by Taylor Ruckle (@TaylorRuckle)
Released about two years ago now, the Drifters EP came at the start of a profound shift for Richmond electronic rock band Opin. In its pulse-pounding live drums and towering guitar/synth arrangements, it marked the point where the group’s artistic workflow came out of the computer and started to fill up their whole practice room--more outboard and more hands-on collaborative, with electrifying results.
Opin’s recently-released sophomore album, Media & Memory (WarHen Records), grew out of that live shift and the continued evolution of their lineup and instrumentation. Bass synth player Jon Hawkins joined Tori Hovater on leads, former guitarist Landis Wine switched to Bass VI, and drummer Ethan Johnstone scaled back his involvement to focus on other projects.
Where Drifters felt more like an ecstatic rush, Media & Memory has time on its side; you can hear the hours that went into refining its nine tracks, boiling down countless practice sessions, hammering hooks, harmonies, and idiosyncratic drum grooves until they sit completely flush. Opin sounds more like a unified creative mind than ever, and they may well twist you through some of their biggest surprises--a vibey instrumental (“For Now, Yellow”) or a screaming breakdown (“A Mug Is A Cup”)--before you’ve even realized what kind of trip you’re really on.
Before the release, in the midst of coordinating a remix album and fresh off the pre-recording of two live performances, the trio of Wine, Hawkins, and Hovater spoke to Post Trash about the process of excavating the album from hours of preparation.
The last time I talked to you back in 2018, you'd put out the Drifters EP and you were already talking about this record. Can you give me an overview of how the project took shape?
Wine: Yeah, anybody want to give that a shot? [all laugh]
Hawkins: I think we experimented with some different writing processes. That's what Drifters was. We went with what worked, reflected on that, and then moved forward. I feel like the single we just released, "No 1," was something that we came up with early in the writing process. A few other ideas ended up on the record floating around that weren't actually fleshed out songs yet, but once we had "No 1" accomplished, I think we were very excited to wrap things up. At that point in time, a couple years ago, we were probably fresh off of writing that song. I think drummers and injuries and stuff like that delayed the writing process a little bit.
Wine: You know, we tried a lot of stuff. We switched up the instruments that each of us were playing from when we were trying to perform songs off of the first record versus trying to write as a group. We did a first round or so of recording here in Richmond back in January of last year, went up to Philly to mix a couple different versions of that, and then I broke my wrist pretty badly, and [laughs] it was unclear for a minute if that was going to go back to being usable. I feel like that fundamentally changed the record, in that we wrote a couple more songs after that and we changed the way that we were recording. We scrapped two or three songs that would have been on the record and it changed into a different kind of thing with a different kind of vibe.
Hovater: I do feel like even though it took so long, it was a good vehicle for refining our writing process. The way we wrote it together definitely evolved over time.
Wine: Absolutely, it allowed it time to gestate instead of feeling like we just came up with an idea and, you know, we wouldn't have really known how to execute it. It took us a lot of time to figure out what we wanted to do and then even more time to figure out how to do it.
Was that a process that worked itself out live or more in the studio space?
Wine: I would say definitely it was the studio space; we had a spot on the second floor of Tori's house. We would kind of just have an idea or have a chord change and we would just sit and play it for hours on and off, recording it.
Hovater: We got together so often when we were in that space. I feel like we spent a lot of time jamming, working on other stuff, and just playing together a lot.
Hawkins: That's exactly it. Also, we were able to practice and rehearse in the middle of the day. I've never had that mindset when it comes to approaching music before, and I think it lends itself to how things turned out. My mood is different in the middle of the day than it is at night or in the morning.
Wine: We were having practice at--2:00 p.m. on Wednesdays? Does that sound right?
Hawkins: Yeah, yeah, something like that.
Wine: A weird, weird time. Not punk time, for sure.
What is the mindset like at 2:00 p.m. on a Wednesday?
Hawkins: There's still potential for the day to be anything.
