music interviews

Doug McCombs

This is a transcript of an interview I did with Doug from Tortoise a month or so ago on the dusty Grays Inn Road near Kings Cross. Cheers to the guys at The Line of Best Fit (where this first appeared) who have been kind enough to let me reproduce this here, and to Rowan at Thrill Jockey for setting this up. Go get the new record, Beacons of Ancestorship, it's one of their best.

I can’t think of another band like Tortoise. They’re a one off. Effortlessly straddling multiple genres (dub, jazz, hip-hop, electronica), and revelling in their sense of experimentation they still manage to retain a sheen of cool, and more to the point still function as a capital R Rock band. What’s more, they seem to be well and truly in it for the long haul – if Beacons of Ancestorship, their dazzling new record, is anything to go by, then they are still very much bursting with ideas and new sonic angles. They sound more vital, and younger, than ever. Well, I say younger…

I met Doug McCombs – Tortoise bassist and glabrous gentle giant – in the troglodytic cavern of the Thrill Jockey offices on The Grays Inn Road. As I walked up the stairs into the shadows, I could see Doug, Kurtz-like in the damp light, with his head in his huge left hand, twirling a packet of cigarettes in his right. It was half past five and after flying in late the previous evening, he’d evidently been talking to the press all day. He looked shattered. It was hot too; the heat lay across London like another layer of clothes… Mercifully, we were shown into the safety of a nondescript boozer on the far side of the road where we could escape the fug and where the cold beer suddenly made the day more attractive.

Matt – It feels like you've been away for ages. What have you guys been up to?

Doug – Yeah, I guess it seems like Tortoise disappears for periods of time but mostly we're really active all the time. It's true that we all play in other bands outside of Tortoise and that takes up a certain amount of our time but we also are pretty consistently working on Tortoise – whether it's going on tours or working on new material and so to us it feels as though we're always pretty active. We try to do as much live playing as we can, even if it's not a tour. We get lots of offers to do one off shows or festivals and even without a new record it's vital for us to go out on tour and play live as much as possible as it's part of being in a band that we like a lot.

We did a tour two years ago in the spring that was a whole tour of the US despite the fact that we didn't have a new record out and it was one of the best tours we've ever done! I don't know it seemed like that, maybe it's something to do with the fact that you get used to people only being interested in the band when you have a new record out and for us it was great to get that validation, that people were coming to our shows even when we didn't have a new album. It really gave us a lot of confidence for the longevity of this band and that we could work at our own pace.

Matt – So about the new record – where does the title, Beacons of Ancestorship come from?

Doug – Well, because we're an instrumental band, when it comes to time to title songs or albums, we're usually trying to draw on different things in our lives that we interested in. It can be anything from literature or art or whatever. Beacons of Ancestorship is an avant-garde, I guess you'd say ‘novel’, or it might be considered an artwork. Basically it was this piece of literature – and I don't even know the author's name – that's one paragraph repeated over and over again for something like 700 pages. That's not necessarily why we chose it as an album title, and I'm sure each member of the band has his own reasons for wanting to choose this title, but essentially, it was a title we all liked. To me personally, what the title invokes is how we see our place in the continuum of popular music, or at least the music we're interested in. It's a reflection of all of our influences and how we see ourselves and where we might take the band in the future.


Beacons of Ancestorship

Matt – The way you describe the repetition of the piece seems to fit in your aesthetic too.

Doug – That's true and also anything that's even vaguely cryptic fits into our aesthetic too [laughs].

Matt – It feels like a very direct record for you, there might even be what are considered a couple of 'songs' on there.

Doug – Sure. I think the second song 'Prepare Your Coffin' might be the most conventional rock song Tortoise has ever played. Which wasn't really anything conscious. Things that we were conscious of when going in to make this record were, thinking about our last album It's All Around You, I think we were trying to, at least in retrospect, refine and perfect everything we had done before and get it to some sort of compositional ideal or something, or at least try to become better as songwriters. So this time we may have unconsciously tried to push away from that a little bit and make it a little more rough around the edges, more scrappy, and more open ended – not as compositionally direct. And it feels that way to me – more direct and looser at the same time. More natural. The songs flow and don't feel as constricted. And I can't speak for everyone in the band but I think that may have been what we were trying to achieve.

The other thing is, as the band has gotten older and more experienced we've become a much better live band and I think we're more conscious of using dynamics in our live shows, and about being a more powerful rock band. When we first started we might have been a little tentative and not sure we could perform this music in front of people and have it be interesting, and so we've slowly grown into this thing where we're now pretty powerful live and also have moments of delicacy. I think we wanted to reflect some of that on this record.

We used the same compositional techniques to get to that. We didn't perform any of the songs live in the studio and we wrote most of the material the same way which is a slow process of bouncing ideas of each other and arriving at something we like by a process or subtraction or addition or cutting up or rearranging. So we didn't perform any of it live but to me it reflects more what we can do live.

Tortoise - Prepare Your Coffin from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo.

