Incomplete festival review and contest. Kuma Hora, Czech Republic – july 13th, 2012. 
All the concert goers looked like the future people in Bill and Ted’s. One of them   floated up and shyly asked if I’d judge a contest of a few new bands playing the fest.  I took this request from the future very seriously and these reviews are the result.

Planety: Pět minut za městem
A dreamy crash-boom-bang traditional pop sound played with force. Heavily effected up beat lead guitars smells like Czech grunge. The lo-fi approach and flavor has me dancing around the room. It doesn’t even matter that I don’t understand a word, I instantly liked Planety’s simple approach.
LISTEN:

KRISTEN: An Accident!
Loopy intricate guitar & bass paired with sparse open drumming and repetitive vocals. Solemn interesting indie noise music. I believe the late Jean-Michel Basquiat would have loved this Polish trio. Aggressive jazzy dance jams with free form bits scattered all over the place. BRAVO!
LISTEN:

Akitsa – Les Sentinelles – (Right Click/Save As)
Download audio file (Akitsa-les-sentinelles.mp3)

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Also Lau Nau at Issue Project Room was incredibly beautiful – rare that you see songs performed that are so surprising and elusive. Totally magical. I’m not one for music adjectives or word descriptions but I could say Lau Nau is a Finnish singer songwriter who lives on an island. She comes from a quiet snow bound domestic existence and her songs reflect that: delicate, subdued and solemn. She played with a Finnish film behind her, and it was the best pairing of music and film i’ve seen in a long time. She puts records out on Locust.

Lau Nau – Painovoimaa, Valoa – (Right Click/Save As)
Download audio file (Lau-Nau-painovoimaa-valoa.mp3)

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I love the Circle of Ouroborus new records, beautiful weird work, and the singer is like a stoner Mark E Smith fronting a metal band. This Finnish experimental black metal band put out lots of records (ten LPs, nine EPs, seven splits and seven demos since 2006 !) with lots of different feels.

Circle of Ouroborus – The Prayer – (Right Click/Save As)
Download audio file (Circle-of-Ouroborus-The-Prayer.mp3)

Circle of Ouroborus – Staining the Paper to Create – (Right Click/Save As)
Download audio file (Circle-of-Ouroborus-Staining-the-Paper-to-Create.mp3)

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My biggest kick of the last week or so has serious meditating on the greatness that was Royal Trux. I was going to write just about them but didn’t want to write about an old band!
But I loved them when I was a kid and have been thinking about them a lot lately.
They totally changed my life, and for that, I owe them a big Gracias!

Royal Trux – Ny Avenue Bridge – (Right Click/Save As)
Download audio file (Royal-Trux-ny-avenue-bridge.mp3)

This is an interview with Hayes who runs Perennial Records from Olympia Washington. They put out great records from the scene up there. I wanted to see how it was run, how the collective consciousness in OLY was going, and just catch up with a friend. Enjoy.

Perennial MP3s selected by Jub of the french punk printed zine Freak Out!

Read the interview,

Dean….I wanted to talk to you, and talk about the label, it’s one of my favorite labels now.

Hayes Thank you.

D So I guess I’m curious, do you run [the label] yourself? or is there more than one person? or do you even run it? I get the sense that you do.

H I kinda run it, at this moment right now it’s pretty much just me.

D I think when I first met you, it was sort of more of a collective idea. I asked if you ran it and the answer was very vague (laughter)

H Yeah it totally started out as a collective, and that just didn’t fly.

D Yeah I guess maybe that’s difficult, when there has to be decisions made, you know, putting out records, like who has to pay for things, and where does the money go. It would probably be harder with a bunch of people. Is that kind of what happened?

H You know, it was weird, it’s still kind of a little sensitive for everybody, we didn’t really have that much trouble getting a bunch of money together separately, we didn’t have a lot of trouble making decisions collectively, especially on bands. At the time that we started there was just so much going on, we just did as much as we could, and we all had worked together for so long anyway that we kind of had a lot of friction about making decisions, especially art. I think the main thing that tore us apart eventually, we all had so much going on [and] once the records were made and pressed there weren’t a lot of people that wanted to do the other work after that.

D Any sending out to radio, or press, selling a record, is that what you mean?

H Yeah, just keeping it going after you made the decision on the creation, like after you created the art. We created art really well together, or at least we did it, and I guess it was so hard either that we didn’t have a lot left, or it was hard to balance, since we’re all in the bands that we put out, it was hard to balance the different responsibilities, like “this is what you have to do with the band” and then “this is what you have to do with the label”

D Those lines can get blurred if you’re both in the band and the label.

H Some people decided they didn’t want to do it because it was too much work, some people said they didn’t find a place that worked out. I ended up doing a lot of the money work, and the mailing work, the organizing, and the label kind of stuff, and then everyone else just worked on their own band. After a while it got to be a fight and people didn’t want it to be a fight, so they decided to do other things.

D Had you run a label before starting Perennial with everyone?

H No, I had helped with a lot of friends labels, I’ve been around music for a long time. Basically punk and underground music, if you wanna put your stuff out you’re usually doing it yourself or someone you know pretty closely, and I’ve been around that for a really long time.

D Are you from the northwest? Where are you from?

H I’m not from the northwest, I’m from Texas and Colorado but I’ve lived in the northwest for about 10 years.

D It’s interesting, just being from Olympia and having such a rich history of DIY culture and labels that put out stuff and that are really separate from any sort of mainstream anything. Olympia, for me, has always been a place that just stands on its own and has it’s own merit, and is a very real place, and I’ve always enjoyed going there and visiting and playing. So how integral and how important is the city of Olympia to the label, or is it not really important? Is it just a place you live, and the bands live and work at?

H Its kind of like saying “How integral is it?” to like any of us as people from our hometown.”

D I Mean how important is it that there’s been labels before that have not really given a fuck with what else is going on? When I listen to the records, I feel the vibe of the records, I feel like the vibe is really nice and it’s not something you’re getting everywhere. You’re not posing and you’re not trying to be anything. To me it feels like it exists in Olympia, as a label to put out bands and it’s a vehicle for bands in Olympia. I guess I’m just curious to see if other Olympia labels are in influence or if it’s just something that exists as a label entirely. You have influences beyond Olympia obviously, does it follow any sort of timeline for you? Do you look at K Records or KRS as something very important to Olympia and that you take something like that and move forward with it? Or you’re totally separate?

H I mean it’s a little bit of both. The thing that shaped K, that I assume shaped K, and that I assume shaped Kill Rockstars, is that Olympia is really isolating, It’s a really small town, that has, for some reason has a lot of influence on people that come in. It’s a college town but it has a real transient population…

(my recorder missed a bit of Hayes’s answer, oops, sorry, DIY)

D I appreciate that the records look and feel really good, so I was just curious to see how important it is to you guys to make something that felt like a Perennial record or just something that felt really good, since you guys care about art and the way things look, and you’ve been fans of labels for a long time.

H I think it’s more about my connection with art, and growing up in art and the people that work on all the layouts and the artists that work on on the records, I think they’re less thinking how we’re gonna make this look like a Perennial record, and more just being obsessed with art and how that’s so important to them. To a lot of us, music and art got us through really tough places in our lives, and its really important to us to keep up that continuum, and to honor that, and keep that going, and to make a record thats worth it. The other thing is we’re all a little bit obsessive, it’s something that’s maybe in the environment of Olympia. Some things we take a little too far like the Sonskull record [laughs]

D [laughs] I think you sent me the test press version of that right? The one that’s the screened version.

H That was the pre-order/day of show version, we made like 50 of those for everyone who pre-ordered and then we did a show for the release and those were all sold there.

D I have to send you some more stuff that I just put out. I sent you a test press version of that C.R.A.S.H. 7″, I gotta get the real one out. We actually hand die cut and glued the covers, I’m pretty stoked. I bought a die cut machine. I’ll tell you about that I guess later. Is it only Olympia bands you put out or you’re interested in putting out?

H At this time, yeah, I mean I really don’t wanna limit ourselves to that and we do talk a lot about reaching out and going to different bands that we have a deep connection to, but we started this to be Olympia centered. Be real local. That’s where we are right now.

D That’s what feels really good about it, and that’s what I was saying earlier about feeling like it’s something that’s from Olympia and made in Olympia, and it’s special I think to someone who doesn’t live there too, it feels really good and fresh and real and exciting. It’s really cool and I’m glad that the labels still going even though the identity or idea has changed.

H I am constantly changing especially with the way the bands are. Olympia’s a really hard place to live in, it’s a really small town, you’re always surrounded by every choice that you made, you have to relive every time you walk down the street, good or bad, you’re surrounded by everything that you’ve done. You can’t escape it, and that shapes the music that we make and it shapes the records that we put out, and that makes really good art sometimes. Thats why I always like to say “hey we’re not always gonna be in Olympia” It’s not all of who we are, we’re not completely defined by out environment.

D Is there anything else you’d like to say to anyone reading?

H I’d like to say, I don’t wanna put out the impression that Perennial is a super together operation, everything is so planned and comes out so well — there’s a lot of blood and sweat that goes into Perennial, theres a lot of well meaning, but things go bad, like things go rough, things are crazy, things are constantly crazy, things are obsessive, things are bad, things are emotional. We make friends, we make enemies. You know we don’t wanna talk to each other for weeks at a time, but I guess we’re continuing to do it for whatever that’s worth.

 Raven’s work is very difficult to pin down (editor’s note: from chamber music to speed metal and folk or experimental noise), and I won’t even try to list all of the projects he’s involved in. If there is a thread that flows through much of his work, for me it must be patience, and by patience I don’t mean passive waiting. Raven’s patience is disorienting in its intensity, especially to someone who is as high-strung as I tend to be. The spaces in his work tend to bear the same weight as the sounds do, and I’ve found that his music has made me think very differently about my own relationship to the sounds that I make. In a way, I feel like he is both more detached from and more committed to the sounds he makes, and I find it very inspiring. Many thanks to Raven for taking the time out and humoring me, and thanks also to Olivié for asking me to be involved in Amour and Discipline.
As I finish transcribing this interview, Raven is in Arizona on the Navajo reservation installing 4 sound sculptures which are powered by wind and sun (see photo). For more information on Raven’s myriad projects, go to the end of the interview for links, discography, etc. The recording of our first meeting is now out as part of Deathbombarc’s Digital Series Club.

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 You grew up in Arizona, right?

My family grew up in Arizona in a town called Chinle, which is near Canyon de Chelly.  My father’s from New Mexico, so we’d go back and forth, and then eventually we ended up moving here to Albuquerque when I was about 10 years old.  Some of my family’s from up near Mora.  There’s a town called Chacon up there too, so I think a lot of my family’s from up there.  We lived in the north valley part of Albuquerque.

Was there music around growing up?  

The only musician I know in my family is my grandfather who just always sings Navajo songs.  He knows probably thousands of songs.   That’s the only musician that I knew growing up who was older that had any kind of talent or anything.  He played other instruments, like trumpet and accordion, piano probably.

So, what’s your earliest musical memory?

Out on the reservation, and it still doesn’t seem like it’s changed – it seems like it’s still the 80s out there – it was just metal.  Tons of different kinds of metal.  My uncles would be listening to Iron Maiden or Judas Priest.  That was when I became conscious of technical ability or a band playing together. 

I read an interview with you online about how something drew you to the idea of broken instruments?

I think that’s something that happened later on, in high school.  Growing up, I was always trying to form bands, any kind of heavy band, not necessarily metal.  I was always trying to get some kind of band together, and I could never find people with any technical ability, for one, and also good instruments.  Any kind of professional instruments, even instruments with enough strings on them.  So, that was just something I used.  I never understood why, after playing in situations like that, somebody would want this crisp tone with all these effects, when there’s this other interesting tonality that can happen with really bad instruments or broken speakers.

