Photo by Richard Dumas

Collaborations between filmmakers and composers are nothing new, but the appearance of a noted rock band on a soundtrack is usually a special event, an awkward cross-promotional backscratch or chance to show off a director’s eclectic record collection. What’s remarkable about the partnership between Britsh band Tindersticks and French filmmaker Claire Denis is its depth and length, with no less than 6 full film scores over more than a decade.

Tindersticks’ music, spacious and atmospheric, was a natural fit for Denis’ films, which favored place and impression over plot and exposition, and their scores are vital connective tissue for the films. Late last month, this body of work came out (much of it for the first time) as a box set on Constellation Records.

At Length spoke with founding Tindersticks member Stuart Staples about the origins of this rather unique partnership, how it has changed the band’s non-film work, and why you won’t see the band’s name in the credits of the Avatar sequel.

Listen below to a sample of what you’ll find on the box set, or visit the label’s website to download several tracks.
TINDERSTICKS – Claire Denis Film Scores BOX SET PREVIEW by Constellation Records

At Length: So I guess the first question I have is how did the band first get involved with Claire Denis?

Stuart Staples: Claire came to say hello after a show in Paris in 1995, I think, when she was just writing Nenette et Boni. Our second album had just been released and I think she felt a connection with the music, with a song called “My Sister,” and I think more or less she just wanted to see if we wanted to be involved in the film, and the conversation progressed into us making the whole score.

AL: So what was the creative process like for that first film?

SS: It was such a new experience for us, and looking back now, you know, it was about pressing buttons on VHS machines and starting to play. Its so different to the accessibility you get with playing music with images that you get with technology now. It was another era. So it was kind of making it up as we go along. [Laughs.] But I think at the center of it, it wasn’t so different from working on White Material, the last film, which was so much more sophisticated. It was still about finding a palette of sound and tying it to the images. I think because of Claire’s connection with “My Sister” and that she filmed the dance scene centerpiece to our song “Tiny Tears,” it kind of gave us a framework to start from, and it became very much about vibes, glockenspiels and brush drums and that kind of a light playfulness that runs through the film. Whereas with White Material the sound was quite dark and abstract, with harmonium and electric guitar feedback and things. So I think its just about letting the images get inside you and see what kind of emotional response you have to write you know.

AL: How involved was Claire in your work on the score? Did she provide direction throughout the process or did you just present a finished product to her and she ran with it?

SS: Well I think in working with Claire in general, she always provides us with the script and if the script’s in French she has it translated for us, and when she’s filming we always gets stills and dailies of what she’s doing and once she gets into the editing room we might get a three-minute montage or something, and then there’s a point when we get a very rough edit. And I think everything that goes before kind of leads up to that point where we are being faced with the images and the feeling of the images and the speed of the editing and things and that’s when – if something happens for us and we have something to present to her as an idea of the starting point, I think that’s when the conversation really begins to get to the end point, if you know what I mean.

AL: Sure.

SS: With White Material, until we were able to get inside of the rough edit, we were thinking, “well how are we going to do this? It’s a film that’s set in Africa.” But when we were actually confronted with the images, I think we gradually felt that the music was in the earth and the soil, and that has a kind of a pain of its own. And it was in the trees and it was almost enveloping the story. And through finding that point, I think is a way to then step forward and step into that space and feel comfortable exploring within that space.

AL: African music has begun to have a significant influence on popular music over the last decade or so. Did it occur to you guys to experiment with those sounds for that film?

SS: No, I don’t think it was ever an option, and I think it was the furthest thing from Claire’s mind as well. I think if she had wanted something like that in the film, I think she would have looked for something more authentic in that vein. It was never really under consideration.

AL: Did your working relationship with Claire change over the years? Did you get to the point where you were able to understand one another on a more automatic level, for example?

SS: I think from working through Nenette et Boni and Trouble Every Day and to a certain amount with Vendredi Soir and then making L’Intrus on my own, I think when we actually got to work on 35 Rhums and White Material, with Claire more or less making those films back-to-back, it was as though we had reached a kind of flowing space, with more understanding about what we both need, without actually talking about it and defining it. I think working on those two films, even though one was kind of easy and one was very difficult, there was a kind of flow in the work and the conversation and what we needed from each other. Whereas working on Nenette et Boni or Trouble Everyday or L’Intrus, it could be more convoluted and a little bit more frustrating for both of us.

AL: Right.

SS: I think that that when we reached the last two films I really saw a kind of natural flow in the conversation.

AL: It isn’t unusual for a director to use one composer over and over again for their films, but I don’t know of any other examples of a director using a rock band in that way. As Tindersticks’ own history shows [founding member Dickon Hinchcliffe left the band several years ago], it’s hard enough to keep an entire band full of creative personalities together when they’re just playing their own music. Adding in the personality of a film director must create an entirely new strain.

SS: I think it is a strange thing. When we first started with Nenette et Boni, it never occurred to me that this relationship was going to carry on and grow, but I would say the same thing about the band. Looking at the band in 1995, if some researcher had asked us “where do you think you are going to be in fifteen years time?” I think my answer would have been that I’d have a proper job somewhere. [Laughs.]

AL: Yeah.

SS: I think the work we’ve done with Claire has kind of punctuated our little journey as a band, and it’s forced us to look outside of ourselves and to discover different ways and to be challenged in a different way. I think that once we’ve done that, we turn back to our own work and we feel kind of changed and like we’ve grown in some way. Now, with the release of this box set and playing these shows, I don’t know if its dangerous but I find that I’ve had to consider all of these things I’ve never had to think about before.

AL: Right, right.

SS: I think it’s been a key factor in why we’re still here, and why we’re still working and why we’re still hungry to work, that along the way we’ve been presented with these that we didn’t necessarily know what we needed to do.

AL: So why are you releasing the box set now? Is your relationship with Claire changing or did this seem like a natural stopping point?

SS: We feel that some of our best material was in White Material, and we wanted to get that released. And I think that once we took that step, we kind of progressed and thought maybe we should release that together with 35 Rhums, and then we thought that L’Intrus was never released, so I think it just kind of grew from there. And then with Constellation getting involved, they had such an enthusiasm and belief in the idea that it just kind of grew into the notion of “lets just make this complete.” So maybe just for the fact that we have to talk about it, maybe changes everything you know. [Laughs.]

AL: Right.

SS:  With Claire, and us, maybe we’re in the situation where what we have had to talk about it, you know, and maybe that might change everything for the better or for the worse or whatever, but maybe that would be a good thing, in general.

AL: I had known of your work with Claire on Nenette et Boni and White Material, but I think I had lost track of just how many years and how many films you had done together. It’s interesting to me that you start doing something like this and then suddenly find that you’ve spent more than a decade doing it without really even being too aware of it yourselves.

SS: Every film has never been a given, that this is what’s going to happen. Claire wanted us to be involved with Nenette et Boni, but I think she asked us in a way of maybe using bits of “My Sister” within the film and it was our enthusiasm for scoring a whole film that made it happen. From the initial conversations about Trouble Every Day, which I think is a film about kissing and why lovers like to bite each other, Claire guided us in a specific direction. I think that we ended up with this kind of very romantic soundtrack set against this very extreme film that I think is quite special. With, say, Vendredi Soir, I think as a band we got so far into it and then it just collided with writing our album Waiting for the Moon, and I thought the album would be compromised if I got too far into it, so that was something that Dickon was able to finish on his own.

And so every film has had its own story. I don’t think Claire ever imagined us being involved in 35 Rhums, but when I saw the opening montage, I heard this music that David was working on a week before and when I put the two things together it was just kind of perfect, and it kind of said it has to be this way. So it’s never been a given. The next thing that Claire might do she might not imagine us being involved and I wouldn’t see that as a negative thing at all. All we can fundamentally try and do is to help her find this thing that she is reaching for. I think when we are working and other people get involved that’s the best feeling — to bring different ideas and to heighten the whole thing.

AL: I know that Dickon Hinchcliffe has gone on to compose for film full-time [including last year’s Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone], but do you ever consider either Tindersticks or you yourself working with other directors and doing other scores?

SS: Definitely if we were presented with an inspiring idea and you meet somebody and you click with them, then I can imagine it happening. I wouldn’t like to make a career out of it — I wouldn’t like to be looking out to the next year and thinking I have got three films to score.

AL: Right.

SS: I think really it’s about balance. In fifteen years we’ve been involved in scoring five films, and that kind of feels that we’re balanced because we’re driven by what we need to make. It’s great to have time away from that and feels rewarding for our lifeblood, and our own ideas and our own desires and needs creatively. I don’t think that they would be able to be satisfied by working on other people’s movies all the time. And saying that, the thing drives us, drives me is very much about Claire. It’s working with somebody with a unique, uncompromising voice and that’s inspiring in itself.

AL: Right.

SS: But even though she’s uncompromising, every actor she has worked with every editor and cinematographer will say the same thing, that she is a joy to work with because she gives you freedom to express yourself.

AL: Right.

SS: She knows where she’s going and because she has a kind of surety, deep down, she has the confidence to let people be themselves.

AL: That’s not necessarily the normative way to work in the film industry. You can’t imagine somebody like James Cameron, with such a singular controlling impulse letting a band like the Tindersticks have that much freedom.

SS: [Laughs.] Yeah, that’s a different world, and not a world that I remotely aspire to you know its, I have to make sure that kind of, I have to make sure that work on more kind of traditional things that are controllable.

AL: Were you a fan of Claire’s films before you guys got involved with her?

SS: No, but it was the first thing what we did after we got home from meeting her, which was to get ahold of Chocolat and watch that. You know, we were so young and I think we just felt that this has something and this means something to us, and having a deeper understanding of it. They were just small steps into this world, and that’s how we worked into it.

AL: Tindersticks released one of their own records a little over a year ago, and I know that you’ll be very busy supporting the box set for a while, but I was wondering if either the band or you, personally have anything else that we should be looking out for this year.

SS: We’ve got a string of shows planned through the summer, but we have so many young ideas that are half formed and this summer we have time to explore them. That is the most exciting time in a way, and so I’m looking forward to that, to the time of being together and taking ideas that have been growing gradually over the last year or so and just see what they are going to. So hopefully it will bear fruit and lead us on to some new, exciting things.

Photo by Amani Willett

Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson and Peter Evans – Electric Fruit by Thirsty Ear Recordings

At Length: So how did the trio for the new record come together?

Mary Halvorson: I met Weasel a few years ago, when he was still living at San Francisco. A couple of our bands shared a bill when we met and thought it would be fun to play together. So we eventually just started playing duo and actually released a duo CD. And I guess we both heard Peter somewhere and totally freaked out. [Laughs] Understandably.

AL: I can imagine.

MH: Weasel wanted to do something with Peter so we thought that would make a fun trio. And actually Peter is somebody I’ve known since high school.

AL: Oh, wow.

MH: We didn’t go to the same high school but we both grew up in Suburban Boston and we did these jazz programs together for high school students, and we used to play jazz gigs together in college at restaurants, which was sort of like our summer job. [Laughs]

So I’ve known Peter a long time, but haven’t had too many chances to connect with him musically recently. So we thought it would be fun to put that together.

AL: It’s interesting, when I bought a digital copy of the record off of Amazon, the metadata just lists you as the artist. It didn’t really seem from any of the other packaging that anybody was listed as a specific band leader, but it made me wonder. Is there a specific band leader? Or was it more of a group improv effort?

MH: No there isn’t. Yeah, it’s a group effort. Actually that’s really annoying. That’s actually happened to me a few times. I think people don’t know what to do with collectives, like they don’t know how to list it, and I have had the experience to where people just decide that it’s one person’s band.

AL: Right.

MH: So sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s somebody else. There have been times where I’ve explicitly told somebody, “this is not my band,” and then it still somehow gets listed like that so, that’s unfortunate. But this trio is not my band; it’s a collective project.

AL: It’s so much the dominant paradigm, especially in rock and pop, where you have just one proper noun to put in that artist category. People just don’t get the whole jazz thing.

MH: [Laughs] Exactly. It’s the truth.

AL: Aside from being a fan of Weasel Walter since his work with the Flying Luttenbachers, one of the things I really like about this record is the bent note sound you get out of your guitar, which reminded me of tape effects or musique concrete. How did you go about developing your sonic palette in that direction?

MH: It’s actually a Line 6 delay pedal that I get that sound out of. I found it by accident about 10 years ago. I was playing around with the pedal and I found that I could get it to make that sound. So it’s something I’ve used ever since, but I like to use other effects — something that sounds like a whammy bar or a pitch shifter, but it’s not. So I want to kind of develop that and use it. I mean I’m not a huge effects person. I don’t have a ton of effects, and I don’t really know a ton about effects, [laughs] so I just have a couple of things that I do and I stick to them.

AL: Right.

MH: So, yeah, I really like that pedal, the Line 6 delay. It’s also cool because every guitar player has it and everyone does something different with it.

AL: Talking about whammy bars and effects pedals, it’s hard not to think of electric guitar as a rock and roll instrument. So many guitarists have explored the sound of the instrument in a rock context, and I was curious how much the work of those rock stylists has effected your style.

MH: Definitely a lot. My first guitar inspiration was Jimmy Hendrix when I was a kid. That’s kind of why I started playing so I guess I had a rock influence in mind before I had any kind of jazz guitar influence, although I did end up studying jazz guitar and not rock. But I love all sorts of playing, and actually I think I kind of like rock guitar more than jazz guitar. [Laughs] So I definitely am influenced by that.

AL: Do you have any personal favorites who are playing right now?

MH: I really love John Dieterich from the band Deerhoof.

AL: Oh yeah, they’re great.

MH: And I love Mick Barr from Orthrelm. Those are the two that are really coming to mind.

AL: They’re both fantastic. Deerhoof in particular is just such a great sounding band.

MH: Yeah. I’ve been a fan of Deerhoof for years. I really love that band.

AL: You know, speaking of rock bands, you have been a part of a rock combo – People – with one of my favorite drummers, Kevin Shea. Storm and Stress was my jam back in the day.

MH: Oh, yeah. Totally. That was a great band.

AL: I was really excited to see on your website that you have a new People record listed as an upcoming release. Is that happening anytime soon?

