So So Modern

There were some great records in 2007 – The National’s Boxer, Panda Bear’s Person Pitch, Burial’s Untrue – but among the most thrilling release of the year were four seven inches released in consecutive weeks by New Zealand four-piece So So Modern. Melding hardcore guitars, dizzying synths and some quite phenomenal drumming, the Friends and Fires series is quite the introduction. Indeed half featured in our singles of the year. While Grayson Gilmour and Aidan Leong took some well earned down time from a relentless touring schedule (they’ve been in Europe since July), drummer Dan Nagels and Mark Leong (keys, guitar) talk hospitality, campfires and dodgy mountain analogies.

Your first UK release – Friends and Fires – was split into four different seven inches released in consecutive weeks. What was the thinking behind that?

Mark Leong - “It’s cheating really –it should be an album but it’s released as four different things. Generally when we write we tend to write songs in pairs – steady projectives. We usually have a couple of ideas for a song and those ideas dematerialise into possibilities and then come back together, usually in pairs because we can only handle two songs at once.

Dan Nagels – “We also have ideas that will spawn others and the new ideas won’t always work for the song so we’ll have an overflow. It’s writing music to propagate other music.”

How do you guys go about writing songs? It’s funny Battles should be on at the moment (Atlas is spinning in the background) because, like them, the process behind So So Modern seems fascinating.

Mark – “Somebody comes to the table with a bunch of ideas and it has to pass through all of us interpreting them and becomes something that the original idea could never have been conceived as. That becomes really exciting to know that something we created couldn’t just have been created by any one of us individually.”

Dan – “It’s a classically cheesy analogy but I always find when I write songs, particularly with So So Modern, that there’s a threshold where it gets quite confusing. And it’s like climbing a mountain, and getting to the tip, you’re exhausted and you think fuck. Then you get over the top and the song just completes itself.”

Mark – “It’s not really like a mountain, it’s like getting to the peak of something…”
Dan – “Yeah…It’s not like it goes back down again or gets easier.”
Where does the sound come from – what informs So So Modern?
Mark - “We’re a very involved band – we discuss a lot together, we do a lot of things together to inspire us. We all come from different disciplinary backgrounds – we have musicians, designers, architects, radiation therapists, teachers and we grab our inspiration from everything else that’s going on in our life.”

Dan - “I think our inspirations are changing with our new experiences.”

Mark – “I think our new stuff will be more autobiographical. If the band was a person, we’d have gone through our teething process and we’re now three years old and just learning to read.”

Glancing at the gig archive on your website, you’ve been touring Europe pretty relentlessly since July. How’s that been?

Mark – “It’s affected us in every single way – by the end of 2007 we’d played over 200 shows.”

Dan – “I think it’s only when we get home to New Zealand that we’ll think holy shit.”

Mark – “We’ve played a lot of small towns, and they’ve been amazing. People are schooled in the etiquette of hospitality, especially in small places in America. They think we might never see these guys again, who are they? Let’s have them stay in our basement and when they finish, let’s hand out a box for donations. That’s amazing because it’s a genuine excitement. In big cities, it’s hard to pick the genuine people from the vampires.”

Dan – “There’s also lots of excitement and hysteria and danger in big cities though. It’s just as fun but for different reasons.”

Do you consider yourselves a people’s band in that case? Remember the campfire is the motto, right?

Mark – “Music’s always a campfire, it’s to express something individually but to communicate it to someone else. There’s a fine line between an artist expressing their idea and serving to express it to other people. As a principal, music something people show solidarity in, to communicate with.”

Is it almost a band manifesto?

Mark – “We’ve always believed that music has that kind of empowering aspect to it, that music has that responsibility. We formed with lots of idealisms that we are everyday re-assessing. Like what’s DIY? People throw it around so much; it’s become some kind status quo. People say we’re a DIY band; we come from the hardcore punk community – we say that so much – but do we need to say that anymore?

You’ve been playing as So So Modern for a while now- how did you all get together initially?

Mark – “We all happened to be in Wellington – studying or working and all hung out with the same community of artists, showgoers and musicians. We all knew each other indirectly, found out about each other indirectly and started a band indirectly.”

Dan – “We were all jamming with each other in different set-ups, all keen to be in a band so it made sense and it was good ‘cause we didn’t have a big history with each other, forming the band was like forming our relationships.”

What’s Wellington like as a place to make music?

Mark – “It’s a really good place to be creative because you have a sense of freedom and independence. It’s a bit of a distance thing because you’re far away from the rest of the world. You can only rely on yourself to make stuff happen. There’s not a lot of money there so people form with the pure intent of making music.”

Is it impossible to be a self-sufficient band in New Zealand then?

Dan – “Musicians can make their way in New Zealand quite well because there’s not a live music industry as in if you play a show, you get everything at the door. There are no venues that take a percentage; bands don’t work with promoters, managers and bookers. At the same time, there is so much more accessibility to New Zealand, we’ve a lot of friends who are touring their now who, before the Internet, wouldn’t have considered it a possibility.”

Mark – “And likewise we know quite a few New Zealand bands who are coming overseas to do similar things to us but it’s really weird meeting bands from London who think we’re mad just quitting our jobs and going to another country. Somehow they think it’s impossible to do it. We quit our jobs to come here to live the dream. They’re here where the dreams supposed to be lived and they’re not doing it.”

Any New Zealand bands we should check out?

Mark – “The first band that most people in the UK would be exposed to would be Cut Off Your Hands and there’s another band called the Mint Chicks who have been working a lot in the US.

Dan – “Die Die Die, they’re pretty big too, probably the most successful band in New Zealand in the US.”

Mark – “There’s also a lot of bands who are doing stuff on their own steam and not really making a big deal about it…”

Dan – “But are incredibly amazing, for example Disasteradio who does like computer game inspired music.”

Mark – “There’s also Frase+Bri who are a two-piece that play Commodore 64’s on stage and they’re great. The Ruby Suns are doing amazing things. The Brunettes, they’re on Sub Pop. There’s a lot of hardcore bands doing really well – Strangers, Dial, they’re both really pushing things… For a country that has such little industry and population, there’s been quite a lot of good stuff coming out for a long time with the Flying Nun stuff in the 70’s and 80’s.”

Dan – “But for New Zealanders, every journey you make is overseas and the whole things is to get signed to some label. It’s just like it is for every other band except you’ve got the geography issue so you have to make it a million miles before you’re on a par with any other band.”

And finally the plan - you were saying earlier you’d like to go home to write, record and release in three months? (The last record took six days to record and mix)

Dan – “We’ll see what we can swindle together. We want to go back and record an album, it mightn’t be finished until the day before we leave but it’ll be put down at least.”

Mark – “We’re not really the type of band who can sit on a recording for too long. Although we like songs to mature… How do we describe ourselves - we’re perfectionists up to a certain point – it’s chaotic perfectionism.”

Dan – “The one thing about touring is that we’ve all overcome our mental limitations because that’s the only thing that can ever hold you back. Going back to New Zealand and taking what we’ve been doing back, we’ll be in a new frame of mind as to what’s possible when we approach the album.”