Live review: Published on Tiny Mix Tapes.com, May 2009.
93 Feet East
Brick Lane, London, UK
Monday 11 May
I know it's wack to hear the culinary details of the reason for missing the support bands but with this Brooklyn duo playing in the Indian Restaurant-laden area of 'London's Brick Lane, I'm hopefully at least partially excused. I had Lamb Vindaloo, by the way; delicious, but probably not the most ideal given Telepathe's propensity for massively heavy bass. Sure, the meticulously produced {Dance Mother} was big on the low end as much as the high melodies and percussion, but live, good grief, you could certainly feel it.
Of course, it wasn't senseless; Telepathe's skewing of hip-hop sounds lets the bass propel their pop/dance ballads like a heartbeat. Live, there's obviously a slight lost of {Dance Mother}'s sheen but it's semi-detached fervour was in full force, beats plodding, vocals soaring just slightly above. Telepathe's sound exudes a particularly sensual feeling, taking dance music's overt sexuality (that often ends up either cringey/forced or just kitsch) and subverting it, enjoying the small emotive flights and club aesthetics as much as a pop romanticism. I was never sure how 'danceable' their stuff was, though, and this full-to-the-brim venue didn't make that any clearer (you could barely move let alone flail; not that it looked like many at this East London venue would've let particularly loose, but that could just be judgemental of me) but did shed light on their paradoxic bedroom vs club feeling; it's a bit of both, deftly combining respective feelings for something warm and in between. Working on a couple of synths and samplers and playing pretty much all the songs from the recent record, there was always a distinct and audible passion, and even if, like these two, it's stylised, dressed up in white and surrounded by smoke, it resonated and felt real for sure.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Jackie-O Motherfucker - Ballad Of The Revolution
Album review: Published in NARC Magazine, July 2009.
4/5
Given this Portland band's propensity towards Zabriskie Point-style delirium and, this new one kicks off pretty languid. Opening track “The Valley Of Fire” is total sun-stroked bliss with its ambient lulls and hazy melodies. It's true they've previously mined similar stoned psych, slow and super landscapey, but this quietly experimental new album flows particularly free. They build breathy and gentle rock with folk structures and free improvisation, heavy on the desert valley imagery and nocturnal feelings. The blood of these sprawled jams is heavy with a reminiscence of vague and vast American rock lineage, and even if their approach to their history is oblique, they fit right in to a wider West Coast lineage, its extensive mythos glinting bright and permanently in their eyes. Ballad Of The Revolution rolls pretty gradually for the first few before breaking deeper into more Midwestern evocations. with Honey Owens' (who makes solo Pacific Midwestern dreams as Valet and plays bass for Atlas Sound) signature imagestic guitar refracting off more organic dusty guitars on “Lost Jimmy Walen”, part Lynch lament with Willie Nelson a din in the distance. Through these liquidy passages, JOMF are always searching for an indelible humanness. It's this massive spirit that provides particular resonance to these beautiful and weird ballads.
4/5
Given this Portland band's propensity towards Zabriskie Point-style delirium and, this new one kicks off pretty languid. Opening track “The Valley Of Fire” is total sun-stroked bliss with its ambient lulls and hazy melodies. It's true they've previously mined similar stoned psych, slow and super landscapey, but this quietly experimental new album flows particularly free. They build breathy and gentle rock with folk structures and free improvisation, heavy on the desert valley imagery and nocturnal feelings. The blood of these sprawled jams is heavy with a reminiscence of vague and vast American rock lineage, and even if their approach to their history is oblique, they fit right in to a wider West Coast lineage, its extensive mythos glinting bright and permanently in their eyes. Ballad Of The Revolution rolls pretty gradually for the first few before breaking deeper into more Midwestern evocations. with Honey Owens' (who makes solo Pacific Midwestern dreams as Valet and plays bass for Atlas Sound) signature imagestic guitar refracting off more organic dusty guitars on “Lost Jimmy Walen”, part Lynch lament with Willie Nelson a din in the distance. Through these liquidy passages, JOMF are always searching for an indelible humanness. It's this massive spirit that provides particular resonance to these beautiful and weird ballads.
Eat Skull
Interview/article: published in Dazed & Confused, July 2009.
You'd be forgiven for getting lost in all the tape fuzz and lo-fi scruff out there right now and likewise for getting lost in Portland four-piece Eat Skull's particularly weirdo adventures into it. It's dense, full of gunk and channelling a couple decades worth of Siltbreeze fuzz into their own contemporary American DIY, occupied also by pals like Times New Viking, Psychedelic Horseshit and The Whines. It's a scene and ethos that Rob Enbom, their guitarist/vocalist is well-schooled.
“People might write us off for being a mess or whatever, and sometimes we are. But we're not able to dumb it down to a level where people can uniformly enjoy it and we're too old and screwed up to do shit right. Sometimes we play good and sometimes we don't, but the ultimate thing about it is if you can't play like that, what's the point.”
They're certainly not trying to fake anyone out with this stuff. Check last year's Sick To Death with it's acid cartoon scribbles of Spock and other mutated nostalgia doodles; it's starts super condensed, all putrid melody and doesn't let up from there, holding The Clean and Harry Pussy like a broken talisman into nervy and claustrophobic pop/punk for crazed anthems that are ridiculously catchy given all that grossness.
“That was just the sound of the time” says Rob of a record frequently labelled as claustrophobic and skewed. “It was Winter and shitty and oppressive and grey and annoying and hard to find reason to be alive and stuff like that [laughs]. I didn't have a job and was smoking cigarette butts off the ground, poor and gross, questioning participating in the economy and fucking up really bad”.
Eat Skull's never a bummer, though, even through all that murk and feelings caught up in past punk angst. Their new record Wild And Inside is looser, and Rob calls it “lazier” too; just more of a casual band effort, which shows in the immediacy of “Heaven's Stranger” or facetiously Life Channel-esque “Oregon Dreaming”. Laid down in a set up recently made easier by moving their 8-track into Rob's room, their lo-fi aesthetics seem part choice and part necessity.
“I look on the internet sometimes and its just like 'oh, drag' because everyone's talking about lo-fi and they just don't understand, they think it's some big choice, but it's just something that makes sense; what would you rather record your music on, a computer or a four track? And I just prefer the latter, tape just sounds way better to me, so that's why the music comes out sounding that way. It's crappy when you get stuck in a computer, not everybody's good at those things”.
You'd be forgiven for getting lost in all the tape fuzz and lo-fi scruff out there right now and likewise for getting lost in Portland four-piece Eat Skull's particularly weirdo adventures into it. It's dense, full of gunk and channelling a couple decades worth of Siltbreeze fuzz into their own contemporary American DIY, occupied also by pals like Times New Viking, Psychedelic Horseshit and The Whines. It's a scene and ethos that Rob Enbom, their guitarist/vocalist is well-schooled.
“People might write us off for being a mess or whatever, and sometimes we are. But we're not able to dumb it down to a level where people can uniformly enjoy it and we're too old and screwed up to do shit right. Sometimes we play good and sometimes we don't, but the ultimate thing about it is if you can't play like that, what's the point.”
They're certainly not trying to fake anyone out with this stuff. Check last year's Sick To Death with it's acid cartoon scribbles of Spock and other mutated nostalgia doodles; it's starts super condensed, all putrid melody and doesn't let up from there, holding The Clean and Harry Pussy like a broken talisman into nervy and claustrophobic pop/punk for crazed anthems that are ridiculously catchy given all that grossness.
“That was just the sound of the time” says Rob of a record frequently labelled as claustrophobic and skewed. “It was Winter and shitty and oppressive and grey and annoying and hard to find reason to be alive and stuff like that [laughs]. I didn't have a job and was smoking cigarette butts off the ground, poor and gross, questioning participating in the economy and fucking up really bad”.
Eat Skull's never a bummer, though, even through all that murk and feelings caught up in past punk angst. Their new record Wild And Inside is looser, and Rob calls it “lazier” too; just more of a casual band effort, which shows in the immediacy of “Heaven's Stranger” or facetiously Life Channel-esque “Oregon Dreaming”. Laid down in a set up recently made easier by moving their 8-track into Rob's room, their lo-fi aesthetics seem part choice and part necessity.
