The Octopus Project Interview

The Octopus Project interview (originally posted at www.thesilentballet.com)

Firstly, as well as ATP you’re also playing Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits this year and in 2006, you played Coachella. With the latter, weren’t you nominated by a fan?

Toto Miranda: Yeah, completely without our knowledge we were nominated then voted into the Coachella festival, we knew nothing about it until we got the invitation from the festival.

I hope that wasn’t the day before or something!

Yvonne Lambert: No, no, it was six months before, but still we didn’t know if it was real or not, it was so shocking. It was something we had never even considered happening, so yeah, it was a big surprise!

So, have you played ATP before, or is this your first time? How does this one differ to other festivals you’ve played?

TM: No, this is our first one too.
YL: This is also a big surprise!
TM: We played a festival in Taiwan last year and it was kind of similar to this, it was in a resort and everyone had cabins and stuff, and all the bands and people stayed together. ATP is kind of like that, plus Coachella; totally awesome bands and a really cool resort thing, but everything being awesome.
Josh Lambert: Really like the best of both worlds.

But without the good weather! [It tipped it down on Friday]

TM: This isn’t bad, the weather was like this in Taiwan only it was really hot, deadly hot.
YL: It was grey and humid.
TM: We’ve been in England for a for a little over a week now, and it was beautiful up until a few days ago.

With your European tour, didn’t you lose a few dates along the way recently?

TM: Kind of, they were all sort of in flux, none were totally confirmed and then they ended up not happening.
YL: Some things got moved and some things got cancelled and things got added, but it’s all sorted now.

So you’re not going to be just wandering around Europe then?

TM: Yeah, saying “let us play please!”

I noticed that Josh [guitarist] kept running back and forth to that black box on stage all evening. Do you have to keep aware of what you’re doing at all times on stage, or can you relax a bit?

JL: Yeah, these guys picked up for it but I totally messed up one of the songs last night. I did some wrong things at the wrong time and they were just like “okay, I guess we’re doing that part now”. It gets confusing some times.
YL: I think in general we each know exactly what we have to do to make everything work together and like Josh said, if one of us just has a moment where we kind of go blank and mess something up, we can all pick up for each other.

The crowd didn’t notice though!

TM: Yeah, we’ve dropped the ball way harder than that, that was nothing! Sometimes a song will just grind to a halt, and that’s never pleasant.
YL: We did blow the power at our first show in London, twice. The power just went on all of the electronics, which is a big driving force for us.
TM: All the electronics and the amps went out, so all of a sudden it was just drums.
YL: That was awkward.

So, aside from that, how did your first London shows go?

JL: They went well, we played another one a few days later at the Vibe Bar in Shoreditch, that show was really awesome, it was really good,
YL: no power issues.
JL: Because all of our stuff is American power, so we have a converter that we got in Amsterdam, so it has European power, then we had to get U.K converters, so it’s like three settings of weirdness.

You’ve been known to use a Theremin, when did you first become accustomed to playing this instrument?

YL: I got the Theremin around 1999-2000, and started experimenting with it, using sound effects and pedals, just different cloaking devices to cover up the fact that I had no idea what I was doing! It took a good couple of years before I was comfortable playing intricate melodies, but its fun.

So how were you introduced to the instrument?

YL: We saw a documentary on the inventor who was a Russian physicist named Léon Theremin, and he was working for the KGB on motion sensors technology in 1920 when he accidentally discovered that the electricity in our body could amplify and detune these radio frequencies. He was also a musician so he made this instrument and toured the world, kind of showing everybody his new invention. It was the first electronic instrument ever invented.

I feel quite ignorant now for never having heard of it!

YL: It is pretty obscure; I think you wouldn’t really hear of it unless you sought it out.

How much do you use it on your albums and live sets then?

YL: We’re using it more, as I’ve learnt how to control it better we’ve been using it a lot more, so the newer album has more intricate melodies using it, and we do use it live. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve trained one ear to pick out that specific sound so I can try to play it live, because there’s no way to mark off frets to see what you’re doing, you really have to hear it. You kind of get a feel for it though, like the tiny movements of the fingers you have to do to change the pitch and the notes. You just get a feel for it though, like with any instrument.

I wanted to ask you about your split with Black Moth Super Rainbow, how did that one come about?

TM: We were introduced to them through the internet. The guy that runs their label, Graveface, got hold of us and we started talking to him about things, so we found out about them through him. Then he was asking us about doing a release, and since we’re with Peek A Boo in the states we didn’t want to do a proper album of our own, but the idea came up of doing a split with them, as a separate venture for both of us. We ended up trading files - little unfinished bits of songs - over the internet, and made it that way. We didn’t actually meet Black Moth until after the record was finished. It was kind of weird when we first met, which was when we first played a show together and walked in thinking “I wonder which one’s them?”

