N.N.E.L. #2- Jeremy Barnes (A Hawk and A Hacksaw)

This is the second ever NON NEW ENGLAND LUMINARY interview, this time with Jeremy Barnes of A Hawk and A Hacksaw, and also of Neutral Milk Hotel wayyy back in the day. Read on as we discuss the current state of the Old World, or the New World’s conception of it, European folk music, and the storied experiences of AHAAH.

Also, AHAAH is making a number of stops in New England on their forthcoming tour with the absolutely fantastic Pillars & Tongues (if you don’t know them, do yourself a favor and buy some of their records, imagine Dead Can Dance fronted by John Cale at a gnarly block party at the end of the world, with boatloads of harmonium thrown in for good measure) and Dark Dark Dark. Check here for full dates and details (they’re hitting MA, VT, ME, and RI.)

(Photo taken by Jeremy for Evening of Light)

EOL: How was living in Hungary? Was it as beautiful as I’ve romanticized it to be?

Jeremy: Hungary is an amazing place to live- we loved it. We went there to work with and learn from musicians we had met, but the whole experience was life changing. But we did eventually move back to New Mexico. Living there made me want to have a field of my own, to be near my family and involved in community in the ways that our Hungarian friends are in their homes.

EOL: Why did you pick Hungary? Any reasons in particular?

Jeremy: There is a cosmopolitan side to many of the musicians we know there, they are interested in Serbian, Romanian, Turkish music, and we love the string bands of Hungary. We just felt at home in a strange way. And the folk culture has had an amazing revival there in the last 30 years, so at this point the level of musicianship is quite amazing.

EOL: Did you find that musicians from the region were generally more capable or well versed than other locales, more committed to the music(s) of their countries? That must have been a big help in finding collaborators…

Jeremy: The four musicians we worked with in Hungary were really into music from other countries, but not in the typical world music way of throwing everything in the pot and adding reverb. They were well versed in and respected music from all over Eastern Europe, they also knew about people like Pharoah Sanders and Jeane Ritchie, they were familiar with John Cage and if they saw Marta Sebestyen on the street they would stop to chat. We just felt a connection there and an understanding with them that we would not just be playing Hungarian music. and they were fine with that, and ready for the adventure.

EOL: I’ve got a friend who does booking in Vermont. He recently booked Jeff Mangum at a church in Burlington and the show sold out in minutes. I’m very curious if you’re still in touch with Jeff frequently, and also (more specifically) what your perspective is on his recent return to an almost mad level of success? For all intents and purposes, Jeff is a normal human being (almost more-so than a lot of indie-type rockstar figures these days), and yet he is continually treated like a god. This has to be strange for you, right?

Jeremy: I am still good friends with Jeff and always enjoy his company. At this point I am fairly out of the loop when it comes to his music career, although I am really happy that he is playing again, and I think he deserves the accolades. He is a genuinely wonderful musician. I was 19 when I joined his band in 1996, which now seems like another, even lost, time. I played drums, not accordion, and at this point I feel very happy that I have been able to have a strange second life as a musician.

EOL: Have you ever had any regrets about dropping out of DePaul University all those years ago to join Neutral Milk? Or has it been absolutely inconsequential?

Jeremy: No, none at all.

EOL: Let’s geek out about Central and Eastern European music, real quick-like. Just for my own nerd-ness. Forgive me if these things are of no interest to you. Are you a fan of Marta Sebestyen?

Jeremy: Yes of course, I love the earlier Muzikas records in particular.

EOL: What are your thoughts on Nico’s Marble Index trilogy? I’ve always felt a very ominous and sort of terrifying ancient presence in those albums, one closely connected to several lost and mysterious traditions. As someone so experienced with and well versed in Old World music(s), do you have any particular thoughts there?

Jeremy: I love Nico’s music although I haven’t listened to her in a few years. But yes, I think she tapped into an idea of Europe that is often unfamliar to Americans- we forget the pagan roots of Europe and the incredible amount of peoples who have drifted through there, and that they all left a mark. Europe is much stranger than the white/protestant sheen that many people consider it to be.

EOL: Are you aware of the older Romani/Hungarian traditional group Kalyi Jag? Ballads and things, vocals and guitar…one of my most treasured groups. Are they known there?