“I look on the internet sometimes and its just like 'oh, drag' because everyone's talking about lo-fi and they just don't understand, they think it's some big choice, but it's just something that makes sense; what would you rather record your music on, a computer or a four track? And I just prefer the latter, tape just sounds way better to me, so that's why the music comes out sounding that way. It's crappy when you get stuck in a computer, not everybody's good at those things”.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Sublime Frequencies: Omar Souleyman and Group Doueh
Review: Published on Tiny Mix Tapes.com, June 2009.
[Star and Shadow; Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK]
[05-23-2009]
Newcastle’s premier cult cinema/low-key music venue filled up pretty quickly with people whose perceptions of Sublime Frequencies were probably as uneasy as mine. It’s definitely problematic to want to imbue the music with a certain esoteric quality, something that lifts it above some “World Music” compilation state of faraway-ness with manufactured "authenticity." Naturally, the music of this excellent UK tour is just more oblique sounds from unknown places (to me at least). Sun City Girls’ Alan Bishop (who also Djed and MC’d between bands) certainly has an ear for it.
Syrian Omar Souleyman interestingly took a turn opening the night with his massively electric colors and hyper-rhythms, adopting an aloofly stoic presence in white tunic dark glasses and red kieffa. The five-piece band maintained a deadpan stoked-ness, too, applying additional percussion and wobbly, wailing melodies to the rhythmic bombardment. Sometimes it almost felt like another whole dancebeat grooving underneath the main staccato sitar, coming off in every direction — real delirious and vibrant.
Group Doueh were scheduled to perform before Souleyman on all other UK dates, so the reversal tonight seemed a contrast to the enthusiasm of many. Not that it really mattered — the diverse crowd seemed just as excited for slower-paced rock as schizoid dance rhythms. Group Doueh are from the Western Sahara and have a more live feel, a desert rock kind of vibe: ultra melodic and recalling scorched 70s moments of the likes of James Brown with a dash of Holy Mountain-flavored psych. The performance was massively electric, and even if physically most of the group had a similar steadfastness to Souleyman’s, they must’ve been focusing on transcendence, sometimes feeling like some mutant Jimi Hendrix. Their guitars were highly rhythmic and their tones mostly sunny, leaving a warm glow to the concrete venue.
Not sure if the show was what everyone expected in Newcastle (a city usually skipped by good tours), but it invariably met my high hopes.
[Star and Shadow; Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK]
[05-23-2009]
Newcastle’s premier cult cinema/low-key music venue filled up pretty quickly with people whose perceptions of Sublime Frequencies were probably as uneasy as mine. It’s definitely problematic to want to imbue the music with a certain esoteric quality, something that lifts it above some “World Music” compilation state of faraway-ness with manufactured "authenticity." Naturally, the music of this excellent UK tour is just more oblique sounds from unknown places (to me at least). Sun City Girls’ Alan Bishop (who also Djed and MC’d between bands) certainly has an ear for it.
Syrian Omar Souleyman interestingly took a turn opening the night with his massively electric colors and hyper-rhythms, adopting an aloofly stoic presence in white tunic dark glasses and red kieffa. The five-piece band maintained a deadpan stoked-ness, too, applying additional percussion and wobbly, wailing melodies to the rhythmic bombardment. Sometimes it almost felt like another whole dancebeat grooving underneath the main staccato sitar, coming off in every direction — real delirious and vibrant.
Group Doueh were scheduled to perform before Souleyman on all other UK dates, so the reversal tonight seemed a contrast to the enthusiasm of many. Not that it really mattered — the diverse crowd seemed just as excited for slower-paced rock as schizoid dance rhythms. Group Doueh are from the Western Sahara and have a more live feel, a desert rock kind of vibe: ultra melodic and recalling scorched 70s moments of the likes of James Brown with a dash of Holy Mountain-flavored psych. The performance was massively electric, and even if physically most of the group had a similar steadfastness to Souleyman’s, they must’ve been focusing on transcendence, sometimes feeling like some mutant Jimi Hendrix. Their guitars were highly rhythmic and their tones mostly sunny, leaving a warm glow to the concrete venue.
Not sure if the show was what everyone expected in Newcastle (a city usually skipped by good tours), but it invariably met my high hopes.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Pocahaunted
Article: Published in NARC Magazine, June 2009.
Occupying a particularly mystic part of LA's grungey experimental scene, the duo of Pocahaunted (Amanda and Bethany) are one of the most prolific. The self proclaimed “Olsen twins of drone” (because one dresses like a crazy and one like a fancy) play hallowed and spacious desert ballads, usually stretching out beyond the ten minute mark for all-absorbing feel. Often driven by plodding and distant tom drums, they tie dye dark soundscapes with vibrant colours, way off melodies and smouldered atmosperics.
“I think we just aim to have a final product that is somewhat modern-sounding mixed with something tribal- and antique-sounding. In our personal lives, we both listen to mostly older music, so I think we tend to draw from what it is we listen to. We both have very eclectic tastes in what we listen to, which essentially is the reason we change so much. We have so many influences and so many things we want to try.”
Working on a mostly improvised basis, their pride in “being a band that changes” makes sense across an oeuvre that at times focuses on dub (Island Diamonds) or “dark raga” (Mirror Mics) or tribal soul, like last year's Chains. The soul part is true, coming out particularly in Amanda's wandering and melodic vocals, but it's also backed by a super realized aesthetic, obsessed with both pop culture (dark New Age shit, Patrick Dempsey) as much as ancient histories and human emotion.
“Our aesthetic is really important to us” says Bethany. “If we were just our band making music and putting it out there with no mystique, we’d be utterly forgettable and boring. Our art helps us, like our personalities help us.”
“Also, we’re women” adds Amanda” “and so I think to not rest on the weird laurels of Bethany’s beautiful goddess voice, we want a bit of spook or mystery. Sometimes I think we’re performance art.”
That'd certainly be true on both recordings and their live set, blurring the lines between conventional pop and sound art. In doing so, they recall a variety of their peers (such as Christina Carter, Robedoor, Magic Lantern or Inca Ore) as well as a varied range of classic hits and a bunch of weird old esoterica. Most recently, Passage, with it's Fleetwood Mac-style retrograde art work calls on a couple of their good pals, Bobb Bruno and Cameron Stallones, the latter of which plays as more tropical lo-fi project Sun Araw (with whom they're touring the UK with). It's their fullest sounding yet, sensual and smoked out.
Even if they often joke about sometimes feeling like they 'just play to dirty guys' (in the holey tshirt/DIY sense), there lo-fi explorations, while admittedly totally flannel or ripped denim, are powerfully feminine.
Occupying a particularly mystic part of LA's grungey experimental scene, the duo of Pocahaunted (Amanda and Bethany) are one of the most prolific. The self proclaimed “Olsen twins of drone” (because one dresses like a crazy and one like a fancy) play hallowed and spacious desert ballads, usually stretching out beyond the ten minute mark for all-absorbing feel. Often driven by plodding and distant tom drums, they tie dye dark soundscapes with vibrant colours, way off melodies and smouldered atmosperics.
“I think we just aim to have a final product that is somewhat modern-sounding mixed with something tribal- and antique-sounding. In our personal lives, we both listen to mostly older music, so I think we tend to draw from what it is we listen to. We both have very eclectic tastes in what we listen to, which essentially is the reason we change so much. We have so many influences and so many things we want to try.”
Working on a mostly improvised basis, their pride in “being a band that changes” makes sense across an oeuvre that at times focuses on dub (Island Diamonds) or “dark raga” (Mirror Mics) or tribal soul, like last year's Chains. The soul part is true, coming out particularly in Amanda's wandering and melodic vocals, but it's also backed by a super realized aesthetic, obsessed with both pop culture (dark New Age shit, Patrick Dempsey) as much as ancient histories and human emotion.
“Our aesthetic is really important to us” says Bethany. “If we were just our band making music and putting it out there with no mystique, we’d be utterly forgettable and boring. Our art helps us, like our personalities help us.”
“Also, we’re women” adds Amanda” “and so I think to not rest on the weird laurels of Bethany’s beautiful goddess voice, we want a bit of spook or mystery. Sometimes I think we’re performance art.”
