SFBG: How was These Are Powers formed?

PN: My band at the time went on a tour with Knife Skills. Both of those bands broke up. Anna and I had talked about playing together. Our idea was to take our guitars out of context and give our music a spiritual creativity. We were trying to do something creative and very personal; ghost punk describes the spiritual part of it. Anna likes to refer to that as Pentecostal reggaeton. The spiritual part refers to anyone who has ever lived and anyone who has ever died. I read Kandinsky'sConcerning the Spiritual in Art a while back, where he talks about trying to unconsciously express what your condition is. It's sort of the idea behind the Der Blaue Reiter art movement that Kandinsky was part of, which is about outsider art in the sense that you are unconsciously expressing what your condition is and what the spirit is inside you. It's a way to translate your condition without too much conscious thought.

These Are Powers live at Death by Audio, November 2007.

SFBG: What is your process?

PN: Living in a way that is not 9 to 5 and is not your standard status-quo American living is as much part of the process as is trusting your condition to translate what you are living is.

SFBG: What kind of life are you all living?

PN: We're trying to do something interesting and meaningful with our lives. Working jobs is fine for some people, but for the three of us, we get very turned on and excited by performing, playing music, meeting people, driving down 80 West in Wyoming. That's really the only thing you can take with you when it's all over.

SFBG: How do you finance your lives?

PN: Sometimes Anna and I are interior painters in NYC. Sometimes she'll temp and Bill will do odd jobs as well. We're all kind of flying by seat of pants. Hoss Records has put our record out. On the road, it's easier; we know we have cash flow. But it's harder back in the city. Being self-employed definitely helps when you're in the city. Before we went on the last tour, we had just enough to get t-shirts and merch from the record label. Once we're out on tour, we know what kind of living we're able to make, and it's enough to eat, play, and party.

SFBG: Do you crash mostly on people's couches?

PN: To keep in the spirit of being turned on by the world at large, we stay mostly with promoters or people at the show or whoever. Once in a while we will get a hotel to reclaim some kind of domestication and nice clean shower. Mostly we stay with people we meet at shows. It's kind of biblical in that sense. If Jesus Christ were a rock star, he'd be doing the same shit we are.

SFBG: Are you and Anna a couple?

PN: Yes, we have been in a relationship for three years.

SFBG: How does that affect your collaboration?

PN: That's always there. It's also a fondness for each other's ability and expression. I like the way she interprets my ideas and vice versa. The chemistry was already there before we put it to music. I think the main challenge is how you handle the rigors of the road.

SFBG: When I listen to your tracks, there are lots of crazy sounds that I can't identify. How do you make your noise?

PN: I have been playing on the same guitar since 1991. When I started this band with Anna, I was really bored by the traditional note you get from bass or guitar. I let go of this idea that you have to make notes to make music. It's kind of based on John Cage tonality and early avante-garde composers who were driven by sound. You hear a sound in your head, and you get a pedal to achieve that. We use pedals like a painter uses paintbrushes.

SFBG: How do you prepare your bass?

PN: I have a dowel rod under the strings. I tune it to this non-standard range. You have this thing called A440 that you base your tuner on. We're totally out of that range. For me, it's very fulfilling to play this way because I can still get new life out of the same instrument. I can play it like a guitar, a saxophone, or a voice. That's the funnest part of it, to go crazy. It's a combination of letting your subconscious and condition lead the way and playing what you think sounds cool. For us, it's trying to fit crazy sounds into a song format without traditional structure.

SFBG: What role does improvisation have in your music?

PN: We usually just get together and write and let accidents lead the way. There are a lot of intros and interludes during our set that are improvised. There are some songs that we play live that we never ever do exactly the same.

SFBG: How is your experience in These Are Powers different from your experience in Liars?

PN: These Are Powers is way more innovative than Liars for me, and it's much more pleasing in that way. In Liars, I had a very traditional bass role, even though it was lead. I really have evolved out of that. It's three people instead of four. We have a very democratic work process. In Liars, it was not quite that way.

SFBG: How has These Are Powers evolved since you formed the band in 2006 with Anna?

PN: Our original drummer, Ted, left the band after the first tour to pursue his illustration career. He did artwork on Terrific Seasons. Bill worked right away. With Bill, we could really achieve our sound. He plays stand up drums on kind of an electro-acoustic set. There's no hi hat, an electric bass kit, some other electronics. Usually it's as interesting functionally as it is compositionally. Ted was a sit down drummer. We didn't have a hi hat with Ted either, but he was much more traditional. We're really, really into this idea. We're trying to do something interesting to ourselves. The idea of guitar, bass, drums – that's not where our money is. We really want to bust that shit all apart and just get crazy with it. I have a whole bunch of pedals that we use. It sounds like a keyboard at times, but we do not have a keyboard. Anna takes the same approach as well. We're thrilled when our instruments down sound anything like they're supposed to. To me, that's what art is, when you take something completely out of context and giving it a new identity.

SFBG: What's your live performance like?

