House Music

Beach House's sound is defined by its contradictions: The funeral march of Alex Scally's guitar combined with Victoria Legrand's chamber music organ could only come from Baltimore, that sad metropolis that feels more like a small town. But Scally and Legrand's music is a far cry from the sound of the city: Dan Deacon's processed mania and Animal Collective's sound collages couldn't be more different. Beach House takes pleasure in its sadness and Teen Dream, out January 26th, is the band perfecting its joyful melancholy. If the album's ten songs sound like they were obsessed over for months, it's because they were. Recorded in a former church turned recording studio, in upstate New York, Teen Dream is a groggy haze of sounds and images, held together by Scally and Legrand's creative bond.

PAPERMAG caught up with Legrand on the phone a few weeks ago, who was on a cold and rainy trip to Florida with her band mate, to talk about the new album, being away from home, and broken hot tubs.

Are you on vacation?

Um, kind of. It's a strange vacation. It's not really warm down here at all. We've just kind of been working on music and catching up on sleep and trying to do some stuff outdoors so we can stay healthy for the next couple months of touring.

It's snowing here if that makes you feel any better. Congratulations on the new album. It seems like it really took over your life while you were recording it.

It definitely took over our lives -- in a good way of course. Unlike the other two records, we were able to not really tour at all while we were writing Teen Dream. We were able to isolate ourselves in this practice space we had found in Baltimore. We just started writing and twenty-hour weeks turned into eighty-hour weeks and we became completely obsessed.

You've said you had to let go of normalcy, daily rituals, and the ability to take care of yourselves.

When you're working that intense on something artistic, I guess there's a price to pay for your dreams. But it's worth it. You're not at home as much. You don't have all this energy for things you might have had energy for before. Let's say a relationship or something like that. You're focusing all your energies and passions into something that's kind of invisible until you make it. We were definitely chasing that vision intensely for nine months. We were very much inside of this. We had more time to record it. The first record was two days our second record was under three weeks.

What was it like recording at Dreamland Studios in upstate New York?

We didn't really get to go out so much and visit nature. That was sort of the plan: get out of Baltimore, go to someplace that wouldn't be as hot as Baltimore can be in the summer. And to continue the same level of intensity we had in Baltimore just somewhere else. We wanted to push the sounds. We just really pushed ourselves to make the most out of what we've been doing.

Was the studio isolated?

It was outside of Woodstock, so yeah. It had this big house with a church -- or what used to be a church -- connected to it. There were trees outside. There was no bustling traffic. There were no friends calling. The room at Dreamland that we recorded in is a beautiful wooden room. It had less to do with it being a church or religious -- that kind of energy isn't what attracted us to this place. We wouldn't be distracted and it had everything we needed. Great microphones. Probably one of the greatest collections of microphones we've seen. Ever.

I think there's something about your music that is so distinctly a part of Baltimore. I'm wondering if there was something about being away from home that helped strengthen your sound.

You're probably the first person that said that it actually sounds like Baltimore. Because we've been asked, “does Baltimore have an influence on your music,” and our response is always we've never consciously written about Baltimore. It's been more of a haven for us to financially exist and make art at the same time. That's very much our world in Baltimore. My sensation of Baltimore is where I live, where I have great friends, but most of the time, it's music. It's there. We're trying to get away from this fleeting, unchanging, over-languished thing. We're trying to break through that. We're trying to bring the rest of the world closer to Baltimore. It's this fleeting kind of memory.

I can see that. As your music has progressed, I think it's become more of a formal experiment. I've noticed, for instance, your keyboards and Alex's guitars fusing into one really strange instrument. The two are sometimes indistinguishable on Teen Dream.

Yes that's something that happened really naturally with us. [Our instruments] really feed off each other. Then the two feed off the voice. So there's this triumvirate basically. The idea of two instruments blending together was something we were working with on this record.

The two of you work very well together. Everything seems completely shared.

Our musical chemistry is something we're really lucky to have.

You must get a lot of questions about your relationship with Alex. The two of you make very intimate music.

Just because of all the touring and recording and living in Baltimore, we're constantly working on Beach House, constantly coming up with ideas. We're around each other constantly. By now we just coexist. It's like two heads, two bodies, but we're so used to being around each other. It's family. Brother sister. It's a very intense friendship. The universe we're creating is literally our home now. I mean, I'm talking to you from Florida where we came to, basically, see new things. We're in a very inspired state right now. We get along very well. It's a very fortunate connection.

There's a visual aspect toTeen Dream that's as important as the music. You've had ten different artists make a short film for each song.

Our music was always very visual, but was never deliberately triggered towards, “This could be a video.” We wanted to see other artists interpret our music -- to have more worlds created, other people's minds interpreting our music. Putting ten videos together is a feat! The fact that it's happened is pretty amazing. Nothing catastrophic occurred.

Not long after the album comes out, you're going on a big tour of Europe, and not long after that, you'll be touring America. What's your experience with that like? Does it make you nervous?

Not at all. My life is Beach House. When I leave for tour now I don't feel uprooted at all. I feel at home. The prospect of leaving is very comforting to me. I like to pack my bags, I like hotel rooms, I like being with a group of people on a plane, and I like being in a van. It makes me very happy. We're very lucky that we have music because it's enabling us to experience things that we would never be able to see. We never really felt a torture about uprooting. At its worst it was always just a conflict.

It's very hard to write on the road, but you store up a lot of energy and inspiration.

Any more plans in Florida other than waiting out the rain?

Trying to get this hot tub fixed! We've had a magical time here. The weather is breaking records for how cold it is. But, you know, we always find something weird to get into.

Teen Dream is out on Jan. 26 via Sub Pop.