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<\/p>\nIs it too early to pine for the glory days of 2006? We were right on the cusp of free music-recording software making its way into every dorm room and basement across the globe, Soulseek was expanding the iPods of nearly every web-savvy twenty-something and stores still sold CDs, or at least tried to. Oh, and Times New Viking were initially making waves with their humble, back-to-roots form of indie-rock, back when the genre was an actual alternative to the mainstream and didn’t just signify an ever-growing slice of the mainstream. They kept putting out great records up through and including their last one, which may or may not be their last, and I was delighted to pick the brain of keyboardist\/vocalist Beth Murphy, who clearly has thought a lot about everything, often with hilariously insightful and poignant results. <\/p>\n
Are Times New Viking officially over? I don’t believe there was ever any official announcement. Perhaps Times New Viking isn’t a “formal press release announcement” sort of band?<\/b>
\nYou nailed it. That, and the notion of a band “breaking up” is a kind of received idea that no band stands by anyway. <\/p>\n
Do you ever think about the dozens (hundreds?) of “lo-fi” bands that came about in the wake of Times New Viking, and thought, “God, what have we done?”?<\/b>
\nWe didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do that; Pitchfork and the rest circa 2008 did that. The only culture event we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re responsible for is resurrecting Siltbreeze Records by making a CD-R for our friends and family to listen to that made its way to Tom Lax in 2005.
\nI do agree with your making the term alleged by putting it in quotation marks. In fact, that should be the genre\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s official written presentation: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lo-fi.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d
\nAs far as what music genre terms are made of, there is nothing like \u00e2\u20ac\u2039it. It’s a genre named after a description of the audio sound, but that audio sound is also not exclusive to the genre. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s similar to electronic music in this way. Meaning, there is electronic music, and then there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one-man melodic black metal made by electronic means. There is lo-fi, and then there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Crossed Out or Burzum who never had to answer these questions.
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u2039But e\u00e2\u20ac\u2039lectronic music is further legitimized \u00e2\u20ac\u2039by\u00e2\u20ac\u2039 instruments \u00e2\u20ac\u2039specific\u00e2\u20ac\u2039 to the genre. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Lo-fi\u00e2\u20ac\u009d doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have that. Further, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lo-fi\u00e2\u20ac\u009d only refers to recorded audio sound. (Lugging a PA system on tour to run vocals through is a conceit to be ignored.)
\nSo! The origin story of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lo-fi\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is wholly in the recorded artifact, rather than the live and recorded composite. And this is where it gets interesting; because if you trace music back to when the recorded version emerged as the ideal over the live version, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll find yourself at the birth of rock-and-roll as we know it. <\/p>\n
It’s almost impossible to read about Times New Viking without the “lo-fi” thing coming up (as proven by this interview too, I suppose). Do you feel as though other great things the band has done, like specific lyrics or hooks that you’ve written, or memorable live performances, just kind of get ignored in favor of the buzz word? Or are we hopefully past all that in 2015 (the downside being that everyone has moved on to other indie “trends” to think about)?<\/b>
\nWhen our music gets boxed in that way, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s at a level that has no business discussing it the first place. With enough publicity, everything gets typecast. How much it takes for this to happen varies, but it always felt unprecedentedly minimal for us. Our music was certainly covered on a scale in which it was never intended. This was a confluence of us getting signed to Matador at the same time music media was expanding online to the scope we know today. I first heard of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Best New Music\u00e2\u20ac\u009d when Adam\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s brother told me we got it. Folks needed content, and these luddites from Ohio \u00e2\u20ac\u201d now endorsed by a respectable major indie \u00e2\u20ac\u201d had just released a record with a fidelity fit to mirror the economic collapse. Shit writes itself.
\nThe best writing about our band comes from Internet-generated English translations of reviews written in a foreign language. That illiterate poetic slippage captures us perfectly.