Jeremy: Yes, I have a few of their recordings and there are quite a few groups in a similiar vein in Hungary. They were very popular in the ’80s and ’90s. There is a great singer names Istvan Szlyvasi in Hungary now whose music is similar to Kalyi Jag.

EOL: Vladimir Vysotsky?

Jeremy: I am familiar with him but in general the area that interests me musically is South Eastern Europe, Turkey, Persia, in other words the region formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire. . .

EOL: Apologies. To re-focus, what acts from these regions inspire or have inspired you the most?

Jeremy: I am interested in Oriental Music, but there is something about that supposed border (which is actually a grey area), where Occidental meets Oriental, that I find completely amazing.  And again, this kind of goes back to Nico, and the idea that Europe is so much more richer than people realize. Bulgaria and much of South Eastern Europe was under Turkish control for hundreds of years, and that leaves a cultural mark, without a doubt.  But on top of that, you have the rich traditions of each country (and often each region in each country), and then the broader awareness of European tonality and composition. Bela Bartok was influenced by folk music, but folk music was not previously existing in a vacuum, it is, at it’s best, a living form. It is affected by the movement of people, rural or urban environments, even by popular culture.  In the ’80′s in the far northern regions of Romania, themost requested song was the theme from Dallas. In earlier centuries it was influenced by classical music, cafe music, parlour music. But I’m rambling.

EOL: What’s the used vinyl selection like over there [in Europe], folk-wise? I’ve found some gems here in New England, but I can only just imagine what it must be like to dig through old stuff there.

Jeremy: It can be good- but during the communist era a lot of the government run labels were putting out orchestrated versions of folk songs, so I feel that alot of the post WWII to 1989 musicians were under-recorded. Romania did a great job in documenting a lot of it’s urban Roma- like Romica Puceanu and the Gore Brothers, but there is a lot of techni-color socialist fantasy drivel to sort through. A lot of the great releases were done by visitors to the region. . .

 

 

EOL: Living in a region with such scenic and very very old locations must have afforded you guys with some unique opportunities for performance. What’s the coolest setting you’ve yet played in?

Jeremy: We played a festival on the grounds of a Psychiatric ward in Somlo, Hungary, where the patients with minor afflictions were allowed to attend the concerts, wearing their white nightshirts. We played a cooking competition in Eastern Hungary, and in Bucharest, Romania, the neighborhood Roma kids joined us on stage, dancing.

EOL: As an outsider playing music modelled after (or in the tradition of) the folk music of these countries, do you find that the locals in these places are receptive to your playing? Do they ever regard you with suspicion? Or, are they just elated that someone from outside the culture ‘gets it’?

Jeremy: Yes they are receptive, I would say that many of our best shows have been in Poland, Turkey, Hungary and Romania.

EOL: When your album covers do feature folk pattern work (the self titled record, and Délivrance), who’s doing them? Are they found patterns or are they specifically designed for the releases?

Jeremy: They are found patterns.

EOL: Now that acts like Gogol Bordello, Beirut, and others have sort of caused an Old World explosion in America’s popular consciousness, do you find that audiences are more receptive and/or fervent at your gigs? You guys easily bucked that trend and, in my mind, stand apart for being so reverent and devoted to the cultures you study. There’s never any hint of shameless swiping or profit in your work, and I mean no offense to the afore-mentioned artists when I say that.

Jeremy: Many people expect us to be like Gogol Bordello, which to me, is a sort of pantomime of Eastern European culture. When they realize that we are not going to fit in with their preconceived notions, they are completely disappointed. So it goes.

EOL: How do you feel about this massive wave of nostalgia for older European culture, music, and traditions? In particular, in American underground and punk culture there has been this huge surge of Romani/Gypsy romanticism in recent years. To me, it feels one dimensional and horribly misinformed/fantasized.

