RIKA: Music first, touring second
RIKA is from Vienna, Austria and release their records on US-Indie-label Count The Lucky Stars as well as tastemaking DIY operation Goddamn Records. They are still unknown though. It’s time to change that! Hey guys. You are from Austria but release your records on the US label Count The Lucky Stars. How did that came together? We first met Cathy and Keith when they were on tour with Empire! Empire! back in 2010. We played a show in Graz with them and they asked us if we wanted to do a split 7“ and of course we said yes. It took us a while to get our portion of the record done, so it came out in 2012.
When we finished our album, we asked them if they wanted to help release it in the US and they loved it. We are pretty lucky to have their support, especially as we have never been to the US before. It surely helped getting our music out to lots of people we would not have reached otherwise.
Have you toured the US before or do you have any current plans? We have not been to the US before, but we would definitely love to tour there. We talked to Keith about an east coast tour, but we all have steady jobs and we have had a couple of lineup changes, so we could not work it out so far. We will see what the future holds, but I’m sure we will make it happen someday.
In Fall you will tour with US-labelmates Free Throw. Have you met them before? No, we have not met them yet, but I’m really looking forward to that tour.
Which city are you looking forward the most? I haven’t been to Hamburg before and we are planning to go there early for a little weekend trip, so yeah, Hamburg. Other than that, the other cities are pretty cool too, but the worst part of tour is that you spend most of the time in the van and you never have enough time to check out the city you are in.
A new 7" will be released shortly. Can you tell us more about it? We recorded the two songs, „Tired Hands“ and „Solace“, in a two day session in September 2013 at Spiegelfabrik studio, where we also recorded our album. We basically went there because we had a bit of a writer’s block and wanted to pressure ourselves to get something done, so we fleshed out the songs on the spot, which worked out better then I expected. I recorded the lyrics at home a couple of months later, in winter/spring of 2014.
„Tired Hands“ is one of the more upbeat songs we have written, at least musically, while „Solace“ is slower and darker in tone. I am happy with how the songs turned out and the approach of writing in the studio was pretty refreshing, as we usually tend to second guess everything to death. The finished material has been sitting around for a while now, but the record is already at the pressing plant and should be out in a couple of weeks.
What other plans do you have at the moment? Not much, we play a couple of local shows before our tour with Free Throw and that is it. I have not been really inspired or in the mood to write music for some time, but the plan is to write a new album in the future. We have some ideas floating around, but most of it is too „more of the same“. We might have to find new approaches to writing and experiment a bit, as we do not want to repeat ourselves over and over. As with everything concerning this band, things take a long time to happen.
Any headlining touring plans? Not at the moment, I think we have to focus on writing new material first, as our last album was recorded in 2011 and playing old songs is not as fun as playing new songs. Maybe we can get something bigger happening in 2016.
