Saturday, June 27, 2009

2008-12-12 - Rolling Stone

12/11/08, 3:51 pm EST

Photo: Jim Newberry

2009 is shaping up to be a busy year for Kevin Barnes and Of Montreal. Talking to Rock Daily from Athens, Georgia, during a lull in the band’s ongoing Skeletal Lamping tour, Barnes says he’s already begun working on the band’s next album. “I’m slowly putting together some new stuff for the next record, like whenever I have a free moment,” Barnes says. “I’m really excited, I’ve been working on a lot of ideas. I kind of want to go in a slightly different direction, experiment, try to look for a new spark, inspiration. What I want to do now is slightly noisier. It’s sort of abstract in my mind, but right now what I’ll create will be mesmeric and kind of physical music. Try to create music that you have a physical reaction to. Try to touch you on a level that’s not strictly intellectual but more physical, and that’s not to say you’ll dance to it.”

Barnes said this new direction was inspired during a recent cab ride in London. “The cab driver was listening to this music, it was really loud and it was the coolest thing I’ve ever heard. He didn’t speak English so I couldn’t talk to him about it, but the music made me feel queasy but in a totally different level,” Barnes remembers. “It just haunted me so now every time I’m thinking about making music, I want to make music like that, it just speaks to a different level of consciousness.”

Barnes also talked about a side project he’s excited about called Blikk Fang. “Me and Andrew Andrew VanWyngarden from MGMT have a project together I really want to get off the ground in 2009, I’ve been talking to Jon Brion about maybe collaborating as well,” Barnes said. “We’ve actually created about 20 minutes of music, but that was the early part of last year. We’ve both been traveling like crazy so it’s hard to get together. The stuff we’ve done so far is sort of a soulful prog. It’s probably gonna be a pretty schizophrenic, crazy album.”

As for finally documenting the band’s theatrical live shows, Barnes reports, “We’ve filmed two shows, a show from L.A. from last year’s Hissing Fauna tour and we filmed one a month ago in Atlanta, so we do have plans to release a pretty comprehensive DVD with all the videos and two full live performances and documentary material as well.”

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