Three Stars: Imperial China

How did you guys meet each other?

BP: So Matt and I started playing guitar and stuff when we were in law school and kind of didn’t get our act together until later.

MJ: I have to correct you here, we started playing, it’s very romantic, we started playing together in Poland. We both studied abroad there and Brian was actually a bass player and started picking up guitar. He couldn’t do anything. This was probably the summer of 2003. He was not good! I want that in print! But I think I have a theory that because he’s an athlete and he played in college, he just picked it up quicker. His ligaments are connected differently than other people so he picked everything up more quickly than I’ve ever seen anyone pick up guitar.

What’s your songwriting process like?

BP: We write all of our songs in practice. Usually one person comes in with one idea…

MJ: …Or a loop or a guitar part…

BP: …And then we just write a whole song out of there. I wouldn’t even feel comfortable writing more than a couple of parts together because I guarantee you the other guys wouldn’t like them and vice versa. We like writing everything together.

MJ: Patrick’s been in a bunch of bands and he’s got a great ear as a drummer but he’s also really great at constructing songs. Brian and I can come up with tones and stuff. He’s very good at going, “no, try this, do this.” He’s very organized so he’s very good at sculpting songs. No one ever comes in with any complete idea. I would never want to play in a band like that.

It seems like you tend to focus more on the instrumental than on the vocal, is that intentional?

BP: When we first started together and then when Patrick came on too I wasn’t going to sing at all. We were just going to play for awhile and if it worked, find a singer. But then everything worked, we started just getting a little bit better and we wanted to be a primarily instrumental band. But at the same time, I like vocals, I like to hear it and I think people want to hear it and if it fits with the song we’ll do it. Some songs it doesn’t really fit. And we’ve hopefully found this style that hopefully fits with the kind of music we play. It’s more speak-shout sort of stuff.

MJ: I think with the vocals it’s just another layer of music. We’re trying to use it as almost like another instrument. Porter thinks a lot about his vocals and his lyrics but music is going to come first and vocals is something you add on top if they work. If they don’t, they don’t. It’s kind of take it or leave it as far as vocals go.

BP: Yeah I use a lot of effects that kind of mask my bad voice. I usually added a lot of delay and reverb to them and you couldn’t understand a word I was saying but then we kept them lower in the mix but because of the EP, we brought them up higher so I’m trying to do that more live as well.

MJ: I never thought his voice would get better but thank god it did. It’s just like an instrument, the more you use it the better you get. You sing and it gets better. We were talking about getting a singer with one of our good friends from Bound Stems and he was like, “Brian why don’t you sing? If you want to sing, sing.”

BP: It’s a dream come true for me.

MJ: If you want to do it, go ahead and do it. Unless you’re tone deaf.

BP: We only do stuff that we think works with the song and that’s why a lot of it is instrumental because sometimes it just doesn’t work. I can’t actually play keyboards and sing at the same time.

MJ: Nothing ever gets written around lyrics but Brian will be like, after a song, I think I want to add lyrics here and Patrick and I are like, whatever. If you want to go ahead. It doesn’t even matter really, I just block him out.

It seems like what little lyrics you do have are very well thought out.

BP: I like to keep them generally ambiguous enough where people can take whatever meaning they want from them and most of them were all abstract enough where you could do that but at the same time they all have personal meaning. I hate love songs. I think we do have one song that’s about girls but no girl in particular. I like dual meanings a lot. I like taking one phrase or one sentence or one line and just building lyrics completely around that. Like Modest Mouse, I’ve always loved his one lines and David Byrne has got great one lines and so I like that idea. I’ve always been really amazed that people could tell a full story in a song because I couldn’t imagine doing that.

MJ: The lyrics are something that are very personal to Brian. And recording, I think every band has to do that before they even realize what they’re doing with themselves because we’re in the studio and I’m like, “That’s what you sing? I mean, it’s cool. I just didn’t know.” Because we always focus on the music. But even with Patrick in the studio, he’s like “That’s what you’re playing? It was full of surprises. It was like Christmas.

How was your experience recording at Silver Sonya?

BP: We actually recorded up at Trixie studios up in Takoma Park. It’s Brendan Canty from Fugazi’s studio and we recorded up there and then did all the mixing at Silver Sonya.

MJ: But everything was done by Devin Ocampo who’s like Faraquet and Medications and Smart Went Crazy and he’s just awesome. He’s got an incredible ear and we almost wanted to put him as a producer on the record. He’d say, “Well, what about a note here?” We didn’t rework any songs based on his recommendations…

BP: …but there were definitely things that changed.

MJ: I understood why engineers get paid like they do, because they have to have an incredible ear. I’d recommend anybody to use him.

Are you planning on recording additional material soon?

