Nashville’s Snooper is here to get weird at the Emerald on Wednesday

Snooper. // photo credit Dougal Gorman

Nashville egg punks Snooper make music which is best suited for bouncing around the room. It’s frantic, energetic, and brims with the kind of giddy energy you haven’t had since you slammed the biggest iced coffee the barista would sell you after staying up too late the night before watching horror movies on VHS. Their debut full-length, Super Snõõper, out now on Third Man Records, channels that into 14 tracks of pure caffeinated bliss.

Their shows and videos are awash with homemade props, oddly-sourced audio samples, and make for an utterly joyous listening and viewing experience. The band, which is the brainchild of musicians Blair Trammel and Connor Cummins, hits The Emerald on Wednesday, October 11, and we hopped on a meeting with Trammel and Cummins to talk all things Snooper.

The Pitch: Where do all of those samples come from? They’re fascinating and we just love them so much.

Connor: Some of them we were just found on the internet.

Blair: We like found footage and stuff. The one for “Fitness” was from a really old bodybuilder competition, but it was in the back when they were all working out and doing their like pregame for the show. It was an interview and then some of them are from old news segments.

Connor: Yeah. A couple of them. The third one is from a cassette about magnets for kids and then some of them I just used a text to voice into some voice thing, and I’m reading it out.

Blair: Those are really fun to find, though. There’s a really cool thing on the internet called he Internet Archive. So fun. You can go there, and it’s public domain stuff. So I spend hours on that a day for video stuff and audio stuff, all kinds of things. Fun things on there.

Are you just constantly looking for this stuff or does it come to you?

Connor: Both. A little bit of both. If there’s a specific name that we’re going for, we’ll seek it out. But sometimes Blair just pulled out that magnet tape and it just like worked for that last sample.

Blair: Yeah. I love old instructional videos and stuff like it. Yeah. So sometimes I look for videos and it’s a two-for-one if I get cool audio and cool video out of something. So yeah, super fun.

It just seems like such a natural fit given the visual aspects of the band.

Blair: That’s what happened with “Fitness.” “Powerball,” too. I think that in general, we like to come up with like a visual theme for a song before it’s written and then that way, we can source inspiration and fill it out that way.

What are the challenges in operating like that, though? Everything does go together so well, in terms of videos and performance, but what are the challenges of starting off visually and then going to what the song is going to be?

Blair: I guess I’m starting out visually, but Connor’s not. So Connor does all the music. He’ll do all of the instrumentation and then he’ll pass it over to me and then for me, I have to come up with the visual thing first so that I can kind of mold the lyrics around that and whatnot.

But I guess the visual stuff of Snooper has become such an integral part of the band that I don’t think that there’s really challenges. I think it just is what works for us, probably. But Connor’s never thinking about that when he’s doing the music.

Connor: Yeah. I feel when you have a couple finished songs though, you kind of pick the themes. You’ll be like, “This one sounds like ‘Powerball’ or something.”

Blair: And we have a lot of props around the house. I do paper mache likes. Even before we started the band, I would make big paper mache heads and stuff and Connor would come over and I’d be like, “Put this on, sit there. This is hilarious,” and so when we started the band, I would look around.

We had this big weight, for example, and I was like, “That would be so fun to use in a video or on stage” and so that’s literally how “Fitness” came about. That’s not for every song, but it’s definitely a lot of them. Like, right now I’m working on a big vending machine and we’re trying to put a video thing inside the vending machine And then that will be for me the launching point and inspiration for the next kind of batch of songs, which is more like consumerism. Maybe. I don’t know.

You just got back from a tour of Australia. How do you make this work, when you’re traveling internationally, to get these props and things like that? It’s one thing to hop in a van and tour around the United States, although I imagine that’s not easy either.

Blair: Well, yeah, it’s crazy. It does feel super important to us now. Usually I’ll make the puppet heads. We have like this big bug puppet that we use in town and then, or within the U.S. and that guy’s really hard to ship because he has antenna and he has a big nose and it would be a million dollars to ship to Australia, for example.

So for Australia, I made a head and we shipped just that. It was very expensive to ship it out there. It was like our one thing we could do and we got it out there. Someone brought it to the first show, which was great. And we like build the backpacks out of PVC piping. It’s not crazy to make. Uou just buy some PVC piping wherever we are, build the backpack.

It’s not the same. Really, we’re kind of having trouble, honestly, with power supplies. We were borrowing all of our gear. Everything was just like a little bit off so, while the guys were fixing all their technical gear problems, I was like, “I must make a giant phone,” so I got a bunch of cardboard and spent a day building this giant phone.

That same night, in Sydney, there were a bunch of people on the stage and they were like, “Let us fuck up the phone,” and I was like, “Okay,” and then it got off the stage and it was awesome. They’re really lightweight. It’s all just cardboard, pretty much .

Connor: You’ve gotten faster and faster. On the first fly out thing we didn’t have anything except the weight. Now you’re like, “I think I’ll build the phone today.”

Blair: Yeah, it gives me something to do. You know, it feels nice, honestly, to have that purpose on tour. It’s kind of fun every time we stop, to be re-plastering something or, fixing whatever it is that needs to be fixed. It’s fun.

How has the way you approach music changed with the live performance aspect, but also the addition of other members?

Connor: Well, we still write everything just as a duo. We have a couple new songs and it’s still just me on all the instruments and then you on vocals and stuff.

Blair: And I think it really works for us that way. Like the rest of the band, actually, likes it works for everybody to do it that way. But I think that now, we just really don’t care much. I think that’s the key: that, well, we don’t care about how we’re being perceived, I think, in the sense that nothing that has happened is what I expected to happen.

I remember when we brought out the bug for the first time, like the huge puppet. We were all so nervous because, again, we thought people were going to think it was really goof or just not get it. We’re basically playing hardcore. It was getting really crazy. We were getting really fast and the shows were sounding great. And then, we’re going to put this big puppet and like who knows? People might really think this is lame.

And then that went well. I remember like the bug coming down the stairs and people were like freaking out So I think we just keep adding all this stuff that we feel like. It’s just fun.

Connor: Yeah, I was very insecure and kind of self conscious about the live show in the beginning because for a little bit I was like, “Is it taking away? The music’s good on its own. Do we have to? Is it going to come off as gimmicky or taking away from the music?” and then pretty much after a couple shows, I realized that it just made everything more fun.

Blair: I think also it like brings the audience in in a fun way. It does, yeah. I always joke ’cause sometimes the props get obliterated during the shows and people are like, “Oh my God, are you pissed?” and I’m like, “No, no, it just happens.”

The shows get so crazy and sometimes people will just start punching the puppet and I’m like, “Oh, you poor guy, you don’t know how to have fun.” It’s like all these tough punk guys are out there and they haven’t been around childlike stuff in a while or something. The puppet will come out and you’ll see a guy in a studded leather jacket punch it or something, but they’re having a great time. It’s just really fun to see how people react to shows when they’re brought in and involved in it.

Connor: Yeah. I think we’ve also pushed past the point of any kind of sane ideas. It’ll be like, “Oh, I want to do a giant vending machine.” It’s like, “Go for it. All right.” We’re going to do a giant stoplight or an eight ball. At this point, there’s no limitations anymore, which is nice.

Blair: We had one idea to have a giant puppet come out on stage and then that guy gets beat up or something, and then underneath there’s another puppet and then in the end, it’s just the person’s regular body, but he has a paper mache head on and then he crowd surfs at the end where it’s like those matryoshka dolls.

Snooper plays the Emerald on Wednesday, October 11, with Silicone Prairie, Carrie Dairy, and Class Act.