Lightning Bolt interview
What:
Earthly Delights
Who:
Lightning Bolt
On:
Load Records, distributed through Stomp
See them live:
With Slug Guts & Abject Leader. Sun Nov 22, The Hi-Fi, West End
Win:
Thanks to Stomp, we have a dbl pass and album to give away! To enter, email win@fourthousand.com.au with your name, mailing address and the subject 'More, more! Faster, faster!'
Lightning Bolt are a juggernaut. They are two men. Brian Chippendale and Brian Gibson. They play and they play and they play faster and they play faster and they play more and faster and more faster. Limbs, masks, and the floor, and the people crushing in, and Halloween. It's like it's Halloween. And then there's the noise, which is the music, and it hits you and you keep going and they keep going. Keep breathing.
Douglas Lance Gibson: Do you guys still record every practice session to 4-track?
Brian Chippendale: Yeah, we record everything. I do all the recording and I still do it onto the cassette 4-track that I have. Actually two of the songs on the latest album are from [recordings off] the 4-track.
DLG: You've done that in the past as well, included home recorded tracks alongside stuff recorded in the studio.
BC: Yeah, we haven't done that in a while. Our first album had some of that stuff, then I've done solo stuff where I've recorded that way, and then, finally, for the new Lightning Bolt we put a few on there. It's the same old story where the demos sounded better than when we recorded them again. The demos just had this sort of magic to them. I think that the 4-track sounded amazing, so I was pushing to get this stuff on there.
DLG: Would you consider recording a whole album to 4-track then?
BC: Well, actually, I plan, one of these days - maybe I'm waiting for the band to break up but I don't know when that's going to be [both laugh] - to go through as much of the stuff... we have so much stuff recorded and some of it is the best stuff we've ever done.
DLG: Is it hard to catalogue everything you record?
BC: Yeah, I mean, I'm lucky if for every 5 tapes I can burn one onto CD and take notes on it, then I'm doing okay. Generally when we're practicing we know, we're like, "That one was really good" so then I'll go back and put it on a CD and make tracks and take notes, and then that's how we do our song writing. There'll be a period when I get overwhelmed and I just don't get to a whole batch of tapes. There's some hidden gems in there.
DLG: Yeah, I can imagine. I've read before that you feel the need to both drum and draw everyday. Obviously when you're on tour, there's plenty of downtime to draw, but when you're away for an exhibition it must be a bit harder to organise time for you to drum?
BC: I've done art installations where I've gone away for a couple of weeks and work on that stuff and I get a little bugged out. I think I should just take up jogging or something, because really drumming, on a base level, is just exercise.
DLG: I used to drum for an hour a day and I used to tell myself that it was fitness, and yeah, in a way it was.
BC: It kind of is. I try to incorporate it into... like, I'll drum and then I'll do stretches and exercise afterwards. I try to let the drumming get me going to do some other stuff. It's become this whole little ritual for me. And then on tour, between all the drumming and the equipment lifting, I turn into a solid, brainless muscle.
DLG: You've been known to defy conventions as both an artist and a musician. Your comics are often laid out in a non-traditional format, and with Lightning Bolt, you often play your gigs on the floor and start immediately after the support band. Was it a conscious decision to flout those conventions or was it just a process of working intuitively and that was the result?
BC: It's pretty much just been working and deciding that that's what makes sense. I never made a conscious decision on any of those fronts. I mean, maybe playing on the floor was a conscious decision but again it was just because that seemed like it was more fun. Although, these days it's getting a little out of hand and we've played some shows on stage for some bigger stuff.
DLG: You played on stage at Primavera Sound earlier this year. Was that the first time you had done that?
BC: That was the first time, yeah. I mean, in a long time.
DLG: You've played with a giant convex mirror above you before as well, right?
BC: That was maybe 2 years ago on this US tour, I carried this huge mirror around. I'm still happy to do that but by the time I'd screw the mirror on and set it all up, it took forever.
DLG: And I guess people would have seen you setting that up too, it would take a bit of the spontaneity out of it.
BC: I know! Yeah, people are like, "They'll play anywhere. They're this cool, awesome band that just plays anywhere. They just set up and go. "And it's like, "Yeah, we'll set up and go but it takes 3 hours to put up and 3 hours to take down." [Both laugh]
DLG: In the past few months, there have been a number of venues, both warehouses paces and bars, that have been forced to shut their doors. You've personally been involved in warehouse space that has been shut down, Fort Thunder and I was wondering if you were able to find any positives that came about as a result of its destruction?
BC: That was a pretty special thing. It was like going to college or something. Leaving Fort Thunder was the end of a certain era. I'm glad I'm not there anymore. I'm glad that things have changed. I'm actually in a place that's not so different from there anyway. It's another freezing cold warehouse in Providence. After Fort Thunder closed, the one good thing that happened and I didn't realise it til afterwards was that all these smaller places opened up, because we were kind of a big room, so we were doing the bulk of the weird shows.
So then suddenly all these small underground places opened, so more people weremaking the decisions, so there was more stuff going on and it all had its own feeling and maybe none of them were perfect like I felt like our old place was perfect for me but in it's way it was good to let other people get involved.
Genre: Instrumental
Release: Interview
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