James Murphy

I recently interviewed James Murphy and Nancy Whang of LCD Soundystem and the full transcript of this conversation will soon appear on Exclaim! Magazine‘s web site. We’ll also be airing the whole thing on the Mich Vish Interracial Morning Show! in the next couple of weeks. Here now though is an excerpt of our chat, where we discussed why This is Happening is the final LCD Soundsystem record.

There’s been much made about how This is Happening might mark the end of LCD Soundsystem as a band. Is this actually true?

Murphy: Well, it marks the end of an era of what the band is. It’s three albums that are professional rock band albums where you go on tour and you make singles and videos and stuff. I think it’s a nice trilogy and I think that’s the end of that because it’s a full-time job in which you can’t do anything else. I’m 40 and these guys have things they gotta do and people have kids. It’s the most fun job with the best people but, as awesome as it is, it doesn’t seem to be worth doing at the exclusion of everything else. So, it might as well go back to it being a fun thing that we can do different things with.

So, it’s not simply a moniker change or something?

No, I mean that would just be a surface change; that would be meaningless. Then I’d just start another stupid band with another name. There’s no reason to do that. It just means I don’t wanna be a professional musician anymore.

Whang: At least not that style of professional musician.

Murphy: Yeah, like make a record, go on tour, do interviews, make videos. I wanna just go back and produce other people again, keep running DFA, work with my friends, make singles—things like that.

Okay, well do you have any plans to score more films? How was your experience scoring Greenberg?

It was great but that’s because I got along with Noah [Baumbach], the director, really well. I normally don’t think I’d score films. That industry is really kinda horrifying. So unless I could deal with a director one-on-one, as if they were just my friend, I wouldn’t probably touch it with a ten foot pole. They’re kind of a bunch of morons. They hate music! (laughs)

Clues was founded by Alden Penner and Brendan Reed, both active for years in the Montreal music scene. Alden was one-half of Unicorns, a band that burned bright and fast at the beginning of the century, and Brendan has been a member of a number of groups, including the endless, Endless Forever. They began building Clues quietly and in near-secrecy during the summer of 2007, playing a series of unadvertised shows in small Montreal venues. Their early performances elicited passionate responses and made it clear that Alden had an awesome batch of new tunes in the works, a glorious voice to deliver them with, and a brilliant foil in Brendan as his co-conspirator.
By 2008, friends Ben Borden, Lisa Gamble, and Nick Scribner had been recruited from the Montreal art and music scenes; a few more exuberant shows went down, the sound building and strengthening every time. With the band’s foundations fully cemented, Clues began work on a debut record towards the end of the year.
During live shows and on recordings, the band share and trade-off on an extensive array of instruments and create a twitchy, urgent, utterly original music that expands Montreal’s (already diverse) pop music lexicon. Clues incorporates multiple drummers, horns, a table of fried electronics (including a Commodore 64 and an OLPC), saw and pianette alongside their trusty electric guitars and basses.
Through their founding and early work as a band, Clues has remained close to home, dedicated to collaborating with and supporting fellow independent artists. In 2008, Reed started VillaVillaNola, a digital music store featuring recordings by predominantly local artists who have flourished underground but who otherwise receive sparse attention. Strong ties to the independent music community, together with shared ideals, led Clues to collaborate with Montreal’s Constellation, who released the band’s debut record in May of 2009.

Etaoin Shrdlu

Featuring members of Rockets Red Glare, Weights and Measures, and I Can Put My Arm Back On You Can’t, the personnel list in Etaoin Shrdlu (there is no proper pronunciation) reads as an all-star lineup for the Southern Ontario post-hardcore scene. In the same way that their name is taken from a forgotten reference within the printing industry, the band was originally conceived as a side project to explore a style of instrumental music that was felt to be lost or abandoned by contemporary bands. The result is a series of songs that are precisely executed and riddled with tension, while still being heavy, groove oriented, and surprisingly catchy. Their new, debut album Mating Calls is one of the biggest sounding albums of the year!

