Brooklyn-based art collective tackle fashion, art, literature…and music
A recipe made in indie heaven. Mix one part fashion, a little literature, two successful bands, then garnish with print art and you may end up with something like Brooklyn-based art collective Uninhabitable Mansions (UM).
The group is set to officially release pressed copy of their first album, “Nature is a Taker,” this Friday. Digital copy of the full-length dropped in early October, and accolades for the have group steadily followed.
Chris Diken, also of Radical Dads, is joined by Au Revoir Simone’s Annie Hart, Robbie Guertin and Tyler Sargent from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (CYHSY), Doug Marvin from Dirty on Purpose and Danny Comer in the multitalented effort.
Diken recently answered a few questions on the past, present and future of the artistic endeavor. UM are set to play DC’s Rock & Roll Hotel this Thursday.
You’re billed as an art collective. Which form of art takes the lead? The music, illustrations or books? What propelled your diverse group to take on such an endeavor?
We work on whatever interests us at a given moment. We also consider what’s demanded by the market. For example, when we conceived our second project, UM Yardstick, measuring was the hot thing. There was always some new dimension that needed attention.
Our album Nature Is a Taker is a response to a series of complaints. People who owned our silent objects brought them back and said, “We can’t listen to these.” So we had no choice; we caved. Recently we noticed a few chests were woefully unadorned. Hence the Unidentifiable Monsters t-shirt.
As noted, you’re a few flavors of CYHSY and Au Revoir Simone mixed with a range of artists. How would you, as a group, describe yourselves? What brought you together?
We describe ourselves as friends first, and members of UM second. Being friends, we looked for ways to spend a lot of time together. Becoming a professional sports team was too expensive, and moving to a commune wasn’t quite pretentious enough. Starting a band and art collective struck the right balance of expensive and pretentious.
Is there an end goal, something large, UM hopes to accomplish? Or, is this an outlet away from your main artistic/career pursuits?
Our goal is to make things that we’re excited about. If other people are excited by those things, that’s great, too. All of us count making art/music among our main pursuits, so it’s not really an outlet from something else we do. That is to say: None of us are accountants and use UM as a way to relieve stress after tax season. It’s more like the outlet that allows us to do all the things we want to do.
Your album officially releases this Friday. “We Already Know” is already looping in my head. What tracks are your most proud of? Any story(s) about the lyrical/musical progression of a track or two?
We’re pretty proud of having made what feels to us like a cohesive album, and not a collection of random songs that happen to be cut into the same disc-shaped object. We put a lot of thought into the track sequence and how many bits of percussive noise occur before a melody kicks in and whether those bits are recognizable as the clangs of an apartment radiator.
Like most bands’ songs, ours evolve over time. Someone brings in a basic structure, or maybe just one part, and everyone contributes to the final product. And so “We Already Know” started life as an R&B slow jam, and through extensive collaboration it became the death metal opus that ends the record. We are also really proud of the fifth track, “Maps: Not Accurate,” because it has a colon in the title. We are unrelenting grammarians.
Last: “Uninhabitable Mansions,” where did the name come from?
We had a number of criteria when selecting a name. First, we wanted something difficult to pronounce. Second, we sought a name that would be easy to misspell, even by us. Thirdly, when abbreviated, the name is “UM,” which is what people often say to fill the air while they are figuring out how to express themselves verbally. Every pause and stutter becomes part of a large-scale guerrilla marketing campaign.
