Interview: These Are Powers

by planbmag on Mon, 2009/03/23 - 4:28pm Post to Twitter

“I used to joke that ‘ghost’ was the new ‘wolf’, when it seemed like every other MySpace friend request we had was from an occult-inspired band,” says These Are Powers’ guitarist and vocalist, Anna Barie. “But ultimately I think even a fashionable interest in these things has the potential to develop into something more enlightening. A good example is Arthur magazine because it creates a dialogue about mysticism for a countercultural community.”

Everyone wants to be out on their own, and it’s a rare band that will respond well to questions about the aesthetic currents among their contemporaries – in this case, occultist vocabulary and subject matter. Brooklyn-based trio These Are Powers – tagged early on as ‘ghost-punk’; currently confounding that description – are certainly a rare band.

“It’s something that I think about often,” Anna asserts. “There are a good number of bands in Brooklyn that fit this description, but it’s not limited to New York. People are looking for answers to some difficult questions about what is happening to us in this world right now. It seems reasonable that music is reflecting this redirected interest from natural themes to the supernatural.”

Yet These Are Powers do not, for me, sound like anything as linear as redirection. Rather, the urgent rhythms and prismatic melodies of Barie, former Liar Pat Noecker (bass and vocals) and percussionist Bill Solas are the sound of perceptual cross-currents, multiple dialogues and intersections – sonic imprints of those places in which nature and supernature meet, where graffiti and broken-tooth skylines form sigils and portents and where mandrake roots sprout from storm drains. There’s a recognition of magic’s underlying tenets of completeness and connectivity that underpins 2007’s sprawling, primitivist debut, Terrific Seasons and its more frenetic and focused follow-up Taro Tarot, combined with an insurrectionary, real-world rawness that recalls British post-punk pioneers This Heat and 23 Skidoo as well as marching bands, voudun chants, Einstürzende Neubauten and NYC ethno-punk contemporaries such as Gang Gang Dance. On forthcoming album All Aboard Future, the band’s noisy edges are often blurred into a more hazy, lambent atmosphere, yet their melodic centre of gravity remains bright and fluid, a constantly flickering, surprising palette of colour, tone and texture.

It’s perhaps not surprising These Are Powers’ music evokes colouristic responses – Pat tells me he draws inspiration from visual art theory and practice, citing both Derek Jarman’s film Blue and Kandinsky’s book On The Spiritual In Art, “where he likens the process of painting to creating music. He believed that music informs and inspires the creation of abstract art. When we create songs, it’s really fun to reverse the Kandinsky process and approach the song as if your pedals and instrument are brush and canvas. This leads me to what I have been thinking about lately – that music and sound are invisible and how music and art is an attempt to make the invisible visible. And in
its essence, a Kandinsky painting makes visible that which cannot be seen. It’s an approach that helps resolve our curiosity about who and what we are – where we are.”

All Aboard Future also sees These Are Powers’ hypnotic rhythmic signatures twisted and expanded into mutant yet danceable realisations of schaffel, reggaeton, drum’n’bass, and on ‘Adam’s Turtle’, a minimal, infectious take on grime. It’s a step ahead that doesn’t feel forced or novel.

“I’ve been producing beats since the age of 15,” Bill explains. “Hip-hop was my first love. When any sound is utilised, its new context opens up unique associations that are a joy to play with. This new record leans much heavier on electronics than our previous recordings because we simply decided that it would. I was finally able to strike a balance between the organic and inorganic, my real drums and my sampled ones. I’m still refining it but this is a document of my current progress.

“I love grime and I’m glad you picked up on that – grime is such a peculiar hybrid of so many styles. When I worked on ‘Adam’s Turtle’ I used the space found in a typical Southern snap track as a reference point. The Southern US rap scene has some of the most interesting and exciting production happening right now; those beats achieve such a strong groove with so little. Miles Davis said it best, ‘Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there’. That quote was a source of inspiration when I started working on many of these new tracks.”

As magic is concerned with the spaces between the spaces, so too is the most effective music concerned with the presence of absence and the processes of transformation. These Are Powers’ realisation of this makes not only for a band who live up to their name, but also – more importantly – for some potentially fierce parties in the liminal zone.

www.myspace.com/thesearepowers

Originally published in Plan B #34: back issues available here.