We’ve spent the whole time walking around the festival going, “I’m sure that’s Explosions in the Sky”, the festival is basically made up of lots of men with beards.

JL [talking about Ryan Figg, guitarist in the band]: Yeah, he’s in Explosions in the Sky, he’ll start signing t-shirts.

With the last record, you used a studio and also kept it lo-fi, so with the next one do you plan on using the studio, or will you be going back to your lo-fi roots?

JL: I think we’ll probably do it ourselves, with a little bit of help in Austin.
TM: It’s about kind of finding a balance between needing a lot of control over what we do, but then also needing some help so things are exactly where we want them. It’s back and forth but the more we do it the closer we get to the comfort zone, as far as things we can do and things we need help with.
YL: With the last record we initially wanted to try going into a studio, and seeing how everybody else does it and try to see how much better of a sound we could get working in a nice studio, with nice recording equipment. It was a really great experience, but I think in the end we still learnt that we needed to do our own thing and we needed more control over certain situations and certain sounds. We still took everything that we got from the studio home and manipulated it ourselves. I guess we’re control freaks in that way, but I think we learnt to trust ourselves more and to trust our own ideas.
TM: The studio was a combination of moments like “Wow, I never would have thought to do that, or that sounds way better” and then there were times when you wanted to reach over their shoulder and go “no, just do that!”

Was the studio recommended to you then?

JL: The guy who’s the engineer on it approached us, it was his studio in Seattle and he approached us at South By South West a couple of years ago. He had done records with The Gossip and Blonde Redhead and stuff like that. The studio was really amazing, so we were like “this sounds like a great deal, he’s made great records, the studio’s really awesome and a really nice guy.” When we got there we were there for like twenty days, we lived in the studio and just hung out there the whole time, and all of us just worked together. We mixed it at the very end of it, but then after we left on our way home we were listening to it and "thought these mixes aren’t exactly what we’re looking for," so we went home and spent the next couple of months mixing it ourselves and then with another guy in Austin.

So the one on the record is the one you mixed?

TM: Yeah, it ended up being a result of all those different processes in a row, it began with a few stages, but each stage definitely left its mark on what we were left with.

Will you be in the studio again for the next record?

YL: It’s possible that we’ll do some work in the studio and some on our own, we’re finding a good mix and trying to figure out the way we work best, what we need help with and what we need to do ourselves.

Do you know when the next record will be?

JL: We’ve just put out a single last month with two new songs and we haven’t written anything else since then, but hopefully when we get back we’ll start working on that.

With the Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead method of releasing music, how do you think music distribution is going to go? Can you see it going towards “free, donate money if you want” sort of thing, or do you think there’s still value placed on the physical copy of a record?

TM: It’s kind of splitting off and those two are becoming separate categories - there’s definitely going to be way less focus on the CD or it’ll be cheap and convenient on digital, or we’ll make a really beautiful vinyl album, so that you have the choice to do both. Tthis is all happening really fast, it wasn’t even a question on our minds when we put out the last record in October. Who knows what will happen between now and when we make our next record?

Do you think it’s a good thing, the way that it’s going?

TM: I think it’s in total flux right now, and I don’t know if it’s going to settle in one particular mode any time soon. I think it’s good to not have the content and the object to be necessarily linked, as you can start to think of those as two different ideas - not that one is more valuable than the other, but it’s just kind of multiplying.

Atlas Sound, a fellow act at ATP, has developed that Ryan Adams thing where he’s constantly releasing new songs online; do you think you’ll ever be like that?

TM: We’re not that prolific with the finished product, there’s tons and tons of stuff in progress but it’s like pulling teeth to get a song finished for us. We’re gonna do something special with it, whether it’s digital or vinyl or whatever; it’s going to be something special, not just releases on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

So we’re not going to be hearing any DJ Reggie (Ryan Adam’s rapping alter-ego) style rap songs then?

TM: We do have some joke songs,
YL: We make up kind of joke, rappy songs just for ourselves, but they never get released.
TM: I’m torn because I think they’re hilarious, but on principle I think novelty rap just needs to be put to sleep.

Finally, is there anyone we should be checking out in particular at ATP?

JL: Animal Collective and A Hawk and a Hacksaw, who we’ll see in a little bit. I saw Animal Collective play about three years ago, but I’m sure it’s completely different now - the clips I saw at Coachella was all electronics, no guitars or drums or anything.