Interview by Nik Mercer
Photography by Milan Zrnic

With the NYC rock scene in a bit of a shambles due to severe stylistic stratification – you’re either part of an electronic act or an über indie unit – it’s refreshing to find a band like the Hundred In the Hands who successfully cull together the best of both words in a sincere and deeply engaging manner. In 2008, the duo, which is comprised of Jason Friedman and Eleanor Everdell, busted out with the self-released Internet single “Dressed In Dresden”, a jerky, sweaty pop anthem, reminiscent of the heyday of dance punk. Since then, they’ve been restlessly climbing the ladder of both artistic progression and professional success (Warp Records signed them last year).

This Desert (Warp, 2010), the pair’s debut EP, is a hazy, dubbed-out collection of six glistening tunes that sublimely weave in and out of your ears and flow into one another like an ocean’s ebb and tide. It’s ideal listening for those unfocused, blindingly bright summer days on which you find yourself sunstroked, lazily spread out on your neighborhood park green. The album, on the other hand, promises to be tighter and more focused, a reflection of getting dressed up for a night on the town where you don’t let the world drift by, but, rather, where you demand it impress you. Friedman and Everdell consistently churn out enchanting, seductive pop gems whose lyrics and body-moving bass groves get stuck in your head in equal measure with the intention of encouraging you to sing along with their choruses while you simultaneously tear up the dancefloor.

Maybe it’d be good to go back to the beginning and discuss the origins of the band. Jason, you were the frontman for the Boggs, and Eleanor, you were touring with them.
Jason: As the Boggs were dying out, I just had to keep [something else going]. We kind of think of it as, like, we put “Dressed In Dresden” online in October of 2008 and we played a show shortly thereafter, and that’s when it really started. Everything happened really fast. We had a UK tour and we put out a 7-inch on Pure Groove and then Warp signed us. The whole time we’d been writing, we’d been working with Jacques [Renault] and as soon as Warp got involved, they allowed us to just close the doors, so we spent all of last summer writing and recording. On our end, we were done recording in August, and from September to December, we just focused on finishing the record. We worked with Richard X and Eric Broucek a lot, too.

How did the thing with Jacques come about?
Jason: Well, way back, every time I saw him out, he’d say, ‘I want to do a remix for you!’ So I just asked him.
Eleanor: “Dresden” was sort of a one-off thing where we just had some time in the studio, and so once that single was done, we were looking for somebody to do a remix.
Jason: I thought he came into it before we’d actually
finished. We hadn’t mixed it. Jacques just sort of… (pause) started doing it, working on his own. But it took him a while, a couple months.

He can be sort of slow.
Jason (laughs): But there was also not really anything going on. We just asked him to do it. We were still trying to figure out what sort of band we wanted to be, and by the time he handed it in, it was clear that his remix was more in line with the way we were going. We almost thought it could be the main track itself.

It’s a great remix. Okay, but you keep talking about the band you wanted to be and all, so I have to ask what that means exactly. Where do you want to go with the band? What is the aesthetic?
Jason: We had lots of things we were putting together, lots of reference points. Like, Tom Tom Club was one. While the Boggs were still performing, we toured with Hot Chip and checked out what they were doing with electronics. That was another reference point.
Eleanor: And with them, we were really focused on how people were responding to them in a live context.
Jason: We were also listening to a lot of Studio 1 stuff.
Eleanor: And early hip-hop.
Jason: It was kind of like, ‘Okay, what’s the connecting point for all these things?’

Making sense of how to put it all together in a cogent manner.
Jason: After teaching ourselves how to use all the equipment… (pauses) Like, we’d never used drum machines before, so there was a learning curve there.

You play guitar, Jason, and Eleanor, you play synths and sequencers and obviously sing.
Jason: Yeah, in the recordings, pretty much all the synths are done by Eleanor and all the beats are based on synth guitars. The guitar tends to be used in a more textural way. It sounds like synths.

Making music as a duo seems a little difficult at times since it forces you to be so tied to the studio.
Jason: That’s why it took us so long to figure everything out. We could just go and, like –
Eleanor: Jam out.
Jason: Yeah. And neither of us come from jamming backgrounds, anyway. We don’t really enjoy it. We like songs.
Eleanor: We tried it a little bit, but it didn’t work.
Jason: So it took us a while to figure out what the process was. Last summer, we really hit our stride.

