'We’re Not Going To Sit Around And Talk About What We’re Going To Fucking Sound Like'

The world shifted on its axis this year for Syracuse, NY noise-punks Perfect Pussy, who took their abrasive, uncompromising vision to the world in the form of their debut album, Say Yes To Love. It’s a brief set – a pummeling 23 minutes of no-hold-barred excitement and energy, swathed in masses of distortion – but that didn’t stop it from gaining a remarkable amount of traction given that the sonic field that they’re ploughing is not usually one that garners bands mass acceptance even after years of graft, let along straight off the bat.

Yet that’s just what has happened in 2014 to the volatile five-piece, who after a year of non-stop travel and gigging are finally enjoying some downtime before it all starts again in anger and they jet into the Southern Hemisphere to partake in some Laneway Festival action.

“I’m actually finally at home in Syracuse, after a year of non-stop travel,” offers keyboardist Shaun Sutkus. “It was quite a surreal year, and it feels nice to be home for a minute. I’m actually packing up my apartment and moving soon, but for the minute I’m home and it’s nice.”

Moving abodes would have to be the least relaxing pursuit imaginable, and as with all things that suck Sutkus has left his packing to the last minute possible. But it hasn’t all been wasted time; he’s also a sound engineer by trade and rapidly becoming a dab hand at production, so he’s merely been flexing these musical muscles instead of using the real ones to lug furniture.

“Yeah, I’ve been busily procrastinating,” he admits. “I’ve been working on a remix for Deerhoof, actually; that’s what I’ve been doing with my time. I finished it yesterday and sent it off to them and they were stoked on it, so that should be coming out pretty soon.

“I’m a recording engineer – so I’ll do the production stuff on the side in-between tours, as well as doing my own noise shows; my own noise shit – but I did a remix for some friends of mine that I would tour with three or four years ago, and they were kind of like, ‘Well, we can’t release this because it’s just noise and it doesn’t relate back to the original song enough’, and I was just like, ‘Whatever, dude, I’ll just release it myself’. Then this year the Deerhoof remix is the third remix I’ve done; that band who said that they couldn’t release the last one have since then asked me to do another one this year and I did it and they loved it. Then Greg [Saunier] from Deerhoof basically said, ‘Yeah, you can do whatever the fuck you want, don’t even think about relating it back to the original song’, and I was, like, ‘Wow, thank you. That’s awesome!’ So I had 100% creative freedom to do whatever I wanted.”

“There’s no compromising my sound – I can do whatever the fuck I want! I play keyboards in a fast indie-punk band, there are no rules."

Most musicians will attest that you don’t get such a mandate for creative control very often, but Sutkus is in the fortunate position of being afforded this luxury in pretty much every facet of his vocation. Even though he has his own noise project, Pretengineer, to indulge his more raucous flights of fancy, he also has no one looking over his shoulder while he’s going about his day job.

“I think with Perfect Pussy I do [have creative control] because what I’m doing is exactly what I want,” he explains. “There’s no compromising my sound – I can do whatever the fuck I want! I play keyboards in a fast indie-punk band, there are no rules. I have no limitations. There is never a time in rehearsal or practice or whatever where I’ve made a sound and someone in the band was like, ‘No, that’s too much man! That’s too over the top!’ It just wouldn’t happen. I can make it sound as nasty as I want [makes some terrifying noises with his mouth] and nobody cares. That was the whole reason behind my own noise thing anyway – this is my solo project, and nobody’s going to fucking tell me what to do! I’m going to break any rule that I can find. When you have that kind of philosophy no one’s going to try to tell you what to do.”

Has this ‘take no prisoners’ attitude always been how he’s approached music?

“No, it hasn’t, but I like it,” he laughs. “It has a time and a place, though. You can’t be like that with everything – I wouldn’t approach every project like that – but this is my project, so I’ll do whatever the fuck I want!”

According to the loose narrative of how Perfect Pussy came into being – singer Meredith Graves (whose band Shoppers had just evaporated) was asked to assemble a band for a film, Adult World, and accordingly put a “fake group” together which then clicked in the studio whilst recording a song for the soundtrack – Sutkus, who recorded that session, was primarily ushered into the band’s ranks to add that same permissive attitude anyway.

“Well, maybe,” he muses. “The whole thing was that Garrett [Koloski – drums] and I ran into each other at an airport, and I was, like, ‘Yo, you gonna start working on that band again? It’s been a year’, because I’d produced a song for Meredith and Garrett and Greg [Ambler – bass], and I’d never seen any of them after producing that song until running into Garrett in the airport. I said, ‘That band was awesome, what’s going on with that?’, and he was, like, ‘I dunno, we talked about getting back together…” Then [Garrett and I] were on the same flight, and the flight ended getting delayed two hours, and he and I became friends!

“It was weird, we had so much in common – we were both involved in the punk scene in Syracuse and blah blah blah – and Garrett was going to London to visit a friend and I was going to New York to fly out for a tour, and we made a deal; ‘When we both get back to Syracuse we’re going to hang out and we’re going to chill!’ So when we both got back to Syracuse I would just go over to Garrett’s house and we’d listen to records and stuff and just hang out, and then we started talking more about starting band, and he said, ‘You should play noise in it!’, and I said, ‘Okay! Yeah, that would be awesome, let’s do it!’ And the rest is history. We made that demo [2013’s I Have Lost All Desire For Feeling EP] and that was it. So I guess you could say I was brought in to do noise.”

According to Sutkus, once the five members (rounded out by guitarist Ray McAndrew) assembled officially the Perfect Pussy band vibe came together quite quickly and naturally.

