Dan Boeckner’s Secretive New Band Operators Is Reverse-Engineering Synth Pop

Dan Boeckner has been one of the biggest names in indie rock for nearly a decade as a member of Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, and Divine Fits, but his latest project, Operators, has been kept pretty much under wraps. The three piece group, filled out by Divine Fits drummer Sam Brown and Devojka, haven’t released any music, and they’ve carefully skirted most press. At first it seemed like clever viral marketing, but Operators is an earnest—make that really earnest—attempt to reverse-engineer the digital laptop production and internet-centricity of recent synth pop in order to craft something organic instead.

I didn’t know what to expect from Operators before they took the stage during Silent Shout’s Canadian Music Week showcase at the Silver Dollar Room in Toronto, but the other acts gave me some hints. Operators’ set was nestled in between synth-heavy bands like Nyssa, Sexy Merlin, Pat Jordache, and New Zebra Kid. One thing immediately set Operators apart from most of the other acts: the conspicuous absence of a silver Macbook. Instead, an array of analogue synths, sampling pads, and drum triggers occupied much of the stage.

The venue was packed wall-to-wall, indicating that the band’s reticent approach to rolling out their music has so far succeeded in creating a groundswell of hype. Operators started off with a salvo of percussive synth bloops and fiery drumming that got people nodding since dancing is pretty much taboo in Toronto. The performance wasn’t just energetic, it was frenetic. Brown’s drumming was mechanic in its unrelenting staccato fury and Devojka’s arms reached out in all directions to control the spiralling synth sequences and arpeggiators. Boeckner erupted into fits of dancing and delivered frantic vocal ear worms.

Operators’ music is all hooks—it’s dance pop. It’s direct, it’s immediately accessible, and it’s radio-friendly. It’s going to be in Urban Outfitters nationwide in a couple months, and I don’t even mean that in a snarky, backhanded way for once. It just has the potential to be huge. The following afternoon, I caught up with Boeckner at the downtown townhouse the band had found through Airbnb for the weekend to talk about Operators and the importance of doing things backwards.

Noisey: My main impression of Operators’ sound is how direct and immediate it is. It’s really hook-heavy. Of course your past projects have been pop-oriented to varying degrees, but this seems like a more aggressive step in that direction. Why did you decide to go down that route?
Dan Boeckner: I felt like I needed to push myself after the Divine Fits record. I really liked that record, and there was a vibe to it, but given what was going on in my personal life when I recorded it… the songs that I contributed to that record were really dark. I toured the record and I cheered up a lot. With Operators, the gear lends itself to repetitive grooves, and I’ve always loved pop music. I was like, okay, I’m going to push myself with the vocals and the melodies of these songs. If we’re going to have the same bass line running through this song, we’re going to need a keyboard hook in it, there needs to be a vocal hook in it, and it needs to be really, really direct. It needs to be immediately accessible. I just really didn’t want to make a record that was ponderous, like a think piece record. I wanted to make something that people could dance to, that had a ton of weird, noisy crap going on, but at its core was pop music. That’s what I wanted with the band. We experimented with s lot of different formats, and this is what we hit on.

How would you say the new sound is going over with the crowds so far? Last night was packed, it was crazy.
So far, so good. I mean, I was kind of surprised—I know we had a few repeat customers last night—I was surprised to see people dancing right off the bat because nobody’s heard this stuff, you know?

I don’t want to jump too much on the “Fugazi meets New Order” quote that’s been in a couple articles about Operators, because I didn’t hear it myself. One song brought to mind the synth sequencing on Cabaret Voltaire’s “Sensoria,” and another had a characteristically Depeche Mode stomp to it, though. It’s such a contemporary package, but you reference all these older acts. What do you think the main influences are in Operators?
Yeah, I think I said that way back at Coachella, and the band hadn’t really coalesced then. We had the songs, but we didn’t know how to present them. I think the main influences, at least for the pop-structured songs, come from the era where punk was just splintering into New Wave. The early Ultravox records have been a big influence on us and Depeche Mode, definitely. But as for contemporary stuff, like, Long Island Electrical Systems… stuff that doesn’t have vocals in it, basically. And the new James Holden record. Have you heard it? The Inheritors?

Yeah, it’s weird, but great.
I mean, that was a massive influence on programming for this record, and definitely Svenghalisghost. Long Island Electrical Systems have this song called “Mars out of Range” that’s, like, this insane analogue techno workout. Fucking great dance song. I would get up in the morning and listen to it when I was walking to the studio. But it’s not a pop song, right? It just goes and goes and goes. That was a big influence, too. I was like, I would like to make something that has a verse-and-chorus structure but uses this kind of hypnotic, modern-sounding groove.

