Splendid: How does it start, usually, when you make a song?

Hunter Husar: A concept or something...

Splendid: One of you sitting in a room, or are you all together?

Hunter Husar: It's almost always one person. It's almost always a rhythm. Sometimes it's a mistake that will turn into something. A lot of that stuff comes through the computer. Or starts that way...but not always.

Splendid: The press on your EP mentions a lot of different influences, but one of the things that comes up is video games. Is that a fair thing, or is that just because you use computers and that's how it sounds?

Karyl Czientzar: I think that's because there are a lot of beeps in our songs.

Hunter Husar: (Laughs) Yeah, that was never intentional.

Splendid: Some bands are interested in that.

Hunter Husar: Well, I think that there are a lot of people interested in low bit resolution composition...8-bit sound cards, stuff like that.

Splendid: But that's not really you?

Hunter Husar: No, we're interested in that.

Splendid: What do you like about those kinds of sounds?

Hunter Husar: To us, it's just another sound. We always...it seems like...I can't speak for everyone, but I tend to like an integrated mixture of sounds from different sources, and that's one source that we take sometimes. I think we use it less on the new album than on Machinegong.

Splendid: How was recording the follow-up different?

Hunter Husar: We had better stuff. We knew what we were doing more. But we didn't know what we were doing at all.

Splendid: How soon after you got together as a band did you record Machinegong?

Hunter Husar: We've been together for a while, but we've always been recording as the main part of what we were doing.

Splendid: So you're not really a live band?

Hunter Husar: We are. Now we are.

Karyl Czientzar: It's a separate thing.

Hunter Husar: They're kind of two separate things. Well, I think through this album and this period, they're melded more than ever before.

Splendid: How were they separate and how have they come together?

Hunter Husar: Unlike most bands, we started back in the day with recording, and then we put a live show around it. It slowly became live. Now it's live music. Our recording started referencing our live show over the last couple of years, because I guess since we've played so much, the equipment became more conceptually related to our music than it had been.

Splendid: There were a lot of things at first that you couldn't do live, that now you're able to do?

Hunter Husar: Yeah. But that's just my opinion.

Splendid: Yes, but it seems like your sound is the kind of sound that's best appreciated live. It's something you could dance to...

Hunter Husar: It sounds good loud, that's the only thing. I've never been in the audience, so it's the closest we can get to that, doing a live show. But the recording is the most important piece. We spend a lot of time messing around in the studio.

Splendid: Do you have a lot of equipment at home?

Hunter Husar: It's not like a lot of people, with tons of stuff. Most of it's on the computer. It's cheaper. We can't afford all that stuff. We borrow mics and we borrow pre-amps and we borrow tape machines. Bass amps and guitars. A lot of our stuff we don't own.

Splendid: You're from Missouri?

Hunter Husar: We're all from Missouri.

Splendid: Small town?

Hunter Husar: Yeah.

Splendid: A lot of the things that people see as influences to your work are things that you wouldn't expect to hear in a small town in the Midwest. How'd you go from growing up in that kind of environment to discovering stuff like Afrobeat and funk and Kraftwerk?

Hunter Husar: It's a small town, but it's a college town.

Karyl Czientzar: We had a college radio station.

Hunter Husar: We all worked at the radio station. that has something to do with it. Internet.

Splendid: There wasn't some awakening?

Hunter Husar: I think we've been into it...for as long as we can remember. We've all been into music at least since high school.

Splendid: So what are some of your favorite records?

There's a long pause.

Karyl Czientzar: Mine change all the time. A lot of stuff is just weird things that I find at yard sales. I like old Marianne Faithfull records, and then I like African music.

Hunter Husar: It's just...everything. Every single sound. Right now we're in this kind of ... beat-driven, Afro-influenced music. But that music, Afro-pop, was influenced by American music. Afro-beat and Afro-pop is really an American thing, too, in a way. I think there's something really good and really bad about almost every recording. But we all have favorites.

Karyl Czientzar: It's not just about music. It's about sound. All sound.

Splendid: What's the difference between music and sound?

Karyl Czientzar: Well, people approach music in a compositional way, where there's order...

Hunter Husar: Music is just noise with some sort of structure.

Karyl Czientzar: Or not structured. It's just created by people listening to each other. I think we're moving in that direction.

Splendid: So you feel like you have less structure now than you did?

Hunter Husar: I wish we had less structure.

Splendid: What would that sound like?

Hunter Husar: Probably better, but I don't know. Probably more freeform. More freedom.

Splendid: You like improv?

Hunter Husar: Of course. Love that. You can't deny that. The two, my personal two influences, and I can't speak for everyone else, at least texturally and with beats, are German music and Afro-pop. But I think we've just gotten going with the whole musical thing...

Splendid: You personally?

Hunter Husar: No, everybody. The whole 20th century, it's just fresh off the block.

Splendid: That's funny that you say that, because I think a lot of people are feeling that we've had all the music there is and there's nothing new to do.

Hunter Husar: I think it's just getting going. I mean, what's a snare drum and a kick drum? Why do people do this? It's like...it's crazy.

Splendid: You guys do some really unusual things with instruments...like I heard about the tap shoes?

Hunter Husar: Oh, yeah. We really only did that one summer. We did mic them, yeah.

Splendid: Anything else?

Hunter Husar: Karyl's doing some circuit bending stuff.

Karyl Czientzar: Taking the circuitry out of some electronic instrument and then touching the little circuits to get a sound that's programmed there. Basically rerouting the circuit through another wire.