MH: You know actually we just found out. It’s just been an unfortunate situation. We recorded the record… it must’ve been early 2009. We’ve just been sitting on it because we had 2 labels that said they were going to put it out and either folded or decided against it after kind of stringing us along for a while.

AL: Right.

MH: It’s ended up with the original label which released our first two records. They haven’t been doing much but then they just decided to get it going again recently. So I think we’re going to put it out on the same label, I and Ear Records. Hopefully it will be released in 2011.

AL: Oh excellent! I can’t wait to hear it.

MH: It feels kind of old at this point. [Laughs]

AL: I’m sure.

MH: But I really like that record. We added a bass player also to the band and Peter Evans actually wrote some horn arrangements on it. So it should be pretty different from the other two I think.

AL: That sounds great. Talking about the horn arrangements, that was a real addition to your sound on “Saturn Sings,” your quintet record that made such a splash last year, giving your existing trio a much fuller feel. That record got so much attention, appearing on so many best of lists, including placing third on the Village Voice’s jazz list. I know that “jazz fame” is almost an oxymoronic phrase…

MH: [Laughs] Yeah.

AL: …but how do you feel about the success of this? It got a lot of attention.

MH: Honestly, I was really surprised. I wasn’t really expecting that. But I’m really happy about it. It’s a really great feeling to, you know, have your music be heard. [Laughs]

AL: Do you feel like it opens the doors to you in a way? Do you feel like there are echelons of jazz? I know that jazz records don’t actually sell a lot of copies, but certainly somebody who gets a lot of critical attention is going to be more likely to be released by some of the bigger labels.

MH: Right. Actually with the label thing, it’s interesting. I feel like so many people are putting out their own music and even choosing to put out their own musical work with smaller independent labels instead of larger labels.

AL: Right.

MH: I’ve got a label I’m working with on the trio record and the quintet record – Firehouse 12 – and I really love working with them. But even if I did have an opportunity to work with a “larger label” I don’t know that I would.

AL: And in this day and age there seem to be so many artists like Radiohead who are at the top of the game leaving the big labels and doing something entirely different.

MH: Exactly. I think it’s interesting. I don’t know that I want to put out my own stuff because it’s just so much work, but then also you’re really in control of the music. I’m sure there are advantages to both but in my case I really like working with the labels that I am currently working with. So pretty likely I think I will stick with that.

AL: One label that you also seem to be stuck with is ‘jazz guitarist.’ A lot of musicians who work in experimental or avant garde music of any sort seem to get labeled jazz by default.

MH: Yeah.

AL: Does genre matter to you? Do you consider yourself a jazz guitarist or something else?

MH: Genre doesn’t matter to me, but I guess I do consider myself a jazz guitarist because that’s the music I studied, the music I grew up with. I think probably most of my music is more influenced by jazz than it is by other types of music, although it is influenced by a lot of types of music.

AL: Right.

MH: So I think if it would have to be put in a category, I probably would consider it jazz. But at the same time that might not be true in ten years. I’m not interested in being a “jazz musician,” I’m just interested in doing whatever music I feel is relevant and exciting. I could definitely change, I could start doing something entirely different and so I guess it doesn’t really matter to me. I think at the moment I probably would say it’s more in one category than any other, but then again it’s such a weird thing to have a label like that. I’m sure there are lot of people that would say it’s definitely not jazz.

AL: People make comments all the time about what is and isn’t jazz. Jazz seems to be one of those genres where the critical body and the fan community seem to be so sharply divided between classical purists and modern innovators.

MH: Exactly.

AL: It seems like a lot of artists just won’t satisfy both camps no matter what they do.

MH: That’s why I really appreciate it when there are people that don’t really take notice of the other side. Someone like Jon Irabagon is a great example of someone who really can function in both of those worlds.

AL: Right.

MH: He does some crazy experimental stuff and then he drops into Lincoln Center and on some more traditional jazz records. And I really wish there was more of that because it seems like everyone’s just fighting all the time about it. There are so many cliques and divides and people say that their thing is the only thing that’s relevant, but I think there’s a lot of good music in every category.

AL: For sure.

MH: So, that’s one thing that I have always tried to do is work with people in different genres or subgenres and try to learn from that. I don’t think it should necessarily be that divided.

AL: Now that this trio record is finished, what’s the next thing project for you?

MH: I am actually recording another record with Jessica Pavone. We’re recording another album and it will be out sometime soon, probably by the end of 2011. I’m also going to record another Quintet Record this summer.

AL: With the same Quintet that was featured on Saturn Sings?

MH: Yeah exactly. And my plan after that record is actually to add two more horns to make it a septet.

AL: Oh, that’s fantastic.

MH: So I just started working on that music. I’m excited about that and I will be alto (saxophone), trumpet, tenor (saxophone) and trombone in addition to guitar, bass and drums.

MH: So I guess you really enjoyed writing for horns. That was the first time that you have done that in a recording, right?

MH: Yeah I did really enjoy it, and I’m still figuring it out. It’s definitely challenging. But I do really enjoy it so I think I want to take it a little farther and then after that I think that’s it. After that I’ll probably go back to trio or something, but I just want to add a couple more horns and see what that would be like.

AL: You’ve said that one of the things that really influenced Saturn Sings was a renewed interest in harmony. Harmony is usually one of those things that most people use as a starting point when they’re getting into music, and I think it’s interesting that it would be something that you would return to. What is it about harmony that suddenly started to grab you and get you interested?

MH: Well I guess one of the things that happened was I went to jazz school for a year. In college I was in The New School for a year and it was just sort of overkill to me and I had to take a really long break from listening to jazz. I took about 8 years off.

AL: Wow.

MH: [Laughs] And then when I came back, I think that I was really hearing it in a different way. Because before I was really hearing it more melodically-oriented.

AL: Right.

MH: I started listening to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messegers, and I was listening to all the harmony happening between the horns. For some reason that started interesting me more. I don’t know how to explain it other than I was hearing the same music I had been listening to when I was younger but hearing it from a new perspective.

AL: Yeah.

MH: And around the same time I bought Finale, the computer program that allows you to write music in the computer. So I had that program and it makes it way easier to hear all the different voices so it made sense for me to start exploring that more at at that point.

AL: I’d read somewhere that you were into astrology as a side interest, and I was wondering if the title Saturn Sings had anything to do with that.

MH: Yeah, a lot of people think it has something to do with Sun Ra, but it actually has nothing to do with him. [Laughs] But yeah, astrology is like a hobby. I’ve taken classes on it and read a bunch of books and I’ve been studying it for about 10 years. But Saturn, well I don’t know, there’s a number of things but Saturn is just kind of taking over my whole life right now. [Laughs] It’s kind of hitting all my planets and it’s all chaos. [Laughs] So when I was writing that record I was really…. I mean, I don’t know how much you know about astrology.

AL: Oh, not much.

MH: I mean the Saturn Return is like a classic thing. If people know one thing about it, it’s that when you’re age 29 Saturn comes around and kind of destroys your life.

So that was sort of happening when I was writing that record, so that’s basically what that means to me. It was a really serious influence on me and I was going through a lot of restructuring and detail-oriented stuff and kind of re-thinking everything. So for me that was a big part of the processes of writing that record. That’s why it was titled that.

AL: As an astrology enthusiast what was your reaction to that crazy meme that was sweeping the internet about a month ago with the crazy new symbol and all that stuff?

MH: Oh gosh… [Laughs] I think it is totally ridiculous, but it was kind of funny how it got everybody all up in a fit about it. It caused a pretty funny reaction, but it just seems crazy to me that there would be a 13th sign. The whole system just seems like it’s based on twelve. You know, adding another thing just…. I mean it’s interesting, but I don’t really think it has any validity. [Laughs]

AL: Yeah. It was such a bizarre thing to be a news item. “This just in: there’s a new astrological sign.”

MH: [Laughs] I know, it’s totally ridiculous. It’s the same kind of thing as when it was decided Pluto was not a planet anymore. [Laughs] Everyone got upset about whether it was a planet or a planetoid or whatever. Who cares?

AL: Maybe that can be the title for your next album. Pluto’s Fired.

MH: [Laughs] Yeah.

Photo by Marina Agostini

When Matthew Friedberger gets an idea in his head, he pursues it to its logical conclusion, or even well past it. As one half of the sibling nucleus of The Fiery Furnaces (with his sister Eleanor), he has pursed a number of concepts that have inspired admiration and more than a bit of headscratching. For example their breakthrough record, Blueberry Boat, which was an entire album full of song suites, drew a rating of 9.6 out of 10 from indie tastemaker Pitchfork but was called “unlistenable” by the New Music Express. Other experiments, such as a stream-of-consciousness collaboration with the Friedberger’s grandmother, were similarly divisive.

But having put out eleven releases over the past seven years, fans never need to wait too long before he changes direction. That, combined with the endless rearranging and deconstructing of the material the band serves up live, give one the impression that he is both restless experimenter and workaholic. Both those traits are in full effect on his most recent project, Solos, a series of six solo releases in which Friendberger plays only one class of instrument on each record. The albums come out every two months over the next year, with two bonus records thrown in to those who subscribe to the series, either through the label’s website, or through select record stores (Other Music, Aquarius Records, Experimedia, and Amoeba.)

At Length spoke to Friedberger about what instruments want to do, what rock songs need from musicians, and why you shouldn’t expect to be satisfied at a Fiery Furnaces show.

Matthew Friedberger – Shirley (Right click on the link to download a track from Napoleonette, the first of the Solos releases.)

Douglas Kirby makes music as big and strange and self-assured as America itself — fitting for a musician who has spent significant time in all four time zones but still finds his way back to his hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as often as he can.  And if you don’t believe it, check out his website, a sprawling digital scavenger hunt full of experimental pop and outsider art computer graphics, all mapped to an idiosyncratic atlas of the United States.

Kirby spent most of the past decade recording with the well-regarded Philly band National Eye, but this fall released Shale and Sandstone, an ambitious debut under the banner of his solo project, From a Fountain. The album should find fertile ground among fans of Sufjan Stevens, The Flaming Lips, and maybe the ghost of Woody Guthrie.

We recently spoke with Kirby about his upcoming tour (including a stop at CMJ on the 22nd), his love of the album format, and time-traveling Native Americans out to rewrite history.

From a Fountain – Rise, All You Moderns (Click on the link to download a track from the album Shale and Sandstone.)

At Length:  One of the things that drew me into the new album is that it feels like such a personal, almost idiosyncratic project.  How much of From a Fountain is just you and how much of it is the product for collaboration with others?

Douglas Kirby:  It’s almost all me.  The idea behind the website was to serve as a repository for everything that I work on, collected in one place and presented in an interesting way.  So it’s mostly me, though I have friends come play whenever it makes sense.  But a lot of it is just me and the computer.

AL:  If it is mostly you, why did you pick the name From a Fountain instead of just recording under your own name?

DK:  I thought it was important to give the work a title, to give the work its own identity.  I feel that deeply about creativity — that I can’t lay claim to all of it.  So keeping it separate with the name, it feels right to say “This is me,” and doing this fully.  It gives me freedom and space to have me and my thing.

AL:  The way you’ve presented this work is very spatial, not only in the way songs are laid out on the website, but also in the way they’re tied into various locations in the U.S.  Were these all places that are significant to you in some way or are they all tied into the music somehow?

DK:  They’re less associated with the music and more associated with me and my life.  Definitely each place is very significant for me, in the same way that each song has been significant as well.  So rather than each song being tied to place, it’s just a way of presenting all of that experience together, into something that’s beautiful.  I mean, I wanted it to be beautiful, I wanted it to tie together and to wrap together.

AL:  Each song on the website is embedded in a digital collage of images and computer art, with a bit of animation that activates when you find the track on the page.  How involved were you with the art design of the website?

DK:  I drew each page.  Each one is kind of a sketch of my memory of the place.  I do them kind of quickly, using an old graphics program (sort of an obsolete version of Fireworks) that’s very simple, and I keep the colors simple and I just go and that’s what it’s supposed to be — that place as remembered by me.  Then I tie it to a song which may or may not link up with it really intimately, but it’s still a place for it to fit.

AL:  There are a million bands out there who present their music as just a list of tracks to click on in some sort of streaming player, but there is a lot of fun to be had in discovering your music on the website.  I especially like the squirrel that leaps when you mouse over it and the quiet bedroom scene with the animated caution traffic light seen through the window.  It’s almost like a video game to explore.

DK:  Yeah, that’s in the bedroom grew up in.

AL:  Is it really?

DK:  I’m actually staying in it in Sioux Falls right now as we rehearse for this tour, so I’m sleeping in that bedroom.  But that’s the idea.  I have written and recorded all these songs I want people to hear.  I want to present them in a way that isn’t  just an album or a disc or a list, and this is how it’s taken shape over the last five or six years. I have been happy with how it’s grown and grown.  It feels like an interesting thing to present to people.

AL:  Speaking of Sioux City, most people can’t help but mention where you come from when they write about you.

DK:  It’s actually Sioux Falls [laughs].

AL:  Sioux Falls, excuse me.

DK:  That’s a common mistake. Obama came before the elections for a rally, probably exhausted from the road, everyone is cheering and going crazy in the Sioux Falls arena.  And he was like, “well, it’s great be here in Sioux City.”

AL:  Oh, no.

DK:  This hush came over the whole arena and everyone was stunned.  But we’re used to that.  That’s a very common thing if you live in Sioux Falls.  But it was very uncomfortable.

AL:  So have you lived there as an adult, recently, or was it just like your childhood home?

DK:  Yeah, I have lived there off and on in the past two years.

AL:  How much of Sioux Falls finds its way into your music?  Does it color the sound of what you do?

DK:  Probably.  Being here, I feel embraced by the city that I grew up in. It’s a unique place that not many people are in the country have experience with.

AL:  Right.

DK:  And so I always try to re-immerse in this — in the uniqueness of here whenever I’m around.  The simplest way for me to describe it is that culturally, Sioux Falls tends to be about ten or twenty years behind the rest of the country.  Less so now with the Internet, but certainly when I grew up it was behind the coasts and the more populated areas so that was a unique kind of experience.

AL:  It also seems that the cultural geography of Sioux Falls and the Great Plains might have informed the narrative for Shale and Sandstone. Can you tell me a little bit about the concept of the album?

