June 7th, 2013 
Brian Leak 
“The passion for music is common to us all and keeps us going. We are proud of the fact that we’re a multi-cultural band, and we’ve figured out how to capitalize on our differences.”
Under the Gun Review is very pleased to bring you this exclusive interview with Liquid Casing, an up-and-coming progressive/post-punk quartet from Houston, Texas.
We recently had the opportunity to speak with the band and you can read our conversation below where we discussed their new forthcoming full-length album, its important themes, and the band’s history and future.
First off, I find your name very interesting. Can you explain where Liquid Casing came from?
Alvaro: The name was inspired by this material that’s used in the oil drilling industry and keeps the drilled walls from collapsing. We also really appreciated the ethereal quality to it. The imagery of an individual being surrounded and confined by a liquid, whether it be water or some other amorphous material, was striking to us.
So when and how did the four of you come to start making music together?
Alvaro: In the late 90s, I formed the band with a close friend, Matt Jackson, and we performed as a two-piece guitar and drum outfit. My wife knew Okiki from work and that he played sax, so she invited him to one of our shows in ’02, and a few days after the show we both tried contacting each other to see if we could jam out together. It was an exciting and new experience combining the alternative/punk guitar sound that we had at the time with Okiki’s jazz and afro-beat sax approach. At some point, our sound started to grow and we knew we needed to get serious and add some melodic low-end to the band. We found Jim through a Craigslist ad, but the crazy thing is that even though we searched high and low for a bass player across sprawling Houston, he only lived within walking distance from my house. We’ve been based in Houston for a long time, but Matt lived in Austin, and the commute combined with his growing family made it difficult to sustain. So, we had to find a new drummer in 2010. We put out an ad requesting a hard-hitting drummer who liked adventurous music, and we were lucky to meet John. He definitely hits hard and also had a lot of musical ideas that helped us grow.
Jim: It’s amazing that four very different people from different backgrounds can come together around music. John’s from New Jersey and I’m from upstate New York, and in most circumstances that shouldn’t work. But, the passion for music is common to us all and keeps us going. We are proud of the fact that we’re a multi-cultural band, and we’ve figured out how to capitalize on our differences.
You have some pretty incredible influences it seems. Some of my favorite bands in fact. If someone were to ask you which band your music most closely resembles, what band would you say?
Alvaro: Perhaps the closest band that we resemble is The Mars Volta in the way they combined a very kinetic rock style with the use of saxophones on some of their albums like Amputechture and The Bedlam in Goliath with Adrian Terrazas on sax.
Okiki: Everyone in the band brings a wildly different set of influences to the table and we end up combining all the great things that we enjoy from the music that we love into a fairly diverse sound. I’m from Nigeria and have a love for artists like Fela Kuti and Lagbaja along with jazz greats like John Coltrane. Jim comes from a blues and classic rock background which is equal parts Johnny Winter and Frank Zappa (in fact an audience member once commented that we sounded “Zappa-esque”). John brings a polyrhythmic and prog rock drumming background with bands like Voivod, King Crimson, and Mahavishnu Orchestra. Alvaro’s influences are along the line of Fugazi and post rock bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Red Sparowes. Somehow we have taken all of these different approaches and found a way to distill it into something that works harmoniously.
So apart from your specific individual influences which may contribute to your creations, how would you describe Liquid Casing’s music and overall style?
Jim: Our music is very percussive/rhythmic and we really enjoy building up sections and playing with dynamics and tension. Most of our songs tend to work in movements with a focus on how energy is built up as opposed to utilizing conventional song structures. The goal and, honestly the fun, is always trying to come up with new ways to elicit an emotional response. The lyrics and concepts in our music are geared towards political issues (e.g. war, technology, corporate media, etc.), but we strive to find a way to describe the emotional impact on people’s lives and not treat it as a theoretical exercise.
Your new album, A Separate|Divide, comes out later this month — what can you tell us about the album? The instrumentation? Are the themes that you mentioned present?
Alvaro: We had fleshed out the theme for the album pretty early on in the songwriting process. As the songs developed, they began focusing on the idea of the exploitative use of divisions to maintain power. The songs touch on a number of issues like immigration, the process of dehumanizing people, and the violence of separation.
Okiki: Some specific instrumental songs like “Non-Linear Solution” use extreme panning to make it seem like the instruments are people trying to communicate across a wall. “Alambrista” attempts to musically capture the journey of people trying to cross over that wall and close the separation.
John: The album utilizes weird-sounding interludes to bridge the gap between songs, so music is playing nearly continuously throughout the whole album. In one of the interludes, we worked in some comments from Martin Luther King, Jr. into the mix since they were very remarkable words from him, though rarely heard. We managed to put more meat into the song arrangements and make the songs bigger and fuller, with the heavier sections really intense. We used a variety of guitar sounds, strings, mellotron sounds, and synthesizers to really enhance the mood of the individual songs.
What about the album’s art (by bassist/vocalist Jim Stettner)? It’s very unique and almost creepy in a sense, even for being so colorful. Why was this chosen for the album and how do you feel it relates to your music?
