Telepathe are the pop-tastic femme fatales writing space-dwelling electronic balladry who enlisted Dave Sitek to produce their really-quite-good debut LP Dance Mother earlier this year. They’re doing a date swap with Baltimore art brats Ponytail next week; Whammy in Auckland and SFBH in Wellington on Monday and Tuesday (you can get cheap double tickets!). Reeling from extreme bouts of touring, they – Busy Gangnes and Dustin Wong – were hangin’ at home for the holidays when we shot the breeze about Telepathe and Ponytail 2.0 respectively.
TELEPATHE with Busy Gangnes
cs: So, from the beginning! How did the two of you meet and how did Telepathe form?
telepathe: Lizzy (Melissa Livaudis) and I used to be in another band, and that split up and she played drums and I played guitar and we just wanted to do something different and we wanted to arrange and write music – all the parts, rhythm etc. that’s basically how it’s worked. Lots of music software!
cs: Did you guys have an obvious sound you aspired to, starting out?
telepathe: Yes and no. We wanted to make beats and stuff but it took us a while to decide everything. There was always a vision – we didn’t want to make disco music. We wanted to make pop. We wanted to make something accessible.
cs: There’s a lot of aesthetic space on Dance Mother. Was this something you were seeking to achieve?
telepathe: Yeah, we wanted it to feel like really big and have a lot of space. Even though there’s so many tracks and so many songs we didn’t want it to sound too intense. We’re into atmosphere for sure. And I think you can tell it throughout that record.
cs: What was inspiring you to create the resulting atmosphere on Dance Mother?
telepathe: For that stuff, we were listening to like The Cocteau Twins and Kate Bush and that’s all really atmospheric. And melodic. And also a lot of hip hop and that’s where we go the rhythm from. So rhythm and melody were pretty much our focus points.
cs: It’s interesting you cite Cocteau Twins. I just did an interview with Oliver from The xx and he excitedly cited them as a huge influence.
telepathe: Really? That’s awesome. We do have a lot of similar interests with those guys….I think you can tell our sounds are similarly influenced for sure even though we’re quite different.
cs: You enlisted Dave Sitek to produce your album? That’s pretty massive!
telepathe: It was amazing. Basically Lizzy and I had been working on the record at home or whatever and we went to a couple of different people – engineers and stuff – we were putting together demos and we had a vision. We wanted a pop rhythm but we’re not a hip hop group OR a rock band, and most people were like ‘ I think you’re really confused about what you want’ and we were like ‘what the fuck why does this keep happening?’ And then someone played Dave Chromes On It on our Myspace and we had a mutual friend and he gave him our demos and home recordings and then Dave was like “do you want to make a record I have a studio, next week, let’s go make a record” and we were like OMG. It was amazing. After so long struggling with people not getting it and being confused and then he came along and didn’t question anything and was even crazier than us, and runs with the ball and creatively we can do anything we want and not question it or second guess it.
cs: So you guys had a really successful first album. Are you nervous about the sophomore, and all the ‘second album syndrome’ that’s associated with that?
telepathe: I try not to think about it. It’s a really common thing that happens to a lot of bands – their sophomore album ‘breaks them’ or whatever in a bad way. Right now, for the first time ever, when we made Dance Mother we were just going with it with no expectation and we had this awesome opportunity but now there’s like record labels and lawyers and deadlines and that’s a bit weird but for the most part Lizzy and myself just want to get back to a place – I mean we are there – paying attention to that pressure is demonization. We can’t put our name on something if we didn’t feel free making it you know.
cs: Are you taking Dave Sitek back on board?
telepathe: There’s a couple of producers and we have a couple of ideas about what we want to execute…he has a busy schedule and he moved to Los Angeles, but he’s like our mentor now so we can’t leave him! We won’t leave him. We’re such a good team together so it fits. And it works.
cs: Is there anything we can expect from the new album at this stage?
telepathe: Basically we were listening to a lot of pop music when we made Dance Mother and we come from more of an experimental background so we weren’t used to making pop songs so we’re just gonna say they’re pop songs ‘cause they feel like pop songs to us, and I think that more or less worked. But now we’re taking a more traditional approach – writing a hook and a verse – it’s as simple as – not that Beatles songs are simple – but like verse/chorus – simple melodies and getting it correct for sure. But writing a brilliant pop song is failrly complicated – yeah? Yeah, it’s a total skill…it’s a parody…it just has to happen and it has to be spontaneous. There’s a good energy between us at the moment to be able to create it.
