Talking with Kinski, Purveyors of Thick, Sedulous, Instrumental Dirges
Kinski
You'll notice Kinski does without a lead singer, exhibiting a technical proficiency that obviates the need for vocals in their music. Actually, there are vocals on some Kinski songs, but they're kept lower in the mix than the bass and drums, and they're basically unintelligible. You're lucky to notice them.
Taking a cue from instrumental rock monoliths like Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Kinski move their songs from dainty quiet to slow and heavy to loud and fast. Or the other way around. You just never know. Kinski songs have an exhilarating element of surprise.
Their second album, Be Gentle with the Warm Turtle, is due out on Pacifico in January. I interviewed them by phone and via email.
What do you say to people who claim to get bored without lyrics?
Chris Martin: I like to say, "It's called music." And then storm off. I get bored with lyrics.
Lucy Atkinson: It doesn't even make sense to me that a song needs lyrics to not be "boring."
CM: Most of our songs just don't call for lyrics. It seems to just get in the way and bring you back to reality. Some guy after a show a while ago said, "I just realized you guys only sang once." It was hitting him later that there weren't really any vocals. I think that's great. I'm bored to death with a lot of traditional song structure, although some of our things are pretty traditional. The transitions just come from trying to think of things I haven't heard before, or at least not very often. Normally it's kind of a drawn-out process. I remember reading Paul Westerberg saying once that if a song wasn't written in 15 minutes then it's probably not worth a shit. That runs through my head all the time while I'm spending hours and hours in the rehearsal room working on something. He'd probably hate us.
LA: There's a lot of music out there that isn't in an A-B-A song structure. When I stopped listening to mostly traditional rock-structured songs, music got a lot more interesting for me. You start listening to different parts of music...what energy is developing through the sounds, what your brain and "ear" are putting into the song, harmonics that appear out of nowhere? It can get pretty cool.
Who do you think of as kindred spirits, musically?
CM: I think I've been most affected by, of people or bands that are still going now, Spiritualized, Windy & Carl and Rafael Toral. I could name 30 [defunct] German bands that I think I've learned tons from. Spiritualized for their sense of drama and melancholy. I saw them do a show in a small club in Boston a few years ago on the "Ladies and Gentlemen" tour and was completely blown away. They could rock like Neu! and then drift away into a pot-fueled bliss. Windy & Carl for how much sound can be created by two people. The layers and the depth of their music is what I find so enthralling and peaceful. Rafael Toral for some of the same reasons as W&C. It's sort of the next step to Eno's ambient work. Hypnotic but never boring. It's background music that you're always aware of.
One of the distinguishing marks of Kinski is how tight and complicated you are. When you're working on songs, do you ever get too tight and have to go back and loosen up?
CM: Yeah, we've definitely overwritten songs before. We'll play something that's really complicated for a while and then realize that it would be way better if we stripped it down. Simpler almost always works better.
LA: It's interesting you say "complicated," because, as Chris said, when we're arranging and writing parts as a band we always end up coming back to minimalism and repetition. Some parts need to be minimal to better support the more intricate?or equally minimal/repetitious?parts that are going on, and I think I consciously play that role in our music. I try to add a hypnotic, droney element to the songs by staying simple. Actually, I get really tranced out playing live...
I've seen you start a lot of shows with "Staring"?a song whose first three minutes are really quiet and unobtrusive, and then suddenly gets loud and furious for another minute, and then the rest of the song is really melodic?and I have a pet theory that you do it to watch everyone jump out of their skin when the first change comes. Am I right?
CM: Yeah, it is fun to listen to everybody chatter for three minutes while we do the quiet intro and then explode into it. It wasn't really written that way on purpose, though.
LA: That song sounds better at the beginning of a set, too. It's not our fault that people don't know we've started.
What's Be Gentle with the Warm Turtle like compared to SpaceLaunch for Frenchie?
CM: I like a lot about [Frenchie], but I 'm not crazy about the pieces that sound indie-rockish. I think if we're reaching for something, it's for things that we haven't heard a lot before. And I'd definitely like to add more pieces that don't depend on a constant rock beat. There's one on the new album that is in that direction.
LA: The new record seems more powerful, more interesting as a whole, though.