Blending glam synthpop, electroclash, indie dance and new wave with a distinctly sci-fi sensibility, Vice Reine have created a world that feels both familiar and otherworldly. Their latest release brings them into conversation with Host Bodies, as part of a project revisiting the band’s debut album ten years on. We caught up with Vice Reine to talk about collaboration, remixing, their visual universe and the ideas that continue to shape their approach to music.
1. You describe Vice Reine as a collision of glam synthpop, sci-fi, indie dance, electroclash and new wave. How does that world shape the way you approach someone else’s music?
Of those genre descriptors, I think sci-fi is the most relevant to our overall approach, because it isn’t a music genre, but a larger ethos that has to do with exploring new ideas and concepts, and estrangement of the familiar to get new perspectives. When we enter someone else’s musical world for a collaboration, we first seek to understand the essence of their creation, then look at how we might play with it and transform it with our own synth-driven palette. The stems almost become like actors in a way, and we’re putting different costumes on them and recasting them into a new movie with our own directorial vision.
2. You remixed “Towards” using an unreleased demo from your own archives. What made that older idea feel like the right starting point for revisiting a ten-year-old Host Bodies track?
So often with music and art we just keep moving forward, relentlessly fast, rarely looking back. With this being a 10-year anniversary release project for Host Bodies, reflecting on their debut album and bringing it into the present day, it felt right for us to also take the opportunity to look back into our own catalog and bring something from the past into the present. We love Host Bodies’ music, have played shows together and connected artistically over the years in various ways, but our music is actually quite different, and it was more challenging than we expected to meld our styles! When we came across this old demo in our archive, the melodic pensiveness and searching quality made it unusual for a Vice Reine track, but struck us as being “Host Bodies-ish”, so we immediately recognized that it had potential for the remix.
3. There’s something fitting about bringing together two pieces of music from different moments in time. Did working on “Towards” change the way you heard either the original Host Bodies track or your own older material?
Definitely! You listen way more closely and deeply when approaching something as a collaborator, so we heard all kinds of things we had never noticed in the track (and the rest of the album) before. Getting to listen to someone’s stems is like peering behind the curtain, it’s so revealing and feels kind of personal in a cool way, getting to see how they built the song and noticing a lot more of the nuances to each part. Some particulars that stood out on “Towards” were the details in their synth layers, and the arrangement that evolves as new production layers enter (rather than any kind of traditional verse/chorus).
With our demo track, the passing of 6+ years since we made it had that estranging effect where we could see the way forward with much greater clarity. For both songs, it felt like taking apart a garment to look at the construction, then finding ways to sew them together and make it whole again.
4. What is the most exciting — or intimidating — part of taking someone else’s song and making it your own?
In general, the most exciting part of remixing is getting to take someone’s piece of work and shift the perspective (another way to understand the concept of “estrangement”). It has that hook of the familiar but the intrigue of the new, and brings new context to the work.
For this specific remix, the most exciting and the most challenging part of it was how different the two musical styles are between Host Bodies and Vice Reine. When they invited us to do a remix, we said yes right away, but then pretty quickly we were like “oh wow… this is harder than we thought”. We tried a few different tracks, a few different approaches, got stuck a few times, and ultimately found our way forward, which was really satisfying to finally figure it out! It was an interesting puzzle to solve. Once we landed on our old demo, it got a lot easier and felt really natural, which is how we knew we were on the right track.
5. Vice Reine feels like a very visual project, from the sci-fi influences to the name itself. How important are imagery, fashion and world-building to the music you create?
For us, it’s always been about the totality of the vision. A lot of our favorite bands and musical artists create a whole world they invite you into with their music, which is what we have always wanted to do. To come right out and state the obvious, music is invisible! It’s this magical force that we can’t see, but has so much impact on people individually and societally. There’s so much room to play with the visual elements that accompany it and enhance it.
With Vice Reine, we’ve always sought to harness the magical power of music to take ourselves into another world, and to invite our audience to come along with us. It’s like casting a spell or opening a portal (both of which we have written songs about). Always seeking the other spaces out there. Our minds are so incredibly powerful, and the invisibility of music creates this limitless canvas for ideas to play out. We do hope to expand on the visual side of VR a lot more in the future, with a bigger live show, doing more music videos, and hopefully a comic book someday.
6. Ten years from now, what would you love people to say Vice Reine helped bring into the electronic music landscape?
I would love for people to say that Vice Reine expanded their idea of what a band could be. That sense of freedom, expansiveness, and exploration in art is so vital to our humanity. I want our audience to feel empowered and inspired to go further in their own creativity and harness the awesome power of – (I’m going to say it one more time) – estrangement! By which I mean, shifting perspective to better understand or get at the essence of something. I think our deep engagement with these philosophical sci-fi concepts while at the same time making it glam and exciting is what makes Vice Reine a unique and memorable band.
