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For many years, the M For Mothland event at La Sala Rossa during M for Montreal has been the stuff of legends—a showcase of the weird, underground, and alternative talent from Montreal and anywhere the extra-dimensional label, booker, and artist agency, Mothland, has decided to foster. Last year’s M For Mothland was opened by the hypnagogic pop stooge, Alix Fernz, and this year it’s about to be opened by Brainwasher—a triphop psych duo from Oklahoma City, made up of Tommy McKenzie and Matthew “Duckworth” Kirksey.
McKenzie grins widely from a dining room table in the Pensione Popolo hotel, right across the street from La Sala Rossa. “We’ve got some serious shoes to fill,” he says, the excitement crackling beneath his laugh. Kirksey sits beside him, and in a few hours, they’ll transform into Brainwasher—a force about to commandeer the cavernous floor of Sala Rossa. The stage setup is nothing short of theatrical: a 360-degree platform bristling with gear, like an esoteric monument at the room’s centre. The audience will surround the performance, orbiting the action from every vantage point, leaving nowhere to hide on that stage. During the show, McKenzie owns the low end, conjuring hypnotic textures from bass, guitars, and an arsenal of noise pedals that blur the line between instrument and effect. Kirksey commands the chaos from above, his high vocal cords lifting the song while his hands dance between the drums and synths. Tonight also marks a milestone: the Canadian premiere of Brainwasher’s debut album, 39 Lightyears from Heaven.
The album was born in fragments across a decade. While touring with The Flaming Lips, Kirksey and McKenzie would steal moments in hotel rooms and borrowed studios, piecing together sonic sketches between shows. They’d reconvene in their respective homes, push the work forward in unfamiliar spaces, and gradually—almost glacially—bring it toward completion in Savannah, Georgia. It took a cool eleven years.
“It’s always the fear of making music, writing these songs and wondering ‘Do these actually make sense together?’ We’re writing with The Flaming Lips right now and going through that,” Kirksey says. 39 Lightyears from Heaven is an odd little beast of an album; there are moments of triphop beatmaking, like with the title track opener, bright, anthemic psych pop with songs like “Home” and “Burning Cars,” and then downtempo, industrial-tinged, “Control.” If the album were a real creature or animal, Kirksey says it would be a stomping bear. “You know, a bear can be delicate and quiet if it’s trying to sneak up on somebody, but then if you rile it up a little bit, it’s like stomping around, and it will eat you.”
It’s an album that rewards you with multiple listens, feeling like playing a trance-inducing 2D video game where each song serves as a specific level. There is also this recurring sound of whirring—sounding like a helicopter’s blades plunged underwater—that is sprinkled in between different songs. McKenzie says it comes from a pedal with a built-in oscillator mixed with tremolo. “There is this kind of surging crash when I turned off the pedal and turned on the tremolo,” he says. “So you can kind of sample that and mess with the timing to make it more ‘musical.'”
“Tommy is really good a mixing in these kinds of droney layers that really become the foundation of the song,” Kirksey says. “So he would send me a piece of droney music, and I would crank that shit up and turn down the melodies.” “It’s like you start hearing more tones and song structure within white noise,” McKenzie adds. “Nothing is permeating your brain otherwise, in terms of melodies, so you’re working more with your lizard brain if that makes sense.” There is also a compelling lo-fi or DIY quality to the album, which is all purposeful. Some of the drumming sounds were recorded by slamming a dryer door or clanking beer bottles together, for example, and the song “At Least It Beats An Actor” has that looped whirring sound that isn’t always perfectly in time.
“I think we’re good about that,” Kirksey says. “If we like the way something sounds in through a phone or whatever, we don’t fuck with it. We’ll do some hi-fi shit on top of it or something. Like with that song [“At Least It Beats An Actor”], that quality gives it that cool, weird gallop.” The connection to The Flaming Lips goes a bit deeper than just Kirksey and McKenzie being in the band. The opening title track to Brainwasher’s 39 Lightyears from Heaven actually started from a soundcheck jam with The Flaming Lips. “Matt had the quick idea to record it on his phone. So it was just a piece we had that we just tried to recreate,” McKenzie says. “I think of being in that kind of state of mind, you’re just jamming with another band and not being critical about it. That just leads to the best sort of ideas.”
The mapcap leader of The Flaming Lips, Wayne Coyne, also helped make the psychedelic album cover of 39 Lightyears from Heaven—featuring a noir-esque photo of Kirksey and McKenzie walking on a bridge in Oklahoma and being viewed by rows of eyes. Coyne also let the duo record some parts of the songs in his studio. “He’s just been a complete champion,” Kirksey says. “I mean, I was a Lips roadie before I was in the actual band. And he gave us a lot of confidence on this record, especially in the beginning. I just didn’t know if it was any good, you know? I’d send him stuff, and he’d be like, ‘Yeah, you gotta keep going with this, this is great.’ I don’t know if we ever finished it without him, to be honest.”
Brainwasher Press Shots by Blake Studdard
