Pitchfork

Zach Condon clearly needed a break. After issuing two stellar albums in as many years as Beirut-- 2006's Gulag Orkestar and 2007's The Flying Club Cup-- and traveling the world with his increasingly large band, Condon pulled out of a planned European tour scheduled for this summer, citing a need to "change some things, reinvent some others, and come back at some point with a fresh perspective and batch of songs." It's been barely half a year since Zach nixed his trip to Europe, but from the sound of things, his time away from the limelight has given him exactly what he was seeking.

As reported yesterday, the coming months will see the release of a flurry of new Condon/Beirut material. On February 17 (February 16 in Europe), Condon's Pompeii records (via Ba Da Bing) will release the double EP March of the Zapotec/Holland. Zapotec is a new recording under the Beirut moniker conceived and recorded in part during a trip Condon and several of his Beirut band members took to Teotitlan del Valle, Mexico, in the spring. It also features contributions from a 17-piece local band. Holland is credited to Realpeople, the name of Zach's pre-Beirut bedroom electronic project, though it contains new material. Obey Your Brain will release the two-fer on vinyl.

Last week, we spoke with Zach about the dual projects, his productive trip to Mexico, his time off the road, and his plans to get back on it soon.

Pitchfork: So your new release is a two-part affair.

Zach Condon: Yeah, there's a bit of a dichotomy going on.

Pitchfork: What was the reason for putting it together this way, on two separate discs packaged together?

ZC: Maybe the best way to put it is just... the stuff I do is so opposite...It's so incredibly different. The acoustic stuff is a very new thing [for me]. I spent years and years doing electronic music. And it's funny, I decided to put them both together just because I thought, why not? If you like the acoustic stuff, it shouldn't be that difficult to like both. [Laughs]

Pitchfork: So the first one, March of the Zapotec, is credited to Beirut. And it was inspired by and partially recorded on a trip you took down to Mexico, right?

ZC: Yeah, we flew down to Oaxaca. There's this small town outside of Oaxaca, it's called Teotitlan del Valle. Actually, a band member of ours, his mother is a professor in Oaxaca about six months of the year, and when she heard that I was possibly working on this soundtrack for a Mexican film-- which ended up falling through-- she mentioned that she'd been hearing these very naive, martial-sounding funeral bands from small towns around Oaxaca. She knew a few by name, and hooked us up with this guy called Tomás, who basically did everything for us down there, including translation, and meeting up with the band and getting us a place to stay.

Pitchfork: When were you down there?

ZC: Let me think. I guess it was still spring. It'd just gotten hot. I can't even remember, actually.

Pitchfork: So you ended up working with a funeral band? What was that like?

ZC: It's funny, they're actually sponsored by the church. The entire town plays in the band. It was pretty interesting. It ended up being 17 people. Basically, I was working on this movie soundtrack. When I decided I was too excited about the idea of working with this kind of small, naive orchestra, I told the guy that I'd rather just carry on and write a few songs for them that weren't for anything but for myself. Because he was actually the one that showed me the sound. He had sent me reference material, funeral music from there. And then I started to look it up on YouTube to see what these bands looked like, to see how they worked and stuff. I kind of fell in love with the sound.

Pitchfork: You also recorded some of the music on Zapotec at home. How did you integrate that with the music you recorded in Mexico?

ZC: It's funny, because it fit right in, actually. It felt like a giant leap, stylistically, which I found pretty interesting. I went down there with every intent of recording an entire album, but I was only there for two weeks, and we ended up doing only a couple songs fully down there, and then they recorded bits and pieces to some other things I had going on. But this thing is actually recorded all over the place. I even recorded one song with Chris Taylor from Grizzly Bear, in the Grizzly Bear church, with him playing saxophone. So, very scattershot recordings in between tours and stuff, and then I got to piece it all together at the end. After I went on a big trip to Morocco, I got to set out the track list, and choose what songs and stuff.

Pitchfork: What did it end up sounding like?

ZC: It's very march-y in some senses. The songs are longer than I'm used to doing, which is interesting to me. I'm pretty accustomed to sticking to, like, three-minute pop songs. These actually have a few movements in them. Nothing huge and epic, this isn't an opera. [Laughs] It's very brass-heavy, very squawky, with these constant churning rhythms.