That'd certainly be true on both recordings and their live set, blurring the lines between conventional pop and sound art. In doing so, they recall a variety of their peers (such as Christina Carter, Robedoor, Magic Lantern or Inca Ore) as well as a varied range of classic hits and a bunch of weird old esoterica. Most recently, Passage, with it's Fleetwood Mac-style retrograde art work calls on a couple of their good pals, Bobb Bruno and Cameron Stallones, the latter of which plays as more tropical lo-fi project Sun Araw (with whom they're touring the UK with). It's their fullest sounding yet, sensual and smoked out.
Even if they often joke about sometimes feeling like they 'just play to dirty guys' (in the holey tshirt/DIY sense), there lo-fi explorations, while admittedly totally flannel or ripped denim, are powerfully feminine.
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Gentle Friendly
Interview/article: Published in Dazed & Confused, June 2009.
There's a mixtape London two-piece Gentle Friendly (supposedly) found that's been kicking around the internet for a while now, and even if it most of its 15 minutes are made up of dark ambient sparkle and Top 40 hip-hop jams, it's a weirdly apt reference point for their own musical style and ethos. They didn't really find it in the glovebox of a burnt out VW like the story goes; David Maurice (keyboards/vocals) made it himself and leaked it as a look at some inspiration for their 7” of the same name. And, like all the equipment they play with, the cover was also a found object from a market; someone else's mixtape without the tape inside or tracklist, just the cover. Not quite from the dumpster from which their drum kit was salvaged, but the mystique's there for sure, shooting out of the cracks in their junkyard pop like rainbows.
“I think that kind of way of working allows you to limit yourself and that's really important” says Dan Boyle (drums/vocals), sitting in The Lexington before their show with Baltimore colour punks Ponytail. “We always talk about just using the gear that we have and not trying to have tonnes of different equipment, to keep it simple and just write the basics of the song on a Casio keyboard and a drum set.”
It's pretty way out, then, that the two have built such ramshackle joy out of so many parts and colours. David's keyboard (stolen from a University in Birmingham) is mostly broken and lets out bursts almost as energised as his vocal yelps. Duct-taped chords and synth skronk rub against more abrasive ambient textures and generally clatter together to form totally imperfect pop perfection, most of which occurs in their basement and living room in London, cluttered with demo tapes and half-formed songs of both noise and melody.
“There are a lot of songs” Dan says, “nearly a hundred, easily, but we just never use any of them. So we've always got tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of songs, so we go through all our cassette tapes and think 'maybe we'll try and record this one' and sometimes it works, sometimes it sounds shitty, but we just pick the best ones and I think it kind of works.”
Gently Friendly aren't exactly cave dwellers but their insular bedroom approach to recording features a similar feverish vibe to that of those frenzied recordings. There's a cassette and a couple of 7” releases, but their first full length is due on Upset the Rhythm this month that'll highlight their distinct, gritty euphoria in new ways. For Dan, it's definitely “like that feel you hear on the Night Tape mixtape; more patchworky, I think” with David finding sounds by “starting with something and ripping it apart, then making another part out of that and putting it together until everything gels. It's a lot deeper and slower, and there's a lot more depth to it in terms of texture. There's more bass, and we've been focusing more on making the sounds themselves just right. We chose everything very deliberately from that mass of material. It all fits together and kind of work, somehow. ”
There's a mixtape London two-piece Gentle Friendly (supposedly) found that's been kicking around the internet for a while now, and even if it most of its 15 minutes are made up of dark ambient sparkle and Top 40 hip-hop jams, it's a weirdly apt reference point for their own musical style and ethos. They didn't really find it in the glovebox of a burnt out VW like the story goes; David Maurice (keyboards/vocals) made it himself and leaked it as a look at some inspiration for their 7” of the same name. And, like all the equipment they play with, the cover was also a found object from a market; someone else's mixtape without the tape inside or tracklist, just the cover. Not quite from the dumpster from which their drum kit was salvaged, but the mystique's there for sure, shooting out of the cracks in their junkyard pop like rainbows.
“I think that kind of way of working allows you to limit yourself and that's really important” says Dan Boyle (drums/vocals), sitting in The Lexington before their show with Baltimore colour punks Ponytail. “We always talk about just using the gear that we have and not trying to have tonnes of different equipment, to keep it simple and just write the basics of the song on a Casio keyboard and a drum set.”
It's pretty way out, then, that the two have built such ramshackle joy out of so many parts and colours. David's keyboard (stolen from a University in Birmingham) is mostly broken and lets out bursts almost as energised as his vocal yelps. Duct-taped chords and synth skronk rub against more abrasive ambient textures and generally clatter together to form totally imperfect pop perfection, most of which occurs in their basement and living room in London, cluttered with demo tapes and half-formed songs of both noise and melody.
“There are a lot of songs” Dan says, “nearly a hundred, easily, but we just never use any of them. So we've always got tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of songs, so we go through all our cassette tapes and think 'maybe we'll try and record this one' and sometimes it works, sometimes it sounds shitty, but we just pick the best ones and I think it kind of works.”
Gently Friendly aren't exactly cave dwellers but their insular bedroom approach to recording features a similar feverish vibe to that of those frenzied recordings. There's a cassette and a couple of 7” releases, but their first full length is due on Upset the Rhythm this month that'll highlight their distinct, gritty euphoria in new ways. For Dan, it's definitely “like that feel you hear on the Night Tape mixtape; more patchworky, I think” with David finding sounds by “starting with something and ripping it apart, then making another part out of that and putting it together until everything gels. It's a lot deeper and slower, and there's a lot more depth to it in terms of texture. There's more bass, and we've been focusing more on making the sounds themselves just right. We chose everything very deliberately from that mass of material. It all fits together and kind of work, somehow. ”
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Extra Golden
Interview: Published on Tiny Mix Tapes.com, May 2009.
"There’s not a lot of African music that’s contemplative or music for music’s sake; it tends to serve a purpose."
[March 2009]
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Extra Golden came about through the meeting of two initially very separate and perhaps unlikely entities: Kenya’s Orchestra Extra Solar Africa and American rock band Golden. The beginnings of the project were fairly casual, almost a chance happening when Ian Eagleson was in Africa studying musicology. Starting out jamming in an apartment in Nairobi with African musicians Onyango Wuod Omari and Otieno Jagwasi, they’ve since released three albums on Thrill Jockey, most recently Thank You Very Quickly, and occupy a unique space in both esoteric music scenes and the wider international landscape. Playing a sunny style of rock that combines elements of one of Kenya’s native Benga sounds with a Western aesthetic, it turns out there are plenty of parallels between the two.
I talked to member Alex Minoff in a venue’s dressing room before they opened the first show of the African Soul Rebels UK Tour, a prominent showcase of contemporary African music headlined by Baaba Maal and Oliver Mtukudzi, who are by all means much more well-known than Extra Golden. Interestingly (or ignorantly), Extra Golden were the only ones of the three I was familiar with, thanks to coverage of the band in independent media. We discussed this phenomenon, along with Vampire Weekend, major chords, and Barack Obama.
----
A lot of the coverage you guys get is from indie media or alternative magazines. Is it a different sort of sphere from where you’re coming from?
Ian and I had played in bands before, and we’ve always been in the ‘rock world.’ This band is interesting, because it allows us to be in two worlds at once, especially with this tour, due to the fact that we have African musicians in the band. But then we can still do things like play the Pitchfork Festival, which is pretty cool.
With the indier sort of sphere, it seems more insular in a way, compared to the more public or mainstream sphere.
You mean better-known?
Well, in a way, but more the type of information/content. Not that, say, a large website like Pitchfork is super esoteric, but it’s certainly not mainstream.
Right, right. Yeah, I mean, sort of “world music” or the African branch of that isn’t necessarily that popular in a broad sense of things either, but it definitely has a different audience, so ideally we can have more than one audience.
I thought it was interesting how The New York Times had asked what you guys thought about Vampire Weekend and you hadn’t really listened to it. To draw that link or assumption seems quite funny in a way.
That kind of started when this guy wrote an article for it about 18 months ago. He interviewed Ian and I for a really long time. That was before Vampire Weekend even had an album, but they were already huge. I’m not really sure how that happens. I’ve certainly never been fortunate enough to be part of something that huge without doing anything [laughs], but yeah, so at that point, it was just a little bit weird, because I wasn’t even sure if this band had even played a show outside of their hometown, you know? [laughs] Obviously, since then, they’ve gotten a lot more well-known. But I think of them as a pop band, really.
