liars off with a flaccid one-liner: “Making a record about fear is one thing; making a record you fear listening to is quite another.”

I know what you’re thinking—snarky reviews have been around since Lester Bangs. These two, however, made me realize how out of touch “criticism” has become. Liars have been ahead of the curve their entire career, from the transcendent drone-pop pieces of 2006’s Drum’s Not Dead to the delicate strings and tamper tantrums of the trio’s latest album, Sisterworld. Even their most conventional record (2001’s They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top) is out of its goddamn mind. Can you think of another dancepunk album that closes like an endless lock groove of This Heat madness?

From the Editor So here we are, toasting the band’s first 10 years with J. Bennett’s thorough look at Liars’ latest left turn.

J.’s previous self-titled cover—a tour of Memphis and Jay Reatard’s trouble mind (RIP)—landed in Da Capo’s Best Music Writing book for 2009, so we’re happy to have him back in these pages. Speaking of our contributors, this is easily our strongest issue yet, thanks to a combination of talents old (Travis Huggett, Turkishomework, Alexander Wagner) and new (Emir Eralp, Elizabeth Weinberg, Katharine Polk). Not to sound sappy, but you’re the reason we continue to slug it out—depleted bank account, be damned—on the independent-music-magazine front.

And hey, Aaron and Arye, you’re swell, too.

Andrew Parks, Editor-in-Chief / Publisher PS. This issue of self-titled—as well as our entire archive—is now optimized for your iPhone and Android devices (iPad, here we come), so you can even view our magazine on the go. Reach out and touch…us?

1MM

Total Slacker / Shea Stadium, Brooklyn / 01.30.10 Photography Turkishomework

1MM Frankie Rose / A house party, Brooklyn / 12.29.09 Photography

cassie marketos (ABOVE)

Converge’s Jacob Bannon / Manhattan / 11.20.09 Photography

alexander wagner (BELOW)

1MM Sonic Youth / Terminal 5, NYC / 11.21.09 Photography

aaron richter

Electric Tickle Machine / Mercury Lounge, NYC / 12.15.09 Photography

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turkishomework (BELOW)

MNDR / Mercury Lounge, NYC / 12.15.09 Photography

turkishomework (ABOVE)

Cold Cave / Terminal 5, NYC / 11.21.09 Photography

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aaron richter

Recording Under the Influence Photography Aaron richter

PHANTOGRAM

Sarah Barthel, of the upstate New York duo, explains what really inspired their new album, Eyelid Movies (Barsuk).

M

lot of time with animals. Our friends Dugal, Fiona, Mira, Keeko and Claus kept us company as much as possible. The occasional rat running under our feet in the studio wasn’t pleasant, but…they brought strange imagery and a paranoia that we carried with us wherever we went. I remember dreaming that a rat followed me into my room while I was asleep and started nibbling at my eyes. Then it climbed into my ear and made a nest for its hairless babies.

There was a lot of activity going on in that studio at all times. We would leave for the night, and the cats would hunt for [rats] all morning. When we went back into the studio the next day, there would be a fresh dead rat neatly placed underneath our equipment.

1. Dreams and/or visions

A lot of our ideas for lyrics, arrangements, tones and themes for songs are carved from visuals we find in our day and night dreams. We also tend to write and arrange as though we are traveling through a dream where a surreal scenario is happening and all you can do is lie there and watch. The winter months seemed to intensify our dreams.

2. Winter

We recorded the album in the dead of winter in upstate New York, where it’s cold, dark, lonely and extremely desolate. We spent almost all of the recording process in our homemade studio with frozen toes and fingers. When we weren’t in the studio, we had only a wood stove and electric blankets to keep us warm in the house, and getting snowed in was a common issue as well as. We spent little time around other people, and the times we did were when we drove back into town to work at our jobs waiting tables—not necessarily my favorite kind of socializing.

We spent a lot of time daydreaming and living in music because there was nothing else around us.

Having no distractions allowed our imaginations to run wild. We had a lot of built-up emotions and obscure imagery that were released on this record because of the winter months. I think it was how we balanced out our sanity.

3. Animals

Maybe it’s because we didn’t have many humans to interact with during the process of writing and recording this album, but we ended up spending a

4. ffffound.com

This Web site is good to gain inspiration through visual images from others. It allows you to click around and gradually fall into what seems like an endless wormhole of art, photography, interior design and other cool images.

5. Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!

It’s a hilarious show we enjoyed during our off time while recording the album. It was a good way to relax and take a break. Their zany structure and unique lofi post-production make it one of our favorite shows of all time. Some people don’t really get it, but we definitely connect with their sense of humor.

CLICK HERE to read about more unexpected inspirations from Le Loup, RJD2 and the Clientele and more.

Photography Travis Huggett

HOT CHIP Hot Chip’s fourth album, One Life Stand, is out now on Astralwerks.

Click here to read our interview with the band.

Words ARYE DWORKEN Photography ELIZABETH WEINBERG

YEASAYER

FREE ASSOCIATI

ION

“Wha aliens as the versio Earth

at would s create eir on of h-pop music?”

T

wo movies that exceedingly surpassed box-office expectations in the past 12 months were 2012 and Avatar. Both films—not coincidentally—were set in the future. Culturally speaking, as the years pass beyond Stanley Kubrick’s vision, we’re obsessed with knowing what we don’t yet know, whether it involves flying cars, aluminum-foil spacesuits or the destruction of our planet by way of an asteroid hosting a zombie virus.

