I was a bit late to the Blanche Blanche Blanche party. The first of their releases that I really dug into was last year’s Wink With Both Eyes, and I fell completely in love with it. When they announced its follow-up, this year’s Wooden Ball, I greedily gobbled up any info, singles, or videos that led up to the album’s release.

Now that I’ve fully digested Wooden Ball, any questions that I had about the songwriting or about Blanche Blanche Blanche in general were intensified, and I had to know. So I decided to interview the pair of them. But as the interview got underway, it soon became apparent that Zach Phillips and Sarah Smith had their own ideas about how the interview would go. Read on to see what I mean.

First question: Where did the name Blanche Blanche Blanche come from? (I’ve always wondered this.)

Sarah Smith: We were sitting down and joking. I remember we said the name and then drew a bunch of fake logos and thought it was funny, and now that’s just what it’s called.

You two seem to like jumping from label to label with each successive release. Now I know that you run your own label, OSR Tapes, so I’m wondering what inspired you two to work with other small labels? Just a mutual support for the DIY scene?

SS: We don’t have the money to put all of our shit out ourselves or the time/business know-how to figure out how to create the money for an enterprise like that. But Grass Widow self-released their most recent album on a label named after their first initials, HLR, which I think is the coolest thing ever. That kind of thing is, like, frighteningly ambitious to me.

Zach Phillips: I love everybody to pieces, but if we’re gonna talk about scenes, I’d rather it be the baseball monologue in The Star Chamber, or in Soultaker when Robert Z’Dar tells Joe Estevez he has obey the rules of time and space.

And did anything change in your approach to songwriting between Wink With Both Eyes and Wooden Ball?

ZP: Well, when we were working on ‘WWBE’ I never thought I’d start collecting French paintings, but you know that’s exactly what I did do. ‘Wooden Ball’ was very expensive to make, and I don’t think we could have financed it without the money coming in from the sale of the more ancillary pieces. In ’10 and ’11, Casio were charging literally nothing for samples, but 2012 was a game changer.

SS: I finally learned to speak.

Listening to Wooden Ball, it seems like some tracks are composed of incongruent parts. It’s almost like there are several things going on at once, and they only sometimes line up. And yet it all comes together as a quirky whole. How do you two go about writing tracks like that?

SS: We don’t write tracks like that!

ZP: Rhythmic variation in the basic structure and the dance of overdubs on top can give the impression of collage, but the music is written linearly. Think of it as songs written on piano and arranged for bass, vocals, chance, and first thought, and you’re on the right track.

You two have sort of left many writers at a loss for words when it comes to describing your music. I can’t help but imagine that you two get a sick sense of satisfaction from leaving people scratching their heads. Please tell me I’m right about this.

SS: We’ve left so many writers at such a loss for words that they forget we are even a band with multiple members or anything other than their own fetish object for underground music culture.

ZP: Many music writers place too great a premium on a sort of contextualization with respect to a suspiciously unified zeitgeist. This sort of writer assumes a collectivity coterminous with the internet, a kind of featureless community with a definite culture, of which it is possible to invoke a “we.” And this writer might as well be describing a cake: you have your recipe of influences, your aesthetic features, and your import: such and such a cake is excellent for the summer season, or, for the more academically inclined writer, challenges “us” to consider whatever in light of etc., blah blah blah. One salient alternative that gets occasional play is the subjective report on items of personal significance: this cake reminds me of this event, helped me reflect on this, and so on.

These structural tropes leave little space for a discussion of the actual music. So instead of addressing the actual content, music writers tend to act as ventriloquists, dishing out a palatable soy analog of the cake’s imagined “context” but not deigning to serve the actual cake in all its rich detail. With this state of affairs, the more the music speaks, the less the critic has to say—see Ian Svenonius’s new book for a hilarious exposition of this idea. Our music is a fucking over the top loudmouth, not only lyrically but methodologically, structurally, in its every attitude, so it’s not amenable to the highly constrained laundry list of tropes that passes for a social analysis of music these days. So to a hypothetical head-scratcher looking at whatever music, I say: stop thinking about what you can compare it to, and start thinking about what it’s actually saying. And if you don’t have anything interesting to say about that, at least with it just dance.

