The local band Kithkin (“treepunk” is their term, and it’s not inaccurate, but I feel wrong about using it unattributed because the last time I touched a tree on purpose Jimmy Carter was president) will play their final show tonight at Chop Suey. Their live shows tend to be decadent and fantastic, and not without an appreciation for sacrificial ritual, so this one is highly recommended. I asked their bassist/singer Kelton Sears a few questions about it, and he in turn answered them, whereupon I cut-and-pasted them into this blog post, and that’s where babies come from!
NOTE: Sears is also the (very talented) music editor of Seattle Weekly, but according to a recent study, musicians-who-are-also-journalists are juuuuust fine.
Is this more like band runs course, or did you (or anyone) have a more specific desire to go in a different musical direction?
Alex’s glue huffing addiction has really made practice hard, he’s just in a constant Elmer’s-induced haze. Ian sort of had a breakdown when he realized he actually hates trees and nature in general, which is pretty fundamental to our whole “thing.” Bob hasn’t stopped texting someone for the better part of a year now, I can’t remember the last time he glanced up from his phone and looked me in the eye. Personally, I just think “music” is pretty passé. I’m way more into League of Legends and catching up on The Magic Tree House series nowadays.
Beyond that, many of us were already going in different musical directions. Alex has an amazing doomy shoegaze band called KA, and Bob and Ian have been playing together in an awesome, semi-satanic gospel/americana/psych band called Bigfoot Wallace & His Wicked Sons for three years now, so we’ve always been kind of all over the place. Kithkin was sort of founded on the four of us always going different musical directions, that’s part of why I love Kithkin—the music we made was interesting because it made zero-sense if you tried to parse out what the four of us were doing. We were a band literally founded on the idea of chaos.
Are you at all attracted to creating a meltdown environment for your last show ever, or will it be celebratory and bittersweet?
Things will certainly melt. We have legitimately lit a number of things on fire at shows before. One time a rock holding up our Kithkin banner almost fell on someone’s head, and another time my ass forcefully did land on someone’s head (there are mid-air photos of my ass moments before the incident, as well as photos of the blood that came immediately after). At Bumbershoot, I indiscriminately threw eight or nine heavy, hardback books of environmental literature into the crowd, and one time a pregnant woman almost sued us because a shard from an acoustic guitar we smashed onstage collided into her baby belly. What we consider celebratory might not be considered celebratory by regular people, mostly just violent, weird and dangerous. We’ll definitely be having a good time though.
I know it’s not exactly good for business to indicate either way, but can you imagine the door being open to Kithkin reunion/anniversary shows?
We are very imaginative guys. Right now we never want to see each other ever again. But I live downstairs from Bob in the same apartment building and Ian has a grill at his house, so, who knows. If Alex ever stops with the glue stuff, I’d consider seeing him again too.
How much is this band a part of your identity, and are you worried and/or excited about the next phase?
The four of us each have a unique ‘Kithkin-sigil’ we designed for ourselves after we collectively decided Led Zeppelin’s whole thing was really awesome, and Bob and I got ours tattooed. So in that way, Kithkin will always be a part of my identity in that it’s straight up on my body. I love Kithkin so much and it changed my life so dramatically—almost every aspect of my life would be completely different right now if it weren’t for Kithkin. Even though Kithkin is done, the ideas and concepts that we tried to talk about through the band still lie at the core of my writing and the art that I make and will continue to make, so to me it doesn’t really feel like my identity will change that much because I’ll just express those “Kithkin” ideas in different ways. I’m definitely excited about what’s next, I have lots of projects I’m very stoked to get to focus on and really devote some quality time to now.
Lastly: Do you reckon your next thing will be a band or a solo endeavor?
Musically, I’m personally not sure yet. Before Kithkin ended, we had written a lot of new songs that were structured around the MPC. We were always a really rhythmic band, we used a lot of extra percussion. Getting into sampling and beatmaking and repurposing the very different rhythmic element the MPC brought into the context of our noisy, fucked up treepunk band was and still is an exciting idea to me. Whatever I do next will certainly feature the MPC and it will certainly be loud. Whether that’s on my own or with others, I’m not entirely sure yet.
