Features

Chromatics - Artistic Identity In The Age Of Flippancy

By Suze Olbrich

Watching Chromatics on stage recently, it was hard to tell who the real maestro was. It would have been difficult to guess that, of the four people visible, Johnny Jewel, the silent smoke-shrouded figure to the right of stage playing all manner of synth, was really driving the entire Chromatics’ project. The show itself was incredible. For music that I love so fiercely (yes, this is coming from total fangirl perspective) to come to life so forcefully from its more hushed, intimate recorded form and yet lose none of its emotional power, nor any intricacies of its beauty, is a rare experience.

The prolific Johnny Jewel writes and records all Chromatics’ music. He also heads up the Italians Do It Better label, which releases Chromatics amongst other acts, two more of which—Glass Candy and Desire—involve Jewel himself. Within these projects lies his deliberately isolated domain, one that only occasionally encroaches into ours, then slowly dims the lights and infuses the sonic landscape with a woozy, aural images of by turn romantic and nefarious nocturnal encounters in distant, filmic cityscapes.

In person Johnny also bears a slight aura of isolation. Granted, he has sought and maintained a calculated distance from the music industry itself so as not to hamper his creative process, yet there is also an otherworldly edge to his personality that renders him an exceptionally intriguing human being. The music on Kill For Love, Chromatics’ latest LP, came to him fully-formed, as with all cognitive embryos of his work. Johnny then strove to conjure this ideal into reality with a continual recording process, gently edging towards it, and, as is naturally and probably a little painfully the case, never quite being able to reach it.

I caught up with Johnny just before he went onstage in London recently to discuss these creative processes, Chromatics, and the ways to keep one’s creative vision intact on the outskirts of the music industry.

Do you have the entire soundscape already composed in your head for each song or even the whole record before you begin writing, or do you start out experimenting with a single sound or melody? Do you always know where you ultimately want to get to with each?
Everything is an experiment. There is lots of improvisation. I know where I want to go with an entire album and I know where I want to go for each song, but that is very abstract. I might have a few of the elements in my head and I have to pull them out of the equipment, but usually, I see a color of the song. It’s really abstract, but it’s like when you have a dream, you can remember a dream, but it’s filed in your mind and not like you actually saw it. Music, for me, when I have an idea, it’s like I have this vision of the song, and then when I’m working on the song, I know if what I’m doing is contributing to that vision or taking away from that vision; I know if I’m getting closer to the goal, the pure essence of the idea or the shape or the color, or if I’m moving away from it.

I just constantly experiment and then construct, deconstruct, edit, remix, build it back up over and over and over until I feel like the most pure essence of the song is there, but it’s still really produced. I try not to think about it too much and just really trust my instinct. I have a hard time taking credit for things, because where do you get ideas, you know? I could take credit for spending loads of hours in the studio, you know, because it’s "discipline," but all good stuff seems like it comes from nowhere—seems like it really writes itself—and my job is just to get out of the way and let it do its thing and then to try to organize it.

Have you always been like that?
Yeah, because I’m not trained, I don’t really know how to record, don’t know how to write, can’t document any music other than recording, which is how I evolved into recording constantly. I started on a boombox in like ’89, and then I got another boombox and started playing tracks to myself, and then got a 4-track and did that for a few years, and then got an 8-track, and then a 16, and now 24. So it’s been a gradual extension of how I work and I never collaborate with other producers.

I’m not an engineer, so the music is really primitive sounding and that’s because it’s all been done by hand and it’s all from someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Well, I know what I want, but I don’t know what I am—I can’t explain why I do what I do.

If you listened now to the stuff you did on 4-track, would that essence of what you wanted the song to be remain unchanged in your mind? And years later, does what you create still come close to what you were trying to achieve with each song?
It always is the same. Actually, there’s a Chromatics song called "I Want Your Love;" the music for it was written when I was 14 and I was living at my mum’s house, and every time we play "I Want Your Love," I still remember being in Houston, it being summer and just getting back from the pool and working on that song and it always feels the same. Any time I hear a piece of music, I always want the same thing from it: I always want it to be organized in the same way, so it kind of dictates to me how it already should be.

So it’s very deeply fixed in the subconscious.
Yeah, there are scientists and philosophers trying to figure that out, I just react to it.

Do you find it really hard to stop striving to perfect this "color" of a track? If you’re going for an ideal, how do you stop yourself reaching for it?
Well, I never want to stop. I have to accept my limitations and think this is the best I can do now for this idea, and then a lot of what happens now is the live versions of the songs continue to progress beyond the album. Like tonight, we’re playing a song called "Back From The Grave," and I really struggled with a couple of the key elements when recording it, and then the version we play now is a marriage of the recorded version and a version that we played on tour in 2010. That, to me, is the perfect version that I wish was on the album, but we play it live at least. In general, with Kill For Love, I’m happier with that album than any record I’ve ever done besides Beatbox.

In art, as an observer, you never see the concept; you see the reality as a fan, but you never see the artist’s ideal realization. With Kill For Love, I feel like I’m almost there—really close to what it was meant to be. Usually, I can’t listen to a record after I finish it; it’s just like, "I want to do better now and I want to move on," but the records that I’m making now I’m liking more and more. I’m getting better at expressing ideas musically.

