Scaling a Mountain of Sound

A Conversation With TV On The Radio's Davey Sitek

originally published April 11, 2007

I was standing in line behind a man with a furry beard and an afro like a halo in Austin, TX, after last year's South by Southwest festival. "Who is that man?" I asked myself. "Why does he look like he'd be in a commercial for headsets?"

Turns out I was right. He is a commercial for headsets, and that commercial is the Brooklyn band TV on the Radio. Kyp Malone is his name, and the band - Tunde Adebimpe (vocals, loops), David Andrew Sitek (guitars, keys, loops, "other music"), Malone (vocals, guitar, loops), Jaleel Bunton (drums) and Gerard Smith (bass) - makes the kind of music that can't be appreciated in the blown-out speakers of your brother's 1991 Ford Escort, even if you learn to fall in love with the band's chanting, beautiful experiments with sound. TV on the Radio's style is difficult to mentally compartmentalize, but when listening to it, it's hard to understand how no one has made music like that up until now. These guys make rewarding loopy, atmospheric, electro-rock and roll with the soulful, effortless harmonies of the band's two singers. It's unselfconscious, gutsy and organic art-rock. Their voices aren't controlled or overproduced, but the music is deliberate and meticulous.

TV on the Radio's debut EP Young Liars brought the group immediate attention, and three acclaimed releases - 2004's Desperate Youth,the Blood Thirsty Babes full-length and New Health Rock EP and last year's stunning, politicized and artful Return to Cookie Mountain - did nothing but solidify the band's position at the front of progressive rock. Davey Sitek, who has also produced songs for The Liars and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, started the band as a recording project with Adebimpe in 2000. Flagpole spoke with him last week to discuss the band's music, the pitfalls of an online persona and the downfalls of physical human existence.

Flagpole

Hello? Hello? Hello. Hello hello? Davey? I'm nervous. I always get nervous when I do phone interviews. I don't know why. I'm awkward on the phone and just I'm reading, out loud, this list of questions.

David Andrew Sitek

I'm awkward, too. Don't worry about it, it will be fine.

Flagpole

Where are you?

David Andrew Sitek

I'm in a cab. In Los Angeles. We've been on tour for about… three-and-a-half weeks now or something, and we had three shows in L.A. and then four days off. We live on a giant bus that smells like a foot, so any time we can get out of the bus and spend some time, we try to.

Flagpole

Let me put you on speaker phone.

David Andrew Sitek

I'll beatbox through the air! Am I echoing through the house, like, through the best sound system?

Flagpole

No, you're echoing through my shitty Motorola phone.

David Andrew Sitek

Awesome.

Flagpole

Do you write music on your bus?

David Andrew Sitek

Sometimes, there's a lot of rough writing, drawing pictures, taking photographs, [that] kind of stuff. Generally speaking, we're more into watching heavy documentaries and cracking jokes. We brought all our recording equipment with me, but I only did one remix on the bus, and other than that the three of us have just been… drawing pictures.

Flagpole

Your photography is really good.

David Andrew Sitek

Oh thanks, I'm just winging it. I was blogging for awhile, but I just kind of keep my writing to myself. Photography is something I just kind of put out there. I've got some stuff at Flickr. We're Flickr pals.

Flagpole

I used to read your blog http://youngliars.blogspot.com. You don't write anymore. [Editor's note: Sitek stopped writing on the blog after a big kerfuffle involving a house fire, supposedly stolen demos and misunderstandings. Y'know, an Internet fight.]

David Andrew Sitek

That was just kind of an ordeal. It was kind of funny. I was totally honest about what had happened, and everyone started writing all this shit. I think they just wanted hits. You know, you live a public life, you put stuff on there, and then people read into it what they want, and disregard what your intent may be.

Flagpole

The Internet is so damn self-appointed.

David Andrew Sitek

It's just a place for really sicko people to read something, and then wipe the powdered cheese on their pants and start typing away. I've stopped publishing my writing, but I still write all the time, because I'm actually working on a pseudo-book.

When I stopped writing on the blog, I just started writing in a notebook. I've written pretty much every day. There's probably about 2000 blog entries that I never posted. The public life I wanted to live was photography. I was like, "There's a picture: think about it." I don't necessarily need to tell people about my interpretations of coked-up gorillas, like, beating up magicians.

Flagpole

Well, that is what the public requires: coked-up gorilla stories. What kind of book are you writing?

David Andrew Sitek

If you read the blog, it's the same kind of thing. It's a bunch of examples of the natural world encroaching back into the human world. It's like… humans have become very un-animal in a lot of ways, and I kind of put together silly little documents about that. They're just all short stories. Just seemingly benign events blowing into these mushroom-laden characters. It's pretty funny. Just goofy stuff. I don't think it will change any lives.

Flagpole

Who takes control of your writing and recording process within the band? How does that work?

