Real punk kids

It’s tempting to describe the new album by Joan of Arc as a departure for the band. However, ever since frontman Tim Kinsella founded the seminal indie/experimental group in 1995, the only consistent across 20-plus recordings of collaborative sonic experiments with more than two dozen rotating members has been change.

So, it’s not a surprise to hear something different again on the recently released 1984. Instead of Kanella singing, it’s Chicago-based artist Melina Ausikaitis and her Appalachia-invoking vocals that the album is built around. The evocative scenes that Ausikaitis paints in her folky parables are met with wide open soundscapes collaged together with electric and acoustic instruments, field recordings and electronic effects. In advance of his band’s upcoming show at Duffy’s Tavern (Saturday, July 14), the CN&R talked to Kinsella—who, in addition to fronting Joan of Arc, has played in an impressive roster of underground acts that has included Cap’n Jazz, Make Believe, American Football and Owls—about the new album and what comes next.

How did you approach composing 1984?

It started with all [of Ausikaitis’] songs a cappella. She’s been writing these songs for about six years, and we have been trying to figure out different ways of arranging them for a few years.

In terms of that combination of electronics with this “Appalachian” feel [you mentioned], we weren’t specifically thinking about that contrast as much we were thinking about what’s true to us. That’s just how Melina sings. She’s from rural Massachusetts and that’s just how she naturally sings, and those are her stories. These are the elements we had to work with, and this is what came out.

Was it a gratifying process?

Yeah, for sure …. It took six years of false starts [to write this record], but it also sort of happened really quick over three days of recording. And then my cousin Nate [Kinsella] spent a long time puzzling it all together. We recorded, I think, nine songs of Melina’s and like three versions of each and then let Nate pick which [ones] he liked best.

Will this approach carry over?

No. We just got the Melina record done. I’m sitting in my little smoking room, and I got six [records]—three of them are mixed and just aren’t out yet, and [the rest] are mostly tracked. They aren’t shit—it’s not that I don’t have a filter—but they’re all very different; different prompts, different groups, different collaborators. We just work on stuff every day.

Doing something different than before is kind of the hallmark of Joan of Arc.

Yeah. I mean, we had a down six weeks or two months where nothing was happening after Melina’s album was all recorded. Nate was mixing it and sending us stuff for responses. So we were like, “what’s a record sound like if we wire my entire house together and we can’t be loud, we can’t bother the neighbors? What kind of music do we make?” And 26 songs came out of it. The sort of idea of this one, is it’s half Velvet Underground ballads and half old-school East Coast hip-hop. Those are, like, the sort of two things that are always there for us. So it’s like, what if we just embrace that these are the edges of what we think about? How do we hit those and then how do we shuffle them together in a way that makes sense?

For this tour, will you be sticking to the sonic feel of the new album, or mixing it up?

It’s definitely stuff from all the records. The new record is a lot more Melina singing … so maybe to counterbalance it there’s a little more older stuff. There are quite a few things that we haven’t played in 15 years that we’ve learned for this tour.

Your bands are often written about as being seminal in the history of American underground music. Do you ever look back and consider your place as an influencer?

No. Sometimes, there will be a thing that happens. We just had an opportunity come up that we aren’t making public yet. (I don’t mean to sound too mysterious about this.) I was, like, whoa, who gets that? That’s cool. What the fuck, how did that happen?

[But] it’s certainly not a rock star life at all. It’s still, the last couple of days of every month, I’m like, “Oh god, where’s rent coming from? How am I going to do this?”