AN INTERVIEW WITH... KHRUANGBIN | PRIMAVERA SOUND 2022 W2 | #PS2022

rps live from promo beta sound 2022 proudly presented by cooper ladies and gentlemen you're listening to radio primavera sound from the parkdale forum we are in weekend two of primavera sound and it is my joy our joy and pleasure and honor to receive one of the bands that me most of the festival attendants are most eager to see we have with us miss laura lee and dj from kruang bin with us in the studio welcome all right thank you so much thank you that was quite an intro yeah and i mean we're we're super excited uh and we don't just say we say this to every band because we truly are excited to see everyone and it's been two years of not being able to be at a festival but we are especially excited to finally see kruang bin in spain is this the first time you're playing espana well last night i suppose we did play last night yeah we played this we're in phoenix at the pueblo espanol in the old town that's right but we actually played barcelona a few years ago at the sidecar oh wow what a privilege to see you in such a small place it's a small venue with low ceilings yeah that's a privilege no longer no more when's the last time you split you played a small venue oh it's been 18. yeah 2018. it's been a while yeah and there's no looking back now but back then the sidecar didn't feel like a small venue to us uh it was if i could remember correctly it was very uh nerve-wracking like uh we're playing yeah and we're playing barcelona for the first time and and actually this really lovely guy gave me a shirt off his back at that show and i still have it and wear it regularly so every time i put on that shirt i think of sidecar did you watch school i just told him that i liked it and he was like here um and yeah it's great people in barcelona are nice i guess so well i can imagine i imagine because you have such a loyal fan base uh do you have lots of that happening on on most of your concerts where there's this beautiful exchange of humanity and and things that get yeah exchange like t-shirts memorabilia that make it feel like a special experience yeah always uh i think a couple of times i've given out a pair of my drumsticks and that's hard to do because if you're a drummer there's this thing about wooden sticks and i don't i'm not one of the drummers that plays really loud and hard so i can use my sticks for quite a long time and the longer you use them the better they feel because they you know the sweat and the oil from your hands starts to wear into the sticks and it becomes really really nice and broken in and there's a sweet spot and people ask me for them sometimes and i'm like you know i like these they feel so good you know i want to play with these uh but yeah i mean admittedly i've used the same pair of sticks one time for like a year and a half played a year and a half of shows with the same pair of sticks and yeah it was hard to let go of those well you might have to customize them a little bit so that they're like look these are like my my personal you know it's like having someone's boxing gloves or i don't know how yeah they're uh my sticks actually have my signature on yeah i'm in a little little tiny airplane so when people get you know a pair of dj sticks they know i'm super biased but i i definitely think that the people that come to our shows are the best audience in the world i've i go to shows a lot i've played with other artists and i love the people at krongman shows it's a really beautiful like kind accepting fun atmosphere and i mean they're our show you know that's what we see and i'm so happy with what i see out there yeah me too i think our our shows are microcosm of just society in general literally everyone we see all ages all races it's it's a beautiful thing it's earth that's the beauty it's true that kruangbin's music is is very positive and it's and it it helps us listeners really like travel without moving and you take us through so many parts of the world where and you can obviously tackle any kind of ancestral old music from any part and make it yours with your your your touch is there any part of the world that is ex that seems interesting that you haven't tapped yet that you think it would work as a creative source of inspiration for kramer uh for me personally we haven't played the continent of africa yet and that's on my list i want to go to the motherland and set foot there and play for those beautiful people my brothers and sisters there we're so close right now yeah this is the closest this is the closest we've been just right across the water well i wanted to know what what about spanish music because you're such avid music fans are there spanish bands that you like yeah well your second album a lot of it had it even had a spanish title um i like uh las grecas yes yeah i love um suzanna estrada um yeah i think yeah i mean she's a freaky woman i love it live for it um i like paloma personally she's huge so yeah i've been digging back into her catalog recently and i like the stuff that she's doing too yeah el fadi was a big influence for us um on the last record el fari i i mean we would never imagine a band any band especially from austin texas