“A dream of a shopping cart left in the street in a desolate wasteland is stuck on repeat,” sings Jonathan Zeitlin on Alpine Decline’s latest album Life’s a Gasp, a record that echoes the dystopian smog world of Beijing.

Alpine Decline is Beijing-via-Los Angeles husband and wife rockers Jonathan Zeitlin and Pauline Mu. Self-described as “psych, shoegaze, noise rock and ’90s indie, without sounding too much like any of those,” Alpine Decline are currently touring their seventh album Life’s a Gasp across China with long time confidante, producer and bassist Yang Haisong.

Kiwese caught up with Jonathan ahead of their gig in Chengdu to talk about touring and synthesisers in a WeChat conversation littered with baby smoking Hitler emojis.

KIWESE: Hey Alpine Decline! Where are you guys?

JONATHAN: We’re driving up from Nanning to Guiyang right now and it is fucking gorgeous. Pauline and I are essentially nature-oriented people living in a city that is the antithesis of natural, so this lush landscape really moves us.

Rad, how was the show in Nanning? 

Nanning was great. I think in places that don’t get as many touring acts coming through, the thrills are a little bit more palpable. A strange room and a strange feeling, like someone might bar the doors and some shootout might happen, or evil spirits descend… this is the perfect vibe for us to play.

“Playing for ten people ready to freak the fuck out is often more fun than 200 people who are only listening with one ear.“

 

Can you tell us about your tour bus and crew? Sounds huge!

We’ve been on the US get-in-the-van trip quite a few times and will be doing it again in October with Carsick Cars and Chui Wan, but this is the first time we’ve had a van to tour in china, instead of riding the rails. It completely changes the nature of the expedition – in a way we are temperamentally well suited for.

We brought our baby and a babysitter, so that adds two bodies. There’s the three of us in the band, Xiao Bao running sound, our old friend (and veteran of the earliest P.K.14 van tours) 黄师傅 minding the details, and our very trusted driver. For awhile Nevin from Genjing Records/Maybe Mars came along. Little Monster rolled with us from Shanghai to Nantong and that was max capacity.

Logistics aside, I love ripping down the road. I like stepping out of the car in the middle of nowhere. I like the whole ‘Peter Pan leading a pack of gypsy children out into the wilderness’ vibe.

This is not the first tour Alpine Decline for little Roland, right? He must be almost ready to join the band as the fourth member haha

This is his fourth tour. He did Australia when he was six months old, then the China tour for our last album GO BIG SHADOW CITY and the subsequent US/Canada tour. He’s pretty natural at it. He gets on really well with everyone and can tolerate the dirty language and rough living pretty well.

With kids, I find you create reality for them… they don’t come into the world with a set of expectations of how things are gonna be. So taking him on tour at first was about us being brave, not about him understanding what’s up. We just felt like it was a bad narrative in the long term to say “we used to tour and make albums and then you were born so it all stopped.” We felt like he could have warmth and support and a reasonable measure of stability and safety while still coming into Pauline and my world, joining our lives and our family.

What’s the best thing about being on tour? 

There is a lot of wildness on tour; wild thoughts, the crazy feeling of being cut loose, the daily encounter with my fight-or-flight instincts. You meet crazy people and seem to be endlessly celebrating something, I don’t know what. For us, we are very focused on the shows, because getting in a room with people and playing music every night, there is a possibility we will get somewhere interesting, and that’s really the only reason to tour.

Of course we get tired, nerves frayed and maybe lose perspective of reality a little bit. But I’m going to reach a place every night where the moment opens up and freezes and we are all intensely present for some fleeting interval. so 辛苦? 辛苦我可以收。(hardship, hardship I can take.)

Welcome to Chengdu, what’s your impression of this place?

Chengdu and these western parts always leave a very deep impression on us. Of course in Chengdu as everywhere you witness the crush of development, but there is a kind of frontier vibe that comes on this far from the eastern seaboard that strikes me as romantic.

Would be great to have an Alpine Decline synth set in Chengdu!

Aw, I would have loved to do a synth set in Chengdu! When we were planning the tour and figuring out where we could do the synth stuff, I just didn’t know if there was a community interested in that kinda thing…

I wouldn’t say there’s a ‘community’ but certainly individuals who have an interest.

Yeah, I find on tour there is pretty intense interest in the modular synths and people just trying to contextualize asymmetrical music in general, so that after the synth sets we are basically spending about a half an hour talking to the crowd, showing them the synths and explaining stuff.

We use the synths during the rock set too, so we also have gotten people who come out even though they aren’t interested in guitars or rock, but read somewhere about the synths.

If it’s not too mafan, are you able to tell us about your synths for all the synth nerds out there?

