Sextile, the LA electronic duo of Melissa Scaduto and Brady Keehn, released their latest album yes, please last month, and are currently on a Europe tour including concerts in Berlin, Istanbul, and more.
We caught Brady for a quick phone call and, in his own words, “in the middle of nowhere” with a lousy internet connection. Still, we managed to engage in a fun chat.
How are you guys doing? It’s nice to meet you although I can’t see you.
Brady Keehn: Yeah, it’s nice to meet you as well. Yeah, we’re good. We’re just f.cking tired from yesterday’s show, which was amazing. It was in France at this festival Art of Rock and we played at 2 in the morning. It was a hell of a night. We’re having a good time. The tour’s been really cool so far.
I’m glad that it’s going well. Here is a funny story: I’m based in Berlin now. While I was preparing for this interview, I read another interview from you guys where you were talking about what other cities or locations you may record your music in the future, and you were ruling out Berlin because you thought it was a dark city, and it is actually a dark, cloudy day here right now.
(laughs) Yeah, exactly. The thing is, we used to live in New York and we kind of get that New York vibe from Berlin. But also, Berlin just has this level of sleaziness. I think you can love it at times, but at other times you might want to walk away from it. And that freedom to be able to walk away from it is kind of what we need. You can get that in LA, you can live out in the suburbs, then go down to the sleaziness, and then come out. I feel like in Berlin, you’re just constantly surrounded by it, you are constantly living in it. But, I mean, I love it.
I’m eager to see you guys here at the end of this month.
Yeah. I’m excited to come back.
You released your latest album, yes, please, last month. Considering the production process of the album, if you were to choose one easy and one difficult song to make, which two would you pick?
“99 Bongos” was the hardest. I had been getting into modular synthesis over the past two years, collecting all this different modular gear from contemporary instrument creators and stuff. I made that bongo loop that you hear in the song. We loved it and we had a couple parts to it, but it wasn’t really going anywhere and we couldn’t figure out where to take it. We tried so many different ways and at one point we were about to give up and just can this track. But we just loved those sounds so much that we knew that we needed to keep pushing through. Eventually, we figured out vocals for it. We figured out different parts of the song flow too. But that was the hardest one for sure. I think the easiest one that came about was probably “S is For”, it just happened so quickly. I think we finished it in a few days.
What do you think is the weirdest piece of equipment you have in your hands?
I think the weirdest thing that I have right now is this thing called the Piston Honda. It’s by a company that was called Harvestman, but they changed their name to Industrial Music Electronics. I have this thing and it just morphs. It’s a wave table synthesis with three different wave table selectors and oscillators. I’ve never heard sounds that are quite like it. It’s this thing that feels uncontrollable, but it’s very controllable.
I have this other thing called Wogglebug by the company Make Noise out of North Carolina in the United States, and they’re really pushing sh.t into the future. They have great, great grand modules if you ever mess with that. But yeah, I’m about to give it to Honda Piston.
Obviously, the name Sextile comes from your late friend Eddie (Wuebben)’s interest in astrology. How has your interest in that field changed over the years? Would you say that you are more interested or less interested?
I think that’s a great question, actually. I guess I’ve become less interested, quite honest. It’s simply because of how I look at the expansion of the universe and how different energies exist from possible different galaxies. We’re looking at the more immediate surrounding stars that we can see, and our galaxy is huge and our current position in it changes, we are rotating with the galaxy. So we’re actually changing to different positions of the universe. It’s like we’re opening the black hole that’s in the center. So I think in a thousand years, or maybe in five thousand years, who knows, we won’t see the same skies eventually. The skies will change and we will change. And how will that play into this idea that we are defined by the energies of the cosmos, I’m not sure.
