Where’s your favorite venue in America?
KW: During our first ever tour here we just got an agent and felt like being awkward, so we told him to book us in venues in weird little art gallery spaces where they had to get in PAs. They were sent up for shows and those were memorable. We did one in Brooklyn where our manager was outside pushing this generator while we were playing. It was just good. We don’t get to do that anymore. Now we play in bigger venues and you can’t really do that. The whole crowd knew someone was outside cranking the generator so we could play the show.
We got the audience to design the artwork for our 7-inch sleeves. We put 500 on the wall and they were all drawing and painting.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94ZmNdc2sv0]
Any bands on tour right now that you’re really digging? Anyone you want to collaborate with?
JDM: That’s a tough call. When we write we put ourselves in a bubble. Being in Berlin we don’t have a TV and we’ve got Internet but it’s on dongles. It’s shady. It doesn’t work one day. Sometimes it’s a really good thing to be away from stuff. You obviously got all your classic stuff you love. Your record collection or whatever you’ve downloaded. When we’re in the studio, which has got no service in the basement of this old jazz club we rented. When we’re in there and you close the door it’s a cave. It’s just us two and an engineer that we met in New York and we brought him back to help us make a record since we’ve got mics and cables and amps. We’ve got the whole thing now. So we find that get into the studio and come out at 4 o’clock in the morning. When we go in it’s daytime and when we come out its nighttime. The three of us will chat for a bit and then we fall asleep. And then the next day we’re like ‘we’ve gotta get that part right. Let’s go back down and do it.’ And then another day has gone. We could go for three weeks and then get a call from someone in LA who asks us what’s going on. We just say it’s goin alright. We don’t know. We’re havin a good time out here. And then they’ll ask us what we’re listening to. And we’re like “nothing.” It was minus 25 degrees out there in January and we don’t speak German, so we were really isolated out there. We worried at first and wondering why we were there. I mean, I can’t really think of anything that we’re attaching ourselves to apart from some classics.
KW: We don’t really listen to music when we write because if it’s in the charts and popular you don’t really want to try and copy them. We listen to a lot of the Knife. I still love that Knife record. Nancy Sinatra, Depeche Mode, Petshop Boys and all that kind of stuff. There’s a band that hasn’t really inspired us, but I’ve enjoyed their music and managed to steal it from a friend that came over and it was The xx. It just sets a nice mood but doesn’t affect our music. It’s more of the old stuff that does.
So when’s the new album coming out? Summer? Fall?
KW: We say autumn, you say fall.
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