Last night Japanther played a concert in Brooklyn, which isn’t anything out of the usual, but right before the show the band let us in on a little thing we like to call “major scoopage.” Remember that show they played back in December at PS 122 with Penny Rimbaud doing weird spoken-word readings? If not, you can catch yourself up with the video below. Now that we’re all on the same page, a couple weeks ago we helped fly Penny back into the States to do a radio interview with Ian, and spend a little time together in a basement in Red Hook, doing something…

What did you guys and Penny Rimbaud get up to in Red Hook?
Ian Vanek: We recorded a piece with him called “Dino Deth Dans.” Last year Matt and I wrote these 10-minute beats and asked him  “Could you do spoken word over these, or somehow apply your performer aspect to it?” We mailed him the tapes in England and he mailed us back the poetry. We read it and edited it and mailed it back to him. Then he came to New York and rehearsed with us and we premiered it at PS 122 in November. It was amazing, so we got him to come back and help us record it down in Red Hook. I’m really excited about it, but also nervous that people will hear it and think, like, “What the fuck are you doing?”

Is it like what you guys did onstage or sort of more musical?
It just stays within the theme of weird performance art. It’s like, when I was a little kid I loved Devo and from there got into Laurie Anderson and Jack Goldberg, all these people who were making records in New York on a really independent scale and didn’t really draw any lines between performance pieces and music. We’re inspired by that stuff, so that’s why we started naming our shit and trying to work with people from different generations like Penny. He was like the Harry Potter wizard coming in on this and applying magic.

You mean like studio magic or magic with a k?
No, just like when you live the way he has for so long and are really a free spirit, you sort of allow yourself to move with the earth and can pull off some powerful shit. I guess that’s the best way to put it. When we were recording his poetry, the second time he started reading the mic started hissing and feeding back like a scratch record. Everyone just knew that ghosts or whatever had possessed the soundboard or something, because it was all digital equipment. It was all clean and new, and suddenly it’s howling and making these insane sounds while he’s reading and being all dramatic.

Whoa-spooky. Was it just when he was using it?
Yeah, and it would just come in during his pauses. So he’d be reading and then take a breath, and if there was any space for a sound it would just be like “yooo-jooo, chkeoOWW.” It sounded like weird, scratching alien bombs.

Did it freak Penny out?
Oh, he was right on the crest of the wave. He didn’t miss a beat. When he came back into the room he was like, “I was really talking to the subject.” His piece is called “I the Indigene” and it’s about everyone’s origin being somewhere on the Earth and how it’s senseless to argue over who’s from where. It’s a heavy tune, and he was really trying to speak to the subject. And I guess some ghosts weren’t having it, or were agreeing—something was happening. But that’s why we try to work with people out of our bounds, because sometimes shit like that will happen. It was really an honor and a weird pinnacle for the band.