TWINS and Anticipation join forces for Pyramid Club

• Kate Lamb

It was only a matter of time before Chris Daresta (Anticipation, ex-Roman Photos) and Matt Weiner (TWINS, Featureless Ghost, CGI Records) started producing music together. Both Daresta and Weiner, along with James Andrew (Tifaret), run DKA, the goth-and-cold wave powerhouse that issues records and books various shows and goth danse parties around the city. Together as Pyramid Club, the duo now embark on a new musical chapter: producing freewheeling sets of sequenced synth music that intersects both musician’s backgrounds. We caught up with Daresta and Weiner after a recent practice session to catch up on the project’s intentions and process as well as the city’s vibrant darkwave scene.

Outside of DKA, when was the first time you guys collaborated musically?
We started DJ'ng together in 2012 and then a month or so later Matt briefly assembled a live band to perform some TWINS material, and Chris joined to play bass. Our collaborations have mostly involved DJing at bars and clubs and running a label together and we had talked about playing together for a while but never really made time to do so until recently.

VOS/Anticipation by The Voice Of Saturn / Anticipation

How does Pyramid Club's process differ from your respective solo processes? And previous collaborations?
It has been a weird combination of our two solo processes, since we have each been coming up with the basic foundations for songs on our own and then coming together and seeing what the other person can add to that. It differs from previous collaborations in the sense that it feels less "forced." We are basically just letting ideas flow and trying to feel it out as intuitively as possible. We both are really into Cabaret Voltaire, Severed Heads, Throbbing Gristle, and trying to combine that sound and texture with elements from some early acid house and EBM and other primitive forms of dance music.

Do you guys each write parts of songs or improvise?
We write parts of songs and then improvise the structure and the elements that we use to color the tracks so that no two performances come out the same, we want this to be a live experience both for us and the audience.

Do you intend to record and release Pyramid Club's music?
Definitely, we're not going to put a ton of pressure on the project, we want it to be fun for us and we're just going to keep playing together and recording our sessions and see what happens.

What are your instruments of choice and why?
We each use an MPC to create our drum parts, samples, and sequences that we send to our synths. That way we can alternate who is writing the main parts of the track and who is driving the arrangement and that gives both of us room to express our ideas and keeps things more varied.

Why is the synth and darkwave scene so fertile in Atlanta right now? And how does the scene differ from that of other cities that you're familiar with?
The standard rock band format (guitar, bass, drums) has been very popular here for a long time, and although the shows that we do don't draw as many people as most of the rock shows here might, there are a growing number of people who are both making this kind of music (both here and elsewhere) and there are enough people in Atlanta who are looking for something different at this point that they are starting to be drawn to the kinds of shows we are doing that are generally centered around a less traditional format. Also, as a general note it seems that Atlanta bands across genres are feeling less pressure to appeal to the mainstream and are letting their ideas go wild and we are very much into promoting that attitude and approach with the label and the bands we look to release and the shows we try to book.

In terms of attendance we probably have less people at our shows than we would in other cities but we have a lot of freedom to do things however we want to do them, especially compared to somewhere like New York and LA. There is not really any sense of “competition" here and we all kind of feel like we need to stick together and support each other to make anything happen, which is not necessarily unique to Atlanta but feels especially important to do so here.

Pyramid Club, Matchless, Gel Set, and Pamela & Her Sons play Eyedrum Tues., Dec. 16. $7. 9 p.m. 88 Forsyth Street SW. 404-578-4430. www.eyedrum.org.