{"id":7915,"date":"2014-09-18T17:18:20","date_gmt":"2014-09-18T21:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/home\/?p=7915"},"modified":"2014-09-22T14:40:15","modified_gmt":"2014-09-22T18:40:15","slug":"sleepy-kittys-projection-room-awakens-the-soul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/sleepy-kittys-projection-room-awakens-the-soul\/","title":{"rendered":"Sleepy Kitty’s ‘Projection Room’ Awakens the Soul"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sleepy<\/a><\/p>\n

Gadfly recently sat down with Evan Sult, drummer for art-pop-rock duo Sleepy Kitty, to discuss the band’s latest album, Projection Room, <\/em>which can be heard on Spotify. Sult, formerly a member of punky, alt-rock group Harvey Danger<\/a>, brings unimaginable depth to the pair’s lives, music, and pasts with his insights on their music and future; both he and partner Paige Brubeck are truly remarkable, one-of-a-kind musicians, as is their latest LP, Projection Room<\/em>, with it’s delightful mixture of edgy femininity and uplifting pop rhythms.<\/p>\n

Gadfly ONLINE:<\/strong> Can you give us a brief history of Sleepy Kitty? What parts of your Harvey Danger style followed you through the transition between acts?<\/p>\n

Evan Sult:<\/strong> Sleepy Kitty started when Paige and I lived in Chicago together. She was playing guitar and singing in a band called Stiletto Attack, and I was drumming in a band called Bound Stems…Paige and I were both running into static with our bands, so we\u2019d blow off steam just playing music and making art together. It was straight-up fun experimentation, and pretty soon it was the most interesting thing to both of us, and when we found a space in St. Louis that we could turn into an art castle, we did. Moving to St. Louis together made Sleepy Kitty, both band and art-makers, official. Since then, we\u2019ve been releasing albums on STL-based Euclid Records and touring around to support them. And making rock posters and weird visual art stuff and running a music magazine when we\u2019re home.<\/p>\n

[…] Harvey Danger was my first band, so I was an enthusiastic learn-by-doing drummer, and I feel like that\u2019s really apparent in the first [Sleepy Kitty] album…Especially in a two-piece, the drums are responsible for taking the reins sometimes, or anyway helping the story get told as vividly as possible. I feel like that\u2019s the thing I\u2019ve been doing with drums ever since: looking for the way to not just play drums but help color the film stock of the movie in your ears, and throw some narrative complications.<\/p>\n

GO<\/strong>: I simply adore your music; what artists would you say have influenced your fusion of punk rock and piano pop?<\/p>\n

ES<\/strong>: It\u2019s interesting you refer to it as \u201cpiano pop,\u201d because the piano is Paige\u2019s most recent writing instrument, and we really don\u2019t employ the instrument very often. That said, I see what you mean \u2014 and I think we think of that same element as musical theater. Paige fell just as hard for the Velvet Underground as she did for George Gershwin or Judy Garland or Francoise Hardy, and all of that music gets tangled up in her head in a way that is pretty interesting…in her case I think she feels the chords and emotional complexity and storylines inside those giant pieces of music, but gets a similar jolt from the drone kick of \u201cWhite Light\/White Heat\u201d or \u201cRhapsody in Blue.\u201d For myself, I love that our band is comfortable weaving passages from other people\u2019s songs \u2014 a signature lead line in Hendrix\u2019s \u201cThird Stone from the Sun,\u201d a phrase borrowed from Gene Pitney\u2019s \u201cLast Exit to Brooklyn\u201d \u2014 into our own songs, and create new meanings. It\u2019s one of the ways to speak the musical vernacular. The electricity in rock keeps jolting new life into the melodies, ours or anyone else\u2019s, and it\u2019s a joy to hotwire songs and lyrics and chords for our own uses.<\/p>\n

GO<\/strong>: Your recently released video for Projection Room single \u201cDon\u2019t You Start\u201d is beautiful, and I think it speaks to the edgy atmosphere of your music! Can you tell us a little about the direction of the music video and why you chose to take it this way?<\/p>\n

ES<\/strong>: Sleepy Kitty is really two entities with the same name and the same staff: Sleepy Kitty the band and Sleepy Kitty Arts, all issuing from one big old building on Cherokee Street in St. Louis. Sleepy Kitty Arts makes rock posters and other screenprinted stuff \u2014 it\u2019s one of our day jobs…So eventually Paige decided that a screenprinted animation would be a natural way to show how the sounds of the music look to us. It\u2019s a crazy amount of work \u2014 at one point we calculated the animations were taking us about one hour of labor per second of finished product \u2014 but it does get across a visual representation of our music. I\u2019m glad we included some footage of us printing in our studio to show what we were doing there, all the ink and paper and hand printing and stuff.<\/p>\n

GO<\/strong>: More than anything, the Projection Room LP sounds free-wheeling and fun; you both seem to be having fun and letting your hair down! Can you tell us a little about the writing and production process? Where are you taking the album and your career from here?<\/p>\n

