5 MINS WITH.. Parks Department
Tell me about Parks Department's latest mixtape release, 'Fragments':
Jordi - Fragments is, bar one song, two-year-old material that we spent more time watching Seinfeld reruns, than developing. Glorified Demos is what the peasants are calling them these days (only really glorified because they got mastered properly by our friend Tristan Barr).
Mitch - We didn’t expect much of a reception for them, we put them out so we could move on emotionally (like a breakup with your dead childhood pet). It’s real hard to get shows if you put nothing out.
If you had to, what genre would you coin yourselves?
Jordi - Music that will be played on Syn Media (formerly known as Syn FM) once and nowhere else. A friend once said that we sound like pop music that cares more about the ambient sound being louder than the melody, that’s pretty fitting right?
The latest ramblings on your Facebook feed are ingenious - pretty dry humour, but there is a strong sense of realism through them. Ever thought of twisting some of them up and using them as lyrics over your beats?
Jordi - TPG is to blame for the rambles, they keep cutting out my internet every month when my bank balance runs dry and forcing me to think on public transport. I’m an introverted daydreamer at times and 90% of my thoughts I try and remember to use later. We also don’t take ourselves very seriously and don’t like people that take themselves seriously with no justification. We’re Larry Davids. If someone says something that we disagree with or we overhear something dumb, when that conversation is over we will both go bitch about them behind their back. Right now i’m about to start beef with my uni email - They won’t let me direct emails relating to “Student Elections” to spam.
Most of the more serious and rhythmically alliterated ones are lyrics actually. We’ve been recording a lot of them lately with very talented singers, it’s refreshing to hear someone else sing your ideas, rather than the “placebo guy” sounding voice in my head.
The 'Endless Of Arms' Remix is totally unexpected, but very reflective of the way you guys work. It's ethereal, apocalyptic & seems like a completely different tune - how did you get there?
Jordi - Remixes are really difficult for us. A lot of bands that make music on a computer are all over warping vocals, and salvaging things which is something we really suck at! When we’re doing anything, it’s usually an idea from either a sound we’ve found or recorded on our phones or from an instrument we’ve played. We will then we will take that and play around with it. It’s not until probably revision 25 of playing with that sound with effects or edits that something we’ve made will be in the final song. It makes life hard, because every decision you make is a commitment to the direction you want to go.
For example I’ve completely forgotten the initial steps I took to starting it, but from what I can tell, It started by finding the parts of vocals that could make instruments, then making atmospheric pads out of them and building it up from there! I’ve been soberly listening to a lot of music that people enjoy whilst on googs. There’s a lot of cool ideas to steal from that housey style of music. We’re also really big on bands that can make a song have different styles in one - whether it’s done beautifully like Lucian Blompkamp or cheezily like Safia. So we tried to achieve those kind of sounds and style with this one.
What's next for Parks Department?
Mitch - We’ve played 8 shows this month, each one with a different setlist and like 40ish or so songs in total - so we’re pretty exhausted from rehearsing and constantly drinking. But if you saw the show, you would've heard some songs from an EP that’s kind of in it’s early stages - we just came up with the title.
Jordi - We’re going to work really hard on the audio-visual live show too!! We’ve tried to make it as different and weird as possible, but it’s still nowhere near where I want it to be in my mind. We’re talking synced lights, theatrics and all that jolly jim squash passion soda-esque things. I’m always on YouTube learning about how to turn some ghetto house appliance into something that will be cool to use on stage.