But with Yeasayer’s first album, 2007’s All Hour Cymbals (We Are Free), the Brooklyn pysch-pop band warned us against gazing toward days to come. “In 2080 I’ll surely be dead,” urged singer Chris Keating on the song titled after the aforementioned year. “So don’t look ahead, ever look ahead / It’s a new year; I’m glad to be here.” Yet as we enter

2010, the band has quite literally changed its tune.

“We wanted the album to sound like the future, this combination of emotion through technology,” says Keating, leaning back in his chair as he breaks down the troupe’s latest effort, Odd Blood (Secretly Canadian). “It’s such a strange time—all this communicating with one another but in such a cold, detached way.”

“With Odd Blood we wanted to directly engage with technology, and a big influence was the idea of the coming singularity,” adds guitarist and singer Anand Wilder, a Baltimore native who’s trimmed his once-flowing tresses to a respectable grad-school student’s length and now wears a pair of glasses practically snatched from a scientist’s desk. “We watched [online lecture series] TED talks by [futurist] Ray Kurzweil about computer chips getting smaller and smaller, and how the technology in our phones is a million times more complex and a million times smaller than the one computer his college had in the ’60s. We wanted to see how far we could take a certain sterility and coldness, and see if it could still have popular appeal.”

Despite intentions of detachment, the trio—rounded out by bassist Ira Wolf Tuton—has crafted a sophomore effort that is exceptionally warm and accessible. “We talked about the alien distillation of sounds from recorded music over the last 100 years,” Wilder reveals. “What would aliens, who are picking up spotty radio signals from us, create as their version of Earth-pop music to [archive] in a museum?” We may never know the answer to that, but in the meantime, self-titled imagines it would probably sound a lot like Odd Blood—broken down here track by track.

“THE CHILDREN”

Chris Keating: It’s the palette-cleanser in between the last album and the new album. It takes you a minute or two to figure out whether it’s a song or not, and by the time you get your head around it, “Ambling Amp” starts.… We’ve heard that it sounds like the Knife and a little like Kanye West. Which is far from being a bad thing.

Anand Wilder: That song was the only thing we had issue with as far as our record label went. They were like, “You shouldn’t start the record with that.”

Ira Wolf Tuton: It makes it difficult for people to figure out what we’re about on this new record.

Keating: The song was inspired by The Brood, this early David Cronenberg movie that we were watching about “psychoplasmic” energy, and this woman is birthing evil, demonic children coming out her brain and her anger—weird stuff. I was also reading about shadow life, and scientists are finding life forms in uninhabitable environments now—I think it’s in arsenic—so I thought it would be a cool idea to create this notion of Earth aliens

“It makes it difficult for people to figure out what we’re about.”

in which this new breed develops that can exist in uninhabitable environments, and it winds up taking over our planet while we die out. Which, who knows, is entirely possible. We just read today that they found water on the dark side of the moon.

“AMBLING ALP”

Keating: “Ambling Alp” was the nickname of Primo Carnera, who was an Italian boxer from the ’30s. He was Mussolini’s strongman. Each country had their guy, like America had Joe Lewis. Primo was Italy’s guy. He was huge and intimidating, big as a mountain, also somewhat slow.

My grandfather was a pro boxer, and he would tell me stories as a kid. I started reading about Joe Lewis, and “Ambling Alp” was a phrase that stood out. But my interest was really with Joe Lewis who fought Max Schmeling, the Nazis’ boxer, during the war. This song was also inspired by that connection to my grandfather. He was an impressive guy who fought Max Beyer, Ambling Alp, all the legends. He was a big guy, like six-foot-two, and my dad’s a big guy, too. Me? I’m a skinny dork.

“MADDER RED”

Wilder: This was a quiet acoustic demo Ira made that I wrote a song to. I stole an opening line—“Even when my luck is down”—from this Celtic book of verse and, from there, wrote a song about a screwup gambler type who can’t get his life together. Then I made it more personal, kind of relating that lifestyle to my own. I wanted to write a song about a pathetic, weak guy, like “Jealous Guy” or “Beast of Burden” or “Still Fly.” It’s about touring and apologizing for being away from a lover. I think of it as a love song, but I guess it’s too negative for that—it’s more of a confessional song.

“I REMEMBER”

Keating: I wanted to channel Eno and Vangelis. Every time I watch Blade Runner, I think that it’s the dopest music I have ever heard. It can feel ironic, but Vangelis was a genius.

“I Remember” was written right after I had met my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, and I wanted to write about love and about a girl. Writing a song about ambiguity is so hard; being in love is a great songwriting inspiration, even if that seems cheesy.

“O.N.E.”

Keating: We want to have a cultural impact without compromising to a label dude, an A&R guy or Coca-Cola.

We want to be on radio, and this song proves that we’re okay with that. Why not take this chance to be culturally significant?

Wilder: [I wrote] this song about addiction, specifically alcoholism, but it could work for any addiction. “One’s not enough”—like you can’t just stop after one drink or one hit until you’ve just cut it totally out of your life. I’m not an alcoholic, and I don’t think I have an addictive personality either, but I made it about my own life because I sort of quit drinking to protect my vocal cords from myself.

