The Phenomenal Handclap Band is an eight member octopus of sound out of New York, and they make music that will make you dance. Their eponymous first album (released in June by Friendly Fire) features a slew of guest appearances from the likes of Jon Spencer, Lady Tigra and Jaleel Bunton.

At the middle of the PHB crowd scene are Daniel Collás and Sean Marquand, New York DJs who, with a little help from their friends, made what might be this summer’s trippiest dance funk album.

The band’s live shows are being touted as nothing less than epic church revival experiences of sound. En route to such a show in D.C., Collás made some time to talk with Stranger Dance. The group comes west next week with shows in L.A. on Monday (The El Rey) and Tuesday (Dim Mak party) and in San Francisco on Wednesday, August 26 at The Knockout.

Stranger Dance: Most discussions about PHB cite your influences. What makes your sound more than an amalgamation?
Daniel Collás: We get asked a lot about our influences … I don’t think we were consciously going after a specific sound based on influences. It was something that we were drawing from, but I think that everybody who makes records has records that they listen to while they’re writing and during the writing and recording process.

I think there are definitely people we know and work with and people that play on this record and involved with things where they’re trying to recreate a specific sound, but that’s not what we had in mind at all. I think it’s like, if you take a sound or you take an influence and you apply it to what you’re working on, and as long it’s us, all the songs we’re writing, then it can only sound like our stuff, because it’s being filtered through us writing.

SD: What adjectives do you use to describe your sound?
DC: It’s dance music. It’s psychedelic.

SD: When you bring in collaborators, are you looking for something particular or is it more of a serendipitous meeting and you see what you can bring from that?
DC: It’s a little bit of both. I think initially that we set out for the record to be a lot more collaborative than it ended up being because people’s schedule’s didn’t allow.

Sean [Marquand] wrote half the songs and I wrote half the songs, and then we recorded those with what’s our core group and we had people come in and play on or sing on a song. And in some cases we had parts for them. In most cases we had parts for them, but it was just a matter of whether or not they wanted to bring their own thing or whether or not to adhere closer to what we had actually written. We just kind of felt that out, because we had written a melody line and lyrics for “Testimony” for example, and we weren’t really crazy about it, it was good enough, and then Aurelio [Valle] came in with something totally different and it just worked.

SD: Would you have forgone doing anything on the record if you had intended on playing it live? Is it difficult?
DC: It is in cases difficult for it to come off live. There is certain way to do things live where you’re not chained to the recording. We’re not trying to reproduce a recording note for note and we’re not trying to cover all the bases that are on the recording. There’s a way to do it live. Sometimes it changes instrumentation, or it changes certain parts. And just make it more exciting for the live performance as opposed to an album where you have time to listen to it and you’re not in a hurry to be anywhere. It’s more deliberate on an album and live there’s a certain urgency. Arranging things a little bit differently… you can just adapt.

I think there are a few examples we were kind of influenced by in making that adaptation. If you’ve seen footage of The Jackson Five or Young Rascals, their albums are generally pretty orchestrated or they’ll have a huge jazz band behind them or something like that or a string section or a horn section. And then live they do most of it with organs, for example, or they’ll just take string sections and that will become vocal harmonies. So that was like a whole other process. It’s not so much that we would have forgone certain things, but it was like we didn’t really intend for the record to be performed live. We thought that we’d play a couple shows live.

SD: The UK Times said that you “encapsulate the spirit of the Brooklyn underground.” What does that mean to you, and do you think it’s accurate?
DC: No actually I don’t think it’s accurate. That piece was written specifically with Brooklyn in mind and we had just been in the UK and there’s definitely a fetishizing of Brooklyn, in, I think, other places besides the UK. I think any place outside of New York, and even in New York. Mostly places outside New York, specifically in Europe and the UK, they really fetishize Brooklyn. They really think Brooklyn is this magical place. Brooklyn is great, but they keep saying we’re from Brooklyn. Pretty much every reviews calls us a Brooklyn collective or something like that.

