Q&A – Kiki Pau

Last week indie sensation Kiki Pau treat us with the first single off their sophomore album White Mountain. An Old Song, feature in this month’s MAP, got some serious “netplay”, being listed in Elbows and The Hype Machine. You don’t have to wait much for listening the rest of the album as it is due this week. We met 3/4 of the band to introduce the band and talk about the new album. 

What is Kiki Pau?

Henrik Domingo (vocals, guitar): We do this for fun… I guess. We started in summer 2006 and now it feels like this is a project that can develop into new areas and keep going. With this second record we realized that we can do pretty much whatever we want to do musically.

Is Kiki Pau now the type of band you envisioned it would be?

Henrik: Probably, yes. For me, at least it was the result off years of waiting to be in a band that would work well.

Pauli Saarikivi (guitar): I don’t think we were very ambitious in the beginning. We just wanted to play some easy punk rock and meet girls, but perhaps now we have reached a higher level.

Olli Juvonen (drums): The band worked because this was the project we all wanted to concentrate in. We thought we would put all our effort on it and see what would happen.

Are you a big British-influenced band as reviewers usually say?

Henrik: Not really. I don’t think we ever considered us a British-influenced band and the bands we have been digging lately are actually 80’s indie bands from America. What happens is that the whole indie genre in Finland is very small and people just associated it with British music. Radio stations don’t play much indie music and when they do, they usually play some British bands.

Pauli: Yes, our main influences come from America. Maybe they are just Big Star and The Grateful Dead.

Henrik: Actually our favourite bands tend to change on a weekly basics. We get excited about something for a while and then we find something else. The sound of the band evolves itself. Songs just come and we arrange them together, but there’s not really a plan beforehand.

How different is this second album?

Pauli: On the first album, we wanted to make some dreamy pop songs and record a very short album, not much more than half hour. This new album brings many new sounds.

Henrik: We joked that we were going to have a prog-rock, which it isn’t, but we have longer and more developed songs.

How was the recording?

Henki: The album is pretty much a live album. The basic tracks are done live, with just a few overdubs here and there. We had everything setup in one room, so we always recorded two guitars, bass and drums.

Pauli: We did the basic tracks in two weekends.

Olli: After that it was two or three weeks for the vocals and overdubs.

Henrik: It was an efficient and quick recorded. We worked long days and we had everything planned in advance, we did not want to start looking for sounds while recording or mixing, with digital effects in Pro Tools.

The album seems to evolve around the theme of the mountain.

Henrik: I wrote White Mountain, the song, first and then it seemed to merge together with the two songs that follow that one: Divider and Quite Mountain. Somehow those three songs became the centerpiece of the album in my head. That’s why the album was also called White Mountain but I’m not sure if there’s a theme. It can be interpreted in many different ways and we prefer to keep that open for the audience. I don’t what to talk much about it because there’s not a single answer.