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Interview

The Pity Party

The Pretty Party's M and Heisenflei

They won our New Bands We Love Competition for 2008, and we have never been this excited about a new band before. So excited that we are making an announcement right now on this page that we are going to fly them over to play a gig or two in London this May. So excited and impatient that we couldn’t wait for them to come over, we had to meet up with them in LA for a chat. People... give it up to the Pity Party, the band whom without Keith Moon and crazy hypnotic sessions would never have existed.

SS: So the Pity Party, what’s your band history please?
Heisenflei (vocals, drums, keyboard): M and I went to school together. We’ve known each other since we were 12. We weren’t really friends but we shared the love of classical choral music and then somehow became friends after we graduated and then we started talking about this idea we had to do music together. And we just talked about it for 2 years. He was in New York and I was in LA and we just talked about it like, ‘Our band’s gonna be like this and our band is gonna do this!’ (smiles)
M (vocals, guitar, Auto-Orchestra): And then we tried it for a month, like a trial, and it was good. That was 2004.
Heisenflei: Finally M moved back a year later and we got a practice space which is the first thing you have to do as a band and then you have to get instruments so we got those, and then you have to learn how to play them (laughs)!

SS: So you were working backwards?
Heisenflei: Yeah! (Laughs)

SS: What were you studying in New York?
M: Music composition.
Heisenflei: I did Film in New York. I think the music I like the most always has a cinematic quality, it’s propelling like a feeling. I think we’re writing like that now. We’re becoming more melodic and a little bit more cinematic.

SS: There’s 2 EP releases now?
Heisenflei: We had the first EP from 2 years ago and there’s this one (Orgy Porgy EP) which is like a taste of what the full length is going to be. We’re doing a little bit freeing ourselves up from the format of the two of us, we have some stuff that we just did in our friend’s living room with an old piano and any percussion sounds we could make so there’s like much more raw, tribal, weird stuff that’s going to on there.
M: A lot of it was just so improv’d and there’s so much joy in finding something great that you’re like, ‘whoa!’ like we just made that.

SS: You mention a lot of machines in your lyrics.
M: Our practice space is converted offices of a poultry factory so when we first started working there we actually wanted to write a concept record about life at the poultry processing plant. One of the first songs we wrote was called ‘The Factory and Machine’. I find technology fascinating so I really like machines.
Heisenflei: People are striving for some kind of weird perfection or repetitive things that their mind can vent exit, but they don’t allow for, I don’t know if you call it spirit or just something unpredictable or something you can’t control or something that just comes to you to exist there. Because of all the machines, they can just fix it, and make it perfect, to my ear that’s boring. But it just seems like everyone’s striving towards becoming a machine because it’s easier because machines don’t feel probably.
M: Whenever I think of the machine I think of something emotionless, like repetitive. It has its jobs and it does it and it gets it, it’s efficient, and people like efficiency.
Heisenflei: But there’s something about also the relentlessness of a beat that’s like a machine. There’s something really sexy about it for me. It’s like forcing you to do something and it’s just perpetually moving. Somebody once told me that my drumming sounds like a drum machine which is I think is kind of interesting.

SS: What made you decide to go on drums and guitar?
Heisenflei: We were using this practising space that had this kit in it already.  We got in there and I was like: ‘Me! I’m on the drums!’ and I just sat down at them first (laughs). So I laid claims to the drums. But I was obsessed with Keith Moon for 2 years of my life in a strange and unnatural way. That was kicked off when I was living in London and he was on the cover of Mojo and I saw it in a little magazine shop. I remember just seeing him and went ‘whoa!’ And then becoming a crazy obsessed fanatic to the point where every night I tried to hypnotise myself so that he would be in my dreams so that I could communicate with him. I didn’t ever drum, I never held drumsticks or sat behind the kit so I think that must be what it is.

SS: It’s not the one of him lying naked on the bed, is it?
Heisenflei: No, but I like that one!  (Laughs) This one is the cover of Mojo. I have every book written about him, I have everything I can get on video. It’s all in the box now because I don’t care any more.

