Tiny Mix Tapes | Features

Interview: Motion Sickness Of Time Travel

Jonathan Dean — Fri, 25 May 2012 12:00:00 +0000

by Jonathan Dean • May 2012

Motion Sickness Of Time Travel is the solo project of Rachel Evans. Since 2009, she has recorded and released a substantial number of limited-edition cassettes, LPs, and CDs on labels such as Digitalis, Aguirre, and Hobo Cult. She is one-half of the duo Quiet Evenings, along with her husband Grant Evans (Nova Scotian Arms, Moss Swarm), and also plays in Aerial Jungle and Modern Lamps. Evans and her husband also own and operate Hooker Vision, a meticulously curated label that they run from their home in LaGrange, Georgia. The sound of MSOTT is Evans’ heavily treated vocals swimming in layers of drone, synthesizer arpeggios, and dusty analog hum. MSOTT is a series of meditations on a love both private and mystical, as well as universal and timeless. These mantras are etched onto magnetic tape with a minimum of editing or post-production.

This month sees the release of both a self-titled double LP on Spectrum Spools, a subsidiary of Editions Mego, and a two-track album called Traces, which acts as the inaugural release for new label A Guide To Saints. TMT spoke to Evans via email to learn more about the project.

The new double LP is your first eponymous album, and it’s also quite long. Should people view this one as a definitive statement about the project?

I’ve never done a self-titled LP before, and didn’t have that in mind when I first started working on the album material. After about 7 months or so of working on the music the original title I had in mind for the album didn’t seem to fit so much. The more I played around with other titles for the release I kept coming back to the idea of doing a self-titled album. When I finally finished all of the music the only title that seemed to work for the album as a whole was just calling it Motion Sickness of Time Travel. I wanted the music on the album to embody what the project has come to mean to me as much as possible, and I felt like the finished product was a good representation of where I’m at right now with the project. In that way it is a definitive statement, although I didn’t intend to do that at first… it just fell into place that way.

It seems like you are working with the same basic set of sounds and techniques as on previous releases, but everything is a little more crystallized… thicker. How did your techniques change or refine on this album?

My techniques when recording this album were the same for all my previous albums. I always track on top of myself until I feel a piece is finished. And even though most recordings are done in one sitting, I recorded material for this album over a really long period of time. I’ve never worked on an album as much as this one before so maybe the fact that I just spent more time on it, and the recordings that make up the album come from a wider range of a time frame, maybe that adds to it. I also used some Max/MSP on this album to create some more specific effects, especially for the vocal parts on the D-side and end of the B-side. I think that helped add to the thickness. It had been more than a year (maybe two?) since I’d worked with Max when I started using it for this album’s material. Synth-wise I used the same synthesizers and electronics as I have on my previous albums and tapes. One big difference in the “thickness” of the sound, I think, has to be credited to Lawrence English. He mastered the audio for vinyl and that really added a lot to the thickness of the sounds overall.

Unlike a lot of synth-heavy underground acts, you don’t seem very purist about analog and modular synthesis.

I’m not trying to sound like a specific type of music from the past, and although I’d like all my gear to be analog and modular I just don’t have that kind of stuff. Analog/modular synths are more pricy than digital, and I’ve always just used what I have or what I can afford. I got my first truly analog synth (Dave Smith Mopho) in February 2011, and it’s become my favorite piece of gear. I have a couple of smaller synths that are analog, like my Space Synth, but I also use a Microkorg and digital effect pedals. So yeah, you’re right in assuming I use a combination of analog and digital. Just doing the best with what I’ve got.

I can relate your work to 1970s and 1980s kosmische/new-age music — Ashra, Upper Astral, etc. — but you don’t seem very interested in specific reference points. Do you ever use older music as inspiration or a creative starting point for your compositions?

I don’t have any specific reference points that I draw from when I start new compositions. Although I’ve heard a lot of music like that, I listen to newer music much more often, and I think my compositions come from a composite of those influences. When recording this album I was actually listening to Grant’s solo music a whole lot (especially his double cassette Winds) and I think that influence is really obvious, especially in certain parts of the album.

You have said elsewhere that your music is largely improvised. Do you tend to build your pieces vertically? In other words, do you improvise for 20 minutes, then overdub on top of that?

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. Everything I record (unless it’s a one-take “live” recording) is built vertically, improvising on top of myself until I feel it’s fleshed out. As I said in a previous question, that’s usually done in one sitting. Sometimes two or three sittings, but 90% of the time in one sitting over the course of an hour or two. The music on the new album was recorded in pieces, more like “songs,” in single sittings like that with layers of improvising. In January of this year I arranged the tracks together into suites and did a little post-editing to connect tracks that weren’t originally recorded together. Everything but the C-side was done that way. The C-side, though, is one complete piece, no overdubs or layers.

As far as tapes being fashionable, there’s a large group of people who never stopped releasing tapes, and in that way tapes have always been “fashionable.”

I can’t make out the words in your music, but the presence of them is intriguing. Do you remember any of the lyrics that you could share with us, or is it all channeled on the spot and subsequently forgotten?

I never write anything down word-wise. And I usually forget them myself because it is all channeled on the spot. But with some tracks I can pick out what I’m saying because some words/phrases just stick with me. I’ve also listened to this album quite a bit myself (something I don’t do with most of my music), so it’s easier for me to remember some words more than others. There’s also a lot of vocal sounds that aren’t words at all, just oh’s, ah’s, and things like that. Here’s a little breakdown per side of the “lyrics”, if you can call them that:

“The Dream” (A-side) only has vocals in one section, and it’s “I am the universe” being repeated over and over.
“The Center” (B-side) I can’t remember the words for the first segment of that suite really, but can pick out the last bit: “I can see the way it goes… someday”. The second segment is in my memory much more, and includes: “Is there a way I never knew; take the oceans tide in your hand, find it new; All alone time goes away…” And the last segment includes: “Stay inside, the dark side I see; you and me; like a… ; as far as the eye can see; You and I; You and me like a…We’ve gone to the edge of our minds, and we’ve come back again… I’ve never seen anything so so so; I’m seeing it all for the first time again; Like a dark star, a dream, and you with me; it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You and I are the center of everything… Find our way outside… I’ve never seen. Oh, nothing is the same as being wrapped up in your arms; you and I are the center of everything.”
“Summer of the Cat’s Eye” (C-side) doesn’t have any recognizable words that I remember, mostly because that recording was one live take and I didn’t listen to it as much since there was no multitracking involved.
“One Perfect Moment” (D-side) has vocals in several places. The first part of that side says: “Cheer up babe, what’s hapennin’ to you” and the last part is something like: “I can see where we roam, like a dream, I am home…” over and over.

You’ve made a few videos for your own work and for other artists on the Hooker Vision label. How important is the visual/cinematic to your work?

I think all sounds have a visual quality to them. When I make videos for myself or anyone else I’m trying to make the video look like the sound feels to me. My husband Grant has been a huge influence on me as far as exposing me to abstract films and older cinema, so I guess those influences come out in the music, too.

How is your working method in MSOTT similar/different to what you do with Grant in Quiet Evenings?

Well as I said MSOTT is me tracking to myself most of the time, and only sometimes do I record live one-take tracks. With Quiet Evenings, Grant and I typically record in the same room and capture all our sounds live in one take. Then we’ll line our two pieces up together and do a little mixing. We’ve done a couple of albums (like Transcending Spheres) by passing tracks back and forth doing a more layered approach, but generally that’s the big difference between the two recording methods. MSOTT is layered tracks, and QE is essentially live recordings.

Hooker Vision is such a carefully curated label. How do you decide what is released on the label?

Grant started Hooker Vision so he’d be better at answering these questions. He’s still the head-honcho. As far as what’s released, we usually don’t contact artists since nine times out of 10 all the releases are by friends we’ve been in touch with from releasing our own music on their tape labels. We get some demo submissions too, but generally we stick to releasing people we’re already in contact with or already working with in some way. Some artists, like Aloonaluna, get in touch with us first. The cover art is both me and Grant and it all depends on the music in the batch. Grant and I both do the collage part; sometimes it’s one he made, sometimes one I made, other times we make collages together with a certain artist’s music in mind. For example, the Riviere Amur tape, Lace Bows tape, and Former Selves tape, collages were made by both of us, sort of passing collages back and forth until it looked just right. The Nuojuva tape collage was all Grant, and the Sashash Ulz tape collage was done by me. But the inside artwork for all the tapes, and the imprinting designs are all done by Grant. Grant also does all of our Hooker Vision LP cover art, layout of the back covers, and label designs.

There have been some blog debates lately arguing about the merits of cassettes as a physical format. On one side, people claim that the recent popularity of the format is due to fashionable retro-fetishism; on the other side are those who note the cheapness and special qualities of cassettes. As the co-curator of a label that releases mostly cassettes, what do you think about the format?

I think cassettes are amazing. I’m more with the second camp. Tapes are really affordable to make and produce, and they allow smaller labels like us to continue to afford releasing music. I also think cassettes have certain qualities (like any format) that are unique; tapes have a certain sound and it really lends itself well to a variety of music. Tapes are also pretty durable and since they’re small they’re easier to store and cheaper to ship too. There’s also a nostalgic thing, most people our age grew up with tapes more than they did vinyl, and in some cases more than CDs. I remember being one of the last kids when I was in middle school to get a CD player, and it was always easier to record to tape on a crappy boombox than it was to record any other way (especially before I had my own computer). As far as tapes being fashionable, there’s a large group of people who never stopped releasing tapes, and in that way tapes have always been “fashionable.” Some formats just never go out of style, like vinyl. Even when tapes and vinyl become less “cool” there will always be people who release in those formats no matter what. Certain people just prefer certain formats. I wouldn’t call it retro, just classy.

Interview: Mount Eerie

John Crowell — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:19:29 +0000

by John Crowell • May 2012

At this point, it’s hard to encapsulate the breadth of Phil Elverum’s artistic voice into a brief introduction. As a songwriter and performer, he cemented his place in indie-rock history with his work as The Microphones, especially on 2001’s touchstone The Glow Pt. 2. In his more recent work as Mount Eerie, he’s run the gamut from naturalistic experimentation (“No Flashlight”), haunting folk (Lost Wisdom), hard rock (Black Wooden Ceiling Opening), ultra-personal lo-fi (Dawn), and even a black metal-influenced opus (Wind’s Poem), among many others.

This year, Elverum is gracing us with two albums. The first, Clear Moon (TMT Review), is released today and will be followed by Ocean Roar in September. Both were recorded at the same time using a studio space converted from a “de-sanctified” church in his hometown of Anacortes, WA. With his penchant for experimentation, it’s easy to imagine how the new and unique environment led to some dense and complex recordings.

Elverum took some time to talk with Tiny Mix Tapes, revealing, among other things, a few clues about Clear Moon.

How did you come to set your studio up in the old building? Was it a functioning church while you were growing up in Anacortes?

The building hasn’t been a church for 30 years. It’s mostly been a sail-making loft (like for boats). The owners of the building are friends and notified me that the tenants were vacating, and so me and a friend figured out how to make it work to rent the place and make a studio.

Do you feel the church setting affected the final product? Is there an element of sacridity there?

The building definitely affected the albums, but probably not the sacredness. It’s more just the epic sound in the room that came through on the album. If anything, I probably was leaning harder on the vulgar to balance out any residual holiness. The pews and altar are gone now. It’s just a giant empty wooden room with high ceilings and nice morning light.

I think the songs are essentially just a way for me to explore my own mental self, like an abstract non-narrative diary. Just riffing on ideas, writing them down so I can experience it echoed back to myself from the page or tape.

Why did you record Clear Moon and Ocean Roar at the same time? How are they linked?

I didn’t have a clear goal for much of the recording. I was just working, experimenting, and exploring the new space. The songs that make up the album all came during this raw exploratory period. About two-thirds to completion I started forming them into two distinct albums, which are two sides to the same idea. It’s clarity vs. obscurity, vision vs. fog blanket.

I did an interview with you back in 2009, right after the release of Wind’s Poem. In it, you said, “I hope to make an even huger, denser sounding record next. A wall.” Do you hear a wall with these recordings?

The wall-sounding one is Ocean Roar, although it’s not the wall I was imagining in 2009. I realized that a solid black wall is boring. Also, immensity only sounds big if it’s next to something smaller for scale. So, like always, the songs range all over the place. But yes, I’m still trying to make a more giant sound than ever.

The only song from Clear Moon I’ve had the chance to hear so far has been “House Shape.” In it, I believe I heard synthesizer and organs with sequenced swells. Can we expect some synth exploration on these records?

There’s actually no synthesizer there. It’s all this 1800s pump organ and compressors and many detuned acoustic guitars. There are some synthesized tom fills on the drums but mostly it’s acoustic. I think people will think it’s really computer-y, but I made these records totally analog. There are a few moments where a keyboard is used for the tone but buried inside other organs and strings.

