working without instruments

I didn’t start off thinking that was what I was going to do. I was just writing songs with instruments, but I’d listen to them and think "This isn’t really good, is it ?" I’d start muting certain things and it would sound better, so I thought maybe I’d just take more away and see what happened. It just kind of happened. Looking back on things, it’s always easy to be wise afterwards, to sound clever, but it wasn’t like that while I was doing it. I was just kind of tired of instruments, bored a bit, and I’d been backing with them a lot the last few albums, arranging for a huge orchaestra- the "Vespertine" tour had 70 people on stage. It was kind of like "Fuck that !" and just let’s do something completely different. There was one track where these German guys did a whole rave sounding track with just their voices and that really helped me see the possibilities. It wasn’t like they were beat-boxing ; these are really white Germans. It just cracked me up and seemed so fun. I was just into having fun with something new.

slapmagazine.com, september 2004