Q&A: Public Circuit Frames Ecstasy In New LP, ‘Modern Church’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY SYDNEY TATE ☆
WITH CROSSED EYES AND BUGGED TENACITY — Public Circuit welcomes newcomers into their world with a mischievous gait, unveiling an archetypal device of Modern Church via À La Carte Records.
Band members Ethan Biamont, Sean Holloway and Nelson Fisher found each other by chance and exist united in a relentless passion for their craft in their current home of New York City. The three first performed together in a lawless fashion in a DIY space in Virginia before unrolling as the concomitant live wires we see today.
Connotations of prior genres do not hold Modern Church. Each track burgeons as an answer to experimentation and self-actualization in sound. With a promise of prosperous exhilaration and no less, the band’s second album delivers. Public Circuit is touring North America through September, with European dates to follow.
Read on to find out more about the band’s thoughts on hyperpop, their dedication to music as a lifestyle, and their favorite snacks for tour.
LUNA: If you had to be a mythical creature, what would you be and why?
NELSON FISHER: Maybe it could be cool to answer as a collective.
ETHAN BIAMONT: We’re just going to debate this forever.
NELSON FISHER: If we were to bond into one mythical creature, I picture a dragon.
SEAN HOLLOWAY: I'm gonna answer for me, I want to be a Centaur. Aren’t those half-horse half-human? I’d probably be half buffalo and half eagle, so I’d be my own Centaur.
BIAMONT: That’s a griffin, bro.
HOLLOWAY: That’s my answer.
BIAMONT: If we’re talking fantasy… elf? An elven sort of mage warrior, or if we want to get American with it—skin walker. Does that count?
HOLLOWAY: What’s a skin walker?
BIAMONT: It’s a Native American folklore thing and they mimic humans and eat people.
FISHER: I’d be a hippogriff from Harry Potter [and the Chamber of Secrets]. That thing is so majestic.
BIAMONT: Honestly, it’d be pretty cool to be a fairy, like a real one. They’ve got sharp teeth and stuff.
LUNA: How did you all meet each other?
BIAMONT: I had just moved to New York and I went to Market Hotel to see Hotline TNT. I was talking to random people because I didn’t really know anybody. This guy Eric started talking to me and we started talking about music and I said it would be nice to know a drummer. He said “My friend’s boyfriend plays the drums, I’ll have to hit him up.” I thought, that’s going nowhere. You know how many people say that kind of thing? Whatever. One day Sean hit me up saying “Hey, come to my practice space, let’s play drums.” We ended up hanging out that whole day and got vegan food.
HOLLOWAY: It was a beautiful day. We went to Champs Diner. I love that place. I felt close to you immediately, like this person just gets it, I can be silly with them.
BIAMONT: Then we played the worst show of our life. Then, a few months later, Nelson can take it away.
FISHER: I think you guys did a few shows together, and I had my own project called Spookystack. I booked us a show at Chaos Computer while it was still around and that was the second show I think I ever played. It was the first show I ever booked, actually. As I’m setting up, Sean gets there early, then Ethan gets there, they don’t even say hi to me. They come up and immediately say, “Do you want to go on tour with me?”
They said they’d never done it before but were pretty sure they could do it. I didn’t even have my drivers license at this point and it was my second show ever. I was so stoked. I looked up to Public Circuit because they had 1,000 monthly listeners and I had around 70. Back then, that meant a lot to me.
I decided to get my drivers license, Ethan was going to book the tour and I would drive my mom’s car. So I spent the next four or five months…
BIAMONT: At this point you had failed the driver's test four times.
FISHER: I failed like three times at this point. So Ethan’s job was to book the tour, and my job was to get my license so we could actually go on the tour. I failed maybe three times after that.
LUNA: Six in total?
FISHER: Six in total. I got my license the day before we left.
HOLLOWAY: I was so scared.
BIAMONT: Then in the future, we got this car registered a day before we left for our tour.
FISHER: At the time we were touring as separate bands, but we had played a bunch of shows together. We ended up at MACROCK, this festival in Virginia, and they were playing this after party that I wasn’t a part of. I was sad and had some FOMO, but I knew the songs at this point so I was like, “Let me just jump in and see what happens.” They weren’t stoked about it at first.
HOLLOWAY: We had a sidebar.
FISHER: They had a sidebar and an hour later they agreed.
BIAMONT: It was low stakes at a house show, and Nelson’s good, he can play by ear, so if anything he can just play on top of it.
FISHER: We did it and the sound was terrible, because it was a DIY basement show. I don’t even think what I was playing was audible, but it was clear that the second we started playing together, this thing happened where all our energy turned into this crazy thing. People were f*cking loving it.
BIAMONT: Once we got home, we thought Nelson had to be a part of the band, but it took a minute for it to sort of work out how it would work out. It really took a year, and we put out our first record. That was really just songs that I wrote, but I think by the time that came out and we toured for a month around that with Nelson, stuff started to click and it finally felt like we were a band.
