Dieser Tage ist A Thousand Years In Another Way erschienen, das dritte Album der Brooklyner Indie-Combo ACTIVITY. Exklusiv für Popmonitor hat Sänger TRAVIS JOHNSON die zehn neuen Tracks der tollen Platte – die ausschließlich auf Vinyl erscheint – kommentiert …
IN ANOTHER WAY
Started with a very long impromptu jam with just drums and guitar. I can’t remember who started playing first but then we just kept going. I have a 20 minute version of it on my phone, just doing the main riff and drum pattern over and over again. We wanted it to be this constant menace that didn’t let up with only subtle dynamic changes. The drone that starts it off was from a Juno 60 that was stuck making this whining hum that happened to be in key, so I tracked like 20 minutes of it and processed it in different ways.
PIECE OF MIRROR
A wall of samples. I sent it to the band and Jess sent back the vocals really quickly, I think she did them in one take on a crappy microphone, but they were perfect. If I remember correctly, Bri came up with the bass part without ever having heard the vocals, and then it was actually played on a punchy low end guitar, through a filter circuit I designed. I think some of the lyrics are from Herman Hesse.
WE GO WHERE WE’RE NOT WANTED
Another wall of samples, but instead of Broadcast/Young Marble Giants like “Mirror,” this is heavy and sinister. With both, the samples are from this huge and ever-growing collection I’ve taken from other songs, but the sounds are so processed that I can’t remember where I got them from when I listen to our songs now. I sometimes work in a record store so I’m always hearing things and taking it home and sampling it. I think the sound of the music directed what the lyrics would be, all these half-formed references to strangers and neighbors and weird things happening on lawns. I like that the structure is me singing the verses, Jess on the chorus, and Bri on the outro. When all the drum machines and live drums hit together at the end, it’s my favorite part of the album.
YOUR DREAM
Some of my ugliest lyrics ever I think. The chorus/bridge of this song took FOREVER to figure out. We must have tried 12 different things and none worked until this one just did. “Decals licked off too soon” is a Beefheart reference that I’m not sure works but I went with it anyway. There are so many chords in this song that I get confused when playing it. When the big shift happens after the last verse, before the outro, all the room mics get brought up really loudly in the mix, an idea I had while falling asleep.
GOOD MEMORY
Did this in one take. Very sparse, like it should be. Jeff Berner, our producer, side chained the room mics to the drums from another song using that filter I designed, giving the beginning that sucking sound. I love how Bri’s voice sounds here. There’s so much sound on the album, having a brief quieter scene like this felt good.
SCISSORS
All came from a fully formed demo that Jess did when she got some new synths. We tracked drums to it and cut them up, and added lots of feedback/texture. There was a version that was less massive and heavy, but I’m glad we went with it like this, noisy and pummeling. There’s this bird call type sound towards the beginning that I love and I cannot remember what we used to get that sound at all.
HEAVY BREATHING
This started with a very hushed, somber thing that reminded me of Xiu Xiu, but a friend recommended we try to do a Depeche Mode/Flood type thing with it and I think he was right. There’s 707 drum machines, rave synths. At the end, live drums come in, which were edited together from like 20 minutes of percussion experiments. In a way I’m kind of self-conscious about how poppy this tune is, but I also love it, and it’s one of my favorites to play live.
HER ALPHABET
Written by Bri on bass. There were a bunch of practice sessions that ended up being just her and me, so we worked it out together but it started from her rough idea. At first my guitar parts were on synth. Jess came up with her parts on the fly in the studio. I love the shift that happens on the bridge, especially when we play it live.
I CAME HERE TO HARM YOU
This is one of the first songs we wrote for the album. The verse guitar parts I’d had for years but never figured out what to do with them until this. It was so difficult to get the dynamic right for all the parts, but now it seems easy. When Jess figured out that guitar blast towards the end it made everything else make sense. The synth on the choruses is one of my favorite sounds on the album.
A BEAST
I can’t remember what we did to the guitars at the beginning to make them sound that way, or what Jeff did. I love how the song opens up in what feels to me like a very specific room. That was the idea with so much of the album, for the listener to see a type of room in their head when they heard it. This song achieves that, for me, more than any other on the album. We didn’t know how long we were going to let the outro go for so we just played it for several minutes and cut it off when we were mixing. The idea of “seeing a beast” is kind of the idea of the whole album, and I’m glad it’s the last lyric on the album, even though we hadn’t planned it that way.
ACTIVITY
A Thousand Years In Another Way
(Western Vinyl / Cargo)
VÖ: 06.06.2025 (Vinyl only)