DK:  The idea occurred to me in the early stages of writing the music. As I started to write the words, the story came out of native Americans persisting into the future as a group, waiting to invent time travel, at which point they could go back in time, go to Europe and get antibodies to all the European illnesses, and go cross the Atlantic and give it to their ancestors, so they would be inoculated.  So the first few songs on the album are the story of that journey — the future Native Americans and their  encounter with the aboriginal natives and then the response of their ancestors to the offer.

AL:  As I mentioned before, the music feels so personal, and yet you choose to delve into these really grandiose concepts and themes.  You even talk about some of the songs dealing with confronting the infinite.  How do you negotiate where the personal meets these immense concepts?

DK:  The story itself erupted from the personal.  It sort of popped up, and like I said at the beginning, I don’t lay claim to some of the products of what I do.  I was sitting around listening and it was there.  And it is very personal, I mean it has to be — it has to come from some personal chunk of stuff within me. And growing up around here with a lot of Native communities and those experiences I’m sure informed that.

AL:  Are you still with National Eye or is that just a past project at this point?

DK:  I don’t know where we are right now.  The last couple of albums I recorded on remotely, but I haven’t been playing with the band.

AL:  I see. The last National Eye Record was a concept record, and then your new record as From a Fountain is very high concept, and then even the way you present things on your website uses a larger organizing principle.  What attracts you to these overarching narratives and big concepts?

DK:  I’m definitely interested in creativity as a whole and unique ways of presenting any art and finding all the links and really going with them instead of just emitting little individual works. It make sense to me to present my work as part of the whole story of making that work, because I have been experiencing that. I have been the one who has been witnessing all this work being made, so to me it is this one big story.  So that’s the interest for me, especially with the website because that’s the way I had experienced this.

AL:  As I explored the website, wandering through these diverse places and finding these songs dropped here and there, almost like postcards from a life.  It definitely gives the effect of being part of the tapestry of a life.

DK:  Thank you.

AL:  Another section of your website deals with the new record, and for a few tracks, you deconstruct the songwriting process, with early demo versions, separate viola or vocal tracks and lyric sheets there to show how the song was made.  Why did you decide to give this behind-the-scenes look at the record?

DK:  Because of the way the album came together in the beginning with the story of the natives, I especially wanted to give those songs in their early incarnations, because I felt like that was important to the telling of that story. And then the rest of the little snippets and bits from the songs are really just presented because I think they sound really compelling apart from the thick song that they’re in.  They sounded interesting and cool to me, so I just wanted to share them with people.

AL:  Some artists are sort of prickly about the idea that you might look behind the curtain and see that the wizard is just this guy from Kansas, and don’t like to show their unfinished work.  As a music fan, I like to see evidence of the creative process that you went through to create the finished tracks.

DK:  I’m glad that you dialed into that.

AL:  So you’re about to go out on tour.  What can people expect a From a Fountain show?

DK:  I’m also learning what to expect from a From a Fountain show. [Laughs.] These will be the first series of shows that aren’t just me or me and a couple friends.  This will be a major band — there’s six of us — with a bunch of my friends from South Dakota.  I’m wearing a white alb right now with a peach-colored tunic on top of it, and I have golden eye shadow on because we’re rehearsing and we wanted to be in our clothes for rehearsal.

AL:  Oh, that’s great.

DK:  So there is definitely a stage component with outfits and lighting.  There will be six of us in the core band and then as we travel toward the east we’ll link up with some of my friends and some of them will join the band, so there will be nine of us by the time we get to Brooklyn.

AL:  And I’m delighted to hear that because it seems it seems like with this material you could go one way or the other, with either stripped-down personal arrangements or something much bigger.

DK:  Yeah, I’ve always felt like Shale and Sandstone especially was so rich with instrumentation that to do it live I wanted a lot of instruments so that’s what we’ll be doing.

AL:  Speaking of this tension between the personal and the large-scale, one of the biggest tensions in the industry right now is the one between the album paradigm that has existed for the past 50 years or so, and the digital trend toward releasing songs individually online.  As someone who seems to both love the album as an art form but has also found new innovative ways to get individual songs online in a compelling way, do you have any thoughts about this?

DK:  I think that albums will always be part of how I think of music.  That will be, you know, in my 70 or 80 years of life, I will always have that embedded in me because of when I was born.  So as I create I’m sure I will continue to think clumps of songs and how they might fit together, but it will be interesting to see if people who grow up later don’t have that need.  There might be all kinds of new ways of shooting out singles or bursts of music. But I don’t feel like a lack of creating possibilty is threatening the album. I don’t feel like we’ve exhausted in any way the concept of a group of songs and what they can get across.

Markus Popp - photo by Constantin Falk

To some extent, the history of popular music since the 1950s is the story of the way musicians and composers have broadened their musical palettes by exploiting the shortcomings of the technology used to amplify and reproduce music.  The amplification of the guitar resulted in the squall of distortion and feedback that are the hallmarks of rock, and the manipulation of vinyl records on a pair of turntables gave us the post-modern, beat-driven world of hip-hop.

Oval was one of the early pioneers of a similarly deliberate mishandling of technology: using computer software and the physical marking of compact disks (famously with felt tip pens) to create a style of music later dubbed “glitch.”  The cadences of the stuttering electronics were both alien and familiar, and are now so much a part of the sonic landscape (think Postal Service, Radiohead or Flying Lotus) as to seem obvious in retrospect.

But Berlin-based Markus Popp, a founding and now sole member of the group, seems almost allergic to labels or expectations.  After a string of impressive releases, Oval has been dormant throughout most of the new millenium.  Now, Popp has a new sound, using live takes and some traditional instrumentation to build upon the angular atmospherics of Oval’s earlier work.  And he’s making up for lost time, with some 85 tracks spread across an EP (“Oh,” out earlier this summer) and a double-album (“O,” out on September 13) – both on Thrill Jockey.

At Length recently corresponded with Popp about the new recordings, his new sonic outlook and his manifesto about his dislike of manifestos.

Oval – Ah! (Right click on the link to download a track from the new double-album.)

At Length: I believe the last record you worked on was 2003′s So, a collaboration with Eriko Toyoda, and your last record as Oval was Ovalcommers in 2001. Also, this summer you’ve released an EP and will shortly release a double LP of all new material.  Why did you take a break from recording, and what brought you back?  And why return with so much new material all at once?  Have you been working on this for a long time, or did it come as a torrent quite recently?

Markus Popp: The “Oh” EP and “O” album are the next chapter in an ongoing dialog with music. And while my early tracks from the mid-90s were engaged with music on a pretty basic and unsophisticated (yet effective) level, these new releases can confidently challenge music on its’ own turf – something I wanted to do for many years, but just did not quite feel ready for. Over the years, I increasingly felt I needed to be part of this conversation – ultimately, because music always has been a part of my life and I wanted to finally come up with a better payback scheme than just dissection or denial.

I always knew I would return with something – albeit not at all cost. Simply returning with just some new iteration of “electronic music” just wasn’t good enough. Basically, there was always a lot more “music” in Oval than might have been apparent all along, it was only a question of which form it would take in 2010. But then again, if you compare my 2010 material with my early albums, you realize that I just might have posted this “love letter to music” already a long time ago – and that it is only now, that its contents becomes more clear. To me, “O” is like a debut album, it is full of passion and enthusiasm.

How to start this dialogue with music? Easier said than done. Step 1: radical departure – do everything differently on all levels: technically, musically, organizationally. I wanted to PLAY stuff, take control – for example, by establishing riffs as the new main building block, replacing loops. This added much more immediacy and control (but also a lot of new decision-making and new responsibilities), while being loop-based had been by definition static and inflexible.

By recording my own improvisations, I was now the composer, not just the “music coordinator.” Once I had the tech aspect down, things went pretty quickly from there. The tracks are pretty much recorded live (of course in multi-track). Still, this says nothing about which direction to take from there – that took even longer. Having direct, real-time access to things does not mean that I was working any faster. All phrases have been triggered as you hear them, they are not montages. In the end, I decided to capture these riffs really quickly, like shooting Polaroids – if the recording went the wrong way, I had to do everything all over again.

AL: In the past, you’ve been careful to note that while you arrange the sounds on any particular piece of music you release as Oval, you don’t actually make the sounds that are heard.  Yet it seems that on your new work, there is something akin to more traditional musicianship or music-making going on, with “live” instruments recorded in the studio.  Are those samples?  Are you playing any instruments on this record?

MP: Hmm, careful with that “traditional musicianship” part. I have seen it fail before!

Sure, I had set my priorities differently. Instead of highlighting the “authorship” question, I went straight into the opposite direction: I wanted to be in charge of bringing out the “music” in “electronic music.” In practice, the production of O(h) was often all about ending up with the best possible take. You know, that one recording that is worth practicing an entire day for, the one that can convey a certain sophistication beyond all that technology involved. Joining the music game was also a pragmatic decision: to establish myself as a producer, widen the frame of reference and to ask for a fair chance to show what my music can do in the real world.

So, am I actually playing instruments on this new record? Yes and no. The more important question is: how to force music-making to catch up with the new challenges of this age of hyperrealism which is already seamlessly integrated into the aesthetic canon of other fields of media productivity, e.g. film.

A rain shower, an explosion, a flock of birds in the distance, human actors – *any* asset as part of a contemporary movie scene are perceived – provided the lighting and photography are flawless – as simply “being there”, whether these assets were ever part of the original shot or just added digitally in post. Who knows, to a certain degree, this new Oval sound might be nothing but a trompe l’oeil, an acoustic illusion – albeit a very convincing one – to a point, where you don’t insist on the seemingly specific qualities of the “original” any longer. So why still give way to the old impulse of investigating the perpetual “how did he do it? I thought people had already been over that with Systemisch in 1994.

Today, my goal is to create a “just listen” type of music that effortlessly just “is” (of course not in an esoteric sense of “beyond criticism”) and convincingly renders distinctions like “programmed vs. played” and “acoustic vs. electronic” obsolete.

AL: Similarly, you seem to be using more recognizable melodic structures here than in your previous work.  While many musicians and artists change their entire approach to their work over the course of their career, I find it striking that you did this while still using the Oval moniker, as that seemed to be so tied to a certain manifesto about the deficiencies in electronic music, or an almost philosophical problem with music itself.  Does Oval now stand for something other than what you once imagined?

MP: Oval stands for…Markus Popp and his perspective on music. And that perspective can of course evolve. I wanted to finally be able to tell the full story – from both, outside (“classic” Oval) and inside (new material) of the music container. And yet, I could still rely on certain continuities (in atmosphere, for example) which ultimately also made it onto the new records. The “manifesto” aspect is mainly provoked by interviews like this one and has to be evaluated separately from the actual musical result, which always could hold its own *as music*. Today, after having completed this latest work phase, I’d say that regardless of technique and the tools at my disposal, my music does retain this signature “Oval” atmosphere.

And yes, there was this (still unresolved) philosophical problem of the electronic musician: being perpetually torn between subjective creative expression and the mere execution of pre-implemented features. In the early days, I did not feel I belonged into any of these two camps and therefore took that “semi-authorship” route with Systemisch and all subsequent releases, putting the generative method center stage. But then again, even the vintage oval releases are remembered as music, not as the soundtrack to a manifesto.

Today, I seem to have gone straight down the authorship route, but let’s not forget, that this is an Oval record after all. A concept like “simply sitting down and playing some tunes” is not a route you can just opt to take – this is 2010. Even though it might be ultra-musical, O is not only an homage. And despite its’ accessible songwriter trappings, this record is a contemporary and pretty technical album – I just chose to give everything a very “playful” atmosphere. This is not only a revisionist “love letter to music”, this is a 2010 hi tech product.

AL: You seemed to have something of an educational aim when you began Oval, to point out the ways in which electronic music is constrained or enabled by the changing nature of the technology.   With so many artists using some of the glitchy sounds and textures or techniques that were your hallmark, how do you feel about the success of the Oval project in that regard?

MP: Well, “educational” might be a bit of a stretch here. But still, in the early days, it was all about not using the tricks of the trade, but to reveal the circumstances of those tricks. Of course the music could only convey this to a certain degree, but I felt obliged to give mention to what I at the time saw as the most relevant problems that were concealed by continuing to talk about music as if nothing had happened. But of course something had happened – software happened. At the time, giving mention to these “extra”-musical aspects seemed absolutely necessary to me. It simply had been no option for me to proceed with “(music) business as usual” while music productivity itself was facing these historical changes.

AL: In the time since you started Oval, popular music has increasingly highlighted the software and machines used in it’s creation.  I’m thinking specifically of the way Radiohead and many other bands incorporate glitches and software artifacts in their sound, and even the way pop and hip-hop artists like Kanye West have used Auto-Tune in ways that obviously distort the human voice instead of unobtrusively correct it.  Do you feel like these trends are in some way the result of what you did in the 90s, or at least inspired by the same things?

MP: It seems that the crucial aspect to “glitch” is not how to precisely date or define it, but from which angle you make it work for you. From my perspective, Oval in the 90s was not primarily about introducing disruptive elements into an otherwise unquestioned, fully intact musical narrative, but in fact it was about the exact opposite. Oval was all about creating intactness from the most disparate and unlikely building blocks – I guess I had subscribed to the somewhat naïve hope to prevent that at the advent of this “software era” everyone and everything would just proceed with (music) business as usual. By the way, I did not (and still don’t) believe in changing the agenda via “anti- music” – like noise, etc. – but always try to go for a more elegant solution that challenges people in an inviting way. With Systemisch, I was pretty busy proving that my tracks could be music after all, even capable of flirting with “pop” – while for others, Oval was probably on the forefront of “experimental electronic music” (ugh).

Sure, the entire early Oval mission did have a lot to do with disrupting certain traditional conceptions about the intactness of music. However, on a practical level, these early tracks were in fact totally linear, pleasant and very song-like. But granted, after the release of Systemisch, the “glitch” meme was undoubtedly out there, a steady part of the electronic music canon – and apparently, it spread into other many areas. But I guess such a dynamic has long been standard practice in arts, no? Plus, this dawn of self-awareness for digitality itself did happen in a lot of other fields of media as well.