Then the next record would be the first Public Circuit record—Modern Church is really the first Public circuit record. It’s what we’ve always been trying to do and what we think is reflective of the actual unit of the three of us, but it took us coming together over a while. It’s not like we came together as a band and wrote music together initially. It was piece mailed over time and playing so much together created this workflow that we decided was how it would work.
We have a very different workflow than I think other bands have been in. We don’t write a song at one point together in the same room, it comes together in a bunch of pieces.
LUNA: If you lived in a medieval village, what would your job be?
FISHER: Bring out the dead.
BIAMONT: Cleric.
HOLLOWAY: I’d be a peasant,ike a nobody talking about oysters, clams and cockles.
FISHER: You’d be a Shaman or something, or that person wearing that freaky mask with the long nose.
BIAMONT: Me? Oh, like a plague doctor? Did you know they’re actually ahead of their time when it comes to medical sciences?
FISHER: I’ve never heard anyone advocate for plague doctors.
BIAMONT: They look really scary, but they were taking medical precautions that were hundreds of years ahead of their time, but I don’t know if I’d be a plague doctor. You know what? I’d be a cartographer. I wanna make maps and shit and say what trade route we need to take for some salmon. Nelson, what are you?
FISHER: I’m just the guy that says bring out the dead.
LUNA: What are your thoughts on hyperpop?
FISHER: I like that question.
HOLLOWAY: I do not like hyperpop.
BIAMONT: I got one word: 2hollis.
HOLLOWAY: 2hollis rules, hyperpop sucks.
FISHER: I think hyperpop needed to happen so this new genre of pop music that’s happening with 2hollis which I actually f*ck with, I’m not gonna lie, but so that this new thing could actually happen.
BIAMONT: People had to be ridiculous at first, but now hyperpop is kind of this amorphous genre with a lot of variants of it, like any other genre. In general, you see its influence in a lot of contemporary pop now. It’s a lot more electronic and cool, like the Addison Rae album. We’ve been bumping that heavy.
HOLLOWAY: I liked that 100 gecs album and in ten years I’m going to be like, “What was I on?”
FISHER: Sean, you’ll like this take. Did you listen to the This Is Lorelei album?
LUNA: Yes I did.
FISHER: Okay, so “Dancing in the Club,” heavily autotuned vocals and sh*t. I’m not saying hyperpop is responsible for auto-tune and all of that to be more prevalent in modern-day indie folk music, but it definitely brought that more into the spotlight and made it a bit more acceptable.
BIAMONT: I think maximalist electronic music had an effect where a lot of ideas were kind of spread out throughout general popular music. You can contribute a lot of different genres to where if it wasn’t for hyperpop, maybe this wouldn’t be as digestible. That can be from something ostensibly electronic like 2hollis, which is just pop, to Water From Your Eyes.
FISHER: I really like that pop music has shifted from this sort of vanilla club beats to there’s more cool electronic stuff going on. That definitely comes from hyperpop.
BIAMONT: I’m a Bad…Bleep, Addison Rae. Our next record—
FISHER: It’s just going to sound like 2hollis. (Group laughs) That’s the headline for this.
BIAMONT: I think with the older music not really representing us as a group, sometimes people throw us in the pitfalls of 80s music and new wave, but we really just like electronic music.
Some of the new stuff we’ve started to write is more in the vein of general electronic stuff. We take inspiration from a lot of different genres, which I think is evident of Modern Church as a whole. It still holds on to a lot of 80s or late 70s stuff, but with the instrumentation moving forward you’ll see it start to slide a bit more.
BIAMONT: In summation, hyperpop has probably influenced how we all look at music, in one way or another.
FISHER: That was a huge era.
BIAMONT: It came full circle for me because as a kid I listened to hella Skrillex. (Group laughs)
LUNA: And we all did.
BIAMONT: Listen, just expect some 808s from us in the future, okay? That’s all I’ve got to say.
LUNA: I know the modern remake of The Crow is pretty bad, but if they did a good version, I think you all could’ve helped with the soundtrack.
FISHER: That would be lit.
BIAMONT: Thank you. All the sync licensing teams need to hit us up.
LUNA: If you had to choose between only watching Cronenberg or David Lynch films for the rest of your life, what would you choose?
BIAMONT: I really like how unsettling David Lynch can be, but artistically, Cronenberg. The last Cronenberg movie I watched was Existens and that shit is crazy. The metaphysical, technological, how he mashes human organism with technology, that’s a very Public Circuit thing in a way. At least in my head.
FISHER: I can’t say anything but David Lynch. He’s my biggest inspiration.
LUNA: Have you had any epiphany-type moments about what you want your life to look like?
