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[melter] - Collective Coruscation Alan Rider asks the up and coming Chicago based electronic duo what it is to bare your soul for strangers every night?

[melter] - Collective Coruscation

Alan Rider asks the up and coming Chicago based electronic duo what it is to bare your soul for strangers every night?

by Alan Rider, Contributing Editor
first published: December, 2024

approximate reading time: minutes

I've always felt like I never had much to offer the world. If it wasn't for music and for creating, I don't think we'd be having this conversation. I don’t think I’d be here.

Sometimes there is just something about a band.  Call it a gut feeling if you will.  There are a lot of electronic two pieces out there, so what is so special about [melter]?  They spell their band name all in lower case inside square brackets. They have an EP out. They aren’t signed to any label. They’ve played a few gigs, many of them support slots. They both still have day jobs.  So far, so what?  But when I first heard ‘Blacklist’ I thought “this is pretty good” and follow up singles ‘Catwalk’ and their take on Gary Numan’s ‘Metal’ sounded equally special to me. However, when I played ‘Blacklist’ again, this time I decided to crank it up neighbour annoyingly loud and guess what?  It sounded bloody fantastic!  This is why we listen to music.  Not to mumble “its ok’, but to shout “this is brilliant!”.  When I finally got to talk to [melter], it was at an unsociable 8am in Chicago (a more civilized 2pm here) and they had just come back off tour, so singer Jax Allos was still snoozing and only just managed to join us in the closing minutes. No matter, drummer/synth player and main songwriter Rob Hyman was awake enough to see us through, so I thought I’d start by asking him about their over exploiting the tracks off their self-titled debut EP.

Outsideleft:  Your self-titled EP came out last year and you've released pretty much all of the tracks off it as singles. Wouldn't it have been better just to record a few more tracks and release it as your debut album, as that would have a longer shelf life?  
Rob: It was more of a strategic thing, where we had basically put the EP together, and then we started working with our PR agent Michel from UTM and he said “well, because it's already come out, there's not much I can do to promote it, because I need new stuff.” It was easier to do that by putting out tracks as singles. We are trying to figure out how to get stuff recorded in a more timely way in future, trying to find someone that can mix stuff for us to our satisfaction. So honestly, it was just more of an efficiency thing. Right now, we're shopping for labels, so that when we do the album, we've got somebody else to help us promote it and get it out there, as opposed to just doing it all ourselves.

Outsideleft: At the moment, you do seem to be very DIY, making videos and recording and mixing, setting up tours, and I guess it's hard work trying to cover all of those bases by yourselves. But then again, it gives you control. So, pros and cons, I guess?  Or is it all cons?
Rob: Retaining control is a factor, but it is more that we have to do it ourselves until we have some other people involved to help it along. We have worked with a few other people on videos and did the last couple ourselves, and we're actually working on a few new ones now. These things take months sometimes to put together. You lay the groundwork and get it rolling, so we are going to do it, whether somebody else is involved or not, but we would much rather work with other people, so that we have more people trying to promote us out there in the world. At the end of the day, there's only two of us in the band, and there's only so much we can do in a day.

Outsideleft:  In the video to ‘Blacklist’ I saw three of you?
Rob: Yes, true. Early on, we had a bass player but we stopped working with him about a year and a half ago, so it's just the two of us now.

Outsideleft: I’m really hoping that you both get on well, because, having been in a two piece band myself, I know that it can get a little bit claustrophobic sometimes unlike a band that's got more members in it, as you are always talking to the same person all the time and when you go out on the road together it's full on, 24/7.
Rob: Fortunately we do get along really well, which has been a strength.  The fact that we went down to two people from three actually made it better, because it was more efficient that way. We did a tour back in September with two other bands and there were four of us in a van for two weeks literally 24/7, but we all got along fine. Jax and I have done weekend tours like the one we just did this last weekend with Christian Death.  When we're out on the road together, it's like ‘Team [melter]!’ you know. But I know what you're saying. If it didn't work well, we would feel kind of isolated, but right now it's very much a strength for it to just be the two of us. The car we tour in is my car, and previously there wasn't room for three people and all the equipment. Now there's just two of us, we're in the front, all the gear is in the back, and it works! As we were saying, the flip side though is that there's only two of you to do all the things that need to get done. If we you had more members, or more people, we could ask “maybe you can make the videos while we're doing other stuff”. That sort of thing. We have got the driving side of it down to a science, but we’ve not done any 30 date tours yet. You know, with just the two of us, that might break us. That might really get to us after a while, but we'll try it first and see how it goes.

Outsideleft: There are real challenges in being a band trying to break through now, because nothing's new. Electronic music is not even that new, really. It's actually been going quite a long time. The synthesizer has been around for around 100 years now and electronic music is firmly part of the rock establishment, like it or not. So how do you do something that is different and can break that mould and twist out of that a little bit? I think it's become very difficult for new bands, because so much has gone before.
Rob: Certainly nowadays, there's so many more artists as with a laptop, you can do it all in your bedroom. Honestly, we just do what we do. Maybe that sounds like a cop out but this is the first band that I've been in where I have been a songwriter. I'm a drummer, and so bands I've been in before, I fulfilled that drummer role, I didn't arrange the song or come up with the chord structure or things of that nature. A lot of stuff now tends to start with me, and I put stuff together and then give it to Jax and she'll work on the vocals. Our process is definitely evolving. Jax writes songs like crazy. She comes from that world of being able to sit down at the piano and write. It’s a bit more of a laboured experience for me, because I'm not a “songwriter” in that sense.