to name drop el fatty like he is a god in spain you know he's we in spain we have julie iglesias and el fari and you're either of one or the other because was like the the the music of the rich the music of the wonderful and friday was like the working-class hero you know so it's like there's always been the two spains no and johan whose t-shirt were you wearing last week [Music] i like some julio songs there's some good there's some it's not the like big songs that we like but there's a couple jams of julio that i like but um yeah bellota our song off the last record was a very elfati inspired song this is a little like chili pepper you know [Music] oh my god we have the headline already this is the the of this show oh um and another thing uh you were you were talking about maybe uh drawing more on african influences for a future project you are going to be playing on the one the biggest one of the biggest stages at the festival just before guerrillas who are a band or a musical project that just absorbs every other talent in the world to create a collaboration i i i'm surprised that if that kruang bin and gorillas haven't done anything yet or am i wrong is there has there been an approach from damon no we haven't done anything uh at least today but i'm a big fan yeah like clint eastwood is one of my favorite songs i love that song yeah we love the gorillas yeah surely yeah damon hasn't texted me today you know what's up with that no um we don't yeah we don't know them but they're i feel like there's a lot of similar vibes in a way we watched him uh we played a festival with him i believe outside outside lands and uh we had a rare chance an opportunity to watch them you know play from the stage i think there was a little balcony area from the stage we watched but yeah fantastic show and you're going to be playing at 8.05 p.m i believe which is kind of golden hour you know some sun's going down did you ask for that slot or did they just give it to you we just look at the schedule the day before see who we're supposed to go it's cause like kruang bin it really is like music for the sunset i mean you can you can listen to your music at any point in the day in the night but there is this thing and because your albums are called well one of it is the texas sun there's this this afternoon kind of you know that melancholy when the day is done and you're ready to meet the night it's just so perfect that you've been given that slot like booking uh i i feel bad for them because there's so much beef uh people are a little bit like with the clashes but it's like look this was just the sweet spot um do you enjoy do you and do you have a preference if it was up to you for playing at certain hours in open air festivals i mean the golden hour is always beautiful i mean anything that's playing with the sun and natural lighting is is beautiful we played a sunset i mean a sunrise session uh once in croatia on the rocks on the rocks on the beach right on the beach and uh we had to get up really really early for that one i'm not a warning person but when we got out there and we played and it was amazing it was also like it it was when the clubs closed so everyone had been out i think that you know clubs goes at 4-5 and then they came to the rocks and we played so we were the like come down set and it was magical because you can watch people it's like spirits kind of bounce right where they want to yeah yeah i i wouldn't talk about texas i've never been to texas have you got home no no no nashville that's not texas no no also i wanted to say we're from houston yeah i said dallas he said awesome you said austin i said austin yeah sorry it's close austin's about three and a half hours up the road but yeah houston do you have that like barcelona madrid where houston and austin and a hundred percent yeah sorry no i was gonna say i've never been i've never been to texas but i feel like your music kind of transports me there um what is texas really like and what is its music like i mean do you think that what you make is quite typical of texas or is it just too diverse to say texas is huge the you the entire uk can fit inside texas three and a half times so you have to think just how diverse that makes the state i mean we have desert we have swamp we have mountains we have planes there's rolling hills so just in landscape it's kind of a little bit of everything yeah um but it's it's expansive and you know texas sun and texas moon are referring to the sky which is the biggest sky you'll ever see because you don't have to build up in texas because it's so big that you build out so the sky is never interrupted you're never you know like there's not buildings in the way you can see sky from from all angles yeah yeah that's a beautiful thing and also the the fact that most of kruang bin is mostly an instrumental project but you know you've found a wonderful collaborator in leon bridges uh it was a match made in heaven could you i'm sure you've been asked many times but could you for our audience here could you tell us a little bit how that friendship or that collaboration came to exist of course we went on tour with leon in 2018 and you know when you tour with an artist especially