2008-10-21 - River Front Times

Sing the Body Politic: Of Montreal's Skeletal Lamping challenges and shocks listeners

By Keegan Hamilton

Published on October 21, 2008 at 11:05am

Avant-garde artists, and in particular musicians, have struggled to strike a balance between genius and pretentiousness for decades. From Lou Reed's infamous noise exploration Metal Machine Music to the Flaming Lips' Zaireeka, which required listeners to simultaneously play four separate CDs in four separate stereos, art rockers have always braved a backlash when they eschew broad appeal in pursuit of a singular (and usually bizarre) creative vision.

Such is the case with Skeletal Lamping, the ninth album from the Athens, Georgia, group Of Montreal. Charged with the daunting task of following up 2007's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? — the band's most critically and commercially successful album to date — lead singer Kevin Barnes crafted fifteen songs that are all nearly unlistenable. A disjointed blend of funk, disco and porn grooves, the record is as tedious as it is bizarre.

Like the brief and woefully inadequate curator notes that accompany contemporary art exhibits, advance copies of the record feature a four-paragraph essay that takes a stab at dissecting the music. "The record has its own internal logic," the back album cover proclaims, "and its many tangents and detours feel entirely intuitive and organic in context." The essay continues: "[Skeletal Lamping] rejects the notion of a fixed identity and encourages the listener to embrace their contradictions and to accept that one's self is nebulous and mercurial." It even calls the album "bizarre, complicated and dense."

Reached in Asheville, North Carolina, the second stop on a short North American tour, Barnes maintains the essay isn't just PR-firm penned nonsense.

"[Lamping] made itself in that way," says Barnes, who wrote and composed every song on the album by himself. "It could be complicated because of the way it's shifting and changing. It never really stays one style for that long. You could call it fragmented or schizophrenic."

The music itself certainly fits that description. Lamping completely abandons traditional verse/chorus/verse songwriting; instead, each song is a patchwork of minute-long bursts of sound that change rhythm and melody without rhyme or reason. For instance, the song "And I've Seen a Bloody Shadow," opens with a Scissor Sisters-do-Elton John piano lick. A sudden time change and moaning synthesizers take over. Just as abruptly, layered vocals of Barnes bawling over a drum machine appear before a brief but catchy palm-muted guitar sequence. It fades out with droning vocals and the same minor-key guitar chord strummed over and over. The song is just two-and-a-half minutes long.

"[The album] doesn't follow any logical path. I wanted to create something full of surprises and unpredictable," Barnes says. "Pop music can be so predictable and a lot of people follow the 'rules' in a way that's not very creative or interesting. I did that a lot in the past and I kind of learned to break free from that."

Barnes' lyrics are as fragmented as his production style. Many of the songs are written from the perspective of a black transsexual man named Georgie Fruit, a Barnes-invented character who he says was once a member of a failed '70s glam-rock band.

"It sounds pretentious but I really feel it just happened, I didn't sit down for weeks and weeks and create a character," Barnes says with a faint Southern drawl. "This voice was just unlocked inside me, and I gave it a name. All of these songs were flowing out of me, I thought it was a foreign entity speaking, but I realized it was a different part of my psyche that was unlocked and speaking to the world."

The 35-year-old Barnes, who is happily married (to a woman), insists he has no problem writing sincere songs about the life of his alter ego.

"I don't make a division between me and Georgie Fruit," Barnes says. "In fact, I sort of regret creating a name for that creative spirit. It might make people feel like it's less genuine, like it's fiction. I want people to realize that it's genuine, and it's coming from the heart."

Lyrically, Barnes has always bared his soul, particularly on Hissing Fauna, where he often sang about a painful separation from his wife and his struggle with depression that followed. But where he was able to distill his neurosis on that album into catchy, three-minute pop songs with sing-along-friendly choruses about chemical imbalance, Lamping feels like a hackneyed attempt at sexually transgressive shock art. It's not just the Georgie Fruit songs, either — often speaking in bizarre abstractions, Barnes alludes to everything from blowjobs in the boys' locker room to a prostitute turning tricks on the hood of a car.

The album drips with crude sexual imagery. He opens the song "St. Exquisite's Affections" by bellowing in his eunuch-like falsetto, "I'm so sick of sucking the dick of this cold, cold city." Other times he sings, "I took her standing in the kitchen/Ass against the sink" and "We can do it softcore if you want/But you should know that I go both ways," and "I want to make you ejaculate till it's no longer fun."

Barnes, who recently told Spin, "For a while, I really wanted to be gay but it didn't work out for me," again maintains that earnestness is not an issue when it comes to writing songs about homosexual encounters.

"I don't make the division between physical reality or intellectual reality or fantasy or dream reality," Barnes says. "Just because you held a brick in your hand and threw it through a window, doesn't mean it doesn't have the same value as dreaming you held a brick in your hand and throwing it through the window. Everything I'm writing about, I might not have physically experienced it — but I did experience it."

While the songs on the album are the sole work of Barnes, he says his bandmates have been critical in translating the album's hypersexuality and out-there imagery into a dynamic live act. And thus far, sneak previews of the Skeletal Lamping tour have looked like a three-ring circus on acid. A recent New York show featured a nearly naked Barnes riding a live horse onto the stage at one point and emerging from a coffin slathered in shaving cream at another. Band members were dressed like cowboys, tigers and the mythical creature Pan.

Barnes, Of Montreal and their peers in Athens' famed Elephant 6 Recording Company have always experimented in the hope of stretching the boundaries of contemporary music. For a time Barnes even lived with Jeff Mangum, the singer/songwriter behind Neutral Milk Hotel. But while Mangum was able to craft the creatively brilliant album In the Aeroplane Over The Sea from a series of recurring dreams he had about Anne Frank, when Barnes attempts to channel his own strange inner voice and shed all the trappings of pop music in the process, the result isn't as transcendent.

"You just create what you feel compelled to create," Barnes says. "It's more fulfilling that way. I've never tried to create for an audience or demographic because that would just be...well...really weird."

2007-10-15 - PopWire / PopMatters

Indie-pop band Of Montreal are touring as they work on their next CD.

15 October 2007

by Len Righi

Guitarist-vocalist Bryan Poole has worked closely with Of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes for more than a decade. But it wasn’t until last year that he felt he had a real clue why Barnes would often compose and complete songs and albums with almost no input from other members of the band.
“I found out sitting next to him on an airplane that he never had real friends until he was 10 or 11 years old, people he could watch cartoons with or roughhouse with,” says Poole just hours before Of Montreal is to play at Oberlin College in Ohio.
“He had to create his own playland. He had to make up characters to keep himself entertained. He was able to explore his mind. To me, that’s a really great insight, and he just offered it up.”
Poole, who also has been part of pop experimenters Elf Power and The Olivia Tremor Control, admits that Athens, Ga.-based Of Montreal has had its “ups and downs and periods of drifting,” partly because of the way Barnes works. “But Kevin is kind of like Prince,” says Poole with admiration. “He can play and do everything himself, and he never has writers block.”
So although Of Montreal is still officially touring behind its fascinating late January release, “Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?,” a dizzying, autobiographical account of a crumbling psyche that Barnes recorded virtually by himself while living in Norway and Athens, Ga., the band already is shifting gears.
Barnes, Poole, drummer-keyboardist-trumpeter James Huggins, keyboardist Dottie Alexander and bassist Davey Pierce are already playing several new tunes that will be part of the band’s next CD.

Poole offers a few song titles and brief commentary:

“Our Last Summer as Independents”: “Lyrically, it’s pretty straightforward. The music is influenced by the current Swedish pop bands, Belle & Sebastian and The Cure.”
“Georgie’s Confession”: “Georgie Fruit is one of Kevin’s creations, one of his alter-egos. He’s a 50-year-old black she-male who has been in and out of prison. He loves Prince and all that older soul stuff, like Sly and the Family Stone, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Funkadelic. He always tells it like it is.
“He turned up on a couple of `Hissing Fauna’ tracks, including `Faberge Falls for Shuggie’ (which is sung in an unnerving falsetto).”
“Softcore”: “That’s another Georgie Fruit song. (Sings) `We can do it softcore if you want/We can do it both ways’ ... It has a weird pop edge to it, but it’s definitely funky with a lot of cool harmonies that (sound like) Prince, Bowie, whatever.”
“Mingusing”: “It’s got some different sections. It’s not dour or nihilistic - or necessarily by Georgie Fruit.”

