PLAYGROUND BOSTON

Photo by Pete Legasey

Red Wire Black Wire isn’t a household name quite yet, but that could be changing soon. Coming from a lineage of successful Wesleyan University bands (namely fellow indie electro-pop-ites MGMT), RWBW recently relocated to Brooklyn where they have begun to garner attention both in New York and across the online community. The music is the brainchild of front-man and keyboardist Doug Walters, who composed RWBW’s debut EP Compass on his laptop, before assembling a 6-piece band to perform the songs live. Poised to release a full-length album and embark on an ambitious tour in the fall, RWBW will be dropping their distinctive commixture of reflective rock anthems soaked in synth-heavy dance grooves across the country and beyond.

Headlining the Middle East Upstairs on Monday night, Red Wire Black Wire was joined by The Franklin Kite, who celebrated the release of their new EP Explosions and Batteries. I arrived in time to catch TFK’s set, rife with cascading, electronically tinged pop hooks. Technology is certainly a friend to these guys, as their songs feature both occasional autotune, and remotely controlled midi drums triggered by a Wii nunchuck controller (in accompaniment to a live drum set). TFK’s songs, floated through the packed house airy and narcotic, the bass and synths rolling out filmy layers of sound to be cut by the pounding drumming.

TFK’s set nicely priming the healthy Monday-night crowd, Red Wire Black Wire took to the stage near midnight. Talking with Doug Walters before the show, he explained jokingly to me that the he would have to be back in the studio in New York by 11 AM the next morning, and as a result this would be his most sober performance to date. Perhaps a level of sobriety works well for the band as, from the start, Walters and his compatriots blasted out a tight, hypnotic sound, deluging the room with buzzing dance-rock energy.

RWBW is one of many bands currently propped for success, yet like many a “buzz” band, still teetering on the precipice between stardom and fizzling obscurity. Walters is a man grinding to make sure the latter doesn’t happen. Adding gravity to the band’s weightless synths and harmonized guitar hooks, Walter’s often troubled and vulnerable narratives ground his songs in the realm of relatable emotion, making them as compelling lyrically as they are danceable. On stage, Walters jumps around the floor, poses for the camera and climbs into the audience to survey his band mid-song, all while delivering his music with careful precision and restraint. The five band-members performing beside him hold up their ends ably, guitarists Zac Meyer and Greg Walters (Doug’s brother) tastefully complimenting each others’ riffs, ringing atop bouncy, poppy rhythms.

Though I headed to the Middle East having heard just a small selection off of the band’s 2008 EP Compass, RWBW quickly converted me as a fan. Their live show is the real deal, and left me eager to hear their forthcoming full-length album. I also had the chance to sit down and talk with Doug Walters and bass player Jonathan Sirlin before the show, our conversation touching on their upcoming tour and album, the Wesleyan music scene, and what RWBW have in common with TI. Here’s what they had to say.

What’s the band up to these days, I noticed you’ve been doing a smattering of Northeast shows?

Doug: Yeah we’ve been doing mostly regional weekend things, even though today’s a Monday, but… we currently have jobs so it’s hard. But we are going to really tour in September.
Jon: We’ve also been spending a lot of time recording recently so we’ve been taking some time off to do that, turning down some shows to stay in and finish up some recordings.

When is the new album going to come out?

Doug: In September …late September
Jon: We kinda wanna finish the record before we have a release date (laughs)
Doug: We basically have just another couple days of mixing.
Jon: All the elements are there, we’re just making it right.
Doug: It should be mastered in two weeks, which is awesome because it’s been a long long time coming. We tracked a lot of it on our own in our apartment, and also with our friend Daniel Lynas at Wonderful Studios. And now we are mixing it with Britt Myers who did the Chairlift record, and has been working with a lot of bands in New York these days.

Doug: Well it’s a little weird because so much of it has been recorded without him, so sometimes he got some stuff and was like ‘yeah… I guess I can make this work’ (laughs). But he’s good, he’s definitely had a lot of input, not so much in terms of songwriting but…
Jon: I think we’ve all heard these songs for years now, so it’s just really good to have an outside ear on it to say like ‘well maybe you’re used to this, but THIS is how works, and you should probably go with this…’

How do you guys write your songs as a band?

