For every emotional crisis I’ve been through in the past year, Bassvictim has been the soundtrack. I’ve never heard anyone accurately describe what makes their sound so compelling, but after experiencing the catharsis of it, nothing else seems to suffice. Their intensity can at times be such that, while driving around L.A. listening to them with a friend earlier this year, they suggested that maybe it was the music itself that was causing my crises. The duo , Maria Manow and Ike Clateman, has just released a new album, Peace + War . Recorded in Vietnam this past spring, it is considerably cleaner than their previous work. Though it maintains the at times transcendent honesty, they chose to restrict themselves to using only electronic instruments, as opposed to the live instrumentation they used on last year’s breakout album Forever . It’s the latest in what has been an almost blindingly productive period for the band, with Peace + War making a total of two albums and three EPs they’ve released in just the past couple of years alone. We met at Clateman’s brother’s apartment the night after their Halloween show at Knockdown Center in New York. Sequestered in a side room, they sat across from me on a Freudian divan and spoke for hours about getting violently ill, why they don’t like their new album, and sobriety, while a group of friends made dinner outside. We never did land on a simple definition of their sound. Like almost everything else on earth that is good, it is beyond words.
PATRICK MCGRAW: The show last night felt different from the last time I saw you play in March.
MCGRAW: It was loose in L.A., we were all dancing on stage. But last night was tighter, more professional.
MANOW: I think the main thing that changed is my sobriety.
CLATEMAN: We also now have a stage designer, and a 12-person crew traveling with us. Before, the Bassvictim shows were an idea. It was portable and we could carry it in our pocket and take it wherever we played and adapt to whatever’s there.
MANOW: Bassvictim has become all of these people, they’re all part of this well-oiled machine. Without them we wouldn’t be able to make it right now.
MCGRAW: Ike, you were so much more active last night.
CLATEMAN: Because I wasn’t being thrown into uncertain situations every night. I had all this time and space to reconfigure my relationship to being on stage.
MANOW: It’s a lot easier when the weight of so many components are lifted off your shoulders, you can focus on giving a good performance. I definitely think sobriety helped. Before, I wasn’t thinking of what I was doing. Now I’m painfully aware of everything around me. It was really hard at the beginning of the tour to get into this professional mode, but once I got out of my head, it was easier. I move a lot more, but I’m really aware of everything and sometimes I get paranoid that people still think that I’m a bit of a mess. Part of the reason why I move so much is because then I feel like people won’t be thinking that I–
MANOW: Yeah, I’m proving them wrong and they’re like, “Oh, this is the real Maria and she can be sober.”
CLATEMAN: I’ve always felt like vices are their own practice. You have to do a lot of them to enjoy any of them. To enjoy a cigarette, you kind of have to be drunk. Once I’m sober, I can’t really enjoy any vices.
MCGRAW: You’ve been sober on this tour though, more or less?
MCGRAW: You guys had a reputation for the shows being druggy and fucked up, and this is very much not that.
CLATEMAN: That was an early days vibe. A band is this creature that emerges from a cesspool and then once it’s out, it washes the mud off and learns to walk and it emerges out of the trees and then it has to put clothes on. All of this is just part of the trajectory of a band moving from playing in the clubs to being in the studio. It makes sense that as the thing gets bigger, there’s more work to do so you just treat it with more care.
MANOW: I’m glad it’s going the way it is. It’s like growing as a child, but I do miss certain elements from the past shows. It was nice to be a part of a greater thing. Now it’s just us versus them.
CLATEMAN: Before the show was the reward. We would make music and then we would get to hear it all loud on these sound systems and that was so exciting. It was always a surprise if people were really hyped because we didn’t have fans yet. So if a show was really good, it was purely because of our energy and the music we had just made brought this place to life. But now it’s like we already know they’re going to be excited.
MANOW: In some ways the previous opinions felt more honest.
CLATEMAN: That is just the thing you can never get back as a band. It’s like a catch-22. You work so hard in these shitty clubs trying to get bigger and then you get bigger and you try to get back to the shitty clubs. The tours were so rough back then.
MCGRAW: Did you bring that newfound professionalism to Peace + War ?
CLATEMAN: Neither of us like it as much as Forever , but I’m really curious to see what people think of it.
MCGRAW: It is different. It’s very well produced. There’s a certain primal element to Forever that I feel is not as much on the new album, even though it’s really good.
