kasra on the sounds of nicks and grazes 🎸🛠🎸 “We set to work on exploring the textural potential of the guitar - throwing it into ostrich tuning, hammering the strings with drumsticks and metal objects etc. It was actually Charles Bullen (this heat) who suggested we try coiling rubber-coated gardening wire around the strings. You get a harsh clanging sound, full of dissonant harmonics and overtones, and that wired guitar approach ended up on a bunch of the record (Feathers, Eager Copy, and Mirror Mirror). I was less interested in the typical musical qualities (i.e ability to play chords or notes even) than the percussive, textural and gestural potential of the instrument. Every time you play a prepared guitar it sounds different - even a slight shift in where the wire is wound or where the drum stick is lodged will produce dramatically different overtones, frequencies, and timbral qualities. The prepared guitar and the Ableton instrument-rack came to represent opposite ends of some kind of binary: one is unpredictable, unrepeatable, the other entirely predictable, infinitely loop-able; one is physical (metal wound on metal, guitar strings choked by wire. All friction, tension, physics) and embodied, the other 1s and 0s, completely disembodied. This dichotomy also maps broadly onto wanting to balance the free feeling of our live shows with the traditionally gridded palette of electronic music. It was @mdreammm who really encouraged us to make the record fully live (there are overdubs but most of what you’re hearing sans vocals was tracked live). And I think in hindsight, it was this decision that really led to some kind of reconciliation of our creative tendencies. Performed, liable to the errors and limitations of our bodies, the electronic elements attained a physicality that they previously lacked. Slowly, through endless drafts and edits, the material started to coalesce/ cohere into something that felt real and authentic.”