“We’re all on different pages I think, but we all trusted each other to a certain extent,” he reflects. “We all bring something different to the table, and then everyone trusts me to record it well and mix it well. The whole thing with us is that we never talk about aesthetics or anything, it’s just that we are who we are and we sound like what we sound like. This is who we are, and we’re unapologetic. We’re not going to sit around and talk about what we’re going to fucking sound like and what we’re going to look like, we’re just going to fucking go do it and that’s what it’s going to be. We’re all on that same page – that’s the page we’re on!”

And this newfound aesthetic is quite a fascinating one; when you first listen to Say Yes To Love it comes across as incredibly nasty and abrasive, but repeated listens unveil buried melodies and hooks which really brings the coarse music to life. 

“Without her lyrics, we’d just be some shitty noise band.”

“Where that comes from is that Ray lays down the basic musical idea with his guitar, and if you take away the distortion and take away everything it leaves some pretty, pretty chord changes,” Sutkus explains. “And Greg adds an interesting element, he adds, "that ‘I don’t give a fuck’ punk, ‘I’ll play as fast as I can and I don’t care if I don’t hit all the notes’ element. Greg also has a cool intuition for weird inversions of chords, and it makes this crazy dynamic. And then my keyboard parts are sometimes following the guitar, and sometimes this really far out, long sweeping melodies. So I want to say that the beauty is in the melodies, but I don’t really know – it’s sort of different for everyone. What you take away from it as being pretty is probably different from what I would.”

And, importantly, Graves’ shouty vocals and confronting, confessional lyrics give the band not only an extra element of power but also a pervasive sense of identity.

“Definitely, her lyrics are some of the strongest parts,” Sutkus concurs. “Without her lyrics, we’d just be some shitty noise band.”

Was Sutkus surprised at how accolades poured in for Perfect Pussy so quickly, especially given that they didn’t compromise or water down their relatively caustic vision?

“It was surprising, yeah,” he admits. “It wasn’t expected and it wasn’t intended, so, yeah, it was surprising to me. It’s strange how this stuff works sometimes. Sonically there’s been no sonic compromise, that’s for sure. We’ve definitely compromised a lot of other things to do this, for sure, but our sound is not one of them.”

Their regimented approach to maintaining integrity seems slightly incongruous for a band who – if you believe their press interviews this year – regularly meet up and “discuss their feelings” to maintain harmony within their ranks, but Sutkus reveals that Perfect Pussy aren’t beyond a little image manipulation of their own.

“No, we don’t [have band meetings about our feelings], that’s fucking bullshit!” he thunders and chuckles simultaneously. “That is 100% fucking bullshit. That does not happen. We started a band and toured for a year straight, that’s what happened. When we first started this band some of us were friends and some of us were acquaintances, and we would make time to hang out with each other, but then when you’re forced to sit at arm’s reach away from five people for a year you’re not going to make plans to hang out with them, unless you really love them.”

The fact that Sutkus is responsible for Perfect Pussy’s sound and – as a card-carrying member of the group – is by necessity always present when they play live would, you’d expect, be a massive bonus. He explains, however, that it doesn’t always pan out that way and that he’s often frustrated how much the band’s live sound varies from the recordings.

"Our live sound needs to be very, very, very particular – it doesn’t need much, but you definitely need to pay attention to certain things, and you need to be absorbed by it."

“Yeah it does [vary], because we’re not in control of it,” he offers. “My career is doing live sound – that’s what I do for a living – and it’s a weird dynamic not being in control of that. Not that I need to be in control of that, I can take a step back, but sometimes it seems like a lot of engineers have a chip on their shoulder and have something that they need to prove, and I don’t fucking care. I don’t fucking care what they need to prove. It’s weird, and very difficult to manage sometimes, because I know what I want. If you don’t know who I am and have never had a conversation with me it’s really hard for me to be blunt and very to the point because – depending on who I’m talking to and they way we interact – it might seem my words are strong but I’m just trying to get across what I want.

“Some people listen and some people don’t, but a good engineer will listen and do what needs to be done. It’s not like I tell people how to do their job, I just tell them how I want things to feel. But doing front of house is like doing a painting – there’s an art to it – and some engineers understand that concept and some don’t, some just don’t give a fuck. Some really care. But our live sound needs to be very, very, very particular – it doesn’t need much, but you definitely need to pay attention to certain things, and you need to be absorbed by it. I can’t always tell people what to do and how to do it.”

Is it a heavy burden being part of the band but also responsible for getting the sound right?

“No, not at all. Just because it’s what I do,” Sutkus reflects. “I’d prefer to play the shows from front of house, mixing them – I don’t mind about being onstage. It would sound better – definitely more consistent sounding. That’s the major thing, our live sound is very inconsistent, and it can turn into a total nightmare – you talk to one person the wrong way and they just decide to be pissed off and be assholes. Not assholes, but they’ll be, like, ‘Oh fine, fuck you too then!’ So that’s the long answer as to why our live sound is so consistent.”

Hopefully they won’t have any such hassles on their impending trip to Australia, given that the voyage is one that Sutkus has been anticipating for a very long time.

“I’m not looking forward to the long flight but I’m definitely looking forward to getting there, because I’ve never been,” he enthuses. “I remember when I was in seventh grade or something like that you have to write your ‘bucket list’ or something – all of the things that you want to do – and I wrote down all of the things that I thought I’d never get to do in my life, like go to Australia. When I was in seventh grade I thought, ‘Why would I ever go to Australia?’ I probably had never left the state at that point, so going to Australia became a dream of mine when I was a child, so that’s pretty fucking cool. I’m really happy. I’m doing some noise shows, too, when I’m in Melbourne – I have this noise duo called Lucid Pyramid, and I have a split-tape coming out with an Australian noise artist and we’re going to do some shows too when I’m in Australia. It will be as Pretengineer when I do these shows, but the tape is a different project.”