Often chaotic and always experimental, Untied States has a sound that straddles the line between abstract and explicit, creating a sort of art-rock that emerges far from the current crowded Atlanta scene. Though they maintain a slight semblence of structure, Untied States often scatters its efforts throughout chords and progressions that are built not only by beats and vocals but also some sort of attention deficit order, a condition evidenced through rapid and continual evolutions in many of their songs. You'll love it!

But don't just take our word for it. Here is an MP3 of their previously released song "Bye-Bye Bi-Polar" and the unreleased "Instant Everything, Constant Nothing."

Holly Lang/Pine Magazine: Your sound is a bit different from the standard fare. What is your songwriting process and how does each member play into it?

Colin Arnstein/Untied States: Well, right now, as it predominately has been in the past, Skip (Engelbrecht) and I are the chief songwriters. Although I don’t like to stress it, for the most part, writing Untied States songs has always been a pretty arduous process, mainly in the fact that one of us will come in with a fairly basic idea or piece and then we spend a great deal of time seeing what we can do to make it as absolutely unique as we can. Nothing we say musically, at least from our standpoint, is filler.

It’s important to stress, though, that our main goal is not to come up with songs that are decidedly “off the wall” but rather an attempt to simply say something that has never been said in a way that instantly recalls someone else’s work. That’s a good bit of why we have embraced the “Untied” moniker. All of our favorite artists achieve this artistic autonomy and yes, it’s an admittedly lofty goal and whether we succeed is obviously up to the listener, but it’s what we aim for.

Back to the nuts and bolts of each member’s contribution though, I have to say there is a healthy balance of democracy and synchronicity in the process. There is a good bit of compromise, a bit of blood and ego shed, but ultimately, the end result is always decidedly right for both (all) of us. When other members are involved, and they have been, we seek the same goal.

PM: Who's in the band now? How has the line-up shifted over the last few years?

CA: Right now, (and god help us, it will stay this way), our main objective as artists will remain the same as it has in the past with our newest (re)incarnation. Our current line-up is the strongest Untied States we have seen.

Joining the core of Skip and I is the remarkable Darren Tablan, who acts as the ultimate arbiter of sonic justice as mixer/co-producer, sampler provider, sonic manipulator and all things keyboard. On the beat is Satchel Mallan, a clock-worthy timekeeper and all-out-there explorist extraordinaire. We just recently added Philip Frobos on the bass guitar and he plays all our parts with his fingers, a feat in itself.

Yes, the line-up has changed and evolved a good deal but somehow the result is somehow always the next logical and progressive step towards strength.   

PM: Getting back to your history some, how did you guys get together in the first place? And why did you guys name this project "Untied States?"

CA: Skip and I met in the neighborhood streets of a beach-y Florida at the tender age of four. Things were different then. Our parents were free-minded, perhaps naïve, but we were two little kids roaming the streets.

The memory is truly unadulterated; he was wearing a full Superman costume, and I a hooded sweatshirt with pelicans all over it. We played tackle football in the street. I lost a prominent tooth at ten doing the same thing: Skip tackled me. We looked for the tooth for an hour. I feared my parents would be upset. Later, we picked up instruments; it seemed like that was what we had to do, certainly not out of necessity, but just an inherent love of music.

As for the name, it was initially my idea -- perhaps a terrible one, at least commercially speaking. We worked at this store together and there was this ‘60s-era child’s spacesuit and I just read the emblem on it as “Untied States” instead of, well, you know. Somehow the idea that I read it wrong gave me an as-of-yet-unappreciated appreciation for the absurdity, arbitrariness or rigidity of language. A simple misfire of synapses resulted in a new, and completely opposite “misinterpretation” of the ubiquitous -- a perfect analogy of what we were aiming for.  I threw the idea at him; I believe we fought over it a bit. Band names are useless and all-too confining -- I just ran across a record by the “Ding Dongs” that I love.  
 
PM: Can you tell us more about your recent 7" release "Bye-Bye Bi-Polar" and your upcoming full-length record?

CA: “Bye-Bye” is a bit of an elegy for the over-prevalence and mostly backwards reverence for mental illness. Mental illness has been an easy, go-to mechanism for art and perhaps even a societal cop-out for, well, you name it. We’re certainly not making light of it; it’s a terribly real plight a lot of us have seen personally.

When we were kids, and this isn’t so long ago, true mental illness was an absolutely taboo subject and yet now it dominates our collective conscious as some sort of a badge of authenticity. Truly “losing your mind” shouldn’t ever be taken lightly or over-appreciated; the concept is akin to glamorizing cancer.

I’m personally tired of this sort of mentality. That said, the new record is a bit of an acceptance of what we often, and wrongly, perceive as “illness,” and taking that a step further -- just jumping over the fence of our narrowly defined and confined boundaries and embracing what we should see as mental growth and going with it as far as it will take us.

PM: Where did you record?

CA: We started the record at our home base, Big Ralph Studios, which is now in different yet very capable hands, and moved to a fancy studio in Atlanta called “Southern Tracks.” It’s our first attempt to record in a “professional” environment. The result is evident- the sounds more refined, the overall sound clearer. The experience of working in this type of environment was exciting: real (“tuned”) grand pianos, a vast array of instruments and machines we could have only dreamed about using before. What struck us most, though, was that you can record into a gold-plated fucking whatever and yes, still, in the end, good songs are indeed paramount to good gadgetry.  

PM: Can you tell us a little about your recording process, and why you chose to self-produce?

CA: As for now, we record ourselves, period. We are also control freaks when it comes to having oversight of every element of our artistic output. We are also poor. That being said, recent recruit Darren Tablan has been a great co-producer and balance beam for this group and has lent a great deal of help in guiding us in our often tangential directions. If we should ever be lucky enough to pay someone to lend their hand in telling us what we should sound like, I only hope we can afford to fire them if necessary.

PM: Is there anything I haven't asked yet I should?

CA: Not yet… but it’s still early.