Occurrence are an interesting new discovery of mine, having released their track Heels Over Head to great applause recently. The group also have a track coming out in January titled Fudge, which we’re very excited for. Keep your eyes and ears peeled for more from Occurrence soon!
By Jane Howkins
How has your year been?
It’s been an intense year to be honest. It was really productive for the band, but it’s hard to not let the news get you down sometimes. And though we’re moving slowly out of the pandemic, we’ve all had a bit of a reckoning about what we want to keep and what we want to move on from. The fact that our band has become stronger and tighter than ever has been a huge silver lining.
You recently released a track titled Heels Over Head, which we reviewed. What can you tell us about the song?
The song began in the summer of 2020, when, thanks to the pandemic, we couldn’t all be together to work. Cat was in Lawrence, Kansas, and Ken and Johnny were home in NYC. Ken started cutting up old vocal stems of Cat and Johnny and then created the initial melody, and the song grew from there. Ken had been re-listening to a bunch of Tears For Fears songs and gave the demo the title, Heels Over Head. He shared the demo with Johnny and he came in with these very personal lyrics about our relationship. We did an early mix of the song but felt that instrumentally it needed something else. We reached out to our friend Kip Berman from The Pains of Being Pure of Heart and The Natvral and he contributed some awesome guitar. We worked on it for a long time before we mixed it with Kiri Stensby. It was a struggle but worth it.
How has the reception been for Heels Over Head and where can it be purchased?
It’s been gratifying to get a lot of Spotify love for the song and some nice write-ups, like yours! It’s available for streaming at all the usual places. But we’d also love it if you bought it from our Bandcamp site. It’s Pay What You Can.
You also have a track coming out soon called Fudge. What can you tell us about that track?
That is a different beast from Heels! We worked on a song called Fudge during sessions for our last record, but we all agreed it wasn’t working. Ken knew there was something there, so last fall, he took the vocals and built a whole new song around it. Cat sang these sensual lyrics, all about the arousal and the ecstasy of desire. Ken left in some studio chatter because we felt it captured how embarrassed Cat was after she sang. Kiri said when she was mixing the track that our drums reminded her of Nine Inch Nails, which, in our world, is a huge compliment. We think it’s a banger. If Heels is about love, Fudge is about lust.
Do you plan to release any more singles in the near future?
Yes, we have three more singles coming out after Fudge before we unveil the next album.
Do you have any plans to release an album or EP?
Yes, Slow Violence is a massive double album of 22 new songs that drops on April 7th. The album is the most personal thing we’ve made. The title comes from a book by Rob Nixon. He defines slow violence as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed over space and time, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” Though Nixon is talking about environmental destruction, we thought of it as an apt metaphor for our lives, the small and slow destructive events that make us who we are. We were also turned on by the art of Jasper Johns, who had a massive retrospective in 2021 at the Whitney in NYC that we went and saw. The idea of repurposing, of taking the old and making it new – that was a guiding aesthetic principle for us during the making of this one.
Your music has an indie-pop sound. What/who influences you most as artists? What have you been listening to recently?
We all collectively love Thom Yorke, Radiohead and The Smile. So I know we always come back to him/them as a touchstone for what is possible in music. We also love The 1975 for their sheer WTF-ness and vision of what pop music can be. Cat and Ken are children of the 1990s so The Cure, Depeche Mode, New Order and Nine Inch Nails will always be near and dear to us. Johnny loves traditional pop music and has a real affection for Broadway musicals. He is always helping us make our sound more accessible, especially given Ken’s general tendency towards the experimental.
You’re based in New York. What is the local music scene like?
The great thing about streaming is that anything can feel local. The awful thing about streaming is that it makes the local feel more diffuse. I am not sure how connected we are to what’s happening in NYC right now. Johnny and Ken love going to Ambient Church events. Since the pandemic we’ve seen Fennesz and William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops live. We also saw Wilco play Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in our neighborhood. But like a lot of people we’ve all become more homebodies than we used to be. We hope that changes.
Do you have any UK tour dates lined up?
It’s a dream of ours to play the UK. So if you have a venue, please invite us. We don’t play live much. For this album, we are making a dance theater piece at MIT with choreographer and director Dan Safer of Witness Relocation. We will play live while the performers dance. There will be a set – a series of connected hotel rooms. We are super excited because it really will add a new dimension of theatricality to our performances. But we’d also love to find a way to play these songs live to new fans outside of Boston and NYC. Johnny and Cat love performing. Ken is more a studio person, as he’d rather be recording all day every day. But he’s warming up to the idea of playing live.
Any last words for the fans?
Our sincere and genuine thanks to everyone who has listened to and supported our music. It really means the world to us.