May 22, 2013

Words by Ash Kissane

Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s debut self-titled album was a fireball of modern 60s psych; hooks and fuzz; and beautifully crafted compositions, skyrocketing the band onto the international stage. From that point on, the band were thrown into a hectic year-and-a-half of international touring, during which UMO’s Jake Portrait said the band, ”Were all just trying not to die.” From this relentless period of touring, their sophomore release, II, was born and it did not disappoint, proving Unknown Mortal Orchestra to be one of the most exciting bands around. The band will be hitting our shores once again this July to take stage at Splendour in the Grass and I had a chat to UMO’s bassist, Jake Portrait, about their sophomore, trying international tour schedules, and why SXSW sucks.

MM: So, it’s been an incredibly busy year of touring already, how are you finding it so far? JP: It’s good! The shows are bigger and they’re into it a surprising amount in the UK. I’m kind of shocked at how well things are going here; I knew it was going well, but you don’t really know because we’re stateside. It’s been really fun and we have a new drummer, Riley Geare, and he’s amazing at drums and really fun to hang out with. So, I would say in the two-and-a -half years and 500 shows we’ve put in, this is definitely the best that I’ve felt touring. It’s the most fun.

So, what’s been a highlight of this tour for you? Well, we’re playing the London show tonight at Village Underground which has been sold out for months. It’s the biggest venue we’ve done in London, so I’m really looking forward to that one. We’re also trying to go in the studio with Mark Ronson this morning and record a song for his radio show which would be a highlight, obviously. But we did Germany; we did five shows there. I’d say at the moment, that would be the highlight so far because we’ve never done any work in Germany before, and we got to see Cologne and that was amazing. That was probably my favourite show.

What were the audiences like there? The audiences were smaller. They’re funny because we didn’t really know what they were thinking, and there would be times where it would be dead silent, which was similar when we were playing in Asia. We played in Singapore and Japan and you could hear a pin drop in the audience when we were playing. Then you finish and they just start screaming and you’re like, “OK, they liked it.” They were very observant and polite. Stateside, and it’s kind of like that in Australia; people just kind of go nuts and pour a beer on their head. Screaming and yelling… Mostly the audiences over here seem like they’re just staring at every move that we make and, like I said, when we stop playing they kind of give it up, which is good.

Your sophomore, II, like your debut is a brilliant record and is doing incredibly well. How have you found the response to the new material playing it live? Yeah, it’s been good. Sometime we play the first song off the new record, and the guitar part starts and everyone starts screaming. You can feel that the second record has gotten a lot further than the first one, just based off people’s reactions. The crowds are getting more diverse, you know? The second record definitely caught a whole different crop of people. I feel like we’re really attentive to the way that we play the music live, and always have been. I feel like, right now, we’re kind of at the peak. This is the band playing our music the way that we’ve been wanting it to sound for the last two years. I feel like this is the moment to see the band. It’s kind of us at our best.

After the release of your first album, you guys pretty much packed up and toured straight for a year-and-a-half, what was that experience like? Was it a bit like being thrown in the deep end? (laughs) Oh, man, the joke is that we were all just trying not to die. First of all, the travelling. We’d never done that amount of travelling before; just circling around the world, back and forth, zigzagging and all over the place. It was really fun but it was incredibly exhausting. We were kind of saying yes to everything, just because it was so exciting. Not that anything has really changed, I just think that there are tricks to touring that we didn’t really have when we started. We’ve taken a month here and a month there before the second record came out, and we kind of caught our breaths a bit. We have a much, much better manager now and we’re being taken care of this time around. I feel like we’re way better at it now. But yeah, that first year-and-a-half was fucking insane, completely insane. I have stories, just endless stories of just really ridiculous things that I’m surprised that we made it out of.

Any you’d like to share? (laughs) I wouldn’t even know where to start.

What was your first gig like as Unknown Mortal Orchestra? It was in Portland, we played with Smith Westerns. Really, what had happened was, “Ffunny Ffriends“ had come out on the internet, and obviously, you know, it caught a lot of attention. Ruban didn’t really have a band and had made this stuff and didn’t really know what to do with it. We were close friends and he was like, “What should I do? There’s this band, Smith Westerns, that offered me a tour,” and I was like, “I love that band!” So, he was kind of like, “Well, let’s go!” We had to assemble a band in two weeks, then get up in front of Portland. At that point, I’d been in Portland for ten years and I knew everybody, and playing at home is always the most difficult for some reason. So, it was a pretty nerve-wracking gig. Not to mention the fact that Domino (Records) had flown out from England to watch our first gig, Fat Possum (Records) had flown out from Mississippi to watch our first gig. You know, we had booking agents there and it was sold out, so there was a lot of pressure. There’s a YouTube video of us playing “Ffunny Ffriends” from that first show that just totally went internet crazy, almost like the “Ffunny Ffriends” single did. You can find it if you’re really curious; Ruban had a cape on and we had only red lights on the stage. It was a dark, dark beginning.