Matt – How much of that goes back to the ATP shows you did, where you played the whole of Millions Now Living Will Never Die from start to finish? Was that part of the confidence building process?

Doug – No, that's different. Playing Millions... live from start to finish was a completely separate challenge because we'd never attempted to play parts of those songs live ever. For instance 'Djed' which many people see as the cornerstone of the record, we'd never played that in its entirety in a live situation. So that was a real challenge as that song is really a tape edit or a collage. That's not really what I was talking about – I was more getting at the fact that when we started the band a lot of the music was so delicate that we felt if we were going to rock out on it we'd almost do it a disservice so we eventually grew into the thing of not being afraid to rock out. So even though we all came from rock bands in the first place it was almost as if we were treating the Tortoise music with too much reverence.

Matt – I was listening to the first album again recently and I'd forgotten how many delicate, essentially ambient moments there were on there. There's little of that on the Beacons...

Doug – The new album has moments.... The other direct thing about the album I think is the rhythm patterns on the songs, even though some of them are contrapuntal and interlocked, most of the songs are in 4/4 time signature. And we've always done stuff in 4/4 but we've also used a lot of semi-convoluted time signatures and I think that lends a certain directness to the record. There's only 1 track, 'Minors', which jumps from phrases of 3 and 4 to phrases of 7. That was all sort of a compositional experiment – Jeff wrote the melody to no time signature at all and then put the chords under it after the melody had been laid down and he realised the chords slipped into weird times.

TLOBF – A couple of the tracks seem to have an almost dubstep inflection to them, 'Northern Something' and even 'Gigantes'. It made me think of D/j Rupture.

Doug – 'Northern Something' for sure references some of that stuff – it's almost like a dancehall or dubstep samba. I think that was a conscious nod. 'Gigantes' was also a song that was based around a rhythm before anything else – the interlocking drum patterns came first before the melodic content.

Matt – And what about 'Yinxianghechengqi'?

Doug – [Laughs] I don't actually know how to pronounce that word! I think it's Chinese. Someone told me it was the first synthesiser ever manufactured in the country. Anyway, that song was another experiment. We were in the studio talking about modern composition and someone said wouldn't it be hilarious to try twelve tone and hardcore which is basically what that is.

TLOBF – So you're mixing Schoenberg and Hardcore? It's been done millions of times, I don't know why you bothered... The track though is really falling apart under its own weight, splitting at the sides.

Doug – That's probably actually the oldest song on the album and we've probably recorded 5 or 6 different versions of it and that version on the album is two wildly different versions spliced together with really different feels. The first part has this sense that we can barely play feel to it, and then it kicks into the real version.

Matt – Has the way you've recorded changed at all? You've said that at times things do get in the way – other projects, band members having families etc.

Doug – Our first two albums were recorded almost all analogue, on tape machines; only on the second album, a little bit of digital editing came in – just some cross fades or something. This was right when digital recording programs first came in. So from the third album until now, it's been in the digital age where, we do record on analogue tapes, but we'll bounce back stuff from tape to pro-tools or vice versa. So, our recording process since the digital era has been pretty much the same. We'll go to the studio, start throwing around ideas and recording them as we go. On a more practical level since some of the guys have children there are times when not all of us can make it to the studio at the same time. But then it's not always that important for us to be in the studio all the time – as long as everybody is there some of the time to agree on any major changes. It can become frustrating when we're in a particularly creative period and someone doesn't show up - I've been that guy too – but it's just the way it has to be.

Matt – Does one of you take charge in the studio, as it were?

Doug – John [McEntire] does most of the recording and mixing. He's the one with the real experience as far as being a recording engineer goes. John Herndon and Dan Bitney have home recording set ups of their own, and they can do stuff with tape machines and pro tools. But John can do it with a remote control – just walk into a room and hit play and away he goes. As far as what you would call production, that is the group effort and John is sort of the conduit. He's able to interpret everyone's ideas and translate them into what's going to work in terms of recording. For someone like me, who's not really familiar with a lot of the equipment, it's really awesome to have someone who understands what I mean when I describe how I want something to sound because he can do it. It's a really amazing thing to have in a band, to have that autonomy, and to have that total confidence in someone to realise those ideas you have. It's a privilege really.


A Lazarus Taxon

Matt – Can we talk a little about A Lazarus Taxon? What was behind the decision to release that box set?

Doug – The main impetus was sort of a compulsive need to gather things together. I felt like the material in that box set represented a side of Tortoise that people weren't that familiar with. I think our albums represent one side of Tortoise, then we have this other side, which is when someone asks us for a track for a compilation, or we make a 7” to sell on tour, or someone asks us to do a remix. A lot of that stuff involves a different working process for us as a band, and some of the results are quite different to the stuff that ends up on the albums. And there was so much floating around out there in different places, and I'd been pushing it for a while to gather it all up so people could hear this other side to the band.

Matt – It's a fantastic artefact, just as an object – but I read somewhere that it was like a tombstone.

Doug – I heard somebody say that too, like 'this band is over'! That's not really what it was meant to be. Maybe they got the idea from the imagery on the front.

