MATT MOTTEL:

Well. One of the first statements that I made about talibam! Is that it is the ‘first word in the new language.’ The initial idea of the word talibam! Is to decontextualize language and its usual roots of power and control which come from an authoratarian perspective and to retake control of language for our own creative and ultimately more positive use…. we are interested in language not having the usual and shared values that our culture mandates but instead to circumvent and in many cases make fun at the absurdity of words and then use wordplay as a comedic attitude in both live and studio form… Our live concerts range in absurdity to serious tone as a matter of our attitude favoring the non linear opposed to the bland carbon copy rock n roll phoned in stage banter that passes for entertainment… we want to entertain both in our music and in our stage presence and humor is a very effective way to connect.?…. for us the difference between live concerts vs studio discs is blending in a severe manner….more so than in the past…  we data mine our live concerts for fresh moments that we like and flush out to turn into proper studio recordings and then re learn the tunes to play live in concerts… right now our live set is 35 tunes…we can play it in 30 minutes or an hour and a half… for our studio albums we are making a focused attempt to create an art that is not just a representation of what our band does live, but can be a deeper narration into our creative mental states… the future of our live concerts will start to incorporate our studio efforts as we get used to playing with samplers or play as a larger ensemble and play music from albums…. … I like what u said about the origins of the band..u got things right…. maybe one thing to add is that our former band mates are in bands like tv on the radio, battles and grizzly bear…. unexpected former collaborators but it makes sense when u hear a record like boogie and realize that we too are interested in a pop form, just not as a conservative form as some of these former collaborators make in their bands….

KEVIN SHEA:

Our humor comes from a place of seeming emptiness, from a place of disbelief aside from a commitment to pragmatic morality and the hope not to take for granted how our choices effect others. We aren’t coming from a place of traditional spirituality to gain our foundation or a place where we hold our opinions as sacred over and above all else. To us music is a process, opinions are plastic, our foundation is process through which we gain a broader awareness and compassion. We don’t think other people are stupid, and so we don’t want to take anyone who listens to us for granted — our ultimate goal is to create music out of kindness, and to be kind by wedding disparate ideologies threaded with proficiency and questioning. When I hear a band always play in the 4/4 time signature, or a band who sounds extremely rehearsed and imbued with woeful lyrics, I think they think I am stupid, I think they are upholding traditions because are either despodic, masochistic, or lost. Our brains don’t operate via clear channel compression or sugar-coated illusion and we don’t want to be a part of the problem. To me… Good music, and good musicians, explore sound in and of itself without feeling any responsibility to indicate melody, time,
meaning, allusion, comfort, sadness, freedom, excitement etc… Sound itself has no boundaries… Bands and musicians who approach music solely by seeing music only as historical or applicable within a preset context bore us. We appreciate musicians who are aware of many kinds of music and who thus play each kind of music in any way they want to as if its no more or less important than any other kind of music with no uber-context. Music can mean and be whatever you want it to, and I think as humans we have a responsibility not to uphold any indoctrinated stringent rules for how communication and meaning are to be realized, distributed, interpreted or expressed. For example, there are nascently accepted cultural values assigned to specific time signatures, melodies, key centers, cadences, lyrics…to us it is a valid/real crime against humanity to negate the meaning that these values instill within others…lest we nurture an indifference to other people, a narcissistic belief system played out in nationalism, facism, conspicuous consumption — The application of diversity in sound is paramount to the appreciation of diversity amongst fellow human beings.