Minneapolis art-pop band Poliça are known for innovation, forward-thinking artistry, and novel electronic soundscapes. The 11-year-old band’s new record, Madness, takes them a step forward into the creative realm with producer Ryan Olson’s new anthropomorphic production tool AllOvers.

Poliça visited The Current studio for a session hosted by Diane that aired on The Local Show on Sunday, July 10. Watch video of song performances above, and listen to the full session audio in the player above and read a transcript below.

Interview transcript

Edited for clarity.

Diane: We are here with Poliça, my name is Diane, host of The Local Show on The Current and Poliça have just crushed a three song set here in the studios. It was amazing. And you all have just released a brand-new record called Madness on June 3, and have a big tour coming up throughout the United States and Canada. So, just want to say congratulations, and thanks for being here with us today. Yeah, thanks. Yeah. Since we have all of you here, I want to get into the fact that you all have a pretty unconventional band setup, and two drum kits, a bass player who also serves as a backup vocalist, and then you having, as a lead vocalist, but also having like a really cool electronic setup that you work out with. Yeah, talk to me about the live band setup: no keyboardist, anything at all. Yeah.

Channy Leaneagh: Yeah, I was thinking of when we first started, and Chris Riemenschneider, I think wrote an article in the Star Tribune and was like, "We'll see how long they last without guitars and keyboards." And that's sort of been our, "We can't add guitars or keyboards, because we wouldn't want to give that guy the satisfaction." I'm kidding, but I mean, yeah, we just... and then we have our like silent member of Ryan Olson, who does all of the production, so just like the synth and the keyboard work is all done, you know, in post, and we're very pragmatic people in the sense I think we, besides the two drum kits, which we continue to like work on a system to make them easier to unload and load. It really works for us to also just have a vibe that the four of us get along well. So the idea of like, the record itself is made, along with the four of us, lots of friends that play keys, or even sometimes electric guitar. That's later process, but for the touring party, it's just yeah, not breaking a thing that is working, I guess.

Diane: And I wanted to mention all your names. We have Channy Leaneagh, Ben Ivascu, and Drew Christopherson, Chris Bierden. Anything you you three would add to the setup you all have going on? I think it's kind of magical, how it works.

Drew Christopherson: Yeah. I mean, it's, I'm glad we've kept it this way, for the 11 years that we've been a band. You know, all the electronics that Ryan creates for it are generally done in Ableton, so it felt kind of silly to like, you know, turn them into a keyboard part because they never really were a keyboard part to begin with. It's more just that Ryan's not here to press spacebar. So, you know, to us, it's true to form that we've got Ableton running and we're doing our own thing over it. And it's sort of like Ryan's presence with us onstage without him physically being there. And also, we just never felt like we were done exploring the possibilities with this setup. We've never felt limited by it. We did, instead of doing two regular drum kits, we fully switched to electronics, so we can be totally sample based. And that kind of changed our approach to how the live sound related to the records. We were able to load our own samples and kind of really dial in our own sound from song to song. So that was new territory, we feel like we've been able to evolve, but also, you know, keep it the same setup. 

Ben Ivascu: It also really helped with live performances. So there, we don't have cymbals going into Channy's mic when she's singing and creating a lot of crazy sound onstage.

Chris Bierden: You noisy drummers!

Channy Leaneagh: Yeah, because I think when we first started, it was like, had the feeling and the angst of like, it felt like we were in some sort of hardcore band, but I was supposed to be like singing in tune and like softly over it. And I just had, like, I had so much aggression on stage. And as I'm getting older, and now I can hear myself singing, I'm like, "Oh, this is just the perfect timing" to just... it doesn't I don't need to have that kind of like, the early like, if you see Poliça perform at the beginning, it was as like my energy was so kind of intense, and that was really awesome. But we've been able to evolve and sort of change the way we even perform by just adapting and always kind of reassessing how we can make our sound better. So yeah, it's nice.

