Interview: Sprain

Los Angeles experimental band Sprain has released two singles—“Worship House” and “Constant Hum”—from its forthcoming album As Lost Through Collision, out September 4th via The Flenser. While Sprain’s 2018 self-titled debut EP was characterized by a droney slowcore soundscape, As Lost Through Collision finds frontman Alex Kent, bassist April Gerloff, guitarist Alex Simmons, and drummer Max Pretzer entwining coarser and more dissonant textures with the band’s already sprawling sonic palette. Influenced by ’90s post-hardcore bands like Slint and Unwound as well as 20th-century avant-garde composers like Xenakis and Penderecki, the forthcoming album is a harrowing journey through existential dread. Below are some highlights from my chat with Kent ahead of the album’s release.

Sprain was one of the first bands I interviewed for this site. After seeing the band play with Duster at the Echoplex last year, we chatted about the self-titled EP and some of your influences. Now, your debut LP As Lost Through Collision is set to release next month. How did this new batch of songs come about?

Well, it’s funny you should mention the Duster show because I think that our first EP we released a couple years ago was constantly compared to Duster, and it began to frustrate us a lot. I think that EP kind of came out at a time when loud music wasn’t really an option for any of us to record. I was living in an apartment complex and had no money. April and I basically recorded that on our own, but we couldn’t really be loud at all. We didn’t have the equipment to make anything loud sound any good. So we made this quiet ’90s slowcore-indebted piece of music that happened to gain some type of traction on the internet. Lots of people would talk to me about it. It was constantly being compared to Duster, and it kind of frustrated me because I’m fond of that music—and it certainly inspired us—but it wasn’t really the type of music that I was passionate about, or that I wanted to totally commit to in the future…[With the new record] there was more of an effort to do something that was more along the lines of music that we’re really passionate about—which still continues slowcore but it incorporate some of the ’90s noise rock, post hardcore, and post rock influences—but also trying to mix all that stuff in kind of a contemporary soup that we made into a record.

What else is different about As Lost Through Collision compared to the EP?

I think that the primary difference is that there is a highlight and a focus upon the philosophy that goes into composing music prior to actually beginning the process of writing the music. I guess this is a little embarrassing for me to admit, but I don’t think that an immense amount of thought went into previous music. I think it just happened to be something that was being made to distract from certain existential despair. I think that this music comes from a similar place, but it actually has a philosophical approach prior to being recorded and prior to even being written. I believe that music should have some type of—I guess it could be environmental or it can be circumstantial or it can just be a mental state—but I think that the impetus of music should be considered before actually doing so. I think some people would disagree with me, but for this particular record we wanted to make music that was more moving and had an actual emotional depth to it. Whereas I felt on the previous record, the pieces just fell into place in a way that was aesthetically pleasing. Now, there’s an approach. Musically speaking, I think that this record is darker and heavier. I think that we were all very anxious when writing and recording this record, and I think that that very much affected the way the songs were performed and written. The single we just put out “Constant Hum” sounds incredibly rickety, at least to my own ears…It does sound like we’re shaking in the studio, trying to hit the really slow, full band hits all at the same time. The song is so slow and we’re trying to play really quietly on the guitars, but it’s hard to do because the amps are so loud…I think it was just kind of another mistake that we had not anticipated in the studio that added to the discomfort of listening to that song in the first place.

I’m really digging the album artwork. What am I looking at it?

The artwork was designed by Raymond Santana-Linares. We wanted it to be a building that could not exist in a physical space, but a draft of that building…He’s currently a pretty accomplished architect, so he was the perfect candidate for it. I just wanted a really cold, very brutalist, industrialized blueprint drawing of a building that couldn’t actually be built…Working with Ray was amazing. He did exactly what I wanted. It’s been difficult for me whenever I put out music to get the right artwork—or to get something that has the same conceptual thought that’s put into the music—but he really knocked it out of the park, and this is the best looking artwork that I’ve ever had the pleasure of being involved with in a musical project, so I’m really excited about it…I think I said that there was some relation with how the lines would go over each other—or kind of interweave—in the same way that we compose the instrumental parts of our music. When Alex and I get together to write guitar parts and April her bass parts, they’re all kind of interwoven and they all become one deformed instrumental passage rather than distinct pieces. Similar to the band Polvo. We really like the way their guitar parts interact. There’s a certain musical language or communication that they all have.

Who are you listening to right now?

Well, the late and great Vern Rumsey of Unwound, whom we’re friends with, passed away last night. So, I listened to the whole Unwound discography yesterday. I’m constantly listening to that kind of revolving door of musicians that we very obviously find inspiration from like Unwound or Slint or Lowercase. For some of the creative work that we’ve been doing recently—and I’ve been doing—I’ve been listening to a lot of Alice Coltrane and Pink Floyd and some older music. I think there’s different eras that permit an acceptability of certain chord progressions or certain sounds. I’ve been exploring different eras where different things were still cool, like guitar solos—not that I’m going to throw any Dave Gilmour guitar solos on any of our next recordings, hopefully. I think there’s a lot of things to take away that you can integrate into your own music by listening to music that’s very different from the music you’re making. I’m also listening to Neil Young and Swans. I’m always listening to Swans, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and lots of music that has a certain cinematic visual quality to it.

I’ve read that you’re also really into classical music.

I’m really fascinated by 20th-century classical music—some of the weirder stuff like Schoenberg, Penderecki, Ligeti, Xenakis. Those kind of composers were taking these approaches of writing music to their most abstract extremes and making music based only upon texture, rather than the classical cliches of motif or chord progressions. I always found that really fascinating because especially in the classical world—where pretty much everyone has to be at a certain level trained—they were able to create this music that was entirely based upon sound, as opposed to anything that was derived…It’s just kind of bizarre and inspiring.

As Lost Through Collision is out on September 4th via The Flenser. Preorder the album here.