Shout Out Out Out Out Kill Vocoders

We haven't touched base with Shout Out Out Out Out since the release of their latest rave-tastic monster, Reintegration Time. Can you believe it? We couldn't either, so we thought it was about time to sit and have a chat.

We gave mad synth-scientist Nik Kozub a penny and he gave us his thoughts on crazy equipment, how the band will never leave Edmonton and, of course, the feelings of Polaris Music Prize rejection.

CHARTattack: Has it ever happened that the electronic side of your show didn't work and you had to completely improvise everything else?
Nik Kozub: We haven't had a full meltdown yet, but we've come close.

It's something we do talk and worry about a lot because we do use a lot of old technology and analogue synths that depend on voltage working. Everyone gets clocked by one central brain sample and if that went down, I don't know what we would do. We've played a bunch of shows where the power has gone out on us while we're playing, but with the number of people in the band and that fact that we have two drummers and everyone has a bass and lots of percussion instruments, we can jam out on something for a while.

It's certainly an issue when we're dealing with so much electronic stuff, and bands like Junior Boys have had similar problems. I've had multiple vocoders die on the road, so we've started bringing back ups. Hopefully my current one doesn't die 'cause it's an old, rare one.

Why are your vocoders dying!?
I used to use one particular brand of vocoder and I've had three of them die on me, so I think they're just bad. The one I'm using now is from the '70s and it hasn't had any problems since the '70s, so it's probably just built better.

We've developed that attitude more and more over the years. We didn't used to want to bring all our analogue synths on the road so we were getting all these digital analogue modeling keyboards and as the years have gone on we've phased all of those out and actually just use all of our analogue stuff 'cause it seems to work more reliably and it sounds closer to what were doing on the record anyway.

We've always talked about pairing down our live set up and trying to simplify things, but now the opposite has happened. Everything has grown and now we're bringing more gear on the road with us than we ever have before.

In some of your tour videos, the crowd chants your band name in a certain way. Is that done everywhere you go?
I don't know where that came from, but it seems to happen a lot. Then we'll play somewhere new and they'll scream it a different way, it's kind of confusing. Usually at that point we're like, "Oh shit, what else can we play..."

Will you guys ever leave Edmonton or are you hardcore locals?
I think as a whole we're all pretty dead set on living in Edmonton. We like it here. Aside from the brutal winter that takes up half of the year, it's a pretty comfortable place to live. There's a really nice community vibe, especially in the music community.

It's logistically weird, living so far from anywhere you can tour conveniently and string dates together. If we wanna do a tour, we have to drive across the country and start in Ontario. Going to Ontario is a 40-something hour drive, so it's logistically weird, but other than that it's not really detrimental to us and it's a misconception that because we're living in this northern prairie city we can't just go and do things. The winter sucks, but that's just the weather.

Tell me about the tattoo on your arm? The big one?
That is the Edmonton area code, 780.

Any other major tattoos in the band?
Gravy has a few gooders. He's got a gravy boat on this arm. He has a tattoo of an old sparkly Gretsch drum set. Lyle, we've been trying to convince him to get ... there's a company called Oberheim with a ridiculous logo, but I don't think he'll get it. I don't really consider myself a tattoo guy, but I continue to get them.

Were you disappointed you weren't nominated for Polaris this time around?
Maybe moderately. I didn't expect we would be. When the long list came out, people said "Oh, man! You guys were ripped off not being on the long list!" And I was like, "Whatever, man." That would be sweet, but I'm not loosing sleep over it.