Words by Jason Lee. Photography by John Christou. Video below shot and edited by Azumi OE. Release party tickets HERE…
If one were afforded the luxury of choosing but in no way instigating one’s own manner of death and just to soften the blow let’s agree that death is not the end whether one’s cosmology is derived from ’90s Nick Cave albums or ancient Sanskrit scripture then really we’d have to go with death by piano and no we’re not just claiming this as an obvious opening gambit to the profile of and interview with Death By Piano that follows below but it’s a useful coincidence just the same…
…cuz who wouldn’t wanna die in a manner so mercifully swift and gruesomely hilarious not to mention potentially newsworthy as having a piano randomly fall from the sky and land right square on one’s melon in a scenario made familiar by countless gratuitously violent cartoons and cartoon-like live-action films/shows to the point where it’s became a well-worn trope (see below) of sorts which isn’t to say there’s no other ways pianos can lead to one’s demise but clearly the piano from the sky is the most appealing of these 88-key-calamities not to mention how often victims seem to be instantly reincarnated after blunt force trauma to the head I mean who knew so many cartoon characters were Hindus…
…and if there’s a musical genre that sonically embodies this type of fatality it’d have to be the genre known as darkwave cuz if you consider artists like Portishead, Massive Attack, Phantogram, The xx, and Tricky one of the overriding sonic hallmarks of their borderline euphoric/dysphoric music is a droney sometimes noisy minor-key ambience much like the sound heard after a piano crashes down on someone’s noggin producing a cluster of ghostly sustained notes from said instrument and sometimes from the piano keys that’ve taken the place of the victim’s teeth a sound which really outghta be sampled and dropped into a darkwave song by someone…
…except Death by Piano may’ve already done it cuz there’s a sound like the one described above heard in the opening seconds of DBP’s soon-to-be-released VOW EP whose title track fades in on a cluster of reverberating ambient tones that drift in and out of the song over its duration like a ghostly presence hovering under the elegantly arranged synths and strings and skittering trap beats as singer-songwriter-pianist-keyboardist Kalen Lister recounts “going back in time to a world before I knew you / to a past whose future grew you / to a different land” describing memories that linger just like the aforementioned underlying ambient drone not always noticed but always there…
…which is far from the only reincarnation-rebirth-renewal imagery to be found on the EP (“Disco Wrecking Ball” being another image of demolition and renewal, in this case addressed to someone who’s like “if Judas and Narcissus had a child” which is a pretty sick burn) and then there’s “Vow”’s penultimate lines about how even when sand get thrown into the gears of life “my heart is hard at work crafting a pearl born from the grain” and it’s little wonder that re-birth and just plain ol’ birth are recurring themes on the EP seeing as Kalen just gave birth to her first child a few years back (speaking of little wonders!) and is currently in the second trimester of gestating her second…
…and speaking of all things born and re-born the six songs that make up the VOW EP likewise mark a new beginning in the ongoing evolution of Death By Piano with Kalen (who performs as “KALEN” in her more rock-oriented but still keyboard-led full band project) teaming up with new collaborator Tom Marsh (more on whom below) in creating this set of moody yet stirring tunes which saw their first public unveiling in late 2023 at a live performance that was just as stylized and theatrical and dynamic as the songs themselves…
…staged and we do mean staged at Manhattan’s highly vibey NuBlu nightclub (complete with suspended backlit catwalk where audience members can dangle their feet almost directly over musicians’ heads which makes us think it’s a good thing no one’s thought to hoist a piano up there) and coming up on April 3rd staged once again at Bushwick’s equally highly vibey Sultan Room and hey we’re not trying to criticize but all you mothers-to-be who aren’t playing full-on club sets in your first and third trimesters featuring songs from your upcoming EP honestly you need to stop being so lazy…
…or in Kalen’s own words, “Death by Piano’s rebirth is marked by a new EP comprised of six darkwave songs about commitment, betrayal, loss, grief, and love. Big beats, soaring synths, and aching strings tell the tale [created in] collaboration between KALEN & Tom Marsh (Lana Del Rey)” with the “visual world being built by Robert Lester” and with the live show conceived as a “growing theatrical experience…complete with live players & dancers [embodying] the electronic rock noir” of Death by Piano but enough of all that with no further ado let’s get on to the interview…
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I’m done, but scared to go.
I’ll miss the life that I’ve grown to know.
Will the quiet be too loud?
Will my old dreams hunt me down?
—Death By Piano “Countdown”
Kalen on Death By Piano’s new live show…
I started experimenting with different modes of performing during the pandemic. Doing video–recording and live-streaming rather than being on a stage and working to make these highly mediated spaces as experiential and live as possible–it’s had a knock-on effect back into the real analog space. I should also mention a powerful dance+ piece by a friends of mine Vanessa Anspaugh that also influenced my show at NuBlu.
