Interview with Imperial China

Delusions of Adequacy recently took some time to speak with one of Washington, DC’s newer post-punk bands: Imperial China. The band has been making a name for itself based on its well-received recent EP and on its frequent live shows.

Delusions of Adequacy: Hi guys. Would you please introduce yourselves and tell us what instruments you play?

Patrick: Patrick Gough, drums.
Matt: Matt Johnson, guitar, bass, and percussion.
Brian: I play guitar, bass, keyboards, and I sing.

DOA: I notice that, for a trio, you cover a lot of ground instrument-wise. Is this intentionally to give your songs a fuller or different sound than other rock outfits or is it just because you like to play all of these?

Matt: When Brian and I started writing, we decided we were gonna use multiple layers to create a full sound. Most of our song writing begins with a loop or sample and build on top of that. Because there are only three of us, we just end up bouncing around on instruments as necessary to fill in the gaps as the idea progresses. This is what I want to believe. In actuality, it’s because of adult onset ADD and our collective inability to focus. I’ve always wanted to be able to play multiple instruments live and I don’t think I could be in a band where I was relegated to one instrument.

Brian: Like Matt said, we definitely wanted a very full sound. While I do like some more minimal-type compositions, I usually enjoy a fuller sound as I think it really adds to dynamics. More than that, though, is that I think we all like a lot of different music and types of sound. Some songs definitely call for certain instruments. Our approach is more about taking one idea and seeing how we can achieve a particular sound or dynamic, and having the flexibility of using various instruments makes it a lot easier (and more fun!) to do that.

DOA: Have you been playing together for long?

Matt: Brian and I started noodling around in 2005 with the idea of starting a band. We started developing a concept and writing in the fall of 2006.

Brian: We didn’t really know what we wanted to do for awhile, so we had a lot of ideas floating around. In late 2006 we brought Patrick in to round everything out.

DOA: Imperial China has the energy of past DC post-rock luminaries but seems to draw from more distant sources as well. At times the songs seem to recall This Heat and maybe The Ruts, both of whom incorporated styles somewhat alien to what was happening around them. Would you say that’s true of you as well?

Patrick: This Heat is one of my favorite bands; I especially love their album Deceit. They were among the first bands to fuse the energy of punk with the musicianship of prog-rock, which is the space I kind of see Imperial China occupying, although we’re cross-pollinated with electronic dance music on top of that to a large degree.

Matt: This Heat’s a great band. I got into them the beginning of this year. Truthfully, I don’t think we’re that self-aware as a band. We play what we like and as long as it has balls and is at least somewhat original, we’re happy with it.

Brian: I think a lot of this stems from our all having different influences. We all share some similar tastes with music but Patrick came from more of an art-punk background and Matt was more punk/hardcore. Surprisingly enough, I think those influences are quite different. My music interests were probably a little more contemporary. That being said, we definitely started sharing a lot of our respective interests, and we just knew that experimentation had to be a major element in our songs. For example, I know nothing about how to play the piano, but I like a lot of electronic music, so I wanted to incorporate that into what we were doing.

Patrick: Do we have a style that’s alien to everything else in DC? I wouldn’t say that. I think people are familiar with our influences enough to not be put off by what we’re up to, even if no other bands around here are putting the mixture together in the same quantities that we are right now.

DOA: How do you manage to achieve the same sound live as you have on the EP, given the instrument-switching going on?

Brian: We wrote all of our songs so that we could play them in a live setting. So in some songs where we’re jumping around on instruments, we wrote transitions and parts that would be dynamic enough to carry the song while we were moving around and switching instruments.

Matt: We have Devin Ocampo, who is incredibly talented, to thank for the live sound of our EP. We told Devin we wanted the EP to sound like we were all in the same room and he worked his magic. There were overdubs done for all instruments, but the rough tracks, which we built on, were all recorded live as we would play them on stage and at practice.

DOA: Some of the songs take off in one direction and change mid-flight is surprising ways (a good thing). Is there something about your writing process that accounts for this?

Matt: Again, adult onset ADD. Actually, it’s because we all write together. Usually someone comes in with a drum beat, guitar line, or sample and [we] go from there.

Brian: While I would definitely say that I personally have adult onset ADD, I can’t say that I agree with Matt (sorry dude!) that our music reflects this. It’s not always about cramming in multiple ideas in one song. We do have a lot of changes, but we never throw something in just for the hell of it. All changes have to make sense within the song (at least, make sense to us).

