The first record was made with the thought that no-one was listening, and that it was just something to put out in Minneapolis, with absolutely no sense of anticipation.
The first record was made with the thought that no-one was listening, and that it was just something to put out in Minneapolis, with absolutely no sense of anticipation.
Incendiary interview Tapes & Tapes, Paradiso, 22/11/2006
Tapes and Tapes took time to speak to Catherine Brodigan on their recent tour…
IN: So, you guys are here in Amsterdam for the first time off the back of a tour and the UK and Ireland – it’s been a busy few months for you, I gather!
Matt: Very.
IN: Things really kicked off for you at South by Southwest, right?
Matt: Yeah, even a little bit before that, we did a couple of short tours, one to New York in January, and a bit along the East Coast. And we were starting to get blog attention around then – then after that, in between South by Southwest and that, we started to get some good reviews, so then South by Southwest was kinda crazy.
IN: But the likes of Pitchfork had you on their radar long before then.
Matt: Yeah, a little bit. The [Pitchfork] review came before that, like a week or two before [South by Southwest].
IN: I read you played eight shows at SXSW? That’s crazy!
Matt: Eight or nine shows. It’s a little crazy, but it wasn’t as bad as we thought it’d be. We thought it’d be kinda hellish, and on the first day we did four gigs, but a lot of the time it wasn’t full sets. It was just down to business for us, you know, we didn’t particularly get a chance to enjoy a lot of the other bands, like most people think about SXSW.
IN: And the end result was that you came out as one of the "buzz bands" – certainly in the UK.
Matt: It was a big introduction to the UK for us, and it definitely made our first trip there in May a little bit easier in a way. Unbeknownst to us at the time, every third person you meet at SXSW is from the UK. So we met Zane [Lowe] there which was good.
IN: I think in the last couple of years there’s been more attention given here to the smaller bands from SXSW, like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah the year before – and you guys this year – and bands like these are breaking the UK quicker.
Matt: Yeah, which is great.
IN: But you’d already had the album done and released on your own label before all of this.
Erik: Yeah, since November of last year.
IN: And you were selling them out of your bedrooms?
Erik: Well, not ours personally, but yeah, the singer’s.
Matt: They shipped thousands of CDs, but then finally we signed with XL in May and that whole chapter was wrapped up.
IN: And the album itself, did it come together relatively quickly?
Erik: The recording of it? Yeah, it was super fast, it was almost absurd how fast it was really. It was before I joined the band, and I was just the producer and engineer. Josh basically traded me – he made a website for me and I recorded the album. So we did it in seven days, and we mixed it in three days – three business days, 9 to 5.
IN: But I suppose everything had been on the boil really slowly up until that point.
Erik: Yeah, it wasn’t like they were trying to write songs in the studio or anything. Everything was written and finished.
IN: Up until quite recently, you all had day jobs – what was that like?
Matt: Yeah, Josh still kinda hangs on to his, and Erik hasn’t had a day job for a while, but I had a day job up until May. I was a project manager for affordable housing development in Minneapolis – I was happy to have that job when I got it! But then it was like, well, I was gone for two weeks, and then three weeks.
Erik: I was sessioning, band whoring. I was a serial band joiner.
IN: Listening to some of your earlier demos, versus what’s on the album, your sound now is a lot more pared down. How do you think the band’s sound has evolved, especially with the new recruits?
Erik: Well, it keeps getting tighter all the time because we’re playing so much, but I don’t know what other dynamics have changed, if any.
Matt: We can pretty faithfully reproduce the record now, but in some ways it’s a little bit bigger now. It wasn’t like we had heavy overdubbing or string arrangements or anything like that on the album.
IN: That was one of the alluring things for me listening to the album, the fact that it’s very home grown.
Erik: Organic, that’s another word that’s been used. But yeah, live, it’s taken on a little bit more of a life than it had during recording. The recordings were, at certain points, for some of the songs, really nude. Like Just Drums and stuff like that. So those songs have maybe evolved a little bit, from the live aspect. No long jamming sequences or anything like that though.
Matt: We’ve just played them so many times we kinda have to do something different with them just for our own interest.
