Tame Impala’s Mind Tricks: Kevin Parker on Sense-Altering ‘Currents’
In just a few short years, Kevin Parker’s one-man recording project Tame Impala has expanded into a full-band psychedelic rock monster. Albums like 2010 debut Innerspeaker and 2012’s follow-up Lonerism not only inspired an Australian psych-rock renaissance, they led Parker to collaborate with the Flaming Lips and Kendrick Lamar (who jumped on a remix of “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards”).
Over the past year and a half, Parker has been hard at work on the forthcoming Currents (due July 27th), which he hopes will expand the band’s parameters considerably. “I wouldn’t say making psychedelic music is my focus,” he says. “That’s not the modus operandi for Tame Impala. It’s about making music that moves people.” On a recent afternoon, we caught up with him before a headlining gig at Austin’s Levitation Fest, where he had just been roused from a combination of hangover and jetlag.
The Currents album art shows a captivating image designed by Robert Beatty. Did this inform the album concept?
I had this concept, a core idea that we needed someone to bring to life. It’s based on this scientific diagram where it shows an airplane wing and the flow of air around it and shows how the air in front is calm and still and undisturbed. But as the wing moves through space, it disturbs everything and the air behind it is mangled, warped and disturbed. Slackness versus turbulence. The last two covers were about taking organic things – a photo in each instance – and fucking them up, taking something that’s real and warping it until it’s weird to look at.
You do that a lot with sonic perception, compressing guitars until they sound like synths and making live drums sound like drum machines. Were there new challenges in making Currents?
Everything I do is a mutant cross between a challenge and something that comes naturally. Making music is so spiritual. I’m not a spiritual person, but music is sacred to me. Trying new things and experimenting is something I push myself to do. It’s one thing to have love for all different kinds of music, it’s another thing to bring them together seamlessly and make them coherent.
The single “Let It Happen” has this digital skip that then turns into its own rhythm. Was that an accident? Or intentional?
I’ve done it before on “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” – it’s exactly the same thing. I love that kind of thing. Going back to the album art, it’s that organic realm that’s been fucked with in a digital way that tricks the mind. That synthetic repetition is the same with the music in “Let It Happen”; for some reason that just does it for me. It makes my ears prick up. These days there’s all these ways to manipulate sound. As I was working on the song, I had this idea for this skipping bit. I loved the idea that someone would be listening to the song on their car radio and they’d think that the radio was broken or go, “Something’s not right.” I feel that’s a big part of what I do.