How much of your recording process is elbow grease, and how much of it is flashes of inspiration? Does isolation play a part?

It’s difficult to describe. It really is just spending days and days fucking around and trying things, moving it a little bit, accidentally leaving the mic on and hearing the tape rewinding through the speaker echoing through the room, recording that sound onto another piece of tape, pitching it down, putting it with this other thing, spending two days pursuing this weird possibility only to realize it sucks. It’s the luxury of not paying for a “real” recording studio, and also of having these analog limitations to force me to search for solutions and accidentally discover things I never would have tried before.

Since you spend so much time discovering sounds in the studio, I think it’s interesting that your live show is so comparatively stripped-down (excluding, of course, the full-band setup that toured for Wind’s Poem). Do you conceptualize the songs differently when you’re molding them in the studio as opposed to when you’re strumming them alone on an acoustic guitar in front of an audience?

Yes, I’ve always thought of the live versions as almost a different project. I try to think of how I can use the tools available to me in any given situation to convey the feeling of the song. In the studio the tools are endless and versatile. On tour, it’s very limited, but I am aiming to evoke the same feeling, just by a different route. Sometimes it’s through words and explanation and lyrically focused performances, sometimes with loud distortion, sometimes some movies, or fog machines. But [I’m] always thinking of what the song is trying to say and how to say that with my given tools. Plus, a song should be a living, breathing thing (I think), and it should take a different form over and over.

That’s interesting, because one of the elements of your songs I find most interesting is the fact that you revisit them in different contexts. One of the best examples I can think of is “Don’t Smoke,” which is presented as a ripping rock song on Black Wooden Ceiling Opening, often as a quiet acoustic song during your live shows, and as a more controlled burn on Song Islands, Pt. 2. You’ve also explored many alternate versions, alternate takes, and revisits of “The Moon.” What leads you to this as a songwriter?

I think music and art is fluid. It’s more natural to let it take many forms than to stick to any one commodified album version or whatever. Songs are ideas that don’t die once they’re recorded. It’s only modern popular music that doesn’t work this way. All music in history is about constant reinterpretation and communication.

Speaking of “The Moon,” the song has always sounded to me like one of your most directly love and relationship-related songs. These themes are reflected in many of your other songs, but the specifics are often obscured, even if the emotions behind the songs are naked and poignant (my favorite example of this is “My Burning” on Dawn). As you progress as a songwriter, and after getting married, do you feel your approach to these sorts of subjects in your songs changing?

Yeah, totally. I don’t want to sing about domestic arguments anymore. When I was 20, it all felt so important and epic but it’s not. I want to explore things that are hopefully more meaningful than human moods and drama. I think this shift is part of getting older. Teenagers think the world is going to end if they don’t get the right jean shorts.

One of the most striking things about your music is how intensely personal it often sounds. Maybe it’s the introspective vibe of your lyrics, maybe it’s the soft and intimate nature of your singing voice, but it’s easy to hear a lot of personal meaning in your lyrics. Have you been able to discover things about yourself and your life through writing your songs?

Yes, I think the songs are essentially just a way for me to explore my own mental self, like an abstract non-narrative diary. Just riffing on ideas, writing them down so I can experience it echoed back to myself from the page or tape. I discover all kinds of shit about myself this way. It’s all for me really, if I’m being totally honest about it. I’m not making this stuff so other people have experiences with it. I am making a thing that I want to hear and think about, but then I’m making many copies of it because that’s what we do with music.

About two-thirds to completion I started forming them into two distinct albums, which are two sides to the same idea. It’s clarity vs. obscurity, vision vs. fog blanket.

Have any friends or family who the songs are about recognized themselves in the lyrics? What was the result?

I haven’t written songs about other specific people for years, but in the past some song subjects have certainly identified themselves. It was never a challenge to see, for those close enough to me to know what I’m singing about. The result was that I felt weird and apologetic for making my personal therapy/diary project too public.

Did you ever hear an interpretation of one of your songs which was different than the one you intended?

I have almost never heard an interpretation of one of my songs that was what I intended. I mostly feel like I’ve communicated poorly and am misunderstood. It’s probably my own fault. I often feel like I’m being clear but then later realize that not many people are on the same page as me, but maybe are getting some other meaning out of it. This is why the first lyrics on Clear Moon are “Misunderstood and disillusioned, I go on describing this place…” I keep trying to make my ideas clearer.

Well, you do have some songs that are explicitly instructional, where the message is clearly defined, like “Don’t Smoke,” and “Get Off the Internet.”

That was a weird phase I went through where I was experimenting with being more “punk” or “political,” in the sense of using my moment in front of the microphone to maybe change people in some tiny way. It was worth a try.

This year will mark the 10-year anniversary of the winter you spent living alone in Norway, which produced the album and book Dawn. Do you feel that experience was transformative for you? How do you feel you’ve changed in the near-decade since then?

Yes, it was totally transformative. The decade since then has been a more gradual transformation, but still a slow change. It’s all that slow shedding of romantic tendencies and growing awareness of the wonder and excellence of “the everyday.” Ten years ago, I’d be, like, sprinting towards the mountain with my camera and yelling about how amazing the view was and then writing 20 poems about it. Now I just look and say “Woah, nice…” and think about it to myself maybe.

Do I sound like a dead body? I think grown-up style is nice.

Feature: The Sonorous and The Spine

Alexander Slotnick — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:24:35 +0000

by Alexander Slotnick • May 2012

This month, director Grant Gee’s new documentary Patience (After Sebald) has its limited US release. The film is a hypnotic meditation on the writer W.G. Sebald and his book The Rings of Saturn. As many Tiny Mix Tape gourmands already know, English experimental musician The Caretaker was responsible for the film’s soundtrack, which shares the film’s title and was independently released at the beginning of the year. Beyond providing a hypnotic 82-minute plunge, the film and its score are noteworthy for precipitating general consideration of how today’s music interacts with fine literature. The Caretaker and W. G. Sebald complement each other beautifully, and in the final fourth of this article, they offer a glowing example of how a musician can commune with a text.

However, before reaching our final destination of The Caretaker and W.G. Sebald, there is another pair of much more notorious artists whose recent, complicated entangling begs extended attention.

In a 1962 interview with a journalist whose name remains unknown, the self-mythologizing novelist Vladimir Nabokov provided a concise, though illuminating, list of those things he most disliked. “My loathings,” he said, “Are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.”

In the digital age of fashionable hi-fi headphones, noise pollution awareness, and all-night dance halls with decibel output exceeding that of a jumbo jet, it makes sense to champion Nabokov’s hatred of meek music. Turn it up! we’d like him to say, because in our era, we are wont to agree. But, in fact, Nabokov, the aesthete, held an indifference — if not disdain — toward music in general; other interviews and confessions reveal any kind of music filled him with distaste, and notes played too softly were the prime trespasser and recipient of his spleen. Nabokov expressing hate for soft music is analogous to an arachnophobe exclaiming, “I most hate spiders with furry hides.” While there’s a certain wooly insect that comes to mind, we know this phobe finds even the ones without bristles to be unbearable. Similarly, for Nabokov, it wasn’t just the volume of music that he disapproved of — though, to be fair, the man never seemed able to stomach timidity.

Of all the pretty poetic ponies Lana Del Rey could have tried to saddle, she picked one that, in addition to being fiercely independent and inimitable, held a grudge with her very medium.

For these facts alone, it’s noteworthy and precarious that Lana Del Rey — the music world’s alternating bane and beloved, varying with whatever URL upon which you alight — should have based so much of her debut album on Nabokov’s classic Lolita. It would surely be simple for Lana’s most ardent detractors to deem her Lolita references clumsy, superficial, and baseless. But it’s also likely that those same self-appointed critics would clumsily overlook a few of them. If you’ve come with Pitchforks and torches to watch the girl get eviscerated, that’s not what this is about; yes, it is unequivocally true that Del Rey’s most obvious Lolita references are awful: the song actually titled “Lolita” is far and away one of the album’s most rebarbative. However, no matter your love or loathing for Born to Die and its birthmother, a closer scrutiny reveals Del Rey does, at the very least, manage to exhibit an “interesting” reading of Nabokov’s masterwork, integrating it into her music in ways more intriguing than an occasional shout-out or two. Whether Del Rey’s interpretation of the book is, in fact, accurate or insightful requires more nuanced consideration; at the very least, she has managed to make a notable entry into the discussion of how contemporary music reads — or possibly misreads — literature.

Nabokov’s rejection of music has an unnervingly simple and convincing basis. In another interview (this one with Playboy in 1964), he offered one of his most brilliant quotes, explaining how he believed literature (and, we can extrapolate, all art) should be experienced: “You read an artist’s book not with your heart (the heart is a remarkably stupid reader), and not with your brain alone, but with your brain and spine.” Now pair this assertion with yet another: in a lecture he delivered to his students at Cornell and later published, Nabokov describes a moment from Kafka’s Metamorophis. Samsa, already transformed and abject, abandoned by his loved ones, hears music and is overwhelmed, weakened by it. Seemingly, to most readers, it is the music’s loveliness that inundates. Nabokov’s interpretation of this scene, however, is so tainted by his personal opinion of music that it seems almost comical, tantamount to an intentional misreading. In fact, says the professor, railing as usual against the common and expected, the music overwhelmed because that’s what music does: it manipulates emotion without any sound reason or logical foundation. In other words, it’s a senses-reliant art we experience through our dumb and wanton “heart” rather than with the glorious logic of our “brain” or the unmistakable shiver of our “spine.” Music enslaves our emotion and gives us over to feelings without justifying why. Consider this. It is, I can admit, often true. A sad song, by its simple sound, can suffuse you with melancholy. Something optimistic, by virtue of its primal, driving beat, can indeed be uplifting. For a mind craving truth, this reeks of manipulation.

Surely there are many counterarguments — the greatest composers have created systems of symbolism through notes themselves; lyrics in pop music have risen on a few rare occasions to the levels of full-blown literature; and the cultural phenomenon of rock ‘n’ roll’s web of genres is one that has at least some academic merit, even if it generally ignores the music itself. But all this is besides the point. What should be considered is the fate of a musician who tries to corral a writer such as Nabokov into her stable of cultural stallions. Of all the pretty poetic ponies Lana Del Rey could have tried to saddle, she picked one that, in addition to being fiercely independent and inimitable, held a grudge with her very medium.

She was a sex object only because she was perceived that way by her surrogate father. Del Rey does these things precisely in order to be perceived as a sex symbol.

As far as I’ve seen, Del Rey’s extensive debt to Lolita has gone much under-analyzed. But, first of all, what are the grounds for this comparison? To start, Del Rey drew the connection herself. First, there is the aforementioned track, which plainly burgles (not alludes; let’s not award a song so crass that privilege) Nabokov’s book’s title as its own. Then, surely with much blasé, Del Rey once called herself in a Guardian interview “Lolita [who] got lost in the hood.” In a “Why We Fight” article for Pitchfork, Nitsuh Abebe makes the accurate if unfulfilled observation that the epithet, and Del Rey’s aesthetic, made him believe she truly was referring to the book Lolita rather than some cultural bastardization of the name. Abebe is correct that, overall, Del Rey does pull much from Lolita, the paper-and-spine entity, but this particular quote is not one such case. Let us remember that the plight of Lolita, Nabokov’s Lolita, had nothing to do with wandering off — we can safely say that if she had wound up in the hood, she wouldn’t have willingly stayed long enough to land a record deal. By the time she does end up in the boonies, hitched, she’s a homemaker and jaded and harbors no fantasies that champion suburban squalor. If her kind spouse would have had videogames to play, Nabokov’s Lolita, at this point in her spurious, tortured life, would already have been too resigned to mope about it, much less pen a ballad. Surely, Lolita never actively “got lost”: the child was abducted, raped. Her consummate scene with Humbert Humbert features only-semi-veiled images of fragmentation and stinging blood. Your wince, reader, is not unsuited.

It’s true: Lana Del Rey adopts the Lolita identifiers of enthusiastically chewing gum, citing starlets, and inhabiting tragic swaths of suburbia. The difference is that Lolita did these things because she was a little girl. She was a sex object only because she was perceived that way by her surrogate father. Del Rey does these things precisely in order to be perceived as a sex symbol. Her equating of the identity and the perception is a fundamental misunderstanding of the character, of the story. Lolita depends entirely on Humbert Humbert… and yet nobody tries to win the hearts of consumers by putting on his guise. I wonder why! All of the details Del Rey borrows are accurately observed but failed in execution. The problem with her conception of the Lolita character is that the character is in fact a victim; anybody intentionally trying to identify with her has, by definition, failed far in advance.

