STACK #140 Jun 2016

Q + A

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You DJ’d at South By Southwest this year; how was it different to your former experiences participating in the festival with Dum Dum Girls? KRISTIN KONTROL: I’ve been to SXSW in, like, the more traditional band experience at least ten times in my life at this point. It’s generally really chaotic and you’re running around and schlepping gear. [This time] I DJ’d the opening party for South by South West, the official one. That was pretty early in the evening, the sun was still out, it was very fun. I’m very selfish about it. I’m playing music I know people will enjoy but ultimately just music I feel like playing. The most fun just from the fan perspective was Gorilla vs Bear, and Charlie XCX was headlining. I just DJ’d two short sets in between the people before her and then I watched her perform from side stage. About your move from personifying Dee Dee (in Dum Dum Girls) to this new solo persona of Kristin Kontrol, you’ve said “it got weird that I was keeping so much of myself out of what I was doing creatively.”Was thaht a lengthy evolution? I think it was a gradual thing, and I also think it took me a long time to

recognise things. It was about eight or nine years ago I started, and I just wanted to be anonymous, and it was purely a recording project. Eventually I had to put a band together. I need to [find a persona for] myself, or whoever was fronting the band. So I chose my mum’s name, which is my unofficial middle name. It was really good and really helpful because I was pretty nervous about going out on my own. I’d played in bands for years, but never written my own song. So for a long time it served me, because it kind of gave me like a protective thing – because I was playing a character, it was easier for me to be on stage. I’ve had pretty bad stage fright my whole life. So anybody who had met me in the last two years called me Dee Dee and then my friends and family called me Kristin, so there was just this weird potential personality split thing happening. Then, I think, the last couple of years working and touring, I started feeling like I am myself, and this is the role that I must step into do to this. It just started feeling like both the music and the persona were – I’d outgrown them. I didn’t need the security of distancing myself. The titular single from the album has a reallyTori Amos feel with the tightening of vibrato and vocal fry, and then bursts into this super- sweeping poppy chorus. How did you write that awesome chorus melody? God, I wish I could remember. Honestly, I get in such a zone and I don’t really have a formula in terms of building it bit by bit. Usually the song happens on a more minimal level, so I would just use the guitar and the the piano, playing around with chords. I knew that I wanted to play around a lot with the vocal melodies on this record. For the first time in my life, as a professional musician, take advantage of the fact that I had come from a more classical background. But for X-Communicate, I

think my idea was Girls Just Wana Have Fun? I wanted a big, full-on melody that had a bit of a descending line or whatever. Apparently you had more than 62 discrete songs to sift through when it came time to pick the album’s tracklist. How did that go? It was a mix. If there were elements of the song that were good they could maybe be the verse for another song, but if the song itself felt weak to me, but maybe lyrically there was something worth salvaging, I would pull that. I’m in the process of packing up my apartment and moving, and I just found this stack of 200 sheets of handwritten paper and all these books. – those were my copies of notes that I never referenced, it’s my thought process that I just ignored, because I was onto the next thing. The collaborative film between Dum Dum Girls and Bret Easton Ellis (for AreYou OK ? from the album TooTrue , 2014) was a fascinating project – did you have any cross-media inspiration for X-Communicate ? [ Are You OK? ] was definitely my first foray into anything outside of just the traditional music video world. It was really cool. There is definitely a part of me that wants to get into that stuff, but for the most part if I am pulling from non-music [inspirations] it’s typically literature and poetry more than anything else. I do watch a lot of films and I do love them, but I don’t think I take intentional influence from them, it’s probably more subconscious. I was, of course, one of the Twin Peaks-obsessive people and the music was a huge component of that. One of the producers for this record, Andrew Miller, he does [film scores] and so he did little things, to try to get into that area more. I’m just waiting for somebody to ask me.

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