Duplekita are another of those musical happy accidents that seem to be popping up all too frequently these days… Duplekita are an Edmonton, Canada-based collective that can include up to nearly twenty contributors. At their core is Tim Batke, co-founder of electro rockers Faunts, who began the band in early 2011. In a recent chat with Batke, he explains that, unlike Faunts, who are a more traditional musical group, Duplekita just kind of happened: “We were just friends. We just came together for fun, without any goal of recording an album.” He also explains that there are definitely some perks of working with a collective of this nature that he is currently appreciating.
“There’s a freedom to working with a relatively large group of musicians. I’m kind of a control freak when it comes to making music, so working with different people offers more opportunity to collaborate. I really like interpreting people’s takes on music and turning other people’s ideas into music. Compared to Faunts,this felt a little looser, a little less of a ‘band.’ There were no specific roles in terms of what any one person could or had to do.”
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Duplekita’s debut album, The Sound of My Name, is due out next Tuesday, July 29th, on Kinsella Recordins. The album, which the band has characterized as, “An album of repetition and layers,” came together slowly as beats, melodies, and chords were continually piled upon each other by band members until they reached the point of what Batke considered to be a finished work. The music itself sounds along the lines of an electronic-leaning art rock band paying homage traditional folk songwriting, or a very organic sounding exercise in sonic synthetics. The band themselves describe this sound as “tribal pop.” And when I ask Batke what specific influences are behind Duplekita, he tells me that they are just as indebted to audio revolutionaries as the often comical circumstances we find ourselves in during the course of life: “I would say a lot of Kraftwerk. And I actually taught elementary school music for a few years, so I might actually say Stomp, as lame as that might sound, but it was all about ‘What’s a new way to make music like that?’ and getting recorders and things like that involved.” And while Duplekita’s calendar is largely unblemished, Tim Batke tells me that this definitely isn’t a one-off thing: “There’s more music in the works, but there’s not really a plan, which is the cool thing about this project.”