Matt – Those Odermatt photos are incredible...

Doug - He was an Austrian, and an employee of the police, and part of his job was to document car accidents. Most of his photographs don't seem to be documenting tragic events – I mean most of them are just fender benders, it doesn't look like anyone died in them. But they are beautiful photographs. And since then there's been another book, of his colour work [Arnold Odermatt: On Duty], featuring loads of Austrian police cadets doing callisthenics, and there's one series of broken tail lights, all melted.


Arnold Odermatt - Untitled

Matt - They struck me as so Ballardian – not just the obvious car crash element, but the affectlessness of them, they're so clean. Going back to ...Lazarus, I also read someone describing it as a time capsule.

Doug – That's a better way of describing it! To me, that box set documents a totally different side to Tortoise – recorded much quicker, less structured, making less decisions, doing it out of necessity.

Matt – I was listening to Rhythms, Resolutions and Clusters EP on the way up here [the third CD in the A Lazarus Taxon box] and there is some very strange stuff on there...

Doug – For sure. Rhythms, Resolutions and Clusters was after our first album and we were definitely into the idea of our songs never being finished, or that there was potential for them to go in different directions there didn't have to be a definitive version. So we thought it would be cool if there was a different version of the album and all of the people on the EP were friends of ours. It was never a situation of 'let's find the hippest producers' – it was more like 'let's give these tracks to some people we like and respect and see what happens'. Later on, after our second album all those remixes were done by people we did and didn't know and after that we just weren't really interested any more. It was more like at that point we felt our songs were standing on their own.

Matt – That period is often seized upon as a kind of zenith for Tortoise in terms of output, which I guess must be quite frustrating for you guys? What do you make of that whole 'godfathers of post-rock' stuff?

Doug – I don't really know how I feel about I. A couple of years into this band I knew that we had potential to be a band for a really long time – just from the chemistry, and that's the way I still feel. The strength of this band isn't going to be how we peaked in the ‘90s; our strength is going to be how we continue to be band, and what comes in the future. We're working through some of those things now. I definitely know that some members of Tortoise are not really that thrilled with Millions Now Living Will Never Die – I mean it was pretty ambitious and we did a good job of it but it was never really completely finished, we didn't have the resources. There was a sense of 'this is what we have and this is going to have to do.' There are some successful experiments on it and some loose ends. And I feel like over the years we've got way better at tying up those loose ends and not having any extraneous, unnecessary material on our albums.


Millions Now Living Will Never Die

Matt – So is there another vaults-worth of stuff waiting to come out?

Doug – There are odds and ends floating around but no, no vault [laughs].

Matt– I'm intrigued by what you said about Beacons earlier, and you're place in a continuum of music – who are the other beacons along the line?

Doug – There are too many to mention! I guess our ambition is to be part of the continuum, be part of what makes music move along. Our only hope could be that we might inspire people to make music, the way the music we all love has inspired us.

Matt – As a final question, going on from the last one I suppose: how do you explain your position as a rock band in that the general response to Tortoise's stuff seems to stand outside the usual clichés of rock music – the simple build and release and the emotional response. How does sit with you? How does it work?

Doug – I think people have become used to hearing music in a certain context, and only if they become really interested in music do they eventually seek out a band like us. Even somebody as successful as Sonic Youth for instance still is not on the radar of your average person. They're an insanely influential rock band and yet they've never reached a kind of universal acceptance. The average person has never heard of Sonic Youth. So I guess there's a certain kind of music listener who eventually finds out about a band like Tortoise and that's fine because those people who do find out about us will carry it with them.

Matt – What do you make of the fact that Sonic Youth have started coming in for some negative press recently? That they've become part of the nostalgia industry and cool for their record collections rather than their music?

Doug – Somebody's always going to run you down for something. I've never known Sonic Youth do anything with anything less that total integrity. And as for the nostalgia stuff, well, the whole Don't Look Back Thing isn't something we'd ever get involved in again – and Sonic Youth did a whole tour of it so must feel even worse about it! I mean, playing Millions... was kind of fun but really, as a rock band you want to be playing you're new stuff. I think we'd have been infinitely more entertaining playing our new stuff...

Matt – So when are you coming over to the UK again?

Doug – We might be here in August or September but nothing is confirmed. Other than that it might be November or December. We'll let you know for sure... [Unless you've been living underground, you must have heard the announcement of the 10th Anniversary ATP show in December. My word, what a line up. If Tortoise come over before that you'll read about it here first.]

