An Evening With Midnight Faces

Los Angeles — I’ve developed an obsession with Midnight Faces album, The Fire Is Gone. The music is so textured and layered, that I couldn’t quite unriddle the meaning or why it’s so addictive. So I listened to the compilation over and over and over again, never able to solve the mystery behind Matthew Doty’s synth-heavy sounds and Philip Stancil’s unearthly vocals. Even though I tried to dissect their sophomore album in a previous review, it wasn’t until I met the duo that I understood. I breathed in their live performance at The Bootleg Theatre and I suddenly knew what made their sound so immeasurable.

The Bootleg has become a right of passage for up-and-coming Los Angeles bands, but the warehouse of exposed brick and steel pipes never felt more befitting than for Midnight Faces. There are no parade of lights with these two, no outrageous outfits to garner attention. Instead, Doty and Stancil are solely about making excellent, profound music. They aren’t sure exactly how it happened or where the inspiration comes from and that’s why it is so brilliant. They just create.

Dressed in a worn t-shirt and jeans, Stancil’s face tightened up as he used his entire body to make the barren room tremble with his vocal range. Pair such passion with Doty’s stunning multi-instrumentals and as they travel through transcendental songs like “Wake Me” and “Hold Tight”, we’re left with nothing but undeniably sensational music. Don’t expect an outrageous display of visuals or try to find the hidden message, just let the cerebral sounds sweep you away.

Ariela Kozin: Where did the name Midnight Faces come from?

Philip Stancil: We were just exchanging emails and dicking around. It’s the name of a really old silent film.

Matthew Doty: There are a lot of bands that I like that take their names from old movies. I’ve never seen the movie either.

AK: How do you think the sound has evolved from Fornication [their first LP] to Fire Is Gone?

MD: This one was just more stripped down. We did it all ourselves. The first record I had the songs mostly written and all the textures and melodies already. With this one, there was less of that going in. This time we let the vocals direct where it was going more so. I think four of the songs, we wrote pretty much in the room together.

AK: I found a theme throughout the album of self-exploration and heartbreak. Was that intentional? How would you describe it?

PS: I’m not sure. I do just write them right there on the spot. I think they do mean something to me, but I think it’s more subconscious. I’m not like, “Oh man I feel this.” It’s not about this girl that broke my heart. It’s just that we find a melody we like and we start writing. I’m not trying to get across some big message, but if it happened than that’s great.

AK: So what is the music-making process like?

MD: Usually we start with the drums, get a beat we like, and mess around from there. Usually when we’re together we’ll have the drums in the background and I’ll play around with the keyboard and guitar.

PS: For four of the songs we were together throughout the whole thing. We would lay down the basic song in full and Matt would only go back to clean it up.

MD: Most of the time, we would lay down a vocal idea and we would find they were so much better the first time. We would try to re-track them, but then it would usually be better the first time with the scratch track. It was rawer.

AK: What do you want concertgoers to take away from your show?

PS: Hopefully that we’re better than every other band they’ve seen. [Laughs] Is that shitty to say? That’s the whole idea, right?

MD: If we had our ideal light show, it would be backlit. We wouldn’t want spotlights. We want something more bare bones and stark. The sound should make the show more than what we’re doing. I find that distracting at shows. Ideally, we want just a nice and beautiful wall of sound.

AK: I just saw the “Hold Tight” music video. It’s sort of simplistic in a beautiful way. How did you come up with that concept?

PS: That was out of default. Our friend James Dierx directed it. We had no idea, but we decided to start out in the desert. We wanted to get beautiful shots singing and walking around, and then we started to jump around and dance. Literally every day, we would figure out where we’d be going the next day.

MD: We didn’t realize the first time we danced that James would go with it. Then we had to dance for four days. [Laughs] We were dancing through the woods and tripping over twigs, but it was pretty ad-libbed and it sort of reflects how we made the album — that improvisation.

Follow Midnight Faces on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MidnightFaces) for the latest band news.

About
Latest Posts

Ariela Kozin

Ariela was born and raised on Los Angeles' creative hunger and booming sounds. She grew up humming the Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan records her mother played on repeat until a driver's license gave her the freedom to obsessively explore the live music scene. It only seemed natural that when Ariela went to journalism school, she paired her love of writing with her passion for discovering amazing new music.