What do I think of this? I remain pretty neutral here. First and foremost, I have always seen my role in introducing new distinctions into music to be suggesting the occasional shift in perspective and, if at all possible, trigger some discussions. And I guess I have ultimately succeeded at that – the glitch distinction/mechanic is out there, part of the electronic music arsenal / vocabulary – albeit for all the wrong reasons, at least from my perspective.

Disclaimer: I have never claimed to have been the first to have “invented glitch”. Looking back from today, I’ d say that Oval represented a certain alignment of musical instinct, pop sensibilities, some innovative details and lots of outspoken, nonconformist attitude – all apparently executed convincingly enough to render Oval this somewhat intangible phenomenon that kept people guessing…and to be “influential”.

AL: In the past, you’ve used high-end Mac Pros to create your music, and helped to create custom software consoles to illustrate some aspects of your work.  Have you continued to engage in high-tech experimentation, and keep up with the latest advances in computing? Have you revisited your software project to attempt to create something more sophisticated that takes advantage of greater computer power or advances in software?

MP: I feel this $500 PC could be the next felt pen applied to the CD surface. It is a piece of info from a release bio that already seems to be on the way to developing a life of its’ own. Even though O was in fact made with this old stock PC, it only serves as a placeholder to signify: “no secret-weapon-type tech was used in the making of this record”.

In fact, Oval always was a low key/low budget affair. If you would go ahead and date Oval tracks based on the hardware utilized in their making, you’d always have to add several years to the assumed creation date, because I never, even to this day, had (or cared about) the “latest technology.” For example, Systemisch ultimately ended up as this glorious mono recording because I simply could not afford a fancy stereo sampler at the time. Also, one of my ideas for these early records was that the music should always retain an atmosphere as if everything could have been created / performed on (multiple) old tape recorders. I guess it remains important to my music to this day that I always had to get creative with modest resources.

AL: Aside from the different methods and means you employ to make the music on the new records, how would you characterize the difference in the music itself?  How has your thinking about your music changed in the time since your last recorded output? What motivated this change of approach?

MP: The main guideline was to create pure music with an irresistible quality to it, something you could not really put your finger on, but that could move people. And despite the fact that pretty much everything else around me has undergone such crazy transitions since then, my perspective stayed the same through all these years. Ultimately, I wanted to end up with emotional, touching music – regardless of the building blocks or construction principles utilized in its’ making. I guess I am pretty good at identifying what I am *not* interested in, always ending up with this essentialist concept. Plus, I do know that I have a compulsive tendency to always go for the most unlikely building blocks. Systemisch was a linear album full of moody songscapes, everything was put together in a very straightforward manner, simply composed out of a few, albeit unlikely, building blocks.

In practical terms, this meant giving each track its’ most convincing musical form and to pack in as much emotion and atmosphere into the smallest possible space. That’s why a considerable portion of tracks on O ended up as these high-density miniatures (album CD2), while others were turned full-featured “songs” (tracks 2,4,6,8, etc on CD1). My primary concern was to give each track a chance to truly shine and achieve as much “associative power” and irresistible emotionality as possible. For example, the sheer “visual” potential of the “interludes” (O CD1, tracks 1,3,5,7,9,11, etc) could lock you into an intense staring contest for a pretty long time. In a sense, this music plays you.

Tracks based on these sorts of high-density phrases would in fact have lost a lot of their momentum by adding more variations – or adding any other type of sound for that matter. All tracks on side B of the Oh EP (same goes for CD2 of the O album) are pure, concise miniatures in order to get across the maximum emotion. Being liberated from having to think constantly about “what could be missing here,” I could instead concentrate on their distinct “faux future evergreen” atmosphere. Other design goals for these miniatures were “ringtone,” “evergreen,” and “music that you could swear you already know”.

All in all, O is all about turning Oval from a lean-forward to a lean-back experience without sacrificing any of the achievements (musical and programmatic) of the former Oval albums – and instead convincingly challenge music on its own turf without being just plain bad at writing songs.

Matthew Shipp (photo by Lorna Lentini)

At the age of 49, pianist Matthew Shipp – who has recorded more than thirty records as a leader or soloist – is one of the most influential figures in modern jazz. As a musician, his occasionally forceful style of play, his dynamic use of the lower octaves, and his keen sense of negative space give him an instantly recognizable sound. His compositional style is deeply rooted in his extensive experience as a free jazz improviser and the idiosyncratic blues of Thelonious Monk, and it has more recently begun to incorporate elements of modern classical music, electronica, and hip-hop.

By the end of the millenium, based solely on the strength of his studio recordings and live performances, Shipp had already become a major figure in the jazz world. But in 2000, Thirsty Ear Recordings invited Shipp to curate their new Blue Series, where he proceeded to not only highlight some of the best and most interesting jazz artists working today, but also to tear down the boundaries within the genre. Artists like hip-hop sound collagist DJ Spooky, rappers Antipop Consortium, rock guitarist Vernon Reid, and electronica duo Spring Heel Jack were brought in to produce adventurous works, both on their own and in collaboration with jazz musicians, to create a daringly open blueprint for the future of jazz. This approach drew rave reviews and generated some much-needed excitement in a genre that suffers from a stuffy and forbidding reputation. But Shipp’s iconoclasm sometimes draws controversy instead of praise, as it did this winter when his remarks questioning the pre-eminence of elder statesmen like Herbie Hancock in the jazz world drew fire in the press.

Now, more or less coinciding with his ten-year anniversary as head of the Blue Series, Shipp has released 4D, which is billed as a summation of his career to date. A solo piano recording full of spacious new compositions and re-arrangements of jazz standards, it also includes startling takes on more unusual tracks like the French class sing-a-long “Frere Jacques” and the medieval “Greensleeves.” At Length spoke to Shipp about his new record, the mystical side of his musical philosophy, and getting burned out on the jazz world.

Click the player below to stream the title track from Shipp’s new record, 4D.  Depending on your internet connection, the song may take a minute to load.

Matthew Shipp – “4D”

Ehren Gresehover:   The first thing I read about this record from Thirsty Ear’s web site was that this new record would be a “synthesis and culmination” of all your work with the label.

Mathew Shipp:  Right.

EG:   And 4D, the title of the record, sounds like it refers to the fourth dimension, which to a physicist is the dimension of time. But there’s also a strong mystical tradition concerned with the fourth dimension, which had an impact on the Cubists. Jazz has a strong tradition of science fiction and mysticism. Were you trying to tap into that with this title?

MS:   Yeah, that’s definitely a component and a product of a way of looking at the jazz universe. I mean, if you look at mysticism within jazz, there are a few known approaches. First, there’s the Coltrane approach, which is kind of a circular universe with a resonance not unlike Indian classical music, taking jazz and making it a very ecclesiastic music, not in a Christian way, but kind of in a universal consciousness way.  And in Sun Ra a persona is created. He was taking aspects of Egyptian mythology, and Greek thought like Pythagoras and things like that to create a figure. And the generation of the musical universe comes about because of that mystery religion world view in sound. So I’m definitely coming out of that tradition – a mixture of both the Sun Ra and the Coltrane ways of using mysticism within the jazz universe. And the other thing about jazz, I mean actually when I play, I’m talking about the actual linear content of my playing.  I mean, I sit down on the piano and I create lines in the same way Bud Powell or Bill Evans would, but I am actually always trying to get a universal equation when I do that. And I can’t define that, but I’m always aiming for the line that has some sort of elegance and for it to actually say something that is an equation of being of sorts. Mysticism is a huge aspect of my whole thing within jazz.

EG:   In John Szwed’s biography of Sun Ra, he talked about how he came out of a pre-jazz tradition in African American culture based on African Zionism and Egyptian mythology, and how that adapted itself very well to sort of a science fiction.

MS:  Right. You can take something like the Emerald Tablet and the idea of aliens coming to earth and get the idea that a lot of our so-called religions might be kind of mistranslations of some other text, which really does lend itself to science fiction very much even though it’s a mystical concept. If you deal with infinity, and if you deal with the fact that a mind is within the pool of infinity, and anything finite is connected to infinity, then if we have human beings, there can therefore be levels of mind infinitely above that. So what maybe religion calls angels were actually aliens? I’m not trying to get like… I’m not into flying saucers and stuff per se, but I’m just saying there is a mythology that goes with the music that Sun Ra did really tap into definitely and informs the whole idea of when you sit at the instrument. It’s almost like you are a mathematician from another planet. And you have the system of math in your head and that system of math allows you to generate an elegant language of sorts, and that’s the whole thought form that feeds the mythology of the music.

EG:   There is something almost alchemical with the way music works. In some ways it seems very mathematical and very physical that that the sounds of all these harmonics and vibrations can be written as equations. But also it’s very much a mystical experience.

MS:  Right. It’s so cosmic that you can’t even describe it. The great thing about the mystery of any music is that when it’s over you know you felt something good, but you can’t say what it was. You just can’t say what just occurred.

EG:   If you could totally describe what music was doing then you wouldn’t need the music. Music is there because it does something that words can’t.

MS:  Right, exactly.

EG:  Bringing things a little more down to earth, I was really curious to what extent you set out to do this set of recordings as a conscious summation of what you’ve been doing lately. Was that at the front of you mind when you started planning the album?

MS:  No, no. I think your whole past is always pressing on you, anyway, whether you consciously want it to or not. So in one sense any slice of space-time is a summation.  But I guess I’ve always wanted to tie things up in a nice way, which you can’t ever do actually, but I’m always looking for that. I think I’m making a statement more of where I am. I guess just basically you’re always going to be able to put together everything you learn.

EG:   When I was prepping for this interview, I came across one that you gave right around the time you put out DNA in which you said that record was kind of capping off a very frenetic period of your career and you were thinking about taking a break. And right after that, of course, you become curator of the Blue Series for Thirsty Ear and had yet another busy decade. Do you see yourself at a point now where you’re thinking about what the next phase is?

MS:  I know what the next phase is. I’ve been thinking about it. I’m at a point now where I’m actually burned out from the jazz world and I would really like to take a break. I mean, I love performing, so I’m never going to get burned out from getting on the stage and playing. But what I would really like to do is take a break. I mean the thing about recordings is the mindset that goes with it. You have to prep for them, you have to set up a kind of a milieu for certain recordings to be accepted and you have to then put it out there and sit back and wait to see what happens. And I am kind of tired of it. I’m not saying that I’ll never do another album again.   But I am really just kind of caught in the cycle of doing recordings. I actually consider myself gifted at that kind of conceptualizing and doing it, but I really want to just perform. But for the next cycle, this solo piano thing is really where I want to go. I mean, I perform solo a lot these days, and I really like it and I really think that I have complete freedom when I do it. So the next cycle is just to keep doing what I’m doing. You know, there’s no other all-electronic phase of any other big jump that I am going to do. I’m just going to play a piano because it’s a really nice thing to do.

EG:   Are you going to continue your work over at Thirsty Year curating the Blue Series?

MS:  Yeah. I mean I don’t really do that much. I used to really be involved with everybody’s recording and stuff, but as long as it’s still there I’ll probably be part of it. It’s definitely a cool thing to do because it kind of kicks me out of my own orbit a little bit sometimes.

EG:   What you’ve done with the Blue Series has been consistently exciting. I feel like the worst enemy of jazz right now is that people are almost too reverent about it. They treat it like a big museum with a bunch of old stuff you’re not allowed to touch.

MS:  [Laughs.] Don’t get me started. I’m with you 100% with that.

EG:   The Blue Series has been doing something really great, not just for jazz, but also for music in general, by bridging some of these artificial boundaries that separate the genres.

MS:   Well I’m just not into the reverence that we give to jazz’s past. Granted it’s a lot of great music, but so what? You get up in the morning and we all breathe the same air. Why pretend that if something was done in 1958 it has any more value than anything anybody’s doing now. I definitely feel jazz is in a deep freeze and the mindset of people that deal with jazz is really very problematic. Part of the Blue Series is me trying to develop for myself even a different paradigm altogether to deal with because the jazz paradigm is deadly, man. There are a lot of people to blame for it, but the bottom line is it’s an illusion and just a drag.

EG:   Speaking of old stuff that’s not a drag, you have a handful of great re-arrangements of some older songs on the new record. A couple of them are definitely within standards in the jazz tradition. But “Frere Jacques” and “Greensleeves” are both unexpected highlights of the record. “Frere Jacques,” in particular is so percussive and surprisingly dynamic. How did you decide to do those two songs?

MS:   Well I’ve recorded them before, actually.   “Frere Jacques” was on Pastoral Composure and “Greensleeves” I did on a duet album with Matt Maneri at Hat Art [Gravitational Systems]. I like song books in general. They have a deep abiding place in people’s subconscious minds because they have just been around forever, and I like to mess with people’s minds a little bit by doing stuff with them. The thing about “Frere Jacques” is that it lends itself to that percussive, Prokofiev quality. I actually did it as a joke when Peter Gordon (who runs Thirsty Ear Records) was in the studio. And somehow it came up and I just sat down at the piano and did it. And I wasn’t keen on using it, but when the tapes were sent back he had listened to them before I did, he was begging me to put it on. And “Greensleeves” I just did at the end of the day. I played a bunch of staff and I was a little tired and I just started to bang away at it. I wasn’t planning on using that either, but when I listened back it seemed to be a proper coda for the album.

EG:   I see you’re doing a European tour in April, but before that you’re going to be playing as part of the 40th anniversary of the New England Conservatory of Music, where you studied more than 20 years ago.

MS:  1983, you’re right.

EG:   How does it feel to be celebrating that institution and to be looking back on that time in your life?

MS:  I’m doing it as a favor for a friend. I’m not celebrating anything. I don’t believe in celebrating institutions of any sort. I’m against institutions; I’m against tradition.

EG:  Very punk rock.

MS:   I think Ran Blake is going to be there, and that’s one thing I’m looking forward to. They’re doing a bunch of these shows, some in Boston and some in New York, which is where I’m playing. Ran Blake is going to be there and I have a fondness in my heart for Ran. I don’t look at him as the New England Conservatory, I look at him as Ran Blake who happens to be at that institution. I haven’t seen him for years. But I have no nostalgia for that place or any place.