Jeremy: Yes, it is misinformed and fantasized. It has nothing to do with Romani culture- which prizes family and religion above everything else, a culture that is still enduring massive segregation and racism, and has very little opportunity for any upward mobility out of poverty. The Romani are insular and tribal, and don’t always get along with other Romani tribes, they have in the past preserved their
culture through being a-part, but being needed at the same time, and by arranged marriages within their tribes. In many ways they are a very conservative culture, and their interactions with non-Romani are usually kept to a minimum. Their mysteriousness has led to a lot of confusion- they are the last “other” in Europe, aside from the new immigrant populations, which don’t have the same nostalgic allure. Because of all this, many people are led to conclusions about them
which have nothing to do with reality.

EOL: On that same note, out of all of the bands in this one wave that are grappling with similar ethno-musical ideas and obsessions, I see AHAAH as being one of the most faithful, respectful, and (in a certain sense) interesting groups of the bunch. At the same point, you make innovations within your work that are no less commendable than some of the more ‘spun’ or ‘caricatured’ groups in this bunch (‘I Am Not A Gambling Man’ comes to mind, in particular) and I find that truly commendable. I’m curious though, within your working process, do you write ‘in the style’ of certain countries or genres of song, or do you invent your own musical forms inspired by these traditions? Or both?

Jeremy: We do try to write in the style of certain places, and we have been fortunate to learn from many musicians along the way, and to share our compositions with musicians in Romania and Hungary. I do not want to be a cover band, and while there is a lot to learn, in the end, I think that our “outsideness” is our greatness strength.  We are not like everybody else.

EOL: Just out of curiosity, can you list some of your favorite acts that you’ve seen/known across the sea that people here should know of?

Jeremy: Taraf De Haidouks, Dan Daniel, Unger Balazs, Trifon Trifonov, Selim Sesler, Atanas Vlatchev, Fanfare Zece Prajini, Mustafa Kanderali, Taraf de Olari, etc. . .

INTERVIEW #3- A Snake In The Garden (VT)

In Maine, our noise musicians tend to be more on the gloriously ridiculous side of things than the dark and violent. We’ve got legendary dudes Crank Sturgeon and Id M Theftable whipping up dada-ist frenzies of noise with contact mics, insane stage props, relative states of nudity, and all manner of hilarious vocalizations, and we’ve got plenty of avant-avant weirdness. However, we have a relative dearth of that harsh and shaded strain of noise music that has been so prevalent within the genre since it’s inception. Our Noise (With a capital ‘N’!) is more aligned with performance art, on the whole, than any sort of futurist auto-destructive blahblahblah.

This is why I was so taken with the work of A Snake In The Garden, personally, when I first stumbled across the Grimeology records website a few years ago. Having lived in Burlington, VT, for a single summer in 2009, it was nearly unbelievable to conceive of such a gnarly act hailing from that pastoral state, and especially from out of a scene almost proudly dominated by terrible bar rock bands. I mean, when I lived in Burlington, all of the good stuff stayed relatively hidden away from me, no matter how hard I seemed to try to find things here and there. Now, however, it’s my understanding that Vermont (and Burlington in particular) has a relatively thriving noise and experimental music scene. Or, at least, the now-legendary cassette label NNA Tapes (founded in 2008) seems to do a good job suggesting that there is one.

ASITG is the sole work of a one Matthew Mayer, and it turns out NNA Tapes is also partially his brainchild. To boot, he runs the afore-mentioned Grimeology Records, a truly brilliant and harsh Noise/Industrial/Etc. label. The guy is a one-man workhorse focused on both releasing and composing highly experimental work of all sorts, and he’s actually pretty tricky to get in touch with. Nevertheless, I sought him out and got him to answer some of my questions and curiosities relating to his work.

His is a dismal noise. It’s grinding, scraping, and guaranteed to turn off even some of the most committed fans of quote un-quote “out there” music(s.) If you’re into absolutely nightmarish sound, just pure and raw sound, you’ll love this. Matthew harnesses metal, microphones, and some rudimentary electronics to conjure some truly visceral post-industrial din. It’s body-and-mind-surrendering stuff, sounds so god awful that (if you’re of the right state of mind and physicality, or persuasion) you can’t help but love them. Read on as the mysteries of Matthew Mayer & A Snake In The Garden are brought to light for what I believe to be the first time:

 

EOL: How did you get into working with noise as opposed to more traditional methods of sound-sculpting/organizing/composing? Have you always been interested in working with noise/electronics/manipulation?

