Welcome to In Conversation, our interview column where we pick the brains of artists on the cutting edge of music. Dobbin caught up with DIY legends Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga of Have A Nice Life at Outbreak Manchester – just after the first ever live show from the project in the UK. We discussed how they finally got here, the newfound interest in their music, and their ‘contemporaries’, as defined by 4chan all those years ago. Photography by Konstancja Szwed from their set at Outbreak London.
Dobbin: Welcome to the UK! We’re speaking just before your set at Outbreak Manchester – how was your Outbreak London set yesterday?
Dan: It was great! A bit of a whirlwind, it was about 1000 degrees in there. I remember walking on stage and walking off stage. I knocked a bunch of lights off the stage, so it was a little shaky for us, but the crowd was amazing, everyone was super nice. That was a bucket list thing for me. We’re beyond pumped and so excited to be here.
Dobbin: Someone put the set-list online seconds after the show. Is that a fixed list for the whole tour?
Tim: That was a forty five minute set. We have sixty for today, in Dublin we have an hour and a half, and two shows. There are variations on all of those – for Dublin, we are looking at doing two as different as possible, maybe with some time to freshen things up at soundcheck.
Dan: We just play all the same songs slower, so it lasts longer. Trem-picking until the maintenance people come to clear us out!
Dobbin: This is your first time over in the UK, how did it work out to be this year that it fell into place?
Dan: A couple years ago I realised that I really wanted to play the UK. Big props to Jonathan Tuiute at The Flenser, who basically realised that we don’t have any real world skills, so he set this up for us. Him and Marika Zorzi, our tour manager, basically worked with the booking agents. I’m beyond thankful that it actually happened.
Tim: We generally have a list of rules – this is how much time we can theoretically spend out on the road, given families, careers, and so on. We like to pick out some essential places and avoid repeats.
Dobbin: Any specific reason why Outbreak was selected?
Tim: Chat Pile did Outbreak last year as they’ve been blowing up in the UK, brilliant dudes, so that was the quickest connection through The Flenser.
Dobbin: I got into Have A Nice Life when I was 17, back in 2011. I absolutely love that more and more people are coming to the band and discovering them. I’m that guy who checks if people know Have A Nice Life – not even as a recommendation, more like, “let me see where you are”…
Tim: I’ve had students ask me to sign things at school. That’s sobering, and something that I’m trying to be constructive and transparent about – yes, this is my artistic life – it’s a signal that a fanbase is regenerating when a kid comes in after English class and says “sign my copy of The Unnatural World”.
Dobbin: There seems to be a particular interest in “A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut”. That’s bemusing to me – that’s bottom twenty songs of yours that should go viral.
Dan: Why do you think so, Tim?
Tim: Number one, on TikTok, it’s the first ten seconds that gets handed to you, where the synths and guitars creep in. It’s become some sort of magical comment on the disappointing nature of reality. Of course, we made the troll-ish decision to make it the eight minute ambient instrumental the first track of double CD set… Number two, when we were tracking it and I brought it to you, as far as we thought about it, we were thinking, you know what it should feel like? The save state in a Final Fantasy, or Silent Hill video game. That was the only real thought. Audience ownership on the internet has pushed it into interesting places.
Dobbin: When I was seventeen, one of the main ways that people shared music was via that 4chan board, /mu/. Your first album is one of the legedary albums from that time. I wanted to bring up this old chart which influenced my tastes a lot at the time – the “/mu/” core chart – and ask you, what do you think about your ‘contemporaries’?
Tim: Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven was formative for me, as well as Weezer’s Pinkerton. Captain Beefheart joined a little later in life.
Dan: I’ve never heard Captain Beefheart.
Tim: …I don’t think it’s for you. No disrespect… I’m saying that as if it was food.
Dan: The top four are all big albums for me (Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, and Radiohead’s OK Computer and Kid A). I didn’t like Animal Collective, and I’ve never heard King Crimson. Kanye West is not really my thing. Burial’s Untrue…
Tim: Yes, high five on that one. Kills.
Dan: I listened to that one recently. Talk about a record that actually feels absolutely timeless! It could come out today. I read an article about how it was edited by hand, not quantised, so it has this lurching feel. Pinkerton I loved; Arcade Fire’s Funeral I liked, but didn’t love.
Tim: Obviously, Loveless, we can be open about trying to rip that off in our own amateur way, but it became our own thing.
Dan: We were just listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor in the van. The first fiveteen minutes of Lift… are just so intense, it’s awesome. It’s weird, with lists like this – anything like this list becomes such an “online” thing, and you then have to deal with the meta-discourse around it. Still, the ones I’ve heard are all awesome.