an artist from your home state being texas texans have a lot of pride and uh so we hit it off quick it was like touring with your family almost and uh you know we passed a song to leon one of our instrumentals and the next day he sent send it back like kind of singing over it it's like oh we should record this and basically that one song turned into the two eps that now exist so if this isn't too rude a question who gets the last word on decisions when you're working on something like that you know weirdly on on the records with leon there wasn't we never really had that moment yeah we have it on our own records but not with um leon it all kind of worked fairly easily yeah and even in in our own records it's not really a last word thing i mean there's three of us so there's usually always a deciding valley one of the guys from lightning bolt it's a duo and they're like man it's always like uh it's a 50 50 decision if one says no then it doesn't go ahead whereas when there's three who's usually the deal breaker in kuang bin well that's the thing it's like i consider krung bin the uh the venn diagram of where the three of our tastes meet so there's a good chance if all three of us are really really into something then that's where krungman lives yeah so you know the things that need a deciding vote are usually relatively small it's like is this a fade out or is there a last note you know they're like but those are really big decisions i know they are and they the the argument will go on for a while but luckily the three of us always figure it out it must be because you know you could say that some of your music is could be labeled as pop in depending what context but generally i can imagine that you have you can have creative decisions that are endless like is it do we just continue fading out or have a bit of a jam and no it's it's it's more expansive yeah oh yeah it must be a headache and i wonder we were talking about a fourth member and laura i think you once called the barn you're recording the fourth member of the band which i thought was a rather charming thing to say you've recorded all of your music there basically why is it so important to you why is it like the fourth member of the band um it's a unique place to record nobody else records there you know whereas you see so many artists go to amazing studios and record which is incredible experience um ours is unique to us nobody else goes to our barn so it nothing else sounds like it and i think that is similar to each of us in the band you know nobody sounds like dj playing drums nobody sounds like me on bass or mark on guitar and nobody sounds like the barn it's in the middle of nowhere and we get to look out onto rolling hills and haystacks and cows and it's a really beautiful thing to create somewhere away from everything [Music] and it feels like home we've tried to plan to record in other places and it always we always end up at the barn and there's always problems because we're dealing with nature and elements but it is also part of the fun i wonder sometimes presumably you can record there as long as you want um do you ever have moments where you you're like okay look at the end of this week we've got to finish otherwise we're going to be here till you know yeah 100 that's yeah we usually don't we haven't had infinite time because we're always touring yeah fine here lately our engineer steve christensen always says you know when a record is finished either when you run out of time or you run out of money and time is money usually most of the cases yeah is it is it staggering when you see that a song like texas sun has [Music] 121. 148 thousand 846 listens uh the last time i checked which was just like 10 minutes ago um we should probably add a few no i'm just kidding definitely i try not to think too much about it yeah um but it's cool you know i love all all of my song babies equally yeah i i was amazed that you played alexandra palace in london which is a big big gig i've got this kind of theory which may be nonsense you've become big by stealth because there was never a moment when i realized that you were getting really big and then suddenly like 121 million uh plays in alexandra palace like how how did you say it how was it for you yeah because it's not like you've had some massive pr campaign like julio alessia's did you know and stuff like that it's like this is as ben said it's stealthily all of a sudden um i i mean relatively we we do try to stay you know kind of low-key and out of the spotlight but uh i don't know um i kind of felt something kind of simmering around the pandemic when everyone went inside and you know we all kind of had to coop up and uh coming out felt you know like a renaissance i mean like i did for a lot of other bands you know getting back to stages and and playing and welcoming each other back but um yeah it felt different and i don't know for us it's a little bit insular because we've been doing this for so long i mean a lot of people don't realize but we've been a band since 2010 yeah um and you know that's 12 years today yeah so yeah i mean there was certainly a jump post pandemic yeah we released an album our own album plus the release with leon