Street: You’re rounding off your North American tour. How has it been in the US?
Kai Campos: It’s been a really great experience it’s nice to go to a lot of places we’ve never been before. We’ve been doing the whole tour with the same openers so it’s been really fun.
Street: How’s touring with Jonwayne & D33j?
KC: Great. Like I said, we’ve been traveling together for a really long time. Its actually getting to the phase now that everyone’s starting to crack mentally, sort of. Were just kind of making stupid noises at each other. But it’s been a really great team. There’s been a lot of sharing of music we ended up kind of working on some music together.
Street: What was your mentality while working on "Cold Spring Fault Less Youth", your latest album?
KC: We were set up in a quiet part of town, a little studio, spent a lot of time kind of settling in and getting to the stage where we stopped doing press and stuff and we weren’t thinking about how it was going to be received. We wanted to be totally in that creative process.
Street: On CSFLY you feature two collaborations with UK teen King Krule. Did you go into the process with those collaborations in mind or was it more spontaneous?
KC: We were fairly hesitant to collaborate with anyone, we usually work in a locked space by ourselves. It wasn’t really a thing that we set up to do but we tried and with Archy (King Krule) it just kind of worked. Archy came in at the early stages and was around for all the music making process and he went through and found the tracks that he felt an immediate connection to. The process was very much together and that’s really how we wanted to do it.
Street: Do you always feel the pressure of really trying to push yourself making something completely different and out of bounds?
KC: I wouldn’t call it pressure it’s just a natural state—it’s all directly coming from ourselves more than anywhere else. Any kind of pressure was coming from ourselves just to stay as engaged and challenge ourselves. We didn’t want to end up making anything like the previous record and the way to avoid that was to make a record we ourselves liked and at the end of hope it made sense for other people.
Street: When did you first start making music? What did you grow up listening to and how do you feel that has affected your growth as an artist?
KC: I’ve actually been making music in some way or form for as long as I can remember actually. The place I’m from had no real music scene so it really took thought on how we treated our music. My parents have a lot to do with the music I grew up around a very broad range of works—pop, blues, jazz, punk. At 12 years old my take on all that changed with getting into hip hop and from that came more electronic music. All that helped me look at music from a lot of different angles and I think that’s definitely affected how I look at sound in general.
Street: How has signed on to Warp records changed your perspective on the way you produce music?
KC: It hasn’t really. I mean I used to buy their records and they’ve always been an important label for us, you know, they’ve always been internationally recognized—people will check out a record because it’s on Warp. So, when we were looking to get signed that was definitely an influence in the decision but at the same time we didn’t want to go into the situation only based on the history. We wanted to make sure it was the right decision for us. Then when we met with them they didn’t even want to talk about what the record was going to sound like—it didn’t even come up in conversation. It’s a really good place to be. They didn’t try to have a say in the creative process and rightly so.
Street: You and producers that create similar type of music have created a very different type of live show experience than music hasn’t really seen before. What do you set as a goal for a live show when you tour?
KC: When we started out, the show we were doing was directly a result of being around clubs [in the UK] at that time but playing our music in that environment didn’t work at all and at the same time we weren’t a rock band. We felt it wasn’t really working that way and were in between several things. Ultimately we realized we just had to find an outlet that allowed us to express ourselves, we had to figure out the expressive parts of our music and find the right way to build off those. It’s really different for everybody. The amount of options we have for music these days is striking and more people are trying to do interesting things. We definitely spent a year just being terrible but it allowed us to explore a lot of different ways of performing and it’ll keep on changing.
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