|
|
|||||||
|
Interview
Laika's been creating electronic pop for about seven years now… how do you feel now that the rest of the world seems to be catching up with you? Actually, we've been doing this for longer, because I was in a band before this… it was along similar lines, a bit more aggressive… That's right, Moonshake… Yeah! I seem to be mellowing a bit in my old age… but it's been the better part of ten years, really… for us, it seemed like the obvious development. We started around our teens, really, but we started thinking actually releasing records in the late eighties… back then, there were a lot of bands like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine that were pushing guitars quite far, farther than I'd ever want to, actually. They were working at it for years… and we thought "there's gotta be something else out there". We were listening to a lot of hip-hop records, that sort of thing, and also when I was about 14 or 15, I was listening to a lot of things like Can and Kraftwerk. Because of that combination of things - just thinking that are there are things like mini-Moogs out there, and all these hip-hop loops - we just felt like we could put them all together! I mean, it was more like "don't throw out the guitars" - it's not like there was some big "life change" where there were "guitars" and then there were "electronics". It's been more like the result of an evolution of all the things we love - just throwing them all in the pot and seeing what happens. It just seems kind of natural to me that music has gone this way. Now you just said that the music was a mixture of different things - how does that apply to your songwriting process? Meaning, do the songs start out on the electronic side or do you work them out more in the traditional way - guitars and such - and then the electronics come in later? We haven't written songs on guitar in about eight years! Really?! Yeah! For the most part, our songs are written from the rhythm up - I know that's more of a "dance music" sort of thing - and a lot of times, that's all you need, really, just a rhythm track and a bass track. Then you add a vocal, and that's your track - sometimes you don't even need more than that. I think when you start writing a song "upside down", so to speak, as opposed to a traditional chord structure down, you're bound to have more groove, a more drum/bass kind of song, and that's definitely something that interested us. But definitely, the way you write affects what comes out in the end. A lot of artists that blend electronics with a strong vocal presence tend to come across as cold, but your songs tend to have a lot of warmth to them… (Laughing) Thank you! …You're welcome! Is that a conscious effort, or more of a happy accident, where it just naturally comes across that way? I think it's more who we are, and what we're like as people. At the end of the day, I think we put emotion over experimentation. That's why we haven't gone into some IDM-type, experimental/vocal style, which is interesting, but I don't like the closed-mindedness that if you do have vocals or you do have songs, you can't incorporate experimental elements into it, which I think we do. But we do value the voice - we do value the lyrics, which is why we put the lyrics on the album sleeves. I mean, as for me, I'm a little bored of music where there are little snippets of vocals, little riffs of the vocals, because it really doesn't convey the meaning of the song. Let's talk a bit about your vocals. Your vocals tend to be on the understated side, but at the same time, very expressive. Who do you listen to and think, "now that's a really great singer"? God, that's such a hard question! I guess I like really effeminate male voices - people like Nick Drake, or Mark Hollis from Talk Talk, and even Jeff Buckley, although I think he goes too far… I don't like it when people go really crazy with their vocals… Histrionics. Exactly. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it all the time, whether it's singing or playing. Even stuff like John Martin, generally, a lot of stuff between '67 and '72… those are the kind of singers I really like. Expressive without being over the top. Exactly. Now the album's called Good Looking Blues, and strangely enough, I was reading through the lyrics, and a lot of the songs seem like if you could change the music, the lyrics would almost be to a blues song, or a country song. Did that occur to you during the creation of the album? I was wondering if that had anything to do with its title. Definitely. I think a lot of the images that I'm drawn to tend to be quite earthy. Lyrically, I think I'm influenced more by folktales, and writers that draw on that tradition, things like Toni Morrison, you know, black American writers from the South, especially females as well. There's definitely a sort of lyricism to the language, and imagery like animals that act like people, and people with the characteristics of animals. I