But these are all concerns of image, which is transient and subject to trends. What of the text itself, or the music? What lies beneath the glossy sheen? Nabokov himself meditates on the subjects of duplicity and multi-layers, presenting these ideas to the reader prior even to Lolita’s first page. In the book’s Foreword, fictitiously penned by the fictitious John Rey Jr., we are introduced to Humbert Humbert by name. The “author’s bizarre cognomen is his own invention,” says Rey Jr., “and, of course, this mask — through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow — had to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer’s wish.” The entirety of Lolita, as astute readers have learned, dances around this question of disguise and deception.

Curiously, it’s also in considering beginnings and names that we get a glimpse beneath the mask of Lana Del Rey. Consider her album’s name, for example: Born to Die. At first glance, it evokes little more than the hint of a Lady Gaga and Springsteen romance. But held up against the backlight of Lolita, Lana’s title acquires a certain diaphanous incandescence. For example, in addition to hinting at H.H.’s haunting malice, the Foreword also secretly prefigures the fates of the major character in the book: they all die. In turn, the phrase Born to Die could be a recognition of this fact, an allusion (here the word is earned) to the idea that our heroes are DOA the moment we crack the book’s cover. Most importantly, though, these opening pages slyly reveal the fate of Lolita herself. Here, we note, she is craftily called by her husband’s name, Mrs. Richard Schiller. It’s by that name that we learn she is to die in childbirth. Born to Die is therefore a phrase quite literal and, we might begin to admit, in this context, quite well-conceived.

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Before dubbing Del Rey a gleaming member of the literati, however, we must admit one three-word phrase is hardly proof of her intent or even understanding. But having now taken note of a possible intent, I propose we also must entertain the idea that beneath Del Rey’s mask of flippancy and pouty glam, there may just be a hypnotist’s eyes. And of course, when we examine her more closely, some evidence does glare back. Let us take a brief look.

First, there is another more obvious example: the track “Off to the Races” plainly quotes in its refrain Lolita’s much celebrated first sentence, “light of my life, fire of my loins.” If nothing else, this proves beyond reasonable doubt that Del Rey seeks to engage Lolita as a text and not just as a misshapen cultural idea. Unfortunately, this really does prove nothing else. We can hardly give Del Rey credit for lifting a book’s already over-cited first lines for a song that doesn’t engage with them meaningfully. Further, this particular citation suffers from the same shortcomings of Del Rey’s quip about Dolores Haze in the ghetto — specifically, in this context it doesn’t actually mean anything. Once again, it reveals the confusion between Lolita and Humbert Humbert, the confusion between victim and victimizer. Let us remember, students of Nabokov and scholars of Spotify, anything seductive in this book has its source in the thrashing pen of a pervert, not the thighs of a poor vixen. It is simply incorrect for Del Rey to belt out this quote and pretend Lolita was the one who originally moaned it. Del Rey’s mistake is baldly revealed in the juvenile pitch she affects when the line squeaks out. To achieve verisimilitude, her voice must plummet three octaves, at least.

The Caretaker’s album does not choke itself on the objective of embodying an entire book. Instead, it sounds as if it has read that book and can now move forward with that greater knowledge in its noise.

But, ultimately, this sort of criticism is redundant and hollow. Worst of all, it discourages us from gleaning what is most interesting, which is, again, what Del Rey got right. Namely, I submit, the song “Carmen.” It seems indisputable to me that of Born to Die’s offerings, the finest songs are the ones Del Rey released as singles prior to the album’s actual debut (“Video Games,” “Blue Jeans,” and the title track). Of the remaining songs, two stand out as approaching the quality of these earlier offerings: the first is “Radio.” But it is in the second song, “Carmen,” where Del Rey makes an argument for herself not only as a compelling pop musician, but as a perceptive reader.

Scour the song’s lyrics all you like. You’ll see they hold no overt reference to Lolita. The connection is more interesting than that, as it is an achievement of metafiction. The song, you see, is Del Rey’s own version of a tune that Humbert Humbert and Lolita sing together early on in the novel, while the girl sits in the pedo’s lap as he secretly (and fully) pleasures himself by indulging through layers of cotton against her lower limbs. The ballad that H.H. employs as distraction, is, of course, about a “little Carmen” and “the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen.” Having firmly established Del Rey’s interest in Nabokov, there is no doubt her song titled “Carmen” is no coincidence. Although she quite smartly generates her own lyrics (she does, however, mimic Nabokov by rhyming “Carmen” with “charmin’”), the reference is undeniable. Of her various attempts to embody Lolita’s character, this song, in its entirety, is the most successful, but not because its content is about some poor girl and her sad, spoiled life. It’s successful because it intentionally refers to a moment in the book when Lolita is oblivious and exploited. Of all the tracks on Born to Die, this is the only one that convincingly portReys Lolita’s pairing of deception with naïveté — of all the tracks, it’s the only one I can imagine Lolita herself singing, but only because I believe it’s been proven through illustration and allusion that, despite the song’s content, she would willfully overlook its darkness and would not notice the man plucking the apple from between her knees. Del Rey, for a sad single song, doesn’t call herself Lolita, but actually sounds like her, and it’s because of the cited scene, through a rare affectation of innocence.

But the strongest case in Del Rey’s favor is the least precise and requires the most generosity from us. It’s simple and, once you notice it, obvious. It’s a matter of aesthetic, and it utterly penetrates the majority of the album’s songs.

Integrated into many of Del Rey’s beats is one of two sound effects: the first is the sound of a man screaming with varying degrees of choler and clarity. Regardless of a song’s subject, this sound gives the often chilling effect of a masculine force attempting to break into the defensive shell projected by the music. The most obvious example is on “Blue Jeans;” the most subtle and harrowing is in “National Anthem” (use those hi-fi phones!). Because these sounds are ingredients of the beat, their suggested violence seems relentless and inevitable, even while the girl sings about girlish things. By now, I believe the relevance in connection with Lolita should be self-apparent.

The second sound is one of children playing. In the final pages of Lolita, a stricken Humbert Humbert, now having reached a sort of moral certitude and doom, tells how one day a bout of nausea compelled him to stop his car at the crest of a valley. Walking to the edge, looking out, he hears coming from the town below the sound of children at play, invisible in the distance. In these last pages, he mourns, hopelessly, “the absence of [Lolita’s] voice from that concord.” Impossible to believe, but also with the effect of impossible sincerity, Humbert Humbert actually intimates the will to repent, accompanied by the tantalizing knowledge that he never can. Appropriately, to hear Del Rey’s take on invisible children at play, see “Off to the Races,” “Summertime Sadness,” and “This is What Makes us Girls.”

No doubt, these details and their effects could be mere coincidence. Even so, there is something to be said and considered about even an accidental resonance of imagery and aesthetic between Born to Die and Lolita. No matter the banality of Del Rey’s statements on literature or the platitudes of her references, there are moments when she incises and strikes right to the quick of something. This is why she remains under examination and why you’ve read this far.

So what is Del Rey’s ultimate fate in terms of Lolita? The conclusion is simple and thankfully shocking. Of the many multi-layered tragedies folded into Nabokov’s book, there is one in particular that sits squarely at the bottom, at the root. It is the tragedy of Humbert Humbert’s art. While not the saddest of the book’s tragedies, nor involving the most egregious crimes, in Lolita’s Afterward, Nabokov himself suggests this tragedy was the seed of his book. The writer describes the “first little throb of Lolita” entering his nervous system when he read an article about an ape who was taught how to draw. The first picture it produced depicted the bars of its cage.

The shocking verdict for Del Rey is she has cast herself more as Humbert Humbert than Lolita.

H.H.’s tragedy is this: the man clearly possesses a sort of genius; he is some breed of literary titan. But, alas, Humbert Humbert’s own fetish has driven him to squander a supremely rare gift to a life of crime and impulse. It is not hard to imagine the character, freed from the compulsion of his fetish, as a writer spewing masterworks with ease and devouring dozens of ingenues of a more appropriate age. But, of course, his prison and its bars — his love for nymphets — has contained and consumed his art.

The shocking verdict for Del Rey is she has cast herself more as Humbert Humbert than Lolita. Of course, I do not mean this in terms of perversion, or of exploiting anybody, or of being a villain. I make the comparison thinking of H.H.’s tragedy, which Del Rey, in a way, shares. Born to Die offers moments of clear potential, such as the evidence that Del Rey is capable of injecting literature into her music in a profound way. But her misreadings overwhelm. All her successes are couched within an album that’s too often either puerile or sterile. We get the impression that something threw her off course, distracted her from making the kind of art that was in her potential. Maybe Del Rey truly had only a handful of great songs inside her, but it seems to me she more likely fell victim to an imprisoning seduction of her own. Exactly what this would be, we can only speculate, but it seems just as Humbert Humbert’s art was deluged, doomed by an obsession he could not shake, Born to Die was crippled by the allure of swollen fame and success, which came too soon.

Afterword. The fate of the writer W.G. Sebald was a tragedy — a tragedy of the real world, not the melodramatic “tragedy” I’ve just used to discuss Lana Del Rey. In 2001, a car crash ended Sebald in an instant, as a New York Times obituary from that year reports. Sebald, 57 years old, had been on track to become one of the 21st century’s indispensable pillars of literature. In the decade since his death, it has become clear that, though robbed of half his life, he stands as a monolith anyhow.

Obviously, W.G. Sebald never achieved a Nabokov-esque level of fame in his lifetime. Although brilliant, his books likely will never seduce the masses with the same naughty tenacity as Lolita. But Sebald himself said on occasion how personally important he considered Nabokov, and the two share common ground. Their propensity for mazes is a start, along with their identities as snowy-haired European gents with supreme gravitas, immortalized in their most famous photographs. They both made great use of English, though it was not their native language (Nabokov wrote his best works directly in English; Sebald, a German living in England, wrote first in his mother tongue, then meticulously and expertly oversaw his translations). Sebald’s perennial subject was the Holocaust, though he most often described it through terms of outline or by examining it in the periphery or reflection of something else. Nabokov’s own brother died at the hands of the Nazis, though this is a subject he attends to in his writing at its periphery. Sebald himself noted in interviews that one of his great talents was to trace unlikely, seemingly roving, associations, like a dog zigging then zagging through a field.

However, not all associations need be far fetched or meandering: it is a great and all-too-tempting coincidence that the same month Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die hit shelves — January 2012 — there also debuted an album focused on one of Sebald’s finest books. The Caretaker’s Patience (After Sebald) is the soundtrack for a documentary about The Rings of Saturn, one of Sebald’s “novels” (the documentary, also called Patience, begins by describing how Sebald’s books effectively deny and decimate conceptions of genre). Appropriately, the film has recently seen a wider US release. It’s very, very good — you can read an aptly glowing review on this very website.

While there seems to be almost no aesthetic similarity between The Caretaker and Del Rey, based on wherein reviews for each artist appear, their audiences do share some overlap. In terms of music alone, it would be a fool’s errand to flatly compare the artists’ 2012 albums because they’re so different. In terms of how each integrates their respective book, however, there is no more enlightening contrast. A pairing is recommended.

An analysis of The Caretaker’s effort can be thankfully swift, because his album is so successful in its mission. There is a quote in the film Patience by Robert Macfarlane describing how Sebald concerns himself with substances of dust, materials on the border between something and nothingness. A fan of The Caretaker will find assured harmony in these ideas, as his method of music-making — filtering vintage-sounding tracks through layers of deteriorating effects — embraces dissolution as a key component. Sebald is a writer fixated on memory and all its holy perforations and errors. The Caretaker’s music is reverent in the way it celebrates the aesthetic of decline. Grant Gee, the documentary’s director, did not find a musician who could rise to the aesthetic of W.G. Sebald — he found a musician who was already living within it. The Caretaker’s album does not choke itself on the objective of embodying an entire book. Instead, it sounds as if it has read that book and can now move forward with that greater knowledge in its noise.

In an interview in 2001, Sebald discussed technology of the modern world. Technology, of course, makes The Caretaker’s music possible, as it makes possible your consumption of these words. Responding to a question about his book After Nature, Sebald said, “In terms of evolution, [machines] are of the higher order, there’s no doubt about it. Whether they are intelligent or not is neither here nor there, but they are of the higher order. They come after us. It is encapsulated in that wonderful image of the dog listening to the gramophone.” As I write this, records emblazoned with the RCA terrier line my wall, bend against books, and gather dust. W.G. Sebald died in tragedy later that year, shuttled darkly by the luxurious technology of a car. Whether or not his radio was turned on, I don’t know, and whether that fact should have significance, I can’t say.

Interview: Tristan Patterson (director of Dragonslayer)

Paul Bower — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:53:51 +0000

by Paul Bower • May 2012

Tristan Patterson’s Dragonslayer was one of the most invigorating cinematic experiences of 2k11. Focusing on a burnt-out skate-punk in Southern California, Patterson’s debut documentary piqued our interest and flirted with larger issues while remaining completely grounded in the reality of the lives it depicted. Borrowing some of its distinctive tonality from several key, genre-defining youth-in-revolt films from the late 1970s and early 1980s, the film doesn’t feel specifically modern, even though its underlying subject matter — the economic collapse of recent memory and its effect on young adults — most decidedly is so. We liked it so much we included it among our favorite films of last year.

