Little Window

HOW DID YOU GUYS MEET

ELI – I started playing music seriously again as a way to grieve and process that 

intensity. My creative practice had been mostly visual art focused for the past 10 years or so. And then I went on the lovable Craigslist [laughter] 

and I found Luca almost immediately and we started practicing together. These two have a cute story of knowing each other first since childhood tho…

MATTHEW - Even pre childhood. Our grandparents grew up in the same mountain village in Italy. We happened to be in the same neighbourhood. I was friends with Luca's older brother. But it wasn't until I was in my mid twenties that we both of reconnected.

LUCA – Same elementary schools, same high schools, and then we connected at CHRY radio, we realized we were both crazy about all sorts of far out music. We were just like “let's jam, let's jam” and we just started jamming, went crazy. Over the next less than 20 years, almost 2 decades if there was ever a project to play in we just ended up somersaulting into the rhythm section together 

ELI – That's what you want in a rhythm section— deeply connected and locked in. We came together as a group for the first time to record our album Creepy. It was so seamless, we just had to keep it going.

IS LITTLE WINDOW YOUR HEART AND SOUL?

MATTHEW – Well Little Window is very much emanating from Eli's art practice and aesthetics and style. Speaking again to Luca and I: we've been really good at “Here's a thing, we can do our thing – in that thing” like more recently we played in a project called MOONWOOD and that was a project that predated us. It was a solo, then a duo then they added a rhythm section. 

It was a neat thing to similarly have someone who has this multi faceted practice and a really clear aesthetic and creative vision for the project and then we show up and we can help augment that or extend that.

IS ELI CREATING THE MASKS AND PLANNING ALL THE VISUALS?

ELI – Yes. I am a full time artist, for a long time mostly in the alt comics and independent publishing community, which also overlaps heavily with zine culture and music, with a ton people doing both. In 2019 I branched into sculpture without any real plan as to what it was going to become, just building out the world from my paintings and comics. When me and Luca first started playing together, we were crammed into the corner of my tiny art studio, with all the morbid grief art I had making all around us. I’d been experimenting with different approaches to Little Window as an art and music project, 

First with hand-drawn animations to my improvised songwriting, then moving towards mold-making, costumes and set design in hopes of making a short surrealist art film. Actually, the skeleton masks were originally vessels with holes in the top, a sort of personification of addition. 

I have no clear memory of when it became something we would instead do live. It all sorta got swept up in Earth Punk, this huge exhibition my art collective put on at It’s Ok*Studios. Maybe I was just so delirious from planning and organizing, it just made complete sense that we would embody it as performance for the exhibition.

SONGWRITING PROCESS

MATTHEW – Guitar > Lyrics > Vocals, for me it's been I'm receiving all of that.

ELI – Prior to the band, I’d been on doing this really long recording project documenting my improvised songwriting. Every time I pickup up my guitar, I’d spend a few minutes finding a new tuning and then just follow whatever comes from there. I was very much trying to escape predictive habits. I’ve been playing guitar almost everyday since I was 9 and it had started to feel so constrictive and unsurprising. 

We’ve started out by messing with this songwriting material, mostly from my grief era, which is way more folky and loose. But we had to slam it through this amplified container so it could compete with Luca's drumming. It just inevitably results in something loud and gritty. 

We’ve shifted to writing more collectively, at least with Guitar and percussion, because it can be easily improvised just on vibes. Luca and I just went nuts one day and basically wrote most of Creepy in two hours.

I was spinning out hard about colonialism and we had been messing this new baritone guitar tuning— I Want, Aerosol and Give It Back were just one long rant of my deep hatred of greed and the worship of violence and property. Songs just sorta spill out like that. Once we have a structure, we keep reworking the entire thing with Matthew until it’s fully locked in. 

WHAT MESSAGE DO YOU HAVE FOR YOUR FANS

ELI – With music, I absolutely love that it’s this authentic translation of who you are. You can't really lie about it or else people will just hear that lie really loud. Just express yourself and be fucking weird.

