February 4, 2023
KARAOKE “OPPOSITE OF TIME” INTERVIEW
With the help of John Manfredi of Media Team and Vinisha Rumph, I directed this video with Karaoke in June 2022. This project introduced me to a quality standard I began to move forward with. In this interview, we talk about the above-mentioned video we made for their new single. We get into their upcoming full release without hinting to too much of an overall plan. We touch on their song process in general and whether or not meanings behind art should be shared or kept vague.
I think the inspiration for the concept of objectifying men is the first topic.
Grace: I wanted to do something objectifying men for a long time. I had written other things about it. I just didn't know what format or what medium for it to be in. I had written this long form poem called The Palace of Hairy Chests and it was all about basically a genderbent brothel but then the whole thing gets turned on its head. The women who are there don't really feel like getting even. It explored a lot of those kinds of nuances and emotions. I had just a vague idea of wanting to objectify men.
Adrian: I came up with a separate concept for a photo shoot. I bought these tiny little shorts for me and Tymb and we were all going to surround Grace. I really wanted Grace to look like a mixture of Bryan Ferry and Big Daddy Kane. My initial idea - I wanted her to be this very masculine-chic character in this photo shoot. Me and Grace started talking more about it and decided to just turn it into a video and have Casey direct it.
Tymb: The concept was basically what Grace and Adrian just said. I just showed up in my underwear. I kind of flexed on everybody with a really kick-ass pornstar robe.
Grace: We keep making you take your clothes off in music videos, Tymb.
Adrian: And this is the third video I’ve been slapped in.
Grace: I think generally we had talked about the idea of using old Calvin Klein ads for inspiration. That was the next step and I think it's really funny that we used Fruit of the Loom underwear. This could legitimately be Fruit of the Loom’s next advertising campaign. This Fruit of the Loom isn't for conventionally buff people. It’s for artists.
Adrian: It encompasses all bodies.
Grace: Well, I do hope to start a trend with the whitey tighties crop top. I think Julia Fox will probably start wearing them.
We could talk more about the video then go into the new album.
Grace: The other thing we wanted to do with the video was have it be in black and white and have all our videos be in black and white because the album is called A Safe… I can never remember how to say it.
Adrian: A Safe Place For Negative Space
Grace: That's a doozy. We're obviously playing with the literal concept of negative space and void, Yin and Yang, blah blah blah. There's also a short story that I wrote that goes along with the album and the idea behind that is that the safe place for negative space is kind of a holistic retreat center, like a meditation type center. Instead of it being a really earthy place where you go to meditate, fast, eat vegetables and feel really holy and spiritual, it's where you go to be really bad. You get all the negative stuff out of your system. You can be on the phone all the time. There's special zones for crying, breaking things and yelling…
Tymb: Should we discuss Opposite of Time, not just the video, but the song? Before we could remember the song titles as we were recording everything, we just referred to this one as a dumb punk song or something, right? We were just like, let's just keep it as a simple fucking distorted punk song but obviously with caveats.
Grace: The demo sounded completely different. It sounded like a sad folk song. I don’t remember whose idea it was (to change that).
Adrian: Me and Zach Pyles started working in the studio and he was playing. He wrote a bass part for it and then he ramped it up and I just started playing that big dumb punk beat over it but you were shaking your head. I was just egging Zach on, like, no let's keep doing that. It started off as a joke then, wait, no, let's keep it big and dumb like this.
Grace: It really worked in a cool way because I feel like the lyrics are kind of bratty and sad but when you make it punk, it’s more palatable.
Is the album’s sound more like open space or are you referring to the lyrics?
Grace: More the sound, right?
Tymb: Yeah, we have a lot of fuzzed out super distorted guitar and really just simple chords back and forth. Everything went with Adrian's drumbeat too and was really like meat and potatoes. The bare bones before we started really fucking with it was just straight up simple punk songs sonically. I liked that we chose to just run with that.
Adrian: Yeah, I feel like we have a penchant for fucking around and joking around with our songs during practices. In practice the other day when we were doing How To Make You Boil, we made it into a jazz song. But this song, we actually latched onto it and wanted to make this joke.
These new songs sound like they have progressed or changed a little bit compared to older songs. It feels different, but in a good way.
Tymb: I think we kind of all agreed without even discussing it that with the departure of Chris Yonker that we should try to do something that we haven't been doing. We wrote the album without a dedicated bass player. There's bass on the record but we were trying to use substitutes for bass guitar on some songs because we don't have a bass player. We have a studio engineer who's a multi instrumentalist, Zach Pyles. We can't try to do the same thing, because we don't have the same utilities and by that, I mean people. I think we all were on the same page without even really discussing that.
Adrian: This album is reaching out to a few more different sounds than we've been accustomed to.
Tymb: I do think this is the first time that we've gone into the studio without having a rehearsed album. As is Karaoke tradition, Grace brings these skeletons and we add meat to it, essentially we take it and all of us will end up arranging it, adding our parts. This is the first time we didn't just stand around in our basement in a circle writing out the songs and then go into the studio and try to cut them all in a few days. We wrote the songs, we wrote our parts, we experimented until we liked something and we recorded it all in the studio, which I think lends a lot to how this record came out, which is not the traditional path we've taken in our previous projects. It was definitely a unique experience to have a recording engineer who was actually a part of a project. (In instances where) if there's something weirder we can do for a part, let's take a minute and figure out what that is. I wouldn't have busted out an Omnichord in a basement rehearsal.
Grace: There's so much on that song that we came up with in the studio, through very untraditional ways. There's a lot of weird sounds that come from weird bells, whistles, beams and pipes that Adrian was hitting with drumsticks. Adrian is addicted to trash. We built him a little trash dungeon.
Adrian: It was pipes hanging off the ceiling and metal scraps everywhere. Broken cymbals everywhere. I think it's the last track on the album. I just banged on all of that. I think I had some kind of vacuum. Maybe some kind of like power tool was in there too.
Grace: I think Opposite of Time is not really representative of what the whole album sounds like. I wouldn't go into listening to the album and expecting every song to be punk. There's pop songs, drone songs, sad piano songs. I think the sound of the album is very eclectic.
In the song, you’re basically questioning what you mean by the title so did you ever figure out what it meant? Should the listeners answer that themselves or should we define it?
Adrian: I think recently you figured out what the opposite of time was.
Grace: I wrote that during quarantine, was home from work every day and time felt way more amorphous and gelatinous. The first half of the song is about the differences between physical and emotional intimacy and not always getting them where you want them and from who you want them. Basically it’s about desire and where desire comes from. At the end of the song, it’s basically saying that it doesn’t matter because it comes and goes.
