The Collapse Board interview – Fire Witch
What was the initial aesthetic you were going for with Fire Witch? Was your sound deliberate or accidental?
No aesthetic whatsoever. We were too young to think about stuff like that. The idea of aiming for a particular sound would have bored us to tears. In fact we were always re-writing riffs that we thought sounded too much like someone else’s. The way we write is by improvising and then working from there. So the songs just take their own shape, we’ve never set out to write a particular type of song.
I couldn’t tell you how many people told us we needed a singer for the first two years! It’s only now I think how fucked that is but we were too involved in our own sounds to notice how many people didn’t approve of us. That’s all we knew. So people would jump on stage and try to “sing” for us and Patto would have to fight them off while playing is bass. We just thought this was all part of it.
We never knew the term DIY existed until much later. We were DIY from the beginning because it never occurred to us there was any other way to operate! And I guess we were very possessive of our own work and wanted to maintain control. So we had no idea there was this whole support network called DIY where you could play different music and that was cool and you could play all ages shows and all that. And to be honest I’m glad we didn’t discover that til much later. Because without that support we had to believe in our own music a lot more.
Do you think Americans have funny accents?
Well, you guys have more diversity of accents than we do. Some are more endearing than others! But they are all so familiar to us since we’ve had your movies and bands and pop culture shoved down our throats for so long. A lot of bands here seem to think it’s cool to sing in an American accent (our accent is harder to sing in, it’s kind of harsh I suppose) and some even seem to maintain it for between-song banter which is so embarrassing. Can you imagine if you walked in on that? How could you take that seriously?!!
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