Poole says that because of the personal nature of the material on “Hissing,” Barnes has a hard time performing it live. Barnes’ inspiration for the record was a self-described “insane year” he spent with his pregnant wife in her native Norway to take advantage of the country’s health-care benefits, his subsequent culture shock and problems after the birth of their daughter that almost sundered the marriage.
Thus, “Hissing’s” exuberant-sounding, Human League-tinged “A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger” has been sidestepped on this tour, and the 12-minute space-pop epic “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal” has been played just once because it puts Poole and Barnes “in a negative head space.”
Poole notes he has lobbied for the song “No Conclusion,” but that it, too, has remained absent from the set list. “`No Conclusion’ is a 10-minute song on an EP (`Icons, Abstract Thee’) we put out as a companion record to `Hissing,’” explains Poole. “It’s awesome and it rocks. But when it came time to tour, Kevin said, `I can’t do it.’ He couldn’t sing the lyrics. They were too depressing, with no hope. I can understand, because the songs were a purging of all these things ... a terrible awfulness that exploded out of him.”
Poole, 37, was born and reared in Nashville, Tenn. “Chet Atkins babysat me one afternoon when my mom was cutting radio commercials and voiceovers,” he says. “I was like, 2 years old at the time.”
Poole remembers “always liking music,” although he preferred the late `70s and early `80s funk his sister listened to over the Frank Zappa and Chick Corea albums favored by his brother.
Eventually he discovered punk rock. “The Dead Kennedys were the first band I really liked, and toward the end of high school I wanted to start a band,” he says.
So he moved to Athens “and started playing and playing and playing.” After a time became part of Elephant 6, a musicians collective that would spawn such well-regarded indie bands as The Apples in Stereo, The Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel and, of course, Of Montreal.
“I met Kevin in 1995, or early 1996,” says Poole, who was then a member of Elf Power. “He had come to town from Florida a few times before to find like-minded musicians to play with.
“A friend told me about him and said, `You two would get along.’ That he was already signed to a record label (Bar None) piqued my interest. And after I heard his demo tape, Kevin and I started hanging out.”

2008-11-13 - Paste (part 2)

Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes: The complete Paste interview

Steve LaBate, photo by Jeremy Cowart By on November 13, 2008 4:10 PM |

Paste: One thing that comes up a lot in this record is—there’s this sexual directness, you know? In the past, the lyrics have kind of played with androgyny, and the performances, with all the costumes. But I really think this one pushes the envelope with its sexual directness. Why is this a theme you keep coming back to, and how does it play into the album, conceptually?
Barnes: This character just sort of evolved on our last tour, the Hissing Fauna tour [in support of the band 2007's album, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?]. Not even to give him a name, but just internally sort of evolving in this new way, and it was definitely more sexual. I don’t know, I feel like that person I sort of became or that stage persona or whatever—like, part of me, my artistic mind—evolved in this way that influenced the songs on the new record. And I hadn’t really thought about it that much because I don’t really second-guess the creative process. You know, when I’m doing something, I don’t think, “Well, what is this all about?” I just do it. But then, when the record’s done, then you think about it. But it is different for me [now]—I’m definitely exploring topics I’ve touched upon, but never really in depth like this. So I think I was influenced by the spirit of that tour, the last couple tours we’ve done for Hissing Fauna, and the outfits I was wearing and the sort of character I had become.

Paste: Living in Athens from 1998 to 2003 and following Of Montreal as it developed, it’s been really interesting to watch your public transformation—from being this quiet, eccentric D.I.Y. indie pop artist, who was not so in-your-face, to being this David Bowie-esque performance artist. In the post you wrote for Stereogum, about selling your song [“Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games”] to Outback Steakhouse, you talked about making yourself into a cartoon. How much did that idea have to do with your gradual transformation, and what was the transformation like for you? How did this stage persona develop?
Barnes: I can’t really say. It all happened in a very organic way. I think I realized at one point a couple years ago—in the indie-rock world, there’s a lot of pressure to be modest. And a lot of people [in that world] are very shy, and feel if someone’s going to be legitimate or genuine, it can’t be pretentious. But I realized it’s fun to be pretentious. Pretentiousness offers freedom. My concept of pretentiousness isn’t phoniness; it’s just role-playing and not having a fixed identity. Because I think that’s really destructive when people, especially in the indie community—it hearkens back to the punk-rock mentality where, to be real, you shouldn’t have a stage persona, you have to just be this person on stage all the time, and you have to have accountability for what you said yesterday. But I feel like it’s cool to not put those restrictions on your character because you’re gonna be different people from day to day. And there’s no reason why you have to put yourself in this prison, like, “This is my identity and this is who I am, and if I stray from that then I’m being phony.” I don’t believe it’s possible to be phony. You’re always gonna be who you are. And even if you contradicted who you were yesterday, it doesn’t matter ’cause yesterday’s irrelevant. Today’s the only thing that matters. Once I accepted that, and allowed myself to not have a fixed identity, I realized, “I want to be something fantastic. If I’m gonna create who I am, I don’t want to be this shy, meaningless creature that hasn’t made a splash in the world. I want to be something outrageous and fantastic and inspiring and bizarre.” In my normal life, I’m very down to earth. I watch ESPN and do a lot of like boring things nobody would get excited about.

Paste: You were saying you play baseball.
Barnes: Yeah, yeah. But I realized, “OK, if I’m gonna be a performer, I need to perform, you know—I need to do something fantastic.” There’s no point in going on stage in your street clothes ’cause that’s not that exceptional. If you’re gonna go on stage and you’re gonna have people watch you, look at you, and you want to entertain them, you should do something exceptional.

Paste: Yeah, it’s like, every choice you make, you can make it be interesting and add to the experience or not.
Barnes: You’re only limited by your imagination. I think the spirit that’s happening right now [in music]—people are adopting that. There’s a lot of bands right now that are like, “Yeah, fuck it, let’s do something really crazy. Let’s do something visually interesting!” I think that’s my major gripe with [most] live bands—no matter how much you love the songs, after like the seventh song it just becomes static, you know?

Paste: It’s like, “are you trying to entertain the people that are there to see you and help them have an amazing experience, or are you there to indulge only yourself?”
Barnes: Yeah, and even beyond that—when I think about the visual dynamic and emotional dynamic, most performers aren’t really that ambitious as far as what they want to do for the audience. Now, I’m kind of viewing it like concept art, more on a theatrical level, something that has more dynamic and more depth so it’s not just like, party all the time, you know? For this new tour we’re going to try to play more with tension and try to create anxiety in the audience, so it’s not just always happiness, it’s also like moments of fear and tension and confusion, which comes closer to the emotional depth we all have within ourselves. I don’t think it has to be all one dimensional for it to be worthwhile. In a way, you’re sort of limited. I mean, when you go into a club, there’s only so much you can do to transform the environment. But that’s the major challenge—”OK, what tools do we have that we can use to completely transform this venue that people have maybe been to like 20 times already and seen any number of different kinds of bands perform there?” We want to try to transform it, so it’s an otherworldly experience—something so exceptional, so out of the ordinary, that people will have that special moment, like when you see a movie or a painting or read a book that really touches you. The reason it touches you is because it’s jumping out from this other world, and it burns in your memory as something exceptional. And I think that’s the motivation behind Of Montreal’s recordings, as well. I don’t want to do anything that’s dismissible. I’m sure that’s why there’s a lot of people who hate us, and there’s a lot of people that love us, and I think that’s a great thing. I feel that it’s a positive. I’d rather make something that people despise with all their heart, you know, than were completely indifferent about.

2008-11-04 - The Line Of Best Fit

TLOBF Interview :: Of Montreal

Posted on 04 November 2008 by John Brainlove

(L-R: Dottie Alexander, Bryan Poole, Jamey Huggins, Davey Pierce, Kevin Barnes)

John Brainlove met Kevin Barnes after a packed out Of Montreal Rough Trade instore to talk about life on the road, inspiration, the differences between dreams and reality, and the fantastical world Of Montreal…

John Brainlove: So, I was googling Airwaves and I got really excited to see you were playing, but it turned out to be a lineup from last year… how was that?
Kevin Barnes: It was great. It’s always a bit scary when you’re playing a festival, and there’s like so many bands and you never get time to set up your stuff, and you get thrown out onstage and it’s chaos, and inevitably something sets on fire or breaks… in this instance my amp was making a horrible sound, so I kinda freaked out for the first four or five songs, then I kinda got into it and it was fun, and then the next thing I know I’m being pulled offstage…

JB: Have you been to Iceland before?

KB: No, that was a first…

JB: Do you find when touring that you get a chance to see places? Or is it just like, hotel, bus, plane, show…

KB: Every once in a while you do, yeah, if you get in early enough and the promoters are enthusiastic, a lot of times we’ll be playing smaller stages in like Italy or Spain and the promoters feel like they have to fill this role of a cultural liaison and show you a good time, and that’s always great. But if you get into a place sometimes, you’re just left on your own and wander around a little bit and find stuff out…

JB: Which I guess is never that nice, just a few alleyways and cafés around a venue…

KB: Yeah totally. To be honest, this is my first really really good experience of London. I’ve never had a bad experience, but I’ve never had a trip where I went to a whole bunch of different parts of the city and really got a good sense. It’s always been in more run down parts of London, whereas this area is like super-hip and young, and where we’re staying is kinda ritzy. I really like that the city has so much diversity, and I hadn’t seen the good side of London before. And I was like “shit man, London’s awesome”.

JB: Yeah, in some parts it’s like a different world, you go around in the day and all you see are decorators and nannies…

KB: … and no artists live there, sure. What’s this area like?

JB: Well I guess we’re right in Shoreditch and Old Street, the first time I came here it was mostly just factories and closed up shops, but it’s really buzzing now, the artists landed here like regeneration locusts and then got priced out…

KB: Yeah, it’s like that in New York, and I guess everywhere. We were in Barcelona and we were like, we wanna move here, and they were like “no, don’t do it! You’ll raise the rent” and all the reporters will come…

JB: So tonight you’re playing in Rough Trade in happening Brick Lane… I think the last time I saw you was ATP playing the Hissing Fauna show. That’s obviously a very personal album. You’ve said that this one is a step away from the autobiographical approach, more fictionalized or written around characters…

KB: No, I didn’t mean to say it like that. I don’t want to propagate the idea that was writing from the point of view of a persona… I hope I didn’t…

JB: (laughs) Maybe I missed some sarcasm or something…

KB: I better go back and read it! There was this character I created called Georgie Fruit, and now I wish I never did, because people are like, “is that a Kevin Barnes song, or a Georgie Fruit song?”… and really there’s no difference. They’re all Kevin Barnes songs, and I don’t like that idea of people seeing a division. I think people would see that as less genuine, but it seems like it’s not based in reality, like you’re writing from the point of view of a fictional character. That’s too much like a defense mechanism. I want all my songs to be like, really coming from the heart and maybe if they’re not about something that’s physically happened, like a physical experience that I’ve had, I don’t really make a division between the physical and the dream state or the emotional state. I don’t really make the division. If you fantasize about something that’s just as real as if you really did it.

