We are, by most accounts, in the midst of the Summer of “Padam,” the latest symbiotic apotheosis of the pop mega-diva and the gay dance floor. In releasing her rainbow-conquering smash, Kylie Minogue has once again cannily hopped aboard a trendy electronic sound four decades into her career. It’s another fine example in the long lineage of the chart-toppers playing catch-up to the groundbreaking sounds long proliferating in queer spaces—including studios like that of Portland duo Microfilm.
Microfilm’s latest album, the shimmering experi-pop Body Arcana, does contain a sly tribute to Kylie (and Sade, and Everything but the Girl). Like “Padam Padam,” the album delves into the emotional states of the body on the dance floor and beyond. But it also limns the more conflicting, intuitive feelings that can wreathe the mirrorball in a teary penumbra. It’s complex work, a sublime tribute to their years together making music, and being a couple, through several sea changes in electronic music and LGBTQ+ acceptance.
The lovely, lilting lope of “Lasers Again,” finds a way through the exhaustion of a life spent in the club to an acceptance of one’s party-filled fate. The chorus of the gently pummeling “X”—”I’ve been to X, but I’ve never been to me”—captures the nagging doubt that the trip you’re on is the right one. “Rewind me, remind me, you don’t have to find me, I’m here” chants Keppel on the funky “Microdose,” in a more seductive register, or is it sinister? You’ll need another drop to find out. And album lead-off “Wistful Bangers,” beyond capturing the prize for best song title of the year, sets the tone with a psychedelic calliope and sweetly warped vocals over a propulsive beat. “You can’t throw your arms around a melody,” is its catchy refrain.
I spoke with Microfilm via email about their longtime relationship in life and music, as well as how Body Arcana, their eighth album, came together.
48 HILLS You’ve been making music as a couple for years now, which is incredibly inspiring. Can you tell me how that started, and how music-making figures into how your relationship works?
MATT KEPPEL Yeah, it’s been… 17 years this year. Wow, it sounds like a long time when you say it out loud. We had been dating for a few years at that point and Mercer was a solo artist releasing his own 12″ singles on various European labels. I guess one day I heard him working on music in his studio and I thought “Hmm, what if we did a song together?” and then flat out asked him if he was up for it and he said yes. And then it kind of snowballed forward and within a few months we had a debut album completed.
I think music-making is kind of like a second job where it’s somewhat separate from our ordinary day-to-day home life. We do our separate parts most of the time in solitude and then come together to hash out the details once we’ve combined our separate artistic elements. I think that’s probably odd when people think of music-making from how it appears in a movie or TV show, with people in a room together jamming or sitting at a piano together.
MATT MERCER Playing music has always been a big part of my life, and when I discovered making music with software, it opened up a huge world of sound that still fascinates me. My earliest records were cut-up microhouse tracks and released on Christian Morgenstern‘s Forte imprint, along with some comp appearances on Mathias Schaffhäuser’s Ware label, but I’ve since broadened my horizons considerably outward from dance music.
Collaborating with Matt in Microfilm provides a distinctly different point of view than my own, without having to sacrifice my instincts. I’ve never felt personally very vocally inclined, and it’s been a fun adventure over time blurring the lines between songs and tracks. I think we push each other out of our own musical comfort zones which is why I love the results so much.
48 HILLS Do you have any rituals in your composition and recording process?
MATT KEPPEL Rituals? Not in the superstitious sense of the word. Not for me, anyway. Maybe similarities or patterns/ways of working that repeat from album to album. One pattern that changes song to song is whether Mercer has a completed piece of music that he gives me and I figure out lyrics/vocals/vocal melody that fits what’s been made, or the other way around, where I have sung something acapella and given it to him to build music around it. That’s quite random which of those two paths the process goes down per song.
MATT MERCER Sometimes I’ll have sketches I’d made ages ago that just weren’t working at the time, but Matt is able to hear something in it that sparks a new idea. Sometimes that results in fleshing out that original idea or sending it in an entirely different but better direction. Other times I’ll more or less just finish an instrumental track, uncertain whether a vocal would work. I’ll pass it to Matt, and if he hears potential, he’ll get to work. But just as often, he’ll pass me a raw a capella to riff on. That can be fun for me also, because while he may have a sort of direction in mind already, often times I’ll just take the vocal as is and see where my raw first impression takes me.
48 HILLS I love the ruminative effervescence of Body Arcana. What was the guiding principle behind this album, or the general evolution of your sound that got you here? Were there any direct influences?
