Ethereal Brooklyn act Acrylics had a busy schedule at 2011′s SXSW, but they found some time to catch up with PopWreckoning. The synth heavy duo, Jason Klauber and Molly Shea, chats about new album Lives and Treasure, Super moon vibes and the influence of “Twin Peaks. Check the full interview out below: 
PopWreckoning: You just played a set here at SXSW, earlier, right?
Jason Klauber, Acrylics: Yes.
PW: Was that your first SXSW performance ever?
Molly Shea, Acrylics: First of this year.
PW: You’re a fairly new band and you just had an EP that came out on Grizzly Bear‘s Chris Gehringer‘s label – the first to come out on his label. How did you get hooked up with him?
JK: Pretty much we’re a part of that Brooklyn band cesspool. We’ve crossed path Chris over the years and he thought it’d be fun to have us record some sessions. These sessions ended up being put out as an EP, so they just put it out. At the time they were just doing singles, and we were just going to record a single, but it stretched out into a 5-song thing. It was really casual. We spent about a week in a church that he records out of. It was really fun to do that. That was our first release and we’re putting out a new record – well it just came out.
MS: It came out March 1.
JK: We’ve been working on it for so long that it’s hard to say – to put it in the past tense, but it did come out.
PW: It’s still pretty new. Present tense. Now on that record, you did a song with Chairlift‘s Caroline Polachek.
MS: She’s just a friend that we met three or four years ago just through musicians in Brooklyn. It’s really true about Brooklyn, I guess.
PW: Well how would you describe that Brooklyn scene? Is it like just being in a family or…?
MS: It’s so huge that there’s so many different groups of bands that know each other. It’s hard to classify the whole sphere.
JK: It’s more of a social thing. Musicians like to hang out with musicians, and there’s a lot of them in Brooklyn. It’s as simple as that. With Caroline, she came to visit us in the studio one day and we had that song going.
MS: Very casual event.
JK: Yeah, we said you want to sing some backup vox? And she said yes, so next thing you know she’s singing.
MS: We thought it was the perfect song for her.
JK: She did some vocal athletics at the end of the song and it’s very atmospheric. Like, “ah-ah-ah-ah,” so we thought she deserved a feature and credit on it.
MS: It was a vocal solo.
JK: She’s a phenomenal singer, so it’s just fun to have her lend her talents to what we were working on.
. “Sparrow Song” ft. Caroline Polachek
PW: So for people who haven’t heard your music, why should they check your record out?
JK: It’s a good record.
MS: We put our hearts and souls into it. I know it sounds corny, but it’s true.
JK: I think there’s some good songs on it and it’s produced in a way that makes it a great record to listen to by yourself in an intimate space. It was created much with that type of intimacy. It’s like watching a movie that takes you from place A to place B while you’re lying in bed. I think you can achieve something similar if you run through the course of our record a few times as well.
MS: It’s a personal, intimate record. I imagine people listening to it on their headphones.
JK: It’s certainly not for everybody, but I think that people who will connect to it, will connect and have connected, in a very sincere and meaningful way. That’s what it’s about for us.
PW: Who are some of your influences on the record?
MS: Tough question.
PW: That’s supposed to be one of the easy questions.
JK: Haha, yeah. We didn’t want to sound like anybody else, but if we ended up sounding like everybody else, it can be a good thing, you know?
MS: We listen to a lot of different – I mean, I love a lot of 60s psychedelic music. I love a lot of loud, hard rock. That might not have come across in an obvious way on the record, but it’s there. We have a lot of punk rock roots that we feel are strong.
JK: I was in the middle of the “Twin Peaks” series when we were making the record so a lot of the Angelo Badalamenti scores for that project had some influence over the sound. In terms of the songwriting, we were just taking from everywhere. For me – most of those songs are just written on acoustic guitar in your bedroom. You decide as just two people how to build up your sound. I think we were interested in cinematic, rich, layered textures. When we were making this record, I wanted something that was connected to a classic, rooted American feeling, but we also wanted to bring in other worldly elements, so that together you’re home, but also somewhere else. You know, that feeling when you come home from being away and you feel great to be home, but at the same time, home looks different than how you remembered it. That sense of being somewhere else when you’re somewhere familiar. That sort of weird – we were going for that.
PW: Since we’re talking while at SXSW and this is kind of a huge and crazy festival, what are some of the coolest and craziest things you’ve seen while here?
JK: A fight! We saw a really crazy fight.
MS: We walked really far into East Austin to check out our friends Das Racist play yesterday. It took us about on hour to get there and it was in a strange part of town and a fight broke out after the show.
JK: Like someone getting his head stomped kind of fight. Very scary. Everyone ran out. It was like walking out into rural Arkansas in the 1960s. We live in the ghetto of New York, so…
MS: We love that kind of shit. We love to go on adventures like that.
JK: We lapped it up like a cat.
MS: We saw all sorts of strange things happen the other night.
JK: There’s this thing called the extreme super moon, which is coming on Saturday. It means that the moon is the closest to Earth that it’s been in 18 years. I think this stuff happening coincidentally with the super moon, is dark vibes.
MS: So everyone be vigilant.
JK: We thrive off those sorts of vibes. We wear black on the outside because black is how we feel on the inside. Haha. I say with a smile. Haha.
PW: Haha. So what’s next for you after South by?
MS: We’re going on a national tour, late April to May, with Junip – Jose Gonzalez‘ band. So we’re super stoked about that because we’ve never done a full tour.
JK: We’re bringing the message to the people. We’re in the process of writing a new record as well.
PW: One record just out and you’re already doing the next one?
G: Absolutely. We stay working. All the time. Writing. That’s what we do.
You can find more about the Arcylics, including tour dates, at myspace.com/acrylicsnyc.