Hunter Husar: There'll be a toy instrument or an old Casio keyboards, and you just attach wires and create short circuits and it creates a weird sound. So it wasn't designed to have that sound, but you can come up with something strange.

Splendid: I noticed in the "Bishop Tutu" song, at the end you're using a vocal sample, repeated over and over again, so that it becomes not a voice, but more of a beat. That's the way you use voices, isn't it -- they're not really something where you hear the words and this is what the song's about. It's more of an equal element?

Hunter Husar: Yeah. Everything is equal. Definitely on this album, the voices are way more prominent. But it's still very rhythmic in nature. I think the voices are a little bit louder and well-thought-out, but it's still pretty muffled. It's not really that it's muffled. I just think that in those pop recordings the vocals are way too loud and it really annoys me. I want to hear my music turned up loud, but when you turn it up loud, the singing is just overwhelming. When you're playing loud on a dance floor, that's one of the factors that makes the voices a little bit quieter.

Splendid: I just put a bunch of Prince on my iPod, and I was listening to that, and seeing a lot of similarities in the keyboards and the rhythms. Are you Prince fans at all?

Hunter Husar: Yeah, of course, we love Prince.

Karyl Czientzar: But it's really everything.

Hunter Husar: There's nothing you could mention that we wouldn't really like.

Splendid: James Taylor?

Hunter Husar: Yeah.

Karyl Czientzar: I think this is a band that appreciates all forms of creative expression.

Hunter Husar: There's nothing...

Splendid: Even beyond music?

Hunter Husar: Yeah.

Splendid: What do you do beyond music? Do you paint, do you write, do you act?

Hunter Husar: There's someone in the band who's doing all of that stuff.

Splendid: So there's five of you, and you're all involved in songwriting. How do you work together?

Hunter Husar: We're all pretty open. But we're all also highly critical. We're all very critical listeners. We're all very opinionated about art. We talk about it a lot.

Splendid: How do you resolve disputes?

Hunter Husar: Argue a lot and then push and pull. I think that's what makes us create interesting music. You're listening to us to, but Dave and whoever else would have different ideas.

Karyl Czientzar: There are five different approaches to music.

Splendid: Do you have songs that are recognizably yours or Dave's?

Hunter Husar: Yeah. Almost every song is, at least from the inside; you can tell who came up with it. You can see that this person came up with the original idea and then this person contributed this and then this thing happened.

Splendid: There are five of you, and you all play all the instruments. What are the instruments?

Hunter Husar: We have a sampler and two drum sets, some trigger pads and stuff like that. Guitar and bass and keyboards and vocals. It's ridiculous. Violin. Toys. But the live show is really a standard rock band setup, extended with some other things, which is just kind of ...

Splendid: Is that frustrating that you can't do all the things that you hear in your head?

Hunter Husar: Yeah, that's just what we have to do. it's hard to bring in the other stuff live. Right now, with computers, there's a lot of stuff going on...especially with like Max MSP. It's a musical programming language. There are more amateurs using it now. It started in academia and now it's filtering down to electronic artists and experimental musicians are using. Now it's reaching a point where you can do what I would think of as almost improvising with a computer. That's one of my goals for this band. Other people have contrary goals.

Splendid: (to Karyl) What are your goals?

Karyl Czientzar: I'd like to incorporate what I was doing previous to this band, improvising sounds. I'd like to learn how to do live processing, but I also want to take all of these sounds that I was using before and try to put them into the context of compositional music.

Splendid: Are you more like discovering sounds, rather than imagining something you'd like to hear and then trying to recreate it?

Karyl Czientzar: It's both. But I definitely am discovering sounds. I usually go into playing rhythmically and tonally with the band. But I'm also trying to go back away from that

Splendid: What is your background that you're going back to?

Hunter Husar: Spoiled Meat.

Karyl Czientzar: I was involved in several different groups before this one in Portland. One of them was this really noisy, violent, with drums and a singer, performance art done up in a very serious, serious way, which somehow became hilarious. I thought it was really good.

Hunter Husar: She jumped out of a vagina.

Splendid: I guess we've all done that once, right?

Karyl Czientzar: Out of a big papier mache vagina. And that was one group that they saw...

Splendid: You knew each other from Missouri and then moved to Portland?

Karyl Czientzar: Yeah, but I did a lot of improvising with musicians out there.

Splendid: Portland seems like such cool scene. Every time I get a record from there, it's always good.

Karyl Czientzar: Yeah. Cambridge, where we just were, reminds me a lot of Portland.

Splendid: How'd you end up in Chicago?

Hunter Husar: It just kind of made sense. It was the nearest major urban area, and we all had connections through family and friends. We all kind of finished living in Missouri, I think. We love Missouri a lot, but Chicago has been good to us.

Splendid: When's the album coming out?

Hunter Husar: February.

Splendid: What are you doing after the tour?

Hunter Husar: This tour? We're going to go back to Chicago and then we're going to CMJ, then we're going back again, and then we're going to go to France.

Splendid: For a festival?

Karyl Czientzar: Transmusicales in Rennes.

Hunter Husar: And then we're going to do some shows in Europe.

Splendid: Are you one of these bands that has more fans in Europe than here?

Hunter Husar: I don't know. We get emails. It seems like that. It seems like we get almost as many people interested in us as in the US, but besides that we don't have any way to tell.

Splendid: So you're just going to drive yourselves around France?

Hunter Husar: Yeah. We got this weird invitation, and we didn't know what it's about.

Splendid: Speak any French?

Hunter Husar: I don't.

Karyl Czientzar: A little.

Splendid: Well that'll be cool.

Hunter Husar: Yeah. But then we'll probably tour here to support the album as much as possible.