]]> http://atlengthmag.com/music/4d/feed/ 0 http://atlengthmag.com/music/finch-original-soundtrack/ http://atlengthmag.com/music/finch-original-soundtrack/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:05:49 +0000 Murder by Death http://atlengthmag.com/?p=1383 Jeff Vandermeer and rock band Murder by Death's Adam Turla in a conversation about the latter's haunting soundtrack to Vandermeer's darkly fantastic detective novel, Finch, the third and final volume in his award-winning Ambergris Trilogy. ]]>

With books recently joining  music and movies in the digital world where they can all be consumed on the same portable electronic devices, it shouldn’t surprise us that books are going multimedia in new and interesting ways.  Yet somehow the idea of pairing a soundtrack to a novel still seems counterintuitive at first glance. But at first listen, the pairing sounds both natural and inevitable.

This sort of adventurous forward thinking is to be expected of  award-winning author Jeff Vandermeer, who is just as likely to appear reviewing or being reviewed in the New York Times Book Review as he is to be name-checked by the tech-faddish Boing Boing.  His Ambergris trilogy has spawned three soundtracks and two short films, not to mention numerous nods in numerous critics year-end lists.  The final novel in the trilogy, Finch, is a menacing and strangely poignant story of John Finch, a noir-ish detective who must solve two unfathomable murders amidst a backdrop of alien occupation and corrosive nostalgia.

And what better musical collaborator for a postmodern detective story than Bloomington, Indiana’s Murder by Death, a darkly earthy rock band that would be comfortable drinking in the same post-apocalyptic dive bars Nick Cave and Tom Waits might find themselves, and who take their name from an eccentric 1976 mystery film.

At Length was able to join Vandermeer and Murder by Death’s Adam Turla in a conversation about why novels might be a better pairing for music than film, the pros and cons of postmodern genre mash-ups, and how rock and roll can be like a poetry exercise.

Click here to read the first 50 pages of Finch.  At the events on page 46, click play below to stream the accompanying track from the soundtrack.

At Length: So how did this all come about? I know from the note at the end of the book that Jeff, you were already a fan of Murder By Death’s music. Did you approach the band about doing the soundtrack?

Jeff Vandermeer: Yeah, I did. There had been soundtracks to the previous two Ambergris novels, and I had been listening to a lot of Murder By Death when I was writing Finch, the third one.

AL: Adam, were you guys fans of Jeff before he asked you to collaborate on this?

JV: I don’t think they knew who the hell I was! [Laughs.]

Adam Turla:I didn’t know who he was, but one of my best friends who I grew up with is an avid science fiction and fantasy reader, and he knew who Jeff was. I told him about the project and he said, “You should do it.” And our publicist had heard of Jeff.  So I said we’d read the manuscript and go from there. And we read it and liked it.

AL: Did you guys talk much during the writing or recording process for the soundtrack?

AT: Well, there was the initial back and forth, of course. Just after we told Jeff we liked the book, we had to talk and see if it was a reasonable project, if it was something we could actually pull off.

JV: But there was no expectation of anything on my part. It was totally their inspiration for what they should choose from the book. I didn’t even have an idea that they were going to take specific scenes until they told me later on, which I thought was awesome.

AT: We had never done anything like this before, so we decided to approach it in the sort of way that we would have for a movie. We just took scenes and said, “What would the score be here?” Or maybe not so much what would be playing if this were an actual movie, but how can you evoke the images or scenes through music?

JV: And that makes sense from my point of view because I was thinking very cinematically about Finch as I was writing it, though I don’t always think this way. So in a weird way the Murder By Death soundtrack is also the soundtrack to the movie in my head. This would be perfect for the beginning of a soundtrack to a movie version of Finch, too. Absolutely dead-on perfect.

AL: One of the things that intrigued me about the project is that the sense of time is so different between books and movies. Both movies and music tend to exist in time, and you can’t escape from it, but with a novel, time is more elastic. Also, it takes a lot longer to just get through a novel, so an album’s worth of music wouldn’t quite sync up.

JV: But I think there’s a very real similarity between novels and music in this respect, which is to say that I think that the listener and the reader bring a lot of their interpretation to it in a way that you can’t with a movie. You can interpret things in a movie, but not in the same way because the images in a movie are already given to you. So you might have lyrics in a song, but they’re suggestive. The listener is still filling in information and bringing their own interpretation, just like when they read a book. So in a way it’s more immersive than a movie but in a different way. Like you say, there’s a long time scale when you read a book as opposed to listening to a piece of music, but they’re both equally immersive if you let them be.

AL: I approached preparing for this interview in a couple of different ways. First, I listened to the soundtrack as I was reading the book, but then I also went back and listened to a couple of specific scenes with specific tracks playing to see how they synced up in time. I thought that “Memory Bulb 1” worked really well – it’s a short part of the book and the song has a tendency to sync up. It seems like the three parts of that memory-dream are reflected in three sections of that track. I was curious how much you had thought about the timing.

AT: Yeah, that was what we were trying to do, but as far as actually timing it out as you listen to it, that’s something that we just hoped might happen for the people who did choose to read it at the same time. We just realized that some parts really worked that way, in a whole Dark Side of the Moon way, syncing up that record to the Wizard of Oz. I remember doing that as a kid and saying, “There’s just no way this is going to work.” (And of course I got high or some shit like that.) You’re watching it, and you want it to work so bad, and there are those parts where it does, but for the most part it’s just, “Yep, there’s music playing over the movie.” The idea of that sort of thing is that you want it to work, so I hope that people will find those moments where it clocks in perfectly. But I don’t think you can really write for that, because people read at different speeds. It’s not like a movie where the monster jumps out of a closet and the music is all “da-DAAA!” So we went for mood and just trying to take those scenes and go, okay, this is the sound of a parade, this is the sound of a mushroom breathing in and out, and just going through each element and trying to capture what we thought that would sound like.

JV: I really like the idea of people listening to the memory bulb tracks as they’re reading those sections of the book for a couple of reasons. First of all, they’re probably the most difficult sections of the book because they’re stream of consciousness and the music sort of carries you along, but also – though the book can stand on its own – there’s a lot of images in there that are hardwired from the other two books of the series, and it’s weird because the music that they did that was the correct emotion if you know those references. I don’t know if it’s intentional, but that’s the way it comes across. So there’s this awesome overlay that the text can only do for some of the readers. So I like that idea.

AL: One thing I really loved also about the two memory bulb tracks is that those two sections of the novel, not unlike the way a theme will occur over and over again in a score for a film, bleed in and pop up at different times throughout the rest of the book.

JV: Well I find it very interesting, too, because there are those recurring motifs in the music itself and then there are the recurring motifs in the novel that are pulled from those sections, specifically because every time you encounter them it’s in a slightly different context, which means they have a slightly different emotional resonance. It’s like a journey where the same things mean something different later. The music does a nice job of conveying that. At the risk of sounding too… whatever, I just love that soundtrack to death. I can’t think of the novel without thinking that.

AT: Thanks, man. Speaking of the recurring motifs and themes, one of the things we were able to do with this soundtrack is something we’ve talked about doing but never were able to do entirely, and we liked the idea of having a theme for an album, but we’ve never really brought back the theme in other songs really, but we did it on the Finch soundtrack. There’s “Finch’s Theme,” which is the first track, with just the guitar playing it. Then later on the album, in the middle, there’s “Finch’s Theme” with the band playing – a lot of cello, some drums and whatnot. Then, later – and this is more obscure but it was really fun to do – I think it’s in the “Shootout” song, the song is in 5/4 but the theme is a waltz, it’s in three. And I actually played the melody on guitar in 5/4 over this sort of weird keyboard thing. It was really fun to do that, because you write the theme and you hear it one way in your head, and you’re playing it the same way and your hands are used to playing it a certain way. But it was really fun to transpose it into a totally different key, a totally different song, and a totally different time signature. And it was just cool and fun to make a musical homage to your own song. It’s fun to write it into a song where it wasn’t even supposed to belong.

AL: One other track that I thought really worked when reading the actual scene, and for very different reasons, is the track “Party.” The instrumentation is pretty much spelled out in descriptions of the band playing in the scene in the novel, and there are even descriptive cues about how they play. It’s the closest we get to stage directions for the band.

AT: That’s how we took it.

JV: That was pretty awesome. It was really a weird experience when I heard it for the first time, because it was really close to what I had imagined it would sound like.

AT: That’s really funny because I pictured it differently when I read the book, but when we tried we ended up with something different. We took the book and it said “trash can drums,” so we made a drum set out of pots and pans and trash and stuff; and there’s cello, accordion, and singing. So we wrote a couple of versions, basically impromptu, but the one on the record was the one that sounded most natural with those instruments, as well as really fun. It’s really fun to have a parameter like that – it’s like a poetry exercise.

AL: Like writing a sonnet.

JV: The funny thing about it, too, is that I listen to a lot of instrumental music when I write, so now I have the soundtrack to write to for the next stuff that I write, as well. And also the book is beginning to get picked up by foreign publishers, and some of the translators are actually requesting the link to the music. They want to see what the mood of the music is because they think it might aid them in their translations a little bit, with the flow of the language and the story.

AL: That’s really fascinating. So they use it to more accurately translate the book?

JV: Well, especially for the cadences. In some places it’s easier for the translators, because my style fits the styles of writers they may be used to in their country because of the way the language is constructed, but in some it doesn’t. So sometimes they ask a lot of questions because they’re not sure of certain things, with the rhythm of it, so that’s one reason why.

AL: Both the soundtrack and the novel are inherently postmodern in the sense that they both play with genre to get across a more complicated or composite effect. In the novel, there are a lot of detective fiction structures to tell this story, along with elements of science fiction, fantasy, and spy novel elements. In the soundtrack, you can take the song “Shootout,” which starts out with sort of a Morricone-esque guitar and then it suddenly bursts in with that old-timey matinee organ, as if Bela Lugosi were suddenly appearing from around the corner.

AT: That’s exactly what we were doing.

AL: Could you talk about the pros and cons when you mess around with genre to create a work of art?

JV: Well, when you do it on the fiction side, you’ve got to make sure you’re really committed to it. I don’t know how it works on the music side, but when you deal with these kinds of noir story elements, you’d better really bring it. You’d better really combine it in a really organic way with everything else, otherwise it’s just like, “Oh, there’s this detective plot, and this fantasy setting, but they don’t really go together.” The thing that really blends them together is this idea of Ambergris being this kind of failed city, like a Baghdad or a Beirut. Then the detective has to navigate through this failed state, and that’s the glue that binds it together – the political and those other aspects of the genre. But the detective story is definitely the spine that gets the reader interested. You start with the murders and all that and it sets up certain expectations. And then because it does, and because you’ve got people wanting to find out what the hell is going on with that, you can do a lot of other stuff off of it. That’s where a lot of that cross-genre stuff comes into play. The reader is going to have more patience, because you’re stringing all this other stuff off this single question that they want answered.

AL: Adam, what do you think are the pros and cons of playing with genre in a musical sense?

AT: I think I always try to be really careful in order not to mimic something. But then if I’m going to mimic it, I want to make it really obvious, like in that part of “Shootout.” I’ve always wanted to have that musical moment where you go “Here’s the monster! Look out!” and this was a perfect opportunity for it. And to actually have someone transforming in the text only helped. So it was cool because it was something we had talked about doing for nine years. Finally, there was the right circumstance, because it can really only work in an instrumental setting. It was really fun in that regard. But like I said, if you’re not going to go for it all the way, you really have to be very delicate. A lot of our reviews, either very positively or very casually, have lumped us into a thing where they say that we have a sort of Western influence on our albums, though we weren’t trying for that consciously. People will occasionally say, “Oh here’s another one of these Western rock bands.” And we had a reviewer say, “They’re one of many Southern gothic bands.” The first time I saw that, I had never heard of Southern gothic. American noir is another term I had never heard until someone described us that way a few years ago. And I was like, “Oh, that’s kinda cool,” but that also implies that we’re not a rock band. So I prefer to keep things fresh. I like to borrow ideas a little bit here and there, and try to keep original, try to keep them Murder by Death, keep them within my writing style, so I’m not just making copies. You know, Americana is pretty big right now. In the last couple of years I’ve seen a big return, with all these punk rockers trying to make folk records. There’s a lot of that out there right now. But if you go too hard in that direction, it sounds very disingenuous. If you’re going to borrow themes or style, you need to just make it your own, or you shouldn’t write about something that’s not really you, I guess. At least from a songwriter’s perspective.

JV: At the same time, with the noir stuff, I’ve read mysteries since I was a kid. It’s not something I’ve ever written before, but something I’ve really enjoyed. So it’s hardwired into me as a reader. And I was also doing a lot of reviewing of mysteries, which made me do a lot of analyzing to take them apart to see how they were put together. So that really helped. I wouldn’t even have to think about what are the mystery tropes, I would just do it. Another thing is that over the years, as a writer, you steal stuff. You steal stuff directly. You say, “I like how this is working,” so you plug it right into whatever you’re working on, which is what I do. I usually take it out again, but I do that to see how it works, and that’s another way of internalizing some of this stuff. So if I see a technique I really like, I’ll steal it, put it in something I’m working on just to see how it works, take it out again, use it somewhere else again.

Another thing, too, is that you’ve got to have some sort of authenticity of setting. The section that we were just talking about with the shootout is based on going to some pretty skeezy neighborhoods in Romania with our editor friends. If you can taste the rust of everything it’s because I’m describing a real place and just transposing it. You don’t have to have been in a shootout to write about a shootout because a lot of people don’t survive those things. But you have to have some level of authenticity.

AT: It’s really important that when you’re writing fiction, and that’s what our song lyrics frequently are, the listener has some expectation that you’re able to sing about this stuff and they can believe it. Sometimes when you’re trying to do fiction within lyrics, that’s where you’re going to get criticism for the fantastic, because there are those occasional people will say, “I don’t believe this,” or “I don’t get this – this is ridiculous. You can’t have done this.” But it’s fiction, it’s a whole genre – look it up. I guess if you still just say you don’t believe it, I’m not selling it well enough, then that’s fine. But I think for the majority of people, you have to bring them in a little bit, just enough that they believe you, and that’s enough. Most people are willing to jump in and ride that bitch to Valhalla.

JV: The thing about the storytelling – that’s another reason I thought they’d be a good match. You hear the lyrics when you listen to the songs, but when I actually looked at them on the page, I was like, “Damn, these guys are really good storytellers.” And that actually makes a difference in how you can sync up with a work of fiction.

