Explosions in the Sky's name brings to mind a flurry of images: munitions detonating over battlefields, fireworks on July 4th, plane crashes, aurora borealis. The Austin, Texas-based instrumental quartet plays music that fulfills those visions, music that is alternately beautiful and frightening, delicate and powerful, spiritual and unholy. Guitars begin songs as gentle chimes and build to raging cacophony; drums, soft as heartbeats, climax in martial rhythms and tribal pounding. Junkmedia talked recently with drummer Chris Hrasky, just prior to the band's European tour for its latest album, The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place.
How long are you guys going to be in Europe?
Basically four months, with a two-and-a-half week break where we come home. I don't know if I can handle that, to be honest with you. We'll see.
You guys have been to Europe before, right?
Yeah, we were there in September and October 2002.
How was the reaction?
It was really good. It was surprising. The shows weren't huge - there weren't, like, a thousand people, but there were usually between 50 and 300 people at each show, which was pretty crazy because we'd never been there. Our previous record (Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die) is available only as an import. We have a European label now, but we didn't then. I suppose it was clearly the help of the Internet to spread the word over there.
I was wondering about that, and how you guys and bands like you guys - instrumental, for lack of a better term, "post-rock" bands...I'm sure there are bands doing what you guys are doing in Europe and the U.K., but I wasn't sure whether it's as many as here in the States.
What's strange is that most of the time in Europe, you play and there's no other band. We did play a few shows with other bands that are in the, whatever, "post-rock" genre. It seems to be thriving over there; there are people at the shows. And Mogwai and Godspeed [You Black Emperor], they're huge everywhere.
When I listen to your music, I think of wide open spaces, the mountains of the Southwest, and I wonder what people from Europe or Japan tell you they think of when they hear your music..
We get all sorts of different responses. People tell us these images that come to their mind, whether it be images of war, or landscapes. We get a lot of people talking to us about what role the music has played in their lives. Not that long ago we got this really long letter from this girl talking about her relationship with this boy and how the music to both of them was the soundtrack to their relationship. Hearing stuff like that is amazing to us. Then we get people writing and saying, "Man, we listen to you and we get so high. Were you guys, like, on drugs when you came up with this stuff?" Well, no, we're not really drug users.
So where do you get your inspiration from? You guys live in Austin, right? I don't know if that has any influence.
It's hard to say. In terms of music and movies, there's so much that we listen to. Certainly that has an influence. The best answer that any of us has come up with is that we're influenced by our own lives, our surroundings and our friends, the way we view the world. It's always hard to sort of consciously say, "This influenced us in this way."
You take it all in and it comes back out through the music.
Yeah. There's something that causes us a tremendous amount of worry. We don't really have any sort of process for doing this. Right now, we're touring for the next year pretty much, so we're not gonna have any time to sit around and write music, and that's always a scary thing for us. A year from now we could sit down and stare at each other and say, "I don't even remember how to do this." That's been a problem for us in the past, and it's been frustrating, but so far we've been able to overcome it.
So you guys don't write on the road?
Not at all. There's just never time. We've never been able to do that. It's not like one guy can go sit by himself with a guitar and go, "Oh, here's this."
Over the course of traveling in Europe, what kind of stuff, separate from playing the gigs, do you look forward to doing?
There are some places where we get a chance to do some sightseeing. But I think probably the greatest thing is just meeting people, and getting a feel for what our peers' lives are like. We just end up meeting so many great people and it's like, "We have these friends who live in a farm house in Italy now."
Will your travel in Europe have an effect on your music?
Maybe, but not in any conscious way. When we write stuff, we'll usually just come up with something and it'll start sounding good, so we'll have this little piece. If we start thinking about anything, we'll think about what kind of mood we wanna have. Or if this were a soundtrack to a little movie, what would this little movie be about?
Do any of the guys in the band have side projects or other artistic outlets?
We all sort of dabble in writing. I actually went to school for filmmaking, and have worked on a couple of documentaries that screened at some little festivals. But that's been put on the back burner for the last couple years. Most of the time, when we're not doing this, we're preparing to do this.
Has anyone in the band done any movie scores, or have you been approached about it? It seems like your music would be a match for moviemaking.
We scored some stuff for a friend's movie, an indie movie. We actually have, just very recently, been approached to work on a big studio movie. We're kind of freaked out about that. It would mean stepping into a world that we don't have much experience with. At the same time, it sounds like something that could be really interesting and really fulfilling to some extent, but we haven't come to a firm decision about it.
You don't want to jinx it.
Exactly. We're getting offers to do these soundtracks. We just feel like such amateurs all the time. What does that mean? Will we be in some studio in Los Angeles with producers hovering over us? That's writing music for other people, which is fine, that's what a soundtrack is.
But it's totally different from writing it for yourselves.
As it should be. You have to please the filmmakers.
How long have you guys been in Austin?
Mark (Smith) has been here maybe seven years. I've been here just a little over five years, and Munaf (Rayani) and Mike (James) are the same, about five years. We started the band pretty quickly, probably four-and-a-half years ago.
Austin's a great place for music. I was thinking about other bands from Texas who tend to be a little out there musically: Trail of Dead, Butthole Surfers, 13th Floor Elevators. I was wondering is there something that goes on there that makes Texas its own little world?
Before I moved to Texas, it was always, like, "Jesus Christ, I'm moving to Texas?"
Where did you move from?
From Chicago. More than probably any other state, people do sort of look at it as a separate place. It definitely gets exaggerated. Musically, the bands from Texas that we've loved, I think something about them is that they're extreme in a way. Not extreme in, like, a mountain biking, Mountain Dew-type of way. They just have these very clear visions of what they are. Like American Analog Set, they're very quiet, but there's an extremeness to that. The same could be said for Trail of Dead, Butthole Surfers or Bedhead or others. There is something sort of interesting about Texas. This whole Texas pride thing crosses all political boundaries. You'd think it would lean toward this right-wing, jingoistic...but everyone's like that down here. It's an interesting phenomenon, and I've not really seen that anywhere else.
Dave Brigham
