At the start of the month, Glasgow four piece AmatrArt officially moved into the 'scene' with the launch of their debut single Souls at The Old Hairdressers. A quirky electro track with a dark, haunting vibe (see The xx), we featured the track on the show a few weeks back. To find out a little more about the band, we caught up with them for our regular 'We're Only Here For The Banter' feature.
Hello! How the devil are you?
Yeah, we’re all pretty good.
It's the question everyone hates, but could illuminate our readers with a little bit about your music and your influences?
We’re still not very good at defining our music but we shall try. I guess in terms of influences there are the usual culprits for bands like us; Talking Heads, Pixies, Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Bowie, Zepplin... It’s a bit of a never ending list. We just look for people who are or were doing something interesting or a bit different. They all have a ‘sound’. We’re into that.
In terms of what we bring… Well that's hard to say as we have a lot of different songs in a lot of different genres, but I guess the main ones would be electronic alternative. There's a couple of funk rhythms involved in other songs; Niall's a shredder on bass so we had to write a few funky numbers to let him flaunt his feathers a bit. There are certain people who we guess are responsible for us all playing music together and who deserve a lot of credit, although they haven't directly influenced our sound as such.
What's your song-writing / creative process like?
It changes quite a lot. Usually it starts with someone will bringing a riff or an idea for a song to the table and everyone will pick an instrument and see what they can get from it. We like to record ideas early on, usually guitars and some sort of drum machine and then see what else we can do with it. There is a lot of computers involved and a lot of recording in our various bedrooms. However, our most recent song Alexander, which we’ll be closing our set with, came together quite differently. We came to our first practice in a while, because of uni work etc, and Josh and Jonathan had two riffs that worked pretty well together. The rest of us just jammed it out and it sort of fell into place as a really cool groove, it actually was a lot more laid back than our normal process.
What could we expect to see from a live show?
Us and our instruments. Also egg shakers, a sneaky fifth member, lights, dancing, drums, falling, and laughing. Hopefully the audience will have a party too. The first 100 attendees will get a free iPad.
Tell us about new single Souls.
Well it’s the first one, which is exciting. It was all recorded in Josh’s bedroom too and it came together pretty quickly. It’s also been fun because its the first song we’ve got to do others things for besides writing and recording music. We’ve been out and about filming short teaser videos for the songs and editing tiny remixes for each trailer. It's also a love song, about our love for the colours green, red, blue and yellow; in that order.
What else have you got planned for 2014?
We’ve just about finished recording a few more songs so should release our first E.P soonish but our main plan is to be playing a lot more gigs and partying with new pals. We also need to seriously up our computer game playing.
What are you listening to at the moment?
St Vincent, Sylvan Esso, Adebisi Shank, Hundred Waters, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, DVA.
Thanks for speaking with us, would you care to share a joke with us?
How can you tell when it's a drummer at your door?
He doesn't know when to come in.
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