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Guest Lists: Jessica Pratt

Evan Minsker — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Photo by Yoni Kifle

Jessica Pratt: "Night Faces"

Guest List features some of our favorite artists filling us in on some of their favorite things, along with other random bits. For this edition, we spoke with Bay Area singer/songwriter Jessica Pratt, who is at work on the follow-up to last year's self-titled debut album.

First Record I Bought For Myself

My family went to Boston on a vacation and it was really insane for me because I was from a small town. I had a gift certificate to Tower Records and I got the first Spice Girls record. I was totally into them. I remember seeing their video for “Wannabe” on MTV, and I was truly struck with their infectious energy.

Favorite Spice Girl

Ginger was my favorite. I liked her color palette a lot. I really liked her hair and all the reds and oranges that she would wear. She seemed like the most well-rounded one.

My Morning Routine

I usually wake up with my cat on me and pet her for a while and then I make a cup of PG Tips tea and just kind of sit around for a while. It’s like a shitty English tea. I think it’s like the Folgers of England, basically.

Dream Collaboration

Ariel Pink. I’m so obsessed with him right now, and it's pretty insane how limitless [his music feels]. He just gets really far out and it seems kind of effortless, but it’s such a range of different sounds from different eras. He makes me feel like I have a limited imagination sometimes [in comparison]. Personally, I don’t think that there’s anyone doing anything even close.

Last Great Film I Saw

Just last night, I saw Clifford with Martin Short and Charles Grodin. I think that’s a great film, but I also have a really weird crush on Martin Short, so it was, I dunno, it kind of fed into that fantasy. I mean, in his prime, if you could call it that. [laughs] I think it developed as a child. I watched Captain Ron religiously as a kid, for some reason.

Best Thing I’ve Bought in the Past Year

It’s a module box that allows you to input several instruments into a 4-track and run through your computer so it’s kind of like a mini studio setup. I’m recording actively.

Favorite Record Store

I have a sentimental place in my heart for Recycled Records on Haight Street because I used to live in like a basement apartment with this guy that worked there, Moses. We would just go down there four days out the week and hang out all day and listen to records. I also really like Groove Merchant when I’m looking to find a bunch of records that I can afford.

Favorite Song of All Time

“I Scare Myself” by Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks. It’s got a really intense violin solo in the middle, and it kind of sounds like a song that a serial killer would write about somebody. But it’s really beautiful.

Last Album I Downloaded

I downloaded the entire Hollies discography. Mainly-- because not all of it’s good-- I was just trying to get Evolution and this other album, Butterfly, which came out one after the other, and they’re both super good. Those two albums are super hard to find on vinyl, which is super annoying, because it is by far their best stuff. All their greatest hits are way earlier, more Beatles rippy-offy kind of stuff, so it’s not as interesting. But Evolution is totally their psych record and it’s really varied but it’s very cool and it’s definitely Graham Nash’s best songwriting.

Role Model

Genesis P-Orridge for just being a freak, if you want to be. I agree with a lot of his and/or her ideas about how you should live your life, for you, and stuff like that. It’s kind of cheesy, but it’s kind of like modern Buddhist ideas about serving yourself, which is cool.

Favorite TV Show

I love “Columbo”. I love “Black Books”-- it’s like a British comedy. It’s fucking hilarious. I also am totally addicted to this show on A&E called “The First 48”. It’s a show that is real time. A crime is committed and it usually takes place in Detroit or Houston or something and it’s basically just tracking the detectives in the first 48 hours after the crime is committed to track down the people who did it. There’s a lot of interrogation, like hidden camera things. It’s just really focused and there’s no fast-paced editing. It’s almost like zen.

Favorite Music Video

There’s a weird video for “Night Fever” by the Bee Gees that’s really cool. It’s shots of a strip somewhere that looks really shitty at night interspersed with these weird low-lit shots of the three Bee Gees standing and they’re singing and they’re lined up, tapping their foot in unison, like the same leg. They all look super dead and they’re not very enthusiastic and it’s really kind of awkward, but it looks really cool.

Favorite Venue

I really like the Great American Music Hall because it’s really beautiful and really historic. I kind of have a sentimental attachment to it. My mom used to live in San Francisco in the ‘70s and she told me this story about how she used to feel like she had this weird psychic connection with Van Morrison. She would have dreams about him all the time and she always felt like if she met him someday, there might be something there for some reason, which is just kind of crazy. She said she went to see him at the Great American and she was right in the front row against the stage and she was like, “Tonight’s gonna be the night, he’s gonna open his eyes and he’s gonna see me and he’s gonna know something.” But then she said he never opened his eyes the whole time. He never opens his eyes.

Favorite “Simpsons” Episode

Obvious choice, but the one where Homer gains all the weight to get on disability-- just so quotable, the whole thing. “I don’t want to look like a freak, so I’ll take the muumuu.”

Favorite Cereal

Cereal, oh fuck. I have a lot. Honestly, I really like Special K. As far as a crazy ass cereal, I love Cocoa Pebbles. I just really like the texture, they’re all airy and weird and tiny.

Favorite Sport

I like the pacing of baseball. I find that it’s the easiest sport for me to become attached to the different people, which is the only thing that makes it interesting for me, because I don’t really like sports. I like being able to see people’s faces without a mask on. I feel like there’s a wide range of looks for a baseball player, like he can be tall or short. They’re pretty varied looking, which is interesting. You can be out of shape or be a tall freak who’s really skinny. It’s like the misfit sport.

Dream Tattoo

I would actually be super into having a portrait tattoo, but the person is always changing. You see people with kind-of-good portrait tattoos but there’s always one detail that’s fucked up. If I could maybe meet some insane Japanese tattoo artist that could do photographic renderings of peoples’ faces, then there’s a lot of people I might consider getting. My friend has a tattoo of Brian Wilson, and it's cool, but it totally looks like Roy Orbison.

5-10-15-20: Nas

Jayson Greene — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:45:00 -0500

Photo by Matt Salacuse

5-10-15-20 features artists talking about the music that made an impact on them throughout their lives, five years at a time. Listen along to Nas' picks on Spotify.

Nas began his career looking back. Even in his earliest material, you could hear nostalgia for bygone worlds. Last year’s Life Is Good might have been the most valedictory record of his career, opening with a weepy overture of piano and strings surrounded by the sound of cheering crowds-- very much the prelude to a champagne-popping, gold-watch retirement speech. Nas obliged, filling Life Is Good with verses that ran their fingers lovingly over tiny details (“At night, New York, eat a slice too hot/ Use my tongue to tear the skin hanging from the roof of my mouth”) and dialed out to swallow entire borough histories (“A Queens Story”). It was a reminder that Nas’s observational eye is never as keen as when it’s backtracking to earlier times...

Hall & Oates: "Kiss On My List"

I don’t know remember much about five, but when I was eight years old, I loved the sounds of Joe Raposo, the composer who made the theme song for "Sesame Street". I loved Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five, of course, and I loved the Police. One of my favorite songs was “Kiss On My List” [sings]: “Your kiss, your kiss is on my list.” Who made that? Probably Michael McDonald.

Rick James: Cold Blooded

I made my brother buy Cold Blooded for me; both of us could only buy one record each, so I picked a Michael Jackson album and I made him pick Rick James. My favorite from that album was probably "Ebony Eyes" with Smokey Robinson-- people didn't understand how bad he really was.

Big Daddy Kane: Long Live the Kane

Anything by Big Daddy Kane, or Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, Kool G Rap. I could go word-for-word regarding any of the albums from ‘88. Big Daddy Kane was a teacher to me; he taught me how it’s supposed to be done. I learned a lot about the world from Big Daddy Kane. He had a big vocabulary: I learned a lot of words from rap music.

Dr. Dre: The Chronic

Doggy Style and The Chronic hit me off crazy. They felt like out-of-this-world music. It changed me. It was my day-to-day theme music. '93 was a crazy year. Illmatic was supposed to have wrapped by then, and I was waiting for it to be released. But that album was actually a part of ‘93, because it leaked. It was everywhere: LA, D.C., Atlanta, New York. It wasn't a leak in the sense of today, where its all over the world at once, but people had already talked about it so much, it felt like it was everywhere.

DMX: It's Dark and Hell Is Hot

That was the year DMX took over the world. He was a street-rapper back then, battling. A bad dude. I heard some of the stuff he had put out on mixtapes, and you could hear that he was coming for the throne, coming for everybody’s head. I was working with DMX on Belly right when it was beginning to happen and we became brothers on the set of that movie-- so I was lucky not to be in his path like that.

A lot of people will see X now and say shit about him, but they don’t understand where he’s coming from when he’s talking about the rappers out today. That’s always been DMX. Before people knew who he was, he always spoke his mind, he’s always been 100% street and never cared what nobody thought about him. His talent speaks for itself.

That was also the year that Lauryn dropped Miseducation. There was a guy who worked on Belly with me and DMX who'd heard the record, and everyday he would try to tell me how incredible this music that was about to come out was. I tried to get a description, like, “What do you mean?” And he just couldn’t say anything. He just kept saying, “It moves your soul.” He did not lie.

Nas: God's Son

When I made God’s Son, and the song “Made You Look” in particular, I felt that there was a lot of bullshit going on in rap. Without sounding cocky, I wanted “Made You Look” to bring “real hip-hop” back to the forefront. People get killed for saying that phrase, “real hip-hop,” because everyone uses it too much. A lot of people don’t know what “real hip-hop” is. I’m not going to try to explain that; I’ll just leave it open. I feel like rap needed a smack in the face. There wasn’t enough of that raw sound in 2003, absolutely not. When the beat cuts out and I’m rhyming at the end, I wanted to sound like the EPMD record where they had K Solo and Redman on it ["The Head Banger"]. My intentions were to blow everything else out.

Public Enemy

I remember things being kinda cool, rap-wise. Maybe too cool. Everything felt safe and calm in my life. But I felt an underlying hypocrisy one going on, a disconnect between older people and young people, particularly when it came to hip-hop culture. I was coming off of Hip Hop Is Dead, and the Nigger Tape or the Untitled Album was my political version of Hip Hop Is Dead, the political side of that conversation. I started to remember what Public Enemy stood for, what Ice Cube stood for-- I was trying to be like N.W.A. and Public Enemy in one person. It was my salute to them.

Update: Katy B

Carrie Battan — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:20:00 -0500

Katy B and Jacques Greene: "Danger" on SoundCloud.

If there’s a single dominant archetype in media and art right now, it’s the flailing, recession-era millennial. We live in a culture infatuated, to an absurd degree, with jobless college graduates postponing their adulthood by living at home with their parents or struggling to make ends meet on a barista’s salary. But what happens when the wayward 20-somethings manage to actually settle into grown-up lives, complete with satisfying careers, apartment leases, and health insurance? It’s a question that Katy B, the 23-year-old UK vocalist born Kathleen Anne Brien, is trying to answer for herself on her forthcoming second album, due out in late spring.

Since her excellent 2011 debut On a Mission, which cemented the singer as a talented negotiator between niche UK dance scenes and pop, Katy has burrowed into the rhythms of adulthood. She’s been living on her own for the first time, taking cooking classes, and partying much less in recent months; we agree that there’s a strange and jolting moment when hangovers suddenly become debilitating, when a couch becomes the most appealing weekend option. It seems a bit silly, certainly, to pine for youth at 23, but the transitions are making Katy more emotional than she’d expected. And if her excellent late-2012 Danger EP is any indication, she should be able to translate her quarter-life unease into a subtle and seductive sound that transcends the dance floor.

"When I was 18, I’d be out four nights a week-- I want to have that energy again but I’ve found I’m a bit old and ready for retirement."

Pitchfork: Both On a Mission and the Danger EP do a great job of evoking the image of a nightclub that can be very forlorn. What inspired the lyrics to your new record?

Katy B: On a Mission has a certain innocence to it, but the new album has a lot of songs that I cry to-- songs that run really deep. I’ve gone through a lot of changes in the last couple of years and had a lot of realizations that come through on the album, too. There’s a song called "Take Me Back" about my best friend-- she sings on it, and I get very emotional listening to it.

Pitchfork: What’s that song about?

KB: I have these memories of my ex-boyfriend’s house, where my friends and I used to stay up all night and chat rubbish and draw weird pictures and stick them on this wall. There were all these young musicians coming in and out of there, playing the drums or singing their little hearts out. Now, I walk past the house and we’re not in that kind of place anymore-- especially me and my best friend. Everyone I know is moving out of their parents’ house, and getting jobs and real-world responsibilities. Things are getting a bit heavier. When I was 18 or 19, I’d be out four nights a week. I want to have that energy again but I’ve found I’m a bit old and ready for retirement.

There’s another song on the album called "Crying for No Reason" that’s inspired by a friend who recently had a breakdown. She was in her car at a traffic light and she just broke down crying. She and I spoke about it, and she realized she was so upset because she’d just gone through a breakup where she hadn’t had much empathy for her ex. She felt guilty about it, and I used that experience to write about my own guilt about certain things in my life.

"Destiny’s Child literally taught me how to sing."

Pitchfork: Are there any big sonic shifts this time around?

KB: I wanted to put more emphasis on songs this time around, rather than it just being one beat. I’m working with Geeneus, who produced quite a lot of On a Mission, again and I’ve worked with Diplo, Al Shux, and Fraser T Smith, who did [Adele's] "Set Fire to the Rain". I'm hopefully doing some more work with Jacques Greene and Joker as well.

Pitchfork: There’s a resurgence of early-2000s pop stars now-- Justin Timberlake, Destiny’s Child. Was that era influential to you?

KB: Oh my god, yes. When I was about 13 Justin Timberlake was touring the Justified album-- I went to go see him in Wembley and liked it so much I wanted to go back to see him again, so I queued at five in the morning to get tickets. I was obsessed with Justin.

And Destiny’s Child literally taught me how to sing. At one of my first-ever studio sessions, the producers were like, "What do you want to record?" I said I wanted to do my own version of "Say My Name". And then I literally couldn’t keep up with the verse-- I remember thinking, "Oh god, I need to step my game up."

Katy B: "Got Paid" [ft. Zinc and Wiley] on SoundCloud.

Pitchfork: As someone with dubstep roots, is it funny to hear a drop in a song like Taylor Swift’s "I Knew You Were Trouble"?

KB: It’s not so weird for me because dubstep has been big in the UK for years. I quite like that song, and as long as it’s done well, I’m fine with hearing a dubstep drop in any song.

Pitchfork: By the same token, does the mainstream appropriation of those sounds make you want to move further away from them in your own music?

KB: It does. The reason I started doing music like that in the first place was because it felt fresh and different. Whenever I’m making something, the challenge is always to create something that’s interesting for me to listen to. So when I hear the same formula being used over and over, I get bored. Just as huge pop artists have taken inspiration from things that are happening at the moment, I do the same with my music. But I’ve never really compared myself to anyone who’s a big star -- I’m not trying to be a fashion icon or get famous.

Katy B: "Aaliyah" [ft. Jessie Ware] on SoundCloud.

Pitchfork: How did you come up with the concept for "Aaliyah", your recent collaboration with Jessie Ware on your Danger EP?

KB: When I got the beat, in my imagination I was catapulted into this club where all the boys and girls are looking hot and wearing amazing clothes, and there’s this girl dancing and looking better than me. My boyfriend, who’s a character in the song, is a DJ and he’s going to this club every week to play for her. He wants to watch her dance. I love writing songs where the name is the title-- I looked on my iTunes and Aaliyah was at the top and I thought, "That’s perfect."

This girl I want people to imagine looks like Aaliyah and moves like Aaliyah and has her kind of aura. And I knew I wanted to do an EP of collaborations and thought it would be sick to get Jessie on this tune, so I tweeted at her. She came down to the studio on her day off-- I think her boyfriend wanted to kill me. I felt so lucky. She’s such a great girl.

Pitchfork: Do you see yourself as a representative for women in typically male-dominated, insular music scenes?

KB: I hope so. If there was a girl who wanted to be involved with this music and was intimidated by it, I hope she would see me and realize she could do it. I’d love for that to be true. But then, in a sense, when you’re surrounded by people, the gender lines become less important-- you think of yourself as a person rather than just a female. I’m excited about representing my gender, but at the same time it doesn't matter. I wouldn’t say my gender has been a disadvantage.

Interviews: Phosphorescent

Larry Fitzmaurice — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:20:00 -0500

Photos by Dusdin Condren

It's a rainy afternoon in December, and I'm supposed to meet Phosphorescent's Matthew Houck at a rundown Greenpoint watering hole called Palace Cafe. One problem, though: It's closed, ostensibly because most drinking establishments don't expect weekday patrons before 4 p.m. I text him to see if he'd rather just talk at his apartment-cum-recording-studio nearby, but that suggestion is shut down. Instead, we walk in the rain, searching for a bar that's willing to serve us.

Ten minutes later, we enter local beer garden the Keg & Lantern, and Houck addresses the bartender in a manner that suggests he's been here a few times before. We grab a beer and start to head out to the heated patio in the back, but he stops suddenly. "Can I get a shot of tequila, too?" He offers me one. (I decline.) At the end of our interview, he decides to hang around, since he'd made plans for a friend to meet up and knock back a few more.

There's little doubt that Houck, a professed road warrior, lives hard; a particularly despondent cut from 2007's cracked-blues opus Pride goes by "Cocaine Lights", and much of his new album Muchacho addresses how hard living-- illicit substances, infidelity, and the like-- can affect personal relationships in nearly irreparable ways.

Born and raised in Alabama, Houck has lived in Brooklyn for about six years now. He lived in relative isolation in the borough's Navy Yards area ("If my environment encourages me to become a hermit, I'll do it") until he was evicted in 2011, decamping to Greenpoint, studio gear in tow. Shortly after that, Muchacho was recorded over the course of a year, with production handled by Houck himself, mostly in his own home. "It's not so much a 'studio' as it is a junky practice space-- no professionals would ever walk in there and be like, 'Whoa.'"

Far from the sullen type, Houck is warm and gregarious in person, but when it comes to talking about the contents of his music, he can be reticent-- which is ironic, considering that Muchacho is the most straightforward record of his decade-plus career, from the ragged Neil Young burn of "The Quotidian Beasts" to "A Charm/A Blade"'s Soft Bulletin-esque sway, to the meditative elegance of first single "Song for Zula". The record's welcome warmth may suggest an artist preparing for his close-up, but in conversation, Houck's still more willing to recede into the shadows.

Pitchfork: You're on the road a lot. Do you like touring?

MH: It sounds really bratty to bitch about being able to travel and play music for a living, but touring is a damaging and destructive way of life. There’s a kind of mental blankness that being on the road encourages. You have to shut down a few things in your mind, or you’ll go crazy. If you’re touring at my level, you’re not touring in a comfortable bus. You’ve got to get up at a certain time of the day and then shut yourself down for six hours while you’re driving. It does something to your mind and your spirit. It’s not like you can do much that's productive when you’re crammed in a van, except read a book or listen to some tunes. It makes your mind lazy.

The last time I was on the road, I thought, "Just a few more months, and then I’ll go home and tend to everything." But when I got back, everything was too far gone to fix, so there was fallout. Losing my place [in the Navy Yards] was a big deal. It’s a big space, and over the years I acquired a decent amount of gear. New York is a beast, man, it’s hard to find a place to do music unless you’re going to soundproof it. Relationships are tough when you're on the road, too-- my girlfriend would come on some of the tours, but it wasn't easy. Drugs and booze were involved. So I lost the place, lost the girl, and lost my mind.

Pitchfork: Some artists write songs that sound incredibly personal, but then it turns out that they're more fiction than representative of personal experience.

MH: It's impossible not to draw from your life-- that’s all you’ve got. Even your imagination is instructed by what you know. It’s very interesting to hear what people come up with when interpreting my lyrics. There are lines that are so personal that I'm mortified that I’m even singing them.

Pitchfork: This record sounds more well-produced and labored over than your previous albums.

MH: At this point, I’m just better at making records. In the past, I was just stabbing in the dark. I needed to make those records, but I didn't care about how perfect the sound was. For Muchacho, I had the luxury of building a studio and playing around with sounds for an entire year. I’m really into that. The act of producing records is really interesting to me right now. I'd love to produce for other artists, but I'm always so busy. It'd be nice to not have to worry about the songs themselves, though.

Pitchfork: Muchacho is also more sonically varied than any of your other albums. Did you draw from any specific influences in the studio?

MH: "Muchacho's Tune" was the first song I worked on, and the production was inspired by Brian Eno's Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. That record sounds very moon-bouncy to me, and I figured that sound would couple well with some Mexican cantina-type stuff, to my ears at least. I got the underwater floatiness that I wanted there. I'm really proud of that song.

Pitchfork: Besides recording in your own home, you did some sessions in Manhattan's Electric Lady studio, too.

MH: I made friends with their studio manager, so I spent a day in there with Father John Misty's Josh Tillman. We were just goofing around, and I thought, "This is great, I want to record here." But after three days, I realized that I just wasn't organized enough to make the record there. I can't be like, "These are the hours we have, let's go in and cut a song." I don't work that way, so it would've been a waste of time. I’m bad about being productive-- it takes me 15 hours of lolling around until my chemicals get right and I can get to work.

Pitchfork: Why is the record called Muchacho?

MH: If you see someone who is getting uppity, you might just say to them, "Hey, muchacho, settle down." I was in Mexico, by myself, feeling pretty raw, and I remembered a line in a Neruda poem somewhere. I can’t even remember what it was, but it was something like, "This is how it is, muchacho." That kept resonating to me-- like, "You better handle it. This is how it is, muchacho."

Pitchfork: Your music is often sad-sounding, but there you are on the cover of this album, smiling. You look happy.

MH: I am happy, but I write terribly sad songs. It’s hard to reconcile those things for me; I don’t feel like a sad wreck of a person, but I write from the perspective of a wreck of a person. Also, I wouldn't call that album cover "happy." There’s a messy desperation going on there. It shows that you can be happy when you’re a wreck.

The Out Door: Imagined Communities

Marc Masters and Grayson Currin — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:15:00 -0600

In this edition of The Out Door, we talk with father and son Yoshi and Tashi Wada about the politics of reissues and the divide between composition and improvisation, dive into the "the abyss of 78rpm record fascination" with Robert Millis of Climax Golden Twins, and explore the varying styles of solo cellists Helen Money and Julia Kent. But first, we explore the idea of "imagined communities" through the lens of a new, fascinating compilation. (Remember to follow us on Twitter for all kinds of updates on underground and experimental music.)

I: Imagined Communities

Lynn Fister aka Aloonaluna; photo by Micah Keith

San Francisco's Lynn Fister runs micro-press and label Watery Starve Press and makes music as Aloonaluna. The latest release through the label is Taxidermy of Unicorns, a book/double cassette package that features words, art, and music by four different women. In an essay included in the collection, Fister explores the "immediate feeling of a collective consciousness" between herself and other female artists, working in very different musical forms. She clarifies that this doesn't mean she can relate to all females, or that she can't relate to males, or that any two individual experiences are ever the same. But still, as she puts it, "There's something about the female experience that feels shared, no matter how imaginary it may be."

Packaging for Taxidermy of Unicorns

I'm struck by that use of "imaginary." It suggests that if we admit that classifications exist only in our minds, we can discuss them without boxing people into them. And we can define and control them ourselves rather than vice versa. Fister found inspiration for this idea in Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities. "His idea was that all these communities are formed and imagined," she tells me, speaking on the phone from her home. "They're not real-- we create those divisions. But they have real consequences because people believe them."

"I feel that I connect to female artists not just because of gender, but that gender does help me connect-- and I don't know why," she continues. "I think it's the way people learn to interact in whatever kind of group they are classified in. Somehow a commonality develops, and I feel I can understand it even if I've never met the person."

Part of what makes Fister's perspective compelling is that she acts on these ideas through her art. Taxidermy of Unicorns is the perfect representation of her approach, filled with singular female voices expressing themselves across the boundaries of artistic media. All four participants work solo, and the release itself is highly individualistic-- Fister hand-packages each copy so that no two are exactly the same. (Mine, pictured above, came with some string, wool, and a bird feather.)

Various artists: Taxidermy of Unicorns sampler on SoundCloud.

More importantly, the work on Taxidermy of Unicorns is varied and personal. Birds of Passage (aka New Zealander Alicia Merz) offers patient music that at times seems to stand still-- yet, as Fister puts it, "it leaves so much room for the listener, [and] it makes you think about so much else." The contribution of France's Felicia Atkinson, who works as Je Suis le Petit Chevalier, bubbles and rolls in intoxicating waves. "It's really elegant and primitive at the same time," says Fister, "which is a really strange combination, and I love it." Spacious, outward-bound sounds come from Rachel Evans' Motion Sickness of Time Travel, whose prolific output continually impresses Fister. "It's never redundant," she insists. "It keeps on expanding, and it's not nostalgic, not sad, not angry... I don't know how to describe it."

The five songs that Fister herself contributes as Aloonaluna deal in drone and abstraction-- she cites the work of Inca Ore as a prime inspiration. But they also make generous use of steady beats, a rarity in this type of music. Often experimental artists seem to fear the constraints of regular rhythm, but Fister finds ways to make it sound expressively open-ended.

"I try to make beats that are adrift even though they're structured. I often will loop a beat so it's a little bit off each time [it occurs]," she explains. "The idea of repeating something over and over and making it slightly different each time has a kind of expansive truth to it. Also, I listen to a lot of drifting music, but also a lot of pop and hip-hop, so that plays into my own way of making music."

As we continue to discuss women's experiences in all those kinds of music, I suggest that talking about this is necessary to get us to a point where we don't have to talk about it anymore. "I wonder if we'll ever get to that point," Fister replies with a chuckle. My immediate thought is that she's right, and that I'm being naïve.

But later I realize that's not necessarily what she means. Perhaps she's saying that even if discussing gender solved all these issues, that would be no reason to stop. We'll still want to explore commonalities, share experiences, and acknowledge or embrace whatever imaginary community we each choose to be a part of. "Knowing how someone got to where they are is so important," she says. "I think it's good to talk about it." --Marc Masters

Watch four videos from Taxidermy of Unicorns here.

Next: Pushing the cello's limits with Helen Money and Julia Kent

II: Resonant body: Solo cellists Helen Money and Julia Kent

Left: Helen Money, photo by Travis McCoy. Right: Julia Kent, photo by Fionn Reilly

There are specific labels associated with music for solo guitar, piano, synthesizer, and vocals, but no such obvious home exists for solo cello music. Consider Arriving Angels and Character, respective new albums by two cellists with extensive resumes and catalogs, Los Angeles' Alison Chesley and New York's Julia Kent.

Kent offered 2011's resplendent Green and Grey through Important Records, a syndicate of the furthest reaches of the avant-garde. But the Leaf Label, a British imprint with a long history of pressing against the boundaries of indie rock with acts like Caribou and Efterklang, delivered Character. Likewise, under the name Helen Money, Chesley issued 2009's In Tune on the now-defunct experimental stable Table of the Elements. But for Arriving Angels, she's made the unlikely switch to Profound Lore, a Canadian metal label better known for six strings of tremolo rather than four strings and a bow. Despite the surroundings, both Kent and Chesley feel strangely and happily at home; taken together, they offer a compelling snapshot of the variety of sounds, processes, and approaches possible with the strings of a cello and some carefully controlled accessories.

Helen Money. Photo by Travis McCoy

"I don't see myself as being experimental, and Table of the Elements tilted more toward that. I don't really see myself as a metal artist," explains Chesley. "But somehow I feel like I have a really strong connection in that community. There's something about metal music that likes what I like. It's visceral, and it wears its heart on its sleeve. I feel like I'm coming from the same place."

On Arriving Angels, Chesley-- a classically trained cellist whose former rock band, Verbow, released two albums on Epic Records-- gets a little help communicating that idea from Neurosis drummer Jason Roeder. Suggested by the record's producer and Chesley's longtime friend Steve Albini, Roeder plays on several of the album's tracks. "Beautiful Friends" finds Chesley looping several passes across the cello, a long and tense melody backed by distorted swipes at the strings. She pauses, dropping suddenly into a darkened sustain that recalls the foundational drone metal of Earth. That's when Roeder makes his grand entrance, drumming a circular pattern with his tom-toms. He goads Chesley to escalate the tempo and the aggression and, ultimately, to pick a barbed rock riff from her distorted cello.

"I don't know why I like dark music, but I like music that takes me to a dark place in a good way," she says, noting that her relationship with rock music started when her brother introduced her to the Who when she was in her early 20s. Punk and indie rock soon followed, and then she joined Verbow. "I never thought I'd play it on my cello, but I ended up playing very aggressive, rhythmic parts on my cello. And that was okay with me."