Wine: Yeah, yeah, you still feel like you could easily have a good or a bad day instead of trying to limp to the finish line. You start at 8:00 or 9:00 and you're like, "I've got a bunch of ideas, but also, I didn't eat dinner." [laughs]
Hawkins: If you had a bad day, you bring that to practice, and sometimes it's not going to be as cathartic as you hoped. That can make you a little bit more like you're dragging your feet. And then in the morning time, sometimes you've started, and you have no day so far, but it's just all past music. In the middle of the day, you try to get a feel of what the day is, and it's malleable to whatever you might want it to be.
Wine: Also, if you start on something that you don't like, you don't feel like that's the cap of your day. So you're like, "Oh well, I'm going to walk away from it." You know, we tossed a lot of stuff to the side for this record in trying to figure out what we were doing, and meeting in a relaxed environment definitely made that easier to do as opposed to the tension of, "We worked on this for six hours and it's gone?"
Hovater: It was like having a lunch date. It was casual, but professional.
This record is called Media & Memory. Last time we talked, something that came up was your love of unique physical media objects, and I feel like that ties in with this record, conceptually. You talk about things like DRAM and minidiscs. How did that overarching motif come together?
Wine: I think that as we were writing, most of the songs ended up being working titles or distortions of working titles. For me, a lot of stuff that bled into it that was either technology adjacent or just very blunt, mundane things that got inserted. Things that are non-romantic--that you deal with on a very day-to-day basis that there's no emotional attachment to. I feel like it also veers back and forth. It could be read as more personal or very technical, almost. But also, I can't speak to Tori. At least lyric-wise, we were writing totally separately from one another, and we never really talked about it. We just kind of went in and did our separate things.
Hovater: [laughs]
Wine: I mean, am I wrong?
Hovater: No, you're right!
Wine: Maybe we did and I don't remember it, but I feel like we just trust each other to do our thing--but yeah, Tori, you can speak more to that on your side.
Hovater: I don't know, I feel like the naming of the record was more you and Jon than it was me.
Wine: I mean, just the thematic stuff of what you're singing. Because, like, you never told us [all laugh]
Hovater: Well, neither did you! [laughs]
Wine: Like, I'm curious.
Hovater: Oh. I don't know--sometimes I write lyrics that are things that happened in my dreams because that's just an easy storyline that I didn't actually have to come up with myself, but it's always pretty weird. Honestly, that's probably most of it. I'm not even kidding you.
Wine: No, I know, that's fine! I'm not judging it.
So if you don't communicate about ideas in advance, what is it like hearing things after the fact? What is it like seeing things come together from your different perspectives?
Hovater: I feel like, at least aesthetically, we're all on a similar or same page, so there's very little disagreement or abrasion. Whenever we brought something to the table, I feel like it was generally well-received, which is cool.
Wine: Going back to some of the other stuff, we were living in really close proximity in the same neighborhood with access to a small studio setup, being able to record and discard ideas, so I think that we kind of agreed upon some of the way that those things sounded without really having to discuss it, just through repetition and getting used to how things felt. Because, you know, I kind of changed instruments. On Drifters I was playing guitar, and now I'm playing a Bass VI, which is an octave down from a guitar, so it's like a bass with a few additional strings. That allowed me to play a role in the band where I can play bass or I can play leads and I can move where I need to go. Because Jon and Tori are all really full-spectrum audio with their keys. Like, they can either do really deep sounds or high piercing leads, and if you're just doing guitar, your options are very narrow. That was a big shift for me.
You've alluded to the way there was a shift in terms of drumming. How did that develop in the making of this record in terms of what the band was going to look like?
Wine: Yeah, so, when we were initially starting to work, Ethan was playing drums with a bunch of bands, and he was working on his own record too, so he was not really around as much. It was mostly the three of us, so what we would do is we would program beats into our drum machine or onto Ableton, and either Jon would bring a rhythmic idea in, or I would program something rhythmically, loop it and kind of create the feel of the pattern. Then when Ethan was available, we would play that back to him and make him play to our programmed beats, and then start going from there to add on top of it.