Posted by poacher in music interviews at 10:43 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

William Basinski

A superlative interview with William Basinski over at FACT. It's ostensibly about his lush new record 92982 and his move from New York to LA, but he covers all sorts of ground, again returning to the miracle of The Disintegration Loops. There is something so perfect about the loops - both in their execution and in the mythology that has risen up around their creation and dissemination - that it bears repeating. The myth and the music work into one another, and with iteration grow into something else. It's mesmerising stuff:

"The Disintegration Loops is about a five-hour cycle of six pieces that came about quite by chance in the studio in the late summer of 2001. I was at a very low point and in danger of being evicted, didn’t have any work and didn’t know what to do, and finally decided, you know, ‘Get your ass in the studio and do some work, you have the time.’ So I picked up where I’d left off archiving these tape loops onto CD-R and I put the first one that was in the queue on – Disintegration Loop 1.1 it ended up being – and it was this beautiful, very grave loop and I just thought, ‘Oh yeah, this is exactly what I need right now.’ It was gorgeous and I didn’t even remember it until then. So I started working with that and created a kind of a French horn random arpeggiation counter-melody that was really cool going along with it on the Voyetra synthesizer. I got that set up and went to the kitchen to make some coffee and came back and after a few minutes I started realising that the tape loop itself, as it was going around on the deck, was starting to disintegrate.

"Recording tape is a plastic medium. It has glue and iron oxide, rust basically, that holds the magnetic recording. So the glue loses its integrity and the iron oxide starts turning to dust again. I was stunned, and I was so glad I was recording, and I thought, ‘God, what’s going to happen?’. Over the period of an hour this loop disintegrated right there in the studio so I just left it, I let it go for the full length of the CD and then faded it out. And then I went on to the next one, and so over a period of two days I had this huge work. And the title came to me immediately. I was just blown away by what had just happened and I was incredibly moved by the whole redemptive quality of what I’d just experienced, that each of these loops had disintegrated in its own way and its own time, yet the life and death of the melody was redeemed in another medium.I was a Catholic growing up, I thought, maybe there is hope after all! [laughs]. So I was calling my friends, ‘Get over here! You won’t believe what’s happened!’. We had quite a few weeks of awe just listening to these and thinking about them…

"And then 9/11 happened, and that was a big shock. We were all stunned and terrified. Living in New York - it wasn’t like watching it on TV from somewhere else, that was bad enough – but to see it, and be there, it was…Hell.

"We had been up on the roof all day. That night, my neighbour had a penthouse on the other side of the building and had a video camera up there; I got a tape and I asked her if she’d help me set it up, and so I framed this static shot of downtown where the smoke was, where the towers used to be, and I just let the tape run out. So I managed to capture the last hour of daylight for that day, and then the next day I got the tape and put it with the first Disintegration Loops 1.1 and made this film."

You should be able to view the video below. If it's playing up then go see it at the Blip.tv site.

Click To Play

Posted by poacher in music interviews at 16:34 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Last addition to the alt-folk pieces of the last few days is a repost of a Memory Band interview we did a while back - Stephen Cracknell was good enough to answer a few of our inane questions last July. If you're intrigued by this then go check out The Accidental as well. It's a band Cracknell formed with Sam Genders from Tunng and their album from earlier this year, There Were Wolves is a great record.

The Memory Band are a ragged collective grouped around the elusive figure of Stephen Cracknell - once of Badly Drawn Boy's band and the experimental folk of Gorodisch. At one time or another the band has featured Jennymay Logan, Adem, Polly Paulusmaand Alexis Taylor. As that diverse rabble might suggest they play what is ostensibly traditionally English, or British folk music but with a subtle electronic sensibility bubbling just beneath the surface. The first album kind of caught me by surprise in that it seemed underdone, slightly shambolic even; but over time I found myself listening to it more and more and I became if anything, beguiled by its simplicity. And Apron Strings has had a similar effect: it comes unadorned, unapologetic and it's a record that implicitly understands the participatory space of folk music: it's easy to feel welcomed inside where all those uneasy ghosts are having way much more fun than you are...

Thanks to the band for some cracking music and to Stephen Cracknell for taking the time to answer these questions.

Download: The Memory Band - I Wish I Wish

Listen: The Memory Band - I Wish I Wish




The Memory Band

mountain*7: You’re quite an eclectic bunch - can you give us a potted history of the band and how you got together?

stephen: The band started with me writing some things at home and recording using my computer and releasing it on a 7" single. After a while I realised it was music to be played by a band so I did some gigs with Adem, Polly Paulusma and Jennymay Logan helping out. When Adem and Polly signed solo deals I looked for more collaborators and we did our first gig with a full band at the very first Green Man festival, Nancy, Rob Spriggs and Alexis from Hot Chip played that day. as time has gone on the line up has changed with people coming in and out, there is a core group who play regularly but it stays pretty flexible.

mountain*7: How has this year been for you guys? How has the reaction to Apron Strings been?

stephen: It's been great fun we've played some lovely gigs in great locations and enjoyed ourselves immensely. the reaction to the album was good particularly in the US where it was our first proper release. Now I am about to start work on the third album so will be taking a break from live shows for a while.

mountain*7: I noticed various good reviews and quotes from the US including Spin magazine and Pitchfork. It's quite a 'British' sound you've got (whatever that might mean) - what sort of response has their been in the US?

stephen: The response has been very positive, being on Dicristina Stairbuilders [mountain*7: home to Vetiver and Vashti Bunyan amongst others] helps, they have a great little roster and it was our first US release. US writers seem to really like tracks like 'I Wish I Wish'. I think we stand apart from a lot of the psych-folk stuff thats very prevalent over there and that helps us the US media. Although on the surface our music is very British underneath there are a lot more global influences.

mountain*7: My initial reaction to Apron Strings was that it was a lot more structured than The Memory Band, which contained a lot of looser, almost jam-led material, – was this a conscious decision?

stephen: Not really, it was probably a result of playing more live shows and developing the songwriting. I don't tend to make conscious decisions in music, just follow where the notes take me. At the moment I think the next album will draw more upon the idea of jamming around loops and sketches, but you never know until you're into the process how it will sound.