JB: I was interested in your ideas about identity, the idea of identity as a malleable construction, does that relate back to that fluid idea of characters and points of view… about your own self being a construction that you consciously work on changing or building. And in that sense having a character is presenting a front…

KB: I don’t really think of it as a front… I don’t think you can ever contradict yourself, even if you contradict what you said yesterday… it’s just as real as it was yesterday. I don’t think you have a really fixed identity. When people say “you’re being phony” I don’t agree with that because you can only be yourself. It’s impossible to be phony. Whoever you feel you are at that moment… it’s real. And whoever you want to be… I don’t believe there’s one true identity that’s the fixed you. It’s obviously fluid, and it’s effected by your mood, your experiences, your dreams, what you ate… it’s constantly changing. Nobody should believe that they only have one fixed persona or character or identity or whatever that’s the real them.

JB: Do you think that’s a scary thought, to have no sense of permanence? Everything as transitory..?

KB: I find it very liberating. You don’t have to worry about being consistent. You just feel what you feel and act how you want to act, without having to worry “is this appropriate for who I am? Is this outfit appropriate for who I am?” … it’s more fun to have that malleable aspect to your character and be free to do whatever. And it’s all real.

JB: Did you make a conscious decision about the change of musical direction? Skeletal Lamping seems like quite a deliberate swerve…

KB: I think I really wanted to make something that was constantly shifting, constantly changing, with no rules and no limitations, no structure really… it still has structure. Some songs have do have repeating parts, but repetition seems to me like laziness. A lot of people always repeat things…

JB: Do you think that’s in contrast to Hissing Fauna, which had quite tight cycles repeating for a long time?

KB: Well, this time I was in the mindset that it’s laziness to write a part, then do it again. It’s a very common thing in pop music to verse / chorus / repeat. It’s more creative that way.

JB: Yeah it’s at the very heart of pop music… if you hear a song again and again and it has repeating parts, you just end up liking on some level through exposure…

KB: Yeah, that’s something that’s very powerful about pop music, and I think in a way I’m depriving them of that relationship with the songs. On this record it’s hard to tell where one song ends and another begins, I wanted to make it flow, and it’s kind of random where I placed the track markers. Tonight when we played, the stop and start parts are random without the context of the album…

JB: After Hissing Fauna, which was so intensely and nakedly personal, Skeletal Lamping does seem more stylized or cryptic, even though it’s just as lyrically dense…

KB: I think it’s just as autobiographical. I mean, Hissing Fauna was like pain. And pain is the great equalizer. Everyone can appreciate pain, confusion, anxiety… these things are universal and easily relatable. But when you talk about more abstract things… Skeletal Lamping is definitely more abstract. I don’t think it’s less emotional or less autobiographical. Maybe it’s a bit less accessible, but it’s all about sexuality, gender roles, the politics of sexuality… the complexity of society and finding your way through it… navigating through it… getting through your childhood, your teenage years, your twenties, and then finding yourself in this place where you’re like… “what the fuck happened? what’s going on?”. But I do think it’s still a very introspective record, and where something is introspective it has to be autobiographical. It’s deeply rooted in my experience, my fantasy world, my dream world… it’s everything.

2008-10-01 - Spin

Of Montreal: Welcome to Normal Town

With unlimited imagination and the resources to realize his weirdest whim, Of Montreal's gender- (and genre-) bending, secretly sane visionary is learning to have his cake and eat it, too.
By Andy Battaglia 09.22.08 1:55 PM
Photographed for SPIN by Michael Schmelling
Photographed for SPIN by Michael Schmelling

For an impish sprite with a wardrobe full of starry aqua ankle boots and fishnet tights, Kevin Barnes is surprisingly intense when it comes to volleyball. It's a numbing summer night in Athens, Georgia, and we're engaged in some serious business in Normaltown, the larky boho haven that Barnes calls home. His backyard is strewn with tangles of Christmas lights, and his friends -- the tight coterie of musicians, painters, and various weirdo visionaries who help make Of Montreal more than just a band -- have split into gamely warring factions. "I've seen him rip off his shirt in anger for losing," says Of Montreal drummer and multi-instrumentalist Jamey Huggins. Keyboardist Dottie Alexander describes playing against Barnes as "a real catharsis."

The attic in the house up front is where Barnes has worked on a series of increasingly ambitious art-rock masterpieces, including Of Montreal's ninth album, Skeletal Lamping. But it's out here, in the yard past the trampoline and a kiddie pool, where Barnes, 34, and his band function like a true unit. The group just treated itself to a new piece of equipment: a shiny pink volleyball to replace a leaky old one wrapped with what bassist Davey Pierce describes as "20 pounds of duct tape." (They tried.) The grass around the net is littered with melted Cherry Garcia cones and empty beer cans. By any sporting measure, the level of play is unmistakably low. But the spirit! Bodies lurch and dive feverishly. Absurdist trash-talk zings over the net like so many feeble slams: "We need to get you finger extensions!" "What would Jackie Joyner-Kersee do?"

On the Set with Of Montreal (video hosted on Spin's website)

Barnes himself is commanding but relatively quiet. Between points, he riffs on the allure of Aerosmith and tells of a dream in which a bandmate appeared before him with a disarmingly small penis and six swinging testicles. (That would be Ahmed Gallab, a newly enlisted supplemental drummer, not yet in town to be freaked out.) But the Kevin Barnes diving after wobbly shots with an incongruously focused look is a long way from the upstart star who preens onstage amid a mess of cuddly winged monsters.

Of Montreal's practice space is in a complex of repurposed warehouses between a chicken-processing plant and a cement factory, under a rusty water tower on which hobo is graffitied in a shaky hand. A trapeze studio and a bike shop do business among art spaces and rooms made noisy by dozens of bands. They rent two large rooms: one for music and another to build props and sets for their famously elaborate stage shows. The music room boasts a guitar amp draped in pink fur and a chandelier attached to a pulley, built on a whim to raise and lower for the lighting of wax candles.

The prop room nearby houses the fixtures that make Of Montreal come alive onstage. A wooden box swathed in brightly colored paint serves as a makeshift coffin from which Barnes can spring forth as a ghostly white blob, covered with the contents of 30 cans of shaving cream.


"Over here we're building leaf-blower guns," says Nick Gould, who started designing sets and props for Of Montreal as a recovering film-school student and dates keyboardist Alexander. Components of a dazzling stage set stack up high against a wall, with luminescent risers and a catwalk suspended in between. In concert they flash in stroboscopic patterns like something from Ziggy Stardust's yard sale. In storage they're just a bunch of plywood contraptions cobbled together and crammed with standard-issue 60-watt bulbs. "Your output is going to be exponentially more creative when you make it up as you go," says Gould.

Of Montreal's growing stature -- 2006's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? sold an indie-respectable 108,000 copies worldwide -- owes a lot to the ad hoc spectacles they stage, with little budget but lots of ingenuity. When they performed "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse" on Late Night With Conan O'Brien last year, Of Montreal had so many people doing so many different things on set -- sword fighting, stumbling around in a ten-foot space-god suit -- that union rules required them to be billed as a "performance group" rather than just a band.

Live Video: Of Montreal, "Mingusings"

Such shoestring theatricality has made them heroes to a new breed of like-minded bands. "Kevin is constantly pushing the boundaries of pop, which is inspirational to slackers like us," says Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT. "He's making the Black Albums and Station to Stations of today."

This outsize ambition has been funded in part by a handful of commercial deals, including a jingle for a certain Australian-themed steak-house franchise that has been the source of much debate in indie circles. "It's all slightly embarrassing, a skeleton in the closet," Barnes says. "But we put a lot of money into the shows that we might not see again. If you want to make a living making music these days, you have to have other sources of income."

"We're always up for an incredulous moment," says guitarist Bryan Poole, who joined up with Barnes more than a decade ago. Back then, Barnes was a shy, awkward twentysomething from Florida with an ear for forgotten '60s pop and a belief that indie rock could be more than glum guys in plaid shirts. Poole remembers him confessing to not having any friends until he was ten or 11, so "he had to create his own world and all these things to entertain himself."

Barnes wasn't alone in Athens, though. When he first moved there, he shared a house with Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel and Will Hart and Bill Doss from Olivia Tremor Control -- each a prime mover in the experimental psychedelic confab known as the Elephant 6 Recording Company. "That was just about making music for yourself and your friends," Barnes remembers. "The scene didn't exist that we wanted, so we just had to make it."

2009-02-27 - The Age

Eclectic band to spread its wings

February 27, 2009

Kevin Barnes turns Of Montreal's shows into dance parties, writes Craig Mathieson.

