Kinski

It's tough enough functioning as a band these days without having to weigh in the added pressures of being pigeonholed into this genre or that. While many artists tend to compromise their vision or bend their ethics into palatable chunks of pop sensibilities, still there are others who wade the waters more elegantly. The Seattle, WA, quartet Kinski has emerged in a big way in this regard, melding ’70s kraut-rock and late ‘60s psychedelic instrumentation and has tested the limits of what independent rock is supposed to be. With their follow-up to 2003’s Airs Above Your Station, the group has once again hit a high mark for bucking the proverbial trend. Guitarist Chris Martin has felt the sting of assumption before, but through heavy melodies and brutal, driving rock, he and his band mates seem poised to uncover a previously forgotten genre: the instrumental song. Synthesis had the chance to separate fact from fiction regarding stylistic integrity and the unique influence of German rock ‘n’ roll on one of Sub Pop Records’ most revered bands.

How difficult is it to expand musically from album to album being an instrumental band?
I don’t think being instrumental has a lot to do with it. I think with any band, especially once you finish a record, you sort of feel like, “well, what are we gonna do next?” You feel like you don’t know how you could come up with anything a year down the road that’s [better]. But you always end up coming through with a different take on things or being influenced by different ideas. On this record, Alpine Static, we had a bunch of time between the last one and this one to work some things out. This new record kind of felt like our first record in a way because we had two years of throwing things out and revisiting things and playing songs live before we actually recorded it.

In what ways do you feel like omitting vocals is liberating as a musician, or is it liberating at all to you?
Well, I used to be in bands and I used to sing in rock bands and would write lyrics and melodies. Now, there’re a couple of brand new songs  that everybody says we should [have] vocals for, but I just can’t come up with ideas melodically or for guitar lines. But it seems like for a lot of our music, vocals would be a sort of tacked-on thing for us. They just don’t seem necessary for most of what we do and so we just don’t force it. The biggest compliment that somebody can give us after a show is that, and a couple people have said it, is that they didn’t even realize that there wasn’t vocals until the show was almost over. So, that’s always great to hear because that means that people are listening to everything else that’s going on instead.

What do you hope your audience takes away from a live Kinski show?
We’re sort of old school in that we just want the live show to just be a big rock show that’s sort of exhilarating and exciting. I like the old school thing where the band will do the set and then come back and do a bunch of encores, I mean encores that are covers. We just want to have shows that are exciting for us and hopefully that translates over to the audience.

Reading your bio, it talks a lot about how the German kraut-rock scene influenced Kinski. How is it that you came across this scene, being a rock band from Seattle, and how exactly has it influenced the way Kinski writes music?
Well, there was sort of that revival right when the band started, in the late ‘90s, of German reissues of the whole kraut-rock scene and I just kind of stumbled into that. Most of that stuff is available again and people just got more interested in it. Now I just listen to a lot of ‘60s and early ’70s psych-rock. It’s sort of just from being record collectors and hearing a bunch of things that we didn’t know existed before. I think we always get influenced by things that we stumble across as we buy records. I think not having vocals on a lot of that stuff but it still being really driving and emotional [influenced us]. There’s so much instrumental rock from the ’70s German scene, but I’d say I’m more into that stuff than the rest of the band is. I think the band, as a whole, came from more of a pop background, pop in the sense of melodic ‘60s rock, so I think that’s sort of the basis we build on and that’s why a lot of our songs are sort of melodic and have some sort of a pop structure in some sense.

Does the band ever feel like outcasts, or find it hard to play with like-minded bands when you go on tour?
There’s a bunch of bands nationally that we connect with. We went on tour for this record with that band Oneida. It seems like there’s a lot more bands that were influenced by the whole psych thing, or the modern take on that. In Seattle, there’s not a lot of like-minded bands so the local shows we’re kind of scratching our heads about who to play with. I think it’s more the genre aspect of it. We’re really trying to play with bands that we connect with on this tour, or bands that we feel we have some sort of kinship with. 

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