so i think but it was hard to see that things grew because we were all inside so it wasn't like we were touring during that time where we could see that the crowd was growing all of a sudden we come back and play alexandra palace but we have done the rounds yeah so you know it's just like we're the we're the turtle i guess yeah like i mean our first show in in the uk specifically was uh at the ace hotel in a tiny little basement yeah uh back in november of well october 20 2015. yeah and uh you know and then from there we kind of worked our way up and you know i remember playing the roundhouse with father john misty the following year and that feeling like like seeing 3 000 people was like wow you know we were all so nervous alexander palace was crazy yeah it was it's like 12 000 or 11 000 people it looked like a festival inside yeah indoor yeah indoor oh wait so you see this afternoon i what i've read from internet is i get the sense that it was from touring with other musicians with other bands as their touring musicians that they suggested you form your own band like they people it was other musicians who encouraged you to to form crankbait oh my god that's like wikipedia's fake news yeah that was fake news no no i went on a i went on a tour mark got me a gig playing bass i'd barely been playing opening up for bonobo and we were in a minivan with like gear and five people and we were all flipping coins to see who got to sleep on the bed that night because we were in motel sixes and at the end of that run i looked at mark and was like i want to start a band um and he was like are you sure it was like i want to do this forever and then i asked dj if he would join our band and then that was it yeah yeah yeah it was a sort of naive i'd never been in a band and i'd barely been playing that i was like oh yeah i can do this um i feel comfortable right being on stage every night and what it takes you know there's a lot of emotional toll to get to that moment where you plug in and hello everyone we are so and so yeah but also correct me if i'm wrong with this one but i get this uh some of you uh came from your musical background is in church playing in church choirs being the the backing band for for church choirs which is quite a a phenomenon in itself in in the south of the united states yeah there's a so many talents i mean from aretha franklin i don't know everyone who made a a an incred left an impre impressive legacy in soul music and stuff came from gospel came from stuff and i get the feeling that people who come from playing in church have a more solid base to become an entertainer is this a fallacy or or could you comment on this idea this perception yeah there's a there's a style that happens uh i guess playing in church because uh it was actually a big transition for me transitioning to the stage because in church um you're almost trained not to be seen you know yeah and not to draw attention to yourself and then obviously on the stage that's you know totally flipped because everyone's looking at you so but i think it in a sense it teaches you to get out of the way of the music and just serve the music itself and not serve yourself and i think at the heart that's what a good musician does i i'm sorry i used to watch them play at church and you really have to be in tune with how the audience is feeling and build them up in the moments that you're meant to and i think that you know the concerts in general are some form of a service yeah yeah so and that whole thing of like you are kind of seeking to reach a higher play spiritual plane i no is is that maybe what it is whereas sometimes on a tour maybe you're you're you're you're in it but but sometimes you it might feel not i'm not saying your case but a lot of bands sometimes we have spoken to them when they get that jaded experience it's like when we've been playing for 15 nights uh in a row right we're on autopilot sometimes there's no spiritual plane here it's just like oh that's just well that's the thing about playing live it's it's an infinite feedback loop of energy um we've had instances to where we've had long sound checks for instance and when you're in soundcheck obviously there's no one in the building it's just you playing songs and when we walk off it's like why am i so why am i so tired right now it's because all of the energy that you gave you didn't get it back but when you play the live show you give this energy to the crowd and then they give it back to you and then you give it back to them and they give it back and the opposite happens when you leave the stage from a show it's like you feel amped and energized because everything's coming back at you so that's you know it's that's a thing yeah i wanted to ask about about your live show because i saw i saw the show last night it's the first time i've seen you really enjoyed it and maybe everyone knows this but i didn't know you did that kind of cover medley that was amazing like how many songs can you throw into that because it was just like song after i was like oh my god it's this and this and you did them all so well and like changing tempos and everything um yeah we change we changed it up yeah we started that was that was what