Keating: Depeche Mode is a good example: They’re playing arenas, songs like “Personal Jesus,” and everyone is waving their hands in their air. But we’ll play [New York’s] Webster Hall, and then what? Where will we play after that? For indie bands, there’s kind of this wall, and why aspire to be stuck against that wall? There are larger venues out there to play, and if you’re into playing them, why not?

“LOVE ME GIRL”

Wilder: It’s a pretty literal song about trying to win over a girl. As the production developed, I started to think of it in terms of that movie THX 1138, like the song itself was a mini-movie, with a long chase scene in the beginning.

Then the song drops and you’re, like, inside the paranoid brain of this man who can’t understand why a girl won’t fall in love with him.

“ROME”

Keating: I wrote this song thinking about a band from the future, like if you imagined a band in Blade Runner in the background. Look at Star Wars—the cantina band was basically playing klezmer mixed with drum and bass. Only bands from the future have the balls to combine random musical styles and make something incredibly strange.

“STRANGE REUNIONS”

Wilder: “Strange Reunions” talks about how secular atheist ideologues, like Richard Dawkins, and religious extremists need to take themselves less seriously to reach some sort of mutual understanding.

Keating: I feel like the song is too sophisticated for me.

People say it sounds like the first record a bit, but we were genuinely trying to progress as a band and do something different. I listen to the first record now, and I don’t think it sounds good. It doesn’t sound like I wanted it to sound.

There is somewhat of a world-music influence on this track—like the beat, and there are some foreign-sounding guitars. But I’m not really aware of world music that much.

I do have some African recordings and some Bollywood, but they’re compilations. I don’t really know world music as much as people probably think I do. I’m a dabbler.

“MONDEGREEN”

Keating: The tonality and feeling of the song were inspired by paranoia and the 24-hour news cycle. I wrote down the word “paranoia,” and that guided what I wanted to write. I wanted harshness, and we sampled sounds from commercials for the verses. I personally avoid Fox News, but there is this overall paranoia in our country. I was thinking of the movie Network and how prophetic it was— all of that freaks me out. That sentiment doesn’t really represent a majority of our country. It’s a small percentage but still, those paranoid freaks became the loudest voice.

“GRIZELDA”

Wilder: “Grizelda” is from the point of view of this hitman who worked for Griselda Blanco, the cocaine queen of Miami, who ordered over 200 hits during her reign. She would kill men while they were sleeping beside her.

Keating: Griselda had these dudes who would do anything for her. She had a drug empire, she had power, and you know, she wasn’t very attractive. I think she’s still alive, but she wasn’t very good looking for a woman who had that many men interested in her. So many songs on this record were love songs, so we thought it would be sinister to close the record with a love song about a female serial killer.

I grew up in Baltimore—the fucking murder capitol of the world—and so did Anand. Someone was murdered on my front steps, like, shot. I didn’t know the person, but he was a drug dealer, and he was shot right outside my front door. We were always around violence as kids. Naturally, I have always been interested in the dark side of things, and you know what? The villain is always more interesting. //

“My grandfather was a big guy... Me? I’m a skinny dork.”

The self-titled interview

OWEN PALLETT S

hortly after this interview, Final Fantasy will take back his name. Following two stunning albums, Owen Pallett will from here forth release music as Owen Pallett.

But as we settle into a booth at Manhattan’s Tribeca Grand, the 30-year-old Canadian composer, songwriter, singer and violin player mentions nothing of the yet-to-be-announced moniker change, even addressing questions related to his now-former sobriquet with polite patience. “[Final Fantasy] is less named after the actual video-game series itself,” quips Pallett, “and more about the experience of playing it when you’re a teenager.” His brow tucked beneath the brim of a baseball cap, the Polaris Music Prize–winning artist—who’s collaborated with such acts as Arcade Fire, Beirut and Patrick Wolf—peppers his comments with staccato laughter as he speaks with self-titled about his new album, Heartland (Domino).

Words michael tedder Photography emir eralp

self-titled: When I first heard Heartland, I thought it sounded like the score for a Peter Jackson film. What made you decide to go large on this one?

I was spending a lot of time doing orchestral arrangements for other people and finding that I was having to edit myself. Which is a great thing—it’s wonderful to have a boss who’s telling you, “I want it to sound like this”—but it got to a point where I felt like I could write an orchestral record by myself and have it function.

Obviously you have the chops and the compositional background, but was making something this huge no sweat?

Or was there a lot of teeth-gnashing hard work?

When I went into this, having done all this orchestral stuff for other people, I thought it would be a cakewalk.

It ended up being the most psychologically grueling experience of my life. So many of my favorite orchestral records have had a staff of 15 people working on them— not to mention have been funded by something other than my bank account. But I was singing, writing lyrics, composing, arranging, executive-producing, mixing, just the whole thing, which is typically done by all these different people. The fact that I was taking it all on killed me. [This past] January I stopped feeling like this record was something I was making but was rather something that had its hands up my ass and was moving my hands for me. It felt like a parasite, basically [laughs].

“Some people write pop music and some people write classical music, and some of it appears in concert halls and some of it appears in bars.�

“W John Darnielle to tell me tha album is too whimsi

Did you make the album before signing with Domino?