That’s kind of the crux of that comparison being a bit off.
That’s true, yeah. I think people are curious what we think of it because, well, for different reasons; they think that we’re way more “authentic”, because we have actual African musicians in the band, or some people ask us because they see our band as doing the same thing. I definitely wouldn’t say we’re doing the same thing. It’s not that one is better than the other, of course — it’s just different.
With that idea of authenticity, it’s almost a risky area, as in, people can put their own ideas of what it is to be authentic onto it.
Yeah, I think there are a lot of people who don’t like us probably because we’re not authentic, because we’re not just Africans.
Do you ever cop any flack for that?
No, not really. I mean, we get a lot of people asking us what we think about that [laughs], but no ones ever really — at least that I’ve seen — accused us of anything. But you know, music is music; the people that are concerned about that kind of thing have different concerns from musicians, you know. Musicians have a lot more of a laissez-faire approach to that sort of thing. It’s not something we ever really sit down and talk about when we’re working on music.
Okay, well, that stuff aside — I guess that’s kind of journalistic-focused – with a track on the new album like “Obama,” which seems overtly political...
Well, it’s actually not political at all. When we wrote that song – that’s actually not on Thank You Very Quickly by the way.
Oh. Right, sorry [laughs]. That’s pretty good journalism right there; I must’ve got mixed up on iTunes before.
Oh okay [laughs]. Yeah, we wrote it a few years ago. It was actually because Obama and his office helped us secure visas to get the other guys into the U.S. It’s pretty normal in Kenyan music to sing songs thanking people for doing something. So, that was really just a song saying “thanks for helping us get these visas,” so there wasn’t anything political about it.
Yeah, he wasn’t a presidential candidate back then, of course. I was wondering, though, if you did treat any of the stuff you do as being political?
We don’t overtly try to be political, but a lot of our existence and a lot of things that have happened to us, it becomes political because of what has happened or draws attention to certain issues. Whether it be immigration, or — I mean, what we had to go through to get these guys to the states, it took months and months to make that happen.
Right, I mean that was exactly around the time when Bush was so focused on homeland security.
Yeah, definitely. Without Obama’s office, we never would’ve been able to get them over, especially with the time issues we had. You have to provide a lot of stuff, like press that shows that these guys are actual musicians; you have to have letters of invitation and also recommendation as well. So they came back to us after the initial application and said, “we want more,” so that’s when Obama’s office really helped out.
Yeah, it’s certainly a nice way to say thanks; a nice sunny pop song. Actually, I was thinking that the general sunniness and optimism in Extra Golden seems personally political in a way — in a loose way.
It’s pretty interesting, actually; the style of music that the Kenyans play is all in major chords. The subject matter that they’re singing about is not necessarily positive or optimistic. But because they use those types of chords, to someone like you or me — a Westerner — we associate it with happiness, like beach music or something.
Totally. The G major chord is inherently a happy sound for us.
Exactly, and to our ears, a minor chord is something that instantly implies some sort of sadness. But that’s not the case in Kenya, or in other places too. If you think about some weird traditional Asian music, to you or me, it’s really weird-sounding and bizarre and might not make any sense, but that’s just what their ears are used to. So, to them, they don’t listen to it and say “yeah man, we make some really weird shit.” It’s just what they grew up with.
Another thing I had read was that there are a lot of similarities that you found with Benga music and Western rock music?
Right, yeah. Well, the chord progressions that they use are 1-4-5 progressions, which are the basic rock ‘n’ roll/blues chord progressions. So it’s very similar in that way, and also just in the context, with electric guitar, bass, drums, singer; it’s not like there are too many weird instruments being thrown in there.
Is it more of a dance music than, say, rock music?
It serves a purpose. There’s not a lot of African music that’s contemplative or music for music’s sake; it tends to serve a purpose. So Benga bands, their function is to play and clubs and to make people dance.
Okay. I guess Benga isn’t a sort of style that a lot of people who listen to your music are overly aware of, [at least to] the more indie rock sort of audience. When did you noticed the attention from those media?
I think really the whole idea of indie music starting to use African sounds, it seems to me that kind of coincided with Vampire Weekend, and we’d released two albums before they’d made an album. Honestly, there’s some truth to the idea that maybe indie rock people are broadening their scope, but I think it’s something that is perpetuated or made bigger by people trying to find something to write about.
Do you ever feel like you get misconstrued by that?
Well, I guess I would just say that I kind of see ourselves as maybe a little outside of that, just because we’re a different style from a lot of that stuff, and because we’ve been doing it for longer and because we have people from Africa in the band. Ian and I were listening to African music a really long time ago, that was just kind of a shared passion back there. There’s been a growth in the availability of reissues of older African stuff.
Yeah, Soul Jazz are pretty good at that.
Yeah, and that stuff in general tends to focus more on being music that sounds like American music, but wasn’t made in America, say, beginning with Fela [Kuti], whose records were all reissued in the last 10 years or so. And that’s music as a starting point for someone who’s never listed to African music because it’s very comfortable; it’s like you’re listening to James Brown or something, but it’s just a little different. But the structures and the rhythms are not anything that’s going to confuse anyone. But like I said, that stuff seems to focus on a more genre sort of thing. There’s almost like a kitsch value to it.
Definitely, it’s often made out as quite an esoteric collection of sounds, but it’s never super abstruse or anything really. I was wondering, with Extra Golden, was part of it ever about giving other people a voice that they might not otherwise have?
It’s like with the politics thing; it’s just something that’s been an offshoot of it. When we made that first record, we weren’t planning on making a record or starting a band. I think that’s one of the nice things about our band, because if we’d gone there with a laptop and tried to find some guys and we’re gonna make a record, I think it would’ve come off a different way.
"There’s not a lot of African music that’s contemplative or music for music’s sake; it tends to serve a purpose."
[March 2009]
Extra Golden came about through the meeting of two initially very separate and perhaps unlikely entities: Kenya’s Orchestra Extra Solar Africa and American rock band Golden. The beginnings of the project were fairly casual, almost a chance happening when Ian Eagleson was in Africa studying musicology. Starting out jamming in an apartment in Nairobi with African musicians Onyango Wuod Omari and Otieno Jagwasi, they’ve since released three albums on Thrill Jockey, most recently Thank You Very Quickly, and occupy a unique space in both esoteric music scenes and the wider international landscape. Playing a sunny style of rock that combines elements of one of Kenya’s native Benga sounds with a Western aesthetic, it turns out there are plenty of parallels between the two.
I talked to member Alex Minoff in a venue’s dressing room before they opened the first show of the African Soul Rebels UK Tour, a prominent showcase of contemporary African music headlined by Baaba Maal and Oliver Mtukudzi, who are by all means much more well-known than Extra Golden. Interestingly (or ignorantly), Extra Golden were the only ones of the three I was familiar with, thanks to coverage of the band in independent media. We discussed this phenomenon, along with Vampire Weekend, major chords, and Barack Obama.
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A lot of the coverage you guys get is from indie media or alternative magazines. Is it a different sort of sphere from where you’re coming from?
Ian and I had played in bands before, and we’ve always been in the ‘rock world.’ This band is interesting, because it allows us to be in two worlds at once, especially with this tour, due to the fact that we have African musicians in the band. But then we can still do things like play the Pitchfork Festival, which is pretty cool.
With the indier sort of sphere, it seems more insular in a way, compared to the more public or mainstream sphere.
You mean better-known?
Well, in a way, but more the type of information/content. Not that, say, a large website like Pitchfork is super esoteric, but it’s certainly not mainstream.
Right, right. Yeah, I mean, sort of “world music” or the African branch of that isn’t necessarily that popular in a broad sense of things either, but it definitely has a different audience, so ideally we can have more than one audience.
I thought it was interesting how The New York Times had asked what you guys thought about Vampire Weekend and you hadn’t really listened to it. To draw that link or assumption seems quite funny in a way.