Six of the songs we did were new. Five of them were from our upcoming six-song EP, coming out early in 2024, called VOW. The title refers to what we honor, what we bow down to. Our compass, our North star, our integrity. What we decide to keep making promises to.
Kalen on recently learning she was pregnant with her second child…
The song “Vow,” the first song I performed the other night, after the intro part with the stones on the keys (“How do you de-throne drowning stones that don’t serve?”) is about becoming a mom the first time around. I’m three months pregnant [ed: closer to five months now] and I find it empowering to perform pregnant. In a way it was a relief that I was “showing” and could subtly reference it in song and movement.
On making dance and choreographed movement a major element in live performance…
Johnny Butler, who played saxophone with me, he’s a dear friend and an amazing musician. We’ve collaborated in a lot of different capacities through the years. And during these years he’s become deeply ensconced in the dance world. Most of his pieces now are collaborations with dancers. Part of my desire to explore in this way was influenced by him. It’s opened my eyes up to the world of dance more. One of Johnny’s main dance partners, Alex Oliva, was one of the dancers at my show. She’s become a sort of mentor, a teacher and a dramaturg, for other shows too.
About a year ago I played a salon event at someone else’s house and wove together my songs using poetry—poems from Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions—with the idea being to create a sense of ritual in the performance. I also used a slide projector, an old-school slide projector, to bring a stronger visual element into play. From that point on, my ideas started to coalesce for putting on a more novel kind of show.
That’s when I started consulting Alex to help make sure that what I was trying to communicate to the audience came across. She helped me to strengthen the choices I was making, to make these choices in a way that was authentic but accentuated certain things further. And I loved it. I’ve loved working with Alex. Previous to that, during the pandemic, I consulted my old acting teacher for some of the online shows I was doing. Having a video camera on my face changed the nature of “live” performance to a certain extent. Things like facial expressivity, getting more into the storytelling side of things, become crucial in a way they weren’t before.
Clair Cuny and Alex Oliva
On finding novel, revelatory ways to present live music…
So all these things sort of started weaving together, and a lot of my passion went into not just the music making itself or the lyrics, the songs, the melodies and all that, but also the presentation of the material. I’ve always thought that one reinforces the other. Plus I’ve become a little bored with the standard format of a rock show or its equivalent. Even when I truly appreciate someone who has a great sound, I’ve become more critical with the standard setup over time, the familiar ways music is presented in a live setting. Maybe it happens when you’ve been doing this for a long time!
Either way, just playing a string of songs wasn’t that exciting to me anymore. That familiar format, I wasn’t turned on by it. So I kept looking for new ways we could all play off from each other, even subtle things like everyone in the band mouthing the lyrics to a song. The other band members don’t even need to be miced, it’s like, oh my God they all know it. They’re all into it! Those little things can make such a big difference.
Honing in on these types of moments was a big part of how this show coalesced. Making concrete choices around how to present something that was more curated in a sense. I had like 20 pages of movement notes alone. And lighting cues too. So there was a lot of forethought that went into it. But at the same time I didn’t want to lose the carnality and the rawness of what I fuckin’ love from rock shows, the “liveness” of live shows. I didn’t want it to feel like musical theater. It was fun crafting something that had space for both those things—with a lot of intention behind it but also space for rawness and living in the moment.
Along these lines, performing at Nublu was another very intentional choice for sure. The owner of the club, Ilhan Ersahin, let us into the venue one day to go and map stuff out which was totally essential. I’m really grateful for that. And then one of the sound guys, Onur Gul, was able to focus on lighting specifically for that night. All the ingredients came together to help us execute exactly what we’d hoped to be able to execute.
On the usefulness of having an acting background…
I used to act in college and also when I first moved to the city. I loved it but didn’t feel like I had the bandwidth to pursue it while pursuing music and trying to make a living. Then I started working with my old acting coach again in anticipation of the show. We’d work together remotely and get inside the lyrics. It was like workshopping a script and trying to ascertain where’s my story here and how do I express this in movement and staging? It was an interesting project. The lyrics were already written and I closely identified with them of course, but doing that work, spending the time to go through line-by-line and discuss and unpack every line, every image, whether a mountain range or whatever else, it helped me to really live inside the storytelling in as real a way as possible. It was helpful going deeper with it.
Doing these exercises helped me materialize the songs not just in terms of my own physical presence but also through the use of other objects and props as well. I did one show, Johnny had asked me to play a solo show a few months back, and I did an initial version of what you saw on stage at Nublu with the placing of the stones on my keyboard. He wanted the stage pretty much clear so for me doing a Death By Piano set it meant playing with tracks. And quite frankly, I think it’s usually fucking boring when people just sing to tracks. So I started to think about how can I do this and make it interesting, how can I make it compelling? I did some research and started exploring the idea of playing with the materiality of objects, like using a shroud and the stones.