I think the energies that we’re really defined by are here on Earth. I think the vibrations that we feel through sound and all the different energies radiating around us are the most influential things. I think there are things here on Earth, like the central vibration of the Earth’s main frequency. We are affected by that. It’s really interesting. My position has changed to almost a belief that a core fundamental of our reality is the simple sine wave. You get the sine wave all around, it’s in everything. It’s Yin and Yang, black and white, good and bad. It defines the core fundamental sound. If you put a sine wave in half and then you move it together, it’s a circle. That’s the way the planet is. (laughs) So there’s this energy, this simple symbol of the sine waves that I feel radiates throughout the universe. Why, I don’t have a clue. (both laugh) I have no idea what it’s doing. I just began to see things this way from getting and diving into modular synthesis, studying it all. So it’s an interesting perspective on understanding the reality or seeing the relationships between all the different things here on Earth to other stars. I feel like I’m rambling now. (laughs)
No, I think that’s a really interesting answer. Sound really is a very spiritual thing that connects all of us on a deeper level, so…
Totally.
You are very much creatively involved in other aspects of your music, including your merch and your music videos. Do you have a memory from the making of your videos where an accident emerged, but it made the process a lot more fun?
I think that’s a good question. The video for “Women Respond to Bass” had a thing that wasn’t necessarily a mistake, but just a series of coincidences. That made it possible and really cool. It was shot in Tokyo and I just happened to go out to a karaoke bar with some people that were helping around after we had performed our first show. They introduced me to a music video director who just happened to be a fan of the band. I said, “Are you free over the next three days? We can shoot a music video in Tokyo!”, because everybody there looks so cool. It’s an amazing place. We just threw everything we could together at it. We shot on the streets of Tokyo. People were running up and dancing. I poured water in some kid’s mouth and he spit it in his friend’s face. It was just one of those crazy things. No boundaries, just absolute fun and chaos. And it all made the music video. I think it just got exponentially energized with a lot of energy.
We are globally living through dark, fascist times of tech oligarchy, genocides, queerphobia, oppression, and more. What message would you like to share with our readers about this? How hopeful are you about the near or far future?
I am absolutely hopeful. I mean, we have the lucky ability to be able to travel all over the world. And despite the terrible shit that seems to be happening in every country for every government, there are so many people in this world who believe in human rights. There is a lot of love and compassion in humans, and we get to see that. Maybe it’s just because we give space to people at our shows and we get to meet all these people. Melissa said this to me this morning: “There’s more of us.” That is 100% true, because all over the world we get to meet really cool people who share our views and pretty much everybody’s views that war f.cking sucks. There needs to be other ways of helping a diplomatic revolution between disagreements, and what’s happening in the United States is even crazier. Donald Trump is sending the National Guard in troops to Los Angeles. The ICE is coming in, pulling out people from their homes, and deploying them. I know it’s really scary right now, but I know there’s a lot of magic and beauty in this world too, and there’s a lot of magic and beauty in humans and a lot of it I see traveling with all these people. I know it exists, and I know that if things really got to a critical point, the positivity and the compassion that humans have for each other always overcome anything. The bottom line is life needs to exist, right? The whole point of earth is life, and the whole thing it wants to do is to continue existing no matter what. We see that because it’s been around forever and it needs a sense of balance and harmony. I feel that we’ll come through and it’s going to be OK.
Finding community through art is valuable, right?
Yeah. I heard people that come into our show who work together, but they didn’t know that they both like Sextile, so they were surprised to see each other at the show. That to me means maybe they haven’t really communicated to each other. They only knew each other professionally and didn’t talk about their actual interests and the way they live their lives. But at that show that they are both at, they can share the ideas and the energy in our music. That relation creates stronger bonds, and gives room for conversations and ideas to happen. In a workplace, you may not do that. I think it’s really crazy. We get to have this thing where we allow or create the space where people come and and feel that way. Give space for a community to even evolve.
Let’s imagine we’re at a Musicians Theme Park 100 years from now, where every artist or band featured has their own memorial stone with a certain lyric by them written on it. Which one of your lyrics would you like to see written on Sextile’s stone?
That’s another great question. It’s funny, because in this last record, we spent more time on our lyrics than we ever had before. Seven years ago when we were writing some of our first songs I was just like, “You don’t think about that.” I feel like I have a lot more lyrics to pull from this latest record. Let me think…
I think it would be, “Change your form, bomb the rave, kiss your friend and misbehave.”
That’s such a manifesto, right? That’s a manifesto of love.
(laughs) Yeah. I’ll choose that lyric. That’s a cool one. Defiant too.
You can check out Sextile’s Bandcamp profile here.
