INTERVIEW - PVT
Excerpts Published: Music Australia Guide #78, July 2008.

For PVT drummer Laurence Pike, the band’s lithe, synth-scarred new record Church With No Magic represents a meeting of minds. 

Hey Laurence, I’m really enjoying the record. 

Oh great. 

The immediate shift, for me, was this greater sense of synthesis between the three of you guys. I don’t know if it was because the instrumentation was more abstracted from its source or if there was more of tonal continuity or something, but to me it seems kind of more conjoined. 

Yeah, well I think that was the underlying idea really. Well, that was the only idea we had when we started making it, to make something that was kind of the result of us being altogether. We’d been doing a lot of gigs and touring constantly and we kind of felt like the previous record was the start of something, rather than the realisation of something in some ways. So I think it was successful in that regard, you know. 

It’s interesting to me because there are perhaps more songlike structures and hooks and melodies on this record, but there’s that interesting interplay between that and perhaps these slightly more harsh sonic qualities. So there’s kind of an interesting back and forth on this record. 

Sure, I think we’ve always tried to make songs, whether they had lyrics or not. I wonder if this is going to strike people as a big leap, but for us it kind of felt very normal, because we’ve seen it unravel over a period of two or three years. We pretty much started working on this, months before the last record even came out. As soon as we delivered the last record to the label, we went straight back into the studio again. 

Working with just the three of you and signing to Warp and touring a lot more, do you feel as though you’re really understanding each other in much more intuitive way? Do you feel like you’ve got to a point where you feel like you can do whatever you want, to an extent? 

Yeah, I think so. There was an interesting point a while ago… I mean, musically our ambition has never been to do any one thing. We’ve never really put limitations on ourselves in terms of what we can do; I think our ambition has always been to do what we want.

We’ve never really felt like we’ve necessarily had to appease anyone and we’ve never been part of a scene directly, you know? We’ve always kind of done our own thing and that’s why we started the band in the first place, so we had a vehicle to take things to whatever limits we wanted, you know?

But I think we feel more like a band now. We did a photo shoot a few months back and I remember Richard was on the phone to me and he said ‘We look like a band now’ (laughs), and it was just weird, as if we didn’t look like a band before. But I kind of knew what he meant. I think he was acknowledging the fact that we feel a lot more like a band now. I think we just get each other a lot more.

Like I was saying before, when we went to record this album, we thought, ‘Let’s just go in and make whatever we’re going to make’, you know, and I think we just put trust in each other just let go and do it. That was our objective.

I always used to think of you as someone with his fingers in many pies – from Triosk to Savath & Savalas, to your project with Dave and working with Cornell – but you seem to be focussing purely on PVT at the moment. Is that a personal, creative shift for you or is it more a circumstantial one?
 

Yeah, over the last two or three years it’s just kind of become the main thing. Pretty much the only other thing I do is recording and touring with a singer called Jack Ladder. We’ve just started work on his new record and fortunately his cycle at the moment seems to be kind of out of sync with PVT, so I’ve got pretty much the next month off from commitments with PVT so we can make a record and that’s conveniently exactly when he wanted to make it.

But aside from that, I’ve kind of really pushed away from doing other things because there was a long period where I just wanted to anything and everything, more out of just curiosity than anything. But I think as you get older, you learn to say no to things a bit more and sharpen exactly how you want to spend you time and energy.

Dan Rule

Church With No Magic is out through Warp/Inertia 

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