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article by jennifer kelly
The first time I heard Liars was late in 2001. I was working, with the radio on the internet, and honestly, I just stopped everything I was doing when "Tumbling Walls Buried Us in Debris with ESG" came on, because I had never heard anything like it before, all thundering clashes bursting into white hot pauses and that cool blue-white keyboard line that split my head right in two. I remember, because someone from my real job called, and I had to turn it off to get the phone, and I was really, really pissed. It seemed like something that might never come again, one of those transitory experiences that could have changed your life, but you were too busy or not paying attention.
Fortunately, Liars did come again, and again and again -- first on this radio station (WFMU, and if you don't listen to it once in a while, you're missing all the good stuff), then through a well-played copy of the Gern Blandsten-issued They Threw Us in a Trench and Put a Monument on Top. A live show late in 2002 (with Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Sonic Youth) sealed the deal. They were, without question, my new favorite band, so when Mute picked them up in 2002, making what had seemed like a secret pleasure into the next hot thing, I had mixed feelings. What if this great, spastic band became a parody of itself, selling its signature funked-up, punked-out, jaggedly indigestible tunes to the masses? Then news of a line-up change gave me even more pause. Original drummer Ron Albertson and bassist Pat Noecker -- both a big part of what I liked about Trench -- were leaving the band.
Well, not to worry. The band has continued to evolve, moving ever further into abstract and experimental territory. Their new album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, at first seems utterly unlike Trench, all dark clashes and overhanging menace rather than stuttering, manic Gang of Four punk. But listen a couple more times and you hear the same raw energy and free-thinking inquiry, the same willingness to go way, way, way out on a limb, pushed into new, dark and very unfamiliar corners. And besides, you've got to love a band willing to make a concept album about witches.
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Splendid: I'm enjoying They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, and I think it's interesting that you went to the country to record it, because it's so dark and industrial sounding. And I know there's a reference to Einstürzende Neubauten on the cover. How have they influenced you?
Aaron Hemphill: Well, they are, as you know, kind of like the founders or leaders of industrial music. None of us really thought that our records sounded industrial, as we were making it. That was just more like...it had less to do with them and their music, our selection of our cover, than with how recognizable their symbol has become and how associated it is with their music. But then, as we thought about it, it became...there were a lot of concepts we could tie in with their music directly, so it was kind of a coincidence.
Splendid: The album is about witches, basically.
Aaron Hemphill: Yeah.
Splendid: How did you decide to focus on that?
Aaron Hemphill: Well, we didn't have anything written before we recorded. We were making everything up as we went along. As things started to sound very similar in mood, we decided to tie everything together with a theme, and out of coincidence we stumbled upon stories about witches on the day of Witches' Sabbath. We got really scared and we started looking at all these stories and facts on the internet about witches. And we were reading children's stories that had witches, too, like The Wizard of Oz and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Splendid: You have a Wizard of Oz song on the Oneida split.
Aaron Hemphill: Yeah, yeah...we scored the Wizard of Oz with a kind of a cheesy kind of Pink Floyd thing. Actually, we were so busy making this record that we forgot that we had kind of forewarned people with that. Yeah, yeah... The Wizard of Oz is just a really good story. It's kind of exciting when you have a character like a witch.
So the theme was witchcraft or witches or folklore regarding witches, or fact based on witch hunts. We tried to cover every possible side, from the very serious to the very childlike.
Splendid: I don't see a lot of bands doing concept albums these days. Were you concerned about that?
Aaron Hemphill: No. A lot of people are asking us about concept records, and we get into these huge discussions about how it's a story record rather than a concept record. Because, you know, anything can be a concept. Our first record could be a concept record in which the concept is that it has no concept. To shorten things up, people hear "concept record" and cringe, but you know, it's just like... It doesn't sound like the concept records that would make you cringe, I don't think. No, it doesn't scare me.