He has a project called Brother Rutherford, and as soon as that record came out, he left to go focus on doing shows around that. We swapped out a couple different drummers who we weren't really writing with, I don't think--those were just for live sets, so it was odd because on the one hand, we were really lucky to have Ethan be on the record, and I feel like he added some incredible stuff to it, but I think that Jon and I are kind of staunchly weird and specific about how the rhythm should work.
Hawkins: [laughs]
Wine: So I think there's a lot of intense drum programming and then letting it go to a drummer and being like, "Hey, this feels natural!" And it's really just this kind of rigid rhythmic idea that neither of us can actually play on drums. [all laugh]
One of the standout tracks on the record for me is "A Mug Is A Cup," which has so much intensity in the beat. Tell me about that track.
Hovater: Yeah, I guess that was Jon and I. Landis, I don't know where you were--
Wine: Who knows!
Hovater: [laughs] I just remember I found that patch in there, and the oscillating was so pronounced. It sounded really cool, and I was kind of thinking about how sweet it would be to base an entire beat around the really slow, like, womp, womp, womp--Jon, maybe fill me in on this. I just remember us holding down a few notes and filling in whatever was naturally happening around that beat.
Hawkins: Yeah, I was learning how to play with voices at the time in a very simple way, and you were playing that pretty repetitive--and Landis was sitting there recording. That's where he was. I think that song naturally just had to be intense. Once that part was established, I got very, very certain that everything had to stay the same way because I got really into that LFO that the bass is doing on that whole song, building around that. I made my patch be a little bit dreamy to not take away from that. I just wanted that song to rock. [laughs] I come from more of a rock and roll background, so whenever I feel something like that, I want to let it breathe so everybody else can hear it the same way I feel it.
Wine: We had a couple demos of it, and I remember one day, I did this big, stupid, sloppy beat that I chopped up and re-pasted within itself so it was kind of off-time, and put that under there. That just became a thing that we could listen to for, like, five minutes without getting bored, and I think that we just were like, "Ethan, play this, but play all the parts that are slightly off as well." And he made it work. [laughs]
Hovater: Just like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I got it." You know, back to my previous comment, timpani was something I also heard when I was asleep. I woke up one morning and I was like, "Wait a minute!"
Wine: Yeah, we tossed some timpani in the end as well. A lot of random stuff.
The vocals are also really intense on that track. What was it like recording those?
Wine: That's our friend Kelsey Hulvey, who's in a band called VV--I feel like they're a no-wave band. They opened for Lydia Lunch, so I feel like that qualifies that. We're friends, and she came over, and we brainstormed for a minute. Initially we had a melodic line there, and I think I brought it to the rest of y'all first, and I was like, "What if we just had some screaming at the end?" And I think Jon looked at me like I was an idiot-- [all laugh]
Wine: --for like a minute, and I was like, "Hear me out!" I made her run through that until she was hoarse, and then we just kind of edited it together at the end. We layered it so there's, like, four of Kelsey screaming on top of herself at the end.
You recorded a lot of this record at Spacebomb Studios in Richmond. How did you find out about that space, and what was it like working there?
Wine: White Laces had done some stuff at their old studio. They were in the process of moving, so they weren't fully moved-in yet when we were there, but it was kind of cool because at that time, their new spot felt a lot more like a practice space for the rest of the Spacebomb crew. It was really close to being back in our studio space, which was just a sparse second-floor bedroom. After my arm had healed enough, I hit them up, and I kind of booked us up before I knew that I would be 100% able to play, but I guess I thought that was a goal and not a bad idea at the time. We did four days there, total. We did all the live tracking in two days, and then we did the vocals. And we did everything, except for "Dram Logic" that has a drum machine behind it, without a click or anything--just hammered it out a bunch of times and took it all home with us.
What is it like recording without a click and layering things on top of it? Was that difficult?
Wine: Ha ha ha--yeah.