MATTHEW – I've never contemplated a message. I guess what I would say is that the sooner you can find a way that your creative impulse can mingle with your peers, the sooner you can think about your community as being expressed through what you do artistically and creatively. And the sooner that you get comfortable being uncomfortable, being vulnerable, maybe failure prone or error prone and working through that, I would say those are good qualities to explore in your work

ELI – Yeah I second failure. Failure is my favourite thing in the entire world. It's the fastest way to learn.

LUCA – I think there are so few opportunities in this world to just really geek out and fall in love with something you're really crazy about. I'd encourage anyone whatever practice, whether it's art, whether it's community radio, whether it's music, dive head over heels and just give it as much love as you want.

WILL THE EXPLOSION OF ANGINE DU POITRINE BE HELPFUL OR HARMFUL

MATTHEW – They're this alien presence, this arrival from other spaces. I think of us being rooted firmly in a particular earthiness.

ELI – I'm a huge fan of going all in on a concept. They really nailed something with the visuals and characters, it’s super compelling. I’m all for any project getting weird.

MATTHEW – We don't do the microtonal though. What Eli was doing prior to our involvement of building songs in a studio context might have been…but now we're much more of a ‘we realize it live’ with the noise aspects. Whereas they seem to be more of a looper pedal massing of sound and then these more mathy arrangements combined with microtonal tuning systems.

I think that Eli's tuning systems, you do play with microtones but you play with pitch bends so there's ambiguity.

LUCA – In a previous radio interview I did compare us to how we came together similar to how the OG NWO came together

MATTHEW — (Whispers oh jesus christ)

LUCA – Where Eli is the Hulk Hogan character, Me and Matthew are Kevin Nash and Scott Hall

MATTHEW – Can we disavow their politics though?

LUCA – Yeah absolutely. Purely from a wrestling stable perspective. That group does a cool hand signal, where I prefer if we just did a classic wolf pack kind of move. So if anything, we would be down to challenge them to a wrestling match? Hardcore rules, biting allowed.

MATTHEW – Can we do a ladder match, and whoever gets the masks?

LUCA – Oh that's a great idea! Total ladder match. Like Sean Michaels / Razor Ramone when Sean Michaels got his pants pulled down. A lot of shakatery, a lot of craziness, we are keen for it so to that duo: we are challenging you to a wrestling match.

[Laughter]

MATTHEW – Can I add one other thing? I will say this, I've been playing music now in a band context, like I was playing music as a kid I was a violin player and in concert bands as a tuba player or trombone player. Then I was playing in bands as a bass player for 15 years, and this is the first time where I feel like I'm actually exploring the medium of live music as opposed to just standing there and executing a riff on an instrument. It's something that I'm actually contemplating all these other dimensions of live performance. So I do think that there is something about playing a character that also is inviting you to be more yourself at the same time which is a strange thing to resolve. So I would just say that complexity is really intriguing and gratifying.

IS THERE ANONYMITY BEHIND THE MASKS? DO YOU CHANGE PERSONAS?

MATTHEW – That's just it. I think there's a tension there for me is what I'm discovering. Eli didn't say “this is your character, this is your personality or your motivation”

ELI – Are you saying that I could though? Don't give me permission to be that neurotic.

LUCA – I mean it's on the table now

[Laughter]

ELI - Im very curious about how it’s all perceived. With this all starting as a grief project and the live component to the project being unplanned. It’s been interesting to lean into the experience and make it unreal. 

I'm not sure if I fully get it but as an artist I’m just following my impulse, this is how I needed to work through my grief. It’s one of the most intense experiences and we don’t live in a society that makes space for that. Like 3 - 5 days off work? It takes years just to just move through the initial shock.

It also could be that, as a queer person, embodying what I felt made the most sense, an extended process towards understanding. Like a type of drag, as in embodying decay and death in an exaggerated way. For me the masks are a playful way to interact with the intensity of it all. When I make them, I don’t feel like they’re fully resolved until they feel both creepy and cute. The absurdity is important.