Interview: The Ruby Suns get aggressive. Kinda.
Fight Softly is quite a different record to the last two; the African rhythms seem to be largely absent for one thing. Was the plan to do something else this time around?
“It was a conscious effort to make a different-sounding album. In some ways, I wanted to make some harsher sounds and some more aggressive sounds just because I hadn’t really done that before. When I was a kid I never recorded any harsh music, whether it be loud guitars or aggressive-sounding synths – maybe that’s off the topic – but I’ve always done fairly mellow kind of pop music, so I wanted to explore more sounds. It’s not an aggressive record, there’s just some sounds that are a little bit different to what I have done before. I just wanted to explore more.”
In an interview with Pitchfork earlier this year, you summed it up quite neatly when you said you wanted to use organic instruments to produce non-organic-sounding sounds.
“Yeah I think that’s what I set out to do. Well, yeah; I was just trying to create new sounds, basically, and sometimes started with organic stuff, just playing guitar and then affecting it in different ways, and in some cases coming up with really interesting results, and that’s what I was trying to do. And then I did that through a myriad of different effects, and a lot of different effects that I’ve never used before.”
To me, it almost sounds like it was recorded underwater.
Just mentioning High Places, was there anyone you worked with or played with between the albums that particularly inspired the direction this album took?
“It would probably be mostly a good friend of mine, Devon Smith, who has a project called Signer that I’m involved with as well. He’s mostly a techno musician, and I sort of joined Signer and he started playing in The Ruby Suns as well. Just because we’re friends who both love music, we’d swap mixes or talk about stuff, and I think being around him more, listening to what he was up to and learning about his processes of recording definitely influenced what I was doing. Some of the synth sounds he gets were just so amazing to me, and I was fascinated by that.”
Being so far away from you, I always wondered what kind of a place New Zealand is to make music?
“Making music in New Zealand is interesting. In some ways there’s little to be gained, because the population is so small that it’s not sustainable to be a weird or indie act… I don’t know. It’s certainly not sustainable to make weird music and expect to make any money from it. Only the really, really commercial artists earn enough money in New Zealand to be able to live off it. But in other ways, because it’s so difficult to make it, it makes everybody’s convictions stronger. All that you can do is make the music that you want to make, unless you want to make a commercial hard rock album. You can be a pretty small band in The States or Europe and have a sustainable touring thing going, and it can work out okay, but that doesn’t work when you can only play to 200 people across New Zealand. I mean, we’re doing four shows in New Zealand and I’m not sure we’re going to make a penny. In a lot of ways it makes an artist stronger because you have to do it for yourself.”
Do you think you wouldn’t necessarily have that conviction or your music wouldn’t sound the same if you were still living in California and hadn’t moved to New Zealand?
“That’s an interesting question. Certainly there are more scenes in North America where there are lots of bands that sound similar, and there’s more of a blog culture in The States, or at least that’s what it looks like looking from the outside in. There’s just none of that in New Zealand. In The States, it might be easier to check out what’s cool and be more like that, or it might seem like that’s the best thing to do because people are going to these shows of a particular kind of music. In New Zealand, people will go see an aggressive, lo-fi punk band, but they’ll also like our band, which is often the case. So yeah, I guess there are more scenes to adhere to in North America that you could be more susceptible to… I don’t know if what I’m saying is making any sense!”
No, it does make sense with regard to the impact that a given environment can make on your music. On a related note, obviously you’re headed Stateside this month to play shows with Signer and Toro Y Moi. Are you a fan of Chaz (Bundick, aka Toro Y Moi) too?
“Yeah, I definitely like what he’s doing. Ever since I asked him to come on this tour he seems to have gotten bigger and bigger, and his profile is just increasing exponentially. I’m slightly worried that he’s going to be five times as big as we are by the time the tour comes around, and he’s playing before us so things might get awkward! Maybe not, we’ll see.”
Hey, maybe things seem bigger in the blogosphere than they are on the ground!
“That’s a really interesting point. And fuck, I live in New Zealand – I have no idea about these things really. The only way I can gauge is through fucking MySpace plays or something!”
The Ruby Suns come to Europe in May, and we’ll have full confirmation (wink, wink!) of a Dublin date in the coming days.
In your words