SS: What about you, M?
M: I don’t have any formal training on the guitar at all. Once I touched an electric guitar I realised that’s all I really wanted to play. I used to play an acoustic and it had lots of chords that I played and I just realised that you could play all these single lines that are just really weird and catchy and make lots of noises. And then somehow I ended up with just a bunch of peddles and that’s where the real fun is for me.
Heisenflei: He also plays this thing we found at a vintage music store called Auto-Orchestra that he bought himself for his birthday a few months ago and he plays bass notes on it with his foot. So now we’re a 4-piece because we have drums, keyboard, bass keyboard and a guitar.

SS: Isn’t it hard to multi-task like that?
Heisenflei: I’m like a flailing crab (laughs). Sometimes it’s scary. Recently it’s become better, but it was so hard and challenging and frustrating that I felt like I could never perform and flow at all, to perform the songs, the words and meaning. I was so busy thinking, ‘What am I doing? What is my left hand doing?’
M: It always seems fragile. That’s part of the fun of it, it could fall apart at any moment, but we’re sort of striking that balance nowadays, the feeling that it’s not going to.

SS: Has it ever?
Both: Oh yeah! (Laughs)
Heisenflei: We’ve stopped and started a song over a bunch of times. One time I asked them if I should start from the beginning or where we left off and some guys was like, ‘Where you left off!’, and I was like, ‘Fuck you’! (Laughs) We started where we left off.

SS: Do you like it though?
Heisenflei: Yeah, I get a kick out of it. I find it funny whenever things are going wrong.
M: I don’t! I stress. But lately I start thinking about how lots people are probably there for any way, they don’t want to see a perfect show, they want to see something different.
Heisenflei: There were things I used to not be aware of, so I know what an audience can bear. They don’t know if your guitar’s out of tune, they don’t know if that part isn’t really exactly how it’s supposed to be. I was never aware when I would go to shows. And even now I don’t unless I know the bands really really well. So we’ll go see Autolux and we’ll be right up front and centre in the audience, just loving it rather than hang out with the beer backstage (laughs). It just keeps reminding you what it is from out there.

SS: Your brother is in Autolux right?
Heisenflei: Yeah, Greg Edwards, he’s such a genius (smiles).

SS: Is that why you wanted to be in a band?
Heisenflei: Yeah, actually.
M: For me too actually, that is probably why I play guitar.
Heisenflei: They’re huge huge influence on us. And his band from before, Failure, is so good. He just has such a good melody sense. I’m really happy that a band like Autolux can have a good fanbase and a career because there’s nothing easy or immediate about them. They’re totally about music, and that’s how we are. But in LA, music isn’t the first thing for people.

SS: What do people like here?
Heisenflei: There’s this weird thing where bands are derivative of indie bands, it’s like the sub-genre-isation of everything. There’s like the Shins and then there’s all these other bands that are basically just ripping the Shins off.

SS: It’s all about marketing now, isn’t it?
Heisenflei: Imagine if the song you fucking hate is your biggest song ever and you’d just have to play it for the rest of your career. That’s why you have to love everything you write, because you might get stuck playing one of those things night after night after night. And at a certain part you’re not going to be like ‘this song... this moment...’ but ‘um... I’m really hungry...’ (laughs).

SS: You’ve got loads of different song directions, how are you going to fit them into the album?
Heisenflei: It’s going to be all over the place. We need to keep finding our voice and not worry too much about cohesion yet.
M: I actually like a lot of comments that I get about how every time there’s a new song it doesn’t sound like the old one, I think that’s good.
Heisenflei: But that’s because we have Attention Deficit Disorder. I have a drumbeat that I use in 2 songs and every time I play it I’m annoyed with myself. I’m like, ‘This is written for the other song and I’m using it in this song,’ which is lazy.
M: Every drumbeat has to be different for us.
Heisenflei: But we could make it so much easier on ourselves.
M: Oh yeah, we could employ some other people to play for us, too! (Laughs)