Experimental indie-electro trio Polyenso, is on tour supporting the release of their latest album, Pure In The Plastic; this summer marks the band’s first foray into the major festival market, with an appearance planned for this weekend at Shaky Knees in Atlanta, and will end the tour’s run with a performance at Bonnaroo in June.
“We came into a really amazing situation,” says band member Alexander Schultz of the recording process. “After making our last album, some friends here in St. Pete, Florida introduced us to a producer; he sat with us in a control room and listened to our old stuff and was like ‘Wow! Radiohead, R.E.M, I’m getting all these vibes, this is great, I love it! Do you have anything new started so I can get an idea of where you guys are going?’ We messed around with some new stuff, one thing led to another, and we ended up being in that recording studio almost every say for two years. It was insane. We were rarely all there at the same time, Denny, our drummer, would go in and lay down a groove or make a track, get it sounding good, and then the next day, I would go in and play bass or guitar or synthesizers on top of it, then Brennan would go do the vocals, and it just became this layered thing. It was a type of writing process that I didn’t think we could do, it was really unique for us. Once we narrowed it down to ten tracks,” he adds, “the hard part was to take our hands off of it and be done, which is ironic, because in our band name, ‘enso’ is an ancient Japanese symbol that stands for ‘beauty in imperfection.’ With our last album, that was apparent; with this one we had to laugh at ourselves because we were going against our ideals by not letting it be finished. At some point, we just had to say ‘it is what it is,’ even it it’s imperfect, because that’s what art is.”
A unique process indeed—usually, a band has pre-production completed and is ready to record as quickly as possible when making a record, because, well, time is money. Freedom from worrying about time constraints allowed the group to fully explore their creativity, and now, armed with the delectable Pure In the Plastic, one of the most sonically intriguing albums this writer has heard in ages, Polyenso is sure to be the must-see act of the summer. “Through that recording process, we hadn’t played a lick of it live together,” Schultz says with a laugh. “Our goal is not to replicate, although we did pull a lot of the samples for the live show straight from the record, our goal is to breathe new life into it during the live show.”
Polyenso heads to Nashville after their Shaky Knees appearance to play at local haunt The End on Sunday, May 15th. Get your tickets here: http://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/1165613/tfly?utm_medium=api&utm_medium=459899
Purchase Pure In The Plastic: http://apple.co/1SSu77e
Leave a Reply