Matt: No one ever brings in a complete song and says, “here, play this.” I wouldn’t be happy in a band like that. It just so happens that writing like this is conducive to a train wreck – angular and disjointed parts.

Brian: We have definitely gotten in arguments about particular parts and have cut out a lot of ideas to make a song more linear. For example, at the end of “Radhus,” where there is this jarring bassy loop going, the keyboard line is actually the same progression as the keyboard bassline during the first 2-3 minutes of the song. So to me, it’s never completely random.

DOA: Imperial China places quite an emphasis on rhythm. How important is this element in your songwriting?

Brian: I think our songs often have a dancy quality to them, and I think part of it is because we’ve lived in DC for a little while, and we’ve seen too many people at shows with their feet firmly planted and arms crossed, not moving. I think that definitely factored into our emphasis on rhythm. We want people to move, so we want to write music that moves.

Patrick: [Rhythm is] critically important, as it should be for every rock band. The emphasis is especially there for us, as we do a lot of loops and we have a guitar player – Matt – who once in a while drops everything to play a second drum set-up. Some of the songs we’ve written have been built around those loops, and we’ve made a conscious effort to incorporate the extra drums in parts that need a little more ‘oomph’; so yeah, the rhythmic aspect is a big part of how we write and play.

Brian: Also, I think two drummers looks pretty neat live.

DOA: Your 4-song EP shows a lot of creativity and it seems that you could go in many different directions from here. How has your newer material differed from those 4 songs?

Matt: We’re excited to find out the answer to that question. We’re only now hitting our stride with song writing and developing a sound. I can say that the newer songs have a punk feel with full instrumentation over driving electronics.

Brian: Tacking onto what Matt said, I think we’re really just now starting to hit our stride in terms of songwriting. We’ve really tried to narrow down our focus and create simpler compositions. We’ll probably still always have the multiple changes, but I think we want to start incorporating more singular ideas as well.

DOA: Any plans to record again just yet?

Matt: Not quite yet. We’re focused on writing and playing out for now.

Brian: We’ve been really happy with our newer output of songs, so we want really focus on that rather than trying to get them recorded, which definitely requires a lot of effort, time, and yes, money.

Matt: We’ll probably reassess recording in the spring.

DOA: You have played shows in cities relatively close to DC but do you intend to tour farther afield any time soon, and would you have jobs waiting for you if you were to, say, go across the country?

Matt: We’d like to play more weekend dates in cities further away, like Philly and New York.

Brian: At some point, I’d love to do some touring, even if it’s just two week trips here and there. In fact, I’d be really disappointed if we never got that opportunity. However, I think our focus now is to get some more recognition here in DC.

DOA: How hard or easy is it these days to spread the word about your band in areas outside of your hometown, or have you yet done this kind of promotion? The internet helps, but sometimes there’s a pretty low signal-to-noise ratio out there because everyone else is also promoting.

Brian: Outside of DC, I don’t think we’ve spent too much time promoting in other cities. But we’ve kept in touch with most bands we’ve played with.

Matt: Aside from Baltimore, we really haven’t tried to promote anywhere outside of DC.

Brian: More importantly, we want to make sure that we play great shows wherever we play them and regardless of how many people come to see us. I feel like that kind of effort has to get noticed to some degree.

DOA: As a way of getting at your individual influences: if you could teleport back in time, what band in what year would each of you most like to have been a part of (e.g., playing drums for Killing Joke in 1983)?

Patrick: Does that question assume that you can play as well as the person whose place you want to take? If so, then I’d like to be in The Who from 1967 to 1971, except without Keith Moon’s alcoholism and all that. Or maybe Mission of Burma from 1979 to 1983.

Matt: Playing guitar in Dog Faced Hermans in ’93 or drums in Stryker circa ’86.

Brian: Crap Matt! I was going to say Andy Moor too! He’s just too nasty of a guitarist to NOT want to be him. Other than that, I’d have to say Talking Heads in around 1982 or George Michael in Wham!… I mean, think about all the action that dude got.

DOA: Finally, would you like to explain the band’s name or leave people scratching their heads about it?

Matt: We really love history.

Brian: Imperial China is a history class at Kenyon College, where I went to school. When I was in college, a friend of mine thought it would be a great band name, so he used it for one of his punk bands. Thankfully, their band didn’t materialize so we got to use it. Success!