Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes talks Skeletal Lamping details

Paste had a dandy time at SXSW this year. Aside from all the usual, fun nonsense involving new bands, beer, blogging and BBQ, we hosted three day parties with our friends at Stereogum. Closing out our final day was DJ List Christee, better known as Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes.

"I intended to do something really cool and come to SXSW and establish myself as this fantastic modern DJ," Barnes told us in an interview immediately following his set. "But then I didn't have time, so I established myself as a completely uninspired loser DJ. But I made up a DJ name, which I think is essential. I always think of these characters and give them names, and I like the name List. It's such a bizarre first name. They say you can't trust a man with two first names, like Peter George or something. But List Christee, you can trust her. She doesn't even have a first name."

Barnes set under the List Christee moniker was less traditional DJ (there were no turntables or microphones) and more traditional-guy-at-a-party-with-a-laptop. But the music selection was excellent, and the Of Montreal frontman doesn't have any high-falutin' DJ ambitions to speak of, anyway.

"I don't even feel like it's a performance," Barnes says. "I'm not a DJ. I'm a real-time playlist arranger. A DJ pumps up the crowd and scratches and does creative stuff on the fly. I was basically just chilling and playing music. During my first set ever, I was an iPod DJ in Oslo at this little bar and they actually pulled the plug on me. 'We don't play that kind of music.' I was playing The Cure, Beck and things that were considered more mainstream by them. It is really humiliating to have the plug pulled on you, and then to have to do the cold walk of shame home with your iPod between your legs."

But Barnes hasn't spent all his downtime since 2007's excellent Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? arranging playlists. He's also been working on the follow-up to that critically acclaimed album. Set for a tentative October release, Barnes says the new album is called Skeletal Lamping.

"This sounds pretty pompous, but I was reading Dylan Thomas poems," he says. "He has such an interesting way of phrasing things. His language is so beautiful. I had this silly project where I would read one of his poems and then use that spirit and write my own poem. 'Skeletal Lamping' was a term that came out of that. I actually used it in one of the songs on our last record, 'Faberge Falls for Shuggie.' I was kind of thinking that would be a cool name for the record. And it would be so bizarre if I named this record Skeletal Lamping and the next record Controller's Sphere and the next record False Priest, because those are the three phrases I say at the end of that one song. So who knows if I'll do that with the next record? I probably won't. But maybe I will."

Barnes says he currently has about 50 minutes of music, which is the length he'd like the album to be, but has plans to record more and trim the fat over the coming months. His mastering appointment in May will keep him to that task, especially since he seems to have a little trouble holding back his songwriting.

"I could've easily made a double album, but I feel like people's attention spans don't go there anymore," Barnes says. "Mine doesn't go there either. It's really exciting and fun to release everything you've been writing, but at the same time, I want to be concise and really effective. I want people to get to the end of the record. I don't want them to be like, 'It's really great, but I always turn it off around the sixth song.'"

Meanwhile, Barnes insists that Skeletal Lamping will pave new stylistic ground for Of Montreal. Citing Health (who played directly before Barnes at the Paste/Stereogum party) as an example, he explains that the new record will likely be a heavier affair than past Of Montreal albums.

"I'm trying to create tension with the music instead of it always just being sun-kissed and happy and disco-y or whatever," he says. "I'm trying to create more sound collages, having them fade into more melodic parts and basically genre hop like I always have. But the new genre I'm including in it is this noisy tension music. Hopefully it works. It's not angry, really. When music is like that, playing with tension, creating discord and using dissonance, it's exciting for me. I don't think of it as angry. I think of it as emotive. When you hear stuff like that, it's not grotesque sounding; it's really cool. You're not only like, 'I wanna dance,' you're like, 'This hits me really deeply and I don't know why.'"

Barnes also promises "really crazy, functional packaging" for the new album that will serve as more than "a little cardboard box that is a conveyor of the CD," but did not divulge any specifics just yet. In the meantime, if you're a resident of Belgium, England, or, um, Michigan, you can catch his band (possibly working on its noise, tension) at one of the following dates:

May
9 - Brussels, Belgium @ Botanique
11 - Camber Sussex, England @ All Tomorrow's Parties

July
4 - Rothbury, Mich. @ Rothbury Festival

August
10 - Leicester, England @ Summer Sundae Weekender

Watch the full Kevin Barnes SXSW interview:

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