Words & Photo by Louis Dillon Savage

Black Moth Super Rainbow of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, make albums that sound like dreams marching in time. Airy synths and meandering flutes tempered by solid beats, most often compared to pioneering Scottish duo Boards of Canada, their music deviates from the comparison with folkier snippets and occasional electric organ. The five members of this electronic band hide their identities behind fanciful pseudonyms, and at initial gigs took pains to hide their faces from the audience. The masks are gone but the band still plays a darkened stage and communicates with the audience as little as possible.

At first glance, the live set is a wild departure from the precise compositions of which their albums are crafted. The jam band atmosphere belies just how rigorously rehearsed the songs reveal themselves to be. These players are tight.

We had the opportunity to throw some questions at the band after their performance at Asheville, NC’s swank Orange Peel, and here’s what they threw back:

‘Sup: Does music have a right to children?
Power Pill Fist: Maybe.

Maybe?
Seven Fields of Aphelion: I’m gonna go with “I hate kids”, so… no. They should be deprived of everything, so they grow up to be strong individuals.
Iffernaught: I think music should exploit children as much as possible.
Father Hummingbird: Music should catch up with the rest of the industries of the world.
SFOA: You particularly want a stage full of small exploited children…
PPF: –if children want to carry my gear that would be cool.

Can you guys tell me a bit about your creative process? How do you get to the sound that you’ve got?
Iffernaught: Well, we have a skeleton builder, who’s absent tonight. He does most of the song building and putting together and we end up witnessing the skeletons and drafts and stuff like that.

So it’s passed down for you to play?
Iffernaught: It actually has a little bit of improvisation in it as well, so…
SFOA: And you can probably tell it’s a very different sound in the live show.
Iffernaught: We take his babies and blow them up… make ‘em bloody! There’s really two aspects of the band. There’s the live show and then there’s Tobacco who composes originally what we’re doing?
SFOA: He was on stage but now he’s hiding. He’s decided we need to practice interviews or something.

How do you reconcile having such a big and dynamic band playing the kind of meticulously composed electronica that’s on your albums?
PPF: It’s taken a long time to get it right!
Father Hummingbird: We’ve been trying for years.

How long have you been playing together?
FH: The band we are right now? About five years.
SFOA: Four years. Yeah, a little more than four years.
PPF: [Father Hummingbird], I and the other guy were together before that. We tried folk, we tried noise and it just worked itself into what it is now.

How did you choose your pseudonyms?
SFOA: We think about changing our names all the time
Iffernaught: Some of the names found us, I think.
PPF: I do an Atari-music side project, that’s where the Power Pill came from. It just kind of worked its way out of that.

“Black Moth Super Rainbow”: what’s that about?
FH: That was Tobacco trying to come up with the best Japanese cereal name, right?
SFOA: Yeah. He likes to make up Pop Tart flavors. It’s like his favorite pastime. We should just tell secrets about Tobacco this whole time!

Given that your live show is so wild improvised, does any of that jamming go back into Tobacco’s production?
Iffernaught: It doesn’t necessarily. He does sit down and record us, so a lot of the time the stuff that he is building, like, the building blocks are changing because of the live sound, which I think is excellent, because getting really raucous drum loops to build off is definitely giving him more texture.
FH: One of the songs we did tonight was from a jam.

So it’s almost like a collaboration between Tobacco and the live band?
PPF: It’s mainly him. He gets us on the occasion… like he’ll sit back and write a song, and he’ll have us come in and do the parts for it. Some of it’s taken from a live jam, some of it comes purely from him. But it is— it’s a collaborative effort.
SFOA: But what he has recorded, a lot of the time doesn’t translate into us being able to just play it as is. Nor would we want to just play it as given. So we kinda listen to it, sometimes we’ll start out playing it exactly as it’s recorded and then a lot of the time we kind of make it our own.
PPF: Yeah, you’ll just go, “Wow, that sound’s so much better,” or, “We need to add another part to this.”

Ok, musical influences: what do you listen to? And you can’t say everything!
SFOA: Everything? Nothing!
FH: We’d say nothing, yeah.
SFOA: Maybe children should have the right to music . I don’t like children and I don’t like music…
FH: Fine with me. I listen to Boards of Canada. I listen to a lot of noise stuff too, like Lighting Bolt.

Your first album sounded very much like Music Has the Right to Children, which is why I asked initially.
PPF: It’s an influence.
FH: The Flaming Lips were a big influence as well as Boards, too.

What was it like playing with them?
SFOA: Oh, yeah, it was amazing.
FH: Indescribable.
SFOA: Wayne was like, Uncle Wayne!
FH: Yeah, he was!
PPF: They would just come and hang out with us and they were just so nice! So nice. And like, they were generous to us–
SFOA: Every show there would be like trays of fruit and cake and food…
FH: Every show they would come and hang out and feed us and eat with us.
Iffernaught: Actually playing with them was really awesome too, because they were really open to what we’re doing, like all the colors and the crazy visuals and, just, the grandeur of it. That’s something Black Moth really has going for it. The more layers and the more melodies and the more colors we can bring into it, the better, so it all just came together in a really nice way. It was good to see how just far you can take it and how far you can actually go.
SFOA: They’re so great. They just bring such energy to what they do. It’s just what you know you’d want to be like.
Iffernaught: They’re not burned out at all.
SFOA: They’re still really excited about what they’re doing.

I heard you played a part in their show
SFOA: Yeah, we’re on a balcony to side of the stage that was FULL of balloons. These giant balloons that were bigger than me and we were pushing them onto the audience, just balloon after balloon and they were just bouncing back at us. It was so awesome. They let us be part of the show, too. It was really cool. They were good people, good times.

Ok, so if this is what you like, what is the worst music in the world?
FH: Us. [Laughs]
PPF: Man, I know we’re in the wrong part of the world, but I don’t like country music.
SFOA: You’re trying to get us into trouble… we’ve been in trouble too many times!
Iffernaught: I think the music you don’t like, you’re not really listening to.
FH: I hate country music, but that’s just me, that’s all I’m saying.

Why the pseudonyms and secrecy?
SFOA: Well, there are a couple of reasons, one of which is that some of us have other musical side projects under those names, and it’s nice to get that name out there.
PPF: Yeah, that’s where Power Pill started.
FH: I think it’s nice if everybody listens to us and enjoys us for the music, and it’s not just about us.
Iffernaught: The whole show really isn’t about us. It’s more about the visuals. That’s why we try to keep the lights low. It’s not about us.