Fire Is Motion Are So Much More Than A Band With 'Too Many' Guitarists

a gentleman near the bar has shouted, "Let me purchase you a drink!" At the musical group onstage. If you've been to shows at smaller venues, you've heard that rowdy nevertheless enthusiastic tone before. The singer, 28-year-old bearded and ball-capped Adrian Amador, smiles and replies that he's driving later, however maybe one of the other three guitarists in his musical group, Fire Is Motion, could indulge the offer.


Hours later, as Amador hauls an amp down the street soon following the show, a friend calls back to the moment and so they share a laugh. And then the friend, who Amador will eventually allocate a ride back to New Jersey in the band's crowded van, illuminates something Amador hadn't realized at the time: "That was a T-Pain reference."


Fire Is Motion don't make music that could be mistaken for T-Pain's. That night, at a late-April gig at Elsewhere's Zone One in Brooklyn, they played with four guitarists, nevertheless some nights they have five. The band's Twitter bio reads simply musical group with also several guitarists." It's a running joke Amador has immortalized online; one might even call it Fire Is Motion's #brand. It's also the only feasible method to adequately replicate live what their lean recorded catalog reveals: yearning, twinkly songs that fit snugly within contemporary emo revivalism. These are lush, densely atmospheric songs that chase the cosmos.


One of these just happens to feature Amador singing with Auto-Tune.


Amador conceived that song, "Day 2," throughout a weeklong writing physical training in 2014. Nevertheless while the sparse, percussion-less original version remains purposely blurry, like an old smudged Polaroid, the live "Day 2" is photoshopped to perfection. Fire Is Motion play the new version, complete with an added funky groove and those glitchy, glimmering vocals, at nearly every show. This makes sense, as it's a banger. "Day 2" also has difference the virtue of being the exact point in their set any time while they start upending expectations of what a five-guitar musical group might actually sound like.


"We were beginning to play some shows, however our sets were habitually pretty short at the time, probably like 15 minutes. At musical group practice one day I was sort of just like, it could be cool if we played one of those songs that's just completely different," Amador explained before the show. "Our friend was filling in at a couple shows, playing drums, and he had a pedal that sort of did the Auto-Tune thing. We were just like, oh, that's really funny. Ever since then, we were just like, we're routinely going to do this now."


The band's origin story hews a lot closer to the svelte "Day 2" demo than its dynamic stage version. In 2011, angling to get a song on a music blog, Amador took an acoustic guitar plus a MacBook up to the attic of his parents' residence and recorded the first-ever Fire Is Motion song, "Smile, It Makes This Easier." It was also the opening song Amador, then in his early 20s, ever wrote by himself. "The objective was for me first to just write and record a song where I sang on it, then the other objective was to just send it to them and visualize what would happen," he said.





It worked. He chose a lyric from a Cap'n Jazz song and created Fire Is Motion's Bandcamp page. He even got fan mail asking about his recording set-up, which made him laugh. "He's like, 'It sounds like you're playing guitar in a room.' I was like, I literally played guitar in a room, so this is brilliant And then? "I just stopped doing anything with it up until like 2013."


Nevertheless Amador kept playing, mostly in local bands in Union and nearby Elizabeth, including with his longtime friend Avery Salermo. Lose been writing music since age 13 as an outlet for her turbulent upbringing, something she calls "a rough situation." "[Family members] were just very much attempting to influence me to be like this one thing or whichever, and I'm just like, I don't really aspire to be a church-going, feminine person. This is annoying. I hate this," she mentioned. As an alternative, she channeled her discontent into the spunky indie rock of her musical group Strawberry Jam, which Amador heard about through a friend.


"I checked it out. I was just like, 'Who is this person?' It was so awesome," he mentioned. Salermo, who perhaps hadn't ever heard him lay it out like this before, smiled. "Oh, that's sick," she said.


Though they've known each other for a decade, Salermo, 26, didn't officially join Fire Is Motion up until 2015. It takes a number of tries to lock in the exact year; Amador likens his explanation of the band's history to a Quentin Tarantino narrative — nonlinear and sprawling. At certain points, he pauses to recall which iteration of the musical group he's referring to (their Facebook page lists 12 extra members who've contributed via years, along with "you").


Any time Amador finally revisited Fire Is Motion and sought to expand it, he required a second creative brain. He noticed it in Salermo. The two became Fire Is Motion's twin pillars, with Adamo because the central creative force and Salermo as his key editor. Both sing and play guitar. Salermo occasionally takes lead vocals both by design ("Maybe I can be courageously afraid," she offers solo on set opener "Yesterday's Coffee"), and out of necessity, like as soon as Amador suffered a unexpected acid reflux flare-up before a show. "Working with each other for as long as we have, I have no shame just being exceptionally trustworthy with him," she mentioned. "I really just don't sugar-coat it."


you could hear it on Fire Is Motion's great nevertheless also brief 2017 EP, Still, I Try, the culmination of years of hard work. Translating that live, though, requires some tact. This is where the several guitarists come in. "As I began finishing or attempting to finish the songs, I sort of little by little assembled more people," Amador explained. "I played a show by myself and I was like, 'This sucks. I wish Avery was in the musical group And then I played a show where I was the only guitarist, which is weird, and then one bass player plus a drummer. I was like, 'This is still not as cool.'"


Eventually he noticed another guitar player, then another — and the cycle continued despite logistical hiccups. Amador recalled a sound engineer at a tiny New York venue recoiling at their stage setup: "He's just like, 'I do not actually have enough mics to do that!'" Despite what the mere sight of 24 strings may evoke, Fire Is Motion venture far from Shred City, U.S.A. Acts like Diarrhea Planet, aiming for the grandeur of Amador's heroes in Broken Social Scene. ("He has to mention it at least twice in each interview," Salermo quipped.) Amador obsesses over textures and moods, and he feels best about songs that work both acoustically (like the band's recent NPR Tiny Desk Contest submission) and bombastically (the same song cranked to 11).


It's been 18 months since Still, I Try's release; considering the years it took to distill its five songs into their finished forms, new Fire Is Motion material may still be quite a while away. Nevertheless in the meantime, they keep gigging, sharing the stage with bigger bands like Wild Pink and Ratboys, and learning what they can.


"We just don't stop getting excited about stuff, whether it's a tiny thing or a big thing. The companions that we made while doing so — it's sort of just habitually how the musical group functions. We're going to be companions with whoever, really," he mentioned. Not missing a chance to bring back the bit, he continued: "If you desire to play guitar in our musical group, we're down."


Salermo recommended a fast clarification: "They're welcome to audition."