Pitchfork: Then you have this other EP, Holland, which is credited to Realpeople, which was the name of your bedroom recording stuff before Beirut, is that right?

ZC: Yeah, that was certainly my growing-into-music phase.

Pitchfork: As I understand it, Holland is more synth-pop, more homemade electronic-sounding stuff. Is that a fair characterization?

ZC: Yes, definitely. There are a few songs that have already been out there, it's kind of putting them in one place. I guess one of them was on the Natalie Portman compilation, that thing for  the AIDS charity. I realized, putting it out there, that there has been positive reaction to it. Something that I had always kept so secret about in my own tiny musical history. [Laughs] I guess I went through a phase when I was writing the first album, Gulag and stuff like that, I felt like that might have been a dirty little secret of mine, and I was supposed to keep it very quiet, and only close friends were supposed to know about it. Over the years, I kept going back to it, and listening and saying, "There's more to this than I originally thought."

Pitchfork: So these recordings that make up Holland, do all of them predate the Beirut stuff?

ZC: There's actually only one song that predates the Beirut stuff. Let's say there's a month when I'm a little sick of hearing the songs I'm recording, I'll slink back to my parents' house and very quietly record these epic synth-pop tracks, and kind of clear the palette and get back into it. They're different aspects of my personality, I guess. It's a pretty ridiculous switcheroo, but if I do it all the time, I tend to edit a lot.

Pitchfork: It sounds like you're recording all the time, in both configurations. It sounds as though there's just a wealth of material.

ZC: I get pretty bummed out if I'm not doing something musical. [Laughs] I can't really let a whole month pass without that.

Pitchfork: Have you considered how, if at all, these Realpeople songs might translate to a concert?

ZC: Yeah, actually. I mean, it's kind of hilarious. I was practicing with Perrin [Cloutier], the accordion player, the other day, and he's a fan of the electronic stuff. Actually, he's been someone that's kind of been pushing for me to get them out in the open before...among other people. He gets a real kick out of playing them on accordion, actually, which sounds hilarious, because there are giant arpeggiators going on, and he's just turning it into polkas and other interesting things. You know, it's something we worked on, it's something we actually played a few tracks of just to see if it would work out. But now I'm actually quite curious to see if we could translate them to a full band. If people start to know them, you know, that would be good.

Pitchfork: Well, it seems like they will if you're putting them out this way.

ZC: [Laughs] It's a very ridiculous release, just because of that. I mean, the funny thing is that if you go back, every album [of mine] has one or two songs that completely stick out. It has almost nothing to do with the songs on the rest of the album. And this time, I just kind of gave into that and said, "OK, let's just split it in half, right down the middle, and give them both."

Pitchfork: Did you consider maybe slipping Holland out, and not letting people know about it, or anything like that?

ZC: Very much so. I wanted to keep it a secret: different band name, different everything, that kind of stuff. Between Perrin and [Ba Da Bing label head] Ben Goldberg and other people, they kind of thought it would be an exciting idea to have the whole thing together, and I thought that'd be interesting, too. Especially with the packaging, the way it is. I guess you haven't seen that yet.

Pitchfork: No, I haven't. Tell me about that.

ZC: Me and my girlfriend were traveling around Morocco this summer, taking a break from all of this stuff. I've been off tour for a while. I've had a lot of time to think about all this stuff. And we ran into this record shop in Casablanca that had nothing but these ancient 45s, with these really intense art deco covers. They all had this feeling to them. I don't know, I think we bought about 25, probably the heaviest thing we bought there, and took them back, and hung them up on the wall, and we've just been staring at them. So we packaged this just like these old 45s, and I think it might be...it's all like a series in my head, just starting different bands that I could imagine myself being, and the quick and easy way to package them and get them out.

Pitchfork: Have you considered that in any serious way? Putting out records under different names, maybe not necessarily albums?

ZC: I have actually. I've realized with my attention span and whatnot, that these little series might do really well for me. I seems to go really strong for four or five songs, and then sometimes run out of ideas. I feel like this is possibly a good way to go, and at some point I can bundle them all together or something.

Pitchfork: There's a note on your website now that says something about "2009 shows coming soon." You must be thinking about getting back on the road.

ZC: Oh yeah.

Pitchfork: Do you know where you're heading? Do you have that sort of planned, or is it kind of still in the works?

