Altered Zones

By Samantha Cornwell

MP3: Peaking Lights: "Tiger Eyes (Laid Back)"

MP3: Peaking Lights: "Hey Sparrow"

Five years ago, Indra Dunis and Aaron Coyes, both life-long musicians, met in San Francisco, CA. They started dating, jamming together, and playing in the psychedelic drone group Rahdunes. A few years later, Coyes and Dunis married and moved to Madison, where they formed the equally psychedelic, lo-fi pop duo, Peaking Lights, and opened The Good Style Shop, where they sell old records, vintage clothing, and curios. The group released their second full-length earlier this year, on Not Not Fun. Less noise-inspired and improvisational than Imaginary Falcons, their first, 936 filtered their “fucked pop” inclinations through a prism of dub and reggae. I chatted with Coyes and Dunis over the phone recently while they were at their home in Madison. As we talked about Aaron’s homemade synthesizers and the experience of recording their new album in a studio, their newest, and perhaps most important release blared continually in the background: their newborn son, Miko.

AZ: What is the meaning of the album title, "936"?

Aaron: It’s kind’ve intimate. Don’t want to give the secret away.

Indra: It has to do with numerology. Aaron came up with the name, but he’s kind of secretive about it.

[Crying in background]

Indra: Sorry. We have kind of a chaotic situation.

AZ: I can’t even imagine.

Indra: You mean having a baby? Well, make sure you’re ready, because its pretty intense. You feel like you’re tripping out for days on end. Time sort of becomes meaningless. I’m up for an hour, and then sleeping for an hour, and then up for two hours. That’s how little babies roll though. They don’t care about your schedule.

AZ: On the level of the songwriting, 936 feels a lot more tightly structured than Imaginary Falcons. What made you want to take this approach?

Aaron: I don’t think it’s that different. I think it's that we recorded it differently, and people think it's different, but I think the songwriting is pretty much the same.

Indra: I think there’s was little a bit of intention behind it, actually. At least from my end, I was writing parts that I think could be a bit more poppy sounding, or vocal lines that were a little more like that of traditional song. We do write parts for our songs, but then we jam them out while we’re playing them.

Aaron: We try and feel out the audience, or what the people we’re playing in front of feel. Try and get into it in that way. If people are digging it, play it longer, if they’re not digging it, cut it short.

Indra: I think also, as Aaron was saying, we recorded at a studio this time and we had access to higher fidelity equipment, and were able to isolate the sounds a little bit better, so that you can actually hear what’s going on. With Imaginary Falcons, it was a little bit lower fidelity.

AZ: Where did you record it?

Aaron: Flat Black, in Iowa City. Sean Reed from Night People turned us onto it. Luke Tweedy is the engineer who runs the studio. I think it first occured to last year, at Kraut festival in Belgium. I don’t know why, but the sound guys were insanely good. It was just so cool to be able to work with people that care about what they're doing.

Indra: That was an important moment for us, when we realized, "This is how we want our records to sound." We want people to be able to hear what we hear. That’s why we did it in a studio rather than recording ourselves.

AZ: What drew you to the dub and reggae influence on 936?

Aaron: Well, I don’t know that it was just that record. I’ve been collecting reggae records since the '90s. When I was younger I was really into hardcore and powerviolence. That was my thing, and some time in my late teens I got into really weird music, noise. I started getting into dub, and just started digging for records like that. But in the late '90s, when I moved to Oakland, I was in this goth band called Heart Of Snow, and we had a huge dub influence.

AZ: Aaron, what have been the benefits of building your own synthesizers?

Aaron: I guess number one is just that I like to do it. It’s a challenge. I also like trying to make unique sounds, and give the music some kind of extra depth. I wish I had more time to just focus more on building, but I do what I can.

AZ: Is there an instrument that you’ve built so far that you’re most proud of?

Aaron: No, I don’t think so. It’s all kind of the same.

Indra: What about the one that you take on tour?

Aaron: The suitcase synth? I’m kind of bored of that.

AZ: Would you say it's boredom that motivates you to build more?

Aaron: Yeah, definitely. And recording a new record definitely makes me want to not have the same sound. We tour with so much crap, it's ridiculous. We even downsized. It was probably two 7 x 7' square boxes.  It was insane.

AZ: Why did you move from the Bay Area to Wisconsin?

Indra: It's mostly 'cause of me, 'cause I grew up in Wisconsin. I lived in San Francisco for over ten years, and was kind of missing it back here and wanting to be closer family and stuff like that. Also, we were living in San Francisco, and it was really really expensive. We lived in the country for a couple of years, and had a pretty awesome house. It was a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired design, and it was really neat, but when you live out in the middle of nowhere, you realize that there isn't really any work out there, and there isn’t really much to do. We decided to open The Good Style Shop [in Madison], selling vintage clothes and records. We did that, and then the drive was really awful, especially in the winter. That brought us back into the city, so we live in Madison now. We had the store for a couple of years, and we actually just sold the store to a friend. We’re going to move back to California, to Los Angeles.

AZ: How come?

Indra: Well, we miss California. Aaron especially, because he’s from there. I actually miss it too. It's just really different living out there than it is in the Midwest. I can’t say anything bad about the Midwest, but Madison is a pretty small town and there’s just less opportunity here for people involved in music and the arts and creative things.

AZ: Have you met any interesting musicians in the Madison music scene?

Indra: Yeah, we’re friends with Julian Lynch. He got started around when we opened our store, and we used to host a lot of music shows. We had him play there. Also, Nika from Zola Jesus.

Aaron: She played the first in-store that we had at our shop. There were like three people there.

Indra: Yeah, we were trying to start something. It took a little while for people to catch on about our shows, but actually now a lot of people go to shows there, which is pretty cool. It sounds bigger than it is when we talk about it, but it's still a small town compared to living in the Bay Area or something.

AZ: Any new releases on the horizon?

Indra: We just created a baby! His name is Miko.

936 is out now via Not Not Fun