1998 / Puncture / with David Berman (Silver Jews)

David Berman engages with The Pastels for Puncture magazine sometime in 1998.
DCB: Alright, lets do this freestyle. I'll hit you with a handful of questions. Answer the ones you want to answer. Just let me know which ones you're answering by number. Then I'll follow up some of your answers and abandon some lines of inquiry. At the end, I'll take the whole mess and rearrange the order and see if we can make the interview as windy and woozy as Illumination.

Do you ever wonder why you live in this apartment and not any of the other apartments?

Katrina: My last place was sinking into a serpentine-shaped shallow mine and I had to get out fast. Outside here there's a big garden with old trees and a bonfire since it's Guy Fawkes night. It's warm.

DCB: In the first one minute and twelve seconds of "Cycle," before you start to sing, did you know when you were going to come in? Did you know that your lips were going to unstick and then you were going to say "sticking?" What were you dreaming about for the first 1 minute and 12 seconds?

Aggi: I knew (but not in terms of time). I didn't know my lips would unstick so audibly. I was dreaming about cycling up a mountainside of hairpins, stopping halfway up to eat goat's cheese and collecting hazlenuts in the woods.

DCB: Describe the most significant internal control weakness you ever identified in your team, and what you did to remedy it.

Stephen: To be honest our team wasn't a team at one point - in 1989. That's the reason the original Pastels lineup split. We reconvened in a more solid way, based on the friendship between myself, Aggi and Katrina.

DCB: How do you turn an occasional Pastels fan into a permanent Pastels fan?

Stephen: That's impossible to answer, but I suppose I hope people will find things about our music that's exclusive to us, that they will be drawn in or intrigued and find us contrasting and slightly complex.

DCB: William Carlos Williams is famous for saying "no ideas but in things." Can you think of a Pastels song that started with a simple object?

Katrina: I'm sure modern lighthouses are quite sophisticated, but the idea of a tower built on dangerous rocks with a bright light shining on top seems so simple. One of the Seven Wonders of the World was a lighthouse. They're so lonely and heroic, especially since they've been mechanised. 'Mechanised' is a Pastels song I wrote.

DCB: What is non-biological fairy liquid?

DCB: Tell me about the piano playing on illumination.

Stephen: For 'The Hits Hurt' we asked our friend Bill Wells to go in and improvise over the outro. What he did seemed random but also melodic. We asked him, out of respect, if he wanted a second go at it. Happily, he didn't. No one in our band is too precious about playing the keyboard parts, although we're all intent listeners. Katrina played most of the keyboards on our last two records.

DCB: My uncle handwrote a 24 volume history of June 18, 1984 but I cannot find your names in the index. Where were you and what were you doing on June 18, 1984?

Aggi: June 18, 1984: Happy to be packing my bags after my first year at art school in London to go home to Clackmannanshire; could be that night was the first all year I didn't go to Alan McGee's club and so I missed the Jesus & Mary Chain's first London (or ever?) concert. Glad to be getting out of that flat that smelled of cabbage, where you always stuck to the kitchen floor because The Legend had spraymounted his fanzine there, and perishing foam sprayed out of the plastic chairs and the landlord kept you waiting to pay the rent while he buckled his trousers up. In my luggage were 2 unfinished plaster sculptures, a head and a spine, lifesize. That year was the first Pastels Peel session and we didn't get asked back till this year.

DCB: I've realized why I have a hard time with classical music. The orchestrations seem to be completely out of scale with the environments I usually hear them in. This Epic music, whose themes include the march of armies, great mountain ranges, and stratospheric ideals played by upwards of one hundred people sound absurd in a strip mall bookstore or coffee shop. Then there is the example of a band like Journey or Asia, whose grandiose arrangements illustrate another problem with scale: the lyrics are simply about relationships, but seem comically tossed around in the whirlwind of heroic keyboards. How does your music address these issues via the proportion of components inside a song and the proportion of the music to the modern environments it must inevitably be played in (what kind of room/architecture does "illumination" most comfortably fit inside of?

Aggi: Our music is compact for modern urban living but expands where necessary. Could be an old building but we're not afraid to rip out the old Victorian cornices. If it's a tidy modern loft you might open a secret cupboard and find all the old junk the owner doesn't really want to leave behind. Either way it has a good view to the sky to watch the clouds rushing by. Also good in tents.

DCB: Does the Pastels music look like Aggi's paintings or do Aggi's paintings look like the Pastels music?

Aggi: At first my paintings looked like the music, but now the music also looks like my paintings ( I think).

Stephen: I think there is a very strong correlation between Pastel music and Aggi art. To me is seems that there is a similarity of approach maybe the core of this is almost a twisted folkiness. Some people have said that Aggi's art is naive which is a comment that recurs with regard to our music, but I don't think it's exactly true in either case. Although both demonstrate a certain rawness, I'd say it's more a matter of choice and a preference to understate more sophisticated ideas. But Aggi's art is completely fluid and it always seems like she's got an intrinsic grasp of the atmosphere of the music and will often amaze us by visualising it. On Illumination, I think we all felt that the music was slightly more minimalist and probably more European than on Mobile Safari. Aggi started to take these out of focus photographs of her artwork and when she showed us them we knew that they implied a three-dimensionalism that we felt we'd found with the music. Katrina spotted the shot that should be the cover and it seemed so natural.

DCB: Do you have lions in your house?

Aggi: Lions? I thought I had aliens but it was Stephen making a funny noise. Actually he is a leo.

DCB: Could you send me some of those postcards with my quote on the back? I want to send them to my friends. Other news: there's been a bizarre media explosion surrounding Steve Keene these past two weeks. he did an art show at an art college in Philadelphia. Time magazine did a full page article on him. It's an art controversy as some to the art professors are very angry, quoted as calling his paintings cynical trash devaluing real painting, etc. Then other critics are rushing to his defense. The director of M.O.M.A bought a lot of his paintings. Washington Post picked up the story. Tonight he is on the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. It's hysterical. Ok lets keep going until James at Up tells us our time is Up: What is your favorite Scottish cliché?

Aggi: That Scottish people are friendly.

DCB: What part of America could be called New Scotland because it is most close to being like Scotland?

Aggi: New York, except there are no drumlins.

Stephen: In terms of its landscape and climate, probably the Northwest.

DCB: Do you like to say the word "Scotland" over and over again because I sure do. It sounds great!

DCB: You said the new album sounds more European. I totally agree but can't explain why i feel that way. To me its the sound of cosmopolitan Poland. a more sensual vision of Poland than we're normally granted. Is this what you meant or am I off track?

Stephen: If you think it's the sound of cosmopolitan Poland, then that's what it is. And I'm flattered.

DCB: How do you react to a negative review? Do you get a physical reaction? Do you deal with it by hating the reviewer?

DCB: What do you think is the legacy of the Butthole Surfers?

Stephen: Bombast is ok. Sometimes.

DCB: I have a black eye, insomnia, and am in the early stages of gum disease. What physical problems do you suffer from?

Stephen: I think I mainly suffer from a lack of sleep. It makes me look ill and feel irritable, unfocussed, and hyper.

DCB: Who do you love?

Stephen: Katrina, Aggi, my parents.