65daysofstatic - The Thousand Faces of Ecstasy
interview by
Matteo Meda
Interviewing 65daysofstatic is certainly no everyday occurrence. So when the offer for this brief chat came out of the blue – granted to only one other outlet besides ours – there was no hesitation in accepting right away. Perhaps the most mysterious and hermetic of the bands who in recent years have flown the flag high for so-called post-rock, the Sheffield quartet has, over the twelve years of their journey, followed a path in constant mutation: starting with the announced deconstruction of math-rock by way of Sheffield-made idm – not coincidentally the band's hometown – and arriving at a highly emotional blend on their latest gem, “Wild Light”. On the occasion of the Milan date scheduled as part of the promotional tour for the latter, John Shrewsbury and Paul Wolinski turned up in surprisingly good spirits: the two multi-instrumentalists and founding members, primarily on guitar and keyboards respectively, who are in effect the central pillars of the band. Fully ready to defend themselves against the attempt – at least partly successful – to make them drop the “mask” that has always characterized them.
Since the earliest years of your career, you've always kept a kind of secrecy around your history and granted very few interviews, almost as if wanting to surround yourselves with an air of mystery. Why is that?
Joe Shrewsbury: I think the real reason is actually pretty boring to tell… Making up a story right now would definitely be way more fun, don't you think? (laughs)
Paul Wolinski: Yeah, no doubt! (laughs) But you know what's even more boring? Rockstars. The ones who love shouting their business to the four winds! I think it's much more interesting and stimulating to get together, shut ourselves in the studio, write and play music, rather than giving time and energy to things that don't deserve it. I don't mean interviews in general, but interviews where we have to talk about ourselves. And on the whole we hope and believe our audience knows enough about our music to spend their time listening to it rather than wondering who we are, where we come from and where we're going!
“Wild Light” arrives to mark your twelfth year as a band. Can we read it as a litmus test of the musical directions you've explored up to now?
PW: Yes, partly, but I think there's also something new compared to the past.
JS: Funnily enough, I think the thing that was actually most similar to the past was the urge to reinvent ourselves! We tried to find that spark we had at the start of our career, that spirit, that enthusiasm that pushed us never to sound too similar even from one track to the next…
PW: …and obviously we didn't manage it (laughs), or rather, we did, but in a different way. Because we can't really expect to forget our past today, to wipe it clean, to go back to when we were young now that we've grown up. So yes, there's a bit of looking back, and there always will be, but I have to say that when we finished recording the album and set off on this tour, we were immediately really happy with what we'd managed to achieve. We recreated that enthusiasm and found an alchemy on a par with our very earliest days, even if it has different traits now.
JS: Yes, and I also think that, like any other band, we've always aimed to do things better with each record. The biggest novelty on “Wild Light” was finding a new, more “choral” and organic way of writing songs: I think trying to renew the language you work with together is the best recipe for evolving your own music too. A bit like when you keep playing the same piece on piano, you get bored of it, and even if you're not quite able to, you start trying to play something different, or when on guitar you start trying to write beyond that sequence you already know how to play in your sleep.
In my opinion it's also your most emotional and spontaneous album. You could almost call it “wild,” going back to the title…
JS: No doubt about it. We worked on it for a really long time and I think you can feel that — it's definitely not an album we threw together quickly, so there's genuinely a huge part of us in it, and the emotional side has never been as decisive as it is on this record. That said, we've always been better at using music rather than words to say something about ourselves, from personal matters to opinions. We'd rather play than talk or write, and we'd definitely be clearer and better at it if, instead of talking to you, we were playing you something right here, right now. Over the years we've certainly built up an audience we feel we have to satisfy, that we mustn't let down, without at the same time changing who we are for anyone or anything: what matters most to us is that the people who follow us keep coming to shows and having a good time.
Ultimately, what connects the album and the songs to their respective titles?
JS: I don't think there are any concrete meanings — they wouldn't have made much sense. If anything, it's more something tied to situations, like when you walk into a room, start playing, and time suddenly seems to speed up, out of nowhere… It goes back to what I was saying about wanting to recover the spontaneity and enthusiasm we had many years ago: once we'd achieved that goal, at least in part, it was like a light broke through the clouds and kept carving out more space for itself. And it's a wild light, almost blinding, like when you're eighteen and can have fun with pretty much everything, except at thirty things are totally different: you realize that, compared to the past, you've eased off a bit and you can't put things back exactly the way they were. But if you try to enjoy this phase instead of worrying about it, then that light can come back and show up in everything, from going for a walk to doing the grocery shopping, and of course through playing and getting on and off stages.
On every record you've always tried to explore a new world and fold it into your music. On “Wild Light” I thought I heard quite a few sounds close to certain contemporary electronic music — it makes me think of Vladislav Delay, especially “Prisms”… What world were you trying to explore this time?
JS: Vladislav Delay? Wow, what a brilliant name, but who is that? (laughs) Anyway, it's a bit of a complex question… What I can tell you for sure is that a new world is the one in which the album was born — just think how much things have changed compared to the days of “The Fall Of Math”, which we recorded in the afternoons we had free from work… Now it's all different. We're certainly not trying to go and explore styles and sounds for their label, especially not on a record like this one, which came together in the most spontaneous way possible, and in that sense it's really similar to our earliest work: we probably made it without even knowing ourselves where we were actually heading, exactly like back then, when we just did what we felt like doing. A bit like a journey with no destination that you know will still end up where it's supposed to, like a film where each scene is fixed but the whole thing only takes shape once they're all put together. Something similar happened with “Wild Light”: some songs came before others, but the tracklist follows exactly the order of the journey, with all its stops along the way — so much so that listening to the album on shuffle on an iPod, I think, would strip away a huge part of its charm.