AL: Jeff, I have one final question about the intersection of music with your novel. Was the character Duncan Shriek any kind of reference to Duncan Sheik, the singer/songwriter?

JV: This is really terrible, and if you guys love him, then I’m damned forever. But I saw him in concert and he was really, really bad. And I thought, well, I need to at least get something out of it. So I took the name and I changed it. [Laughs]

Myra Melford (Photo by Jean-Francois Laberine)

Myra Melford is one of the most exciting musicians working in any genre, and though she’s most frequently associated with the more avant garde circles of jazz, sometimes it seems as if she’s working in every genre. Drawing from influences as diverse as the blues of her native Chicago and the North Indian harmonium music she studied as a Fulbright Scholar in 2000, her music defies even the bravest attempts at categorization.

January will see the release of The Whole Tree Gone (Firehouse 12 Records), her first outing as a bandleader since the 2006 album The Image of Your Body, both of which recorded with her elastic and versatile ensemble Be Bread, consisting of Cuong Vu on trumpet, Ben Goldberg on clarinet, guitarists Brandon Ross and StomuTakeishi and drummer Matt Wilson. Melford talks to At Length about her new record, and pushing the boundaries of geography, genre and gender in the information age.

Click the player below to stream a track from Melford’s new record.  Depending on your internet connection, the song may take a minute to load.

Myra Melford’s Be Bread – “The Whole Tree Gone”

At Length: This record came as a bit of a surprise to me, because I was expecting more of the electric touches that you began to explore on The Image of Your Body, your first record with Be Bread. Why did you move away from that on this album?

Myra Melford: It just seemed that the music I wrote seemed to be more appropriate for an acoustic ensemble. Sometimes I don’t know that. I can have a certain idea about who I’m writing for and what I want to happen with it, and then when I actually start playing the music, I feel it would sound better in a slightly different setting. So in this case, I decided that I liked having everything acoustic as a contrast to the last book of music.

AL: These recordings are a few years old, are they not?

MM: The recordings aren’t old, but the compositions were written a few years ago. Everything was recorded just a year ago. So all of those are recent performances. But it’s music that I wrote for a Chamber Music of America grant in 2004. So I’ve had many years to perform the music, and try it with different people, and finally got to record it with this group this last December.

AL: Has the music changed a lot during that time period, playing with different musicians?

MM: Yeah, I think every time I play it I learn something new about it, but you know the compositions – the actual composed material – don’t change very much. What can change is, obviously, the arrangement, depending on what players and what instruments are being used. The other thing that tends to change a lot is the improvisation, depending on who’s improvising it. And the better I get to know the music, the more free I feel with the material to try a lot of different approaches to improvising on it. And that’s the really fun part – to see how different it can be and still be the same composition.

AL: That seems akin to one of the fundamental principles of a lot of avant garde art: Once you master the basics of pure formalism, you can feel free to experiment.

MM: Well, I think that’s true and at the same time I think you could argue that as you’re getting to know the material and you’re experimenting and exploring, you’re at once mastering and also learning what that material is. So, I wouldn’t discount all the experimenting and insights you get while you’re still learning the music, if you know what I mean. That whole process is important, especially for me. While I have colleagues who I greatly admire who decide what the music is, and they write for a new band, and they play it with that band, and they record it and that’s it. But for me, first of all, I like playing the music in a lot of different contexts, and it’s become part of my creative process to live with the music for a while and discover more and more about what the potential is.

AL: Rock music, and popular music in general, tends to be much more the other way, where you write the composition almost during the recording process.

MM: Right.

AL: But technology has changed the context of recording and putting out product, so that even in rock music, bands and artists will post early versions of songs and almost workshop them out online. Have you done any experimenting with that?

MM: You know, I’m pretty bad about trying these new technologies, but I have to say that I do see it changing with my colleagues and peers with all the social networking things. I have a MySpace account which I try very hard to keep updated, but I’m always behind. I do notice that a lot of my “friends” are exploiting it pretty well. And I also have friends who are great about either blogging or sending out a newsletter to their fans about what’s going on. I can see that it’s really appealing and has been quite effective for some of them. We’ll see if I ever get around to doing it. I think it’s happening more and more with the advent of the internet and the demise of the record industry as we know it. I think people are really – partly out of necessity and partly out of creativity – using that kind of networking to good effect with this kind of music. Because yes, you could say I’m a jazz musician, but I’m equally at home in a kind of alternative music scene because I don’t play straight-ahead jazz. It seems like those people on the fringes are the ones that kind of have to look into other ways of reaching fans, because they don’t have access to mainstream venues for that.

AL: When you push past the boundaries of any given genre you suddenly find yourself with a lot of other like-minded people who are doing the same thing in other genres.

MM: Exactly.

AL: Speaking of the internet, a lot of the hallmarks of the information age are things you’ve already been doing. Like pushing between genres, and even between cultures. You’ve done a lot of work in Japan with Satoko Fujii, and of course you’ve done your Fulbright studies in North India, and it seems like you’re ahead of the curve. Do you find more people that you’re working with are getting a more global mindset or are doing more of this collaboration across continents?

MM: Yeah. I think it’s just a natural outgrowth of how much we travel, how easy it is to travel anywhere in the world, and also how easy it is to hear music from anywhere in the world whether you travel or not. The third reason are these social networking things where all of a sudden I’m friends with all of these people in far-flung places that I didn’t even know had listened to my music. So I think for me certainly a lot of it is based on being able to travel, to work with Satoko and certainly what I’ve done in India, but I think I have made similar kinds of connections to people in Europe, like Han Bennink. I’ve just come back from a trip to Europe, where I was in Berlin for a couple of days, and I’m working on a project here at UC Berkeley where I’m trying to amplify the inside of the piano, which is not so easy to do. I met up with a couple pianists, one in Berlin and another in London who are doing similar experiments, and we started exchanging notes and talking about projects. I think it’s just partly my own personality and partly because of travel and being able to hear music from all over, it’s a lot easier to make those connections than it was even twenty years ago.

AL: We mentioned Satoko earlier, who is just one of a number of women that you have collaborated with. Jazz, like a lot of things both in music and without, has tended to be historically dominated by men. You seem to work more frequently with women than the average musician. Is that a conscious choice? Do you feel compelled to nurture younger women in jazz, or make a point to collaborate with other women who are your peers?

MM: Yeah, it’s interesting. If you look at my work historically, I went through a long period of working mostly with men, although early on in my career, in the late ’80s, I worked with a flute player named Marion Brandis, and she and I put on this women’s improvisers festival, where we were celebrating the fact that there were, in fact, a lot of women doing interesting, creative music with improvisation, whether jazz or some other kind of alternative orientation. But when I started getting into writing and playing my own music, I saw myself gravitating towards musicians who I felt best helped me realize that music, and a lot of them happened to be men. And just in recent years, I’ve discovered that there’s all these younger women who are wonderful musicians who I do feel a real affinity with musically, and it’s been really fun to start to work with them, and I think now it is again like it was in the late ’80s. it’s a conscious choice in part, but it’s also that it really makes sense to me musically. The other person I’ve been working with who’s really great is Nicole Mitchell.

AL: I didn’t know that the two of you were collaborating. Are you working as a duo, or part of a larger ensemble?

MM: Well, right now it’s that I’ve been a guest with her ensemble. She wrote a piece, a suite of music for Alice Coltrane a couple of summers ago with me as a guest soloist. That’s been performed now several places around the world, and we’ve talked about doing a duo or something like that which hasn’t materialized yet, but I’m hoping it will at some point.

AL: This new record strikes me as very warmly conversational. There are solos, but they feel tightly and organically connected to the composed material, all the players acting together toward a common goal. And I notice that you’ve been involved lately with a couple of projects that are leaderless ensembles. How do you interpret the role of a bandleader in a jazz ensemble, and has that changed for you over the years?

MM: Well, I’ve always really welcomed playing with musicians who are comfortable collaborating even if they’re “side people.” I’ve always welcomed the input of the people in my band. Part of the reason I hired them is because of their personality and their approach to things, and I’ve always been more open to that than some band leaders would be. I think also, obviously, I have a lot more experience now than when I was younger, and I would say that of the two collective projects I’ve done most recently – Trio M and the duo with Marty – have been very collaborative, especially Trio M and the way that group has been approaching improvisation. We certainly still solo and have times where we’re featuring one or the other of us, but a lot more of the time we don’t even prearrange any of that. If someone emerges as the soloist for a while, great, if they pop up for a minute and someone else takes over… it’s extremely conversational, to the point where we’re discovering what the arrangement of the music is while it’s evolving. Obviously it takes a lot of listening and a lot of communicating in a way that is conversational, and I’m sure that informs a lot of the way I work with my own band now.

AL: It certainly feels very ego-less when you listen to this record. You feel like you’re listening to a really integrated unit.

MM: That’s nice to hear.

AL: You’re currently on tour in California. Are you planning on doing any other touring when the record comes out?

MM: I was planning on doing two tours in January: a long weekend on the East Coast and a long weekend on the West Coast. The East Coast dates will have to be postponed, but we still will be playing several dates in California: at the Freight & Salvage, which is a a club in Berkeley on the 27th; on the 28th we’re going to Kuumbwa Jazz in Santa Cruz; the 29th and the 30th will be at the Redwood Jazz Alliance in Arcata.

AL: I wanted to ask you one other question that I find really interesting. You frequently draw upon work from other forms of artistic expression – I’m thinking about the song “Frank Gehry Goes West to Rest,” your work with poetry, and the piece on this record, “Moon Bird” for the Miro Sculptue at MoMA. How do these other works, visual art and literature, translate for you into a piece of music? What’s that process like?

MM: I have to say that for me it’s very intuitive – very little of it is intellectual. So it’s not like I’m trying to make this direct, very literal sort of translation. It’s more that when I’m moved by another work of art of whatever medium, I start to hear that or feel that musically, and that’s the first point. And the second point is that I rely on my standard approach to composing, which has a lot of variability in it, but I’ll start to work with material that somehow seems related to that work of art and I’ll develop it over a period of time. Then I’ll start to put the elements together, again referencing that work of art, but as I say, it’s very intuitive and has a lot to do with being inspired by a work of art in another medium and then translating those feelings or insights or whatever I get from that work of art into a musical form.

AL: Have you ever done a work of art in collaborating with a visual artist or a poet where the two of you work to create parallel works of art at the same time?

MM: I’ve done several projects like that. The biggest multimedia thing that I’ve worked on is a piece called Knock on the Sky that was a collaboration with two Butoh-trained dancers – Dawn Saito, who’s in New York and Oguri who’s in LA – and an archtiect friend of mine [Michael Haberz] who’s from Graz, Austria, and a colleague of his who’s a videographer. So we had live video in this architectural setting, mixing musicians who have worked with me (Cuong and Stomu – both from this record) and the two dancers. And there was a highly theatrical component to the work as well. It was based on Kobo Abe’s Woman in the Dunes, which was also made into a fantastic movie in Japan with a score by [Toru] Takemitsu. So that was our starting point. In this case, yes, we were all working off the same ideas, but going apart and developing our individual components and then coming back and putting them together and seeing how we needed to revise things, and going away and coming back again. So that was a fantastic process and the most ambitious multimedia work I’ve done. But I also used to work with a poet named Ruben Jackson when I was in New York – he’s at the Smithsonian in DC – and in that case it was more writing music that I felt worked with his poetry, so it wasn’t quite as collaborative in the same way. I’ve also worked with several other dancers, and done a lot of improvising with Oguri, this dancer in LA whom I mentioned. We get together and decide very little and do these free improvisations. But I really love working with other media for sure. Right now, I’m working on a project based on the drawings of an artist friend of mine who is based up in San Fransisco named Don Reich. I got a commission to write some music for his paintings, which will then be performed in an installation of his work at the Crocker Museum in Sacremento next year.

AL: Thank you so much for giving us your time today.

MM: Thank you so much.

Jason Urick - Photo by Devon Deimler

The personal computer has forever changed not only the way people consume music, but also the way they create it.  In much the same way that the camera enabled people to create works of visual art without being constrained by the limits of physical dexterity, a contemporary musician can use software to create, manipulate and mix sound to create musical compositions.

The music that Baltimore electronic composer Jason Urick has been creating with his laptop is difficult to categorize, but in both his previous ensemble Wzt Hearts (pronounced “Wet Hearts”) and on his new solo release Husbands (released 10/06/09 on Thrill Jockey), his work has been consistently compelling.  Recently, he spoke to us about the art of deconstructing a melody, having a long artistic attention span, and the unspeakable genius of Nicolas Cage.

Jason Urick – The Eternal Return (Right click on the link to download a track from the new album.)

AT LENGTH: For those unfamiliar with your work, could you describe the music you create and what you use to create it?

JASON URICK: Well, the second part is a little easier. I guess as far as the music I create, I would say it probably would be considered ambient or experimental. I definitely think it’s in the realm of electronic music. That would be the easiest large umbrella I couldn’t find a way to wriggle out of. But in general, it’s just kind of what I’ve done for a long time. There are definitely artists within the ambient, abstract electronic field that have led me in that direction, but I feel like other things have seeped in. And the tools I use to make it tie into this. I never really properly learned an instrument growing up – I mean, I had my time in junior high school with the guitar, but I wasted that trying to learn “Crazy Train” and never really learned the fundamentals – so I didn’t really pick up music until just after high school. I bought a really weird synthesizer, or at least it was weird to me. I knew the dude in Pavement had a weird analog synthesizer, and I started listening to stuff like Tortoise and Faust and became fascinated with all the weird sounds that I couldn’t really place, which didn’t sound like a guitar or a keyboard as I knew it. I bought a Roland Juno 6 and pretty quickly I was like, “Alright, now I just need to get a band.” So I had some punks and weirdos making music with me for a while. After I moved to Chicago, I didn’t have a band with me anymore, so I just started playing around with tape machines and out-of-tune field recordings and basically holding down three keys on a synth, but when I got to the computer, it felt natural and easy. It was the first time I was able to get out the stuff that was in my head. It’s just always been my medium, and if you’re working with a computer it’s electronic music – there’s just no way around it. My music ends up sounding abstract to most of the people who don’t share the same language. I feel like through the years I’ve swallowed so much music, I forget what’s weird to people and what’s a regular pop song. I love it all, but you sort of go with the intention of making music and ideally I’m not alienating people. Hopefully it will speak to a larger group, but that’s pretty much dictated by who gets it.