BRYAN Poole is worried. "Have you got my wings?" the guitarist for Of Montreal calls out to a crew member loading up with gear for the eclectic American six-piece's New York City show. He gets an affirmative response and sighs with relief.

"I had a set of wings made for me by a very nice girl who is a fan, bless her heart," explains the genial Poole. "They're tremendous — they fold up and then you can open them up on stage. I had a Brian Eno-like cape thing happening on the Hissing Fauna tour in 2007, so this is definitely the next step."

Wings barely qualify as being outside the norm when it comes to Of Montreal. The band's frontman and songwriter, Kevin Barnes, is a cross-dressing sylph with a taste for extravagant eyeliner and fishnets. Setting the tone for his musicians, he has created a visual element for the band that has turned their live shows into excitable dance parties.

But the band's frenetic live indie-disco is just one part of their make-up. The group boasts a rich back catalogue of nine studio albums, which with 2007's Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? and now Skeletal Lamping have grown increasingly diverse, flitting between styles within songs to reveal a songwriter equally fascinated by experimental literature, electro beats and gender politics.

"We're fortunate that Kevin has never had writer's block. He's always on and he's a workaholic," Poole says.

"The day we get home from tour he's into his attic recording. Making music is part of his DNA and it shows — he gets better and better at it. There's always another record in his head."

Poole compares Barnes' current predilection for jumping between styles within a single track to a film editor using jump cuts — Skeletal Lamping's Four our Elegant Caste, for example, skips between Motown bounce, new wave pop and Freddy Mercury's falsetto.

"There have been a million records that tell you a straight story and, really, is anybody going to do it better than Ray Davies?" he says.

Much of the impetus for the band's output comes from Georgie Fruit, a black, 40-something man who has undergone multiple sex reassignments. Near the end of writing Hissing Fauna, a particularly dark and personal record for Barnes, the composer claimed that Georgie Fruit has possessed him, writing the record's upbeat final compositions.

"Georgie kept on writing songs," confirms Poole. "Georgie doesn't filter his thoughts or emotions — everything comes to the fore.

"There are a lot of dark thoughts in your psyche that you don't want to come out except in the odd strange dream that you wouldn't even tell anyone about, but Georgie Fruit just lets it all hang out. His stuff is a bit more buoyant, if weirdly and perversely sexual."

Barnes, a 34-year-old married father of one, has since moved on from Georgie Fruit. "He's left the building," Poole notes. "We hunt out quite a bit — I'm going to miss Georgie."

Of Montreal play the Hi-Fi Bar on March 5 and Golden Plains festival on Saturday, March 7.

2009-01-?? - I Heart AU

of Montreal : "I wanted to make a record that destroys that pop template."

Words by Chris Jones

In every self-respecting artist’s career, there comes a time for reinvention. Unless you’re Oasis, you have little chance of long-term survival and critical appreciation unless you take the odd risk; push the boundaries of who you are and what you are capable of. The Beatles, short as their career was, did it several times. Radiohead continue to delight and confound expectation at every turn. But no-one is as synonymous with the idea of complete, fearless reinvention as David Bowie, and Kevin Barnes, who to all intents and purposes is of Montreal, knows this well.

Now on his ninth studio album in 11 years, Barnes is at a creative peak. Of Montreal’s last album, 2007’s masterful Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, continued his gradual shift from the bright indie-pop of his earlier career to lyrically darker and musically more varied climes. However, 18 months on he is now back with a new album, Skeletal Lamping, and it is immediately obvious that he has no intention of standing still. The musical range is yet broader, encompassing everything from cacophonous guitar noise (‘Nonpareil Of Favor’) and avant-garde freakouts (‘Plastis Wafers’) to his more usual pop, soul and funk. And that’s without mentioning the dizzying sound mosaic he has created, or his decision to perform much of the album in character. On the latter point, Barnes’ Bowie fixation is most marked.

Just as Bowie introduced Ziggy Stardust in 1972 as his career was taking off, so Barnes (albeit on a much smaller commercial scale) introduced the character of Georgie Fruit, a middle-aged black transsexual soul singer, on Hissing Fauna, and he plays a much bigger role on Skeletal Lamping. Barnes says that the title – which first appeared as a lyric on Hissing Fauna track ‘Faberge Falls For Shuggie’ – initially had no meaning.

“At first it wasn’t really about anything,” he says, “it was these two words that popped into my head. I gave it meaning later, and the obvious one that cropped up, to me, was thinking of these skeletons from your closet that you’re bringing to the surface.”

Or shining a light on – the word ‘lamping’ refers to the cruel hunting practice of shining powerful lamps on prey in order that they panic and are therefore easy pickings. The title is an appropriate metaphor for the task of exposing raw, often sexually explicit subject matter, as expressed through the medium of Georgie Fruit. It seems like a bizarre step, but Barnes is happy to admit that Ziggy was a major influence on his decision to introduce a character to his work.

“I think, definitely, I would never have come up with any of this stuff if it wasn’t for people like David Bowie, and Ray Davies and Prince,” he says. “People that created these different personas for themselves and recreated themselves from album to album. Those are the people that I look at and say, ‘This is great’, because there’s always a fear of repeating yourself in music. You put out five or six records and there’s a tendency for people to get trapped in this one thing that they think defines them as an artist or a band or whatever, and I found that that very limiting; I never want to do that. So it’s great to see these other people that are willing to take chances and really do different things throughout their careers. It’s almost like they become different artists in different periods, and they can be different people.”

Georgie’s libidinous stamp is all over Skeletal Lamping. From the stark proclamation, “I’m just a black shemale / And I don’t know what you people are all about” on ‘Wicked Wisdom’, followed swiftly by the strident “We can do it softcore if you want / But you should know I take it both ways” (‘For Our Elegant Caste’), we are left in no doubt as to who we are dealing with. For Barnes, creating Georgie was a form of escapism after the struggles with depression, medication and his faltering marriage that had blighted him and provided much of the lyrical inspiration for Hissing Fauna.

“He sprouted up around the time of my depression period,” he explains. “When I was coming out of [that] and becoming slightly more healthy, this little figure sort of popped in my head. It’s kind of abstract and difficult to explain, because it’s not really a split personality situation where it’s like, ‘Georgie Fruit is talking right now’, you know what I mean? It’s almost like a songwriting device.

“Psychologically, I could say that maybe it was a necessary thing that had to happen for me. I was sick of being trapped in this circular, negative spiral where I was obsessing over my internal feelings about whatever, like depression, anxiety, paranoia, suicidal thoughts, all that shit. I was really getting sick of that and wanting to explode and go somewhere new. I think creating this character helped me put all that stuff in the past and move forward and feel, ‘OK, this is fresh, this is exciting, this is different, this is new. It’s not connected at all to that darkness’.”

He is, however, quick to stress that he hasn’t fully assumed the character of Georgie Fruit to the extent that Bowie became Ziggy, conducting press conferences and giving interviews in character. “I don’t want people thinking that Skeletal Lamping is in any way a concept album or that I’m singing from the perspective of this fictional character,” he insists. “It isn’t like that. Creating Georgie Fruit gave me the ability to give a voice to this other aspect of my psyche, and it’s sort of pretentious and difficult to really say it, but I feel this sort of thing was unlocked inside of me, and I gave it a name. It was not really necessary to give it a name, but I think it helped me go to a place that I’ve never been before. It gave me a defence or something.”

So the words on the album are Barnes’s alone, even though he himself has given the character a name and a backstory. Georgie and Kevin are one and the same. Sort of. It’s a confusing and slightly troubling distinction. But maybe he felt like he needed to give himself some distance in order to be able to tackle his sexuality in such a fearless and often alarming way. The album is peppered with references to sex, often with outrageously comedic effect. To imagine these words coming from a skinny, floppy-haired, 34-year-old white man is frankly bizarre, but it’s a topic that he felt inexorably – and involuntarily – drawn to.

“I didn’t really decide to do it, I just felt compelled to do it,” he insists. “I try to work that way, I try not to second-guess myself or direct myself in any way, really just let whatever the organic, creative spirit wants to happen, happen. I did realise that, ‘OK, this is a pretty sexual record’, but it didn’t bother me or anything.”

With the record having leaked months before its October release date, Barnes has had plenty of time to gauge the online response from the band’s devoted fanbase and the media. With of Montreal’s status as one of the biggest underground bands in the world, and with such a huge back catalogue for fans to get their teeth into, there is no shortage of discussion online. Reviews have largely positive, though the critical acclaim hasn’t been as deafening and unanimous as that which greeted Hissing Fauna. Nevertheless, the fan response has largely been excellent, and Barnes has clearly been keeping an eye on it.

“So far it’s been really good,” he says. “Initially, when I was making it, I was a bit nervous that people would be not as into it or not prepared for it. But then I realised that it’s not really that far-out. It’s not really that shocking, so I didn’t really give people enough credit. It’s not completely out-there. The only thing that’s really unconventional about it is addressing bisexuality in a very open way. There’s so many really heterosexual songs, and then there’s new things sprouting up like “I kissed a girl and I liked it” or whatever. It was just the spirit of the time, people were becoming more open-minded to those sort of things.”

Though Barnes is married, his flamboyant, androgynous image – coupled with the new album’s lyrical content – begs the question as to how he defines his own sexuality, especially as he hasn’t chosen to disassociate himself from his latest set of lyrics.