David Andrew Sitek

It's extremely democratic. Everyone in the band is extremely talented in different directions, and, um, there's a lot of overlap. My drummer is actually the best guitarist in the band. Our bassist is a flamenco guitar player, and I play guitar, but really I mostly do drums and samples. It flip-flops a lot. We're a band definitely more concerned with figuring out an answer, rather than trying to make a statement.

We usually wind up making a song, and it will go through 50 different lives, and it will wind up accidentally being about global warming. It's a very sandbox kind of feel, you know? We make things and then destroy them and make more ones and then bicker a little bit, and then make more things and destroy them, until something sticks and we say, "Let's work on that more."

Flagpole

Do you get along with them well?

David Andrew Sitek

Yeah, they're my best friends I've ever had. The whole reason that we're a band is because Tunde and I started and we made this Young Liars EP in my bedroom. We were asked to go on tour, and we just didn't really feel confident that we could play the stuff by ourselves on tour, so we made Kyp join.



We had no basis to think that he was the right person or the wrong person, it was just that he was our friend. We were like, "Hey, if we go down in flames, will you go down with us?" and he was like, "Yeah, of course." So then he joined the band, and the tour started getting bigger, and at larger venues. We thought, "Aw, we really can't just go out and wing it with these little briefcases." So then we asked Jaleel, one of our best friends who plays guitar, we asked him if he would be our drummer. He was like "Are you sure? 'Cause I don't play drums." We were like, "Oh, it doesn't matter."



These are people we could imagine spending the amount of time you have to spend on tour. We just asked people to join our band because we liked them. It didn't really matter if they were good, or not good, or right, or wrong. We're pretty tight-knit. We get along famously. We fight just like brothers.

Flagpole

How long has this lineup been together?

David Andrew Sitek

We've been at five members since we went to Iceland, [so] for about three years. Me and Kyp were like, if we're going to embarrass ourselves, let's drag our friends down with us, so we asked them to play the Airwaves concert. I think we only asked Jaleel and Gerard to play with us for a couple weeks, but then they just got stuck with us.

Flagpole

Then you haven't screamed or strangled anybody then?

David Andrew Sitek

We never really turn on each other.

Flagpole

Do you like how this has turned into the gossip column?

David Andrew Sitek

Yeah, yeah. Basically we're a bunch of comedians. Our sense of humor is so twisted and dark, you know? We're ultimately just trying to make each other laugh, so when we get frustrated, it's usually with someone outside of our band and it just winds up us just retelling the stories to each other in hysterical ways. We just don't take ourselves that seriously, so there's nothing to really get that mad about. I mean, sure, there are disappointing moments where you think, "Oh, come on. Are you really like that? Come on, dude." But we don't really get pissed off. I mean, we're in our thirties.

Flagpole

I like what that implies: you're not in your twenties.

David Andrew Sitek

Notice I didn't say "We're not in our forties." But you know what I mean - I think that if we were in this band and we were in our twenties, we probably would have turned on each other and fought because that's what you do when you're trying to, like, "figure it out." Now we just fight about where we're eating for breakfast. Or, "Who ate all the oatmeal?"

Flagpole

What equipment do you use in a live show?

David Andrew Sitek

A lot of guitars and basses. And uh, samplers. Keyboards. We have these looping pedals. You can like, play an instrument or sing into and make a loop into and play along with it. I think everyone in the band has at least one of those. We use about 1/16th of the equipment we use on the record. On our records, we have horns and kettle drums, and like, five different synthesizers. It would take four semis' worth of equipment for us to tour and to play everything that we did on the record, so we stripped it down to the most essential stuff. It would be very similar to, like, Aerosmith.

Flagpole

What makes you self-conscious? As a musician. Or as a person. You decide.

David Andrew Sitek

I just think I was born that way. I think most people are born that way. I think with me it's more of a case of trying to find things that make me not even think that I'm a… a person. Or that I'm part of a bigger whole. You know, I went to Iceland outside of the band, and just saw the grand scheme of things, the landscape that hadn't changed for thousands of years. It kind of made me feel like a fleck of dust, and that feeling kind of stuck with me.

I'm just… oh, I'm just winging it. We're a bunch of confused animals winging it until we throw our bodies down. Back in the soil. But I don't really care about what's cool. I don't really come across as cool anymore, it's not really a concern of mine, so I don't really get caught up in the… I don't get too self-conscious any more. I'm more like, oh yeah, you know… I'm a guy who farts. I kind of treat myself like a pet.

Flagpole

I think that's where I should to stop asking questions. That way this culminates with "I treat myself like a pet."

David Andrew Sitek

Well, in reality, it's all guesswork. You know what I mean? I think that as I get older, I realize how much more guesswork there is. Coming up with solid answers is just getting more and more hard. I just accept the vague notions, you know, like, oh, maybe today, I am… the walrus. Koo koo kachoo.

Flagpole

You talk with the same voice you write with.

David Andrew Sitek

Most people think I talk like a weatherman.

Bunny Mcintosh

WHO: TV on the Radio, The Noisettes WHERE: 40 Watt Club WHEN: Thursday, April 12 HOW MUCH: $15