Chesley originally wrote all of the drum parts Roeder plays as loops and sent them to him to see if he'd be interested in recreating them at Albini's Chicago studio, Electrical Audio. When he arrived, he ended up replacing part of the loop on "Beautiful Friends" with his own ideas. In the brooding and building "Shrapnel", Roeder's drums completely supplant Chesley's loop. That's how she prefers her collaboration: In the past, Chesley's played on records from bands such as Russian Circles, Broken Social Scene, and Bob Mould; those roles are best, she says, when there is a back and forth between the band and the guest instrumentalist. It influences not only the piece she's getting paid to record, she says, but her own music, too.

"I'm always inspired by the music that those people have worked on," Chesley says. "It gives me enthusiasm for the music I'm writing."

Indeed, Chesley serves as something of an ambassador for the cello. She enjoys the thrill and labor of working with a team in a studio to make records, though since moving to Los Angeles last year, she's done much less work as a support player. Instead, she's been writing her own music and teaching cello to children, making sure they learn their fundamentals before they chase her lead of effects pedal chains and extended techniques.

She also relishes her distinct mix of formal classical training and casual rock education, especially the flexibility it provides. When she was recording with Japanese post-rock band Mono, for instance, Takaakira Goto walked into the room of classical musicians playing the string parts and explained that he wanted them to sound as though they were a cloud drifting through the sky. Some instrumentalists rolled their eyes, Chesley remember, but her background allowed her to understand his lack of technicality.

"He's just trying to express in words what a lot of people would put into dynamics," she reckons. "But it impressed me that he cared so much about evoking an image or a feeling."

Julia Kent.; photo by Pedro Anguila

Kent is a bit more reserved with her cello, both in composition and collaboration. Kent is also classically trained, though she put the instrument down for a number of years before joining wild-eyed group Rasputina after moving to New York. Where Rasputina and Chesley sometimes push the instrument until its sound only vaguely resembles the general perception of a cello, Kent's records interweave familiar tones in novel ways, with long tones intersecting lithe melodies and loops of plucked strings adding accompaniment beneath bowed shapes.

It's telling that Kent records her music in the isolation of a cluttered spare room of her New York apartment. (Kent described that space in our 2011 interview.) From there, she's able to balance the city outside with her own environment inside, a dynamic equilibrium that has helped inspire the blend of cello, found sounds, and fields recordings that define both Green and Grey and Character. "The energy of New York City is always present in whatever I do," she told Dummy Magazine earlier this year, "even when what I am doing is attempting to block it out."

Green and Grey, as its title suggests, attempted to find a balance between nature and New York, an idea not too far removed from those of Antony Hegarty, the singer that Kent has helped back for the better part of a decade. For that record, Kent wove recordings of cicadas into a fade of gentle pizzicato cello, the babble of a hyperactive brook into agile themes. But Character is more internal, both in its motivations and its sound sources.

"Rather than using field recordings of external atmospheres, I tried to bring the walls into the music. This is a much more self-contained record," Kent explains. She recorded pedestrian events such as lighting a match or wine glasses clinking and then processed them to create intriguing new textures and rhythms within the songs. "Those turned out to be some surprisingly interesting sound sources."

The field recordings of Green and Grey often served as distant bookends or background canvases, but the added elements on Character are much more present throughout each piece. The racing melodies of "Tourbillon", for example, reflect off of distant background percussion, a simple and quick click-clack rhythm affording the strings gravity. The pings (those wine glasses, perhaps?) that flit throughout "Salute" provide a delicate bell-like effect beneath Kent's steady, solemn drones. When the piece lifts in its third minute, growing louder and brighter, those samples serve as the springboard. The record is better for the shift, with the pervasiveness of those smaller samples tying together each piece and, in turn, these elegant and intricate 10 tracks.

"With the field recordings, I was trying to introduce other sounds to what was primarily cello. And now I'm becoming much more free in my approach to doing that, to using found sound and percussion and electronics," Kent explains. "I've been listening to a lot of electronic music, and that's been inspiring in terms of the variety of sounds that are out there and possible to be create. But that's also daunting, because of the infinite possibilities." -- Grayson Currin

Next: Robert Millis on his obsession with 78s, and two new Sublime Frequencies compilations

III: Robert Millis: The Spirit of 78

Robert Millis is obsessed with 78rpm records. He admits as much in the liner notes to Scattered Melodies: Korean Kayagum Sanjo, one of two collections of music from 78s that he's recently compiled for Sublime Frequencies. "Hearing this Korean music," he writes, "was the precise moment that I fell down the abyss of 78rpm record fascination that will be my doom."

The music he's referring to is known in Korea as Sanjo, an improvised style developed in the 1890s and played on a string instrument called the Kayagum. On Scattered Melodies, Millis collects Sanjo tracks from the 1920s up to the 1950s, and they're all oddly transfixing. The playing is often subdued and sparse, yet there's a fiery unpredictability to each performance. Even the softest notes leap out from under the scratchy surface noise of the 78s.

The other new 78rpm collection Millis produced, The Crying Princess, is not focused on a single style. Instead, it compiles music made in Burma as early as 1909 and as late as 1960. Heart-bursting harp-and-voice ballads sit next to piano-led pop and winding melodies crafted on electric guitar. Particularly fascinating are pieces by Po Sein, a Burmese legend whose troupes toured the country performing plays and songs, which Millis calls "the popular music of Burma before radio and TV."

Millis' interest in 78 rpm recordings and non-Western music informs his work as a researcher-- he's traveled to many countries in search of 78s-- producer, ethnographer, and musician. Alongside his other Sublime Frequencies compilations (such as Harmika Yab Yum: Folk Sounds from Nepal), he's made films in India, Southeast Asia, and Thailand. He wrote a book about 78rpm records, Victrola Favorites, for the Dust-to-Digital label. All these pursuits have influenced his own work in the long-running duo Climax Golden Twins with Jeffery Taylor (who co-authored Victrola Favorites).

Millis is currently in India on a Fulbright scholarship (pictures from his journey can be seen on his blog). He spoke to us via email about how he seeks out 78s, how time saturates their grooves, and how their sound is "the death cry of tiny insects."

"There is a beautiful mystery in these early recordings-- who were these people? How did it work? Who invented it? Why was it invented at that time?"

Pitchfork: How did you first became interested in 78rpm records?

Robert Millis: Many things one finds out about are an accident and then when the accident happens you think, "Why have I never heard this before? It is familiar, it's like coming home... and I never knew it existed until right now." When I was in high school, accidentally, somehow, in between the old Neil Young and Beatles records I was listening to, I heard a compilation of 1920s recordings by Jelly Roll Morton, and I loved them. There are some great spoken moments on those Jelly Roll records, and the sound of the human speaking voice, coming through this haze of surface noise, sounded like I was being spoken to by a spirit from the ancient past. [And] you can hear the joy they have in working together, feel the heat in the old crowded "studio" as they gathered around the single microphone.

Po Sein and Ma Kyin U: "Romantic Duet" on SoundCloud.

Years later, again accidentally, I heard the Korean music that is featured on Scattered Melodies, and it sounded like I was tuning into a radio station from 10,000 years ago or from a distant universe. Another accident: I found some Chinese Opera 78s in a junk store with beautiful labels that seemed to be whispering "buy me." There is a beautiful mystery in these early recordings--who were these people? How did it work? Who invented it? Why was it invented at that time? I have always loved music and records, loved recording, so here was the origin of that love-- how could I not help but be fascinated?

And then there is the design from that era, pre-Depression: the hand lettering, the typefaces, the illustrations. Even further, 78rpm records have an immediacy. There were no studios at that time-- barely microphones-- so there is very little in between you and the musician except shellac.

Pitchfork: How do you hunt for 78s? Do you contact people before you travel, or do you start looking once you get there?

RM: A little of both. It's nice to have a purpose when you travel, a goal. At the moment I am in India, traveling around meeting musicians and talking to collectors. In two days I am going to visit and stay with a collector who lives outside of Kochi, Kerala. He has such a thick accent I can barely understand him. I am sure the bus ride there will be confusing. He lives in the county, in the middle of the woods, in India. But he has over 30,000 78s and many old players and gramophones. I have no idea what to expect when I get there, or what to expect from getting there, but no matter what happens it will be a wild ride, and the food will be good.

"Shellac is created from the secretions of certain insects, so 78s are not vegan. That surface noise is a steel needle dragging through the effluent of millions of tiny insects. It is their death cry."

Pitchfork: You've written about your fascination with "how sounds are mediated through the equipment used to record them." How does that manifest in 78s?

RM: I have a strong interest in the resonance of objects-- literally in how sounds "sound" when played back through unusual materials or devices. Part of my interest in the 78rpm era is focused on this-- the effects of using shellac as the material from which old records are made and the surface noise this creates. Shellac is created from the secretions of certain insects, so 78s are not vegan. That surface noise is a steel needle dragging through the effluent of millions of tiny insects. It is their death cry. But perhaps I am getting carried away and the insects deserved to die for the shellac.

Also, I love how the old "talking machines" sound. They were designed to be acoustic playback devices-- electric speakers were a long way off in the future-- and so they have interesting resonances. They vibrate, they transmit sound. These early record players were extensions of the techniques of instrument building, and as someone who plays acoustic instruments I am fascinated with this.

"I am interested in the passage of time-- how time accumulates very obviously in the surface noise and wear and tear on records. And less obviously in our accumulated cultural references."

Pitchfork: What do these records say about the times in which they were made?

RM: With my 78rpm research I am not particularly interested in discographical information, or in calculating history scientifically. I am interested in the passage of time-- how time accumulates very obviously in the surface noise and wear and tear on records. And less obviously in our accumulated cultural references-- how we hear old music, nostalgia, and how newer music has appropriated (and improved or ruined) the melodies and harmonies. How imagination and hearing works. How memory works. How memory associates and layers, how we remember, why and what we remember. Music is often very colored by this, and culturally by similarities in song structures and progressions and scales. Architecturally such thoughts are easier to see: old building facades with additions, decay and damage caused by weather and time, new paint jobs on old, etc.

St. Gun Khin May: "Shan Village Part 2" on SoundCloud.

Pitchfork: Do you think it's possible to hear history in the grooves of the 78s you've compiled?

RM: It is possible, but it takes years of ninja training and specially re-constructed earlobes. Both compilations span so many years, from some of the earliest recordings made in Burma (roughly 1909) up well into the 50's. For Scattered Melodies it is perhaps more obvious, as all the tracks are essentially one solo style. Whereas The Crying Princess encompasses so many styles-- theatre, popular, Western influenced, modern. I try to point to some connections, between the Burmese harp playing and modern electric guitar for example, the connection with the Western piano. However, I don't want to be heavy handed about this-- I am no academic and frankly, this is a huge question. You have the history of two countries to contend with in the answer, not to mention the history of the recording concerns that made the recordings, not to mention the history of the music, the history of the musicians... if you want I could write a book about it. But I suggest just listening and it will be fairly obvious. Listen to the Burmese trio on side 1 of The Crying Princess. Is there anything more beautiful? Who needs context when confronted with music like that?

Pitchfork: Do you think there are any modern parallels to Po Sein and the touring troupes of Burma?

RM: Sun City Girls.

Pitchfork: Sanjo music sounds quite experimental, almost avant-garde. Do you know if it was perceived that way at the time?

RM: As far as I know it was perceived this way, though we shouldn't forget that it is not a folk music or urban music style. It was conceived as part of a tradition, as part of the existing court music of the time under royal patronage and developed by an established musician. However, it quickly grew into one of the primary musical styles of Korea. There is a slight comparison here with American blues music or even rock n' roll, which started out as outsider music, and is now more mainstream than [the] mainstream ever imagined it could be. But we shouldn't make too much of that because as I said, it developed under royal patronage as court music.

Shim Sang-Gun: "Chungchungmori" on SoundCloud.

Pitchfork: What do you find fascinating about the Sanjo style?

RM: There are several things I love about this music: it is very textural, it revels in the snaps and pops created through a very visceral style of playing, the vibrato goes on even after the tone or the musical note has died away. The string bends are very deep and exaggerated yet so precise. I love that it is in part improvisation, with shouts of encouragement from the accompanying drummer.

Pitchfork: How has your interest in these older musical forms influenced your work with Climax Golden Twins?

RM: My interest actually grew out of the work I have done in CGT. Initially I and my good friend Jeffery Taylor, with whom I founded CGT, collected 78s together. We used 78s in several CGT compositions; records were broken over each other's heads at some shows. We also cover songs from this era-- mostly American hillbilly and blues numbers. Our record from 2004, Highly Bred and Sweetly Tempered, is completely a reaction to all the music from this era we were listening to, absorbing, and collecting, especially Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. It might not sound like it, which is as it should be, but it is.

Pitchfork: How did you put together the Victrola Favorites book?

RM: It grew out of the Victrola Favorites cassette series Jeffery and I had been working on. The cassettes were loosely themed collections of 78s played on an old Victrola. After Dust-to-Digital offered us a release we began scanning labels, recording tracks, and working with a fantastic book designer named John Hubbard. It was a slow process-- improv book design, you could call it. Right from the beginning, though, it was conceived as a way to create two separate narratives: one of the imagery, the paper ephemera, the sleeves, labels, photos, etc, with the music being a separate yet connected thing unto itself. So many people expect the two to correspond, but they were never meant to. It was a celebration of the era, of our collections, of the act of collecting, of discovering new (old) music, and of design.

Pitchfork: You've designed covers for Sublime Frequencies and Dust-to-Digital. How do you go about making those?

RM: I have not designed much for Dust-to-Digital, just a few things, or things in collaborations with others (such as "…i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces" in collaboration with Hubbard and author Steve Roden). For Sublime, half the things I have designed are for my own projects. For the rest I draw inspiration from 1960s and 70s LP designs, or work with the great photos collected by the compilers themselves. I do not really consider myself a designer, though. People like John Hubbard are "real" designers. Also Jeffery Taylor has a natural design aesthetic, and of course Alan Bishop [co-founder of Sublime Frequencies] has a great visual style as well. I just learn from them and from keeping my eyes open. --Marc Masters

Next: Yoshi and Tashi Wada on EM's reissues of Yoshi's seminal drone works

IV: Sound reproduction: Yoshi and Tashi Wada

In the last five years, the whimsical and venerable Japanese label EM Records has taken up the task of asserting Yoshi Wada's role as an eminent and innovative drone pioneer through a series of reissues and archival releases. At best, this music originally had an audience of listeners lucky enough to secure original copies of his very few and very limited releases. At worst, however, this material was heard only by the handful of attendees at Wada's performances two or three decades ago.

"I was an ignored guy," Wada says, "an unknown guy."

EM has spared little expense in the effort-- each of the label's four Wada releases have resembled library books. Earth Horns With Electronic Drones captured a four-person ensemble playing the massive steel pipe "horns" Wada built in the early 1970s. Its high-powered and immersive drones came carved into three LPs, accompanied by an essay from Wada, photos depicting the horns in their monolithic glory, and a promotional poster from a subsequent 1975 concert by Wada's "Lip Vibrators", featuring fellow traveler Rhys Chatham on "20' pipe horn." At the time, Wada, an early Fluxus member, wasn't interested in releasing records, diminishing the memory of the work he'd done. These new packages represent that work and reaffirm his place in conversations about drone, minimalism and, quite simply, the sheer power of sound.

The fifth and latest such release is Singing in Unison, which captures Wada's singing trio from the late 70s delivering a series of similarly distended and enveloping vocal drones in the legendary performance space the Kitchen. These pieces were inspired by various folk traditions and the work of two Wada mentors, La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath.

The artwork for Singing in Unison

Somehow sinister and gorgeous, the performances presented by Unison are a testament to Wada's pursuit of sustained sound through whatever mechanism seemed most suited. Over the years, he's used not only instruments made of plumbing equipment and creaking voices but also bagpipes of his own construction, the innards of large buildings, and nautical horns to explore systems of musical sustain and decay and, mostly, the magic that happens when those properties are no longer a binary.

We spoke with Wada in San Francisco, where he has lived for more than a decade after spending the bulk of his career in New York City. He talked about his newfound legacy status, the perpetuation of his music, and the divide between composition and improvisation.

"Some of what I did in the past, I don't think people appreciated. And now, people are appreciating the body of what I have done. They feel the value of it."

Pitchfork: The release of Singing in Unison is part of a larger operation to archive many of your works that, outside of their performances, have never been heard. Why now?

Yoshi Wada: I wasn't so interested in merchandising through CD or whatever form. I wasn't really so aggressive about promoting my own work. I had my recordings from the past, but I never thought someone was interested in releasing it. But then EM Records and other people were asking, "Let's do it." I'm a laidback, lazy guy, so if somebody wants to release it, I will agree. That's how it happened in the last five or six years.

I have a DVD project. EM Records is interested in releasing some other recordings, but that's frankly not my interest right now in life. What I am interested in is the DVD form with sound installations. I am working on an archive in a way.

I do have more recordings, but I have to go through them and think about what to release. I don't want to release things too similar to each other. I've been working on selecting something different from my other work. If a piece is still valid today, I will release it.

Yoshi Wada: "March 15 - Part 1" on SoundCloud.

Pitchfork: What makes a piece valid for you two or three decades later?

YW: At the beginning, I felt sort of reluctant about my music from my past. But in the last couple of years, I felt good about what I did in the past. The way I see my work, time passes from the time I performed or recorded a work. When I look at it now, 25 years or 30 years ago, if I see that it has value today, I will agree to release it.

Some of what I did in the past, I don't think people appreciated. And now, people are appreciating the body of what I have done today. They feel the value of it.

Pitchfork: Have you been surprised by the positive reception for these releases?

YW: I'm an old guy. I'm 69. I was surprised, frankly. I was an ignored guy and have been for many years. But I suppose I became well-known after being ignored. After the release of the CDs and LPs, especially the LPs, people like it. I was impressed.

Pitchfork: Singing in Unison emerged as a synthesis of many of your interests and influences, including folk singing and the music of La Monte Young. Can you tell me how the piece came together?

YW: In the early 70s, I studied with La Monte Young, which was more like electronic music. Later on, Pandit Pran Nath came to New York. What he taught me was to be in tune and about intonation. I would sing myself with a tambura and just regular a cappella singing and practicing. I did that around 1973 and 1974, and I finally developed my own style of singing.

The turning point around that time was that I went to an Ethnic Music Expo in Queens, New York. There were Macedonian women singing. It was a small group, and they were singing in unison and in a very high pitch. It was a really piercing and traveling sound. I couldn't understand the words, but it didn't matter anyway about the meaning of the words. What impressed me was that they weren't trained musicians. Rather, they were like farmers and peasants in the region. The meaning came from everyday life.

Yoshi Wada: "March 15 - Part 2" on SoundCloud.

After I heard this singing, I organized a three-man choir. Prior to that, we had a Macedonian woman singer showing us what to sing. After that, we developed our singing in unison. It was all improvisation. It wasn't easy to synchronize because we weren't trained singers ourselves, but slowly we got into it. This was based on my own notation, but still it was improvised completely.

Pitchfork: Listening to the music, the singing presents a strange mix of feelings. It seems mournful and strangely ecstatic, too.

YW: I didn't understand the words, but I don't think it matters because it was much more a sound study. The Macedonian women singers sometimes sing farming tunes, something they have when they're working. I guess they were happy about singing and working at the same time. I wasn't working and singing, but it was a great feeling as a group activity. You're in tune with other people, singing.

Pitchfork: Similar to Macedonian singing, another of your strong interests was the drone of bagpipe music. You moved to New York after being born and going to school in Kyoto, so how did you first discover bagpipe music?

YW: I heard the bagpipes in 1976 or 1977. I went to the Scottish Games. It was outdoors, of course. It was a competition and demonstration, and the first time I heard the whole thing was such a great experience. At the time, I met a bagpiper, Nancy Crutcher. She lived in New York, and I started taking lessons. I went to weekly bagpipe sessions in a church basement in Manhattan. I wasn't interested in marching band music, but I had to focus on that. Then I got into one of the Scottish classical styles called piobaireachd, which is a very old music that started around the 1700s or something. I really got into this music. After that, I started to compose bagpipe music in my notations. Then I started building bagpipes by myself, and then I started to perform with the instrument myself in the 1980s.

Pitchfork: What appealed to you about bagpipe music?

YW: For a long time in the 1970s, I was experimenting to build musical instruments and use them. I did a lot of ethnic music studies and other things, like electronic music. Making homemade musical instruments and performing was my major activity from the time.

Scottish bagpipe has two tenors and one bass-- three drone pipes-- and then the one chanter. If you put bagpipes together, it creates such a fine sound. I had been working on the overtone series from the beginning, so it made sense to me to follow the bagpipes. I felt it was the way to go with the overtone series. I also made a brass reed instrument to go with the bagpipe, and I was also singing with it. After that period passed, I got back to playing Scottish pipes with other people.

Initially, when I was making the bagpipes and reed instruments, it was different from the other instruments. In terms of sound itself, it may not be different, but in performing with it, it was a necessity to build it if I was going to perform and make scores with it. By making the instruments, it helped me compose the way I want.

Pitchfork: You also famously built your Earth Horns, massive pipes that produced low and long notes. What inspired that?

YW: That started in the earlier 70s. I was actually in construction, doing plumbing work to earn money. One day, I picked up a pipe and blew it, and it made an interesting sound. I had to get a much larger size pipes and begin experimenting. It was an unknown thing. I ended up with gigantic pipe instruments called Earth Horns. It was a really low pitch, a very extreme range, like a sheep demon being created. It was 30 to 60 Hz.

I organized an ensemble. It was quite interesting, because nobody had that kind of idea of building such instruments. The title of the piece was Earth Horns With Electronic Drone. Some of them I had to give up because they were so heavy-- steel pipes, after all. At one point, I couldn't carry them around anymore, so I stopped. The Emily Harvey Foundation in New York has a couple of the instruments, and I have a couple of them in San Francisco, too. In 2009, I did perform at the Emily Harvey Foundation with the Earth Horns.

Pitchfork: With many of your pieces, there is a slight line between composition and improvisation, if any. There seem to be parameters for what will happen during a piece, but the terms of the performance itself seem very fluid. How do you distinguish composition from improvisations?

YW: I don't think I differentiate between composition and improvisation. Improvisation could be a large part of a composition. To me, even for La Monte Young himself, improvisation is composition. It's different from the earlier pieces, but I do think most of his music is improvisation. Most of my music is improvisation, and composition is improvisation. Even if I have a score, it is improvisation. Now that I'm thinking about it, I made score for Off the Wall. I had notation, but improvisation is part of it.

Pitchfork: You've lately been making music with your son, Tashi. Did you ever expect that this music you make would become a part of your family?

YW: At the beginning, I didn't know he was going to do the things I do. He wasn't doing it! It's been about three or four years. He knows much more in musical terms, and he was helping me three or four years ago. We can communicate well, and it's easy for us to perform together. He himself is a very good composer.

In 2010, Tashi Wada released Alignment, a stunning debut that used bowed strings to create waves of microtonal phosphorescence. Wada followed that release last year with Gradient, a similar study that proved that his music is not far removed from the orbit of his father's cohorts in the early 70s. We spoke with Wada about the influence his father has had on his own music and its place in the world.

Pitchfork: When did you first begin to understand the sort of music your father makes?

Tashi Wada: My early associations with my dad's work aren't specifically music-related. I suppose his work had a way of blending in with our family's life in New York City: his loft on Mercer St where we lived, his studio/workshop in the basement, the variety of artists in the building and SoHo in general, Fluxus, his jobs in construction, etc.

But I knew he was up to something. I remember, in elementary school, being asked what my father does and not knowing how to answer. When I asked my mom what I should say next time, she replied, "Just say he's self-employed." I love that.

I began to make sense of what he was doing, and how it fit into the world, as a teenager after we moved to California. Eventually, I ended up going to school at the California Institute of the Arts to study with James Tenney, who happened to be an old friend of Yoshi's. Everything really started to come full circle.

Pitchfork: When did you first perform with your father?

TW: The first time my dad and I performed together was in 2009 at the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York City. Taketo Shimada asked Yoshi to put together a performance of his piece Earth Horns With Electronic Drone after seeing some of the instruments in Emily Harvey's collection. Yoshi no longer had the electronic drone system, so I played the part on reed organ and sine waves. Since then, we've performed together a handful of times. We like to joke it's a family business, but there's no money.

Pitchfork: Many of your father's pieces were specific to the moment and the setting, which make them strange fits for physical media. Do you think the sound-only aspect of a CD or LP diminishes the experience of his music, or is it more important that these records exist for listening, buying and understanding?

TW: I associate Yoshi's music with building and sculpture. He trained as a sculptor in college. Each of the sounds is specific to the thing making it. It has to do with physical presence.

The recordings tend to highlight more of the compositional aspects of his pieces, how things are structured, etc. I approach Yoshi's CD and LP releases primarily as a form of documentation. Most of the recordings weren't made with the intention of releasing them. They aren't the work itself, but they give you an idea of what the work is like.

That's why Yoshi, Koki Emura of EM Records and I have made an effort to include things like photos, scores and notes. We're currently sorting through videos of Yoshi's installations to have them transferred for some kind of release.

Pitchfork: What influence has his music had on your own music?

TW: When I was just getting started making my own music, my dad said, "You should think about art, but also anti-art and non-art."

It's difficult for me to single out the ways my dad and his work have influenced me. There's an unusual emotional quality to his music, which I understand. It isn't so obvious; it's very personal. --Grayson Currin

Guest Lists: The Men

Ian Cohen — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 09:25:00 -0600

Photo by Kevin Faulkner

The Men: "Electric" on SoundCloud.

Guest List features our favorite artists filling us in on some of their favorite things as well as other random bits. For this edition, we spoke with Brooklyn guitar destroyers the Men: bassist/vocalist Ben Greenberg, guitarist/vocalist Nick Chiericozzi, drummer Rich Samis, guitarist/vocalist Mark Perro, and lap steel player Kevin Faulkner. Their latest record, New Moon, is out now via Sacred Bones.

Favorite Venue

Rich Samis: In high school, my friend and I had a band together and we got kicked out of my parents' house. We needed to find a place to play, so we went to this alleyway down the block from my house in East Meadow, on Long Island. We went outside and put all our equipment in shopping carts and plugged into a power supply in the back of this Radio Shack. We were just playing music outside in the middle of suburbia for like five hours, and no one did anything. So my favorite venue is that alley behind the Radio Shack.

Favorite TV Show

Ben Greenberg: I was only allowed to watch PBS when I was a kid, and they would show one music video after every episode of "3-2-1 Contact". In a lot of ways, that was my introduction to mainstream pop music. The first music video I ever saw was AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" at the end of an episode of "3-2-1 Contact". I was five years old and it totally fucking blew my mind. It's on PBS, on a children's show, but when you think about it, what's really bad about that video? They just rock really hard.

Favorite Video Game

RS: My cousin had this arcade game in his basement called Satan's Hollow. On the side, it had this huge demon with extended wings holding a globe. In the game, you're in a spaceship and you shoot these goblin things and the goal is to build this bridge to this castle. And after each level you fight this big demon character that is manifested in different names for the devil. So in one round you fight Beelzebub and another would be Lucifer and another would be like Mephistopheles. They scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.

Best Birthday

Mark Perro: I used to go to this Hibachi place, Shiro of Japan, every year from ages six to 13. They would put a little samurai hat on my head and take a Polaroid of me. So I have like 10 Polaroids of me with a little samurai hat on smiling ear to ear with hibachi food in my face.

Weirdest Display of Fan Affection

BG: Someone brought a little wooden sword they had carved and painted "The Men" on it and gave it to the band. It had some lightning bolts. It was a pretty epic little gift.

Dream Tattoo

BG: I really want to get a stick-and-poke of the Ballantine Ale logo with the green circles. I don't know if that's really my dream tattoo, but it's the one I'm dreaming of right now.

Favorite Drink

BG: I fucking love water. It's the only thing I drink that keeps me alive without killing me.

Dream Merch Table Item

BG: Denim jackets

Favorite Actor

MP: John Wayne. I heard that when he died he had 30-40 pounds of impacted shit in his intestines.

Favorite Athlete

MP: My all-time Knicks team would be Patrick Ewing, Anthony Mason, Charles Oakley, Walt Frazier, and Phil Jackson. Currently, Carmelo Anthony's my boy, he's a clutch shooter.

Favorite Purchase of the Past Year

Nick Chiericozzi: The guitar that I played on [New Moon]. It's a Gibson L6-S, and I bought it because my go-to Les Paul broke in Europe-- I'm gonna write the hell out of that off [on my taxes]. My second favorite thing would be a 12-string electric guitar that I bought for the next record that we're making.

Favorite Movie

Kevin Faulkner: In the van we'll watch VHS tapes.

MP: The one we watch the most is Uncle Buck. [laughs] It's been viewed at least 10 times.

Update: Jose Gonzalez / Junip

Ian Cohen — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 09:15:00 -0600

Photo by Karla Andreasson

Junip: "Line of Fire" on SoundCloud.

