Javelin Talks New Album 'Hi Beams,' Bosom Buddies and Mushroom Trips with Island Foxes

Listening to the new Javelin album Hi Beams, I was hard pressed to find any loss of inertia. They defy entropy with an energy that is punk and a style that is pastiche. Though they still employ collage, Javelin's new album is fully-realized, born of a desire to use the studio as an instrument, creating a complete sonic artifact in the process. A tonic for the micro-genre, blink-and-the-band's-gone age.

Last year, Javelin's Tom Van Buskirk migrated to Los Angeles, while bandmate and cousin George Langford held down the Brooklyn fort. The commute from the West Coast forced the duo to record Hi Beams in just eight days. Judging from the quality, none will be the wiser.

As they ready Hi Beams for a March 5th release on Luaka Bop, I talked with Van Buskirk about Steve Winwood's Back in the High Life, the virtue of bosom buddies, and mushroom trips on an island overrun with foxes.

Noisey: What was it like recording the album in a studio for the first time?
Tom Van Buskirk: It was absolutely great. We both agreed we wouldn't make another album without that part of the process. We still made tracks at home, but once we had them ready, we took them into a studio and spent maybe eight days there doing vocals and overdubs. But the bones of the tracks were already there in various stages of completion.

We only used one [software] plug-in on the whole album, and the rest of it is amps, spaces, and weird outboard reverbs and stuff. It was really satisfying to record in a studio. We were always inspired by great albums, but knew we couldn't imitate their quality at home. We've constantly dicked around on our computers, and we wanted to get away from that this time—you know, invite in another mind. The guy we worked with, Seth Manchester, added to the album in major ways. We loved it and will do it again for the next album.

Did you have access to a lot of gear at the studio or did you bring your own?
We mainly brought our own. A large part of it is mixing know-how—mixing outside of a computer. We used a few instruments they had, like a couple of old synths. I think we used an electric piano for an eight-second solo in one of the songs. But we had a time crunch, so we spent most of the time recording vocals and arranging the tracks.

The new album Hi Beams doesn't lend itself to genre description. Do you feel that you guys drift through different sounds, so to speak? The album is collage-like, but not excessively so.
We sort of do work in collage, even when we try to make something whole. Someone asked recently, "What's the new album like?" And I answered, "Well, it's decidedly more song-like than what we've done before." All of those old elements are there, like drifting around genres, dabbling here and there with the songs we want to make. And there are still samples on the record.

We used to work in such a way with samples it was like cutting and pasting from a magazine. You could really tell where the edges were, and we weren't trying to hide it. It was a whole bunch of fragments. We've also worked subtly with sampling. But with this record it might be a bit more difficult to tell what's going on. But I do think the element of collage still applies. From song to song, the canvas varies—to stick with the art metaphor.

Speaking of samples, on the track "Judgment Nite" there was a bit that sounded as if a hip-hop artist sampled a lost theme from a Rocky soundtrack. The horns sounded triumphant. Were they sampled or played?
We played that. I think George might have been thinking of Steve Winwood when he made those horns—a Back in the High Life kind of vibe. It definitely sounds like a hip-hop artist going back and sampling that sort of stuff. We make both of the elements. We make the sample and then the rest of the track, and hopefully, it sounds fresh.

Another nod to the era of '70s pop seems to be "City Pals," which evokes Electric Light Orchestra in a very good way. Was that intentional?
I had sort of been thinking of Paul McCartney. I thought, "Where did this come from? It must be Paul McCartney, because I don't listen to much ELO or Alan Parsons Project."

But you were writing the song and started to hear something curious in its character as it took shape?
First, I wrote the keyboard line, but it was much slower and on piano. The chord changes were really familiar. Then I sped it up and changed the sound to an electric harpsichord and the rest grew out of it. I wasn't expecting it, but this was the track we made!

We called it "City Pals" because it was kind of a reference to '70s and '80s sitcoms like Bosom Buddies and Perfect Strangers. We were breaking those titles down to their most basic element: they're friends who live together in the city. [Laughs]

So you were scoring an imaginary TV show that celebrates the virtues of having a bosom buddy?
It kind of wound up that way a little bit, yeah. [Laughs] I think if we got a little touristy with the aesthetic-cribbing thing, you'd lose any substance or heart that's there. But what's so funny about the creative process is that you're still who you are when you're working in these styles, and what does come out still has significance to your life.

Were there any mind-altering experiences that happened during the making of Hi Beams? Dreams, an odd situation, esoterica, et cetera?
I actually spent a decent amount of time in nature during various parts of the making of this album. I spent a year upstate in New York. I lived remotely and isolated and got to spend time smoking cigarettes and looking at the sky, which I'd done before but only on the weekends. When you're a city person, you look up at the sky and think, "Ah, this is so precious, I need to squeeze every second out of this because I'm about to go back to the light-polluted horror of the city!"

The way we're built, we're only meant to look at what's right in front of us. It's funny being a human individual moving through these gigantic systems that most of us only perceive in little glimmers. Oh, yeah, that's how it works: the moon is gigantic!

Joycean epiphanies.
Yes. One time when we were making the album—I was out in California by this point—we took a camping trip. Some friends and I spent a night on an island off the coast and it was really gorgeous. There were little foxes running around. It kind of felt like the video game Myst. It had been a farm and there was all this working equipment, but it had been abandoned. Everything was rusted over and antiquated. So you're walking around this island and you feel that you're sort of looking at a historical situation that completely failed 100 years ago. And you feel like an archaeologist examining the story of what the hell happened here.

There were maybe 14 people on the island at night, so we did anything we wanted. We walked to the cliffs and to the water. We were technically on mushrooms. [Laughs] I woke up in the morning and I immediately got the vibe for what I wanted to achieve with the lyrical portion of songs that I had already made sonically. I think that stuff definitely snuck in there.

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