Retrospect and going modular with MSTRKRFT

Canadian dudes MSTRKRFT are back. 2009 was the last time we heard new music from these guys, but you may have noticed their name popping up on a couple of festival bills over the new year. And that's because not only are they back on the road, but they've got new music with them too.

Spending over two years on tour, it's understandable that it's been a while between releases.

Their new record Operator is an intricate snapshot into MSTRKRFT post-Fist Of God. Going entirely modular, the only computers used on this record were for recording. Modular synths, 909's, 808's and multiple sources of distortion forge its way onto this one, making it the most raw and destructive release from MSTRKRFT to date.

Beyond The Valley and Field Day will be hosting them over the New Year, so ahead of their time here, we sat down to have a long-distance chat to Al-P and Jesse themselves.

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You guys haven’t been to Australia for a couple of years now, have you?

Al: No ma’am. It’s been a while. It used to be an annual event, but then we did some stuff. We didn’t tell everyone we were drifting. That might have had something to do with it.

I was doing my homework, reading up on a couple of other IV’s, and I’ve noticed that you guys have changed the way you approach your live set. I know that you tend to have more of a studio setup than a compact set. How do you think this is going to work logistically in Australia?

Jesse: It’s going to be a huge pain in the ass, a lot of work and a lot of arguing with the people at check in desks at Qantas. That’s something that we’re used to doing though, in Canada and every other airport. That’s nothing new. It’s just a lot of work. It takes us longer to set up than it does for us to play. For us, it’s worth it in terms of how we wanted to perform this record and how we wanted to be performing right now. We’ve really wanted to do this for a long time and play live for real. We wanted our electronic music to be just as live as it would be if it were a rock band playing. Over the years, a lot of people have used the term live for what we might have done. We look at it and we think that if everything is sort of pre-arranged and pre-laid out, then you can’t have any errors or risk computers crashing. It’s too safe for us and it never appealed, so we never did it. And we decided that since we made this whole record live essentially, that we wanted to perform it live as well. And that was a big part of us deciding what equipment we would use to make the record and how we would make it and how we would sync it together and all of that.

The whole time we were thinking that we only wanted to use things on the record that we could take on the road with us, because if we can’t do it for real, live, then we shouldn’t want to present it that way.

To some extent, for us, it’s either that we play live for real, or we DJ, but there’s no halfway point there for us. I don’t know if I’ve answered perhaps the next question, but we knew what were getting into when we started down this road a few years ago.

You guys have been working on this album for quite a while. Has it been a different process than your previous albums?

Al: Yes, absolutely. First of all, when we were finishing the Fist of God tour schedule, that took us to about 2011-2012? 2011, and during that gap we were kind of taking a step back and just a lot of planning as to how we could execute making a record like Operator and how we would record it and how we would tour it, and so we started the record in late 2013. We were recording it for maybe two years. And I guess that’s when I was prepping all of the planning we had done, and we were basically just using a computer as a multi-track recorder.

All of our equipment is running in synchronise, and the writing process is what’s the most different about the music that we’re making now. I’m avoiding using the word jamming – because that’s totally not what it is. We’re using all of the machines and writing a few pieces on the fly and getting feedback from the sounds of the synthesisers and working with kind of unexpected results and refining those results. And when we’re recording, we tend to record in long chunks with an idea. Throughout the course of your day, we might go through 3 ideas and that might be half an hour of recording time, and then it’s a matter of sitting down and listening to what we’ve recorded and finding the moments that are worthy of pursuit to finish into an arrangement.

Talking more about the mood of the album. When you look at Fist of God and the context behind it, 2008-2009, electro was really big at the time. I must admit I was 12 years old when I first heard you guys. Operator is such a different feel, it’s a lot more techno and industrial. What is the context that you think the album needs to be listened to under?

Jesse: For us, the only thing we ever really think about is how we enjoy it or if we enjoy it. I think we’ve probably listened to it the most while driving, but that just has to do with our lives. It’s one of the only times we get to just be loud. It’s really hard to answer because a big part of this record and I guess MSTRKRFT going forward in terms of us being happy with it, was to not think too much about the context of this record and to just see if we were enjoying the music we were making as MSTRKRFT. I’ll backtrack so this makes more sense.

Dance music is the only type of music where you can express purpose. Dance music is supposed to be for dancing, and if you’re making music for DJs to play, then you need to kind of take into account so it makes it easier for other people to play your music. There's always different conventions and things to think about, but on this record, we didn’t pay attention to any of that. When we DJ, we like to challenge ourselves and try to play absolutely anything, and so nothing really discourages us in terms of playability. We didn’t want to be hung up thinking about that stuff. We just wanted to make something that we liked.

I feel like this album is definitely one of your most raw and defining albums. When I was listening to the album, I kind of thought “Wow, I didn’t know that was the direction that they wanted to go in”, but it definitely works. How do you guys feel that your sound will be received when you play here? I know people tend to know you guys more because of ‘Heartbreaker’, but it was definitely a one off for you guys.

Al: Definitely, I’m glad you recognised that song as a one-off for us because if you really look at our whole body of work, ‘Heartbreaker’ is quite out of place. For us, I’m super happy with how Operator turned out in terms of a snapshot into what we’re doing and what we’re interested in now. I think it covers a lot of ideas and the range of musical ideas that it covers is quite satisfying to me as one of the artists who made it. I think if people are expecting ‘Heartbreaker’, they’re obviously not going to get it. It’s up to the audience or the listener as to how they perceive it. If they’ve come this far, maybe they’ll go a little further.

