Kunal Prakash - Silver Synthetic Interview
Are you originally from New Orleans? What was your childhood like growing up? When did you first begin to fall in love with music, more specifically the guitar ? Was this something that was relevant growing up in your household?
I moved to New Orleans from Brooklyn in 2013 with my partner who had been accepted into a graduate program at Tulane. We thought we’d be here for 2 years and it quickly became 10. My dad is a history professor and after short stints teaching in Middletown, CT and in Pasadena, CA he landed in Princeton, NJ where I grew up for the most part. There was music in the house growing up courtesy of both my parents and my older brother. My dad loves the Stones so there was a lot of that. Every track of the Bob Marley Legend comp remains seared into my brain from childhood. I imagine this might be the case for a lot of people my age. Bollywood music was around either on cassettes or via the bootleg VHS tapes we’d rent from the Indian grocery store. My brother was a high school kid in New Jersey in the 90s so there was a heady mix coming from his room of whatever was on MTV at the time along with older rock and roll stuff.
Hendrix, De La Soul, Zeppelin, Blues Traveler, Wu Tang. My parents would also occasionally have parties where my dad’s university colleagues would put together a band and play covers in the living room with a slight red wine buzz. A leading expert on Spanish colonial civil law on the drums, a Greek antiquity scholar on bass who speaks 4 dead languages… A real wrecking crew. I started with piano lessons when I was maybe 11 or 12 but there was a kid who lived next door that got an electric guitar around the same time. We’d walk home from school together pretty often and go to his house and take turns playing his guitar and learning the songs in the back of guitar magazines. It would usually be 3 or 4 songs in each issue with one of them being some kind of canonical rock jam. Creed, Blink 182, and Zeppelin. Something like that. I eventually started bringing his guitar back to my house and playing it a lot. My piano practice quickly took a back seat and I think my parents noticed so they got me my own guitar and pulled me out of piano lessons. Some day I’ll get back to learning piano properly.
What would you and your friends do for fun growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years? When and where did you see your very first concert? When did you realize you wanted to spend your time pursuing music?
I played guitar in a pretty demanding jazz big band in high school. We had class every day, night time rehearsals at least once a week, played a dance in the cafeteria once a month, and traveled to competitions. Along with that I took jazz guitar lessons with local NJ/Philly legend Joe Federico who was a disciple of Dennis Sandole (google him). So jazz was big early on but I also liked lots of classic rock and jam band stuff, so I had a group of friends I’d jam with on the weekends where I’d get to play that kind of music. You know, play half a Hendrix riff repeatedly in a basement for hours with your stoned buddies and then ride your bike home. The first real big concert I remember seeing was Weezer at the Meadowlands. My dad took me and a couple friends for my birthday. It was the Green Album tour and I think At the Drive In and Saves the Day opened. In college, I was lucky to spend a semester in music program in Mali where I got to basically just play guitar for 3 months. I’d sit in with my teacher’s band (Super Djata Band) that had a standing weekend gig at the air force base bar in Bamako and do my best not to blow it. Then the next day he’d show me where I had fucked up and tell me not to do it again. It was amazing. I had gotten into a lot of West African guitar music before that trip but my teacher and other musicians there turned me on to so much more that I still listen to today. It was the first time I got to be part of a community of working musicians. I loved it.
Have you participated in any groups, or projects prior to SS? You mentioned in our correspondence that you are an on and off member of the classic JTBH. How did you initially meet our mutual friend Jake Orrall? How did SS initially form and how did you meet your mates?
I’ve played in quite a few short lived, or one-off groups prior to Silver Synthetic. I’d definitely forget a lot if I tried to list all of them so I’ll try to keep it brief. I played with Viva L’American Death Ray Music starting in 2010. I still play with them on the rare occasion that we are all in the same place at the same time. I’ve toured with Quintron’s Weather Warlock band and have been playing with Quintron & Miss Pussycat for their legendary New Orleans high holiday shows (Halloween, Mardi Gras) the last few years. I’m also the Ronnie Wood/Mick Taylor in The Shitty Stones which plays once a year in New Orleans. We rehearse for 20 minutes and play a 90 minute set. It’s both terrible and very fun. Like you mentioned, I’ve also played with Jeff the Brotherhood on and off since 2014. In between these bands I also occasionally filled in on guitar with Son Little and Benjamin Booker and very, very occasionally did some live solo guitar shows. I met Jake Orrall when we were both 19 so we’ve known each other for close to 20 years at this point.