MANOW: I agree. We both agree. I can’t listen to that album.
CLATEMAN: But it’s weird because we actually downgraded the studio. I just brought a little home studio setup to a bedroom in Vietnam. And on Forever , there was co-production and stuff. Peace + War was just all me on the production side. It was almost back to the old days, but somehow it did come out almost more polished and poppy.
CLATEMAN: It wasn’t a choice so much as it’s just like, you don’t want to repeat yourself.
CLATEMAN: I like to be surprised. So I made the choice to cut myself off from access to all the acoustic instruments and pianos, and go back to just working with my laptop to see what I would do now that we’ve made these two albums with full-on instrument studios. I wanted to strip it back, and see what would come out.
MANOW: It’s interesting how the space affects the sound. Forever was done in Norway. It was cold and got dark really early. There were so many instruments that we were jamming with. So that sound naturally became the way it did because we recorded there. If we did Peace + War in Norway, it would have sounded more similar.
CLATEMAN: That was how I felt too. And that’s why I didn’t want to go back because I could just see the process being identical and I like the idea of giving yourself obstructions.
MANOW: A lot of Forever stuff is based on real instruments. And this is purely digital. I was also ill in Vietnam and getting quite fucked up. I cared less. I had a lot of anger there. Something happened after we made Forever . I was in L.A. and started feeling a lot more unholy or something. I started feeling negative emotions, but in this more aggressive way. So all of these songs sound more aggressive. I was really ill in Vietnam, I lost so much weight. It’s insane. I look at my pictures and it’s like I hardly recognize myself.
MANOW: To cope with the illness, I was getting fucked up because I was in so much pain. But then getting fucked up made it worse. And on top of that we had our friends filming us. We were in a country that’s super wet and sweaty.
MANOW: 100 degree heat or cold inside because of the AC. I hate those environments and we didn’t have any tools. So making this album just wasn’t a vibe. In Norway, it was such a vibe that we were in this beautiful cozy pod and then we would come outside of the cozy pod and it would be super crispy.
MANOW: For me it wasn’t. CLATEMAN: We had quite different experiences in Vietnam. For me it was a perfect pod environment, just this simple setup and lots of beds and TVs and lights and isolation, just no one to talk to and no one to see. That’s why the album is so long because I was working constantly.
CLATEMAN: That did affect the album’s sound. With Forever there was a glue between everything. The environment and the music, me and Maria, it’s really stuck together. And with this album it feels disconnected in different ways. But I think that’s interesting.
MCGRAW: It’s not necessarily a bad thing.
CLATEMAN: I think of this as our White Album . It’s a time where we were really prolific but not super connected and our desires for the project were mysterious to each other.
MANOW: I also feel that in some ways I was out of melodies. I know that that’s not true because you’re always going to find new ones, but there were just so many good melodies on Forever, it was like I came up with every single good melody and every single good lyric and there was nothing else.
CLATEMAN: It’s a cool way to think about the album. I think it’s kind of apocalyptic. Like, imagine a world where there are no more melodies left. It’s the end of melodies.
MANOW: Part of the reason there are less melodies or hard-hitting lyrics is because I just wasn’t inspired. Forever was so inspired by my breakup. But in the months prior to going to Vietnam, I was just relaxing in L.A. and Poland. So a lot of the songs were more abstract, going back to anger that I felt from the past or health related things because that was going on. “Happysad” is the way I feel about the world now that we have become bigger. Without that intense breakup, I went back to the mindset I had during Basspunk 1 and Basspunk 2 where it was harder to channel consistent inspiration.
MCGRAW: I can’t think of any other music that hits you on this guttural level right now. I’m trying to think of what words I would use to describe it, visceral–
CLATEMAN: I feel like you experience everything viscerally all the time.
CLATEMAN: You’re saying you didn’t have the breakup, but the inspirations for Peace + War were just as visceral.
MANOW: I think what makes me feel like it’s not as good is that when someone asks me what’s my favorite song, I can’t pick a favorite song.
MANOW: I like it as a whole thing. In previous albums, I liked every single song, but I could pick favorites.
CLATEMAN: Yeah, when people are like, “Can I hear a song from the album?” I never know which one.
CLATEMAN: I’m always looking through every single one of them, and I’m like, “No, but that one’s too, but this one is–”
CLATEMAN: “White Flag” was kind of the one. That’s why we put it out as a single.