Matthew: I got into electronics around 2000 when I bought my first DJ setup. I was really into punk and hip-hop at the time (high school), and became fascinated with scratching and turntablism. So I saved up and got a “starter kit” kind of setup and just started destroying my dad’s record collection, as well as buying my own records for the first time. I would just practice and record tapes of weird mixes, myself scratching (poorly) over instrumentals using old sound effects records and stuff like that, just making one-off tapes. I guess this was my introduction to electronics since I had to learn how to use a DJ mixer…using stuff like EQ, gain, knobs/faders…the basics.

I continued with turntablism over the years, but didn’t really start messing with noise/experimental music until around 2003/2004. I first started experimenting with noise after my roomate at the time bought a Korg Electribe EA-1, which is a little compact analog-modeling synth/sequencer. I really had no idea what it did since I had no real experience with synths and other related gear, but I would just play around with it for hours with my headphones. I became familiar with things like cutoff, ring modulators, delay, chorus, and the other basics. Around the same time I started buying lots of weird tapes that I would find in Worcester’s amazing selection of thrift stores. It was also around this time that I discovered free jazz and musique concréte, I was blown away and started checking out books on Cage, Coltrane, etc. I was living in Worcester, MA at the time and got exposed to the local noise rock scene, which led me to start going to shows in nearby Providence, and being exposed to live noisy stuff was inspirational to say the least. One real game changer was this Halloween show at a warehouse called the Pink Rabbit, I saw bands like Fat Day, Lightning Bolt, USAISMONSTER, for the first time, and all at one show…it was intense.

EOL: Do you consider your work ‘music’?

That’s a complicated question which even I struggle with sometimes. I think it all has to do either with the intent of the artist, or the eye of the beholder.

EOL: What do you seek to accomplish onstage when you do play live? How often do you play live?

Matthew: I mostly seek to establish a connection with the audience. I am aiming to elicit an emotional response from people as a reaction to high volume sound, creating an atmosphere of intensity and drama. I’ve always been interested in the way abstract sound could convey different mental imagery and different feelings in different people, leaving it up to the individual’s own interpretation. I have been playing live noise pretty consistently for the last 4 or 5 years, mostly in or around where I live, Burlington Vermont, and around New England in general. With a few tours here and there.

EOL: Have you had any extremely adverse reactions to your live shows? Any horror/good stories?

Matthew: I can’t think of too many negative reactions to my performances that I know of. But, like everything, there’s going to be people who love it, people who hate it, and people who are indifferent. I’ve had the PA unplugged on me one time at the beginning of a set by some dude, but I think he just had no idea what was going on and was standing right in front of a speaker while he was hitting on some girl. I’ve had a dude recite a poem to me that he had written during my set, that was pretty interesting. I’ve also played to nobody except the people I was touring with before, which is probably some kind of rite of passage for a noise person.

EOL: ASITG has a very harsh and grimy visual aesthetic in all of its releases, flyers, promo designs, etc. This seems consciously cultivated and excellently achieved. What is the reasoning for this, or what obsession drives this visual bent?

Matthew: I try to create an accompanying visual element to my noise within the artwork that I make to go along with it. I like to extract real imagery from my life, and then violently abstract it, trying to remove traces of narrative or context in order to leave it open for personal interpretation. This goes hand-in-hand with the way I create my noise, capturing sound or objects from my life and re-appropriating them as source material. Visually I enjoy a lot of textural imagery, things that I would think look like what harsh noise would sound like, or the imagery of things I see everyday, or that have some kind of personal significance to me. I’m also really interested in a regression in technology, focusing more on collage, Xerox, cut & paste type of methods, rather than computers. I like things to look tactile and organic, which is also a nod to the aesthetic traditions of noise and industrial music, and tape culture in general.

EOL: Where did the ASITG logo come from, or how did that come about? Dare I say that it looks almost runic at points?

The logo I think was actually inspired by Iasos’ wordmark, believe it or not. The runic elements and symbols in it are meant to represent the connection between mankind, self, and the universe… a desire to know where we fit in as people, a need for answers.