Diane: Yeah, speaking of your, your singing and your voice that it always is that stands out and your vocal style and delivery is absolutely stunning and kind of magical. Yeah, you write really good melodies and you sing it with finesse; that's just very unique. And it almost sometimes sounds like you're speaking a foreign language when you sing. Can you talk to me about your vocal style a bit?

Channy Leaneagh: I'm not sure I have a good direct answer about it, but I definitely have strong influences. You know, it's fun to sing with Chris because I think we do have really different voices, but at the same time, it's just always really great to collaborate and meld into another singer. But in Poliça, it really started out as the vocals as another processed instrument. And so while I have to be honest, like, worked on some of my pronunciation as a singer, because my words are never supposed to — I'm not a singer songwriter in this band — so I'm never wanting my words to stand out over the music. But I do want to always keep working on being able to sing like an instrument and meld into the band, but also, you know, make something articulate. I love listening to instrumental music and music that I can't understand the words to. And because sometimes words are too overwhelming. And so I don't know if that's what I'm trying to— I'm not trying to do it intentionally, but that's definitely a big influence of mine. But, yeah, I just, you know, like to sing!

Diane: Well, yeah, yeah. It comes out. It comes out. Your your voice was just absolutely glorious.

Channy Leaneagh: Yeah, it's really still fun to do.

Diane: Yeah. And yeah, you're right, you found a great vocalist, partner, Chris Bierden, who I enjoy your original music as well. 

Chris Bierden: Well, thank you.

Diane: Yeah! Tell me about singing with Channy.

Chris Bierden: Oh, gosh! Yeah! It always feels like a big responsibility. So I'm always trying to make it as perfect as I can. And blending is really important to me. It's like, it's a different headspace when you're listening to the — you're receiving and inputting at the exact same time, trying to line up to their rhythm, their timing, the notes they're choosing, and it's just, it's a really fun mind meld. I love singing with other people.

Channy Leaneagh: I think it might be, you know, when I see Chris in other bands, too, or his own stuff, there hasn't ever been in Poliça a time when we're like working on harmony, or I think in that sense, you know, I never write like charts for notes, or tell Chris specific notes to sing. I'm maybe to, to a definite fault. I'm like more of like we have, you know, it has to feel... it's just do what you feel. And it's the same way that I write a song like I want, you know, a lot of the songs or the melodies I have are the thing that came out when I first, when Ryan first played me the skeleton of some track he worked on. And I need to catch that, like, that first reaction, because the main reason why I play music is to like get into the visceral space. And I appreciate that about Christo because he finds a place and finds something like beautiful and cool to sing along with, even though we're not so like, giving a lot of instruction. He's obviously—

Chris Bierden: I do a massive amount of homework.

Channy Leaneagh: A massive amount of, you know, a technical musician. He always knows the keys of the songs, and I've given up any of that long ago. Like, it's just so easy to ask Chris. 

Diane: That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely a seamlessness and I don't know I keep using the word flawless, but that's kind of how I how it sounds to me is it just like, has this such a really rich, amazing sound. And I mean, to bring it back to Ryan and what he does: I want to bring up how having a minimal amount of experience working with Pro Tools and MIDI keyboards and that kind of stuff, how hard it is to write electronic music and not have it sound like elevator music or not have it sound like a karaoke song, you know, and I would love to hear some, you know, hear you impart some knowledge about what it takes to actually create sonic beauty that comes from electronic music. 

