The psych noise and big beats of Lemonade are as organic in roots as the name may imply. Hailing from the Bay Area where “self” is more than just a four letter word and lifestyles drink from the same dub and laid back samba beat waters the band relies on, this trio of schoolyard friends have suddenly become the buzz of improvised indie. Their brand of trippy hooks encapsulates elements from North African rai to breakbeat in order to create their uniquely and fantasy driven sound.

Recently before taking the stage at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, the experimental dance trio Lemonade sat down with Pensatos and talked about their roots, the making of their self-titled debut album and their recent relocation from San Francisco to Brooklyn.

Pensatos: Tell me how you all met each other and how Lemonade started.
Alex Pastermak (percussion): Callan and I grew up together. So we’ve known each other since he was in sixth grade and I was in fifth grade. Junior high was kind of the first place that all the folks from our area -

Pensatos: The San Francisco area?
AP: Right, on the coast. We grew up outside of San Francisco, about half an hour. I grew up south of Half Moon Bay and he grew up just North of it.
Ben Steidel (bass): And I met these guys through hardcore. [laughter]

“We want to be prolific.“

Pensatos: Never underestimate the social networking power of hardcore.
BS: Yeah. We all at one time or another played in hardcore bands, so I knew them from the Bay area.
AP: You played in a Half Moon Bay band.
BS: Yeah, I was in a long running number of Half Moon Bay hardcore bands. So that was how we knew each other. And I guess some point three years ago I had come off a really long, hardcore tour and Alex was talking about playing music, and I was saying how I was looking to do some other stuff. The story goes that they [Callan and Alex] got asked to play a show.
AP: My friend from work asked if we had a band to play at a show with them, and I said “Yeah!” because Callan and I had been talking about the idea for Lemonade - we had the name and everything. [laughter] We were already thinking about what we wanted to sound like… So I said, “Yeah, we have a band, for sure.” We went out and told everybody about what our sound was like and stuff - and we hadn’t played yet. And this was like two weeks before the show.
Callan Clendenin (vocals): We hadn’t written anything yet.
AP: We couldn’t find a drummer so I played drums and asked Ben to play bass.
CC: So we got back from traveling, and the show was like two weeks later. We called Ben and practiced like four or five times and played the show. And then we just kept playing steadily the next month and the next month…

Pensatos: Bands have started with less preparation…
CC: Yeah it was really organic. We’d get a new idea for a song and then we’d sort of learn it. and then the next time we practice it would be the next practice before the show. So we’d be basically learning it while playing it live.

Pensatos: So it would always feel really loose on stage?
CC: Yeah, it was mostly improvised back then.

Pensatos: How much of that is in what you’re doing now?
BS: Not… much. I mean our songs are pretty strict, structure wise now. When we started out we were playing with the same basic equipment setup only instead of having a lot sequenced tracks, [Alex] was operating a drum machine manually and playing and trying to hit buttons. And eventually, we outgrew that conceptually, as far as having idea for songs and not being able to perform them like that.
CC: We outgrew that pretty fast actually.
BS: The songs are much… we sit down and we write beats…
AP: Now if we play and it’s six minutes 20 seconds, then its going to be six minutes 20 seconds, but within that form…
BS: Yeah, we still have time for [improvising].
AP: A lot of that came out of a lot of us being into noisy experimental music too. It’s something that I think we have a little bit more time to think about our music, I think we’ll swing back into that direction. I’d like to be able to do more improvisation … It’s going to be a matter of retaining the complexity of arrangements we’ve got now. I mean, it’s hard having electronics. You know, how much do you want to be playing to a track and how much can you pull off live. And as the technology changes it’s going to be easier to do that.

“San Francisco is like ‘Hey you want to work on something? Eh… maybe let’s go outside. It’s such a beautiful day let’s go smoke a joint or drink a beer in the park.’ It’s so casual… I love that we grew up there.“

Pensatos: So is most of the record is more structured than improvised?
AP: Yeah, the oldest song on the record [”Nasifon”] is the first that we sequenced out. It doesn’t really have any of our older style stuff on it… But this record marked the transition in programs we were using. We were using ProTools to chop it up. And even recording it was kind of weird because we realized it wasn’t quantized right, so it was synching up really sloppily.
CC: Yeah, it was really trial and error.
AP: And that’s kind of how it’s been with this band, learning how to do a whole bunch of stuff. I’ve never been the drummer in a band before. None of us have had much experience doing electronic music before.
CC: We learned how to make electronic music after we started the band.

Pensatos: Speaking of which, for most bands, the remix album comes after a few months or a year after its release. But you guy have a remix album [REMIXTAPE] right out there too. How did that come together?
AP: Well the album’s been done for a year… [Laughter]
CC: Yeah, that’s how it happens, just the fact that album has been done for so long. It actually took way longer to come out than we had imagined. So we weren’t going to sit on the remixes. Besides, it’s kind of fun to just blast people with a lot of material at once.
BS: It’s a lot more about how things have come together outside of music for us. We recorded the album over a year ago and then, because of the nature of how we did it and where we did it and everything, it took a long time to finish the mixing and mastering and actually getting it out. So in the meantime, we had from the get-go wanted to do remixes.
CC: Usually a remix CD is a collection of remixes for the singles and we don’t do any singles. It’s just the album and a lot of it ended up online anyway.
AP: Before we even knew what label was going to put out our first release, we had already taken the tracks, separated them and sent them out to all our friends and said “Hey, who wants to do remixes?” So by the time [the album] was released … we already had three or four remixes done.

