INTERVIEW: THE HUMAN FLY
New York’s The Human Fly have come a long way from the sparse lo-fi folk of their first record, everything feels bad all at once (2012) and their haunting alt-Americana sophomore release, Gruesome (2017). Their latest project, an ambitious series of four EPs called Indy500, showcases their evolution as a band in terms of sound, influence and membership. The new sound features bright guitars, a heightened sense of lyricism, and a wide range of audio samples dispersed throughout the songs. The first part of the series comes out this Friday, February 21st with the next installments set for release throughout the course of 2020. We talked to The Human Fly’s bandleader, Robert Mathis, about the EP’s new explorative sound, the evolution of the band, and the family connections that inspired the songwriting of Indy500.
hope: Compared to your earlier work, this record has a much brighter sound. In terms of songwriting as well as production, how would you describe your sound evolving? What kind of samples did you look for/how did you come upon the ones used?
Robert: I’d chalk any evolving up to the natural process of time — time spent listening to more types of music, time spent learning how to use new technologies and equipment, and so on. Andi, who did all the production for this first installment of Indy500, has come a significant way from when we did Gruesome (our previous record); she’s got a whole studio setup now in Philly that we operate out of, as opposed to squeezing takes in between toilets flushing in her parents’ basement. I also learned a lot more about analog and FM synths, which had a pretty big influence on how we wanted to shape the arrangements, and Jack got a TR-09, which is basically a 909 replica. Totally changed how we thought about and visualized percussion.
Songwriting-wise, I started writing Gruesome way before it was recorded, when I was getting way into stuff like Sparklehorse and Songs: Ohia. Both are still really dear to me, but I’ve made a way more deliberate effort into expanding the palette of what I listen to. I’ve learned a lot from listening to Moor Mother, Lushloss, and Fanny in particular — all of which are drastically different but have their own little pockets of influence on these tracks.
In terms of actual samples on this? It was all from watching and listening to old Indianapolis 500 telecasts. It was digging through hours and hours of footage, letting the substance of the songs drive any points of interest, then ripping those and re-processing them through Ableton. That’s how we were able to warp some of them and get some of the weird artifacting going on.
hope: The title is captivating, but has a totally different feel than the ones you gave to your previous two albums, Gruesome and everything feels bad all at once. What’s the connection to the Indy500, especially considering the sample we hear on “Interview1”?
Robert: It’s short for the Indianapolis 500, which in itself is usually stylized as the ‘Indy’, so if we were going to reference it, it felt way less cumbersome to just refer to it as that. My uncle recounts this on the interview on the EP, but my Grandpa was a volunteer race officiator for the 500, so the family started attending every year. As people started having kids and moving away, it became a focal point for a family reunion, which is a huge undertaking — on that side of the family I have five sets of uncles and aunts, almost all of whom have families, some of whom are now having their own families. At its peak, we’ve got 50 people in one house. Much of the weekend revolves around attending the race itself the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend when this all takes place. I remember my cousin once talking about how he felt the race itself was so emblematic of the family in so many ways. It all sort of naturally spilled out after that — it really was this rare “aha, that’s it!” moment. I was trying to write songs about family and hearing that ended up shaping the whole narrative around them.
hope: What was your writing process like compared to previous records? How much has it changed since 2012?
Robert: I sit with things a lot more nowadays. When I started doing The Human Fly, the whole idea was unencumbered songwriting, sitting down and letting it flow naturally when it felt right. Nowadays I’ll be pulling from riffs and demos that are years and years old, re-writing songs, experimenting with different keys and tempos to evoke different moods. Having an audio workstation like Ableton or Reaper in front of me is huge, because I can arrange around songs and shape parts as I’m writing them. When we did Gruesome, part of why that record took forever was because we started with the basic acoustic guitar parts and then just fleshed them out as we went, which culminated in a lot of ill-spent time. Now we’ll be able to walk in with a fully realized vision of a song, which has made us work so much more efficiently. I’m also way less solitary about writing parts — I’ll send demos to Andi and the other musicians, they’ll put their own spins on it. Some of my favorite ideas were total surprises the first time I heard the finished recordings; Jack does these quick little bass riffs on “Mymy” that I didn’t even know about and they’re some of my favorite moments on this batch of songs.
hope: Like a lot of artists today, your project was born out of humble lo-fi/bedroom pop beginnings. How would you describe what it’s like to evolve out of it?