IN: So how have you found the touring experience?
Matt: For the most part we’ve been doing our own tours, which is good. We’ve been lucky, people come to shows everywhere we go.
IN: I suppose it’s been a bit easier in the US than over here, what with the blogs there talking about you.
Matt: Yeah, well I went and looked in the Free Record Shop today – it wasn’t a very good record shop, it didn’t have our record! I did see it in Stockholm though, in a regular record store. It’s still surprising – wow, that’s our record.
IN: I read that in the US, Jakov’s Suite has just been featured in a Nissan commercial. How do you guys feel about that?
Erik: I don’t think we really know how it came about. I’m sure they just contacted the licensing department at the label. I think the sum of our knowledge is that we were told that it might happen at some point, and then on the first night of our tour, back on October 18th, it was on during the World Series. So we were there watching TV and then our song is on a commercial. But we’ve been away this whole time since.
Matt: It’s a really good commercial – it’s really light.
Erik: It would seem that Nissan is targeting a hipper, younger crowd. (God help us – ed)
IN: On to the second album – touring is keeping you pretty busy I’d imagine, but with The Loon being in the bag for over a year now I’m sure it’s on your minds.
Erik: It’s an itch that we just can’t scratch, at least until we get back from the Australian tour. We go home for six days, then we’ve got a show in Seattle, a show in Japan, a couple of days promo and stuff, and then we go to Australia for a week or something. We get back home on December 15th and then it’s time to eat, drink and be merry for the holidays.
IN: Have you played any new stuff live yet?
Matt: No…we’ve worked on a few demos in the very limited time we had back home. We’ve resurrected a few old songs off the first EP to play live, just for variety.
IN: It’ll be interesting to see how the process goes this time around, with the label backing and everything.
Matt: No doubt it’ll be different. The first record was made with the thought that no-one was listening, and that it was just something to put out in Minneapolis, with absolutely no sense of anticipation. No-one to send the demos to except for friends…
Erik: Exactly, it was like "alright, let’s play a show at St. Paul for a CD release show,have some friends come and play".
IN: There are quite a few remixes around from The Loon, I was listening to a few earlier. Out of any of the songs of the album, any particular ones you’d like to see remixed and who by?
Matt: Oh man!
Erik: That’s a good question.
Matt: I always thought Omaha would be a cool one to remix, Erik thought that’d be a cool one to remix, but the way the sample was done or parcelled up or whatever, I don’t know the technicalities of it but it can’t be done. Remixes in the States are more left to the hiphop and R&B scene, there’s not as much indie remixing going on. Although it is starting – I have a couple of friends called Certified Bananas, they’ve remixed things for Editors and stuff, but it’s not as popular in the States as it is in the UK.
IN: Sound-wise, there’ve been lots of comparisons between Tapes ‘n Tapes and The Pixies, Pavement, Wilco… probably Pavement more than anyone else.
Erik: The Pixies, too. It’s almost become one word – PixiesPavement.
IN: Is that reflective of what you guys would have listened to growing up?
Erik: It’s certainly what I listened to for a huge span of the 90s. But the recording aspect of it was sort of patterned after what we could afford to do and how much time we had. It wasn’t like "I’ve got a copy of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain right here and I want this record to sound exactly like this!" It was more like "does that sound good enough? I think so, let’s move on" because we didn’t have a lot of time. But as far as the comparisons go – we like all those bands, so as long as we’re getting compared to bands we like, we’re probably in good shape.
IN: Is there anything that you’re listening to now that’s really firing you up?
Erik: I haven’t listened to anything all year, probably, between all the touring and stuff. It’s nice to take a break from music. You listen to stuff all the time though, Matt.
Matt: A little bit, I mean, again, most of the new stuff we’ve picked up have been other "Beggar’s bands", where they’ll give us a promo copy of their album. I really like that Juana Molina record, though, and the new Belle and Sebastian.
Erik: Yeah, that’s a good one.
Matt: Not a whole lot of new stuff, I guess.
Erik: We’ve been playing shows every day for five weeks… the first thing I do when I get home is not going to be putting on CDs and shit like that. I’ll enjoy the sound of silence.