Pitchfork

If you've seen !!! recently and were wondering why there was only one tall crazy guy jumping around (that would be Nic Offer) instead of the usual two, well, that's because the onomatopoeic party-starters have been playing with a man down (and, as it happens, a lady up).

Percussionist and sometime vocalist John Pugh (depicted here singing lead on "Dear Can") has officially left the group, as reported last week, in order to kick his Free Blood project up to full throttle. That project will unveil its debut offering, the "Quick & Painful" single, next week in the UK via Adventures Close to Home. U.S. releases are expected to follow via Rong Music.

We caught up with Pugh to get his take on the split split split, and to learn what else the world can expect from Free Blood.

The duo of Pugh and friend Madeline Davy, Free Blood began as an attempt to merge two worlds of revelry. Explained Pugh, "In New York you [used to have] two kinds of parties: a Manhattan party and a Brooklyn party.

"A Manhattan party was usually at a really fancy club with bottle service, but the music was always pretty amazing. They'd just have top-notch DJs, and you would go there and kind of get an education in the history of New York dance music. But the thing is, there was a dress code and this feeling that if you showed up without having coated yourself in cologne you were kind of a black sheep, so you left feeling kind of bummed out.

"But then you go to a Brooklyn party and it was at the other end of the spectrum; you would have this anything-goes attitude, and everyone would be sweaty and hadn't bathed in weeks. It was really fun, except the sound system was always busted and the music was kind of on fire-- people would just be playing 'Another One Bites the Dust' over and over again and getting totally shit-faced.

"So, when we started throwing parties at our place, we wanted to be kind of a marriage of the two ideas. And when I first started writing songs for Free Blood, I was thinking of this marriage."

Uniting two worlds proved a heady task, and eventually Pugh was forced to choose between this undertaking and his work in !!!. As he told it, "I officially quit at the end of July. We had pretty much been on tour since February and I had reached my limit. And it wasn't any surprise to anyone I think; I think everyone understood my reasons for leaving.

"It was a long tour of duty for me, like eight years. And they're still going at it. I don't think it really broke their stride much, so I'm happy about that, that they kept going and doing their thing."

While Free Blood at one point counted !!!'s Dan Gorman as its third member, the band is now decidedly a duo. "He left just because he wanted to do [!!!] more so he's doing that thing; I wanted to do Free Blood more so I'm doing this thing."

Along with the marriage of party vibes in Free Blood also came a marriage of styles. "You have a lot of electronic acts that are purely electronics-- like this [imitates] 'We are robots. We are so cold and soulless' kind of thing-- and then you have these rock bands that are like, 'We're totally rockin' and bearded and we don't play with drum machines, those are for pussies!' and that kind of thing.

"So I was like, they're both right and they're both wrong-- just two schools of thought-- and there's got to be some way of having a band that's not just about, 'This is our ideology and we're sticking to it.' I wanted to create a band with no baggage and no specific mission statement, a band that wasn't so much about performance but about creating an atmosphere. And about infiltrating the audience by being one and the same. We would usually play shows where we were playing on the floor as opposed to on a stage, and we would mingle with the audience and walk out and dance and sing with people."

Obliterating the fourth wall, are we? "The fourth wall is not even in play. And the third and the second and the first wall didn't matter either. All walls are down so we could just do our thing."

Pugh, who started Free Blood back in 2003, soon encountered obstacles to his idyllic musical marriage proposal. "I was torn. I wanted to be noisy and just really stretch out, but I didn't want to be boring. I didn't want to be fiddly. I didn't want to fall into that trap of a lot of free music where all rhyme and reason is abandoned just to prove how experimental you are and how out there-- that you don't need a time signature or whatever. So I wanted to plug that noise ideology into the pop-song structure. I tried to explore that more and that's kind of where we are now."

In addition to "Quick & Painful", Free Blood have two more singles in the queue: "The Royal Family", which will come backed with "Grumpy", and "Orangutan" with "Weekend Condition" on the flip. Said Pugh of the "Orangutan" single: "I feel like that's going to be the weirdest one. Both our labels have already been a little like, 'Whoa, this song is weird.' And we're like, 'Yeah, that's kind of where we're at right now.' And what's interesting about these three singles is they present a chronology of our evolution just over the last year or so."

Pugh and Davy couldn't have done it alone, however. Said Pugh, "I should mention that all these singles are made possible because of the work of The Brothers [Joshua Ryan and Eric Emm], who are these producers in Greenpoint who built a studio in their apartment-- actually hidden behind the closet; [it's] kind of a weird thing to walk into the closet and walk through another door and you're in this little studio. But yeah, they were really instrumental in helping us figure out what the fuck Free Blood is supposed to sound like in the studio."

Pugh is quite pleased with the results, adding, "We encourage people to give away our singles as Halloween treats to the trick-or-treaters." Meanwhile, an album of all new material is presently in the writing stages.

And as for tour plans? "Eventually," said Pugh. "I just became a little tour-phobic after !!! and the last two years of constant touring. It kind of left me wanting to hang out in my city and with the people that I know and love, and really just get back in the studio and work there primarily.

"But, having said that, I know I'm going to have to tour...because the live thing is such a different animal than the studio thing. In a lot of ways, I imagine we're going to run into a situation where people who love our live show hate the records, and vice versa, because they are two different animals, completely."

Free Blood did recently play a brief run of shows in London, however. "[That] was fun and kind of chaotic. Lots of technical mishaps, it was really weird. Pretty much everything that could've gone wrong went wrong.

"But it was still a success I think. The main thing is we made an impression on people. People were like, 'Who the fuck are these people?' And that's all I ask for. I don't care if you love us of hate us, I just want you to be talking about it afterwards."