Doug: I usually put it together on my computer with synths and fake drums. Sometimes I’ll have a guitarist come in and sit with me to work on stuff, and record it again, and then we work it out live and change things… and now we are re-recording everything again, for the final product. We all went to Wesleyan and most of us were music students there, so John wrote some full orchestra pieces for his thesis, so for some songs I was like ‘Hey John, write a string section for the chorus!’ (laughs)
Jon: And these songs do change very organically. They start with a skeleton and we figure out what works live, and maybe we end up changing it completely and go back and do it again. So its kinda half-way between a collaborative process and what comes from Doug.

I read on your Myspace blog that there has been some experimenting with flutes and other instruments?

(laughs)
Jon: We’re pretty fortunate to have a really good network of really excellent classical musicians that we try to exploit now as much as we can
Doug: Sometimes it works out the way we want it to and sometimes its like ‘you know what? This sounds… stupid.’(laughs) But we have some bassoon on there and tuba and French horn, and weird things on there that aren’t synthesizers that make me initially uncomfortable (laughs).

When you’re writing do you usually start with the lyrics, or the music?

Doug: You start with a female… (laughs)
Jon: Heartbroken…
Doug: I haven’t really been writing since we started recording, it’s been about four months now, which is kind of weird psychologically, because it’s really how I make sense of a lot of things. But I do carry a notebook around and write things down… but there’s all sorts of different ways. Sometime you’re sitting at a piano and playing a few chords, and like for “Compass” I started out with just a bass line and basically put the whole thing together before I put the melody over it, which is maybe why John doesn’t like that song
(laughs)
Jon: Hey I love that song! I love all the songs!
Doug: Ha, yeah… but it comes in all different ways. We tracked the title track “Robots and Roses” very different from all the others. It started out very conceptually, like I knew what I wanted the song to be before I knew any words to it. I just new “robots and roses” from this dream, which was pretty different to have a concept before the notes. I feel like it’s important to figure out what you’re doing before you start putting the notes in, so you have an idea of the textures you want to use, because I think in a lot of ways that is what differentiates music. A vocal melody and chords can be done a million different ways, so I sort of set out to try to incorporate Timbaland style synths and some other hip hop percussive style. I was listening to TI on the way here and I love it, the beats on it really remind me of Red Wire Black Wire, maybe other people don’t see that but I do…

Going back to touring for a second, what’s the plan for the tour in September? Is it national? International?

Doug: It’s vaguely international. I think we’re hitting two countries, maybe three. We are starting out in DC, and then to Denver where we are playing the Monolith Festival, which is at Red Rocks, which is…
Jon: Daunting!
Doug: Daunting… (laughs) And then heading to California where we are finally going to meet our label, which we haven’t met yet. We met one of the dudes in person, but I haven’t met my guy who I correspond with on a daily basis.
Jon: He might be an evil machine
Doug: He might be a robot
Jon: Which would be fitting… …if he was a robot… (laughs)

Ha, why would it be fitting?

Doug: Oooh, the album is called Robots and Roses, that’s what John’s talking about. And there is a middle song on it also called “Robots and Roses” which seemingly is going to be maybe a kind of turning point on the album, I dunno, we are figuring out which songs are gonna follow what at this point. And we’re kinda going in a couple different directions in figuring out how to group the music. … oh but the international (tour) thing is that this club might pay for us to go to Russia and play in Moscow! …which is weird.
Jon: And awesome!
Doug: So I think in October we could potentially be going to Moscow for 48 hours.

Do you have a following in Russia?

Jon: We’re going to find out! (laughs)
Doug: We have no idea! My brother, who actually lived in Moscow and different places in Russia over the last six years, had been working as a journalist and quit his job and moved back to America and joined my stupid rock band. So he has that Eastern connection that got us that invitation. Oh yeah we might go to Canada too… maybe
Jon: So its really more like two and a half countries (laughs)

Ouch that’s harsh.

I saw a video interview in which you said that one thing you would like to see is less irony and more sincerity in pop music today. I thought that was an interesting statement, and wondered if you could tell me more of your thoughts on this, and what sincerity in music means to you?

Doug: Well I don’t know how sincerely I really meant that…
Jon: He was being ironic!
(laughs)
Doug: No but really what I meant by that was that I feel like there is a lot of irony and layers of intent that aren’t very clear behind a lot of music, especially in the scene in Brooklyn, and I think we are… well lyrically maybe more sincere. Most of the songs are about stuff that actually happened, and I try to make them pretty direct from my life… so that’s really what I meant. And I get the feeling that irony can be a crutch a lot of time. It’s useful in that way, because it can help you avoid saying something stupid, because you didn’t mean any of [what you said] anyway, you know? But I think ideally I enjoy music that is… well I’ve been listening to a lot of a band called the National lately, and that is music that sounds very sincere to me.