FISHER: You know what? Actually, yes, very recently. I was on a little vacay catching up with old friends and I was telling them how I’m playing shows, bartending, whatever. They asked me what I’m really trying to do, like what’s ideal for me to be happy and think I’ve made it.
I was like, “Honestly, what I'm doing right now is exactly what I've always wanted to do my whole life. I'm playing shows, I'm making music, I'm traveling the country, I'm traveling the world.” The only thing that I would want is just a little more money, but if I could have a little more money and have the same lifestyle that I'm living right now, then that's exactly how I want my life to be.
HOLLOWAY: I have a similar answer to that because I recently met with a career advisor. I've been in the service industry for a bit, and I'm on my path, I know that I'm on my path, but I would like a little bit more structure. I wanted to find a way to have some stability and pursue a career avenue that works for my unique lifestyle like touring maybe a few months out of the year. I feel very fulfilled artistically with what we’re doing, but the epiphany I had was I want a family and kids and stability. I want a way to invest in my future. I just want kids—I love kids, I want to be a dad, I love love, I want my girl. I want my family, I want my house, but I also want to pursue self-actualizing and explore why I’m here.
Everything in me is saying to keep doing music and keep doing my thing, but I want balance.
BIAMONT: We all work service jobs, and it's definitely a big sacrifice to do music a lot. We take music from a very maximalist standpoint. Sometimes maybe it doesn't come across in that way, and hopefully it doesn’t come across this way, but sometimes we put a lot into it.
It takes a lot of time to take away from jobs and tour and go around spreading music and we’re putting everything into it. With playing live, I don’t think it matters what show it is. We’re putting everything into it because this is what we want to do. Whether it’s a great big successful giant ass show or a small show, we’re doing what we love and what we’ve always wanted to do.
We have differences. Our similarities are that we’re all extremely passionate about music, and I think it took a while for us to kind of come to a point of getting on the same page of wanting to make sacrifices for music. It also comes from the fact that we all respect each other as musicians and we believe in each other and feel confident that we can spend so much time together, drive across the world and do all this bullshit, because it is a big sacrifice.
We're not the only band doing it. It's hard to be a band. It's hard to live right now, especially as a band in New York. It's hard enough to live in New York, having to make that sacrifice.
My personal epiphany was years ago when I was out of work for a while after I moved. My dad met some guy who knew someone else in New York who worked for Comcast or something and he’s also a TikTok influencer. Very rich guy who’s a VP at Comcast. I met with him on Zoom to talk about getting a job and he really couldn’t offer me anything, he was just trying to give me career advice. I was telling him about music and what I did for work and he said, “So music’s your side hustle?” In that moment, I thought “F*ck this.” I don’t want music to be my side hustle. This capitalistic pursuit where I make time for my job, then in my free time I make music. Why can’t music be my thing and I make ends meet some other way?
That shifted my perspective on how I needed to be more confident in pursuing music. We had a shared epiphany at some point as we started to tour more. In North Carolina last fall we played Hopscotch Fest, and it was this amazing experience where we got artist passes for the whole weekend.
We got to go around and see MJ Lenderman, JPEGMAFIA, it was really cool to realize we were playing that festival too. We played a smaller club stage one night and it was at capacity, and the next day we were walking around and people would come up to us saying they had so much fun [at our set.]
It was a moment that felt like this was what we’re supposed to be doing. It sounds a bit corny in a way.
BIAMONT: Every band has highs and lows in music. Even the biggest band isn’t free from having a dud show. It’s a path where you’re being super vulnerable and you don’t ever have guaranteed success and it comes in waves.
You have great seasons of highs and great seasons of lows. You’re putting out a new record and you don’t know how it’ll be received, but we all try to center ourselves around knowing that we'd rather really be doing nothing else. Apart from all the struggle and the money that goes into it. At the end of the day, you want to just talk about your passions and music, but money is something we all need to survive.
HOLLOWAY: I’m thinking of the movie Inside Llewyn Davis, when he’s playing a beautiful three-minute song and when it ends, another character says, “I don’t see any money in it.”
That has been my experience as a musician for my whole adult life. Holding that inside of you is hard, but then you realize I'm on my path. I'm doing my thing. It makes it worth it. You have to hold onto that light and belief. Like you guys were saying, getting a glimpse of validation like at the festival, you just have to hold onto those moments. When you feel seen and validated for what you’re doing, it means so much.
BIAMONT: Yeah, because it is a very vulnerable thing. The work we put into it isn't necessarily a public thing. And that goes for a lot of different bands.
FISHER: You have to be the right amount of delusional.
BIAMONT: I think that's true for any artist. You don't want to be too delusional, but I think there's a perfect amount of delusion that makes people successful.
HOLLOWAY: You should say what Nelson said about our next record.