Right.  It’s just what some random person decided is “good”.  

Yeah, and maybe it’s something where I didn’t even know what I wanted until I was put in that position of not having a choice, and so that was a sound I preferred.  When it comes to the technical proficiency of the people I was surrounded by, or lack of it, the blurring of things like rhythm or pitch became interesting too, because it wasn’t precise or technical metal or whatever else.  That blur was what got me interested in what I do today but also in realizing I could do all that stuff myself.  I could make a blurry mess all by myself. 

Right, through that experience of playing with other people, you could see it happening, whether you knew at the time that that was what you wanted or not, and then you could figure out later how to recreate it.

Right, but the way it happened was my father was a teacher out on the reservation, and he used to bring artists to teach out there and to come visit, and he was friends with this woman named Bonnie Jo Hunt, who was a Sioux Lakota opera singer, and, when she found out we were moving to Albuquerque, she knew of this woman who was moving out here from England named Dawn Chambers.  When we moved here, this woman gave me and my sisters piano lessons for free.  I was about ten years old or so, so that was my first instrument.  I was learning to play piano classically, how to read music and even start writing music.  I would have never taken piano lessons any other way. 

What were the lessons like?  

She would have a song, and I’d learn it, and then eventually we got into more complicated pieces for that level.  And I didn’t think anything of the lessons for a year or so.  I mean, I did the work, but…  What happened, though, and this is funny, is she said “you know, I’m having a concert.  You should come see me play.”  So, my parents took us over here to the college, and the event was this annual composer’s symposium that happens there.  This was back in 1989 or something.  Anyway, she comes out in a bathrobe, sits down at the piano, puts all these toys and rubber duckies on the piano, then slams the lid shut and walks offstage, and I was like, “what the fuck was that?”  I didn’t think anything of it.  After the concert, she introduced us to this old guy.  She said “these are my piano students.”  I shook this dude’s hand.  It was John Cage.  That was the year he was invited to that symposium.  I still didn’t think nothing of it.  I started thinking she was a cooler lady after that experience.  I think I heard his name a few years later when I started getting really interested in music, wanting to find out everything I could about music, and then I realized that was that guy and started researching all I could about the history of what people were doing.
 

You brought up Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, and I was just thinking about metal.  I got really into metal when I was ten or something like that, and I was into it for a long time, and I got more and more into it, speed metal, etc.  At a certain point, I think I distanced myself from it because there was a certain theatrical or camp element that I felt weird about. I was embarrassed about it maybe.  One thing I think is interesting about some metal is it seems directed towards kids or some childlike element in us, but then there’s also this sometimes this very dark adult side of it, which I think also appeals to kids.  I just wonder what it is about metal that people connect to?  It seems like it’s cross-cultural.  It’s huge all over the world.  

There’s probably a generation where you and I grew up where music seemed to be at the peak of technical proficiency, at least from a young persons perspective.  Maybe there was a time before that in the 70s with prog that was even more technically demanding, but I don’t know if that was ever as fun as metal. 

Right, exactly.  It seems like it was intentionally trying to not be fun.  It was trying to be serious.  

Yeah, and it was trying to be like classical music or something.  And I think metal takes the best parts of classical music, and it makes it fun.  I think maybe that’s the difference.  Maybe some kind of shift happened where people didn’t care for fantasy at a certain point and wanted some other realism to happen around the time when metal was becoming less popular.  I understand what you’re saying.  I don’t think it’s the fault of the audience.  I think the bands kind of ran out of ideas at a certain point somewhere in the 90s, and a lot of people lost interest in it.  Or maybe they took themselves too seriously, and that was the problem.  I think the mythology that bands can create around themselves sometimes gets ignored, and I think metal bands exploit that, and that’s what I like about it.  But also, another thing I think about with the stuff we do in Tenderizor is all of the historical references, like when you think of Maiden…

Yeah, right.  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner…

Yeah!  There’s not much music that does that, that’s like a history lesson in itself, and I like that idea of it.  And then you have somebody like Judas Priest talking about the future all the time.  You have these parallel events in history that these bands were talking about all the time, instead of just one song.  It might be a whole album based around some concept of an imagined past or future that doesn’t exist.  I think that’s why it resonates with people in rural areas.  There are these fluctuations of interpretations of history or future histories.  Also, I think that technical proficiency in those bands is something that all musicians strive towards.  Maybe not that style, but for a lot of people, that’s the only window into somebody spending that amount of time on their instrument.  Of course, there’s a lot of other musicians who work hard on their instruments, but for a lot of young people who only have access to a few radio stations, that’s it.  And I think  the other part of it, too, is the live situation, how that thing translates live with metal.  It’s a style that can sound totally different live, so you kind of get 2-for-1 in that regard, where you’re hearing a more massive, distorted version of the song when it’s done live.

I was listening to the Tenderizor stuff, and one thing that occurred to me was that I really liked these bursts of harmonized melodies that you guys would do, and it made me think that you were taking elements from this tradition and taking it wherever you want to take it, and it made me think that metal is maybe a great language to imprint your ideas on.

Yeah, so all of us in that band come from that, that’s our main influence for the first 10 or 15 years of our lives.  That was the major influence, thrash metal.  We all got to this point where we were interested in all kinds of other things, like noise.  I think those of us in Tenderizor are more open-minded than your average metal-head as far as listening to and giving other music a chance.  So, when we formed this group, that was the reason, to superimpose these ideas that we have in these other projects onto the metal idiom.  And some of them translate very well.  All of those things you can’t do in a noise situation you can exploit when you use 3 guitars or something like that.  In the past, that’d be a taboo to have 3 guitars playing at once because it’s supposed to show how much one guy can do.  So, we were like fuck it, let’s have 3 people playing guitar at once and see what kind of interesting harmonic things can happen with that.  We were talking about why people lost interest in metal.  For instance, you have somebody like Slayer or Metallica, and they slowed down in tempo, and they didn’t go far enough.  Imagine if they’d slowed down super, super slow, and then that would have kept my attention forever, but they only slowed it down by 20%.  But, imagine if they had slowed it down 90%, you know?  And bands did that.  I mean, it wouldn’t be for everybody…  I’m not trying to generalize about all metal bands that were around back then, but they just didn’t experiment enough.  They were so close-minded, and maybe it’s because it reached its commercial peak that everybody felt they had to do a certain thing, but it was very hard to find experimental metal at a certain time back then, even if you were looking.

So, taking a step back, what impact has music made for you on your life?

That’s a hard one to answer.  I mean, everybody loves music.  There’s not a single person who doesn’t like music.  There’s a lot of people who don’t like paintings or theater or dance, and there’s people who don’t like films or television.  I’ve thought that maybe it’s this obvious place that language will end up.  Maybe in a thousand years, our voices will become like singing, and there are some indigenous languages where it sounds like they’re singing.  I was just in Australia, and I was speaking with some aboriginal people, and they would tail off the end of their sentences and keep on going like they’re singing.  Maybe that’s what all humans feel they need to do is get to that point where speech can be like that.  Maybe, because a lot of our speech isn’t like that, and maybe it was at some in the past, we feel need to listen, and our ear is always attracted when that happens.  A big part of the world speaks English, and maybe it’s that maybe a very long time ago, everybody used to speak like that, but for whatever reasons, our language and most of the more used languages in the world have lost the part that we all used to have, and there’s still indigenous peoples whose languages are still like that. We’re striving to get back to that.  That would be the only thing I can think of, other than something more spiritual than I have the capacity to talk about.

How have your ideas about music changed since you were a kid?  Is there something that has remained constant?

I think my whole idea of music has gotten a lot simpler.  Like I was saying, when I was growing up, my first exposure to people playing together was this display of virtuosity, and even now, when I hear my grandfather singing, there’s some serious complexity there, and of course the metal was probably intimidating for a long time.  Over time, I started realizing how simple music can be, that it’s not about complexity or virtuosity or planned or rehearsed.  It’s just something that happens.  It gets either pulled together or interpreted by the listener as what it is.  

So, if you’re not thinking about that, what are you thinking about, when you’re composing or playing by yourself, or you’re in an improvising situation.  What kinds of things do you focus on?

For myself, I start trying to think in terms of shapes of either sound or of the form that I’m involved in.  So, for instance, you, me and Thollem are playing, and there might be a certain shape that’s happening, or patterns, and that’s another thing to focus on rather than ways of responding to it.

I had another question which was related to that, and you kind of already answered it.  When you’re improvising, there are a lot of different ways to think, and there’s a lot to think about, and people have all kinds of different philosophies.  You can come in with a game plan or project what’s going to happen, or listen and repond or not respond or think about shapes or whatever.

I don’t think there should be a plan, because it’s always great to just immediately play with somebody unplanned, go to somebody’s house and then start playing, and so I don’t want to say that people should have a rule towards improvising, but what I do like to do is to know who I’m playing with, if I have a chance to, and know how they sound and what they do and just research the decisions that they make by seeing them live or listening to recordings.  So, it’s good to find out who it is that you’re playing with, and that might be enough to start with and go from there, at least for myself.  I think beginning musicians might benefit from other kinds of processes or strategies or ways of approaching it.  For more experienced musicians, maybe they should be willing to reciprocate and be available to play with less experienced people so those less experienced can learn these processes.

You were talking about things that you could possibly think about when improvising, and one thing I sensed when we have played together was a feeling that you don’t just hear something and respond to it.  There would be a feeling that you’re occupying a strong idea, and you would have this almost oppositional kind of feeling.  You weren’t being swayed by whatever argument was being presented, and I really love that.  It’s something I look for in people I play with.  There’s interaction, and there are also times where different kinds of relationships are possible.

Yeah, some of that’s based on the comfort of playing with people multiple times.  That probably happened in the last few times we’ve played.  You can always just respond to people, but anyone can figure out that that’s what’s happening pretty quickly.  I do like to have faith in the strength of the form that’s being created, whether consciously or unconsciously, and find ways of supporting that structure.  Sometimes things that don’t seem to fit with the immediate content that might be happening –  something as simple as place-markers that happen at intervals, but really just a way to support the overall strength of what’s happening.  Maybe it still is a response, but on a larger form, instead of the immediate defense.

It’s something I value because it’s something I have a hard time with.  I’m sort of a nervous person, maybe, and I often struggle with that feeling of “God, what’s happening?  Nothing’s happening!  Nothing’s happening!”  I wanted to ask you about teaching.  How did you get started doing that?  

I’ve done some teaching in different places.  I’ve taught in New York, Long Island University, and here at the University of New Mexico, but the main project I have is called the Native American Composers Apprenticeship Project (NACAP), which is a program that was started in 2000.  It’s part of the larger event, the Grand Canyon Music Festival, where they have a month-long series of concerts at the Grand Canyon. Around 2000, the festival started this program where they could have these kids from the reservation near the grand canyon participate in writing some music for string quartet.  So, it started off as a small program where they had maybe 5 to 10 students from one or two of those schools on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, writing 3 minute long string quartets, and having a quartet play them at that festival.  They had gone through a few different composers as teachers there, and I was approached in 2004 to start teaching, and it was great, because it’s definitely something I love.  I love that medium.  I love all of the different ways you can experiment with it.  I think guitar players can relate to the language of chamber strings and how to write for them.  That was one interest for sure, but I’m from that area, too, and I still have family out there, and I grew up in the area that is being serviced. We’ve been able to expand that program to where we have 30 or 35 students writing music for quartet, and the quartet we work with, called Ethel, is based out of New York City, and they don’t even consider themselves a string quartet, because that’s maybe too narrow of a description of the type of music that they play.  It’s not necessarily classical repertoire that they play.  They’re improvisers and composers themselves.  So, it’s great, because they definitely can recognize some of the really awesome work that the kids are doing, and they’ll play those pieces all over the world when they tour. 
For me also, the goal is to expose the students to the languages of chamber music and all the rules for writing for those kinds of instruments, as there are rules that need to be followed in learning that language and communicating with whoever they’re collaborating with.  But at the same time, it’s not encouraged that they write classical sounding music.  They’re open to write whatever kind of music they choose to write.  And, like we were talking about earlier, in rural communities, and especially on the reservations, metal is still a huge influence.  Time has stood still out there. And again, that’s something I can relate to, and I can see the lineage of influences of the students because it’s the same as mine.  So, I think it’s been a successful collaboration.  I’m able to learn a lot of things from the students.  Some of these concepts that are classical in nature — vibrato might be an example –  can be interpreted in a lot of different ways.  A person from China might interpret vibrato in a very different way than a person from Africa.

