Balmorhea Interview: SXSW 2010

Posted on Mar 12th 2010 11:11AM by Curtis Finn
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Balmorhea's third release, 'All Is Wild, All Is Silent,' was named one of the Top 10 releases of 2009 by both the Austin American-Statesman and by KUT 90.5. Although their music is often described as post-rock, the group's sound defies categorization. Employing a minimalist style, their compositions contain an assortment of acoustic instrumentation, including guitars, piano, a three-piece string section, light drums, and even some banjo. The Austin-based band will play SXSW for the fourth time.

Let's start off by getting the pronunciation of the band's name right. Is it Bal-moor-ay or Bal-ma-ray?

The second one was right. Yeah, the accent is there by the end.

And is the band named for the town in west Texas?

Kinda. Yeah. I mean, when we started, when we named the group, I guess we weren't really too serious about it. We just kind of chose the name. It's a town that I grew up going to when I was a kid, that I had a lot of memories at. It just kind of seemed to fit what we were doing, so it kind of stuck. Yeah, it is named after that place.

How did the band actually form?

It started with myself and my band mate, Michael Muller. We were longtime acquaintances. He's a little bit older than I am, and when I moved here he was living here in Austin. We just kind of struck up a friendship and realized we were both working on some music on our own. So we would just get together and work things out together, and just realized we kind of had something going there.

What are your musical influences?

We are influenced by a lot of different music. We're interested in a little bit of a classical form. We like folk music. I'm a big fan of country music, which really doesn't factor into Balmorhea that much.

And how would you describe your sound?

Actually, someone wrote the other day something that was interesting, I thought, that kind of fit. There is a term that we often get applied to [us] -- post-rock. But in this interview someone said, "It's not really post-rock. It's like pre-rock." I would just call it maybe new music, contemporary music, instrumental, a little bit folk, a little bit classical, a little rock. I mean, it's really a hybrid. I'm not really comfortable with any one term, as far as a genre goes.

Does not having vocals make things easier or more difficult?

It's a different thing altogether really. We're freed up in a lot of ways, and we're interested in that freedom. Of course, we don't have the power to express things quite as precisely as we did if had five verses and a chorus. But I think it gives us a lot of freedom to express things. One thing that we've often said [is] how we like that our music can be interpreted different ways by different people.

Does your sound ever make you feel like you stick out like a sore thumb in the Austin music scene?

(laughs) A little bit. One thing that we like about Austin is that there's a lot of different things going on. There are a lot of things that are similar here as well, but people are generally pretty open to different music forms. It's actually been a pretty good place for us to be.

What's in your festival survival kit?

I guess my own house and my own bed that I can retreat to, so that I don't have to be a part of it at every moment.

What's your musical guilty pleasure?

Oh, man, um, 1990s popular country music.

You've released an album each year. Do you think it will be difficult to sustain that kind of a pace?

We're usually surprised when people are surprised that we're able to make records that quickly, but it really has happened in a pretty natural way. I do think it's going to be a little bit longer before we do our next one, just because of things we have going on in our lives. I'm thinking about spending a little time in another city, and I think Mike's doing the same thing.

What do you think happened to cause your last release to strike such a positive chord with the critics?

I don't know. There's a lot of homogeneity in music right now I think. I think people like hearing something's that's different, and especially within the instrumental music world. I think we're doing something different than most instrumental bands, and I think it just gets recognized as such.

You play a fair number of churches. Any particular reason for that?

Well, if you listen to this most recent record that we put out, there are a lot of piano-based songs that are quieter, that don't lend themselves to, like, the rock dungeons so much. We're happy to play those places as well, but I think we feel like the music that we're creating can kind of breathe a little bit better in an acoustic space like that.

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