Interview: These Are Powers

“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.