AL: Is the band you’re referring to Wzt Hearts?

JU: The band I was talking about formerly was the band I had in school. We never played in shows. We were just three 19 year-olds and a 30 year-old Philipino drummer. We would just drink Heinekens and play music once a week. It wasn’t until Wzt Hearts when I had the first real band and the only real band I’ve ever been in. When I moved to Baltimore I started collaborating with people, and Sean, the Wzt Hearts drummer, came up with the idea for this one-off show with me, him and Jeff Donaldson, who was the other steady member of the band. It started off as a one-off, but we kind of understood each other’s language and it lasted about four years or so.

AL: You put out a couple of pretty well-regarded records.

JU: Yeah, it was one of those bands that the press liked, but it still meant going to weird cities and playing for four people. We would always have one kid in every city and he was always “I couldn’t get my friends to come. I’m sorry.” But it was a really awesome experience. Before Wzt Hearts, I had chances to release stuff on smaller labels, but always found a way to second-guess my way out of it. I’d want to do something better, but when I finally had other people pushing and it wasn’t just my own self-doubt holding it back, it was nice to finally go through the process of putting out and releasing a record and seeing what would happen with that.

AL: So this is your first full length solo release since Wzt Hearts, right?

JU: Yeah. I had two online only EPs that I put out in 2000 or so, but never really came out as proper releases. This record was stuff I had started working on when I was still in Wzt Hearts, where I had come up with some things while manipulating sound and I would be like “This would work,” or I’d be trying it out and it wouldn’t and I’d put it to the side. But when I stopped playing with Wzt Hearts, I still had the urge to do some stuff, so I went back to these sketches and sound sets and decided to see what I could do with them. So the record just came out of that, though I wasn’t even sure it was going to come out. I sent it around to a handful of people and there was a weird email mess up, because five months after I sent it out I got an email from Bettina [Richards, founder of Thrill Jockey Records] saying “Hey, I guess you’re not anxious to do it, but we really want to do the record.” [Laughs.] I guess nobody else wants it, so it’s yours.

AL: It’s interesting that you started recordings some of this stuff while you were in Wzt Hearts, because it doesn’t sound that drastically different from the stuff you did there. Would you say that fans of Wzt Hearts would also like this record?

JU: Yeah, I would think so. My process never really changed. Wzt Hearts isn’t an improvised band – it’s hard to say you’re fully improvised when you’re working with a set of sounds on a laptop – but you’re still feeding off each other. But the sound and the process that I used with the new material are very similar. The only difference is that I don’t have that other person to dictate where I’m going to move my own sounds. But yeah, I think in general, other than the absence of drums, it sort of falls in line with a lot of the electronics in Wzt Hearts’ releases.

AL: I’ve seen you describe your work on this record as “ghosted, fragmented melodies,” which I thought was an interesting way of talking about it. What makes the pieces of a melody more interesting to you than a more straightforward or whole melodic structure?

JU: I think I like a lot of straight up well-crafted pop and folk music, which is very direct. Maybe it’s because when I try to do something like that I don’t feel like I have the language or the skill set to do something like Van Dyke Parks or some of the amazing songcrafters. What I can do is take a small motif or melody and see how many ways I can twist it. Most of the stuff that really got me excited when I was moving out of punk rock and getting into weirder stuff were bands like Oval or US Maple, Beefheart – you’d still have this melodic content but it had been changed. US Maple to me is like taking a normal rock sound, smashing it on the ground, and then taking the pieces and putting it back together in a really interesting way.

AL: I like Storm & Stress for that exact reason.

JU: When I lived in Chicago, one of the greatest things was being able to see them play a bunch of times, and US Maple. There was just a really great scene for people thinking like that. Storm & Stress specifically were such a huge influence on me at the time. I was 19 and geeking out at their shows, blown away at how they approached this rock band thing. Everything [from a traditional rock sound] was there, but it was all different and exciting. And I think it just carried over into the electronic stuff that I liked, which had a really deep and tough sensibility to it, but it was not presenting to you in a way that you’re used to receiving it. It really affected me. I put them on the same line with people who write pretty pop stuff. It’s just a progression of a way of doing it.

AL: Speaking of pop stuff, and fragmenting melodies, you very literally fragment one specific melody with the track “Let There Be Love,” which is just samples of the Bee Gees song of the same name, right?

JU: Yeah, pretty much two or three 1-second samples. I don’t think they’ll ever, ever come across them, so I think in a legal sense I’m pretty safe. I’m a huge fan of early Bee Gees stuff and created that song, not as a joke, but I just kept listening to this song over and over, and one day I was just sort of bored and brought a couple of samples of it and started playing around with it, just to see what would happen, and the song just built out of that. I wrestled back and forth with wanting to put it on the record, and decided to after all.

AL: It’s such a pretty song, what you do with it. It still has a bit of the color or feel of the original. When you listen to the two you can tell that they’re related, but with such a different end result.

JU: Well, it’s definitely easy when you have a really pretty jumping off point, I guess. For the longest time I didn’t do much sampling. For some reason it didn’t excite me. I think I just started to realize that no matter how much you twist something, there’s something that remains. I try not to go too crazy, just layering on effect and effect and effect. I like to sort of see what you can do with simple processes on a source recording and still retain this certain soul of the original thing. You can twist it out of recognition, whether it be a bit of guitar from the sample of a song, but I like to still feel the essence of the initial sample still in there.

AL: Speaking of eponymously named songs, the album is apparently named in tribute to the Cassavetes movie Husbands.

JU: In a sense, yeah. It was actually a name that me and Mike Haleta from Wzt Hearts were pushing for the name of our last record early on, but it got shot down. Mike had turned me on to the movie Husbands right around the time we were recording that and somehow I ended up with a video cassette of the movie that I think is stilled owed back to him. [Laughs] I think it’s still around here somewhere. It just seemed one of the those movies that I just wanted to watch over and over late at night. The more I sat with the title and the more I watched the movie, the more I became obsessed with elements of the it. So when the time came that the record was being worked on, all these things seemed to line up and it made sense to give the movie an unintentional, or semi-intentional tribute. It wasn’t like I sat down and decided to write a soundtrack to this movie. It’s just something that’s been a fascination of mine for some time, so I thought I’d give it the nod now that nobody can tell me not to call it that.

AL: It has that famously long bar scene…

JU: Yeah, that’s specifically the one that sort of stuck out with me. I feel like it’s one of those things in music that I like, the idea of re-contextualizing melody or structure. It’s rewarding if you stick around long enough. I guess I have a long attention span. I like things that are almost grueling at times and finding the beauty in that, and realizing why Cassavetes wanted that scene to go on seemingly forever. You question it at times, but at the end you’re like “Wow, that really had an impact.”

AL: There can be a really great delayed gratification effect with some things that seem difficult, or where something collapses, only to have something beautiful come out of it at the end.

JU: Exactly. Exactly. And hopefully with this record, the name tipping its hat to that and the cover with its obvious reference, I feel like I’m playing with fire in a sense. You hope it comes off as a tribute, but you worry that you’re saying “In Husbands, there’s this really rewarding thing, and you should reward yourself by suffering through an 18-minute song of descending synth tones, and it’s going to be just as good.” It’s sort of tricky. I wrestle with whether people will understand that it’s a tribute in a sense, but it’s also semi-self-effacing. But I don’t know, I still haven’t found a way to feel comfortable talking about it, I guess.

AL: Changing gears, when I was preparing for this interview, I was thinking about the kind of dance music that came out of Baltimore, B-More Club, which is known for being staccato and chopped-up and kind of fragmented.

JU: Absolutely.

AL: And Dan Deacon is probably Baltimore’s biggest indie export right now, and he’s known for having this disorienting cut-and-paste sound. Do you think there’s that feel in the music scene in Baltimore? Do you feel part of something that’s going on like that down there?

JU: It’s hard to say. I guess it’s a little different from the inside then how it’s presented outwardly. You would have stuff like Beach House and Dan and Wzt Hearts at the same show, which actually happened. It was more that it was just a small city, and there were disparate elements right alongside each other. At the warehouse I live in, we threw these three big shows with K-Swift, who was one of the bigger club djs before she died, unfortunately, and Dan played at the second one of those before he really blew up. And I don’t know how much Dan had really heard Baltimore Club before he moved here – I think he already had his style in place – but it was pretty funny to see these two worlds next to each other. I guess the energy is there and if you live in Baltimore, Baltimore Club permeates the radio and you either learn to appreciate it – and I think everybody should because I think it’s amazing music – or you don’t. But it’s tough to say how much anybody has a direct influence on anybody’s sound here. It’s more a general attitude of people here in the scene feeling like they can sorta do what they want and still have a really supportive community behind them. So I think this idea of it being a utopia is off-base. When Dan blew up and this small group of friends came up with him with the Wham City thing, that tagged us as sort of spazzy and neon. We would tour around and people in Europe would ask us what Wham City is like. I think they have these weird visions in their head of Baltimore as being a far out party or something.

AL: Not all the time, at least.

JU: Not all the time. There are these other elements, but it’s all pretty tight-knit. It’s a great city and I love it a lot. It has this great scene that didn’t always exist in the way it’s depicted in the press. In a way, I think it was way better than all these fantasies that people had. But it’s a great city to be a musician in, and I don’t ever feel like I need to lay some beats down to have anyone come to my shows, but certain things will always be in favor on a Friday night, and the stuff I make isn’t usually going to be it.

AL: Speaking of shows, are you planning to tour in support of the record?

JU: Yeah, that’s something I’ve been slacking on a bit. I’m going to be doing a European tour with Ecstatic Sunshine in early 2010, but we’re still waiting on the booking guy for the dates. I’ll hopefully play some East Coast shows sparingly up until I go to Europe. I’ll probably be in Europe myself from mid-December to whenever the tour happens, so for a couple of months. I’m trying to play more shows there than over here.

AL: They seem to be more receptive to this sort of thing than America.

JU: Yes. Also, the idea of sleeping on a floor in Bloomington and paying ten dollars is a little less alluring than sleeping on the floor in the Hague for ten Euros. It’s just a different floor. Touring with Wzt Hearts was an amazing experience, but by the end of it you’re just ready to be done. Touring in America, until you get to a certain point, is a pretty depressing proposition.

AL: And everything is so spread out.

JU: Yeah, once you get off the East Coast. The East Coast is great because living in Baltimore, New York’s close, Philly’s close, then there’s Boston, Providence, some cool little towns in the South. I haven’t been to the West Coast in that capacity, but that’s something I’d like to do. It seems like out there you don’t have to go more than a few hours before you get to the next music hotbed. But once you get to the Midwest, it can be a little grueling on you.

AL: You’ve named your album and one of your songs after other artistic works, which made me imagine your track “National Treasure” as a tribute to the crazy acting genius of Nicolas Cage. Can you confirm or deny my wild, baseless conjecture?

JU: I can definitely confirm in a sense, yes. That movie is something I was obsessed with for a little while. It blew my mind in so many different ways, both good and bad. Just everything about it. Nicolas Cage alone can do that. That movie seems like his pinnacle.

Oneida isn’t exactly the most famous rock band in Brooklyn, which seems to be the mailing address of half the bands who find their way to blog-fueled indie stardom these days.  Yet they have been a staple of the scene (and in more than just an “inner circle, hipster, high-five” kind of way) for just over ten years, before many of their more well-known neighbors had left their college towns and moved to New York’s most rapidly gentrifying borough.  Now Oneida has decided to sum up everything the band sounds like and stands for with a trilogy of albums called Thank Your Parents.  The first of these three releases was last year’s Preteen Weaponry, a single forty-minute long track divided into three sections.  This summer they released the second volume, Rated O, a sprawling triple album of punchy garage rock, hypnotizing kraut rock and a healthy dose of sonic experimentation.  But while a career retrospective frequently marks the end of a rock band, Rated O finds the band at their most fresh and adventurous.

At Length talked with Oneida’s Fat Bobby (a.k.a. Bobby Matador) about the virtues of being a good self-editor, their upcoming September performance at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Monticello, NY and why being a little old-fashioned about making music may be the key to succeeding in the new music business landscape far into the future.  Check out the  interview below while listening to the sprawling masterpiece “Folk Wisdom” off the band’s new album.

At Length:  It seems that this project was a long time coming for you.  You started a few years ago, then scrapped it, and now you’re coming back to it.

Fat Bobby:  “Scrapped” isn’t quite the right word.  We just called time out.  It wasn’t quite becoming what we had hoped, which isn’t to say we were doing it badly, we just had this vision for something based around a trilogy kind of mode, but at the time our band was going through a lot of upheaval.  Nothing dramatic, but we were losing our recording studio, and I had just moved from Brooklyn up to Boston.  We weren’t really doing the idea justice — we were all hung up.  So we thought, this is a great idea but we’re not quite succeeding at getting where we want to get with it, so let’s just return to it in a little while.  Which isn’t that unusual for us — to take a project and begin work and suspend it or string it along or return to it at another time.

AL: So you had originally wanted to do this trilogy and now this second volume is out and it is, itself, a triple record.

FB: Right.  Obviously, none of us is deep into numerology. There’s been this kind of return to a triad relationship here with the idea that the three pieces of it fit together, with Preteen Weaponry being the first leg in what we may be a little pretentiously calling a triptych.  But really, my whole conception of a triptych is something like Stonehenge and the idea of two pillars supporting a lintel, so you’ve got these two things supporting a middle piece, and Rated O is the middle piece which is, itself, a triple album.

AL:  So there’s already a lot of music with these two volumes.  Did you guys know that there would be such a massive amount of material that you’d be producing for this?

FB:  We make a huge amount of music.  I can tell you that Rated O was pared down.  We have volumes and volumes and volumes of recorded music, different compositions and recordings — output isn’t really an issue for us.  When we talk about shelving the triple album idea it wasn’t like, “Oh we can’t make enough music.”  At the time it was shelved we had more than enough for a triple album but we are self-editors and I think that’s a strength of our band.  I know that it’s hard from a consumer side and particularly it appears to be hard for people who try to encounter or relate to our music on a professional level, you know, journalists, reviewers, whatever.   I think a knee-jerk reaction from a lot of people is, you know, “Oh my God, this band needs to pare down their triple CD down to a single CD!” It’s sort of like, no, we’ve done all the paring down. You may not like it, or have a meaningful relationship with the whole thing, which is fine, but output isn’t the problem.