That kind of started when this guy wrote an article for it about 18 months ago. He interviewed Ian and I for a really long time. That was before Vampire Weekend even had an album, but they were already huge. I’m not really sure how that happens. I’ve certainly never been fortunate enough to be part of something that huge without doing anything [laughs], but yeah, so at that point, it was just a little bit weird, because I wasn’t even sure if this band had even played a show outside of their hometown, you know? [laughs] Obviously, since then, they’ve gotten a lot more well-known. But I think of them as a pop band, really.
That’s kind of the crux of that comparison being a bit off.
That’s true, yeah. I think people are curious what we think of it because, well, for different reasons; they think that we’re way more “authentic”, because we have actual African musicians in the band, or some people ask us because they see our band as doing the same thing. I definitely wouldn’t say we’re doing the same thing. It’s not that one is better than the other, of course — it’s just different.
With that idea of authenticity, it’s almost a risky area, as in, people can put their own ideas of what it is to be authentic onto it.
Yeah, I think there are a lot of people who don’t like us probably because we’re not authentic, because we’re not just Africans.
Do you ever cop any flack for that?
No, not really. I mean, we get a lot of people asking us what we think about that [laughs], but no ones ever really — at least that I’ve seen — accused us of anything. But you know, music is music; the people that are concerned about that kind of thing have different concerns from musicians, you know. Musicians have a lot more of a laissez-faire approach to that sort of thing. It’s not something we ever really sit down and talk about when we’re working on music.
Okay, well, that stuff aside — I guess that’s kind of journalistic-focused – with a track on the new album like “Obama,” which seems overtly political...
Well, it’s actually not political at all. When we wrote that song – that’s actually not on Thank You Very Quickly by the way.
Oh. Right, sorry [laughs]. That’s pretty good journalism right there; I must’ve got mixed up on iTunes before.
Oh okay [laughs]. Yeah, we wrote it a few years ago. It was actually because Obama and his office helped us secure visas to get the other guys into the U.S. It’s pretty normal in Kenyan music to sing songs thanking people for doing something. So, that was really just a song saying “thanks for helping us get these visas,” so there wasn’t anything political about it.
Yeah, he wasn’t a presidential candidate back then, of course. I was wondering, though, if you did treat any of the stuff you do as being political?
We don’t overtly try to be political, but a lot of our existence and a lot of things that have happened to us, it becomes political because of what has happened or draws attention to certain issues. Whether it be immigration, or — I mean, what we had to go through to get these guys to the states, it took months and months to make that happen.
Right, I mean that was exactly around the time when Bush was so focused on homeland security.
Yeah, definitely. Without Obama’s office, we never would’ve been able to get them over, especially with the time issues we had. You have to provide a lot of stuff, like press that shows that these guys are actual musicians; you have to have letters of invitation and also recommendation as well. So they came back to us after the initial application and said, “we want more,” so that’s when Obama’s office really helped out.
Yeah, it’s certainly a nice way to say thanks; a nice sunny pop song. Actually, I was thinking that the general sunniness and optimism in Extra Golden seems personally political in a way — in a loose way.
It’s pretty interesting, actually; the style of music that the Kenyans play is all in major chords. The subject matter that they’re singing about is not necessarily positive or optimistic. But because they use those types of chords, to someone like you or me — a Westerner — we associate it with happiness, like beach music or something.
Totally. The G major chord is inherently a happy sound for us.
Exactly, and to our ears, a minor chord is something that instantly implies some sort of sadness. But that’s not the case in Kenya, or in other places too. If you think about some weird traditional Asian music, to you or me, it’s really weird-sounding and bizarre and might not make any sense, but that’s just what their ears are used to. So, to them, they don’t listen to it and say “yeah man, we make some really weird shit.” It’s just what they grew up with.
Another thing I had read was that there are a lot of similarities that you found with Benga music and Western rock music?
Right, yeah. Well, the chord progressions that they use are 1-4-5 progressions, which are the basic rock ‘n’ roll/blues chord progressions. So it’s very similar in that way, and also just in the context, with electric guitar, bass, drums, singer; it’s not like there are too many weird instruments being thrown in there.
Is it more of a dance music than, say, rock music?
It serves a purpose. There’s not a lot of African music that’s contemplative or music for music’s sake; it tends to serve a purpose. So Benga bands, their function is to play and clubs and to make people dance.
Okay. I guess Benga isn’t a sort of style that a lot of people who listen to your music are overly aware of, [at least to] the more indie rock sort of audience. When did you noticed the attention from those media?
I think really the whole idea of indie music starting to use African sounds, it seems to me that kind of coincided with Vampire Weekend, and we’d released two albums before they’d made an album. Honestly, there’s some truth to the idea that maybe indie rock people are broadening their scope, but I think it’s something that is perpetuated or made bigger by people trying to find something to write about.
Do you ever feel like you get misconstrued by that?
Well, I guess I would just say that I kind of see ourselves as maybe a little outside of that, just because we’re a different style from a lot of that stuff, and because we’ve been doing it for longer and because we have people from Africa in the band. Ian and I were listening to African music a really long time ago, that was just kind of a shared passion back there. There’s been a growth in the availability of reissues of older African stuff.
Yeah, Soul Jazz are pretty good at that.
Yeah, and that stuff in general tends to focus more on being music that sounds like American music, but wasn’t made in America, say, beginning with Fela [Kuti], whose records were all reissued in the last 10 years or so. And that’s music as a starting point for someone who’s never listed to African music because it’s very comfortable; it’s like you’re listening to James Brown or something, but it’s just a little different. But the structures and the rhythms are not anything that’s going to confuse anyone. But like I said, that stuff seems to focus on a more genre sort of thing. There’s almost like a kitsch value to it.
Definitely, it’s often made out as quite an esoteric collection of sounds, but it’s never super abstruse or anything really. I was wondering, with Extra Golden, was part of it ever about giving other people a voice that they might not otherwise have?
It’s like with the politics thing; it’s just something that’s been an offshoot of it. When we made that first record, we weren’t planning on making a record or starting a band. I think that’s one of the nice things about our band, because if we’d gone there with a laptop and tried to find some guys and we’re gonna make a record, I think it would’ve come off a different way.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Skaters (Solo) / P.A.R.A
Live review: Published on Tiny Mix Tapes.com, May 2009.
Mordern Tower is a cosmic, low-key music and poetry venue set into a super old Roman-era stone wall, now out the back of Newcastle’s Chinatown. Naturally, these three expert noise adventurers — P.A.R.A. (a.k.a. Labanna Bly) joined James Ferraro and Spencer Clark, who were playing solo sets rather than as their usual duo Skaters — made the place even more magical.
Once the sun had gone down, P.A.R.A. changed from double denim to ephemeral gowns (and wig) and filled a table with a buttload of weird New Age jewels, bowls, incense, a MacBook covered in fur, keyboards, and one amazing Gridiron or motorcross helmet pimped out in feathers and fur — all with pickups attached. Tapping the bowls, for instance, caused a strange resonance, exemplifying pristinely the paradox between the organic and the digital that seems at the heart of her dreamed-out noise wanderings.
Tonight, Spencer Clark, one half of Skaters, played as Monopoly Child Star Searchers. He sat at the desk, now sans those mystic adornments and replaced with a couple of small keyboards (one only had like five keys left!) and some pedals. There seemed to be a slight malfunction with the PA during his set, causing an intermittent and weirdly percussive clicking sound that only built on the skattered rhythms that eventually wiggled out of his blunted tropical noise. It was real head-nodding material, and paired with massively psychedelic imagery via layers of squiggle, it was absorbing and salubrious.
Skaters’ James Ferraro ended the show as Genie Embryo Garden, sitting around his keyboards and pedals. It’s always struck me as amazing that his myriad CD-Rs and tapes of liquidy textures are all created from scratch, aside from the odd Beavis and Butthead sample. For noise so obsessed with pop culture, it’s incredible how otherworldly and just plain bizarre these ’scapes are, channeling tack culture and and cereal boxes as much as intergalactic feelings and astral vibrations. His set focused on a twinkly and busy ambience that had a constant scruffy grandeur, shimmering in a similar way to those dozens of recordings. His particular sort of mystery was still all over his improvised set; even seeing him embark on those insular processes right in front of us, it was, fittingly enough, still unclear how exactly it was happening.
