Lilac Fortress plays music that leaves you with on foot on the ground and one lifting off into Outerspace as the music seems to live in both spaces. There are times when the melodies call you to Earth and the electronic or subtle industrial sounds push you into the unknown. It was great to get a chance to talk to bandmembers, Adam Bubolz and Bryan Wildes about their sound and the new album.
Please tell us about Lilac Fortress and your music.
Adam Bubolz: Bryan and I first played together in a rock band briefly and also played improvised music at an art opening. The idea of Lilac Fortress was intriguing as a challenge as I’ve never played guitar in something that wasn’t a more classic rock band lineup. It was a lot of work and time, both studio and live, to figure out how this could work. Bryan writes everything, and we pick and spend time just looping things in the practice space till something forms. With the record, though, there was a lot more time for me to sit around and just work away on guitar parts until I had something interesting.
Bryan Wildes: Playing art shows is a lot of fun. When we first started, I was really pushing harsh, acrid sounds more geared towards experimental. Like, what if the Future Sound of London and Whitehouse formed a supergroup. I don’t think Adam was all that into it. He would steer me into more inviting sounds as we were writing, which helped the record out in the long run.
The timing of the release coincides with some major political changes. When did you start creating these songs and is the timing coincidental?
AB: We started a lot of these songs somewhere around 2019. As we started to think about having a clear album of songs to record, 2020 happened, and we were brought back to our own homes to work. I live in South Minneapolis, about four blocks from George Floyd Square, and the year brought me into more serious involvement in my local politics. Whether that intentionally affected the record or not, we recorded the music amidst one political shift and released it during a completely different one.
BW: The main theme of the record is escapism, specifically the fantasy of surviving day-to-day life. Leaving Earth and your struggles, surviving not only your own death but the end of the universe. The majority of us are one accident away from inconceivable debt, eviction, defaulting on a mortgage, etc. It is an inescapable reality. Political shifts do impact people’s lives, but I don’t see either party willing to address income inequality. The goal is to get elected, not change lives. That being said, escapism is a pretty natural want. To have the pressure of daily life in the forefront of your mind all day every day would crush you, but spending too much with escapism will stifle progress. I suppose there is a balance, but I don’t know what that looks like.
The album sounds like a journey that’s arduous until the Interlude and then lightens significantly with sounds that remind me of older video games mashed up with a softer industrial sound – like the repeating of a hammer tap as opposed to harsh mechanical sound of “Industrial” music. Can you tell me about the flow of the album?
AB: The flow of albums has always been a major fascination of mine. Listening to the beginnings and ends of songs repeatedly to figure out how things flow and what curveballs you can work in and still make the record a flowing collection of songs.
A big part of the journey of this album was learning how to do this all on our own. I was recording guitars through virtual amps on the computer in my home office, and some sounds are just by accident in working with a new technology. Sometimes things react as you think they would, but sometimes you just stack and swap ideas until something weird happens. The guitar on Interlude is probably the best example of that.
BW: The thematic flow of the record is ‘leaving and coming back.’ It wasn’t too challenging to establish a track order to serve that purpose. The intro, interlude and outro were written after the fact for emphasis. Pulsing synths pushing from beginning to end. In producing the record, DIY was very important to us. Every element of recording, mixing, design and photography, as much as we could finish with a high level of satisfaction, we did it ourselves.
I love the idea of the Intro, Interlude and Outro on the album. Places like sonic palate cleansers. How did you decide to add these?
BW: It’s a combination of growing up in a classical music household mixed with how influenced I was by the first White album (Shou Wang and Shen Jing, 2013). I wanted to do something that incorporated both of those things to enhance the full play-through of the record.
AB: I’ve learned over the years how important learning when not to play is. The way the intro and outro pieces flowed in and out of the songs just felt right as it is without me. Interlude was such a different piece central to the album flow that I immediately heard heavy guitars, and it gave me a chance to do something different than many of our songs.
Where can folks find you and do you have any shows coming up?
Find us here:
We post short video art content on IG and TikTok, trying new things, different sounds. Kind of like little writing exercises and we always try to make show flyers unique little pieces. It’s debatable if that serves to advertise when and where we are playing, but we try to post flyers about a month out from when we have a show. If you are on any of those platforms, please consider following.
Mostly Minnesota 