\nConversely, the fact that Shazaam will recognize a song as Times New Viking, but get the song wrong every time, is a perfect analogy for the particular brand of shitty music writing we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve inspired. <\/p>\n
What do you miss more: the swank European festivals or the random Midwestern basements?<\/b>
\nThe fondest memories are in random basements. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s where the evidence of what we did having any meaning is stored. Shit felt pure. In-the-momentness happened. One thing I miss about playing live is being 100% present in a moment. It doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t happen in real life.
\nThat said, at this moment, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d take a fat European-festival paycheck before I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d agree to all that woo-woo alone. Just me being practical and in my thirties. And basement shows are \u00e2\u20ac\u2039an inevitability\u00e2\u20ac\u2039. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If all of Times New Viking’s material was permanently destroyed but for one song, which song would you want to survive?<\/b>
\nOn the Friday you sent this question, my first thought was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Teenage Lust.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d To be sure, (or more accurately, because I had the house to myself, my band is my \u00e2\u20ac\u0153guilty pleasure,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and it had been awhile) I pulled all the Times New Viking records from the shelf, made a small stack on the coffee table, and started listening at high volume. It was during \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Teenage Lust\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that I suddenly did not have the house to myself anymore. So I shut it down \u00e2\u20ac\u201d this kind of behavior is obnoxious, even to a life partner I won the lottery with, and I already knew this song was the answer. What I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know was that it would be the last song we heard in our house before it was broken into that weekend, the thief making off with: our receiver, television, record player, a fan, video camera, and all of the records that were still on the shelf. Because we were out of town when it happened, and only had the house-sitter as first responder to relay the scene, I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t realize until I got home that the Times New Viking stack I set on the coffee table, an act triggered by your question, had been spared.
\nCorrect me if this is reductive, but your hypothetical could have been anything eliciting my favorite Times New Viking song; it may as well have been some variation of what played out.
\nBefore I got home and realized the Times New Viking records were left, I reflected on the question as a spooky prologue to its own manifestation-somewhat. Then, and now, its some kind of precognitive firefighter.
\n(There is actually a third layer to this, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a little hairy to get into now. Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just say the Times New Viking record stack may have offered a clue…)
\nSo yeah. Magical thinking reaches an all-time high whenever shit hits the fan.<\/p>\n
After the success of Times New Viking, would you be willing and able to start a new band that does a CD-r to pass around to friends, play house parties for donations, sleep on a stranger’s floor, or are you spoiled by the success you’ve had? What I’m wondering is, is it possible to get a taste of fat European paychecks and hotel rooms with separate beds and then go back to starting from scratch?<\/b>
\nLook, success is relative, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m afraid you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re overstating ours. Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just say Pomplamoose would have had a problem. And sleeping on the floor was always probable. Sure, from 2008 to 2011, we eked out a living touring six to eight months out of the year and bartending \/ working record store jobs back in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cheap beer, cheap rent, Indian mounds\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Columbus, Ohio the remaining four to eight.
\nUnless you mean successful for a band like us; that, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d understand. But then, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not really success, is it? \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Success\u00e2\u20ac\u009d implies hotel rooms and tickets to Europe were ever goals. Certainly not. As my friend Bobcat Goldthwait says, success is for creeps. We were blessed or lucky hard workers who just ran with it. We were shepherded toward each of our opportunities by people whose opinion we counted.
\nBut to answer your question: It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s naive and transparent to take money as granted in the pursuit of music. Nobody is going to pay you to be yourself. Even in low Heatseeker degrees of popularity, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to be uncomfortable. For professional artists to business professionals alike, to make it, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got to be willing to play the game. A person decides what game they have the capacity for: what they are willing to mitigate, risk, etc.
\nFor us, the trappings of eking out a living in that way began to discourage creativity, something we didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to risk. It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that it was all that gross. If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re philosophically intuitive these signature sell-out moments have their appeal. (A Kia Soul show in Cincinnati played to about 25 folks who were all optioned free packs of Camel Lights stands out.) It was the ennui of it: Twenty too many attempts to capture our image (why aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t you guys more photogenic?); lip service, broken record, college credit press, canned response (only twice were we interviewed by someone older than us, one was John Norris); seeing bands like No Age and Wavves soar past us, seeing bands like No Age and Wavves on tour, only seeing bands like No Age and Wavves on tour.