Les Mammographes

A late addition to the bill, Les Mammographes are a band from Quebec City and you can learn more about them here: http://www.myspace.com/lesmammographes

Special Guest:

DJ Charless

Thursday January 14, 2010
The Ebar 41 Quebec St. Guelph
Doors at 10:00 PM
All-ages/Licensed

$8 with non-perishable food item
$10 without

Tickets Available:
The Bookshelf – 41 Quebec St. – Guelph
Orange Monkey – 005 Princess St. – Waterloo
CSA Office – University of Guelph – UC Room 274
(non-perishable food items will be accepted at ticket outlets)

All food items collected will benefit the Guelph Food Bank.

musicprogramming [at] gmail [dot] com

UPCOMING KYEO/CSA SHOWS:

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 18: IAN BLURTON+HURON=HAPPY ENDINGS & THE SAD CLOWNS @ Ebar – 9:00 PM $8 w/food donation /$10 – AA/LIC benefit for: www.outontheshelf.ca

Next week the Mich Vish Interracial Morning Show! is pleased to welcome Sufjan Stevens to the program at 8:00 AM EST.

Sufjan Stevens

This interview was ostensibly conducted for a large piece on Sufjan and Asthmatic Kitty that will appear in the next issue of Signal to Noise. A full transcription will soon appear at exclaim.ca as well, but you can obviously hear it firsthand on our show next week.

To learn more about listening live or downloading this show for up to 45 days, please visit this link or perhaps even this link.

Thanks,
vk

p.s. Here’s another excerpt:

…[w]ith the hula hoops and superhero costumes of the Hooper Heroes [in the BQE], you’ve again reflected a fantastical comic book world within the context of your music; what is it about this medium that appeals to you as a visual artist?

You might have a better perspective in assessing my motivation in all that, in creating a fabulous, fabricated environment. I’m not really sure where it comes from. It’s probably just the fact that I believe what I do is artificial—that art is artifice and a fabrication. It’s not real; it’s a reflection or representation of reality but it isn’t reality. So, the colours are much more saturated y’know, in the art work and the sounds are much more dramatized. There’s a kinda melodrama inherent in almost everything I do, whereas myself as an ordinary, every day human being, I’m extremely normal, ordinary, level-headed, phlegmatic, and I don’t have dramatic outbursts. Whereas my music is always clamouring for attention and so I think it’s like an alter-ego. It’s true for a lot of artists but my work is really animated; it’s the work of the imagination. It’s the language that I use to represent very real, true, ordinary, and tragic events in every day life. For me, the BQE is a tragic object because of how it’s displaced people, the way it’s an obstacle, the pollution and noise, and the constant upkeep and the traffic and all that. It’s a very real, practical problem in my life every day and my way of rendering that through art is to transform it into a fabulous object. Into a transcendent, phenomenal experience that’s completely unreal, completely artificial. The Hooper Heroes come to represent all these issues—environmentalism, urban planning, and the plight of the pedestrian versus the monstrosity of the city. The Hooper Heroes represent that as these artificial comic book characters.

It is fascinating to me that your route to escapism is often rooted in real places and things. They’re not phenomena, they’re states, they’re places people can visit. I guess you’re just re-imagining them in a weird way.

Yeah, maybe I have a utopian view. Maybe I’m an idealist in that way. Because I think in regular life, I’m a bit of a pessimist. I don’t necessarily presume the best in life for me. I expect things will work out but in my work, it’s definitely a heightened idealism.

…[W]hat’s next for you in terms of your own music and that of Asthmatic Kitty?

Well, I’m trying a lot of new material on this tour and they’re kind of long-form songs—meandering, works in progress, but I’m hoping that they’ll eventually find themselves on an album. So I think that all of that negative view of the state of affairs of the music industry and the demise of the LP and all this—I feel like that’s sort of old news for me. It’s a recent crisis but one I feel that I’m getting around. I think that a lot of the new material that I’m working on is inspiring enough to get me to record it and maybe have a new record out next year.

And you’re freeing yourself of any conceptual restraints?

Yeah, I don’t know if I’ll have any success doing that because it’s how I’ve worked for so long but generally, I’m trying to dissuade any kind of conceptual framework and just write music, love songs, pop songs, and just forget all that conceptual mess…