Listening to Mahjongg’s latest album, “Kontpab,” you might think that the people behind it are some rather strange individuals. From the almost ambient Afro-pop opening of “Pontiac” to the distorted stomp of “Those Birds Are Bats,” this Chicago collective’s latest throws one curveball after another, almost defying listeners to keep up with the band’s restless—but always danceable—sonic experimentation.

But when vocalist-guitarist Jeff Carrillo answers the phone while on the road in the Pacific Northwest, he sounds like the most normal guy in the world. He’s even doing his bandmates’ laundry.

As Mahjongg prepares to visit the music industry’s annual orgy of hype, South by Southwest (SXSW), a surprisingly calm Carrillo reflected on some survival tactics learned from the band’s last trip to Austin and explained what the name “Kontpab” has to do with spam and German avant-garde composers.

How are you?
I’m good. I got the final load in the dryer, so things are going well.

I haven’t seen you guys live yet, but from what I’ve heard, I gather that you sweat through your clothes pretty much every night.
Yeah, definitely. And some of the guys, they sweat through [their clothes] about a week at a time without changing. So it can get pretty hairy. I am a big proponent of the laundry day. With a couple of the guys, I decided it had to be done, or I wasn’t gonna be in the band anymore.

Have you guys been to SXSW before?
We haven’t been in I think three years. We skipped ’06 and ’07.

Do you have any advice to give to bands who are going for the first time?
Pace yourself. Because you’re gonna get tired after like, two days. And if you’re there for four days, you’re gonna want to leave so bad. By the fourth day, it could be all your favorite bands and you won’t even care. You’ll be so tired of music and so tired of bars and so tired of drinking.

So don’t overindulge.
Yeah. Or just sleep. Get sleep—but it’s hard to do. My girlfriend’s actually flying in and this is the first time she’s ever been. I have no idea how she’s gonna respond.

What’s going to be the biggest difference playing SXSW this time compared to the first time you went?
Well, we’re not new anymore. And I like that. There’s no pressure. I did some feel pressure [the first time], like people thinking, “Are you gonna be the next band that everyone’s talking about?” And now we’re just who we are. People either like us or they don’t; we’re not like minor league prospects anymore, where it’s like, “Are you gonna be the next so-and-so?”

Does it bother you to get those kinds of comparisons? People do bring up bands like Talking Heads a lot in describing your sound.
I understand that that’s a necessity. [Even] if someone says, “this band sounds like,” and then they name two of my favorite bands in the world—that’s great, but I don’t think, “Yeah, he’s right; we are like two of my favorite bands in the world!” It doesn’t boost my ego or anything, because it’s just somebody’s opinion. So I try not to take it too seriously—but then occasionally, someone criticizes us and I totally agree with them. And that really is a strange feeling.

Can you give an example?
Someone called our last album [“Raydoncong 2005”] “cold.” And I did feel like—you know, when you work on something for so long, and you record it on your own and you engineer it and you do everything, you can lose that spontaneity. And I did think, that’s something we need to change on the next album.

Does the album name “Kontpab” have any meaning behind it?
It’s kind of a hybrid of a few things. When we were talking about names, I really liked “Kontra-Punkte,” which was a [German composer Karlheinz] Stockhausen name—I think he named a piece that. It’s sort of German slang for the word “counterpoint.” And Hunter had spent some time in Berlin—and there was this thing called “pab” in Germany in the ‘30s. I think it was some kind of cereal that was really cheap and really bad. And apparently it has connotations in German now of meaning “shit.” Or like “spam”—it’s like German for “spam.” So he came up with “Kontpab” as a mix of the two ideas. I liked it because it’s a word that doesn’t exist.

And it means “counter-spam.”
[Laughs] Yeah. I hate talking about naming things, especially when you have four or five people and you’ve got to agree. It just takes so long. So Hunter and I both were like, “Yeah, ‘Kontpab’! That’s cool! That’s the album. Let’s not talk about this anymore.”

If you’re heading to Austin, you can catch Mahjongg at Emo’s IV Lounge on Wednesday, March 12 at 10 p.m. Metromix will check in with them again while we’re there.

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