ZC: We do, actually. I just saw this funny interview with Tom Waits, about how he plotted his tour route against constellations in the sky.  But I noticed  that ours are taking an interesting shape, a giant diamond from New York to Mexico to California back to Canada. But actually, I think the thing that I'm most excited about show-wise is we're basically going to quietly pick out four or five spots, smaller places in New York, and just pop up here and there randomly. In February, we'll start playing.

Pitchfork: Oh, that's great. Outdoor spots?

ZC: No, maybe just favorite haunts of ours. Smaller venues that have just popped up that we're starting to like.

Pitchfork: It seems like in the last few months, there's been quite a bit of that in New York, these smaller places.

ZC: Oh totally. I just saw Department of Eagles down in the Smith-9th Street stop on the G train. What was that place called? [The Bell House --Ed.] Oh, it was beautiful, though. Such a bizarre, bizarre place.

Pitchfork: You cancelled your European tour this summer, and it seemed as though, at that point, you were maybe a little bit overwhelmed by what was happening, or maybe how fast it was happening. Have you settled into it a bit more in the months since that happened?

ZC: I don't know if you can get used to it. [Laughs] I suppose you can take the time off and actually process it, actually have a logical reaction to it. But yeah, no, I make no secret about the fact that I was way in over my head. And it seemed like the only way to stop the cycle was to just stop it completely, stop the train. Which is interesting, actually. I think it works for the best, for sure. [Laughs] It was a rough year.

Pitchfork: I can only imagine. Is there anything in particular you attribute the slowdown to?

ZC: There might be a couple of things. I guess to be totally honest, touring obviously is a brutal thing, but I don't know. I felt that at some point I completely lost touch with my own songs, and home life was nonexistent. I would come back from touring, I would still be living like I was on tour. Just passing the time-- I don't know. I feel like it's maybe a long conversation. [Laughs]

Pitchfork: Do you have anything in place to maybe head that feeling off at the pass for this next round of dates?

ZC: Yeah, yeah. They have to be shows I'm excited about, there has to be a lot of new material that I'm actually behind. I don't know, I feel like we're all pretty fresh-faced at this point, which is much more exciting to go back into. Because we've never been the kind of grueling, punk band touring style anyways, so I think we'll kind of keep it to that. Special shows that we can be excited about, and not too much more, really.

Pitchfork: You've mentioned a couple times that you felt some lack of connection with the material. Was there something about Flying Club Cup? Or was it something else?

ZC: It is playing the same songs night after night for years in a row, while you're carefully crafting something else that you're trying to be really excited about. It seems like my head doesn't have room for the two of them to coexist. It's almost like I have to be really good and done with something to move on. I can't move on before or after.

Pitchfork: That makes sense. You recently did a benefit show for Obama with Grizzly Bear and Nico Muhly. That, of course, means we have to ask about any thoughts on the election you might wanna share.

ZC: [Laughs] The whole thing is starting to scare me. I'm the kind of guy that usually just throws up his hands in frustration. You know, calls it a loss. I feel like here in New York, it's easy to see us gaining ground and winning this thing. But at the same time, we're an island off of America, and we don't really remember much about the country anymore. I don't know, it's a scary thing, I obviously have always felt like doing my part, but I never, ever wanted to "dabble" politically if it would ever overtake the music. I'm very careful with it, but that one just sounded like a really low-key, fun thing to do, and I was glad I did it

Pitchfork: Yeah, it was some kind of garden party, wasn't it? With bingo?

ZC: It was at like a New York horticulturalist society [The Horticultural Society of New York- Ed.] that I had never heard of, but that was pretty interesting. It was me and Perrin on the accordion. We tried out some of the electronic songs and had some fun with that, had some free drinks.

Pitchfork: Anything else going on that people might wanna know?

ZC: I've been stacking up on instruments, I guess. I got this box that makes noise, and I think I'm going to make a single out of it as soon as I get the chance. A present from the record company, actually.

Pitchfork: That's cool. What sort of thing?

ZC: I've never even seen the damn thing before, it's just this box, and you just hit the different shapes on the box and they vibrate-- somewhere between, like, a marimba and something else. Maybe a thumb piano. But it's loud and it's big. Pretty exciting. [Laughs]

Pitchfork: You must be running out of space in your apartment.

ZC: It's disgustingly cramped. I'm in the process of looking for a real studio, because I feel I'm such a slacker at my own home.