You first met Skreech, the titular character, at a house show in Chino. I was wondering if you can still recall some of your immediate thoughts about him.

The main thing was that he was wearing this [obscure-yet-legendary, mostly unrecorded, late-1970s L.A. synth-punk band] Screamers T-shirt, and I was really shocked that he would even know who The Screamers are. We talked for a little bit and I don’t completely remember the conversation but I do remember that he told me he was on five tabs of acid — which he now disputes. Maybe he was just fucking with me when he was talking to me, but that definitely stuck out in my mind, and when he talked he had what I picked up as this total strange Southern California poetry. I tracked him down about a week later to do something. I thought it would be fun to film for like a couple weekends.

Had you already decided you wanted to make a film before you met Skreech? Was that something you were really wanting to do and you were just waiting for something to make a movie about?

I definitely was hungry to make something, but I’d been pretty entrenched in the studio system as a screenwriter for probably around 7 years [when I met Skreech].

Anything we would be familiar with?

No. That’s the thing about being a screenwriter in Hollywood. You can do pretty well, and in a way you feel really lucky to be getting work, but nothing gets made. To me it started feeling like this crazy make-believe reality where even though you’re making this good living and it’s really hard work, you kinda feel like you’re this unpublished author with nothing to show for it. So I was kind of hitting a wall where I didn’t really want to be a screenwriter. I wanted to be a filmmaker.

I had no idea at the time, but it really bore itself out because from the age of 11 or 12 [Skreech] was at the Fullerton skate park every night, all night long with that original punk generation from Fullerton. Those guys are still there and they raise the next generation, and now Skreech is at the skate park raising the generation coming up under him.

So had you met some people through the studio system that you had decided to work with?

I had worked with (producer) Christine Vachon before, and she’s producing a script I wrote that I’m attached to direct, which was coming together and falling apart with all weird different kinds of financing and super-cool actors, and just kept crumbling at the last minute.

I’d been thinking about making things for so long and I came to this point where it’s just like: “I don’t care if this is seven minutes long and I put it on YouTube. I just want to make something that I can watch by myself in my living room and think, ‘Yeah, that speaks to something that excites me and exists.’ ” That was really my only ambition.

How into skate culture were you when you met Skreech? Or was this something that you weren’t very familiar with at all?

I grew up in Southern California and it was always a part of my childhood and teenage experience. But I never thought: Oh, I’m gonna make this skate film. It was much more sort of — like when I met him the economy had just collapsed, and I was really struck by it. I’d gone out to see Rick Agnew play, you know, the guitarist from the Adolescents who’s in his fifties. And he’s playing this driveway at a houseparty. It felt sort of like the original 1980s punk generation were the parents of this new generation of kids. And I love these youth-in-revolt movies from the late 1970s and early 1980s, and I talk a lot about them, but Over The Edge, River’s Edge, and Suburbia

Like Repo Man

Repo Man, totally. And when I met Skreech he seemed like a kid who could really casually walk into a frame in one of those movies. What was interesting to me is that I would never write a [youth-in-revolt movie] because I feel that they’ve already been made, and they’ve been done really well and that time is kinda passed. But I thought, with him, like maybe there’s this new kind of youth-in-revolt movie to be made for today. And so instead of being based on a script it would be influenced by reality-television shows like Laguna Beach and weird things I was seeing on YouTube. And I’m really curious about this new generation of Californians that came of age right as, suddenly, there was no money left anywhere. And so all of the punk rants against the system became relevant again.

So it’s almost like that Eternal Return thing, it’s like the circle’s just repeating itself

Yeah. And I had no idea at the time, but it really bore itself out because from the age of 11 or 12 [Skreech] was at the Fullerton skate park every night, all night long with that original punk generation from Fullerton. Those guys are still there and they raise the next generation, and now Skreech is at the skate park raising the generation coming up under him.

You used some pretty modestly priced equipment to make the film. Do you feel that the frugality you used to make this movie helped you capture that sort of DIY aesthetic of what was going on in front of the camera?

It wasn’t that cheap. Everyone’s crazy for these Canon 5D cameras, but we were using pretty expensive film lenses to get the kind of images we were capturing. It was great that I could give Skreech a Flip camera that he could just turn on point and shoot [in] high definition, and I love the kind of video aesthetic of that. I felt like I wasn’t seeing stuff on a big screen that had the same feel. I didn’t feel like I’d seen the cinematic embodiment of the stuff I was seeing on YouTube. Or you look at a show like Laguna Beach or The Hills, and it’s a totally ridiculous show, but it’s kind of beautiful in its own way. And I felt like, “Well, what if we repurposed this idea to actually shoot stuff that matters rather than bullshit conversations between bullshit people?”

To me it started feeling like this crazy make-believe reality where even though you’re making this good living and it’s really hard work, you kinda feel like you’re this unpublished author with nothing to show for it. So I was kind of hitting a wall where I didn’t really want to be a screenwriter. I wanted to be a filmmaker.

The film seemed to strike this remarkable balance between embodying this kind of free-form energy of the characters and the story, but then it also has this very intentional organic narrative structure to it. How hard was it to make that happen during editing?

We edited for 13 months, so it was really hard. One of the reasons it turned into a feature was the fact that after the first day of shooting I was able to look at the footage we were getting, which was kind of abstracted and really observational, and then I could see what Skreech shot on his Flip camera of the same stuff that was first-person and really kinetic. You feel like you’re in his head and he’s talking behind the camera. So right away the collision of those two kinds of footage was really exciting to me, and I felt like that’s the movie I wanted to see. In terms of narrative, the rule was we were going to be absolutely authentic to Skreech’s experience, and we’re never going to be able shoot *that*, so we had to figure out a structure that would somehow work with the kinds of footage we had. Which was where this idea was born [to break the film into chapters]. And it wasn’t going to be this polished greatest-hits album from a legendary band, it was going to be like their first recording. And then we started grouping [the footage] by moments, and on a certain level each moment pulls back a layer and we get closer and closer to something that’s hopefully essential.

I’m sure you’ve probably seen a couple of these, but I was just checking the trailer again on YouTube and there were all these comments from people who were just like: “This is what’s wrong with America!” “This guy is a burden to the economy!” I’m wondering if you’ve seen these and if you have any opinion as to what it is about seeing someone who’s so totally free and kind of irresponsible that pisses so many people off?

Skreech is definitely way more provocative to people than he was to me. I knew I was making a film that was going to be radically different than whatever someone considers a normal film or a normal documentary. And it’s kind of this weird thing where you make something like [Dragonslayer], and you think in a way that this is going to be its own thing and it’s totally unique and totally different. And then when people react to that, like they don’t know what they’re seeing and they’re pissed off, you’re like, “Wait, why don’t you love this thing that you’ve never seen before?” I just think it’s the nature of trying to make something that’s different, or trying to live in a way that’s different. And I think that, for whatever reason, there are a lot of people that are miserable in their 9-5 jobs and hate everybody else who didn’t take shitty work like they did. But [Skreech] isn’t leeching, he’s just figuring out his own way to be young, and that’s where I always go back to the fact that this movie isn’t “The Life and Times of Skreech”; it’s a nine-month period in his life.

You’re releasing Dragonslayer through Snagfilms digitally. Do you think this is sort of where independent-film releases are headed?

When we finished this film and got through South By Southwest and realized, okay, this film exists; now we need to figure out how to have it land in the world, I asked myself, “If I hadn’t made this film what would I do to make sure I was aware of it? How would I find out about it?” So to me, that really is all about Drag City, this record label that I worshipped. I was thinking, if Drag City put out this movie I would’ve heard about it. And so you hope there are other people out there that know what Drag City is and will think that this isn’t just some skate video, that there’s something different about this that they can protect and kind of push. And I do think all of these new technologies are going to be the future — watching movies however you want to watch them. But, I mean, it’s a very different to see Dragonslayer in a movie theater than it is to see it on a 6-inch window on iTunes.

Interview: Wooden Wand

Paulb — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:00:58 +0000

by Paulb • May 2012

At this point in his musically inclined career, you could probably build a small brick and mortar building devoted entirely to the catalog of James Jackson Toth. With nearly 100 releases to his name (and varied pseudonyms), Toth is one of the more prolific musicians of the last two decades. He’s recorded and released hours of solo material under his own name (as well as WAND and Wooden Wand), but he’s also played with countless bands and groups over the years and recorded and released nearly all of it.

Last month saw the re-release of Toth’s Briarwood (originally released this past November), now a double LP that includes eight stripped-down demo versions of songs from the original LP. TMT recently chatted with Toth regarding the Briarwood re-release, the indisputable Suck that is an unending tour schedule, and just how good that new Lee Ranaldo LP is.

Why did you decide to re release Briarwood? Is this your first re-release? Would you do it again if given the opportunity?

It was actually the label’s decision to re-release it, not mine, but I think it’s a testament to Fire’s belief in the record that they’re re-releasing it so soon. I think we all felt that the timing was all wrong for the initial release, and a lot of that was my fault — I had a few too many pokers in the fire at the time.

You’ve alluded to the unreleased material on Briarwood as your “grimoire.” Why these songs in particular?

They aren’t unreleased songs, just demo versions. The idea is that the demos are created more to remind me that a song exists than for any other reason. They also help the band get familiar with the structures of the songs. I write rather prolifically, so if I don’t keep some sort of record of what I’m writing, things get forgotten.

The age of the blog critic is a death knell in a lot of ways. I’m a stickler for good grammar. To me, a misplaced modifier ruins your credibility faster than anything dumb you might possibly write about music.

Have you noticed any significant changes in your songwriting over the years? Can you pinpoint any specific things you consciously do differently?

I think I’ve just gotten better at it. I should hope so, at least, having been doing it for so long. There are things I’ve written in the past I’d never write now, and the inverse is also true.

Was all the material for Briarwood written for/with a full band in mind? Have you had to change your way of thinking when writing for a full band?

It was written with a band in mind, yes, but that doesn’t really change the way I write too much. There are considerations — like leaving a solo section, having an additional vocal melody, that sort of thing — but mostly I just bring the songs to the band and let them worry about making music out of it.

Are you enjoying playing with a full band? Do you enjoy playing solo as much as playing with a full band? Do you still try and do both equally?

I love playing with a band, and this band in particular. I really don’t enjoy playing solo, never have and only really do it out of necessity.

Have you always enjoyed touring? Any awful/hilarious recent tour stories?

Oh, the novelty of touring wore off for me around the turn of the century. I really don’t enjoy “business travel,” which is what touring is. I love traveling for pleasure, but I don’t get to do that very often. In fact, ironically, I probably take fewer vacations than people who work in a bank. As for awful/hilarious stories, on my recent tour with my old friend Jeffrey Lewis, we presided over no fewer than three vehicles that had to be towed within a three-day period. Murphy’s Law situation, and I don’t mean the band, which would have been preferable. A puppy was also killed on our watch. Not making that up. Raw shit.

Do you pay attention to your critics? Is there a significant reason why you pay attention or ignore criticism? Any critics getting it right?

It’s funny; the negative reviews have a better history of “getting it right” than the positive ones. There are exceptions, of course, and I generally prefer to read that someone enjoyed the record, obviously, but I tend to learn more from bad reviews. I’d like to say I don’t read press, but I often do. I just wish there were more real writers writing about music. The age of the blog critic is a death knell in a lot of ways. I’m a stickler for good grammar. To me, a misplaced modifier ruins your credibility faster than anything dumb you might possibly write about music.

What are your thoughts on downloading music? Are you cool with your fans downloading your music first and then paying for it? Do you embrace technology?

There are things I’ve written in the past I’d never write now, and the inverse is also true.

I would not say I embrace technology, no. I do obviously use email, social networking and, err, Microsoft Word. I’m okay with fans downloading if they like what they hear and then go and buy the record. Using downloading as an audition tool will just make bands work harder, and I’m all for that. Also, if fans download and don’t buy the record, I would hope they’d be charitable enough to come to the show and maybe buy a t-shirt. I understand no one likes to buy CDs anymore, but for God’s sake, buy something. Our van won’t run on your demo tapes. Also, piracy has already made half the things I love about music obsolete — record stores, cool labels, and local scenes…

Any current musicians you’re paying attention to? Anything current you wouldn’t hesitate to plead with someone to run out right now and buy?