Domino wanted to make some offers, but there’s nothing I hate more than the feeling that I might be letting someone down, so I didn’t want to sign with them before they heard the record. So I told them, “Let me finish this record, and when I have a final mix, you can listen to it and tell me what you want to do.” It ended up being very worthwhile.

The [label’s] advance covered most of the expense of making the record, which was a relief, because I was worried how I was going to live.

Heartland doesn’t sound like it was cheap to make.

No, it was very expensive. Well, it was very expensive for somebody who was otherwise not really employed. But I don’t have a drug problem, so I’m okay.

Do you live in Canada still?

I live in Toronto.

Is your rent expensive?

It’s not cheap, but it’s not New York by any stretch. I pay $600 a month.

When you’re the executive producer, how do you know when a record is done?

That’s why I hired Rusty Santos to mix it at the end; I wanted somebody who could definitively say, “Done. This is your final mix.” Early on, too, [Arcade Fire drummer] Jeremy Gara was there to take my demos and kind of fashion them into actual bedtracks from which I could do my own arrangements over.

Did you do everything else yourself, or did you bring in other string players?

No, all the strings were done in the Czech Republic with an orchestra. The winds and brass were all done in Toronto with different players. All the drums were done

by Jeremy. There’s guest appearances by Nico Muhly, who does a little bit of the backwards piano on “The Great Elsewhere,” and Regine [Chassagne of Arcade Fire] sings backing vocals on a couple of songs that are really dense vocally. I wanted to have some other textures in there besides my voice.

So you went all over the world?

We started in Iceland, and I did two weeks there. And we recorded the bedtracks there, just me and Jeremy. And I took that stuff and arranged it. It took me a long time, and I was on tour at the time, and it was driving me crazy.

I went to Prague and recorded the orchestra, and at that point I realized there was so much work involved if I was actually going to complete this record, and that’s when I started to go a little insane. Came back to Toronto, did a lot of editing, finished all the vocals parts, recorded the percussion stuff, winds and brass, etc. And then we started mixing in May. So in addition to the music, Heartland has a storyline?

Yes.

Who is at my m title ical?�

“We had a photo shoot…but I don’t have any pants on.”

And the character is a farmer, right?

It’s difficult for me to describe because I kind of wanted the album to be the statement. But essentially it’s set in a fictional world, and there’s a farmer in there who becomes aware that he is in communication with the songwriter, with the person who created this world.

With me, basically. At first he enters into this religious ecstasy, and then he realizes this world has boundaries and he’s more of a subordinate, and that he is just the object of my affection—that he is the “baby” that R&B singers sing about. So he kind of rebels against it, and he climbs a mountain, and he disembowels me at the top of a mountain. And at the end, the narrative voices converge into one. That’s basically the narrative, but I feel like I just ruined the album by telling you [laughs]!

This may be a random question, but are you aware of the author Grant Morrison?

No. He does a lot of graphic novels, and in the ’80s he wrote the comic Animal Man. And when he wrapped it up, in the last issue he showed up as a character and explained to Animal Man why he did all the terrible things to him to make it interesting for the audience. Or it’s like that Nick Cave song “We Call Upon the Author”—those things where the author talks to his character…

There’s a history of it. Midway through, after I had almost completed all the lyrics, I re-read some Roland Barthes essays that I hadn’t even thought about since college, and I realized there was a lot of him in this record. He wrote this essay “The Death of the Author,” and the idea of extracting the notion that somebody has created this, and what the work becomes when you remove that. And not to mention, A Lover’s Discourse, which is essentially exactly what this record is trying to flip, in a way. While A Lover’s Discourse is this guy talking about his own feelings in regards to this unseen other force, this is that unseen other force reacting to the fact that he’s the subject of all these unseen feelings, and there’s all this stuff going on around him. That was a big thing, and Paul Auster, obviously, City of Glass. He was cast as his own character in that, but I don’t even really remember that book all that much. And the Looney Tunes cartoon “Duck Amuck” where Daffy Duck… Daffy or Donald—I think it’s Daffy [Ed. note: It’s Daffy]—is taunted by the animator who keeps putting him into bizarre situations.

And then it turns out to be Bugs Bunny.

Really? I haven’t seen it! Bugs was the guy doing it?

You can probably find it on YouTube.

I want to see it; it sounds fun.

Did you go to school for composition?

Yeah, it was a composition degree [from the University of Toronto].

When you were there, did people look down at rock and pop music, or was it encouraged to explore and cross genres?

Well, I think that any sort of school where they don’t allow for that cross-pollination, it’s an indication of that school’s provinciality, which is unfortunate. I actually took a course where the teacher was doing a survey of 20th-century music, and she relegated John Cage to being like “You know, that guy. He roles dice and stuff.” And in a way that pretty much summed up my entire experience there. I felt like as a confused teenager I was grappling with all these ideas about expressing myself through post-modernity, and the teachers there were strictly interested in fugue writing and stuff. Which is awesome—I learned how to write a fugue. But it wasn’t until after I graduated that I, through osmosis and through talking with friends and reading books on my own, began to figure out ways that I was going to express myself.

Was it heartening for you when the composition world and indie-rock worlds started getting together?