Jose Gonzalez is the type of musician you might expect to wax poetic about the limitations of technology and the dangers of ubiquity. A Nick Drake acolyte who works with little more than fingerpicked acoustic guitar and his soft voice, Gonzalez doesn't have much in the way of an online presence. (I'm willing to bet a good portion of his fans don't know what he looks like, or that he's from Sweden.) And he produces new music at at a pace that's positively tectonic; it's been nearly six years since his last solo album, the haunting In Our Nature, with no timetable as to when its follow-up might appear. But there's the more pressing matter of his revitalized, kraut-inspired band Junip, which picked back up after 12 years of dormancy in 2010 for an exquisite EP, Rope & Summit, and a follow-up LP, Fields. By comparison, the three-year wait for their self-titled sophomore album, due out next month via Mute, is a turnaround time worthy of Bob Pollard.

Gonzalez's patience certainly manifests on Junip. Its roomy, slowly unfolding songs, like first single "Line of Fire", subtly expand on Fields, showcasing a band that's figured out what it does best while confidently exploring all it's capable of. Tracks that might otherwise might have been spare Gonzalez songs are bolstered with airy jazz textures, Brazilian rhythms, and German motorik. As Gonzalez took a break from geeking out to Dan Snaith's Daphni project and evaluating cover art options for Junip, we spoke about the new record.

"It can be a bit frustrating to always get the soft-rock stamp."

Pitchfork: From an emotional standpoint, how do your Junip lyrics differ from the ones you write for your own songs?

Jose Gonzalez: I let the music set the tone of the lyrics and, this time, I allowed myself to write more about relationships and emotions, in a girly way almost. [laughs] But it's not always personal; it's about making the music emotional or big.

Pitchfork: What sonic ideas or stylistic tendencies did drummer Elias Araya and keyboardist Tobias Winterkorn bring to this album?

JG: Tobias is really into melodies and more traditional pop songs-- he's the analog-synth nerd, and he likes to play with distortion a lot. Elias has the most patience for moody or weird music-- so he's got the more artistic side. And, with the style of his drumming, he's the one who makes most of our songs so repetitive and he adds a crowded element without too many fills. He hasn't studied music, so whenever he does percussion or keyboards, he just hits the black keys and sees what happens, it's more from an artistic side than an entirely musical side.

Pitchfork: Are the band members more comfortable playing with each other now as compared to the first album?

JG: Yeah, there are a couple of examples of that, like "Line of Fire", which is more orchestrated and traditional-sounding than many of the Fields songs. And with a song like "Baton", we did these additional jam sessions acoustically with one mic, forcing everyone to play very softly. It was us taking a different step in how we work together.

Pitchfork: What about a song like "Villain", which is less than two minutes and pretty loud-- is there ever a temptation to really rock out with Junip in a way that might not be allowed with your solo work?

JG: Yeah, definitely. All three of us have a history in louder music, so when we did that song, we felt like it would be nice to add some of that element. It can be a bit frustrating to always get the soft-rock stamp. [laughs]

Pitchfork: Who are your influences when you're looking to listen to something louder and more aggressive?

JG: We always get back to old soul singers like Nina Simone, and how her recordings sound. Also new music like Tobacco, or people that use a mixture of analog and electronic music.

Pitchfork: What's the influence behind the song "Your Life Your Call", which takes on an unusually synthetic tone?

JG: I guess the 80s, which is sort of a new step for us. We had a version that sounded really different, but then Tobias, who's been listening to a lot of New Order, put some programmed drums on it. Writing lyrics for that one felt a bit like trying on new clothes for me.

Rising: Kate Boy

Lindsay Zoladz — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:10:00 -0600

Kate Boy: "Northern Lights" on SoundCloud.

Even after hearing Kate Boy's neon-streaked 2012 singles "Northern Lights" and "In Your Eyes"-- all white-heat hooks and warping plastic production-- and taking a look at their shadowy cover art, it wasn't really clear who "Kate Boy" was-- a singer? A producer? A band? The answer's a little complicated.

"We basically do everything together," Hampus Nordgren Hemlin says of his three bandmates, Kate Akhurst, Markus Dextegen, and Oskar Sikow Engström. "We all write and produce everything together, and play each other's instruments as well." So when it came time to name the still-untitled band they formed last year in Stockholm, Sweden, they decided to create "Kate Boy" as a fictional fifth member that reflects their egalitarian songwriting process. (They consider it "this androgynous person, almost like a character," Akhurst explains.) If it sounds confusing, the video for "Northern Lights" offers a sleek visual metaphor: all of their silhouettes continuously blending and morphing into a single, slightly eerie composite face.

Taken apart, the members of Kate Boy are a geographical hodgepodge-- vocalist Akhurst is originally from Australia, while the rest of the band members are Swedish. And musically, they're interested in updating the classic 70s/80s sounds of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush with what today's technology has to offer. Following their recent Northern Lights EP (which also features an excellent, slow-mo remix of the title track by fellow Swede Taken by Trees), Kate Boy have spent time prepping some more material and planning the visual component of their live show, which they hope to bring Stateside later this year. "Everything we touch turns to gold," sings Akhurst on "Northern Lights"-- a hell of a declaration to make on a debut single. But as Kate Boy look forward, they're hoping to make good on that promise.

Pitchfork: Kate, what brought you from Australia to Sweden?

Kate Akhurst: I've always loved the music that came from Sweden. I started out as a songwriter in Australia and got my first publishing deal there when I was 16. Then, at 21, I moved to L.A. for five years before coming [to Stockholm] for the first time in October 2011. I met the guys the last two days I was here. Someone from [another recording session] was like, "You should meet these boys, I think you're really going to like them." So we met up for a drink, and then decided to go straight down into the studio and start working that very first night. We had this instantaneous connection; we couldn't even wait until the next day. I felt like I found my people, like, "I've been waiting all my life for you! I can't wait another minute." We actually wrote "Northern Lights" on that first night we met. After that visit, I wanted to come back straight away. So I went back home and got a visa for the UK and Sweden and now I've been here the past year.

Hampus Nordgren Hemlin: "Northern Lights" came as a bit of a surprise-- it wasn't anything I thought we had in us. It just came through us, and then we liked it, and we've been developing it since. It's been a learning process to be able to recreate what we did.

Pitchfork: What do you think it is about Sweden that makes it such a pop mecca?

KA: L.A. is really, really pop too, but the thing I love about Sweden the most is how they do pop music with a twist and an edge to it. I haven't really heard that in other places. A lot of the times, everyone's chasing each other's tails and trying to do the hottest sound.

HNH: Sweden is a pretty small country compared to others in the music business, and everybody sort of knows everyone, so it's easy to collaborate. And since we have seven months of darkness and winter, you've got to be creative. In other countries, you go out with your surfboard and chill on the beach, but we have to do something else-- there's no beach to go to.

Kate Boy: "Northern Lights" (Houses Remix) on SoundCloud.

Pitchfork: You produced "Northern Lights" and "In Your Eyes" yourselves. As you move ahead, is it important to you to retain that DIY approach?

KA: Our vision is so clear that it doesn't matter who we bring on board, or whether we're left on our own. We can execute it ourselves, luckily, but we do want to expand.

Markus Dextegen: Instead of going around, talking to people, and getting money to do it, we just made it ourselves. It may have taken longer than it would have doing it the other way, but at least it became what we wanted and not what somebody else wants.

Interviews: Devendra Banhart

Ryan Dombal — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 10:30:00 -0600

Photos by Ana Kraš

Devendra Banhart: "Mi Negrita" on SoundCloud.

When Devendra Banhart used to read interviews with his favorite bands as a teenager, he'd scan the articles looking for one question: What are you listening to these days? "For me, that was it," he says, sitting in his drawing studio, which overlooks Manhattan's Lower East Side, "I found out about so much music through them." And now that he's an interview-worthy artist in his own right-- and an absurdly sponge-like one at that-- he's looking to pay that sort of wisdom forward.

He played a random stream of songs from his iPod stereo during our entire talk-- often pausing the conversation to effuse about a certain track or musician-- and dropped the names of his favorites at a quick clip, including, but not limited to: Morrissey, Nirvana, avant-garde composer Harold Budd, Guns N' Roses, Kronos Quartet, Oasis, Yo La Tengo, Blur, the soundtrack to the 1959 Brazilian film Black Orpheus ("my number one soundtrack of all time"), Helado Negro, Robert Wyatt, Pulp, Julee Cruise, Orange Juice, Caetano Veloso, Scott Walker, Thurston Moore, John Cage, and Grace Jones ("I saw her show recently; she's in her 60s, in a g-string, and she says, 'I want to suck some dick tonight!'-- unbelievable"). His music fandom can even involve an element of foolproof fantasy. When I point out a couple of identical black-and-white press photos of famously gruff Yonkers rapper DMX on his floor, he lights up. "I love him so much," he explains, "and I like press photos because the joy is what you write on them, like, 'To Devendra, duh duh duh...' So often it's very disappointing when you meet your heroes, so this is my way of assuring that it's a fantastic experience, and that they send me off with a beautiful message."

Devendra Banhart: "Never Seen Such Good Things" on SoundCloud.

Cross-legged in a wooden chair with a chomp taken out of its back, Banhart says he's always wanted to be a "radio disk jockey-- introduce a song, give a little bit of history, perhaps a personal anecdote, say what the music reminds me of and then ask my audience, 'Does it remind you of the same thing? Why don't you call in?' That kind of communication. Sounds like paradise." That curatorial spirit extends to his new album, Mala, which features a heartbreaking tale of a two people waiting in line to see Suede, an acoustic-guitar tribute to late pro skateboarder Keenan Milton, and a surreal yarn about 12th-century Saint Hildegard of Bingen getting a job playing videos on MTV. The album was recorded in Banhart's L.A. home with longtime co-conspirator Noah Georgeson, and while it still skips from genre to genre like his last three LPs, it's also his most concise effort since 2004's Niño Rojo.

And while Mala is marked by songs about the aftermath of broken love, the 31-year-old seems to have reached a newfound peace. He shares his artist's studio with his fiancée, Serbian photographer and designer Ana Kraš, and several her vibrant, hand-strung lanterns are perched on a nearby table; at one point, in mid-conversation, Banhart casually cuts out a foot-wide paper heart and sticks it to the front of Kraš' computer screen. Mala, which is Serbian for "my sweet dear thing," is highlighted by a sly duet between the two called "Your Fine Petting Duck", where Kraš pines after a deadbeat ex, played with knowing humility by Banhart: "If he doesn't try his best, please remember that I never tried at all," he advises her on the song.

True to form, the two moved to New York City last year after Banhart read Tim Lawrence's book about Arthur Russell and the downtown Manhattan scene, Hold Onto Your Dreams. Turns out it's something of a triumphant return to the city, which didn't treat the singer so well 10 years ago. "Back then, I was living in an abandoned salsa club with fucking no electricity, no water, meth heads walking into my room in the middle of the night, and a rat trying to eat through my wall," he remembers. "So I thought I should give New York another shot, see what it's like in a different place in my life."

Banhart says he's more excited about the art studio and his sturdy wooden desk than the new album (for which he once again drew the cover himself), though when asked if he would rather do visuals or music for the rest of his life, he's more diplomatic: "I want to take both more seriously; I don't know if I like the music I make, but I certainly love making it."

"I think five percent of all songs can be love songs, and
another five percent can be miscellaneous or political,
but the rest should just be about medieval feminists."

Pitchfork: You got engaged recently, but instead of love songs Mala is filled with songs about the complexities of love and losing it and wondering if you're ever really going to figure it out.

Devendra Banhart: Well, I had a song about Ana-- a real love song-- but I thought it could have been more romantic, so we didn't put it on there. The almost-nihilistic, devoid-of-any-hope observations on relationships on this record have nothing to do with her. The record I'll be writing next would be more about the celebration of finding someone you really love. Still, it seems very boring to write a song that goes: "Everything's going so good/ We fight now and then/ But still, everything's going great/ Being with you baby is so good." [deadpan] Actually, now that I say that, I think it would be a great song. I like those lyrics. Maybe I'll do that.

But it just seemed more fun to write about relationships in this [pessimistic] way. And it's experiential. Quite often, it's just a composite of bad relationships, an amalgamation of awkward situations-- which I'm a magnet for. Really. This morning, this old guy came up to me and said, "Would you like a bag of goodies?" He opened it up, and there was a copy of the first Harry Potter movie on VHS and some other weird shit. Really creepy. "No, thank you."

Pitchfork: Do you think it's easier to write these negative love songs as opposed to more positive ones?

DB: The lines on the album about how we've just met and can't wait to fuck it all up are what's fun about writing a pop song. That's pop music, and a lot of these songs are also love songs to that genre. The song I sing with Ana, ["Your Fine Petting Duck"], is a love song to that type of love song, which often goes like, "Baby, I'm so sorry, take me back." So on this one, she's ready to take me back, but I remind her that she doesn't want to do that.

Pitchfork: I read that you asked Ana to marry you the first day you met her.

DB: I did. It's the first thing I said to her. It was not well-received, it really pissed her off. We met because she was supposed to shoot the interior of my house for this magazine called Apartamento, but she still hasn't shot the fucking thing. As far as the proposal, I thought, "If she says yes, this is going to be so cool if we do get married, and if we don't, who cares?" But she doesn't see how awesome and charming it is that we're actually getting married.

Pitchfork: Have you ever instantly proposed to someone like that before?

DB: [sarcastically] Yeah, I say that every time. [laughs]

Pitchfork: Well, why her then?

DB: I was just so shocked. I couldn't believe this person was in my house. She's quite stunning, easy on the eyes. So it just kind of flopped out, very casually. And I understand how it was a real turn off for her. I had to work hard to make up for that one. But she came to take the photos and she just stayed. We haven't been apart since that day.

Pitchfork: Was there a more official proposal later on?

DB: Yes. I took her to this place called Pocono Palace. It's frozen in time; it's still 1975 there. So horrifying. From the surrounding area, it looks like the place where you're either going to get raped or murdered, or raped and murdered. So creepy. But when you open the door, it's another world! It's so beautiful, but also tacky and gaudy. Totally charming. There are heart-shaped hot tubs in every room, giant champagne-glass hot tubs. There are comedians, air hockey, ping-pong, mini-golf, strip night-- which is actually a strip steak night-- and erotic bingo. There's a big sign that says, "Please, no guns allowed in dining room." It's a place where your aunt and uncle would go to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary.

Pitchfork: The Mala track "Daniel" tells an affecting story of a whole relationship-- the start, the end, and beyond-- in just a few lines. The economy of the songwriting is impressive.

DB: I'm so happy you used that word in particular-- "economy" has always been part of my whole thing. I look at the words like a food budget; I'm going to the bodega and I've got four bucks, how do I make a meal? I don't know if I have an economy of words, but that's the goal. I went through this shift. As anthropomorphic and surreal people have said my early writing was, to me it was really stock and almost banal in the sense that it was just description, the poetry of comparing: "Your feet are like A, and your eyes like B."

But now I've moved a lot closer to my favorite kind of poetry, which is Japanese poetry; it doesn't say what the thing is like, it just says what the thing is. One of my favorite haikus goes: "New Year's/ Stars in the sky/ Vomit in the streets." It's so perfect, it's an entire film. My favorite poem actually is by Oswald de Andrade. It's called "Amor"-- that's the title-- and the poem is: "Humor." A one-word poem. It's very full. It doesn't need more words. I've always wanted to write a song that goes, "I love you" and a book that goes, "Something happened." Something very direct. I have yet to do that, but now I'm trying to say the most in the least amount of words.

Pitchfork: Sonically, this album is more pared down than your last few; the overall presentation is more modest, like your earlier albums.

DB: I forget the old albums are just acoustic guitar and voice because, even on [2002's Oh Me Oh My], I still wanted each song to sound completely different. I didn't want to make a record that was just guitar and voice, that was just the technology available to me. At the time, I remember thinking, "I am making a Faust album." That didn't translate.

I would like to make another me-and-a-guitar album someday, though. I can't tell you how many times I've had a friend tell me, in this tender and discreet voice, "It's just you and me bro, and I want to tell you the truth: make a record of you and an acoustic guitar. Please. That's what everybody actually likes." That's so funny to me.

Pitchfork: Something I really enjoyed while listening to this album and going over the lyrics was looking up some of the musicians and artists you sing about. When you decide to say someone's specific name in a song, is part of it about spreading the things you care about?

DB: I would feel presumptuous saying that the only reason I'm writing about something is because I want you to learn about that person, but I certainly care about it enough to put it in a song. For "Für Hildegard von Bingen", for example, I just think all songs should be written about medieval feminists-- five percent of songs can be love songs, another five can be miscellaneous or political, and the rest can just be about medieval feminists. I was a fan of hers because Kronos Quartet had recorded some of her music, and they choose incredible composers, so I looked for her biography, and it's unbelievable. She's a saint! I thought it was a worthy subject.

Pitchfork: When you're making music, do you ever wish you weren't into so many different things?

DB: No. I try to listen to as much as possible. I know some people really try to avoid music when they're writing and recording, but I am very inspired by so many different musicians, and I need to learn. I sit around and try to play along to certain songs that I really love. It helps you explore new territory. I don't think I listen to enough.

Hall of Game: Gray Matters

Andrew Nosnitsky — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 09:15:00 -0600

Influence can be a funny form of power, particularly in the creative world. It moves ideas and aesthetics but sometimes leaves the works that birthed them behind. Consider the late DJ Screw, who died in 2000 at age 30, but is arguably the most influential hip-hop DJ of this century. Even as the role of the DJ has been progressively marginalized in commercial hip-hop, the Houstonian's technique-- slow speed blends, chopped and doubled-up snares and vocals-- still bullied their way into the genre's evolving vocabulary. This was precisely what Screw dreamed of in life, when he was still a local icon (albeit a major one). In interviews, he spoke of how he wanted to "screw the world." It seemed optimistic at the time. And then it eventually happened.

But as his impact spread, DJ Screw and his music were both left behind in some ways. It'd be easy to fill this space by telling of the Houston rappers and pop megastars and Tumblr goths who have all borrowed and repurposed what can broadly be defined as the Screw sound in the 13 years since his death. Or how that sound has been inexorably (and somewhat inaccurately) linked to the popular rise of the drug that reportedly took his life. We could throw around words like "crawling" and "syrupy" and "psychedelic" to create an easy point of entry for readers who wouldn't otherwise give a fuck about a little old rap mixtape DJ from the Southside of Houston. But to do so would only further this disembodiment of a human artist and his work from his brand and mythology.

The secret about Screw that gets lost in the on-record shout outs and the hashtagged condolences and the godawful slapdash remixes that bear his name all over the internet is that slowness is not the pure essence of Screwness. It's a central element, to be certain, but just one of many. Screw was, after all, a DJ in a time where the role and reception of the DJ was dramatically different from what it is today. DJs made their names not just on account of their taste, but also their personality and craft. Screw was the rare triple threat on these fronts-- a true tastemaker, a masterful technician, and an out-and-out relatable human. His roots were in battle DJing-- transformer scratches and body tricks and beat juggling and all of that. When I interviewed Rob Quest of the group the Odd Squad, for whom Screw briefly DJ'd for, he described Screw's early style as "actually hip-hop-ish." I'd venture to suggest that everything he would go on to accomplish fell directly under that umbrella, even as he warped its dimensions sonically.

For a man so closely identified with all things slow, Screw moved quickly, releasing new mixtapes on a near-weekly basis in his prime. This pace imbued his tapes with an air of autobiography; they were a series of soundtracks for the life of a man whose life mostly involved making soundtracks for himself and his crew. When fellow Screwed Up Click members celebrated their birthdays, the party was handed down to listeners. When Fat Pat died, people felt the clique's pain. Mostly, though, Screw tapes conveyed the general joy of the crew's existence and success, particularly on the later ones where the SUC freestyles were more prominent and developed. History has often linked this work with darkness or drug use-- because that's the direction latter day interpolators have magnified-- but when you get right down to it, what you frequently hear are dudes having fun while rapping endlessly off the top of the dome. What could be more hip-hop?

None of this is to discredit the impact of the slowness. The crawl of a Screw tape was immaculate as well as earth-and-skull-shattering. Hip-hop has always been a genre of quiet innovations, and it makes sense that something as simple as slowing things down would prove to magnify the effect of its most instantly affecting component-- that bass. Screw didn't invent the idea of pitching down rap records to this end-- another Houston DJ by the name of Darryl Scott had been doing it prior, as had more than a few Miami DJs-- but he was the one who perfected it by pushing it to extremes that would've previously defied logic. Everything was slowed and everything had to be slower than it was before.

It was an immersive experience. Though his music is now mostly disseminated via YouTube fragments, Screw's primary medium was the long-form mixtape. Eight or 12 or 20 tracks stretched across a 100 or 120 minute Maxell XLII cassette. Gray Tapes. While full-length Chopped & Screwed mixes still make the rounds today-- acts like OG Ron C and DJ Slim K churn out freebee and sometimes-artist-sanctioned C&S takes on full lengths by everyone from Rocky to Frank Ocean-- they're usually released on the Dat Piff circuit and to very little fanfare^[1]. Meanwhile, fan-made single track mixes of recent hits still rack up YouTube views despite their obvious amateurishness. These tracks are tailored directly to neophytes, an audience that seems more interested in the idea of Screw Music than in its execution.

In life, Screw was largely protective of his brand, if not his aesthetic. "It's only a Screw tape if I Screw it," he told The Source in a brief 1995 interview. But there might be an even shorter explanation for why so many of the Screw-style mixes by today's adherents sound outright horrible: It's only a tape if it's a tape. Screw made analog music through and through^[2], but it was the cassette in particular that defined his sound. Not just the thump of it but the warmth as well. And there was something almost poetic about this loyalty to the naturally decaying format. Even if he had never actively Screwed his tapes, they might've still eventually slowed to Screwed pace with time, as if by instinct.

His exact recording method has been obscured by myths over the years-- I've heard stories as abstract as him putting a screw on the face of the record, to loosening some sort of a magic screw inside the turntable (never mind that neither of these are actually things that would result in the slowing down of a record^[3]). In fact, the effect came much further down in the recording chain, having little to do with the turntables themselves but with a basic pitch shift effect that was common on multitrack cassette recorders (1200s also have pitch shift but they don't go to the extremes that Screw's stuff would end up at). This methodology lent itself to unique and complicated blends. He wasn't just throwing a ccapellas over instrumentals in the pre-mash up era, but playing records on top of previously recorded multitrack mixes to the point where he could be stacking three or four different records all at once, each with a new slight layer of hiss and humanity.

Listen to a real-life Screw tape alongside those latter-day acolytes and it becomes apparent how technology has colored-- and still colors-- the form. By the time the Screw aesthetic had fully disseminated, technology had seemingly caught up to his imagination, but only in the most superficial way possible. Now you can type "how to screw a song" into YouTube and find a bevy of tutorials, most of which don't even acknowledge the act of DJing. One of the few that does is entitled "The correct way to Chop and Screw using Virtual DJ" and features the following comment exchange below the video: "This is gay do not use this method it is too complicated for something so easy."; "This is the method DJ Screw used when he invented screwed music." (It isn't and it isn't.) But that's progress, I guess. This technological democratization has inverted the delicate balance of craft and slop that defined the classic Screw tape-- too polished sonically, too unrefined in terms of performance.

His successors are also lacking in what might've been Screw's greatest strength-- his taste. Like all true tastemakers, he was beholden only to his convictions. This meant banging Bay Area hard head B-Legit in the same space as British reggae stars Steel Pulse and then letting those influences trickle down throughout the scene. "We wasn't really worried about what was going on in the rest of the world," said fellow Texas legend Pimp C in the The Untold Story documentary. "When we did hear the rest of the world, it was cause DJ Screw was putting us up on it. We wasn't checking for nobody unless it was on a Screw tape."

And while Screw might've been brushed off as a regional phenomenon in his time, his taste in rap was anything but. Yes, he showed his city love and rightfully so-- dropping cuts from both local stars like the Geto Boys and Port Arthur ex-pats UGK and unheralded contemporaries like Street Military and Coppertone Conspiracy alike-- but he also reached well beyond his immediate borders. His usual favorites included gruff-voiced Sacramento goon C-Bo, under-heralded Los Angeles G-Funk pioneers Above the Law, and Chicago double-time spitters Do or Die; legend has it he was one of if not the first DJs to spin Cash Money records outside of New Orleans. At the same time it was not uncommon for him to bring contemporary superstars like Pac and Biggie or even critical darlings like Nas and A Tribe Called Quest into the mix. The slowness flattened their differences and highlighted the similarities of these disparate acts. He'd even drive that point home further by reaching back and dropping common 80s influences like Whodini or LL Cool J.

This geographical diversity was a reflection of the culture that produced Screw and artists like him. Hip-hop's largest markets-- New York and, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles^[4]-- were so empowered as media hubs that they could sustain an internal dialogue in their rap scenes. So while those media hubs fortified their borders (and eventually feuded vocally), a national network of underground rap spread quietly. Memphis acts were blowing up Chicago, Bay Area rappers were huge in Texas, etc. The biggest of these artists-- the E-40s and Twistas and Eightball & MJGs-- were quietly selling hundreds of thousands of records while rarely earning more than a footnote in The Source or any play on "Rap City"^[5]. Screw tapes might be the best standing document of this silent majority's interests.

But you don't hear them. This disconnect can partially be chalked up to a matter of practicality. Screw's catalog is a deep one to dive into. If he's not the most prolific mixtape DJ of all-time he's certainly the best documented one. Two hundred and fifty-six of these tapes have been reissued posthumously as double CDs in the officially sanctioned (though often shoddily produced and mastered) Diary of the Originator reissue series. Past that there are a few dozen piecemeal retail collections of varying degrees of legitimacy along with a countless number of tapes that have yet to be anthologized but are likely still floating around in shoeboxes and glove compartments or as ghosts in the Megaupload machine.

It's an intimidating catalog to parse, but it's definitely worth parsing. If only because it exists. Though we now take artistic sprawl for granted in hip-hop, that was definitely not the case in the 90s. Major-label rappers toiled away for years at a time making grand statements. The independent rap worlds-- and particularly those of the mixtape DJs-- were sometimes more generous with their output, but even then most of that has been lost to time. As such the Screw catalog is one of the purest and more expansive musical snapshots of small culture hip-hop out there. Hundreds of hours of recordings culled from one bedroom studio, breadcrumbs left over the course a decade by a group of friends and their leader tracing back every small step of their creative evolutions while simultaneously providing a running tally of hip-hop trends writ large^[6]. As fascinating as Screw's influence has been in the years since his passing, his output might be better used as a lens to the past that we lost with him.

^[1]Strangely more notable-- and, in my opinion, competent-- second wave C&S artists like Michael Watts and Beltway 8 have abandoned the form or disappeared completely, perhaps failing to fully make the transition to the internet era.

^[2]In a 2010 interview with Jesse Serwer, Screwed Up Click member ESG recalled how then rival Northside DJ Michael Watts was able to gain traction in the late 90s as he transitioned to playing CDs while Screw stubbornly stuck to vinyl. "Screw would not change," he said. "If Serato was out when he was living, he would not do it. It was strictly turntables."

^[3]Screw himself maintained that the name had nothing to do with his mixing process at all but instead his rejection process. When he heard a record that he didn't like he'd take a screw to the grooves, rendering it unplayable.

^[4]Admittedly, L.A.'s hip-hop borders were always more porous than New York's, particularly on the creative side of things-- there's an entire alternate history to be written about the direct influence that Texas rap had on the rise of Death Row, for example.

^[5]Pimp C might've best articulated this division on his underground classic "Top Notch Hoes", a not-so-subliminal shot at vocally anti-jiggy Northeastern rap darlings the Roots and Jeru the Damaja: "They play they videos every day/ Sold 50,000, he swole/ Y'all bitches act like y'all don't know me/ Bitch I always go gold."

^[6]The only other semi-accessible archive of that nature that I can think of are the dubs of Stretch Armstrong & Bobbito's legendary Thursday night show on Columbia University's WKCR that have floated around forever. Though the sounds and styles of the two communities are dramatically different, I see a lot of similarities between the WKCR recordings and Screw tapes. Both offer panoramic glimpses of dominant 90s underground rap scenes by way of a bunch of kids-- some of whom were or would become major stars-- spitting rhymes and playing records in a casual environment. The one major and unfortunate difference is that Stretch & Bob tapes are not available commercially, and the once obsessively-fan-curated .rar rips are now mostly buried in the RIAA's dead-link graveyard.

Interviews: Foals

Laura Snapes — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:10:00 -0600

Photo by Nabil

Not so long ago, it wouldn't have made much sense at all for Metallica to choose Foals to play their music festival. But with Holy Fire, the Oxford band's muscular recent Flood and Alan Moulder-produced album, Foals stop noodling in the margins of rock and run headlong into its belly, blending the careening swagger of stoner rock with a sleazy funk thrust-- all without sounding anything like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, thank God. And within that hypnotic thrust, Holy Fire hits some restful-if-anxious points, too; "Providence", for one, dusts itself off with a vocal line from frontman Yannis Philippakis processed to sound like an old Lomax recording, as he explains when we chat by phone in early February.

