Pitchfork's anti-genre heroes

When singer Jeff Carrillo hears Mahjongg's latest album, "Kontpab," he envisions it in stages of construction that have less to do with creative process and more with physical labor associated with band saws, plywood, sweat and brief periods of near homelessness. And rightfully so. During Mahjongg's creation of their debut album with K Records, the Chicago collective of artists was waist deep in building what would eventually be their studio and, in turn, their home on the city's West Side in Humboldt Park.

Carrillo describes parts of those months as being a dark time in the band's artistic existence, as a period when the line blurred between Mahjongg's creative musical output and their constant push to get the brick-and-mortar portion of the band completed. Turns out, they needed both to survive and, specifically, to finish "Kontpab" and keep the group's music moving forward.

So they publicized "Kontpab" not only as their latest electro-driven album but also as a deity of sorts that helped the band escape a mundane, beigist mind-set to one filled with imagination and the type of communal creativity that fueled them from the beginning. It was a fitting message for the band, which was built on abandoning boredom for something a lot more original.

According to Carrillo, Mahjongg started out as a "recording project." It was an idea between two musicians - Carrillo and Hunter Husar - with very different musical backgrounds. Carrillo was a veteran rock singer and guitarist, the kind of guy who automatically gets named frontman in burgeoning indie rock outfits. Husar, on the other hand, was a DJ and a gear-head who wrote music with his computer. The two couldn't have been a better fit at a worse time, when Carrillo suddenly became bored with the same old American guitar rock he'd been playing for years.

"I needed Hector to mess up my work and I needed to organize his," Carrillo explains. "He had these incredible things that he didn't know what to do with, and I didn't know that I knew what to do with them either, but I certainly tried."

The collaboration paid off. New members were added to the project and eventually Mahjongg hit the stage with oodles of percussion devices and computers, playing for Midwest audiences that didn't see any of it coming. The sound that still defines Mahjongg not only defied genres but also threatened anyone who wanted to pigeonhole their electrified beats and African influences with turning the whole thing on its head just to spite them.

"Naming genres in bands is dangerous because it's easy to do," Carrillo says. "We didn't want to really belong to any certain genre."

And they don't. Not really, anyway, though when the band moved to Chicago to try their hand at city recording, they discovered a flickering scene of electronic music that already bowed to a similarly eclectic rock altar. "It was daunting," Carrillo says. "We came here, and a lot of the technology we were trying, everybody had already been doing those things. - We didn't do anything specific when we got here. We were just being ourselves."

Looking back on the move and Mahjongg's deft progress that's landed them atop Chicago's electrified roster of anti-genres, not to mention a label deal with independent outfit K Records, Carrillo says that if things hadn't worked out as well as they have, the band might have needed to work harder to stand out from the fold. Then again, Mahjongg probably wouldn't have done anything different either way.

"I don't really think about what things are going to be like before I do them," Carrillo says.

And that, in and of itself, is what makes Mahjongg stand out. It's the thing that keeps them artistic, that maintains the creativity that felt threatened during their Chicago studio's creation. Carrillo admits that much of "Kontpab" was written via improv. But even that process feels void of rules - with the exception of playing on band members' strengths. "Often times it'll be one thing that someone has and everyone loves and we'll improv off that," he says. "Sometimes there's nothing, and we'll play off nothing."

Recreating their songs on stage definitely poses a challenge, and as Mahjongg heads to Pitchfork Festival this weekend, performance techniques - both sonically and visually - are on the top of their minds. They're honored to play Pitchfork, Carrillo says, and though they haven't played outdoors in a while, they're gearing up to replicate the new album as feverishly as possible.

If Pitchfork is Mahjongg's summer highlight, then their European tour surely will top the fall. Because the album's release meant the end of their studio's construction, Mahjongg hopes to return to full writing mode after that, which, when considering the band's full-on improvisational style, is open to interpretation - one that fans can't wait to invent a new language for.

"It's easier to do," Carrillo says of the band's writing process, post-construction. "It's easier when you don't have to break down your stuff to break out the power saw."