Los Angeles-based experimental music project SCALED ALPS recently had an exclusive interview with Boostrin, discussing their music, creative identity and the ideas behind their latest project, LET THE ALPINE PLAY.
Known for creating music that sits outside easy genre descriptions, SCALED ALPS use sound, atmosphere and physicality to create an experience that listeners can interpret in their own way. In their exclusive conversation with Boostrin, the project opened up about everything from the meaning behind the SCALED ALPS name to their approach to songwriting and the importance of allowing music to communicate through feeling rather than explanation.
The interview also takes a closer look at LET THE ALPINE PLAY, a 16-track project that forms part of a wider artistic world for SCALED ALPS. The band discusses why they believe the music should establish that world before the visuals and other physical elements surrounding the project are introduced.
SCALED ALPS also share insight into their relationship with Los Angeles and how constantly moving through the city has become part of their creative process. From Los Feliz and Silver Lake to Echo Park, Hollywood, Pasadena and beyond, the city’s energy has become an important part of the environment in which the music takes shape.
The conversation explores some of the project’s individual songs too, including “Neo Noir (Stelvio)” and “Pink Diamonds.” The latter runs for only 64 seconds, reflecting SCALED ALPS’ willingness to let a song exist for exactly as long as it needs to rather than conforming to conventional expectations.
Perhaps most importantly, the interview reveals an artist collective that is less concerned with fitting into a particular category and more interested in transmitting a feeling. SCALED ALPS talk openly about instinct, physicality, experimentation and the idea that music can communicate something to a listener before words or literal explanations ever enter the picture.
From the strange and intriguing meaning behind their name to the wider world they are building around LET THE ALPINE PLAY, SCALED ALPS give Boostrin readers a closer look at a project that is deliberately difficult to define.
Read the full SCALED ALPS exclusive interview Below and discover the ideas, influences and creative thinking behind LET THE ALPINE PLAY.
SCALED ALPS is a name that immediately suggests a collision between something enormous and natural and something deliberately constructed or measured. What does SCALED ALPS mean to you, and what kind of artistic identity were you trying to create when you chose that name?
Reptiles, ascension, music, skin, mountaineering, size, recursion. Impossibility.
There is a strong sense that the songs are meant to be experienced rather than neatly explained. What do you believe music can communicate through atmosphere, sound and instinct that cannot always
be communicated through words?
Nearly everything. A great many of our listeners are international. I don’t think that’s coincidental. The feeling precedes any “literate” understanding of the thing. The physicality is mirrored in the audience. The song induces a reaction: incantation. The song is implanted. The listener goes for a walk and is gleefully subjected.That’s what we’re angling for.
Your description of LET THE ALPINE PLAY suggests that the songs come first, while the visual and physical world surrounding them becomes stranger after people encounter the music. Why was it important to allow the music to establish the world before introducing the audience to everything else around it?
I am repulsed by people who “start bands” or “make music” as a precursor to being photographed or idolized. I think it’s a sick exercise. I wish they’d find their more natural home in low-rent pornography and leave art alone.
Not that there’s no artistic merit in low-rent pornography, but the sort of person nowadays who seeks a career in independent art, music, whatever: you don’t need to be playing games about getting on a Saint Laurent billboard anymore. It’s not going to happen for you. Celine either. It’s over. It’s time to write some fucking tunes.
As a Los Angeles band, you are creating from a city that has been endlessly documented through music, film and popular culture. What parts of Los Angeles genuinely inspire SCALED ALPS, and what parts of the city’s mythology are you interested in challenging, exaggerating
or completely ignoring?
I live in Los Feliz, and I tend to walk about ten, fifteen miles a day. This gets you Silverlake, Echo Park, Angeleno Heights, Downtown if you really want it. Thai Town. Beachwood Canyon. Hollywood. You get
the idea.
I have to do it. I have to walk all the time, or I’ll hurt myself or someone else. The energy is there; I have to tamp it down. Hence the music.
I get around: the Westside, various valleys, Pasadena. I’m forever in Pasadena, eating and antiquing. South Pasadena, even, Christ, and Altadena. Everywhere, really. We recorded the record in North Hollywood, right there on the edge of nothing, butted up against Panorama City, with a view of nothing, and—what was I talking about?
When you are creating together as a band, how do you know when an idea has the strange quality that belongs to SCALED ALPS? Is there a particular instinct, sound or emotional reaction that tells you the
music has entered your own territory?
At this point I feel a great deal of comfort in myself, a sort of “smoking a joint at 3 AM in briefs on the porch” sort of confidence. The breeze on your balls, God love it.
“Neo Noir (Stelvio)” compresses cars, fashion, Los Angeles nightlife and the phrase “neo noir in neon Dior” into a very short, hook-driven song. What were you trying to capture in that world, and how did you turn such a visually dense idea into a song that lasts only around two and a half minutes?
All of the lyrics to “Neo Noir” are highly interpretable to various subjectivities, and I ascribe no superiority to any of them.If you find porno chic or Italian film or psilocybin or Silver Apples or “Leather So Soft” or whatever, man, yeah, it’s probably in there, isn’t it?
So why don’t you take it on a walk, take it on a trip, see where it goes for you. See what kind of meaning you can make out of it, see if it’s useful to you. Maybe it is . . .
“Pink Diamonds” takes that compression even further at just 64 seconds. What made you decide that the song had said everything it needed to say in that amount of time rather than expanding it into a conventional full-length track?
If you want it again, the replay button’s right there. We could do this again and again, forever.
Neo Noir (Stelvio) & Pink Diamonds seem interested in creating an immediate sensory reaction, but they do it in very different ways. When you are writing, how important is it for a song to establish its world almost instantly, and what makes a hook feel powerful enough to carry the listener without excessive explanation?
Each song is in some sense a world unto itself, but the planet or planetoid or whatever the thing is should ideally link back to some system. LET THE ALPINE PLAY.
LET THE ALPINE PLAY contains 16 tracks, yet your description suggests that the album is only the beginning of a larger experience involving visuals and physical elements. How should listeners approach
the record as a whole, and does the meaning of the songs change once someone encounters the wider world you have built around them?
We have been told the record is soothing, unnerving, uncanny, refreshing. We’ve been told all manner of things. I think if we bring it to you full-force physical, the way we want to, you’ll understand it. I don’t care if you “like it.” I think you’ll understand it.
SCALED ALPS appears to resist the idea that a band has to fit comfortably into a recognizable category. As you continue developing the project, how far are you willing to take that experimentation, and what would you like to surprise even yourselves with next?
We don’t care at all. We’re sound. Maybe it’s in a room. Maybe it’s outside. We’re named vibrations. I’m voiced, verbalized frequencies. I’ve got something to say, a lot of things to say, if you want to hear it. If you want to wag your ass, you can ignore me. I genuinely don’t care. It’s all valid.
You want to be understood, right, as an artist. But you want a lot of things. Good luck with all that. In the meantime, you can transmit feeling. You can make a global audience understand an exhibition of physicality, of raw emotion. They can understand you through intuition, through pain or pleasure or lust or aggression or whatever it is you’re transmitting. We’ve got it all, and in spades. Drink
deep.