we did last night um god i don't know what the biggest medley we've ever done is the mega medley the mega man we call it the mega medley but which was basically uh a bunch of the medleys that we put together previously just stacked on top of each other and um yeah i think there's you know and and the records that we put out we try to sing in different languages sometimes because i think we want to kind of wink to as many people as we can to say we we know you we love you we're here too for you and i think the medleys in a way they're all over the place and some everybody is going to know one of the songs and so everybody can have that moment where you're like oh yeah yeah yeah so it's like it's about bringing people together at the end of it talking about about languages we were we were talking about this yesterday and we were saying that um talk about bands who come to barcelona and speak catalan do you are you going to try any catalan tonight i am not well versed in catalan at all i don't think anyone is i'm not either being from texas we all speak a little spanish yeah uh but the span is just a little bit different here i guess the dialect of the speed uh it's so fast like the the speed of the spanish here but it's so beautiful i mean the language itself it's a beautiful language uh and i love hearing native spaniards speak the language it's like so it's like a flower yeah luckily because our songs are mainly instrumental we can just lean in everybody speaks instrumental it's a universal language most definitely oh by the way you've had time you've had time to do a little bit of tourism in barcelona since you played two you're playing two nights have you been able to see a little bit of the city is there anything that you've liked um we've been hanging out quite a bit i mean i went out for a walk a pretty long walk the other day it was nice i i've enjoyed being here the food is great yeah walked on the sea i mean honestly because there's so many artists here it's like summer camp for musicians so being able to catch up with your friends in a beautiful place is an incredible yeah you hung out with flea the other day oh cause he's they played not the festival they played day before yesterday in barcelona ah so yeah he's like hey i'm in town yeah my my bff oh because of course and have you ever played together do you jam on the base because no but we had a beautiful moment where it was flea and thundercat and myself and they had a supergroup we stood in a base triangle they stood in a base triangle what what was that was it free basically freebase was it peter hook from new order enjoyed a business manny from stone roads and someone else maybe someone from happy mondays or or and i don't think they have released any records but they certainly existed yeah yeah that's that's are you guys are you still avid record collectors i mean do you try and buy a search out like record shops in wherever you go in the in the world we yeah we haven't this we haven't yet this run um we will it's it's crazy because we've we've been touring up until we like last year and this year but we've been in a coped bubble yeah so we weren't allowed to go into shops or see anybody until like very recently yeah so i think the first step was like friends and then it'll be record shops wawa records wawa records they actually they reissue uh long-lost albums they have like licensing thing they've got it all covered ariel pink i think it was the one who said it was his favorite record store in the world uh slightly grumpy in my opinion yeah well oh the people that wow oh yeah but record record shop you expect record shopping clerks to be like the most uh grumbly anti-social people on earth with the best music taste ever i want to ask very briefly about your t-shirts because i was at the gig last night again and i saw some amazing t-shirts and there are some people down there that have amazing t-shirts as well really beautiful how come like who does your t-shirts how come they're so they're so amazing ah oh we have the designer in front of us they are so nice congratulations very good work um i i used to work in um in art i used to work in art museums and in curation and so i'm still getting to use that muscle and finding all the artists that make our work um and then we get to hang them up on our wall or wear them and it's like really great yeah yeah yeah you got to leave artwork behind and along with the great recordings anyway i think that's all we have time for yeah the bell tolls the bell tolls uh thank you so much uh dj laura for joining us here in a radio primary sound thanks to the audience that come here i hope you guys come tonight yeah yeah eight o'clock eight o'clock the golden hour over at the at the massive stage i think it's well one of the two the next two i would okay i think yeah yeah okay well uh it's been an honor it's been a pleasure and thank you so much for your music thank you thanks for having us rps live from promo sound 2022. proudly presented by cooper

Channel: Radio Primavera Sound

Views: 15,613

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Id: qS1i93x2mrQ

Length: 28min 9sec (1689 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 28 2022