AL: Yeah, certainly, so many bands have put out the double album that the critics have savaged and said, “There’s one good album here and they’ve added a lot of filler.”

FB:  I think that there’s a danger for people in the critical role to try and pronounce a universal judgment on something.  We knew that this would happen and of course it’s bearing fruit as far as I can see in terms of people’s reactions to Rated O, where people say, “God, you can make one single 45 minute album out of this.”  But the great thing is that you ask people to do that and it’s different for everybody. A great example is, I think, Sandinista by The Clash.  You know the sort of canonical trope regarding that is that it’s sloppy and full of crap.  But it’s kind of like, well, you know what, why don’t you ask a bunch of people to make a CDR or a mix tape out of Sandinista and see what you get?  And it’s fascinating because it’s a band reaching in all kinds of directions. I don’t necessarily love the whole thing, but on the other hand I’m a fan of sprawl if it’s focused, not sprawl meaning, “Oh here’s all the music I made, bro” or “Here’s the whole book I wrote.”  You have to be kind of relentless but it’s also, to me, completely justifiable to say, OK, what’s the unit that people consume something in right now?  It’s the song.  It’s just the digital thing, it’s really not the album.  Albums exist, but you download songs.  If you do buy an album, or download a whole album, plenty of people rip through it and pull out the things they like.  And that’s great.  And, of course, that means I’m totally out of step, but I don’t mind.

AL:  Back when Sandinista came out, it was such the punk ethos to be concise and to get in and get out.  But these days, I feel like people eat stuff up, whatever covers and alternate versions and remixes a band will put out, fans want it all.  They seem to have an endless appetite for consuming different variations.

FB:  I think you’re right in some respects.  There are true fans — that’s exactly the right word — a true fan of something is going to want it all.  You’re right, the appetite has been able to be fed in a way that it wasn’t when distributing music cost money.  Now, if we wanted, we could say “Hey, here’s eleven hours of our Rated O sessions,” and that’s fine and there’s definitely a handful, like a dozen or so Oneida fans out there, that would probably be pretty stoked about that, but at the same time we kind of want to present something that’s exactly how we want to present it.  There’s a little bit of power-tripping in that, maybe, and a little bit of ego, and one of the cool things about where we’re at right now with technology and music and intellectual property is that it’s a little bit of a wild west moment right now, and nobody really knows what the rules are.  Fuck the laws,  I mean the sort of aesthetic rules are totally in flux.  Should we just be releasing a song at a time online?  Should we be releasing twelve hours of music at a time?  So we’ve made a choice to do it this way and who knows how we’ll feel about that five or ten years down the line.

AL: It’s interesting, because it strikes me that part of what you guys seem to be doing is that you seem to be getting into ideas that take more space to develop.

FB:  I think that’s fair to say, but the one place I would check you on that is our double album called Each One Teach One. The first disc of that is just two long form songs, so it’s not unprecedented for us to do this. But, yeah, sometimes we make music that takes up a lot of space, and this is a convenient way to do that.  Now, a critical response to that that I could imagine might be, “Well, why don’t you create, you know, a sort of short, limited, sampler size version of a ton of ideas and make more fully expanded versions of those ideas available online?”  So it’s not like we’re super didactic about what the approach is. It’s very personal, you know, it’s just this is really what we want to do right now. Some of the music that we make, the power and the effect is only available when it’s consumed or experienced in these full versions. Frankly, my own experience with it is at very high volume and at length.  You just have a different reaction.  I have complete respect and sympathy for the consumer or listener who is like, “You know, man, fuck you, I don’t want to hear that.”  Which is totally fine.

AL: I was really struck by how much these three discs seem to have a very different feel from one another.  That first one with the sort of dubby feel with a lot of dark grooves, and the second one was a lot more what I think of as Oneida’s classic sound, and the third one had this kind of expansive, experimental, free sound.

FB:  I would agree with that.

AL:  Was that the plan from the beginning, to have these three different statements that you were thinking about, or was it more that you recorded a bunch of stuff and sorted them based on how they felt to you after the recording process?

FB:  That’s an excellent question.  The motivation behind doing this was to present different sides of who we are and what our music is and what our experience of our music is.  So in that sense, we always understood that we wanted it to be a presentation of something, but that something is always kind of elusive and changing and we didn’t really know for sure what it would be.  We always have made music both motivated by a specific idea, something like, “OK, we’re going to do this and we want it to sound this way,” but also at the same time being willing and, frankly, delighted to really listen to it critically after the fact and re-categorize it or say, “Boy, we really didn’t get what we were going for, let’s try again,” or “We really didn’t get what we were going for but, my God, this is going in this direction, can we do something else like this?” So that there is this fluidity in how things are characterized.  It’s not like we sat down and were like, “All right, disc one: dark, electronic groove thing. Okay.”  It’s not at all that directed.  The idea of characterizing knowledge and experience into three separate strands is something that you see in intellectual disciplines throughout history and across cultures, and that was something that was really appealing to us.

AL:  Speaking of the feel and the vibe, especially of that first disc, it seems that any one line description of Oneida will always mention that you have this ferocious and awesome live show.  It struck me that this first disc has more of a studio sound than you guys usually seem to do, and I was wondering if you felt that there were some things that you were just not going to be able to tour with, or were already thinking of ways to bring them out on tour?

FB: That’s another nice question that allows me to provide a little bit of a window into our live versus studio existence.  We always make music when we’re working in the studio via as many different approaches as we find feasible and valuable, so there’s never, ever been a conscious direction towards “Let’s do something we couldn’t do live blah blah blah.”  Every record has tons of songs that we’ve never played live.  But also every record has songs that have been studio constructions that we’ve decided, “Oh, this one would be sweet to play live,” and then we relearn it and sort of re-contextualize it or just take the spirit of it, which is a great process to go through.  I think being freed from any expectation of monetary or commercial success [Laughs] allows us to write and dive into our music again retrospectively and re-channel itso we are playing some stuff from the first disc live, and the reality is that whole first disc of songs were all performed on live instruments.  Some of them were layered and built up track by track in the studio.  Any one of them could be easily done in some form live and some of them, like “Human Factor” or “Story of O” were just live recordings in the studio.  “10:30 at the Oasis” was done in piecework, like “OK, you lay this part down here and you lay this part down here”, in like 15 different pieces.  But we could definitely do that.  Find a way to do that, work on translating that into a live sound given a specific live incarnation.

AL:  And that’s certainly no different than almost any band that records an album these days.

FB:  Yeah.  As corny as this sounds – sometimes true things are corny and corny things are true – we really just try to remain open to the possibility that our music isn’t going to sound like we intended it to sound, and then to listen to it and decide if we like it or not, and then we decide if we can take what we like in a new direction or build on it, and that’s how we decide what we’re going to play live.

AL:  Speaking about the difference between playing live and being in the studio, I’m really fascinated to see what you guys are going to be doing at All Tomorrow’s Parties [ATP], curated by The Flaming Lips, in September. You’re going to take your studio, the “O”cropolis, and put it out there among the people.  Can you tell me a little bit more about what you’re going to be doing?

FB:  Absolutely.  This was born of something we’ve done over the past year a few times, which was live performances in our studio.  Our studio is in a building called Monster Island, which is like an art collective thing with several tenants, including the Mighty Robot Visual Studio (which runs a gallery called Secret Project Robot), Kayrock Screenprinting, the Live with Animals art gallery in the front on the first floor, and we have our studio in the basement.  When we’re in the studio, we sort of inhabit it and it becomes a community experience.  People come by and play, and we record and work in a very open and loose and holistic way, and I feel it’s a credit to this that you’ll see a bunch of past and present Oneida associates and members and people are playing on Rated O, and that’s how we run our world.  And, basically, the Mighty Robot Visual A/V Crew are kind of a real visual partnership and analog to us.  Anyways, we’ve been having these events in our studio, where we’ll put a little announcement on our MySpace page and our Website, saying “Hey, if you want to come to a free live performance, email us.”  And the first fifty or sixty people who email come, and bring some canned goods to donate to a soup kitchen, and we’ll just do three sets in the studio.  And it’s been really enjoyable for us, because it’s a performance environment where we’re assured that people are there because they care about our music.  We try to make it a really welcoming, casual environment and a fun place to be and try to create a little bit of utopian communalism, and it’s worked out really well.  At ATP they’re providing us some space on Sunday and we’re carting up a bunch of the equipment from our studio, but not all of it — our studio is packed floor to ceiling with some crazy shit.  The Mighty Robot A/V Crew is going to come and they’re going to do projections in this space, and we’re just going to play and record.  We’ll play songs and improvise and have guests and some of that is going to be pretty fluid, but hopefully we’ll be able to schedule some of that and provide ATP with good information ahead of time, of what people will be playing when.  Have you ever been to All Tomorrow’s Parties?

AL:  No, not yet.

FB:  One of the really great things about that festival (and I’m speaking about the ones in the UK that I’ve been to) is that you can just make your way around, and you’re there already, so you don’t feel like you need to be somewhere.  I can identify like one or two things that I really want to hit, but the rest of the time you can just walk around and – Boom! – here’s this band playing or here’s some music happening, and I’m just going to enjoy it and not be uptight about where I’m supposed to be.  So we wanted to provide the same experience, the same sort of comfort level, and this view into our weird-ass thing, which is not quite as career-driven as some of our world is.  But a place you can drop into and drop out of.  It might be like, “Oh there’s nothing happening for the next 40 minutes,” because we’re just hanging out, but that’s OK, hang out.  We’re very nice.

AL:  So for those people who can’t make it to ATP, are you planning on doing other touring right now?  I saw that you’ve got some European shows scheduled, but do you have any more US dates on the horizon?

FB:  We just did a few, and I think we’re going to leave it at that for a little while, as far as supporting the album goes, from that nice “Let’s make the record label happy” perspective.   Although only fair if I’m going to say something like that, is to point out that our label Jagjaguar is the most ludicrously supportive entity in the world of music.  We tell them we’re releasing this huge album that we consider the defining statement of our band and we’re only going to play six shows in the US and they say, “OK, cool.  What can we do to help you?”

AL:  Jagjaguar must’ve been really on your team to support you guys through this.

FB:  It’s funny.  We’ve put out a lot of music and we’ve put it all out with them except for our first record.  I mean, occasionally we’ll do EPs and stuff with other people, but that’s it.  I don’t want to get all flowery about our label, but we’re a band that’s maybe a little bit out of the traditional business currents.  I mean, I don’t think we’re not marketable — we’re not out there carving swastikas into the faces of people who come to our shows.  We’re not about transgression in a typical way, but at the same time, who would want to try to sell “It’s going to be a series of three albums, and one of them is a triple album, and people are going to really hate some of this music?”  So, they’re awesome.  They’re totally behind it.

I’m sorry.  I got off on Jagjaguar and lost the thread.

AL:  That’s OK.  We were just talking about live gigs.

FB:  We played Brooklyn, San Francisco, LA, Boston, and we played this really cool Sunday night New Haven show.  We just played a couple.  We’re going to Europe for two and a half weeks and then ATP.  We’re hoping that the ATP show will be this really positive, definitive experience for people who don’t know who we are.  To be like, “OK, here’s what this band is.  These assholes who released this huge amount of music?  This is why they’re doing it.  This is what their world is like.”  Not that I’m pushing it or trying to sell it too hard, but if you want to know the O, you’re never going to get a better chance at it, unless you live in Brooklyn, in which case pay attention to our site and our Myspace and the next time we do one of these studio shows you email us, and you come and everyone is friendly.  And it’s not some little inner circle, hipster, high-five thing — there are always people there who don’t fucking know anyone and everybody gets to hang out and see music.

AL:  It’s kind of a corny thing to say, and it gets said a lot, but that thing with the free shows announced via MySpace and the open studio at ATP, these both sound like how the new world of distribution and the music business in general is supposed to work.  You have more direct contact with fans and you eliminate a lot of the garbage and the rock stardom stuff, and it’s more about interpersonal interaction and more of a feeling like you’re part of something.

FB:  I think you’re right, and I think that what you’re doing is sensing the idealism behind it, and there is hopefully some kind of low-key idealism that drives us.  But I think it’s important that we call a spade, a spade here.  If we were a really popular band, that would be a hell of a lot harder to do.  So it is something that that is made much easier not being superstars.  But you know, boo-hoo, I’m sure that’s something I could handle.  And it’s also something that’s made possible by all of us having other ways of supporting ourselves.  It’s one of the most liberating things and infuriating things at the same time.  Not just a day job, but something that you care about outside of the music world, in your life.  It’s infuriating because it’s hard to coordinate the schedules of this massive number of people, but it’s liberating because we don’t have to always be finding ways to make everything yield as much money as possible.  You know, we’re not like, “Dude, money’s no good!  Fuck that!”  I mean, I would love to make a million a year.   That would suit me fine.  I would probably also still be a middle school teacher.  The ability to create music and put together events without the financial pressure of having to monetize everything is great.  But yeah, we sell albums.  It’s not like we want it all to be free.  But you’re right, the ideal situation for us is a combination of the good parts of hippies and the good parts of the DIY punk shit, and then whatever this new world is and what it’s shaping up to be, which is kind of exciting but will ultimately let us all down, and that’s fine.  [Laughs.]

AL:  I’ve just got one more quick extra credit question.  What  sort of movie would be “rated O?”

FB:  The idea of rated O is that it’s something that would be retroactively applied to something, like, “Wow, that shit was rated O!”  So by definition, I would say it would have to be documentary.  Only a documentary would be rated O.  You can’t write something and then film it and be like “This is rated O,” because you knew what was going to happen going into it.  What has to happen is that everything has to go off the rails in ways you couldn’t imagine and in ways that your mom wouldn’t be psyched about.  And then there you are.  You can’t plan it in advance.  Only in the cold, grey haze of a Tuesday morning can you be like, yeah, I’m pretty sure that weekend was rated O.