Celeste Landing (NACAP Student) – Pink Thunder (Right Click/Save As)
Download audio file (Celeste-Landing-Nacap-Student-Pink-Thunder.mp3)

One way of looking at art or certain ways of doing art, especially music, is that you’re in this in-between space between things that are understandable.  You’re in this weird gray space.  What is it like to switch modes and be in a position where there are some people who want to learn and want you to teach them, and you’re in a position of deciding what to teach them.  You can’t just be like “anything goes.”

It should be weird.  There are some definite rules for the lessons.  These rules are the limitations of the instruments themselves and explaining what those are and also what the instruments can do.  So, after getting those rules out of the way, it’s up to the student to present some musical ideas to me, which would be the initial work on their composition, and then it becomes a one-on-one lesson situation, and I’m able to at least advise them on some different possibilities of where their music can go.  I’m not sure if music composition is something that can be taught in a group situation.  So, aside from the technical rules and other kinds of language lessons of those instruments, I think the rest has to be done one-on-one.  At the same time, it is challenging to teach music more than some of the other arts, because some of these terms are hard to describe.  There are words for certain musical parameters or musical ideas or shapes or forms, but other than that, to describe a sound is still going to have to relate back to the technical ways that you pull it off on the instrument.  So, it can be a hard medium to articulate verbally, and especially with younger students who are quiet in the first place or in some situations where English isn’t even their first language, there are a lot of different obstacles.  At the same time, the music speaks for itself more than something like, say, a painting.

Could you talk about how the group Postcommodity got started?  

There is a small world when it comes to the American Indian arts scene, if there is such a thing, and our exposure to it here in the Southwest and probably a lot of the people in the world’s exposure to it is through Santa Fe, for instance, which is this sort of arts and crafts scene, but there is contemporary work that’s being made and has been made, but I had never related to any of it.  Some of it seemed very responsive to certain issues that are more complex than were being answered by these works.  So, the group Postcommodity was formed in 2007 by Kade Twist and Stephen Yazzie and Nathan Young, and they had been doing work for a couple of years, and they invited me to join.  I was busy doing other kinds of work and touring, and I eventually met Nathan, who also has a noise project called Ajilvsga out of Oklahoma.  They had come to see me on tour in Tulsa, and we got to talking more, and that was the first time I met them in person, and I finally did join up with them in 2009 and was immediately interested in what they were doing.  The first project I did with them was one where we cut a hole out of the floor of a museum in Phoenix to expose the earth underneath; that kind of conceptual work was very interesting to me. It became another vehicle for me to express some of these ideas I wasn’t fully able to articulate musically in other situations, even in teaching.  So, that was my main motivation for working with them, and I’m glad I hooked up with them.

How do you decide on what project you’re going to do next?  

We all live in different cities.  Nathan now is living near Austin, and two of the other guys are living in Phoenix, and I’m here in Albuquerque.  A lot of it will stem from an idea that one or two of us will have, and then we’ll just get to discussing that by email or on the phone or conference calls or whatever.  Just working more around the concept of what we’re trying to do and all of the technical ways of being able to pull it off.  I’m not going to say that we necessarily have a unified concept in mind when we’re making these works.   I think that’s what’s interesting about it.  A person can’t pinpoint all of the stances that we’re taking in some of this work, and I think that’s a good thing.

Relating to what you just said, on the Postcommodity site, the words “lens” and “voice” are brought up as metaphors, and you talk about wanting to forge new metaphors.  This is more of a comment than a question, but it seems like what is so interesting about this project is that you guys are saying something, and it might be a lot of different things, but you have at least a field of things that you’re addressing.  A lot of artists, especially musicians, are often very coy about what they’re actually trying to say.  Sometimes you hide your intentions.  You don’t want to influence the listener.  With this group, you manage to do the impossible, in that you have intentions, and there is a magical combination where you aren’t telling the audience what to feel or think.  You’re opening a discussion in a very open-ended way.

That is a hard field to navigate, where any artist might be expected to have a strong comment on what they’re doing or have a reason for any note they play, any kind of reason other than to make art, and so I think that’s what I like about collaborations in general.  There’s always going to be more ways that things can be interpreted because there are all these different people involved, even if we’re not there making ourselves visible as characters at all.  There are all these points of view from which we’re approaching it, and it can’t help but be interpreted in a number of different ways.  I think the best of collaborations in any medium are like that.  Also, I think the format of how we’re doing this is different than, say, other Native American artists have approached this in that they have felt the need to either be constantly on the defense or even in some ways on the offense of confronting certain issues, and our approach has been more to be a filter for the ideas or issues that are currently circulating out there and letting them pass through this lens and letting it spread out from that lens to these other ways of being interpreted.

I think lens is a great metaphor.  It might as well be the hubble space telescope, because a lot of these issues are simply invisible to most of this country, let alone internationally.

Well the lens also implies reflection, a mirror that might be happening in these communities.  Whether something’s happening regionally or nationally or internationally, our job is to reflect these ideas back onto themselves, not that we’re necessarily taking a stance of, say, us against the non-Native world, but all of us being involved in what Postcommodity refers to as “the market”. It’s important to us that we’re not here to provide an answer.  All we can do is reflect how we are incorporated in this larger society and how we would respond to any of these as being active participants in the same larger situation that we’re all involved in.

To me, there’s something really great about the open-endedness of what this group does  in that it strikes me a lot like dreaming or daydreaming.  That is, a lot of times, when we dream about something, there is a visual component, possibly a narrative or physical component.  There may be music, there may be talking, but all of it is  subsumed by some bigger idea, especially in dreams, where you sense that your mind is trying to tell you something.  Is that something that drew you to this format?  Does that relate?

That’s interesting.  We’ve never talked about inspirations like that.  We just haven’t had that discussion, maybe because we’re all just trying to do other kinds of work (laughs), but it does ring a bell for me.  A lot of what I do, whether with Postcommodity or my music, has been in a space between dreams and awakeness.  I think that’s an important thing to realize, that a person can try to explain the world with their art or they can try to complicate it.  I think what’s been interesting about our situation in Postcommodity, being representatives of Native Americans, is that some of these ideas should be complicated and should not be explained away so easily, so when I think about dreams, they might explain something by way of complicating it more.  That is an inspiration to me.  I appreciate the ability of dreams to do that.

It also just occurred to me that another connection is that we live in a society where a lot of us don’t want to be told what to do.  We all want to think that we’re in charge of ourselves, and we don’t answer to someone else.  In dreams, the part of us that is experiencing the dream gives authority to a creative aspect of ourselves.  There’s a voice with authority that we’re willing to listen to in a way that we often don’t listen to ourselves or other people in real life.  You know what I mean?

Yeah, I’ve felt that way before, that no matter how creative you can be when you’re awake, there’s always another part of you that can remind you that an idea you have is really good or bad.  There’s another voice, I’m not even sure it’s ourselves.  Maybe it’s some shared being, but it’s always nice to be thrown off guard, no matter how long you’ve being doing art, reminded that you don’t really know what you’re doing, to be interrupted.  Like you were saying earlier about improvisation, to play with people who may throw you off, but it still connects to what you’re doing.  I think that dreaming situation you’re talking about is an even more powerful way of experiencing that, if one chooses to listen.

There is something about music which is the fact that it’s an abstraction.  It’s not tied to the world by anything other than its performance, and especially with instrumental music, its meaning may have more to do with the contexts we associate it with than the music itself.  We ascribe meaning to it that maybe doesn’t have to do with the music itself.   With Postcommodity, it seems like you can tie the music into something without pinning it down and reducing it.  By combining these elements, you are able to get at something bigger.  Throughout history, music has served the purpose of something that essentially heightens other experiences, be they religious or ceremonial or whatever.  It hasn’t always been an end in itself.  Do you see Postcommodity in that light, or is there any relation there?  I’m just wondering how you approach the musical component of postcommodity?  Is its role to heighten the piece or comment on it or…

The music attempts to represent who we are as American Indian people, as individuals, and as listeners and fans of different types of music.  Part of the practice also is a recognition of the tools that we use in the rest of our work, and it’s something that’s a big part of my solo work, where there is this mixture of lo-fi technology and electronics mixed with other kinds of natural objects: antlers or wood or bone, or glass. So, mixing those things together is not necessarily a metaphor pertaining to any of the other topics that we deal with in Postcommodity.  Put it this way: if an artist can’t escape putting themselves in their own work, that’s our solution to trying to skirt around that dilemma.   We try not to have ourselves as artists be a part of the content of the work, but I’m not sure that it’s always possible to do that.  So, it’s by way of this music practice that we address that question.  Again, we’re all listeners and fans of many different kinds of music, so it’s just another mode of expression for us.  We’ve also built instruments or written software and found it might have some use in one of our sound installations.  At the same time though, there’s also the frustration where you do a work, and it’s kind of a static piece that exists aside from you, and you kind of let it go, you sit back from it, and you feel this need to be more active than that after building such an instrument, and our music practice allows us to exercise that energy.

So, you’re playing along with the installation?

They’re separate from the installation, but it’s just another common interest that also has its benefits in redirecting other energies we feel are also contained in this collaboration.   To also answer your question, with this lens, there’s always going to be an opportunity to comment on further topics with the music.  Also, though there’s no vocals in our music, there’s always an opportunity to comment with other mediums (such as packaging) on what we might be thinking.

How long have you been involved in bringing in concerts and putting on concerts in Albuquerque?

A long time.  I was doing that a little bit in the late 90s.  People might argue otherwise, but I don’t remember any kind of experimental music happening in Albuquerque back then.  There were some things happening with the university and the Outpost, and they always were bringing great jazz artists and improvisers, but that was a different scene. That wasn’t a warehouse or a small artist-run space or a house or anything like that.  So, I was hosting people at my house or out in the desert, putting on concerts, and 5 people would show up or whatever.  That lack of a scene here was why I moved to LA (other than to go to CalArts), but I just had to get out of here cause it sucked.  I started coming back because I was teaching at UNM, and when I started coming back, I started seeing there were a lot more things happening.  So, since about 2005 or so, I’ve been booking shows. We’ve had spaces throughout the past decade that I’ve been involved in.  That church you guys played in, that was a place I had previously done with some other local musicians.  It’s something I really like doing because there are always musicians coming through.  Since the 50s or even before, Route 66 and all that, since the interstates were built, there have always been people coming through Albuquerque and playing, and in the past, people who lived here had this idea that you had to go play in a bar and you had to have so many songs, and you had to play once or twice a week, and they had all these rules about what they had to do to make it or whatever they thought they were doing, and you had to sound like The Strokes or some shit.  So anything that can be done to open people’s minds to what’s happening and bring in great musicians from all over, I’m happy to help do that.

So, for Small Engine specifically, do you have specific goals for it?