MANOW: I don’t like “White Flag” that much.
MCGRAW: The crowd really liked it. I was surprised how much they liked it.
CLATEMAN: I love that song. How would you rate the album if you were at Pitchfork? What would you give it?
MCGRAW: Even the best Pitchfork albums, they only ever give it like a 9.7, right?
MCGRAW: I really like “Happysad.” I really like “White Flag” and “Blueberries.” You start by liking one song and then that song drags you into the rest of the album over time. I’ll probably listen to “White Flag” a bunch tomorrow, and then by this time next week, I’ll like another song on the album.
CLATEMAN: Because then you get kind of hypnotized by the sound of that song and you’re like, “I want something similar.”
MCGRAW: Isn’t there a song called “I Don’t Know?”
MCGRAW: That’s not my favorite now, but I can see it coming. In two weeks, that will be my favorite.
CLATEMAN: I’m looking forward to liking this album. I think I’m going to.
CLATEMAN: We’re just being an open book because I feel like that’s what Bassvictim is about, trying to be really transparent. There’s probably other artists who would have made this album, and felt the way we feel about it and they would just not release it. They would scrap it and wait, and work on something else until they got it right. And I totally respect that way of working.
MANOW: I actually don’t respect that at all. CLATEMAN: I respect it, but it’s not for me.
MANOW: People who have that kind of perfectionism never end up releasing anything. If you’re afraid of making mistakes, it’s just an excuse. If you don’t like something and don’t release it, then how can you be sure that the next thing that you do is going to be amazing? It’s better to just release it, and see what people think, because your art is not only for you.
CLATEMAN: Me and Maria both enjoy relinquishing a degree of control over things.
CLATEMAN: That’s why we work well together, because we enjoy randomness. We are in this process of letting go when we’re making the music. It almost feels like once it’s made, it’s not even for us. I hardly ever revise and edit the music. Once the song’s completed, as in once Maria’s done all the vocal takes, there’s no version one, version two, or version three of any song.
MANOW: Because that’s the biggest enemy of all artists and musicians. Perfectionism ends up killing so many talented people. We try to release as much as possible from the stuff that we’ve done. I’m also not going to be this kind of musician who knows that they don’t like their own album very much, but then they pretend to in every interview. We’re not going to fake our emotions, we’re not going to hide from them.
CLATEMAN: If we never released the album, I would always hear it as this frustrated project that suffered, and didn’t turn out how I imagined it would. But if we release it, I’m going to get to hear it totally differently. Once I see how people react to certain songs live, which songs become people’s favorites, I’m going to hear a new album.
MANOW: If you can’t find the love for the album, at least find love for the stats that are going to come out. That’s my mentality.
CLATEMAN: At least you can have love for the statistics.
MANOW: I love seeing statistics from the albums, and just wondering why certain songs are favorites, because ultimately you’re never going to know if it’s the production, or the lyrics–you’re never fully going to know what it is.
CLATEMAN: Some songs become more popular later on.
MANOW: It’s super interesting, seeing the growth. How in the first week, you would assume that the first song is going to have the most listens, but it’s not the case. And then seeing how sometimes songs get popular suddenly. “With You” was never a popular song, but all of a sudden it got quite popular. When we were doing a survey of our fans before our shows, a lot of people said “With You” was their favorite. And I had never even thought about that song, it was confusing.
CLATEMAN: You just set the songs free. You open the gates, and let them out into the world to do their work.
MCGRAW: I remember after a show in L.A. there was this group of kids asking for photographs. But you were asking them, “What’s your favorite song? What’s your favorite song?” and they were all saying “Grow Up.” You asked why and they were like, “Oh, well, I’m growing up and it communicates that.” It was such a simple explanation. I feel like why I like a song is always some bullshit complex answer, but they were just like–
MANOW: I feel like little kids or teenagers take it very literally.
MCGRAW: I think when you’re striving towards something of a certain level, that intensity is either there or it isn’t. It’s such a blessing to have even one moment where you achieve that.
CLATEMAN: The musical moments in Bassvictim that are transcendent, they almost have nothing to do with Bassvictim. Bassvictim is just a story that we’re telling. So we’re not going to cut a chapter out of the story, just because it was a difficult chapter.
CLATEMAN: We’re just going to keep rolling it out, and hope that those moments come along.
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