BP: Not right now. We recorded the EP in, I guess March, released it in April. So I think for now we’re trying to promote that as much as possible. I think maybe next spring we’ll probably reassess what we want to do. We wanted to get a good amount of press before we start sending it to labels and stuff. On the unlikely chance that we’d even get $1000 toward recording, then I guess we’d probably record sooner. Money factors into it and also we really recently hit more of a stride as far as figuring out our sound. We’ve really just recently our sound has just started to congeal.

MJ: Only now it seems like people are starting to actually know about us. Before when we were playing, nobody knew who we were. We’re not big by any means but like, the fact that we have friends who come out to shows. I’ve had people say, “Oh I recognize your name.” Maybe they’re being nice but like at the same time, we’ve started getting more reviews and stuff so we just wanted to have a package and get it out there and go through this whole thing. But we’re learning. I’ve never done this before.

How has your sound evolved then since it’s sort of congealed?

BP: It’s gotten a little more, a lot of it’s gotten a little mathier and a little dancier.

MJ: I feel like bouncing when I play “There Is No Translation.” It’s bouncy and jagged.

BP: All we wanted was to create music with balls and I feel like we’re getting bigger balls. As vague as that is, that’s how it sounds to me.

MJ: We’re only now hitting our stride in terms of writing and in terms of our ideas coming to fruition. We’re all on the same page, we’ve been playing together now since February/March of ’07. Only now are we really starting to understand each other. So songs are just getting better because I think we know what we’re doing.

BP: Time is a major factor in everything. Playing out more, people start to catch your name more, playing together for longer, you’ll really start to understand each other a lot better.

How have you adjusted your studio sound for the live setting?

BP: I’d say probably 70% of the loops are prerecorded. We have a few things where we’ll loop it live. Sometimes there are little things that we fuck up that we can’t hear because we’re really loud. For the most part, Patrick has started wearing headphones so he can actually hear better so we’re able to do it live without messing it up as much but really looping is to create a fuller sound.

MJ: Patrick wearing headphones is one of the new things that we’ve put in during the last couple of shows just and we needed to do that because one of the hardest things for a drummer especially when we’re really loud and everything’s based on a loop in the beginning like everything kind of centers around the timing of the song so it was incredible that we started thinking about having these headphones. He looks like the drummer from Linkin Park now but it works. It helps us, it helps him hear but sometimes when we’re writing songs he says “I wish I could hear what the rest of the song sounds like” cause all he hears is the loop.

BP: On record he’ll finally hear it.

MJ: But we’ll stop and play stuff for him so he’ll know what the song sounds like. It’s pretty fun.

BP: Basically we just like music that moves. That’s why live we want people to dance. We want people right up there because we dance. Matt’s just recently started coming out of his shell and he’s got fucking hilarious dance moves.

MJ: I’m not a natural performer. That’s been one of the hardest parts. I don’t really like being up there in front of people most of the time and I’ve only really [gotten comfortable] within the last three or four shows. It’s growth.

What’s been your favorite place to play?

BP: We played the Spazatorium in Greenville, NC which is the coolest venue in the world. It’s the coolest venue in the world and the guy who runs it is fucking awesome. It could’ve been in nowhere-ville Kansas. And it’s totally an old school small town where you drive through and there’s the barber shop, there’s the hardware store and then there’s this store front which has got black curtains in the front, you walk back and they have the stage against the wall. It’s a back room and they have rafters that people are sitting up on and basically everybody is right there on top of you. And sixty and seventy kids come out of nowhere. Greenvile, NC looked dead and there’s like sixty kids just waiting in the pit.

MJ: It’s a set up store front and you go in and BYOB. It’s because it’s a small place in NC so there’s not as much to do but the kids don’t even know anything about the bands they just go there to see music and it just reminds you of being young again, how I would just go to shows and just I love the non-sterile feeling of it. It really felt good.

BP: They got shut down, I think now they’re playing in a children’s theater or something like that. Might still be BYOB. That was the coolest venue I think we’ve ever played in. We’re psyched about Black Cat. Been going to shows there for six years, so definitely psyched about playing there.

MJ: When we had set goals for ourselves for the summer, that was it, like, the one big goal we had was to try to play Black Cat for the summer in some capacity and we’re really psyched that Vicky let us do that. We’re very happy about that.

How’d you guys feel about playing Fort Reno and opening for Statehood?

BP: It was awesome! We had sent our demo to Amanda back in February before we recorded. So it was just this demo we had and the sound quality since we’d recorded in our basement wasn’t great but it was something and we didn’t get asked until a week before the show. We’d already had that Velvet Lounge show booked the next night and we were just like, Fort Reno, you can’t turn that down, it’s such a DC staple. You get there and there’s maybe 200 people sitting out on the lawn and half of them have never heard any of your songs. So that was really cool and then we were told that the sound there was the best they ever heard that night. That specific night all three bands sounded great and sometimes they get echo from the school across the street and so it was really exciting except that we’re kind of a dance band and it was kind of weird to be playing in front of people that are all sitting down.

