“I actually hate cables,” he adds. “I hate tripping on them and getting them all tangled up.” He shows me his newest invention, which is a board-game-sized metal project box with dozens of knobs and lights and tiny switches — he’s taken the guts out of nine of his guitar pedals and hardwired them all together. “It cuts down on the mess.”
The release of the two records is a transformative process for the music, more so than for most bands. It’s fascinating enough to watch the songs grow live, but their freestanding counterparts have their own allure. The looped repetitions take on a sense of careful precision, parts rolling in like patient tides. On the discs, Micka replaced several automated loops with himself playing the parts. You can feel it — some sections seem less like metronomic placeholders than carefully planned lines. It can be very dense music that sounds as if hordes of people were working on it, but the end product feels personal.
Still, he says, “Sometime it would be great to try and do this with someone else doing all the engineering. Someone to look at me and say, ‘What do you want to do next?’ You know, instead of just going, ‘Hmm, maybe I’ll go read a magazine now,’ and putting things off.”
ANIMAL HOSPITAL + BIG BEAR + BIG DIGITS | Great Scott, 1222 Comm Ave, Allston | March 3 at 9 pm | 18+ | $9 | 617.566.9014 or www.greatscottboston.com
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