On combining, or even blurring, the “natural” and the “synthetic”…
But I wanted to make sure anything I used had a purpose, and that it was woven into more than just one random part of the performance. That’s when I started experimenting with the stones, and playing with them on the keyboard. I don’t remember the exact moment of inspiration. It may have been a happy accident that I put them down near my keyboard. And then it was, like, whoa, wait a second. It got nice feedback at the first show so I wanted to explore what I could do with the stones a little further this time around.
In Death By Piano it’s my goal to have the tracks come across as big and visceral and “real.” But for this performance I was also looking for ways to have “natural” sounds complementing the tracks, which is part of why this was the first time I’ve ever had a female backup singer as a full part of the show, Claire Cuny, the dancer you saw at Nublu who’s also a musician. I wanted her to sing because I wanted to bring more human voices into the mix, enhanced by having Johnny on the saxophone too. One of the things that separates Death by Piano from my solo stuff is that the songs usually begin with tracks, instead of me at the piano creating songs from scratch that way. So there’s already a canvas to paint on even as the songs evolve in new directions.
Singer/rapper/beatsmaster No Surrender (with Claire Cuny at right)
On the centrality of artistic collaboration…
For the VOW EP I reached out to Abe Seifreth who had worked on a bunch of Death by Piano music, and he recommended this guy Tom Marsh. He said, I think you should talk to Tom Marsh. I think that you guys could collaborate nicely on some Death By Piano stuff. So I reached out to Tom. This was during the pandemic. It was a while before we met in person. Tom’s a British guy who lives here in Brooklyn. He was Lana Del Rey’s drummer for many years, spent ten years on the road and was still her drummer when I met him. He’s an amazing producer and songwriter too. We have a lot of influences in common. So he shared a whole bunch of tracks with me and I picked out some that really spoke to me and started writing over them.
As we got more familiar with each other he staring sending me more detailed stems and I’d fuck with his arrangements—adding synth parts and getting more involved with pieces of it. The five new songs I played at the show were all collaborations with Tom. Then there’s another layer of collaboration that happens playing the songs live. If you didn’t fully notice, Marlon Patton, the drummer, plays all the base lines with his left foot. Every bass line that you heard he was doing all of that live while he was playing the kit, which is fucking ridiculous. He’s going through Moog pedals, so it’s synth bass that sounds as big and nasty as it should for that kind of music, and it all sounds so blended.
I first saw Marlon play around the corner from my house with this great saxophone player, Greg Sinibaldi, so it all just snowballed. I was just about the only person in this cool little beer bar watching them play on a Thursday night because I’d met Greg there before and liked him, and I liked his music. So I wanted to go check out this little thing he was doing, and he was playing with Marlon, and I was just like, what?! You know when you see really great players do something exciting and you just you just start laughing. You just can’t believe what you’re seeing and hearing. And that’s how I felt.
Then I actually went into the studio and fucked around with them one day which was fun—all of us just experimenting—and from that point I had him him filed away in my mind for this kind of project. Don’t get me wrong, I love my drummer, Graham Doby, with the KALEN stuff. He’s fabulous. But the specific combination of what Marlon does is perfect for DBP. The drums shouldn’t do a lot on these tracks, but that bass needs to be monstrous. I remember our first pre-production day for the EP, going into his little rehearsal space to work on it. And I was just like, yes, yes. I knew it would sound good, but it sounded even better than I’d expected.
And then there’s the dancers, Alex and Claire. It’s the first time I’ve ever worked with dancers on stage. Collaborating with them was awesome. I loved working with them. And I usually don’t collaborate with females, period. (laughs) Women are the best, of course. Apart from gender, it’s such a different type of undertaking though. As musicians we make decisions based on a lot of different things for a song, right? It could be the storytelling. Or it could just be the sound, the vibe, the rhythm. But for the dancing, and all the movement choices we were making, it was all about concept. All about us asking, what are we trying to say? And how will it be heard, seen, and felt by the audience based on the choices we make?
On mindfully manifesting the authentic on stage and on film…
It was just such a different way of thinking about a show, about presentation and process. I would say we ended up having a couple main guiding visions for it. One was the fact that we wanted to work off of movement that I was naturally doing already when I presented these songs. I’m not a dancer, but I like to be embodied when I perform. They really wanted to use that as a backbone for some of our movement choices. And the other main thing was that I wanted to be sure it didn’t present like a typical pop type performance, that it didn’t come across like, Here I am, I’m the goddess and they’re my handmaidens or something. That would cheapen any power I was supposed to have or empowerment I meant to present. So we all wanted to be mindful of that and try to do more with less, in terms of our bodies, and moving more sparingly.
