A conversation with Ernest Greene of Washed Out
Ernest Greene of Washed Out talks about his next move, while ruminating on the Internet's unruly ways, and growing as a performer
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- Ernest Greene of Washed Out
Believe it or not, Washed Out has never really headlined an American tour in support of last year's Sub Pop Records breakthrough, Within and Without. Ernest Greene, progenitor of the oft-ridiculed chillwave genre, marks the end of his summer tour schedule with a show of sensual, electronic pop, touching on all of the album's hits - "Amor Fati," "Before," and maybe even a few older numbers as well.
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Time on the road as been a learning experience for Greene, and while making his way back to Atlanta with a mostly new band lineup in-tow, he's still planning his next move with Washed Out, all the while ruminating on the Internet's unruly ways, and how he's grown as a performer.
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Washed Out. With Airbird, Dog Bite. $15. 9 p.m. Sat., May 19. Terminal West, 887 W. Marietta St., Studio C. www.terminalwestatl.com.
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Chad Radford: So are you living in the city now, or are you still somewhere in the outlying communities?
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Ernest Greene: Yeah, my wife and I have a house in East Atlanta - just a couple blocks from the Earl. We've been here for about a year now, I guess. I did most of the recording for the last record in Eatonton, Georgia on Lake Sinclair, but that's been over a year now. We still feel pretty new to Atlanta. Everything is very spread-out, and I'm still wrapping my head around the different neighborhoods and stuff. We're excited for the show coming up on the West Side at Terminal West. I haven't spent much time over in that part of town at all.
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You're at a point now where the excitement surrounding Within and Without has tapered off. Are you playing new stuff these days?
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We're wrapping up our summer tour in Atlanta, and surprisingly enough, it's the first headlining tour we've done for this record. When it was released, we headlined a handful of shows here in Atlanta, New York, and a couple on the West Coast, but then went straight to Europe, did a bunch of shows there, then came back in the Fall for a tour with Cut Copy. I wrote a lot of this record with the live show in mind, but didn't have the experience to know how to pull it off. At this point, we've played the songs enough now, and I've changed things around enough to where, after a month of rehearsing, we're pretty comfortable with the songs.
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Since it's a headlining tour, we have more money to invest in the visual side of the things, which is important. It's hard to put on a really entertaining show when you're stuck behind a synthesizer - in a rock band with guitars and everything, you're free to move around, and for the audience it makes a more entertaining show. But when you're playing soundscape synth music, any kind of visual effects really help. So that's something new, and I'm hoping that by the time we get to Atlanta, we'll have our shit together, and it'll be a better performance than anything we've done here previously.