“I don’t really try to say I’m this or I’m that,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I don’t even necessarily think it’s healthy to define yourself in that way. You might have characteristics of one thing or another from one day at a time, and if you’re open-minded I guess you could say you’re bisexual. So I guess I could say I’m bisexual, but I’ve never dated a guy. I’ve never had a long-term relationship with a guy, so I can’t really say that. But maybe, 10 years from now, I will.”

Aside from Georgie and the fixation with sex, a third aspect of Skeletal Lamping has set tongues wagging – the music mosaic alluded to earlier. Rampant eclecticism has long been a feature of of Montreal’s records, but here that approach is taken to its logical conclusion, and applied not just to an hour-long record, but to four-minute songs. We had fair warning of this last year, when Barnes stated in an interview with an Australian website: “I am going to create a bunch of 30-to-50-second sections and string them all together. I don’t think there will be any pauses between pieces. I want it to feel like one long piece with hundreds of movements.”

He has been almost as good as his word. Coherent songs do appear from time to time (first single ‘Id Engager’, ‘An Eluardian Instance’, the excellent Seventies piano rock pastiche ‘And I’ve Seen A Bloody Shadow’), but throughout the rest of the album, ideas come and go with bewildering speed. Hooks, lyrical ideas and melodies threaten to burrow into your brain before, tantalisingly, being snatched away. It’s a frustrating experience, but strangely addictive and reminiscent of bands like Wire, the Minutemen and Guided By Voices (who Barnes specifically cites as an inspiration). The difference is, those bands finished the song when the idea was up. Barnes doesn’t; he just heads straight into the next musical motif without finishing the “song”. Why do it?

“Mainly just to create an interesting arrangement,” he reasons. “I feel like a lot of songwriters use repetition out of laziness, or just because that’s the conventional thing to do. You know, pop songs can be so predictable and, to me, they lose their value when they’re like that. It’s like you know exactly what’s going to happen, and it’s just boring. So I wanted to make a record that destroys that pop template. It’s kind of arbitrary – I could easily have put the track markers anywhere. It’s not like these four sections work any better than these six sections, but it’s kind of fun too when you’re open in that way – anything goes and you can do any sort of tempo changes or key changes or musical style changes, wherever you want to do it. I really tried to keep it interesting for myself.”

All the same, Barnes acknowledges that this approach might infuriate some listeners, who hear a glorious 30-second section and fantasise about Barnes turning it into fully-fledged, three minute pop song. “Yeah, I can definitely see that. Going back to David Bowie, he has that record Low, where he fades the song out. He makes a one minute song, or a minute-and-a-half or whatever, that’s so amazing and you want it to go on for another two minutes. But it’s kind of sweet in that way that it’s short and you go, ‘Aw, I want to hear it again!’, so you go back and listen to it again. There’s something to say about not getting what you want, but getting a taste of it.” Leave them wanting more? “Yeah, like if you get some dessert or something that’s so delicious, but you only get three bites. But if you’d had 10 bites, you would’ve been sick of it.”

Talking to Barnes even for a short time, it is very apparent that he is borderline obsessive about music. With such a prolific record over the last decade, that’s no surprise. However, he is also refreshingly – unduly – modest about his capabilities as a songwriter, musician, performer and producer. When asked if he feels unable to limit his sound, a sound that has touched upon so many different styles in what is often – by now erroneously – labelled an indie-pop project, his answer is simple:

“I don’t really want to. For me, what’s exciting about making music is pulling all these references together. I don’t really think of myself as terribly original. All I’m really doing is taking all these other people’s good ideas and putting them together in my own way. That’s all I can really do.”

That said, he knows that if this is all he can do (and it plainly isn’t), he is among the best around at it. He doesn’t offer any doubt that he will have the opportunity to keep making music for as long as he wants, and he sees himself doing it into old age, as his heroes have done.

“I look at people like Robert Wyatt or Fela Kuti, people that never really stop making interesting music. There’s plenty of people who have really long careers, but they’re completely irrelevant because they stopped taking chances and they just keep spinning out the same crap over and over again. I don’t want to be like that. For me, my main goal is to always stay excited and to continue moving, and developing and changing, and doing different things. Kind of like what David Bowie did. He went through so many different periods and so many different phases, and he’s left the world with so much to dissect and go through and explore. That’s definitely my goal.”

Skeletal Lamping is out now on Polyvinyl

2008-12-05 - Reax

Of Montreal: Personality Crisis

from volume 03 issue 07 // Michael Rabinowitz

Of Montreal:
Personality Crisis
Words: Michael Rabinowitz
Photo: Courtesy 2:30 Publicity

Kevin Barnes does not want you to see him as Ward Cleaver, Cliff Huxtable, or even Homer Simpson. Yes, he is 34 years old, with a wife, a daughter, and a house; maybe even a dog and a white picket fence. (I can’t say for sure. I didn’t ask.) But Barnes wants to be a viewed as a sexually amorphous nymph, an avant garde artist railing against the chains of mediocrity, a “vessel” for the alternate personality of a black transsexual former R&B singer, anything but your standard operating procedural dad.

“I don’t think of myself as ‘34, married with a kid,’” he bemoans. “That creates a different image. You know ... middle-aged man, with a wife and child. Just seems boring."

“I don’t want to think of myself like that," he adds with a laugh. "I think of myself as having unlimited potential, and I can be anything. My identity is fluid. I don’t have to be what my human vessel tells the world that I am. I have a very active internal life experience that is separate from the external one. I am still developing, still growing and changing. I haven’t gotten into this rut that a lot of people get into.”

As this fluid identity grows (almost daily), Barnes, the sole songwriter and creative force behind Athens, Georgia art-pop ensemble Of Montreal, continues to garner attention as much for his extremely personal lyrical admissions as much as his ability to craft an addictive pop track. Part of the original Elephant 6 Collective (Neutral Milk Hotel, Apples in Stereo), Of Montreal has taken off on the flight of Barnes’ sexual lyrical outbursts, outlandish and often nudity-punctuated (mostly Barnes’ junk) live shows, paragraph-length song titles ("We Were Born the Mutants Again With Leafling"), and, of course, the licensing of a song to Outback Steakhouse - an occurrence that forever changed how the American public views Mother’s Day.

The Outback commercial, which bastardizes a version of “Wraith Pinned To The Mist And Other Games,” sticks in the craw of most critics as a brazen form of selling out. It also forced Barnes, never a shrinking violet, to pen an essay to music blog Stereogum railing against the “sanctimonious indie fascists” who look down their noses at musicians that dare to make a living.

It seems that the whole “Wraith Pinned” experience would make Barnes run away from any form of commercializing or commoditization of his art, but not so. Skeletal Lamping, Of Montreal’s latest LP, comes in seven packaging formats: CD, LP, T-shirt, tote bag, paper lamp, button set, and the ever-popular wall decal set. It would seem Of Montreal is wholeheartedly embracing commercialism as art.

While Barnes denies this marketing of Lamping as product placement was a tongue-in-cheek response to the Outback-lash (“we thought it would be fun to make as many art objects as possible”), the sound of the new album is sure to deter any request from the Aussie steakhouse for future licensing.

For Barnes, the cacophonous result of Lamping - a type of nocturnal hunting where a bright lamp is shined upon the game, a metaphor for the “hunting” of Barnes’ darkest emotions - derives from an attempt to shatter the conformities of pop-music structure, much like his efforts to shatter to the conformities of the American dad.

“There are a lot of tricks that every songwriter knows and so many songwriters use, but to me it seems like laziness,” he lectures. “There is no real reason for everyone to do that, or for everyone to feel that they have to do it to make their songs solid. So I broke free from the pop song template and just went wild and had fun, to let myself be super-creative.”

Lamping is beyond “super-creative.” The piece is a disjointed, quasi-neo-soul improvisation that Barnes refers to as “organic,” though nothing organically grown is as jarring. There is barely room to get comfortable, or a semblance of preternatural elegance. Just as the listener gets into a beat or a harmony, Barnes jerks the needle away, to another rhythm or even another song. Then there is the bacchanalian nature of the words: “I wanna turn you on/I wanna make you come two hundred times a day.” Subtle!

“I basically just experimented with the work,” he says. “I didn’t really labor over anything. I just let things happen in an organic way. If it was working, I would take it where it wanted to go. If it wasn’t working, I’d change my direction, try something new. Just put together the pieces. When I was done with one song, sometimes I would use it as motivation for the next piece. Sometimes I would just put them on the shelf with the other ones and make something else. Eventually, I would have all of these sections of songs. What I wanted to do was create a fragmented, somewhat schizophrenic collection of music sections, and piece them together in an exciting, unconventional way.”

Maybe the reason for the schizophrenic results is Barnes’ channeling of another “personality” named Georgie Fruit, a black transsexual who was once in a funk-rock band called Arousal back in the '70s. Georgie does not exist, of course, except in the recesses of Barnes’ mind - he's a construct that allows Barnes’ inhibitions to peel away, with a Prince falsetto voice. Considering Of Montreal’s live performances consist of extreme body paint, a healthy amount of shaving cream (mostly applied to the body), and various poses of bare-ass nakedness, an alter ego can be a helpful proxy.

But even Georgie Fruit sometimes needs to be reined in.

“I try to create a balance,” Barnes admits. “The stuff that is in Georgie’s world sometimes, in my mind, seems a bit cheesy. Sometimes you get some R&B lyrics that make you cringe. You go, ‘aww, man. That's a silly thing to say.’ I was writing things like that that I had to say, ‘No, I am not going to say that, I am going to say something a bit more abstract.’ That was the only clash when I was collaborating with him.”

