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P.E. is more than a happy accident

P.E. started out without any plans in mind. A project that unraveled from experimentation and the rudimentary approach of “jamming”. After their project, Pill, Veronica Torres, Jonathan Campolo, and Benjamin Jaffe, alongside Jonathan Schenke and Bob Jones (from the band Eaters), let improvisation and nature take its course. The result is a wild collaboration filled with percussive and vocal playfulness, where versions of genres intertwine, like tamer digital hardcore, noise punk, minimal synth and several dense and unspecified tunes that allow the compositions to feel dissonantly pleasant and united. A chaotic and individual configuration that merged well and feels right. “It’s a thing now. We made this weird baby,” shares Veronica Torres, “it feels good.” “The album absolutely is the starting line,” adds Jonathan Campolo. And yes, it is real, and as complex, atmospheric and synth driven Person might feel, it’s abnormally present.

 

 

“We played a show before we had songs,” continues Campolo. “Full improv, on stage, nerve-racking. That idea became the band,” he adds. Torres shared that they had two practices and there were roots of ideas, but there were not fully form songs when they play that first show. This was a show with Bodega, were band members encouraged the group to just join forces under the premise that they wanted all their friends present in this occasion. “That’s literally how we got in a room together,” shares Torres. After the show, they started jamming throughout the winter. “That first show was the summer of 2018. We went into my studio and recorded a bunch of ideas, whatever came to mind. If Bob or John had an idea, and the others hop on it, we just hit record. We kept doing that for the weekend,” tells Schenke. “About a year ago, we all got together and started parsing through that. Like, Veronica would have a vocal idea that would sort of inspire a structure for making a song out of these riffs,” he adds. Campolo remembers the first weekend they got together, “it rained the entire weekend. And we couldn’t go outside. We didn’t do anything except record. The idea for that weekend, the only idea going in was to set up a playground and hit record. We didn’t made plans. Just go at it,” he says.

 

 

This happy and unplanned accident Torres called “a little bit of automatic writing.” Building together and being intuitive in the process played a significant role in being able to complete Person. “An intuition is a huge part of the way we all played together, but also the way in which played the record. It wasn’t that we are going to do a certain part this long or stretch a verse. It was like, the sax part and the way it plays with the keyboard let’s repeat that. [What] Veronica sang here felt like a hook, let’s repeat that. Rolling with it,” adds Schenke. Campolo continues expressing how not stopping and thinking about anything helped the course. “If you want to put [together] something you love, let’s move on. Not [get] hung up into adding this concept that we want to put into the song. Edit later. That’s the way the album came together. We used a lot of maximalism, and then it became an editing project,” Campolo adds.

For Torres the process helped unearth things within. “I feel it’s a way of working that some people don’t trust or value. I think there’s something about it, that you end up unearthing things within your own psyche that you don’t even realize until later.  It’s a release and a process,” Torres shares. The method and the completion has impacted the way the group sees creating music together. “Setting up your situation to allow for happy accidents, I feel that’s a big part of my personal practice. This project, in particular, is a happy accident. The mixtape that we made is all a happy accident. It’s something that’s very easy to scrub out or erase specially with a lot of electronic music where it’s all loop based, rigid and pre-defined, that is very hard to get that human aspect, the sloppy edges,” tells Schenke.

 

“It’s all about experimentation, and exploration,” says Torres. “No rush, and no pressure, ever. There never has been. There’s no manifesto to do whatever,” adds Jones. Jones adds that it’s about making music that means something, makes us feel, and ultimately music that resonates with being “through the ringer at some point.” A freedom that comes with time. “Playing music when it doesn’t work is heartbreaking, it’s the worst,” confesses Campolo. “When this band turned on,” he continues, “it was kind of obvious that it worked, and we haven’t even tried once to not play our strong suits. Everyone is just doing what they really like.” Jaffe tells, “when you can communicate with other cats on your instrument without thinking about it you really got some music. You got to recognize when that happens.”

For Veronica, expectations were set after Pill. Her voice could be present, or not with this new project. It allowed her to play around with her vocals, aggression, and how there are different ways to get to the same place. “I was able to try on different methods,” she adds. Now that the band is just a few steps from their first experimental approach as a band and managed to complete these first batch of songs that comprise Person, I wondered if the feeling of newness remained. “It’s slightly more stressful in a way, because you can make a mistake now,” tells Jones, “there’s still a lot of freedom in the process. We are committed to still have it be fun and interesting to us.”

“I think of them as loosely scripted. There are certain things that we are following, but what we do could be different night to night. Going off in unexpected directions, that we love and would want to incorporate next time,” says Schenke. For Torres, Jaffe is the wild card on this aspect. “Sometimes he’s totally skateboarding through the set…” Jaffe then interrupts and says, “I based my saxophone playing post 2001, in the early skateboarding of Jay Adams.” They all laugh. Torres continues, “I find myself just listening to what Ben is doing and let myself be inspired by the moment to play with my voice a little bit.” This surprised Ben, “that is new information to me,” he confesses, “it’s like I said, when you can communicate with other cats without saying anything, you got to do it.”

 

 

Playing together resembles a little world, as Jones shared. “There’s a little bit of improvising,” says Bob, “but we practice!” adds Veronica to which Campolo replies, “WE HAVE SONGS NOW!” They laugh, in collusion. And the songs are a collage of sonic environments and grounding lyrics. “Machine Machine” allows Torres’s vocals to reverb as loud as the rest of the crowd, deliberate, yet lost in an industrial cage, full frontal madness. Mainly in charge of the writing task, Veronica created a world of perverse honesty with a few words, “I feel like less is more,” without crossing a line that would’ve made the album entirely hers. Veronica manage to dive deep into the utopian corners of the loose idea that is P.E. and make it a concrete collective truth. It’s present, talking about toxic masculinity, and the female orgasm in “Pink Shiver”. It doesn’t feel lacking. “In terms of writing, I carried around a little notebook, wrote on my phone. I collaged a lot of words together. Since we went into the studio and were doing it live, it was a lot of throwing stuff in. Johnny got a lot of different performances out of me and encouraged me to be gentler. I feel that also contributed to some of the sentiments expressed in the songs. I have a straight up love healing; love lost song and I haven’t written many of those in the past,” she says.

 

 

In Person, P.E. don’t say exactly what they want to say, but they don’t have to. They’ve painted a cohesive narrative and carved a path of process and experimentation through method. Joining forces for a show unraveled a series of events where creation was an unconscious and powerful source to be curious enough to see what else could they do, together. The uncertainty and the natural evolution that the practice, studio time, playing a live show without songs, etc. gave them the opportunity to explore within. “It does to me, sound in a way a little bit like both bands (Pill and Eaters), which it does to a degree. But something that really came out when we were together that didn’t really exist in either band that much, was a real degree of tenderness. Its not like trying to be really clever. It’s a real vibe of tenderness, almost like love, I could say. True romance. I personally crave that from art and music and the world we live in. I think it’s really important,” finishes Bob.

Person is out on 3/6 via Wharf Cat Records. Catch them live at Trans Pecos for their album’s release party with Gauche and Macula Dog.



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