While touring behind Foals' last album, 2010's Total Life Forever, Philippakis often appeared in quite battered form, turning up to interviews with yellowed eyes, a spotty tongue, a packet of quickly chain-smoked cigarettes, and on one occasion, a bottle of cough syrup. Certain stories made him appear in a harrowed, panicked place, a portrayal he now says was perhaps slightly exaggerated due to his willingness to let journalists into his troubled mindset. For now, though, "it's an era of contentment" for him and the band. "With this music malarkey, I used to bang my head against the wall, but now I've learned the way through the maze a bit better," he says. "I can still get lost, but my emotional equilibrium isn't as tied into it."

He makes himself subject to quite a tongue-lashing on Holy Fire, however, berating his unfaithfulness and bad habits in order to "feel uncomfortable" when listening to the new material. We spoke about the pitfalls of writing cryptic, self-referential lyrics that don't cop to much, how Flood and Moulder played tricks on them during the album's recording, and why he's recently taken up growing roses. Read the interview and watch the band perform Holy Fire outtake "Blue Bird" below:

Pitchfork: Parts of Holy Fire comprise some of the most aggressive music the band has ever made, but you're singing your most open and vulnerable lyrics. What provoked that?

Yannis Philippakis: I'm just worn down and weary of bands whose lyrics are cryptic and self-referential. I don't get any humanity when I listen to that, so I really wanted to avoid it. You can get into a comfort zone writing lyrics, like wearing a mask. But I wanted to feel uncomfortable when I was listening back to [the lyrics]; I wanted to squirm. I never want to listen to the songs in front of people close to me. There's an emotional honesty in that place where it's not earnest but it's vulnerable.

Pitchfork: You self-flagellate a lot over the course of the record.

YP: Oh yeah. I'm taking a bath in my guilt, but there's a redemptive purpose to that. It's not as if I'm endlessly throwing out a trail of images that can never be traced back to me; I can see the traces of myself, and I wanted it to be a cathartic process, to grow and work through the knots of my personality. Music was my friend when I was a teenager, and I would inhabit and take comfort in lyrics. That's how I want to write. I like simple writing. I'd rather read Hemingway than Burroughs.

It's a hard thing to do when you first start as a band. The lyrics on our first record epitomize a fear of being found out, or of being too known. You feel vulnerable and you want to hide it. But now I feel like a middle-aged woman who's just gone through a divorce, and she's looking in the mirror and is OK with herself-- I can get up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror and say that I'm a beautiful woman and believe it.

"We wanted to do something that felt like this sweaty, stickier thing--like an insect climbing into delta marshlands."

Pitchfork: Tell me about what's going on at the beginning of "Providence"-- your voice is captured in a way that makes it feel like an old field recording.

YP: On that vocal, I was definitely inspired by gospel music, or old-school R&B; I got into some Good God gospel compilations. I like the fervor of religious music, the zealous aspect-- that preachers can go from a conversational cadence into this passionate singing. And I've been listening to Alan Lomax's recordings for about five years years now. They've never failed to startle and move me, they're so skeletal and haunting that I can't see how anyone wouldn't be absolutely stunned by them. You realize how much power and emotion can come out of a voice. It was a sign that we didn't need to rely on gimmicks or crutches, or have a lot of bolstering sound.

Pitchfork: You wrote some of the record in Karpathos, Greece, where your father lives, and a few of the songs on the record appeal to a mother figure. Was your heritage on your mind?

YP: That's hard-- I'm definitely preoccupied by thinking I'm just a biological thing. I want to feel that there's more, but so often I'm reminded of how we're just like baboons, basically. The thing about Karpathos that made it such a good place to write lyrics is that there's no wifi, no cars, none of the pernicious side of modern or urban society. Instead, there's mountains and a feeling of timelessness, it's unchanging. I can feel my bloodlines there. I don't know how it creeps into the lyrics, but its definitely part of my brain structure.

Pitchfork: It definitely feels like Foals' most varied album from start to finish.

YP: When we started writing, we wanted to free ourselves from the shackles of keeping things harmonious. It was informed by a confidence in the band-- we feel we will immutably sound like ourselves no matter which producer we work with, or what palette the songs are written in, or what the medium is. The headspace was: "Let's not overthink it, let's not discuss it, let's just enjoy everything, and if things feel intuitively right, then be OK with it."

Also, Flood and Moulder really reinforced our belief that we should try and fan everything out. If we had two songs that felt like they were occupying the same space, we would consciously try and push them apart from each other as much as possible. This record is a myriad of colors rather than shades of the same.

"When you're making an album with people who made
your favorite records as a rebellious teenager,
it feels like you've achieved something."

Pitchfork: I read that Flood and Moulder double-bluffed you by saying you were doing practice takes, then telling you that they had actually recorded them.

YP: It was sneaky and genius of them. I don't know if it's plagued us more than other people, but when we became conscious of the red light going on for a take, it would somehow creep into the playing. There'd be something missing, or there wasn't the kind of feral energy that there would be in the live shows. That sleight-of-hand totally navigated that problem-- there was a charm to a lot of those takes, so we didn't need to do much more.

Pitchfork: The producers you've worked with previously have all essentially been your peers.

YP: And musicians in some way. Flood and Moulder are definitely not musicians, they're producers and engineers, studio men. And they come from that old tradition of British studios, it's almost like a guild. They understand that there's a line between the artist and the songs they've written, and their job is to convey that from the speakers. It meant we didn't ever really feel territorial about what was happening. It's an honor to work with them as much as anything. I grew up listening to The Downward Spiral and Mellon Collie; when you're making an album with people who made your favorite records as a rebellious teenager, it feels like you've achieved something.

Pitchfork: There was always a positive disparity between your records and the significantly heavier shows. Do you feel Holy Fire comes closer to capturing what you're actually like on stage?

YP: Yeah. It's not just the heavier songs, like "Providence" and "Inhaler", that have that sort of energy, but also songs like "Moon" and "Stepson", where me and [guitarist] Jimmy [Smith] were allowed to go in the studio and just play the same song for five hours without interruption, over and over 'til we were tired of playing it or the wine made our eyelids droop. Someone in the control room would capture it. The integrity of the takes remain.

"Inhaler" almost didn't make it on the record-- when we got back to Oxford after tour, it got extended and became a 27-minute-long beast. We had it on the back-burner, then had three days where we were like, "Let's just give this a go," and it came together, thankfully.

Pitchfork: I've always thought it would be interesting to hear you guys release something long-form.

YP: We'd like to do that. It's strange because there's a tension in the band that's almost bipolar-- if we were left totally to our own devices, we probably would just turn out these proggy jams without focus. But at the same time, there's a desire to make things that are concise and that communicate to the outside world. There's a special edition of Holy Fire that's got all the fragments and loops and jams that informed the actual album. It'll expose the process, show the skeletons.

Pitchfork: Was the stoner rock quality a sound that had always been a part of the band? What made now the time to make a record in that vein?

YP: I've always listened to stuff like Earth, Sleep, and Sabbath, though we didn't have a desire to actually go to that territory before; we don't need to put a little ribbon around what somebody else's idea of what we should sound like is and just adhere to that.

After touring Total Life for so long, we infinitely know the boundaries and parameters of what we had written up until then. Being given a new lease of life to go and write was exciting-- everything felt fertile and new. It's about writing the next sentence, and we got it in our heads that we wanted to do something that felt-- and I don't think the whole record feels like it-- like this sweaty, stickier thing, like an insect climbing into delta marshlands.

Pitchfork: Am I right in thinking you've taken up gardening?

YP: Yeah. My mum used to make me garden when I was younger, then I just stopped doing it. Then I got a craving to do something that felt like it was connected with the land, something that felt domestic. It was grounding for me. I started growing roses. I enjoyed the craft of it and that they're difficult to look after; they can provide joy. But I'm going on tour now so I don't know what will happen to them.

Pitchfork: You're about to go on the road for ages, but you recently tweeted that you wanted to make another album already as well.

YP: What we might start trying to do whenever we get a free day on tour is go into a studio and cut tracks, like how it used to be done; you'd cut a song and it'd be pressed and it would go out. A good thing about the industry changing is that it frees up the artist to disseminate music in various ways. One thing we're going to have to do in our lifetime is free ourselves from the shackle of making albums that are the focal point for everything for two years on either side. It's great in the sense that it's a big task and enjoyable to craft something from start to finish, but it's not natural. The way we write is compulsive, all the time. It'd be nice to have that direct outlet.

5-10-15-20: Bryan Ferry

Lindsay Zoladz — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 10:00:00 -0600

Photo by Adam Whitehead

5-10-15-20 features artists talking about the songs and albums that made an impact on them throughout their lives, five years at a time.

Halfway through my conversation with Bryan Ferry on the 35th floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Manhattan, he asks if I have ever seen that video of Prince playing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". No, I have not. "Well, let's try our best to find it," he declares intrepidly, grabbing his PowerBook and preparing for what could be an epic voyage to the farthest corners of the internet. Of course, we find it in about 10 seconds.

But as we load the clip (an all-star jam from the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, paying tribute to George Harrison), and I show Bryan Ferry how to full-screen a YouTube video (an accomplishment that now sits atop the "Awards and Special Achievements" section of my résumé), the ease with which we've accessed this video comes into perspective. Ferry has just been discussing his earliest memories as a music fan, growing up in a working-class family in Newcastle, England, in the 1950s, when "being into jazz" meant saving up for a week or longer to buy one Charlie Parker 78 and then playing it, exclusively and obsessively, until it wore out. "I had to be very careful with my one 78 a week," he recalls. "I couldn't afford an LP at the time."

As the Prince video plays, Ferry studies the screen like a quarterback taking mental notes on a rival's game. He also provides running commentary throughout, gleefully making fun of Tom Petty ("Ha-ha! They cut his mic!") but mostly fawning over the Purple One's guitar prowess and impish panache; when Prince first emerges in this outrageously stylish crimson hat, Ferry-- arguably the most impeccable dresser of the glam era-- gasps, "The red devil!" In this moment, I'm seeing firsthand something that's also obvious from Ferry's varied and brilliant discography: Fandom is a huge part of his musical identity. From the innovative pastiche of Roxy Music's earliest records to his best solo albums-- which feature wildly imaginative covers of Dylan, Otis, and Lesley Gore, to name just a few-- the 67-year-old's career has played out like one prolonged, well-informed, and often-exclamatory conversation with popular music.

The Bryan Ferry Orchestra: "Don't Stop the Dance" on SoundCloud.

And it rages on. Four decades after Roxy Music first glitter-bombed the world with "Re-Make/Re-Model", his latest project still makes good on that mantra. Featuring arrangements of Ferry's songs dressed up in a 1920s New Orleans jazz style, The Jazz Age just might be, as Ned Raggett declared in his review, Ferry's "most radical work yet." After speaking with him, it also feels like his most personal: an impassioned mash-up of his early musical heroes' sensibilities and his own. The Jazz Age is also Ferry's first instrumental record, but he promises that when he tours for it in Europe this fall, he will also reprise his role as the devilish frontman. "We'll do some instrumental things to open the show, and then," he laughs, "I will appear as if by magic, like Prince, in a red hat." (Listen along to Ferry's picks with this Spotify playlist.)

The Ink Spots

My first musical memory is from when I was about five-- one of my aunts was really into music and she had a lot of records by this beautiful vocal group the Ink Spots. The lead had this lovely high voice and there was a bass who always did this thing in the middle where he kind of spoke. Elvis Presley was a big fan of theirs, and it was quite a big influence on his singing style.

Charlie Parker: The Magnificent Charlie Parker

I went to the local school and used to cycle home for lunch everyday. We were really poor, but I went to a great school. I couldn't afford an LP at the time, though I owned one, which I won from a radio program.

Radio Luxembourg was this big station in Europe. Kids used to listen to it under the bedclothes because it was a bit risque to listen to that music; rock'n'roll was just starting. Bill Haley & His Comets took Europe and America by storm with big hits like "Rock Around the Clock" and "See You Later Alligator"-- that was the first rock'n'roll tour of Europe, and I had front-row seats to see them. My big sister took me, and I just sat there, transfixed. Then Radio Luxembourg ran this contest where you had to put your favorite Bill Haley records in order of preference. I won it, and they mentioned my name on the radio-- that was first time my name was ever mentioned on the radio.

In 1955, I also started listening to jazz. There was a great revival of New Orleans music from the 20s at the time, and there were a couple jazz records in the charts in England by English bands. And as kids are at that age, I became obsessed, finding out who was who: Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, all the way through Charlie Parker. I saved up money and I bought this EP of the Charlie Parker quintet. The Magnificent Charlie Parker seemed the coolest record in the world, very different and avant-garde. I learned every note of that record, all the solos in my head. I can still sing them.

Billie Holiday: The Golden Years Volume Three

There are certain voices that, as soon as you hear them, you're hooked. Leadbelly was one for me, and Shirley of the Shirelles, and Ronnie Spector. I love women's voices, actually-- I haven't got much time for men's voices, except for a few: Elvis, Sinatra, Lennon, Otis Redding.

But Billie Holiday is probably my favorite singer ever because she was so inventive, and soulful, and just so cool. The album I listened to all the time was The Golden Years III. It had all these really well-crafted songs: "Summer Other Spring", "The Man I Love", "Body and Soul", "God Bless the Child". And the band she had on this record was fantastic, especially Teddy Wilson, the piano player. I play piano, though I'm quite basic-- I use it for songwriting more than playing onstage. But my piano player for the last 12 years, Colin Good, plays just like Teddy Wilson when he wants to. He's a proper jiver.

Bob Dylan: Bringing It All Back Home

I went to the University of Newcastle when I was 18 and studied art for four years. At that point I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I loved sports. I used to play basketball, tennis, running, hurdles, cycling. At school, I was just going through different phases, though music was always lurking in the background.

Then I started singing with a couple of R&B bands when I was at university. It was quite sophisticated because we had a horn section, and we did Bobby Bland numbers. It was a really cool band. We played around Newcastle, and then the rest of the band dropped out of college to become professional musicians, but I was torn-- I still wanted to be an artist.

It took me a while to get into Bob Dylan because I wasn't into folk music. It wasn't sexy enough, all sandals and beards-- it wasn't what we were into at all. Then somebody played me Bringing It All Back Home, and half of the album is with an electric band, which drew me into it. I've actually covered two of the songs off of that album since.

Neil Young: After the Gold Rush

After the Gold Rush is very soulful, very plaintive. Some of it's quite heavy, too, like "Southern Man", but then there's some parts that are really quiet. It wasn't a radio record, not in England at least, but when I first heard somebody playing it I was immediately drawn to it. I still have the album on vinyl and I played it a few weeks ago for one of my boys. My youngest son is a vinyl freak. He's 22, and he loves playing guitar and listening to various blues artists. And he likes Neil Young.

Otis Redding: The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads

I could have chosen this album for any year of my life, but I put it here because that's what I was listening to when I was looking for material for The Bride Stripped Bare in 1976. I covered one of his songs, "That's How Strong My Love Is", and I tried to do it really close, copying the horn arrangements that they did. It's one of the best covers I ever did.

Otis Redding was a huge hero for me-- I even named my first son after him. But before that, while I was at university in '67, I hitchhiked to London to see Otis Redding play, just before he died. That was an amazing night. It was the Stax Road Show at this place called the Roundhouse, and I was just desperate to see it. The house band had appeared on all those records: Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Al Jackson, Booker T, just incredible musicians. Otis was the star of the show, but before him was Sam and Dave, before that Eddie Floyd, Arthur Conley-- all these great records that I lived with came to life in front of me. That was the first night I really thought, "I want to do this."

Sister Sledge: "We Are Family"

We used to spend a lot of time in New York in the late 70s, and Chic was a great New York band. We made an album in '78, and I was staying right near the Metropolitan Museum. We had such a great time-- a wild time. We went to Studio 54, Xenon, all these clubs.

Chic's music was a big part of the experience. Nile Rodgers later became a friend and he's played on all my records since '84. He's just a genius guitarist and personifies a certain part of New York musical culture to me. Those Chic records still sound great today. My favorite of his is actually not a Chic record, it's Sister Sledge's "We Are Family". Whenever you hear it, everybody jumps up and starts dancing, and that's just how it is whenever he plays. But, oddly enough, he's also one of the most analytical players you could ever meet. Most rock musicians will say, "Well, this sounds good, we'll just do it." But he'd be like, "Oh, this is a minor thirteenth" and analyze it in a musicological way. Nile's a very impressive character.

Prince: "When Doves Cry"

Another American artist: Prince. He's a brilliant lead guitarist, but also a great all around-er: singer, guitarist, personality. He's someone I rate very highly. I like his uptempo songs, the ones with energy: "When Doves Cry," "1999". I saw the film Purple Rain once, I don't really know it that well, it was kind of crazy. But by the by, he's really great.

Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings

I also could have chosen the blues for any year of my life, too, but if I had to pick one artist it'd be Robert Johnson, who I was listening to a lot when I was 45. He's one of the great musical creatures.

Do you know skiffle music? In the mid-50s, these jazz bands who played in New Orleans would also sometimes have a skiffle group, which was like a group within a group with an acoustic guitar, a T-chest bass, maybe a washboard. They'd do old blues things. One of the bands-- the Rock Island Line, which is a guy called Lonnie Donegan-- became a big hit. He was a banjo player and became a big star in England for many years, but his big hit was "Goodnight, Irene", which was a Leadbelly song. So that's how we originally discovered Leadbelly, through a cover.

Eels: "Novocaine for the Soul"

Something more contemporary is Eels. It's just this one guy, really, Mark Everett, and I've never seen him play, but there's this record called Beautiful Freak, which is really good, and it's also right at my son's heart. Everett also wrote a book, which I bought and have been meaning to read. I've got it in my case. But he writes thoughtful songs, and I like the texture of his music. So many years would go by and I wouldn't hear anything new I really liked except dance records, but "Novocaine for the Soul" is the one I remember hearing and thinking, "Oh, finally, someone I really like."

Phil Spector: Back to Mono

This box set has all the hits: Ike and Tina, the Righteous Brothers, everything. The first Spector record I liked was the Teddy Bears' "To Know Him Is to Love Him", that's a beautiful thing. He's a singles artist, really, so when this box set came out it was great.

From when I was at university and onwards, Phil Spector dominated. The girl groups were his great creation, and those records are fantastic. There was a record that he did with Ike and Tina Turner wasn't that big in America but was huge in Europe called "River Deep, Mountain High". There was this guy at Newcastle who had a sports car with one of those 45 players, like a cassette player, in his car. We would drive around Newcastle playing that monster endlessly, again and again. Spector had that kind of effect with his records, he could sound so huge.

It would've been great to have worked with him, but I was always quite shy, I never really approached people. Maybe he would have thought we were rubbish anyway. [laughs]

Arcade Fire: Funeral

Of the more recent bands, I like Arcade Fire, they seem to have a bit of a spirit; they seem to have the spirit of early Roxy a bit. In fact, my friend put me onto them sometime before because he heard them very early. He was a critic. So I saw them at their first gig in London. I love their approach and how they sound and running around stage hitting everything. It's cool.

Bryan Ferry: Olympia

I put out a record called Olympia two years ago and got a lot of great people to play on it. It's one of those records where all the tracks sound a bit different-- some people don't like that, but I do. Having different people playing on different things adds richness. But sometimes, the albums that tend to be best are the focused ones, where you have one thing to say; After the Gold Rush has that flavor.

The track from Olympia I like best is "Reason or Rhyme", which we also did on The Jazz Age. To pick the songs for that album, I went through my catalog looking through various songs from '72 to Olympia. I always wanted to do an instrumental record, but then I thought, "Well, how should I do it?" The thing about doing it in a jazz way is that you have the chance to improvise. You get different things which you wouldn't have expected-- joyful moments, hopefully. [The musicians] can go off and do their own thing within the context of the tune. The tracks that sound best to me are the ones we do that are more Duke Ellington-sounding, more New York Cotton Club, with clarinets in harmony-- quite haunting.

Normally, I'm working with screaming guitars, and I like that, but this record is a departure to saxophones, trumpets, trombones, things that sometimes don't sound so cool to the modern ear. But they sound great to me. It's the kind of music I listened to when I was 10.

Rising: Chvrches

Ian Cohen — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:35:00 -0600

From left: Ian Cook, Lauren Mayberry, Martin Doherty. Photo by Christina Kernohan.

Chvrches: "Recover" on SoundCloud.

The three members of Chvrches span a wide range of both ages and previous career experiences. At 25, vocalist Lauren Mayberry is the youngest and the one with far more educational credentials than indie cred-- she's already got a law degree, a masters in journalism, and a sense of humor about the futility of such assets in today's job market. "I've always worked in cinemas or cafes to make money because it turns out freelance journalism is quite hard to get into," she admits. Meanwhile, Iain Cook, 38, and Martin Doherty, 30, were previously in brooding post-rock bands whose volcanic soft/loud dynamics positioned them as progeny of Scottish standard bearers like Mogwai and Arab Strap. Cook was a guitarist in the underrated Aereogramme, whereas Doherty performed live with the Twilight Sad. "I'm having more fun on stage than I did with previous bands," says Doherty. "When you play aggressive rock music, or shoegaze, or whatever you want to call it, you're expected to act a certain way on stage because you can't just be smiling and jumping around."

So Chvrches' keyboard-heavy pop is a tremendous shift in every way for all three in both sound and profile; their 2012 singles "Lies" and "The Mother We Share" placed Mayberry's regional accent and sweet melodies against sharp synth lines and militaristic beats, drawing immediate comparisons to the Knife and Purity Ring. A UK tour with Passion Pit followed, and now they're preparing their first EP, Recover, due out March 26, with an LP in the works for later this year.

Pitchfork: You originally presented Chvrches as an anonymous entity, did you always have an idea of how long you planned to keep that going?

Lauren Mayberry: There wasn't an evil master plan. It was more like, "Let's put a song on the internet and see what people think about it." We're lucky that people responded, but considering the type of music that we make, there are also dangers about how your band will be perceived-- especially for the female in the band. We've had to be quite careful as far as how that gets portrayed. Not that I'm paranoid or anything... but I am paranoid.

Pitchfork: Have there been any situations where you were disappointed with how you've been portrayed so far?

LM: We've been reasonably lucky. I did my dissertation on the idea of femininity and women's writing, so I spent eight months reading about how women are portrayed in the media in terms of images and tone of voice and what words are used. It's something that I think about all the time, so I've been on the offensive with that from the start. We've had a couple of situations where people pitched things to us that we would never do, like individual entries in women's magazines. It's nice of them to offer, but I don't ever want to do that. Not that there's anything wrong with anybody doing that-- that's absolutely their choice-- but it would make it trickier for me to sleep at night. I worry enough anyway.

Chvrches: "Lies" on SoundCloud.

Pitchfork: How did you guys first get together?

LM: I met Iain when he was producing the EP of my other indie rock band, Blue Sky Archives. He mentioned that he and his friend Martin were hoping for an electro-something band; I've always been a big fan of electronic music and pop music, but I'd never really tried it. Luckily, we've gelled quite well so far, which is helpful because when you're in a windowless basement with just the three of you, it helps to get on well. Otherwise, I'd imagine someone would get murdered, and that would be a shame.

Pitchfork: Does this style of music inspire you to write different sorts of lyrics?

LM: Someone once said to me that no one gives a shit about the lyrics in pop songs, but I find that very offensive because I always listen to them. I never wanted to write really cheesy pop lyrics-- like, "baby, baby, the sun is shining"-- that's not something that interests me personally. I'm always wanting to write something that has some kind of meaning.

Pitchfork: Have you been surprised at all by some of the bands you've been compared to?

LM: I haven't read a huge amount of any of that, but I love the Knife. They're really great at making secrecy a part of their career; they have a lot of control over how they come across, which is unusual in this day and age.

Martin Doherty: A lot of people say we sound like Purity Ring, but I don't think we do, though they're an amazing band.

Iain Cook: Purity Ring are a lot more obscure in terms of their melodies-- they try to bury their hooks a lot deeper, whereas we want our melodies to be up-front and immediate.

Chvrches: "The Mother We Share" (Miaoux Miaoux Remix) on SoundCloud.

Pitchfork: Has there been a situation where you've come across your own music playing around Glasgow yet?

LM: I heard "Mother We Share" on the jukebox in a pub we sometimes go to, but other than that I don't really go into places seeking people who are playing our songs-- it would be disturbing, and maybe as embarrassing for them as it would be for me. It'd be uncomfortable.

Update: Eleanor Friedberger

Laura Snapes — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:35:00 -0600

Photo by Moses Berkson

Eleanor Friedberger's first solo album, 2011's brilliantly low-key Last Summer, was a map-like exploration of the Fiery Furnaces singer coming-of-age in New York over a decade ago-- taking ecstasy with friends and hopping the train to Roosevelt Island, getting a bike fixed by a Russian guy in Coney Island, tracking down silk and wool in Manhattan's garment district. But NYC isn't such a central character on Friedberger's forthcoming as-yet-untitled follow-up, which she considers "of a piece with Last Summer" but also "much more universal."

Citing the inspiration of "dead English guys" like Duncan Browne and Alan Hull, Friedberger says, "I wanted the album to be extremely romantic-sounding, but instead of being about romantic love, it's more about music, and that means a lot to me." Most of the record, which is due out this summer via Merge, was worked out at live shows before Friedberger and her band recorded them over five days last fall at DFA's West Village studio along with Last Summer producer-- and onetime DFA in-house engineer-- Eric Broucek. The results are beefier, sparklier, and both more heartbreaking and relatable compared to her debut.

Speaking to Friedberger in early February as she prepared for a snowstorm, shovel by the front door, we discussed the positive influence of her touring as part of the "Portlandia" traveling band and why she wishes the Fiery Furnaces had gotten started a decade earlier. And if you can't wait until the summer for the singer's new record, she also just released a country-tinged 7" single called "I'll Never Be Happy Again" featuring a cover of Jimmie Dale Gilmore's "Dallas" on the flipside.

"The Fiery Furnaces started pretty late-- I was 27 when our first album came out. I'm kicking myself for going to college."

Pitchfork: You mentioned trying to write "more universal songs" for this album, is that a reaction against singing often very complicated, conceptual lyrics with the Fiery Furnaces for quite a long time?

Eleanor Friedberger: I would never say it was a reaction against any of that. It's different: When you're working with somebody else in that kind of way, you always have to have these guidelines to what you're doing-- especially when you're working with your sibling. But when you're working by yourself you're free to do whatever you like. So maybe this is my natural mode; I feel like it's the next step.

Pitchfork: How did you feel about the overall reaction to Last Summer?

EF: I was relieved that I did it and that it came out and that I played some shows, but I'm disappointed it didn't do better. I wish all my shows sold out, I wish I had sold more copies, I wish that a song was picked up to be in a TV show-- whatever these little benchmarks are. You always want something more.

My big regret is that my brother and I didn't start doing what we did like, 10 years before. I feel like then we would have sold some records. We started pretty late-- I was 27 when our first album came out. I'm kicking myself for going to college. I feel like I'm struggling now, and nearly every musician I know feels that way-- even the most successful ones. I realize that I'm very lucky, but I still feel like I could be doing so much better.

Pitchfork: Is there a song on Last Summer that acted as the jumping off point for starting the new record?

EF: I don't think so. It was more about getting together with other musicians and playing live. I needed to suss out a full set [for the Last Summer tour], and I didn't want to play Fiery Furnaces material. So half of our set was new songs that we ended up recording for this album. And that made such a huge difference-- going into the studio after playing a song for two years, knowing it inside-out and having sung it millions of times, and then recording it is a totally satisfying experience. You're suddenly in this controlled environment and you can make it sound exactly as you've been imagining it.

Pitchfork: Did your live band contribute to how the album came out?

EF: Totally. I'm in a funny position: I've been in one band in my life and that was with my brother. As incredible as that has been, I feel like I'm missing out a little bit on being in a real rock band-- or how I imagine being in a real rock band to be. It's like being in a street gang: you all wear the same leather jacket or whatever. So I tried to make it about playing with pals, and that grew into a bigger, better collaboration on the new record.

Pitchfork: Last Summer had some specific touchstones-- John Cale, T. Rex, Jorge Ben. Was there anything similar you were referring to on the new one?

EF: I'm such a copycat. When Eric and I started out, I gave him all my demos, and I would say, "I want to try and do this like the Donovan song 'Changes'," or "I want to do this bit from Van Morrison." I don't know how else to illustrate something, because I'm not a super-great musician. In that way, I'm more like the producer.