Oh, man, tons of things. Recently, the Carter Tutti Void album has been ruling my world. I love Lee Ranaldo’s new album, that’s my current car jam. The Fugitives by Control Unit. The new Charles Gayle album, Streets, may be his best work. Everything Graham Lambkin has ever done, but most recently, his brilliant Amateur Doubles LP. The Robert Turman reissue, Flux, has been getting a lotta play at our house. The last Scott Tuma record, Dandelion, is also getting wore out around here, especially at night. Really love this guy Simon Henneman, who released an album last year, Black Magic and Mustache, that I’ve been playing constantly. As far as songwriters go, I really dig Cass McCombs; his last few albums blew me away, but this most recent one is a pinnacle, I think. I just reconnected with that Ezra Furman guy, I think he’s got something for sure, but I’m a sucker for any singer that sounds even a little bit like Gordon Gano. Hiss Golden Messenger put out one of my favorite albums of the past five years, Poor Moon. Get that one first.

What’s next?

New album in October, called Blood Oaths of the New Blues. I’m extremely proud of it — it feels like a defining record. I’m psyched for you to hear it.

Feature: Tribeca Film Festival 2012

Susanna Locascio — Mon, 07 May 2012 14:03:35 +0000

by Susanna Locascio • May 2012

This was my first official year covering the Tribeca Film Festival, but I’ve dabbled in years past. While many applauded its genesis — De Niro et al reviving a post-9/11 downtown with a world-class cultural event — it remains a puzzling festival. It falls between Sundance and Cannes (not to mention after Berlin and SXSW), leaving it fewer world premiere options (a close reading of the fine print reveals many North American premieres). The screening venues have hopscotched around town, this year settling primarily in Chelsea and the East Village, confirming Tribeca as a brand rather than a geographically precise title. It boasts high-profile corporate sponsors (sometimes problematically so), but there are upsides to 10 minutes of pre-film ads, like free digital distribution of competition films, and programs like TFI All Access, which supports underrepresented filmmakers. Tribeca seems to be constantly evolving, and with some careful curating there are wonderful and surprising films to discover in their lineup.

When culling my Tribeca best-of list, I immediately noticed almost all are directed by women, and heavily foreign in scope, if not origin. Even as Girls chatters its way to popularity on HBO, there seems to be a push in independent film away from the “talky white people” genre. Emerging digital technologies, from camera gear to distribution models, are beginning to free up filmmakers to travel further in their pursuit of stories worth telling. My picks include a French film by a Polish director, a Cuban film by a British director, and a New York film by a French director — eros, drama, and comedy, nimbly done by talented women. The outlier is Andrew Semans’ Nancy, Please, but his wimpy man-child is notably sandwiched between two strong women. This was entirely coincidental, but a happy accident nonetheless, which could describe my Tribeca experience as a whole.

Una Noche (Lucy Mulloy)

Inspired by travels to Cuba, the Oxford-educated Lucy Mulloy traded Politics for Film Studies, using her Tisch MFA to launch Una Noche. Based on real events, the story follows three teenagers who attempt to flee Havana for Miami. Mulloy spent six years in Cuba, auditioning actors, scouting locations, and building her crew, even writing a song for the film’s original score. The result is a potent debut, energetic, visually lush, and strong with detail, and honest without being preachy or humorless. The camera work is especially notable, including several tracking shots Mulloy says were inspired by the classic I Am Cuba. After a premiere in Berlin the film swept the awards at Tribeca, but in a strange life-imitates-art coda, two of its lead actors disappeared en route to New York to apply for political asylum. Such are the challenges of working in Cuba (blackouts! defections!) but Mulloy is undeterred, already developing two follow-up films for what she intends to be a trilogy.

Polisse (Maïwenn)

This 2011 Cannes winner is a compelling piece of work. To gather material, the model-esque Maïwenn (who wrote, directed, and acts in the film) actually embedded with a Child Protection Unit in Paris, drawing on true stories to craft her verité-styled film. If there is a plot it’s minimal, most of the momentum given over to the tense, charged confrontations between the cops and the perpetrators of child abuse. The team of cops encounters everything from pickpockets to incest to internet porn, an onslaught they cope with in various ways. They are brusque with the victims – detectives and enforcers rather than psychologists – yet are fully dedicated to their work (often leaving their own families to bear the brunt). The film is surprising, far more crass, loud, and swiftly tragic than expected. For a drama grounded in realism, with a handheld camera that barely keeps pace with the dialogue, its pathos is well-earned.

2 Days in New York (Julie Delpy)

This sequel to Julie Delpy’s sleepy rom-com 2 Days in Paris catches up with the breezy blonde Marion several years later. She’s had a son with her Paris beau Jack (now her ex-husband), and exists in quasi-domesticity with her new boyfriend Mingus, played with surprising subtlety by Chris Rock. Their boho New York life is interrupted by the arrival of Marion’s pervy father and catty sister, the latter of whom unexpectedly bringing Marion’s ex-boyfriend along. Hilarity ensues! The film is light as merengue, but so good-natured and funny it’s hard to resist. Zany cultural misunderstandings abound, but the jokes are witty and specific, and nicely capture both Parisian and New York nuances. The supporting cast has terrific timing, but Delpy’s frazzled, charming heroine carries the film. For a writer/director/star, Delpy has a remarkable lack of vanity, which is of course what makes her super-cool.

Elles (Malgorzata Szumowska)

This dense film finds its core in the lead performance of Juliette Binoche as a journalist writing a story on prostitution. The film unfolds over the course of a day, where we watch Binoche strain between her duties as wife, mother, and writer. As she rushes to meet her deadline and prepare for a dinner party, her mind circles back over the stories shared by her young confidantes, impatient beauties willing to sell their bodies to pay for their education and lifestyles. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and built on documentary footage with Parisian prostitutes, this debut by Polish director Szumowska nicely reverses expectations. The sex scenes are so transactional they are stripped of eros, at least for the young women, who trade the anonymity of their flesh for a sweaty palm full of cash. But for Binoche, bound to bourgeois convention and her husband, this vicarious knowledge unsettles. She swells with anger and grief, aroused and sickened by what she imagines. The men come off as caricatures, and some may find the womblike intensity of the film off-putting, but fans of Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay will appreciate its rhythms.

Nancy, Please (Andrew Semans)

The premise may be as skinny as Semans’ white boy protagonist, but an odd creepiness and ferocious performance by Eleanore Hendricks give the film heft. Said white boy is a sweater-wearing graduate student who moves in with his girlfriend, but falls several notches short of domestic bliss. He’s underwater with his thesis, and has forgotten a crucial novel in his old apartment. This should be cheerfully resolved in, oh, five minutes, but then there’s Nancy, his ex-roommate, with whom he has a weird, inexplicable (psycho-sexual?) tension, and who refuses to return his book. His gerbil-y attempts at resolution only escalate the problem, until we are no longer talking about a book, but the unraveling of his sweater-clad life. It doesn’t all make sense, and certain scenes lull, but Semans’ film has some nice jolts and surprising turns, none more so than Hendricks’ terrifying cameos. For the lone male wolf among the female directors in my list, Semans betrays an impressive comfort with emasculation.

Interview: Ilyas Ahmed

Lee Michael — Thu, 03 May 2012 16:07:04 +0000

by Lee Michael • May 2012

Since 2005, Ilyas Ahmed has released a slew of fantastic releases, some self-released, others on labels like Root Strata (the amazing Goner), Digitalis, and Time-Lag. With Endless Fire, his latest in a litany of transcendent art-folk albums, is out now on cassette and LP via Immune Recordings, and it further solidifies his grasp on bleak, yet resplendent territory.

Tiny Mix Tapes caught up with Ahmed via email to talk about his compulsive music-making techniques. Check out the interview below and head over to the Chocolate Grinder for a premiere of his new video for “Skin in Circles.”

I read another interview where you stated that your favorite piece of musical equipment is the fingernails on your right hand. Do you consider yourself primarily a guitar player? Would you ever call yourself a singer/songwriter?

I suppose I never really even think about the “what” that I am. The term singer/songwriter generally conjurs up negative connotations in my mind so I imagine I’d like to steer clear of that moniker. I think of a guy strumming G chords singing “clever” lyrics. I suppose I am primarily a guitar player, and it’s the instrument I feel most comfortable with, although I would like to play piano more. I am also, in general, a bigger fan of vocalists and horn players than guitar players. I do consider what I do to be songs for sure, although my definition of songs might be different than others’.

The need to distill one’s output into a simple byline is pretty common. It’s like the filmmaker who says, “No no, I’m not an artist, I’m just a storyteller,” in an effort to be more easily understood. It sounds like you have no interest in doing that. Are you conscious of wanting to communicate something with your music?

I’ve learned that what I’ve intended to communicate and what get[s] interpreted is sometimes lost in translation so I suppose I’ve given up on specificity. The work is meaningful to me, and when anybody else gets something out of it means a great deal to me.

I am aware of the sort of cute indie-rock thing here, although I don’t feel part of it or even really pay attention to it, so when I play out of town and people want to talk about about, say, a television show, I’d rather talk about Golden Retriever.

What are your songs about? Is that important?

What the songs are about are very important to me as I feel they are personal transmissions towards specific people, and the specifics are not entirely important to anyone else. I respond to music that feels more open ended and blurred and leave space for the listener to attach their own pathology towards.

What do you tell people when they ask you what kind of music you play?

Soul music.

It seems that living and working in Portland is somehow defining to a lot of artists and musicians that live there, coming from Pakistan, New Jersey, Minnesota, etc. do you feel that way? Have you settled into the Portland lifestyle or scene or whatever?

I have made some of my closest friendships of my adult life since moving here, and feel very connected to a community of people that are very much at the top of their respective games. And after a sort of vagabond-ish time throughout my twenties I feel connected to this place in my old age. It’s also a visually stunning area. I am aware of the sort of cute indie-rock thing here, although I don’t feel part of it or even really pay attention to it, so when I play out of town and people want to talk about about, say, a television show, I’d rather talk about Golden Retriever.

Yeah indie rock, who cares about that! I really meant, you know, Dead Moon, Grouper, and like… everyone on Stunned Records. So what is it? I’m going to postulate that it’s cheap and often cloudy (moody), therefore artist breeding ground. What say you? And I’m guessing you didn’t see that last episode of Game of Thrones.

It’s cheap, it’s cloudy, and there’s a lot of good coffee, you tend to stay inside and work on your thing, and it’s just a really livable city for someone like me. And alongside a close friend like Liz, there’s Golden Retriever, Operative, Valet, Pulse Emitter, the Smegma family, the Rad Summer nexus, the Exiled Records and Mississippi Records crews, Hisham and Sublime Frequencies, a bunch more… You know, these are all folks that I think are real singular and inspiring talents, aside from being amazing people. Maybe we’re all making up for the lack of Vitamin D we get for the rest of the year. Game of Thrones sound like a metal band name.

It is very metal. Your albums covers show a lot of people with collage-mutilated faces. Tell me about your visual artwork.

I’ve probably been making visual art longer than I have music, and it’s something I’ve always done & paid attention to. I work on visual art alongside music constantly and they probably overlap in ways I’m not aware of. I’ve always approached making album art as objects that, as a fan, I would want to find. Like if you were flipping through records and your local shop and came across an album, held it up, looked at the art, and were like what could this possibly sound like?

Making records is a compulsion that usually entails spending an inordinate amount of time in my hermetically sealed apartment with headphones on.

Do you have plans for your visual artwork beyond your own record covers?

I had a solo exhibition here in Portland last year at a great space called Nationale that shows a lot of really amazing work. I’ve been getting some work together for some upcoming shows in the next year or so.

Your music sounds very physical to me – many different acoustic sounds, recorded on analog tape. What is your physical process like for recording an album? What do you do everyday? Do you play or record everyday?

Thanks, I’m glad that comes across. I work on and play music and make art everyday, as much I can all day, read a lot, listen to records, and, more importantly, try to span as much time with my girlfriend and loved ones. Making records is a compulsion that usually entails spending an inordinate amount of time in my hermetically sealed apartment with headphones on. I can’t imagine ever wanting or needing to take a break from any of it as it’s the only thing that I don’t feel the need to take a break from. It’s everything else that can be a drag.

So are you sitting on like 10 more records of material?

It’s not up to 10, but… sort of. There was record I made while I making Goner that was really stripped down, that was pretty bleak and wasn’t anything that I felt needed to be heard, so I buried the tape in town. Maybe all the rain will make it grow into something nicer. I’m still messing around with a record that doesn’t have anything that’s recognizable as a guitar on it, and a few other things too. Some collaborations that I’m really excited about. My role model for work has always been visual artists, I guess. Most painters don’t make, like, one painting a year. I just like working. But I don’t feel the need to put it all out. I like sort of grand statements from the people I’m a fan of, Scott Walker-style.

How did you come to work with Julia Blackburn on the new video / what was that like?

Julia is a dear friend, and also an extremely talented clothing designer and photographer/filmmaker. We’d talked about doing a collaboration forever as I feel my music sounds the way her clothing/images looks. I couldn’t be more psyched on how it turned out.

What else is good right now?

