It’s taken me a while to type this up – it was going to be up on Monday but the computer I was working on crashed and I didn’t save this, which kickstarted a very stressful evening. But I figured it would be worth checking out, so better late than never eh? I now present to you FIVE QUESTIONS WITH… FUCK BUTTONS

1. So why Fuck Buttons as a band name?

ANDY (jokingly): We really like the word “fuck” and it had an incredible resonance at the time, we just enjoyed embellishing it with the word “buttons”. The word “buttons” with “fuck”, it kind of turned into… it excelled the word, in a way.

FLFD: Did you have any other contenders?

BENJAMIN: Piss Witches. (everyone laughs)

FLFD: Alright, now we’re rolling!

2. Listening to the new material tonight, it sounds like ideas piling on top of another, creating this really dense feeling – it’s akin to reading a book with various subplots running alongside one another. Is there an intention to put together music that feels especially layered?

ANDY: I think we were really conscious in embellishing our sounds from the last record. With Street Horrrsing, there was definitely a prominent singularity to the components of the music but this time round we were extremely conscious of not repeating those steps but also in learning from them. You’re right though, we’ve definitely moved towards becoming a more multi-faceted prospect this time round.

FLFD: The new songs are a lot heavier - I heard elements of rave and industrial music that weren’t prominent before.

ANDY: I guess these are words attached to specific aesthetics but it’s not something we can turn ourselves with or at least have an intention with. I can see why you hear elements of dance and metal in the new songs, but it’s certainly not a conscious decision to contain these sounds.

3. How does a song begin in your writing process? Does it start with an idea or a certain riff or…

BENJAMIN: We never have any set agenda when we sit in a room to start writing music together, like wanting to use particular chords or wanting a song to evoke a certain emotion. We literally just sit in a room with as much equipment as we can get our hands on and try to extract sounds from them. Once we hit upon a sound we like, we jam it out and then work on structuring something around it. We never come in with ideas and that leaves us constantly surprised with what we come up with. That keeps us happy.

FLFD: My friends’ old band used to write really technical songs that I imagined took up to a month to finish writing. How long did it take to write “Ribs Out”, for instance?

ANDY: “Ribs Out” actually took two hours. Our perspective and sensibilities are really important when it comes to writing – I mean, it can take a few days to experiment with sounds until we hit on something but the actual structuring of those sounds don’t take too long at all.

BENJAMIN: Some tracks will take two hours to write, some tracks will take two months.



4. With the wide array of different equipment you use, would you consider yourselves an analogue or digital band?

BENJAMIN: All of the signal processors we use in the first instance are analogue, but there is some digital manipulation in there. A lot of the stuff we use are things picked up from car boot sales and things like that, but it’s a mixture – we don’t have a set idea as to what we’d use to create a song. Whatever goes, really.

5. How do the lyrics play into the music? Unless there’s some secret Dan Brown code hidden in the artwork to Street Horrrsing that I’m missing out on, I know nobody that knows the lyrics…

BENJAMIN: There’s no lyrics. For the most part, it’s improvised.

FLFD: Really? Can you tell me just one line that you usually use?

ANDY: “Be awesome to each other”.

BENJAMIN (sceptically): Yeah.

ANDY: The reason behind improvising the vocals is because they don’t function as a narrative tool.

BENJAMIN: They’re like another layer of sound. (pause) There are some lyrics we use, but we’re not going to tell you. I’d probably have to kill you. (him and Andy laugh)

Fuck Buttons - Surf Solar (Album Version)

[Thanks to Andy and Benjamin for rocking Stereo last week/deafening my girlfriend/doing an immortal drop that I can never use for my show ("You're listening to Flashing Lights and Flash Drives: eat a dick, motherfucker") and being sound. Their new album is called Tarot Sport, it's out on ATP Recordings and it just leaked. Be a nice person and take it home with you on October 12th instead of downloading it.]