Pitchfork: You've done some comedy work recently: a strange McSweeney's radio play that Wayne Coyne and Richard Parks put together, and touring with the "Portlandia" guys. Did that have any influence on the new album?

EF: Maybe not any direct influence on the songs, but all that stuff adds up to me having a lot more confidence, which is a big deal. Not that I feel like I have a lack of confidence, it's just good to stand up in front of people who don't really know what to expect. Am I going to say something? Am I going to sing? And often when I do say anything it gets a laugh, because everyone's already used to laughing. So I can seem like I'm actually a funny person.

Pitchfork: What was the setup like for the "Portlandia" shows?

EF: It was pretty off-the-cuff. There was a house band which included Fred [Armisen] and Carrie [Brownstein] and two others. We would play a few of my songs, and then there would be a few covers every night. It was so spontaneous-- we would decide on the song that afternoon. Every town we roped other people into it: In Boston, we did a Neil Young cover with J Mascis-- we were just standing there pinching ourselves, watching J Mascis play "Cortez the Killer".

Update: Gunplay

Carrie Battan — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 11:35:00 -0600

Gunplay: "The Hard Way"

Just this morning, Gunplay, the 33-year-old Miami rapper born Richard Morales, Jr., apparently evaded a potentially lengthy prison sentence after pulling a gun on his accountant-- on camera, no less-- last April. But the close call isn't causing him to reconsider the powder-keg, take-no-prisoners attitude that has helped him scale the ranks of rap as part of Rick Ross' Maybach Music Group. In January, when I ask him if he's been told to reconsider his rap name amidst the country's current revived gun-control debate, he says yes... and goes on to explain that anyone who presents him with that sort of talk can fuck off.

Kendrick Lamar: "Cartoon & Cereal" [ft. Gunplay]

He's planning on naming his forthcoming Def Jam debut Medellin after the Colombian city where he was filmed brazenly snorting cocaine in front of cops. He's spoken openly about blowing through $1,500 per week on weed, cocaine, and pills. He's not a role model by any means, but that's often his appeal-- his loose-cannon antics and personal tribulations are inextricable from his artistic success.

Gunplay: "Jump Out"

"It's exhilarating to move rapidly back and forth between identifying with Gunplay's character and feeling inside of this hyper-violent and visceral world and pulling back to feel something that approaches shock," wrote Mark Richardson, describing the rapper's gunshot-riddled 2012 track "Jump Out". The song, like much of Gunplay's material, is laced with an over-the-top, blood-splattered mania that's nothing less than Tarantino-esque-- it turns something harrowing into something exhilirating. Conversely, watching the rapper hit a man with the butt of his gun on a silent security tape is simply repellent, full stop. As more artists attempt to draw lines between their lives and their work, Gunplay seems set on blurring his worlds further, regardless of consequence. "You can't go through life being afraid," he says. "If you're scared, don't let nobody else know."

"Niggas can say they pop molly, but do you really?
I doubt it. I can't imagine Kanye popping a molly."

Pitchfork: How do you reconcile your incredibly raw roots with the prospect of being a rich and famous rapper hanging around rich and famous people all the time? Do you feel like you have a personal duty to stay loyal to your origins?

Gunplay: I've just got to figure it out as I go along. I get myself into some fucked up situations, but I learn from it. As you go higher up in the ladder, you look down, and it's a pretty far fall, so you tend to watch your step a bit more. That's all you can do. It's a full time job not to kill these niggas out here; every day I ask for the strength not to go off the handle and whack one of these stupid cunts. Ross tells me the same old shit: "Quit the dumb shit, let's get this money." When Ross couldn't get through to me, I had to get through to myself. I needed to buckle down, watch my temper, stay focused, work hard.

Pitchfork: Speaking of Rick Ross-- you're someone who's completely transparent. Everything is out there. When you first connected with Ross, were you ever skeptical about his background as a correctional officer?

G: Nah. He can't tell the world exactly why he was a corrections officer, he'll end up being indicted. There are a lot of things that go on behind the scenes that people fail to look at. You don't know what he was doing. And if he sits there and spills the beans, you never know what kind of ramifications could come. And for what? To please these fuck-niggas out here who don't pay his bills and want to see him die? Nah, fuck it. I'll always be riding with my dog, that nigga is 100. Anybody that feels different, they don't know no better.

Problem: "My Last Molly Song Ever I Promise" [ft. Trinidad James and Gunplay] on SoundCloud.

Pitchfork: You've done more than a few drugs in your day-- what do you make of the fact that every rapper is talking about taking ecstasy now?

G: Molly's been here in the hip-hop community a while. I have no idea if all these rappers are actually taking it. Just like these rappers who are killing: Are you actually a killer? Did you actually take a life? Did you actually blow a nigga's brains out one time? Did you ever go to jail? Have you actually been in some shit? It's the same shit with molly. Yeah, niggas can say they pop molly, but do you really? I doubt it. I can't imagine Kanye popping a molly.

Pitchfork: You've explained your Swastika tattoo a bunch of different ways at different points. What does it really mean to you?

G: It originally meant peace and love and prosperity; Hitler took it and basically turned something innocent into death and destruction and holocaust. And that's the way society does the youth, the kids, me. We were born with love and happiness, and then look at what you made out of it. You can't judge a book by its cover, though. People think I'm bad because I got tattoos or snort a little cocaine here and there. They think I'm a killer. But what if I wasn't a killer? Then what? Don't be tripping on me. I pay my damn taxes, OK? Chill.

Pitchfork: What's the status of the Def Jam album?

G: We're about halfway finished. It's called Medellin, after the city in Colombia. Very beautiful city, beautiful women. I had a ball last time I went. They said my career was going to be over because I was snorting cocaine on camera there, so I just decided to take it back to Medellin and see what it do.

Pitchfork: Do you have any collaborations in mind for the record?

G: When I get back out, the people I want to get to for features will be more accessible because of my newfound fame. I've reached out to Pusha T. I'm also looking for one with Drake, so I can cater to the bitches.

Pitchfork: What does a Gunplay song for the ladies sound like?

G: It's very simple. If you listen to my feature on Masspike Miles' "Vanilla Texture", I'm talking about cocaine, but you wouldn't know it. I've made it sound like I'm talking about a woman. I'm making another one called "Greedy Love" for the ladies, and I've got one with Wale and Roscoe Dash called "Damn" that I haven't released yet. It's like "No Hands" part two.

Masspike Miles: "Vanilla Texture" [ft. Gunplay and J'Rell] on SoundCloud.

Pitchfork: Have you gotten any pressure from Def Jam to tone down the more aggressive aspect of your sound?

G: They know they can't tone it down. They can tell me to-- but will I listen? They signed Gunplay because Gunplay is Gunplay. They don't really want to change my personality. But if they do need a certain sound and record, that's no problem. That's why I'm a professional at what I do. I can make a certain kind of music if need be.

Gunplay: "Bible on the Dash" on SoundCloud.

Pitchfork: Can you talk about the song "Bible on the Dash"? That's the gentlest and most introspective we've heard you sound.

G: I wrote that song while I was on the run. When this case happened, I was stuck in a part of my mind where I was asking myself: "Do I want to go back to the streets and handle my business and take care of this problem or do I just keep calm, let everything blow over, and get this money?" So I put the Bible on the dashboard and let God guide me on my road to riches. That's why the hook is like that: "I got a problem and a plan, revolver in my hand/ Tryna keep it cold, y'all won't understand/ That's why I roll with the Bible on the dash." I'm not Christian, but I'm religious. I believe in a higher God and beings and spirits.

Update: Angel Olsen

Laura Snapes — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:30:00 -0600

Before Angel Olsen released her wonderful second album, 2012's Half Way Home, the greatest demand she had to fulfill was providing faster service during busy Sunday brunches at the Chicago cafe where she worked. But now, following the record's warm reception, including reviews that marveled at her loose flame of a voice and songs detailing a devout internal landscape, certain quarters are angling for a piece of a different pie. "A lot of people come out the woodwork," Olsen says over the phone from her home. And she has harsh words for those trying to capitalize on her relative success: "The songs are like my children, so it's like, 'Back off my womb.'"

The metaphor is appropriate: Anyone hurrying the onetime Bonnie "Prince" Billy bandmate to create more, faster, sadder, now, clearly didn't take heed of the human flesh, maternal wondering, and sacred spaces that set Half Way Home apart. The 26-year-old recently followed with a thoroughly low key release on the tiny label Sixteen Tambourines-- a 7" called Sleepwalker, which comprises the two heaviest songs she's released to date, "Sweet Dreams" and "California", and comes with a hand-folded paper crane. Although the limited pressing was intended as a pointed move (high demand means a second round is due soon), the darker shift in tone shouldn't be interpreted as anything but an artist exploring different facets of her musical personality. "I'm not trying to prove that I'm capable of doing many things," she says. The implication is that she doesn't feel she has to.

In a conversation peppered with frequent references to the cosmos, and equal parts intense seriousness and hearty self-deprecation, Olsen comes off enviably self-assured and easy in her own skin: gracefully twirling on that axis between knowing who you are and knowing that you can still surprise yourself.

Pitchfork: "Sweet Dreams" is a bit rougher than the material on Half Way Home. What is that song about?

Angel Olsen: It's a little bit about how, if you can't be psyched about your own thoughts, then how are you supposed to have a meaningful interaction with anyone? It's very important to enjoy time alone with yourself and just existing, because existence is kind of cool.

Pitchfork: It's like that line in Half Way Home's "The Sky Opened Up": "No one will ever be you for yourself." Sometimes it takes a little while to realize that.

AO: You get to a certain age and it really occurs to you: "My mother and my father will not always be here. My spouse or my girlfriend or boyfriend are here right now, but someday they won't be." You realize that you need to like yourself. "Sweet Dreams" is such a dark-sounding song, but it's about not taking anything for granted; share yourself with others after you have first spent some time with yourself.

It's funny, I was on a plane the other day and we hit turbulence. I was thinking "Come on, cosmos. I still have things I have to do, so if we could land safely that would be so awesome." And then, of course, after we land, I go home, take a nap, wake up, and watch "30 Rock".

Pitchfork: A lot of what "happens" in Half Way Home takes place in some internal landscape, things that are thought about deeply and sung about openly, but not spoken aloud.

AO: I sometimes write as if I were talking to myself, or to a mirror, or to someone for the last time. There's this element of confrontation. A lot of the songs have to do with feeling like you're this being that was once in a womb... and now you have a womb. You are in-- excuse me for saying this-- this womb of existence, and who knows what's outside of it? Who knows if there's anything outside of it? That's a really lofty way of explaining the album, but those are the thoughts I have in between thinking about going to the grocery store and having a really superficial conversation with a friend.

Pitchfork: How has your life changed since Half Way Home was released?

AO: There's been a lot of weird asking and waiting. More people than I'm used to have been contacting me about working on things, and while it's really cool to have that opportunity, you have to be very cautious. You want to create things as purely as possible without allowing the universe to interfere so much that it's manipulating it and making things unreal to you.

There's a lot of expectation after you do something that seems to have been well received. It's kind of unfair. I'm still living that album, I'm still breathing it, it's still happening to me. A really crude comparison would be like if someone said to a mother, "We love your child-- can you have another child? What about your unborn child? We really need that. We really want to hang out with your unborn child." And it's like, "Back off of my womb." I know it sounds so lame, but the songs are like my children.

"I don't believe people when they say their songs
have nothing to do with their personal life."

Pitchfork: Was it a surprise that the album got picked up in the way it did?

AO: I wasn't sure how it was going to affect people, but I knew it was honest. I just want to scream: "I'm being honest, I swear!" Maybe it's embarrassing, but I don't care anymore.

Pitchfork: What parts do you think could be embarrassing?

AO: Well, I've done a lot of interviews recently where they'll ask the same question, and part of me wants to curl up inside...

Pitchfork: "Do you write lyrics from a personal perspective or are they characters?"

AO: Right. It's like, "Well, it's both actually. Do you want me to delve into detail about which one is which, and then ruin all of them for you?" I'd rather people interpret the songs and get whatever they can out of them instead of thinking about me crying in a room with a guitar. They're about people I know and situations I've been in, but I don't want to exploit anyone. I don't believe people when they say their songs have nothing to do with their personal life.

Pitchfork: There's this huge misconception that women who play acoustic guitar must be tragic and confessional.

AO: Yeah, like you're just sobbing in your closet with all your clothes around you. "Where am I in life? I need to fight something or someone so I can write another hit, y'all!" It's kind of like that, but it's kind of not like that. A lot of people ask me if I'm OK. I'm capable of crazy-- a lot of people are-- but I'm OK.

Photo by Emmett Kelly

Pitchfork: You covered Richard and Linda Thompson's "My Dreams Have Withered and Died" with Marissa Nadler last year, are you guys planning on working together again?

AO: She and I have been working on some more covers. She lives in Boston and I live in Chicago, so I don't really see her very often. I don't know if we're going to release them, because we don't have the rights to those songs. We're just having fun. When we sing, our voices could be sisters, and that's really cool.

I met her when I opened up for her at a show, and seeing her live was incredible. One minute we were just talking, then suddenly she was on a stage, and it was like she was somebody else. She created her world, and I thought it was really awesome to be able to do that.

Pitchfork: Is that something you try to do with your shows?

AO: That was the first experience I had with anyone showing me that a musician can include a theatrical vibe to their music. It never occured to me before then-- I would just close my eyes and go with it. With Will [Oldham], we did a band covering the Kevin Coyne/Dagmar Krause album [Babble], and we called ourselves the Babblers. Later on, we did a Mekons cover band. Experimenting with those different groups and songs, I learned how to be more theatrical and have more fun, and to take a song and sing it over and over again in different ways, and make it different each time. I'm not just singing the song-- it's this thing that's affecting me. So now, I'm ready to take on different selves and experiment and see what happens.

Pitchfork: The vocal peaks and bursts in your songs seem very physical and spontaneous-- they're not the kind of thing you could plan.

AO: Sometimes I'll hit a note and sometimes I don't. Why not at least try?

Pitchfork: Who first inspired you to start making music?

AO: I don't really know. Music is the first thing I ever cared greatly about. I've been singing and writing songs since I was six or seven. My parents would tell stories about how I'd wake up in the middle of the night and start singing and they'd have to get me to go back to sleep. I still wake up and think, "Oh shit, I should record some of this, because what if it slips away?" My roommates say, "Can you actually do that tomorrow?" "No, I can't do it tomorrow." I wasn't an only child, but I was the youngest, and no one else in my family played music.

Pitchfork: You've talked about being adopted at a young age.

AO: Yeah. I was adopted legally around age three, but it's not like this thing I think about when I wake up every day. I was adopted by my foster parents, so I was comfortable with them. I wasn't in this alien place. The experience made me a very guarded person. I don't know if it's really affecting me now-- I'm sure it is, but I don't really know how. My family life, my adoption-- it could be related to the songs, but I think the songs are deeper than that. They're not just about this experience. And the family that raised me are awesome people and they are my mother and my father and my brother and my sister. I've never viewed them as these "strangers" that took over. It's never been this crazy, dramatic, Lifetime-movie situation. It's been chill.

Pitchfork: Have you ever made contact with your biological family?

AO: I have contact somewhat with my mother, but she and I exist in different worlds. It's hard to force a relationship with a stranger even if they happen to be someone you happen to share blood with. I don't want to just call her up and be like, "Let's have a conversation because you owe me that, or I owe you that." People should know each other because they want to, because they have things in common.

Pitchfork: Have you thought about what you'd like to do next?

AO: I've been writing a lot of songs in twos, songs that are like twins in my mind. I don't know what's going to become of them yet. I'm sure that, even if I had a plan, it would change by the time I got to recording. It will be much different [than Half Way Home] in a lot of ways, but I don't know exactly how quite yet. I'm working with a few other musicians more concretely now and I'm really confident about it. I feel really good about the future and working with people. I hope that I can do something totally different. Maybe I'll write a musical-- a children's musical! That'll be the next thing.

Rising: The Haxan Cloak

Larry Fitzmaurice — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 10:25:00 -0600

The Haxan Cloak: "The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)" on SoundCloud.

As the mastermind behind ultra-black project the Haxan Cloak, Bobby Krlic orchestrates terror on an unsettlingly intimate level. His music is indebted to dark, filmic motifs-- especially Wendy Carlos' seasick synth experiments for Stanley Kubrick's 1980 masterpiece The Shining-- and it's easy to imagine a dismembered man's final breaths while the cracks and rumbles seep through your headphones. His 2009 self-titled debut used traditional instrumentation to pile on the dread; on forthcoming sophomore effort Excavation (out in April via Tri Angle), he takes the inverse approach, wielding creaky samples and cavernous, awesomely disorienting levels of bass. In Krlic's world, no one can hear you scream.

Citing doomy inspirations such as Sunn O)) and Earth, the producer's work exudes spookiness right down to his project's name: "Haxan" is Swedish for "witch," a word that seems almost too on-the-nose considering new label home Tri Angle was once (perhaps unfairly) regarded as the forefather of the oft-derided "witch house" micro-genre. "That term's not something I've ever taken very seriously, and the label's shifted away from that now," says Krlic. "If that hadn't been the case, I would have been wary of signing with them."

Still, Excavation's conceptual arc, which picks up thematically from where his last album left off, spends plenty of time in the graveyard-- and beyond. "The first record was about a person's decline towards death, so this one's about the journey he takes afterwards," says Krlic. The change in atmosphere is felt within Excavation's digital, Reznor-like hell, a shift from his previous album's mostly organic instrumentation: "Death represents moving away from earth. When I think of sounds that represent the earth, I think about acoustic instruments and field recordings-- so I went with the opposite of that."

The 27-year-old Krlic came of age in the small town of Wakefield, in West Yorkshire, and currently resides in London's Newington area. Aside from making music, he works for-hire on composition and sound design ("mostly corporate installations and parties"), and occasionally teaches musical workshops in a prison for young offenders. "One time, right at the end of the performance, a huge fight broke out and the whole place had to be evacuated," he says. "It couldn't have gone much worse."

"After one gig, a woman came up to me and said
that I made her womb tickle. She seemed pleased."

Pitchfork: As a listener, your music can sometimes be physically overwhelming. I can't imagine how it must feel while making this stuff.

Bobby Krlic: It gets very intense. I work on music up to nine hours a day, so there's definite points when it's four in the afternoon and I'll be feeling really weird. I'll stop playing and realize, "Wow, I haven't even gone outside today." Being in that zone for that long can freak you out. After one of the last gigs I played, a woman came up to me and said that I made her womb tickle. She seemed pleased.

Pitchfork: Do you consider yourself a dark person?

BK: No. I'm not sitting in my room and listening to Bauhaus all day. One of the things that I always think about is how much one can find comfort within discomfort. You're going to watch a film that terrifies you and feel horrible, but at the same time it's such an adrenaline rush. You have to plunge yourself into it.

Pitchfork: Are you afraid of death?

BK: I'm absolutely terrified of it. It scares the living hell out of me. It's the unknown element that gets to me. It's the human condition to be afraid of the unknown.

Pitchfork: Do you come from a musical family?

BK: My mum was a Northern Soul DJ. When she was younger, she was best friends with [Soft Cell frontman] Marc Almond. When they were in their late teens, he had just started Soft Cell, and he went up to her and said, "We don't really know anything about Northern Soul, but we want to do a cover of one of those songs. What do you recommend?" She gave him the 7" of [Gloria Jones'] "Tainted Love". So you could say my mum's responsible for Soft Cell covering that song, in a way.

My dad first put a guitar in my hands when I was six. He always played guitar, but he wished he took classical lessons; as parents, you want your kids to do all the things you never had the time to do or couldn't afford. And my older brother was bringing lots of punk and grunge into the house. At school, there was a group of us that would stay in the music practice rooms after school because we got on really well with the music teacher. All I wanted to do was smash out the drums, because it was something you could never do in your own home.

Pitchfork: What do your parents think about your music?

BK: My mum and dad are into it-- my extended family, not so much. My parents have always been interested in whatever music I was into. When I was 21, they both came to a Squarepusher concert with me.

Pitchfork: What was the first record you bought for yourself?

BK: When I was nine I bought Lou Reed's Transformer. Whenever my parents would go to parties at their friends' houses, I'd go along and all their friends would say to me, "You have to get Transformer, it's a classic record." "New York Telephone Conversation" really spoke to me. He's singing about this world that, as a nine-year-old, sounds like Alice in Wonderland. I couldn't even imagine what the things he was singing about would look like. He's a very honest lyricist.

Pitchfork: In the music you make, lyrics are non-existent.

BK: My girlfriend always says to me, "I wish people wrote more songs these days." She listens to lyrics intensely and really enjoys songwriting. Maybe it's because there's way more instrumental music now than there ever was, but lyrics are secondary to me. They're important, but they're not the thing I listen to; I could probably listen to a song five times and not be able to tell you what the lyrics were. I listen to a lot of rap music and it's the same thing-- I don't even listen to what they're saying, the lyrics are just another rhythmic element for me. I'm not a writer, so I've never written lyrics or poetry in my life. I can switch off that part of my brain quite easily.

Resonant Frequency: "Happy Birthday, Kurt"

Mark Richardson — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 11:40:00 -0600

Had he lived, Kurt Cobain would have turned 46 years old today. A middle-aged man on his way to being 50. And if this February 20 is like the last few, my Twitter feed will be clogged with remembrances. A "Happy Birthday, Kurt," especially if it comes from someone famous, will be retweeted hundreds of times. Imagine yourself being wished a happy birthday in public, by strangers, after you were dead. It's an odd thing. But, from another angle, it makes perfect sense: It's teenagers leaving flowers at Jim Morrison's grave, without the plane fare to Paris. The eternal romance of the untimely death. As Lindsay Zoladz wrote in her Ordinary Machines column last week, people are still figuring out how to mourn online. Death in a world of binary numbers might mean something different. John Cage, writing in Silence, said, "Mushrooms grow most vigorously in the fall, the period of destruction, and the function of many of them is to bring about the final decay of rotting material. In fact, as I read somewhere, the world would be an impassible heap of old rubbish were it not for mushrooms and their capacity to get rid of it." But mushrooms are a strictly analog phenomena; in the digital world, the dead stuff keeps piling up.

If you live long enough, you see artists transform from people into icons. Death accelerates this process because it freezes the person in time; when the image becomes fixed, ideas start attaching themselves to it. Cobain was the first big rock star who seemed close to me in age and also like someone I might have hung out with. He was a dude from a crappy town who found a way to become someone else in part through aesthetics. He seemed nice enough. And approachable. I remember reading a feature on Nirvana in Details that said he had a freezer full of frozen Hungry Man dinners, and that's all he ate. At that moment in my life, I could relate. But in the 19 years since his death, he's gone from being a guy in a band into a meme, an idea, something that keeps cycling through culture in different ways depending on the current state of media. Ten years ago, that might have meant he appeared on magazine covers advertising retrospective features, but now that means he's showing up in Tumblr and Twitter and Facebook. Which means I experience him mostly through the internet.

Late last year, the famous "Top 50 by Nirvana" list, Cobain's handwritten tally of his favorite albums, wound its way around Tumblr. People look at it and feel a sense of recognition, and in that flash of "Hey, he was kind of like me," they reblog it. It's a tiny gesture that brings you just a little closer to him, if we can define "Kurt Cobain" as a media image instead of a person. An alliance, however small, is formed. And one of the reasons Cobain's outsider appeal endures is that he was that indie kid who liked to make lists and felt like an underdog. Attaching yourself to Cobain is a way of validating your own insecurity. He was the beautiful loser who, for a couple of years, somehow managed to win. But it wasn't enough to keep him in that place.

Reluctant fame carries a kind of nobility. When you see
someone who is loved by masses but doesn't quite know
how to handle it, you imagine yourself in that position.

Two pieces of Cobain's writing have become well known in their own right, and they are related. One, of course, is his suicide note, where he chastises himself for being a big baby unable to enjoy his success. And the other is the liner notes to 1992's Incesticide where, in addition to talking about the joy he's felt in being in the presence of heroes like the Raincoats, Jad Fair, and the Vaselines, he lays into an element of what he perceived to be a growing segment of his fanbase. "At this point I have a request for our fans," he wrote. "If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us-- leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records."

He had to know that this plea would not keep a single person from coming to a show or buying his records. Few admit to hating people like this; it's always someone else with these kinds of feelings, while individual people, including people like Cobain, rationalize their prejudices. But his note was an attempt, however feeble, to make Nirvana seem like something private, something exclusive, something that wasn't for the dreaded "jocks." Something more like the indie bands that he admired. The Raincoats and Half Japanese and Daniel Johnston presumably didn't have to worry about attracting people who hated homosexuals and women because their fans' very interest in the artist was predicated on identifying with those outside the white male power structure. Cobain did not have that luxury. That's also why, according to the same liner notes, he made a million dollars that year. Through the power of mass media, he had made himself and his music available to everybody. And while there were elements to that mass fame he surely enjoyed, there was a darker side that came with it.

Reluctant fame carries a kind of nobility. When you see someone who has the trappings of notoriety thrust at them, who is loved by masses but doesn't quite know how to handle it, you imagine yourself in that position. You'd never be quite convinced that you deserved it, but you would have no choice in the matter, because something you've done has touched people. It's a powerful fantasy for people who crave acceptance but can't escape a certain amount of social awkwardness. And it's another reason why Cobain has become a touchstone. There's something perfectly cyclical about it all; he was insecure, he wrote in notebooks about bands he admired, he got to meet those bands and tell them what they meant to him, he became famous and admired himself, and then, in death, he became an object of admiration to be scribbled in notebooks (usually digital, partly-public ones). And it begins again.

Cobain said that he missed the comfort in being sad. And when his visage is presented as an emblem, someone else is, in a
very small way, wallowing in that comfort.

Shared failings is one way to build a community of strangers that feels intimate. Cobain had a good sense of humor, and Nirvana had many funny gestures (witness the t-shirt that circulated after Bleach), but I'm not sure he ever wrote a song that could be described as "happy." To truly convey happiness, he had to turn to the songs of others, like the Nirvana covers of the Vaselines' "Son of a Gun" and "Molly's Lips". Self-loathing was an essential part of Cobain's enduring appeal, especially coming from someone so talented. The "Negative Creep". I listen to that song when I want to be reminded of intense pain. Cobain's voice through the second verse terrifies me. There is no concern for his physical well being or even his future as a vocalist in a rock band. He sings as intensely as he can possibly sing. Sometimes, when I'm listening loud, I think my headphones might be breaking up from the volume only to realize that the membrane being excited to the point of distortion is actually Cobain's larynx. And the simple lyrics are so perfect: "I'm a negative creep." That's pretty bad. You can imagine yourself sitting in a dark pool of loathing with that image. But then, guess what: You're stoned. You sink deeper. "Negative Creep" is a transmission, Cobain to you, and you've either felt it or you haven't.

Cobain said that he missed the comfort in being sad. And when his visage is presented as an emblem, someone else is, in a very small way, wallowing in that comfort. But he was a guy-- a talented guy-- but in the end just a guy. We think he was a good guy but we really have no idea; we know he was a drug addict and that he abandoned his family, but many of us overlook that because we think we understand his pain, and who are we to judge. But of course, we can't do the same for people in our own lives. Forgiveness in real life is much harder and more complicated, which is another alluring thing about interfacing to an iconic image: We get to practice feelings when the stakes are low.

If Cobain were alive now, you wonder if he'd be on Twitter. You can almost see him going off on rants and then deleting tweets and then deleting an account and maybe coming back later to apologize. Who knows. What we can say is that if he was still breathing today, he'd be older and probably less cool and definitely less beautiful and he'd be fading away just like the rest of us, and he'd be lucky for it.

5-10-15-20: Jamie Lidell

Larry Fitzmaurice — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:05:00 -0600

Photo by Lindsey Rome

5-10-15-20 features artists talking about the songs and albums that made an impact on them throughout their lives, five years at a time.

Jamie Lidell is kinetic to the point where he often comes off like an organic mass of pure energy rather than a mere human being. From the moment I enter his spacious, sparsely decorated temporary apartment near Manhattan's Chinatown district, he's talking. For a short while, the topics of conversation are circular and slightly removed from the task at hand; he loves gonzo-beat duo (and Warp labelmates) TNGHT, living in Nashville (though he still misses New York, which he left two years ago), and working out with gym buddies like ex-NFL player and Heisman winner Eddie George ("He's married to Taj from SWV") as well as wildcard film auteur Harmony Korine ("We listen to Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane, which is really intense-- you're doing push-ups but your mind gets slurry, it's psychedelic").

The 39-year-old's conversational manner-- splattered and splayed, but somehow making just the right amount of sense-- is akin to his musical output, especially the loud neon sounds on his new self-titled solo LP. But when it comes to discussing the music that's marked his life, Lidell's everywhere-at-once outlook reveals layers of insight into the inner workings of his own sonic digestion. "When you're obsessed with music, it becomes a hugely important marker in your life," he says, "it's amazing how it drags everything else with it." (Listen along to Lidell's selections with this Spotify playlist.)

