Artist Interviews

Q&A: 65daysofstatic

By | Published on Tuesday 20 April 2010

65daysofstatic

Starting out back in 2001, 65daysofstatic are an instrumental electronic and post-rock band from Sheffield. They mix heavy, progressive, guitar-driven instrumental sections with both off-beat sampled drums and live drums; creating a distinctively gritty, industrial sound. The band released their debut album ‘The Fall of Math’ in 2004, and went on to release LP’s ‘One Time For All Time’ and ‘The Destruction Of Small Ideas’, all through Monotreme Records. They release their fourth long player ‘We Were Exploding Anyway’ on 26 Apr via Hassle Records, with the album streaming exclusively on MySpace for the rest of this week. We caught up with the band’s Joe Shrewsbury to ask the Same Six.

Q1 How did you start out making music?
We started out making music together out of a basic desire to create something for ourselves that we really really liked, and that maybe other people would like too. I met Paul in a bedsit in Sheffield entirely by coincidence. And I met Rob before that when we were fifteen at a gig, and Rob crowdsurfed onto my head. Si was introduced to us by some other very tall people. I don’t know how something like actually starting to make music happens, to be honest. It would probably be different for all of us. Maybe you get born and just love music and are able to make it yourself. Maybe you just realise one day that everything else you’re doing isn’t as good as music.

Q2 What inspired your latest album?
Uncertainty. Daft Punk. Noise Complaints. Gregory Crewdson. A lack of funds. 4/4 Time. The Master and Margarita. 17/8 Time. Super Hero Names. Moby Dick. Motown Top 100.

Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
If we could really answer that question comprehensively, we’d write more music. With this album, most of the initial ideas came from the electronics. We tried to make the tracks more like ‘songs’ even though there’s no singing, while retaining some of the better elements of good dance music, ie repetition and hooks. We were more interested this time round in harnessing what in the past has been barely controlled chaos – we wanted to direct the listener’s ear towards fewer but stronger melodies and rhythms. While this album is by no means minimal, we feel it doesn’t over play it’s hand in terms of the amount of stuff going on at any one time, which may have been the case in some of our previous music.

Honestly though, we go to a room in an ex-industrial part of Sheffield, fill it with instruments and drink a lot of tea. We do this for nine months. We write maybe sixty tracks. Nine of them are on the record. Maybe six more will be released in the future. The rest are in the great audio dump in the sky.

Q4 Which artists influence your work?
Last summer, a couple of months before we went in to make the new record, we all saw Radiohead headline Reading Festival. It was an incredible set. They didn’t play a crowd-pleasing show, they played an esoteric, ‘we’re Radiohead, deal with it’, slow-burning kind of show. And they got away with that because their back catalogue is so accomplished, and well-written, and they have evolved themselves as a band in increments, to be able to do whatever they want, and for that to be accepted by everybody.

To be as big as they are and to be doing what they are doing, head and shoulders above most other bands out there, is incredibly inspiring for us.

Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
Turn it up, yeah?

Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
Our ambitions are the same as they always were, really. And if we’ve lost some of the naivety we had when we were twenty, we simply pretend we haven’t and practice ‘enforced naivety’. Our current priority is to get on the road and play as many shows as possible.

Writing this record has taken a really long time, and it was good for us to re-evaluate how we make music and what music we want to make, but now it’s time to play it. This has always been something the four of us have really enjoyed doing, and maybe that’s why we’ve stuck together for so long. Sleeping in a car park in Antwerp or a stable in Belgium, being awake for 30 plus hours in Moscow, trying not to get in trouble in the bad part of Texas – these things are very different experiences depending on whether you actually want to be there or not. We tend to always want to be there, even if we haven’t been home for ages.

Obviously, we’re hoping this album will capture people’s imaginations and make them feel good, or at least have a really great 52 minutes listening to it. Everything else that happens will be a bonus.

MORE>> www.myspace.com/65propaganda



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