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The Going Gets Gorgeous: A Conversation With Blonde Redhead

by Alexander Dimitropoulos
09/13/2007

The door on Blonde Redhead’s trailer has fallen off the day of a performance in Northampton, Massachusetts, and for people who have heard the group’s newest, seventh album, this news could be disconcerting.

“We’re stuck here because, well, we’re just waiting to see if we can get another trailer to come and then transfer everything onto the other trailer and then go,” drummer Simone Pace said in a phone interview with Athens Exchange on September 7.

He was calling from a parking lot.

The songs on the new, self-produced, album, 23, usually start without a hitch, however. 23 smoothes down the angular guitar edges of the band’s earlier records, and the instruments weave into seamless reverb-soaked patterns. In addition, the lyrics of vocalist Kazu Makino and Pace’s twin, vocalist-guitarist Amedeo, rarely cover concrete details or the banalities of everyday life.

Blonde Redhead, whose name comes from a song by DNA, is a constantly transforming, flexible unit, even without the auto trouble. The band is still reworking the live versions of songs from 23.

“We actually finished the record and we started touring pretty much right away,” Pace said. “We didn’t have as much time as we wanted to prepare the music for the tour. When we are on tour, we kind of work on it regularly, and try [to] improve it.

“Amedeo just got a new keyboard that we’re going to be using, and we’re going to experiment with that on this new tour and see if we can get a simpler setup. Right now, it’s a little complicated.”

Putting the Pieces Together

In addition, the band is touring without Skuli Sverrisson, the bassist on 23. Blonde Redhead recreates some of his bass lines on a keyboard in concert.

“We wanted to bring Skuli, we really did,” Pace said. “It was just a difficult decision because, you know, it changes a lot of... the way that we interact with each other. To have another person, you know? We weren’t sure whether it was going to affect the balance of things and how. And also, Skuli is quite busy with Laurie Anderson, and we were going to be able to bring him for a tour, and then the next tour he wasn’t going to be able to be there. And rather than getting used to having him and then not having him anymore, we just thought it would just be easier for us just to be on our own and see what we can up with.”

Sverrisson would add the bass to a song after the band had finished the rest of the recording, and he did it quickly.

“For this album, he recorded everything in two days,” Pace said. “It just came. He just came up with the bass line at the moment. There’s only a handful of people that can kind of pull that off, I think.”

Over the course of seven albums with the band, Pace said that his approach to playing drums has changed. He said that he has been developing a process since the album Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons where he samples his drumming and then plays over it.

“There’s two of me, usually, in some of the songs,” Pace said. “It’s hard to tell what’s what because the sounds are my sound. Like, I sample my bass drum, my tom, my snare and I play with myself, basically, even though that sounds weird. But that’s what I do. It enriches the sound, but I don’t think it sounds chaotic. It think it just sounds like a bigger version of me or something.”

Help with the New Record

23 is Blonde Redhead’s second album on the 4AD imprint. If you hear traces of My Bloody Valentine’s seminal shoegaze album, Loveless, they might be the work of Alan Moulder. Moulder produced Loveless and mixed parts of 23.

“He’s someone we really respect and someone that we really wanted to work with,” Pace said. “Both him and Rich Costey were choices. Alan mixed songs over in England, and we had no idea what he was doing. We gave him complete control. He had the full freedom to do whatever he wanted to, and then he would send us the version, and usually it was just perfect.”

Pace said that Moulder mixed three songs, and Costey, who has produced albums by Muse, Mew and Franz Ferdinand, did the other seven.

“That was also the same kind of thing where he really added a lot of the atmosphere that the record has, and he had a lot of big input in the way it sounds,” Pace said. “But we were pretty hands-on for those mixes. For mastering, we had a little bit of an issue because the three songs sounded very different from the seven other songs, and we had to match, and to master it three times in order to get it to sound kind of like one record.”

Touring

Blonde Redhead will perform at the 40 Watt September 17 with School of Seven Bells. It will not be Blonde Redhead’s first performance at the venue.

“I really like the vibe there,” Pace said. “It’s a nice place to go to. Actually, yeah, I’m not sure why we haven’t been in so long.”

After being in the band for more than a decade, Pace said that a certain aspect of touring has become easier. Now, the band tours with a bus rather than a van. Some other things remain a constant.

“You know, you have to manage to eat well, you have to manage to eat healthy,” Pace said. “If someone gets sick on the bus there’s a chance that everybody’s going to get sick, you know, so it’s a little tricky.

“But it’s also a relief at times because, you know, living in New York is quite stressful, and you just get wrapped up into things and you get totally, you know, worn out. And touring is almost like putting things on hold for a little while. There’s not much you can do from the road except sort of play shows and work on music. It’s just nice to be able to just, you know, be able to do that.”

Tickets for the band’s performance in Athens are currently available at Schoolkids Records.