Leonard Michaels short stories, Ekin Fil, Michael Chapman, Mina Loy, Date Palms, Pete Swanson, the new Chromatics record Kill for Love, modern cinema seemingly getting better again after years of crapulent fraudulence, summer almost being here in rainy Portland, and my girlfriend Jessi. You know, there’s tons of reasons to get out of bed every morning. It’s like W.C. Fields said, “Life is great. Without it we’d be dead. “

Interview: Ava Mendoza

D-BO — Tue, 01 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

by D-BO • May 2012

Ava Menodza is a busy guitarist. When she’s not throwing in her singular blend of free-jazz/blues-fingerstyle/controlled rock-debris with musicians like guitar paladin Nels Cline, synth-pop fringer Dominique Leone, or collabing on film scores with international East Bay heroes tUnE-yArDs, she’s an essential piece of a burgeoning Bay Area free-rock music scene.

All it really takes is one good listen to know Ava’s not just onto something, but has been perfecting her craft for quite some time. While not exactly a secret in San Francisco and Oakland, anyone with a taste for the kind of avant-garde, boundary-altering, ear-stretching audio known and loved by TMTers will find a remarkably fresh voice.

I wanted to talk about the most recent thing that’s coming up for you, the tUnE-yArDs International Film Festival collab. Are you improvising music over Buster Keaton films or is it something more composed?

It’s more composed, for sure. We rehearsed for it a lot. Me and Merryl [Garbus] did a lot for it over the course of three weeks while tUnE-yArDs, the band was off-tour. So we just got in all this rehearsal time. We’re kind of adapting songs of hers and songs of mine for the film. Also, we wrote some new stuff together. tUnE-yArDs’ aesthetic is pretty tight, kind of, which is perfect for these films I think. It’s all about really dramatic/tight action, kind of. So, it will be very not improvised for the most part. There’s little sections that are noisy and stuff like that. But it’s really plotted out.

That’s pretty cool. The reason I ask is because I had some friends in music school in Michigan and they did this improvised score to this French film called The Red Balloon. It was pretty interesting too.

Yeah, I did a score for the Film Society in November… With this drummer that I play with, Nick Tamburro.

Yeah, you told me you did an album together.

Yeah. But we did that score… together. And that was an old horror movie. An early campy horror movie that’s sort of like making fun of itself but also scary.

What’s that called?

The Bat.

Okay. I may have heard of that.

Yeah, it’s funny. I hadn’t heard of it before I picked it for this. Yeah, it’s not super-duper well known but it was kind of a classic, I guess. We also plotted out everything we were going to do for that one but there was a little more looseness. A little more free jazz involved in that one than there will be for the tUnE-yArds one.

That’s cool though. I mean, I know Merryl’s been in the area for a while. How long have you known her?

I met her when we played a show at Blue 6 in the city like three years ago, I guess. I knew Nate [Brenner] from before. We both worked at Pandora.

He’s a good dude.

Yeah, he’s awesome. I played solo and she played with Nate. We just liked each other’s stuff. When she moved down here we tried to find an excuse to work together somehow. This is the first thing that came up.

That’s great. That’s really cool.

We were realizing, after the last rehearsal, that it’s a really funny way to first work together.

Yeah, to collaborate on a film score.

Yeah, because it’s such a narrow world to work in. It’s not like we get together and write songs or one of you learns another person’s song. Just a really specific agenda. But it worked.

There aren’t too many guitar players I’ve heard in the area that sound the way you do. I’m curious about how you got started early on. Did you pick up the guitar before 10 years old?

Yeah, I started playing when I was 7. I played sort of on and off when I was a little kid. It was all classical guitar. I never had an electric guitar until I was 16 or 17. I played all classical guitar growing up. I got super serious about it by the time I was 15 or 16. I was really into it and practicing a lot but I was also listening to weirder and weirder stuff. I got into noisier rock and I got into Sonny Sharrock. I got into Derek Bailey. Then I was listening to Peter Brötzmann and Alber Ayler records but then playing classical guitar. And I was like, “Something has to change. There’s a discrepancy here.”…

So, I just wanted to play music that was more expressive, basically. So, I started playing electric guitar when I was 17 and never went back.

I assume that, since you started so early with classical, you learned how to read music too. It seems like, for guitar players — at least younger guitar players — you learn Led Zeppelin songs or tablature.

It was, I guess, the opposite of what happens with a lot of people because I was never, like, in a blues jam. I didn’t really improvise or have my own style growing up at all. I just read music. By the time I was 16 and 17, I was frustrated. I was like, “I really want to do something that’s me somehow.”

It’s still cool that you have those tools though.

It’s cool.

Most guitar players don’t have those tools. When I went to school for music I could barely read music. I’m still terrible at it but it’s also the guitar thing.

It’s laid out so weird! It’s not like a piano or something.

It’s one of the hardest instruments to read on. You have like five different ways to play one note.

Right.

You went to Mills College, is that right?

Yeah, I moved up here to go to Mills and I went there for undergrad.

Was there a reason you were drawn to that school, in particular? Did the instructor/musician Fred Frith have something to do with it?

Yeah, that was a part of it but I actually originally went to Mills thinking differently. I wasn’t in the music department, I was in the media department.

Interesting.

But my first year there, I thought I didn’t want to study music academically and I was in the anthropology department. And that totally didn’t work. I was like, “Oh, my god I can’t think about stuff that’s not music all the time.” But yeah, Fred was a reason and just the fact that they have a good contemporary music department and I just love this area and I wanted to be up here.

That school has a pretty good reputation for improvised music as well as other stuff.

Yeah.

You mentioned being into classical music but I notice that sometimes, when you play solo, you do a lot of blues finger-picking type stuff. Do you make the associations between different styles or is it something that’s more naturally developed over the years? It’s not like, “Oh, well now I’m doing something different”?

I just got into a bunch of old blues guys kind of at the same time that I got into noisier rock and free jazz when I was in late high school. And I just wanted to hear music that wasn’t slick, basically. I wanted to hear music that was expressive and pretty direct. So, I started listening to Robert Johnson and Skip James and Reverend Gary Davis. I guess Reverend Gary Davis and Joseph Spence are two of the guys that their feel and stuff was really exciting for me. They just have this excitable way of playing rhythm.

He’s kind of a different type of blues musician, but I was watching a video of Albert King…

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was looking at his hands and I was like, “What the fuck is he doing?” He’s actually just playing a guitar turned upside down, he doesn’t restring it.

But he plays right-handed?

He plays it left-handed but it’s not re-strung. So, when he was bending all these notes and playing riffs it makes you do a double-take. I think with the guitar, in general, perhaps moreso than other instruments, you find a way to make it work for you.

Yeah, I think so.

You develop your own sound and style because of that.

Yeah, everyone’s so different from each other. When I go see any guitar player, they’re always doing all these things that would never occur to me to do. And they’re all so different from each other. It’s super-personal.

Yeah, like Django Reinhardt, losing the majority of his ability in his left hand and developing a whole new technique. Or Wes Montgomery, he didn’t want to use a pick because his neighbors would complain about him playing too loud so he would play quietly with his thumb.

Oh, okay.

Just those kinds of things are pretty interesting to me. I don’t know enough about other instruments but it seems like with guitar it’s like that happens so often — People use their disadvantages as an advantage.

Yeah, totally. Or just stylistically, the differences. From Django Reinhardt to Terry X to Kerry King or whatever. It’s like, what? This isn’t the same instrument!

I was talking to this girl, who’s a guitar player and works at Guitar Center. She was just like, “Aw god, being a woman guitar player’s so awful! Guys disrespect you all the time!” And I was like, “Really? When does that happen?”

Speaking of guitarists, I know you’ve done some work with Nels Cline. How have some of those collaborations with him come about? Has some of it been with the Singers?

I lived in LA, growing up. So, I liked that band the Geraldine Fibbers, that was his old band with Carla Bozulich. I actually never saw them.

So, you were talking about Nels Cline a bit.

Yeah, so those guys lived in LA and I got into that band the Geraldine Fibbers and then I got into Nels’ solo stuff. I think the first thing I heard was the cover of “nterstellar Space”that he did. I heard that before I heard the original “nterstellar Space.”

Oh, really? That’s really interesting.

[Laughs] It’s funny. But he was like the first guitar dude that I heard make a bunch of noise. I was like, “Ah!”

He’s pretty amazing.

Yeah, he’s amazing. But I just started talking to him at a show and I asked him for lessons and he has like insanely low self-esteem. And was like, “I’m too stupid to teach! I can’t give you lessons but we can sit around and talk about music.” So then we would just get together and sit around and play records and talk about music.

I don’t know what it is. Some of the best musicians I’ve met are very, very humble dudes.

Yeah.

It’s like whenever I see interviews with Bill Frisell, it just blows my mind because he’s like, “I don’t know, I’ve been doing this for 50 years and maybe something good has happened.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s old school humility, for sure.

I read something about your approach to improv: the idea of throwing a wrench into what you’re doing. And then starting over and feeling like that’s how you can get deeper into the music?

Yeah, for me, I really like to compose. I really like songwriting and writing something that’s super tight. But then, I like to find ways, in solo or a group, that it can develop or change somehow. If somebody can throw some kind of surprise turn into it, it can take a really different direction.

Yeah, when things fall apart it can be really cool. To me, it seems like perception is the issue: the difference between what you’re playing and what people are hearing.

Yeah.

Sometimes it’s like, “Aw, fuck! I fucked that shit up!” But for a person that hasn’t heard it before, maybe that’s the coolest part.

Sure, or for a person that’s heard it like, 50 times before, they’re like “Oh, wow! Thank god, something new!”

The first time I saw you was with Dominique Leone. I know Jordan Glenn plays in that band too.

And Aaron Novik is the role of bass player as bass clarinetist. I just knew Dominique from around here and we played shows together in separate bands a few times. He just asked me to do a tour with that band. He had a tour booked and no band.

[Laughs] That’s the hard part.

[Laughs] Yeah, so he asked me like a month before as he was getting the band together. I just stayed in the band and that lineup, the quartet that it is now, became the band. He’s now playing in a trio with me and Nick [Tamburro]. Dominque’s playing this kind of synth — it’s like a Korg Mini. But he’s playing that as like a bass role. It’s my trio, the Ava Mendoza Trio. It’s super incestuous.

I knew some friends from Interlochen. Did you enjoy your time there? I hear it’s pretty intense.

It’s really intense. I guess it’s like an Oberlin of high school. But it was great for me, actually. I was living in Orange County, at the time. So, it was good to escape Orange County. I just got a lot more serious about classical guitar while I was there. It’s super straight-ahead there. It’s very straight-ahead classical and super-square jazz. But it was just like a kick in the ass.

I was talking to Nate [Brenner] (of tUnE-yArDs) who went there. He actually enjoyed it. But Ohio for your whole life is a bit much I think.

Where are you from?

This really small town between Cleveland and Columbus called Mansfield. Where they filmed The Shawshank Redemption. Claim to fame.

[Laughs]

The last time I saw you perform, you were playing with a group with your bandmate Jordan Glenn and Sam Ospovat on drums.

Was it just Sam playing drums or was it three drummers?

It was just Sam, but I think Jordan was playing vibes.

Yeah, that’s Aaron Novik’s band. That’s called Dante Counterstamp. [Laughs].

That’s nice.

Yeah, that’s a pretty new thing. It’s just been the last six months that we’ve been doing that. Aaron wrote all this super hard music and we’re still getting a handle on it.

How long have you known drummer Nick Tamburro?|

Like, two years. We teach kids together at this place called San Francisco Rock Project. So, we had a year of being like, “Hey, we should play” and never getting around to it. I’d been playing solo for a long, long time and finally I just asked him to play a duo show with me. Solo with drums, basically. It was awesome. Now it’s a trio with me and Dominique [Leone].

We’re a really good match. He [Tamburro] comes from being into hardcore bands and death metal and stuff. He’s a really powerful player. But then, he has good swing feel also and is interested in a lot of different music. So, he just has good chops and is a really passionate player.

I was listening to the forthcoming recording, Quit Your Unnatural Ways. When I was listening to it, it didn’t sound like you guys weren’t listening to each other but you were also playing in your own spaces. I always enjoy hearing that. The sound of what you guys are doing is very different than a band like Don Caballero — but the way they would play, with each person in their own space, was familiar.

Cool. And that duo record is coming out on Weird Forest in June.

That’s awesome. One of the questions I was thinking about asking — but I hope isn’t too personal — is that sometimes with guitar or music in general, being a female guitarist you deal with a lot of weird situations.

Yeah.

I don’t know if it’s necessarily prejudice but the awkwardness of people not respecting a female musician. I don’t know if this is ever happened to you, has it?

No, I don’t feel like it happens to me a lot. For most of my life, I haven’t felt like that has happened to me a lot. It sort of makes me wonder if I’m just oblivious or if it just really doesn’t happen to me. I feel like, at least the guys I play music with, are like, “It’s not an issue.” It just hasn’t been something that’s gotten in the way.

That’s good.