Tim: Antler’s Hospice isn’t something that I came to myself, but one of my students brought it to me. With artists like Godspeed You! Black Emperor I’m often saying “you need to listen to this, young one”, but this went the other way, and I get it. It’s great, it’s so raw.
Dan: I love Hospice, not a record I listen to very much, but some records are like that. It’s excellent.
Dobbin: Outbreak is tapping into this somewhat, especially with the more eclectic artists they are booking – they booked Death Grips some years ago, for example. I also love that this isn’t an algorithmic list, which is really precious in the current era.
Dan: Right, it’s a different kind of thing, like your big brother or sister recommending something. If there are records that are online a lot, you know them more by their album cover than anything else.
Tim: The power of the thumbnail, that Death of Marat crop choice…
Dan: You know what I’ve noticed? Look at the shape of Deathconciousness and Pinkerton. It’s almost exact… Kid A almost has it, and OK Computer almost has it too. There’s a spatial analysis thing…
Tim: We should order a study on this.
Dobbin: You as people will have changed a lot over the years. A lot of what you’re playing is now ‘old material’. How often are you looking back and saying “what the hell were we thinking?”, and how often is it “oh wow, we were on the money.”
Dan: I almost never think “oh wow, we were on the money!” What I often feel is a lot of compassion for the version of myself that made the music. A lot of the songs are very emotional, but it’s not so much that I’m re-living the emotion that I had at the time. It’s more of a connection to, and compassion for that person.
Tim: You gave us a similar explanation when we were doing the Giles Corey sets. You aren’t expressing that ‘I’m going to do it, literally, now, but I was going to do it, and I’m channelling empathy for the person that was going to do it’. That album was your trip, and for those of us that were helping to arrange and back those songs, that was our mission. This is how you get into the mindset to execute someone’s deep, raw feelings – empathise rather than ask, ‘are you OK now, Dan?’
Dan: There is definitely something that happened when I’ve had kids, and particularly because our audience is younger. So it’s more like I see myself in the audience than I do in the music. My kids listen to Have A Nice Life, they’re into it, sometimes… It’s interesting to think about it through that lens. How would I react if they were feeling this way? So there’s still a lot of emotion in the music, but it changes as you develop as a person.
Tim: I’m not the storyteller in the band, but if you think of something like “A Quick One…”, you realise that this is an interesting feeling to be exploring through a shitty garage band setup, or my four track back then. When we were recording like that, it was as a matter of necessity, using the tools that we had. It’s very rewarding to now be better at guitar, and have a well rehearsed band band, to go back and access feelings that, theoretically, were behind those original recordings, in a cathartic, self-negating way. It improves upon the idea of what we had it sounding like in our heads at the time in 2006. So from a performance, instrumental and sonic perspective, the feelings are very rewarding – maybe even more now than it was before, where it was ‘I have no mouth, but I must scream’… I wanna play something cool, but I suck!
Dobbin: The production across all your material is a fascinating and magnetic part of it. Something I love is how the compression works, or doesn’t – a chord will come in, and everything else ducks away, and the beat comes back slowly. It’s interesting because we do see people leaning into that sound now, for example in metal or in hyperpop.
Tim: I didn’t know how compression worked.
Dan: I didn’t know what compression was!
Tim: Only now have I learned how to dial in a compression pedal at age 42. We were just piling shit on top of shits… Did we even pan the tracks, or is it just one centre mix mono? We had no earthly concept…
Dan: We always get questions from people asking “what should I get to start”, and I always say, whatever. The way you cope with your limitations is what makes you unique stylistically. All the things that people point out in our production, that we re-create now, are things that we created by accident. We started putting reverb on everything because the fan of my laptop was so loud in the background! And then you realise that you like that, and you end up leaning into it. If you don’t, and you just copy your heroes, you become derivative. We all do that.
Tim: For example, Tracey and her boyfriend’s disembodied voices in “There Is No Food” – we accidentally recorded Dan’s room-mates having a date in my kitchen. Later when we listened back, it sounded like ghosts, so we kept that in.
Dan: Those are the best times, when you have those limitations. If someone dropped a truck-full of money on us, the record we would make would suck balls. It would be terrible.
Dobbin: You’ve just done a set with Oldest Sea, we’re big fans. How did that go?
Dan: It went well! They’re incredible musicians. Sam Marandola, the songwriter and the singer, she’s amazing.
Tim: They’re multi-faceted – they’re doing doom metal sets, synth only sets, always re-interpreting their songs. I wish I had the bandwidth to do that.
Dan: She wrote songs for us, we collabed on a few and we performed it live, it went great. With a band like that, I just have to not fuck it up, I don’t have to be the main point, which is refreshing. Oldest Sea are incredible.
Have A Nice Life essentially sold out their entire tour, but you might be able to catch tickets for their sets at Fekete Zaj festival, OFF festival and in Berlin this summer.