The Jazz of it All with Dummy

(Photo Credit - Kyle Berger)

Los Angeles-based five-piece Dummy are back with their latest do you love the color of the sky? this Friday! Check out our interview with the band!

do you love the color of the sky? Is chock full of dynamic beats and melodies throughout. I especially loved the sound you achieved on the opener “April Limousine”. The vocals on any given track pair so well with the melody, which is especially highlighted by the percussion for me. What were some of your inspirations for the landscape you were building musically?

Emma - "As far as like inspiration, I mostly draw internal inspiration, in terms of lyrics environmental and political terms. "April Limousine" just sounded like it was gonna be the intro track, I just got the idea that I wanted to gather ideas from all the different songs. I was able to gather bits and pieces from all the songs throughout the record. Lyrically, it has parts of all the record. When Joe and Alex sent it over to me at first, their very first thing was asking to just freestyle some vocals over it. I did some meandering vocals and they chopped it up and made that bass level thing that went intro"

Joe - “When we were writing it, we thought it would be cool to have Emma freestyle and chop it up.”

Alex - “By that point we had been messing with her vocals on other tracks and I felt like that was something we were doing on other tracks so it fit. Instrumentally, I was trying to do something that was house or techno or pad sound. We did it with just guitar through a sweeping filter and delay that's making almost this synthified sound. With the drums it was chopping it up like the vocals and messing around and seeing how it sounds.”

Joe - “Every little piece was in service of the rhythm.”

Alex - “It was like editing things to make the rhythm”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention some of the themes you take head on here, such as climate change on “April Limousine” and AI/the degradation of the value of art on “Full Spectrum Dominance”. How did you come to approach these types of issues and do it in a way that remains accessible to the audience?

Emma - “You kind of want people to get the point and not beat them over the head with it. There is poltiical messaging that can come off stilted or cornball. Things are a bit couched in metaphor and there's a garden motif in that song. It's basically how generative AI is "creating art". it's built on the sumtotal of human art that someone was able to scrape from the internet. It's just a comment on the fact they couldn't have done it without us. It's up to us as whether to accept that as something we like or something we accept as art. It seems fairly obvious that most people don't see AI generated art or music as art.”

Joe - “It doesn't have creative value.”

Emma - “It needs humanity or otherwise it's just a mashup of other people's work.”

Joe - “It's also like a weird internal fan service of what you wish someone had done. When you see AI art it is "If I made this movie it'd be this actor or this kind of story". Usually it's filled with racisim or sexism. It's not necessarily fan service.”

Emma - “It's democratized art that's put in the hands of people that is not good.”

Joe - “It's just laziness, it is not creative.”

Emma- “It's sad to me when people say "I'm an AI artist"’

Joe - “To me and all of us, (the creative process) it's a real and sacred thing, the closest thing to spirituality. The people that are seilling it to you are greedy tech people. Any person who is an actual artist who does actual art would never touch it with a ten pole.”

You all have a reputation as a prolific touring band. I think I read you recently completed about 113 shows in 150 days. That’s just mind blowing. With that in mind, how do you take this music and translate it into the live setting? Additionally, what are you most looking forward to about sharing these new tracks in a live setting?

Emma - “We're still working on the live show, we're practicing these songs about three times a week. We're kind of reverse engineering these tracks for the live setting. We write and then figure out how to play them live later. Tour is coming up, we've practiced them but we're still working on it. We're also perectionists about the live sound”

Joe - “Recording is it's own thing and then the live is it's own thing. We approach recording things without thinking about how to do it live. We may record something and the arrangements may vary a little. If some elements of the recording that are left to the way side. There was a song on our first album called “Final Weapon” there was a flute part that never translated live and we didn't do that aspect live. “

Alex - “I always feel like we continue changing the song as we make a song and there are these small changes you make as you play it. There are old songs that we restructure or we toy with for the live set as well.”

Joe - “It's also fun to discover songs in a new way live. For rock bands, we write songs and then you start playing it live in the next set. For us, partially due to the fact this album was written between tours, we didn't have time to test them live. It's cool for us that they live in their own seperate worlds per se. You can kind of say that the recording is the snapshot and the live is the vicesaral version. Sometimes when you have something live, it doesn't sound the way you want it to. Sometimes you need to boost or reduce something. Currently nothing is muscle memory, eventually it will become a little more natural. For all of us, rock and roll is about messiness. Even though we're playing electronic live music, there still has to be a humanity that has to be imperfect, the performance must be very human.”

Alex - “The jazz of it all.”

I love the swapping of vocals on tracks between Emma and Nathan. It keeps the listener on their proverbial toes. How do you decide which way a track is leaning vocally from a performance perspective?

Emma - “It was kind of just by feel. Sometimes it will be Joe saying that I should do it. Or sometimes I'll claim something. It's pretty organic, sometimes we can just tell who's voice fits it the best.”

What are you most looking forward to about releasing this into the ether of the internet?

Joe - “For me when we were working on the singles, everyone had different ideas of what they should be and there was no song that represents the album as whole. There were obvious singles that didn't end up being singles. The tracklist is very deliberate. The sonic back and forth is tied back and forth is very deliberate. The tie to radio and singles was something we had never had to think about. With Polyvinyl there were considerations we had never had to consider. For this record we wanted to create a hypnotic atmosphere. I'm excited for that theme.”

Alex - “I think the singles are some of the most immediate moments on the record. There are definitely tracks that I'm excited for people to hear that are like deeper cuts you could say. It was a long process.”

Joe - “It's funny because we played one of the songs back in the spring on a brief three show run, everyone was asking "what was that song" and I felt like it was definitely going to be a single. However, on the finished product it was not. So I'm excited for that one to come out as well.”

do you love the sun? drops this Friday wherever you get music!