LA Priest Finds the Magic in Machines on ‘Into The Sky’

LA Priest has never been particularly interested in using instruments the way they were intended. For Sam Eastgate, machines are less like tools than unpredictable collaborators—things to be built, broken, modified and pushed until they reveal sounds that shouldn’t quite exist. That restless approach has shaped his work from Late of the Pier’s cult-classic ‘Fantasy Black Channel’ through LA Priest albums ‘Inji’, ‘GENE’ and ‘Fase Luna’. On his latest record, ‘Into The Sky’, Eastgate turns that experimental instinct toward something more immediate: making people dance.

But this is hardly a conventional dance record. Its rhythms emerge from homemade machines that barely function as drum machines, while its momentum owes more to ‘70s songwriting and unexpected chord changes than modern build-drop formulas. For Eastgate, imperfection remains part of the point. Cheap electronics, battered equipment and sounds passed through multiple processes can still produce the kind of musical “witchcraft” he believes is becoming increasingly rare in an era of carefully programmed production.

AudioFuzz spoke with LA Priest about letting malfunctioning instruments dictate songs, resisting the clichés of contemporary dance music, reconnecting with the electronic instincts of his Late of the Pier years, why overproduction can become a “graveyard of songs,” and his continuing pursuit of those moments when a voice, instrument or machine suddenly transcends what it was supposed to be.

Interview

You’ve always approached instruments almost like collaborators rather than
tools, from building your own drum machines and synths to modifying guitars in
unconventional ways. When you were creating ‘Into The Sky’, did any of your
homemade instruments unexpectedly steer a song in a direction you never would
have reached on a conventional setup?

Yes, absolutely. The machine that produces all the drum sounds on this album I actually
thought was a bit of a failure for a few years, because most of it is made for producing
these weird bell-like sounds and blips, it barely even has a convincing snare drum
sound, but the bass drum is alright with a bit of compression. So in order to fill in the
rhythm just to get the feel of the song started, you’d have to dial through these
frequencies and figure out how these bleeps are going to make a rhythm in place of a
normal set of drum sounds. With all the equipment I used for this record, I didn’t have to think about how they were going to build a certain atmosphere. I’d usually be happy with it or throw it away within a few minutes and had a lot of songs to try on only a handful of instruments.

You’ve said this is the first LA Priest album you intentionally made for people to
dance to. Dance music often aims for repetition, while your songwriting has
traditionally thrived on surprise. How did you balance writing grooves that pull
people onto the dancefloor without sacrificing the unpredictability that’s become
part of your musical identity?

I didn’t really think I would get much surprise in this record, it was actually more of a
challenge to try and make something good that I can stick to and keep rolling. Maybe
unpredictability has even been a bit of a crutch in the past. But I think luckily some of
the ideas that I combined such as the ‘Sailor’ / ‘Shakin’’ / ‘Into the sky’ sections of the
record had rewarding transitions that feel somehow uncommon. I think I have a pretty
bad intolerance to what I would consider cliche, which is going to be different to what
everyone else thinks is a cliche, so I’m not going to avoid everything of course. But the
first things that I tend to steer away from are build-up, breakdown, producer-types of
formulas, so making danceable music for me is more of a 70’s type of thing where the
songwriting carries the energy more than the production. That means you can make it
feel like it’s changing gears with just a chord change and it avoids a lot of boring
technical trickery.

Fans still hold Late of the Pier‘s ‘Fantasy Black Channel’ in almost mythical
regard because it felt like a band that had no interest in following anyone else’s
rules. Looking back nearly two decades later, are there creative instincts from
those sessions that still shape the way you make LA Priest records, or do you
feel you’ve consciously had to unlearn parts of that younger version of yourself?

I think if I did any unlearning it was mostly done between then and the first LA Priest
record. If anything, I’ve been unlearning the unlearning so to speak. I probably steered
pretty heavily away from anything too rave or techno-sounding and I suppose I allowed
that to appear again a bit on this record. The music I used to do before Late of the Pier
was also very plastic-sounding, electronic and simple a lot of it, so I tried to stop thinking
of that as “beginner” music, and accepted the simplicity of it, mainly because I think the
opposite (over-production) is actually the real graveyard of songs.

One thread that seems to connect your work—from Inji through GENE, Fase
Luna, and now ‘Into The Sky’—is an obsession with finding humanity inside
machines. Has your relationship with technology changed over the years, or are
you still chasing the same feeling you were when you first started experimenting
with homemade electronics?

Well, I’m impressed by the same things as when I started, the recordings that still make
no sense where it feels like a voice, instrument or machine suddenly transcends,
escapes its boundaries, like witchcraft, becomes something else. That for me is the real
magic of recording, and I think it’s a bit rarer now because a lot of music is pre-programmed, so you hear well-planned things but not many musicians know how to put
themselves in an environment where the impossible will happen. I suppose if anything
I’m doubling down on that stuff because I see less and less of it and I’d like to carry it on
and see it come back. One thing I can share is that you have to get the sound hot and
cold – pass it around, it’s best if it starts life outside the computer, then goes through a
few processes before you record it. You don’t need expensive outboard, I wanted it for
years, now I’ve recorded four albums without it and all of the best sounds came from the most beaten-up-looking or the most badly homemade things that I have. If you want a really creative studio you could buy 40 things that are £50, 10 things that
are £200 and one thing that is £2,000.

You’ve collaborated with artists as diverse as Connan Mockasin, Boys Noize, and
Franz Ferdinand while maintaining such a distinctive musical voice. Is there an
artist—past or present—who you think would genuinely challenge the way you
write songs, someone you’ve always wanted to spend a week in the studio with
simply to see what would happen?

I haven’t collabed with Franz Ferdinand btw, that was the other Sam from Late of the
Pier. I haven’t actually done that many collaborations, maybe an average of 1 every couple of years, I think I’m always in one of two states, either I’m waiting for an idea to take shape
or it’s arrived and I’m recording it. The only way I can work with other musicians is if
they can switch between those situations quickly and erratically.

The other thing is that the musicians that really amaze me probably don’t want to repeat
what they’ve done, it’s really a roll of the dice. It would be better to be at that moment
where the other musician is at their best for the first time maybe. The most talented
people I’ve worked with in the last couple of years we’ve just ended up hanging out
more than recording much and I think that’s ok because I think it actually gives us all
drive and energy to put into our own ideas. Good drummers are always very important, ones that sometimes without being too busy, make you re-think the song, not just reinforce what you’re already doing.

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