Reykjavík Grapevine - 28.08.2015, Qupperneq 46

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uno is the perfect place to start
a good day or end a great evening
When I ask kimono singer/guitarist
Alison MacNeil whether they’re turn-
ing into Portishead or—worse—Guns N’
Roses, she seems unperturbed. “Well, the
album before ‘Easy Music’—that came
out in 2005. And the one before it was
released in 2003. Based on the timeline,
the gap between albums two and three
was quite long, and this time around it’s
incrementally longer. So I guess we’re
working on an inverse logarithmic scale.”
Hey, Joni!
Shortly after ‘Easy Music’ was released,
work and family obligations took over
kimono’s lives. “Gylfi [Blöndal, guitarist/
bassist] and I got sucked into our jobs at
[sadly defunct Icelandic online music re-
tailer] Gogoyoko big time, constantly try-
ing to make that work,” explains Alison.
“So we didn’t do a lot for the two years
after ‘Easy Music’.”
The intervening
years saw a huge change
within kimono’s world,
on both a musical and
personal level. For in-
stance, Gylfi moved
from baritone guitar to
bass. And then there has
been Alison’s journey
with her gender transi-
tion, which among other
things, brought on a re-
think about her role as
the group’s singer. “At that time, I was
thinking a lot about how I was going to
sing,” she explains. “For a lot of people
it’s a big thing, what they do with their
voices. When we made our first records, I
wasn’t really a singer. I’m still not really a
singer, not like [operatic voice] “la-la-la”
but back then it was all in a lower regis-
ter. So it was a process of contemplating
whether to do something completely dif-
ferent, or to just sing in the same way as
before.”
Alison’s solution was to alter her
process of preparing for performances:
“Because I’ve never studied singing, the
way I always got my voice in shape for
concerts was to make songbooks—with
bands like Pavement or whatever—for
fun, to play and sing along with. So this
time, I made a songbook that was heavy
on female voices to practice singing in
a higher range, using my breathing dif-
ferently. Stuff like My Bloody Valentine,
Slowdive, Cat Power, Bat For Lashes,
some Joni Mitchell—that was a challenge
[laughs]—and Elliott Smith.”
Actual work
Despite contending with changes and
outside commitments, kimono haven’t
been entirely idle. They self-released a
single, ‘Aquarium’, in 2013, while 2014
brought a 7” called ‘Specters’ on Theory
of Whatever Records. Last year, they
underwent the ambitious project of
reissuing their back
catalogue on vinyl, fi-
nancing it through the
Karolina Fund crowd-
funding website, a pro-
cess that, while success-
ful, proved draining.
“It was a good ex-
perience,” muses Alison,
“but a really time con-
suming one. And I don’t
think I really like the
whole manufacturing,
mailing or admin side of the process. The
actual work involves things like contact-
ing the pressing plant. It can be all profit
for the band, one model for an artist to
make some money from their music, but
doing a three album reissue with all the
artwork and layout is a hell of a lot of
work—getting the test pressings, having
the vinyl sent to Iceland and then mailing
out records to everyone. I’ve done it now,
and I can safely say I don’t like it. I’d be
happy for someone else to do it [laughs].”
kimonopera
kimono are currently looking forward
again, in the process of finishing a new
album. Tentatively titled ‘This Is Going
To Hurt’, it’s been in the works since late
2013, when the band reconvened to write
new material. Although Alison notes
that they “don’t do concept albums,” the
album centres around themes of trans-
formation and overcoming. “It’s about
all sorts of things and change—relation-
ships breaking up, other life events, the
transition that comes from any kind of
change...”
“My own transition is definitely in
there,” she continues. “I wrote the lyrics
for one song the morning that I woke up
in the hospital. I wrote it all down in one
go. I was of course on a lot of morphine,
which was a first for me. I also wrote an
opera. Actually, the opera came first and
involved radios, but then I realised later
that it was probably just some Fluxus
thing I’d heard about. I don’t think you’ll
be hearing that anytime soon.”
I ask Alison how far along they are
with the record. “If I could sit down for
a weekend, the tracks would be done,”
she tells me. “It just needs proper mixing
and mastering. I don’t really like to be the
last set of ears on our music. I always end
up making things sound too raw. In the
past we’ve always done our records with
Aron Arnarsson, but he’s now living in
Barcelona and touring a lot with Gus Gus.
It’s always been the final step in the pro-
cess, bringing him in to add the finishing
touches.”
‘This Is Going To Hurt’ thus seems
like it’ll pretty much be done... when it’s
done. “There’s no real outside pressure to
get the record finished,” explains Alison,
“still, part of me wants to get it out ASAP,
and not sit on it for another three years—
even though people keep trying to get us
to stick to the script. Fuck the script.”
MUSIC
COME BACK
Over the past fifteen years, kimono have slowly become one of Iceland’s more venerated gui-
tar bands, their small but powerful collection of music marking them as a band that runs a
slightly different course to its peers. However, things have been fairly quiet on the kimono
front in the past few years, with over five and a half years since the release of the three-piece’s
last long-player, ‘Easy Music for Difficult People’, in the beginning of 2010.
Photo Alisa Kalyanova
Words Bob Cluness
6
This Will Hurt You More
Than It Hurts Us
After Some Time Out, Kimono Are
Coming Back Into Your Lives. Be Prepared!
“I wrote the lyrics for
one song the morning
that I woke up after
being in the hospital
for surgery. I wrote it
all down in one go. I
was on a lot of mor-
phine. I also wrote an
opera!”
September 9 at 20:30kimono / Ari Russo Húrra, Naustin