BIAMONT: Should I even say that? Okay, baseline, we all enjoy music, and I want to make music that is enjoyed by people like me. I want to find new music and not care about genre or whatever, but I want to make music that’s cool. Nelson says our next record is going to be one of the best records of all time. (Everyone laughs)
We were driving home from a show at 1 a.m. and we were talking about how we want this next record to sound sonically, and Nelson said it’s going to be one of the best records of all time. Me and Sean were laughing but we realized he was serious. Like, “As good as Radiohead or The Beatles or something legendary?” He goes, “Honestly, yeah.”
And you know what, Nelson, we need this confidence. This band started as something I spearheaded and I probably get the most negative or doubtful, but when it comes to music, it all falls together at some point.
FISHER: I believe in manifestation, I really do.
BIAMONT: That’s true. All I said was that I wanted to go to Europe next year and we kept saying it, so if we didn’t do it I would’ve been a liar. I’m not a liar.
FISHER: It's really you're just working hard because you see a vision, whether that's manifestation or not, whatever.
LUNA: What are your favorite snacks on tour?
BIAMONT: Easy, easy.
FISHER: We all have our own favorites.
BIAMONT: Trader Joe's ABC bars. Honestly, I thought about gatekeeping that. Before we leave on tour, I go to Trader Joe's and lowkey feel a tad bit embarrassed, but I gotta own my truth, because I get a basket and I fill it up with eight boxes of ABC bars, and then I stuff it into my bag.
That's my lifeblood. Sometimes I feel a little lightheaded if we played a really sweaty show, sometimes we don't get a chance to eat, and I don’t like eating a meal right before we play because I’m moving around so much on stage. ABC bars.
FISHER: Mine is Trader Joe's also with the trail mix. Big fat bag of trail mix. If we’re lucky enough and we have a cooler that isn’t flooded, turkey and bread. Maybe a pickle on top.
HOLLOWAY: I loved our sandwiches Nelly. This last tour I would get the Kashi cinnamon cereal and put three in my mouth, then take some soy milk and swish it around.
BIAMONT: He would take a handful of cereal, put it in his mouth, then pour Silk into his mouth.
FISHER: If you want a little more than a snack and you’re at the gas station, get one of those packaged hardboiled eggs, get one of those slimjims, and a piece of bread. *Gagging noise in the background*
BIAMONT: Sean’s gagging because he’s vegan.
FISHER: That’s a full meal right there.
BIAMONT: I got chastised for trying to eat peanut butter and jelly. There’s nothing wrong with a PB&J on a road trip, that’s a great American road trip staple.
FISHER: These folks wanted to eat PB and J's for the whole tour every day. At a certain point, I snapped. I’m not a child. I am an adult. I cannot eat PB&Js anymore.
BIAMONT: You’re European bro, I blame Europe.
LUNA: That’s why you have your egg.
FISHER: I need my egg.
LUNA: Do you have any irrational fears?
BIAMONT: Why are you asking us these deep ass questions? I'm about to crash out in this interview.
FISHER: It doesn’t have to be deep.
LUNA: It could be spiders.
FISHER: Or crickets.
LUNA: Crickets are scary.
FISHER: Their legs, I hate their legs. Ew. Let’s try to answer this question without getting deep.
HOLLOWAY: What really scares me is dark water.
BIAMONT: That’s what I was just about to say. I'm scared of really deep, dark water, because my irrational fear is that I lose something necessary, like my glasses. If we’re on tour I’m irrationally scared of losing something like my phone or my glasses or the car keys. That would f*ck everything.
HOLLOWAY: The ocean is terrifying. What’s underneath is terrifying. When you’re in the water and it’s dark out, it’s that times one thousand.
FISHER: I have another one. I’m scared to crowd surf, and someone’s going to stab me in the back. I know it’s irrational.
LUNA: That’s understandable though.
FISHER: Did you also have that fear when you were a kid, if your feet were outside of the covers that an old man would come and tickle your feet? (Group laughs)
LUNA: Ethan, do you have any specific songs or albums that you'd like to show somebody that you want to impress?
BIAMONT: I was at a show last night, and this is gonna sound so pretentious, but it was awesome. It was some loft space in Greenpoint and I met some guy from Lithuania who played. He was like a Lithuanian 2hollis. His project was named after his hometown, Pilaitė. That sh*t was gas. Shout out to him.
FISHER: You can’t forget such a big inspiration, YHWH Nailgun. All our brains shifted.
BIAMONT: When I met them and we went to those early shows at Hart Bar three years ago, it gave me this sense of confidence in writing, where I realized we could do our own thing. With New York music in general, there's been a few bands that clearly stand out to me, and it gives me the confidence to do my own thing.
FISHER: It was cool to see a band that wasn’t doing shoegaze.
LUNA: Rare at that time. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
BIAMONT: Public Circuit is anti-AI.
Modern Church is out now via À La Carte Records.