The live performance, the costumes, the effects, the nudity already garner so much attention. When paired that with an album that is freeform to the point of inaccessibility, one might wonder if Barnes worries that the spectacle of the show will overshadow his music?

Or, if maybe that's the point?

“I never really think about the music at all when we are putting on a show,” he states, matter-of-factly. “OK, we are going on stage, we are going to play the music, we are going to play the music well. That goes without saying - what else are we going to do? Let’s make it a really interesting production. Let’s make it totally over the top, overstimulating, and full of surprises. Not just for the audience but for ourselves. When you go on tour, for weeks or months at a time, it’s always at risk of becoming a bit mundane, even if you are playing in front of big crowds. The nature of our how our minds work, we get easily bored. The more craziness going on in the show, the less likely that you will get bored anytime soon. You have so many roles to play; I am always running around changing costumes and interacting with performance artists. It’s a physical workout for me. I never stop moving.”

2008-10-20 - Pitchfork

Of Montreal

---

by Tyler Grisham

October 20, 2008

Kevin Barnes isn't himself these days. Or at least, that's the impression you get listening to the lyrics from Of Montreal's ninth album, Skeletal Lamping. Since the band's earliest days, their output has often been a repository of his own diaristic compositions-- all the way back to Barnes' time spent as a loner teen making four-track recordings at home. On the band's last album, 2007's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, Barnes broadcast his personal battles with anxiety, his use of antidepressants, and some brutally revealing musings on his marital troubles. Now, as if emerging from a musically induced catharsis, Skeletal Lamping finds the eccentric performer shedding his skin and taking on the alter ego of a middle-aged, sharp-tongued, transgender black man-- about as far as you can get from a reserved high schooler making his own tapes at home-- and dressing it up with equally schizophrenic arrangements. But Barnes claims to have more in common with his outsize stage characters than it seems, and now he's trying to help his audience connect with their inner Georgie Fruits.

Pitchfork: It seems as if electronic and dance elements are becoming more prevalent in indie music these days, and your work is no exception. To what do you attribute this shift?

Kevin Barnes: I don't know, maybe there's more exciting technology out there. Back in the 1970s and early 80s, synthesizers were very expensive. Now they're so affordable-- you can get a really good one for just a couple hundred dollars. Most people are recording on computer software. Every computer recording program comes with a bunch of software synthesizers and drum machines. So I think even with GarageBand or whatever, you can probably make a pretty decent record.

Pitchfork: Are these disco and funk elements things you always wanted to work into your music?

KB: [On] the early records, I was into a completely different thing-- really creative, psychedelic pop music from the 60s. That's all I really listened to, and really the only kind of music I really wanted to make, and eventually I realized I was tired of making that kind of stuff. I wanted to make something new. As a kid I was really into Kool and the Gang and stuff like that. I always had an interest in that stuff, but I went through different phases and I have kind of come back around to stuff like that again. I just sort of rediscovered Prince. When I was in high school I was a big Prince fan, and then I sort of lost it and got into other things, and then I came back to Sign O' the Times and realized what a masterpiece it was. Then I got into some Curtis Mayfield, Sly & the Family Stone, and Stevie Wonder, and also there's definitely a hip-hop influence as well. I really like Kanye West, the Neptunes, Timbaland. All sorts of modern, really great producers in that genre inspire me. I really like André 3000 and Cee-Lo and everything that Danger Mouse touches seems pretty, pretty golden.

Pitchfork: There's also a lot of dance-inspired material on Skeletal Lamping, but the record is not exactly made for the dancefloor. Do you ever consider pursuing a more dance-oriented approach in the future?

KB: I like dance music a lot, but I find it to be way too repetitive. And lyrically it's usually not that exciting. I've sort of created a new form of dance music. It's a bit heady and slightly more dense and complicated lyrically, but still has the immediacy that great pop music has. I geared further away from the pop template that a lot of people work within. It's really fun to try to craft the perfect pop song, but [on] this record I've definitely been trying to create something that is more fragmented-- elements of pop music and dance music and soul and funk-- and throw them all together in a really chaotic collage.

Pitchfork: You said that you think in contemporary songs "you can finish the artists' sentences musically and lyrically." Were you thinking about yourself, or are there artists that you specifically have in mind there?

KB: When you're trying to create a song, there's a natural path you take and you're definitely influenced by the things you've listened to and the music that you like. So I was trying to, in a way, defy that natural instinct. When something seemed like it might go in [a] direction that seemed kind of obvious and natural, it sort of intentionally forced us to go in another direction-- to create something unpredictable.

The music I really like is unpredictable. Deerhoof, for example. You're listening to a Deerhoof song, you don't really know where it's going to take you and that's really exciting. There's other bands like that too: Animal Collective... and Ariel Pink is one of my favorites in that way, too. You know, I really love the Beatles, and I really love like everybody from like Gwen Stefani to like whoever [laughs]. I love hot music. And I love a "good-time" type of song. But I think the stuff that I find the most interesting and the stuff I go back to the most-- or for longer periods of time-- have a lot of twists and turns and you can't memorize everything. And so things still surprise you even though you've listened to them 10 times. There's definitely these moments in time-- the Beach Boys' Smile is a great example of one of the first records that I discovered that was like that. You never really know, like, "Is this the same song?" They have three or four different versions and you don't really know if you're still listening to the same song or if you've moved onto a new song.

Pitchfork: I got that same feeling when I went to a listening party for Skeletal Lamping and couldn't tell if I was hearing a 12-minute epic disco song à la "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", or just a string of four songs somewhere in the middle of the record. I wonder how the process was to assemble those. Did you just have fragments of songs and just kind of cut and paste them?

KB: I'm sure that, for a lot of people, it might just be completely random where the sections are pieced together. But I did record a bunch of pieces and then somehow said, "Okay, well, these kind of go together." I worked on them in sections, so I wasn't really thinking in terms of making a song that had a natural flow. Or even a song that had-- I mean, some of the songs do have repeating verses and choruses, but we were trying to shy away from that as much possible and just tried to work in different sections and piece them together in a way that would be interesting. I actually recorded probably another 40 minutes of material that had to be cut away from the finished record. Just because I wanted to make something that people could listen to in one sitting. I didn't want it to be like, "Yeah, I never even heard like the last six songs on that record."

It might be something really dense that hurts some people's heads at some points. But at least it's definitely not for mass consumption, I don't think. I read the Spin review that came out recently, and the writer clearly did not enjoy the experience. He's obviously very frustrated and confused by the way I put it together. But then, there are so many people like that, that are going to be like hoping for really easily compartmentalized songs. Like, "Okay, this is this kind of song. And these are the references to the point here. Okay, that makes sense." It's really for people who like creative pop music, who are searching for things that are interesting. There are a lot of people out there.

Pitchfork: You are now writing for probably the biggest audience you've ever had, and yet your lyrics seem to be more personal than before. Does the size or composition of your audience affect your songwriting?

KB: Luckily, it didn't factor into it at all. I purposely tried not to read anything about me, or written about my music or anything like that, 'cause I didn't want to be influenced by people's perceptions of what I am or what I should do. I think it's very damaging for an artist to do that. If you have that voice in you're head, like, "are they going to like this?" There's nothing that kills your buzz more than that. I definitely try to just get lost in my own little world, my own little bubble, and sort of exist outside of the critical world when I'm making music, and try not to allow that to enter in at all. I think it could be paralyzing, and it would just make you really confused and worried all the time-- second guessing everything. I wanted to take a lot of chances with this record and really do something more out there and more interesting. And if I was worrying about what people would think, then god only knows what kind of record I'd make.

Pitchfork: You said in a recent interview that you were writing this in response to the perceived backlash about the Outback commercial. You said you wanted to show them that "I am not a sellout and show them how talented I am." Were you trying to make something that sounded immediately less accessible to sound less commercial?

KB: I didn't really think about it till later, but I think I was definitely influenced subconsciously by that. I think it motivated me in a good way. It gives me fire. Like, okay, some people are going to say I'm a sellout. No one is actually coming to my house, knocking on my door, and calling me a sellout or anything. It's just a perceived sense of the world criticizing me over something, but it still affected me and filled me with this new desire to create something really interesting. And it's cool, because I've been wanting to make this sort of record for a really long time. But because, as you said, the band had become a bit more successful, maybe you become a bit more conservative because you don't want to lose that popularity that you've worked so hard for. At the same time, luckily, that did not really factor into it. It was kind of the reverse-- I was like, "Okay, well, I'm gonna show that I can make a really creative record, a really thought-out record, and produce it. And prove that I'm not only motivated by record sales." I think that was just one aspect of the motivation.

I also have this sense that there is this movement going on right now-- really great artists putting out these amazing records. I'd really like to be a part of that world of taking back music and making it an art form. It's a really interesting art form, and it doesn't have to be something that people are just putting in their iPod Shuffles. You don't have to think about it in that way, "Oh, I just want to make a song that like gets used in a car commercial, or gets used in a hit movie, or gets used in an iPod commercial." I want to make art, something that's really interesting and bizarre. You don't have to dumb it down. You don't have to worry about people not understanding it because it's too complicated.

Pitchfork: I wonder who exactly you have in mind, as far as recent albums that you consider truly artistic.