There is a lot of confidence displayed in your music. This style is wholly your own and you attack it with lots of energy and reckless abandon. Was it always this way or did it take a while for you to find your footing so to speak?

ZP: I think we have no footing. The moment we stop stumbling, our equilibrium is ruined. With each group of songs (usually 3-4 per album) I hit the piano differently, the recording process differently. Always the search for novelty is aggressive. I don’t know that anyone can be less sure of themselves; our perceived personal successes amount to a growing challenge, and as images become recognizable they call for avoidance. Through work, tropes are generated and must be discounted. This is the confidence you read, our power source that we can never really own. Up, up, up the mountain! As Nahman of Bratzlav would have it, “What am I? Only that which my soul creates anew.”

SS: We have a lot of confidence in our friendship and receive a lot of positive affirmation from each other on a creative and personal level, so I guess that comes across in the music. I agree with Zach—we have no real footing besides motion itself.

Your answers have sort of taken control of this interview and driven it in a completely different direction than anything I had anticipated. Now that I think of it, that’s the same spirit that is embodied in your music. It breaks down expectations and forces those who engage it to do so on its own terms. With all that being said, it’s still very poppy, catchy, and (despite its weirdness) accessible. Do you aim to challenge and please in equal measure?

SS: We aim to please ourselves. I feel like trying to live inside other peoples’ heads when it comes to art can be really dangerous and self-defeating. We challenge ourselves, frequently please ourselves, and if other people want to be involved that’s great!

ZP: We don’t control the base content; it isn’t governed by intention, and knowledge is not applied. We can make methodological decisions, though, with formal consequences. To be honest, I am so bored with my own striving for clarity of contradistinction vis-a-vis the hackneyed narrative tropes that I’ve encountered as I familiarized myself with contemporary music writing on the internet and the language of institutionalized art more generally. Today, music is often celebrated for what seems to me to be its lack of definite content, instead relying on its evocation of various emotional states via an aesthetics of texture. And I don’t mean just musical texture, but the political texture invoked in statements about the music, etc.: everything talks but the song itself. I am bored because I’ve forced myself to jump through so many conceptual hoops to describe to myself how different I feel, how impossible I find this cultural situation. But I’m not afraid anymore of being eclipsed by its mirror totem growing within me. A couple of pages of roller derby or a successful minute on the piano will do the trick. Let the moment’s Ouija take aim, let the synchronicities rain down from heaven. I can’t pretend to know what is happening during songwriting, and that’s why I’m living what is today a misunderstood tradition that goes all the way back to Sappho: setting words to music, “healing myself with magic” as Chris Weisman would say, “living a substitute life” as Cassavetes said; and no proof of whatever good or bad effects will ever stunt the flow as long as it’s coming. I have experienced the flow’s redirection but whatever, it’s obvious that we’re talking about forces of destiny here, and I’ll take what is given, whether the role of the prodigal son, the true man of kindness, the scoundrel, the sophisticate or the simpleton, the fool, the magician: always as a musician.

You said that Wooden Ball was an expensive album to make. Is that something that you will need time to recover from or are you more content to keep your nose to the grindstone whatever the conditions?

SS: Every album we make will be twice as expensive as the album preceding it.

What does Blanche Blanche Blanche have on the docket for the rest of 2013? Any pool parties this summer?

ZP: Yeah, on Elon Musk‘s seasteading freighter… We’re working on new material and will be touring this fall to support a new album we recorded with our live crew: Breaking Mirrors. Imagine skating a full pipe that is one giant rigatoni. Thanks for the questions!

Wooden Ball is available now on NNA Tapes. Go grab it.