How do you do the live thing, then?
Jason: Yeah, there’s a lot of backing track stuff, which we rearrange for a live setting. The funny thing is, I find people think backing tracks means you’re being lazy, but it’s actually really complex. You have to think both forwards and backwards; you have to be aware of what you did last time or at least remember the sequence of events. At the same time, you need to figure out how to make things spontaneous without having to chase after the backing track.
Eleanor: Ableton is sort of where we’ve gotten to. We started out by only using just samplers and sequencers on stage and it was more involved. Now we’re actually playing with a synth, which allows for a lot of really cool manipulations, and it also makes the sound a lot cleaner, more separated.
Jason: It was really important to us from the start that we have a soundsystem on stage. It’s because we use backing tracks and it’s really difficult to hear what’s going on when they’re only coming from the house. So we bring our own P.A. For me, it’s like having a third member on stage. Also, it makes the guitar sound and feel as though it’s not the only loud thing up there.
Eleanor: Maybe the best way to think of it is, like, the Ableton side of things is the live DJ aspect, and then the other stuff is the live show. I don’t know. Hopefully it works out.

Moving to the production side of things, you worked with a bunch of producers, the biggest of which was Richard X. How did that pairing come to pass?
Jason: I think Warp suggested it. We always knew that we wanted to collaborate with producers at some point, even though we self-produce a lot. It’s really helpful, if for no other reason than to just have another person [chiming in].

Self-producing can be a little dangerous at times –
Eleanor: Also we’d have access to better gear and a better technical knowledge.
Jason: We still have that DIY rawness, but –
Eleanor: He was amazing. Initially, we kind of had these grand visions of treating [our material] like a hip-hop record with all these different producers, but that didn’t work out, largely because that’s a really intense world with a lot of money floating around (laughs). Richard thought there was something there and we got super lucky. Not only does he work with really cheesy, poppy –
Jason: Now, you can’t say that!
Eleanor: It’s true. He works with more pop acts in England, but he has super great taste in music and a huge record collection, so it was sort of complimentary for both of us. We wanted to really push it, which you can’t, really, when you’re just working out of your apartment or whatever.
Jason: I think he liked it because we presented him with something different.

Tell me about your affinity with synths.
Eleanor: That was one of the really amazing things about working with proper producers: Everyone had great synths. Eric has some amazing analog synths and Richard has, like, everything. For me, that’s kind of my territory, but it really takes a lot of time and energy to get your head around it all. It was great to have someone there to help me navigate through that whole world. Part of this whole synth world is developing good tastes because there are so many options, not just good tastes, but your own tastes. Texture, sound and how you want to work with things. Like you imagine these things in your head, and you have to find the synths that evoke that.

I get the impression with you guys that you’re avoiding pigeonholing yourselves to a certain genre. You’re not just post-punk or New Wave or whatever. A lot of people say, ‘I am this specific niche genre, which means the bpm has to be between 120 and 130 and the kick has to be phased out,’ and so on. You put all these self-imposed restrictions on the creative process. It’s admirable to see you guys sort of saying, like, ‘Screw that –we’re going to do it our own way.’
Jason: It’s funny because when we start talking about an idea for something, we actually find that we like the idea of having self-imposed rules, but we’re really baroque in our sensibilities, so it’s always like, ‘Oh, we could also add this into it’ or whatever.
Eleanor: I think the thing that ties us down or keeps us focused – at least for the EP and the record that’s coming out this fall – is we’ve been focusing on traditional song form, and that’s not necessarily something either of us have done in the past. We just decided to give ourselves those parameters. Pop in the best possible way.
Jason: I think in our minds, what we’re actually make is really rough pop. Our manager is constantly telling us that it’s not.

To me, the EP is, like, deceptively poppy. The tunes are pop songs, for sure, but they sort of craftily circumvent pop while simultaneously coming back to pop.
Jason: I know what you mean. By the time we started working with Richard and Eric, we already knew which songs were going to be on the album and which songs were going to be on the EP. So, as we were finishing the EP, we were focusing on giving it its own vibe, which, in our minds, was more summery and dubbed-out. We really love how every time we turn the delay up on something we’re like, ‘Wow, that sounds fantastic!’ But we know that we sort of obscure something, so the [songs on This Desert] are the ones that we really indulged the foreground in.

