How did you and Abby first discover you were artistically compatible?

She did an installation when she was still in art school and I did one long song which I eventually put out as a split 7” – it was kind of the first thing I ever put out on my own. And that felt a little like, “oh, this could happen. We could do more stuff…” I think it was really with the Sun Tongs record cover. And it was like, “Okay, she has a style that’s very much her own that I feel like could work for the music that were doing… and that it could be cool, or make a cool record cover.” I had this idea – and this is an example of where I had a picture of something in my mind of these weird dead, kind of punk chicks and Abby will joke about how all the people she always draws always look like dead people, no matter what she does. So it was kind of like, “Can you do this cover that’s sort of a weird collage-y mix of drawings but these two kids are kind of dead zombies and they’re also Animal Collective fans? “ And she did it! I was like “Yeah! That’s totally what I wanted.” From there we were able to just keep stuff going and it kind of progressed into her doing the live video for shows with Animal Collective and now with Slasher Flicks. She contributed to this tour in that we’re touring around with the videos she made. It’s the one from the live stream but we’re projecting them onto these skulls but you can’t tell as much what’s going as much as there are a lot of heavy colors. It’s for the environment.

Given that your music, and the visuals that often accompany it, has always been pretty heavily psychedelic, I’m wondering if there was any specific bits of psychedelia that made an imprint on you in the early years of your musical discovery.

Yeah, I think it was really the idea that music could become this different thing, it could really just have this effect on me. I wouldn’t say psychedelia only cause the word’s so vague. I feel like it’s one of these go-to words that’s easy for people, but also so many people probably have different definitions of what it is. Everyone thinks so differently.

But for me I think it started when we were in high school, listening to music and it was about experiences we were having on LSD or mushrooms and just hearing how music could change and affect you emotionally. And in that context it just stuck with me then, you know, it wasn’t even something I really explored extensively beyond that time period, but it just got me into music in that way. It’s fitting with music to look at it as an art – drawing the ties between visual art and music and movies and it all just kind of came together for me. Visual art was an easy way to get inspiration for music too.

I understand you spent some time at Dead shows at a very young age? Hence the name for Merriweather Post Pavillion ?

Yeah, before Jerry Garcia died, when I was really young. I actually didn’t really have any drug experiences because we were so young, We went with my older brother and my cousins and stuff. We would just go and dance and have a good time because I really liked the music a lot. It was just such a freakshow. I’ve never really been to an environment like that where you’re just at this huge concert and everybody is just really losing their shit and flipping out, dancing. It was just so cool to me.

So you were raised in a pretty ‘far out’ environment?

I mean I saw it around me. I feel like that’s what sort of pulled me into that culture. It made it seem like a very normal thing to me.

Let’s talk Horror for a moment. Slasher flicks don’t really strike me as your favorite subgenre…

No, not at all, actually. I really just like the way the words sound together as a band name. I think there is an element of slasher movies I like – sort of the more psychedelic gory side of it, where it’s just like watching visual art in this really low grade kind of way. I feel like it’s just a genre that’s like no other. It’s very visual for me. But I’m more into the supernatural. When it comes to real horror, I really like The Exorcist or The Shining, something with a little bit more of a supernatural twist to it. I really like reading ghost stories in general, in literature. That whole world is just more appealing to me.

For me, I feel like listening to your music over the years, and watching a lot of the image art associated with your music, I’d more peg your horror favorites as surreal haunts like Carnival of Souls or House.

Oh, totally! House just became this bizarre movie that we all liked a lot. In the early 2000s we got this bootleg of it that we kept on watching. There’s just these movies you sometimes stumble upon and when it happens to be in the horror genre, it’s just like “What the hell is this movie?!” you know? Also I just feel that’s like the thing about horror movies too is that once you’re in it and once you kind of break those boundaries of what you’re watching, It allows you go into the world of murder and supernatural, and so much of it is hearsay anyways, it sort of becomes this dreamlike, nightmarish atmosphere where anything can happen. So I feel like with those movies, especially the ones I like the most, are the most absurd and, no holds barred

Do you have a favorite David Lynch movie?

I actually just saw a short he did called The Grandmother, which I was kind of blown away by. I don’t really know where it’s been – maybe it just hasn’t been readily available or something. I’ve never really been like a huge Lynch freak or anything. But I saw Inland Empire, and maybe it was just the circumstance of seeing it at the IFC theatre and the sound being so intense and him just kind of being into stuff like sound so much, but I really related to that movie somehow. The effect it had on me… it was just such a sonic visual experience.

I feel like you and Lynch employ similar sonic tactics. I don’t especially wanna call your stuff abrasive, but your work definitely has its share of freak-out moments.

Totally, I mean it’s about appreciating the abrasive.

Getting back to slashers, how would you describe the appeal of watching a pschyo with a chainsaw chasing a girl while wearing another man’s face?

Well, I feel like if you’re speaking specifically about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I feel like that movie just set the groundwork for the movies that came after it, just as a piece of art. It’s not really that I get into a dude chasing people around with a chainsaw. I feel, especially with modern stuff like Hostel or something like that, I just don’t get into that. I mean, it kind of bothers me you know that sort of gratuitous murder, murder kind of stuff. But like feel like that movie in itself being low-fi and with that soundtrack, it is more like a noise piece or a contemporary classical music piece, it’s abstract in making you consider what is appealing about it. There’s something that’s emotionally effective about it. It might not be the emotions you want to experience, or most people wouldn’t want to experience anytime, but for me it’s somehow appealing.

Also early audiences of Chainsaw back in 1974 didn’t know what a slasher movie was so that in itself must have made it a pretty surreal first screening.

Totally. You can imagine people seeing the movie for the first time – and I recently went and saw the movie Under The Skin, and I haven’t really seen a movie in a theatre in a long time like where I was kind of like “Ah man, this is making me feel a lot of intense emotions and dark things. I’m not sure if I’m into it or not into it.” It just made me think of what it would be like going to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. And 2001 is like this really popular movie that everyone knows about, but what was it really like going to see that in theatres for the first time? With people just like ‘WTF?!’ you know?

If you were commissioned to write a screenplay, what do you think a horror movie from your brain would look like?

It would be more like an art show probably (laughter), like way more visual and abstract I think. Though I’d also like the challenge of doing something more linear and story based. I think that would be cool, but it would be hard for me to not also want to focus on visuals in the ways that people like Alejandro Jodorowsky or [Andrei] Tarkovsky do. Visually, that’s a style I really like a lot, so it would probably be a weird combination of that kind of stuff.

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