Small Engine is still fairly young and we’re funding it ourselves with shows and just out of pocket.  There are three of us involved in that space, and we’ve been interspersing our exhibitions with music shows and trying to balance the two.  More recently, we’ve had more art exhibitions, which has been great, because it is also to function as a gallery.  Also, it’s a space we can work out of and rehearse and do other kinds of projects in.  So it’s kind of an open space for this community of artists to use, and we’re happy to host various events and projects that probably wouldn’t get hosted anywhere else.  We have had this interesting series develop that I hope we can continue where people who are known as musicians but might have a practice in visual art might do exhibitions there, so we’re hoping to get Mat Brinkman down from Denver and we had Bob Bellerue show some work a few months back.  Mark Beyer is going to show some work, too.  I don’t know what’s going on.  I hope it’s still there.  I’ve been out of town a lot.

Your label, Sicksicksick.  How did it get started?

Back in the late 90s or 2000, I was performing a lot and doing a lot of different musical projects, but there was a very small audience here for any of that, and there was still this idea here that you had to go through certain avenues to be heard or get your music out there, and I just thought that was bullshit, that you had to play an hour long set in a bar once or twice a week, and somebody would sign you to a label or something.  I saw no reason why I couldn’t make cassettes of work and record it and that would be it.  I knew people up in Denver and in California who were doing that, so I would trade with other people that I would find out about.  That’s how it started, and I’d just make these things as I recorded them.  So the first five were releases of my projects, all under different names, just to give people the false hope that there was a record label here in town (laughs).  Eventually I started meeting different people, like Kenny (Alchemical Burn), so I put out their music on cassette and Cdr.  I started finding more and more people in that way to put out their music, and it has focused on the Southwest region, which includes Colorado all the way to California.  So that’s what I focus on, with the majority coming out of Albuquerque itself, and so it’s up to 55 releases so far.  I don’t know what the future of physical recorded media is, but at least the past decade, that first decade of the 2000s was the perfect time to do something like that with the internet, because you could find people so much easier and make orders and it used to be where you’d be sending cash through the mail and that last decade made it a lot easier with paypal and just finding who’s out there and advertising it and you didn’t have to make any paper or zines or anyting like that.  I was always a fan of that kind of aesthetic, too, like Relapse records, these metal mail order catalogues, but it too was a way for me to experiment and get out of my system any kind of craft or packaging, which I like very much, and so that’s a big part of it, too, is myself designing the packaging or collaborating with the artist to make some kind of irrational packaging.

One of a kind irrational packaging.  That’s how you can bill it.  

Yeah, irrational packaging!

The last time I went to Small Engine, there was a show of a couple of bands on your label.  There was one guy doing tape loops of Navajo singing.

His name is Ryan Denison.  He’s a young guy, 19 years old, out of Gallup.  We just put out a 3-inch release of his recording from that show.  They’re all gone now, but they were just Polaroid pictures he took of his family, and he stuck a 3-inch on there.  He’s funny, because I don’t know how we came across him.  He knows my sister, but he had been a collector of some of these Sicksicksick objects, and he would order them and I encouraged him to play some shows, and he was good, so we made a release out of it.

Yeah, he was great, and it’s the kind of thing that you’re only going to see here.  It seems like there’s a strong underground of people.  People are doing something because they need to, and there’s part of me, reading about the history of New Mexico, which makes me wonder how much of the character of the music community it is tied to the history of this place.  

Yeah, it’s a funny place.  It can be thought of as an island, in some ways.  You won’t find anything but sand for an hour out of here unless you go up or down the river, but you couldn’t really escape it if you were trapped here without gasoline or whatever.  So, it is an island, but there are these arteries that go through, the highways,  people not intending to stop here.  They just travel through, might end up staying here for work or whatever reason or get stuck here, but at the same time, I think it’s used to that.  It’s used to being an island.  It’s always been an island.

That’s kind of what I mean.

I think that stands out more in this era of the internet and how things can be spread more easily.  I think there maybe even is a reaction.  Sure, there’s always people who want to be the next Shins or something, but I think there’s a reaction that people feel that what is going on here should be experienced.  So, there is this regionalism where I think it’s okay that it’s somewhat insular.  I think some people do recognize that everything you need can happen right here, and so I think people are beginning to recognize what’s happening here and acknowledge that it’s not necessary to move or even spread it around or not necessarily feeling the need to import other things to make this into some other kind of city or other kind of hub of culture, because all of that’s already here in it’s own unique way.  I think maybe people are realizing that more if they weren’t before because it’s a reaction to everything being available anywhere anyway in this virtual digital realm that everyone can get on and experience an art exhibition that’s happening in…

Adelaide…

Yeah, Adelaide.  And so yeah, there’s a tight community of people who make things happen because things don’t happen otherwise.  It’s not a huge city.  A place like Phoenix could have been like this but it didn’t choose to be.  It chose to be a large center on this international level of what cities strive to be, and if Phoenix can do that, I don’t see why Albuquerque didn’t have a crossroads where they could have chosen to become that, as well, and it chose not to.  Rio Rancho, on the other hand!  (laughs).  I don’t know what happened there . . .  Santa Fe, too.  Santa Fe, when you think about it is only 150,000 people.  I think about half the addresses there are only lived in in the summer, but that’s another kind of interesting place that’s like a ghost town in some ways, but it’s like a market.  That city, when the Spanish were coming up from Mexico, they believed that it was made of gold and they got there and were disappointed but still set up shop anyway.  The church and everybody just set down there and it became one of the oldest cities in the Americas, but I don’t think that reputation has escaped it yet.  I think people go there because there’s this market of arts and crafts and this kind of mystique about the place.  That’ll always be there, but I’m not going to say it’s an empty city, and I’m not going to say it’s a disappointment, but it’s still kind of a battlefield, an unresolved place, whereas Albuquerque is maybe the remnants of that, and that’s why it’s larger than Santa Fe is.

What do you mean by remnants?

If Santa Fe is the fantasy, then Albuquerque is the reality.  This is the response to that, and maybe it always has been.  There’s hardly a music scene in Santa Fe.  People from Santa Fe will disagree, but they don’t come down here.

Like you, I travel around a lot playing shows and things, and the thing that struck me since moving here is how this is one of these incredibly rare places that still has a relationship with its past, and I’m sure it’s changed a lot even in the last 10 years, but… It actually looks and feels different from the rest of the US.

Yeah, you’re right.  It’s a funny place with its history.  It’s changed hands more than a lot of places.  First it was indigenous, then Spanish, then mexico, then a territory and then a state. So, it was under all these different flags, more than many of the other states and all that time, people have just stayed in the region and had different foster parents coming in. I think it will always be like that.  It’ll always be ambiguous as to what’s going on, and I think people are okay with that.  They’re all connected in some way.  There will never be a majority, there’s just always these small bands of people all over the state.  It’s cool.  I like it like that.  

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Raven Chacon, John Dieterich & Thollem – Improvisation mars 2011 (Right Click/Save As)
Download audio file (Raven-Thollem-John-Dieterich-march-1-2011.mp3)

Raven Chacon – Neeznau (with mask) (Raven Chacon – Neeznau (with mask))
Download audio file (Raven-Chacon-Neeznau-with-mask.mp3)

Raven Chacon – Teasing Game (Right Click/Save As)
Download audio file (Raven-Chacon-Teasing-game.mp3)

Raven Chacon-related links:

http://spiderwebsinthesky.com
http://postcommodity.com/
http://www.grandcanyonmusicfest.org/nacap.htm
http://deathbombarc.com
Sicksicksick label

Partial discography:

(w/ Summer Assassins) Creeping Of The Foul (Deathbombarc Digital Series Club, 2012)
(w/ Postcommodity) Your New Age Dream Contains More Blood Than You Can Imagine 12″LP (Anarchymoon, 2011)
(w/ Bob Bellerue) Kitchen Sorcery (Prison Tatt Records, 2011)
At The Point Where The Rivers Crossed, We Drew Our Knives 12″LP (Anarchymoon, 2010)
Black Streaked Hum (Lightning Speak/Featherspines, 2009) sold out
Overheard Songs (Innova, 2006)
(split w/ Torturing Nurse) The Incredible 17000 KM Split (8K Mob, 2006) sold out
(w/ Jeff Gburek) Jesus Was A Wino (Herbal Records, 2005) sold out
Still/life (Sicksicksick, 2004) sold out
(as The Kleptones) Meet the Beatless, (Sicksicksick, 2003) sold out, download for a free donation here.

First step, you should play DJ/rupture famous “Gold Teeth Thief” mix from 2001 (check full infos and tracklist here).Then move to this enlightening interview.

DJ/rupture – Gold Teeth Thief Part A (right click + save as)
Download audio file (dj_rupture_goldteeththief_part_a.mp3)

DJ/rupture – Gold Teeth Thief Part B (right click + save as)
Download audio file (dj_rupture_goldteeththief_part_b.mp3)

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ANDY: In your recent Wire interview Peter Shapiro mentions post colonial post national worlds… And that you were navigating these worlds. What do you think he meant?

JACE: I think he meant that my ideas about sound or music take into consideration issues of power struggles and representational struggles, while not being confined to any particular scene. I think he was trying to explain my interest in music from all around the world and that I’m hoping to engage with it, but not ignoring or glossing over differences,
but exploring them, giving voice to them. He contrasted me with Diplo right in the beginning. The idea for Shapiro is that Diplo has more of a “colonial” approach — market difference, sell it, and then move on to the next buzz… not too much discussion. At least that’s how I understood that Diplo reference.

ANDY: What to you is “exoticising of music” … does it have bad and good aspects? If so what are they?

JACE: Def has bad and good sides. At a basic level, I think I want all my music to be exotic — to be from a special rare place, right? To be a rare moment of harmony or intensity in an often-dreary world. That’s thinking of exotic almost as a synonym for ‘special’ or “transcendent” I suppose. The bad side is, well, for example, white producers or record label owners putting pictures of black girls in bikinis on the cover to sell compilations of music from Brazil, say. I have a nice quote about this “I don’t care what ‘Westerners’ fetishize. They’ve been fetishizing black people for centuries now, who cares? You simply exist in all your complexity and let them deal with it. Fetishism is so vague. I care a lot when Westerners rip off non-Western musicians, even by rendering them anonymous like Sublime Frequencies often does, but random concepts of fetishization don’t really mean much. It’s almost too abstract to matter. “Musicians like getting paid to play, they like getting credited for their work, and if they’re singing or rapping, they want you listen to their words. It’s simple. I think Western fetishization is an awesome thing if it means, say, more African bands can travel and make a living outside of their home countries. Who’s to say what’s the difference between fetishization and interest? How many kids fetishize Bjork or Radiohead? Is use of the term “fetish” racist in and of itself, would you just be talking about ‘fans’ if it were Western bands?”

ANDY: When I listen to Ethiopian music I love it… For many reasons… One of them being that it is “exotic”… Exotic for me also meaning theres so much about it I don’t understand… And this excites me… The not knowing… Do you share this ?

JACE: Yes, I definitely share that! I love not understanding music It’s thrilling. In both directions, too. There’s all this Arabic and African music with subtle time signatures or groove structures or whatever you want to call it, that no matter how much I listen to I can’t wrap my head around — but i love it. And this September in Tangiers, i was working with some Moroccan friends, and one of them was having trouble wrapping his head around
what i heard as a simple beat in 4/4 time (and the beat was actually Egyptian).

ANDY: Do you feel it is necessary to really know and understand a particular style or ethnicity of music before playing it ? How do you deal with this if you cant read music… Or understand the language?

JACE: The issue of DJing or playing music I don’t know very much about is trickier. As a DJ, I like to know the words of the songs I play to the public, but that’s not always possible. It’s tricky — perhaps the most important thing is being sensitive to how the music one plays might be received. And then you can play with that reception!

