3. Harmonia & Eno ’76Tracks And Traces

I found out about this record in 2012 or so, via the internet radio station Dublab – I heard the song ‘Vamos Companeros’, looked up the band and thought, “This absolutely fits the Krautrock part of my brain”. I was working on an animation project, doing a bunch of stop-motion, and I just left that track on a loop for three days. It’s such a chugging-forward song, and I feel like we ripped off a bit of that for ‘Quartz’, the first song on TV On The Radio’s second record. I essentially just sent that song to Dave [Sitek, bandmate]. He was like, “You have anything?”, and I was like, “Just do this!” I don’t even know if the two tracks sound that similar, but it really was the only thing in my brain for such a long time. 

I just love the spirit of this band, and that they got together and collaborated with Eno and were like, “This is what we made when we were holed up in this room in Berlin for two months”. I love these little one-off projects where artists are like, “Yeah, let’s team up and fight crime,” and then they’re like, “That was great! We’ll never, ever do it again!”  Would I ever work with Eno? Oh yeah. I would just tell him, “It has to be as weird as possible!” I’d be super-down with that. I’m a very big fan of Eno, in all his different incarnations. It’s good to have somebody throw a broomstick in the spokes like that and just shake it up a little bit, whether you agree or not with what they’re suggesting. It’s just fun to play and to experiment.