Anna Barie: All three of us really enjoy performing live. For me, all I really wanted out of music was to travel and meet people. Playing live is a venue for that. It's a direct connection with people and a direct experience. It's a cross between the old showbiz attitude of putting on a really good show and something that is a little bit more transcendent, something that just kind of takes over before we perform. The audience reaction is very immediate. It's noise that you can dance to, or there's a lot of confusion with people trying to figure out exactly what we're doing. Even if you don't like the music, you can take something away from the performance. Either it's going to be touching or comedic or terrible. We're doing it for ourselves as much as for the people who are watching us. It feels good after 12 hours of sitting in the van.

SFBG: What is the concept behind your Silver Lung video?

AB: We filmed that on my birthday last year on a full moon. It was shot on Super 8 by Joseph Krings. We had a guy that did the lighting. We filmed it in our basement. It's based on a couple of dreams that Pat and Ted had. Ted's dream was something like his grandfather was literally a rocket scientist and in the dream his grandfather and some of the men he worked with had formed some invisible man network of lights and laboratories underground. Pat had had a few mysterious dreams about some people in his life. We combined the two and wanted to have something that reflected the feeling of the song. It was kind of ritualistic. We had a crew of our friends. I had never made a video. We actually just made another video for Chipping Ice, but it's basically the complete opposite of that film. This one is really bright and shot digitally and is mostly the band performing. It's kind of the other part of us. Lately we've been interested thematically in dualism. This band has it – intensity and heaviness (darkness) but we are all pretty goofy, actually, and friendly -- and funny (I'd like to think)! I think that catches people off guard.

SFBG: What are your influences?

AB: I am definitely not a record collector or expert by any means. I feel sometimes that it can be ridiculous to ask bands what are you listening to. In the van, we listen to a wide variety of things. It's funny that we get the no wave thing, because it's not what we listen to. When we were writing, we were thinking about James Brown a lot and a lot of traditional or ceremonial world music. I grew up listening to country music and Thai disco (my mom is Thai). When I put something on in the van, it's usually mellow or instrumental. Bill is definitely the one to talk to about music and using that as an influence. A lot of the bands that we get compared to I have never really listened to.

SFBG: How do you fit into the New York and Chicago music scenes?

AB: I think we have elements of what is happening in both cities. Bill being from Chicago is definitely an influence, as is Pat and I being from New York. I think in Chicago it's easier for people to be influenced by one another because it's a smaller town. There's more happening in the way of people using electronics there, although in Brooklyn we have High Places, Aa, Oneida. The bands that we relate to are all variations on a theme, a general feeling, but the way the message is expressed is different. Gang Gang Dance, Telepathy… we're all the same flu virus but we've all mutated drastically. We can definitely relate to the kinds of things that are going on. It's not just limited to those two cities. The beauty of the internet is that you can connect with bands all across the country. When we go to their towns or they come to our town, we can play together. Internationally, a band we really like is called Naked on the Vague from Australia. They are coming to New York.

SFBG: So you guys seem to have a pretty strong aversion to being classified as No Wave. Why does it bother you?

Bill Salas: We get that reference quite a bit to the point where it's quite annoying. We're not going out of our way to try to pick up the piece of this genre that only lasted a few years and carry it out into 2008. I had my little phase where I was listening to a lot of it, but we very rarely play anything from that time period. It's definitely not completely unfounded. Terrific Seasons, our first record, fits into the punk/noise continuum a little more than our newer stuff.

SFBG: Where things are headed?

BS: Things are headed in a different direction. The main thing is sound – it's our paint. We are trying to work with sound in a variety of timbres, not relying on a particular key signature in a song. Rhythm and sound are the two core elements of what we were working with. We've gotten "No Wave" from other people reviewing our records or describing our bands. That connection can be made – it's easier to toss around old comparisons instead of new ones. New comparisons – I wouldn't, I can't. I've never really thought about it. It's easier to describe what we are doing – we strive for a certain amount of originality. We more often say, "Let's try to sound not like so-and-so."

BS: I didn't actually pick up the drums until a couple of years ago – people were leaving pieces of drums at my house in Chicago. I was into older dance music and hip hop. I've been making beats since I was 14 and DJing; I've never stopped. I just started picking up acoustic drums because people were leaving pieces of kits at my house. I play standing up and do it so I have an electronic bass drum trigger. I'm playing like an 808 with my foot – so it's an electro-acoustic that is utilizing low 808 and 909 samples. I route Anna's vocals through a box and process them in real time. Essentially, we're working with really heavy rhythms. I am playing caveman beats, Star Trek, fairly primitive beats over Pat and Anna's waves of sounds and noise. The new stuff is a little bit more up-tempo and dancey, even melodic, and a little bit more fun. It's definitely lighter than Terrific Seasons. It's funny – at our shows, people are dancing to these really fucked up beats and samples. It's not straight up dance music but I myself that is what I am going for. I am playing reggaeton beats and shit like that. Pat and Anna are totally fucking everything up over that. I don't know how to play sitting down – I made the kits suit me, the only way I know how to play.

These Are Powers performs live on Saturday, March 1st at the Hemlock Tavern, 9:30 p.m., $7 (1131 Polk Street, SF, 415-923-0925), and Sunday, March 2nd at the ABCO Artspace (3135 Filbert St., Oakland).