ANDY:  Why is it so important to know the words… When in many cases most of the people listening won’t know them either?

JACE: Exactly, honestly, 9 times out of 10, if its a track where I don’t know the words but it has a deep emotional appeal to me, when i find out the words I’m like “yes, of course that’s what its about!”. Sound itself can convey so much. More, in the end, than words. At least in lots of cases.

ANDY: But you are content to listen to a CD of Angolan pop music and enjoy it without knowing what they are singing about? Doesn’t it depend on the style of music? For instance most dance music is made for people to dance to… And the words are often not really that important… Dare i say this ?

JACE: I think I agree.

ANDY: Actually I would say 90 per cent of the music I listen to I don’t know what they are singing about… That is something that has really become common in my listening experience the last 10 to 15 years… But when you do discover the text it can amplify your appreciation?

JACE: Yes, I agree.

ANDY:  In the last 2 or 3 years you have switched to Serato as a DJ tool… How has this effected your performance? Has it enabled you to be more or less spontaneous? Has it forced you more into a kind of beat matching mode, and has it reduced or increased the “mistake” factor? (Serato is an interface that allows DJs to access all the MP3′s and AIFF’s files on their computer but still play them using two special vinyl records… The mp3 is selected and can be played on the record as if the music were actually pressed on the vinyl… )

JACE: For the most part, Serato is so great because it is so transparent a technology — I still mix with vinyl records and a mixer, so my interaction at that level is the same. So the major difference is a) having the possibility of bringing more music with me and b) having to remember records by their titles and not by what their artwork looks like, which is how i do it with records but those differences aren’t too big — you can still make all the analog serendipitous mistakes with Serato! And those are important I actually want to start regularly using a CD-j in my setup, because they can do extreme pitch shifting and you can be percussive with cue points and such, its a totally different way of mixing music and I want to explore it a bit.

ANDY: Why are mistakes important?

JACE: Mistakes are important because in order to be able to make mistakes, you need a wide expressive range— it’s like, if you want to be the kind of musician who can give a really really good performance, then you have to be able to be in the moment and take risks, and the flip side of that risk-taking is that sometimes things won’t go right, and there will be mistakes, but that’s why it’s all so exciting. Ableton Live DJ sets are the most boring thing. DJing with vinyl (or playing in a band) is all about trying to pull these different energies together and harness that.

                                                                       using Serato & real vinyl to make some positive creative “mistakes”

ANDY: I don’t know too many DJs who are willing to take this risk… Both in relation with making mistakes and daring to cross genres and styles… Why do you think this is ?

JACE: DJs can be really lazy. When I grew up in Boston, it was super cliqueish and very very strict about staying in your genre and being hierarchical, like in London with drum&bass or even dubstep, where it’s a small group of people attempting to police who has access to what venues/radio shows/promotional outlets/labels. I think it might be because most DJs are secretly insecure – like, if you just play one style or become known for own thing, it’s easier to “own” that and to not have to push your self. My biggest DJ regret is not learning how to scratch really well. When I was coming up, scratch DJs only played hiphop, and their approach to scratching sounded the same… It all kind sounded the same. So i focused on other stuff. But now, I see if I’d gotten really good at scratching I could use it in a totally different way, but that was super hard to see back then.

ANDY: Is it too late ? How long would it take to learn how to scratch?

JACE:  Good question! 5 years? I know the basics, but to get real good, I’m thinking 3-5 years. But first, I need to learn French. Maybe I can find someone to teach me both at once.

ANDY:  When I see people dancing to certain styles of techno trance and house they don’t really seem to be moving their bodies in a very fluid and organic way… More like a kind of stiff movement with a lot of hand and fist waving… It feels like they are dancing because they should rather than because they really want to… Am I being unfair?

JACE: Hahaha.

ANDY: Is it important that people dance at your live shows or are you happy as long as they are really listening?

JACE: Dancing is the best form of listening.

ANDY: What has been the strongest dance music you’ve heard in the last year?

JACE: I have to say, I don’t really listen to it or play more than a few tracks a night, but the “brostep” stuff is kinda awesome, because of how the sonics are in fact really energetic and crazy. If I was in high school I’d be super into that.

ANDY: But there is a part of you that is in permanent high school… How else would you be able to do what you do?

JACE: Hahaha, yes, permanent high schooler.

ANDY: Where is it from and how does it sound?

JACE: It’s basically young American kids taking some cues from UK dubstep, but mixing it up with rave and electro and metal, so they make something that is kinda like dubstep on hard drugs, buts its also cheesey. Cheesey synths and then these insane bass drops, so it also messes w/ the distinction between “hard” and “soft” or “serious” and “rave” or whatever. Guys like Skrillex.

ANDY: I hate Skrillex, sorry.

JACE: Why?

ANDY: The cheese factor… But never mind thats my problem! You haven’t released a DJmix on CD for awhile at least not an official release… Are you finished with this or are you just too busy?

JACE: It’s complicated — legalities… To do an official release it would have to be bootleg.

ANDY: Have you ever had any real bother with copyright from releasing these mixes… Like Minesweeper Suite?

JACE: Only the lawyer holding rights to Nina Simone’s Plain Gold Ring, and when the label explained the release, he didn’t get upset… so… I dunno. Maybe I should just do another like Minesweeper Suite? I’d really like to!!! My style influences a lot of people and the DJ world sounds a lot more like “Gold Teeth Thief” now, 10 years later, which is great, but that’s the great thing about DJing, there is always new things to say and explore.

                                                                     Minesweeper Suite excerpt w/ “plain gold ring” that got lawyer’s attention

ANDY: When you DJ live and on the radio… In both cases you are a selector but you are also making comments in a journalistic kind of way… I don’t mean with actual words… More to do with your choices. What are the differences and similarities between these two ways of sending out your musical message?

JACE: Well, for me they are really separate activities! When I’m DJing, it’s very much a hands-on thing, I’m immersed, I get really non-verbal, and I’m also responding at some level to the crowd and the immediate situation. Also, each few months, I’m DJing from the same pool of tracks. For a technical style of DJing like mine, I need to really know the structure of the raw material I’m working with. But with radio, it is more about selection, finding exciting new sounds each week and presenting them in a nice way. It’s a very solo activity, and it is purely selection, meaning I’m not trying to mix or beatmatch or put on FX or anything. But I suppose both activities come from the same place.

ANDY: Yes but in both cases you are making some kind of comment by the actual choices you make… throwing a cumbia track on right after a dubstep track and mixing that with comgolses pygmies. That’s what I meant by journalistic. What are you saying with these kind of choices? Do you see it that way… and how does it connect with your writing as a music journalist?

JACE: The nice thing about DJing is that whatever I am “saying”, I am using records to say it. So the message or experience is very specific but also abstract — and not confined to language  — because that’s the way sound is. My spoken commentary during the radio show expresses my  views of course, but, for me, it uses what feels like very different parts of me. When I write  as a music journalist, my goals are (I think) quite different from a DJ set. A DJ set I’m trying to express a narrative line, to conjure an intensity, trying to make a special shared experience using sound as a medium. When I sit down to write, I am more interested in explaining to a general audience what I find so fascinating about this musician or that scene — I can concentrate on the specifics, really dig into the context of a music’s history, production, reception, as well as what it sounds like. When I DJ I always improvise, so it’s not intellectual, everything happens in the moment, and I don’t really think about anything at all. Plus it happens with people, it’s inherently social. Writing is like thinking, it happens in isolation, and it is the opposite of improvisation! Writing is 90% editing, a slow process.

ANDY: DJing once a week at WFMU is unpaid work and quite a commitment… Why is it so important to you ??

JACE: Man!! I know! I think the main reason is because I truly believe in having a rich & truly varied landscape of media– tuning into Bostonarea college radio stations in high school changed my life, so I’m hoping that my show will have a similar experience on someone. Also, at a basic level, I love sharing this stuff and realize that my course through music offers people stuff they wouldn’t get in the same space anywhere else. I have enormous respect for cultures of music listening and appreciation, whether it happens via dancing, DJing or sharing mp3s etc… But it sure would be nice to get paid to do a radio show.

ANDY: Is your work as a musician in your band Nettle a priority and something that could take precedence over your DJ work if it were to take off ?

JACE: I think Nettle is too weird to “take off”! Haha. But I really enjoy the project, and  working and traveling with musicians is more pleasant and sustainable in the long-term than solo DJ traveling all over the world.

ANDY: So “community’”is important to you despite the fact you are predominately seen as a solo artist?

JACE: Yes exactly.

ANDY: You took Nettle to morocco… Why ?

JACE: Nettle to Morocco felt necessary for two reasons — a large part was Hassan Wargui, the banjoist & bandleader in Imanaren that I met in Casablanca in the summer. We were hanging out a lot and working on stuff, but it was obvious everything would be so much richer if we could get together with Nettle. And the whole Beyond Digital project, it was important for me not to make it a “hit and run” where we are there for one month then never return. So in September we had this window of opportunity, so I put up like $3500 of my own money (and I’m broke!) to make it happen. I knew the two groups would work together and wanted to give back. It was an investment. The other reason was my loooooong-term interest in Morocco music. As a listener and as someone in a group influenced by it, it was extra important not just to go there, but to share, to take our weird music to the streets and see what happened. we gave a free, public concert in one of the main plazas of the Tangier’s medina.

                                                                                                                              video of Nettle in Tangier

ANDY: How did Moroccan people react to your weird music?

JACE: The best moment was when Lindsay (our Canadian violinist/vocalist) started singing a song in Berber. Hassan had taught her the phonetic pronunciation, and it was a kind of dusty gem by this band Izenzaren. People were floored, a palpable wave of shock went through the crowd. It was so strong that Lindsay was flustered for a moment, but kept on. Another great moment was in soundcheck, when Lindsay played a lone violin line. We stop soundchecking, but the violin line continues — a guy in a djellaba was there with his ipad, and he’d recorded it on video and was playing back! So people were surprised and a bit weirded out, but also hugely supportive. we made an effort to communicate what was happening — we printed up flyers in Arabic and Berber explaining the concert and handed them out, that sort of thing.

ANDY: It seems to be a means of communicating your love and appreciation of Moroccan music… And a kind of celebration of their music by performing to them in this way but at the same time keeping your own identities is this your goal?

JACE: Yeah, definitely! Not trying to reproduce Moroccan music, but show how we are moved by it and engage it as something living we are in dialogue with.

ANDY: In that sense it is post colonial… You are not there to take something away but to share and celebrate.

JACE: True! Our sound guy said something really nice — he keeps flyers for all the events he does in Tangiers (he’s Moroccan) and told us it meant a lot to him that this was the first time when a bunch of foreigners had done an event where the poster was written in his mother tongue. You understand because you are doing similar things in Ethiopia quite regularly.

ANDY: You were just in Jamaica… What was your perception of rastafarianism and how do you perceive their continued belief that Haile Selassie is venerated as a kind of messiah and Ethiopia their ultimate homeland ?

JACE: I was there w/ The Fader, staying at The Congos‘ compound. They did a record with Sun Araw (noisy soundscape guy from LA) it was super crazy, Rastafarianism… Really, it’s a lot to think about. and so bizarre about Haile Selassie as a god there. People in Ethiopia are more critical about him right?

ANDY: He was their last king and brought Ethiopia into the modern world… He is loved and worshipped still/ But he is also criticized a lot by the intellectual elite and the young.

JACE: Rastafarianism is very anti-textual, anti-authoritarian, and they really believe, but specifics of belief are hard to come by. Lots of mumb-jumbo about returning to Africa, when they seem to have no concrete idea of what might actually be going on in Africa. Rastas as anti-church, anti-state, anti-babylon. its vague, but they don’t like any central authority as i understand it.