I was talking to this girl, who’s a guitar player and works at Guitar Center. She was just like, “Aw god, being a woman guitar player’s so awful! Guys disrespect you all the time!” And I was like, “Really? When does that happen?”

There’s a song on the last Marnie Stern album about female guitar players.

“Female Guitar Players Are the New Black.”

Yeah. What does that even mean? Maybe it’s not a huge leap but I don’t know. I’m not a female guitar player so I can’t say.

Yeah, I don’t know. I kinda thought she was trying to say that they’re the new fetish. But I don’t know. Or they’re the new group that’s discriminated against?

Yeah, that’s kinda what I assumed.

There’s kind of a whole colony of female guitar players who are badass and getting press.

So, what have you been listening to lately? Anything you’ve been super into?

Yeah, let me think about that. I’ve been listening to P-Funk a lot, over the last few years.

That’s always good.

I’m always listening to them. I’m always listening to Albert Ayler also.

Do you have a favorite Ayler album?

I like Live in Greenwich Village a lot. And there’s a Live in Europe record that I really like.

Speaking of saxophonists, have you ever listened to Pharaoh Sander’s album Thembi?

No.

That’s my favorite one by him. The cover is so cool because it’s just Pharaoh Sanders playing some weird woodwind instrument and he’s got all these percussion instruments throughout the record. He’s kind of just wandering off in the photo.

That’s awesome.

My friend gave me that album in college and I think that was the first Pharaoh Sanders album that I heard.

What else? Yesterday, I had this “fix my guitar” session because it had all these little things wrong with it. So, I just sat around and fixed my guitar all morning and listened to Slayer. And that was nice.

Reign in Blood?

Yeah.

That brings me back. I had a friend in high school who was super into Metal and even goth stuff too like Type O Negative. But I remember he had pictures of Slayer and Metallica taped up and covering his bedroom. It was this weird oasis that we zoned out in. We didn’t even smoke weed! [Laughs]

[Laughs]. It’s like too Agro to smoke weed to.

You’d get paranoid.

Yeah! Jeff Beck, actually, I’ve been listening to a lot.

See, I don’t even know where to start with that guy. I’ve heard him play so many times and sometimes I’m like, “This is cool.” And sometimes, I’m like, “I don’t know…”

Yeah, I feel like he plays really bad songs and music overall — well, not bad but cheesy. There’s Yardbirds stuff where I like the songwriting and whole package. But a lot of his solo stuff is on the cheesier side. But just the way he plays, even if he’s playing “Over the Rainbow,” just the way he phrases it and bends is so [great].

He’s a great guitar player, there’s no denying that.

That’s really like a geek thing.

Feature: Unsound Festival New York 2012

TMT Staff — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

by TMT Staff • April 2012

This year marked the third installment of the New York edition of Unsound, an offshoot of the annual Kraków fest (which will have its 10th installment in October). From April 18-22 and across five different venues — BAMcinématek, (Le) Poisson Rouge, Public Assembly, Lincoln Center, and ISSUE Project Room — Unsound New York 2012 featured music that included everything from warped dub and ambient metal to bass-heavy club music and techno. This meant we were treated to the likes of TMT favorites like Hype Williams, Sun Araw, Heat Wave, Laurel Halo, Peaking Lights, Actress, Demdike Stare, and many more. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to check out any of the Unsound Labs (which featured panels, discussions, screenings, lectures, etc.), but we caught plenty of shows that wonderfully reflected the festival’s desire to connect Eastern European and Western musicians together through some penetrating music.

The Option of Silence: Julia Holter, Jenny Hval, Julia Kent
[Wednesday, April 18 @ ISSUE Project Room]
By Tim Terhaar

My friend K. and I arrived late to the show because we were at a Poetry Project event wherein 17 people read passages from The Library of America’s The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. Set the bar pretty high for the night; sadly, the J-named women didn’t meet it. We missed Julia Kent entirely. We sat down (yes, this was a seated show) for the last two songs of Jenny Hval’s set. The best that can be said for it is that it was inoffensive. The audience looked bored, but at least there were a lot of them. Two songs were all K. needed to hear in order to devise the formula Hval = Enya + The Cranberries.

Julia Holter played piano and sang. She wanted pretty heavy reverb on her vocals, which, as K. noted, seemed like overkill because Holter has good pitch and the ISSUE space is cavernous. But I think too much reverb is part of the ethereal atmospheric package, which includes a voice that sounds like it’s coming straight out of her throat. The problem with this lack of physicality is that Holter isn’t a good songwriter. The effect was strange, a blandness that was hard to be present for. And I wasn’t the only one having trouble paying attention, because the average rate of attrition across the set was four audience members per song. One can hardly blame those who took the showcase title up on its offer and opted for silence: with Holter, there was no challenge, nothing out of place.

Singularity: Actress, Hype Williams, Next Life
[Thursday, April 19 @ (Le) Poisson Rouge]
By Tim Terhaar

I was stupid enough to arrive on time (without a friend). Next Life is a metal band from Norway with an electronic element. I think the best way to illustrate their approach is to note that the bass player was wearing a Don Caballero T-shirt and said “thank you” a lot. I’m not sure whether I liked the music, but they played well. I think the phrase “proliferation of discourses” is a lie, but it arrives as an alibi for my “not getting it.”

Then Hype Williams got on stage. A tiny white woman, Inga Copeland, stood at the microphone while a massive, beautiful black male bodybuilder stood off to one side. For at least half an hour, the audience listened to a relentless but mercifully complex loop, which turned out to be a technical hiccup. (My favorite part of the night.) When Hype Williams finally played their set, it was very loud and made extensive use of strobe effects. It was depressing in the way that I imagine doing a ton of blow is depressing. Copeland sang in a somewhat dispassionate way while the strapping black man flexed and gyrated slowly.

Actress got on stage. By 2 AM, I was unfortunately fading with no prospect of reconstitution. Check out this video instead:

The Bunker: Monolake, Demdike Stare, Hieroglyphic Being, Ital, Laurel Halo, Zemi17
[Friday, April 20 @ The Bunker]
By Jonathan Dean

Nearly all of the artists invited to play Unsound this year had a spiritual lineage stretching back to techno, and accordingly, most shows involved versions of dance music, no matter how minimal, abstract, mutated, or monstrous. However, the Friday show at The Bunker was the only night specifically pitched as a late-night rave. Featuring a packed lineup, a massive surround-sound system, and a large projection screen with live visuals, this was a show tailor-made for adventurous minimal techno, dubstep, and house music.

Laurel Halo’s set was the first to make full and glorious use of the venue’s surround-sound capabilities. Her dreamy, expansive compositions were divided spatially between channels, with woozy tape-saturated synths coming from the rear speakers, trebly clicks from the front, and deep bass frequencies from giant subwoofers on the floor. The effect was immersive and cinematic, and Halo’s vocals provided a uniquely human touch the other “enhanced laptop” performances of the night could not provide.

Ital excels within a special brand of house music that achieves its unique effects not through the alteration of structure, but through the use of a set of sounds with radically different textures and fidelities. A perfectly punchy kick might coexist with a deeply distorted bass synth, or a wobbly overcompressed sample that cuts in and out. His set was mesmerizing, and the most apparently “live” of any of the acts that night.

Textural complexity also was the hallmark of a hybrid DJ set by Hieroglyphic Being, a Chicago producer who has excelled at dipping his toes into a large number of divergent mutations of electronic music over the years. His set moved across eras and genres for an experience that was enjoyable, but seemed a bit incongruous in a lineup of artists who tended to stick to one consistent sound for their sets.

Demdike Stare was the first act of the night to provide their own visuals, a creepy mix of weirdo rare mondo and giallo cinema clips focusing on close-ups of eyes and montages featuring surrealistic visual rhymes. It was the perfect accompaniment for the duo’s dark spin on bass music, all cinematic drones and breathtaking, eye-vibrating drops. Surprisingly for a group whose recorded output often verges on noise, it was the only set of the night that did not utilize blown-out, noisy, or low-fidelity sounds. It was rich, pure, and crystal clear, all the better to communicate the heart-stopping menace of their miniature explorations of heightened emotional states.

Monolake is the longtime project of Robert Henke, one of the two guys who created Ableton Live, the DAW that has launched a million laptop performances. His music sounds as you would expect the music of a software engineer to sound: seamless, systematized, enumerated, and cold. His performance was billed “The Ghosts In Surround,” a reference to his new album Ghosts, as well as the multi-channel mixing of his set. The irony of an artist named Monolake performing in surround sound was apparently lost on the organizers of the event. I won’t describe the set because it was indistinguishable from the recordings; even the surround mixing didn’t seem to add much dimension to music that is technically impressive but emotionally remote. Coming at the end of so many great performances, and starting well after 3 a.m. when most had peaked and were on the downhill slope, Monolake could not help being something of a letdown. On any other bill, his performance would have been a highlight.

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True Horizons: Sun Araw, Inner Tube, pole
[Friday, April 20 @ (Le) Poisson Rouge]
By Tim Terhaar

I arrived a bit late for Inner Tube’s set. It was New Age computer-and-guitar wankery, not dangerous in the least, nor urgent, nor necessary. During the last song, a guy walked up to me and said, “Has anybody started playing yet?” I pointed: “He’s playing right there.”

I was worried that the rest of the night would go the way of all the other performances I’d seen at Unsound. (I think not dangerous is the most concise way of describing their common failing.) pole (Stefan Betke, a middle-aged German man who looks like he could be a retired golfer or pro poker player) began tweaking knobs. He was making some strange high-end noises, but it wasn’t particularly special. Then the bass dropped, and I mean BASS. I could feel it in my chest, and for the better part of an hour, I was transfixed and transported, gyrating and wishing for once that everyone would let their shit go and just dance. This was the only show I saw at the festival that was serious and funky. Will be buying some pole records.

Sun Araw was four dudes I probably wouldn’t get along with. The set was hip; kind of a mess, kind of sucky. I left early, but other people seemed to be down with it, if not getting down to it.

Transgression: Lustmord, Biosphere
[Saturday, April 21 @ West Park Presbyterian Church]
By C Monster

So, aside from going to see Lustmord and Biosphere get super fucking serious here of all places, I had to leave my girlfriend across the street because we were too cheap to pay her entry. But arriving right at the beginning of they’s set, shit starts to get real: indistinct talking from either the stage or audience, switching taps and twitches, overture atop of overturn atop of overturn, etc. Lectures on thinking happened and it got kitschy, so I zoned in on the screen behind them displaying black-and-white nature and landscapes. Absorbed in colorless trans-views and -sound, there was patience in the audience as sounds chiseled away at their being.

Away from all this land, Lustmord and Biosphere led the audience to a beyond blanket of sound and meditation. In that landscape, the viewers are led both musically and visually (upon their screen) to a place hidden, yet past our existence. Humming scorched any hearing I had the rest of that night. Swelling between myself, their instruments, that dude who keeps taking pictures, cameras they used to film, and the church began to fuse everything into one vibrating entity. Which also turned on my dead phone, as my girlfriend was calling me from across the street. Beating the crowd, I raced out only to hear my girlfriend’s inquiries on the ritual I just experienced and if there was anything that climbed out of the dead body she assumed was sacrificed.

Bass Mutations: Distal, Nguzunguzu, 2562, Sepalcure, Dave Q
[Saturday, April 21 @ Indie Screen]
By Art Ivan

This year’s Bass Mutations night of the Unsound festival took place at Indie Screen, a venue I’ve passed by for years on my way to either Death By Audio, 285 Kent, or Glasslands in a small but ever-increasingly bustling block/corner of Kent Ave between South 1st and 2nd in Williamsburg, overlooked by an enormous, towering decrepit factory and along the East River. In a positive sign of growing relevance and significance within the electronic and bass music scenes, the party was thrown by Percussion Lab and Dub War (NYC), and started off with current resident Dave Q, who got it going strong by only 10:30.

There was no mistaking the focus of the event was BASS: upon entering the venue — which is, in actuality an independent movie theatre with a bar — I noticed the performance space overlooking everything and everyone from a balcony; under it was a set of speakers emitting blaring beats of such density as to literally dissolve one’s tympanic membranes, and you couldn’t escape them, even when wandering into other areas such as the actual movie theatre, which was showing all manner of short films, hand-drawn and computer-generated animations, lights, shapes, birds flying, clouds, scenes that seemed to have been left on the cutting-room floor of Blade Runner, sped-up footage of city streets, ballet, King Kong, Babes in Toyland… all the while, viewers engaged in all sorts of activities, which grew all the more daring as the night wore on, ranging from dancing on the seats, to the active use of illicit substances, to possibly, well, intercourse… yeah.

The bass having drowned out almost all else pertaining to sense and sensation — and perhaps I’m exaggerating as a result of partly having had more than a few drinks — Dave Q (who at one point yelled he just wanted to play some drum ‘n’ bass, or “whatever you call it these days”) seemed to blend seamlessly into Sepalcure’s schizophrenic old-school homages, and from there to 2562’s house and dubstep-ish variations and then Nguzunguzu’s inventive bleeps and bloops, all the way into arguable headliner Distal, but by then, I reason I must have been effectively rendered incapable of reporting on what occurred thereafter.

