MINIMAL SCHLAGER

TANK The music on After Midnight is very sensory and evocative of place.
Minimal Schlager I believe music should be experienced, not just listened to. I listen to a lot of music in Spanish that strikes me quickly emotionally. Sometimes, listening to music in English requires me to read the lyrics to understand what’s going on, and that always bothered me. The music that strikes me hardest is the music I can build an image inside my head with. I always wanted to be situated in a world or an environment from the first beat.

TANK Were there any specific films that inspired the sound?
MS Cinema has been a huge influence on us, but there isn’t one singular film that defines the band. There is a lot of influence from Lynch, not only in the spatial sound sense but also in the storytelling. I'm a big fan of Godard, how everything is so structured, but so messy at the same time. He’ll have two or three different things happening at the same time, but only one of them is important. It forces you to react very fast. 

TANK You’ve spoken about the blood, sweat, and tears that went into the creation of this EP.
MS At the beginning it was supposed to be an album, but we were touring at the same time, doing a fuckload of shows, so it became difficult to find the time to sit down and compose the songs. At SXSW last year, we did seven or eight shows in five days. I remember landing in Austin, massively jet lagged, having a change of clothes and going straight to a venue to play. For a song like “Gloria”, I wrote the backing track on the train on the way to a show in Frankfurt, and we developed it further on stage. Creating the EP ended up being a bit chaotic because we are used to being more of a studio project. It took a lot of time to put the tracks together, so I’m really happy that it has finally come out. 
 
TANK What different qualities do you and Alicia bring to the band?
LS Ali improvises a lot more, in a sense, and I am more of an arranger. Sometimes I start producing a sound that gives me a certain feeling, and start writing lyrics from there. She does it the other way around: she’ll start writing and then fix the song after.

TANK You’re a collector of analogue synthesisers. What is it about them that appeals to you more than digital?
MS  For me, it's about workflow. If I'm writing something or recording something, with an analogue synth, you can’t go back and change anything. You have to decide, is this it? If you go back to change something that you’ve done weeks or months before, most likely you're going to destroy that magic. The analogue workflow is that you live in the moment, you appreciate it and move on to the next thing. The fear of something not being good enough can stagger you artistically. You listen to a song by another artist and you're like, oh man, this sounds so much better than mine. But you need to come to terms with your ability at a certain time. We usually forget when listening to other references that that music was made at the creative peak of the artist. It’s good to come to terms with yourself, not to punish yourself. You can say, okay, I did this, and if it sucks, then I will have to do it again from scratch. That's a good thing about analogue because it forces you to do that. You just have to actually learn how to do it.

TANK Someone like the recently departed Brian Wilson was probably tooling away at the melodies of “God Only Knows” for months. 
MS  Last night I couldn't sleep so I started listening to this YouTube channel called Behind the Sounds, where they got the original tapes during the recording days of Pet Sounds. Brian Wilson spent four hours working on the middle eighth of “God Only Knows”, which is only a fraction of the song. For every decision he was making, there was no way back, no “that was good enough”. It’s a massive, Renaissance way of making art.

After Midnight is out now. Photo by Alex Amoros