You have a beautiful voice, Eleanor, and it’s really wonderful to hear someone just belt it out and not be all nasally since that’s what so much of pop singing has become. Working within a tight register and holding back so much.
Eleanor: Thank you. I think there are a lot of people, especially in our universe here, who develop their particular style and figure out what they want to sound like and it sounds amazing. For me, it’s like, I’ve been singing since I was really young, and I’ve gone off on many embarrassing directions with that, so I know it’s one of those things where I can’t narrow it that far. I wind up pushing [my voice] in all these different directions and always wanting to try something differently. So I think, ‘Okay, I haven’t really pushed it that far yet, so now I’m going to see how far I can push it.’
Jason: We come from really different writing standpoints. Ellie works on the vocal parts completely differently from the way I know how to sing, which is to just wing it. She uses her voice like an instrument. It’s not guesswork for her, and I think that’s pretty rare.

It sounds very classically based.
Eleanor: I went to classical music school. I mean, I was never good, but I think the best thing that came from music school was the ability to read music and understand it on a theoretical level. That helps a lot when you’re trying to decide which way to go.

I studied piano and French horn for many years as an adolescent, and I think that’s one of the things that’s missing from DIY music. You may be completely freed of things like harmonies and chord progressions and keys and time signatures, but that stuff is really useful in that you’re able to construct stuff more soundly.
Eleanor: My boyfriend in college was a piano major composer, and he kind of tried to push, for a while, to be in a rock band and I think his mind was so chained to the way that he understood writing music from a compositional standpoint –
Jason: You just wind up writing really terrible Radiohead (laughs).
Eleanor: I mean, he wrote really good music, but I guess I’m really glad that I developed that to a certain point, but I never really fully did, so it’s not hard for me to just go into it and do whatever sounds right. But when it comes to a point where it’s like, ‘Okay, I know this would sound better if I resolved this note this way or, I have this harmony and I want to make sure that these three parts really lift it at this point, I can go back to that stuff and find answers.’

It’s like coming equipped with a proper set of tools.
Jason: I think my department is bringing the foundation of the energy and the groove or something, pushing it that way. I think we both get excited by what we’re not good at in the other person. Something that I think of as being not that big of a deal, Eleanor will get excited about.
Eleanor: I think that’s one of the things Jason got from making music for seven years in New York in the Boggs. His major strength is developing energy and mood with a combination of elements that are more band-focused. Me, coming from a classical background, the whole nature of a band is foreign. He has a more natural sense of when things work well and when they function or don’t.
Jason: And I don’t really have much of a problem in leaving the chord progression, throwing in a few extra notes.

You’ve been in this New York scene for a while.
Jason: It’s funny because we’ve been working on this stuff for a year and I really don’t think about the Boggs.

But I mean, like, you went through a really significant period of time in New York. Your band and the bands that were around it – that was a really big-deal time in this city! I feel like there’s a resurgence, not of, like, 2001, 2002, but –
Jason: I moved here in ‘94, and back then, there were no bands at all. It was somewhere around ‘99-ish that all of a sudden, all these people who were around and going to the same parties all started playing music. All at once. No one, at that time, was thinking beyond New York. In mind my, indie rock was really boring. The music I really liked was ‘60s mod and early New. It seemed like a party, and that was the light bulb that I, along with all the other bands felt. Like, ‘We’re just going to have fun and things don’t have to be super serious.’ It doesn’t seem like New York has ever gone back to what it was at that moment. Now it’s just expected that there are bands.

But, I mean, the Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Liars. It’s been a decade since they came out. That’s a long time. People look up to those groups as, like, the uncle bands, and I think that these new bands sort of look up to them and aspire towards them.
Jason: I admit that, having gone through it, that’s the part of the puzzle I don’t really see. It seems like a continuum; I don’t see any line in the sand. New bands now, I still think of them as being a part of that same thing.
Eleanor: It’s different from my perspective. I mean, Jason really was there, so, for a while, when we first met, I was, like, ‘So… what was that like?’ Not to be too dorky about it, but yeah, I think there was a genuine thing that happened. All this charisma came together and everyone was like, ‘Hey, let’s make a band.’ It was so logical. Now I feel like so many people are in New York and in music are very conscious of that moment in time.