Splendid: I really loved They Threw Us in a Trench and Put a Monument on Top, and this is obviously a whole different thing; you've got different people in the band and a different feel. What's been happening in the band creatively that's driven some of these changes?
Aaron Hemphill: Well, we actually only have one new person in the band. Me and Angus are the same. We've pretty much always written the songs the way we write them now. So it's not a change in how we make the songs. If anything we're more pure in how we're doing things. We don't have to give our ideas and have them be filtered through and turned into something different. Julian, our new drummer, is very good at playing what we make.
AUDIO: There's Always Room on the Broom
Splendid: The percussion is really interesting on this record -- so you've pretty much mapped that all out for him?
Aaron Hemphill: We've always -- me and Angus have always constructed songs by recording them either individually or I'll record the whole song on a four-track and then Angus will add vocals or sometimes he'll play bass. Yeah, we all play different things. I play the drums a lot. Sometimes Angus plays guitar. And Julian was more willing to recognize that...that idea that it's still a collective work. He's not traditional in the sense that he's the drummer and he has to play drums on the album. You know what I mean? It's more like a collective. It's made how it's made and that's what it is.
Splendid: Do you miss having a full-time bass player at all?
Aaron Hemphill: No, not at the moment, no.
Splendid: So I guess I was seeing They Were Wrong as a continuation of the direction you started maybe with Fins to Make Us More Fishlike and maybe the Oneida split, where you're becoming more concerned with pure sound, the way things sound, and maybe less with the structure of the songs. Do you think that's fair?
Aaron Hemphill: Uhm...yeah, I guess. Kinda. I think that they're both the same thing, the structure and how it sounds. It's the same to me. I see what you're saying, it's maybe less chorus-driven...
Splendid: There are just all these things on the new album, where you're thinking, wow, that's a cool sound. Where that sticks out at you.
Aaron Hemphill: I think it's just that we wanted to make things sound different. We had this opportunity to make different sound with our instruments.
Splendid: Let's talk about that. I know you use your instruments in sort of non-traditional ways and maybe in the studio you use some non-traditional instruments. Tell me about some of the things you did to get these sounds.
Aaron Hemphill: It's pretty simple. Some of the noises are voices that have been recorded. People used to use tape machines to alter sound. It's the same thing. We make a song out of sounds, and we kind of sample that. We use things like glasses through effects, voices through effects, nothing too crazy.
Splendid: There's this really cool, kind of stuttery percussion in the opening to "Broken Witch"? How'd you make that?
Aaron Hemphill: That's just a drum. It's just a beat.
Splendid: It sounds really metallic.
Aaron Hemphill: I recorded the drums in my bedroom, and then sampled it with a digital tape player. It maybe sounds squishy because it was in my bedroom.
We have a brief crisis as the batteries in my tape player go dead, and I crash through the house looking for replacements, finally cannibalizing the CD Walkman in the kitchen. Aaron, miraculously, remains on the phone.
Splendid: So I understand that you guys are big fans of hip-hop. Can you tell me about how that affects your music, if it does?
Aaron Hemphill: I don't know. I think it really affected our first record. One of the things that interested us about hip-hop was the way that the vocals were used almost as percussion, and you can hear that on Trench. There is less of that on the new record.
The similarity between hip-hop and our newer stuff is that although our record's stories are mostly fictitious and folklore and whatnot, a little bit of fact comes through. Most of the hip-hop that I like kind of has a story-telling element to it. I think hip-hop is a bit more autobiographical and a bit less fictional, but I think that can kind of tie in. It's still similar to our music in that respect.
Splendid: Some of these tracks feel almost cinematic to me -- for instance, "If You're a Wizard, Why Don't You Wear Glasses"almost feels like a really violent, scary movie. Do see pictures when you're playing and writing?
Aaron Hemphill: Oh, totally. That sounds pretentious, but, well, whatever. Every time I make a song, I visualize what it would look like and how it's going and what it ties into. Because whenever I hear a good record, you kind of make up scenes that it inspired. So, yeah...