EOL: How close of a kinship do you feel to the pre-existing lineage of industrial/noise/power-
electronics artists like Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten, Whitehouse, Nurse With Wound, etc? Do you walk proudly in that tradition or feel that you operate there only out of chance similarity in interest and approach?

Matthew: I definitely do feel a strong connection to noise & industrial music, although it was not necessarily the original intent when I started the project. I found out about noise through an interest noise rock, which led me to bands like Skullflower and Whitehouse early on, but I didn’t really revisit the older-school of noise/industrial music and culture until later. I focused on the present of harsh noise for a while before tracing it back to it’s roots in old-school industrial, which these days I am hugely inspired by. Not just sonically, but through things like visual aesthetic, fidelity, mood, themes, and so on.

EOL: Plans for the future? Releases? Tours?

Matthew: I plan to just keep practicing more, recording more, and continuing to play live. I have a bunch of upcoming releases slated, some tapes on labels like Phage Tapes, Sound Holes, Skeleton Dust, Narcolepsia, and a few more later down the line. I hope to do a couple shorter trips around New England sometime soon, and a longer tour maybe around the upcoming winter or spring. It’s a goal of mine to tour the west coast at some point, starting from somewhere like Seattle and going down to Southern California.

I’m also trying to enter a zone of heavy recording, I just picked up a new fancier 4-track that I need to learn to use. I’ve been messing around a bit with a shitty sampler I got, and I’m hoping to get this reel-to-reel player up and running. Lee Tindall (Zerfallt) and I are about to play our first show with our project Einfgall, and we’re hoping to work on some new recordings as well. Other than that I will just be continuing to work hard on NNA Tapes, the label I run with my friend Toby Aronson, as well as finishing up the remaining releases for the Grimeology label.

EOL: Outline for me, if you will, some of your most important/cherished equipment? I’m really interested in how you get some of those ridiculous textures and squeals out of your gear….

Matthew: The most cherished equipment I have would probably be the scrap metal collection I’ve amassed over the years. I’ve exhumed a lot of gnarly looking stuff up here in Burlington. My favorite has to be this rusty old railroad spike barrel that I dug out of the ground near the train tracks near our old practice space. It’s become a permanent part of my setup at this point. It’s been nicknamed the “Tunnel of Blinding Light,” and the cassette I did of the same name is kind of an homage to the different techniques I use to make noise with it. It’s really disgusting and creates equally disgusting and mysterious sounds. I’ve also accidentally sliced my arms up a few times using it in live performance, I have couple scars from it… so I have this weird connection with it.

Other than the metal the rest of my setup is pretty basic, some distortion and EQ and a few other pedals, some decrepit cassette players, and contact mics. Lately I’ve been trying to shy away from lots of distortion pedals, relying on the natural tone and texture of the metal combined with extreme EQ and gain to achieve the harshness.

EOL: Favorite musical acts/groups/people on the New England scene today?

Matthew: Man, there is really so much good stuff out here. We are lucky to have a wide variety of experimental music and noise here in New England. Boston in particular has been producing some of the best American Power Electronics/Industrial over the last few years… projects like Sharpwaist, Xiphoid Dementia, Karlheinz, and Sewer Goddess have really been pushing themselves to new levels. Guys like Keith Fullerton Whitman, Howard Stelzer, and Zerfallt have been killing it out there as well. Out west you have guys like Diagram A, Noise Nomads, Angst Hase Pfeffer Nase… Connecticut’s got an amazing crew with projects like Reviver, Colorguard, Sickness… there’s the mind-blowing Work/Death down in Providence… Maine has legends like Crank Sturgeon and ID M Theftable… I could really go on and on.

UPDATE 8/24/11

This is it, the new and improved EVENING OF LIGHT. More interviews are coming soon, some back-logged from the first edition of EOL and others from the forward-looking future of EOL. Another Non-New England Luminary is just around the corner with someone very, very special.

INTERVIEW #2- Gem Club (MA)

Gem Club is one of the East Coast’s most melodic and achingly beautiful best-kept secrets. For as long as I’ve known their music I have been absolutely perplexed by their near-total obscurity on the New England scene. The Boston duo, made up of vocalist/pianist Christopher Barnes and cellist/vocalist Krysten Drymala, write fantastically breathtaking songs that seem to scream for widespread attention but continue to elicit only cult following in the states.