MATT KEPPEL If there was any kind of main guiding idea it was that we wanted to make a dance record where every song had beats underneath. Our last album [O/V/N/I, 2022] was a very mellow, ambient-influenced collection and we wanted to do the exact opposite of that for this one. The last one was very cerebral and this new one is very body/dance-oriented, hence the title.
MATT MERCER Even though O/V/N/I had some uptempo tracks that kick it off, the real emotional center of that album was amorphous, sensual, and celestial. I was really pleased with the end result, but getting there was not a straightforward journey, and it might be the most labor-intensive of all of our releases.
Body Arcana started from a clear contrast in that I wanted to experiment with tweaking samples or loops and seeing where it went — quick and instinctive, much like the techno on my solo album Ataxia, released last year. Most of the initial instrumental tracks on Body Arcana were semi-complete within a month, compared to O/V/N/I‘s year or longer. And we wanted to lean into the physicality of dance music again after that.
48 HILLS I hear there’s a (sort-of) secret special guest appearance on the album, along with the tributes to Kylie and Sade and cover of Tracey Thorn. Can you tell me the story behind that?
MATT KEPPEL When I was a young, budding music journalist in the late ’90s, I interviewed an artist I was a big fan of and I kept the cassette recording of our long phone call. It was in a shoebox and banged around for years, then decades. I pulled it out last year and Mercer converted it to a digital file. I took that file and cut it up into short phrases and pulled out the key lines that sounded cool to me. I paired it up with an older unused track Mercer had made and we started arranging where the vocals went. The voice is pretty distinct, so if you know who it is, you know.
48 HILLS Speaking of the Tracey Thorn cover, your version of “Seascape,” a kind of suspended animation electronification, is pretty breathtaking. That song is such a buried gem from 40 years ago now! What’s the story behind choosing that song?
MATT MERCER We’re both fans of Everything But The Girl and Tracey’s first solo album, as well as her more recent ones. It’s such a beautiful, simple song, and I was a little conflicted about straying so far from the source. However, I like that the beauty of her lyric and melody come through against a very different arrangement, both in a different key as well as the very different timbre of Matt’s voice. I really enjoy those sorts of contrasting juxtapositions, taking the song’s brighter sweetness and turning it on its side with some genuine reverence for the songwriter.
MATT KEPPEL I’ve been a fan of Everything But the Girl since I was a teenager. During the pandemic, I came up with the idea of possibly doing a covers EP. I recorded vocals of covers of Goldfrapp, Kylie, Eurythmics, Billie Eilish, and Tracey, all women’s songs. We started the beginnings of Kylie’s ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ but it wasn’t working. We did complete another cover that did work that will come out sometime. But the Tracey song stuck with me, so when we started really working on this album, I pulled out that vocal and we worked it into a cool piece of music that Mercer had just made. I think that was one of the first songs we did for the album.
48 HILLS What’s your view of independent queer music right now, in terms of getting music out there and supported? And are we likely to see a tour?
MATT MERCER I do wish there were more of an embrace of less easily categorizable queer artists, particularly those exploring the outer limits of sound design and experimentalism. It feels as though we may be in an unusual inflection point in American politics and culture where everything queer is possibly at its highest mainstream acceptance, yet there’s such a sharp backlash from a very vocal radical right minority who want to turn back the clock a few hundred years. In that sense it’s more important than ever for our voices to be heard and for LGBTQ+ artists to be unapologetically queer. Platforms like Bandcamp have been really invaluable in getting our endeavors out there, finding an audience, and developing a repertoire that answers to no one but hopefully resonates with many.
MATT KEPPEL I feel like there is more of a support for the visibility of queer music in mainstream music sites and publications now, which is a good thing. I think it skews very pop, young, and sexy but that’s what is gonna sell for record companies. I wish big music sites and publications would focus on more indie queer artists and not just pick out the two or three or whatever they’re going to put their focus on for that year and then ignore the rest. I sometimes feel like smaller indie artists, especially queer ones, had more of an audience/reach in the heyday of the blog era (late ’00s-early ’10s) but the blog era is over, and streaming kind of rules everything now. Which is a bit depressing.
Touring is not going to happen, I’m afraid. The return on investment, the time, the logistics, the pressure of trying to do something interesting as an electronic duo live with a tiny budget isn’t worth it, unfortunately. Set us up with a major label deal and sponsorship and Es Devlin doing production design and we’ll talk!
