Chris Martin plays guitar for, and is the driving force behind, Kinski. For those of you unfamiliar with the band, here’s a little snippet from the Sub Pop website:
“Kinski is a (mostly...) instrumental rock quartet from Seattle. By turns melodic, swelling, roaring, propulsive, and sparse, Kinski walks the margins of avant-rock (ref. High Rise, Sonic Youth, Bardo Pond, Mogwai, GYBE) with nods to Krautrock and a penchant for noisy psychedelia.” Which sounds about right.

I first heard Kinski at Bumbershoot a couple of years ago. I was fascinated by their seamless melding of ambient music and loud, gnarly rock & roll. I’ve been a fan ever since.

In an email to Joan Hiller at Sub Pop, I mentioned, in passing, that I’d dreamt I’d interviewed Chris. She replied that she’d be happy to set up just such an interview, and I jumped at the chance. So, many thanks go to Joan and to Chris for making this so simple, and industrial-strength thanks to Science Girl, whose technical assistance and mad transcription skilz go above and beyond the call of girlfriend duties.

bmarkey -I like this new album an awful lot.

Chris Martin - Oh, thank you.

It’s got a sort of playful side I haven’t heard from you guys before. Was that intentional?

Not really intentional, it just happened to be that batch of songs. And we’re taking ourselves less seriously overall anyway, I think.

I wanted to ask you about the re-recording of “Fell Asleep On Your Lawn” as “Passed Out On Your Lawn”. Is it meant to be a new song now? Why did you re-approach it?

Well, we had that split with Acid Mothers, and that was kind of the song of the moment that we were working on, and it wasn’t quite done when we recorded it. We did it in a little basement studio with a friend. We were happy with that version, but we wanted to do a regular, y’know, studio… just kinda rework the song. It was always intended to be on this record, that was just a trial EP kind of thing.

And the retitling is…

To separate them a little bit, but still basically have the same title.

Speaking of titles – how much should one read into song titles with you guys?

(laughs) We never have titles until the record’s due. Then Lucy and I spend a week frantically trying to think of something. We think of phrases and stuff and try to make it match the feel or mood of the song a little bit, but it’s pretty vague, I think.

I pictured you all sitting around the studio pulling names out of a hat.

Yeah, we have a big folder where there’s, y’know, matchbooks and stuff with title ideas on it.

What was it that made you first pick up the guitar?

Probably just… I’ve always loved listening to records, since I was a little kid. That was probably it.

I never did actually pick up the guitar for 15 years. I didn’t start playing until I was 21, I think, and so it was basically listening to records and finally I decided I wanted to try making my own record.

Do you recall what the first record that you bought on your own was?

On my own? Probably “Ballroom Blitz” by Sweet.

How did you come across experimental music?

I don’t know. It was probably the whole Krautrock revival in the early 90’s, as they reissued all those records. The Faust stuff, that really blew me away…

(Clarifying) Faust?

Yeah, Faust IV, especially.

I was going to ask you for a sort of “Krautrock For Dummies”, because I’m ashamed to admit I know next to nothing about it. What album would you start somebody off with?

Probably that one, Faust IV. And there’s some… the Can record, Ege Bamyasi, that’s really great, too. I’m not as deeply into that whole thing as I once was, but I still love all that stuff.

What do you listen to these days?

Lately, when we’re just hanging around the house with friends, I’ve been pulling out a bunch of older CDs that I haven’t listened to in a while… like, I listened to that first Faith Healers record the other day and it was amazing. So, I listen to that, and a lot of bubblegum stuff, and 60’s stuff, 70’s psyche, and… just kind of all over the place, really.

Cool. Do you listen to Spirit, at all?

I’ve heard a little bit. I don’t have any of those records, though. Is that good?

Oh yeah, definitely. You want to check out The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus.

Yeah, I’ve heard about that one.

That’s… oh, yeah, I’d definitely recommend that.

Oh cool.

I know improv plays a large part in what you do. When you go into the studio, do you come in with some riffs and everybody plays off what you have?

No, we… well, that’s true. Yeah, I bring in… kind of the structures, but it’s normally a year or so before we go into the studio, and we play the songs out live a bunch for the year before the record, so we kind of rework things and change things around. By the time we go into the studio, everything’s pretty structured, actually. I mean, we normally jam and kind of come up with something, but normally (they’re) pretty structured songs.

OK, and then when you’re playing those pieces that you’ve recorded, live, you’re improvising bits and pieces here and there throughout?

Oh yeah, there’s definitely sections where everybody can just kind of just go for it and see what happens.

Do you ever find yourself at a place with a particular piece where you think, “I’ve done just about everything I can do with this”?

Yeah… that’s more of the songs that are pretty structured, like the song “Semaphore” on our last record…

And maybe some of the shorter ones on the new one, eventually.

Yeah, probably the second track. (“The Wives of Artie Shaw”) There’s not a lot of room to change anything around, because they’re so structured and so tight and so… I get kind of tired of those after awhile.

But something like “Steve’s Basement” (from Airs Above Your Station)…

Yeah… for some reason we’ve stopped playing that live, I don’t know why.

Oh, that’s my favorite!

Oh yeah? (Laughter from both)

How much does your set list change from night to night?

This tour it’s gonna be quite a bit different. We did a short little tour a few months ago with Black Mountain and Oneida, and we were in the middle of (recording Alpine Static) and we only had six or seven songs to play and it drove us crazy to have to play the same stuff. So this time we’re going out with 20 songs, which for us is a lot because we can only play seven or eight a night, so it’ll change around quite a bit this time.

