Tanlines

April 29th, 2010

In the traditional sense of the word, Tanlines – the musical duo that is Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm – is not exactly a band. They certainly do make music: Emm is a veteran guitarist, formerly for the bands Storm & Stress and Don Caballero; Cohen was raised on the drums and keyboard (most recently playing for the band Professor Murder); and Tanlines’ debut EP, Settings (True Panther), thumps with electrifyingly diverse instrumentation – bongos and steel drums convene with airy guitars, hooky synth riffs, and thumping bass lines to create a sort of tropical disco dance party. But Cohen and Emm barely play any actual instruments on the album. Like a growing number of young experimental DIY pop musicians, they translate their musical ideas from their brains straight to their super high-tech computers. “For us, the writing and the recording process are the same,” says Emm. “I think the evolution of our band is kind of the opposite of the historical evolution of a band. With a band, you start out writing music in a practice space and then go to a studio. We go to the studio first.

If Tanlines’ evolution as a musical group seems out of order, it may be due to the lack of premeditation behind their decision to form a band. “We were friends,” says Cohen, who met Emm at their now-shared studio while recording with Professor Murder. (Emm is also a part of the production team Brothers, responsible for the likes of !!!, Free Blood, and Telepathe.) “Professor Murder wasn’t doing much at the time, and Eric didn’t really have his own project going on either,” says Cohen. “So I would hang out with him at the studio. Tanlines grew pretty organically out of that friendship. We sort of spontaneously began working on music together. It wasn’t as much a band as it was a way to use the studio creatively.”

In fact, it wasn’t until Tanlines was asked to contribute a song to a collaborative art project that the duo even contemplated making an original composition. “At first, we just wanted to do remixes and produce songs,” says Cohen. “That was all we thought we could do. But an artist we knew was releasing a book of poetry, and she asked some different musicians to do music based on the poems.” The response to their contribution was positive, and the song, “New Flowers,” ended up being Tanlines’ first single. “It just sort of clicked that we could make music ourselves,” says Emm. “It was fulfilling in a different way than what we’d been doing previously – and so, very quickly the direction of the project shifted to becoming more like a band.”

Since then, the duo has steadily put out original tracks, including the dancey, bongo-heavy, Calypso-informed “Bejan,” included in 2009’s seventh annual Kitsuné Maison Compilation – a crucial cred-building milestone for up-and-coming musicians. True to their history, however, Cohen and Emm are still working out the details involved in being in an actual band. “It was hard to make the transition to playing live,” says Emm. “We had to figure out how to do all of the things in a live situation that humans just can’t do.” Not to mention the fact that neither artist had previous experience developing vocal parts. “Writing lyrics is something I haven’t done before,” continues Emm. “It’s a challenge. It’s like I’ve been learning how to play this new instrument.”

Tanlines – Reinfo

But at the core of the Tanlines project – be it a “band,” or a “production duo,” or whatever other name you deem appropriate – is the desire to make interesting and experimental music you can move to. “As a small child I was more known for dancing rather than playing music,” says Cohen. “Part of what we do in this project is reflect on different kinds of rhythm-based music.” And while the growing demand for new music from Tanlines will inevitably push them to put out a full-length, Cohen and Emm plan to continue working at an organic pace. “I like the idea that we could produce music in a way that it reflects the way that we consume it,” says Cohen.

Words Lucy Madison Images ioulex