Chic: "Le Freak"

I grew up in Perry, a tiny hamlet in England. My dad was a psychologist, but he was working on an Air Force base with flight simulators in America. My mum was just being a mum. She loved the classical radio station, Radio 4, and I'd come downstairs and change it to Radio 1-- but my mum loved me, so she'd tolerate the crap.

She had a vertical record player and a handful of records, like Chic's "Le Freak". There I was in the middle of nowhere, getting my first taste of the potential of crazy time travel and dreaming. You see the band lounging on the cover in luxurious surroundings; coming from my very sheltered, white, rural English environment and seeing these black characters, I was like, "Who are they? Where are they?" The music was mysterious-- I had no reference points.

"There was a lot of vanity in punk, which pissed me off as a kid."

Punk crossed over in England around this time, too, and the Sex Pistols were huge. But it scared me, because I was brought up in a square world-- and these punks had mohawks and piercings. I was curious, but it wasn't the type of curiosity where I was like, "That's what I want to be." It took me a bit longer to get my freak on.

The punks had that nonchalant thing going on, but they were the ones who'd spend the most time in front of the mirror. They had to be absolutely fucking perfect, no accessory could be out of place. There was a lot of vanity in punk, which pissed me off. As a kid, I was like, "These guys don't seem friendly, they seem aggro and showy." Of course, I was ignorant. I didn't know shit; I was too young. I probably would have loved it if I was older.

Herbie Hancock: "Rockit"

We all moved to Arizona with my dad when I was seven, which was magical on so many levels. There was the cactus, and it was "the West"-- the real West. But my parents divorced soon after that, so my mum had to hold it down. She taught aerobics, and the music at that point in my life was about her getting our stuff together.

At that time, England was moving away from the old-school, buttoned-up attitude towards the undercurrent of youth who were disgruntled by that slow-moving mentality. Even as a young kid, you felt the class struggle. But America seemed so much more optimistic-- like, "You can do this!" The romance of America hit me straight away. It still influences me today. The smells, the taste of watermelon bubblegum-- you can't get that in England. This was the time when candy was exclusive to a country. M&M's were strictly American. Everything was exotic. And there was "Sesame Street"; we didn't have anything like that in England, either. The music on "Sesame Street" was incredible, the funk was so natural-- as a kid, you're swept away. We were only in America for a year, which was a shame. I was sad to leave. I had even started to develop an American accent.

School seemed much more advanced in America than it was in England, but it was hard for me. I tried really hard, but I was at the bottom of the class. But I did a lot of singing and plays, though, and I was always getting lead roles. Most of the kids were a bit shy and rubbish, but I was confident, because my mum is a good singer. She still sings to this day.

"That record shop experience wasn't positive for me, I felt completely alienated. I would have loved to browse things online, in the comfort of my own world, and not be worried about someone judging me."

When I was early in my teens, I would go into record stores and wish all the records I liked would just show themselves. All the cool kids were around me hanging out, and I felt like a nobody. I'd think, "Maybe I'd like this record, but I can't afford anything." I would have loved to browse things online, in the comfort of my own world, and not be worried about someone judging me. That record shop experience wasn't positive for me, I just felt completely alienated. I'd take the word of magazines about everything. I felt really cut off.

It was an amazingly fertile time for music, though. There was a lot of destruction going on. I remember electro breaking. Rock Steady Crew's "Hey You" took electro's blueprint and made a pop song out of it, and I loved Herbie Hancock's "Rockit". It made you think, "Whoa, the future is here." How cool is it that it became so popular? That was my first hint that the underground could change the overground. The video was crazy. It was some messed up shit. It was art. And it got big.

Prince: Sign 'O' the Times

Around this time, I became obsessed with my sampler; it's the best instrument that ever was invented, basically. Back in those days, no one had a sampler. So I got good at beat matching, putting a couple of breaks on top of each other, getting my technique down. I was doing tracks just for a laugh-- it was cheesy shit-- and this dodgy geezer caught wind of them and said, "Oh, I've got a gig for you." I was completely clueless and was like, "OK."

So one of my first real gigs was opening up for the Prodigy at the Peterborough ice rink when I was 17. It was a big one. I'm at the gig and I noticed the kids were looking a little nuts, so I said to my school friends, "How come everyone's turning into such idiots?" They were like, "Oh, yeah, it's E." I played what I thought was a pretty ropey set, and they were coming up to me like, "That's amazing man, fucking hell, this is brilliant." And I was like, "Settle down, it wasn't that good." Then the Prodigy came on and fucking killed me, they were insane. It was one of those moments where I was like, "This is incredible. These guys are destroying the PA."

When I was 16, I bought Funkadelic's Funkadelic strictly because of the cover. I didn't have a clue who Funkadelic were. I bought Sly and the Family Stone's Fresh for the same reason. I was listening to a lot of Prince at the time, too, and I was like, "Hang on a minute, there's something going on here." I took every song on Sign 'O' the Times and tried to play it on the guitar. The diversity blew me away. It's fun, it's stupid, it's original, it's playful-- but it's kind of serious, too. There's all that weird stuff about Prince where you're just like, "What is going on?" When I hear OutKast's "She Lives in My Lap" or Kendrick Lamar's "Swimming Pools (Drank)", it all sounds like footnotes to "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker". Why was Sign 'O' the Times popular? That was a weird album. It's pretty dark, so minimal. In a way, it's a miracle that that shit was popular.

"Usually, when I hear an album for the first time, I'm like, 'Nah.'
But in the back of my mind I'm like, 'Give it a try.' It's like drugs."

In high school, there was this indie kid who I wanted the approval of. He was the cool guy in bands. So I asked him, "What do you listen to, man?" and he was like, "If you want to get real, son, you should listen to [Can's] Tago Mago." So I listened to it when I was starting to smoke hash out of the window of my mum's house. I put headphones on and just started freaking out... in a bad way. I was thinking, "What the hell is this shit? This is a fucking nightmare." I wasn't ready for it. I knew there was something there, though. Usually, when I hear an album for the first time, I'm like, "Nah." But in the back of my mind I'm like, "Give it a try." It's like drugs. When you're trying a new drug, at first you're like, "No way, this is going to fuck with my life." But something at the back of your mind is like, "Give it another try." So you go back and realize there was some subtlety to it that you miss the first time around.

Aphex Twin: Digeridoo EP

I heard about Aphex's Digeridoo EP at school from a friend-- I actually just talked to that friend the other day, even though he moved to Singapore. There are only a few people in your life where years can go by and you just pick up the phone and say, "Hey, how's it going?" Anyway, this guy was always much more in tune with things. He'd read Melody Maker and catch the waves. So he says to me, "This guy Aphex Twin's music is insane," and I was like, "I wouldn't mind a bit of that." So I played the 12" through my speakers and was floored. I had no reference points for the sound. It was amazing to have all of your knowledge erased.

I started to get curious about drugs near the end of my teens. I'd take speed and E, and I smoked a lot of weed. Once I started, I got good at it, you know? In England, you always smoke weed with ciggies, so going from nothing to ciggies and hash was a really grim transition. We would leave school on lunch break, do bucket bongs, and go back to school thinking we were really smart: "Teachers'll never fucking know." We were having a laugh. We were hammered and holding it down, looking like idiots. Then I got deep into taking E every weekend-- by my early 20s, I started raving hard. It was fucking amazing.

Sun Ra: Greatest Hits: Easy Listening for Intergalactic Travel

I moved to Brighton and met Cristian Vogel, we joined up around 1998. We were working on the first Super_Collider album, and I was working on my first album, Muddlin Gear. At the time, I was always getting baked, and my productivity was low. It would take me years to make an album. I would get really anal over all the wrong things, looking back at it. But I enjoyed hanging out with people, getting high, listening to music, talking shit all the time.

I was living with a guy called Pablo Fiasco. We used to do shows together-- he'd do the lights-- and he introduced me to Sun Ra and a lot of other eye-opening shit. I couldn't take all of it on-- I just wanted to think I was cool. But with Sun Ra, I didn't have to front. I love Sun Ra. The first moment I heard him I was like, "Where has this been?" I had been listening to trad jazz, but no one mentions Sun Ra in that circle. He's out on his own. His singles collection is amazing, those songs are so cool and generous. Like Prince, he's so comfortably diverse.

Muddlin Gear was an homage to Sun Ra. Being in space is a good thing for a musician's mind. You look down on planet Earth, and shit gets pretty cool. Some people are like: "Deal with the common man and ground-level issues." But I'm more of a dreamer, because growing up in a small village, there's nothing. You're not confronted with real life. You're confronted with repetitious, mundane, small-minded suburbia. But you know there's something in your mind that's huge, like the sky. And as soon as you see that, you start dreaming.

And then I moved to Berlin, where I had to fend for myself; I had a bad habit of letting other people dictate where I was going in terms of looking after myself as a human being. I was living off social security and not holding a lot of self-esteem in the way I was living. But in Berlin, after I broke up with a girl who I moved there to be with-- which was a terrible mistake and a weird, misguided move-- I had to fend for myself in a foreign country with no money. For the first time in my life, I had to get real, like, "No one's going to bail me out." So that's when I started doing live shows and doing my own bookings and getting really serious about it. I got it together, slowly but surely.

Sly and the Family Stone: There's a Riot Goin' On

I started to get disillusioned with electronic music around this time, so I'm giving it to Sly and the Family Stone for this age. I got into Sly a lot earlier than 30, but when I get disillusioned with music, I always go back to a few records. If I can't feel the funk of like There's a Riot Goin' On, or if I can't get anything out of Marvin Gaye or Sam Cooke-- these undeniable cornerstones in my mind-- then I'm in deep trouble. I'm fucked. The stickiness, the crazy sound, everything about Riot, I just fucking love it.

At the time, I was seeing someone in Paris, which was odd. I was traveling a lot and I lived in Berlin, so we were very much from different worlds. It's one of the things where I look back at it now and I'm not really proud of myself. I was wasting her time. We were never gonna be a thing, but I held onto it and made her think that. I'm out of those bad ways now, but it's interesting being in music, traveling, touring-- your nomadic identity can really corrupt your own mind. You don't really know what you want. I just didn't want to be lonely, I guess. At the same time, I was playing around with other people's emotions in Berlin. I was being a bit of a flirt, like, "Yeah I'm up for anything," but I wouldn't follow through. I was being very selfish. I had a really misguided understanding of what it was to be in a relationship.

But music was always clear. I think a lot of musicians have that: The music stays pure, it's like your little church. Even if you're not a saint in your life, you've got the sanctity of creation.

Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest

By now, I'd moved to New York with [my wife] Lindsey, who I deeply love. It was a great time of change and optimism. Musically, I was looking for something rich. Everything was boring. I was just listening to music going, "Why isn't anyone ambitious? This is meant to be a record that's gonna change my life? It's not. It's just a sound." But when I heard Veckatimest, I was like, "These guys have really done some soul-searching. It's deep." That album fell into a perfect moment with me. I really needed something to let me dream. And then I got to hang and work with [Grizzly Bear's] Chris [Taylor] on Compass.

Compass was a tricky album. I definitely needed to shake off where I was going with the soul thing, because I was bored. I was like, "Oh shit, this is gonna get popular and I'll have to do this for the rest of my life. There's no way." I'm in it to grow. If I'm not gonna be able to grow with this shit, I'm gonna be doing corporate gigs with a smile on my face and I'm gonna feel like a fucking clown. I've never hit the mainstream, so I'm the underdog, and I like that position. I would never sign a major deal, even though I could have. But I want music to fill my soul. I want to get back to that place, where I'm feeling like Sun Ra is looking down smiling, going, "That's all right, son." That's real. I love that. If you don't have that, you're just making it duller. You can get other jobs to do that.

"Back in the day, I was just living for me, but now I want to be a good man. Musicians are so lame and needy a lot of the time."

And I stopped smoking weed when I came to New York; I was an everyday smoker before that. Sometimes I'll smell some skunk and be like, "I might have a little hit." But I'm not gonna smoke it and go, "Oh wow, I'm really missing this." I don't want to miss it, but at the same time, it's nice to be high. It's such a weird thing, isn't it? Now, I work out a lot for that high. It sounds lame, but the kind of shit we do is really challenging, where you're exhausted mentally and physically and you think, "There's no way I can do this." With drugs, it's too easy. You don't think, "There's no way I can roll this joint," unless you're that hammered.

Back in the day, I was just living for me, but now I'm living for my wife. I want to be a good man. I don't want to be selfish like I was, it's so stupid, so easy. Musicians are so lame and needy a lot of the time. It's all insignificant. I always want to think of the bigger picture and start to move into that place. The art will be better.

Articles: Permanent Press: The Story of Musicol Recording Studio

Joel Oliphint — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 12:45:00 -0600

Photos by Rachael Barbash; all songs below recorded at Musicol Recording Studio.

If it weren't for the mowed grass, raked leaves, and a '98 Honda Gold Wing parked in front of the door, you might not know the place was still in operation. A large sign on a pole in the front yard announces the business as Musicol Recording Studio, complete with throwback treble clef logo. If the sign hints at the studio's 1960s vintage, the mint green siding completes the picture. Set on a corner lot in northeast Columbus, Ohio, it's a curious structure: two Cape Cod homes joined together and abutting a two-story cinder-block box labeled "Studio A." A fenced cell tower looms over the property, and just a few doors down is the sound wall of Interstate 71, wending its way northeast to Cleveland and southwest to Cincinnati.

Musicol's foyer looks and feels like the waiting room of a doctor's office that hasn't changed in decades. There's plaid wallpaper, fake flowers in a vase, subtly psychedelic diamond-patterned carpet, wood paneling, an unattended reception desk, and a pastel-hued still life of a violin in a thin, brassy frame. Even the reading material is vintage; a Columbus Monthly from November 1990 sits atop an end table. On most days the lobby is quiet except for the occasional client picking up orders, ringing phones, and the chugging sound of machinery emanating from the basement. That sound is the main reason this unassuming establishment is having one of its best years in more than four decades.

Musicol is one of the last places on earth where bands can have their music recorded, mixed, mastered, and pressed to vinyl all in one place. (And all without ever touching a computer, if they so choose.) It's a throwback to the days of one-stop shops like Chicago's Chess Records, Cincinnati's King Records, and Cleveland's Boddie Recording Company.

Those famed music-making locales, and others like them, are long gone. But every weekday between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m., you'll find a Musicol employee pressing vinyl in the basement on two manual, steam-heated Finebilt record presses-- emphasis on manual. Vinyl collectors like to think of records as handmade treasures-- the earthiest, most tactile music format-- and at Musicol they're exactly that. Whereas larger pressing plants use an automated process to crank out records by the thousands, at Musicol a sweaty dude pours the PVC pellets from a coffee can into a hopper that funnels them into an extruder, which heats the pellets into a blobby substance and oozes it out like toothpaste from a tube. He makes the blob into a patty, affixes a label, and presses it like a pancake with a nickel stamper, carefully trimming off the dross around the edges and inspecting the final product. A run of 500 takes about eight hours. Musicol has turned out a few million records this way, doing runs of 100, 300, 500, or 1,000, all pressed by hand one at a time. (Eat your heart out, Etsy.)

J.R. Ferguson pressing records at Musicol

These days, the basement pressing operation brings in more business than the studio. Local label Columbus Discount Records, run by Musicol house engineer Adam Smith, presses all of its records here, including releases by Times New Viking, Psychedelic Horseshit, Ron House, Cheater Slicks, and other Ohio lo-fi luminaries. Chicago's famed jazz/blues label Delmark Records (Junior Wells, Magic Sam) has pressed many of its records at Musicol since the early 90s. And Musicol presses records from all over the world-- Europe, Russia, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan. Even with overseas shipping, it's cheaper to press at Musicol.

The two recording suites still bring in business. Times New Viking recorded to 2" tape on Studio A's 16-track machine for their 2011 full-length, Dancer Equired, and the Black Swans recorded their 2012 album Occasion for Song at Musicol, as well. These Columbus bands are following in the footsteps of thousands who came before them, recording garage, soul, gospel, folk, country, and pretty much every other genre at Musicol since the 60s. Even Chicago's Numero Group, arguably the most respected archival label in operation, has noticed: The label is in the early stages of compiling music recorded at Musicol for a future release.

So how did Musicol do it? In the age of Pro Tools, home studios, and laptop recordings, why is this analog dinosaur not just surviving but thriving when the vast majority of its peers closed up shop decades ago? Sure, the oft-referenced "vinyl resurgence" has played a major role; sales of and interest in vinyl releases continue to rise annually. And even Clear Channel rockers are singing the praises of analog: Dave Grohl recently made a documentary about California's Sound City Studios after purchasing the famed studio's Neve 8028 recording console. But there's more to this survival story than the recent fetishization of a format, and it all starts with Musicol mastermind John Hull.

John Hull mastering a record at Musicol

On a rainy afternoon in December, 84-year-old John Hull stands over his 1944 Scully lathe in Musicol's lower level mastering suite, cutting grooves into an aluminum disc coated in lacquer for the London, Ontario, band Disleksick. The lacquer will be used to make the shiny nickel stamper that gets loaded into the press. This particular 7" is a brutal, punishing onslaught of sound. (The group requested Hull inscribe the words "West Coast Noisecore" into the record's innermost ring.) Some tracks on Side A last less than 10 seconds. Most octogenarians wouldn't stay in the same room as this music for even that long, but Hull-- a mild-mannered, Baptist Midwesterner prone to grandfatherly chuckles and plaid button-downs-- just grins, tweaks some levels, and watches as the Westrex cutting head transfers sound from electrical impulses to the motion of the heated stylus, which makes grooves in the spinning lacquer. It's the 491st side he's mastered in 2012, meaning Hull is on track to break Musicol's previous single-year record of 504.

"John is an expert mastering engineer," says Dante Carfagna, Numero Group's man in the field and an archivist with Columbus roots. "I went in there one day and he was in the mastering den downstairs, sitting there with an oscilloscope trying to figure out a basically inaudible signal from some experimental metal guy-- some 50 billihertz tone that he was trying to get right so it would show up on the LP. He's really, really good at figuring out what those things need to sound like when they get pressed to records. It's not often you get a guy, particularly of John's age, that would even have the tolerance for some harsh noise CD."

It's not exaggeration to say Hull has been perfecting this process for nearly 70 years. The latter half of World War II coincided with Hull's high school years in his hometown of Fort Recovery, Ohio, a literal stone's throw from the Indiana border. Settled by Catholic immigrants from northern Germany who refused to convert to Lutheranism, fewer than 1,000 people lived in Fort Recovery in the 40s. Among them, though, was a science teacher who encouraged Hull to pursue his interest in electronics and sound recording. Emboldened by the support, Hull and his brother started a pirate radio station, broadcasting music and high school football games for almost two years until the FCC shut it down.

Hull didn't have any way to record music, though, and that bothered him. Because of the war, metal was hard to come by, so Hull took parts from junked radios and other discarded electronics gear and built a lathe that would record onto discs. "I still have some recordings I made back in '45," he says.

After spending three years studying electrical engineering at the University of Cincinnati, Hull transferred to Ohio State University in Columbus to get his degree in engineering physics. He also enrolled in Ohio State's ROTC program and went on active duty in the Signal Corps in 1956, providing communications for tests on the atomic cannon in the swamps of Louisiana. He was discharged in 1958 and soon after went to work for North American Aviation (later becoming part of Rockwell International and now Boeing) developing antennas for airplanes.

Watch a mini-documentary about Musicol Recording Studio:

"I had been out of the recording side of things for some time," Hull says. "But some of the people at North American found out I had done recording in the past, and they started a concert band. A couple of the guys who were in the group said, 'Do you think you can get some equipment together and record it?' That was enough to light the fire. I recorded the first concert of the North American Aviation Concert Band in 1960."

Everything snowballed from there. Through a mutual friend, Hull found a like-minded business partner in Boyd Niederlander, and they began recording high school bands and choral groups. At first it was mostly field recordings, but Hull also did studio work in his family's suburban homes through 1965. As studio work escalated, the partners moved to the current location on Oakland Park Avenue in the North Linden neighborhood, incorporating Musicol (often written "Mus-I-Col" in the early days) in 1966. They were savvy businessmen from the get-go, able to run the enterprise out of a residence because the property originally housed the offices and model home for the builder of the surrounding neighborhood, so the lots were incongruously zoned commercial.

Hull's engineering acumen quickly earned him a reputation in the community. Gary Hedden, Musicol's first employee and longtime engineer, was recruited when he was just a high school freshman. He remembers an existing company doing most of the field recordings before Musicol came along, but Hull convinced the high schools and bands to hire him, too, and then choose the recording that sounded better. It was a shootout. "Every time we went up against this existing guy, we won," Hedden says.

"Almost every person who ever started a studio in the 20th century comes from an electrical background," Numero Group's Carfagna says. "They were tinkerers. They would build their own circuit boards. [Hull] is in a long line that, for the most part, is gone."

Vintage Musicol ads

At Musicol, if you can build it, you do build it. One of the original consoles Hull built in the 60s is still in use today. When the record presses were put in the basement in the 70s, Hull couldn't get consistent quality, so he built control systems to regulate temperature and other variables.

"The term DIY gets thrown around a lot, but John actually did do all this stuff himself," says Musicol engineer Adam Smith. "The stuff he built around here is bananas. All the control systems, boxes that I still use, the bits and bobs that make a studio work-- he built all of it."

There was very little ego or showmanship that accompanied Hull's extensive know-how. As impressive a room as Musicol's high-ceilinged Studio A is, the place was and remains down-to-earth and unassuming. If some studios are sterile spaceships, Musicol is a dusty living room. "It's never bought into the glamorous side of studio recording equipment," Hedden says. "The quality of the product [at Musicol] has always been good even though the décor was never fancy."

Musicol's Studio B

Hull and Niederlander were frugal, always on the lookout for bargains on good equipment. Hull picked up RCA ribbon mics and Neumann tube mics on the cheap from radio stations and concert halls that grew tired of the maintenance required to keep them functional. (Hull could fix any of them, and those microphones are worth thousands today.) Even Musicol's trippy carpet was salvaged from the Cincinnati Convention Center in the 70s. You can still flip over boxes at Musicol and see "Army Signal Corps." "He doesn't sell anything," Smith says. "There's attics full of gear."

Unlike some of Musicol's contemporaries, Hull never aimed to run a studio that doubled as a label cranking out genre-specific hit records. Musicol is a custom studio providing a service. There were brief attempts at label imprints-- Hull Records in the early years, Ironbeat for garage, Now for gospel, Mus-I-Col for various genres-- but artists released their music however they desired, Musicol imprint or otherwise. Some recorded there but pressed elsewhere, others recorded elsewhere but pressed at Musicol. Sifting through the music made at Musicol would take years (and a lot of patience for white gospel, choral groups, and Ohio State Fair recordings).

There's no wall of fame at Musicol, but recognizable names did come through from time to time, usually to do voiceover work in Studio B: Lou Rawls, Dom DeLuise, Phyllis Diller, Pete Rose. Many early recordings weren't well-known at the time, but plenty of diamonds in the rough exist. Columbus soul legend Bill Moss recorded at Musicol before launching his own Capsoul label, which Numero Group chose for its first compilation. (Hull remembers Moss doing 180 takes before nailing a bass line.) A psych-rock outfit called Owen-B recorded a fantastic, but mostly forgotten, self-titled album and some singles at Musicol. (They payed it off by helping with the construction of Studio B.) Quite a few gems from 60s garage bands-- Ric Ocasek's little-known pre-Cars combo Id Nirvana, for example-- never saw release, but a punky 45 by the Myrchents titled "Indefinite Inhibition" remains a coveted collector's item. And J.C. Davis, who played sax with James Brown and Etta James, recorded the song "A New Day (Is Here at Last)" that was later reissued by Carfagna and his pal Josh Davis (aka DJ Shadow) on The Complete Mus-I-Col Recordings of J.C. Davis and subsequently sampled by Will.i.am on Justin Timberlake's "Damn Girl".

Many of Ohio's underground greats passed through Musicol, too. Twisted psychobilly outfit the Gibson Bros. and Ron House's post-punk band Great Plains made albums for Homestead Records there, as did countless Columbus rockers who were poised to break nationally but never quite did. Rappers came through from time to time, and still do; Bizzy Bone of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony once got angry during a recording session and punched a hole in the wall.

Like so many aspects of Musicol that remain unchanged, the hole is still there.

Warren Hull searching through old masters in a Musicol attic

After meeting Musicol's five staffers-- Hull, his son Warren, grandson Jonathan, engineer Adam Smith, and press operator/plumber/boiler repairman J.R. Ferguson-- you'd probably guess the Honda Gold Wing out front pairs with Ferguson, a 50-year-old jeans and sleeveless T-shirt kind of guy who's worked here since 1985. But the touring motorcycle actually belongs to Warren, a graying, doughy 51-year-old with a kind face and incisive eyes. You'll find him in slacks and a polo most days, reading glasses hanging around his neck. He's taller than his father and similarly amiable, though not as jolly. Warren keeps Musicol's wheels turning. He answers the phones, manages the record and CD orders-- billing, shipping, scheduling. He cuts the grass, blows the leaves.

This morning Warren sips from a coffee mug courtesy of No Idea Records ("Black coffee colored vinyl," it reads), then pauses to take a call from a Jose in Puerto Rico, who is checking on a test pressing. Afterward, he laughs while recounting the early days running around his dad's home studio poking holes in the speakers. He talks about the hard times, too, particularly the 90s. His dad doesn't remember the presses ever stopping, but it seems to be selective memory; during the down period, Warren says they were silent "for months at a time." Through the 70s and most of the 80s, the records pressed each year fill pages upon pages in Musicol's handwritten logs. Flip to the 90s, though, and each year gets just a few spiral notebook pages. Records were dying off. The CD was king, and CD duplication was not initially profitable. Warren remembers 63-minute blank CD-Rs going for $25 apiece. Cassette duplication still brought in some business, and people still used the studios occasionally, but times were tough. Niederlander, a founding partner, bowed out in 1990. John had to pump his own money into Musicol to keep it afloat. Then Bela Koe-Krompecher's Anyway Records came along.

Start listing the "important" bands to come out of Columbus in the 90s, and chances are they had a vinyl release on Anyway: Gaunt, New Bomb Turks, V-3, Bassholes, Jenny Mae, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, not to mention Dayton's Guided by Voices and Cincinnati's Ass Ponys.

"Many of the early [Anyway] releases had inserts that were sort of a catalog that promoted Musicol," says Koe-Krompecher. "This wasn't an agreement we had with them. I just thought it was the right thing to do, to plug a local operation. At the time, there was only a few places that pressed vinyl-- Dixie in Tennessee and Erika in California-- but both had higher prices and you had to pay for shipping. Plus, Warren always gave me a break, and I love Musicol."

"Bela is the one who resurrected the records coming back," Warren says. "He was one of our biggest customers-- he actually was on the beginning edge of the resurgence of vinyl. It has probably picked up 10 to 15 percent every year since '95."

Record pressing is the mainstay of Musicol's business today. In fact, Warren says if it weren't for record pressing, "we probably wouldn't be here." Every weekday, Ferguson starts pressing around 8 a.m. Smith follows him around noon, and Jonathan works the 5 to 10 p.m. shift. Only about a dozen pressing plants remain in the U.S., and Musicol is one of a handful that can do small runs.

Diversification has served Musicol well over the years; if one part of the business was down, another picked up the slack. Even outside Musicol, John Hull stayed involved in other ventures. He helped launch a Christian radio station. He started and sold a medical company and a communications business-- hence Musicol's cell tower, which he still owns. He even worked full-time jobs in addition to Musicol through 1994.

Building and fixing your own equipment, resourcefulness, an eye for bargains-- they all factor into Musicol's survival. But there's another, rather obvious component: John Hull is still here. Most other studios of Musicol's vintage aren't around anymore because the founders aren't around anymore. And Hull isn't Owner Emeritus. When healthy, he's at Musicol every weekday afternoon mastering records.

Much of the studio's strengths are a direct result of Hull's skills. Musicol isn't a top-flight digital studio because Hull isn't a digital guy. (There's a Pro Tools rig, but it's about 10 years old; when your studio's founder loves to talk about the studio's aircraft-quality Teflon wiring, Pro Tools projects will probably never be your bread and butter.) He's not an analog snob, mind you. He doesn't revel in Musicol's vintage-ness or wax poetic about recording to tape. He doesn't romanticize vinyl; he presses it. This is what he knows, what he was trained to do.