Artist: The Memory Band
Album: The Memory Band
Label: Hungry Hill

mountain*7: How do you approach your material? I’ve read somewhere that you ‘had in mind drawing upon the vast "memory band" of music created since time began’ – that’s a daunting prospect!

stephen: It doesn't feel daunting, it's just freedom to take influence from everywhere without restrictions which feels liberating to me. I write in different ways with no particular method. Although we've always been described as a folky band, in truth the influences come from a much broader spectrum. I don't really understand the idea of musicians being influenced by other artists and trying to sound like them. I have no desire to sound like the people who inspire me, I more interested in using their ideas in new ways to create new sounds.

mountain*7: The traditional folk song, ‘I Wish I Wish’ has been collected numerous times (most famously by John Clare) – does the weight of all that history become cumbersome? Or is there a kind of freedom with genuine folk music?

stephen: Not at all. Our version isn't really an arrangement of a trad tune, the music is wholly original and the words just appealed to me and fitted with what I had, it just seemed to work. I don't really think about types of music, history or such weighty matters. the great thing about making music is the freedom to do what you want. Obviously folk music is a form where history and tradition has often been given a lot of emphasis but that feels quite alien to me. When I make music I feel free to do whatever I want.



Artist: The Memory Band
Album: Apron Strings
Label: Peacefrog

mountain*7: Does the same ideal of freedom lie behind the covers of such disparate songs as Ronnie Lane's 'The Poacher' and the Carly Simon/Natasha Thomas track 'Why (Does Your Love Hurt So Much'?)?

stephen: Yes, I like doing covers, as with the Arthur Russell track on the first album and its great fun doing them and trying to put our own spin on the tunes, which I think we do manage to pull off. I'd like to think we aren't intimidated with what others have done with the songs before.

mountain*7: What have you got planned for the summer? I see you had a slot at Glastonbury – any other festival plans, The Green Man maybe?

stephen: The plan is to get on with making the third album. I'm just finishing another project I've been producing in conjunction with Sam Genders from Tunng, which has yet doesn't have a name, we used the Glastonbury slot to try out some of that material - it wasn't really a Memory Band gig. When that is done it will be back to The Memory Band, which I'm really looking forward to. I've spent the last few years doing loads of music festivals, it will be good to take a break this year.

mountain*7: There seemed to be a nucleus of a 'scene' there for a while with the likes of yourself, Four Tet, Tunng and the whole Homefires thing etc, all melding various styles to varying degrees. Was that, and the godawful folktronica label, just something dreamt up by the music press or was it more than that?

stephen: Well I've known Kieran quite a while and the gang from Tunng are now good friends of mine. Along with the Fence Collective and others we have played a lot of the same festivals and got to know each other. I suppose that constitutes a scene, although I think there is far more diversity and variation in the acts than the media ever recognised. It wasn't just a media creation but the constraints of journalism often mean these things get simplified for a sound-bite culture and important factors are overlooked. What has been funny is seeing a lot of young acts following on who definitely call themselves "twisted folk" acts and very much focus on following in the footsteps of 60s artists which the media have identified as "heroes". I feel quite distant from that and that the earlier artists you mentioned are far more forward looking and less stuck on replicating what has gone before. That's not to say the younger acts aren't good, because many of them are, but that their emphasis seems quite different.

mountain*7: I read somewhere that you're originally from Hale in Surrey, near Hindhead. It's odd because I was reading some William Cobbett recently and he used to frequently crisscross that area of the country on his Rural Rides and there was a strange aura about Hindhead - almost as if it were treacherous or a place to be avoided. What was it like to grow up there, has it affected the way you make or approach music at all?


Hindhead

stephen: That's true I am from Hale and my family have lived in and around Aldershot for a several generations (Hindhead about ten miles south near the Sussex border). I have read some Willliam Cobbett but am not really a fan, he was a bit of a tory. That area of the World is very prosperous now and in truth I couldn't wait to leave, although it was a very beautiful area it was a bit of a cultural desert. My memories of it are that if you went towards London you headed into suburbia but if you headed West you came into a very English countryside, a few miles down the road they still talked with a real Hampshire burr, although the landscape is much transformed now, its part of one of the largest conurbations in the country. As for it affecting my music, I really couldn't say, I suppose it has to really maybe my music still looks in both directions. The story of Fanny Adams which inspired a song on the first album comes from Alton about ten miles further West, but I don't think there is anymore of a dark underbelly to the area than anywhere else, these things are universal. All the gang who started Trunk Records come from that part of the World too.

