Indian Jewelry Find Creative Freedom in Fun -- Top 100 Acts at SXSW 2011

Posted on Feb 28th 2011 7:55PM by Brian Voerding
Comments

Courtesy Indian Jewelry

Indian Jewelry make music that escapes description. The Wikipedia page for the Houston-based ensemble says they're known for their "droning vision music and seizure-inducing stage show," though the band will tell you that they just write songs -- let the audience and the lighting designers take care of the rest. Spinner talked with frontman Tex Kerschen about making a racket, the uselessness of the term "experimental," and how broken gear teaches you to work with what you have.

Amazon

Download Indian Jewelry's 'Oceans' (MP3) off 'Totaled' Free

How did the band get together?

Erika Thrasher and I formed the band in 2002. We were driving around on a trip in west Texas around New Year's Eve, and had this shared idea for the music we wanted to play... The idea of this band is that we can play any kind of music we want. I had a band a million years ago that was focused on one thing and we incorporated older songs, reinterpreted songs, played some straight as can be. To some degree there were limitations, limits to ideas and what was possible for a band. Music is not something we do for any kind of narrow genre purposes.

How has your sound evolved over the years?

We've just gotten louder, I think. Essentially we deal with limitations that are external, rather than internal. I'm not sure how much I believe in total freedom in the philisophical sense, but it's definitely an idea we work toward. We have no money and very seldom had money. Our gear is always between breaking and being repaired. The way we do things now in terms of combinations of electronics and drum machines, we have a whole stack of gear and go with what we have; we change it up over the years, get things working again and it makes us much more loud. And then things break over the years. It's about working with what you have. It's fundamental to what we do.

Do you find limitations to be a struggle or a freedom?

Since I was a kid and wanted to play music, it was always about creating things -- the struggle. There's always something holding you back. That's an element that defines an enterprise from the get-go -- what you have and don't have at your disposal. It's a source of adventure. You constantly change to new circumstances. Some people do the lawyer trick -- you work really hard so you can afford the guitar you want and to make the music you want to make. The only thing that's a struggle for us is getting food to eat, making sure we have a roof over our head. In terms of the creative and aesthetic, in terms of style, we can make music using our hands. Being a really loud rock band is one facet. We can make music with a couple turtle shells.

How do you nurture your creative spark?

You don't worry about it. I've been told by different people, and really appreciate the advice, is to don't worry about it. You just wait. Humanity's basic. It's part of our nature that our imagination recharges, no matter what we do or don't do with it. Everybody beats themselves up sometimes and worries about it. I've been doing it long enough that we're kind of confident that things will always be there for us.

Your music is often branded as experimental. Do you identify with the term?

That's banded around far too loosely. We do sonic experiments but it's not experimental music. We're not that formal about it. We're just songwriters and we're open to whatever we know. Experimental music is a different way of thinking about music. There are people who push one piece of gear or aesthetic to see how far they can go. What we do is write songs.

Where does the band name come from?

A piece of sound poetry. Going back to seven years ago now, we were on the road the whole time. We had stand-by names but we never used them; we were constantly changing the name of the group when we were on tour. The effect was fun, it was great not thinking of your band as some kind of corporate product but something you could change when you felt like it. But moving to keep up with that without a team of news agents pushing people's buttons is hard. People who wanted to come [see us play] didn't hear about it. We wanted to fix our name. I had been working on different kinds of names, and Indian jewelry -- which is completely prevalent on reservation -- had the idea of authenticity. And when you bring up whether something's real or fake ... we wanted to give some love to Native American people and all the con artists and hucksters who have exploited them over time. Poetics contain a lot of different things.

When did the band become a serious project?

To make this band we gave up everything else. We had all the things you get when you've been working at things for years. To be able to travel around the world and see cool things was meaningful, and to have a salary from that, and a lot of freedom, but to do the band at the time at half-measure was engaging in a practice of self-deception. So we gave up everything. We moved to California, we gave up our jobs, gave up our house, all our money, hooked up with some friends we had. It wasn't horrible. It wasn't like being refugees from war or anything. We just happened to commit ourselves. Now we've committed ourselves for so long we can put the thing in the proper place in our lives. We've already proved what we wanted to prove. It's not just a matter of how much you do it -- you have to give yourself a vacation from it once in awhile.

What does it feel like to have SXSW more or less in your backyard?

When we were starting off years and years ago, a lot of people got really worked up about it, and whether it meant something. We played it countless times. The longer you do it the more you come to the fact that it's a thing, like anything in this world. A chance to socialize, tell people what you got going on. All the industry stuff, it's very real, there's no doubt about that, but based on the kind of music we do and the way we control and manage our band, we'll never be on that fast track to where people are going. We're not unaware of that. It matters. It's nice to get paid and nice to have people come. But it doesn't matter enough to develop a heart condition over it.

We've never been that career-minded. We've always felt like SXSW is a weeklong camp where we get to see a lot of our friends from across the country and the world. We never had that much going into it, and usually not coming out of it either. It's just fun if you can just hang out and listen to music everywhere.

How have you been able to sustain a band that isn't necessarily career-minded?

We were born lucky. We were also born in Texas, which makes you perverse by nature. I don't know. It's not part of the discussion. We lived in L.A. for a few years and saw the different world of possibilities, but it seemed too much stress from the real work of making lots of records and performing a lot, which is, in the end, why bands do it. People want bands to be different things. Some want entertainers, some want martyrs. But we're all humans first.

We've outlived six thousand trends. Every time you go through the cycle of watching people go up and come down, they're scattered at the end, there's nothing left of them ... They're in a hurry but they don't know where they're in a hurry to get to.

Ever since I was a young kid I just wanted to make a racket. And now I get to make a racket all the time. It's a lot of fun.

Catch Indian Jewelry's SXSW Set on Wednesday, March 16 at Soho Lounge (217 E 6th St.) 1AM.

Watch Indian Jewelry's Video for 'Swans'