Hovater: [laughs]
Wine: It was something that felt like a good idea when we were doing it, and I like how it turned out, but we--we had been using for the whole record a drum machine called the Digitakt, and there was some software that was in beta testing for it where you could essentially treat the whole unit as a software plugin. We dropped all of Ethan's drums in Ableton, and then I reverse MIDI-mapped them, so basically, this drum machine played along to Ethan for the whole thing. Instead of the way that a lot of electronic bands have to play to a click at the beginning and then stick to that, we worked in reverse and made all of our live playing become MIDI information to feed into the drum machine and other synths and stuff. It was a little meticulous, but I would do it again. I feel like it allows us the freedom to stretch out and not have to think about following something, which sometimes can kill the mood, depending.
There's also a remix album coming along with Media & Memory. What is that going to look like?
Wine: Oh, yeah, I'm pretty stoked about that. It's been really, obviously, not a great year, so we can't go do shows, we can't go do much of anything, and we decided that we wanted to reach out to some of our friends--and just people who we admired or wanted to collaborate with--and put some remixes together. We've sat with these tracks and various edits of them for over a year and a half, so it was nice to give those to other people. We've got FM Skyline, we've got Jeff Zeigler from up in Philly. It's going to be a six- or seven-track companion to the LP, and there's some stuff on there that I'm still really stoked about, which is awesome. At this point, it's exciting to listen to someone else do something totally different with the record.
Tori, Jon, what is it like for you hearing other people work with the music?
Hovater: Kind of a breath of fresh air. Everything we've gotten back so far has been really cool, just to hear everybody's different styles. It's a nice way to reframe some songs that we've been sitting with for a really long time, especially with other local artists. It's always fun to collaborate and take a look at each other's stuff.
Hawkins: We've been trying to collaborate with everybody in Richmond, basically, since we started, so it's cool to actually have the opportunity where people are willing to sit down and listen and then give it their go, and everybody is making amazing things. It's cool to hear how they hear us, or how I hear them, but with my tune. I really like that part of it. It's just fun to be like, "This is my friend who remade this song that we made," and the fact that we recorded so much allowed us to really just send everybody way too many files.
So has that been a recent thing, coordinating the remixes?
Wine: Definitely. We finished mixing the record with Dean [Hurley] in January, and then we got it mastered in April, and that whole period was just figuring out what we were going to do with a label and that sort of thing. We had a couple cool options initially, and then we had a couple people who were like, "Hey, y'all are gonna be able to tour in the fall, right?" And I was like, "I don't think that's going to happen." [all laugh]
Wine: So--right, now it seems absolutely ridiculous, and so we ended up connecting with WarHen, which was really great because they've been extremely realistic about the scenario, and extremely helpful as well. I feel like, given the times, it's crucial to be both.
How did you find out about the label?
Wine: So, there was a band on Kanine who are from Virginia, Eternal Summers, and Daniel from that band--his other band The Concerns had done a record on WarHen, along with, I guess, Butcher Brown's last record, so I had never met them before, but I knew that they did good work. I kind of just reached out from there. They're based in Virginia, and we didn't want to work with somebody who's really far away because we weren't going to be traveling, so it didn't really make sense to do something where we felt like we had to over-promise or over-deliver or whatever. They kind of let us run wild with what we wanted to do, and the remix record is one of those things where it's like, “Let's just seed this out and see what we get back.”
You also alluded to this live performance you had done. At the end of such a long time not playing live, what was it like bringing these songs back?
Hawkins: What was wild is, I don't think some of those songs have actually been played live at all. Some of the stuff hadn't been adapted yet for a live setting because in the studio, you can do layers, and certain parts become more important to you than other parts. We hadn't gone through that conversation yet, and we spent a week practicing almost every day--maybe a week and a half--just figuring out all the dust under the rugs and getting it all ready so we can now play that album live and feel good about our representation of it. It's going to be slightly different, but it's a good different.
Wine: You know, it was odd, but we actually did two. We did one at The Jefferson Theater in Charlottesville and one at The Fuzzy Cactus in Richmond, and that was slightly different. We just did the album straight through for that one. Yeah, it was really wild and kind of exciting to get to hear those songs played as actual musicians doing them as opposed to listening to, like Jon said, layers piling up. It was a lot of fun.