Fade Out: Sun Araw vs. Heat Wave, Eltron John, Maria Minerva, Napszyklat
[Sunday, April 22 @ Glasslands]
By C Monster

Napszyklat was slick. They got them deep beats, which world-ruled. Their vocals weren’t totally a style I was into, but they were into it WAY hard, so I bobbed, ya dig? Went back stage with Alex Gray [of Heat Wave] after, and they were so Polish-ly verklempt that when I was saying, “You guys were feeling that set,” I only received sweat and nods.

Maria Minerva (pictured) gave 100% too. I mean, like, performance-wise, as someone who’s caught the MC ego bug, I’d rather Maria Minerva handle shit on stage than anyone else. She questioned why there was no whiskey accompanying her between her first and second harsh-crooned track. And her backgrounds were real real: work-out dancing, the Milky Way, a hurricane, etc. Deep electronic melodies surged and the stage strobe-light seemed to display the rainbow intermittently. Some of it was cut up super-fresh too, like her first album Tallinn At Dawn. Shit was 3D in a real way.

The Eltron John set consisted of talking to Jonathan Dean about some nasty shit and how hurricanes are not cool. Eltron John was some jam-dance shit, and it got all the Italian ladies bopping. Yeah-yeah, though. Attention was my first priority at this point. Like, rock ‘n’ roll and all that jazz, yeah?

The main event-slash-after-after-after party was a Sun Araw vs. Heat Wave DJ set, which expectedly caved the roof in. It was a rainy night to begin with, but if some of that Cali weather were temp’ing outside, and the roof had actually been torn off, the moisture would’ve been welcomed by savagely dancing audience members. Oh, they brought that Fornia-funk via soul-zones to the East Coast way hard. Without remorse. Gray turned his faucet to drippy and was wearing a kick-ass purple shirt with yellow guitars on it. But Cameron Stallones boiled them noodle beats, strained ‘em, and by a mustache hair, won the live versus!

Interview: Sleigh Bells

John Crowell — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000

by John Crowell • April 2012

Sleigh Bells’ story — a former hardcore rocker has a chance encounter with a former teen-bopper etc. — is so ingrained in the fabric of their mythos it doesn’t bear retreading here. With their continued artistic output and bombastic presentation, guitarist/producer Derek Miller and singer Alexis Krauss have progressed beyond their auspicious beginnings into an artistic entity that can no longer be succinctly tied up into a snappy blog-post paragraph.

The duo released its sophomore album, Reign of Terror, in February. It was saddled with the responsibility of being one of 2012’s most eagerly-awaited albums, especially after the breakout success of Sleigh Bells’ explosive debut, 2010’s Treats. Miller will be the first to acknowledge reactions to the record have been mixed, especially when, inevitably, compared to Treats’ aggressive sugary aural assault. But he’ll also be the first to point out he was expressing a different mindset with Reign of Terror. He says he can already feel more artistic progression under way for a third record.

He recently took some time to speak with Tiny Mix Tapes about how the new music came together and how much he believes, and hopes, fans will follow Sleigh Bells there.

You’ve been touring for several weeks since the release of Reign of Terror. What has the audience reaction to the new songs been like as compared to the older songs?

Every week, the reaction gets closer and closer. I mean, Treats has been out for almost two years, so people are [still] super-psyched to hear those songs. There are people who are still coming to that record so it’s brand new to them. Every three or four shows more people know the new record, so that’s obviously a good sign.

It’s really a trap to fall in to when people only need you for one record and then they just sit there through the rest of your songs. You always have to worry about that. Treats was received [well] almost across the board. Second records are difficult, it’s just a fact of life. But I love the new one, I really do. I feel really good about it. People seem really into it.

Reign of Terror has a darker vibe than Treats throughout, but occasionally a more concentrated song-based structure as well, so the total feeling it generates is maybe a little more serious. Do you hear that in the songs?

That’s fair. It came from a very different place. Treats was a very “up” record. There’s almost zero cohesion to it and that’s what I love about it. On Reign of Terror, I was working with a [more] limited color palette. It’s very much a guitar record, and it’s a very claustrophobic, depressed record. It differs from Treats in that way.

[Reign of Terror] just came out, but it’s a little older for me. We finished tracking around Halloween, and I don’t feel like that person anymore. I’ve been working on a lot of new stuff. There’s an ecstatic, “up,” positive feeling creeping back into the new stuff, because I got a lot of stuff off my chest with Reign of Terror.

I played in a hardcore band [Poison The Well] for six years with four other people. There were too many cooks in the kitchen, and it was too hard to make a living. Splitting a buck five ways was not as much fun as splitting a buck two ways, if I’m being honest. We have to be practical.

Oh wow, so you’re already working on new material?

It’s really too soon to be talking about it, but I never stop working. That’s what sustains me on the road. We do a lot of touring, which I enjoy. I love playing live and I love being in a different city every night. But having new material that I feel like is the best work that we’ve done is what keeps me going. I can play 200 shows knowing that at the end of 200 shows I can go back into the studio and hopefully do the best work of my life. It always starts with the first new song, when I’m like, “Oh my God!” and I won’t shut up about it to my friends and I play Alexis the demos and she gets involved. That’s really what sustains us on the road.

I saw a video interview with you a couple years ago where you showed off your music production area. It seemed pretty Spartan, with a MicroKorg hooked directly into Logic on your laptop. Are things still that straightforward?

It got a little more complex with Reign of Terror, but now I’ve sorta moved away… dude, I don’t even use Logic. I don’t even fuck with software. I have a synth that Teenage Engineering makes called the OP-1, and I use my iPhone voice recorder, and my guitar – that’s it. I didn’t even bring my interface on tour. I haven’t opened Logic in months, and it feels great [laughs].

The skeleton of the song has to be solid. If I’m excited by it using limited means, I know that when I do it “for real” (which is kind of a ridiculous concept) I’m really gonna love it. When I actually utilize my sound library and start […] chasing the sound I hear in my head I’m gonna get really psyched on it.

It’s funny, dude. For “Infinity Guitars,” [from Treats] I plugged my Alesis SR18 [drum machine], which you can buy at Guitar Center for $200, into… remember those shitty, white Belkin iMic’s? They were like the size of a quarter? I plugged my SR18 into the Belkin and then into Garage Band. You can’t really recognize the SR18 for what it is because I pushed the master so hard [the beats] don’t sound like the original source material.

I never thought I’d ever release that. It was like, “Let’s just use this for now and I’ll do it ‘for real’ later.” That’s a mistake bands make often – whenever you re-record a demo it’s always robbed of something. So I’m glad at the time we were making Treats we knew better than to make that mistake.

You’ve obviously come a long way since then. Was your recent appearance on Saturday Night Live something of a milestone for you?

It was really cool for my mom, but the only thing I really care about is making records. That’s what I’m in this for. Playing shows is amazing, and I love it. I’m all about making new music and pushing it as hard as I can. I’m in love with that moment when you do something new and you really, truly believe it’s the best thing you’ve ever done […] that’s the addiction.

It’s going to go away. It’s gonna dry up at some point; not anytime soon. I feel like Alexis and I are just getting started, but there’s a lot of fear and paranoia that it’ll go away because everyone loses it at some point, it’s just inevitable. That fear and paranoia is a big part of the creative energy for me.

I noticed from your appearance on Saturday Night Live that you’ve added a second guitarist to the touring lineup. Is he there to help you with the multiple guitar melodies on the new songs?

That’s exactly what it is. Reign of Terror is so guitar-heavy and there are so many guitar harmonies I just couldn’t sacrifice those live. It would drive me crazy. I play all sorts of rhythm, and any synth parts I can I just put on the track, but I’m not going to go so far as to put guitar parts on the track. That would be way too corny.

I can play 200 shows knowing that at the end of 200 shows I can go back into the studio and hopefully do the best work of my life.

It’s my good friend Jason Boyer, who does a band called Nerve City, which is really amazing. So he has his own thing going on, he’s just doing this as a favor. I’m also really obsessed with symmetry, so I like the fact that Alexis is in the middle and she has a guitar player on either side.

It’s another person to interact with on stage, and another one of my good friends who gets to come and be a part of this thing. Every day there’s a moment where we look at each other, and we feel like we’re getting away with murder. It’s like, “They’re paying us to do this? Are you kidding?” We’re really bad with having strictly professional relationships. Alexis and I are really close to everyone we work with. So a lot of times it feels like a family business, even though none of us are siblings.

Sleigh Bells has a very distinct sequenced-drum sound, but would you ever consider expanding to a full band with a drummer and bassist?

It’s not something I foresee. I can almost guarantee that we will never expand past this lineup. I tried practicing with a drummer, but there’s way too much compromise, sonically. I’m a producer, so I’m into detail, and I can’t replace a [Roland TR-]808 with some guy’s right foot on a kick drum. I can’t do it. And I don’t want to stack it because it will never sound perfect, it’ll be kind of flammy.

I feel like we sound sort of like a nu-metal band with a drummer, to be honest. It turns us into too much of a rock band, and I never want to be in a rock band again. I did that. I played in a hardcore band [Poison The Well] for six years with four other people. There were too many cooks in the kitchen, and it was too hard to make a living. Splitting a buck five ways was not as much fun as splitting a buck two ways, if I’m being honest. We have to be practical. So I don’t think we’ll add any other members. I’m really comfortable with the setup.

In your working relationship with Alexis, is there a special kind of intensity to creating music with only one other person?

It gets very intimate and you really can’t hide any of your vulnerabilities. You have to be totally honest and they have to be totally honest with you. To this day, I get super-nervous when I’m presenting a new idea to her, and vice-versa. I do a lot of really bad work, and thankfully no one has to hear it [laughs].

We worked a little more closely on the melodies on Reign of Terror, although I wrote most of the music and lyrics. But the last song we recorded, “Comeback Kid,” I had recorded the instrumental and I wasn’t even planning to include it on the record because I wasn’t sure what it was or if it would be interesting. It’s a handful of power chords, really. But I gave it to her, and I said “This is yours, do whatever you want with it.” I handed it over, and she had the entire song in five minutes.

It was one of the only optimistic songs on the record and was a great way to wrap everything up. Her sense of melody is so much stronger than mine. What she does is so much more memorable and sophisticated than anything I can do in terms of writing melodies. So I think that’s the next step for us. I’m going to focus on production and arrangement, and just give her instrumentals and let her do her thing.

The setup of your live show allows you to interact with the audience in such a unique way. It seems to include the best parts of rock attitude and passion with all the audience-participation of good electronic and DJ-produced music. Do you ever look at it as a kind of performance art?

It’s really a trap to fall in to when people only need you for one record and then they just sit there through the rest of your songs.

I personally wouldn’t call it performance art, but it does differ from Poison The Well in that, because I’m not limited to working with guitar/bass/drums, we can do more sonically. I can’t imagine ever going back. It was such a limited palette. I can turn anything into a kick drum now, and that excites me. I don’t have to use a rock snare, I can use snaps or I can create my own. It’s addictive. Really, that’s what I like most about it in terms of the differences between the two. It’s the freedom to do more sonically.

Sleigh Bells has a very distinctive style. Is there a conscious direction to the way the two of you dress and present yourselves?

We basically wear what makes us comfortable. I never considered myself a fashionable guy. You know, just jeans and t-shirts. When Treats came out I was so distracted and shell-shocked by a number of personal events I was going through that the aesthetic was not something I paid attention to. I very much had bigger fish to fry. I’m actually amazed that I was able to tour on that record and get everything done because I was going through such a horrible time.

It’s been a couple years now, and I worked through it just like anybody works through tragedy. You just have to become a stronger person. I got a lot of self-confidence back. I stopped apologizing for who I was, what I wanted, how I wanted to look, and the guitars I wanted to play. I remember when I started playing Jacksons people thought I was kidding. They thought I was making a joke, that I was being ironic. I just remember thinking, “Fuck you guys. I’m not sorry. I’m not gonna apologize.” That’s just a part of growing up and coming into your own and being your own person. For me that meant playing Jacksons and [telling Alexis] “I kinda wanna make a metal record, is that okay with you?” She was like, “Great!”

And in terms of the aesthetic, our clothing, it just felt natural to me. I wanted custom lettermans, and I had a couple of bucks and could definitely get them made, so I did. And I want to stand in front of a wall of Marshalls. Sure, half of them aren’t working, everybody knows that. But half of them are, and it looks really fucking cool.

The aesthetic has everything to do with that. Just me being honest, and Alexis being honest, with ourselves and how we want to present ourselves and the things we really like. Who wouldn’t want to get onstage in a studded leather jacket and scream into a microphone? It’s ridiculous and over-the-top, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun.