Guitars and synthesizers become doppelgangers in 60 Watt Kid’s hands. The trio of Kevin Litrow, Derek Thomas, and Dylan Woods has been re-rooting itself in the Los Angeles local scene over the last six months, fitting punk bills and indie shows with alien-affected, psychedelic sound rock. The music incorporates noise – but not amp-feedback aneurysms – and structures that follow the lines of ambient music – but not the sleep-inducing kind. 60 Watt Kid is just about ready to release a new full-length album on Absolutely Kosher Records called We Come From The Bright Side, which concerns “jacking into the ethos” with soundscaping devices. We spoke to multi-instrumentalist Derek Thomas about looping and experimental music, and how sometimes raw turkeys can become part of a performance.
URB: How did you end up as the residency band for Sean Carnage’s 4-year anniversary of hosting underground shows?
DT: Kevin knew Sean in his pre-60 Watt days through the old Smell in Santa Ana, and Sean Carnage was running Il Corral back then. I met Sean through 60 Watt Kid playing at Pehrspace. Sean Carnage is amazing. He’s been the guy who’s had the underground all-ages spaces in L.A. for the last four or five years. I don’t know if this is the best way to put it, but Pehrspace has been like the Smell, with alcohol, kind of. That’s one of the reasons that Monday nights go off with Sean. Since Pehrspace has been recently under the gun, we were going to hold our residency at the Smell, but it seemed in the spirit of Sean Carnage to play these shows at a more underground place like Women.
URB: Can you delve a bit into your soundscaping set up?
DT: I do live loop-sampling with my guitar and keyboard. I’ll play something live and then record it right after I play it and bring it back in the rest of the song. We don’t really have any instrumentation that is pre-looped. We have some voices that come in and field recordings. Usually in one song I’ll have five different things I’m doing, so I’m quite busy. I have some vintage equipment and some modern equipment and I pair them all up. A lot of times, we’ll reroute things in a different direction, it totally changes and refreshes the sound. With pedals or even hand-oriented effects, there’s always a chain. When you change the chain up, you vary the results from the effects you get, and also the instruments that you end up playing. Maybe one time a keyboard is playing a part and another show, I use a guitar to play that part and I have the keyboard mimicking something else. Sometimes I’ll play through a vintage analog robot voice pedal. That was actually the pedal used for voices in the first Star Wars. And I’ll sing through a telephone, I guess, it’s one of the things I do.
URB: How do you find new ways of playing your instruments?
DT: We’ll record a free jam where we just turn our pins and tune to whatever and we’ll jam out in noise and see if we grab something that sounds cool when we listen back. We rely on instruments more than we rely on effects. We could do the whole thing without any effects. We could play acoustic. Effects happens to be the touch that adds color to the presentation of the instruments and songs. Also, dynamics are one of the most important things to our band. We try not to fucking blow out extremely loud anymore, like we used to. We get loud, but then we get so quiet you can hear a pin drop and then two seconds later it’s loud again. The ability to control sound, that’s one thing we do well. Recordings are interesting. You’ve got to be really sensitive when recording to let the dynamics come out. That’s definitely what we did for the new album We Come From The Bright Side.
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