A short talk with Insides on labeling, the desire to make music, and their newest single, "Shade/Crumb Dropper".
Diogo: The journalist Simon Reynolds claimed he first used the term "post-rock" to comment on your band's sonority. Do you think the common definition for "post-rock" (music "using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbre and textures rather than riffs and power chords") has become too simplistic to accurately describe a post-rock band's sonority in 2021? What are your thoughts about labeling in music?
Kirsty: SR has said that his intention was to be able to write about a group of bands that he was interested in. He didn’t think everybody sounded similar but none of the bands were likely to get much coverage on their own so it made sense to group them together using an aesthetic rather than a sound. It’s funny that Post-Rock came to be fully realized as a pretty dull and very conservative, Rock-sounding recognizable genre. I think of it as Mansplaining emotion. I was fine with it at the time but it doesn’t mean anything to me now, and it’s nothing to do with Insides.
Labels are largely for the machinery that surrounds music, ie: shops, people writing about it, festival promoters, streaming algorithms… They can be useful in the early days of a musical movement too, I’m thinking of Happy Hardcore & Jungle in the 90s. The interesting stuff is more likely to either blur the boundaries, sit in the margins or be a total outsider. We still don’t have a natural home.
Julian: Yes, I don’t feel that a band like Mogwai has much in common with what we are doing at this point in time. In the 2000's the term seems to have become associated with the anthemic and sublime. Modern post-rock makes me think of feeling brave and strong. It’s not how I normally feel! We were more interested in the microscopic aspects of sound and nuance, I suppose that also encompasses my passion for bossa nova and artists like Nick Drake - it's the small details that I love. Materially, our moving away from only composing using guitars and using other tech instead is pretty much the norm these days for making music. So as a term, its impact is historically contingent to the early '90s and its usefulness is pretty problematic. Soon enough like most neologisms it became co-opted as a generic branding. I’m sure few musicians would embrace that term enthusiastically.
Diogo: Twenty years separate the release of Soft Bonds (2020) from the previous studio album, Sweet Tip (2000). In what ways did this two-decade pause contribute to the development of your latest work? What were the main reasons that led to such a big break?
Kirsty: There was no particular desire to do anything, certainly not to play live (which, at that point, I hoped I’d never do again) or to release records. Even in our limited experience, it was tiring to do the kind of thing that we were doing without any support. But It’s not like it actually stops, not the actual creative impetus anyway, it just comes out in silly ways, like songs about our cats, or whatever. I don’t really like the process of making music, I can’t just sit and noodle and noodle and noodle, making minute changes, and so on, but it always continues in my head.
Julian: Writing music has had to be a part-time gig for me - I’ve not been particularly good at keeping that balance of ensuring you work on your own stuff a certain part of every month. Sometimes months would go by without me playing guitar and you don’t realise at the time but you really are losing a part of yourself when you allow that to happen. I do a lot of other types of work and yet the only time I really feel myself is when Kirsty and I are making music. Certain things that contributed to Soft Bonds: loss, the utter horror at world events (the resurgence of fascism and yobbism). Feeling that left-field music is not challenging much of the time.
Diogo: You've just released your newest single "Shade/Crumb Dropper". In my opinion, the electronic elements have some kind of eager feeling to them, both on "Shade" and "Crumb Dropper". How would you describe your latest pair of songs? Should we expect some kind of "second phase" in the band's career?
Kirsty: They come from a longer, more free-form piece of music that Julian put down about 10-15 years ago. "Hot Warm Cool Cold" also came from it, and there are all kinds of clunks, door-slams & doorbells in the recording. I think we re-discovered it around 2016 and decided it was worth fiddling with. We finished "HWCC" that summer. We originally picked out 3 distinct parts to work on for the LP, but two of them didn’t fit with Soft Bonds, so we stopped trying to make them. It was a good move because the LP was taking a long time to finish and we suddenly got a lot closer to the end. And then we got the opportunity to release the spare tracks as a single - we’ve never had spare tracks before. If anything, they pre-date Soft Bonds, so they aren’t necessarily representative of the future.
Julian: Both are exploring how an initial idea can be spun into very different outcomes. We enjoy it when the song structure has some strange quality - like how improvised playing can dissolve into tightly automated structures, and that can go back and forth, and now we have more of an interest in working with location recordings and different types of recording, such as binaural. The pianos are all binaurally recorded on those songs. Another thing is they are very much off-grid these days, by which I mean very little is quantised in our process.
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