Mordern Tower is a cosmic, low-key music and poetry venue set into a super old Roman-era stone wall, now out the back of Newcastle’s Chinatown. Naturally, these three expert noise adventurers — P.A.R.A. (a.k.a. Labanna Bly) joined James Ferraro and Spencer Clark, who were playing solo sets rather than as their usual duo Skaters — made the place even more magical.
Once the sun had gone down, P.A.R.A. changed from double denim to ephemeral gowns (and wig) and filled a table with a buttload of weird New Age jewels, bowls, incense, a MacBook covered in fur, keyboards, and one amazing Gridiron or motorcross helmet pimped out in feathers and fur — all with pickups attached. Tapping the bowls, for instance, caused a strange resonance, exemplifying pristinely the paradox between the organic and the digital that seems at the heart of her dreamed-out noise wanderings.
Tonight, Spencer Clark, one half of Skaters, played as Monopoly Child Star Searchers. He sat at the desk, now sans those mystic adornments and replaced with a couple of small keyboards (one only had like five keys left!) and some pedals. There seemed to be a slight malfunction with the PA during his set, causing an intermittent and weirdly percussive clicking sound that only built on the skattered rhythms that eventually wiggled out of his blunted tropical noise. It was real head-nodding material, and paired with massively psychedelic imagery via layers of squiggle, it was absorbing and salubrious.
Skaters’ James Ferraro ended the show as Genie Embryo Garden, sitting around his keyboards and pedals. It’s always struck me as amazing that his myriad CD-Rs and tapes of liquidy textures are all created from scratch, aside from the odd Beavis and Butthead sample. For noise so obsessed with pop culture, it’s incredible how otherworldly and just plain bizarre these ’scapes are, channeling tack culture and and cereal boxes as much as intergalactic feelings and astral vibrations. His set focused on a twinkly and busy ambience that had a constant scruffy grandeur, shimmering in a similar way to those dozens of recordings. His particular sort of mystery was still all over his improvised set; even seeing him embark on those insular processes right in front of us, it was, fittingly enough, still unclear how exactly it was happening.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Mi Ami
Interview: Published on Tiny Mix Tapes.com, April 2009.
"If a song is laid down too strictly, then we’d just be following the rules."
[April 2009]
San Francisco trio Mi Ami have a distinct volatility. From the scratchy jungle-as-disco percussion and the feathered Mardi Gras album cover of new record Watersports to the wide-eyed falsetto vocals and the screechy and unpredictable guitar stabs, there’s a massive and deranged vibrancy to their stuff. Comprised of two members of Black Eyes (amazingly thrashy hyperpunk on Dischord), Daniel Martin-McCormick and Jacob Long, as well as Damon Palermo, the group takes punk and infuses it with elements of dub, free jazz, and (almost) dance music.
Their debut LP Watersports is a surprise in many ways. Ditching the concrete relentlessness of earlier EP African Rhythms (which occupied a similar full space to that of Black Eyes grime) and focusing further on dynamics and more open spaces, it runs on with plodding dub and disco beats on a dancefloor graced with the ghost of Albert Ayler. And by allowing themselves space in which to move around, they’re only building on that particular volatility, even if it’s as much focused on the deft and the restrained.
I felt a little bad when I called Daniel Martin-McCormick: it was real early in the day, right before they were to embark on a (LONG) UK/Europe tour, and he had a bit of a cold. But that didn’t deter what is obvious a super-enthused and lovely guy from exposing a lot of the inner workings of a band in an America that I’m sure would be many times as deranged as Mi Ami’s sound.
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I was really getting into the African Rhythms EP. I thought that sounded a lot like Black Eyes, but with this tropical kind of edge in all the rhythms. It’s more relentlessly thrashy than Watersports, which feels much more spacious. I was wondering if there was any particular interest you were pursuing on Watersports in that sense?
I think, in general, one thing that happens with a lot of bands is in their early stuff, the space is all full up — and then as they progress, it starts to open up and you get better at exploring the shading and different textures and more defined nuances. I mean, you can hear it in even Minor Threat, for example; if you listen to the complete discography, you hear this gradual opening up as they go on — even every couple of songs — and by the time you get to Out Of Step with tracks like “Betray” or “Little Friend,” these songs have a lot more dynamic to the earlier stuff. One thing about Watersports that a lot of people have commented on — and people talked about the last Black Eyes album in this way too — is that it doesn’t really capture the live sound. Some people like it a lot, and some are a little disappointed, not so much with the songs themselves but maybe more with the production. I like the sound of it, but live, we are a bit more blown out. The thing with the record is it’s really compelling to explore the space you can create in songs, but I don’t know... I think we all like music that is powerful and intense but that is also spacious at the same time. With African Rhythms, a lot of people liked it, because that track, it’s so bludgeoning in some ways, but then you flip it over and the B-side is much more spacious and more calm to me than any of the songs on Watersports. In some ways, Watersports is kind of halfway in between.
Yeah, it seems that way; you can certainly hear the spaciousness and the way you’re playing off each other, and I was thinking, almost in a free jazz kind of way; it feels semi-improvised.
Well, the songs aren’t improvised at all. Improvisation with a capital I is something we don’t do. We do improvise within the structures of our songs, but it’s more like, we basically write songs that are relatively solid, but then we can move through the parts with a great kind of flexibility, and some of the idea or the reason we do this is because we need space to play the songs, to access the essence of the song every time instead of being beholden to a rigorous structure and amount of repetition. So if we play, say, “Echonoecho,” to map out each verse would be silly, because the whole point of that is to use this minimalist approach and to repeat it until we get this beat and this feeling and it starts to open up. That’s something I’ve heard free jazz musicians talk about a lot, playing one thing over and over again and eventually, like, the saxophone starts to let them play and be in conversation with the instrument and it would open up to the song. I think we have our songs written in such a way that we give ourselves room for them to open up to us. The songs are, in a way, very much alive, and we have to work with them and answer to them. If a song is laid down too strictly, then we’d just be following the rules. But yeah, none of the parts on the record are improvised parts; we didn’t just start with a little riff and jam from there — they’re very much songs.
I guess the reason it almost sounds improvised is because it’s super frenetic and there’s a big tension for me between the volatile and the restrained, because it feels really controlled but then there’ll be these flourishes of, say, your vocals being real loud or guitar shreddage. Actually, I saw an interview where you were talking about a Suicide song that totally let loose in the middle; that made a lot of sense in terms of Watersports.
Yeah, I remember thinking when we first started to write it that I wanted it to be like a weird boxing match or something. So you’d be engaged the whole time, but there are particular moments of attack and then you have to pull back. I think for me it’s a little bit more interesting than just playing all attack all the time, although I guess we do kind of play with much more attack [laughs].
I was wondering, in terms of danceability — because for me there’s a post/punk feel to a lot of the rhythms — how much you thought about dancing and dance music in terms of the sound you’re making.
Well, David and I especially always do listen to a lot of dance music of one variety or another, and I like post/punk, but I don’t really consider a lot of it dance music or dancey. And in a way, even if a lot of people dance at our shows, a big influence is, ah, well... I think a lot of post/punk bands come along and they’ve got these parts where it’s like “this is the dancey part!” [makes disco bass line with voice], and it’s this little arbitrary so-called disco beat. But I think with us, it’s more being really into, well, I know there’s a genre called "body music," but we prefer that term to cover a much wider sound, like any beat-heavy music that engages with the body and dominates your senses in that way, whether its dancehall or punk or disco or African disco or techno or whatever. A lot of the stuff we listen to at home is beat-heavy or groove-based music: body music. So, I think that’s what it’s about for us; finding these feelings, but it’s very natural — I mean, we never sat down and thought, well, it should be dancey and noisy. I think it is an influence, but people ask about it as if it’s something we would’ve calculated, but we just play and when it feels good we go with it. I think a lot of people have appropriated dance music in this way that is garish or ironic, but for us it’s much more about being pure; just making this music with respects for whatever genre, but it’s not about us doing anything too deliberate, more feeling it. We just did this remix for Telepathe [that] is all electronic, but it still feels like us, even if it’s more dance music-sounding.
Totally, I was thinking how it made a lot of sense you guys doing that remix. So in terms of that innateness that seems like dance, or body music, like you say, is generally about, it’s kind of interesting how the word “tribal” gets chucked around about it, and it’s always been problematic for me. I mean, it’s kind of separate from you guys, because it’s what people say or write, but I was wondering what you thought about that?