Last night you said that you’ve intentionally avoided putting anything online, avoided promotion, that kind of thing. Why keep it under wraps?
We moved faster than, I think, any kind of marketing plan would have allowed. We played a really small punk show in San Jose in a kind of early incarnation, and then we did some demos, and then we went to Montreal and recorded. I just think that the one thing that people have that isn’t dispersed into the internet is live performance. And I just thought it would be really cool if, instead of putting stuff up on the internet or showing it to Pitchfork or Consequence of Sound, we debuted it on stage in front of people. Because those people in the room—with the exception of whatever Youtube videos come out—at that point they’re the only people who have heard those songs except for the guy who produced the record.

I read in another interview that you wanted peoples’ first introduction to Operators to be live. What is it about the Operators sound that makes live performance the best introduction to it?
I think the energy and the ability to push everything on stage a bit. I like the dichotomy, too, between the type of music that we’re playing and the usual way that this music is made. We’re working backwards compared to how most electronic acts work. Making electronic music in 2014 is, for the most part, a solitary thing. Take Actress, for instance. That guy will work on stuff at home, put it out on the internet, make the record, and then go out and play a different version of the record. But everyone’s introduction to that was this sort of hermetically sealed person at home. Doing it backwards as an electronic act is, I think, interesting. I think it’s cool.

My band’s kind of doing the same thing with that. We don’t use computers live. It’s refreshing, I think, and it’s cool to see Operators taking that approach.
Yeah, and I think people are ready for it, too. I think that the climate kind of demands that of people right now. Five years ago, when chillwave was popular—Washed Out, all those bands—most people’s introduction to them were GarageBand recordings. Grimes is part of that, too. I remember playing Pitchfork with Wolf Parade and Washed Out was playing along with Panda Bear, and it was pretty clear that these were some of their first shows. They had these symphonies that they had written on their computers and they were trying to push it out live. But there was a disconnect. Eventually, some of the better bands found their footing. Like, Washed Out is a great live act now. But now people want the live show first, and the recordings second.

Watching Toro Y Moi at some of their first shows, it was like, okay, you’ve figured this out. You’ve used Ableton, you’ve used samples, you’ve used an SP-404, you’ve put it together in Pro Tools, and now Pitchfork is offering you five thousand dollars to play at four in the afternoon at their festival. There’s a shit-ton of people there, and you have to do this. Like, oh shit, you’ve got to play live. These guys had to slowly figure out how to be live acts, which is counter-intuitive to how I think. I mean, I’m older. It’s counter-intuitive to how I started playing music in the punk scene. Now, hardcore bands are really popular. I think it’s no coincidence that people want to go see a band like Perfect Pussy because it’s quote-unquote “real.” And it is real, it’s all real, but it’s a different kind of real that people want right now; that people are hungry for. I think performing sets with hardware, creaky synths, not having a computer on stage, having some movement and some energy… I think that’s what people want.

Going back to Operators, specifically in terms of the energy of a live performance, I’m interested in how these songs are going to sound on record. Because that could go either really well or really badly, I think. How did you capture that energy on record?
I think you have to record as much live as possible. At some point the record becomes a different experience than a live performance which, I think, is kind of a necessity because nobody—nobody—wants to go to a show and see it done perfectly. It can be nice, like I remember going to see—I’m not a huge Phoenix fan—but I remember seeing Phoenix at Coachella when Divine Fits played a couple years ago and they sounded note-perfect. There wasn’t a note out of place. It sounded absolutely perfect, but then you’re like, okay, why am I here? Am I here because I want to see the people who made the music in the flesh on stage from twenty rows back? Swans is a great example of a band whose arrangements are totally different live. They destroyed the stage when I saw them, it was amazing. Nobody moved, it was great. The audience was rooted to the spot. And that’s just it. That’s it. You have to offer something different in a live performance than on a record. We try to balance out the energy that we’d get from a live performance with a more detailed, nuanced approach with how the parts sit in the mix.

When are we going to get to hear these songs on record?
Don’t know. We’re shopping the record around right now. We recorded it in Montreal at Hotel2Tango with the idea that if we had a record in the can, it would allow us—and this is a luxury of being able to save money up from touring and make your own record—to shop it around. So we’ll probably release it in the summer or early fall.

It seems like it would make a great summer record.
It would make a great summer record! We’re just trying to find a home for it. That’s the plan, at least. All of that planning and stuff aside… I didn’t want that to stop us from playing shows because the idea of being beholden to that—and waiting—just seemed stupid. We have the songs, we know how to play them, and we want to play them for people. We were hoping people would come out and they came out. We wanted to do it ourselves.

Jordan Pearson is a writer living in London, Ontario - @neuwaves

---

Kaytranada makes music with a laptop, but he's pretty good at it.

So does Guelph DJ, Elaquent

Odonis Odonis uses laptops to surf the internet