While Warren will likely inherit the business from his father, he admits he knows little about the recording side of things. Smith, 33, is John Hull's ideological heir. Very few modern engineers know anything about electronics, but Smith believes in the old-school ethic enough that after getting a degree in graphic design from the Columbus College of Art & Design, he went back to school at Columbus State for two years (at Hull's prompting) to learn electrical engineering. The technical, hands-on approach comes naturally to Smith, who describes his parents as "back-to-the-land hippies."

Engineer Adam Smith

"We built our own house, had a farm," he says. "I've always worked on my own stuff. That's why I like working here. [Musicol] is a pretty similar setup to what my mom and dad's house was like." John brought Smith on as an engineer about four years ago, when a previous engineer left. "It's not an easy thing to jump into," Smith says. "At this point, there's 100,000 tricks of the trade. For the first several sessions I was just terrified."

Smith picked up his shift pressing records about a year and a half ago. Now, mastering is the final frontier. John has always done the mastering, but last fall he went under the knife for quadruple bypass surgery. Orders had to be sent down to Nashville while he was laid up, and outsourcing did not sit well with Hull. He began training Smith to cut lacquers in December.

Smith's involvement at Musicol has given the recording side of the business a boost in recent years. There have been times when Smith says Studio A stayed locked up for months, and though it may be too early to call it a Renaissance, younger Columbus bands are returning.

"I believe in the vibe and history of rooms, not just the gear and engineers," says singer Jerry DeCicca of the Black Swans. "I wanted to record within the same walls where some of my favorite records from my own community were made. And once Adam stepped into the fold there, I knew we'd be comfortable."

Times New Viking inside Musicol's Studio A. Photo by Jo McCaughey.

Musicol was Times New Viking's first studio experience after doing mostly four-track recordings. "We liked the history of it," says TNV singer/drummer Adam Elliott. "And we've always been sticklers for analog. Adam had re-done these mics, and we could record on 2" tape. And the carpet-- we were going to make our album cover that pattern."

"It's pretty amazing that Musicol kept going," Elliott says. "The world wasn't looking, but it was still going. And it's still here."

Interviews: Johnny Marr

Carrie Battan — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 09:20:00 -0600

Photo by Jon Shard

On February 27, Johnny Marr will be honored with British rock bible NME's highest title: Godlike Genius. It's a designation typically awarded to entire legacy bands like the Cure, the Clash, and U2, or individual frontmen with oversized public personas, like Ozzy Osbourne, or Oasis' Noel Gallagher. But Marr abides by the rules of a different sort of rock'n'roll handbook, one that favors a calm and clear-headed vision and studious adaptability over bold statements or over-the-top showmanship. He's long operated patiently and pointedly from the wings of various acts, beginning with the Smiths, who broke up 1987, and later as a guitarist alongside anyone from the Pretenders and Modest Mouse to the Cribs or his own band, the Healers. And throughout each incarnation, he's done an unusually respectable job of squaring his fame and talent with the tenets of basic human decency. He almost seems motivated by a pathological desire to not be an asshole.

Even now, as he gears up for the release of his first-ever proper solo record, the politically charged The Messenger, he refuses to adopt the mindset of someone seeking personal glory. When we meet late one morning in the lobby of The Dream Hotel in downtown Manhattan to chat about his new record, he explains that as a solo artist, he's consciously thinking about what his fans want for the first time in his career. Marr is a youthful but wise 49, and his austere look-- raven-like spiky hair and pale skin, a slim-fitted sweater and skinny rock'n'roll-dude black pants-- contrasts a warm and conversational tone. Fittingly, The Messenger, a loosely constructed tale of British identity, is a decidedly populist record. The album hosts a traditional Brit-rock sound with big, clean hooks that showcase the metallic guitar jangle that cemented his name in the ranks of important guitarists nearly 30 years ago. Marr's name stands by itself on the cover, but The Messenger invites everyone in to share the spotlight.

"It's not in my nature to think that success as a musician
makes you any different from anybody else."

Pitchfork: You've aged gracefully in the world of rock'n'roll and handled your own legacy better than many musicians. Have you been conscious of your reputation all along?

Johnny Marr: I just try not to be a dick-- and I don't always get it right. But I have friends who would call me out if I was being an ass. Growing up in public is a test, and not many people know how to do it. Coming from a working-class background, where my father did manual labor, was a good grounding; I was obsessed with getting a job or getting out of the house at 15.

And I met my manager when I was 17, when I didn't have enough money to buy a set of guitar strings. There are not very many people who are looking out for you and being in business with you when you're at that stage. And it's not in my nature to think that success as a musician makes you any different from anybody else. I've also been with the same girl, Angie, since I was 15.

Pitchfork: How has that relationship impacted your career?

JM: Navigating with a partner makes it half as difficult. We keep each other in check. It's not like she was ever a quiet little wifey wife behind the scenes. She's exactly like me. She's very smart. We're very lucky that we've always wanted the same things. She loves guitar music, she loves important records, and our lives are about records and shows and great bands.

Pitchfork: You've talked about the nobility of being a sideman as opposed to a frontman. Did you have to surrender any personal values to make solo album?

JM: No. Those considerations are from about 25 years ago, to be honest. Now, I'm a dad, I'm an adult. I've been solo for 25 years; I've been in other people's groups but I'm solo [in a broader sense]. I stopped comparing myself to other people's maps when I was maybe 24, really. The trajectory that I've gone on is not one that I can compare with anybody else.

When you're young, you obviously have people you look up to. People like Andrew Oldham and Nile Rodgers inspired me then, and they inspire me now. But at some point, you start to try to be the best you can be and you're not copying anybody else. I'm just doing it in public, and my work needs to reflect that as well.

Pitchfork: Why did you choose to record a solo album at this point in your career?

JM: The ideas wouldn't go away, and the overriding theme of the whole thing-- it's about Britain and living in cities in Europe-- just kept building and building. I haven't been walking around for years with some burning desire to do a solo record. If I had, maybe I'd have made a record that was experimental. Usually, the idea of a solo record is to get some weird stuff out of your system, but I don't think like that. I wasn't interested in making something that was a hard listen-- maybe I'll get around to that some other time. I wanted it to sound effortless, not like I was trying to reinvent the wheel.

Pitchfork: You've been in so many bands throughout your career-- where does this record fit in? Do you see it appealing to a particular set of fans?

JM: If people who've stuck with me over the years like it, I'm totally fine. Earlier in my career, fans weren't a big consideration for me. In the earlier part of the 90s, I was really hell-bent on discovering how new technology works and how to make records entirely without a producer, which isn't necessarily what fans wanted. But I had to do it because I felt it was in my destiny or whatever. With this record, though, I want the fans to like it. I'm not interested in trying to have people who might like other kinds of music follow me. I don't want to please them.

Pitchfork: You lived in Portland for years, so why did you choose to record the album in Europe?

JM: If I had made my record in Portland, I would have leaned on my friends who were there to help me record it. And I just felt like I needed this to sound British, so back I went. The album connects to who I was when I was a teenager, and the young people who follow me. But it's not a nostalgia thing-- how I felt when I was younger is pretty much how I feel now.

I had a feeling about what I wanted to say, and I wasn't really qualified to discuss real things out of America because I didn't grow up there. The first song is called "The Right Thing Right" and it's about feeling like a complete target for consumerism; I thought if I was going make that kind of complaint in an exuberant, giving-the-finger kind of way, it should be from my own country. I don't believe that I've really got a right to say those things in someone else's country at the moment.

"The Right Thing Right":

Pitchfork: You spent a big chunk of your career living in Portland and even guest starred on "Portlandia" last year. Were you ever bothered by some of the sillier aspects of that city?

JM: It's a town that's so overtly vegan, where people can be artists whether they're good or not, and where the people who are working behind the bar might be a bass player in some kind of band. Those kind of things are better than being in a lot of cities! Some cities are really boring and straight. Don't get me wrong, I think "Portlandia" is really funny, and quite brilliant, but I like to be in a city where I can hang out in Powell's Bookstore most nights and go out with my friends in a liberal, relaxed atmosphere. I wish more cities were like that.

I moved to Portland because Modest Mouse is there. I didn't necessarily mean to live there permanently, but I've got a really good feeling for it. The sensibility there really suits me. I happened to have grown up in Manchester, a city that was a pretty cool place to be a musician. It's close to Portland in a lot of ways.

Pitchfork: The song "I Want the Heartbeat" sounds like an indictment of modern technology. Is that accurate?

JM: No, that song's more of a surreal story about how we fetishize our technology. I just started to wonder about the ultimate machine to have a relationship with, and I came up with a story about a guy who wins the lottery and swaps his wife for a heart-rate machine, one of the big ones they have in hospitals. Then he has a romantic relationship with the machine-- he gets his kicks, erotically and otherwise, by slowing his heart beat through the machine.

Pitchfork: How would you describe your relationship with the internet and modern technology?

JM: It's pretty strong; I'm absolutely not above it. Most of it's silly business, but then at the same time, there are positives. For instance, our government got very, very close to selling off huge parts of the British countryside, and that was stopped because of an internet campaign. That was amazing to me. That incident alone is worth nearly all the bad shit that the internet brings. It's all about choice, and the internet can ultimately mean freedom.

We're in a society where no one's putting a gun to your head and making you use your phone, but some people start to crack. "I Want the Heartbeat" is about the downside of it. People can and do break up friendships and relationships because of the internet, and that can't be good. You have to find a balance. You can't let it be the boss of you.

Photo by Carl Lyttle

Pitchfork: What's your engagement with contemporary music like these days?

JM: I really like Howler and an American band on Sub Pop called Jaill. There will always be new bands that I like, it's always been that way. I still go out to shows. One thing I don't like now is this idea that all singing needs to be expressed at maximum volume with so much bullshit sentimentality-- it's pervading regular pop music.

Pitchfork: Define "regular pop music."

JM: Anything that's ever gotten on the charts as a result of "American Idol" or "The X Factor" in the UK. It's born out of karaoke culture. It's been a long time coming, but it's absolutely affected radio. Now chart music is a genre all of its own and it's slipped away from what I understand pop music as. It's pretty difficult to take; it clogs up the airwaves.

Occasionally, a great band would come along, like Blondie or OutKast who could be pop and bring interesting ideas into the mainstream at the same time. That's now gone, because of this weird mutation of pop, rap, R&B, bad rave, and supposedly soulful singing on top of it. That's my peeve. I don't really care what music's made on-- I love guitars, but I'm fine with great electronic music. I also find this kind of folk with guys in Wellington boots and washboards not good to listen to. That music is one step away from barn dancing as far as I'm concerned. Anyone under the age of 60 should not be wearing Wellington boots on stage.

Articles: Local Natives

Ian Cohen — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:40:00 -0600

Clockwise from left: Matt Frazier, Ryan Hahn, Taylor Rice, Kelcey Ayer. Photos by Bryan Sheffield.

Local Natives: "Heavy Feet" on SoundCloud.

It's a drizzly December night in Santa Monica, and the members of Local Natives are picking at a deli plate in the green room of Berkeley Street Studio, where they're recording a session for KCRW. Though they're nursing some serious jet lag after flying over from a UK festival, this radio gig should be a piece of cake-- that is, compared to the death, depression, homelessness, and band shake-ups that inform their second album, Hummingbird. The plan this evening is simple: play some new stuff, handle some softball questions, get back to the green room to enjoy some baby carrots, microbrews, and other trappings of modest indie luxury. And yet, there's a distinctly nervous buzz in the air. The pressure's on.

This appearance at KCRW-- a radio station that's been playing the everliving shit out of their debut, Gorilla Manor, since 2009-- is something of a notable moment in their timeline. A bastion of tasteful indie rock, it's the natural element for a band of calm, good-humored, hardworking, and undeniably career-oriented guys like Local Natives. It's also a signpost in their personal history. Four years ago, they were the confident, assured group with a business card and not much to lose, another Silver Lake band handing off a five-song demo to one of the station's DJs, hoping to get a spin. When they first heard Gorilla Manor deep cut "Cubism Dream" on the radio, guitarist Ryan Hahn admits, "We thought it was a mistake."

Since then, they've opened for Arcade Fire and the National, capturing Los Angeles' indie rock hopes and dreams in the process. (In fact, the National's Aaron Dessner was taken with the band enough to produce Hummingbird as well.) "I'm so excited what this could mean for L.A.," says KCRW's publicity director, "it's been so long since we had a band like this." If you're not from Los Angeles, this might strike you as a bit overblown. Judging from 2012, you'd think the city doesn't really need the help: Frank Ocean and Kendrick Lamar sold impressively and tag-teamed atop almost every critic's list last year, followed closely behind by San Pedro's Miguel, Flying Lotus, Ariel Pink, and others.

But L.A. wants a band that is the National or Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, or Fleet Foxes-- an indie band making the kind of music that could one day land them a Grammy or a headlining slot at a big festival. And, like the folks at KCRW, plenty of people in Los Angeles believe that band could be Local Natives. As the band joke backstage and nervously stack their cheese cubes, they look like bunch of junior executives on the verge of a big promotion they hope is on the way.

A month later, we take up a table at the Thirsty Crow, a Silver Lake bar close to Local Natives' home studio, and it's clear they've given some thought to their place in the L.A. scene. They're chatting about the recent breakup of hometown favorites Deadly Syndrome. A few years ago, that band occupied the space that Local Natives do now, but after a buzzed-about debut and two self-released albums, they quietly bowed out.

Soon, though, the conversation shifts back to the old old days. Local Natives started out as two separate, rival Orange County bands with very earnest names: Cavil at Rest and Through the Heart. They describe their various high-school haircuts, ranging from "Dragonball Z" to "At the Drive-In Afro." Later, they cop to life-changing Slipknot/hed(PE) shows at the Palladium, and listening to Incubus and Deftones up until college and beyond-- all the things that timestamp them as lifelong Southern Californians in their mid-20s.

Though the recent conversation about how even successful indie bands have trouble making ends meet has largely been restricted to New York, the predicament extends to Los Angeles, too. "Are we all in a lot of debt right now? Yes, we are," says Taylor Rice, the mellower of Local Natives' main vocalists (sometimes known as "the one with the moustache"). When faced with what he sees as a declining market share for bands like Local Natives, Rice asks rhetorically, "Is it snide and insecure of me to say that electronic music is the scourge of the earth and kids aren't gonna buy guitars in 15 years? Totally. We had this moment in Montreal where and there was a kid, a busker, on a street corner and he was DJing. He had this little boombox out there and, honestly, it was sort of terrifying to me."

But it's also a relief for him and the rest of the band to let go of the controls for a little bit. "I was like, 'Wow, is this legitimately, going to make guitar music obsolete?' I don't know, you'd have to ask the kids that are being born now if they really emotionally connect to that music. But I think we'll be OK-- we'll die just before the time when no one knows what a guitar is."

For now, Rice is reminiscing about sleeping on air mattresses and couch surfing as recently as last year while we sit in a spacious, hillside Mt. Washington house rented out by his girlfriend and two others; he notes they can make a month's rent in a way that's distinctly L.A.: doing work as extras, or, as he puts it, "Being a blurry face in a background for a few days."

Hummingbird, in a way, is about being in this liminal state: on the album, people stare at ceilings, stay awake all night for no reason, poke at cold cereal, become too afraid to leave the house. It's fueled by the band members' personal experiences-- like the death of singer-keyboardist Kelcey Ayer's mother and the departure of bassist Andy Hamm-- but, as Hahn explains, it also speaks to something bigger: "There was this stuff on the news about the financial crisis, just seeing people who've lost everything-- it makes you realize that the reality you uphold is actually not as solid as you thought, everything's temporary."

But working together as a band on volatile personal matters can be tough-- how do you tell someone the song about his mother's passing needs to be three minutes shorter? "We wanted to tear down this wall between the listener and the musician," Hahn recalls, talking about Ayer's maternal ode, "Colombia". "Kelcey says his mom's name, Patricia, at the end of the song. At first, I was like, 'Aw man, is that too personal?' But then I realized it's not just some song about something-- it's an insight into his life."

Local Natives are about to take the stage at a sold-out Fonda Theater for Hummingbird's release show in late January. Over the past couple of years, the Fonda has proven to be a California Bar Exam of sorts for on-the-cusp indie bands-- make the cut and you're probably headed to the Greek Theatre or Nokia Center next. M83 passed in 2011. So did Tame Impala last year. When I asked Rice what they hoped the success of Hummingbird might bring, he bluntly stated, "We'd love to play the Greek." They see their place on the ladder.

The set leads off with recent single "Breakers", while Hahn sheepishly apologizes for the abundance of new material. The songs from Hummingbird are warmly received, especially "Colombia". Still, there are people manually acting out the lyrics to Gorilla Manor's "Sun Hands" like they wouldn't mind seeing the same set from 2010. It's a typically tight and heartwarming performance that could still easily be interpreted as a sign that that people might not be as instantly receptive to the heavier, subtler, sadder Hummingbird.

The L.A. Times raves about the performance two days later. You could argue that Local Natives are getting a home-field advantage, and it could indeed be a totally different story once they reach any of the other tour stops that will keep them out of the city for the majority of 2013. Then again, they'd probably prefer getting away for a while; it can be wearying to deal with the projected ambitions of a whole city. Perhaps it's the sense of possessiveness that afflicts this place: Los Angeles needs an NFL team, needs a real public transportation system, needs a real pizza joint, needs an indie band they can be proud of.

The album goes onto debut at #12; the band's name is written in a relatively legible font size on this year's Coachella poster. And when Rice talks about the "ambition" of his peers, I recall my own experience and those of so many others who arrive in L.A. in their early 20s looking to redeem the city. Usually, by their late 20s, these same people are desperately looking for the city to redeem them. There's a serenity that comes with being from Los Angeles but not defined by it-- it's synonymous with adulthood, and Hummingbird is a record about recognizing how quickly you can be forced to grow up. Local Natives have their share of civic pride, but they'd rather have "Colombia" connect with a kid in Omaha than achieve the kind of locally recognized stardom that allows them to throw out the first pitch at Dodgers Stadium. It's for the best.

Interviews: Pissed Jeans

Ian Cohen — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 11:55:00 -0600

From left: Bradley Fry, Randy Huth, Sean McGuinness, Matt Korvette. Photo by Sasha Morgan.

Pissed Jeans: "Cathouse" on SoundCloud.

Four albums in, Pissed Jeans frontman Matt Korvette is still trying to keep his band a secret from the coworkers he encounters during his day gig as an insurance claims adjuster in Philadelphia. "One lady found out about it and she was just a real snitch," Korvette confesses, "She was like 'Oh, you know, I saw the internet... Pissed Jeans.' It felt like I was busted."

But with new record Honeys, Korvette-- along with his band of beleaguered cubicle occupants, who channel the frustration of aging, not-so-upwardly-mobile males into pummeling, scuzzy punk rock-- isn't against wider acknowledgement outside of his office. "Ten years ago, I never would have dreamed to be on Sub Pop-- that just seemed like a hilarious prank we pulled on the universe somehow," says the 30-year-old singer, whose last three albums were released by the revered indie imprint. "We should probably try to be on the Grammys and MTV right now."

I'm going to wager a guess that Honeys probably won't earn Pissed Jeans a Grammy-- but it does feel like the kind of record that could raise their profile. While it's the quartet's most consistent and tuneful LP to date, Korvette's hysterical, lacerating lyrics remain the focal point, conjuring the idea of Henry Rollins being given the lead in Office Space: The Musical. Previous subject matter included scrapbooking and male pattern baldness, and, amidst bulldozing riffs and cathartic hooks, Honeys covers topics such as online dating, wishing death upon your coworkers, the unrealistic expectations of relationships, strip clubs, and, in "Male Gaze", an apology for latent punk rock misogyny.

Fresh off of a long Wednesday at the office and trying to fix a busted laptop, Korvette shared his thoughts on his evolving views on gender relations at rock shows, finding a place for Geto Boys and Too $hort in his life, and his preferred means of death.

"If I jump in the audience and start spitting everywhere, I will be the 10,000th frontman to do that. But if I wish cancer upon someone, that might make people's ears perk up a little bit more."

Pitchfork: Honeys feels more like something of a potential "crossover" Pissed Jeans album, but do you ever fear that achieving a greater level of success would detract from the band's common-man themes?

Matt Korvette: I would love to have a different set of problems-- the Pissed Jeans record where I'm complaining that my suntan was too strong or how people don't know how to make the right mixed drinks for me. But at the same time, I don't picture any sort of greatness beyond all the things we've been lucky enough to have so far.

Pitchfork: As someone as lyrically focused as you are-- as well as someone who's set up those kind of caricatured goals of fortune and fame-- I have to ask if you're influenced by hip-hop much as a writer.

MK: Oh yes. My favorites would be the Geto Boys, but I feel like a big part of me enjoying them involved being a teenager who was petrified of women. Like, "Oh, that's cool that a midget pretended he was Freddy Krueger and killed a thousand little girls, good for him." But now, I can't listen to that with the same sort of enthusiasm. So I'm a little disenchanted by the hip-hop I used to love, like Too $hort; I can still rap Cocktails from start to finish, but I don't think I ever should.

Pitchfork: Both "Bathroom Laughter" and "Cafeteria Food" take place in an office setting, are they inspired by actual people you work with?

MK: I don't think anyone in my job really knows about Pissed Jeans, these people are very sweet. But ["Cafeteria Food"] is a death wish, where there's no actual violence involved-- it's just a really strong mental concentration that someone'll eventually get cancer, or something. It's definitely just a bit of a release-- if you were a really good artist and you drew the person you hated dying in a fire, you'd probably be pretty psyched. If you could get to sit there and detail the flames and make sure the frustrating torture on the person's face is proudly captured, it's a satisfying way to create art.

Pitchfork: In light of a song like that, are there any times where you write something that you think is just too dark for Pissed Jeans?

MK: There's some off-limits stuff that definitely intrigues me, because I love to push that line. That's what's fun about being in a punk band: getting to push buttons. And that's pretty hard to do now; if I jump in the audience and start spitting everywhere, I will be the 10,000th frontman to do that. It's totally not exciting. But if I really call someone out and wish cancer upon them while speaking about other really specific things that go unsaid, that might make people's ears perk up a little bit more.

Photo by Brad Fry

Pitchfork: Is "Male Gaze" a response to the idea that the lyrical content and style of music Pissed Jeans play is predominantly considered to be masculine?

MK: Totally. I think we've got plenty of female fans, but in rock music, people discredit women right off the bat, even if they're unconsciously doing it. I know I've been guilty of that in the past. And that song was just the apology for being misogynist throughout my life. Pissed Jeans doesn't really have a lot of misogyny to answer for in particular, but just speaking on a personal level-- just like craning my head while driving and not paying attention. It's something that I've really been trying to fix.

Pitchfork: Outside of your own self, do you see this sort of thing as a major problem in punk rock?

MK: Definitely, and it matters whether you're a punk or a fraternity jock. You're still raised on the same MTV shows. It pummels into you that idea that girls have to be hot, and if they're not, something's wrong with them. But if they are, then you don't have to take them seriously. It's just a horrible paradox, where they can't win or be taken seriously as human beings.

We can either sit there when a female punk band comes in and buy their tape, or you can talk to your guy friends and be like, "Stop saying that shit about that woman in that band just because of how hot she is-- just knock it off, man." It can be awkward and uncomfortable, and no one ever wants to even approach these topics. But that would do way more for women to feel welcomed in playing rock music than just being at shows. Women are smart and they're not all just drones with good taste because their boyfriend passed them a record. That's such a shitty fallacy.

Even going back to hip-hop and thinking about Too $hort-- you'll have a record that's filled with nothing but horrible misogyny for 12 tracks, and then the last one will be like, "The world's so messed up, man, what's going on today? Kids don't go to school, girls being disrespected..." And you're like, "Wait a second, dudes."

Pitchfork: In regards to songs like "Romanticize Me"-- which has a hook that goes, "Take all my faults and twist them in your hand until I look like a sweet and thoughtful man"-- are you currently in a romantic relationship right now?

MK: Yes, I am. I often feel that I'm a pretty lousy partner, and that song is about feeling super lazy and not wanting to help make things work and snidely saying, "Imagine that I'm actually great, and all your problems are fine."

Pitchfork: Does your significant other use that one against you?

MK: No, not at all. We're not worried about those things, and she totally is a Pissed Jeans fan-- she's ride-or-die officially now. It's easy to be this raging guy from up high, shooting thunderbolts down at everyone, but a song like that helps for me to keep myself in check. There was a weirder song [from Hope For Men] called "The Jogger", and people would be like, "Oh, he's making fun of yuppies." But I'm right there thumbing through the organic bananas, too, wondering how I got here. People see me and they don't see some street thug weirdo meth head. They see an insurance adjustor.

Pitchfork: Do you think that there are times when like your fans or critics might miss that a lot of these lyrics are actually self-directed?

MK: Definitely. Most bands are just like: "This sucks, and this sucks, and this sucks-- see you next week," rather than aiming any of that at themselves. It definitely helps to talk about my own issues, and just get them over with. Like going bald. It's like, "Yes, I'm going bald, this sucks." It's totally scary. It's legit: What I have this year, I will not have next year. That's a harrowing real thought that I'm having along with other members of Pissed Jeans.

Pitchfork: By the same token, "Health Plan" seems to be about putting a lot of that stuff off.

MK: I'm just coming strictly from the point of being an adult male who is getting to the point where problems start to arise physically-- and just being petrified of having that doubt. I feel like there's a direct path from, "This feels weird," to realizing, "Oh, you have to have it removed." And then you get it removed, and then the tendon's not working, so you have to go to physical therapy, and then you're on medication. Just this horrible downward spiral of treatment. That's probably more just my fear than any sort of reality, but we actually brought that up while we were going to practice one night. [Bassist] Randy [Huth] was talking about how he has an uncle that fell off a ladder and went to the doctor, who was like, "Oh crap, you have tons of cancer." Then he just wasted away over the course of like three months and died.

I would have rather not known and just lived my life. Maybe I would have gotten some more months and then just died unexpectedly. I think about cancer a lot. It's a horrible thing. I wonder if that's what my demise will be. If I got hit by a bus, that would be so much nicer.

Ordinary Machines: Gratuitous Pictures of Your Grief

Lindsay Zoladz — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:55:00 -0600

The story of why-- in a crowded cafe no less, my laptop within view of complete strangers-- I spent an afternoon placing sparkly flower gifs on the virtual tombstones of my favorite dead musicians on a website called Find a Grave is, actually, a story about Judee Sill.

Sill was a California-born folk singer who released just two studio albums, though I didn't know a single thing about her life when I came across both LPs a few weeks ago at a record store. All I knew was that Daniel Rossen had recorded a sighingly gorgeous cover of her song "Waterfall" on a tribute album a couple of years ago; I had always just assumed that the person who wrote that melody and those lyrics had to be some kind of angel fallen accidentally to earth. I combed the front and back covers hoping to learn more about her, and what I saw was a woman who looked like what Millie from "Freaks and Geeks" would have looked like if she were an adult hippie: long, slightly beaky face, middle-parted hair hanging in twin braids, and a not-unfashionable yet earnest-seeming crucifix dangling by the breast pocket of her denim jacket. The pictures feel candid, unposed. She is not looking at you in any of them, and-- on 1973's Heart Food's cover, in particular-- she seems somewhere else, lost in her head's vivid rapture. That was the one I decided to buy.

Heart Food is a beautiful record-- the sort of clean, classical, Fibonacci-arcing and mathematically-provable version of beautiful that makes you feel inferior and grubby and inescapably human in its presence. (Sill gets lumped in with an interchangeable cast of plaintive-voiced folkies from the 60s and 70s, but a few critics have noted that her baroque arrangements conjure no one so much as Bach.) But there's something approachable about it too. It feels like spiritual music for not particularly spiritual people: You don't need to meet it halfway with any sort of faith or dogma or knowledge, you don't need to believe in anything but the strangely stirring power of the sound itself. There's a song called "The Kiss" that has a melody so crystalline and palliative that, if you could drink it, it would probably both cure leprosy and make you accidentally fall in love with the next person you see. And "The Donor" is an eight-minute finale of such blazing power that you sort of just sit there after it's over, unsure about what you've just experienced, full of questions about the kind of person who could successfully shut out the shitiness of the world and make music music that is so thoroughly, faithfully, unapologetically beautiful. So, to Wiki you go.

Have you ever loaded a Wikipedia page wanting to believe that the obscure folk singer or nuclear physicist or game show host you're looking up is still alive and has lived a happy, fulfilling, painless life-- and then the basic facts of their biography land on your gut like an anvil? Here is the first thing I saw on Judee Sill's page: "Died: November 23, 1979 (aged 35)." And then: "The first artist signed to David Geffen's Asylum label, she released two albums, then worked briefly as a cartoonist before dying of drug abuse in 1979." To me, the cruelest thing about this sentence was that "drug abuse" was hyperlinked to its own extensive and authoritative Wiki, as if all the varying, personal horrors contained in that phrase could be broken neatly into sections, tagged with proper citation, and explained.