I really detest the word tribal. I mean, it’s so racist, if you look at it. Because first of all, which tribe are you talking about? It reduces this huge spectrum of musical practices from across a couple of different continents to basically just [makes “tribal”/funny beat with voice], you know, just like beer commercial music or something like that. And yeah, it goes to show how little music writing in the underground is actually serious/thoughtful music criticism or is actually engaging with music on some terms. Because the fact that this term is in practice in our world is just kind of disgusting to me; it’s just so broad to relate to this sort of music. I think what people are talking about, though, is a certain tempo that can be lulling or hypnotic and is not too fast, with drums in the forefront and beats that aren’t kick and snare centric, that have toms. So fine, we have that, but to call it tribal is ridiculous. It’s like this term that you use when you don’t know how to actually talk about it.
Yeah, it’s the ultimate white man kind of reduction.
Yeah, and we do like the stuff that people might be referencing when they use the word — we like music from Africa, and we do like drums — but yeah, we like a lot of stuff. I don’t really feel like we’re a tribal group. I mean, aesthetically of course we just look like regular guys. But if you listen to the music, maybe the drums will catch your attention as they should, because that’s how we wrote it, with just as much bass as there is drums and vocal and guitars. It’s not like the drums are in the forefront; it’s like everything’s in the forefront. We’re not trying to be primitive or future primitive or kitschy or anything. I mean, I don’t get super pissed about it, but it’s just a bit wrong, kind of a nonsense word, you know.
Absolutely, yeah. There is something that people love to write about, that primitivism thing — it seems to resonate especially at the moment in a political way, some sort of humanism or something. But yeah, I was interested how much you guys felt the whole recession thing effected the stuff you’re making or your lives in general?
It’s been coming for a little while I think. Certainly on Watersports, some of the tracks and, well, the title of the record is a reference to the political climate, although at the time we were thinking more about the war in Iraq. Watersports has a couple of different meanings for us; one of them is, you know, you hear a lot about torture and there is this feeling of being sickened by sporting with other peoples lives for some profit, like Cheney and his cohorts, stuff like that. And very much in the same way, the housing crisis that’s going on; it’s just unbelievable in a way that someone could take that much disregard and be so reckless with other peoples’ lives for a little more money, and to me that’s what’s so disgusting about it. It’s not even to make a big amount of money; it’s when you already have a lot of money, sporting with peoples’ lives just for another little drop in the bucket. With the band, our jobs are stable enough, although other people’s certainly aren’t. There’s a tiny little silver lining that comes with all the problems at the moment in that gas is cheaper at the moment so it’s easier to go on tour, but I would gladly trade expensive gas for people having their homes back, you know. It’s a really sad climate to be in, because everything is effected and you can trace it back to this get-rich-quick scheme that a couple of people have engineered in order to make that little bit more money. It breaks my heart.
It’s pretty perverse. It seems like across Watersports there is this essence of despair, captured in this volatile sound; it’s an interesting way to capture this contemporary feeling. And the idea of, say, rock music and “rocking out” — on a more musical note now — it seems like you guys do that in a similarly oblique way than say more mainstream rock music.
Yeah, speaking of structural or emotional content, we’re really not interested in being some hips-thrust-forward rock stars or lyrically to tell people what to think; it’s important that the lyrics are an emotional reaction to a certain situation, so like my experience of living in a certain situation. So, “African Rhythms”; it’s not about Africa, but rather what it’s like and how it feels to live in a nation that is this neo-colonial thing. And the songs on the record have a lot to do with feelings of living in America at this time or even just to be in my body at a time of personal crisis. Rock tropes as far as [makes funk rock riff with voice] like some Lenny Kravitz riff or some shit [laughs] — to me it’s just not powerful. I really want to access something that is powerful, you know, something that’s a signifier, maybe not as traditionally but not trying to be weird, just trying to be real. Playing a sick riff might work for some people, but not for me. In some ways, we’re fumbling around in the dark when we’re writing songs, trying to find something that works, but they’re intense parts for me to play.
It’s funny, my job is doing sound at this club; I’m a sound man, and a lot of times bands will come in and be doing some cock rock or hard rock thing, and sometimes they’re good, but sometimes they’re just so bland. I’ve seen so many prime examples of people doing everything right and by the book, but they’re still just going through the motions. It really has taught me a lot about what I want to do, like who cares about doing things the way you’re supposed to do them? It’s better to do the way they need to be done in order to access some heavy shit instead of wasting people’s time and being generic.
"If a song is laid down too strictly, then we’d just be following the rules."
[April 2009]
San Francisco trio Mi Ami have a distinct volatility. From the scratchy jungle-as-disco percussion and the feathered Mardi Gras album cover of new record Watersports to the wide-eyed falsetto vocals and the screechy and unpredictable guitar stabs, there’s a massive and deranged vibrancy to their stuff. Comprised of two members of Black Eyes (amazingly thrashy hyperpunk on Dischord), Daniel Martin-McCormick and Jacob Long, as well as Damon Palermo, the group takes punk and infuses it with elements of dub, free jazz, and (almost) dance music.
Their debut LP Watersports is a surprise in many ways. Ditching the concrete relentlessness of earlier EP African Rhythms (which occupied a similar full space to that of Black Eyes grime) and focusing further on dynamics and more open spaces, it runs on with plodding dub and disco beats on a dancefloor graced with the ghost of Albert Ayler. And by allowing themselves space in which to move around, they’re only building on that particular volatility, even if it’s as much focused on the deft and the restrained.
I felt a little bad when I called Daniel Martin-McCormick: it was real early in the day, right before they were to embark on a (LONG) UK/Europe tour, and he had a bit of a cold. But that didn’t deter what is obvious a super-enthused and lovely guy from exposing a lot of the inner workings of a band in an America that I’m sure would be many times as deranged as Mi Ami’s sound.
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I was really getting into the African Rhythms EP. I thought that sounded a lot like Black Eyes, but with this tropical kind of edge in all the rhythms. It’s more relentlessly thrashy than Watersports, which feels much more spacious. I was wondering if there was any particular interest you were pursuing on Watersports in that sense?
I think, in general, one thing that happens with a lot of bands is in their early stuff, the space is all full up — and then as they progress, it starts to open up and you get better at exploring the shading and different textures and more defined nuances. I mean, you can hear it in even Minor Threat, for example; if you listen to the complete discography, you hear this gradual opening up as they go on — even every couple of songs — and by the time you get to Out Of Step with tracks like “Betray” or “Little Friend,” these songs have a lot more dynamic to the earlier stuff. One thing about Watersports that a lot of people have commented on — and people talked about the last Black Eyes album in this way too — is that it doesn’t really capture the live sound. Some people like it a lot, and some are a little disappointed, not so much with the songs themselves but maybe more with the production. I like the sound of it, but live, we are a bit more blown out. The thing with the record is it’s really compelling to explore the space you can create in songs, but I don’t know... I think we all like music that is powerful and intense but that is also spacious at the same time. With African Rhythms, a lot of people liked it, because that track, it’s so bludgeoning in some ways, but then you flip it over and the B-side is much more spacious and more calm to me than any of the songs on Watersports. In some ways, Watersports is kind of halfway in between.
Yeah, it seems that way; you can certainly hear the spaciousness and the way you’re playing off each other, and I was thinking, almost in a free jazz kind of way; it feels semi-improvised.
Well, the songs aren’t improvised at all. Improvisation with a capital I is something we don’t do. We do improvise within the structures of our songs, but it’s more like, we basically write songs that are relatively solid, but then we can move through the parts with a great kind of flexibility, and some of the idea or the reason we do this is because we need space to play the songs, to access the essence of the song every time instead of being beholden to a rigorous structure and amount of repetition. So if we play, say, “Echonoecho,” to map out each verse would be silly, because the whole point of that is to use this minimalist approach and to repeat it until we get this beat and this feeling and it starts to open up. That’s something I’ve heard free jazz musicians talk about a lot, playing one thing over and over again and eventually, like, the saxophone starts to let them play and be in conversation with the instrument and it would open up to the song. I think we have our songs written in such a way that we give ourselves room for them to open up to us. The songs are, in a way, very much alive, and we have to work with them and answer to them. If a song is laid down too strictly, then we’d just be following the rules. But yeah, none of the parts on the record are improvised parts; we didn’t just start with a little riff and jam from there — they’re very much songs.