Splendid: I see you've already done a video for "There's Always Room on the Broom". It would be easy to a really literal video about witches and this one is more abstract. Can you tell me about the process of making that and what you guys were going for?
Aaron Hemphill: Well, our friend Cody made it. He's an amazing artist. He's in a group called the Ssion, and he makes videos like that for his music and performs them. We wanted him to do it and we knew he would do a great job because he wouldn't do it so literally. You know -- ooh, it's about witches and brooms. And like a lot of the artwork is trying to poke fun at those types of literal associations, like the scary, goth stuff. It's not. It's all about -- we were inspired by folklore. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe isn't really goth or scary.
AUDIO: They Don't Want Your Corn, They Want Your Kids
Splendid: Did you all read that when you were children, too?
Aaron Hemphill: No, just recently. I read it when I was young, but you know, we took it on tour because a lot of times you don't have time to be absorbed in a really heavy book. With a book like that, you can read it pretty much anywhere, with as much time or as little time as you have. That's the advantage of children's books.
Splendid: I also really like "They Don't Want Your Corn, They Want Your Children." It's got this really great sort of disco-synth thing, but with some really dark lyrics about selling your blood. I was wondering if that song is a political statement?
Aaron Hemphill: Well, it was more from...I think...maybe when we were broke. We're still broke. It was more about just being poor. And it also ties into the record again. Ah...no. I wouldn't say it's a political statement.
Splendid: It sounds like it could be a commentary on what's happening to the country and the world.
Aaron Hemphill: It's more of an observation of what's going on, just as a record about witchcraft can tie in and possibly be perceived as a political analogy. But in the same way, our songs are more observations and not statements. I don't know. I tend to believe that if a song is a political statement, it should be stating something that is a bit more...I don't know. I wouldn't say it's a statement, no.
Splendid: How is it having your own studio? Is that helping the process?
Aaron Hemphill: Yeah. We couldn't have made it if we didn't have our own studio, because it took us so long. We wrote it in the studio. Most studios charge by the day, so it would have been really expensive.
Splendid: And this studio is in one of your houses?
Aaron Hemphill: Yeah.
Splendid: Does that mean that you're writing more frequently? Because you can just go there when you want to?
Aaron Hemphill: Well, no. It's in New Jersey and all our equipment is in Brooklyn. It doesn't necessarily affect how we write. It affects what we record. We can record and not have anything written and create it there. Or we can mess with things we wrote before. Or we can record things we wrote immediately. So I wouldn't say it affects the frequency at which we write. It affects more what we record.
Splendid: Can you work on things more than you could before?
Aaron Hemphill: Yeah, but more along the lines of making... instead of modifying something that you already have recorded, it's more to do with experiments that might not pan out.
Splendid: Let's talk a little about that. How do you start with one of these experiments and how do you build it into a song? Is it a sound that you hear? What's the core and where do you go from there?
Aaron Hemphill: A lot of the time, it's what you don't want in a song. What instruments you don't want to play. It's just experimenting with it in the literal sense in that you try to do something different. A lot of times it doesn't come out well. Like most experiments. It's much more simple and, you know, accidental than one would think. It's not always so planned out.
Splendid: Liars were one of the first bands that had this jittery, kind of spastic Gang of Four, PiL sound, and now you hear that everywhere. It's gone from the point where Liars didn't sound like anybody else to now, where there are a lot of bands that seem like they're trying to sound like you guys. I was wondering how you feel about that, and do you feel like you have to keep changing to stay ahead of that? Or did you get bored with it?
Aaron Hemphill: I don't really know any bands that are trying to sound like us.
Splendid: I don't know if they're trying, but it just seems that a certain kind of sound that I heard first from you guys has now become extremely fashionable and a lot of people are doing it -- not because they believe in it, maybe, but because they think it's cool.