Has your sound evolved following the development of your personal tastes too?
PW: Honestly, I think the two things have drifted further and further apart over time. “We Were Exploding Anyway” is a very electronic record, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the music we were listening to at the time, for example. If anything, it's more the production and recording techniques that have evolved, following what we were hearing and seeing…
JS: …definitely, compared to the days of "The Fall Of Math"! But the role of taste within the music has also changed, because back then the fusion of electronics, guitar sounds and a rock framework was something sought after, calculated, whereas today it's all much more natural, so much so that it's become difficult even for listeners to pick out the individual instruments within the flow, especially on "Wild Light". In short, I think it's really no longer possible to compare the way we make music with the way we listen to music - if there was ever a connection between the two, there isn't one anymore.
Beyond production, has anything changed in the way you use your instruments, or in the instrumentation itself?
PW: Definitely in the early days the electronic component was much more pronounced, meaning digital instrumentation, which over the years we've increasingly tried to strip away. Today we use very little software and electronic backing tracks, especially live - we've tried to keep moving in a direction that makes our music feel more alive, more direct, as little cold and artificial as possible. On "The Fall Of Math" I never played piano, I dealt almost exclusively with digitally generated rhythms, while on "Wild Light" it's exactly the opposite!
JS: I think you always need to find a way to improve - you can't really make six albums without evolving your music for the better, it wouldn't make sense. You always have to look for new paths, new means of expression, however slow and gradual that process might be if it's done with the necessary care and without disowning what you've built up in the past.
Before "Wild Light" you also ventured into the world of soundtracks, working on "Silent Running". What's the relationship between your music and images?
JS: In that case it was particularly interesting because the images already existed and we had to "follow" them, which had never happened to us before. Generally speaking there's definitely a strong connection, but an equally subjective one: each of us builds our own images, as is only natural, and I think that holds true for listeners too. Ultimately, it was definitely a completely different and stimulating experience, a bit of a new way of putting ourselves on the line.
Your music is often filed under the post-rock label, alongside names like Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky. What do you think of these comparisons, and do you think this supposed post-rock actually exists?
JS: I don't know who came up with the term post-rock, but it's rarely musicians who end up categorizing music. When we started out we were definitely very fascinated by the music of bands like Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but we never wanted to do exactly what they were doing, and in fact I think I can say we never did! In recent years, moreover, this definition has become rather strange, because it lumps together bands like Mogwai, who have made and continue to make great music, alongside plenty of other totally derivative bands doing extremely boring, repetitive stuff. As for us, we've never really cared about fitting under this or that definition - we've always simply wanted to keep moving in the direction we felt was ours at any given moment, or period. And however flattering certain comparisons might be, I think that anyone who sets out to label the music they listen to generally ends up missing a lot of the nuances it contains.
In a few hours you'll be playing live here in Milan, and you've said more than once that this is your favorite part of being musicians. Do you think the live dimension is the best means of expression for your music?
JS: It's definitely one of the most stimulating ways of connecting with our sounds, and for us it's like a kind of reward for having written the music we then perform, like going downhill after the climb, a pleasure after the effort. After spending months shut away in the studio working together day and night to write, arrange, record and mix an album, going out on tour and traveling the world playing is a fantastic crowning moment. That said, we're also fairly demanding with audiences: it's as if they were our lifeblood when we play, although it's definitely a two-way relationship. But if we see that people aren't getting into it, our own enthusiasm suffers too, even though it's highly likely that it's entirely our own fault! (laughs)
The last and hardest question is a brief assessment of these twelve years: what's your favorite 65daysofstatic album?
PW: Personally I'd say this latest one. As you said at the start, it really is the purest, the most direct, the most spontaneous. I'd also say the most mature.
JS: Definitely the next one we make!
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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Matteo Meda, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
65daysofstatic on OndaRock
Discography
| Stumble.Stop.Repeat (EP, ltd, Dustpunk, 2003) | ||
| The Fall Of Math (Monotreme, 2004) |  |
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| Hole (EP, Monotreme, 2005) | ||
| One Time For All Time (Monotreme, 2005) | |
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| The Destruction Of Small Ideas (Monotreme, 2007) | ||
| Escape From New York (live, Monotreme, 2009) | ||
| We Were Exploding Anyway (Hassle, 2010) | ||
| Heavy Sky (EP, Hassle, 2010) | ||
| Silent Running (OST, Dustpunk, 2011) | ||
| Wild Light (Superball, 2013) | |
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| No Man's Sky: Music for an Infinite Universe (Laced Records, 20176) | ||
| replicr, 2019 (Superball, 2019) | ||
| Rarities and Remixes | ||
| Unreleased/Unreleasable, Volume 1: 65's.late.nite.double-a-side.college.cut-up.trailers.for.the.looped.future (compilation, ltd, Dustpunk, 2003) | ||
| Unreleased/Unreleasable, Volume 2: 'How I Fucked Off All My Friends' (remix, ltd, Dustpunk, 2005) | ||
| B-Sides & Rarities, Volume 1: '...Then We Take Japan' (compilation/remix, Zankyo, 2006) | ||
| Unreleased/Unreleasable, Volume 3: The Kids Have Eyes (DVD/compilation, ltd, Dustpunk, 2005) | ||
| Unreleased/Unreleasable, Volume 4: A Year of Wreckage (5 EPs, mailed out, 2019) |
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