I guess the reason it almost sounds improvised is because it’s super frenetic and there’s a big tension for me between the volatile and the restrained, because it feels really controlled but then there’ll be these flourishes of, say, your vocals being real loud or guitar shreddage. Actually, I saw an interview where you were talking about a Suicide song that totally let loose in the middle; that made a lot of sense in terms of Watersports.
Yeah, I remember thinking when we first started to write it that I wanted it to be like a weird boxing match or something. So you’d be engaged the whole time, but there are particular moments of attack and then you have to pull back. I think for me it’s a little bit more interesting than just playing all attack all the time, although I guess we do kind of play with much more attack [laughs].
I was wondering, in terms of danceability — because for me there’s a post/punk feel to a lot of the rhythms — how much you thought about dancing and dance music in terms of the sound you’re making.
Well, David and I especially always do listen to a lot of dance music of one variety or another, and I like post/punk, but I don’t really consider a lot of it dance music or dancey. And in a way, even if a lot of people dance at our shows, a big influence is, ah, well... I think a lot of post/punk bands come along and they’ve got these parts where it’s like “this is the dancey part!” [makes disco bass line with voice], and it’s this little arbitrary so-called disco beat. But I think with us, it’s more being really into, well, I know there’s a genre called "body music," but we prefer that term to cover a much wider sound, like any beat-heavy music that engages with the body and dominates your senses in that way, whether its dancehall or punk or disco or African disco or techno or whatever. A lot of the stuff we listen to at home is beat-heavy or groove-based music: body music. So, I think that’s what it’s about for us; finding these feelings, but it’s very natural — I mean, we never sat down and thought, well, it should be dancey and noisy. I think it is an influence, but people ask about it as if it’s something we would’ve calculated, but we just play and when it feels good we go with it. I think a lot of people have appropriated dance music in this way that is garish or ironic, but for us it’s much more about being pure; just making this music with respects for whatever genre, but it’s not about us doing anything too deliberate, more feeling it. We just did this remix for Telepathe [that] is all electronic, but it still feels like us, even if it’s more dance music-sounding.
Totally, I was thinking how it made a lot of sense you guys doing that remix. So in terms of that innateness that seems like dance, or body music, like you say, is generally about, it’s kind of interesting how the word “tribal” gets chucked around about it, and it’s always been problematic for me. I mean, it’s kind of separate from you guys, because it’s what people say or write, but I was wondering what you thought about that?
I really detest the word tribal. I mean, it’s so racist, if you look at it. Because first of all, which tribe are you talking about? It reduces this huge spectrum of musical practices from across a couple of different continents to basically just [makes “tribal”/funny beat with voice], you know, just like beer commercial music or something like that. And yeah, it goes to show how little music writing in the underground is actually serious/thoughtful music criticism or is actually engaging with music on some terms. Because the fact that this term is in practice in our world is just kind of disgusting to me; it’s just so broad to relate to this sort of music. I think what people are talking about, though, is a certain tempo that can be lulling or hypnotic and is not too fast, with drums in the forefront and beats that aren’t kick and snare centric, that have toms. So fine, we have that, but to call it tribal is ridiculous. It’s like this term that you use when you don’t know how to actually talk about it.
Yeah, it’s the ultimate white man kind of reduction.
Yeah, and we do like the stuff that people might be referencing when they use the word — we like music from Africa, and we do like drums — but yeah, we like a lot of stuff. I don’t really feel like we’re a tribal group. I mean, aesthetically of course we just look like regular guys. But if you listen to the music, maybe the drums will catch your attention as they should, because that’s how we wrote it, with just as much bass as there is drums and vocal and guitars. It’s not like the drums are in the forefront; it’s like everything’s in the forefront. We’re not trying to be primitive or future primitive or kitschy or anything. I mean, I don’t get super pissed about it, but it’s just a bit wrong, kind of a nonsense word, you know.
Absolutely, yeah. There is something that people love to write about, that primitivism thing — it seems to resonate especially at the moment in a political way, some sort of humanism or something. But yeah, I was interested how much you guys felt the whole recession thing effected the stuff you’re making or your lives in general?
It’s been coming for a little while I think. Certainly on Watersports, some of the tracks and, well, the title of the record is a reference to the political climate, although at the time we were thinking more about the war in Iraq. Watersports has a couple of different meanings for us; one of them is, you know, you hear a lot about torture and there is this feeling of being sickened by sporting with other peoples lives for some profit, like Cheney and his cohorts, stuff like that. And very much in the same way, the housing crisis that’s going on; it’s just unbelievable in a way that someone could take that much disregard and be so reckless with other peoples’ lives for a little more money, and to me that’s what’s so disgusting about it. It’s not even to make a big amount of money; it’s when you already have a lot of money, sporting with peoples’ lives just for another little drop in the bucket. With the band, our jobs are stable enough, although other people’s certainly aren’t. There’s a tiny little silver lining that comes with all the problems at the moment in that gas is cheaper at the moment so it’s easier to go on tour, but I would gladly trade expensive gas for people having their homes back, you know. It’s a really sad climate to be in, because everything is effected and you can trace it back to this get-rich-quick scheme that a couple of people have engineered in order to make that little bit more money. It breaks my heart.
It’s pretty perverse. It seems like across Watersports there is this essence of despair, captured in this volatile sound; it’s an interesting way to capture this contemporary feeling. And the idea of, say, rock music and “rocking out” — on a more musical note now — it seems like you guys do that in a similarly oblique way than say more mainstream rock music.
Yeah, speaking of structural or emotional content, we’re really not interested in being some hips-thrust-forward rock stars or lyrically to tell people what to think; it’s important that the lyrics are an emotional reaction to a certain situation, so like my experience of living in a certain situation. So, “African Rhythms”; it’s not about Africa, but rather what it’s like and how it feels to live in a nation that is this neo-colonial thing. And the songs on the record have a lot to do with feelings of living in America at this time or even just to be in my body at a time of personal crisis. Rock tropes as far as [makes funk rock riff with voice] like some Lenny Kravitz riff or some shit [laughs] — to me it’s just not powerful. I really want to access something that is powerful, you know, something that’s a signifier, maybe not as traditionally but not trying to be weird, just trying to be real. Playing a sick riff might work for some people, but not for me. In some ways, we’re fumbling around in the dark when we’re writing songs, trying to find something that works, but they’re intense parts for me to play.
It’s funny, my job is doing sound at this club; I’m a sound man, and a lot of times bands will come in and be doing some cock rock or hard rock thing, and sometimes they’re good, but sometimes they’re just so bland. I’ve seen so many prime examples of people doing everything right and by the book, but they’re still just going through the motions. It really has taught me a lot about what I want to do, like who cares about doing things the way you’re supposed to do them? It’s better to do the way they need to be done in order to access some heavy shit instead of wasting people’s time and being generic.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
The Hunches - In The Red
Album review: NEARLY published in +1 Magazine but actually not because I didn't see ne had already been written by someone else :(
[In The Red]
Last ever record from this Portland garage band and it's this ridiculous sort of incessant garage fury but also super beautiful and ballady in parts. Quieter experimentation drifts across those mutated Stooges songs, full of scraping textures and tectonic melodies underneath. Honestly, on "Pinwheel Spins" it sounds like they actually went down underground to the sewers or some cave to make (the space is that concrete and echoey). Not that it sounds subterranean or anything, it's just this experimentalism edges their rock way past just punk normalism or lo-fi aestheticism. It's often melodic and not always linear. Much like The Hospitals, they prove it's still pretty crazy how many directions you can take a song.
[In The Red]
Last ever record from this Portland garage band and it's this ridiculous sort of incessant garage fury but also super beautiful and ballady in parts. Quieter experimentation drifts across those mutated Stooges songs, full of scraping textures and tectonic melodies underneath. Honestly, on "Pinwheel Spins" it sounds like they actually went down underground to the sewers or some cave to make (the space is that concrete and echoey). Not that it sounds subterranean or anything, it's just this experimentalism edges their rock way past just punk normalism or lo-fi aestheticism. It's often melodic and not always linear. Much like The Hospitals, they prove it's still pretty crazy how many directions you can take a song.
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