Matt and Kim's punky dance party

(Credit: Tod Seelie)

Matt Johnson and Kim Schifino see little need for last names. Performing as Matt and Kim on the keyboards and drums, respectively, the Brooklyn-based duo (who met at New York's Pratt art school and began dating around the same time they started performing together) recently released their sophomore album, “Grand,” which is filled with more of their trademark, peppy/punky synth-pop.

Just prior to embarking on a long U.S. tour to promote “Grand,” Matt checked in with Metromix to talk about being banned in Boston, recording in the middle of nowhere and why microphones sound good in washing machines.

In the video for your single “Daylight,” I notice that Kim is wearing a shirt that says, “Banned in Boston.” What did you do to get yourselves banned in Boston, of all places?
No, that shirt is actually a shirt that her dad gave to her mom, like, in the ‘70s or something. I don’t know how that one ended up being the shirt being worn, but we were like, “Yeah, that one seems about right.”

You might actually do something in the future to get yourselves banned in Boston. Maybe that should be a goal?
I mean, we can try! You’ve gotta make some goals, right? Kim grew up in Providence and I grew up in Southern Vermont, so my early years of music was driving two hours to go to shows in Boston. That’s a little piece of my early history that I can’t give up.

I was going to ask about where you grew up, because I read that you recorded “Grand” at the home you grew up in. How remote is it exactly?
The town is called Jacksonville, which no one has ever heard of unless they get a speeding ticket there. When you go to certain ski resorts, you go through that town on a back road. It’s really small. We were up there between a month and a month and a half and Kim started losing her mind. She had to get out of there. All work and no play makes Kim a dull girl, kind of thing. I said, “Kim, do you realize I spent 18 years here? Don’t tell me about a month and a half!”

With that being said, do you think recording up there brought positive elements to “Grand”?
The album is a lot about New York. A lot of it was written here in New York, but when it actually came time to focus and make finished songs, there’s no distraction [in Vermont] and there’s no clock ticking like when you’re in a studio paying by the hour. We thought we’d give it a try and we didn’t have to worry if it wasn’t going to work. It was ultimate freedom.

Did you have to work around the limitations of the surroundings at all? Were there cows mooing in the background?
We recorded in my childhood bedroom, which isn’t very big even though my brother and I shared it for 17 years, before he went to college. When we wanted to get a bigger sound, like for the drums or something as on songs like “Daylight,” we put microphones in the hallway down by the washing machine to try to make a bigger, fuller sound. It ended up working really well, so yeah, there was some improvising. Stick a mic in a washing machine to get a good echo.

You seem to enjoy playing those sorts of experiments, like taping a wallet to a drum for a different sound or making a tent over the cymbal out of your shirt.
I think that really applies to our band in general, because we haven’t been traditionally trained in any of this. When people have been trained in recording they have a specific way of doing things, but since we had no idea what we were doing when we first started, we just tried everything until we found something that worked. That’s the same thing with drums and keyboards; we didn’t know what we were doing, but we just played them until we found what sounded best.

Would you consider taking any lessons?
I’ve been doing this for four years, and it’s the only work we’ve been doing for the last two or three years, and just this morning I went to a singing lesson [for the first time]. My vocal style has always been really bizarre. The first time I heard myself recorded, I was like, “This is never going to work.” But for some reason, people really respond to it being this sort of uneducated thing. But I have found myself damaging my voice on long tours and running out of breath really easily, things that you learn when you are traditionally trained in vocals. So I figured since I’ve been doing this for a while, it was about time that I learn how to sing!