65daysofstatic
von kk anno 2010
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65daysofstatic doesn't make it easy for music journalists. How can one concretize the music of a band that is strictly against being forced into a genre and whose song writing follows the principle of whatever feels right? With their last album they drastically changed their style towards dance music. CrossOver talked to the British instrumentalists and was explained a view of electronical music, that makes it more understandable to people who are not familiar with the genre.
Let's talk about some electronic music I did not find mentioned in any of your past interviews. Those are Crystal Castles and Daft Punk.
Paul: I like Crystal Castles. I heard the new record once on the Spotify and it sounded like it's probably going to be pretty great but I've not sat down and listened to it. I don't really know much about them. They've got really famous. I think anything that is just noisy and confusing is got to be a good thing, because when they get more popular, it helps the rest of us, I guess. Daft Punk however: absolutely incredible. I always listened to electronic music before. Underworld, Orbital and The Prodigy were my top three. I was always aware of Daft Punk but I never really gave them much time. But the past couple of years I sort of revisited them and it finally clicked how just absolutely incredible what they're doing is, because it's so much more than just a band and dance music. They create this entire world. The songs are the best kind of dance music. But they're still pushing things forward. Their live shows and the way they mashed up all that stuff together - they're a brilliant band. I'm really looking forward to the Tron soundtrack. I've been hearing a little bit leaking out.
Is that something that is appealing for 65daysofstatic, too, to combine everything you mentioned? Or is it rather the musical level?
Paul: Something we always felt was important was to understand that a band is always more than just the music. When we started, Kick 606 and people like him were doing really interesting stuff, laptop music. That was a new technology or certainly another level of stuff you could do just on the laptop. It was brand new and really innovative. But at the same time there were bands like At The Drive-In and Trail Of Dead around, guitar bands who were so much more exciting in a visual way, these people jumping around the stage. A band if more than one person is something you can believe in so much more than just a guy behind a laptop. We always wanted to be a band and even if we started without a drummer we still wanted to come across as a live band rather than a dance project.
Was the album "We Were Exploding Anyway" meant to be played in clubs by DJs?
Paul: [laughs] We haven't written anything for DJs because our tempos aren't anywhere close to being uniformed for easy beat matching. But with this last record we did try and write it so people could dance to it. I've got to admit that was more dancing on our live shows than sort of being as conscious as to write music that would get played in clubs. It would be nice if it did obviously. But yes certainly we tried to write music that makes people dancing.
What makes you prefer an analogue bassdrum to an electronic one? "PX3" on the new EP has a "normal" one whereas "We Were Exploding Anyway" has an electronical one.
Paul: I go with what feels right. I've got such a huge library of samples we've got on hand all the time. Whereas proper analogue synthesizers we don't really have any. And certainly we don't tour with anything like that. I've obviously got plenty of samples of analogue kick drums, so - whatever feels right. Different songs require different tones. We're probably quite lazy when it comes to production. Throughout the writing process we just sort of throw stuff down with really quickly made synth sounds and beats. We throw samples into a sampler to make the beats rather than concentrating on the sounds. We do that much later on once we've got the arrangement on and then we go back and build it up. But then also there are always live drums to take into account. We've got a custom built kit for Rob that he has designed himself. The kick drum is so deep. It sounds actually incredible through PAs in clubs and on the record. On the first albums we made, "The Fall Of Math" and "One Time For All Time", there's just everything being played over the top of each other and we didn't know what we were doing. There are real kick drums and fake kick drums clashing all the time whereas these days we try a lot harder to have some separation, to be a bit more disciplined. It's more effective. It's a lot harder in one sense to write a song like a Daft Punk song where it's just a 4/4 kick drum with nothing to hide behind than it is to write some sort of really glitchy Aphex Twin style in a million BPM break beats because it's so much going on. It's just too much to take in. So these days we try to strip things back a little more.
Is the fact that it is much harder to write a good song with fewer elements appealing to you?
Paul: Yes, to an extent, certainly. We spent a long time with 65 trying so hard to not sound like anybody else. We maybe missed the trick about the importance of genre music. I've been listening to much more dance music than anything else the past couple of years. I've got a new found appreciation for artists or producers or whoever will work within really strict templates, will almost have the same BPMs and the same arrangements, like the breakdowns and the build-ups. Being interesting within that framework is an entirely different discipline and skill than it is to try and make something that sounds like nothing else.
Which other elements of electronic music fascinate you?
Paul: The directness is definitely a good thing I'm quite into these days. It's quite refreshing for a different take on arrangements. We're getting better at it. When we did the "The Destruction Of Small Ideas"-album all of the songs have so many different parts and there are these huge journeys. Whereas if you listen to a really good dance song by Underworld or Trentemøller any number of songs can be ten minutes plus and they don't really go anywhere but that's also fine, that's really good in fact. Just repetitive beats. Magical.
