Martin: . . . It just kept the music too grounded.
Atkinson: It's not individualized to the listener as much, and we were enjoying that more. Did we ever sit and talk about it that way? Not specifically.
Robin Laananen
From left: Barrett Wilke, Lucy Atkinson, Chris Martin, and Matthew Reid-Schwartz of Kinski.
Details
Kinski (with Makoto Kawabata) play a benefit for YouthCare at the Crocodile Cafe with the A-Frames and Climax Golden Twins at 9 p.m. Sat., July 31. $8.
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Martin: Vocals keep the band grounded, too, because somebody's sort of having to memorize—I mean traditionally, memorizing these lines and then the music goes off—and you know, a lot of bands will have two or three minutes of the song and then they'll take it somewhere else. We just sort of wanted [that part] to be alone, to take it somewhere else from the beginning, if that makes sense.
SW: Sure. Before you were a psychedelic band, were you interested in psychedelic music, or in psychedelics, period?
Martin: If we ever talk about our own band, we always just say we're in a rock band. 'Cause to say we're a psychedelic band is really loaded. I just mean as far as critics, if they say something—in print, I just think that psychedelic rock looks better than space rock.
SW: OK, I gotcha.
Martin: I think we just think of ourselves as a rock band.
SW: I don't mean now, I mean before, did that have any effect on you tweaking things to the left a bit?
Martin: No. Not really.
Atkinson: I'm not, 'cause I teach kindergarten.
SW: So do your students know that you play in a band?
Atkinson: Yes, they do.
SW: Have they ever asked to hear your music?
Atkinson: They want me to play, but they don't really understand what it means to bring a bass rig into a school, so I just say no, I can't. Last year we played at Bumbershoot, and there were some students there [with] their parents. That was pretty cool. We don't play a lot of all-ages shows, so we don't really have the opportunity.
Faust: "Krautrock" (1973) from Faust IV (Virgin)
Martin: This is one of my favorites.
Atkinson: This is one of the first Krautrock records we got, wasn't it?
Martin: Yeah. I kinda read about the reissues. I got the CD for 99 cents in a Wherehouse store—they didn't know what it was. I got it home and it just blew me away.
SW: The cover makes it look like a modern-classical record.
Martin: Yeah—I wish I would've heard this record when I was 12. I mean, things would have changed drastically.
Atkinson: Were all of those things available pretty much in the U.S. back then? I was talking to this Swedish band, Trad, Gras Och Stenar, and they were saying that there wasn't much trading of music going on between, like they couldn't really find any records in the '70s, and vice versa—everybody just toured and stayed in their own country, so was this concept here? Probably not.
Martin: I remember, it definitely went to the U.K. more. I think it kinda trickled over here. Some of the stuff, like Neu!, got their CD over here.
SW: So you had just heard it, finding it for 99 cents?
Martin: Yeah, I think I had one Can record, and I thought they were interesting. After that, I just went crazy and started to turn a lot of people onto it.
SW: How did you discover Trad, Gras?
Martin: Three of the four guys in this band Parson Sound, in, like, '67, were in Trad, Gras. It sounds like it was recorded yesterday; it's amazing how ahead of its time it was, they're really droning and really heavy and lots of guitars—it's incredible. And then after we heard that, we just [kept going further]. They turned into [International] Harvester and then Trad, Gras. We started buying all of that stuff. And then the way we met them is that they were just doing six days in the East Coast—and I just wrote them and said, hey, if you guys want to set up [shows in] San Francisco and Portland from Seattle, if you guys want to come around—and they did. That was a year ago.
Spiritualized: "Anyway That You Want Me" (1990) from The Complete Works Volume One (Arista)
Martin: [on the first note] Spacemen 3. No, Spectrum.
SW: Further along.
Martin: Spiritualized.
SW: There you go. You got that really immediately.
Martin: Yeah, there's always a vibe with all of their stuff: melancholy, sort of dark, but melodic.
SW: Painkiller music.
Martin: Yeah. That was a big influence on us when we first started. I heard that stuff when it came out, and I liked it, but I just wasn't ready for it. And then I just started to listen to it again, and I thought, "Wow, this is really great."
SW: Did it help you kind of figure out the direction you wanted to go?
Martin: Yeah . . .
Atkinson: . . . It sorta did.
Martin: Especially the way they mix pop with superexperimental stuff.
Atkinson: It's really moody.
Martin: It's really hypnotic, because of the repetition.
SW: When you were younger, even before college, was that something that appealed to you in music?
Atkinson: No, I liked completely pop music.
mmatos@seattleweekly.com