Robert: Liberating. I recorded the first record on an old laptop and worked with what I had. It still amazes me, sometimes I’ll get a message from someone thanking me for that first record and I’m like, that’s great, but hey! We can do so much more now! I guess it makes me think about how it’s not about the resources but the substance of it. I’m naturally curious, so I like to explore new musical ideas and learn how to do new things or operate new instruments. I think if I had done the same thing over and over again with The Human Fly, I wouldn’t have been compelled to keep the project as long as we have.
hope: What has it been like to expand in terms of number of band members? How has this evolved in live recordings over time? Has this influenced songwriting at all?
Robert: It’s funny, we’re actually still not at the place where the band will workshop songs before we bring it to the studio — it’s the opposite. We did do some songs for the upcoming EPs where drums, bass, and acoustic guitar all recorded together, but it’s still logistically impossible for six people to play the songs in one go in a room. I do still enjoy the concept of working backwards, figuring out how to take what we achieved in tracking and translate it to a live setting — I think we’ve been really successful at doing this for the songs on Part 1. But I’ve definitely been writing for a live band, it’s been so helpful to have a solid notion of what the instrumentation will be when we try to tackle these songs in a live setting. There are absolutely songs in the pipeline that I wrote with that in mind.
hope: What have you been listening to lately? And what inspired Indy500?
Robert: Lately I’m into a lot of the music my friend Ross plays during our Dungeons and Dragons sessions — there’s this compilation of Japanese ambient music called Kankyo Ongaku that Light in the Attic released that’s been on repeat for me. Citrus City Records just did this release by Pedazo De Carne Con Ojo called ‘¿Pero Like Cómo E'tá?’ that’s so cool to me — it’s largely sample based, and I’m always trying to learn more about how other artists play with it. I love the band Soul Glo, too — great, great hardcore out of Philly. Their drummer played on Gruesome!
I’d say Asking/Bearing by Lushloss in particular was a massive influence on Indy500; it’s this gorgeous record of sparse, experimental indie-pop interspersed with interviews from the artist’s mother. That gave me the idea of using samples and interviews throughout these EPs. I hope it’s ok that I liked it enough to want to do it? Let’s see — I could talk about tons of artists that influenced this thing. Tasha, Ther, Low, 700 Bliss, McKinley Dixon, Pentangle, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Fleetwood Mac, and so on.
hope: What has been your main source of inspiration? Is there a story that connects the whole series?
Robert: Gosh, the main source of inspiration is a tough one. Definitely that Lushloss record. I saw Melissa Lozada-Oliva do a poetry reading when opening for Palehound and immediately got her book Peluda, all her narratives about family really got me thinking about my own family. I guess the story that connects all of this is me, a New England Jew, trying to find peace and connection with a very proud family I’m related to but can’t always relate to. It’s about the families that we don’t choose and how complicated that can all be. I love them dearly, but there’s a lot in there that I don’t totally understand. I’m also named after the patriarch of this family, who passed away before I was born, and how I’m constantly trying to grapple with his legacy while seeking comfort in foraging my own path. I hope this sort of push-and-pull is something relatable to other folks; non-chosen families are such an odd thing. We can have nothing in common with them on a day-to-day level, but they also can ultimately decide things like our mental health, our strengths, and our circumstances before we’re even born.
hope: What inspired you to release a 4-part EP? Will the scenes you describe on songs like “FWD: Devotion” be fleshed out more on the rest of the project?
Robert: Oh, yeah. It was originally supposed to be one long record that we release gradually, but the distributors wouldn’t let us do that, so we figured we’d just do four EPs — four “parts” — of a larger whole. Makes it way easier to digest all of it. It’s a lot harder to get people to listen to an entire album nowadays, which is such a bummer because I love digesting music that way, but we’re also willing to meet people where they’re at. The rest of the EPs will be full of scenes like the one in “FWD: Devotion” — it’s all built on anecdotes about the family that help paint the larger whole. There’s a song about my cousin’s finger getting partially cut off (shout out to the super-talented Jake Mathis, who is killing it in LA studying to be a dancer), there’s a song about what it’s like to actually go to the Indianapolis 500 and the culture shock that’s involved.
The Human Fly play at The Monkey House in Winooski, VT with LEAN TEE and A Box Of Stars this Wednesday, February 19th — more info on the show here. Indy500 is out this Friday, February 21st, but the fine folks over at Atwood are streaming it in full right now — listen here.
THIS ARTICLE WAS GRACIOUSLY CONTRIBUTED BY:
Liam Creaser is a senior at the University of Vermont who writes and edits for their alternative newsmag The Water Tower. Follow him on Twitter @liam_creaser.