In this space of isolation or distance, I feel like a lot of people are revisiting cultural things that are important to them or branching out into new things. For each of you, what are your biggest non-musical influences and what have you been into lately?
Wine: I dove back into film, collecting some Blu-Ray restorations and media that I just hadn't had a lot of time to sit and consume in a meaningful way, or had been substituting with streaming trash. I feel like that was extremely influential in the sense that I ended up messing around with more of the visual art for the record this time, which I hadn't really ever attempted or done before. I've been dabbling a bit.
What kind things were you getting into, in terms of restorations?
Wine: Oh, nothing crazy. Watching the Kubrick movies that have been transferred to 4k, watching things like John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness--like, movies that I'd only seen on really terrible transfers. Or The Magnificent Andersons, that old Orson Welles movie that was, again, only circulated in terrible quality for years--and watching it in a way that felt exciting and felt like a real experience, because, you know, it's not like we're going to go to a theater. Eventually, that will be social [laughs] but it's also a fun thing to do by yourself. What about y'all?
Hovater: I don't even know how to answer that question because I feel like most of what I've been consuming for the past six months has been music in some form or fashion.
Then I'd love to hear about that, too!
Hovater: I have been practicing more classical music in preparation for a job I might be taking with Richmond Ballet, so it was definitely spending a lot of time with music that I haven't spent a lot of time practicing the last few years. It was interesting to come back to some of those things, and I do think that, for us, being able to get together and play a show after having a week or two to prepare--keeping that up definitely paid off. Otherwise, I've just been spending a lot of time outside, so I haven't been consuming a whole lot of other media that I feel like would have influenced me.
Hawkins: Yeah. I don't know, man, I feel like our music is most of my life. If I'm not doing this, I'm doing other music or listening to music, and I hate that answer for myself, but it's pretty much the honest truth.
Wine: I don't know, Jon, I saw you kill it on that Tony Hawk remaster.
Hawkins: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Wine: You were destroying that fuckin' game, I don't know--
Hovater: Jon, I have been impressed by your Instagram brackets. You know I love those.
Hawkins: Oh, yeah, I created brackets for everybody to do March Madness, but instead of basketball, it's all kinds of other things. Right now I'm doing horror movies, and we did techno tracks from the '90s--
What were the winners for movies?
Hawkins: The movie one's not done yet, but I'm hoping it's Halloween. It's all horror movies, so Halloween would be--
Wine: I saw Candyman versus The Thing, and that's rough. I feel like those brackets get real unfair.
Hawkins: It's so controversial.
Wine: Jon's gotten a lot of angry DMs this year.
Hawkins: Truly, I do. [laughs] I do.
What's next for you after this album release?
Wine: We're working on a video for "Mug,” and then, yeah, we've got the remixes. That's going to come out as a Bandcamp donation thing at the end of the year. We already started jamming on new stuff and trying to move past where we were at, I think. We have, like, four hours of that, so it's certainly something. We have a new practice space, like, small studio, and we've set it up so we can practice and record simultaneously in a way that we were just relying on our iPhones for with the previous record. Now we can get more granular with parts, and it's been really fun so far. We've just dipped our toe in that, so who knows. I mean, I told you about this record two years ago. I don't know. [laughs]
Hawkins: Since we do record a lot, I personally feel like we have a giant bank to pull from. That's why, before we recorded, I felt like most of the record was done, just because we had so many ideas that we loved. And when we went to go actually perform them, we changed things up, and that takes a lot longer than just making things. We have, like he said, four hours of stuff right now, and we're probably still gonna do some more, and then we'll figure out where we go from there. If we find a vibe, like "No 1," maybe we'll be like, "This is the vibe we want to go for," and go on that ride for a while.
Wine: Yeah, we possibly have several more months of excavation. We'll find something. [laughs]
Hawkins: Perfect word for it.
Do any of you have projects outside the band that you want to plug?
Hawkins: Yeah, I have a thing called Thumpr, and I've been working on that a lot this year since we've been at home. It's mostly electronic-based music that varies between dancing and the abstract--it's somewhere in between there, depending on the mood I'm in.