When I show up at the Wicker Park apartment Adam Gil and Daniel Perzan share with two other guys, Super Mario Kart for the SNES is paused on the TV. Gil and Perzan, half of the band Yawn, have just climbed out of a cluttered basement whose walls are covered in creepy, fading murals of biblical scenes, a space they’ve partially converted into a rehearsal room and recording studio.
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For a group that’s only played seven shows outside Chicago, though, they’re doing pretty well for themselves. They opened for indie darlings Yeasayer in Saint Louis on April 26, filling in for Sleigh Bells, and in March at South by Southwest they snagged a slot at the Fader Fort, one of the most-hyped venues at the festival. Since then Pitchfork has posted two tracks from the EP to the Forkcast section of the site, and on Monday it will premiere the video for one of them, “Kind of Guy.”
But for now, Yawn’s business is in that basement. Though they fantasize about capitalizing on their buzz with a west-coast tour, they’re in the middle of recording a second EP—one track of which, “Acid,” they leaked to the Internet this winter. Every time the band, or any subset of the band, starts working in the practice space, it’s like a continuation of an extended studio session that’s lasted for most of Yawn’s existence. “For us recently,” Gil says, “the writing process has been the recording process. One of us will have a snippet of a song and we’ll start putting it into the computer and go, ‘Where do we go from here?’”
Yawn have the particular talent it takes to combine indie-pop fundamentals, a vaguely African melodic sensibility, and washes of abstract sound into music that hangs together organically—”Kind of Guy,” maybe their catchiest song, is a perfect example—but in other respects they’re proud amateurs. Like many of their peers, they learned the basics of electronic music—basic sampling skills, step sequencing—mostly through trial and error. “We always kinda resented thinking of a band as having to be technically proficient at one instrument,” Wolf says, “because it just seemed limiting to be so obsessed with one particular instrument. I was actually a music major and I was kinda just turned off by that whole thing.” In videos of their Fader Fort set, they hold it together fine, but at times they look worried the songs are about to fly apart.