I can imagine it would be a very hard task to create videos for this record in one sense. I actually almost didn’t watch your videos, as the music has very strong imagery within, so once I was involved with the record, it felt like it would be really hard for anyone to illustrate the music without taking away from my experience of it.
It’s one of the reasons we didn’t do videos for so long and Glass Candy still hasn’t done videos because of that, but I see how effective videos are for turning people onto the music. I’m trying to use the visual as neither a counterpoint, nor the visual equivalent of the music, but an alternate mood that is oblique enough to just sort of give you something for your curiosity visually while you’re listening to the song, but one that has nothing to do with the meaning of the song. That’s why we really like Alberto Rossini’s videos, because everything is like a hazy fantasy and nothing ever happens, and they’re really lo-fi, so it’s like looking at a kaleidoscope or something.

Do you think you could have gotten to this point with Italians Do It Better and Chromatics if you were starting out now with all the pressure there is on younger artists to have all this stuff? There must be a few out there that aren’t experienced enough or confident enough to say “You know what? I don’t want a video.”
Yeah, I think so. And I think there are young kids starting out now who are hitting that same wall that are going to figure out a creative way to jump over it.

The difference for us in particular between starting now and starting then is so much of what has happened now is based on what we did then, so it’s been really hard to answer what we have already done. That was really challenging, but in terms of the industry, for most others it’s not that challenging as most people don’t really spend quite as much time protecting their art as we do. I feel like when you really, really focus and you’re doing music for the sake of music or doing art for the sake of art, the cream sort of rises to the top. We’re not racing anybody and we’re not competing and we have our niche; if people like it, they like it, and if they don’t like it, I’m not trying to convince them to like it.

Was not doing any PR before this release a part of that?
If you just throw everything out the window like we did with this whole campaign, I mean, I just had no campaign and I wanted it to be about the music and everyone else was like, "You’re insane," but I have a really fatalistic view of the business side of things, and if you make good enough music, you can get away with it. But it’s not a proper model to be imitated, because it’s kind of suicidal.

It really annoyed people, the way we did things. They’re used to having everything first or getting the inside line to something, and I just shut everybody out and was like, "You can have this at the same time as a 12-year-old with their allowance for the week, that’s it." And we were threatened with people not going to book us, and I was like, "Don’t book us, then." We’ve never put out a bad record, our back catalog alone is stronger than the band-of-the-week where everyone just waits for the single to be played at the show and goes crazy as it’s a really strong single, while the album is—at best—pale imitations of the really great single, but the mentality of bookers and publicists and everything is that everyone wants to be special, and they are special and they’re all God’s creatures, but I want this to be about what I do.

Everyone makes a big deal about the way this record was released, but it’s the exact same way every single record I’ve ever put out has been released. No press, no statement, no release date, it just comes out. The problem is so many more people are waiting now. I mean, I don’t care, it’s worked for us and it’s always worked for us. I just made the mistake of—when I talked to Pitchfork, they asked me when I thought the record was going to come out and I was like, "Oh, I’m hoping for Valentines’ Day as Kill for Love and Valentines Day," and Valentine’s Day came and went and everyone was like, "Where’s the album? It’s a hoax." So I have to be really careful, I’m learning now, as more people are paying attention.

I think people in the industry are more scared now, too. They aren’t willing to take as many risks, so a little bit of gossip like that will have more weight and fly around further, whereas before, they could afford to be a little more relaxed.
Yeah, and information spreads so fast these days. Before, you could experiment at shows without it going up on YouTube or without—like, if you wanted to have a Tupac hologram, you could do that before at each show and each city and surprise the audience each time; now, you do it once and the whole world knows about it and everyone’s waiting for it at the next show.

The same thing happens with film now: they put more and more in each trailer. I’ve started to avoid those and reviews with albums I am keenly anticipating too, as you can’t then be totally open to what you’re going to experience.
Yeah, I wanted to give that to people, as that’s my experience of getting records when I was growing up, and I wanted to protect everyone from the press, you know? Although, I wasn’t sure if the press was going to be positive or negative. It wasn’t because of this, but there’s a song—"Identity" by X-Ray Spex—and it’s like, “When you look in the mirror, do you smash it quick? Do you take the glass and slash your wrists? Did you do it in pain? Do you do it in a fit? Did you do it before you read about it?” And for me, that line always really stuck with me: just the idea of how influenced we are by identity and images in art.

Even if we want to have our own opinion and we’re very stubborn, just reading something or being exposed to an idea before you have a chance to interact with the art itself is—I don’t want to say it’s then tainted or anything like that, but it does affect you, and you either want to agree with it or you want to disagree with. Then, during the interaction with the art, you’re wondering why this person said that.

The original opinion is also necessarily reliant on precisely where the person who wrote its head is at that time and where your head’s at when you read it, so even a flippant comment from someone in a piece can be very much magnified in significance.
And this is the age of the flippant comment.

Debbie Harry used to get brutalized by the press, so when she would come over here to play shows, she would never read any of the reviews. It was a rule in the band that no one would read any reviews until they got home, as she said when they read the reviews, it would feel like they had to answer this on stage every night—whatever was said in each town, they had to react and say, "Well, that’s not actually true." I’m the same way. Some bands, when they play a festival, they have to see all the other bands and see what they do. For me, my job is to be me as much as I can be me, so the more isolated and ignorant I can be, the better. I love walking onto the stage not knowing what the hell’s happened all day and just playing what I play the way I to play it.

Chromatics on tour:

30 June Electric Forest Festival Michigan$

13 July First Avenue, Minneapolis, MN*

14 July Pitchfork Festival, Chicago, IL.

18 July House of Blues, Boston, MA*

19 July Rock & Roll Hotel, Washington DC

20 July Terminal 5, New York, NY*

21 July The Electric Factory, Philadelphia PA*

22 July DeKalb Market, Brooklyn, NY

26 July TBA, McAllen TX$

27 July Mohawk, Austin TX$

28 July Gorilla Vs Bear Festival, Dallas, TX$