SPECIAL EDITION: Sweeping Promises Q&A
Very excited to be publishing Always Donny’s first band interview. After writing a bit about Sweeping Promises a couple weeks ago, the band’s singer Lira Mondal reached out to me via email and got to talking about their music. I sent over some questions for her and Caufield Shnug to ponder and they came back with these super insightful answers.
Haven’t done anything like this in a minute feels good to be back!
Donovan Burtan: Can you talk a little bit about how Sweeping Promises came to be?
Sweeping Promises: Quickly! We were just goofing around in our recording space and happened to write the first half of our album in about an hour. We decided to record it right then and there. I think we actually didn’t keep that first take, but it was then we developed our “one mic” method and a fast-and-loose approach to doing things. We’ve always valued efficiency in our other projects, but SP is something else…
DB: When it came time to put together an album, did you have any goals? Was there any sort of concept?
SP: Not really. The project wasn’t very militant beyond a general ethos of raw, fast-moving sound. In Jan 2020 we were fully embracing Boston DIY obscurity and just making music for ourselves, that is, non-strategically. Our basic concept was a somewhat zany and open-ended pop mentality that conveys a kind of severe contemporary outlook.
DB: Caufield mentioned some interest in “primitive” lap-top recording in your interview with WBCA and the bandcamp page for this album mentions a “single mic technique.” Was there anything in terms of production that you wanted to do with Sweeping Promises?
SP: We enjoy recording with computers in a non-computational way! We’re searching for undivided, non-stratified sounds. We admire rock music mixes that are relatively non-hierarchical, which don’t privilege some types of frequencies or voices over others in the mix. For this project, we avoided precision edits, targeted EQ, calculated punch-ins, headphone monitoring, flex time, etc. – computers can have a way of making musicians think of music too “evenly” in terms of cleanliness and control. It is cliché to call digital recording “cold.” But it doesn’t have to be! Anyone who uses laptops frequently knows they are inherently “hot” as cultural tools; computers have a tendency to reveal raw experience, for better or worse!
While on topic, we wouldn’t consider our strategies to be necessarily lo-fi, though we can understand why people associate our music with the name of lo-fi. To us, “low fidelity” means “low faithfulness”: the betrayal, manipulation, or mangling of origin sounds through creative media use. We’re not out to intentionally distort sounds away from their “full origin” – we are interested in making music that exists as a streamlined and monolithic unit.
DB: From what I gather, other than Spenser Gralla’s drumming on “Falling Forward,” this is just the two of you. Was this a deliberate choice or was it just kind of how things went?
SP: Just how things went. We’ve been making music as a duo for years, it’s our wondrous default! That said, Spenser contributes to the milieu; we wish we had him all along.
DB: You mentioned to me that Sweeping Promises LP2 is already in progress, is there anything you'd like to say about what you want to do next with this project?
SP: Some of the songs have more than one mic (including a tube mic that Caufield built!), and there will be a few more special effects.
DB: I’m interested in the fact that you two adopt so many different band names.
Do you feel like this is a retroactive thing? Assuming that the two of you pretty much jam and write together all the time, do you think about how you’re going to package different songs later on? Or do you approach music making with an idea of what “band” it might fit?
SP: Sometimes a new name can artificially generate a sense of progress, scenery change, or formula swap even though in reality it’s still just us with the same equipment. We appreciate the idea that a band – against the rigid and tortoise-like nature of so many institutions, corporations, organizations, bureaucracies – can essentially be conceived, brainstormed, and produced in a single afternoon. That momentary burst of cooperative effort can translate into a public face that can stand the test of time! It’s hard to start things in general; but, with us, it has been easy to start bands.
DB: I think that Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug could be a duo project posing as one band. In the digital age, there’s lots of examples of groups that are “bands” in more of a theoretical sense. Bon Iver is primarily the work of Justin Vernon but he works with a wide variety of collaborators, whereas Tame Impala is just the studio work of Kevin Parker. There’s also examples of “solo” artists who are primarily the work of two specific people (Mitski w/Patrick Hyland and Jessy lanza w/Jeremy Greenspan). What factors in when you come up with a new band name?
SP: Yes, that is a good way of putting it, we often feel “theoretical”! As for naming factors, I don’t think we’ve ever come up with hard criteria for the choosing – though we do deliberate painstakingly!
DB: One of the things I’m trying to talk about in my newsletter is record labels. A lot of times with blogs I feel like they talk about music as if it appeared out of thin air, but I hope to invite my listeners into the discovery process with me and talk about different sources for music.
How would you describe your relationship with Feel It Records?
SP: Music always has a material basis, and it annoys us too when music journalism makes it seem like such-and-such track just floated down to us from the ether! As for Feel It, with no prior relationship, we cold-called Sam [Richardson] with the unmixed tracks, misleadingly calling them “demos” (they were essentially the final unmastered tracks). He really took a chance on us, and we’re glad he did. He’s super smart and hard-working and he comes from a perspective of respect for underground music.
DB: Were there bands on that label that you looked up to before you were releasing an album there?
SP: The Cowboys, Pleasure Leftists, Gen Pop, Fried Egg. We’ve gotten to know more of the great Feel It roster in recent months! The label is always expanding.
DB: You released an EP in 2019 with Illegally Blind in Somerville, which I’m assuming is a bit more of a literal community, seeing as the organization primarily plans shows in the area. How does that dynamic compare to Feel It?
SP: Jason Trefts (who runs Illegally Blind) is one of our closest friends in the music scene, and we have long been honored to count him as our supporter. For years he was the most impactful booker in Boston. The intent behind the Illegally Blind label is scene-building, strengthening underground visions with a community focus. As a label with coast-to-coast and global distribution, Feel It is less localized and perhaps more attuned to an online punk matrix.
DB: Recently there was some controversy about a Boston Globe piece which insinuated that the city of Boston has lost its musical identity and doesn’t have acts today that compare to the likes of The Cars, The Pixies, and Aerosmith. The piece was heavily criticized for its lack of depth of understanding of local talent and white-centric framing of music. Many have pointed out that hip-hop holds the place that classic rock did in current mainstream culture and the city of Boston is historically hostile to hip-hop artists and even the hip-hop artist Cliff Notez, who was featured in the article, didn’t feel like it represented the things he said.
I’m sure you can’t answer for all of these issues but is there anything you’d like to point out about Boston as a music city?
SP: The Boston Globe piece is indeed boneheaded, regrettably so. It has a curious way of mourning the loss of Boston cultural advancement while almost willfully obscuring the situation on the ground. It is a shame the Globe won’t court writers actively participating in the music scene to cultivate a more nuanced perspective. As for us, we’ll spare you our prognosis for the following reason: we are hereby no longer Bostonian. We’re now in Austin, a move forced by the disaster economics of COVID. We are very sorry to leave behind the Boston scene, as tumultuous and inspiring as it was; we hope to return one day!
-Donovan Burtan