Hi Haale & Matt, how the devil are you today?
Excellent, thanks.
How would you describe your music to people who have not heard you before?
It’s super percussive with interlocking electric guitar riffs and layered vocals. As you said in your review, and others writers have echoed, it's hard to pin down bands that we sound like. There are strains of TV on the Radio, Tinariwen, Blonde Redhead, PJ Harvey, Page & Plant in the music, but there's something new happening here.
Matt, who are your drumming influences - Billy Cobham, Michael Shrieve & or Neil Peart by any chance?
They are all great drummers for sure. All powerhouse, technically great players but also with a lot of deep groove. Of the three, I have checked Billy Cobham out the most. Another great drummer is Narada Michael Walden – the stuff with Mahavishnu on “Visions of the Emerald Beyond” is classic.
But since I play a hyrid set with a lot of percussion, I also really like Zakir Hussain, Jamey Haddad, and Nana Vasconcelos, among others.
Haale, your vocals are delightful, what other songs, albums or bands have you sung on, or played with in the past?
I released a couple EPs in ‘O7—“Paratrooper” and “Morning” which were produced by a great drummer and musician named Dougie Bowne. I released a full-length album called “No Ceiling,” which Matt played on and produced. On these, I'm mostly singing in English but there are also some tunes in Persian.
On “Paratrooper,” there's a song called 'Floating Down' which I wrote after reading the biography of Jimi Hendrix called “'Scuse me while I Kiss the Sky.” The passage which inspired the song described his experience as he trained to be a paratrooper, how he loved descending from the plane, and hearing the wind whipping around his ears, how even in that situation all he'd think about was music and how he was going to recreate those sounds on his guitar.
Another project I really enjoyed was recording on the The Clash Sandanista! tribute album, called “The Sandanista! Project.” I sang “One more time” with some lyrical adjustments I made. That was a blast to sing.
All the songs on these recordings are on iTunes.
How do you go about your song writing? In solitude, on the road, bouncing ideas off each other?
Each song is different. Sometimes it starts with a guitar riff, sometimes with a groove. Sometimes we ping pong back and forth. Most of the time we'll be jamming, and something worth exploring will emerge, that’s the seed of the song. Then we either write it all at once, or we go our separate ways and find other parts, melodies, lyrics, and then come back and see what we got. ‘Trump’ and ‘My Alll’ were written all at once, and ‘Hummingbird’ in a more piecemeal, ping-pong fashion. All the songs on 'Wild Poppies' were written in our studio in Brooklyn.
If you could choose a movie to write a score for, what would it be?
“Riding Giants” which is a great documentary about the history of big wave surfing. Also we’d love to write songs and/or score a Wes Anderson film and a Jim Jarmusch film.
For other musicians; have you discovered any new instruments or recording techniques that are new to you? (Unless that gives away trade secrets)
As far as instruments go, we're only using the electric guitar and percussion on this album. The Pog 2 is a great pedal, that's what gives me the bass sound on 'Trump' and 'Hummingbird' and I'm using a Full Drive distortion pedal and Line 6 delay pedal. I play in varous tunings, so at one point I traded in two guitars which were not so easy to take on tour, and got the Gibson Robot, which allows me to program tunings in and change tunings in between songs quickly. It’s a great sounding guitar. Matt uses an array of drums, one of which is the Slapback 99, a frame drum he designed with Cooperman drum company.You can watch a video of him on youtube explaining features of the drum.
What would you most like people to know about your new record?
You can hear the whole album on our website, and you can buy it if you want to support independent music.
Any U.K. or European dates or album release on the horizon?
Not yet, but we’d love to be touring in the UK and Europe so we definitely want to release the album there as soon as possible.
As I said at the start of the interview, we thankfully discovered you out of the blue yesterday. Are there any other bands that you would like to recommend to us, that we might also be unaware of?
Lately we've been digging Delicate Steve, Arto Lindsay's album ‘Prize’, tUnE-yArDs, Buke and Gass, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Nico Muhly, Elis Regina. We’re both way into Malian music as well---Oumou Sangare, Juldeh Camara and Justin Adams, Ali Farka Toure, Khaira Arby, Salif Keita, and Rokia Traore. This music makes us happy--as classic, and elementally important to us as Bob Marley’s Fi-yah Fi-yah.
