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By Nathan Reese
“There’s a million trash names for a record, or your band even, until you come up with something that really clicks,” says Peaking Lights’ Aaron Coyes. “Like all the records we’ve had, the title has always come in weird epiphanous ways.”
The title in question is Cosmic Logic, the new record that Coyes and his wife/bandmate Indra Dunis have been working on for the last couple of years. The result is the brightest, most pop-oriented collection of songs yet from the dub-leaning Angelenos. The production is immaculate, Indra’s voice is bell-clear (she took voice lessons prior prior to recording), and the beats are downright danceable. Cosmic Logic could be the band’s best-sounding record to date.
But even as the songs gravitate toward pop, a comforting undercurrent of blissed-out positivity runs though the music. The video for “Breakdown,” for instance features a monstrous smartphone on the attack, while Peaking Lights sing about breaking free. “It’s just that trying-to-stay-positive thing,” Coyes explains. We caught up Coyes to talk recording the new LP, how kids have changed his perspective, and the mysterious numerological coincidence that lead to the album’s title.
Let’s start with the new album. It’s been a couple years since your last one—what’s changed for you and Indra since then and what did you wanted to bring to Cosmic Logic?
Well, we had another kid and we were able to upgrade our studio so we had better equipment to record with. We’ve pretty much done all of our records ourselves—that’s been part of the process. Part of the learning has been to approach things that we don’t know, engineering or production-wise. The fidelity is higher because we had better gear to use. By the end we were caught up in our own bubble and so we decided to mix the record with Matt Zornley. We did the production, everything, and all the arrangement was already done. And then we went into the studio with Matt and Drew Fisher, who is an assistant and finished up the stuff sonically, ran it through a board—put electricity in it basically.
The record definitely has a brighter, clearer sound than your previous stuff. Was that the result of the new equipment or just how you wanted it to sound?
I wish that we had had those sounds on our previous records, but at the same time, we wouldn’t have been doing it ourselves and we wouldn’t have been learning how to do it. It’s been a slow process, but now I feel really confident in the studio. Whereas before I might have just kind of sat back and not been able to understand how different things get different sounds, now I understand what compression does and how to EQ two sounds that sound similar so that they each have their own range. It’s way more technical, which is awesome and I’m super stoked to learn that stuff. I feel like by teaching ourselves, it’s also given us ways to do things that maybe we wouldn’t have done. [For example,] all the drum sounds on the record are sounds that we pretty-much made ourselves.
When you go back and you hear the early the early tapes or 936, does it feel like the same band you’re in now?
936—listening to that record was such a changing point for us. With Imaginary Falcons we had overwritten, so half of the songs from that record ended up on 936. We wrote the other songs, like “All the Sun That Shines,” “Marshmellow Yellow”, and I think, “Hey Sparrow” pretty quickly before we went into the studio. 936 was such a changing point for us. There was still the tape hiss because we were still using tapes for the sounds, but we basically recorded that tape hiss off of the amplifiers. We had already recorded all the backing tracks onto cassette tapes. Because of how we recorded it, the music is actually a little bit slower than what we’re playing, so the pitch is a little bit off.
How has your approach to lyrics changed over the years?
We took more time with the lyrics and we wanted to get more into telling stories and having them be something that was meaningful—something in our life where we really felt we could connect with. There was just more energy put in. There are metaphors within the lyrics, they are more direct than we had ever done before.
Why did you decide to start the record with that Flying Lizards homage, with “Der Song von Mandelay”?
I love that record, [The Flying Lizards]. I think it’s brilliant. The way that that record is sequenced is awesome. When you hear that bass line, the impact that it has is insane. That record was a game changer for me in the ’90s. With this record we decided to connect with more stuff from our past. Indra is 42 and I’m 37. When we look back, we’ve seen different genres come and go multiple times, and been able to be a part of a lot of cultural movements. For us it was about connecting with our past—what we’ve seen, what we’ve heard—and having fun with it. Trying to relate that to things that we see happening with contemporary culture and contemporary sound.
Would you ever consider doing something like Lucifer in Dub for the new album?
We did a disco mix of one of the songs and a dub mix of one of the songs—it was on the pre-order for the record. I think that for this record, though, we just want it be out there, to kind of like to hear other people’s interpretations. Adrian Sherwood did the “Tiger Eyes” remix. Having other people touch your material is really inspirational too. I’d like to do another dub mix of a record at some point or a remix of our record, but it’s really hard to do and right now. We recorded Lucifer in three weeks, and we wrote the songs in the studio. So it wasn’t like with 936, where we went into the studio and we’d already been playing the songs live for a year, year and half. So with Lucifer in Dub, we were trying distill some of that stuff a little bit. There were songs that we had a hard time with, we couldn’t wrap our head around because we didn’t have time to develop them. With this record I feel like we had so much time to distill and sit with it, and change, and warp. I mean, there’s 60 versions of each song already in the ProTools files, so it’s just a different thing. Now I feel we’ve been in a bubble around the music so long, having other people touch the material and break us out of that bubble is more important for our development than trying to make something right that we felt was not right from the beginning.
There seems to be an upbeat worldview throughout your music, and especially on Cosmic Logic. Was the title related to embodying that positivity?
Yeah, trying to stay positive. The reason we picked Cosmic Logic is actually really trippy. We were sitting around and we were trying to think of what to call the record. I was like, “Indra, let’s call it Cosmic Logic, but I had it spelled different. It was like C-O-S-M-I-K, I think, or something like that. And she was like, “What if we just spell it C-O-S-M-I-C-K?” So we put it into a numerology calculator and it came out to some strange number. And she was like, “Well what if you spell it the right way? What does it come out to?” So we put it in the numerology calculator [again], and the numbers came out to 936! And we were like, “Whoa, this is crazy.” It’s kind of in line with everything. So that was why we chose it.
Do you think that having two kids has changed your outlook or the way you make music?
I think it has done a lot. I feel like it makes us focus more. I think Indra would say this too—that the amount of focus that you have from having kids is so much more. It’s harder, you get less sleep, and you have to put a lot of energy into your kids so that they could thrive and grow. But at the same time, there’s just this focus that you get where—I don’t know—where before I would fuck things off and not care, now I actually care about stuff and I’m really into learning new things. By the pure action of what you do, your kids seem to understand and grow and learn. You don’t even have to tell them, they just do it.
Cosmic Logic is out now. Get it here.