Channy Leaneagh: Well, I mean, I think it might have changed a little bit in the beginning. But Drew might have more specifics on this talking about AllOvers, which is a production tool that Ryan sort of, this was one of the records among many that he's working on right now, that is sort of a testing of this AI-generated production tool. But Ryan, since the second record, has been using samples or studio time with people coming into his home studio, or now his like studio space, and like just getting people together, and jamming on keyboards or guitars or bass, and then he's processing all that stuff. And using— Ryan's very, like interested in continuing to find the sounds that you know, represent him. So I think it takes a lot of processing, but there's definitely real instruments involved, as real as electronic keyboard is, and even vocal processing. And with something like AllOvers, you can take like a conversation between Ryan and his son and input it into Ableton through AllOvers, which is this AI-generated production tool, and you're able to select like a key, a style of music, a BPM, so then you're able to take a conversation and turn it into a melody line, turn it into a beat. And when we first started working on Madness, I just said I wanted to write to, like, the saddest songs he could possibly make. And so that is sort of the process of, to me, what I see Ryan doing is taking maybe, like a vibe or, you know, a feeling, or what, whatever makes him — he also makes music much like the rest of us for things that feel good, that feels good to make — but it's making real music, using real instruments, sorry, to process over months until it feels right, into a print of synth. And so, in that sense, it's you know, you're he's never like just like picking a keyboard from Ableton or Pro Tools and then picking like a reverb from there and then playing like a keyboard into that. He's now at this point in his ancient age, he's amassed like skills and a toolbox. And I think that's what all the people that I see that are really progressing in the way they're making it. They just like, have amassed so many, like, tips and tools and little libraries and special ways they like to do things, and their favorite synths and their favorite keyboards.

Chris Bierden: He thrives in chaos. And I think that's why it's always interesting, because it's, everything becomes incidental, every accident is an opportunity. I think that's really how he works the best. And he pools people together to like collect their energy to focus it in just one direction. That's kind of his biggest talent, I think.

Drew Christopherson: Yeah, we'll do, you know, we'll get together when he's in the part of songwriting where he's kind of gathering samples for ideas and such; we'll maybe do 10, 12 improvs. And, you know, maybe one of those, we'll end up with something. He's just throwing a lot of ideas down, getting a lot of people through the door to add ideas. And then he might catch two bars or four bars of it that really grabs his attention. And then now he's got a loop to build off of and then, even then he'll try to smear it out as much as he can and just, but it pretty much all of the stuff that he uses starts with a live performance from, you know, from an instrument. Like Channy said, it's very rare that he just steps up to a sequencer and builds a sequence and calls that the melody. He really looks for those, like Chris said, the kind of the accidental things to creep up from some other attempt. And, you know, and then follow those leads. This production tool that Channy mentioned, the AllOvers as well is like, it's almost too much to describe, but it's — he built it for Mass MoCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. It was meant to be a room filled with microphones that would pick up ambient sounds, whether it's people walking down the stairs or people chatting amongst each other. It takes those sounds, processes them, throws them in a large bank and analyzes all of the input from it. It grabs sections that are in G, sections that are in D; like, so then you're able to say, "Feed me back everything that's this one chord." And it can turn all these ambient sounds into a bizarre melody. And it's somewhat like accidental in what you're hearing. But it's also based on all the input that you feed it. So, like Channy said, they used the example of a recording of a conversation between he and his son, and all the audio data from that conversation gets turned into, you know, thousands of tiny bits of audio data that is then rearranged. And, you know, he tells it kind of what to do and takes what it gets back and looks for interesting loops out of that. So it's kind of bizarre to explain, but it really did, like, it led to a creative burst at the time, where it's like, every time it played back something, it had a little bit of excitement to it, because you're like, "How did that even happen?" But it was by design, so it wasn't just totally, like, algorithm based. Or, you know? Yeah. It's interesting and confusing, right? Someday he can explain it, although I doubt he ever will.

Channy Leaneagh: Yeah, it's interesting. I'm sort of very anti-technology, but also recognizing that I'm not. So wanting to see the human side of the computer — we did it for the artwork, too — it was very much like, I want to give it 50 images of me. And then I wanted to see like, what it learned about me. And that's very much what I like about trying to find a way to work with AI to make it like another member of the band, or to be able to see not how it can recreate something more perfect than what humans do, but how you could like look into its like, soul; it seems to like pick out any, it seems to learn human, like the human face, at least my face, or in this like really kind of perfect, sad, kind of like, distorted. And a lot of that with the songs too. So to sort of find that, like, human darkness within a computer. And so yeah, you know, instead of like, I want this computer to like, make every mistake go away. And by computer I mean AI. Instead, I'm curious to see what kind of mistakes it makes. And, or what, like where it goes into darkness? Because like, how it interprets darkness, I guess.

