“Through our music you will, eventually, be able to face the most beautiful ass on the beach. Our siblingship was intended by the doglike to bring something bigger into this world.”
Easter’s Facebook bio, like the band name itself, is typically enigmatic. Behind the name is the mysterious duo, Max and Stine – two individuals who were destined, it seems, to meet and create.
The Berlin-based band met in 2003 at an environmentalist camp in Norway. “We made out with the same girl, so we didn’t like each other at first,” they say. Thanks to this shared crush, however, they stayed in touch and started to work on Easter a few years later. Now inseparable, Max and Stine admit that she did them a favour: “Together we are Harder. Better. Faster. Stronger. Easter.”
While Max and Stine are “together all the time,” aside from sharing a bottle of Tequila as a ritual before playing live, they need their own separate ingredients to make their writing sessions fruitful. For Max, “a functioning body, time, noodles and a new software” will make it work, while Stine banks on “alcohol, snus [moist powder tobacco] and trail mix”.
“I find it good to be slightly hungover or overly excited about something hysterical that just happened” adds Stine. “To be in that mood where you can’t take yourself or anything seriously and just write for the fun of it.”
Stine also finds inspiration “around Christmas and in hotel rooms,” while Max draws his from his own past: “Nostalgia is like candy to me, I have to consume it so I can stop thinking about it.”
Max then talks about the creative process itself, which develops into an academic ramble about achieving perfection. “We first started out laying down a song in 30 minutes. As time passed that changed of course; you have to keep things interesting to yourself. In our case, it means crafting.”
“Perfection is tempting because you can approach it but never reach it. Yesterday I was Googling the sunset time for Berlin because I wanted to watch Game of Thrones on the beamer. I asked myself, ‘How exact can this time be determined, down on a Pico level, and how do processes like this neglect the seemingly general imprecision of nature?’
“I guess if the scale of time and space of an action increases, it approaches perfection. Like if you would draw a circle with an infinite radius it approaches perfection. But ultimately that universal idea gets replaced with a personal compromise. Like with the creation of a perfect clock, currently being the atomic clock, which is also inaccurate, but pushes the definition of exact time far enough beyond human grasp. I like that. I watched it at 8.30 pm.”
So, what is ‘music’ for Easter? In Stine’s opinion, music might be “The best thing that came out of human existence.” For Max, defining music is a tricky thing: “There’s a huge difference between making and consuming music. You never consume your own music the same way as others. It’s like looking into the mirror, just to see that you still exist outside your head.”
Trying to describe Easter’s own musical style and artistic language is so tough that even Stine struggles. “I would never try,” she says. One thing that can be said, however, is that listening to Easter is a trippy experience. As a visual extension of the tracks, their bewitching music videos take us through various stages of consciousness, from the hypnotic “Funghi Baby” dance in ‘Smar’, to the anxiety-provoking climate of a hotel room in ‘Pillo’.
Since it is not easy to imagine Max and Stine outside of Easter, I wanted to know what else they would be doing if it were not music. “I think I would be cleaning hotel rooms. But my dream is to open an animal sanctuary,” says Stine. As for Max: “Maybe I would have tried to open a hair removal salon. No laser, all mechanical.” I wouldn’t have expected anything less.
If you would like to get a live taste of Easter and “see mushrooms being born out of shrimps,” you can do just that on 24th November at The Waiting Room in London.
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Cover photo by Yana Shtilman
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