Jesse: Also, that song isn’t something that we could do again, musically. If we were to do that again, people would be like “uhh, they just did that again." And not to make a musical or an artistic comparison, but like Led Zeppelin only made one ‘Stairway To Heaven’, there’s some things you can’t make again.

I remember even when Heartbreaker was really big, people were like "Yeah MSTRKRFT this song is really great", but then people just listened to that song and then didn’t look at the rest of Fist of God or your previous album. It was interesting to see how people tend to take things on face value and don’t tend to delve into more of it.

Al: I think that’s part of the reason why with this record, and what was interesting with its release was that it had no vocals and was just modular exploration and a 909. I think we just needed to press reset on what everyone thought that we were going to do. I think to prepare people for the rest of the record, certainly. Our thing with this record, if anyone was to ask “Where’s ‘Heartbreaker’?” we’d say our ‘Heartbreaker’ for this record is ‘Go On Without Me’. Because really, emotionally, that’s your song. The lyrics for that song are just the heaviest thing. And I mean heavy not in a metal sense. For us, that’s the emotional song on the record. And as much as it’s like an inside joke for us, it’s also true and really accurate for us in terms of where we’re at with this record.

It’s a definite great end to the album, because you go through it and you form your own perception of it and it ends on this track that is just so completely leftfield, and you’re left thinking ‘What did I just listen to?’ this is crazy.

I know DFA is something that’s close to Jesse’s heart, what do you guys feel about the constant comparisons made between DFA and MSTRKRFT?

Jesse: I think it’s funny because for me, in some sense, the way Al and I work together is way different from the way that I work with Sebastian. It’s like a completely different musical exercise and a completely different way of expressing myself. For me there’s almost no similarity in terms of the way my brain approaches things. I know that there’s musical forms and changes and choices and things that I do that have some signature to them, and I’ve been told that there’s congruence between the two things at times, but for me they’re very separate. If you were an artist and you did paintings, but you also made video installations and sculptures, and you also made collage art or something, it’s just different ways of being creative. Different formats to be creative in. That’s the extent of it for me. I kind of think MSTRKRFT is now the heavier of the two projects.

Obviously 2016 MSTRKRFT is completely different to 2009 MSTRKRFT. If you guys could say anything to yourselves 7 years ago, what would it be?

Al: I was going to make a joke, but I pulled out.

Jesse: I think you just did make a joke. That’s tough because you create this weird loop. If you did go back, would the 2016 version of yourself be then effected by the 2009 version?

Al: I think that’s called the causality loop.

Jesse: That not withstanding, I don’t know. It’s hard because The Looks and Fist Of God were kind of made under duress. We went through a lot of weird bullshit in our lives at that time, like I don’t mean to be blind, but we had these crazy legal battles that took like ten months to get through and all of this shit, always dealing with some nonsense. I lived in a hotel for a while. The hotel was down the street from the studio, so I could just walk to the studio because I had nothing else to do. And also at that time, we weren't working on the record, we were just on tour always. We lived in the same house for years and we had this calendar on the wall, like a whiteboard calendar that had all of our show dates and our travel dates and what not, and I think that it was the last month that I lived there, I took a picture of it and every single day was full. I looked over to my calendar on the computer later that year and noticed that over the course of a year, it was less than two months that we were actually home.

Al: We were on the road for 10 months that year. When we would be away, because we would be in Europe at that point, we’d have a week or ten days between shows we wouldn’t come home. We’d just stay. We didn’t care. There was nothing holding us back, and nothing else in our lives really so we could just do that. It’s strange. It’s kind of fucked up, and I felt bad creatively because all of our influences are just sort of on the road.

Do you guys find that you do much writing on the road?

Jesse: I think there are a lot of conceptual ideas that we will birch while on the road.

Al: I think that there are things that we’ve written, as Jesse said, conceptually, almost to completion on the road. We get it to a point where all we need to do is just go into a studio for a few hours and it comes together. In that sense, absolutely we’ve done a lot of work on the road. We’ll hear something that inspires us in some way. Recently we played in New York, and the DJ that played in front of us was just plain amazing. And I know I definitely took if not anything specific, away from that, I definitely took a certain feel that I want to use in future ideas and stuff. So there’s a lot of work that gets done on the road and in our minds.

Jesse: We’re neglecting something so important! We basically travel with our studio now, as we talked about, but we’re basically now always recording as we’re performing, so we know that the multi-track outs that are being recorded exactly the same way –with the same cables even. Everything is exactly the same as we did it on the record, except we’re performing it in front of people. So we have all of those recordings, we archive everything. All of the stuff that we make up while we’re on the road, things that aren’t just us performing the songs, and really we’re playing half of what would be in front of the audiences, we made it up on the spot. I’m pretty sure that there’s something from the New York show that will definitely be on the next album. There was a moment where I was like “Fuck, this is big, holy shit!”

MSTRKRFT tour dates:

Beyond The Valley

Lardner, VIC

28th Dec, 2016 - 1st Jan, 2017

Mercat Basement

Melbourne, VIC

30th Dec, 2016

Field Day

Sydney, NSW

1st Jan, 2017

Words by Caitlin Medcalf

LISTEN TO NEW MUSIC HERE