mountain*7: Trunk Records still seems to be going strong (I love the search engine description: Music - Nostalgia – Sex) – It seems to fit well with the overall aesthetic of The Memory Band, the idea of dipping into all that abandoned cultural memory and retrieving it…what’s happening with that right now? How do you source the material for it?

stephen: I haven't been involved with Trunk Records for a long time now, although I keep in regular touch with Jonny who is still a very close friend and am very proud that what we started is still going strong. Its had some great releases, the new release by Michael Garrick is spellbinding and I adore the Basil Kirchin stuff. As you say there is a strong aesthetic link with what The Memory Band does, its all connected in some strange way.

mountain*7: What are you listening to/reading/watching at the moment? Any recommendations for us?

stephen: I've been enjoying the Gruff Rhys album a lot and also the Fennesz/Ryuchi Sakamoto collaboration. There's an album coming out on Static Caravan by a harpist called Serafina Steer which is wonderful (she plays on the project I mentioned above). She covers a Brian Eno song which has led me to go back and listen to albums of his like Before And After Science. I listen to radio 3 a lot. The one thing I haven't been listening to is folk music....

Posted by poacher in music interviews at 19:37 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Band of Horses

This interview was first published in 2006

There seems to be an almost unspoken consensus about Band of Horses, a quiet thrumming collective joy that they've released such a great record, that they exist at all. And they inspire a strange kind of anti-criticism, with people falling over themselves to draw in the long verbals and shout about What A Great Fucking Record Everything All The Time is. And it is. It's a record you listen to with the blood, it's huge widescreen production the sound of travel and of disappearing into the vastness of America; meaning does come but it's slow: Ben Bridewell's lyrics guarded, elusive and impressionistic are the story of this disappearance and the high of being found. As it goes at the end of 'Monster': 'If I am lost it's only for a little while'.

Cheers to Ben and the band for a great album and for answering these questions we sent over last week.

poacher: So has it been a crazy year for you guys? How have you been coping with the (ahem) adulation?

Ben Bridewell: As far as people enjoying our stuff, I guess it's a little scary. We just played a bunch of large shows (for us at least) this past week and it can be scary. I just don't want to let people down who like our record and when there happens to be a large audience of them all staring in our direction, I have to say that it's unnerving. At the same time, it's a wonderful position we're in right now and could disappear tomorrow, so it's important to not think too much and just do what comes naturally.

poacher: Could you tell the ignoramuses among us a bit about the forming of the band and what you were up to beforehand?

BB: Before the band really started I was down at our rented practice space just messing around with all the instruments we'd acquired during our tenure of Carissa's Weird (previous band). Once I had some songs I enlisted a rhythm section and worked constantly to just keep writing stuff, even if I thought it was garbage. Took a while but we decided to play a show, and it's been off to the races (moan) ever since.

poacher: The reaction to the album seems to have been really, really positive- could you tell us a bit about its creation and recording etc?

BB: The album was harder than I thought it'd be. We wanted it to sound raw and live-ish but those hopes were dashed immediately by lack of talent to actually play the songs well enough live to tape. It's also my first time recording for real as a guitar player or singer so I had my hard times during the process.
which leads me to:



Artist: Band of Horses
Album: Everything All The Time
Label: Sub Pop

poacher: It’s got a fabulous widescreen sound- was Phil Ek your first choice of producer, did you intend it to sound so big?

BB: Phil was great to work with and helped us realize that we had to create the record he knew we could make. Although he's an absolute slave driver, Phil Ek gets results. We'll be working with him on our new record beginning in February.

poacher: Do you read much of the music press? It seems to me that since the rise of blogs there has been a proliferation of over-interpretation of music (Jesus, we’re as guilty of it as the next erm, blog) with every last detail being examined for meaning (A.J Weberman in Dylan’s bins has nothing on these guys). I don’t know how much this would mean to you but it seems to me that much of the press has found Everything All The Time strangely resistant to criticism and that if they could they’d simply put out a one sentence saying something like ‘Great Fucking Record’. Is that a fair call?

BB: Press is the best and the worst to me. I find that most things in this business are. Example: I’m glad they like the record, I wish they'd leave us alone. Or I'm glad so many people showed up to the concert, I wish they'd stop staring. I just hope people don't read blogs as the gospel. Anyone with an opinion is free to say what they want which is great and terrible. I only read sports blogs and I never comment.

poacher: As a direct corollary of that some of your lyrics are pretty impressionistic (evasive?) and yet have got an intensely personal presence as well, so as such there isn’t a distinct message coming through. Is there a sense of communication with lyric writing or is it solely a personal thing?

BB: My lyrics are meant to stay hidden on the last record. I write in code sometimes hoping only I know the meaning of the words. this is also spawned from the insecurity of being new to the song-writing field. I kinda like not knowing the words correctly to some of my favourite songs as well.