Honestly the only reason I take exception to it… I live in Manhattan, and it’s really kind of rare to meet a band that’s mostly from Manhattan, especially, there’s eight of us… and the majority of us are from Manhattan. So I don’t think we exemplify or epitomize any kind of Brooklyn sound.

SD: How do you find people you want to work with?
DC: The recording process with the record is a different story than the band, because on the record, those were basically all friends of mine, whether in nightlife, DJing or promoting parties or throwing parties or playing in bands. Those were just people I had met and never really had an opportunity to work with but we had always talked about working together. Like Morgan Phalen or Aurelio, or Jon [Spencer]… Those are just people you meet in your travels.

On the recording it was more of the collaborative effort, it was more about “Let’s just make a cohesive record… we finally have an opportunity to work with these people, all these great singers and guitar players essentially that we wanted to work with and haven’t had the opportunity to.”

But the band has developed into being just these eight people. For the first few shows Bart Davenport came and sang with us and Angelina Moysov and Carol C. and Aurelio. Right around the time we went to South by Southwest is when we cemented it being the eight of us. There used to be between ten and eleven people per show, and that was a headache. It’s hard enough just with eight. But now that it’s just the eight of us everyone is really committed and dedicated to this band, it’s not really a question of people filtering in and out.

SD: What are you listening to lately?
DC: I’ve really been into this record Os Brazões from Brazil. There was this guy Miguel de Deus who had this record in the ’60s with his band, they were called Os Brazões. They came at the end of the Tropicália movement. I’m not sure if they were necessarily affiliated with Tropicália, they’re really kind of like poppy psychedelic but more soul influenced.

Right now we’re listening to Beach Boys. I still really like that Hungarian stuff. That mid-late ’70s proggy soul-influenced rock music. Daft Punk. I like Daft Punk an awful lot. Black Devil Disco Club. Been listening to that lately. And The Dramatics, that won’t leave my turntable. The Dramatics album What You See Is What You Get is amazing. All the songs are written by the producer Tony Hester. Really super well written songs. Really well arranged and produced. It’s from ‘70 or ‘71. The title track was a big hit around that time.

SD: You’ve gotten praise from NPR to SPIN to Playboy to Pitchfork. How does approval from a wide range of outlets feel?
DC: I think it’s great. Whether people have good or bad things to say about this album, it’s more important to me that they understand the album. As long as they mean it, it’s cool. Even if we get a bad review and it sounds like they listened to it and they were able to pick out things that we did wrong or that they didn’t like, but as long as they had listened to it and they understand what we’re doing. Because that’s the worst, whether it’s positive or negative, when you get a review written and it’s just sort of cast-off comments. A lot of journalists are about creating a story around a review, but it’s more like they’re interested in hearing their own voice, so to speak, than actually reviewing a record.

SD: Anything else that you want to add?
DC: Just the part about how we’re a Manhattan band and not a Brooklyn band.

SD: What do you think the inherent difference is?
DC: I don’t know of any other bands from Manhattan… I guess there is a [Brooklyn] sound emerging when you consider MGMT or Amazing Baby or bands like that. And Yeasayer. There’s definitely a sound. But we’ve been kind of doing what we’ve been doing all along. I really like that MGMT record; I think it’s amazing, but I think that we were working on our record the same time they were working on that record. And I don’t think our record even sounds anything like that. But I think that there might be similar sounds on the palette, but it’s not a conscious decision.

Whereas if you take a scene like a 2 Tone scene from the late ’70s. Those people had very unified sound that was spread between five bands. There were parameters and a spectrum of that sound, but it was a sound. Right now the music scene seems to be into the Dylan-esque country-rock kind of stuff, or folky, or more dance oriented. There’s a lot of duos now around. I think the post-punk thing has shifted to being less being about post-punk disco to being like post-punk Boleric or tropical or even almost like that ’80s easy listening thing.

SD: Who would you put in that category?
DC: TanLines are kind of like that. YACHT. It’s just my opinion. It just seems like that’s the emerging trend. But we’re not doing anything like that, because we’re in this unique position where we’ve just been making the music that we’re into and people are picking up on it and liking it.

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