Interview with Exit Clov

Washington D.C. indie pop group Exit Clov’s songs of “revolution, ennui and societal idiocy” are putting the indie back in… well, indie. Vocalists Susan and Emily Hsu refuse to accept ideologies at face value, including those of their own music community. Backed by the chunky indie rock timbre of guitarist Aaron Leeder, bassist Brett Niederman, and drummer John Thayer, the Hsu sisters blend soft violin and keyboards within the arrangements. In this brief interview, they give us their take on indie music, partisan politics, and the marketing of race.

CB: As a band that features violins alongside distorted guitars, how do Brett and Aaron tailor their performance and tone to fit the smoothness of the strings?

BN: On “Violent Berries,” a song which features the violin, Aaron and I both play an eighth note pattern with the main line on the bass and the harmony on guitar. Harmonizing bass and single note guitar is something we recently discovered that works well with our sound. We also like using big guitar strums on the ones and subtle, long sustaining organ. This kind of arrangement—which can be found all over the EP—leaves a nice canvas for the girls to sing and play violin over.

AL: I’ve been trying to add more middle and low end to better accompany the string sound. I have also been incorporating more palm muting to get a more subtle effect when the strings are in the mix.

CB: Respond, Respond opens with “DIY,” a criticism of a fairly well-represented aesthetic in independent music regarding major labels. Was this song directed at someone in particular?

SH&EH: The song isn’t directed at any one person. It’s about this weird notion in this city that you can only be cool and independent when there’s no one at your shows or if you don’t promote your band, which just blows my mind. The DC punk/DIY scene in the 80s was a great thing from what I’ve read and heard. There was a core group of people who really lived up to the whole punk ethos thing and left a great legacy. But now you have these tangential communities that are trying to co-opt the ideas, and they try to protect it by putting down young new artists that don’t fall in the same community. A lot of newer artists now weren’t old enough to have lived through it, but they still really worship the ideas that came out of that era, including us. So it’s frustrating when you hear people—some from that era, some who aren’t—talk shit without bothering to recognize that these bands are doing things just as independently as in the 80s, putting out records on maybe $100 tops. It’s not cool to be presumptuous that none of these bands have any integrity and are only out to make a buck.

CB: The lyrics throughout the EP are quite political, but much of the album seems tongue-in-cheek. Is this an intentional way to lighten the mood of otherwise sensitive topics?

SH: It’s perceptive of you not to assume that being “political” automatically means we’re trying to make a trite leftist commentary on the Bush administration. As for the tongue-in-cheek feel, we didn’t design our lyrics to lighten the mood. I guess it just reflects our personalities/interests… if you know us as people, you’ll know we’re not overtly political, making statements about anything and everything. But we do live in the nation’s capital, our backgrounds are in history, journalism, music, politics and policy. So we reference stuff like that a lot, sometimes in a comical way, sometimes more seriously.

CB: What was the inspiration behind the lyrics of “Violent Berries?” Has the meaning changed at all since the completion of the song in reaction to current world events?

EH: The lyrics to this song were inspired by a longstanding fight between two people who are close to Susan and me. But it can really be about any conflict, big or small, where neither side is willing to back down. It’s also about the persistence of war. Even though we’ve accomplished a lot in terms of conflict, it’s still existent everywhere. “We broke the Berlin Wall, but we make no sound… Is our house still a box?/ Are we all still the same?/ Who is there left to blame?”—it’s like questioning the advances we’ve made and realizing there’s still a long way to go. The words were written in the winter of 2005 though, so it hasn’t really changed much in meaning beyond that.

CB: The video for “Violent Berries” has a very bland feel throughout most of the shots, setting up the effectiveness of the finale scene. How did the band arrive at this concept behind the end of the video?

EH: We were on our west coast tour, hanging out in our hotel room a couple days before the video shoot. Like I mentioned in the question before, the song is about perpetual conflict, whether it’s between countries or between people. We wanted to convey the idea that people are numb to war because it’s practically a constant state we’re in. Hence the opening line, “War is old, so we don’t feel it now.” We also wanted to show the bizarre ironies of cultural meshing—watching the Hiroshima bombings while enjoying sushi. Regarding the ending, we wanted to do something that was obviously horrifying and shocking (like murdering your sister) and show the utter indifference of people around it. So we had one of us stab the other to death while the boys just kept stuffing their faces with sushi and wiping blood from their faces nonchalantly.

CB: In press releases, Emily and Susan have been referred to as “Asian twin sisters.” Does the band ever feel uncomfortable using a racial element in this way?

SH: Unless it’s a press release directed at Asian American magazines/organizations, I don’t agree with it as a marketing thing. I think it’s irrelevant to our music and sometimes misleads people to assume we play cultural Taiwanese music. I know plenty of cool bands where you don’t know their racial composition unless you actually go out and saw their show. We’re just singers. And we’re just people. We also have Jewish people in our band. You’re right, nobody says, “I know this really great band with Jewish people in it. You should really check them out.”

CB: Will there be a full-length release in the future for Exit Clov, or is the band continuing to concentrate on touring to support Respond, Respond?

EH: There may be one in store for 2007 but we’d probably still continue touring this year as well… stay tuned!

[Interview by guest contributor David Barnes]

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