Featured Artist Interview: EXITMUSIC

By Travis Woods

Forged by husband-and-wife team Devon Church and Aleksa Palladino, EXITMUSIC sounds like nothing else in L.A, a dark and noirish collusion of layered guitar bliss and ominous, alluring electronica. Or, as we put it after catching their show at Let’s Independent! this month:

“…Aleksa Palladino’s vocals slithered throughout a clanging, rhythmic noir of cinemascope atmosphere and postpunk’d guitar, the sound of dreamy pop shaded beneath the shadow of a rain-slapped midnight cityscape. A breathy and sensuous undertow of seductive vocal coos and sample-flit dirge-rock enveloped by a fog of woozy guitar ambience, EXITMUSIC crafted some of the night’s most stunning twilight swoons of mood and songcraft, never sacrificing one for the other, but holding the audience in a swayed thrall with both.”

Having already released one stunning album (2007’s The Decline of the West), EXITMUSIC are preparing to record a second, as they allow their new songs to flower in a string of live dates. Web in Front spoke with Palladino and Church recently about their band’s unusual sound, how to record an album at home, and how reading Nietzsche can lead to lifelong romance.

Interview


Web in Front: Before we get to the nuts and bolts (”how did you meet? Who influences you?, etc”), can we talk about the development of EXITMUSIC’s sound? There really doesn’t seem to be another band around doing what you do—it sounds like a Weimar Republic-era act playing shoegaze in some rain-slapped nightclub…if that makes any sense. Where did that come from, and how did it develop?

Aleksa Palladino: I think there are several answers to this question. On one hand we were just working with what we had which wasn’t very much. It was our first step into writing on a computer with Cubase and all the sounds in it were very straightforward…so, instinctually we started to add effects and give them a personality and a point of view…to make them sound like something we were feeling. So in a way it was an incredibly clean slate…I think it worked out much better than if we had had a room full of strange instruments that already had something they were saying.

Then, on the other hand, I think it sounds a lot like where we were in our lives at that point. On the edge of childhood and with a pervading sense of loss and vulnerability. And a need to release it. It was like being called into a time of change…

Umm, I don’t know how to sum up the sound other than it was all happening and we used our ears and our instinct and each other to guide and be guided by it. We were listening and writing. and it was capturing us. There is an innocence and a genuine vulnerability on that album that maybe only I can hear but is was so deeply rooted and it chills me that I will never be there again. It was personally a beautiful farewell kiss to my childhood. And my past. And everything else I thought I was.

Devon Church: I think there was also this psychic, spiritual zeitgeist going on in the years that we recorded The Decline, 2004-2007. They had that sort of Weimar republic, pre-apocalypse, pre-fascism vibe. The spacier elements of our music I think reflected a desire for an alternative to that reality, something cosmic and transcendent—in a sense it is the antithesis of shoegaze, which just sort of puddles in narcotic sound, and is not really what we’re about.

WiF: Even more impressive, perhaps, than the band’s sound is that neither of you had any recording experience before you recorded the album at home; despite that fact, the album boasts such a depth of sound and atmosphere…as far as learning experience go, it sounds like a successful one. How long did that take?

Devon: Three years… It was more like archeology than actually learning a skill. I feel like I learned very little about how to record an album, except that you just have to jump in and trust that you’ll find what you need. Like we couldn’t go back and recreate any of those songs from scratch. It was like they were already written and we were excavating them, and we had these weird tools we didn’t know anything about to try and find them with. Neither of us had ever even owned a computer before we started recording on one.

Aleksa: It was just so in the moment, it was just the two of us going through it all. It came out of a place so much deeper than where our minds could take us—we couldn’t have planned it. I think what we have learned is how to create a space where something can happen. more than a skill…a way to enter the moment and connect and let go.

Listen to “The Decline of the West”

WiF: There’s a meticulousness and a precision to your music—how difficult is it to move the songs from their recorded incarnations and into a live setting?

Devon: Hard. It took us a year of playing out before we started to get the fullness of sound that we were looking for. Oddly enough, that required scaling down to a three-piece from the five piece band that we started out with. And our new drummer, Dave McFarland, has really elevated our set. He’s really amazing.

WiF: As I said, your music is a bit atypical to most of the other bands playing around town…what’s a typical audience reaction to your music?

Aleksa: I think people are connecting to something. I mean, I really hope so.

Devon: We usually get a warm reception, and there’s always a couple people who come up to us and really seem excited about it.

WiF: Ok, brace yourself—how did you to meet, and how did EXITMUSIC come together?

Devon: We met when we were both 18, right after high school. I was shoveling snow for money in Winnipeg, when some Australian tourists offered me a train pass they didn’t need. The next day I got on the train to go visit a friend in Montreal, and I brought this huge stack of books with me, and this is going to sound preposterous, or pretentious or something, but I was literally reading Thus Spake Zarathustra and there’s this part where Zarathustra keeps repeating (I’m paraphrasing here) : ‘I’ve never met the woman I could have children with, unless it were you, my wild wisdom.’ And then I looked up, there was Aleksa, stretching her back like a cat in these tight velvet pants. I guess I just stared at her because she told her friend that some weird guy had given her a really mean look. I followed her into the smoking car (the good old days, like the Weimar republic), and she and her friend were like holding court for all these freaky middle-aged stoners.

