2 Oct 2015

Interview: GPOGP

9:10 am on 2 October 2015

Music 101's Emma Smith catches up with Casey Latimer from avant-garde rock outfit GPOGP.

Casey Latimer of GPOGP with his tarot works.

Casey Latimer of GPOGP with his tarot works. Photo: RNZ / Emma Smith

As far as evocative album titles go, Scrying in Infirmary Architecture, the namesake of Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing’s new album, paints an intriguing picture. (As does the band’s name - more on that here.)

Far from ‘scream crying’ (thanks for nothing, Urban Dictionary), scrying refers to the act of seeing visions or foretelling the future in a reflective surface – traditionally a mirror, crystal ball or body of water. Eschewing such tired tropes of divination, GPOGP instead ask us to imagine messages from another realm manifesting in the surfaces of a hospital – sort of like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour,  but set in an old villa off Auckland’s Ian McKinnon Drive.

According to Casey Latimer, who started the quintet as a solo project four years ago, the album title is a fairly faithful description of their writing process – which saw the band journey through altered states over a number of days in Casey’s sub-street level flat.

“I personally don’t feel like I was in as much control as I had been in the past over things, or what was sort of manifesting”, he says of the experience. 

“Somebody across the room can open their mouth and say something that can really strike you… or you’ll wake up with something in your head, and just to write these things down and then eventually these things just put themselves together and make some kind of sense.”

Music 101's Emma Smith meets Casey at his home, where he’s embarking on an intense new voyage of self-discovery - to illustrate all 72 cards of the tarot deck on roughly A3-sized sheets of card.