The sound of travel

poacher: I’ve read that you’re originally from South Carolina, now Seattle- what influence has geography had on your sound, if any, or is the record the sound of travel?

BB: We're actually moving back to South Carolina in 2 days. that place had a lot to do with even wanting to start this band at all. The chance to sing about where I come from or make my family proud. I’m a sucker for geography songs as well. I find travel to be the most inspiring aspect of being in a band, yet I never can seem to write a decent song while on the road. Strange.

poacher: How’s the ceaseless touring been? Are you still sleeping on floors and tour buses or are you living in opulent glamour now?

BB: Thank God we travel comfortably now. I slept on floors and in freezing vans on the road for a good ten years. I’m over it. At the same time we're not overboard about it. I want the following: safe vehicle, beer, and bed. If they happen to have internet and cable so be it.

poacher: You’ve talked about the notion of being on stage as an uncomfortable one, and that you inhabit a dream-like state to cope with it. What happens to the songs in this sense, do they belong to someone else, are you just channelling them?


Band of Horses

BB: Every show is a different beast for me. I’ll get too sensitive about the crowd seeming bored or the sound being fucked or something. You just have to trust that everything is fine and try to make someone feel some emotion. I'll sneak small peaks at the people’s faces and I’ll sing with that face in my mind and know that I want them to cry or smile or lose their shit. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don't.

poacher: Is there such a thing as an aesthetic of disappearance in American culture, is it fair to say that it’s one of your grand myths?

BB: I'm not sure America has ever had much of a defined culture to lose. we've been playing a lot of shows with our friend Chad Vangaalen (and friends) who are Canadian and realized how much funner they are than yanks. Fuck it though, America is still a wonderful place to live and I wouldn't trade it for any other.

poacher: When you guys going to head to the UK?

BB: Unsure about a UK tour. We'll do it when the time is right I’m sure.

poacher: What are you guys reading, watching, listening to right now- any recommendations for us?

Band of Horses: This week I like:
Willie Nelsons new "Songbird".
I saw the movie "Prestige" and liked it very much.

Posted by poacher in music interviews at 14:25 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Belong
Album: October Language
Label: Carpark

Just for the record this interview was done back in 2006.

For anyone that might not know, Belong are a two-piece band from New Orleans that deal in warm psychoactive billows of sound. October Language, their debut album, is at once a layered exploration of chaos control (drones bleeding into the air, MBV guitars at their limits, crackling radio static) and a peaen to New Orleans- a celebration of diversity and decay. The album was actually recorded before Hurrican Katrina devestated the area, but, perhaps inevitably, a narrative has been mapped backwards onto the album, and as such the melancholy and brutality apparent take on new meanings. This interview was conducted over e-mail over the last few days and I'd like to thank Turk for his time and detailed answers. Thanks also to Todd at Carpark Records for putting us in touch.If you get the chance, check the record out. It contains multitudes.

poacher: What are you guys up to right now? What has happened since the release of October Language?

Belong: We are currently in the midst of finishing an EP, and after that we will continue work on our second album. Since the release of October Language we have been fortunate to tour America and Europe, and we have met some very interesting people through the spread of the music.

poacher: What drives your aesthetic? How do you sit down and 'plan' this kind of music, or does it come from improvising sessions?

Belong: Well, there is no set or defined parameters to the way we work. Each track has it's own circumstances. Some tracks may begin from us doodling around in the studio while others start from a definite idea that we want to try and see to it's fruition.

poacher: In relation to that, is there a sense that these songs could have gone in other directions? Is there a method of chaos to the way you work? I guess what I mean by this is that there is certain feeling of entropy to the pieces- they tend to disperse and are fluid at the edges. Is that a fair comment, or is there a rigidity to your method, a depth of control beneath the surface?

Belong: It is the control of the chaos that I feel we are most interested in... we like to create these really dense and chaotic pieces but then go in and meticulously edit and arrange it from there. So, we are not strictly interested in just chaos or control... it's both. With that said, I believe the tracks could have gone in different directions....and very often our initial ideas are transformed into something else entirely. For instance, "I'm Too Sleepy... Shall We Swim?" was initially to be a really dramatic long loud piece, but it morphed into the really quiet melancholy track it is now. We don't ever bind ourselves to our initial ideas...


Sun Storm

poacher: There is a sense with this kind of music that it almost self-produces, is a form of found-sound, and is an organic entity in its own right. Aside from how this detracts from the obvious work you put into its creation how far do you follow this train of thought, is there any validity in Eno's idea of generative music?

Belong: I do believe there is validity to that, and I happen to be very fond of Eno's music and his ideas. I feel October Language does work in the ambient sense that Eno spoke of... I think it is an album that you can put on quietly and it can work as an organic hum in the background... but at the same time, you can play it really loud and it can totally fill the room working more in a "rock" sense. It was something that we set out to do and hopefully achieved - we wanted the album to be something that could be played real quietly which could be really wispy and easy to listen to... or you could play it really loud and get a more brutal experience from it.

poacher: Perhaps inevitably, a 'narrative' has been mapped backwards onto October Language so that it's come to stand as some sort of comment on Hurricane Katrina and the events of that time- how do you feel about this? Has it affected sales in any way?