Are there cities where you think you go over better than others?

Yeah, the Northwest is always good, San Francisco’s always good, Denver’s always been really great. I’m not quite sure why, but it’s been really good. And Boston’s always been good.

Since this interview is going to appear online, I thought I’d ask you a couple of computer-related questions. What are your thoughts on file-sharing?

I haven’t really thought about it much. We still have a low-speed connection so I haven’t really got into that.

I’m not the only one! (laughs)

I don’t really have a strong opinion either way.

OK. There was a piece in the New York Times about a month or two ago, about how the writer believed that music software like GarageBand is going to take the place of actual bands playing in garages, for musicians to get a start. I wondered if you had any opinions on that?

No, I don’t think that’s true at all. I mean, people have been able to do stuff on laptops, it’s been at least ten years now… It seems like there’s more bands, rock bands or… just regular bands, than ever. I think there’ll always be people … mainly because people don’t want to go to a live show and just see somebody… I mean, they want to see a band with instruments. At least playing something, it doesn’t have to be instruments, but…

They don’t want to see somebody pecking at a laptop…

Yeah. I think everybody’s burnt out on that.

Yeah. Now, as far as your recordings… I know you use a lot of pedal effects and things like that. Do you sort of massage things with the computer at all, or is that just not on?

No. This record we recorded to tape and then synched it up to ProTools so that we could do guitar overdubs in a cheaper studio, and then we mixed off the tape. So we were using all of the basic tracks, and it was just guitar overdubs that were on the computer. And then when we mixed it we were mixing back off both at the same time, so I think there’s only one edit on the whole record, too, so that it’s pretty, uh… well, all the sounds and everything, nothing’s been really manipulated at all… as far as computer stuff. Definitely pedals and things.

Yeah, it’s amazing, the range of those sounds you’re able to get with just the pedals, and I think Lucy (Atkinson, bassist), uh, bows the bass a few times.

Yeah, she uses an E-bow a little bit…

OK. Let’s see here… uh… we talked about Acid Mothers Temple… now, that came about through your reading a bulletin board, your collaboration with them?

Yeah, through an email… well, no… it originally just started through an email group I’m on. Somebody asked if there was a band that wanted to go down the West Coast and tour with Mainliner, which he was in, Kawabata from Acid Mothers was in, and I was a big fan of theirs and wanted to do our first tour anyway, so it worked out really well. So we met them and hit it off and we toured with Acid Mothers a few times, we went over to Japan once, and… so that’s how that record happened.

Were you all in the studio at the same time, or were you sending tapes back and forth?

We were at a little house/studio of Hiroshi, the guitar player, he just had a little (E-DAT? I couldn’t quite make out what Chris was saying here – ed) and we just jammed. So those, the second and third tracks of that record are us just playing in his living room.

Especially with some of your more ambient pieces, I’ve often thought that it would work really well as a film score. Have you ever been approached for something like that?

Yeah, some guy was gonna use… we’ve had little things, but some guy was doing this new Sony movie, it had “Exorcism” in the title, but it’s not a horror film, but uh, he was gonna use some older songs and we were going to maybe score… and he put us in the rough cut and the studio thought it was way too loud and guitar-heavy (No-duh! – ed) so it got nixed. So we’ve been asked, but nothing’s ever worked out. But we would totally love to do that sometime.

Um, I’ve got one or two more questions and we’ll wrap up ‘cause I think I’m getting close to my (time)limit here… What do you want the audience to take away from listening to the record? Is there any one thing you want them to get from it?

(Long pause)

Oh, I think… I’m always hoping they’ll feel some sort of emotion, that they won’t just sort of sit there. I don’t know, I think our records sort of require a lot of attention, where you have to sit and listen to them, which I don’t even know if I like that, exactly, about them. I guess ‘cause it’s my stuff I’ve never put it on as background and let it lie there.

I don’t think it lends itself to that, actually.

Yeah.

It does sort of command your attention.

I love records that you can use either way… but that’s sad, I guess. I just hope people will feel some sort of emotion out of it, I guess. Whether it’s an energetic thing or, y’know, melancholy feeling or… probably those two emotions, more than anything.

I imagine you’ve done quite a few of these interviews today. Is there anything that nobody has asked you that you’ve desperately wanted to see in print?

(Chuckles, long pause) I keep forgetting to mention things like bubblegum and the Faith Healers and… Teenage Fanclub is one of my all-time faves. Everyone keeps asking about music and I keep saying these psyche bands, Krautrock, when I realize at home we’re listening to way more fun stuff than that.

I would imagine that would be sort of a busman’s holiday if you listed to psyche all thetime, ‘cause that’s kind of what you’re doing, a little bit.

Yeah.

I once described you as being “art garage”; does that sound even remotely accurate?

Yeah, that’s a good one. (Chuckles)

Well, I think that’s just about all the time I’ve got. Unless you want to keep going?

If you have anything else you want to ask… I think they’re just doing it until the next call and we have call waiting, so…

Uh, OK… How did the band get together in the first place?

Lucy, Matthew and I… I took some time off from playing in bands for a year or two, and just kinda… (Phone beeps) Oops, hold on a second…

Okay.

(Pause)

I guess that’s the next one.

Oh, OK.

Basically, Lucy and I had gone out for a long time, and we just met our first drummer, Dave, at a bar… and Matthew’s just an old friend, so it came together pretty naturally, actually.

OK. Well, thank you very much for your time. I’m gonna send a copy of this to Joan (at Sub Pop) when it goes up…

Great.

…and hopefully she’ll send it on to you.

Thanks a lot for doing it.