MJ: I looked down and I saw a couple of kids that were just going nuts and doing forward rolls and I thought “Oh man, that’s cool.”

What are some great shows you’ve attended recently?

BP: Monotonix. They’re fucking crazy. And they played a show this spring at Red and the Black. They lit the floor on fire and they did all this crazy shit like all three of them went up on the bar at one point in the night, played everything, full drumkit.

MJ: We were supposed to play that show but I think I was out of town then, like I think I was at a wedding, but then they’re playing Mainstage Black Cat now and with Silver Jews. Such an odd combination. But I’m psyched to play with them.

BP: We saw Don Cab last night.

MJ: We missed Ponytail and that’s who we wanted to see. Ponytail is incredible.

BP: Nastiest band around right now. But with Don Cab it’s almost like desecrating their good name before because they’re doing the same thing and the drummer’s the only consistent member. It’s kind of like The Eagles where it’s like one or two original members or five or seven different people.

Like The Beach Boys?

BP: Without Brian Wilson…touring without Brian Wilson.

MJ: At what point does it stop being the band but not even just that but are you making your product worse and devaluing what better members did.

BP: But the drummer is just as nasty as ever. He’s such a nasty drummer, you could go just to watch him. One other interesting show, Battles, was awesome. They are ridiculous. You know what’s cool though. We do a lot of loops in our songs. A lot of pre-recorded and we’ll just play on top of it to create a fuller sound. And they do a lot of looping and it’s cool to see them fuck up. It’s cool to see them have to turn a loop off and then start because they got off time with the loop and then have to start it back up again. It was cool to see that because they just seem so not human.

MJ: We saw them at Ottobar probably a year and a half ago it was right when the Mirrored tour started. Ottobar’s my favorite venue in the area and it was great to watch them there and I was just like and people were just getting down. People who had never heard them who had just shown up were like, dancing.

BP: What was cool about it was not a whole lot of people dance at shows in DC but Battles actually got people to dance. People were out there, that draw a little more diverse crowd.

MJ: I didn’t go to this show but Brian and Patrick did. Double Dagger played recently at Ping Pong, so I get that Double Dagger took chalk and I guess the floor is kind of concrete or something. But he took chalk and he was drawing, because no one at DC moves at shows so he was drawing circles around people that were standing still and everyone was just like, “what?” And afterwards the bassist explained that “every time we come to DC, nobody moves.” And we saw Double Dagger at Whartscape and it was fucking incredible. Except the drum went flying through the air and that was not cool.

What happened?

MJ: The drummer got frustrated and threw a tom and hit a kid in the face.

BP: It was one of those things where you like the band and you know them, you’ve met the guys and you want them to succeed and they do that and you’re like, “C’mon man, pull your head out of your ass!”

MJ: That’s the way punk rock is but this isn’t 1985 and venues can get shut down for shit like that. And concerts will get shut down and people get sued.

BP: Frustration can make you do some crazy things, it’s true. It was like the smallest stage I’d ever seen I mean it was as big as that countertop over there. The drums barely fit on there.

Who are some of your favorite bands in the DC area to see and play with?

BP: True Womanhood are super nice kids. I saw them play a show over at the Red and the Black and they put on a good show. They’ve got some really interesting music. I mean they kind of pick up random objects and use them as instruments. At one point they took an acoustic guitar and were using the strings of that guitar as the bow on an electric guitar. Their drummer has this setup where he has this random percussion pieces around him . He just plays on one for a little while and then just jumps to another one. It’s really cool.

MJ: Definitely both of the bands we’re playing with at Black Cat are two of the most original. Caverns is an amazing band, really tight. They’re insane live. The guitarist goes nuts.

BP: They have a freaking light show.

MJ: True Womanhood is also one of the most original bands in the city. They definitely stick out as someone who’s doing something really cool. So we got a chance to put this bill together and we put them on.

BP: And that’s the thing, I’ve started making friends with a lot of bands in DC. It’s really cool now going out to support them and people always think that there’s not that much of a scene here because they kind of compare it to the scenes of the late 80s or early 90s or even Baltimore, which has a really close-knit scene. But there are networks here. I’ve started to go out to a lot of local shows and I’ve started to see other bands coming to check us out and it’s really it’s cool. It’s there.

MJ: There’s a good network of bands and I don’t want to leave anybody out but Black & White Jacksons is awesome and there’s a bunch of bands that have started kind of supporting each other and everyone hangs out and gets to know each other so it’s been cool. There’s a cameraderie with a bunch of the bands that seem to be coming up now so it’s really cool. And Caverns. And New Rock Church of Fire.

BP: Yeah, I saw them two Fridays ago and they were awesome. They had a smoke machine and were total rock stars and I was so impressed because that’s the most crowded that I’ve ever seen Rock and Roll Hotel. And they were just rock stars up there and the smoke machine was filling up the room and they’re sitting there, guitars way down on their hip and attitude on them. They just had this swagger.