Yeah, the stuff that happened in the early 2000s has become more formalized and organized.
Jason: I kind of remember that moment when like, well I was talking to Nick Zinner right before [Yeah Yeah Yeahs] left on their first big tour, and it seemed as though there was this possibility that the door was actually open and that we could enjoy this and that we could all join the real world rock ‘n’ roll. It wasn’t just for fun. And I feel like that’s changed. When you’re a young band now, you expect that you’re going to be afforded those opportunities.

The album’s coming out in the fall and it’s going to be –
Jason: Just more direct.
Eleanor: I think that since we’re sort of coming out of nowhere, it’s sort of appropriate that we ease into things.
Jason: We may be the worst people to ask about what the album’s like. The EP, in our minds, has always been our good vibes, summertime, happy record, and the album is all dark and more grown-up. Our manager is just, like, ‘No! It’s the complete opposite! The EP is the weird, dark one and the album is totally happy.’ We have no idea.

The EP can get a little dark at times, but hey, if you say it’s summery, fair enough.
Eleanor: I think the way I think about it is that it isn’t necessarily light, but that it sounds like music I want to listen to in the sunshine. The record is stuff I want to listen to at a nighttime party. There are some tracks on the record that aren’t like that, but –

I see what you mean. It’s not about being literally sunny, but –
Eleanor: It’s kind of more daytime/nighttime.
Jason: [The EP] is dubbed out, a little blotto.
Eleanor (laughs): Morning after…
Jason: The album is like, getting dressed in your best and going out.

That makes sense.
Eleanor: If you think about dubby stuff and hazy stuff, it just sort of drifts into your head and you don’t necessarily need to focus on it. It’s very experiential. The nighttime stuff is, like, trying to grab your attention and hit you over the head with something.
Jason: There’s also just a lot more to clarify on [the album]. There are guitars that sound like guitars. There’re a lot more live drums, too. We got Vito [Roccoforte] from the Rapture to come in and do some stuff. He’s playing on songs he never heard. We got him into the studio with two room mics to play along to early versions of songs and then we just ended up using them on a bunch of songs.

That’s always fun. I like seeing people take drum segments and breaks and fills and whatnot and putting them in different contexts.
Jason: We consciously recorded them to sound roomy and dirty, and it’s always being used with programmed beats, which are really punchy and sharp.

You guys really create that dichotomy well. I don’t like to pigeonhole people, but I know that, inevitably, you will be dubbed a new disco act or something along those lines. How do you feel about that stuff?
Jason: It’s not really a concern. I mean, when we started, disco was definitely one of our reference points. We’re hearing it more now. A lot more than when we were first doing it.
Eleanor: I mean, I think that working with Eric and Jacques – and while we were working with Chris Zane, Holy Ghost! had just recently come out, so there’s this connection we have by association to the DFA world and a lot of the stuff coming out of that scene is really exciting to us. I mean, we’re not using any of their tricks – you know the DFA sound. We’re doing our version of something else that’s a legitimate thing. And as much as we don’t want to be pegged to anything, yes, disco, old and new, is definitely something we’re into.
Jason: The only time it becomes a problem is when, say, someone really likes a certain song, like “Dressed In Dresden”, they’re disappointed upon hearing other things.

You also are a duo, and I think that carries with it a certain set of assumptions.
Jason: Yeah, we ended up being a duo because the two of us would be focused on the music in a way that [other people] wouldn’t. We wanted to tour and we didn’t want to worry about things like getting a new drummer or whatever.
Eleanor: I think part of it is the nature of what’s going on right now. It’s really impractical to have some giant band. Even four people is really intense. Trying to get people to coordinate and be as focused as the others – I feel like a lot of bands now may have that many people in them, but the collaboration is really only between two members or there’s just one person who’s the driving force behind it all.

Yeah, like the Holy Ghost! guys. It’s still just Nick Millhiser and Alex Frankel.
Jason: And that’s why we don’t have any issue with using backing tracks. This is the reality of what we are.
Eleanor: In order to develop past a certain level of consistency and really be confident in what you’re doing, you need to know that a certain number of the elements are in place and aren’t going to go anywhere.
Jason: I think it’d be really hard to find people who are okay with working on the schedule we self-impose. We’re also in the rehearsal space for like, eight or nine hours a day, and we have been for about the last year or so.

I was going to say you look a little pale. No windows…
Eleanor: (Laughs)

Eleanore wears clothing from Malin Landaeus and Lover
Jason wears clothing by Dana Lee and shoes by Rachel Comey
Styling Molly Kennedy
Photo Assistance Korey Vincent