Diane: Because we think of like, technology or computers like as having the perfect because as, exactly like a calculator, is perfect. It will come out with the perfect thing. But you can figure out ways to manipulate it to make it be flawed. That's really cool and deep.

Channy Leaneagh: And "flawed" is like in quotes because, you know, what is flawed? But to be like, oh, man, that's how it sees this. That's how it makes folk music. That's what it thinks folk music is, or that is how it interprets minor chords, and it creates a whole new world.

Diane: It seems like a lot of just coding and nerdery in some ways, but it's so cool and hip at the same time, which is just kind of mind blowing.

Channy Leaneagh: Yeah, the coding is Seth Rossiter. Seth Rossiter. Yeah.

Diane: Okay. So he's the one that gets down into the coding. Okay. Cool. Yeah, you mentioned like, there was a visual aspect too; the visuals becoming, like the rotting and stuff. So AllOvers does the visuals too?

Channy Leaneagh: It wasn't AllOvers, it was actually a free — like, copyright free, I forget what that's called at this moment — but that part of the Internet where everything is free. 

All  Open source!

Channy Leaneagh: Thank you, open source! This is like a game you play where it's like, "It's that thing where it's free." So open source. You can just plug in a bunch of images, it will shoot back; it will learn it, and then give you back what it learns. And combining all of those images. And you can have fun with that for days.

Chris Bierden: Often grotesque. It's really interesting what a computer thinks we look like.

Channy Leaneagh: Or just like it would make, like the way it would make clothes, and it would take patterns from here and there, and yeah, it was really fascinating.

Diane: Cool. Yeah, the artwork is really striking. Yeah, and different. I've been checking out the website of course.

Channy Leaneagh: Yeah. Ian Babineaux and Brian Huddleston did the actual like [artwork], yeah, then processed it much like Ryan processes the AI that he uses.

Diane: Yeah, I want to get back to like, the, what makes Poliça this, you know, artpop amazing group that stands out. And I think that's what a lot of your fans and people that follow you, like respect about you is the creativity and the originality behind your music. And I mean, there's so many different popular forms of electronic music coming out, especially with like trap beats and EDM. And yeah, and you still don't really hear anyone who sounds like Poliça. And I think a lot of it has to do with like, developing these technologies. And so yeah, I want to say kudos again on another great record, Madness. 

Channy Leaneagh: Thank you.

Diane: Yeah, it's really cool. But yeah, is there anything you would add to how Poliça stands out? In this realm of electronic music? Or is there things that you that inspire you that you hear as well?

Channy Leaneagh: I don't think we're the band that would like, that usually likes to talk about how we stand out! We're from Minnesota, so it's like, "Are you talking well of yourself?"

Chris Bierden: Well, I think we, the band started kind of on the fringes of technology, like, using new technology, like the Helicon voice pedal, and Ryan using this Yamaha sequencer was kind of like, fundamentally, I think the band started as kind of play with these objects. And I think after a while, you know, once you figure out how something works, you get bored, and you want to move on to something else. And so, continuing that process with new toys to play with has kind of helped us, you know, the vitality of the project.