One guy was a white witch, on his way to Toronto to do battle with a black witch, something like that. It was a weird circus scene—a lady crawled out of her duffle bag after the ticket taker passed. Aleksa was playing Bob Dylan through cheap little speakers, and looking after two little native kids who were running amok on the train. Anyway, I asked her for a cigarette and we wound up talking all night, and there was a meteor shower, and we spent a few days together on the train and in Toronto, where they took away my train pass because I was an impostor. I almost followed her home to New York, but I had no money, so I went home. The next few years kind of sucked for me, and I wandered around in Mexico and Asia, until we got back together almost four years later.

Aleksa: Devon had written to me after we met… beautiful things. And I never wrote back… I still don’t know why. But I’ve also stopped questioning it cause eventually I did write back. Almost three years later I pulled out a pen and paper and wrote everything I had felt then but was too young to understand. I think it was one of my bravest moments, sending it off with a kiss. Then he called me from a pay phone in Taiwan and for the next year we spoke occasionally and wrote to one
another. It was all still there. There was such a sense of recognition.

He came to new York and within days he moved in. That was six years ago, yesterday.

Devon: Its kind of interesting to me—the way we came up with the name Exitmusic – We were watching the movie 2001 and at the end there’s a title card that says EXIT MUSIC. And the song is “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” which kind of brings it all full circle.

WiF: There’s a very insular quality to your music—how much of that would attribute to creating music within your own home, in your own world?

Aleksa: Oh yes! I think so very much. Since we were doing it together it became our life. So it was our world. It is a very significant part of how we experience ourselves and each other.

Listen to “The Father’s Estate”

WiF: What’s the songwriting like? Does one person handle lyrics, the other music, or is it a mix of both?

Aleksa: We wrote most of that album completely together. Words, music, everything. For us that was the point of doing it at all.

Devon: It was a mingling of energies, like alchemy, where the whole point is a union of masculine and feminine, darkness and light. The problem with a lot of music is that it’s usually all dark or all light, goth or pop. Which just doesn’t seem true to reality.

WiF: I won’t ask what bands influence your sound (that one gets old), but I am curious: who inspires you, musically? And in general?

Aleksa: Those who raised me, Sabrina, Angela and Tony.

And musically speaking (we won’t bother mentioning books and movies and painters right now):

Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Leonard Cohen, The Band, The Velvet Underground, Tom Waits, The Beach Boys, Ella Fitzgerald, Louie Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Sinatra, Roberto Murolo, Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Radiohead, Spiritualized, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Sigur Ros, Mogwai, Sonic Youth, Elvis Costello, Nino Rota, Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, Hip Hop from the ‘90s, Bob Marley, Beethoven, Chopin, Puccini, Verdi, Clouddead, Elliott smith, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Sebadoh’s Freed Weed album, Indian and middle-eastern music, etc, etc.

But sometimes deeper influenced by silence. And the well of human experience.

WiF: Who are you listening to at the moment?

Devon: Nothing new. Just whatever happens to be on.

WiF: I’ve spoken with bands who have said they can’t listen to music while writing, especially by their favorite artists, because they begin to write songs that sound like those artists… do either of you have to protect yourselves from that kind of osmosis?

Aleksa: No, I think we can listen to whatever we feel like. To be honest, the music that really makes me want to write is so different sonically then what we make that it’s not a problem…and even if it does influence you, so what?…I am more than happy to be moved. Also, I think if you are working from the inside out then you don’t really run into that problem, anyway.

WiF: Coming back around to the LP—how did that album come about? Was it simply a ‘the time is right’ affair?

Devon: Basically. I sort of wish we had started playing out before we put out the album, just so it could have got a proper release party and some reviews and all that. But we were sort of set on having this amazing album to show up on the scene with. And, it really did seem like a huge task to begin to put the songs into a live setting, since the focus had been 100% on writing and recording. We didn’t even remember how to play most of our parts… But anyway, we recorded as we wrote, over those three years, so when it seemed like we enough songs for an album, that was it. And we spent a lot of time on the art and everything too. The artist is Tony Palladino who is Aleksa’s grandpa and a really accomplished graphic designer and painter (he is famous for designing the torn letters from Psycho). The photographs were taken by Lauren Dukoff.

WiF: As I said, that record is just classic.

Both: Thank you so much.

WiF: You’ve got a long string of live shows ahead—do you plan on working through new material during the sets?

Aleksa: Yes, we have been working out some new songs. “The Distance,” “Sparks of Light” and “WavesWavesWaves.” And we have a bunch of new ones coming soon.

WiF: Are the newer songs following a new direction, or are they an expansion of The Decline of the West’s sound?

Aleksa: Well both, I guess… They are definitely a new breath…

Devon: They are definitely more direct and intimate. Aleksa’s vocals are going to be way more up front, and her singing is really evolving. And the guitars too are going to be less buried in layers and allowed to breathe more.

Aleksa: I guess the landscape has changed a bit… more space… and boldness and trust.

WiF: Do you have any plans to record in the near future?

Devon: Yes. We have been talking to Chris Coady (the engineer/mixer of Grizzly Bear, Blond Redhead, TV on the Radio, YYY’s, Entrance, etc…) about coming to New York to work together this fall. And we are always recording at home.

WiF: What are you plans for the future in general, in terms of EXITMUSIC?

Aleksa: No actual plans… but things keep happening.

Rare Tracks

EXITMUSIC was kind enough to allow Web in Front to host two new tracks, both of which are still works-in-progress–the stunning live showstopper, “Sparks,” and the darkly beautiful “WavesWavesWaves.” Enjoy.

July 28, 2008 | Filed Under Exclusive Features, Featured Artist Interviews 

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