INTERVIEW WITH...
“It’s nice to polarize the audience with your music.
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Sophie Lindinger and Marco Kleebauer are the two driving forces behind the Austrian band LEYYA. Having just released their excellent sophomore album ‘Sauna’, they are currently touring Europe. Prior to their show in concert venue ‘Nest’ in Ghent, they kindly agreed to have a chat with Keys and Chords. Lindinger and Kleebauer are talented, humble and very friendly. Support these guys, and buy their album.
Marco Kleebauer: ‘This is our very first time in Belgium.’ Sophie Lindinger: ‘Once, we drove from Vienna to Brighton, and we had a five-hour stop in a hotel somewhere in Belgium, but that’s it.’ Julian De Backer: ‘Your album ‘Sauna’ has a lot of subtle noises, sounds, riffs, soundscapes, it’s really an album designed to be listened to with headphones.’ Sophie: ‘That’s our approach. We listen to music with headphones, so we want to make music like that as well. You can listen to ‘Sauna’ on a laptop, or in the background, but you’ll find more in our songs and you can absorb them a little more with headphones.’ Marco: ‘We try to make music with a lot of layers. We want our songs to have a long lifetime. Every time you listen to one of our songs, you’ll discover something new.’ Julian: ‘It’s a healthy trip. No drugs needed, just good music.’ Sophie: ‘That’s perfect!’ Marco: ‘It’s supposed to be listened to as a whole thing. After a couple of minutes, in an ideal situation, you can get into some kind of meditation, a trance. It sounds a little bit corny, but because there’s so much going on – we worked really hard on the record – it would be nice to have a listener fall into our music, and in our world of sound.’ Julian: ‘The tracks flow from one song to the next; they complement each other.’ Sophie: ‘That’s what we wanted to achieve.’ Marco: ‘We tried to differentiate from the songs we’ve written before. ‘Sauna’ was envisioned as a whole album while writing, and afterwards, we picked the songs we thought the people might like as a single release, and not the other way around. We didn’t want to release a couple of singles, and put them on an album. Hopefully, it works in the context. It was important to have a homogenic album.’ Julian: ‘Leyya is a young band. Nowadays, most young artists just think in terms of singles or streaming. An album is considered a lost art.’ Marco: ‘We don’t try to be retro, we try to be progressive. We have an album that isn’t two hours long; on the contrary, it’s only 38 minutes long. That’s fitting of the current time, nobody needs a long album. We were able to say what we wanted to say in the shortest amount of time.’ Sophie: ‘We want to make music primarily for ourselves, and we still listen to albums. I love putting on a whole album.’ Julian: ‘I’m very glad you guys also released a vinyl version of ‘Sauna’. I’m a big vinyl fan.’ Marco: ‘Yeah, the aesthetic of a vinyl record can’t be replaced by a CD copy. I’m more of an MP3 guy myself, because I see the practical aspect of a computer file. There’s nothing practical about a CD …’ Sophie: ‘Maybe in an old car?’ Marco: ‘You can also use your MP3 player in your car, right?’ Julian: ‘A 90’s car probably won’t have an MP3 player.’ Sophie: ‘If it still takes cassettes, you can use an adaptor.’ Marco: ‘CDs are cool for some reasons, but I don’t like the format. I’m more of a digital guy, but I also love vinyl. Because you can actually make out the artwork. There’s something about listening to vinyl, holding the artwork, and physically having it in your hands. It’s different.’ Julian: ‘People tend to listen more closely, because you never ‘just’ put on a vinyl in the background. It’s a ritual.’ Sophie: ‘And you have to flip it in the middle.’ Marco: ‘It gets more important to have the physical ritual of putting on music, because it’s so easy to press play in the digital age and just have it in background. People are no longer sensitive to music. I’m not complaining about the times, but some aspects could be better. That’s why we have a vinyl release in 2018.’ Sophie: ‘We want to make timeless music. If you listen to our songs in fifty years, we don’t want you to be able to say: ‘Oh, that’s such a 2018 record’. We want to make music that works in whatever year you listen to it. That’s what we want to do.’ Julian: ‘‘Sauna’ could be an old album, or a new one, it has a timeless quality.’ Marco: ‘That’s perfect. We really thought a lot about that. We don’t want to part of a retro 60’s revival. I like the 60’s and the 70’s, sure enough, but we should be relevant for the times of today. We need to make relevant stuff. It’s not possible to make something wholly original, but we want to at least try.’ Julian: ‘Everything has been done, but you can try and give it your own spin.’ Marco: ‘A lot of people don’t like our music, which is a good sign. They don’t like the fact that you can’t pigeonhole our music. They want to label it, but they can’t. Even in Austria, some call our output ‘interesting’, but not necessarily ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It’s nice to polarize the audience with your music.’ Julian: ‘Do you guys get enough airplay in Austria?’ Sophie: ‘There’s a big alternative radio station that has supported us from the very beginning. Two weeks ago, the biggest mainstream station also started to play us. They kind of have to, because we’ve become a big export product for Austrian music. It was pretty weird to hear our music on that station. It may be mean to say, but every song they usually play sounds the same.’ Marco: ‘We did an interview for the mainstream station, they were all really nice to us, and that was just because our musical tastes matched to a certain degree. Otherwise, they would never have invited us. The music we listen to, has nothing to do with the commercial music business. We see it as an opportunity to bring our music to a lot of people. The single is a tool you need to get to the people, the album is what needs to be bought.’ Sophie: ‘To me, it’s okay if you only listen to the singles. If you get something out of it, why not? But we are album people.’ Julian: ‘You mentioned export products of Austria. Prior to this interview, I was thinking about Austrian music, and all I could come up with without research was Mozart and Falco, and now Leyya. Am I missing out?’ Sophie: ‘We do actually have good music in Austria. It probably just doesn’t reach Belgium. There’s a current hype with two or three bands singing in German with an Austrian accent. They’re really big in Germany and Switzerland, too. The language may be a barrier for them to reach Belgian shores. In interviews, they sometimes ask us why we don’t sing in German. ‘Why aren’t you following the hype?’ Quite funny. You might like Bilderbuch.’ Marco: ‘They’re really progressive. They’re really good.’ Sophie: ‘They are. They somehow came up with progressive, new, modern music that’s still for everyone and that still fits the mainstream. It’s so strange.’ Marco: ‘The other band we can’t afford not to mention is 5K HD. It’s kind of similar to ours …’ Sophie: ‘No no, I would say it’s a little bit of jazz.’ Marco: ‘They’re weird, in a good way.’ Sophie: ‘Catchy melodies, but really experimental. Insanely good. They sing in English.’ Marco: ‘They even played Montreux. The singer is a well-respected pop singer, too. Really good. You might like it.’ Julian: ‘Great, thanks. Back to you guys. Many of your songs have just one-word titles. Is that a conscious choice?’ Sophie: ‘Ha, we always have to talk about that. We don’t really mean it as a concept to have one-word titles, we always say we need to change the title to something with more words. Sometimes, it just fits the best.’ Marco: ‘We try to not dwell on titles too much. Sometimes we just keep our working title, because it would be strange to change it since we would refer to it by the working title anyway.’ Sophie: ‘The song ‘Solitude’ had the working title of ‘What’. I just sang something, humming instead of singing lyrics. We somehow only heard ‘what’, but we said: ‘We have to change the title, we can’t just call it ‘what’. ‘Drum Solo’ started out as a drum solo, so we just called it that.’ Marco: ‘We try not to think about it. It’s just funny to have odd titles. ‘Drum Solo’ has a drum solo in it, so why not? Our titles are authentic.’ Julian: ‘A lot of songs could be movie titles. ‘Heat’ and ‘The Fall’ are movies, ‘Zoo’ is a TV series, ‘Sauna’ has a cinematic quality.’ Sophie: ‘Actually, our song ‘The Fall’ is inspired by the movie ‘The Fall’.’ Marco: ‘We saw the movie, and the next day, we wrote the song.’ Sophie: ‘The movie is fucking incredible.’ Marco: ‘It blew us away.’ Sophie: ‘We had one sample in the chorus, the string sample reminded us of the movie, we saw the movie again, and we decided to name the song after the movie.’ Marco: ‘No, it was the other way around!’ Sophie: ‘No, it was like that.’ Marco: ‘Really? But we finished it the next day?’ Sophie: ‘We just had the sample, we saw the movie, and it then it reminded us of the movie once we started working on the sample again. We finished it, and called it ‘The Fall’, inspired by the movie.’ Marco: ‘It sounds like the cinematography of the movie. ‘The Fall’ is what our music would look like, visually, in a perfect world. All those colours complimenting each other in a perfect way, and everything is in its right place. If something is huge, there’s nothing else huge. The focus is key. I fucking love the movie. And it’s not super famous, not one of my friends knows it.’ Sophie: ‘And I don’t know why, because every scene is perfect.’ Julian: ‘Director Tarsem Singh is amazing.’ Sophie: ‘The story is as well.’ Marco: ‘The movie is already ten years old.’ Julian: ‘You should send your song ‘The Fall’ to the director.’ Marco: ‘Actually, we should try.’ Sophie: ‘We could. We dedicated that song to the movie.’ Marco: ‘The song always reminds me of the movie. I always have the pictures in my head. That’s the cool thing about music; you can always associate it with images.’ Sophie: ‘What movie is the ‘Heat’ movie?’ Julian: ‘You don’t know ‘Heat’? It’s a 90’s movie starring Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro and Val Kilmer. Quite a famous movie. Director is Michael Mann, which sounds German. He’s one of the creators of ‘Miami Vice’, he also did ‘The Insider’ and ‘Collateral’ with Tom Cruise.’ Sophie: ‘We should check it out.’ Marco: ‘Especially if it fits our music.’ Julian: ‘Your songs could be soundtracks to movies, because they have a cinematic flair.’ Sophie: ‘That’s cool.’ Marco: ‘That’s always important to us, the visual aspect. We never want to leave that behind. The mood of the music can connect with the visual element in your brain, I think. Even though you can’t tell what it is exactly, ‘Heat’ was always a colour to me. Red, obviously.’ Sophie: ‘True. In our press text, we wrote something about how you can hear the colours. ‘Which song, which colour?’ is what some people ask us. We didn’t think about it when we were creating the songs. ‘Zoo’ was always green to me. Zoo, nature, whatever. It feels like that.’ Marco: ‘It’s easy to come up with a theory after you’ve made the music. During the creation, everything happens intuitively and quickly. Sometimes, we have something in our mind that won’t be fully evolved in our brain. We never thought about: ‘Oh, heat is red’. Ideas are flowing and morphing while writing. We want to keep an open mind until the end of the song, and not be limited by anything.’ Julian: ‘You can’t mathematically write songs. The passion would disappear. Afterwards, you guys always have to come up with an explanation for journalists like me.’ Sophie: ‘Haha, yes!’ Marco: ‘Yeah. You’re the first one that really …’ Sophie: ‘You know how it works. Most of the time, they think we had a concept in mind.’ Marco: ‘We never have a list of things we want to work with.’ Sophie: ‘It just evolves during the writing.’ Marco: ‘It always comes from somewhere. Otherwise, we wouldn’t do it.’ Sophie: ‘The same with the title, ‘Sauna’. Yes, we liked the sound of it, and we once had the idea thanks to a comment on social media. It fit our songs, but then we had to construct a story around it. Because people ask: ‘Why sauna?’.’ Marco: ‘I like the idea of thinking about it, afterwards, because it’s interesting to think back on why ‘Sauna’ and not ‘Refrigerator’ was the right word. ‘Sauna’ reflects the music. But that’s not enough for most journalists. It’s weird, because it is a concept album, but it’s hard to talk about the concept. I once read an interview with Kurt Cobain, in which they asked him the same questions: ‘What’s the concept behind ‘Nevermind’?’. He didn’t know, he said he had to figure it out for himself. He just wrote music. In a perfect world, people get one sentence, and they’re satisfied with it. ‘Nevermind’ means ‘to criticize politics right now’.’ Sophie: ‘I hate it when people ask: ‘Describe your song or your album in one word’. If I could do that, it would mean we made a really boring album.’ Marco: ‘Ironically, I really like Nirvana interviews in which they talk about album meanings, even though they’re complaining about it and I’m complaining about it. I really like the situation. He’s screwing with the press, and that was part of his charm. Somehow, Kurt Cobain always talked about it. He never said: ‘It doesn’t mean anything’.’ Julian: ‘Pete Townshend from The Who once said: ‘I wrote the song ‘I Can’t Explain’ as an 18-year old, and I spent the next forty years explaining it to journalists’.’ Sophie: ‘Haha!’ Marco: ‘That’s the paradox! Perfect symbolism.’ Julian: ‘In the song ‘Zoo’, you guys sing: ‘Don’t believe what they say about me’. Did someone spread negative rumours about you?’ Sophie: ‘Well, sort of. You can work forever on your first album, because there’s no pressure. When you’re working on your second album, people have expectations. They want the same, or a similar, sound. You think you can’t make melancholic music when you’ve just made happy music, or whatever. At one point, we just didn’t care and made the music that was pouring out of us. We couldn’t change that, and we didn’t want to change that, because it’s what we wanted to do. We didn’t care what the people MAYBE would think of the album, we just released the song ‘Zoo’ and used the topic in the lyrics.’ Marco: ‘It was funny to have that situation be the motive of the song. For us, it was a nice way to handle the pressure.’ Julian: ‘Thank you guys for the interview.’ Marco: ‘Our pleasure.’ Sophie: ‘Thanks!’ |
Julian De Backer © 2018 Keys and Chords