To close out the year the Kansas City weekly the Pitch printed a great article about local musicians releasing vinyl. Read about the feature HERE
here is a copy of my phone interview with the pitch staff writer Kent Slauderbach.
"So was it you that designed the cover?
No. It was actually Sarica Douglas [bass]. We went through like four different designs. It’s kind of funny - this is on a sidenote: We never actually got all the records from the record label. I don’t think they ever actually followed through and gave all of them to us. They were supposed to do 300, but we only got 25. So with that set, we made a really fast preliminary, really fast cover just for the 25 that we got. Then when we got the rest of 275, we were going to redesign it and have like a back sleeve and an insert and all this stuff. So the cover of that everyone knows is actually just a predecessor or for something that never came to be, which is a weird side note, but yeah, Sarica designed it. It’s based off a portrait of Drew Barrymore, and It’s kind of akin to Roxy Music album covers. We were going for that vide, but a little bit more folky, hand-drawnish thing going on.
Could you describe the vibe a little bit?
The vibe? Hm. I would say a little bit...(pause) I know it has a sense of nostalgia, and it’s a little campy, and um (pause) it’s kinda confrontationally blank. I think that’s the best way to describe it.
So if you did have the rest of the albums to fill with inserts or liner notes or whatever, what would those have been like?
We did a little bit. The back cover is the image of a temple or colonnade exploding from a horror movie. I think it’s called the Hunted. It’s the last scene and it’s a massive explosion, and the other side of it is the temple before the explosion, so it’s like back and forth. Then we had Sarica’s. We wanted to have multiple covers, and so those are what we were working with. And the insert, which I ended up doing anyway, has lyrical content, who recorded it, where we recorded it, who released it, the dates we released it, and how to contact us, so you know, it was pretty straightforward. I knew we wanted something... yeah, still on that confrontationally blank and graphic and colorful, with a sense of duality, like black and white, this and that, a and b - we wanted to have a sense of contrast.
Does it contrast with the music, too?
Yeah. I think it does and it doesn’t, I think, which is why we wanted back-and-forth. The release had six songs, and three have the same vibe, and then other three have their own vibe. They’re pretty different from each other, but they’re all kind of the same within that, you know, trilogy. So it’s like a double trilogy, like a dark side and a light side.
So that was A and B of the record?
So Sarica’s image is the A side and the B side is the exploding temple.
That never got printed?
Well it never got printed in print, but it’s online. Yeah, and I don’t really want say like, “[pissy] I didn’t get all the records.” But I’ll just the let public assume that the backside is the image of the exploding temple, because that’s what it was supposed to be like. I ended up just photocopying and scanning and throwing in stuff. It’s weird - it was with Record Machine label, and the lathe that cut it, I think, got broken, and all we got were the test pressings. So there were 50 of them, and they got 25 and we got 25, and I think basically the lathe like exploded or something, and it never followed through. Then Nathan the owner was like, “We we can redo it, but I need $250.” I mean I already paid $300, so I was like, you know, “This is your problem. Your on this side, I’m on this side. I mean I’ve paid for at least $400 on this plus recording time, so I want you to follow through on this, and then he never really followed through, and since then we haven’t really communicated. So that was kind the end of that. But there’s a new 7 “ that’s coming out that I have my hands all over, so I think it’ll be a lot more organized than the last one.
So there’s another 7“ coming, so does that mean you guys like doing that the best?
Yeah. We do. The band likes to do EPs or singles, and we like to take like an albums worth of material and put it on CDs and tapes and others stuff, but then we kind of pick some of the more defining of 12 songs, and then we send them to the EPs. I think we’ll do one EP release every year, along with like two cassettes and live stuff and other compilations, so we’re going to stick to like the four song, six song EP format. Unless we could only make 7”, but financially it’s kind of hard for an independent band, unless someone picks us up, so It’s easier to just load it up and have that to work with.
So, talking about the new one, what is your approach and what is the band’s approach to making albums, like album of vinyl, not just the music but the opening and closing and so on?
We trying to approach to like origins of how we go about writing songs and recording and releasing that them, but polishing that into vinyl, and for the self-titled one we went into a studio and recorded with Mike Tooly from Ad Astra, and we were trying to do like a straight-up studio Roxy Music art record, and so we wanted to work in a nice format. With the upcoming one, we going to do the inverse, and just warp the best songs with weird fourtracks and bouncing and mixing, and then go into the studio with this collection of you know 16 tracks on four tracks and then mixing it all down with Ashley Miller and Albert Redwine, and that’s the next one so, and I think we want to do because I think it was an emotive vibe than the studio stuff, which I felt was little bit too critical, because it’s hard to communicate a lot of nuances of the songs, which have like beautiful messups and other stuff like that. In the studio, you know, it was too formulaic, so it kinda lost it, but it also found it’s own kind of voice to. The new one will be more hands on studio-wise as a band, rather than working with a recording software that we’re not familiar with.
What does the aesthetic of the vinly record do for the music? Like before and when you’re listening to it. Does it enhance the experience?
I think it does. I think in general album art is wonderful. It’s one of my favorite aspects of music, is album art, and kind of looking through stacks of them. I think it’s just as important, if not more important than the music itself, because sometimes the album art has struck me more than the music. And sometimes it’s the opposite - you can have really crappy album art and a great album, so sometimes that understatement of the album art - I think that’s what’s fun about it, thinking about the visual and not visual. But when I look the cover that Sarica did along with exploding temple, I get a good sense of the like scenic narrative, like film, like stories were being told, because Sarica’s side is like personally told, so there’s like this impersonal personality that I can see.
It’s kind of funny, but the art I’ve never been truly a fan of, but the band really liked it, and I think it was really because of Zach - Sarica drew it, because she’s an artists and does a lot of paintings and drawings, and she didn’t have any intention of it being used as album art. it was just kind of like sketchbook doodles, and Zach saw when he was up in her apartment one day, and he loves that kind of stuff, you know he plays in the Ssion and Cody’s clothing style, and it’s a little bit similar to that, and I think he likes the femininity of it and the handdrawn colored pencil-ness of it, you know, and he also likes that it has a movie star on it, and he’s like, “this is great, this is just perfect,” and I was kind of like, “I can see that being edited in and I think be able to work that,” but I wasn’t really sold on it being album art, and they just kept going with it, and I’m not one to say no after a certain point. Then Sarica added in LAZY and collaged it. Then everyone saw it and was like, “Welp, this will work for now.” Then we scanned it in and told Record Machine that we were also going to use the exploding temple, then they posted that on their website, but then we also gave them the Sarica image and they posted it. But then the prints of the 50 copies were just double sided of the Sarica image.
Is the record colored?
Yeah, the record is red. It’s like clear red, and it has all the song listings on it, and it’s 33rpm, and two songs on each side filled with zine-style stuff inside of it and the outside sleeve is Sarica’s stuff. He asked and I was just like, “Red sounds cool,” and it does look really nice. It’s a beautiful 7”."
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