Track By Track: Kali Masi – ‘Wind Instrument’

Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff

kali masi

Vicious in both their bark and bite, Kali Masi are bringing forth a hell of a infectious record. Wind Instrument rings out with booming refrains, crushing syncopated sections of rhythm and bombastic progressions. One of the lead singles “Recurring (II)” shows the aggressive spark innate in the band’s writing, with gnashing instrumentals and snapping rhythms catching listeners ears and being stuck with them the rest of the day. “Powerline Days” is another single with a ferocious amount of catchy progressions, with a verse line that weaves through guitar chords bouncing to a delicate beat. The hook is meant to be shouted with a full voice. Ever present in being fun and refreshing

Kali Masi went into depth on their album Wind Instrument in this track by track! Wind Instrument is out today, October 6th via Take This To Heart Records. This is a special record packed to the brim of energy and biting, relatable lyrics. Don’t sleep on this record.

Purchase Wind Instrument here

 

*I’d like to preface this with saying that I think that you can really disservice a song by explaining too much about it. You can completely shatter what it could come to mean to someone else by over-explaining its intention. Even for me, the songs I’ve written have completely changed shape over the years and begin to mean entirely different and more complex things to me than what I initially intended. For that reason, I will keep the themes vague and try to be more detailed about where the songs came from and how they came together. –Sam Porter

Some Friends

I stole this riff from a Simon & Garfunkel song called “Old Friends” that I was learning one weekend when I was out visiting my mom in the town I went to high school in. It’s largely about the group of friends I ran around with during that time. I would love for more of our songs to be this brief.

Her Palms Were Read

I was listening to a lot of The Young Leaves during this time. I have a voice memo on my iPhone where I was trying to sing in this really low voice like Chris from TYL, but I can’t pull that off. This is the one of the poppiest song’s on the record, and I love the way it came together. I was listening to a lot of WHY? when I wrote the bridge, and that’s one of my favorite vocal parts of the whole record, so, big thanks to Yoni and Chris for the inspo!

Powerline Days

This song came together very slowly over a few months of rehearsals but was one of the first songs that we finished. I wrote the lyrics in one feverish sitting at our old practice space in a warehouse on Grand Ave. in Chicago. I’m really proud of my writing in this. Love is a really special thing, might as well do it your way. 

Jejune

Jejune ruminates on that sobering moment when you’re feet hit the ground again and you think to yourself, “wow, actually I’m kind of fucked up.” after a long while of thinking that everything is fine. I remember looking through a thesaurus for Naive and found Jejune and thought it was a great name for a song.

Recurring (II)

I have this dream over and over again where I am somehow involved in a brutal murder. It happens by accident but then I freak out and panic and end up dismembering and hiding the body and have all of these interactions with people who are worried about the victim and I have to pretend I don’t know what happened. It’s so stressful. In the dream, I murder loved ones or friends/family. Most recently it’s been continuing through separate dreams like chapters. Last night in the dream, the severed head wound up on my neighbors doorstep. So next time I think I’m going to get caught for sure. I have no idea what it means, in reality i’m a rather docile person.

Anyways, this song is not about that dream. This song is about several other recurring dreams I have had where I either lose motor skills in front of people I respect or I recognize someone from behind but can’t get them to turn around to see their face or communicate with them. Writing this song taught me that ‘reoccurring’ means that something happened again that happened once before, but ‘recurring’ means that something happens again and again and again and again and keeps happening.

Ghost (The Pottery Scene)

Ghost was a writing exercise for me. I wanted to write about one singular topic, which is often difficult for me to do because I’m a very scatterbrained person. It’s a vignette about a morning I spent with a person that I had a pseudo-secret relationship with. The whole scenario was very bittersweet, but it’s a good memory. They were very into like, cycles of the moon and the zodiac and healing crystals and many other things that are irritating. I have a great memory of recording vocals to this song and when it got to the part about sacred stones, Jay just hit the spacebar and went “Dude, you KNOW I back this.” Not hating on Wiccan’s, it’s just not my thing.

Lunger

I recorded this song very late one night in our practice space on my iPhone when I was extremely drunk. I didn’t have lyrics. I just screamed a melody at the top of my lungs. When I listened back to it the next morning, I really liked it, so I deciphered the yelling into what words they kind of sounded like and then made sense of them. I’ve never done anything like that and I highly doubt it would work again. I actually really like these lyrics a lot because its not the way I would normally write.

Your Other Left

Your Other Left is my favorite song title on this record. I love double entendre’s and word play. I love the way that this song builds and falls apart. I wrote the bulk of this song in Summer of 2014, I had a surprise night off from bussing tables and went to see All Eyes West and Typesetter play at Township. Typesetter played Wild’s End in near-entirety (this was right before they recorded it), and I left feeling very inspired to write a song that was loud like they were. I rode my bike home very fast and started writing YOL.

Sputter

Sputter is a fucking blast to play. I love this song because it has two lines from my favorite Ezra Pound poem in the verses. The lyrics focus on the gap between two people and how it can seem impossible to bridge with communication. The longer you go without communicating the wider the gap becomes and the more daunting it can be to pick up the phone and fix the silence.

C.A.

This song has completely changed meaning for me over the years. When we first started playing it, it was a bloodletting anthem about a failed relationship and yearning and loss. But as time goes on, to me it’s really more about being in this band. It’s about being in the van and touring our world with my friends and playing music. The outro to C.A. is really the resolution of the record. There isn’t a formula or a strategy for feeling complete, it will always be a journey,. I think that being lost is a big part of that journey.

– Sean Gonzalez