Aaron Hemphill: I think we can definitely react against what we've made in the past. Not that that's a primary motivation. A lot of it has to do with ...you just get tired of playing that stuff. What I hope is that bands do what they do to make themselves excited. I don't want to play music that I'm not excited about. It's not to keep ahead of the game or to compete or contend with these bands. For one thing, I don't pay much attention to much of the new music. Some of it I do. But we mainly kind of focus on what we think about it. If it makes us happy. That's what we did when we made the first record. That doesn't really affect us. When we hear bands, that's not the feeling we get. We don't get the feeling that, ooh, we've got to change. This is too trendy. It's more like, if we see a band we like, we say wow, that's a good idea. If we've changed, our change has had more to do with wanting to play something different.
Splendid: You've had this album finished for a while, I guess, and that was also true with your last album, that it had been finished for a year or so before most people started hearing it. What is that like having all these songs that other people are perceiving as new, and that you've been working on for a long time?
Aaron Hemphill: It's something that I accept. That delay. That recorded material is never going to be current. So that puts even more emphasis on the fact that records don't have to be any representation of what you do live, because there's so much time between when you play them live, from the song's inception, to when people hear them for the first time. That's the main thing, that's the tough thing to deal with. As long as I can remember that, when we record the next record, we don't have to backtrack and record things that aren't on the record. You can just make a new record and never record those songs. You can make things a bit more...special and kind of what they are.
Splendid: So do you have a whole bunch of stuff that you've never recorded and don't intend to?
Aaron Hemphill: Yeah. We have a lot of stuff that we've never recorded and probably never will, that we played live.
Splendid: Just because of the timing? That you were excited about it, but not at the time you were making a record?
Aaron Hemphill: Well, yeah. And it's not fun. I don't really feel it represents anything that we're into, that we feel or that we appreciate and like in music. At the time it was cool, because we made these songs to perform live and we got to. We played the music because that's what we wanted to make at the time. And to record it just because it's not recorded, I think that cheapens everything. You have people who saw it live and hopefully liked it. That's enough. That's what it was for.
Splendid: You should do a live album.
Aaron Hemphill: Yeah... I'm not going to rule it out, but at the moment, I tend to think that that puts too much...it's trying to rehash a moment in time. It's like having your first kiss videotaped. You try to get those feelings from something or you try to say to other people that this is the feeling you should get from this experience, when really it's not.
AUDIO: Hold Hands and It will Happen Anyway
Splendid: But in a way, all recorded music is trying to recapture a moment that people have different associations about how they felt at that moment, and you play the record to try to feel that way again.
Aaron Hemphill: Well, yeah, maybe if cut out all the crowd noise. I don't know. It's something we haven't thought about.
Splendid: It should be a DVD, though, because you guys are really, really fun to watch.
Aaron Hemphill: Thanks.
Splendid: So are you working on a bunch of other stuff now that's happened since the record, and is it different from what's on the record?
Aaron Hemphill: Yeah, we're recording stuff that we've been playing live to try to...just for fun. We're just recording a bunch of songs we have.
Splendid: Does it seem different to you? Are you going for different things than you were when you made the record?
Aaron Hemphill: It's different because we performed them before we recorded them, whereas with the record it was the opposite. So, yeah, it's more like how we did the first record. It's just different, not better or worse.
Splendid: Can you tell me just a little about the tour before we finish up?
Aaron Hemphill: Sure, we're doing a US tour in mid-March to mid-April with a band called Young People from New York.
Splendid: Oh yeah, I know them.
Aaron Hemphill: And then we're meeting up with a band called Get Hustle on the West Coast, who are great. And also a band called Shoplifting who are really great. It's our first US tour in a while and I'm really excited about it.
Splendid: Cool. Thanks.
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We swear, we have other feature writers beside Jennifer Kelly -- they're just not as productive.
[ graphics credits :: header/pulls - george zahora | photos - promo photos :: credits graphics ]
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