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Lemonade: Weird And Wired

Their ethereal feel mixes dub-step, grime, dance and electro; their experimental nature goes beyond the usual synths.

Posted 13th November 2009, 5:06pm in Interviews, by Jasmine Phull
Lemonade Introducing Brooklyn based trio Lemonade. Their ethereal feel mixes dub-step, grime, dance and electro. Their experimental nature goes beyond the usual synths, walks into the kitchen and reaches for the closest kitchen utensil and or food group.

Their stuff is weird and wired; their known for taking you on gastronomical adventures through their innovative use of food. 'Bliss Out' takes you to the jungle dance-floor while newly released 'Big Weekend' is simultaneously dubby, noisey and tropical.

Member Callan Clendenin gives us the lowdown.

Callan: Can you not ask me boring questions?

Sure. What was the decision behind moving from San Francisco to NY?
C:: In SF there just wasn’t really a scene for the stuff that we do, but mostly we all wanted to move for personal reasons.

I saw the XLR8R video (http://revision3.com/xlr8rtv/lemonade/)...
C: We made that in our makeshift studio in the club house. We’ve always kind of joked about the idea of combining food and music. Then we came back from tour with no money to our names and XLR8R offered us $40 and we we’re like let’s buy food! It’s a funny song - we like it, but it’s not fully representative of our sound. It’s kind of a cartoonish extrapolation of what we do normally, but it’s still fun.

So it seems like these gastronomical adventures are quite an integral part of your music making process?
C: We’ve definitely always cooked a lot, not just cause we like it but cause we don’t really have any money. But, we’ve always sampled weird stuff, except for recently since we’re lazier and it’s easier to manipulate samples than it is to record stuff.

Is eating a carrot an exciting experience, or are the unpredictable 'eating' noises no longer a novelty?
C:: We haven’t done much sampling of synths, but once you start working with electronic production, every time you hear a cool sound, you really wish you could sample it.

Like a car door?
C: Not so much a car, but maybe a deadbolt. Maybe some type of door but not a car-door. I don’t like cars.

How was Spain’s Primavera compared to stuff you’ve done in the US? The crowds, the environment?
C: Primavera is just the ideal festival – there are soo many good artists and it’s in the perfect place. That festival had the best crowd; we played to soo many people and everyone was just dancing – it was great.

How did your songs translate in such an open air environment?
C: The stuff on our debut is very distorted and extremely noisy and that stuff was really good for warehouses but the stuff we’re writing now [for the second album] is for big out-door festivals. It’s bigger, much less noisy and less limited.

A lot of artists seem to remix your songs. Do you get a kick out of seeing what other people can do with your music?
C: Definitely. It would be pretty cool if one of the UK funky dub-step artists had a go.

Dub-step and grime is pretty big in the UK.
C: Yea, we’ve always listened to it and at one point no one else in America was listening to it. The beats are just really hyper.

Where would we find your CD in a music store?
C: We’ll it’s really difficult. We’re marketed as an ‘indie’ act, and we don’t really know that we are. If there was an experimental/dance section I guess you’d find it there.

I think a lot of bands are being labelled indie bands.
C: It's just a buzz term - it's the new 'mainstream' music. It's like 'alternative' in the 90's; bands like the Butthole Surfers, were being put in the same genre as a band like the Cardigans. And they are completely different.

And do you think that’s what is happening now with the term ‘indie’?
C: Yeah, it’s like whatever wasn’t designed to be played on the radio is indie.

How did you hook up with music producer Chris Coady (TVOTR, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, !!!, Blonde Redhead)?
C: He saw us play in Brooklyn and he just really liked us. Then we saw him a year later and he invited us to record at the studio he had with TVOTR’s Dave Sitek.

What an opportunity.
C: He was really great and he did it for free. We keep trying to get enough money to pay him back.

Just buy him some beers.
C: Totally, but he’s very grateful and he wants to still do stuff with us. We were lucky because at that time the music scene in SF and NY felt less crowded, so people felt more inclined to do favours for one another. But now, I feel like there are soo many bands trying to get people to do them favours.

Your Pitchfork review was amazing. Did that help widen your fan-base?
C: It did a couple of things. It definitely introduced us to a larger audience. It has allowed us to play bigger shows and thus become a little bit distanced, from the immediate artist community that we used to be involved with.

Is that a good or bad thing?
C: It’s kind of a bad thing, although I could never complain about the review and the exposure, but now there’s kind of like this rule where we have to headline shows. But it has sustained our momentum and allowed us to work a lot more on touring.

Last but not least, now that you’re sharing the same city as Lady Gaga, what is your opinion on the G?
C: That rap she did. That one song was really weird.

Which one?
C: I don’t know, it was a weird rap it was like ‘chicken and lickn’.. and stuff. I think it was called Poker Face.

It seems like she’ll do almost anything to maintain the spotlight.
C:: Yeah, I can’t tell if she’s smart or stupid. She’s probably smart.

Kinda like Paris Hilton...
C: Yeah, in like an abstract way..

Lemonade’s self-titled debut album came out in September.
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