Drew Christopherson: I think there's a couple things too that we've, a couple elements that have sometimes remained like traditional enough to where they're like recognizable, like I think about Chris's bass playing; he's always been a pretty busy bass player that plays almost reminiscent of like, you know, '60s, '70s kind of funk-soul sort of licks that continue to exist in a song that started out as like this droney, rumbling electronic pulse thing. So we kind of have been able to take really obscure sounds, and then in the end, end up with a, you know, a song out of it and Channy as well, like, totally not afraid to go otherworldly with effects and just layer on, you know, stuff and try to blend in with the music. But at the same time, we'll write a verse that is still very much rooted in like a folk music tradition, where there's things you can grab onto and remember and sing along with. So it's kind of always been this balance between, like, trying to be experimental and out there, but at the same time, trying to make listenable music. And we like it when it's totally out there and, like, challenging, but we also like it when it's a little bit more of like, you know, or there's a number of songs that don't sit that far out there. And it's kind of been that balance that we, you know, linger in still.

Channy Leaneagh: Yeah, and I think we've never... we've always had a strong kind of leader, or the hierarchy is really in place, but everybody gets to have their own style. Ben, you know, is more like a hardcore drummer originally or rock. Drew has done a lot of also hardcore, but like, rap drumming.

Drew Christopherson: Back in the day.

Channy Leaneagh: Back in the day. Chris has done also a wide ranging amount of things. Nobody in this band, like Chris comes up with his own basslines most of the time. Drummers have some leeway. I, you know, no one like I just write the songs because I need to say something. But we've never gone about writing a record where we're like, "We want to make it sound like this," which I think is a common thing that I read about, I guess in the news or whatever, if I'm reading about people making a record. if they're like, "I wanted to make a record, and I wanted it to sound like these people. I wanted it to sound like this style." That is something that we've never done. People have strong influences; Ryan certainly has strong influences, but I personally am making music to literally like feel something. And we all are playing to like, feel something together, feel something for ourselves, and Ryan specifically, is looking for ways for each of us to be able to like express ourselves. Or by that, I mean like, he thinks about "Is Ben going to be happy with this part? How can I make Drew like this? How can I work on everybody's strengths? Where will Chris fit in?" You know, he's thinking about like not stepping on anyone's toes quite frequently. So a lot of care, I guess. And a lot of love. It all comes back to love.

Diane: Yes, I can tell there's definitely good camaraderie you've all got going on. And yeah, I mean the Minneapolis music scene, of course, is really well interconnected. And there's a lot of, I know that you got a couple some other guest vocalists, including Velvet Negroni.

Channy Leaneagh: So he did a lot of keys.

Diane: He did a lot of keys? Huh — that's cool.

Channy Leaneagh: In general. Yeah, no singing but like he's a he's a melody master.

Drew Christopherson: Jeremy Nutzman is an incredible musician. We believe that through and through.

Channy Leaneagh: Aaron Baum is also one of Ryan's favorite keyboardists to work with CJ Camerieri does a lot of horns with Ryan. Tim Fain did the violin, and we are humbled by that because, I mean, he's an incredible violin player.

Drew Christopherson: A lot of help from Dustin Zahn lately, a techno producer friend of ours who has stepped in and co-produced a number of the recent material with Ryan.

Diane: That's right, "Rotting."

Channy Leaneagh: "Rotting." "Alive." And there's another one that I'm thinking of…

Chris Bierden: "Away."

Channy Leaneagh: "Away," that's on the record. Alex Nutter was on this record as well. Ethan Hanson.

Drew Christopherson: Boys Noize. 

Channy Leaneagh: Boys Noize. Just kind of, yeah. It's people that helped out, and we thank them very much.

Diane: Channy Leaneagh. Chris Bierden, Drew Christopherson and Ben Ivascu, thanks for being here again. It's such a pleasure, and anything else you would add that I maybe didn't cover?

Drew Christopherson: Thank you very much for having us today.

Chris Bierden: Thank you.

Channy Leaneagh: Yeah, thanks.

Diane: Yeah, love the new record Madness, out everywhere. My name is Diane, host of The Local Show.

Songs Played
Rotting
Alive

External Links
Poliça - official site

Credits
Guest - Poliça
Host - Diane
Technical Directors - Evan Clark, Eric Romani
Producers - Derrick Stevens, Luke Taylor, Jesse Wiza