I never really felt that there were disparate elements between the two. A lot of people ask me about violins in rock music and how it’s had this resurgence, and it’s just not true. There’s strings in everything; it’s a really prevalent instrument. As for the cross-pollination of classical music and pop music, there’s been countless academic books written on the Beatles. There’s probably more books written on the Beatles than Wagner. So I don’t know. Some people write pop music and people write classical music, and some of it appears in concert halls and some of it appears in bars.

There’s a song on the new Fucked Up singles compilation, Couple Tracks (Matador), called “Ban Violins.” In the liner notes, they said they wrote it to protest all the violins in rock, and it also says that years later “Owen was playing violin on our record because we are hippie sellouts.”

Yes, it’s true. They actually credited me on the original 7-inch. And it’s true because the year they wrote and recorded it, I had played on 12, 15 Toronto releases. I was playing on everyone’s record. We were all just playing on everybody’s records, except for Fucked Up, who were really outside that scene—very much a hardcore band at that time. So they wrote that song and credited me on it, and Mike Olsen, too, who is the cellist. He and I were often working together on Arcade Fire, Jim Guthrie, Hidden Cameras, and I thought that it was awesome; I cracked up when I saw it. And it was maybe only six months later that they contacted me and wanted to do a record.

So how are you going to tour for Heartland?

Well, Final Fantasy began as a looped violin project, and that’s still what it is. About two years ago, I stepped up the game, looping wise, at least my game, because I felt I had done everything I could do with a loop station. So I built a polyphonic looping system that allowed me to loop and have violin be anywhere in the room that I wanted. It allows the songs to get dense and complicated, which you can hear on this record. But all these songs are written without the looping concept in mind so I can play them.

people to turn to me and say, “Oh, that album title, it’s not very good.” But Yam, the King of Crops, dude.

How about one of those band-plus-orchestra shows that the Decemberists and Grizzly Bear have been doing?

I don’t know. I did one with Grizzly Bear in February. It was a mixed success because Grizzly Bear didn’t really need the orchestra. And I’ve seen them now with the orchestra a couple of times, and every time it’s like, “Sure, whatever, guys. You’re already sounding so amazing; you don’t need it.” With my set, I didn’t do any violin looping.

I just sat at the piano and plinked away and sang the songs as they were to appear on the record. I wasn’t feeling comfortable just sitting there singing, and I didn’t deliver a very good vocal performance, and the show didn’t have the kinetic energy of the looping show. I don’t think either of us brought it. So it was only with a show I just did a month ago in Halifax with an orchestra that it actually really felt great. It was a combination of looping and orchestra, and felt like something I could really tour with.

No. I can assume.

No, you can’t actually.

Your background is classical, but you clearly have a sense of humor: You’ve named an album He Poos Clouds; you cover video-game songs. Are these two parts of your personality or just a way to remind everyone not to take music so seriously?

I don’t really think like that. I kind of had an argument— not even an argument but a conversation—with John Darnielle when we were on tour, and he called me out and was talking about how he thought He Poos Clouds was a bad album title. And I’ve heard a lot of people say that, and it really disappointed me to hear that because John’s a fan and I’m a fan of his. But I walked away, and I just thought, “Dude called an album of his Yam, the King of Crops, and he has another album called Taboo VI: The Homecoming.” You know what I mean? Who is he to tell me that my album title is too whimsical or whatever?

There are times, too, when I’m looking at what I’m doing and thinking, “Wow, this is really highbrow compared to what John’s doing.” He’s just up onstage playing a guitar and singing, but at the same time we’re referencing all the same sources. He’s got a song the chorus of which is from the cut scene from the [PlayStation 2] game Odin Sphere.

He’s got another song called “Thank You Mario, But Our Princess Is in Another Castle.” I don’t know; everyone is just doing what comes naturally to them. It’s easy for

The New York Times won’t print that album title, and the Village Voice’s blog likes to make fun of them for that.

Yeah, I don’t know. That’s their business, not mine.

So my editor told me that I have to ask you about appearing in Butt magazine. I wasn’t aware of that publication.

Oh, Butt magazine. You don’t know that magazine?

Oh, I can’t?

It’s a unique gay magazine that’s printed on pink paper, and it’s black and white, and it looks more like a zine than an actual magazine. It doesn’t fetishize youth culture the way other gay magazines do where they just say, “Youth is beauty,” or “Muscles are attractive,” and that’s the end of it.

It portrays a lot of men who are interesting or attractive for other reasons, so there are a lot of pictures of hairy asses, a lot of dicks. It’s a lot of interviews. It’s a very different kind of magazine. Unfortunately, I don’t know those editors very well, and I hear they don’t like me very much.

Oh, what happened?

I did an interview with Butt within the same week as I did one with Out, and they came out at the same time. I think Butt fancies themselves to be a counter-culture sort of thing, a political thing.

How did the Butt article turn out?

There are two photos. They typically do nude stuff, compromising positions. So we had a photo shoot, and a lot of stuff happened. And the photos that made it in were me putting on my shirt and a photo of me leaning down to plug in a microwave, but I don’t have any pants on.

Are you still a big video-game fan?

I haven’t been playing many video games these days. The last new one I played was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

I like shooters; I’m really excited about the new Sin & Punishment game coming for the Wii; I bought the original Sin & Punishment when I was in Japan. I burned off the edges so it would fit in my Nintendo 64. I love that game. I played Guitar Hero, too, but it didn’t hold my interest.