Pensatos: And remixes kind of legitimize things too. Like if you’ve been remixed it’s kind of like [an impressed sounding] “Oh… wow.” So it’s almost like you guys jumped the gun. The record came out and somebody does the remix album already, it’s like “Wow, that was fast.”
BS: It’s kind of like the nature of how things have been, especially with dance music and dance music with indie roots, it seems like that’s what you do now.

Pensatos: It’s part of the process.
BS: Yeah.
CC: It’s like a lot of electronic artists put out a few mix tapes a year and then one actual album…
BS: That’s more of the direction we were taking. And we just wanted to hear it.

“[Remixes are] kind of like the nature of how things have been, especially with dance music and dance music with indie roots, it seems like that’s what you do now.“

Pensatos: I would imagine that in the long time in between recording and getting it out, you wouldn’t want to get bored with the material.
AP: Also keep in mind the this REMIXTAPE is basically a burned CD-R that we’re selling at our shows. I mean if somebody wants to release it in the next few months, then we’ll do it. I just think the press got a hold of it. So even though we have like 50 copies…
BS: I think at some point we’ll just put it out digitally. We didn’t pay anybody to do it. It’s just our friends. And I want people to hear it because I want people to hear Ghosts on Tape. He’s awesome. I want people to hear Lazer Sword. They’re friends of ours but they’re also artists that we’re super into. If that helps get their music out, that’s just as awesome.

Pensatos: So you’ve recently moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn. What was imperative to move from one coast to the other?
CC: It sounded like a lot of fun.
AP: We’re all from the Bay area…
CC: We’ve been there forever.

Pensatos: You just needed a change of scenery?
CC: It just sounded like a lot of fun. Every time we went to New York, we met a lot of people. That’s where we recorded and that’s where our label is based. So it made sense for some reasons like that but it was also like… we’ve been in the San Francisco area for years and we’re not going to stay just because we’re in a band.

Pensatos: It’s not like you consider yourself a “San Francisco” band, tied to that area and that scene?
CC: No, we definitely have a scene and a community. We haven’t forsaken it, we’re just living in a different city now. The sort of energy we got out of those parties was really great but we’re definitely willing to do something different.
AP: Plus we’re doing Europe now. No one has ever invited us to play Shanghai or Japan. [laughter] … You just have to think about if you’re based in San Francisco, you think of the immediate places you could go nearby to play. So when the next few cities that would invite to us play, you have Portland which is ten-and-a-half hours north or L.A. which is seven hours south, it’s like, “let’s see, if we were living in New York we could go play Philly in what, two hours?”
CC: I don’t know, I feel like we’ll do New York and if we love it we’ll stay around and if we don’t maybe we’ll move somewhere else.

Pensatos: What are some other big differences?
AP: It’s cold.

“We’d get a new idea for a song and then we’d sort of learn it. and then the next time we practice it would be the next practice before the show. So we’d be basically learning it while playing it live.“

Pensatos: Well… yeah. [laughter]
CC: There’s a very different energy. San Franciscans do what they do and they don’t really care what anyone else. New Yorkers are more self-aware of what they do because of the press that follows them around. So what you do there is more readily in the spotlight, and to more people it’s more relevant because there’s more stuff going on and it’s the center of everything. San Franciscans just do their own thing and they do it at their own pace. So the energy in New York is different because people produce things a lot faster because there’s more pressure.
AP: Or especially because of the cold you do more work… San Francisco is like “Hey you want to work on something?” “Eh… maybe let’s go outside. It’s such a beautiful day let’s go smoke a joint or drink a beer in the park.” [laughter] It’s so casual… I love that we grew up there.
CC: Yeah, we all love that.
BS: I think we’re all welcoming a little more pressure in being surrounded by a bigger community of really ambitious people. We want to work and be prolific and tour and make music.
CC: And there’s all this different stuff to do. I think that’s what it comes down to for me, I just wanted to do different things. I don’t think New York’s better than San Francisco. It’s different. And I like that.

Pensatos: How do think this tour El Guincho will go?
CC: I’m forecasting good things.
AP: I’m forecasting more terrifying drives in the snow. [laughter]

Pensatos: How was that drive from New York to Chicago?
AP: That was hard.
BS: None of us have done much driving in snow.
AP: Especially right before here. Right before Chicago…
BS: We just had a patch of icy roads and then there was a car flipped over.
AP: It was right after that my mom calls too. She goes, “Honey I’m really nervous… you don’t know the snow you’ve never driven in it. I heard there’s snowstorms…. I don’t think you should do it.” [laughter]

Pensatos: “…but we already have a gig.”
BS: “We’re going to drive slow. We’re not even going to pretend…”

+ video: Lemonade ‘Benzbounce’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbIlmdDT1wY