Autumn Falls: SX sounds good in every season

SX has finally followed up their hit single “Black Video” with an album. The Kortrijk indie band is one of the most striking names on the line-up for the Autumn Falls festival.

SX arranged to meet us in the Planetarium at the Heizel/Heysel. Under the rounded dome there, with its starry sky, the duo led by Stefanie Callebaut and Benjamin Desmet gave an exclusive presentation of its debut album to a crowd of loyal fans, even before the official release show in the AB Club. “We are going to imagine we’re in the golden ball,” says guitarist and keyboard-player Benjamin Desmet. He’s not talking about the Ballon d’or that Messi has a few copies of in his glass case, but about the yellow sun that appears on the horizon on the album’s sleeve and also crops up in the video for the new single, “Gold”. “You are gold / You have silver bones,” sings Stefanie Callebaut with her powerful, haunting voice. “You rise and you fall / Reverberate / And then it’s all gone”. “Inside, the sun does actually contain silver, and the stars…they are disappearing, literally and metaphorically, as it is also an ode to all those musicians who died young.”

SX is one of the most striking names on the line-up for Autumn Falls. But is the autumn the season their music is most at home in? Callebaut, at least, doesn’t think so: “Our music sounds good in every season. ‘Black Video’, for example, had a summery video with palm trees, even though it’s a pretty dark song. So you could connect it with both summer and winter. Actually, in our music we are constantly striving for that tension and balance, between the S and the X.” The “rounded” S is intended to symbolise the female, the sensual, warm, and secure – and the angular X the powerful, the mysterious, and the unknown. “The two attract each other like two magnets.”

The group members pay a lot of attention to the artwork; they believe it is important that the image they create matches their musical ambitions. They don’t like to see their synthesiser-dominated sound palette linked with the bleak synth bands of the 1980s. “We don’t listen to that stuff,” says Desmet. “Give us Stevie Wonder any day, using his [Yamaha] DX7 to transform digital sounds into something natural. That’s much warmer. Or the way Prince works with synths, or Herbie Hancock!” New York indie bands like MGMT, Yeasayer, and Animal Collective intrigued them because they could see themselves in them. “Their DIY attitude, especially, appealed to us. We even went to Brooklyn to soak in the atmosphere. But don’t get the idea that we dissected that local Williamsburg scene in order to find our own place in it.”

“On the contrary, when we have the feeling we’re going too much in a particular direction, the natural tensions within SX ensure that a countermovement develops. Right now, that’s tending more towards classic soul.” That is one of the reasons why they got involved with the US engineer Ben H Allen, renowned for his studio work with, among others, Gnarls Barkley, M.I.A., and Animal Collective. “He is at home on a number of fronts, including soul, hip hop, and pop,” explains Callebaut. “Someone like that was exactly what we needed. He helped us to make the right choices and to give the final result a fine palette of colours. But above all he taught us to let something go. As incorrigible DIY’ers, that was the toughest obstacle for us. But if you want to keep everything in your own hands, you might never get things done and just keep on tinkering for ever.”

SX, 30/11, 20.00, AB (+ Stubborn Heart)

Autumn Falls • 26/11 > 2/12, Ancienne Belgique, Atelier 210, Botanique, Madame Moustache, Magasin 4, VK*, www.autumnfalls.be