KB: My favorite artists right now-- Deerhoof, Animal Collective, Fiery Furnaces, Caribou, Gang Gang Dance... I think HEALTH are great. There are just so many great bands. I feel like it's an amazing period of time. I think this is a time period we'll be looking back on in 10, 15 years from now and being like, "There were so many great records being made at that time." It's kind of hard to have a sense of the moment, but I'm trying to not take it for granted and realize there's so much great stuff out there. There are so many talented people out there.

Pitchfork: Are you still enjoying working completely on your own, apart from the Elephant 6 Collective? Are there any aspects of like a more collaborative style that you find that you miss?

KB: Let's just say that there's this perception of the Elephant 6 manifesto, or whatever.... You know, it's not like Jeff Mangum would ever in a million years discourage me from exploring different forms of music. It was just in my mind at that time. I had just kind of created restrictions for myself, like, it's only real if it's recorded on a tape or if there's analog or something, and we gotta do everything in an organic way. I thought that somehow that was legitimate. But then I realized that was very close-minded of me, and that there are so many awesome tools out there for you to use creatively, and there's no reason to stick yourself and say, "Okay, I am only going to do it like this." You become sort of a self-fascist in a way. But, um... I can't really remember the question.

Pitchfork: Well do you still find it easiest to work by yourself?

KB: When I first started making music, when I was in high school, I didn't really have any friends. My parents had moved from Michigan down to Florida, and it's really hard when you move in the middle of high school-- it took me a really long time to meet people. I was really fortunate to discover a good four-track recorder and a cheap microphone. I did everything myself-- I'd write everything and record, arrange, and engineer by myself. I made hundreds of songs that way. The process of making music like that was so fulfilling, putting on the headphones and escaping from the outside world. You are sort of living within this inner world, and it becomes almost this meditative process where the outside world-- things that might bother you-- dissolve, and you're able to transform the problems or anxieties you might have, or the emptiness you feel is out there, into something more beautiful and more romantic.

And that's something that, when you work in a collaboration with a bunch of people, becomes slightly less personal, because you all have to compromise a bit. After making a couple records with a full band, that I really missed the process of working by myself. I missed that escapism that you get when you're by yourself, taking everything piece by piece, one instrument at a time, putting it all together and thinking about it at night when people are going to bed. It becomes such a powerful force in my life-- it's so important and exciting. And of course when it's done, then it's not as fulfilling, I forget about it. I never listen to my old records. I just get bored with them after a couple of months. I realize it's the process that I really love. It's not as much about the end result, if your thing is good or if people like it-- that's not as important as the actual experience of creation.

Pitchfork: So it seems like you're making this music at least as much for yourself as for anyone else?

KB: Yeah, definitely. What I thought about other people's reactions would be never really factored in, because it is just very pure and organic. Just making new things. I can't really say what motivated one song or another song or this or that. I just get it in my mind, "Okay, I want to make it like this." And then I do it and it's really fun, and then I forget about it and do something else.

Pitchfork: Since Hissing Fauna, you've been experimenting with the quasi-fictional characters Georgie Fruit and List Christie-- are there any other alter egos you're developing right now?

KB: Every once in a while I fool around with different ideas. I thought that maybe there'd be a character named "Chandeliera." I don't really know, like, List Christie... it's kind of just wordplay. It's just fun. Georgie Fruit, he's definitely a fun character to think about, but I try not to propagate the myth too much, just because I don't want people thinking that Skeletal Lamping is some sort of concept album and that I wrote it from the persona of some fictional character. It's not like that at all. I created Georgie, or I thought of him as this sort of device that would enable me to explore different aspects of my personality.

At least at first, I would feel a little too vulnerable if I said, "Well okay, this is me." At first it gave me a weapon or a defense against criticism. But then I realized that there's no real way to create something that is not you. There's no way to really defy who you are, even though who you are is very fluid. Georgie is just kind of an aspect of my personality. It's not really a character outside of myself. I don't want people to feel like I've divorced myself from the songs in any way. It definitely feels Kevin Barnes. It sort of enabled me to go to a place outside of my personal experience. But it's kind of just more a fantasy then.

Pitchfork: Do you consider Georgie Fruit to be more a caricature of yourself or does his personality simply stem from you as a writer?

KB: I think, to some degree, it's sort of an exaggeration of this image I have. You know, when I think or when I write something it's, like, more sexual and it's almost more like R&B or something. You know like something you would find in an Ohio Players record or something. I think that there are so many weird cultural restrictions are placed on us. Like, "You're a white person, this is who you are, and you can't really do this because that's for black people." And vice-versa-- "You're a black person, you can't make techno... or British folk music," whatever. There's some stupid, prissy restrictions that limit what we do, or maybe put borders around our minds in a way that is very limiting. When I think of this Georgie Fruit character, I try to think of him as a middle-aged black man, probably in his fifties. And somehow-- even though it sounds totally absurd and ridiculous-- there is a middle-aged black man inside of me. But there's also an adolescent Chinese girl inside of me, or whatever.

The things that you see-- movies where you identify with certain characters even though they come from different walks of life-- I think there are these universal themes that everyone can identify with, and even though someone comes from a different culture or a different part of the world, or a different gender, there are so many universal feelings that everyone shares. The human experience is very complex, but at the same time we all can identify with anything that anyone goes through for the most part. Or at least, if we have an imagination, we can go there. In a way, I think that means we house the potential to be all these different kinds of people. So I'm a middle-aged black man, and I am a Chinese girl. I don't really feel like I need to be what my human vessel tells the world that I am. I don't feel like I need to be a 34-year-old caucasian man. Just because the human vessel sends out that message to people, that doesn't mean that's who I am, that that's the limit to who I can be.

Pitchfork: Do you think that a character like that helps you sort of communicate through a live performance? How much do you plan to involve Georgie Fruit in the live show?

KB: That is something that sprung up during the Hissing Fauna tour. I was definitely in a funny state of mind that I'd never really been in before. And I really enjoyed wearing the most outrageous and unflattering outfits I could find, just piecing together the craziest things-- you realize how much fun it is when you have no real hang ups about that. Performing gives me the ability to do things like that. In my daily life, I wouldn't want to wear a bright green thong and a muscle shirt to the grocery store.

Pitchfork: Oh, really?

KB: [laughs] But I'm serious-- it's fun to do that. And everyone laughs. It's just playfulness. It's fun, you know. That's what I love about performing now, it really is just like dress-up time. It's a fun game, and everyone can get into it. I see that a bit at our shows-- people dressing up and wearing outrageous things. I think it's healthy for people to do that sort of gender bending, to escape from these gender roles that are enforced upon us, or that we perceive are enforced upon us. I really hope that the live performance gives people the opportunity to let their hair down and just say, "Okay, fuck it, I'm going to be someone nobody thinks I am tonight." Just for one night. I don't think you have to do it all the time.

And that's kind of the thing, too. It's interesting-- in my daily life, I just want to be anonymous. I just want to be invisible. But when I am on stage, I don't want to be invisible at all. I want to be a peacock, because I'm on stage and that's the point. If people are going to pay to see you on stage, you have the opportunity to do something in front of all these people and help them escape from the limiting aspects of public existence.

Pitchfork: I am particularly curious about that idea of gender-bending. Does that play into the universalism of having experiences that other people do, or is that coming out of a more literal place in your psyche?

KB: I don't really think of it as gender-bending. It's funny because a lot of people think that if you put on makeup and you put on a dress, then you're cross-dressing. But I don't think that just because-- I mean it sounds kinda stupid and teenager whatever-- just because women wear dresses and men typically don't wear dresses; it's not like dresses are only for women. It's not like there are certain clothes that are really exclusively for a certain gender. So I don't really think of it as really role playing. But in a way it is kind of fun, because it is like, yeah naturally men don't wear dresses. But, there is no reason you can't wear dresses. But, at the same time if you do wear a dress and you live in like Cheyenne, Wyoming or whatever, you might like get dragged from behind a pick-up-truck and murdered. Or whatever, you know. So it kinda gives people like a safe venue to do something more interesting and sort of breaking out of the norm of like what is acceptable and what's not acceptable. It's kind of a friendly environment to just experiment and just do something that's out of the ordinary.

Pitchfork: In an interview with Pitchfork last year, you talked about reliving your personal life on stage and said that there's a communal aspect of sharing something with other people and receiving feedback from the audience. Putting your personal lyrics on display for people, does it help you explore these things going on in your mind?

KB: Well the weird thing is, when you're performing the same songs every night for months at a time, they tend to transform in a way that you didn't really expect them to. I noticed with the Hissing Fauna tour, these songs, which at the time were very personal-- when I created them I was in a really bad state of mind-- when we performed them they became almost like these anthemic celebrations. People are pumping their fists, because it's like an anthem to anxiety and paranoia. Which might seem a bit bizarre. I mean, it was definitely bizarre at first, but then I realized it's kind of natural, and it isn't something I should be freaked out about.

I don't really go there for every song. For example, with "The Past is a Grotesque Animal", it's almost like it has taken on this new meaning. I'm not transported back to the time of me and Nina breaking up, to all of the horrible anxiety and depression and paranoia that was going on at that time. Somehow it sort of formed into something different, it's like a different animal now; it's hard to put into words what that means to me. It doesn't really have less value, it just has different value-- you know, it's a different thing. And so, when you perform it every night, and you associate it with this glam, crazy, colorful, avant-garde circus or whatever the hell we're doing now, those songs still fit into it in a weird way. Because the density of the songs or the subject matter is definitely in touch with the complexity of the human spirit.

