Pit Happens
Patrick Freyne asks Michael Angelakos what a nice indie boy like him is doing in a banging 1980s club night of a band like Passion Pit.
Patrick Freyne, 23 Jun 2009
“It’s just a kind of freak thing that came about really,” says Michael Angelakos in a barely-awake drawl. He’s explaining the origins of the first Passion Pit EP (joyous electro pop wrapped around a strangulated emotional core). “I started writing electronic music because it was simple; you can formulate songs mathematically and visually – putting them together and arranging them on computer. So I started writing in that vein and the next thing you know there was a compilation of songs I’d written all about her.”
“Her” is the girl he famously presented these songs to as a Valentine’s gift (they’re no longer together, but are still good friends), and there, as an extravagant romantic gesture, the matter would have rested, if Angelakos hadn’t taken to the stage with a microphone and backing tape and caught the ears of keyboard-player Ian Hultquist.
“So I did a show in my school [Emerson College in Boston],” he says. “It was like karaoke. I brought in my laptop, set it up, played the songs and sang over them. It was terrible. To be honest that’s where I would have left it, if Ian hadn’t asked if I was interested in fleshing it out and making more of a project out of it. You see, usually I have this issue with starting bands, writing material and then scrapping them after one show.”
By the sounds of it, prior to the first Passion Pit EP his quitter’s mentality was no great loss.
“I was just playing indie rock music before then really. It was very depressing, slow-core kind of stuff. By the time I’d hit on the Passion Pit songs I was depressed and didn’t really know what else I wanted to write. I was scoring a lot of films, as well.” He pauses to think. “I wasn’t really focused, I guess.”
But something clicked when Angelakos discovered synthesisers, samplers and an affinity for pop music.
“I actually don’t really listen to a lot of electro pop,” he admits. “In fact the last time I listened to the Human League was about a year and a half ago. But I really like Kate Bush, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel and people like that, forward-minded pop makers. Something about those people has always stuck with me. There’s a reason people are going back to get inspiration from that specific era of music. You see, people do want pop music but they want that pop music to be done in a more interesting fashion. There was a long lull there which yielded predictable and catchy pop music but it didn’t yield anything very interesting or lush or beautiful or complex or smart. Steve Reich [minimalist, often electronic, New York-based composer] is also a huge, huge influence. I want to make pop music, but I still want to maintain the more experimental side of it. It’s just that I also reach a large group of people. People aren’t self-conscious anymore about liking something that’s outright pop. And pop music can be as smart as any obscure indie band.”
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