I’m trying to think about songs you’ve played on that could make it on there.

I don’t know. I have “Many Lives –> 49 MP.” That would require some pretty clever shredding. It’ll be the wimp edition of Guitar Hero. //

After years spent in Brooklyn and Berlin, Liars return to Los Angeles to conjure a Sisterworld from the cities within the city.

Words J. Bennett | Photography Alexander wagner | Styling Katharine Polk

A WORLD APART

Sweater general idea

“We don’t wanna make this record more confusing— again.”

I

n retrospect, it’s difficult to determine which was more startling. It was bad enough when someone shot the security guard at the weed dispensary downstairs. The paramedics cut his clothes off as his blood spread across the sidewalk, his life leaking into the gutter in crimson rivulets—literally down the drain. According to the LA Weekly, it was the kid’s first day on the job, for fuck’s sake. But the night a couple of dudes smashed through Angus Andrew’s bedroom wall with sledgehammers? Well, that was the last straw. The Liars frontman was wearing headphones at the time, working on music for his band’s fifth album, Sisterworld. When the two-man demolition crew mistakenly punched through the wrong sheet of drywall, they were just as surprised to see a six-and-a-halffoot-tall Australian sitting there in his underwear as he was to see them. “It really freaked me out, man,” Andrew recalls. “It freaked them out, too. I was in my boxer shorts screaming, so they ran off. But that was the maximum for me at that point. Once my sanctuary was violated like that, there was no turning back.”

And so Andrew’s tenancy on South La Brea Avenue, in the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles, came to a close. He’d moved there from Berlin, where he’d spent a few years in self-imposed isolation, unable to speak the language, as deliberately cut off from world events

as he was from his neighbors. The move to LA was a homecoming of sorts. His bandmates—drummer Julian Gross and guitarist Aaron Hemphill—were already living there. It’s the city where they’d first met back in 2000, when Andrew and Gross were attending CalArts and Hemphill was working at a local record shop. But LA proved to be merely a jumping-off point then. They split for Brooklyn—Gross had yet to join the band—where Andrew and Hemphill wrote and recorded Liars’ 2002 debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, with then-members Ron Albertson (drums) and Pat Noecker (bass).

Meanwhile, their narrative became intertwined with those of fellow Williamsburg compatriots Yeah Yeah Yeahs and TV on the Radio. Corralled under various millennial post-whatever journalistic aggregations, the bands had whiffs of musical similarity—varying experimental degrees of noise, punk, art rock, dance and electronica—but the press concerned itself with more-tangible connections, like Andrew’s erstwhile romance with Karen O. Since their origins, all three groups have had their fingers in one another’s pies: TVOTR’s David Sitek produced Liars’ witch-trial-inspired 2004 album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned (their first outing with Gross); Karen O directed a Liars video; Hemphill contributed to Karen O’s Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack; and TVOTR’s Tunde Adebimpe remixed a new Liars songs for Sisterworld’s bonus disc.

Where Liars diverge is in their unwillingness to settle into an instantly recognizable sound. Their catalog seesaws from the snotty dance rock of Monument and dark atonality of They Were Wrong to the masterful percussion-drone collages of 2006’s Drum’s Not Dead and Moodswingerenhanced motör-skronk of their self-titled 2007 album. On Sisterworld, Liars dabble in recognizable references—some sedated Beck here (“No Barrier Fun”), some mid-’90s Sonic Youth there (“Drop Dead”)—while the inescapable influence of their friends becomes more apparent than ever in the gorgeously drunken, TVOTR-ish blur of “Scissor” and the “Maps”-like flash of “Proud Evolution.”

But as any real-estate agent will tell you, location is everything. And for Sisterworld, that location had to be Los Angeles. Just up the street from the garage where Balthazar Getty works in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Andrew’s apartment—the one that would literally become a hole in the wall—was selected because it was the halfway point between Hemphill’s place in Venice Beach and Gross’ pad in Highland Park. “We came here specifically to make a record,” Andrew confirms. “But it wasn’t until we got here that things started to establish themselves more, and we definitely took on the inspiration that was around us. I really got into it—trying to discover what LA is really like between the gaps.”

“It was r

y

Top: Suit Shipley & Halmos Shirt ELC Boots Billy Reid Bottom: Jacket Bespoken Shirt and Pants ELC

really shady in this only-in-LA way, like they were young amateur-porn upstarts.”

MICROCOSMS

Sisterworld—the name itself bespeaks alternate realities.

For Andrew, that meant living far from the garish cock-suck glamour of Hollywood and the gentrified hipster territories of Silverlake and Echo Park, in a neighborhood tucked between the pockets of Latino sprawl and the prevailing strip-mall hell that pepper the city like bullet holes.

The space he found on La Brea, situated above a weed dispensary, shared an entryway with an unlicensed afterhours club—the kind of fly-by-night Craigslist rental that reeks of thigh-high platform boots, large-gauge tit rings, shitty drugs and general desperation. “It was really shady in this only-in-LA way, like they were young amateur-porn upstarts or something,” adds Gross, who describes the scene’s sensibility as “alien sex goth.”