Are there other bands that you’re into right now?

Doug: Well I’ve been obsessed with the National. And as I said we went to Wesleyan and MGMT came from there and I think they’re just awesome. It’s really strange because my freshman year they were just a college band and they would play their old version of “Kids,” and now I walk into a supermarket and its playing!
Jon: It’s pretty nuts!

2008 was a huge year for Wesleyan alumni that saw the rise of Santigold and MGMT to name a couple. Now you guys are getting some attention. Is there something special about Wesleyan and its music program?

Doug: Oh I could name you a bunch more bands! But I think, at least for the music program, it is very experimental, which can help overlap with pop music in a certain way… but I think it’s largely about the student body…
Jon: I think it’s really the student population. Every weekend there was always a show to go see, it was a big part of the scene. It would be like… ‘well there’s parties here and parties there but oh look there’s 4 huge shows!’ And people would drink a lot and go out to drink and have a good time at the shows… so it’s really easy to start a band, and have people come out and see you.
Doug: There were just so many good musicians all over the place.
Jon: And also going back to the music program, there were a lot of encouraging teachers who were encouraging to try things with the computer, and everyone had a laptop, and everyone could sit down and make a whole song. So when you have all these people doing this, not just for class but for fun, something’s going to come out of it, especially when you have people around to help you.
Doug: I think when bands started to do well coming out of Wesleyan people were kind of like ‘well shit, lets take this seriously!’ And once there were a couple bands that did well people really did take it more seriously and the scene kinda snowballed. So I think that could have a lot to do with it. There are other Wesleyan bands like Amazing Baby and Mobius Band that have been doing really well.

Speaking of laptop music, I heard you did a remix for Dntel?

Doug: Well I made one a while back for a competition… which I lost (laughs)… or at least didn’t win sadly… but its out there on Sound Machine!
Jon: Well I like it a lot!

Well it did certainly make it out to some blogs at least. And now there are some remixes of your songs that will be coming out?

Doug: Yeah! Shuttle, which it one of the dudes from Passion Pit’s side project, which is awesome in its own right, is doing a remix of “Compass.” And a dude named Dave Wrangler is doing a remix of “Locked Out.” I’ve not heard either yet but I’m pretty excited.

Have you heard remixes of your songs before?

Doug: Nope. This is going to be the first actually.

Does it make you nervous at all?

Doug: Nooo… well ha yeah always. But they both do cool stuff, and I feel like it doesn’t really reflect on us that much.
Jon: One thing that’s been interested about this band beginning to actually take off a little bit is that it’s cool to have other people’s support, effort, time and concern over something that I’ve been megalomaniacally slaving away at for so long. And now there are other people putting in effort in their own right and capacity for their own satisfaction, related to our project, which is really exciting.

When you are writing your own music what computer programs do you use?

Doug: I started writing music on the computer for television, when I was in high school I interned at a studio, and ended up working there for a year writing music for National Geographic documentaries. So I learned on Digital Performer there, and I still use it… but I think its time that I change. Its been really frustrating because in the studio we’ve been tracking all the stuff in Logic, and then we have to export all the stuff into separate files so I can get it into my own interface, and then we are now mixing in Pro Tools… which is NOT how I’m going to do the next album, because its been such a pain in the ass moving these files around. I feel like so much of the time I wasn’t really doing anything except for transferring these files for hours and hours and hours.

How would you do it next time?

Doug: In a beach house! With a blender, making margaritas! And all in one place, not having a job, and having more money, and doing it all on one computer! To a certain extent I think it was functional the way we did it, with our budget, and it made us do things that wouldn’t be obvious necessarily, because if we were doing it a different way maybe it would have come out differently, so it aided in the creative process a bit. But it was just so much frustration and time spent that when we first started mixing I was so emotionally exhausted that I felt like I wasn’t even really able to think about what we were doing… though I’ve gotten my head into a better place now. Doing it over a shorter period of time in one place would have been just so… awesome. And on the beach!

Anything else you want people to know about Red Wire Black Wire?

Doug: Well the Compass EP is out now, and you can get it on iTunes or from our website. And we’ll be on tour in September and the new record should be out then, and I think it’s going to be good! I’m feeling really good about it now.

Red Wire Black Wire
The Franklin Kite

n

[View with PicLens]

Thanks to Pete Legasey for the photos!