When did your newest album come out?
All: April.
It's your first full-length, right?
Joe: It is. But the oldest song on there is five years old.
Matt: Which one is that?
J: Safe Like a Train.
M: That was on our first seven inch. We recorded the album with these guys called The Brothers (they're brothers) in Greenpoint. They recently started a recording studio. We gave them a sampler of songs that we wrote, but they really liked that old song off the seven inch. Then…
J: We had a recording of it sped up. We said, isn't this novel?
Sped up? Like from 33 to 45?
M: Not that perceivably, but...
J: The old one goes like this. (strums guitar) Then the new one is more like this. (strums guitar) - higher pitched, faster tempo It makes it into a hoppy…
Kurt: Like its trying to get somewhere.
J: Exactly. It's churning along, like a train.
When I listen to your songs, I have these visions of y'all jumping around, wherever you happen to be at that moment performing the songs.
Joe: Or maybe when you play the record, we start jumping around wherever we are.
Is the record hardwired with special radio frequencies inside that relay to a special collar in your neck that makes you jump around? That's the next generation of performance art.
Matt: Luckily not too many people listen to our record at the same time. We have a hidden motivation in not becoming too popular.
What do you do to accomplish that goal?
J: Make music that is difficult to listen to.
M: Make music with no bass frequencies that hurt people's ears
J: In the past it has seemed like a really exciting thing, to make music that shreds people's ears apart. I think it does it less so on the record than at the shows. People say “Man, I like those songs but you are hard to listen to. There is so much of that stuff that hurts you.”
M: “I love your Myspace page.”
J: It's a difficult question; whether to shred people's ears or make them pleased to listen to your music.
Do you desire to shred people's ears, or is it…
M: It used to be. We started playing in college in the basement. We were thinking that the music has to sound really tough. Then we realized that we are all pansies.
Will having Kurt in Berkeley influence the way that your sound develops?
J: This tour has been an attempt to try to play the music that we made with Kurt on the newest record.
M: In practice there's not that much difference between what we've done with Zach in Brooklyn, but besides a couple of new songs that we wrote with him that we haven't been playing on this tour, I think the general idea is doing what we know how to do together the best we can.
Which is perhaps shredding people's ears.
M: We do that with Zach too.
J: That's the funny thing. We do that very naturally. I think some of it has to do with the fact that our ears are damaged in that frequency range already, because we've been playing there a long time. Even when things are shredding other people's ears, we think 'Aw, that's not ear-shredding enough.'
M: And we're wearing ear plugs.
K: Yeah. I think that's the thing with our show, and when we write songs. We're writing songs with ear plugs in, and then we listen to stuff on the recordings, and its not turned up nearly as loud as when we play, so we're kind of shielding ourselves from exactly the frequencies that destroy everyone's ears.
M: And the writing kind of necessitates the volume, or at least we make it so that it does. If we try to turn down a lot, it doesn't sound the same. For Joe and Kurt it's a volume issue, and for me it's an energy issue. I feel the way I'm inclined to play the drums is in a sweaty and emphatic way. I'm trying to improve on a more dynamic range and subtlety, so I'm not always blowing it out. It's a constant struggle.
J: Constant struggle.
Where do you think your desire to play loud music comes from?
J: Emotional insecurities. My mother did not hold me enough when I was a child, so I'm afraid to put myself at risk in performance. So I hide behind the noise.
From: https://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/pterodactyl