You guys are constantly moving and being uprooted, but now you’re all based in Portland, what’s that like for a home base? I think it’s good. I think I’m on year 12 of being in Portland and I just got an apartment in New York. I’m going to slowly start working out of New York a little bit more, but Portland’s been good to me for the last 12 years. Riley has been there for a long time as well, and he really embodies Portland. I know it’s been really good to Ruban, because after going to New Zealand and spending a lot of time in Auckland and coming to Portland, there are some connections there; there are some things about it that feel really comfortable. It’s a lovely place. It really is a great city.

Can you explain a bit about the significance of Janet Farrar (Irish ‘witch’/witchcraft expert) being on the cover of II? We had a close friend who posted that picture on the Internet and it kind of caught Ruban’s attention. I think it was an Instagram post. Ruban had snapped it and made it his background on his phone and it was just a cool photo. At that point, there was no knowledge of where the photo had come from. As it started coming up as a cover option and everyone got pretty attached to the idea of it being the cover, for some reason it just seemed to work really well, we started trying to find the original photo. It was a really impossible find and we contacted our friend, Taylor, and she had gotten it from a book in a store which was owned by a witch in New York, but she wouldn’t go back into the store. The witch had said something to her that made her not want to go back in there. So we went to Taylor’s sister and coaxed her into going back into the store to get this book which is this black book with no title on the front, but once you flip it open, it’s titled The Witches Bible. It’s a book that Janet wrote a long time ago; it’s kind of a guide to being a witch, really. Ruban wrote Janet a really nice personal email explaining to her the significance of the photo and its role in the record, and she sent back all of these photos from that day, taken by her husband at the time, of her wearing that garment, chilling out in the wilderness. She’s awesome. She’s really cool. She didn’t try to get a bunch of money out of the band; she just liked the music; she had worked at Apple records, The Beatles label, and was just into the whole thing. She was like, “This is my era of music!” So it all worked out, it’s an amazing photo, and she’s an amazing person. We got lucky on that one, thank God for the Internet!

Who are some people you listened to growing up that you feel might have had an influence on you? I like the most generic shit in the world. David Bowie, T-Rex; I like Proto-punk, that kind of genre in general. Punk music had a pretty big influence on me when I was really young. Obviously, I got my first drum set after Nevermind came out. That lead into getting a guitar and starting a band, pretty much. My story’s kind of the most generic on the music front, it’s kind of just indie-rock and punk-rock were just what got me going. Ruban’s kind of a crate-digger, you know? He’s got lots of weird records, old and new. He’s really into the Floyd, and I love Pink Floyd too. There’s a reason why those records have lasted for that long. The way they’ve made the records; incredible recordings; incredible musicians; incredible producers, amazing songs that have lasted the test of time.

You’ve played some huge festival shows, more recently SXSW. Do you enjoy festivals like that? How do you find festival shows compare to your own live shows? SXSW sucks. It’s a terrible thing. It’s got such an incredible spread internationally, everyone always brings it up, but it’s just a shitty festival. They just roll into a beautiful town; Texas is a beautiful state, and they just jam 125,000 people into this space. The bands are completely not looked after, the music is absolutely at the bottom of the priority list, Red Bull is at the top. We could just not do it I suppose, but for some reason we always seem to be on a tour where we’re right nearby SXSW. So I don’t like that one, but we played Meredith two years ago and that was one of the best days of my life. The whole tradition of Meredith, I think it’s 23 years now that it’s been together, and it’s an amazing story about how that festival came together. The feeling around that festival was just incredible. We played right before Kurt Vile in the evening with our first album in front of  11,500 people or something. It was incredible. I really like playing festivals, but the little club shows in Germany, 200 people the first time we’d been there, was also pretty special. I like it all!

You’ve got The Great Escape festival tomorrow in Brighton as well which has a great line up, are you looking forward to that one? Yeah, I am!

There are a few little Australian bands in that line up, it’s good to see. Oh, really? Who do you know that’s there?

Deep Sea Arcade, Velociraptor, Snakadaktal, The Griswolds… There’s a fair few. Oh, nice!

Then you’re playing Splendor in the Grass festival over here in July… Yeah, that one’s like a big deal, right? That one keeps coming up. To be honest, when we get this busy, I stop looking at stuff because it’s slightly intimidating. It’s even hard to keep track of it. Anybody that asks us about it seems to say it’s an incredible festival which is exactly what happened before Meredith. All these people were like, “Oh, wow, you’re playing Meredith!” So I would assume Splendour’s probably pretty cool. We just played All Tomorrow’s Parties which was curated by TV on the Radio, and it turns out those guys are the nicest, coolest guys ever and they’re playing that. I’m really looking forward to hanging out with them, and I’m pretty psyched about seeing Frank Ocean, because he’s amazing and incredible. So, I’m excited.

Published – Moustache Magazine