ANDY: There is a big community of rastafarians in Shashimene om Ethiopia but the local people think they are all crazy. Partly because in general anyone with long hair in Ethiopia is seen as a bit crazy

JACE: When Selassie landed in Jamaica, he was so afraid of all the dreads he stayed inside his plane for an hour!

ANDY: How is the music in Jamaica these days?

JACE: Amazing good music all the time old reggae, new reggae, American rap, soul…. its the strongest musical culture I’ve experienced. This dude Popcaan is big right now.

ANDY: You are writing a book can you tell us what it’s about?

JACE: It is scheduled to be published in 2013 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in North America, and by Portobello in the UK. I need a title! Right now it is “____: music at the dawn of the digital century“. I’m working on it now. Basically, the book takes an extended look at the last 12 years,as music gets compressed and digitized and networked and all that. I’m a DJ who has traveled all over the world, experiencing music as performer and audience in many, many different contexts, high and low, and so the book will be written from that perspective. I’ll be focusing on several key artists and moments that are taking advantage of this new situation to create culture in truly new and exciting ways.

—

Ckeck Jace’s fantastic blog : http://www.negrophonic.com
and his WFMU radio show’s page : http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/DR

                                                                       rupture live in knoxville filmed by andy moor

                                                                    andy moor & dj/rupture hot pink version

Texture, timbre, mood, vibe: today, music journalists and musicians alike tend to keep the bulk of their eggs in this well-padded basket of aesthetic signifiers. These amorphous musical elements don’t lend themselves very well to language, and so their privileged status in music writing is a little ironic. When the fascination with aesthetic categories swells to the point of eclipsing the more tangible tonal, structural and lyrical aspects of songwriting, writing ostensibly “about” a specific piece of music finds itself in the absurd position of holding the indescribable above the inscribable. Similarly, musicians captivated with aesthetics face some pretty limited prospects for developing novel material if the possibilities of musical novelty are relegated to an abstruse realm of effect and intention.

All this to say: what happens if, instead of resorting to “fifth-dimensional namecalling” by attempting to stabilize unstable aesthetic signifiers so that writing makes more sense, you hone in on the representable, repeatable, linguistically communicable content of a piece of music? What happens when there are no rules but structure still matters? What happens when there are no rules but a C# is still a C# except it’s arguably happening more like a Db right now, or you’re playing in a nonstandard tuning so it’s a C# on the fretboard but an A on the stroboscope?

What happens is this: you write some music infused with your engagement with the event of this language. I don’t care if C# is any more “real” than the “suburban vibe” of the new Real Estate record; I don’t care if you name and remember your chords or write down your melodies (I usually don’t). Sure, the premise that C# is any more ontologically stable than timbre is indefensible; both are theoretical as far as I’m concerned. The difference lies in the availability of pitch to the interactivity of language. As Socrates said to Theaetetus, “the notes, as every one would allow, are the elements or letters of music.” And as soon as you hit that C#-on-the-fret-but-A-in-pitch on the fretboard, you are dealing with a multivalent empirical phenomenon: that C# and that A are characters you get to respond to, favor, position, make speak, or deny, etc., all the infinite dramaturgical possibilities fostered by the God Position and the corollary Position Of Worship. Privileging tonality in music doesn’t mean presuming to answer the question of knowledge, of objective forms, etc.; instead, it opens up 1000s of ways to frame those questions.

Chris Weisman – Os Tonokos Token (from Bentonia on Blueberry Honey) (right click/save as)
Download audio file (Chris-Weisman-Os-Tonokos-Token.mp3)

Chris Weisman: “Pitch Noise is the aesthetics of Noise — shock collages, maximum sensuality, letting the materials speak in their own tongues — but focusing on pitch relationships rather than timbre, texture, costume. What seems reactionary — but is radical by virtue of 1) being unpopular 2) requiring an education in theory and analysis — is the privileging of exactly the elements that were traditionally hierarchically higher in Western Classical music. For example Debussy believed timbral and decorative elements were awesome but must serve the higher powers of cadence, form, tonal drama; that the real music is what can be captured on the notated page. You know like you can read a poem aloud in all these different ways — and those ways make a difference — but the poem is really somewhere else; it can be real all these different ways but ultimately the poem is unreal, abstract, like geometry or math or a game. These are the star systems I try to encounter. When I bring them to earth I might try a pedal but the real work is already done.“

American civil rights attorneys suing the state often worry about inducing “bad law,” i.e. when legally uncontroversial cases based on clear precedent are heard in districts spellbound by the unshakeable ideology of pro-government, anti-plaintiff cronyism. The danger is that a ruling will prove influential, either with respect to the merits of the particular case or by introducing concepts that constrain future litigants seeking redress for violations of their constitutional rights.

During the Tang dynasty, kung-an (公案) referred to something like the precedent resulting from a legal ruling. You know it now as koan. Lin Chi said, “If you want to get it, you’ve already got it — it’s not something that requires time.” Because the practice of writing songs is time-consuming and characterized by intense focus and deliberation, there is always the danger of creating a bad public precedent! Let me try to explain what I mean.

“If you do not see what I do not see, then it is quite natural that it is not a thing. Why is it not your self?” When it is taken up in thought rather than lived, the concept “pitch noise” is a pedal, too, only available to be turned on after the work is done. The institutional many-face of music may ask, “do you want to play the changes or do you want to change playing?” But you don’t have to list your sources in citationless anthropology. Participant observation is the name of the game, and if you’re doing it right, the one you’re watching looks back, failing to see not having to try.

Chris Weisman – The Mask Is The Face (from Hi) (right click/save as)
Download audio file (Chris-Weisman-Mask-Is-The-Face.mp3)

Fabrizio Palumbo is — there is no other way to say it but — a true and pure artist in the most constructive and devoted means of understanding what that word can mean. When you meet him, just with conversation, he transports you to a place of a more fervent and a deeper creativity than you imagined that you had in you. When you play with him, using the simplest of musical gestures, he takes away the inhibition to try something new while not being afraid to be yourself.

There are a handful of people who changed my life, totally, the way i think, the way i see the world and how i hear music. His prodigious music career is incredibly worth opening yourself to, going from a dark grinding to free hearted and touching. He has also booked some of the most incredible art music of all time: Current 93, Six Organs of Admittance, Swans, Genesis P-orridge and Baby D, filing the world with art that few others would dare to stand behind.

From Torino Italy, pull back the curtain and open your mouth!

Larsen with Nurse With Wound – Call Me Tell Me

Download MP3 file

You grew up in the mountains around Torino, what were you like as a teenager?

Actually when I was a teenager I moved back in town; I was born in Torino and then moved  to Torre Pellice and spent there 8 years of my life with my grandparents ’till I was 13. Torre Pellice is a weird place, people there are pretending to not be Italian, and somehow they are not, they are more connected  with Swiss history and culture. They are the biggest community in Italy of Protestant Waldensian people.
My family is not really religious,  so throughout my childhood there I had the local catholic priest and the Waldensian pastor fighting to save my soul.
Waldensians sing all of time and make good pies but the catholic priest had muscles so I was actually more interested in him after I saw him climb the bell tower shirtless.
I have to say I was actually very happy to live when I was 14. Back then the only option in Torre Pellice would have been becoming a junky which was not really an attractive one. Now I see how relevant it was for me to grow up in the mountains ; the power of nature, the woods, the snow, the fog… I was a very solitary kid, spending lot of time alone, reading sci-fi book (one of  my grandfather’s passions, I really owe him a lot). Torre Pellice hosted  the first meeting of gay associations in Italy, my schoolmates were kidding me for being gay, useless to say that at that age I was not really aware of being so, neither did I have any expectation about sexuality ; but for them I had to be gay just ’cause I was not like them at all, not interested  in soccer and other boys’ stuff, but much more in my books, stars, art and music. Useless to say at the end they were right and they probably sniffed my nature as  animals do with possible predators or quarries. When I moved back to Torino things changed, first impact has been shocking and I actually had a nervous breakdown, but then I figured out to manage  the situation, I had my own post-punk epiphany and started to really enjoy the town.
 

Tell me about your tattoos;

I actually don’t have much to say about them. I’m not really aware of being a tattoed man. I’m not really a tattoo freak, I mean, I do not consider any of  them a piece of  art or such. Sometime “Bue” of Larsen  shows me  some artworks that are really interesting and  beautiful, but all of the stuff I have on my skin are just rough sketches. I’ve always been also very bad at taking good care  of  my tatts  during the healing process and  most  of  ‘em got  infected. I did all of my tatts at specific moments of  my life, usually the really bad ones and only few in the good ones. The last one I did was a pink dot on my wrist when my cat died. I look at them as reminder of my past and  as some of them actually bother me, but they were necessary. Does  this make any sense ?

Famously you have led a debauched existence. Could you tell me about some of you more scandalous adventures?

Not so famously even if  actually once I found online a picture of  myself involved in some (pretty boring) sexual activities (don ‘t  waste your  time looking for  that pic it has been taken down). For a while I experimented  with sex, but my goal was not really sex in itself, which I’ve never been a big fan of , but more a social experiment on myself  , I’m not really proud of  this but i think for a long while  I’ve been like a predator  sucking emotions  out of his victims  in order  to figure out myself and  my needs, and as a young gay man sex  was actually a very easy, affordable and accesible tool to play with in order to explore your  own dark-side.
It actually worked and  helped  me learn  how  to  keep  my dark perverted ego under control and  just let it go when needed to create or perform on stage, but as a teen I was  bit like Laura Palmer and I had fire walking with me.

That’s a good  thing about being an artist: the opportunity to use even the most destructing feelings and  emotions in a positive way instead of let em take  control and  consume you.

Anyway considering you wanted a gossip about my depraved moments here is one for you: I went to an orgy, and  i ended  up  doing  nothing at all if not just  some coke and leave in less  than half an hour to join some friends of mine and  spend rest of  the night  with them. several hours later I then realised I forgot my bag at the orgy so I came  back to pick it  up  and at that point  someone gave me a very casual blow  job; I really didn’t spend more  than 40 mins there,  but as I  was leaving with my bag  the host of  the  night  told me  that  they were all very impressed  by me and  I really made the difference…  He  was  not being ironic at all, I guess he thought i was someone else or while I wasn’t there they got into much more  interesting drugs than that coke…
Anyway I think you have already heard most of my stories and you are a much more depraved man that I’ve ever been so feel free to make any other moment of  my  wild years public, as you know  I’m now a very monogamous relaxed man and at the age of  43 I can look back at my past and enjoy it, just as horror movies can be really enjoyable and  funny.

Your list of collaborators is long and note worthy (not unlike, so i have heard, your cock). who are some people you have worked with and who are you working with now?

Well you have seen my cock so you can judge yourself… anyway I’m actually gonna  work with you again soon, and  that’s  something that always makes me happy, düde.
I’m also super happy to have crossed my path with Little Annie’s, she is  now Larsen’s  singer and such a fantastic person and  friend. I will always be  grateful to Michael Gira, who I consider to be my mentor… I enjoyed touring with Ben Chasny this year, Gordon Sharp of  Cindytalk is on the new Blind Cave Salamander album and I have ongoing projects with Jochen Arbeit and  Steven Stapleton.
I’ve been really lucky ’cause I ended  up working with most of  my favourite  musicians and  now they are all good  friends, what else could I ever ask  for ?!? There have been just a couple of exceptions but  ’cause i’m a gentleman I will not mention them.
I think a special mention should then go to my bandmates  in Larsen, Blind Cave Salamander and Almagest!  and to  my long time friend  Daniele Pagliero who is now  such a relevant part of  my ( r ) project and  probably best band/tour mate I could have ever asked for, and then ’cause of  music  I’ve got  to meet my partner Paul Beauchamp…ah, now  I’m getting  sentimental… as Madonna  said “Music makes the people come together”… What if  I’d just answer your questions quoting Madonna’s  songs… too conceptual maybe?!?

