michael c hsiung

Download: Telepathe “Chrome’s On It”

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(from Chrome’s On it out now on IAMSOUND)

It’s good to admire Kate Bush—probably the holiest female producer of all time. Telepathe knows what’s up, and while they’re not ‘Wuthering Heights’ anywhere, the girls throw down a dance number in their ‘So Fine’ music video. Cross-breed Bush with Dre and a little David Byrne and chop and loop until you’ve got a whole new mutant, and that moody avant-garde hip-hop will make Melissa Livaudais and Busy Gangnes a pair of happy mother fuckers. This interview by Daiana Feuer.

Melissa Livaudais (percussion/keys/more): So no cuss words?
You can totally say cuss words.
ML: Oh, good—fuck yeah!
What’s your favorite cuss word?
ML: My name’s Melissa and my favorite cuss word is ‘motherfucker.’ I’ve always loved it. I love to throw it around whenever I can, you know. It just sounds good. I wore it on a t-shirt once, which said, ‘Dance Mother Fucker.’ Which is actually the title of our record, but then we made the ‘fucker’ part silent and invisible on the title. But it’s there. It’s our little secret we like to fill people in on when we can.
And you—what’s your favorite cuss word?
Busy Gangnes (percussion/keys/more): My name is Busy and I say ‘fucking’ a lot. Like, ‘That fucking person!’ or something. I like emphasizing my sentences—whatever I’m talking about—with that word.
It’s a good—is it an adverb? An adjective?
ML: I think it’s both! You can use it both ways. They’ll have to invent a new grammatical term for it.
Can you recall the last time ‘fucking’ came out of your mouth?
BG: In that fucking way?
ML: You probably said it this morning.
BG: Oh yeah—‘This fucking taco sucks!’ Our breakfast tacos were horrible.
Bad eggs?
ML: Busy got so sick from eating them. They were from the health food store. They had sprouts in them and stuff.
Actually, I had a dream of talking to you about this.
ML: Wow, really? And it’s happening!
How do you like to make eggs?
BG: I like omelettes and frittatas—making them. My favorite style of egg is over-easy. It’s pretty basic. You make a sunny-side up egg and flip it over for two seconds, and it’s done. When I was a kid I used to eat them soft-boiled a lot in those little cups. I’m Norwegian and that’s how they eat them every single day.
How do you say egg in Norwegian?
BG: Oh, fuck…Oh! It’s just ‘eg,’ E-G. ‘Eg.’
ML: You should ask her what blueberry is.
How do you say blueberry?
BG: ‘Blobar.’
ML: ‘Can I have a blobar?’
You’re not both from there, right?
ML: No, I just went there. It was awesome. I went there twice. Once we went there for fun and stayed with Busy’s family and once we went there this past summer and played a music festival.
BG: We were there in August and the sun is up practically 24 hours a day. It goes down for like four or five hours a night. We got to see—
ML: We saw Clipse and My Bloody Valentine in Norway in the same day in less than two hours.
What’s cool about playing different types of venues? Or what’s the worst?
ML: It took us a lifetime to figure out our sound on stage. Busy needs a good snare and hi-hat. Ideally we like to have two bass amps, two big cabinets behind us with heads for monitoring that we run all of our tracks out of and have the monitors from the PA of where we’re playing for vocals—so that it’s loud as shit. And you can feel the bass and hear all the stuff on top of whatever’s in the house. We used to rely on a venue’s sound system, which is never reliable! Usually monitors at a venue don’t have all frequencies—they’re only for vocals, so there’s no bass or low end. It would sound really tinny and we would be like, ugh, why does it sound so weird!
BG: We’ve completely revamped our set since last fall. This mainly came from spending more time with Ableton Live as a live tool. We’d always used it to record but we wrapped our head around it more and took all our electronic tracks and filled them out and separated them and re-sequenced them and made different live arrangements. Before we were trying to make it sound too much like the record, but then realized if we stripped it down and rearranged some things, we would have way more fun with it live.
So you are remixing your own songs?
ML: It was a very tedious process. We spent three months working eight-hour days—trying things out and reworking material and treating our sounds so they would be really loud, really punchy and compressed. Since we already played our live set in a handful of clubs, we finally figured out what we would need to do in order to make our setup the best it could possibly be, depending on the sound engineer and how much control we needed to have on stage, and what we could give over to someone who never heard our music before when we show up in a new city.
Does taking this producer approach change the way you conceive music?
BG: In our old band, having that more traditional setup—playing music was about each member of the band knowing their parts and playing them at the same time with everybody else. Ever since we started getting more into electronic music and producing, we ended up seeing ‘the song’ as a whole made of different ways it can be arranged or composed. I think we already listened to music in that way and that’s why we wanted to make music the way we do now, and have our hands in more aspects of the song-writing process. The stuff that we sample, we’ve chopped it up and slowed it down or reversed it and added effects to it so it’s completely indecipherable. We’ll take an obscure piece of a song and loop it with another piece of a song in such a way that you can’t tell where any of it came from. Mainly that’s a cool way of getting an idea for a beat or melody or tempo, or a key signature, and we’ll build all around that.
What’s a difference between male and female brains?
BG: I could talk about this for hours, and usually get myself in trouble. Let me give an example. I came into the idea of being in a band later in life. Even though I was technically trained on piano, I didn’t know drums, but I was a drummer in our old band. In teaching myself how to play that instrument, I just relied on my own intuition—how I respond to music—I wasn’t really worried if people would think that I was really good or could tell if I was technical. I feel like guys have more of a hang-up with that from what I’ve noticed. They feel like they need to play the right way, and excel at the rules. They’re stuck in this right way of doing things. I always wanted to play well. I didn’t want to be a sloppy musician but I was fine with the idea of making up my own version of how I play that instrument. It seems like guys, the way they play, the way they act, they have something to prove. A woman’s approach is more intuitive. We do what feels right.

TELEPATHE WITH ABE VIGODA, BLUE JUNGLE AND NITE JEWEL ON SAT., JUNE 13, AT THE SMELL, 247 S. MAIN ST., DOWNTOWN. 9 PM / $5 / ALL AGES. THESMELL.ORG. AND ON TUE., JUNE 16, AT DETROIT BAR, 843 W. 19TH ST., COSTA MESA. 9 PM / $10 / 21+. DETROITBAR.COM. TELEPATHE’S DANCE MOTHER IS OUT NOW ON IAMSOUND. VISIT TELEPATHE AT TELEPATHEMUSIC.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/TELEPATHE.