One thing that ties together all of your records is a spooky, psychedelic edge. Now with the next album in the making, we have been experimenting with the song again, so maybe it’ll find its place there. For example, there is this demo from the Ruination sessions that we all like, but it was too “noisy” for that album as well as for Polysomn. We have songs and ideas that haven’t made the cut yet, and we are revisiting them every time we start writing material for a new album. Niko: With each record, we try to build a seamless whole and if a song doesn’t fit in, it gets taken out. In the process of writing and recording each album, how much ends up on the cutting room floor? Do you ever revisit ideas that you abandoned years ago? I’m pretty confident we will continue to make records this way in the future: making everything by ourselves. Needless to say, the band and I learned a lot during the process. I’m very obsessed with how our band’s sound is represented, so I wanted to see if I could pull it off. We had a clear vision of what this album should sound like, so I chose to do all the mixing and technical stuff by myself. How did producing this third LP yourselves compare to working with outside producers? Did you learn anything new about your music? We usually have pretty strong vision before we enter the studio, but we do not fight against the natural evolution of the songs, even if we are already in the recording process. The same goes with the recording process, you might find new things and start to evolve songs into a different direction. We usually create our songs as far as we want to individually, but after we bring those songs to our rehearsal place, they get arranged by all of us, and the final result can be a lot different. Is this the same for you or do you generally set out with a general vision in mind? When my band writes we feel like we have little choice over what we’re creating – it just happens. The songs need a lot of dynamic variation to represent a vast array of moods and emotions. But whenever we arrange this material at our rehearsals, we tend to blast it pretty loud. When we write music individually at our homes with DAW’s or whatever, it isn’t that loud. Niko: The writing process varies with each song, but we experiment a lot with the loudness at our rehearsal place. How loud do you play when you write and practice? Please say you use ear protection. Like much of your previous output even at low volumes it feels extremely loud. ‘An Bat None’ was the first single you released off of the new album Polysomn – it is a huge, expansive song. We like to play around with the contrast of beautiful parts and heavy weirdness, in the similar way The Flaming Lips and My Bloody Valentine have done. At the core, we try to create quite basic pop songs, but then we soak them with layers of sounds and chaos. The sound and dynamics in our music have evolved naturally since we all like to play energetic music, yet we love catchy melodies and beautiful chord progressions. We like to experiment with our sound, but we’ve always been drawn to loud noisy guitars and dreamy atmospheres. Niko: Well it’s not far from your description. Does this reflect how you see the band’s sound? Is this a style which came naturally to you or did you have to actively work at fusing these genres together to create something new? Your music, to my ears, fuses shoegaze and much heavier, crunchier post-rock. Hopefully, we can start playing shows next year in Europe supporting our new album. Our original plan was to play a few Finnish and European festival shows during the summer and do an European tour in Autumn, but these plans have all been cancelled. Public places were shut down for a couple of months but since June they’ve been slowly re-opened and things are now almost back to normal. Niko: Finland has been lucky compared to some other countries in terms of the pandemic. How has Finland been during the pandemic? Have you been able to keep up any semblance of normality with the band, practising or anything you’d usually associate with an album cycle? The group’s guitarist Niko Lehdontie was in conversation with Richard Wiggins to find out how they are finding 2020 and explore the process of putting together Polysomn. Their initial singles have promised a panoramic set of songs which could shoot off in any direction. Fans have waited three years to hear new material from the group. On 11 September Finnish experimental shoegaze outfit Kairon IRSE! will release their third album Polysomn.
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