The Murder Barn

As befits a band with a decidedly leftfield and unorthodox attitude, I meet up with Murder Barn’s leading lady Chesca Dolecka and fellow barn dweller Matt Jones amidst the literary surroundings of Gorki Coffee House in Stokey.

Looking cool in an understated boho-grunge-chic kind of way, the sympathetic artists reveal themselves to be talkative and refreshingly down to earth.

Music-News:
Your band is named after your local workspace in East London, called the Murder Barn. That’s a lot to live up to, no?

Chesca / Matt:
Well, haha, it’s not as sinister as it sounds. When we first got there, it was a shell and the place looked quite ominous. It was a bit of a bad joke. It looked like a concrete bunker with chains hanging from the ceilings. The kind of place where you can tie somebody up and leave them there for a few weeks. But it looks much more civilised now, it’s quite nice really!

MN:
Your double A-side single, which just got released, can be obtained on a ‘pay what you like’ basis… How do you intend on making a living, given such liberal attitude?

Chesca / Matt:
It’s just for the download. For that you can pay as much as you want. It’s the same as any other business. Primarily, we are musicians because we can’t be anything else, it’s not an option! Whether we get paid or not is irrelevant because we gonna do it anyway. We want to get the music to as many people as we possibly can. In the modern music business it’s very hard to make money out of music, unless you’re an established artist. So, as long as we can put money into making new recordings that get mastered in a top mastering studio that’s fine. That’s how we want to do it and it’s what we want to do. We don’t necessarily expect anyone who’s in our band to pay for that. You know, we want people to buy our music, but it’s not imperative to pay through the nose to get it. We also got vinyl that people can buy, and it’s not as if we’ll make a lot of money out of that. We want people to hear our music, that’s the main goal.

MN:
The video for your track ‘Harvest’ is about love and rituals – could be the pagan Lammas, could be the Christian version, but in the video we see native American elements, how come?

Chesca:
It’s actually the Russian ‘Rites Of Spring’.

MN:
But there is an American Indian on horseback in the video… And your outfit looks like a traditional female Cherokee/Seminole dress.

Chesca:
The video is a real mishmash to be honest. My outfit in it is actually a Nordic ceremonial folk dress. But yes, my sister, who created the stop-animation video, did integrate a Native American. But as for my make-up and the costume, that’s actually ‘stolen’ from the original Ballet Russes ‘Rites Of Spring’.

MN:
As for the track ‘America’, it seems to deal with the grittier side of the States. Why do you think artists have such an ongoing fascination with the USA whenever they sing about America, why not Central- or South America?

Chesca / Matt:
Strictly speaking, our ‘America’ is not an anti-American song. It came in a trio of songs, I guess you can’t explain that when it happens. There were three songs that I wrote at the same time. One was ‘America’, the other is about a Russian place and the third song, which we haven’t released yet, is about England. Anyway, the current track isn’t just an anti-American song as I’ve already mentioned. There are criticisms of all sorts of things that I felt simultaneously shared something. But the only real protest in that song is that it’s a hymn against the religious Right in the States. I mean, we love America, it’s not as if every person in America belongs to that category.

MN:
You use a lot of claymation / stop-motion in your videos, some of it, like the video for ‘Stone Cold Heart’ for example, has a very East European feel and reminds me of the Brothers Quay. Is this a preferred medium of yours to express yourself creatively?

Matt / Chesca:
The videos are made by Chesca’s sister Becca (Grover Jones), who also happens to be my wife. It’s a bit like with music. Everybody can make a video these days, everyone has got an iPhone and a camera. But often, the results look homogenized you know, people take photos on Instagram but it all looks exactly the same, nothing is any different. It’s not as if we deliberately started going down the opposite path. It’s simply that Becca started doing something that looked amazing, and it translates really well. It’s different from what everybody else is doing. We’ve always had that approach that everything we’ve ever done is very DIY but it’s original. We would rather do things ourselves if it looks original than spend a lot of money on something that ends up looking like everybody elses. Becca has never done this before on a professional level, but she is being asked now because what she does looks so strong.

MN:
You are a six-piece band, but you, Chesca and Matt, also perform as a duet…

Chesca / Matt:
With a six-piece band it’s down to logistics really. With some gigs we get asked to do, it’s obvious that we should just do it as a duet, because to get six people to perform a gig is quite a big undertaking! So in order to get as many people to come to see us and listen to our music, Chesca and I performing as a duo is an easy way to get a few more gigs. And of course, performing as a duet as opposed to a six-piece is a different experience. We don’t want to perform as a sextet every to weeks in London when we just started. It seems to me that it’s more interesting to do lots of different things. It keeps it fresh and interesting. Also, not every band’s music is suited to an acoustic style, know what I mean.

MN:
Having a band comprised of six members, I imagine there is a lot of creative input but at the same time also creative disagreement. Who has the final say?

Chesca / Matt:
We have this motto ‘the song is the king’ and we are in the service of the song. Everybody has got their strong points in terms of input, be it the videos or the photos, or the production level. Chesca writes the songs, I flesh them out, Velibor hits the drums very hard (looks good with his top off!) and Brian does everything else. So everybody has got their specific thing that they bring to the band and there is not need to argue over anything because we all have trust in what the other person does.

MN:
Matt, tell me about your Casio collection…

Matt:
I have fifteen Casios, and I’m not allowed anymore… says my wife Becca. So between all the animation stuff and my collection of keyboards – I have them too, not just Casios – there has to be a final line point!

MN:
Chesca, you have a truly amazing voice… that is made for the indie market. With your deliberately offbeat approach to things, how do you feel about female artists who also have impressive voices, like Adele for example, but have opted for a much more commercial route? Do you ever have a moment when you say to yourself “If I would compromise more, than my life would be easier?”

Chesca:
Listen, there are a lot of things that I could do that would make my life easier but you can’t actually choose it. I don't think so. There were many opportunities were I could have found an easier way to make a living but at the same time there would not have been much point doing so. I’m not that nice a person and I have no patience. And also, I can’t put on a leotard like Christina Aguilera, it’s not going to get me any money, haha. I’m also not referring to people like Adele because I don’t enjoy listening to her music, although I think the fact she’s become so successful without looking ‘hot with her tits out’ is a very positive thing. I don’t mean that in a patronising way. But yeah, people who go down that route, I couldn’t make music as boring as that because it would put me to sleep. I want to make music that I find interesting.

MN:
Do you think in nowadays musical climate it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve respect and success without having to compromise too much?

Matt / Chesca:
On many levels it always existed the way it exists now. The only difference now is that on a grassroots level, everybody who wants to make music can make music. Because they have access to recording technology and stuff they can do at home. I mean, ten years ago you couldn’t do stuff at home on our computer, you had to have a genuine, full interest in being a musician in order to do it. And now, anybody can do it. From the top down, as far as the industry is concerned, they always chucked money at pretty people to go and sell records. That’s never gonna change.

MN:
Thanks for your time and best wishes for your future projects.

(Please read my Murder Barn singles review in our ‘Singles reviews’ section).