Interview: BRAHMS
Meet You At The Show: You guys made a pretty big leap onto the scene last year with your first show as a supporting spot for a sold-out Passion Pit show and then playing SXSW. How crazy was all of that for you as a band?
Cale Parks: The Passion Pit show was totally nerve-wracking because we were playing for 3,000 people and it was our first live performance. Then the whole SXSW experience was amazing… But looking back on it, I wish we would’ve waited until this year because we hadn’t really developed much as a band yet. I watch videos of that now and I cringe because our sound has sort of changed and evolved in the past year. Those early demos and performances were still very young and unrealized, and I feel like our new material is way more put-together and it means a lot more to me than the early demos. But the whole experience was great and I’m glad people liked it right out the gate, but I’m really more excited about the music we’re making now.
MYATS: Were there any specific learning experiences from your first shows that are helping you now on your North American tour?
CP: Performance-wise, the sound is always evolving, and I feel like we learned how to be a band on stage in different situations on that first tour. We’re more prepared to play in smaller venues and deal with whatever sound is coming our way. And as far as touring, we know how to travel together now, we know what to expect, so that’s going to be a little different.
MYATS: What would you say drew you to your electronic aesthetic?
CP: I guess I’ve just got a fascination with that sound. I’m a drummer primarily. I don’t know at what point I started listening to electronic music differently; I’ve always liked it, even in college I’d listen to Aphex Twin and more experimental electronic music. I guess it’s the whole culture around it. It sounds amazing, and there’s something about the way electronic music moves people and makes people dance, and the whole technology involved. It’s the future! It’s not like garage rock, there’s so many possibilities for it, and that’s where music has obviously been going the past twenty to thirty years.
I don’t really listen to rock bands at all now. I find the rhythms involved in electronic music are far more interesting than the rhythms in most rock bands that have live drummers. I think a lot of live drummers get off on listening to technical live drummers, like math rock, where all of it is very technical – and that’s cool, but it’s very testosterone-based music, it’s very macho. In electronic music, the rhythms are so crazy, most drummers can’t play that kind of stuff.
MYATS: So do you play drums live?
CP: I do – well, there’s not a live drummer, there’s only three of us. But I’ve got a drum machine that attaches to my microphone stand, and I have a set-up next to that of toms, acoustic toms, cymbals, and then I have drum pads with electronic samples on them and I hit those in time with the drum machine. So there’s always a beat or a pulse, there’s a dance beat coming out of the system. We don’t use a laptop or backing tracks or hidden iPods or any of that shit. People, especially live, identify with acoustic drums so they can see someone actually making the sound.
MYATS: Can you tell me about your upcoming debut album?
CP: We have no idea when it’s coming out – it’s not even recorded yet! We’re recording it in April when we get back from the tour. Basically, in the last year, as a band we’ve been taking our time. We have 30-something demos that we’ve gone through and picked out the best ones. We’ll be playing a lot of new material on tour so when we get home it’s just gonna be there and we’ll just track it and make the album. But it will be out some time this year.
We also have a 7” coming out this week. One song was premiered on Stereogum, called “Add It Up”, and then we’re also doing a song called “Repeat It” which is going to be the B-Side on the 7”. We’re self-releasing it; we did everything – we record all our own music, we shot the photograph for the cover, we laid the artwork out in Photoshop, and we just made a music video, too, and we shot that ourselves as well. But we realized once we got into Final Cut that we really sucked at editing video, so from there we gave the footage and our rough idea to a friend of mine who’s a really good video editor and he pieced it all together and made it look really cool. [click here to view the video on their website now]
-Interview conducted by Natasha Young
We would like to thank Cale Parks and Brahms for taking the time to chat with us. You can catch the band live this Saturday, February 26th at Casa Del Popolo with Asobi Seksu. Tickets can be purchased online via Blue Skies Turn Black.
