Afrojack

Never in my life have I played the same set as somewhere else. And I never want to do that.

story by Lisa Mrock

In the past two years, Nick van de Wall (known internationally as Afrojack) has garnered two Grammy awards, collaborations with Pitbull and Neyo, and the number seven spot on DJ Magazine’s “Top 100 DJs of 2011” list. And with the breakout year he’s just had, he might be topping every such list in explosive fashion in 2012.

Between touring, traveling, remixing, producing, and making his own music, Van de Wall found time to talk to Chicago Innerview about the upcoming leg of his Jacked Tour, his height, the future, and things that are generally going on in the party-centric world of Afrojack.

Chicago Innerview: So, I know who you are and a lot of other people know who you are. But for those who don’t know you, describe yourself.
Afrojack: Okay well, I’m Nick. I’m 6-foot-9. I was born in Holland and raised in Holland. I make music for a living and I produce music and I also do it for fun, which is basically why I started it. And I like to party. That’s me!

Chicago Innerview: To start us off, how are you?
Afrojack: I’m okay. Actually, I’m just recovering from a cold, making more music, and getting ready for the Jacked Tour.

CI: Yeah, you have the new tour coming up. What can concertgoers expect out of the tour?
Afrojack: A lot of people ask me that. I just did a tour a while ago in America and basically I was really happy. Everything was really crazy, all the parties were really crazy, and everybody was having the time of their lives, so I’m not gonna change much. I have some new visuals, but the vibe was awesome last time.

CI: Joining you on the road will be DJs and musicians like R3hab, Sidney Samson, and Shermanology — who are all on your label Wall Recordings, just to name a few. Now these guys are good friends of yours and you’ve worked with them before, so can we expect some live onstage collaboration of sorts?
Afrojack: You can’t really expect live onstage collaborations because we’re DJs, but there may be some back-to-back action. The most important thing with this tour with the guys from my label is that we’re all there for the same idea. We want to have a great time and play new music. I would like to get ready for 2013. We’re not those guys who play the hits; we know those songs already. We want to bring the ‘next-level new shit.’ That’s what we’re gonna try and do. And because of our connection, because we’ve known each other so long, I think we’re gonna make a great team. I’m happy I have such a great team joining me. I think it’s gonna be dope.

CI: So this tour’s gonna be about looking toward the future?
Afrojack: Yeah, that’s what basically an Afrojack party is. We’re always playing future music. It’s not like shows I see in America. I see DJs do the same choreographed show all around America and I can’t do that. I’m a DJ. I wanna play new stuff. I want to make it different every time. Never in my life have I played the same set as somewhere else. And I never want to do that.

CI: Think back to when you did your first tour in America and think about the upcoming American leg of the Jacked Tour. Do you have a lot of the same feelings you had back when you did the first tour? Do you feel differently?
Afrojack: It’s mostly the same feeling. I mean, the first time I performed my own show in New York [it] was like 6,000 people, and it was sold out within a couple hours…and that was scary. And then it turned out to be one of the greatest parties ever. Now I’m going to try to do that all the time. The last Jacked Tour was really crazy and it was exactly how it was supposed to be. People go there for a certain kind of music and just want to have a great party. That’s what I’m going to try to keep now. I’m not an artist that does a show wearing a funky computer hat. I’m a DJ; I want to play a great party. I want to connect with fans. I think that’s a nice aspect of being a DJ, that you have a live feel to it. It’s the type of music where I can play it and I can turn it around and I can twist it.

Afrojack :: Congress Theater :: November 17.

Future Islands

We’d take a field recorder and go wandering around town…like detectives, trying to find interesting sounds.

story by Jessica Millman

Eclectic, distortion-heavy and ever evolving, the minds behind Baltimore-born Future Islands infuse synth-heavy pop tracks with audible environments and real life atmospherics. They are constantly searching for inspiration in the most unconventional of places, from the wild to the domestic. Their musical sleuth work debuted in 2008 with Wave Like Home, followed by the critically acclaimed In Evening Air LP (2010). Last year presented us with the broiling, organic tones of On The Water, an album that embodies the currents it describes.

Before taking the plunge into their upcoming tour, bassist William Cashion spoke with Chicago INNERVIEW about the band’s fluidity, mood integrity, North Carolina shipyards and hunting for meaningful sounds.

Chicago Innerview: In comparison with On The Water, much of your earlier work has an emotional aggressiveness to it. How did you go about building up this energy for albums like In Evening Air? Was it a conscious effort?
William Cashion: Well, the songs were all written shortly after we moved to Baltimore. We were all going through a lot of changes [like] getting used to living in a new city [and it was] our first time really writing as a 3-piece without a drummer. Maybe that sound was trying to recapture some energy. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious effort, but I guess we felt some of the power was lost. [Previously] we had almost a punk vibe, really fast…we wanted to regain that power.

