Entrevista - Lights Out Asia

McDonalds.Pássaros.E a imensidão do Oceano Atlântico.

Depois do deathcore dos Shot at Dawn, o Art is Fucking Dead volta à musica mais atmosferica com os norte-americanos Lights Out Asia. Depois do (excelente) "Eyes Like Brontide" , o trio prepara as gravações do seu quarto LP.

A aguardar com expectativa, claro...

Pereira - Please introduce yourselves and describe the essence of Lights Out Asia.

Lights Out Asia - Well, this is Chris Schafer… and LOA is pretty simple. We are three friends that have enjoyed playing music together for over a decade in multiple forms. Having music as an outlet is fantastic, but being able to share it with people of all walks is even better.

P -I am aware that you guys are in the studio right now. How is it going?

Chris: It's going well. We have always been a very detailed band as far as how we record and production. This time we seem to be going just a bit more slowly on this album just because we are probably paying attention to a great amount of details. We are all perfectionists and this helps us a ton but sometimes it hinders speed in the process.

P - Can you tell us the main ideas about the album that you are recording?

Chris: I'm not sure we think that far ahead. We just write in the moment and then it all happens. I wish that there was some profound system that we used as our template, but it is just song to song, at least at the beginning.

Stats (Mike): We do start to develop an album "concept" once we have five or six songs that are close to finished and are pleasing to us. This is where we are at right now in September 2009. Then we start throwing around some song titles, artwork ideas, and general themes. And something inevitably begins to take shape, some thread begins to connect everything, but the process is so subtle that it's something that is almost out of our hands. The albums sort of come together on their own, once we've built the parts.

P - What are your influences, when writing a song?

Chris: For me it is mostly my personal life, but outside of that it's movies, trains going past my home or, for instance, the huge thunderstorms we had back in the summer. Recently I've been sitting in my back yard and this cardinal just sits on the power line singing in a very patronizing way. It is there every day. I have some ideas on writing about this bastard bird.

Stats: You're an insane person. Love it! I am influenced by the music I hear in my head, although it never comes out right. Chris and Mike usually make it turn out much better. I am also very influenced by Chris and Mike's ideas, and I hear something they write and it sounds great and I feel bad that I didn't come up with something so brilliant. So I bury it deep down and browse some more synth patches. Seriously, though, I am inspired by a lot of things, including other bands and little snips of soundtracks or even traffic noises. Sometimes you just sit down and start moving your appendages and something comes out from nowhere. It's great. A lot of time it's crap, though, which is why it's helpful to be in a group.

P - Do you have any dates planned, or tour planned, for the rest of the year?

Chris: Not yet.

P - You released your latest album, "Eyes Like Brontide" last year, on n5MD. How was the reception ?

Chris: Very good. People have had great things to say about and its always nice to hear good feedback. We hope it continues. It was a fun album to write and see come together from start to finish.

P - Can you tell us the main concept behind that album ?

Chris: Brontide was a darker side of LOA, in a sense. Dark would mean frustration, aggression, a general feeling of loss or how terrible I would feel if I ate McDonald's. Brontide didn’t have a real main concept, but consciously had a flow that fit well with each song.

Stats: I agree with this assessment. Brontide to me had to do with feelings of isolation, uneasiness, unanswered transmissions and such, or like how you feel when you look up at the sky and feel very small or hear thunder echoing from very far away. You're both connected to and disconnected from your world. I guess that's the "concept." Whether we executed that concept is up to the listener to determine, and for all we know they may have a completely different concept, or none at all, and still enjoy the album. Music is weird like that. We'd rather have our music be open to different experiences than be "this is what the songs mean, this is how you interpret them, now buy our records."

P- Your sound is quite spacey and distant, yet introspective. Can you describe to us what gear do you use to achieve your sound?

Stats: Nothing magical or unusual. We use guitars, laptops, samples, keyboards, microphones. The best gear is whatever inspires you with its sound, or whatever gets out of the way and makes it easy to work. I like "friendly" gear, gear that lets you get in and start cranking away at knobs and sliders and you can feel how the sound changes. I like gear that also gives you something unexpected from time to time. The unexpected is a big part of soundscaping for us. So we like friendly gear that gets out of the way but also sometimes insists on doing its own thing, as long as that thing is interesting. There's lots of gear like this today, I don't think you need to have stuff nobody else has in order to have your own sound. You just need your own ideas and a healthy sense of experimentation.

That being said, we used to do all our beats in Powerpoint, except for one song that sampled the couch.

P - What have you been listening, watching and reading?

Stats: I've been listening to "Endtroducing..." by DJ Shadow all summer long. I've always liked it, but for some reason it's really grabbing ahold of me again recently. I've also gotten into "Untrue" by Burial, which is this amazing atmospheric dubstep thing that resurrected a lot of the late 1990's UK gloom that is sorely missed. And both of these albums use samples and atmospheres to construct these dark environments that are rich and detailed and full of soul. So, yeah I'm either two years or like eleven years out of date... I'm also a big fan of Marconi Union right now, and Yagya is a big LOA after-practice favorite. Also Marsen Jules and Ametsub. As far as watching goes, it's football season. What I read is too geeky to print.

P - When can we expect you guys to play a show in Portugal ?

Stats: We'd love to, unfortunately we have a hard time fitting all of our gear into the kayaks.

P - Thanks a lot for your time!

Stats: You're welcome!