Playground magazine

If make-up is like a shield for him, music is the refuge where he likes to shut himself up. An emotional space in which Johnny Jewel claims to operate by following his instincts, and where he likes to move almost in silence, usually alone. In a way, for the brain behind Chromatics, music is a kind of sedative to get away from the madding crowd. He says that he is constantly recording (although he later ends up releasing only 5% of everything recorded) and this season, we seem to be in luck. 2012 is a year (the last one being 2007), when the time has come for Jewel to put out a healthy ration of material. So far he has released one of the masterpieces of the year, the enigmatic and captivating “Kill For Love”. Here he takes the sound of Italians Do It Better to new heights, giving it form and depth - but he assures us that he has other aces up his sleeve for the coming months. Meanwhile, we will soon be able to see him live at San Miguel Primavera Sound.

“Kill For Love” is a huge work in every way. Both emotionally and logistically. It took Johnny several years to shape the hour and a half that the album lasts, but the end result couldn’t have been better sculpted. With it, he seems to have wanted to bend such vast, intangible concepts as time and space to his will; and the forms that he uses to do so are highly seductive. The same thing happened to me with M83’s recent “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming” - I notice that when I listen to it, I sometimes get the feeling that I am watching a film rather than listening to an album. As a consequence an idea comes to mind: if “Kill For Love” were a film, it would be one of those treacherous, slightly erotic, 70s movies. Something like “Emmanuelle”, I think, without thinking too much about it. When the time comes to chat with Johnny, I decide to ask him about that and a few other things.

First of all I’d like to ask you about Portland. I’m addicted to the “Portlandia” TV series!

Oh, I actually haven't had time to watch it. But everyone says it's really funny.

From what I can see there, it looks like a great city. Why did you decide to move there?

In 1994, I took a bus from Houston, Texas to Olympia, Washington, to see the Yo Yo A Go Go music festival. Most of the bands were based off the West Coast and they never toured Texas, so me and my friend Sean quit our jobs and bought Greyhound bus passes. It took us four days to get there. On the way, the bus stopped for 15 minutes in Portland to get gas. I got out to walk around and something just switched on in my brain. It's difficult to describe, but I felt awake, like I could really focus and work there. I think it was because of the clean air and the river running through the middle of the city. I wanted to move to the West Coast, but was too poor to move to San Francisco or Seattle. Portland was really cheap at the time so I moved there. Two weeks later, I met Ida from Glass Candy, and that's how this whole thing really began. That was January of 1996.

How has the musical scene changed there since then?

It used to be more indie rock like Seattle, but is very DJ oriented now with a lot of electronic music being the main music of the underground.

In what sense do you feel your music connected to other contemporary artists?

For me personally, there is not much of a direct connection with my contemporaries. But I see that a lot of kids that are listening to Glass Candy, Desire, and Chromatics are also listening to Ariel Pink, M83, LCD, Beach House, Lindstrom, etc.. So in that way, the bands are connected to each other through the fans. When I was in a period of my life where I was writing less and listening more, I felt more connected to the idea of a scene. It's ironic, but spending your life making music for people to share together ultimately separates you from everyone that surrounds you.

Regarding the new songs, I can see connections with the way The xx control space and time. Did they inspire you? Talking in more abstract terms, I also can see connections with the decadent hedonism that The Weeknd’s Abel Tesfaye has put in the map. Do you know his albums?

We love The Weeknd. I don't know all of his music, but I love what I've heard. He's definitely working from a similar place conceptually in terms of space and mood. Letting the music cry.

There is no doubt that Chromatics sound very languid on “Kill for Love”, almost like an antithesis of dancing. Do you like to dance?

I love to dance, but I have to be in the right mood. I find myself dancing in the studio alone while writing. We use a lot of electronic tones that are generally associated with dance culture so sometimes the lines are blurred between genres. But music is music, and we love it all. I personally don't consider Chromatics to be a dance band, but that's just a term. It doesn't bother me if someone calls us dance or rock. The music is very percussive and rhythmically driven, and people dance at the concerts.

A lot of your songs make me think about the concept ‘solitude’. Is loneliness a concept you try to explore within your music?

It's an omnipresent obstacle that I deal with and it comes out in the studio. Growing up in Texas in the 1980s was pretty bleak for a kid listening to Nico and John Cage. Writing music has always been like a journal for me, so that's the headspace I am in while recording. I feel more connected to the world somehow while recording. But 90 percent of “Kill For Love” was made alone in a studio with no windows in the middle of the night while the rest of the world slept.

The night is one of the other concepts most present in the heart of Chromatics.

I was born in a hurricane in Houston at 9:45 pm. I have always felt excited by the stillness of night and the race to do as much as I can before the sun comes up.

What’s your relation with a concept like ‘time’ (in music)?

I like music that breathes and becomes part of my environment. The use of space in sound is one of Chromatics’ strongest points. We explore repetition and let the music drift in and out of consciousness. This gives the feeling of ‘time’ in music. For some, it’s boring. For us, it’s heavenly. Time is the one thing we never have enough of, but in music we can fantasize about stretching out moments and making them last. They say mother earth and father time. Time is supposed to be masculine and logical, but to us, the concept of time is tragically romantic.

The first thing that calls the attention about “Kill For Love” is its length. Sometimes, because of the length and the changing moods, it feels more like a movie than like an album. Did you have in mind the idea to make an album that long from the beginning, or was it something that just came up?

We knew it was going to be long, but we didn't know it was going to be this long. When “Night Drive” came out, it was originally released as a tour only demo CDR. Then it exploded. We made 300. Then overnight we had orders for 15,000. That was a huge jump for us, so we just took the plunge. I didn't want to rework a record that people were already falling in love with. It was really difficult, but I had to let it go. We released the demo version officially and that was the end of it. After that, I promised myself I wouldn't do that for the following album. I wouldn't release it until I felt like it was done. No matter how short or how long it ended up being.

It took you five years to complete it; as happened with “Night Drive” and “Beat Box”. Why so much time?

Editing, mixing, writing, splicing, mastering, rewriting, remixing. These things are very time consuming, and we don't work on computers, so that time is multiplied. This combined with the need to walk away from the music for months at a time, causes the records to take forever. The goal is to go from concept to reality without discolouring the original idea of the song too much. What our albums lack in punctuality, they make up for in shelf life.

I think the original tracklist was narrowed down from 36 tracks to 17.

All of the tracks were selected on the album in order to complement the entire picture. Like a painting, the album is balanced by multiple colours and strokes. The pop songs are deep red, and those can only be three or four minutes long. The red is so vibrant that you are immediately drawn in, but too much can be overwhelming. Once the pop pulls you in, the muted blues of the abstract tracks hypnotize and sooth you. In between these extremes, there are violets & lavenders. Up close, these moments seem like distinct opposites. From a distance, they combine to make a complete image. The 17 tracks on “Kill For Love” are sequenced to make one huge arc.