motel void

MOTEL VOID: You reside in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as in Japan. That’s really interesting. How does this cross-continental cooperation work?

CURLING: We’ve been playing music together for about 12 years now and, when we started out, we both lived in the Bay Area. Jojo moved to Tokyo almost a decade ago and we’ve done our best to keep the band going despite the distance.

Neither of us are great at remote songwriting or exchanging demos, so we tend to just do all of our songwriting together in person when we can both be in the same place. The general modus operandi is for us to get together in the Bay Area once or twice a year for about a week at a time. We’ll spend 3 or 4 days writing new songs, another day or two rehearsing them with our drummer Kynwyn (who lives in Portland, OR!), and then the last day or two cutting basic tracks at a recording studio.

MOTEL VOID: Is it possible to play live shows for you?

CURLING: One of the toughest things about being so spread out as a band is that we have to be very considerate of balancing our time together between writing/recording and live performance. Until pretty recently, we were a lot more focused on the former. I think, if we could, we would probably just be one of those studio-rat-type bands like the later Beatles or XTC who only really put out records and didn’t play live much. We love recording! However, we don’t really have that luxury, so we’ve been spending more time recently playing live shows when we can get together. It’s been a lot of fun sharing our music with audiences and the reception has been really positive, so I think we’re growing into it.

MOTEL VOID: Last year you released your new album ‘No Guitar’. Could you tell us more about the recording and writing process of this record?

CURLING: We started working on No Guitar in 2018 after the release of our second album, Definitely Band. The earliest songwriting sessions were driven by the stipulation that we’d write songs without any guitar. That lasted about 30 minutes!

We ended up tracking four songs (Shamble, Pastoral, Reflector Mage, and URDoM) before the pandemic and lockdown happened and it became basically impossible for us to get together at all. With Jojo stuck in Tokyo, I started to go a bit stir crazy and ended up eventually working on some new material without him in 2021. I think a lot of the more introspective, acoustic-driven atmospheres on the album were a result of us being apart for so long and not writing rock songs for a band to perform.

As far as the recording goes, we are very keen to avoid repeating ourselves. Definitely Band was recorded in mono and has a lot of tape speed manipulation (varispeed), DI guitars, and other studio tricks that we borrowed from some of our favorite artists. Our approach to No Guitar was a lot more straightforward, which I think has also made the more rock-y songs easier to arrange and perform live. There’s still plenty of depth and subtleties to the recordings, but it’s a bit less of an impressionistic palette than we used on the previous album.

Photo by Emi Ito

MOTEL VOID: Your biggest inspirations right now?

CURLING: I’ve been really enjoying the new Lemon Twigs album and the most recent Shame record. Those are two bands we’d love to play with. Otherwise, our listening habits are kind of all over the place. To me, anything with great melodies will always be an enjoyable listen.

MOTEL VOID: Your plans for 2024?

CURLING: We just wrapped up a 3-week stint including a tour in both Tokyo and the US. For now, we’re going to get some rest and work on some new material. We’d like to hit the road again this year, though! Maybe late summer or fall.