Is the silver stratocaster that you play the only guitar you have owned?
What are some musical devices that are close to your heart?

I had a cheap Squire before, it lasted  few  months and  then its  neck exploded  ’cause of the  humidity  in our old rehearsal space; since then my silver fender has been my only guitar, I’m not a guitar maniac, I’m happy with my fender, it sounds great , it’s a good  gtr and does its  job pretty well and anyway  I really don’t like Gibson’s. But I’d be nothing without all of my efx! The e-bow changed  my life, same did  the loop station.
These days i’m more and more into the Freeze you gave me.  It’ s a fantastic pedal, it has a great  quality of  sound and it’s fun, I also find my electric  viola really  fascinating, I just love the way it looks. But then I love all of  my toys and my guitar.
I never considered  myself  a guitar player, to me the guitar is just a tool to produce sounds, but in the last years I’ve realised how connected I’m with it , how it actually became part of me of “my language”, so I guess  that mean I actually am a guitar player.

You have in the last couple of years begun to sing more. several years ago you said that you hated your voice (which is crazy because it is amazing and special). Have you come to terms with it? What is it like to sing much more now?

If i said  that, I lied. I do like the sound of my voice , but  I  didn’t  have words, I didn’t feel confident in using words.
But now  I have things to say or at least I had for my latest album as  ( r ), “Drama Queen”.
I actually love to sing live, to be a “crooner”; a guy told me I sound like Leonard Cohen in doom, I loved that !

What is your relationship to the camel?

A long time ago I was looking from the window when I saw my mom, to whom I’m very close,  cross the street and suddenly I realized she was looking like a camel, and she was even probably a camel. And if she is,  I’m too, and in a  very jungian way things started to make sense and lot of informations about  camels started to pop up in my life and  they were all very coherent with my own attitude.
I love all camels even the unhumped ones (like lamas and alpacas) but my fav is the asian one, the bactrian camel, long hair and 2 humps, it’s such a beautiful creature. From an esoteric point of view it’s a symbol of chaos, he is at risk of extinction ’cause he is not really interested in sex and reproduction.  He likes the company of other camels but camels are not stupid pack animals and they are not into hierarchy. They are ok with working with humans but they are not submissive animals. They are very strong and tough and resoluted but not aggressive at all… I could  go on for hours talking about camels… Camels rule!

What is your relationship to color? You have gone from Blackest Black to Pinkest Pink.

I’m still very black as well, black and  pink are complementary, and  those colors  together really match my personality. In any case  full black times are over ! I’ve been there and done my best into that “territory”  but once you experienced it in its fullness and majesty you have to stop. Black is too self indulgent and not really communicative.
As an artist my role and goal is to bring beauty to the world, even when I explore the darkest side of my own nature and life. Not just for the sake of it, but to acquire knowledge.
I don’ t wanna sound like a retarded hippy but I really do believe that’s what creativity is about, beauty and love are what I’m interested in, beauty and  love are forever, pink is as bright and powerful and political as beauty and love are.
And on the top of everything it is fucking glamorous too!
 

You recently finished what is essentially a Christmas record/Xmas record with Little Annie. as stated, larsen has had a long and fruitful working and personal life with her. How did that come about and what is it like to work together?

I love Annie, I’ve been a big fan of her work most of my life and we clicked straight away the first time we actually met some years ago, thanks to a mutual friend. Then both Larsen and  Annie played a festival in Austria curated by David Tibet and after the Larsen set Annie came to us and told us that she would have really loved  to sing on some of the music we had just performed and it would have been better for us to have her join us on the album we were working on (which then became “La Fever Lit”) or she would have kicked the door of the studio down. Of course she didn’t need to and she has been with us since. You should read her autobiography, it was supposed to be published on Sep. 11th 2011, but now it is still unreleased… Annie is actually working  to a new and  updated  version of  it   to be  published  hopefully in the near future. She is a fantastic storyteller, she is a true survivor and a real diva in the best possible sense of  the word.

Working with Annie is supereasy, usually the first take is the right one. As a singer, besides her pretty unique  voice, she always knows how to get into the song and she has a unique phrasing and  rhythmic style and she was born to be on stage!
Our “blue Xmas ep” came out on the 26th of November. Originally it was supposed to be part of series about colors, and we were  asked to work on “blue”. The original concept was including also a series of  live  shows in Athens  Greece but  the curator of  the series fucked up big time and those shows  never happened. So with Joseph of  Tourette Records we decided to publish the ep anyway in a different context and ’cause both Annie and  I are shopping addicts and love lights and wine, we thought that this could be the right opportunity to follow the footsteps of Phil Spector and do our own Xmas single, which is something I always wanted to do.
None of the 3 songs  in the ep is actually about Xmas or a Xmas classic but we think the general feeling, notably ’cause of our cover of “Blue Moon”, is pretty christmas-ish in a kinda fucked up way; we have approached this ep as we were Nancy & Lee (or Nancy & Nancy or  Lee & Lee) and we had lot of fun doing it. Annie has also painted the artwork we used for the cover and  she also came up with 50 lovely little pieces of canvas we are using for a limited art edition.

What are some of your favorite krautrock records?

Oh yeah!  Some of my favourite albums ever are actually  from German artists  from the 70s;
Let me think …ok, let’s  say:
- Sand: “Golem” (which has just been reissued with a new cover designed by Steven Stapleton)
- La Düsseldorf: “La Düsseldorf” and “Viva” (pure  joy!)
- everything by Neu! and Harmonia and also Michael Rother’s “Flammende Hezzen”: I went to see Rother live a year ago, he was performing Neu! and Harmonia stuff  backed up by a (very good) bass player and Steve Shelley; it looked like a potential disaster, but fuck…He blew my mind!!! In 10 minutes he sent me to Mars and far beyond, most of the people in the audience were college kids that were there for Shelley (who actually did a good job in doing the “Klaus Dinger”), one of  them even asked me if I knew  the “old man ” playing  guitar and electronics…that’s how history works I guess…
 - Amon Düül II: “Yeti” (the album that made me understand that LSD back then was much better than the one I used to take which anyway was not bad at all)
- everything by Tangerine Dream up ’till their 1975 live abum “Ricochet” (such a pity whatever they have done after totally sucked), I especially love “Zeit” which I consider to be a total masterpiece, the one and only real “cosmic” album ever.
- Can: “Soundtrack” and of course “Tago Mago”
- everything by Cluster including Moebius and Roedelius (two really nice men !) albums with Brian Eno
- Popol Vuh: “In Den Garten Pharaos”, “Einsjager & Siebenjager” and their soundtrack for Herzog’s “Aguirre”
- Holger Czukay: “Canaxis”
- Kraftwerk: ” Trans Europe Express”, “Radioactivity” and “Autobahn”
- Riechmann: “Wunderbar”
and then two albums I like bit less but still are fantastic:
- Faust “IV” (I know “So Far” is probably a better album but “IV” is the one with “Jennifer” and has a pop touch I really like) and Ash Ra Temple‘s “Schwingungen”.

 —

Download the Fabrizio Kraut Comp, the best introduction to krautrock you could ever dream of: Fabrizio Krautrock Compilation (Compilation + Tracklist + Cover)

+ Nicole Boitos live painting action with Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo & Marco “Bue”Schiavo at Blah Blah Torino Italy on the 26th of April 2012:

Basically, Jason Meagher of Black Dirt Studio is doing it right.  A fellow fighter against the evils of pale pop music.  He’s a sympathetic audio engineer by all accounts and it seems to me his time with No Neck Blues Band provides a unique window into the world of free-form improvisation.  

Meagher’s track record is admirable.  He’s made records for the Black Twig Pickers, Blues Control, Charalambides, Eleven Twenty-Nine, Expo 70, GHQ, Steve Gunn / John Truscinski, D. Charles Speer & the Helix, Stellar OM Source.  

He’s playing with Pat Murano as K-Salvatore (their first gig in a decade or so) as part of the Spy Music Festival at Death By Audio on Friday, July 6th.  

I got in touch with Jason to ask him questions about the fairly new and ongoing NATCH series.

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Jason makes each NATCH session conducted at his studio available for free download on NATCH website. You can also stream and get them on Free Music Archive. Or even more simply, at the bottom of this post.

Play these while reading the interview :

Aaron Moore & Carter Thornton – Josef Ituk
Download audio file (Aaron_Moore__Carter_Thornton_-_01_-_Josef__Ituk.mp3)

Dave Nuss, Rahdunes, Stellar Om Source & Aswara – Consolamentum
Download audio file (Dave_Nuss_Rahdunes_Stellar_Om_Source_and_Aswara_-_01_-_Consolamentum.mp3)

Pat Murano & Tom Carter – Prophets And Martyrs Are My Witness
Download audio file (Pat_Murano_and_Tom_Carter_-_01_-_Prophets_and_Martyrs_Are_My_WItness.mp3)

Zachary Cale, Mighty Moon & Ethan Schmid – Trees Don’t Sleep
Download audio file (Zachary_Cale_Mighty_Moon__Ethan_Schmid_-_04_-_Trees_Dont_Sleep.mp3)

Dave Shuford, Margot Bianca & Pigeons – Dickel’s Dream
Download audio file (Dave_Shuford_Margot_Bianca_and_Pigeons_-_03_-_Dickels_Dream.mp3)

Black Twig Pickers & Steve Gunn – Sally In The Garden Sifting Sand
Download audio file (Black_Twig_Pickers_and_Steve_Gunn_-_01_-_Sally_in_the_Garden_Sifting_Sand.mp3)

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What prompted the move upstate?

City living was something I’d done my whole life. My wife and I talked a lot over the years about moving up north and there were some circumstances that came about that allowed us to do that, so we did.

So the move wasn’t to start the studio. How did Black Dirt come about?

I’d been recording for years on a 4 track, but never with any real investment in it as a process. In the years leading up to the move I was involved in recording The Suntanama up at the Hint House on a Korg digital machine and I totally got the bug, bad. There would be weeknight sessions where everyone would split and I’d stay until the early morning hours, killing a bottle of rum, dicking around on the machine with little to no idea what I was doing, trying to make things sound good. There were mic sims on the machine that were named 57, 421, 87, etc and I had no idea what those numbers meant! Didn’t know the difference between an insert effect and a master effect… Of course, the great thing about recording is you can approach it from a very caveman perspective. What is this thing, what does it do if I put it here, move it here, turn this knob, etc. Eventually you get a feel for making things sound ok. And once you’re there, it is an easy jump to “I think I’ll start recording other people.” Which lead to Black Dirt. The timing was perfect. The bug had evolved to a full blown disease and there was nothing else I wanted to do than record music.

Black Dirt is situated in a rural area only 60 miles away from New York City.  Are you saying the shift in geography wasn’t intended to influence these potential recordings?

Well, it would be nice to say something like being in a rural area in a basement creates a vibe somewhere between Big Pink and Nellcôte, but I don’t think that is the case. From my perspective there’s not much of a difference between recording here and recording in a city, except there are less adult distractions in spitting distance. Most sessions start in the daylight and end deep into the nighttime darkness, there are few to no windows, not much fresh air in the lungs, etc. That’s kind of the same everywhere. I have heard from artists that being isolated is a great thing; that it is nice to get away from their lives, the routine, and focus on the music. For city dwellers I would imagine that seeing so many stars at night, or wild animals in the daytime, can be a nice feeling on a break, rather than a bodega or a delivery truck. That said, I have had people book time here based on the seasons – the strangling heat of August, the long nights of February, etc. Artists have utilized field recordings here as well – insects and frogs in summer, air pressure drops in late winter, rain, birds, etc.