Chicago Innerview: On The Water seems less vitriolic. Tell us about the shift. Was it part of the power search?
William Cashion: Probably! We recorded On The Water pretty much right after we got off touring In Evening Air, playing really loud and fast every night…We weren’t like, ‘this stuff has to be more chill.’ We try to be more honest; we don’t force things. For me, In Evening Air was a bit angrier, a little more intense…On the Water is intense too, but the songs were kind of a reaction to that.

CI: You recorded On The Water in North Carolina. Can you speak a little as to how this setting affected the album?
WC: We wanted to get away from the city, from distractions in general. Our friend has a 3-story house there and said, ‘Hey guys, come down, set up and record if you want.’ The biggest shift is that we made a point to write out-of-the-studio. We’d walk to the coffee shop downtown — it’s a very small town — which was right on the water. The songs became very introspective; it’s that kind of vibe. Then at night, we’d hang out and stare at the water…there’s a shipyard right across the street.

CI: Did you find any other inspirations or images this way?
WC: The house definitely lives and breathes throughout the album. We try to capture sounds of the nothingness of a house, a room, a hallway and add them in. [Its] fingerprints are all over. We’d take a field recorder and go wandering around town…like detectives, trying to find interesting sounds.

CI: Anything special planned for playing back in Raleigh?
WC: It’s special in that it’s sort of a homecoming. I grew up outside of Raleigh, so it’s a lot of old friends. It’ll be the first night of the tour, so I hope everything goes well. We have a bunch of new songs on this tour; we’re going to be testing some of those out. They change, gain a life of their own…We feel like the songs are really written after we play them live.

Future Islands :: with Dope Body :: Lincoln Hall :: November 18.

Matt & Kim

This [one] show I climbed up the scaffolding and stood on the top where there was nothing to hold onto. Seeing the pictures later I was like, ‘what the hell was I doing?’ You just get swept up and forget.

story by Ian Jones

Hard-charging Brooklyn two-piece Matt & Kim meld balls-to-the-wall rock ‘n’ roll with intimate bedroom pop to create frenetic songs and videos like “Lessons Learned”, in which both Matt and Kim stripped naked in Times Square in the middle of winter and got chased by the police. Their newest album Lightning is a bit of a departure from their usual lo-fi sound as they experiment with electronics among other unique instrumentation, but the raw power and energy of their live show continue to make Matt and Kim an experience they won’t let you forget.

Chicago Innerview caught up with vocalist/keyboardist Matt Johnson to get the skinny on what it’s like to be in one of indie rock’s most exciting live bands.

Chicago Innerview: The first thing I wanted to address was the song ‘I Said’ from the new album. It gets a little electronic. Where did that that come from?
Matt Johnson: We’re inspired a lot by what we’re into. There was something that just hit hard with the beats and bass and drums. It’s still got the bass and has a more EDM sound and what not, but still has very live drums, not electrified by any means. I think combining those two worlds keeps that song in that Matt and Kim spectrum.

Chicago Innerview: People ask your favorite show and you guys usually say the Art Camp show with the little kids. I wanna know the show where you were most terrified.
Matt Johnson: We did one for MTV in Austin on top of a parking garage and told everyone to jump. The garage was flexing down and bouncing like a trampoline. The sound guy was holding onto the board like it was a bucking bronco. I thought everyone was going to fall through the floor. Luckily that didn’t happen. There’s a moment when you’re like, ‘if the whole place goes down, no big deal’ — then afterward you’re like, ‘well, that’d be a big deal!’ This other show I climbed up the scaffolding and stood on the top where there was nothing to hold onto. Seeing the pictures later I was like, ‘what the hell was I doing?’ You just get swept up and forget.

CI: What would a Matt and Kim baby be like?
MJ: Well, we invest every hour of every day we have into doing this because we love it and it’s fully our lives. But we did have a baby. Before the band, Kim was a nanny for two girls since they were born. When they were two years old they’d say, ‘wanna see my art exhibition in my room?’ and I was like, ‘man this kid is cool!’ I hope that our kid is like that, not that we’d wanna push.

CI: What was the hardest song to write on Lightning?
MJ: ‘I Wonder’. Sometimes songs just happen in a day or two and some take months. You could hear that the song was in there in the beginning, but we had to chop everything up. I think those uphill battles come out great in the end because you’ve gone through so many angles that the one you finished with was the best.

CI: Easiest?
MJ: ‘Much Too Late’. We decided to write a few of the songs on guitar, because writing on guitar is how I started. That song was written with one string on a guitar and we kept the one string in there and the energy it created was this Motorhead sort of vibe. It’s the first song we wrote that has a bassist and guitar…or well, one guitar string.

CI: If you could sing a song to Matt and Kim as they first started out, with all the knowledge you know now, what would it be?
MJ: Can you think of a song that’s about always trusting what you think? When it comes to the actual writing of the music, we feel that we trust ourselves and our instincts. I’m sure that if we’d taken people’s suggestions we could have made some songs better, but when we go with our guts on the songs themselves we are happy with them the way they are. That makes us wanna play them more and stick around with them because we’re gonna be the ones with them for years. I don’t know what song could encompass that.

CI: Any last shout-outs?
MJ: Yes, Kim is still searching for every Rhode Island quarter in existence. If you happen to come across one, bring it to our show and hand it over.

Matt & Kim :: Congress Theater :: November 10.

Amanda Palmer

I had a sex dream about Adele that wasn’t even a sex dream. I think Adele and I were…in my apartment. And I never really thought Adele was my type. I don’t know where the sex dream came from. But yeah, it was a weird thing.

story by Phil Forsyth

Former Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer is steadily finding her way to the front of the crowd. With a killer new puck rock cabaret album Theatre Is Evil landing at number 10 on the charts, this DIY crowd-sourcing pioneer is setting the stage for a new musical movement. Not without her detractors, trying to address this multi-tasking machine is akin to trying to catch salmon as they swim upstream.

When you ask Amanda Palmer questions, as Chicago Innerview had the pleasure of doing in advance of her Chicago show this month, you get about 19 different answers — from sex dreams about Adele to recent comments by local punk curmudgeon Steve Albini criticizing her crowd-sourcing practices which, if you’ve been living in a cave, have been blowing up music blogs and enveloping the Twitterverse. Here are some of our favorites:

Chicago Innerview: Hello, how’re you doing?
Amanda Palmer: I’m feeling…pretty good. I have a mild…mild hangover.

Chicago Innerview: Yeah? That’s alright, I think I can work with that. You got me a little earlier than I’m normally up, so we should be kind of on par.
Amanda Palmer: Thanks. I saw an incredible show last night. It was awesome…It’s crazy. I never go out to have a good time when I’m on tour because…I’m sore…And when I’m home I usually just hole up and do nothing but sex, answer email and stare at YouTube videos and very rarely go out into the world, but Swans was playing last night in Boston…

CI: When was the last time you were in Chicago?
AP: That was…fuck! It might have been the Dresdens reunion tour…It might have been the Evelyn Evelyn show. I don’t really know and it doesn’t surprise me that I don’t know ’cause I think my brain has decided that keeping track is not worth the amount of access memory, so everything just gets erased as I go along. Which is kind of a beautiful, fun way of living. I have been to Chicago many times and I know I’ve always had a great show…

CI: So I’m sure you’ll have a good show when you get here.
AP: Chicago actually sold out. I think it was our first show to sell out, which is pretty fucking awesome. You know it’s weird at the time, there’s this strange tightrope you walk between playing a place too much and wanting to go back and fuel the fire…and keep everything rolling and…speaking of rolling, I had a sex dream about Adele that wasn’t even a sex dream. I think Adele and I were…in my apartment. And I never really thought Adele was my type. I don’t know where the sex dream came from. But yeah, it was a weird thing. That is probably nothing that you could include in your interview, but I just remembered and I know I’d forget.

CI: Alright. Well, I don’t know if you’re willing or not willing to talk about Steve Albini, but I thought it was worth bringing up considering he’s a Chicago guy and you’re kind of making your triumphant return to the city.
AP: You know, I sent Steve Albini an email and invited him to the show. I doubt he’ll come.

CI: Really? That’s very good of you.
AP: Oh fuck. I mean, Steve Albini is definitely not a devil. My engineer for [new Kickstarter-funded album] Theatre Is Evil…is actually good friends with him and hangs out on the Electrical Audio board where the quote by Steve Albini got picked up and put into the press. And Steve has come around a couple times and…well, not so much taken back what he said, he meant what he said. But he’s definitely not out to get me. At all. And I know he’s a very grumpy man.

CI: You appear nude in the bathtub in the video for the Flaming Lips song ‘The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face’ and it’s been reported that Wayne Coyne will be directing the video for your new single ‘Do It With a Rock Star’. What was it like working with Coyne and what are your thoughts on artist collaborations in general?
AP: I’m way more interested in communicating and connecting with people than I am in making music. Music seems to be the thing I chose and the thing I have to do in order to get the things that I want, which is the connection. I think that’s true for a lot of musicians; it’s just such a sideways way of looking at it. They don’t necessarily realize what’s driving them. I’ll be very open and honest about it: if you gave me a choice between playing music for no one and being with everyone without music, I’d pick the everyone. I’ll be perfectly honest with you about this.

Amanda Palmer & the Grand Theft Orchestra :: Metro :: November 10.