PONYTAIL with Dustin Wong
cs: Tell me about forming in art school?
ponytail: We had a class to form a band and everybody went into class knowing that they were going to be in a band with somebody and the teacher gathered us together in a circle and there were 30 of us and just went ‘you’re in a band, you’re in a band’ etc.
cs: Did you develop Ponytail’s style systematically from art school?
ponytail: Jeremy’s (Jeremy Hyman) been in a band before – he was in a metal band – and his drumming style is very influenced by that genre and Lightening Bolt and stuff. I’ve been in a few bands before and stuff…and punk bands in high school. So our style was already set in a way – we knew what we liked initially and we tried to bring those together somehow.
cs: What was the idea at art school; the overall aim of forming a band?
ponytail: The class was called paralleling – it means parallel to painting – the idea of art and expression and by living life you are creating art and you know being in a band can be like making a painting, or going to the grocery store and finding the best carrot is like finding the best colour.
cs: Extending visual art into the real world?
ponytail: Exactly – just changing the medium.
cs: It seems a lot of visual artists extend themselves into the music world. Do you think this is a natural progression from a visual medium?
ponytail: I think both sides inspire each other. Musicians admire visual artists and visual artists admire musicians. It’s kind of natural because a visual art can be so cerebral whereas music is so sensational and you can feel it when it’s happening whereas visual art is more cerebral and contemplative – music can be too though.
cs: Tell us about being from Baltimore?
ponytail: I think there’s multiple developments going on there at the moment. A group of people that are really into free improvisation and noise and groups that are more pop orientated. I just played a solo show for a local festival at this warehouse and it was just so many people and so many solo acts – maybe 10 or 12 just that night – and it was very much kraut rock and electronica. There was a really cool thing happening and it is a generally cool thing happening at the moment. Everyone’s doing their own thing and it’s rad.
cs: I’m interested in why places blossom with creativity at particular moments? Why in Baltimore at the moment?
ponytail: When I visited Baltimore for the first time I was 19 – Freshman year in college – I was in California at the time. I fell in love with how real it felt, and it made me want to move there with the potential of what it could be and I think a lot of people found that in Baltimore. And Dan Deacon moved down with that idea. And he got people excited to make music.
cs: Do you think the place Ponytail is from from has influenced your sound?
ponytail: Definitely the bands we’ve toured with – touring with Battles was a huge influence for us. We toured with them a few years ago – 2007, yeah the summer of 2007 – we toured with them for a couple of weeks. They were so professional and we were just a rambunctious quartet and we took a lot from them and got inspired by them.
cs: Album, released in 2008 in the US. Tell me about the making of Ice Cream Spiritual?
ponytail: I think we started writing Ice Cream Spiritual – we were in the middle of releasing the first album and Jeremy and I got together and we started writing and we wrote Celebrate the Body Electric – the first song we wrote for Ice Cream Spiritual. We emailed that to Ken and Ken wrote some ideas on top with his computer mic and guitar and that became a strong middle point and then we wrote around it and figured out the beginning middle and end. It took a long time – we were still trying to figure out who we were as a band. We wanted to make something that was better than the first record. Although I like the immature attitude of the first one, we wanted to progress.
cs: Going into the album did you have an idea of how you wanted it to sound?
ponytail: I mean, it’s hard to say. We you know, were getting more pedals at the time and put that into the songs. In the first album we don’t use any effects at all – maybe a delay pedal but nothing else. Ken has an octave pedal which lowers the octave of whatever you’re playing – we don’t have a bassist so we needed to fill that space somehow. We wanted to sound big with what we had.
cs: Coming from visual art backgrounds, do you place importance on the visual aesthetic which compliments the music? Do you think of them as separate and want them to be a whole?
ponytail: When we write the songs we think about imagery. We’re like “what does this make you feel” or “what do you think about when you’re listening to this” or playing it. “Oh it felt like we were going through a tunnel of flowers” or something like that and then we kind of all have our own images about what the songs sound like in our minds for each song.
cs: Do you understand it as a good song if there’s intense imagery created?
ponytail: Definitely – if we think the song is done and we think it’s good the images are a lot richer naturally which is awesome – it all fits together.
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Telepathe play SFBH January 5, Ponytail play SFBH January 4 – tickets are $30 for each show!
Courtney Sanders is a freelance writer and the editor of Fluro. THANKS COURTNEY!