You probably familiarized a lot of your fans with electronic music. With which bands can they start to understand your influences and get deeper into electronic music?
Paul: I'd always say Orbital because I grew up listening to that band. They're incredible. I saw them this year at a festival in England and it was the first time seeing them in six or seven years and they were still just as good as they always were. It's so melodic but so dancy and interesting without being too clever. It's just perfect. Who else who else, so many. I've been listening to a lot of Kavinsky. Not that it is much to listen to, but he is really good. Then there is this new guy, just heard of it today, called Make Up And Vanity Set, who does this sort of 80s drum carpenteresque sort of squelchy dramatic synthesizing music which is really good. Footburns are really good and noisy as well, it's dancy. I got hold of the new album by a guy called Oneohtrix Point Never. That's really interesting, less dancy I suppose, more synths and noise but it's good. Bloody Beetroots, they're good fun.
There's a huge amount of good artists hailing from Sheffield. Is there something in the water?
Paul: [laughs] Maybe maybe. The balance is just right between being supportive and but also not being impressed easily at all. Obviously we're not famous anyway. We walk around and it doesn't make a difference. But everyone will have seen Jarvis Cocker or one of the Arctic Monkeys just wandering around in town on one point or another. That sort of happens and nobody really pays it much attention. That's a nice thing. I'm living in Manchester at the moment. I'm from there originally, not Sheffield. We've never considered ourselves a huge part of Sheffield's scene. But we just kept to our devices really. I can't really consider myself an expert in the place but it's a friendly city.
Is there any urge in you to collaborate with other artists?
Paul: Whenever anything occurs to us to try we try it. But it's people that we know. We did Circle Takes the Square on the last record. That was really good. It's strange because for one rule we're pretty huge control freaks and it's almost like a luxury. The band is a constant struggle to stay ahead of ourselves. A band like us, we're all so poor and so busy all the time, there's so much admin that comes with it. There's never really time off because there's no luxury to take the time off. Time off the band would actually mean getting full time jobs. It's not like we could just take a couple of months and maybe collaborate with someone. And if it works that is cool but if it doesn't it doesn't matter. There's too much momentum going to do that kind of thing. It is not really the forefront of our minds. We're quite an insular unit. We understand how to write music together. None of us has been in bands that have been anywhere near successful as 65 has. We enjoy writing together and the need for an external collaborator never really comes to conversation. And when it does, we've tried it like the Robert Smith vocals, we do try it, but I don't know. It probably would be good and healthy to get some outside ideas and try new ways of doing things. We don't know that many people in bands really anyway. The people we do know usually are busy as us doing their own thing. But something is so vague it has sort of been too hard to make time for it.
Have you thought of rereleasing old LPs? Some of them are still changing hands at high prices or aren't available to the public at all, like "Radio Protector".
Paul: The problem with "Radio Protector" is that I really loved doing that project, but there's no way to redo it because we spent three months taking Polaroid photos, took a thousand different ones. We're not doing that again [laughs]. It got really hard at the end to make something interesting.
The whole band was taking Polaroid photos?
Paul: Yeah! One camera each, just boxes and boxes of film. It was a lot of fun but it did take a long time. And then cataloguing them all and putting them together, that took ages. We'd like to put some of the early records out that haven't ever had a vinyl release, that'd be good. Monotreme Records would like to do that one day, so it's still about finding the time and the money. We'll see.
I just thought of the Godspeed-record with the penny overrun by a train.
Paul: That was a great idea. I think that's the thing bands need to start doing more of. Because you can download music for free now. The bands that try and fight that are ridiculous. It's not a very helpful attitude for anybody really. It's just that's what happens. The solution to us seems to be to rather try and sell 5000 plastic CD albums with just the music that you can download anyway, concentrate on a 1000 nice packages which include the music of course, but just you know artwork that has some thought gone into it, something unique, something that's worth owning. You're not selling this many but the people who do buy them really get their money's worth and get to value something. Hopefully it's good enough to charge a little bit more. But a 1000 people are fans that understand what's happening and will buy it and you get to pay your bills that month.
What's a song worth to you? How much would you pay for your favourite record?
Paul: I don't know. I really don't know. Because the worst thing about being in this band is the lack of music we can afford to buy. For ten years now my library since we started doing this, the amount of music I bought just dropped because the spare cash goes into the band. I mean it's impossible to put a price on it. I've spent plenty of silly money on New Order records and stuff, nothing is particularly rare. I just want to hold them and have them. I don't know. Putting a price on a song seems bizarre, really. I'd rather have 10000 people download our record for nothing than them never having heard it in the first place. It's still about communicating that to people anyway.
Thanks.
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