Jim: This painting is all about human suffering and the toll that all of these divisions take on us. Since the mid-90s, at least 6,000 men, women, and children have died trying to cross the US/Mexico border as a result of government policies, pushing migrants into the most dangerous and remote areas of the border. The digitized image of the human symbolizes the correlation of man versus machine. It emulates the idea of humans being reduced to merely a number, an ID, and how “progress” has debased humanity; reducing our worth to “man-hours” and other measures of productivity. The horizontal lines in front and piercing the human’s face represents “The Line which Divides” and keep us from the right to freedom of movement. The full color palette reminds us that the figure in the painting could be any one of us. You mention that you feel that the painting looks “creepy,” yet colorful; then the message from the artwork was successful. If we stop and really think about how we treat our fellow human beings, it is far more creepy than any fictitious horror movie, it should make everyone’s hair stand on end.
John: Jim showed us his painting towards the end of the recording process and as soon as we saw it, we all knew that this captured visually what we were trying to do with the sound of the album.
How would you say that A Separate|Divide differs from An Empty Sparking Light? Is there anything specific that you set out to do when writing and recording this record that you wanted to evolve on from your previous work?
Alvaro: Jim and John had not recorded with us on An Empty Sparking Light. So, this is the first album that they’ve been able to contribute to the sound of the band. Their ideas and playing have really made this album as diverse and dynamic as it was intended.
Okiki: I started to move away from a grand piano sound to more of a dirty Fender Rhodes sound to better capture the emotion and feel of the album. We utilized more synthesizer sounds than we had in the past. Alvaro worked really hard on his vocals, especially on “Checkpoints and Borders” to really find a way to get to the pain that the lyrics were trying to convey. From a recording standpoint, we had some grandiose visions for An Empty Sparking Light, but our knowledge in the studio was not equally matched. We still have big, grand visions, but had an easier time translating them onto the recording this go around.
Do you guys have any touring plans in the works in support of A Separate|Divide?
John: Currently, we are trying to set up shows in Texas for later this summer and fall, but nothing is finalized just yet. We definitely feel like we’ve been locked away in the studio for far too long. We only played a handful of shows while we were recording this album, since we really wanted to focus on getting our vision out of our heads. So, we are dying to get back to playing a bunch of shows for as many people as possible.
How would you describe a Liquid Casing live show to someone who has never attended one?
Alvaro: We bring a lot of energy and passion to each of our performances. We try to incorporate all the things we love about live performances into our sets. We love big percussion (e.g. dual drumming sections, and the use of gongs and sound plates). I also love big, crazy, loud endings with gobs of noise crackling through the speakers. We prefer to cut down on the between-song banter, mainly because I suck at it. So, we utilize the musical interludes from the albums to enhance the ambience and segue into most songs or just straight-up morph songs from one into the next. We’ve noticed that a lot of folks are surprised when seeing the saxophone take on such a critical and lyrical role in this kind of music. So, we really see it as a challenge every time to surprise people.
Being a band that uses Bandcamp to help promote and share your music, what are your thoughts on the website and how it has affected bands much like yourself?
Alvaro: I like the simple interface and the way that the music is presented as the most important thing. There are a lot of different avenues to share music which is great, but a little overwhelming at times. It’s a bit difficult to keep up with which sites music lovers are really using and interacting with.
Have there been any substantial obstacles that the band has come up against thus far that have made you question at all whether or not the band would succeed or even proceed?
Okiki: There is never a shortage of obstacles trying to derail us from making music. We’ve just tried to be as single-minded as possible in taking each step forward. Another thing is that John and I were both dealing with some immigration issues with our own families, which certainly stressed the band, but made our focus on the album more relevant.
What albums have you guys been listening to a lot lately? Any that have come out this year that have been in rotation a lot for you?
Jim: Fred Frith’s Guitar Solos, Morphine’s Cure for the Pain, and Re-Marrying for Money and Lemon Fish Tweezer from Henry Kaiser.
Okiki: Live stuff from Chris Potter, Four MFs Playin’ Tunes by Branford Marsalis, everything afrobeat from Fela and Femi Kuti, Antibalas, and old school Nigerian music for inspiration.
John: Coma Divine from Porcupine Tree, Pelican’s March into the Sea, everything from Russian Circles, Turn on the Bright Lights from Interpol, and Xenophanes by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Group.
Alvaro: Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun by Red Sparowes and Sonic Nurse by Sonic Youth. I used those a lot for reference when I was mixing the album.
What would you say is the primary goal for this band and what kind of lifespan do you see Liquid Casing having?
Alvaro: Our primary goal is to connect with people. We love making music, and the strength in music is always tied into letting it work through another person’s psyche and finding a home. For us, that entails making meaningful music, recording it, unleashing our sounds on as many people as we can, and performing that music to those who can identify with it. We’ve been at this for a long time and we really enjoy the process of discovering new musical ideas and fleshing those out. It’s incredibly fun, and although we can explore some fairly serious themes, rockin’ out is still so liberating. The musical journey, our evolution, and enjoying the camaraderie of music gets us through the day and is the reason Liquid Casing will keep at it for a long time to come.
Written and conducted by: Brian Lion – Follow him on Twitter
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