Kinski:
Stunningly Realizes the Unconventional

By Bob Ham

Photo By Melissa O'Hearn

Speaking on the phone as he drives through the streets of downtown Seattle, Chris Martin makes a shocking admission. “I like listening to some of the stuff they play on Radio Disney. I even went out and bought that Hannah Montana CD because there was this one song that just blew me away.” Coming from most other musicians, this wouldn’t seem like such a startling thing to say. But when the person speaking is the mastermind behind Kinski, a band that specializes in galloping, buzzing, psychedelic rock, it is practically unfathomable.

Yet, scratch the surface of Kinski’s music and underneath the layers of fuzzy guitar, charging rhythms and beautiful drones is a group that has an uncanny sense of how to craft an unforgettable melody and imbue each song with a combination of experimental sound and pop in ways the world hasn’t seen since Sonic Youth’s early ‘90s heyday. This has never been more apparent than on the quartet’s recent full-length, Down Below It’s Chaos, which Sub Pop Records will release on August 21. On the album, the urgent attack of the band is tempered on many songs thanks to some understated keyboard work (courtesy of second guitarist Matthew Reid-Schwartz) and, although Kinski has used vocals on all its albums, Martin’s voice seems more present than before, adding another layer to the already thick sound.

If his penchant for radio-friendly pop wasn’t a surprising enough comment, it is amazing to hear that Martin didn’t start playing music until he was in his 20s. “I kind of fell into it,” he says. “I went to film school in Bozeman, Montana, and I met some guys at the college radio station who said, ‘We’ll show you what to do’, and it took off from there.”

In fact, three-quarters of the band are self-taught musicians — bassist Lucy Atkinson only picked up her instrument when Martin asked her to start a band with him. “I pretty much started when the band started nine years ago. Honestly, it wasn’t that hard. But if you told me to pick up a guitar, that would be a different story,” Atkinson says. The only member of the group with any musical training is Reid-Schwartz, who majored in flute in college and studied with renowned avant-garde composer Alvin Lucier.

Reid-Schwartz has not only added his flute playing to the band’s work over the years, but he’s also been able to help make sense of Martin’s trickier songs. “We have a song that is in 7/4, then 9/4, and then 10/4 time and I didn’t even really know that we were doing that,” says Martin, “but we had someone come in to overdub a part and Matthew was the only one that could explain to the person what was going on.”

This is not to say that Kinski’s songs are thrown together. As the main songwriter, Martin spends a great deal of time putting his ideas together and then pounding them into shape in the rehearsal studio with his bandmates. “We normally spend about a year on songs,” says Martin, “playing it out, jamming on it and whittling away.”

That working model has served the band well, resulting in five albums worth of tightly constructed songs, the last three of which (including Chaos) have been released on their hometown’s venerable Sub Pop label. “Of course we were aware of the band since they are from Seattle,” says Chris Jacobs, a member of the label’s A&R staff, “but I had seen them a bunch and was a great fan of theirs, so it seemed natural to ask the question, ‘Why are we not putting out records by them?’”

Kinski’s signing to Sub Pop seems, in retrospect, to be the most logical step for a band that was embraced by their local music scene right from the start. “We didn’t really expect anything,” recalls Martin, “but were accepted really quickly. There was soon this base of people who would come to all of our shows.”

Atkinson, too, was “taken totally by surprise” at the foothold the band quickly gained. “When we started, it seemed like everyone in Seattle was into the Fastbacks and Guided By Voices and that kind of stuff and we were writing really long instrumental songs. But booking agents really liked us and we were able to play a whole bunch of different kinds of shows” — including a tour with Hovercraft not long after Kinski’s first album, Be Gentle With The Warm Turtle, came out.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen Kinski in concert as to why fans in the Northwest and beyond have taken such a shine to the band. The foursome attacks its songs with an energy and aplomb that tends to be missing from the live performances of other likeminded groups. “I think it’s important that our shows are something exciting,” says drummer Barrett Wilke. “I’ve seen far too many experimental shows that were very indulgent and I think there’s something to be said for the visceral thrill of seeing a great rock show.”

For all the verve that the band showcases on stage, they have all felt that until recently, they were never really able to bring that to their records as easily. “We definitely felt that two years ago,” says Martin, “feeling that we were way better live and that the records never captured the energy and the sound. The big goal with Alpine Static [the band’s 2005 release] was to try and get that live sound.” For that album, they made what Martin feels were crucial adjustments to what happened in the studio. “The main thing we wanted to get away from was the big, reverb-y, echo-y drum sound for a tight ‘70s, ZZ Top-style of drum sound. It was also important that we were getting better guitar sounds, since most of the time the guitars and amps we use in the studio are different that the everyday ones we use on stage,” says Martin.

Establishing the recorded sound the band wanted has freed Kinski up to be able to make an album like Chaos, whose songs weren’t completely figured out at the point of entering the studio. “They weren’t quite as arranged as before,” says Martin, “but they were still mostly written. I deliberately left a lot of the arrangements bare so that we could add more to it and flesh out the songs in the studio.”

It is that kind of confidence in both his and the band’s abilities that has lowered the level of Martin’s mental anguish. “This record came together in a much different way and I was not as invested in this as I was with the others,” he says. “They weren’t songs that I’ve really labored over. They just kind of came together. I really hope that in the future [our records] could be more like that.”

Martin spends a lot of time thinking about the future of the band, especially in regards to the rare, and somewhat unusual, opportunity that came up for Kinski earlier this year: opening up for Tool on the band’s most recent U.S. tour. “We got the call four days before it started,” recalls Martin. “They had rescheduled their tour and someone they had chosen to open couldn’t do it. Apparently, [Justin Chancellor, Tool’s bass player] is a big fan.” Going into the tour with visions of being booed off stage or pelted with bottles, Martin says that the band soon realized that “this was going to work.”
“It was really amazing and it felt sort of comfortable. Once the lights go down, you can’t see anything. All’s you can see are the other band members on stage, so we didn’t get too freaked out,” Martin says, explaining that the group then “went into [each show] really wanting to win them over.”

According to Jacobs, who was able to catch a few of the shows, Kinski managed to make some new fans quite easily: “When the lights went down, there was this huge, deafening roar and then a [sigh of disappointment] when Kinski walked on stage. But then two songs into it, the crowd really responded to what they were doing.”

Even with all the accolades that the band has received in response to these shows, thanks to emails sent to them and comments left on their MySpace page, Kinski did run into some rough spots along the way. This was mostly due to the fact that not all the members of the core line-up could do the whole tour because of the short notice they were given. According to Martin, “Lucy couldn’t do one of the shows and the guy who flew in was a drummer so we had Barrett playing bass, something he’d never really done before. And we had a couple of hecklers at that one, which threw us off a bit.”
Despite this low point, Martin admits, “The arena thing is so much easier. The shows are over at 11 p.m., which means you can go out and have a drink afterwards, whereas a club date is over at 2 a.m. and then you have to find a hotel.”

Despite this, the band will more than likely be hitting the club circuit again in support of the new album.If not opening up for bigger bands in stadiums, Martin says that he wishes Kinski could hold out for “any new or weird experiences that may come up.” Something like Kinski’s recent appearance at Seattle’s Triple Door, providing a live soundtrack to the silent cinema verite classic, Berlin: Symphony of a City, or the music the quartet will provide for a dance performance that will debut in New York City in November.

It is the mixture of seemingly disparate avenues of popular culture (the arena rock show and the sit-down, neorealist film screening) that encapsulates perfectly what is so special about Kinski. They can win over the art house crowd and the art metal fans simply on the strength of their heady sound.

www.kinski.net