Rob Melter

Jax has taken lessons here and there on things over the years, and she plays a ton of instruments, so she definitely has more technical schooling. I took drum lessons years ago, and I did take some music theory and whatnot, just enough to give me some idea of what I'm doing, but it's still a lot about just getting into the studio and experimenting, starting an idea and then fleshing it out from there. I honestly prefer that. I've worked with people that were very technically proficient, but creatively they never found anything they were happy with, always worrying about being in the right key.  I don't care.  If it sounds good, it is good. A lot of the music I like, they break the rules. That’s far more punk rock!. Some of the best keyboard lines are written with one finger.

Outsideleft: With any band, people always gravitate to the singer as the ‘spokesperson’ for the band.  With female singers, even more so.  That is very unfair on the rest of the band, even in a two piece.
Rob: We definitely try to make it more democratic. I'm even a little uneasy doing this interview without her!  Because she's the singer, she's seen as the front person. When I'm on stage, I look out at the audience, and most of the eyes are on her, you know, but that's just normal. That's kind of what that role is and she's aware of that, but she's very conscientious about bringing attention to me and making sure when somebody shoots live photos of the band, not making it all about her, but you don't always have control over that. If someone wants to spin it that way, then that's fine, but in the band we get the job done collectively, whatever needs to get done. Whether it's admin stuff, writing the songs, everything that goes into being in band, we're both involved. We play to our strengths.  Jax does a lot of graphics and video stuff. I'm not good at that, but if she's doing something, she'll show it to me and get my input. By the same token, I do all the legwork in the studio, but get her input.

Outsideleft: I wanted to ask Jax something about the lyrics to ‘Catwalk’, the suicide theme to that, so it’s a shame she overslept.
Rob: Honestly, until we put the promotional materials together for that, I didn't even know it was about suicide. Obviously, something like that is a very personal thing. she was actually a bit uneasy about saying it was about suicide, because she wrote the lyrics when she joined the band, and she was in, obviously, a bad place at that time. Getting into the band and making some changes in her life saved her life, in a way.

Outsideleft: The music industry as a whole tends to not support artists mentally. Quite the opposite. It benefits a lot financially from people having breakdowns, committing suicide, as that sells records and so they don't tend to really help people at all with that, because commercially it's good for them to have tortured artists. 
Rob: I've been in the industry for a few decades, so I know that is out there. I've known people that committed suicide, and other tragic things, etc. I guess maybe it happens in the music industry more than others, but it's all a part of life.  I think that the driving force behind all of it and why all of us continue to do it and create stuff and pour our hearts and into it is because maybe you heard a song when you were a kid and it helped you. So maybe you can pay that forward by helping someone else with your songs. It's a modern way of storytelling. There's other mediums, of course, but music is a way of communicating with people that maybe allows you to do things in a way that's more comfortable for them.

Outsideleft: Being in a band can almost be a therapeutic thing and a way of getting out stuff that's inside that you wouldn't feel comfortable talking about one-to-one, but you're happy to sing about in front of a whole load of strangers, and on releases, which seems counter intuitive to me. Why would you share things in public you can't say in private?
Rob: I think you're right, there is a therapeutic thing, and it's maybe strength in numbers.  If you were just standing on the corner, screaming about problems, it’s just you on your own. But if you're doing it within a band context, you've got people on stage with you. Its like you're not in this alone. You get some strength from people connecting with it, so it makes you feel less alone. But, yeah, it is a weird thing to say, I don't want to talk about it, but I'll write a song about it.

[Jax joins us, looking sleepy]

Outsideleft: I’m glad you made it, as we were just talking about the lyrics where you get some stuff out in public, but actually it's quite a private thing that you're talking about and you may not have discussed it with people close to you.
Jax: I just woke up, and I'm so sorry that I am late! [clinking sounds as she makes tea]. Um, it's very tough to make yourself vulnerable in that way, but it just kind of naturally happens. I don't know if it's because, as a kid, I couldn't express myself, and now I can. I don't know. I don't know how to explain it. it's easier to do it on a stage than it is to do it in person. interviews are hard for me because I am put on the spot. English isn't my first language, so I also have to translate stuff on the spot in my head.

Jax Melter

Outsideleft: You're trying to convey an emotion, anger or hate, or sorrow, or whatever it happens to be, but you are communicating that to a bunch of strangers in a place you might never have been to before. It's a very temporary kind of experience, doing gigs and playing live, but what you're doing every night is having to bare your soul, so how do you keep that kind of honesty and rawness going without harming yourself?
Jax: Wow, that's a very good question. I just get out there and do the thing. I don't really overthink it too much. I mean, there's other aspects that I overthink, like the production side of it, you know, getting up there and making sure that the microphone is working and I'm in the right place and I have enough room and it's safe to perform, but when it comes to the actual performance, it keeps me sane at the end of the day, it gets me out of bed. For some people that's how they keep their sanity.  I've always felt like I never had much to offer the world, right? But I guess I was just in denial for a long time. I put off doing music, seriously, for a very long time. If it wasn't for music and for creating, I don't think we'd be having this conversation. I don’t think I’d be here.

At that point we lost the connection. It happens. [melter] may have been around a few years but it feels very much like they are still finding their feet.  They certainly have something worth finding though and need a label to support them whilst they do that.  So, if there is anyone out there listening, now really is the time to step forward with an offer.


Essential Information: The self-titled EP ‘[melter]’ is available now on Bandcamp here

Alan Rider
Contributing Editor

Alan Rider is a Norfolk based writer and electronic musician from Coventry, who splits his time between excavating his own musical past and feeding his growing band of hedgehogs, usually ending up combining the two. Alan also performs in Dark Electronic act Senestra and manages the indie label Adventures in Reality.


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