1. Who’s in the band and who plays what?
HWGM is five people; Luke Temple sings/plays guitar, Mike Bloch sings/plays guitar, Jen Turner sings/plays bass, Peter Hale sings/plays drums, and I, Kristina Lieberson sing/play keyboards.
2. Whose music has most influenced yours?
Krautrock is a big influence for us- so bands like Can, Neu! and Kraftwerk are huge. R Stevie Moore. Neil Young. Dan Can’t Get Off The Toilet.
3. What’s your favorite/least favorite aspect of the music industry in the age of the internet?
The thing that’s great about the blogging generation is that it gives the little bands, with no finicial backing, no label, no identity even, to be heard. The downfall is the exact opposite-because everything can be so image driven and fashion concious, it doesn’t even matter what the music sounds like, so the fluff can really rise to the surface, leaving the music with real spirit to go unnoticed.
4. Best show so far? City with the best audience?
There’ve been a couple. Primavera festival in Barcelona was amazing. Flèche D’or in Paris. Emo’s in Austin last night. And both Paris and Austin have great audiences. Texas in general is a really fun state to play in.
We heard a band the other day whose music we really like. They’re called Warm Ghost and they’re from Brooklyn. We don’t know too much about them, but found this on their MySpace: “Alright, what’ve we got here then.. A crispy white white platter containing a right old hodgepodge of influences, both old and new. The most striking is the underground 80s synth feel which seems to fit right in with the current surge in interest in the cold/minimal wave thing, the combination of that with copious amounts of fuzz, reverb and distortion is immediately making me think of the earlier, scuzzier Cold Cave stuff.
