SIMIAN MOBILE DISCO’s upcoming album, Whorl, sounds like the music that might play in your head after a long, hypnotic night in the desert (perhaps aided by a psychedelic or two). Which isn't surprising when you learn the album was recorded in California's Joshua Tree National Park. It's unusual for an electronic album to be recorded outdoors, and even more so in the course of just three live sessions. But Whorl isn't your average techno record. Stepping away from their 2007 club-favorite Attack Sustain Decay Release, Simian Mobile Disco recorded the entirety of Whorl using only a handful of synths and sequencers––no computers. The result are looming ambient sounds and organic beats, breaking away from, in their words, “the extra sounds” to pursue the potential of creative limitation.
Saturday at MoMA PS1's Warm Up, James Ford and Jas Shaw performed Whorl live. We managed to snag them as they took a breather to discuss Joshua Tree's "hippie alien chasers" vibe, their "Albert Einstein"-esque personal style, and New York as they see it—then and now.
RIKA NURRAHMAH: Whorl was the end product of mixing together a couple of live sessions. What inspired this album?
JAMES FORD: In terms of inspiration, I don’t know really. Probably just like a lot of our favorite classic records: acid house, early house, and techno—all made by guys with a limited amount of gear and a limited sort of, you know, the 808s and 303s. Even the krautrock stuff, they were pushing their instruments to the limit of what they can do, and we like the idea of trying to force ourselves to do the same thing.
How many times so far have you played your live sets with this setup and process?
JF: Not many, like four maybe.
JAS SHAW: We decided to do the last live record simply to document a live kind of rig because it changes so much—kind of evolves slowly. It got to the end of that tour, and I think we realized that we pushed that incarnation of the rig as far as it could go, and if we wanted to make it more live, more on the fly, it needed to be torn apart and rethought out again. So this new rig, one of the things that is exciting but also slightly nervous: we can’t really play any of our old songs, certainly not in a way that we used to. We’ve been really fussy about where we play. Things like PS1, a great example, an arty, open-minded crowd with other people playing that we are really interested in—it’s kind of smarter music.
Is it challenging creating an entire live dance set using modular synths?
JF: At the end of the day, sometimes it will give you something good for free that you didn’t expect it to do, like, "Oh that’s cool. What the fuck is that?" And you work with it and try to expand on it. Sometimes it won’t do anything you want it to do and it’s really difficult to kind of control. So we’ve been using that kind of equipment for a long time. Also, we’re quite quick at problem solving in that sort of situation. It’s definitely a challenge. This is definitely the hardest show we’ve ever done in terms of working pretty hard.
The documentary you did with Vans shows the