Ah, so basically we built two boxes and filled then with different modular synth components from a variety of sources. Eurorack is basically a format, a set of standards, so people can build synth components that will be compatible with other peoples modules. so we have basically a collection of oscillators, filters, VCAs, envelope generators, utilities, etc that we can patch together to create any sound we imagine.

We don’t have any presets or memory banks, it is nearly impossible to perfectly recreate a sound, so every night on tour the synths are slightly different, their ambience a little slippery and sorta every variable. plus they are a lot lighter than lugging around big vintage synths like the last tour haha.

I read in an interview that you recorded Life’s a Gasp in a makeshift studio in the mountains?

I think the place was originally going to be like a western style residential neighbourhood in the mountains past Badaling, northwest of Beijing, but the government moved some factories out to the adjacent valley and the place was more or less abandoned by the ten or twelve people that built houses there. Surreal, kind of ghostly, maybe some abandoned dogs, but with the ruins of unrestored Great Wall snaking along the ridgeline. We kinda had a sound design in mind and wanted to find a very big room where we could record drums, guitar and bass live together, and one of these houses became available to us. So we moved there for a week and were able to create a really different, closed-circuit kind of habitat for this part of the recording process.

So you guys are rolling in Guangxi right now, a far stretch from L.A. You’ve been in Beijing for a decent few years now, do you still align yourselves and your style with the L.A. scene at all?

No, we don’t align ourselves with the L.A. scene at all. Actually, I don’t have a clue what’s been going on in L.A. the last five years at all. Even before we moved here, we were feeling very disassociated with the music scene, pretty aware of the distance between what we were looking to do and the territory around us.

It might be a little different on a personal level for Pauline, because she grew up there, but especially for me just kinda drifting through from more remote parts, L.A. just seems like a fantasy to me, even when I lived there.

I’m originally from a small town in north-eastern Ohio, a sort of farmland about an hour outside of a big collapsing steel town.

There are brilliant musicians in L.A… I’m in disbelief I had the opportunity to call them my friends and whip up some music together… but we had a different plan when we started Alpine Decline and after about a year knew it wasn’t right in L.A.

L.A is known around the world as the mecca of music and film production, so no doubt full of people trying to make it big. Do you find any parallels between that and Beijing?

The scale is really different. People seeking to make art come to Beijing, but the leading industry in Beijing is politics, not art. In L.A., its almost exclusively entertainment, like a coal town with screening rooms instead of mineshafts. Truthfully, L.A. is really just film and TV, so playing music there is still a little outside… unlike New York or Berlin, perhaps.

I don’t know what “making it big” would look like in China. We didn’t think that was an option here, which was part of the appeal.

Thanks Jonathan!

---

Alpine Decline play NU SPACE Chengdu this Saturday with support from the almighty Hiperson!

购票请长按下方二维码:

Press & extract the QR code below for tickets on Zaomengshe:

Alpine Decline ‘Life’s a Gasp’ China Tour 2016

天津 Tianjin 6.1 周三 13club

合肥 Hefei 6.2 周四 On the Way（大摩店）

南京 Nanjing 6.3 周五 欧拉艺术空间

宁波 Ningbo 6.4 周六 CMK

杭州 Hangzhou 6.5 周日 酒球会

上海 Shanghai（模块合成器） 6.7 周二 Shelter

南通 Nantong 6.8 周三 The Void

义乌 Yiwu 6.9 周四 隔壁

上海 Shanghai 6.10 周五 育音堂

温州 Wenzhou 6.11 周六 米房cei

厦门 Xiamen 6.12 周日 Real Live

泉州 Quanzhou 6.13 周一 动物世界音乐公社

东莞 Dongguan 6.14 周二 红糖罐（769店）

珠海 Zhuhai 6.15 周三 九号仓音乐工厂

广州 Guangzhou（模块合成器） 6.17 周五 Loft345

广州 Guangzhou 6.18 周六 191space

深圳 Shenzhen 6.19 周日 B10现场

南宁 Nanning 6.21 周二 侯朋现场

贵阳 Guiyang 6.23 周四 劲 Livehouse

重庆 Chongqing 6.24 周五 MAO

成都 Chengdu 6.25 周六 NU Space

西安 Xi’an（模块合成器） 6.27 周一 光圈

西安 Xi’an 6.28 周二 光圈

洛阳 Luoyang 6.29 周三 喜堂

新乡 Xinxiang 6.30 周四 Sub Ark

北京 Beijing 7.2 周六 School Live Bar

北京 Beijing（模块合成器） 7.3 周日 fruityspace

襄阳 Xiangyang 7.8 周五 Vox

武汉Wuhan 7.9 周六 Vox（武昌店）