'We play with sound'

Adam Clayton welcomes Laura Lee Ochoa, bassist and vocalist for Khruangbin, an American musical trio, to the latest episode of his Sirius XM series Don't Ask Me, I'm the Bass Player.

The pair discuss life after the end of a tour, tunes that influenced their bass playing, and how neither one of them thinks of themselves as a "musician."

"I define myself as an artist rather than a musician, because I think musicians are people that can play anything and do anything, and I don't feel that's what I do," Adam said. "It's like I listen to something, I figure out how I can contribute to it, and other people witness it. And that's it for me. That's the expression."

Ochoa concurred: "I'm a hundred percent not comfortable with the term musician," she said, "but I love artists and I feel like artists actually just encompasses my spirit much more."

"Exactly," Adam continued. "We play with sound. That's what it is…it's a big playpen."

This reminded Adam of the American artist Matthew Barney and his series called 'Drawing Restraint': "He hung himself on a bungee in a room and then tried to reach the four walls of the room and make a mark with a pen. And sometimes I think that's how we are as musicians, as artists. We are struggling to make it sound the way we think it should sound, and that struggle is the essentially kind of human part of what we do."

"Yeah, because a struggle is your struggle and it's nobody else's struggle," Ochoa said. "The sound that you make is your sound, and because your sound is your voice and is your being, and as artists, that's who we are."

During the episode, Adam played several tracks Ochoa said were seminal to her as a bass player, including Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin ('69 Année Érotique'), Barrington Levy ('When Friday Comes'), The Beatles ('All My Loving'), and Deee-Lite ('Groove Is In The Heart')—that last one being among Adam's favourites. 

"What a great tune!" he enthused. 

"Other than the bridge, the song is basically just a bass line on a loop," Ochoa said. 

"Well, you know that's my kind of music," Adam laughed. 

As the Deee-Lite tune ended, he added: "We were just reminiscing there about Lady Kier and hoping that she is somewhere having a wonderful, fabulous time."

As Khruangbin were wrapping up their 10th anniversary tour, Ochoa considered the transition to life off the road when she once again could join the audience. 

"As the stages get bigger and your crowd gets farther away and you're in in-ears, there starts to be a real separation between the performer and the people watching," Ochoa said. "Some people aren't able to go out and be in the crowd, and it's nice to have that."

"That comes around again, I have to say," Adam said. "I'm sort of enjoying that experience…When your audiences are actually a different age to you. We all come out of the audience initially and they're our peer group and our friends, and then, if you stick around long enough, there's that big separation and when that separation happens, it actually gives you the freedom to go back into that audience and kind of look out."

"I love that connection," he said. "We all thrive on being part of humanity in one way or the other."