Previously featured with their band Paper Native, Luis has embarked on a new solo project in the form of King Puzzle. Keeping busy during quarantine while also reflecting on their musical experience, this new endeavor has allowed Luis to experiment with their sound.
In this interview, I sat down with the artist to not only discuss their new releases, but also how quarantine has impacted them and the music industry as a whole.
In your first Instagram post as King Puzzle, you said you were terrified and excited to start this new project. What was it about this that made you feel different in comparison to working with Paper Native and Ornamental?
With any sort of solo music project it’s very revealing and intimate. When you’re doing something with other people you can bounce ideas off of each other. It’s exciting doing this project because I get to make all these decisions by myself and stuff. Like, I’m not limited to a recording schedule, I can just record in my bedroom and experiment with my sound.
I’m releasing a new single tonight. The first two songs I’ve released were very Mac DeMarco or any other chorus effect-heavy person you want to pick, right? “Planetary Set” is very The Strokes meets The Growlers, that’s what people are pointing out. This next song is very ambient and there’s less solo sections. It’s this six-minute song in this weird time signature. I’m really pushing myself to do more vocals things. There are these harmonies and other elements that are completely different from my previous releases.
The next two songs I want to release, my friend’s dad said, are like Pavement on Quaaludes. One of them is like Death Grips or 100 Gecs where they distort their voice but still make it like Black Flag-y where it’s hardcore punk with a super driven bass. I’m free to to all these different things, but that’s also the terrifying part. It’s all just me.
I’ve noticed that King Puzzle is this in-between for your last two projects. Paper Native being more grunge while Ornamental is more soothing and ambient. I’m curious what the future looks like for all three?
I’m still with Paper Native. We’ve been super dormant because we had to change bandmates. We also have sensitive family members so we can’t meet up without putting them at risk. We have an EP that I’m hoping to have out before December ends just because this was recorded at the same time as our other EP. It just didn’t get finished in time. I think we talked about this in the Paper Native interview when Tanner was stuck in Ohio for two months.
With Ornamental there’s a whole new album. We dropped “Urban Legends” recently and we started working on another song but there’s been a lot of scheduling conflicts. There are five members instead of three like with Paper Native, and because everyone’s spread out it’s hard to safely be together. Also, Lucia [lead singer of Ornamental] and I are doing our senior capstone projects and everyone’s working.
Even when I’m done with school and everything I’m still a busy person by nature. There’s still plans for both in the future. Once a vaccine or something comes out, and there’s less of a worry to get together it’ll be a lot easier to navigate everything.
Going off of what you said about being busy by nature, is that the reason why you started King Puzzle during quarantine just to have another thing to do?
Yes and no. Some of the songs like the title song “King Puzzle” and “Planetary Set” I wrote during my songwriting course in the Spring. That professor really pushed me because he though I could take things to another level. Those two songs are really lofi because I was using an SM 57 for vocals and everything through an iRig at two in the morning in my bedroom. It was fun, but it was also for class.
With King Puzzle I wanted to write a Beatles kind of song or something a little more laid back. I also wanted to make more mysterious lyrics. Paper Native and Corporate Dreamboat were very straitforward. I’m trying to be more vague so people could gauge their own meanings.
During quarantine, since I don’t know how long this will last and I can’t see my bandmates, I upgraded my rig and just had fun. I’m trying to keep everything fun and not have this expectation to be perfect. With Paper Native we were gigging a lot and we had this pressure to put a record out and promoting and all this other stuff. We skipped 100 million steps to become a band and went straight into gigging. There was this point where I was stressed out all the time and just wasn’t having fun. But with King Puzzle, this project brought me back down to Earth. I needed something where I could write something simple or off the cuff or just something silly. Just have fun with it, you know?
A lot of artists during quarantine have allowed themselves to just step back and reflect on what they’ve done throughout their musical career. And now they’re focusing on what they love and are trying to enjoy the time they have now because, as you said, things are uncertain. Might as well do something you like and see what happens.
Exactly. Especially with venues closing. There’s a possibility that music is going to surge when it comes back. But also, where are we going to play?
I’m hoping the Save Our Stages act passes. So many independent venues are struggling.
Like the PhilaMOCA. They’re getting hammered by the City of Philadelphia even before quarantine happened with codes and other renovations. They’re paying all this money to fix the space, but there aren’t any bands playing. There’s this other space that Ornamental played at The Bourré in Atlantic City. It’s a cute little venue of the Anchor Rock Club that was brand new. But now they’re one of the venues on the Save Our Stages bill.
Also, talking about how artists have had this time to reflect, it’s also given them time to organize. I hope all of this leads to more change within the music industry. Some have been trying to get Spotify to pay their artists more per stream. They make so much off of these musicians. If you’re a small artist and you’re not getting over 1,000 streams you’re not making anything that you can put back into your work. There’s so many people that worked at venues who are out of a job. And there’s people who made a living off gigs or self-produced, or were on the cusp of making it somewhere and just invested so much on new gear because they were supposed to tour. They can’t do it anymore. And the streams aren’t holding them up.
Going back to King Puzzle, I’ve been loving the photos you and Max have created! What’s the meaning behind the globe you’re holding?
Those were promo shots for “Planetary Set”. Like I said, trying to find interesting ways to say simple things. In my head, I would have rather had a solar system. But then I thought that a planetary set could also be a globe.
When we were doing the shoot I wasn’t really thinking about it. I just gave this lyric, “your head spins like a planetary set”. You’re head spins, and you’re dizzy, and you’re stuck. A globe is set in place and when it spins you can’t just tell it to stop. It’s not living, it keeps going until it’s allowed to stop. The same thing with your head; when you spiral into your thoughts unless you’re able to stop it yourself, it just goes until you’re out of that state. In the picture, we tried to capture that aspect. The photo on the single art, it’s really trying to depict that. The hand’s reaching out to try to stop it but it can’t.
I wanted Max to be up close with this shoot, but the distance shots they got of me captures that isolation. You have the whole world in your hands but you’re still alone.
King Puzzle
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