The tenants threw weekly parties and spent the other six days preparing for the big night. “They’d always be working on these weird props and sculptures and stuff,” Andrew explains. “On Saturday nights, these groups of people would come, characters that you forget exist. It was a really good example of watching people who had fallen through the cracks or who need their own place to be, an environment where they can feel comfortable.”

It was a congregation of the failed—those chasers of the Hollywood dream who missed the carrot and have been getting beaten with the stick ever since. “If you think about it, LA has to be one of the places where there’s the biggest amount of rejected people,” Andrew ventures. “It’s this huge pool of rejection, and where do those people go? I’m sure there are a million other places just like the one I was witness to.” The constant police presence in Andrew’s neighborhood certainly didn’t make life any less colorful. “There were always helicopters, blocks being cordoned off so you don’t know what’s going on, but you know something’s going on,” he elaborates. “But more immediately, there were a couple of attempts to rob the weed store that I was living above.”

Cut to violence in the street: Gunshots ring out, and the alien-sex-goth crew comes running into Andrew’s place, freaked the fuck out. Again, Andrew is wearing headphones, oblivious to the goings-on below. “I suggested we go down and check it out,” he recounts now. “We saw the security guard laid out on the sidewalk. It was a really shocking and heavy scenario. But at the same time, I was kind of eating it up and really buzzed by it. Which makes you feel sick afterward.”

FEELING CALIFORNIA

Today, Andrew lives roughly 10 miles from that dispensary, in a modest guest house just up the road from Gross’ place. Though the surrounding neighborhood might not be much better than his old one, his street is relatively mellow, and his living arrangements are considerably more private. Inside, a large painting hangs above the futon on the wall that frames the front door. The other walls are more or less bare, but a nearby bookcase overflows with reading material. The spine of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Road, is clearly visible from across the room. We sit drinking glasses of water, waiting for Hemphill to battle his way through freeway traffic from Venice. Gross has taken the change out of his pocket and is playing with it on the coffee table.

All this talk about shootings has brought back some not-so-fond childhood memories. “Seventh grade was the first time I remember hearing about someone from my school dying from violence,” Gross says. “It was a kid who stole a radio.… His name was Cornelius. The story was that he came out with a screwdriver, so [a] cop shot him. The next day in school, everything was covered in handwritten memorials to this guy Cornelius. Girls crying, everybody crying. It was terrible, man. I didn’t know him, but I knew who he was. He was in one of my homeroom classes.”

By the time Gross hit Venice High, the situation had not improved. “The first time I ever saw a drive-by, I was in

“I was in my boxer shorts screaming.

Once my sanctuary was violated, there was no turning back.”

On Andrew: Jacket KZO Jeans Raf by Raf simons Boots florsheim by duckie brown On Hemphill: Suit and Shirt Shipley & Halmos

class listening to [Stevie Wonder’s] ‘My Cherie Amour,’ ” he recalls. “I heard the pops, and then I looked out the window, and there’s a guy standing in the street, shooting at two girls and a guy who ran off. Then he jumped into a car and sped away. I was probably 16.”

When the cops arrived, they asked Gross and his friend to come down to the station to look at mug shots.

“Then this crazy old Venice gangster came up to us,” Gross continues. “I remember he had his shirt off and shit. He goes, ‘You saw what happened?’ And I go, ‘Uh… yeah?’ Then he was like, ‘You gonna tell the police what happened?’ And that’s, like, fifty-fifty right there, you know? What is the right answer? I figured he was from Venice and the shooting was against Venice, so I said yes.

And he goes, ‘Okay,’ and walked off.”

When Gross finally split town, he couldn’t leave fast enough. “I hated LA when I first left. I was like, ‘I’m never coming back.’ But after a while, I was just longing to be here. When I finally moved back, I appreciated it more— the historical parts especially. Even though the gang stuff isn’t that great, I like that it was born here. And I like that part mixed with this kind of super-Hollywood side, the ugly part—like Hollywood Boulevard 15 years ago when it was just like crack hell. It was a very different place.

But yeah—sun, beach, mountains—it’s great. And having everybody here again for the first time since school.”

Attaching the band members’ various LA experiences to any specific Sisterworld tracks is where the story gets a bit fuzzy. A song like “The Overachievers” might be the most obvious place to start looking—at one point Andrew barks the refrain “LA! LA! LA!” before shouting a line about the stars in Malibu—but Liars have never included printed lyrics with any of their albums, and they’ve become hesitant to explain their concepts in anything but the broadest terms. When Hemphill arrives, he relates an anecdote about turning down a fan’s e-mail request for lyrics to a Liars song. “I wrote back sincerely how great it is that the person took the time to write and that they actually care enough to get the lyrics right, but ultimately I said, ‘I can’t give you the lyrics.’ I went into detail as to why and even apologized, but it sorta means too much to me.”

Hemphill has the disconcerting habit of appearing to frown slightly when he talks. It’s unclear whether this is part of his natural demeanor or because he dislikes the questions he’s being asked. At one point, he mentions “spooky coincidences” within the lyrics that he and Andrew wrote for Sisterworld but, when pressed, refuses to elaborate. “I’m gonna have to decline,” he tells us. “I just don’t wanna sidetrack [this interview]. There are tons of things that we put ourselves through. I think we deleted this same sentence from the record bio, but we do have strong conceptual sensibilities when we approach things.