ES<\/strong>: I\u2019m glad that sense comes across. The album was a kind of gradual accumulation…We wrote four songs pretty quickly after coming home from the tours for [debut album Infinity City], so we went to the tiny rooms of Sawhorse Studios in St. Louis to see what we could do. It was really fun, and funny, to make a bunch of swamp sounds in this really nice studio, or to sing emotively about being ten years old waiting in line for Batman: The Ride at Six Flags…at one point I just started chanting \u201cthe rocks that sing the songs of the city!\u201d about one little detail of the ride. Meanwhile, though, there\u2019s a song about one of the most emotionally awkward moments we\u2019ve ever heard on the radio, and some quite emotionally emphatic sections. \u201cNothing = You\u201d was Paige\u2019s response to listening to a bunch of \u201960s French pop. \u201cGodard Protagonist Inflection\u201d was very challenging to make, because it was in Paige\u2019s head before she could figure out a way to show it to me so that I could write to it, which was a first for us. When we finally did work out how to piece it together in the studio, it was exhilarating to hear her blast that guitar solo \u2014 it\u2019s so theatrical, this gushing fount of released frustration that has been building up within the lyrics (and of course it doesn\u2019t hurt to picture Brigitte Bardot at any point in that song). Also, we realized at some point that we\u2019d be missing something crucial if we didn\u2019t record some of the album in a dirty noisy basement, so we went to Smoking Baby Studio in town to work with Jason Hutto, one of our favorite producers ever, and got the kind of grotty sounds that satisfy that side of our music too. Tempering the beautiful studio with the gnarly one helped keep it fun and real and relevant to us.<\/p>\n

We have taken the album all over the Midwest and West Coast; it\u2019s been a busy summer. We\u2019re still pushing Projection Room this fall and winter…because we\u2019re very happy with how it came out and what it does as a whole. At the same time there\u2019s been a lot of new music happening in the practice space. We\u2019re always kind of at a crossroads with this band: do we do everything ourselves? Do we start involving other musicians, and, if so, in what part of the process?…It\u2019s always tempting to just go ahead and find some other people we like to play with us, and we sometimes do have friends join us for a few songs onstage\u2026 but there\u2019s something about the radical limitations of a two-piece, and especially two people who dig each other a lot, that is hard to let go of. And in a lot of ways, it feels like we\u2019ve only just started really working out what we can do…there are plenty of new directions for us to push into. About the only thing we don\u2019t have any interest in is a bunch of pre-recorded tracks backing us. As long as we keep writing and recording and touring nationally, and then internationally, I\u2019ll feel like our career\u2019s on track.<\/p>\n

GO<\/strong>: Finally, what does music mean to you? What are you hoping to communicate to listeners with your music and message?<\/p>\n

ES<\/strong>: When I was in Harvey Danger and we all lived together and hung out together, we used to spend hours and hours talking about what music was and how it worked and the bands we loved and what we thought they were doing…Now, a lot of years later, Paige and I still spend hours talking about what music is and what it means\u2026 and thus I don\u2019t have a quick answer. I do feel like one thing though, is: making music is the best way to find out what it means to make music. And making music over a long period of time is a great way to learn new things about the work that you did before…Music is great in that it\u2019s both momentary \u2014 music exists as you\u2019re playing it \u2014 and theoretically timeless: the recording stays the same once it\u2019s laid down. And then it becomes a way for you to see how you change or stay the same. I\u2019ve definitely come to appreciate musicians who set out to learn the language of music and its structural underpinnings in an intentional, scholarly way, though that\u2019s not how I ended up making music.<\/p>\n

The thing is: I\u2019m the drummer. I don\u2019t write the chords or the lyrics. I\u2019m not saying drums aren\u2019t crucial to the music in the end, but that\u2019s different than music in the beginning, at least most of the time. I don\u2019t write the songs, I co-write the songs; I help bring them into full being by paying attention, and by trying to lead in various directions, by playing with or against the feeling of the guitar or melody. Music from my seat is a way of working together. Sometimes I\u2019m a translator, sometimes I\u2019m a disruptor or an amplifier or a door or the train you\u2019re riding in or the rising storm or just the backbeat.<\/p>\n

Music is a form of magic; that sounds absurd, but I bet every musician knows it\u2019s true. It\u2019s the original magic: it\u2019s a spell woven right in front of you. It\u2019s a relationship between you and a secret language of chords and modes and precedent, but it\u2019s also an immediate feeling of discovery and insight. The best feeling in the world is being a part of a group…playing together becomes writing a song together…Creating a song, and invoking it once it\u2019s been written, those are some of the most potent creative feelings in the world…Rock music is fundamentally exciting, a way to speak that has no analog. We get to talk about the things that are rolling around in our heads \u2014 frustrations, desires, moments, people \u2014 and watch those specific personal thoughts, translated into song, become something that other people can relate to their own lives. That\u2019s amazing. It\u2019s funny, because viewed from a step back, there are a zillion people making rock music, and it\u2019s easy to feel like it\u2019s all been done before\u2026 but then we find ourselves in the middle of writing a new song, and that elation kicks in like it did when Harvey Danger wrote \u201cLove Bug,\u201d or when Bound Stems first wrote \u201cTriggered,\u201d and I know that, at least for me, making songs\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0the message, and that every time I help write a new song that I\u2019m excited about, I\u2019m doing my real job as a human.<\/p>\n

It seems that Sult and Brubeck were destined for these musical lives, and fans are overjoyed for this fact. Fans old and new can check out Sleepy Kitty’s first video from Projection Room, “Don’t You Start<\/a>,” and snuggle into this latest LP like a cozy, warm, simply fun blanket.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Candace Carter swims through a sea of schoolwork and work-work on the daily to be able to talk to cool bands and listen to nice music. She loves to write and play with her cat. Check out more of her work at cavalierdaily.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gadfly recently sat down with Evan Sult, drummer for art-pop-rock duo Sleepy Kitty, to discuss the band’s latest album, Projection Room, which can be heard on Spotify. Sult, formerly a member of punky, alt-rock group Harvey Danger, brings unimaginable depth to the pair’s lives, music, and pasts with his insights on their music and future; both he and partner Paige Brubeck are truly remarkable, one-of-a-kind musicians, as is their latest LP, Projection Room, with it’s delightful mixture of edgy femininity and uplifting pop rhythms. <\/p>\n

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