I don't want it just to be a completely vacuous party all the time. I like the fact that there are these deeper elements that speak to the complexities of the human mind and the human experience. So that's the thing I really wanted to do: make music that's dancey, fun, and infectious and has immediacy, but also speaks to the darker side of the psyche-- things that maybe we're not that comfortable, forcing ourselves to accept things that everyone tries to push under the surface, and trying to bring them up to the surface and realize that they are interesting and magical just like everything else.

Pitchfork: You said that this album was your attempt at lamping, or hunting, your proverbial skeletons. What part of your thought life exactly did you want to explore through this record, and how has the process of making it helped you do so?

KB: The record is very sexual-- the thing about sex that I find so interesting is that it's never boring. It doesn't matter how many times you have it, or how many times you've seen it on television, or how many times you have conversations about it, it never gets boring. And that's kind of fascinating. It's one of the few subjects that is like that. Most things, the more you do it, it sort of loses its appeal and becomes mundane. But sex never becomes mundane. And the way it plays off our psyche, there are so many different levels, it's so complex. So I think with this record, I was definitely exploring more of my concept of my sexuality and the role that sexuality plays socially in our lives-- how it sort of creates our own identity. Like, "This is who I am, a heterosexual man, and these are the attributes of a heterosexual male. And I subscribe to all of these things." And I realize how political it is, and it's just really interesting to me, like on "Womens Studies Victims".

But there are a lot of things that I've just thought about that I haven't really shelled out in a completely linear fashion. I've been thinking about feminism, for example, and homosexuality and bisexuality and how whatever path you feel is your path can really help create this identity that you have. But I realize that identity is not fixed, I could be-- like I was saying before-- a homosexual. And I can be a feminist. And I can be a butch dude. I can be all these things, and I am all these things. There is no reason for me to say I am just one thing. Like, "I am a Republican," "I am an evangelical," and, "These are the things I believe in and subscribe to everything else that everyone else in this group believes in." I don't really feel like I need to make that decision. I don't need to commit to being one thing-- I can allow myself to be everything, even if all these things contradict each other.

Pitchfork: That's interesting. Did the sexual nature of the subject matter directly influence the cover art?

KB: Yeah, it's definitely supposed to be this liberated cast of people. And it's interesting, when you think maybe there is some symbolism with the one character in the foreground, who's pointing out that cancer-- which kind of looks like this beastly vine-- is about to devour everything. I didn't create the artwork, and I didn't even visualize it. I just left it up to [brother] David and [wife] Nina to create. But it's interesting how it does directly connect to the record in a sort of unintentional way. I know that my brother and Nina were listening to the record a lot, so I'm sure it definitely influenced their hands when they were creating the artwork.

Pitchfork: So it was just their response to hearing the album? Nothing more?

KB: Pretty much, I mean, we didn't really sit down and say, "Okay, this is what we want to accomplish." And that's the way it's always been with David and Nina. It's basically just, "You guys do your own thing." It works because I think we are sort of the same animal and we are connected in that way. We really, really appreciate what the other one does. There are certain artists that really seem to speak to you personally and you can't really understand why. I think we just have a really natural, artistic rapport with each other.

Pitchfork: Whose idea was it to release Skeletal Lamping in several packages, and do you think that is a necessary way to combat illegal downloading of the album?

KB: I think it was an idea my brother and I came up with. What we tried to do with the Hissing Fauna packaging was create something that was slightly unconventional, kind of interesting, that wasn't the same thing we had done, because we've already put out like 10 records, 11 records or something. And basically they're just all the same, you know, maybe you get a six-page booklet instead of a three-page booklet this time. But we wanted to make something that had more value as an object, that wasn't just a little booklet that goes into this little plastic rectangle. So we just started talking-- what sort of objects could we create? What would be interesting? And we started thinking that interior design objects would be really great, because then people could incorporate that into their daily lives. And the object would flow with the rest of the things they have in their house, and it wouldn't just be this thing that you would need to put on a shelf or whatever. We wanted to create an exceptional object for the album, and then we were thinking, "Well why stop at one?"

It didn't really take very long, luckily, for us to convince Polyvinyl that this would be really exciting. And luckily, they got super excited about it, too, and they helped do all the legwork-- to [find out] who we had to talk to get all these objects manufactured. 'Cause, you know, we had never made a Chinese lantern before, and they had never made a Chinese lantern before, so it was like, "We know Chinese lanterns exist, and we know they're not that expensive." It couldn't be that hard to put album artwork on one of them, right? So they were like, "Yeah, this shouldn't be that hard." So we went back and forth with them for a couple months, and eventually we found someone that would produce them for us. It was really fun.

I really like finding interesting objects, and I know a lot of people really like finding interesting objects for their living spaces. We wanted to produce these kinds of things that people get excited about and find inspiring and fun, and that are not just disposable. They have a value beyond just transporting the music from your car to your house or whatever. So we created a Chinese lantern, and we created these wall decals. They're sort of-- well not really stickers, because you can unpeal them and move them around in your house. Nina and David designed two wall decal sets. And the CD packaging itself is really, really crazy and really interesting. It folds into the normal shrink wrap you would get at your local record store, but it's all one piece of paper, and when you open it up you realize, "Oh my god, this thing is almost like a paper sculpture in a way."

It's kind of hard to describe, but it folds out to become almost this weird beast with a gaping mouth-- kind of nefarious looking. And on the inside, there's this triangular object that houses the CD. And you can open the object-- the triangle-- and pull out the CD, and then close it up again. So your CD doesn't get scratched or anything, but at the same time you can put it on your table, or you can put it next to your bed, or you can put it on your mantle. Kind of a conversation piece. It's just this weird and interesting object. It goes back to this thought that we had, that it would be so cool if that becomes the norm and no one is creating just jewel cases anymore. Everyone has to create an interesting object and something that's singular from other objects. So you go to a record store, and it's filled with these totally bizarre art objects. It's like, "Hey, I'm looking for the new Panda Bear record, what is it?" "Oh, it's this bonsai tree."

Pitchfork: I hope he doesn't take your idea now.

KB: I think it would be cool! He can have the bonsai tree.

Pitchfork: You must have had a decent response so far. Is that why the album had to be pushed back a little bit?

KB: No, to be honest, it was a printing error. It was really frustrating, especially for the label, because they had been doing all the grunt work, getting everything in line so it could all come out in time. And it's obviously way more complicated than a normal release, so they were under the impression that everything was running smoothly. And then they got the sample from the printing place and they were like, "This looks like shit. What happened?" For some reason they didn't proof it before they created 75,000 copies of it. So they had to start from scratch. That's why it got pushed back. It's really frustrating and annoying, because we had submitted all the artwork on time, and they had done everything they were supposed to do, and then it's just one dude sitting at the printing place who doesn't take the time to look at it and be like, "Oh, you know what, this doesn't look anything like the template that they created for us. But I don't care, let's just make 75,000 of these and see what happens!" Really, really dumb. It sucks, but in a couple months' time, it won't really matter anymore.

Pitchfork: Are there plans to sell the lamp and the decals separately? I want to decorate my room in all Of Montreal stuff, so do I have to buy the album five times?

KB: [laughs] Well that's the thing, you buy the object and then you get the record, you get the download coupon. You get that with every object, so you can basically give them to your friends or give them to homeless people or whatever.

Pitchfork: Are there plans for an EP or other release to feature the 40 minutes of extra material you said you had?

KB: I want to release the stuff, but at the same time I don't want to put out the "Loser EP"-- you know, the EP of songs that weren't good enough to make the record. I think that some of the songs are actually kind of interesting, and I'll probably release two or three of them at some point.

Pitchfork: You have a pretty crazy tour schedule for the rest of the year. Is there any new stuff we should expect on the tour?

KB: This tour is definitely the most ambitious. We're investing more time, energy, and money into this one than we ever have before. We're viewing it as almost a once in a lifetime experience, and we're bringing a lot of people on board. We're going to create this room, and on one side, when it's facing away from the audience, it will have projections screens on it. And then when you turn it around, then you'll expose this new environment, and I'll interact with some performance artists within the room at the same time. It is going to be sort of a meta performance. I'll be performing, and then maybe it will go along with the theme of the song in the background. And then, maybe something completely absurd that will have no connection to anything else will be on the screen. We're going to have, like, five projection screens, and it's just going to be so much crazy visual stuff. And at shows in certain cities we are going to be doing special things, but I can't really give away what they're going to be. But they're going to be really far out, really visual things.

The record itself is so dense with ideas, it's very bizarre and all over the place, so we wanted to make something that is visually representative of that. On some level, it might be a lot. It's going to be a crazy banquet for the senses. It's going to be touching so many different parts of the brain, hopefully. We don't want to make just a party atmosphere. Parties are fun, but what I'd really like to do is make something that is more, you know, with moments of tension and drama. Maybe even you feel scared for a second, or you feel disgusted for a second. You don't really often feel disgusted at like an indie-rock show, you know what I mean?

I kinda want it to be like a great film in that, it's like pretty long and you go through all these different moods and have all these different experiences, and at the end of it you feel a little bit depleted but happy. You know you just have something to talk about on the drive home, as you're still like piecing it together you're like, "Oh, yeah and remember that part?" "Yeah, what the hell was that?" We want it to be along those lines, where people are leaving the venue feeling a little bit nauseous. You know, in a pleasant way. Like, when you're leaving an amusement park.