Robert Perlick-Molinari: We've taken this van to a number of mechanics, and they're very confident in their work. I think we're gonna live through it. I think it's gonna be fine.

David Perlick-Molinari: We're going 50 miles an hour down the highway, everyone's screaming by us. [laughs]

Nothing wrong with mechanics thinking positively.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: Well, not all of them thought positively.

David Perlick-Molinari: When we were in Wisconsin, there was this Dodge dealership who had a bunch of new cars there. Here's this conversion van from the early 90s, with the little TV and VHS and everything. We bring it in, and they laughed at us, and they're looking at us like we're gonna die. Like we're not even going to make it out of the lot.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: They said we wouldn't make it out of the lot and here we are, almost to Mexico!

So the tour's going well?

David Perlick-Molinari: The shows are going great, but. . .

Robert Perlick-Molinari: Yeah, the van, actually, since we got scared by these people in Milwaukee, they were like "Oh, man, you gotta get it fixed." And then we got it fixed, and then the people that got it fixed actually broke it.

David Perlick-Molinari: We took a few steps backwards there.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: The moral of the story is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And don't pay attention to the Dodge dealership in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

David Perlick-Molinari: Ford, actually.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: Sorry. The Ford dealership. They pulled out this thing from the car, and they put it on the table and were like "This is what your coolant looks like." It was this clear yellow.

David Perlick-Molinari: "This is your coolant on drugs!"

Robert Perlick-Molinari: They did give us a ride to Culver's. We're trying to give [tourmates] Database a taste of America here. They're used to it, though.

Database: Hi!

Robert Perlick-Molinari: He's like, "I'm going home! I'll go into Mexico and I'll take a bus home!"

David Perlick-Molinari: Can you cross the Suez Canal?

Robert Perlick-Molinari: It's the Panama Canal.

David Perlick-Molinari: Can you cross the Panama Canal? There's gotta be a bridge.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: I heard there's a bunch of banditos on that trail. We went down to see Database in Brazil - they invited us to their one-year anniversary night in Sao Paulo - and we were thinking about doing the drive. Just hypothetically, but it was frowned upon.

David Perlick-Molinari: I think it's generally frowned upon unless you're an adventurous kind of person.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: Which we are!

David Perlick-Molinari: I'd say we're adventures. We're almost in Mexico.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: Yeah! We're traveling to the most tippy-tip of Texas, which is this little town called Brownsville, for the show tonight. Apparently they're very excited for the show - and so are we.

David Perlick-Molinari: They've finally fulfilled what we have on our rider. Nobody ever does that.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: Yeah, no one ever reads the rider.

David Perlick-Molinari: We always ask for a bottle of tequila, and they actually have a lot of it. And a bottle of vodka! They've raised the ante.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: They've got a bottle of vodka, which we didn't even ask for.

David Perlick-Molinari: That's how excited they are to have us. I think we're gonna make it. We're going. . . 60 miles an hour! The car doesn't like it to be too hot.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: We call the van Lucy.

David Perlick-Molinari: She's a hot girl in general.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: I left this girl in Brazil, all hot and bothered.

David Perlick-Molinari: She wanted to be famous, now she's gonna be famous for being named after this giant van.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: Database just got nominated for best electronic act in Brazil, by the way.

How did you end up on tour together?

Robert Perlick-Molinari: We had these remixes for "Up All Night," which we released a while ago.

David Perlick-Molinari: I don't know if you're aware of this place, The Disco, in El Paso. We're going to play it in a few days, but Robert was lab partners with who throws this party at Northwestern University, who's kind of this odd duck.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: Basically, Northwestern has a lot of really preppy kids. He and I really gravitated towards each other being lab partners. He went back to El Paso...