He was living in Olympia at the time and was roommates with one of my close friends from Princeton. They’d been making a lot of music together and when I went out to visit we did some recording and I shot a music video for them on a VHS camera they’d rented from the Evergreen College A/V department. We’ve been making weird stuff together on a shoe string budget ever since! Silver Synthetic was kind of born out of my bandmate Chris needing a home for a pile of songs he’d been writing that didn’t quite fit the vibe of his more rowdy garage punk band Bottomfeeders. As all bands do, we talked about working on these songs for months at the bar and eventually actually got in the practice space to see if it would work. Pretty quickly we knew that it was something worth pursuing. Lucas, our drummer, grew up with Chris and was also in Bottomfeeders so that was easy to figure out. We had a different bass player at that time who moved away. Our friend Ben Jones has been on bass since early last year. Funnily enough, he and Chris were roommates almost ten years ago when Chris began writing what would become Silver Synthetic songs. There’s demos lost in the sands of hard drives that Ben played on so in a way he was always our bass player.
Tell me about writing and recording the band’s debut EP “Out Of Darkness” back in ‘20. What was the overall vision and approach to those tunes and would you mind walking me through some of the backstory to tracks such as “Making Time”, “OOD” and “Anyway I Can”?
The EP and the full length came from the same sessions so the process was pretty much the same for both. We started playing together in the summer of 2017 and played our first show in the fall of 2018 so by the time we were recording in April 2019 we’d been crafting that batch of songs for quite a while. The EP release really came about because the plans to release the full-length in 2020 kept getting pushed back due to the pandemic. Third Man came up with the idea of combining two B- sides with two album tracks as an album appetizer to give people a taste of the music while seeing if it would be possible to wait out the lockdowns. “Making Time” was definitely an early song for us. We played it often at our first shows and there is another version of it on the dozen, or so demo tapes we sold at those shows. I straight up just play the melody of a Kinks song in the guitar solo which is pretty funny. “Out of the Darkness” really took a journey from the live setting to the recording. At early shows, we’d jam the intro part for a long time and I’d do a bunch of feedback, whammy bar wiggles before we ever got to the song. When we recorded it we tried to capture some of that but tighten it up to keep things moving along for the listener. I could be wrong but I think “Any Way I Can” was relatively fresh to the band when we recorded it. I’m pretty sure it supplanted another song we thought we wanted to record shortly before the sessions and I’m glad it did.
The band released its self-titled the following year, can you tell me about writing and recording this record and what you guys ultimately wanted to achieve and express with this material? Was there any sort of pressure, or anxiety with this being the band’s first full length, or was it all excitement to get this one out to the world?
Like I mentioned, the full length and the EP are kind of conjoined projects born out of the same sessions. We recorded and mixed those songs before we had ever played out of town let alone had a label so there was no pressure at all in terms of expectations when we were working. We just made the album because we’d worked hard enough on the songs to make them worth recording but we had no idea what we were going to do with it once it was finished. The main thing we all agreed on going into it was to avoid any tropes of what you might call. “modern psych”. No giant reverbs and delays on vocals. No drums smashed to bits with a distortion plug-in on the computer. The goal was to present the songs with some clarity. Ross Farbe (Video Age) engineered everything and totally understood what we were going for so the process was pretty smooth. All the recording happened in one week at Chris’ house and we mixed it at Ross’ house in one week a few months later. There’s always some mixture of excitement and anxiety around release days. I was mostly excited to finally get this one out there because we’d recorded it two years earlier and then spent so much time cooped up at home during the lockdowns. There was a new layer of anxiety due to the pandemic because we couldn’t play live. For a rock band that was signed largely on the strength of a live show that was a real bummer.
What have you been up to as of recently? I see you guys have some shows coming up in France soon. Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
Jake and I have a long list of recordings to revisit and finish up so we’re always kind of sporadically working on that. Hopefully we’ll get around to doing a followup to our ASMR album soon because it’s nice to make soothing music sometimes. Jamin came to town recently and we tracked a bunch of new Jeff the Brotherhood stuff that I’m really excited about. It’s really heavy and almost all first takes so the vibe is really wild and free. Silver Synthetic is indeed headed to France next week for a handful of shows. Paris, Bordeaux, and a couple of beach towns. I’m looking forward to the food. We’re releasing a super freaky remix Oliver Ackermann (A Place To Bury Strangers) did of our song “The Door” to coincide with both bands being in Europe at the same time. Last but certainly not least, we just finished up mixing our second record which we made in an actual studio this time rather than Chris’ spare bedroom. It was a blast to make and we’ll be playing some of these new jams in France next week! What a trip.