Belong: I think the melancholic tone contained on parts of album combined with the "worn" sound of it all is the reason people have made a correlation. It's weird for us because we finished the album before the events of Katrina... but I don't think it's a bad thing that people can listen and be reminded... as far as it affecting sales, I don't think so... we are still poor... hah.


Damage caused by Hurricane Katrina

poacher: As a direct corollary to that, how much do you think place can affect sound? Is the geography and environment of Louisiana and New Orleans an influence on your sound?

Belong: If we lived elsewhere, our music would sound totally different. New Orleans has the biggest of influences on us. If you have never been, there is a beauty to New Orleans unlike anywhere else in the U.S. The city is old, and there is natural decay that has happened to it over time... we find much beauty in that natural decay, and we try as best we can to convey that in our music.

poacher: It'd be really good if you could tell us something about how Katrina affected life in New Orleans and how you responded to the treatment of the US Government. It'd also be great to know how the city has recovered and how the rebuilding process is coming along?

Belong: Well, the greater New Orleans area currently has about half the population it did before Katrina. While a lot of the historical areas of New Orleans were spared (uptown & downtown) other areas of the city were totally destroyed like the lower 9th ward, new orleans east and lakeview to name a few. The rebuilding process has been terribly slow, and I personally don't think the local government has decided yet on how to go about rebuilding the really bad areas. While it is quite surreal, life has moved on in the places that received minimal damage... uptown and downtown are pretty much back to normal with 98% of the population back and businesses have been up and running since the beginning of the year. People who were born and raised in New Orleans are very similar to people who were born and raised in New York... similar in that we absolutely adore our city and will do anything to see it back to its former greatness. New Orleans is not dead by any means...

As far as the reaction by the government after the storm, it was initially very shocking but in hindsight it is par the course. The U.S. has a long history of treating its poor like savages dating all the way back to colonial times... not much has changed in the last 400 years.


Damage caused by Hurricane Katrina

poacher: The music is genuinely emotionally affecting and in the wake of Katrina this is multiplied hugely- did you set out to make a record that plugged into certain emotions? What might have influenced this?

Belong: What's there is what comes natural to us... I don't think you'll ever hear anything overly happy or kitschy from us... it's not what we do.

poacher: In 'Tonio Kroger' Thomas Mann states that 'nobody but a beginner imagines that he who creates must feel': does music bypass this? Is there actually a strong link between music and emotion?

Belong: I think there is a strong link... I find that music easily elicits emotions in me... from excitement and happiness... to laziness and sadness. It is very nostalgic for me as well.


Pedals

poacher: Despite the organic nature of the sound this music is obviously manipulated and distorted. Could you tell us something about the machines you use and the processes involved?

Belong: Obviously things are manipulated and we have a variety of process and machines that we employ. We use everything from a 4-track to a computer to achieve the sound we want. Hardware effects, pre-amps, stomp boxes, guitars, synths, software effects, plug-ins, etc... we don't limit ourselves to one aesthetic in the studio... we like the combination of old and new.
[Poacher: there is a video interview over at Gearwire where the band discuss their technology in more depth]

poacher: How do you transfer the sound to the live arena?

Belong: Since there is just two of us, it would be impossible to totally recreate the sound of the record live... even with five of us, it would be pretty impossible... Mike plays guitar though a ton of effects, and I use a midi controller and a laptop with synth and mellotron sounds which are heavily manipulated. We have a video projection that we made which is synced with our entire performance. For our next tour, we will actually tour as 3 piece... we want to try and be more of band for the live show.


Sequential Prophet-5

poacher: You guys got any plans to tour the UK anytime soon? Will you let us know when you're coming over?

Belong: We just got back from a 5 week tour of Europe with Ariel Pink... you must have missed us ... [poacher: don't I feel like a prize prick! I always hear about these things too late!] We'll be back to promote our next record though... hopefully, we will back over there by fall of next year.

poacher: Any recommendations for us? What you listening to/watching/reading at the moment?

Belong Current Watching:

George Washington by David Gordon Green
Last Year In Marienbad - Alain Resnais
Badlands by Terrence Malick
Videodrome by David Cronenberg
Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 5

Belong Current Listening:

Junior Boys - So This Goodbye
Brightblack Morning Light - S/T
Bibio -Hand Cranked
The Normal - TVOD
Goblin - Profondo Rosso
Paavoharju - Yhä Hämärää
Skinny Puppy - Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse
Franz Schubert - PIANO TRIO IN E-FLAT, OP 100 (second movement)
Sonic Youth - Sister
Autechre - Chiastic Slide
Giorgio Moroder - Midnight Express

Belong Current Reading:

A People's History Of The United States - Howard Zinn
Anthem - Ayn Rand
The Gambler - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light
and the Dream Machine - John Geiger

poacher: Once again Turk, thanks for everything and good luck in the future.

Posted by poacher in music interviews at 17:30 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)