Liars Are Weird, Poor, and Happy

When Grizzly Bear’s profile in New York Magazine shed light on how tough it is economically even for one of the most high-profile indie rock bands working, I’d assumed that the trickle-down meant serious woes for bands with less poppy bones than those guys. Well, it turns out that while the Grizzlies are on the low end of an income bracket where you could maybe make as much as a high school teacher and raise a teensy family, Liars are on the high end of another bracket of artist who is still thankful for six PBRs in the green room and floors to crash on as they approach their forties. According to Angus Andrew, no one in Liars has a day job and by dint of their deal with their very supportive label, Mute, they are one of the few bands signed to an indie who are still putting out CDs and feeding and housing themselves off it in 2014.

My surprise at that fact is due to how stinking weird Liars’ newest Mess sounds. Ostensibly, Andrew’s indulgence of a “straighter,” dancier road not traveled during the band’s sessions for 2012’s WIXIW, there’s hardly anything on Mess that isn’t detuned, splattered, throbbing, or distorted—it’s definitely someone incapable of making commercial dance music’s idea of commercial dance music. I spoke to Angus Andrew recently about how Mute pays him to beat his head against the wall until he possesses the minimal technical facility to make a Liars record… and why he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Noisey: It’s interesting that you guys are in LA due to the myth that non-commercial creativity doesn’t really have a home there. I think maybe that myth has kind of popped.
Angus Andrew: I always just thought that on the face of it, some of the funner experimental art came out of Los Angeles, while some of the more formal and studious stuff came out of New York. That’s what actually drew me to Los Angeles, that it was a place on the frontier, not following any kind of modes or traditions. It’s always difficult to generalize with these things and particularly Los Angeles is [resistant] to these kind of blanket terms.

I wanted to ask you about the evolution from being a rock band with electronic textures to being a band with no acoustic textures at all—just, exclusively electronic.
It certainly wasn’t something that I would have foreseen. It’s all based on the idea of experimentation and picking up tools and instruments that I’m not familiar with. That’s what this is all about—it’s not about refining, it’s about exploring. It’s really amazing the kind of landscapes that you can step into [with electronics]; it’s never-ending. It was also a way to expand my limited means when I’d record music at home.

What did you compose on originally? What did you usually reach for?
As an instrument, it would be piano; as a device, it started with a four-track and that eventually ended up as ProTools. It’s really all about that [thrill] of recording yourself making music. The reality is that I would make this thing and then six months later, we would enter this fuck-off studio and try to recreate that song. Good things can happen, obviously, that you wouldn’t be capable of, but then there’s this lost in translation thing where it’s hard to recapture that first idea. That’s one of the biggest reasons I came to work in the computer. You can generate record-quality sounds, as is, ready to be put on an album. That opportunity to bypass the need for translation is such a great and exciting thing. That’s what I’ve been most excited about with the last two records.

The trade-off is obviously this imposing amount of learning you have to do to learn these devices.
Absolutely. That’s what the last record, WIXIW was all about: sitting there, trying to create a song with the user manual open, with all the fear and the doubt and the anxiety of trying to learn this language that I felt so many people were fluent in and I was having such difficulty with. The difference with Mess is I felt comfortable enough to manipulate things more fluidly. In the end, it’s still an issue for me, though, because I’m not a technical guy. There’s a pretty clear line between people who are into talking about the gear and the mics and the speakers and the people who aren’t, and I’m in the “aren’t.” There’s a limit to how far I’m willing to go.

I think it’s the same for any instrument. If you don’t need to be this insane shredding guitarist, why learn that? You can create limits for yourself.
Exactly. I appreciate people who go in and get virtuosic with their instruments but for me, I’m most excited [to compose] at that point where I don’t know that much. Right now, I feel like I’m starting to get a handle on it and quite honestly that’s when it starts to get less exciting. [Laughs]

So there’s this precarious point where between comfort and discomfort where you like to sit when you make music.
Yeah, and in life, too. Generally, whenever I feel comfortable in the house or city or situation I’m in, that’s when I get antsy. The comfort makes me uncomfortable.

Tell me about the financial realities of being a band that’s successful but not Justin Bieber or the Rolling Stones. This dialogue you have with your fans where they expect you to challenge them—has it been rewarding?
Well, first and foremost, as a financial or business model, the way we approach making music isn’t the ideal for being successful; people [would rather] latch onto an idea and I understand that. The fact is we were incredibly lucky being picked up right at the beginning by Mute Records and Daniel Miller has always encouraged us to do what we want to do; in terms of finances and [lifestyle] they’ve basically kept us alive. Touring is obviously a big part of it but having someone willing to put out your records is the biggest deal. We know bands who’ve gone the other route and ended up with labels who’ve refused to let them do this kind of thing, who’ve dictated what they should be doing, and I’m so grateful that that didn’t happen to us.

What do you guys do in the interim? Are there any lucrative side gigs or is it all Liars?
It’s all Liars. We enjoy some licensing things once in a while but overall, we can’t complain: we have this idyllic lifestyle where we get to play the music we love around the world. And if I couldn’t do this, this way, I wouldn’t be making music. It would just be boring for me.

Alee Karim is on Twitter - @aokarim