Blazer Cheap Monday Shirt Shipley & Halmos Pants ELC Belt His own Shoes Florsheim by duckie Brown

On Hemphill: Blazer Cheap Monday Shirt Shipley & Halmos On Gross: Shirt general idea On Andrew: Sweater raf by raf simmons Shirt his own

It’s super brainy and interconnected with banal things and super-crazy, spooky things. I can’t really divulge them, though. Angus and I have to discuss that first. It’s not that we’re scared to be ourselves. It’s just that we don’t wanna make this record more confusing—again.”

As it turns out, trying to avoid confusion has become one of Liars’ top priorities. “The majority of the time, when we’re disappointed about a record, it’s because it’s been misinterpreted as something other than what it’s intended,” Andrew confirms, “like people think we’ve made a really crazy, noisy, arty record, when really our intention was to make a really song-oriented record.” He cites the DVD that accompanied Drum’s Not Dead, which included three homemade music videos for each of the album’s 12 tracks. “But then it’s like, ‘Oh, shit—maybe they got all that arty stuff from the way we titled the songs or made the DVD.’ It’s all these extraneous things that aren’t actually the music.”

In fact, Liars have altered their own creative inclinations based upon how past records were interpreted, even going so far as to strip their self-titled 2007 album of any overarching concept. “When you put out records, you do learn things about how well you communicate ideas and how well people react to them,” Andrew explains. “For example, we did this concept record with the witches [They Were Wrong, So We Drowned] and it was really fun for us to do that, but it was also not the best idea for people to deal with. A concept record about witches is kind of heavy, and people get kind of shut off immediately because of that.

And then we made Drum’s Not Dead, which was less based on a concept, but we had these images and characters that represented things, and that was kind of confusing for people, too. I think that’s why we reacted and made Liars devoid of that stuff. People were getting stumped on these ideas and not really getting to the music.”

As such, Sisterworld’s concept is deliberately broad and intentionally vague, at least as far as the listener is concerned. But Hemphill’s reticence to discuss the conceptual nuances of the band’s music is rooted in the nature of explanation itself. “To me, there’s no such thing as a misinterpretation of the record by a listener,” he offers. “It’s more of a misinterpretation of a quote, and it all takes place in this world outside of music. Like, if I say there’s a song on the new album that was inspired by an LA drag race, suddenly all the reviews are about this drag race. But it’s not about demystifying it; it’s that I don’t wanna put my name on it again. I don’t wanna promote the mystery of what I intended it to be about or what Angus intended it to be about. I wanna promote whatever the listener thinks it’s about. I want them to have fun with it. It’s not important what we think.”

Of course, there are limits to this strategy, limits that Hemphill readily acknowledges. “That kid who

e-mailed me, if he said, ‘Can you give me the lyrics to that gay-bashing anthem you wrote?’ and the song is really this ballad that I had written for a woman, then yeah, I’m gonna say, ‘It’s not what you thought, man.’

But I’m gonna put it in broad terms. If it’s that crazy of a misinterpretation, that’s different. But how we can effectively communicate that stuff is an ongoing thing, and we’re not gonna get to the point where we can communicate perfectly. That’d be stupid anyway. It wouldn’t be an art form. It’d be something to learn, a quiz.”

Ultimately, Liars want what any artist wants: for the art to speak for itself. “When bands are overly forceful with all the rigors of their rituals to come up with their sound or lyrics, I question it,” Hemphill explains. “It’s like a photographer who tells you too much about what the photograph means. Why did you choose photography as your vessel to communicate in expressible ideas if you keep talking? You should do spoken word or something.”

DENOUEMENT

The security guard, he died from his wounds. His name was Noe Campos Gonzalez. He was 25 years old.

His death has become something of a flashpoint in an ongoing controversy that is particular to Los Angeles. The proliferation of medical marijuana dispensaries is such that the February 2010 issue of Harper’s claims that the ratio of the “minimum number” of dispensaries in LA to the number of Starbucks is now four to one. According to the November 23, 2009, issue of the L.A. Weekly, though the city placed a moratorium on dispensaries in 2007, an inexplicable loophole in the law allowed roughly 400 more dispensaries to open by way of a bizarre “financial hardship” clause. As of late November, the Weekly puts the total figure of dispensaries in LA at around 540.

It doesn’t take a genius—or even a stuffed suit from city hall—to understand that where vast quantities of weed are known to be stored, crime will follow. The brute-force logic of smash-and-grab has been around since the Stone Age, and in this case, it’s simple as Simon: Hold up a dispensary; take the weed and the cash; resell the weed; make more cash.

As we spoke with Liars after the violence on La Brea, neither Andrew nor self-titled realized that what the singer had witnessed was, in fact, the aftermath of a homicide.

Nevertheless, it served as a grim reminder of how frail the barriers between our seemingly private worlds can be.

“I had this setup where I had a couple of extra locks on the doors, and I felt really secure in my little space amid this sort of maelstrom going on around me,” says Andrew, recollecting the urban sanctuary he created following the shooting. “Until one night these guys with sledgehammers came through the wall.” //

Photography

andrew parks

jay reatard

(1980–2010)

This photo— inspired by Pantha Du Prince’s Black Noise— was created by Chaz Bundick of Toro y Moi.

end.