\nTurns out I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d rather play someone else\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s game than have someone play mine.
\nGet a job. Make art. Maybe in the next economy it will be different. I kinda buy into the whole “future of no work” thing. <\/p>\n
How integral was Columbus, both its musical scene and general style of living, to Times New Viking? It always seemed like Columbus was mentioned in conjunction with Times New Viking, almost as if you were its musical representatives.<\/b>
\nColumbus was super integral. Because it has no national identity, the artists and musicians living there feel no weight of influence, allowing for ad hoc gangs of meaning.
\nBut we are hardly its musical representatives. That belongs to a clutch of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc80s – \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc90s bands: V-3, Scrawl, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, Gaunt, Mike Rep and the Quotas, New Bomb Turks, Gibson Brothers, the list goes on.
\nMany members of these bands, or even the bands themselves, were still active in Columbus music when we started playing. If not active, any dormancy was slight enough to be disrupted when a small scene emerged post-Y2K. Not old enough to be our parents, but with established legacies to behold, the sounds and stylings of this music was in our DNA. It was not for nostalgia\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sake that we recorded on four tracks and liked loud and fuzzy rock music, it was the only we would ever be.
\nKeep in mind, we all graduated high school in 2000; it was 2003 when the band formed. Our adult sensibilities were established before the internet began its sociocultural effect.
\nWe were on the last bus of organic influence.<\/p>\n
Who did your cover art? The sort of collage-y, hand-written notes with scribbling and whatnot seems inseparable from your music – like I don’t think I’d process it the same way if your records came out looking like Klaus Schulze’s or something.<\/b>
\nAs part of our 300% creative control business model, we all did. We met in art school, so it could be said that our visual aesthetic was agreed on before anything else. <\/p>\n
What were the best aspects of working with Matador and Merge? Were they vastly different labels to work with, in how they operated, or was it kinda the same thing?<\/b>
\nAside from the fact that we were with Matador for two albums and an EP, and with Merge for one album, operations were pretty much the same. We could email Mac or Gerard respectively, tell the same jokes around them. <\/p>\n
Do you feel bad for bands starting today, that they can’t exist in any sort of anonymity thanks to the overwhelming presence of the internet? Would you want to start a new band soon, or does it seem exhausting?<\/b>
\nAny degree of online anonymity can be managed if desired (False, His Hero is Gone, Tragedy). Some bands only use Bandcamp, a lot of obscure stuff can be found on Soundcloud. The internet doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t look good on bands that go all-in with it from the get-go, but a band with a marketing strategy is nothing new.
\nThe internet is neither good nor bad, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the ebb and flow of applications that affect certain culture industries, and in real time. Twitter has been great for comedians; podcasts are a new option for journalists. From 2003\u00e2\u20ac\u201c2006, we worked MySpace. A group without much technological interest or knowledge could create what was essentially a networked website. You had complete control of the content: songs, tour dates, photos (and ours were only ever album art and flyers), videos, you could even change the page colors and backgrounds by editing the HTML (Fun fact: the open code feature was an oversight which became one of the platform\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s main attractions). If you found a band that you liked, check out their \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Top Friends\u00e2\u20ac\u009d! This was the networked part.
\nAnyway, I hope the fact that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m waxing nostalgic about MySpace speaks to the absurdity of valuing the state of anything by the technologies that exist. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not saying, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153back in the day, everything was different, because MySpace.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Technology is fleeting, good music is forever, and the internet isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going away either. \\
\nI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d start a new band. <\/p>\n
Would you feel comfortable going on record at confirming or denying the possibility of a Times New Viking reunion, say in 2020 or so?<\/b>
\nI feel comfortable denying it. That way, if it ever happened it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be all the more unexpected and special.
\nWe might record soon. I aspire to be one of those non-touring bands that just make records. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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