I’ve always kind of imagined the members of Fol Chen writing songs the way scientists would conduct experiments in a laboratory, with beakers and Petri dishes and controlled explosions and all that. After speaking with guitarist Samuel Bing and Vocalist Sinosa Loa for 20 minutes while waiting for a round of hot toddies, I learned all kinds of things about Fol Chen, from how they created a tetrahedron musical etch-a-sketch to how they made three songs car crash into one to write one of the standout tracks on their new album, The False Alarms. Full discussion is below to explain what that even means.
Kelly Knapp: I’m excited to see you guys tonight – I’ve heard that you guys wear disguises and play instruments that you’ve invented…
Sinosa Loa: That has been known to happen. We do not have the instruments we built on tour with us. They are a little delicate. We’ve considered bringing one though; they’re pretty visually interesting.
KK: What kind of instruments are they?
Samuel Bing: It’s called the Tetrafol. We designed it with a company called Monome. They invented those button grid controllers that DJs and electronic musicians use – it’s just kind of a grid with lit-up buttons. And so a gallery in L.A. put us in touch with them. We didn’t have much of an idea; they did most of the design. We were like, ‘we want to make a sound-y thing, something that we can play with that makes sound, that we can play with in real time with hand gestures. It’s basically a four-paneled – it’s a tetrahedron, because it’s a pyramid – and loaded into it, it’s got a speaker built in and a out-put jack, and 18 or 15 samples. As you move it in space, if you tilt it on one axis it changes the speed of the sample loop, if you tilt on another axis it changes the pitch. You can go in circles or throw it upside down, and you can also jiggle it, and it makes a wobbly sound. If you give it a hard shake, it moves from one sample to the next one, so that’s how you switch samples.
KK: Like an etch-a-sketch.
SB: Yessss. The only thing on stage that’s similar is the guitar is a little bit hacked.
KK: What about these disguises I’ve heard of? What are you guys communicating with that?
SB: We don’t really do that that much anymore. It started as an experiment in being completely anonymous, but we just wanted to hide, and just put out a record without an identity, really. But then of course, that becomes your identity, so you can’t really escape it, and that becomes the story. We also just feel a lot more comfortable with presenting ourselves to the world.
KK: Who were you guys really inspired by growing up? Who were you listening to?
SL: You know what’s funny, is that I actually don’t listen to a lot of music. It’s a hard question. I’m not really a music fan. I travel a lot. That’s where all my money goes. As soon as I left home I went around the world. It took a lot of time away from music – eight years where I wasn’t really being creative, I was just traveling and working and living in different cities. I always knew I was being really informed for some purpose, and I didn’t even know if I would go back to music, but I think that it has an influence on what I’m doing now.
KK: What made you start playing music then?
SL: I played as a teenager. I liked to perform and I like to sing, but I wanted to sing songs that I could sing well, and I thought the best way to do that is write them for my own voice, and things I could perform myself. That just kind of developed.
SB: I guess I started hearing the stuff my parents listened to – they were big music fans, but very much top 40. Elton John, Billy Joel…this is stuff that kind of infected my brain. My earliest music memories are probably hearing Billy Joel records. Which is great, because it’s an easy point of entry. Those melodies are so bombastic. They’re kind of exciting, especially to a child’s mind. It’s kind of perfect, because there’s no subtlety at all, so you don’t have to be a person of taste yet. It’s like music for people who haven’t developed taste yet, and it’s fun. I think that’s what convinced that music is exciting, and fun, and I want to do it. That was it, really. And then I started making my own poor decisions about music. I left my parents’ bad choices behind.
SL: I definitely liked pop music when I was younger, and then in my effort to learn more about music, kind of got disenchanted by it, and maybe learned too much and got bored. Maybe that’s why I took so much time off too. And I think I over-thought it. Finally, I think it took me actually living with a baby and starting to write nursery rhymes.
SB: Whose baby? You don’t have a baby!
SL: It’s when I was an au pair in Sweden, and lived with a baby for half a year, and I would sing to it. Then I remembered that I liked songs, and that I didn’t have to over-think it.
KK: That’s beautiful. And so now you’re touring in support of your latest album, False Alarms. Tell me about this record; what was your vision for it?
SL: To kind of further along the theme of the first two albums. We make pop music out of a lot of sounds we’ve created, and we strive to employ a lot of our own ideas in every step of the production and songwriting. This was maybe a natural next step. It has mostly what you might call standard pop structure, but maybe it doesn’t sound that way. But that’s what’s exciting, and what’s the challenge – to make pop songs that keep us interested.
KK: How did these songs come together? Do you all write together?
SL: Well, Samuel had a wealth of ideas that he would come to us with.
SB: It’s like a pile of scraps. It’s like a digital scrap pile of things recorded on a phone or something, and then later organized in iTunes by song or by idea style.
SL: So we kind of picked things that stood out. You know, one day something sounded great and we started working on it more. We actually developed a lot more songs that ended up on the record. We got pretty far – maybe eight to ten other songs that we didn’t actually complete. And it actually came to the last minute, which ones we would finish.
SB: We were talking about doing a double 10 inch, or something like that. It’s just, when you have that much material, as a listener it’s hard to pay that much attention. We thought it was better just to save that stuff for later, rather than kind of dump it all out just to get it out.
KK: My favorite song on the album is “The Fifth Season.” Tell me about that tune – what was the inspiration behind that one?
SB: Well, musically, it started as a guitar loop that I made, and then my co-producer Julian Wass – we have this joke that’s called ‘Produce This’ where we send each other something that’s like, produce this! You wanna be a producer? Produce this! That will be the subject line of the email, with an mp3 attached. So I really liked the loop, and I figured he would really be into it and want to produce it somehow. It started like that, but also we had begun two other songs…it’s actually three songs that got kind of car crashed together into one.
KK: Considering the way your songs usually come out, that sounds totally perfect.
SB: It felt organic. It’s kind of amazing, but literally there were two different songs in two different tempos in two different keys, and we had to figure out how to combine them. The verse is one song and the chorus was a different song. It came together really nicely, I thought. We’re all really fond of that one, so I’m glad you like it.
SL: A couple of the songs actually got dissected and used for parts in other things, like the bassline.
SB: We have a nothing is wasted policy. You never know when something in a different context is going to make a whole new kind of sense. There’s no need to delete anything anymore. You can keep it all.
KK: Hard drives.
SB: Hard drives, man. Terabytes.
KK: Another tune that stood out to me was “Boys in the Woods.” It has this predatory vibe to it.
SB: Yeah, it’s supposed to be kind of evil.
KK: So if you guys were wild animals in the woods, what would you be and what would you be hunting?
SB: I would be hunting boys in the woods. I’m one of those animals from the movie where you can’t really see what it is, but it has fangs, and maybe some fur. My animal is just a dark furry thing with fangs. Other than that, there are no details. A hairy shadow.