David Perlick-Molinari: The point is, when we started to think about going outside of our homes and surroundings, Robert called him and asked what we should do. He was like, "Well, this, this, and this. Here's some friends of mine." That's how we met John Burke from Oklahoma City, and then we were finding out on the road a lot of times that we could be DJing ourselves. We hadn't really DJed that much before, but it became a necessity because there wasn't any music that was appropriate before we played. [laughs] Because you wouldn't know what to expect, you know? We just booked these random shows.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: It was a lot like DIY-type punk.

David Perlick-Molinari: We needed the right fit, you know?

Robert Perlick-Molinari: We'd have some crazy emo/screamo dudes. There was this guy in Lubbock, Texas who played with us. It was him on a guitar.

David Perlick-Molinari: Wasn't there an upright bass?

Robert Perlick-Molinari: It was him on an upright bass and just yelling the most awful things.

David Perlick-Molinari: It wasn't awful, it was heartfelt. [laughs] It was true. It felt real, Robert.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: It was all very...anyway.

David Perlick-Molinari: It just wasn't right for us. We had to somehow transition to what we were playing, so we would DJ and play good music.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: Wait, so why did we hook up with Database?

David Perlick-Molinari: We had this list of eight or 10 DJs who were good, and Database was on that list. We went onto Hype Machine and created this massive download so we could listen to them all and find the ones we liked. From that list, I met four or five of them to see if they'd be interested in remixing us.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: That was the really cool part about it: from the list that we had, we thought it would make sense to ask the people that we actually like. It's hard, because you jump out of your environment. At the time, we had a lot of really small indie labels pushing us to get remixes by UK. . . it was a lot of stuff that wasn't right.

David Perlick-Molinari: Like early 90s UK house guys.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: Well, we tried to get the Vengaboys, but they wouldn't have it.

David Perlick-Molinari: So anyway, Robert and I sent all these cold e-mails out, and we didn't get much response. It was either no response or just "No." But Database came back with...

Database: "Uhhhhhh this is amazing, sure!" [laughs] "You guys are amazing!"

Robert Perlick-Molinari: So anyway, they did a remix of "Up All Night," and then they came back and wanted to collaborate on something together, and that's what Beaches & Friends is.

How is the long-rumored album coming along?

David Perlick-Molinari: Long-rumored? [laughs] It's coming. There's a couple tracks from the album we actually play in our live set. But we're gonna do Beaches & Friends properly, and then after that we'll go do the album.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: Yeah, the idea is that we're trying to garner some kind of anticipation for it, because we just started to work with these two guys in the UK, and they're just releasing the "Up All Night" track for the first time in the UK. So we're going to let that sit a little bit and work that over there with them, and then see what happens and when it makes sense to release the album. It's funny about these things, because it's nice to have a lot of the work done, because then you can think about the best way to present it. The whole album has this story, and Beaches & Friends is kind of a segue way from the "Up All Night"/"Broken Heart" kind of stuff into this new, fantastical, psychedelic, electronic extravaganza. It's obviously very dance-y, very poppy, and nostalgic and quirky, but this new stuff is pretty exciting.

David Perlick-Molinari: We really wanna get it out as soon as we can, so we'll be working through what we have on our plate right now so we can move on to the next step.

Robert Perlick-Molinari: The album's more a concept album, one where you travel. Because a lot of what's in our head right now is starting in one place but ending up in another, whether it's geographically, conceptually, harmonically, or whether it's just where you are in your life. It's about change. When we started it, we found the album just kept going: we're going to another place, and another place, and another place. But then you realize that you can't just keep going places, because where are you gonna end up?

David Perlick-Molinari: It's like a chase movie, where we're constantly chasing something down, but learning about environment and our perceptions from what we've known about it in the past and projecting that into an extra-dimensional world. We've come across things like Moses and sacred geometry, and the end of the world, all this really kind of fun, conceptual things about what people over the course of time having thought about cracking the essence of what we're doing here. You know, things like the natural ratio. We're chasing all these things down, and then where do we end up? We don't know. We don't know.

French Horn Rebellion play the MadeLoud stage at Monolith on Sunday the 13th at 5:45 pm.