like all of that - I think it's a very… warm thing. Over the years, the band has gotten stronger melodically. Ever since Silver Apples, your sense of melody has grown, especially on the new singles, "Black Cat Bone" and "Uneasy". What other songs on the album strike you as being the strongest melodically? I'd say something like "Go Fish". It's a bit of a concept song, really, because I wrote two different styles of vocals for it, and neither one really carried the song in the end. So we ended up playing them both simultaneously! There was one called the "folky" vocal and one called the "bluesy" vocal, so we put them both together and realized "Whoa! That works!" It's a bit more conceptual than we usually are, but live, I can only sing one, so I sing the folky one. But live, it works quite well! I think it falls into the category of what we'll do next, which is a sort of sparser rhythm section, with a bit more on the vocals, and an almost folky kind of vocal. That's unusual, because your albums usually have a kind of "dense" sound to them. It seems like you take your time recording them. It's been three years since Sounds of the Satellites. How much of that time was spent in the studio? A week! (Laughs hysterically) Really?! So how was your extended vacation? Well, it wasn't quite that! A lot of the songs start out programmed - the drums and the bass are programmed, and we usually do that at home, but the week at Great Linford Manor was basically us just playing with live bass and drums, which is something we always wanted to do, but we never had the time to not do everything all programmed. Usually, half of the rhythm section is live, and half of it is programmed, and we'd always meant it to be the whole thing. On this album, there was a lot more of demo-ing the songs - it took about nine months to write, and that was pretty much a constant thing at home. Nine months straight of writing, and after that, we could've released it - I think it would've been very similar to Sounds of the Satellites. So when the record company heard it at that stage they said, "Well, you're done then", and we were like "no, no, no, we just started!" (Laughs) It was just a demo, and then we did what a rock band would do. We went to the studio, we played a bunch of shows - we did a little Scandinavian tour, a bunch of dates in the UK - and that was a new thing as well. I think a lot of electronic bands don't really do that. I think there's more of a mindset there where you make your album and then you figure out how to play it live, or you made your album on your own in your bedroom, and you either do a playback live, or you have to hire a bunch of musicians for the first time. We wanted to do this album more like a band. How's the response to the album been over there? It depends - everywhere but the UK it's been really, really good, but who knows? For some reason we're pariahs in the country that we've chosen to live in! (Laughs) Now, Laika's doing the Leeds and Reading festivals in the UK next month. Any chance that we'll see you here? In the autumn! We're here right now taking care of that kind of stuff, setting it up and so forth. We've toured here before for every other album - we did eight weeks for the first album, and six weeks for the second. So we usually get out here! One last question - what's the story with the "Badtimes" track? (Laughs) Well, as you know, I didn't write the lyrics - it's an appropriation of an e-mail. You know, before I mentioned that the other song was quite conceptual, and thinking about it, "Badtimes" is conceptual as well. This is one of the few different things on this album that we hadn't tried before, but I think we felt confident enough after a few albums to kind of say "we like it, it works, let's put it on the album." It really does. The first time I heard it, I hadn't read the lyrics yet or anything, and it just stopped me in my tracks. It was the strangest thing I'd heard in a long time! I think it's great! You know, one record I've always really liked is Ken Nordine's word-jazz stuff, that stuff in the '60s where they had all these proto-hippies playing bongos and stuff like that, with very surreal poetry over the top. And Ken Nordine was basically some guy who sold toothpaste over the TV - doing voiceovers - but in the evenings he'd head on over to the jazz clubs and do these surreal talking pieces, over this jazz background. And that's what the backing track was making me think of. It was kind of a slow, loping thing - it seemed like it was just going to need a spoken-word thing. And then that e-mail just kind of arrived in my in-basket. So I'm sitting there reading it, and the track was just playing on the ghetto blaster, and I thought, "well, that could work". It was just a first take vocal. I grabbed the e-mail out of the printer, turned the recorder on, played the backing track, and just kind of read along! Laika's latest album, Good Looking Blues (Beggars Banquet) is out now. |
 |
 |