Sill's life was like something out of a cautionary after-school special: heroin, prostitution, bank robbery, jail-time. Intermittent homelessness ("I was living in a '55 Cadillac with five people at the time, sleeping in shifts," she reminisces during some light banter on her Live in London album before adding, with characteristic resiliency, "It was in the summer, it wasn't so bad. It had air conditioning in the car.") She hurt her back in a car accident a little while after she was dropped from Geffen, and since her doctors knew her history and wouldn't prescribe her painkillers, she remained in chronic pain until she died. Her death itself is a bit of a mystery. "The Los Angeles coroner ruled Sill's death a suicide," according to a 2006 article in The Washington Post, "but those who knew her better have always contended that the 'note' found near her body-- a meditation on rapture, the hereafter and the innate mystery of life-- may just have been part of a diary entry or, perhaps, another one of her haunted, haunting songs beginning to take shape."

It was in this state of mind-- trying to reconcile how someone who'd known such pain could still find the strength to sing like a lamb-- that I saw a link at the bottom of the page: "Judee Sill at Find a Grave."

There is a place a friend of mine refers to as "the other internet," where the streamlined, homogenized design of Facebook never caught on. Where people ramble on to their heart's content, ungoverned by the laws of 140-character concision. Where "GIF" still means what it meant in 1998; where the "Ally McBeal" baby probably still dances, blissfully uninterrupted for all of eternity. Find a Grave, a website that bills itself as "a virtual cemetery experience," is located deep within this realm. But do not let its GeoCities-caliber aesthetic fool you: This is a well-trafficked piece of internet real estate. There is (naturally) a hit counter on the main page, and it boasts about 14 million page views per day.

Back in 1995, James Tipton, was just a guy who "could not find an existing site that catered to his hobby of visiting the graves of famous people," and decided to take matters into his own hands. Find a Grave began as an online database that hosted photographs of famous graves, but it's since expanded (exponentially, thanks to a dedicated staff of tombstone photographers: 93 million graves and counting) to hosting photos of non-famous graves. Today, most of its traffic comes from people looking for friends and family members' burial sites-- some of which they'd never be able to visit in person. It's a commendable service, but coming to the site through Sill's memorial page, I was most intrigued by the celebrity pages, and seeing what sort of messages and GIFs their fans had posted.

On Sill's HTML tombstone, there is a short bio, a photo of her looking very happy in a canary-yellow tunic, and a rather clinical indication ("Burial: Cremated") that her ashes have been scattered across the Pacific. There are also 43 notes and clip-art style "virtual flowers," left by members of the site. The notes range from sweet to bizarre and, at that moment, as I was trying to process the sad details of her death 33 years late, they were exactly what I wanted to read. There are missives from diehards ("With devotion from a loyal fan who loved your music then and now. I saw your first concert in April 1971 at Doug Weston's Troubadour in West Hollywood") and a few from random Find a Grave users just passing through ("I'm sorry I don't know your music, I love the music of the 60s. You sound like an interesting lady, rest where no tears fall…"), but most of them have one thing in common. They all address Sill-- the woman who, on her record covers, seemed too lost in her own joy or pain to even notice you there-- in this familiar tone, like they are talking right to her.

There's something unexpectedly comforting about
the fact that somewhere in the wilderness of the internet,
grief goes on long after the #RIP trending topics have faded.

As you can probably imagine, there are some truly bizarre and downright disturbing things about any given Find a Grave experience. For example, I saw on a few different memorial sites a rippling, rainbow GIF that read, in a Comic Sans-esque font, "In memory of a Victim of Suicide." There is also a poll at the bottom of each celebrity's memorial page, which asks "How famous was this person?" and lets you rate them on a scale of one to five stars. (For context: Adam Yauch is a 4.2. Abraham Lincoln an impressive 4.9.) And maybe worst of all was the image of a frowny sunflower carrying the message: "The Virtual Flowers feature has been turned off for this memorial because it was being continually misused." Thinking about whatever people were saying on Biggie and Tupac's pages to warrant this message makes me lose one more sliver of faith in humanity.

But once (or, more likely, if) you can get past all the strangeness and despair, there's something unexpectedly comforting about these memorials-- about the fact that somewhere in the wilderness of the internet, grief goes on long after the #RIP trending topics have faded. I've found the kneejerk motions of writing a timely Twitter obit to be a little queasy; I can remember, as the hashtagged memorials poured through my feed following Broadcast frontwoman Trish Keenan's sudden passing in 2011, I felt impelled to join in but could merely muster a string of clichés that didn't even hint at what Keenan's music meant to me.

"On Twitter, grief is just another meme," Jewcy's Jacob Silverman wrote last summer, commenting on some of the patterns he saw across his social networks the week that Adam Yauch died. "When a celebrity dies, we are all prompted to author our own mini-memoirs." In July, right after Donna Summer's death, Monica Hesse came to a similar conclusion in a Washington Post article called "Tweet It and Weep", which defined digital grief as a superficial combination of "sadness" and "performance art." "Online," she concluded, "grief over dead celebrities is about us."

And the messages left on Find a Grave's pages are, in Silverman's words, mini-memoirs. But they don't feel condemnably narcissistic to me. They're joyful and sad and silly and heartbreaking. They humanize the musicians as much as they do the people who wrote them.

To singer-songwriter Tim Hardin, who wrestled all his life with the burden of his talent: "You were in my creative writing class at South Eugene High in 1959. You always had such promise and always seemed to 'blow it,' but that is not for me to judge."

To Alex Chilton, on the enduring, private ripples of a hit song he always resented: "About 10 years ago, I wrote a letter to an old friend who lived out of state. He took an airplane to see me. Your song, 'The Letter' has been our song ever since. We've been very happily married almost 8 years now."

Some heartfelt bromance for MCA: "MAN I MISS U BUDDY. BRASS MONKEY 4 LIFE! MY BELL I GOT THE ILL COMMUNICATION. NO SLEEP TILL BROOKLYN!!!!!!!!! --KRAZY JOE"

And on Janis Joplin's page, clip art of a red, white, and blue rose accompanied by a rightfully exclamatory caption: "We made love!"

Fandom has always been this interplay between the public and private, between the self-conscious broadcasts of band t-shirts and the quiet, devotional headphone moments. And whatever a "virtual cemetery experience" is, Find a Grave's memorial pages replicate that duality; millions of page views a day, and yet you get the eerie sense you're the first person who's been there in months. So, while clicking through the virtual headstones, I'm suddenly compelled to do something that seemed stupid and embarrassing 15 minutes ago: I make an account on Find a Grave. I leave a rose for Janis. A beer for D. Boon. For Left Eye, some music notes, but only because there wasn't a condom eye patch in this particular collection of clip art. By the time I get to Sill, I'm comfortable enough with this whole ridiculous exercise to leave a note. Her own words, paraphrased to fit the occasion:

"I know you would have not only been amazed that this site exists," someone wrote to Joplin, "But you would be laughing your head off." I think Sill, too, would have been delighted at the lurid, glittering weirdness of it all-- the internet's gaudy, rapturous take on the hereafter. "Judee Sill has now triumphed beyond the grave," wrote the Post's Tim Page on the occasion of her 2006 reissues, "As she always believed she would." He was talking about her records, of course. But you should have seen the flowers.

Show No Mercy: KEN mode and Inter Arma

Brandon Stosuy — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 13:00:00 -0600

The second half of 2012 included installments of Show No Mercy featuring some bigger bands like Baroness, Converge, and Pig Destroyer. For the first Show No Mercy of 2013, I decided to interview two smaller bands who've made two of my favorite albums in this young year, metal albums that could easily resonate with non-metal fans, too.

KEN mode by Scott Kinkade

The Winnipeg trio KEN mode's fifth and best album, Entrench, is out March 15 on Season of Mist. It's their first with bassist Andrew LaCour, also of the Orlando, Fla., post-hardcore band Khann, and the first since winning a Juno award for for 2011's Venerable. Across these 11 tracks, the band moves into bigger, hardcore/metalcore-influenced songs, amplified by guest vocal spots from onetime Deadguy/Kiss It Goodbye vocalist Tim Singer and Dave Verellan (Narrows, ex-Botch). The group, who recorded the collection with Matt Bayles (Mastodon, the Sword), also added piano, keyboards, and strings without sacrificing the violence of their sound.

You can get a sense of the new direction in "Counter Culture Complex". When I asked vocalist and guitarist Jesse Matthewson about it a few weeks ago, he said its working title was "Party Fun Blast" and explained: "The lyrics deal with growing up and picking your battles; dealing with a basic understanding of the world and the people inhabiting it as you move on from being a teenager/young adult to being old enough that you should know better."

We spoke a bit more about the album a couple of weeks later.

Pitchfork: Entrench is your biggest sounding record, one with a more metalcore sound. Can you discuss the shift?

Jesse Matthewson: I think with each album we're undeniably influenced by what we've been listening to around the time of writing. For myself specifically, I've been gravitating a little more to hardcore over the past year, so it shows in some of the riffs I've been writing. Adding Andrew to the writing lineup also clearly has had an effect, and he won't deny his desire to play fast at all times! I think with the combination of our two writing styles, the more hardcore/metalcore side of KEN mode shined a little brighter than it has in the past. I was on a serious Rock for Light kick when we started our second writing session for the album...go figure.

Pitchfork: So, Bad Brains. What else? It sounds more polished to me, too.

JM: Since we tend to be organized to a somewhat neurotic degree, we actually discussed beforehand how questions like this would be answered in terms of where our influences came from when writing this record. Last record we suggested tinges of Deathspell Omega, Future of the Left and TAD. For Entrench Andrew cited Nomeansno and Meshuggah as having infiltrated his psyche in the riff making department, while my two name drops would include Bad Brains and Zeni Geva. Shane and I grew up listening to the Melvins, Kittens, Nirvana, Drive Like Jehu, the Jesus Lizard, Today is the Day, the Dazzling Killmen...so there's a blended Canadian filter on that mess going on at all times as well.

I'm not sure if I'd agree with things being more polished, but I do feel there's a little higher fidelity and clarity to this record that arose from both the attention to detail during production and the writing itself. Bayles' style is pretty clear and concise; but I still think this is a rather dirty record.

Pitchfork: I do think it's your best album. The changes work. Are you anticipating a larger audience? It has a more accessible sound.

JM: Here's hoping! I know as a whole the songwriting is a little catchier, without sacrificing any of the grittiness of the actual riffing, nor the overall technicality of the music itself. There seems to be a whole new generation of hardcore listeners these days that were raised on bands like Converge and the Dillinger Escape Plan; we've never really been marketed to these types of kids before because, by and large, people have focused on the "noise rock" side of our music, despite us never really fitting into the noise rock scene itself. I'm not afraid to admit that you'll find equal parts Johnboy and Strife in my record collection.

KEN mode: "The Promises of God" on SoundCloud.

Pitchfork: What was it like working with Matt Bayles?

JM: I know it's totally cliche to talk about what a "great and rewarding recording experience it was" and how "this is our best sounding record yet!," but I suppose that should be the truth with every new album you make, otherwise what the hell are you doing with your life, right? Going into the session I honestly had no idea how our record would turn out, as Matt has done a lot of classic albums in this sub-sect of metal but I wasn't entirely sure how well the production on Leviathan or Oceanic would fit a band like us. Going through the process though, Matt completely understood where we were coming from, where the session needed to go, and our working styles meshed quite appropriately. We'd heard stories about how hard Matt can be on bands in the studio, which was actually one of the selling points in us wanting to work with him in the first place, but to be honest, I didn't find him to be very hard on us. Maybe it was because we had plenty of time to execute the session, or maybe it was because we all had similar expectations performance wise.

Pitchfork: How did he influence the sound?

JM: I don't really feel like Matt influenced the sound at all, he merely captured the sounds the way he tends to do with bands. All of the tones we used are the same we use live, and very similar to those of the last record. The songwriting itself was all done prior to Matt becoming involved and a lot of the more outside of the box ideas (a la acoustic guitars, piano, strings) were all our ideas. Matt just helped refine some of the approaches and aesthetics we were going for.

Pitchfork: Did winning a Juno for Venerable change the discussion around the band in Canada and elsewhere? Did it add to any pressure for Entrench?

JM: Winning the Juno definitely brought us to a different level of general awareness around Canada, and to a much lesser extent internationally (though I did see a fair number of stories written about it, which was neat); whether or not it's anything tangible, I suppose we shall see with the release of Entrench. Though I feel like we didn't really feel any added pressure having won a Juno, we definitely wanted to deliver with our next album; but really, I would have wanted to anyway. I guess the biggest thing the Juno changed was in my feeling a responsibility to go after as much Canadian grant money and loans for musicians as I could. We were armed with a weapon in that piece of crystal, so why not use said weapon to further some less savory art on the international stage. Both the programs at Manitoba Film & Music and Factor were paramount in our ability to record Entrench the way we did.

Pitchfork: When we premiered "Counter Culture Complex" you mentioned Andrew's been helping with songwriting. How has that changed KEN mode?

JM: Andrew contributing to the writing changed a couple pretty important things, the first obviously being sonic: He's infused his own southern flavour to our cold, northern mix of noise rock, hardcore and metal. The second was the intensely concentrated speed in which we were able to put Entrench together with, requiring really only about three weeks worth of full-time writing. Andrew being the main songwriter in Khann meant that we now had three songwriters butting heads as we pieced together and stripped apart ideas. It was an adjustment for Shane and I to work with someone as opinionated as Andrew, and it was a trip for Andrew to be placed in a scenario where he wasn't completely manning the ship. A lot of intensity built up, but in the end, I think we produced a product greater than the sum of its parts, and the best KEN mode record to date.

Pitchfork: You guys come up with great song titles. What's the story behind "Your Heartwarming Story Makes Me Sick"?

JM: The title came up while we were on tour with Deafheaven in 2011 and our bassist at the time, Jahmeel Russell, was telling Shane and I the adorable story of how he met his wife, if I recall correctly. That quote was Shane's response to said story; to which we all burst out laughing. A lot of our song names are weird inside jokes between Shane and I that inevitably tie in to a set of lyrics that I'm laying out for a song. This particular song is almost a cliche in itself, in that it pokes fun at both the classic cookie cutter, worker-bee, pie in the sky dream and some of said people's views on anyone who thinks outside of said paradigm, and the melodramatic antithesis of the counter culture rebel. Pretentiousness run amuck.

Pitchfork: "Secret Vasectomy"?

JM: Back in Jan 2012 we demoed four songs with our longtime friend, and engineer of our 2nd and 3rd records, Craig Boychuk. When he heard the song names for the group of four ('Secret Vasectomy', 'the Terror Pulse', 'Romeo Must Never Know', and 'Why Don't You Just Quit?'), he stated that our new album sounds a lot like a black comedy. When he told me that, I honestly thought he hit the nail right on the head as to where a lot of the sentiments of this record were coming from. As a journalist, I'm sure you can relate to the situation of needing to produce, yet feeling utterly uninspired to write anything of any perceived value whatsoever. There is your starting point. There can be a mammoth in the room, but you refuse to let that be the stimulus for your fingers hitting the keys and instead you slump in your chair and shoot blanks.

Pitchfork: "Romeo Must Never Know"?

JM: Songs like this I enjoy way too much, as people who know anything about me could possibly draw a whole bunch of different conclusions as to what the actual source material is about, yet it's probably not what they think. Even the title itself... sometimes you shouldn't give up on the things/people you love. Sometimes you can't (please read the last two sentences in Liam Neeson's voice).

Pitchfork: Entrench seems to deal with various issues of power/dominance.

JM: Entrench as a whole is very much about accepting who you are, recognizing what you want in life, not letting others control your path, and crushing whatever road blocks or barriers stand in your way. Sometimes you get sidetracked and drift aimlessly, even get brutally lost, but picking yourself back up, dusting yourself off and foraging on is the key, and in itself, the meaning of life.

All of the lyrics I wrote for this album also fell in between tours of ours, so I was training muay thai, Brazilian jiu-jitsu and a little wrestling pretty regularly, so some of those fighting sentiments might have crept their way into some of the lyrical themes as well.

Pitchfork: I've always appreciated the almost regimented feel of KEN mode-- on Venerable there's "Obeying the Iron Will…" Here: "Why Don't You Just Quit?" and "Figure Your Life Out." That sort of drill sergeant vibe. So I found it fitting when a friend told me Entrench was his "favorite gym album of the year." Thoughts?

JM: I can definitely understand that vibe, given such song names... when really, the names themselves are us laughing at extremely shitty/mean things to say to people to elicit a response, which is completely drill sergeant-like in nature.

Shane and I grew up with a weight room in our basement, and have named songs after books by Ian King (Book of Muscle). Are we completely self absorbed douchebags, or are we sarcastically laughing at everything? I suppose the reader can jump to their own conclusions, then drop and give me 20.

Pitchfork: You guys ever cross paths with Henry Rollins?

JM: Once, in 2006 when Shane and I drove down to Minneapolis to see the reunited Rollins Band (the Weight lineup) with a few friends. It is still to this day one of the best shows I've ever seen in my life. Rollins' voice was definitely past its prime, but the intimacy and intensity of that entire show, along with the song selection they played, was so top notch; I will never forget that show. Rollins has always been an intense showman, even until the final days of his music career.... on a whim, we decided we'd try to meet him after the show, like total fan boys. We even brought a copy of our Reprisal record, as I thought on the off chance that he'd see the name, have it register, and chuckle at the fact that we're called KEN mode. When we gave it to him, he looked at us like idiots, said thanks, and moved on. I definitely regretted putting myself in that situation, and I don't get star struck often, but Rollins did it to me. I felt like a child. Oh well. Maybe he kept the disc; maybe he threw it out...I'd reckon only Rollins knows.

Pitchfork: What's it like being in a band with your brother?

JM: I suppose it would be a different experience for different people, but for me it is one of the best most rewarding experiences I could ever hope for in life. Shane's my best friend, my business partner, my co-conspirator, and a lot of of the time I feel like we share parts of the same collective brain. We are born on the same day, only two years apart, and have been best friends since the day he was born. Does our heartwarming story make you sick?

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Catch them live:

All dates with Today is the Day, Black Tusk and Fight Amp (unless otherwise noted)

03-05 Portland, ME - Port City Music Hall*
03-06 Brooklyn, NY - Saint Vitus Bar
03-07 Cambridge, MA - Middle East Downstairs
03-08 New York, NY - The Studio at Webster Hall
03-09 Philadelphia, PA - The Barbary
03-10 Pittsburgh, PA - Mr. Smalls
03-11 Atlanta, GA - The Masquerade
03-12 Orlando, FL - Backbooth
03-13 New Orleans, LA - Siberia
03-14 Austin, TX - SXSW (KEN mode only)
03-15 Austin, TX - Red 7 (Tone Deaf Touring Official SXSW Showcase) **
03-16 Austin, TX - SXSW**
03-17 Dallas, TX - Double Wide (Spillover Fest Afterparty)
03-19 Mar 13 Albuquerque, NM (US) Launchpad
03-20 Tempe, AZ - Rocky Point Cantina
03-21 San Diego, CA - Brick By Brick
03-22 Los Angeles, CA - Satellite
03-23 Santa Cruz, CA - The Catalyst
03-25 San Francisco, CA - Elbo Room
03-26 Portland, OR - Rotture
03-27 Seattle, WA - The Highline
03-28 Bellingham, WA - The Shakedown
03-29 Vancouver, BC - Richshaw Theatre
03-30 Kamloops, BC - Bailey's
04-01 Calgary, AB - Palomino
04-02 Saskatoon, SK - Amigo's
04-04 Winnipeg, MB - Pyramid Cabaret
04-05 Fargo, ND - The Aquarium
04-06 Minneapolis, MN - Triple Rock Social Club
04-07 Chicago, IL - Empty Bottle
04-08 Grand Rapids, MI - Pyramid Scheme * w/Ringworm
04-09 Columbus, OH - Ace of Cups * w/Ringworm
04-10 Newport, KY - Southgate House Revival * w/Ringworm
04-11 Cleveland, OH - Beachland Ballroom * w/Keelhaul
04-12 Detroit, MI - Magic Stick * w/Keelhaul
04-13 Toronto, ON - Lee's Palace * w/Keelhaul
04-14 Montreal, QC - Il Motore * w/Keelhaul
04-15 Ottawa, ON - Maverick's * w/Keelhaul

* No Black Tusk
** No Black Tusk or Fight Amp

Inter Arma: "'sblood" on SoundCloud.

The Richmond, Va., quintet Inter Arma's second album, Sky Burial, is out March 19 on Relapse. It follows 2011's Destroyer EP, out on Toxic Assets, and their 2010 Forcefield debut, Sundown. The group shares three members with the black metal band, Bastard Sapling, who released Dragged from Our Restless Trance toward last year, but Inter Arma offer a very different sound, a huge, more open-ended mix of doom, sludge, groove metal, Southern acoustic ambiance, and filthy psychedelia. (And while I feel like I should keep a swear jar for every time someone uses the world "blackened," here it fits.) They're a great band, with a masterful new record, and no real gimmicks.

I spoke with guitarist/co-vocalist Trey Dalton about the new collection, which pushes to an hour and change across eight tracks.

Pitchfork: It's been two years since the last Inter Arma an the last Bastard Sapling. Why the uptick in production?

Trey Dalton: Well, the Bastard Sapling jams have been recorded for a while now, but they finally saw release in 2012. Inter arma had been trying to figure out our best option from a recording perspective, as we had a lot of material to put down. Things came together rather serendipitously when Mikey Mikey Allred hit us up about recording, and here we are.

Pitchfork: How'd you whittle down that material to make a cohesive record?

TD: We just recorded most of the stuff we had and it turned out pretty cohesive. The songs on Sky Burial were all written over the course of two years, probably. "Westward" was written maybe two weeks before we left. I've had the main riff to "The Survival Fires" floating around since 2007, and was finally able to get it down on tape. More coincidence than anything.

Pitchfork: Does Bastard Sapling influence Inter Arma? Vice versa?

TD: I think so in both parts, but probably not in a really tangible way. I don't imagine that if someone listened to Dragged From Our Restless Trance and Sky Burial back to back that they'd get some profound sense of continuity or shared musical philosophy. I'd say any influence is probably more person-to-person than in an overall sound. That doesn't mean that it would be any less powerful, just more subtle.

Pitchfork: You can't pin a specific tag to Inter Arma. How would you define the sound?

TD: I wouldn't. This may sound super pretentious, but so be it. In a way I understand the reasons behind classification and throwing genre this and that on bands, as it makes them easier to market or fit in to whatever niche that makes sense. With that being said, we're just a band that plays heavy music. Well, mostly heavy music.

Pitchfork: As you suggest above, there are plenty of gentler moments on Sky Burial. It feels cinematic to me. What influenced these moments? What non-heavy music have you been listening to?

TD: We've actually gotten the cinematic thing before, and I think that's a cool way to look at it. We think that it's important for music to have high and low moments. There should be an ebb and flow, at least in our stuff. There's something to be said for bands that just go balls out intense at you for 40+ minutes, but I think that quieter, more delicate parts make the heavier parts that much more powerful and distinct.

I can't speak for the rest of the dudes, but I've listened to a lot of Andrew Bird, Pink Floyd, Camel, Talking Heads, Jaga Jazzist, Peter Gabriel. I've also rediscovered how much I love OK Computer. Throw in some hip-hop and 80s electro stuff like Zapp & Roger and that's a decent picture of the non-heavy things that have been circulating for me recently.

Pitchfork: Who do you view as likeminded or kindred bands?

TD: Any band that didn't come out and say something analogous to "let's start a (insert genre) band" and just wrote music. Specifically, there's this band Hivelords from Philly that just play weird, ultra heavy music that I wouldn't call anything other than sinister. We've played with Lions of Tsavo a bunch and they're definitely playing and recording whatever they want and saying damn the consequences. I think that's a pretty respectable attitude to have.

Pitchfork: What's it like in Richmond right now? Were you Breadwinner fans?

TD: Richmond is awesome. Breadwinner was rad, but I missed out on all of that as I was maybe seven when they broke up. However, there is a lot of good music springing up. Windhand is killin' it. I wish Diamond Center wasn't doing the whole hiatus thing, but it happens. Devil's Hand, Men's Room, Sports Bar, Unsacred. Check out anything that's coming out on Forcefield Records this year. I could talk about the plethora of killer music coming out of this town for hours...

Pitchfork: You open with a 10-minute track, "The Survival Fires." How did you decide on the sequencing?

TD: Well, a lot of it had to do with what was going to fit on each side of a record. Most of the tracks are long and we didn't want to lose a lot of sound fidelity by squeezing songs onto sides where they don't fit. Further, we were initially torn between easing into the record a bit or making a more of a proclamation. We decided on the latter.

Pitchfork: There's 4-minute acoustic instrumental piece "The Long Road Home (Iron Gate)" followed by the 10-minute "The Long Road Home." How are these songs connected thematically?

TD: Well, "Iron Gate" is basically an extension of "The Long Road Home", both musically and thematically. The lyrics are an ode to a friend of Mike's from back home, and Iron Gate is a town right near where he grew up.

Pitchfork: Can you be more specific about the lyrics? I know they're not yours, but maybe the reason for the "ode"?

TD: Without getting to into detail, as it's a pretty personal topic, it's about a guy who was in a very bad way and had gone home prepared to die. Mike used a lot of Native American poetry as influence on how the imagery fit together. I love Mike's lyrics on this record, but I think the lyrics to that song are the most poignant.

Pitchfork: Can you talk about "'sblood"? What's that song about? It's one of the shorter songs, though also one of the "weirder" ones. You released it as one of the lead tracks.

TD: "'sblood" is an archaic term that is short for God's blood. It was a curse in days gone by. Not like a voodoo curse, but more of a roundabout way of taking the God's name in vain. That song in particular is about not needing a religion or set of spiritual dogma to find meaning in existence or validate what you do. And I imagine the dudes at the label thought that releasing a 10+ minute first "single" was probably harder of a push than a shorter and simpler track. I really like the song, but I can see it throwing people for a loop out of context (or in context for that matter).

Pitchfork: There seems to be a recurring sense of travel on the record.

TD: Yeah, definitely. I don't know if that's something we strove toward, though. I think it naturally happened as we were recording and Mike was penning down lyrics. Without getting bogged down by amateur philosophy, we've all been playing music for a long time, and in a sense we've been constantly moving toward this record, so that no doubt influenced Mike's outlook while he was writing and probably influenced the way that some of the riffs and progressions came together.

Pitchfork: Can you discuss the title, "Sky Burial." Again, feels like travel, albeit here, to a grave.

TD: Yeah, sky burial is a Tibetan practice where they leave a deceased person on the side of a mountain to decay or be eaten by animals and predatory birds. The title track is about definitively moving past the ruins of the world that you despise and allowing yourself to die amongst the elements. Not really light reading, if you will.

Pitchfork: "Love Absolute" is a somber instrumental with some noise and theremin that hints at vocals. What's the idea behind that song?

TD: This song is a [drummer] TJ Childers' special. He was toying with this progression on an acoustic the entire time we were recording in Nashville and finally put it to tape two months after we got back. Mikey spiced things up and added the theremin and mellotron choir. I'm a sucker for Sabbath's Sabotage record so I was really stoked when I heard the mellotron reminiscent of "Supertzar". Either way, TJ has some top secret lyrics for it. We've never seen them, and probably never will. Musically, it's a somber way to break things up.

Pitchfork: Are you taking the Theremin on tour?

TD: I wish. However, if you make it out to either of the shows in Wisconsin with Mutilation Rites we will have a dude there who'll play theremin with us. No joke.

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The band is going on tour next month with another excellent group, Mutilation Rites:

03-10 Chicago, IL - Cobra Lounge
03-11 St. Louis, MO - Fubar
03-12 Lawrence, KS - Jackpot
03-13-3/16 Austin, TX - SXSW
03-18 El Paso, TX - The War Room
03-19 Phoenix, AZ - Chaser's
03-20 Fullerton, CA - Slidebar
03-21 Tijuana, Mexico - Bar Revolucion
03-22 Los Angeles, CA - TBA
03-23 Camarillo, CA - Rock City
03-24 San Francisco, CA - DNA Lounge
03-26 Seattle, WA - Highline
03-27 Bellingham, WA - The Shakedown
03-28 Portland, OR - Rotture
03-29 Boise, ID - The Shredder
03-30 Salt Lake City, UT - Burt’s Tiki Lounge
03-31 Denver, CO - Aqualungs
04-01 Des Moinise, IA - Vaudeville Mews
04-02 Minneapolis, MN - Medusa
04-03 Madison, WI - High Noon
04-04 Wilwaukee, WI - Franks Power Plant

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Since the last installment, we've posted tracks from Nails, Portal, Sannhet, Call of the Void, Cult of Luna , Coliseum, Torche, the Botanist, Teith, Black Boned Angel, Darkthrone, and Old Wounds.