I first started to explore this kind of terrain in the video for “Do I?” a couple years ago. The song’s lyrics are a lot about trying to challenge myself, like, Am I ready to make a change? Am I ready to draw the line? To get out of a bad relationship and be okay with it. In the video we tried to recapture something along the lines of the Maria Abramovic performance piece “Rhythm Zero” where she was literally present and people basically had permission to f*ck with her. There was a gun on the table. There were knives. And some people started to really abuse her in awful ways.
I worked with an amazing filmmaker on that music video, Lena Rudnick, and we explored this concept of drawing the line – or not – in different ways. The dancers for the live show and I watched the video to come up with ideas for how to perform the song, but we were also thinking about how the song presents from a much stronger place. Even though it may have been written out of a sense of vulnerability, at first, it ultimately comes across as a challenge. We wanted to present it from that place, from a place of strength more than of vulnerability.
On dramatizing transformation…
That’s how we came up with them getting me ready for a fight and choreographing the song that way. Also since “Do I?” was going straight into “Disco Wrecking Ball”—the most angry song in the set, about feeling completely betrayed by someone you thought you knew and who you trusted and loved—our concept was to imagine they were getting me ready, like a fighter entering the ring, in the form of “Disco Wrecking Ball.” So the primping, the costume changes, were meant to position them as trainers. Trainers wiping the sweat off your brow, massaging the fighter before they go into the ring.
We also wanted to have a visible transformation happen during the song with my appearance changing over the course of the song. So the skirt goes on—a prop needed later for “Too Soon” where I’m saying goodbye to my dad and letting go. But we wanted the transformation to be even more explicit. Alex had the idea to cut my hair. I was game for it, like, yeah, I can do this, especially since I’d had my hair cut on stage before. I did hair modeling back in the day in the city, and there was this one time they got me all dolled up like I’m Black Widow or something, like a Russian assassin going undercover, so they cut off all my hair off in front of 250 German hairdressers. I didn’t even recognize myself after with the shorn hair and all the make-up on. It was wild.
So, yeah, Alex had that idea and I thought it was kind of thrilling. Why the fuck not? It was punk rock.
On New York City…
I went to art school in Philly where I’d sneak off to the practice rooms regularly to write rambling nine-minute long songs on the piano with no fixed key or tempo. But then I started writing over jazzy hip hop beats and Gang Starr instrumentals because the production is so good.
I’d always been attracted to the idea of coming to New York, but it sort of scared me at the same time. The idea of coming here for college, I had a vision of a totally different New York from out of the ‘70s like, you know, my mom’s hippie time. And I thought, I want to be part of that, to be part of underground culture and the artistic community. Once I moved here and had a big reckoning with the fact that my fantasy wasn’t quite the reality, I found my own version of that reality in Williamsburg with loft parties and the different scenes going on during the time. Either way, it was art and music that drove me here for sure.
The first band that I got hired to play with in New York was Primordial Ooze. The guy who ran the band lived in a big loft with a bearded lady who had a three-legged dog named Tallulah. It was all really interesting. I remember our first photo shoot was at the Bronx Zoo. We got on camels, camels at the camel ride that families took their kids to. So here’s me and a bunch of old jazz heads getting pictures taken, pictures that were ultimately Photoshopped to make it look like we were riding camels in Times Square which was printed onto giant posters pasted up all around Williamsburg when I was living there.
And then there was Ladybug Stingray which was really cool. We used to play at the OG Spike Hill. Murder Bar. Alligator Lounge. It was a duo, kind of a performance-oriented, punky funk project. The drummer played left-handed bass. I played keys and synths and sang and would kick over my keyboard and scream and rap. Then there was Kalen and the A-Listers. We were Kalen and the Sky Thieves for a while. We were on Rope-A-Dope Records. We did some touring with some really great bands.
Finally, when we asked “what keeps bringing you back to music as a form of expressing yourself?” Kalen replied…
I think music is the best vehicle for expressing feelings, and for keeping you in touch with your emotions. As a listener music can be utterly transporting. And as a musician, I don’t know of another better way to process my experiences and the world in general. Making music helps me metabolize it all–what I’m thinking about, what I’m feeling, what I’m confused by, what I’m excited about, what I’m angry about–in a way that couldn’t happen otherwise.
Also because it’s so integrated with the other arts too. Having a background in visual arts I think one of the reasons I was attracted to music is because it’s so collaborative. At the risk of sounding lame, I love the creative process. I love how surprising it is. I love collaborating with other people. Music is just such a collaborative art form. Even if certain musical things feel kind of old or tired, to me, there’s always new explorations to be had including new ways of presenting my music and bringing in these other elements.
I guess all art forms are this way, but I feel like for music especially we learn by imitating what we like and putting our own spin on it. So it’s collaborative in that sense too—across generations and across space.