I wanted to model the experience artists would have at Black Dirt on some of my own as a musician. One was to include a sense of hospitality that I learned from staying at Byron Coley‘s places in Western Mass over the years as a young man on tour. We built an apartment for the artists to stay in while they’re here and on long sessions (and even sometimes on weekend sessions, time permitting) we’ll cook a meal for the band, take a nice break, drink some wine, get away from the pressure for a few hours. The other was the laid back, not on the clock, homespun feeling I experienced recording at Paul Oldham’s Rove Studio in his farmhouse in KY and Jerry Yester’s place in AK. All of those places had a profound effect on me and so by virtue of transference, perhaps Black Dirt can have a similar effect on others, and perhaps wouldn’t have been possible in a city setting.

So, tell me what is NATCH all about.

NATCH is about recording people without focusing on the fact that people are being recorded. It is like an anti recording session. Get some talented people together, hang out, play some music. Music comes naturally. Without the concept of success or failure lurking in the corner of the room, if you give anyone an instrument, they’re going to make some noise on it. These sessions hopefully kinda get back to that feeling, even if the people coming here are really good players.

How did the series come about? How has it evolved after the initial release?

It got to the point here that when I wasn’t working, I wasn’t recording and I never started recording with the express idea that it would be a j-o-b type job. In the early days of the studio, Dave Nuss (NNCK, Sabbath Assembly, etc) would book these one off sessions where he’d get people together up here and just make music. He did one with the Family Underground that became the Christian Family Underground LP on Woodsist. Another with Jakob Olausson. One that became the band Amolvacy. The last one he did was with Rahdunes, Stellar Om Source and Aswara and nothing ever came of it. I had fond memories of the music they recorded and one night I decided to just start a mix and see what came of it. I was reminded of those sessions and how much fun they were. I was aware of the Daytrotter series and had recently been hipped to the Shaking Through series in Philly and it all just clicked. Why not set up some sessions that could be done fast, free and fun?

The first couple of sessions I booked were with people who had been to the studio before. Along with the artists, I had no idea what was going to happen at first. One thing that has changed is that I’ve begun inviting up artists who have never been here before, which has been amazing. Also, the sessions have begun to take on an internal rhythm – whether that is because there is a document of what has already happened, a watermark, and therefore a bit of an expectation on the artist’s part as to what they want to accomplish in the short time here, or if the walls are just vibrating a certain way when that energy of the first couple of hours of each session unfolds.

Collaboration is obviously a very important element to the series, could you elaborate as to why?

The main reason was to try and keep the sessions away from feeling like a demo process. If NATCH was a series of one artist or group coming up to do their thing, there’s a good chance it could become a testing ground for their next release. Or simply a promotional tool. With recording technology the way it is, what would distinguish a NATCH session from a recording done at home to a laptop or digital 2 track? By putting people together who have never played with each other before, the hope is to keep it in the moment, maybe find some middle ground between the artists that they might not go to on their own. There’s been a nice side effect of the series, in that some of the artists have continued to work with each other after their session.

What do you look for when pairing artists?

First and foremost, people who I hope will get along, socially and musically. I’m still waiting for the uncomfortable “clunker” session, but thankfully that hasn’t happened yet. Also, the artists should share some kind of intangible thing musically, an aesthetic, a particular nuance to the way they approach sound, where they are in their personal arc in their relationship to sound. And I’m thinking about the pairings like a sonic jigsaw puzzle – what instrumentation might work in a traditional way, or non-traditional way. Lately I’ve been inviting larger numbers of people to a single session with an ear towards a kind of one off band experience rather than a pairing of two single artists. We’ll see how those sessions turn out.

What kind of hang ups do you see when a band comes in to record with a record deal already in place?

Well, there’s an obvious focus on getting it right, for better or worse. You know, someone is paying for the time and the artists want to maximize it and make it perfect. “Are we nailing it?” “Does it sound as good as the demo / rehearsal / live show?” etc. That is all important, but there is a lot of amazing music to be found in the cracks between those questions as well as in happy accidents. Most contemporary budgets don’t allow for much experimentation in the studio. I’m not talking about writing, but trying a different approach from the one that has been hammered out in rehearsals. Another common situation is the “Come and get me when it’s my turn” scenario. During a session, it is impossible for everyone to be committed to focusing on every sound the entire time, but a lot of doors are closed when half the band thinks that they’re done with their contributions and partially check out for the remainder of a session.

I also do a large amount of artist funded projects, where the goal is to shop around the recording after it is done. That brings along a more intense dose of maximizing in a different way as well as the specter of “Will anyone be interested in producing this?” hanging out over the artist’s head the whole time.

What is your most prized piece of equipment at this point?

The default snarky engineer answer to this question is always, “My ears!” The piece of gear I love the most right now is actually something I have on semi-permanent loan from Jimy Seitang, an Alembic Superfilter. It has really changed the way I balance across the frequency spectrum over the last couple of years.

Is there a pinnacle collaboration for NATCH?  Any artist, any band (past or present), who would you choose?

How about Allen Toussaint and Leon Russell? Or Michael Hagerty and the Kinks? D Charles Speer & the Helix and Kaleidoscope? AMM and the Dead C? Fahey and Jack Rose… I would’ve retired after that one!

What’s in store for the future of Black Dirt?  Any specifics on tap?

Well my advice to anyone considering starting their own studio is, don’t do it! At least not alone. The biggest drawback of being isolated is the lack of community around the studio. It would be great to host listening parties, summer cookouts, NATCH style jams, etc, here, but it is just not feasible without a local scene. I’d love to be able to move out of the basement in the near future to have some more flexibility with mic placement and live off the floor recording, natural reverb and ambiance, as well as having some more space to incorporate a machine room to get some of the noisier gear out of the control room and bring in a 24 track tape machine. There seems to be a scene percolating on both sides of the river between Beacon & Hudson including Rosendale, Kingston, etc, so maybe a move a little northeast might be in the future. Any readers out there looking for a similar setup and a partner, get in touch!

There are some exciting NATCH sessions coming up including Dave Nuss and Michael Evans, Michael Chapman with Steve Gunn, Jimy Seitang, Nathan Bowles & Marc Orleans (tentatively calling themselves The Woodpiles), Ben Chasny & Hiss Golden Messenger, maybe something with Betsy Nichols, Dan Melchior, Jon Lam, and the Helix rhythm section – Ted Robinson & Steve McGuirl. I’ve been talking to some other folks as well, tho’ nothing is written in stone, they are equally exciting!

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You now deserve to download :

Dave Nuss, Rahdunes, Stellar Om Source & Aswara – NATCH 0

Black Twig Pickers & Steve Gunn – NATCH 1

Dave Shuford, Margot Bianca & Pigeons – NATCH 2

Aaron Moore & Carter Thornton – NATCH 3

Pat Murano & Tom Carter – NATCH 4

Zachary Cale, Mighty Moon & Ethan Schmid – NATCH 5

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Adam of Northern Spy, responsible for this stimulating interview, also gave us his label’s plans for 2012 :

“. In August, the first Diamond Terrifier (Sam Hillmer of Zs) full-length drops.

. In September, we’re dropping a box set.  It’s four discs of material compiling the complete sextet works by the band Zs.

. Also, we’re putting out a new record by Dan Melchior called ‘The Backward Path’ which features overdubs by C. Spencer Yeh, Ela Orleans, Sam Hillmer, and Haley Fohr (Circuit Des Yeux)

. October, we’ve got a recording by John Butcher made at the new Issue Project Room space (110 Livingston).  It’s a solo performance in the empty room.  

. And we’ve got the epic follow up to Infinite Ease / Good God.  The record is called COL and it completes the Colin L. Orchestra trilogy.  This is Colin Langenus’ band. Colin was in USA is a Monster.  Now, he’s got the Colin L. Orchestra, CSC Funk Band, and Alien Whale.

In November, we’re putting out a collaboration between the duo of Loren Connors & Suzanne Langille with the painter MP Landis.  This will be the first record by this duo in about 2 decades.  The record was made in one day, live in the studio, with no overdubs.  We projected paintings by MP Landis.  Suzanne and Loren were seeing them for the first time.  They played to the paintings.  This will be out on CD later in the year.  Two tracks from the session are getting pressed on a limited 7″ which will be available this week with original art by MP Landis.”

Learn more here.

“Pazuzu, Lord of Fevers and Plagues, Dark Angel of the Four Winds with rotting genitals from which he howls through sharpened teeth over stricken cities….”
(William S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night)

A recent PEW/Psychedelia American Life survey revealed that Astral Travellers spend between 10-15% of their off-Earth time in MUTWAWA.

MUTWAWA is an acid Rorschach blot (bloat?) for seekers & questers.

Some samples have been brought back from the Astral Plane, and decomposed into their constituent parts by dark-side-of-the-force chemists.

We know what MUTWAWA is made of, but not how or why.

The Association for MUTWAWAN studies held its last congress at the summit of the Great Pyramid of Cholula. No agreement was reached about MUTWAWA’s Ontology and Ontogeny.

Several theories vie for supremacy:

MUTWAWA is the ectoplasm of the ghosts of the victims of 20^th Century imperialism jacking a séance convened by Green Velvet.

MUTWAWA is the conventional-direction-of-time-countervailing-ripple produced by the achievement of consciousness by military drones after entering contact with ancient Balinese spirits, aka the future echoes of a Jodorowsky-class singularity.

MUTWAWA are Wolf Eyes squashed at the revolutionary disco.

MUTWAWA are being trained up by Add (n) to (x) and Gibson’s Digi-Loa to go into the black fibre wastelands of the matrix, and whip the floor with the Lawnmower Man’s ass.

We look forward to the hypothesis testing & methodological developments that will be afforded by the release of their new cassette, ‘Lamashtu Pazuzu’, where some have already pointed out that they have their ‘Dinosaur X Moment’.

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MUTWAWA – Lamashtu Pazuzu (Right click/Save as)
Download audio file (MUTWAWA-Lamashtu-Pazuzu.mp3)

MUTWAWA – Epsilon Eridani (Right click/Save as)
Download audio file (MUTWAWA-Epsilon-Eridani.mp3)

Check their bandcamp here, get the tape there.

So it’s been a while since our last post and it’s about time we dropped a few lines about what we’ve been up to. No, we did not perish in some plane crash or mass suicide, nor did we withdraw from urban society to frolic in an environment free of electricity & internet.

As you may know, the goal of Amour & Discipline is to provide a donation system allowing people to send money to ANY indie artist/label they’d like to support. As you may have noticed, this application still isn’t there although it was meant to start almost a year ago.

At first, the development of this app relied on a single person. It was a big mistake, as this kind of project obviously needs to be carried out by an entire team. The developper struggled against unexpected difficulties during several months, until he decided to quit working on it last summer. Because it was coded in an uncommon language and some documentation was missing, we couldn’t find anyone to finish it. We had to start all over again.

We’ve punched walls for a few weeks, then we managed to gather a team of inconspicuous wizards willing to help us complete this blasted website. After five months of volunteer work added to their full-time jobs/studies/home lives/kinky time-consuming hobbies, we’re almost done. The donation app is working, we now have to eradicate a few remaining bugs and finish the design of the user interface. Laure, esion, Vincent, Patrick, now and forever we bow down — eyes wet, grinning foolishly — before your talent and benevolence.

So the whole A&D donation system will be up and running this spring. The collective webzine will really resume when the donation app launches, but we’ll probably post a few articles until then.