ERIC: I heard a lot of the recordings on the album were recorded at home.
SEBASTIAN: Yeah, especially with the first album. When we recorded with John MacEntire we just thought it was going to be a demo. So I think only half of the first album was recorded with him. The rest is stuff that we actually just recorded at my parents basement on the four track. More like the little keyboard jams, stuff like that and also that song “Prowler” was recorded at the Oberlin college radio station live on air. We recorded half of it with John and Thrill Jockey was like, “Do you want to release an album?” and we were like, “Of course,” so we had to sift through our tapes and find stuff to put on it.
ERIC: It doesn’t around much like home recordings on that album.
SEBASTIAN: When it’s something like a drum machine and a keyboard it’s harder to mess it up. All the rock songs on the first album were recorded with John.
ERIC: It’s hard to get a clean drum sound at home, things tend to bleed a lot.
SEBASTIAN: Yeah, so the ones that were recorded at home were simpler songs. The second album, some of the songs, like “Motr,” we recorded on our eight track. Some of the more electronic ones, like “Night Dancing,” were recorded at home.
ERIC: I think some people think of you as pretty hi-tech, but one of the guys in the band was showing us your keyboard setups and they were very...
SEBASTIAN: Yeah, we’re not hi-tech at all. The one sampler we use is a totally shitty DJ sampler.
ERIC: Like a Gemini or something? (That’s what I have too.)
SEBASTIAN: Yeah, it’s a Gemini. And we only use that in one song and we don’t use any computers when we record or sequencers, so it’s pretty primitive. It’s pretty lo-tech. There are three reasons for that. First is the money involved; a lot of that gear is really expensive. The second is that you have to put in a lot of time to learn how to use it; which I’m willing to do, but if you don’t have the money, then what’s the point? The third most important
reason is that, I think that with electronic music, if you start getting too hi-tech about it it loses some of its... I mean the reason I like some electronic music is that it sounds really mechanical and artificial and simple. And sometimes it loses that appeal to me if it starts getting really complicated. I think with the gear that we have we can do that just fine.
ERIC: It’s almost like sometimes if you get too much stuff it becomes too easy and it doesn’t force you to think about what you’re doing.
SEBASTIAN: Yeah. Also, when you’re writing a song, like say if we’re writing just a baseless guitar song, if it takes you a week and a half to write it then it’s probably not going to be a very good song. I think our songs are better that take us a day or two to write, that just come out. And I think when you have all that gear writing an electronic song, you’ll spend two weeks on a song and get so caught up in it that you can’t see the big picture. You lose the spontinaity. I don’t know, we might eventually get more gear and hopefully even harness it. Like just now we were working on some new electronic songs and even with the stuff we have now it was kind of getting out of hand. Too much stuff was going on. I like to keep it kinda simple.
ERIC: I’ve noticed with my band there’d be songs we’d make up on the spot and the next day we’d practice again and we’d try and replay the song; and we’re playing the right everything, but it just doesn’t sound good anymore. Something gets lost in the translation sometimes.
SEBASTIAN: The same thing goes with mixing. I don’t like to take a whole day to mix one song. When you have that much time you start asking questions that aren’t really that important.
ERIC: I was reading another article (in AP) where you were talking about your “humanzie” theories [created by breading humans with chimps] and that struck me as funny because my brother and I always discuss the highest form of comedy as being chimpanzees dressed as humans, especially with cigarettes. Like when people say, “It’s the funniest thing you’ll ever see,” we say, “is it really funnier than a chimp dressed up as a human with a cigar?” So I thought that breeding humanzees would be an excellent way to produce quality comedians.
SEBASTIAN: Yeah, it would be even funnier if it was a humanzie.
ERIC: Then they could tell their own jokes.
SEBASTIAN: That whole humanzie thing just came from talking about monkeys and biology I guess, but we just thought it would be really offensive. I think that interbreeding a chimp with a human would really piss people off.
ERIC: Yeah, people get angry enough when scientists do test on bunnies.
SEBASTIAN: And this would be a lot worse...
[end]