Certain factions in Europe have been more attentive to Barnes’ & Drymala’s work (NoFearofPop’s editors placed the pair’s release Acid & Everything in their Best of 2010 year-ends, and Delicious Scopitone was an avid supporter of the group early on) but the overall response remains relatively hushed in comparison to the group’s obvious merits. Perhaps Gem Club’s music is too hushed, even too pretty, for most folks’ tastes nowadays. It seems to me, though, that one well-aimed placement of the duo’s work in any number of dignified motion pictures could easily break this band. Witness Brianna Olson‘s riveting video for ‘Animals’ and see which side of the Gem Club fence you fall on:

 

EOL: What musicians most inspire you, or your work within Gem Club?

Christopher: Well I really can’t give away all my secrets, then there’s nothing for us to talk about when we’ve run out of things to talk about. Here’s some stuff I’ve been listening to: Aaliyah, Carissa’s Wierd, Cat Power, Opal, Gas, Grouper, Holy Spirits, Kate Bush, Aphex Twin, Lower Dens, Tindersticks, Picastro. Girls. I think you can tell from this list that I love girls’ voices, and Aaron’s voice of course.

EOL: You’ve been working on a new record recently. How is this next release going to compare to your previous EP (2010′s Acid & Everything)? Any changes to the formula?

Christopher: I wrote and recorded the EP very quickly. The whole thing took about two weeks and there was no time to really stress out over any of the things that I normally stress out about. This time around I’ve had more time with the songs. There’s more space on this record. It takes its time. There’s also some new instrumentation and Ieva. Ieva is new-ish.

EOL: What do you set out to accomplish in writing your songs? What’s the Gem Club approach?

Christopher: Jared and I were talking in the car the other day about how absolutely dispensable music has become today. We were more talking about stuff you find on the radio and how quickly it comes and goes. Culture of immediacy, blah blah blah. I’ve always been drawn to writers and performers who were able to create music that you could keep coming back to and still feel moved, even if the trends or whatever have changed. I guess I’m trying to do that. I don’t know. I don’t really think about it too much to tell you the truth.

EOL: Gem Club describes itself (within promotional copy) as making ‘minimal pop songs with piano and cello.’ How do you see what you do as ‘pop’? Is this more a reference to structure and tonality, or do you feel some deeper alliance with ‘pop music’?

Christopher: I’ve always had a difficult time describing the sound. Even when I was just performing by myself around Boston. People would ask me what my music sounded like and my response always sounded really disparaging: “its slow, its sort of sad, its quiet.” So when someone said soft-focus pop it sounded like the simplest way to describe the sound. I’ve never really thought about it as pop though. To me pop seems more targeted towards a younger audience. Like teen girls or whatever. I think yes I do theme and variation, and the structure is sometimes similar to what you’d hear in a pop song, but pop as in like “popular appeal”? I don’t really think so.

EOL: On that note, where do you see the sound of Gem Club, or the songwriting within Gem Club, heading in the future?

Christopher: Some days I want to change it completely. I want it to be a larger sound. More grand. Other days I want it to be slower than it is. I want it to be less than it is. I’m really looking forward to meeting and working with more people. And maybe either or both of those will things happen.

EOL: How did it feel to get some serious attention for ‘Animals’ and it’s accompanying video? Was that a surprise?

Christopher: The whole thing has been sort of crazy. I put some songs up on the internet and Emmanuel from Delicious Scopitone wrote and asked if he could write about them on his blog. From there it sort of just went. I remember calling Brianna Olson from my bedroom to see if she’d be interested in doing a video and I was super nervous. I don’t know. We had only talked briefly online. She had this idea where she was like ‘I’m thinking about school girls and marriage and dogs‘. Then she sent me a picture of herself wearing a clown nose. That was it. When Bri came to shoot the video we were hunting all over Boston for a location, trying to rent a studio space to film the girls. We ended up filming it in my backyard. That backyard is gone now though.

EOL:  Have you received any attention from record labels yet? It astounds me that you are still unsigned.

Christopher: Hmmmm. Maybe…

[Note: Gem Club signed with Hardly Art not long after this interview]

EOL: How many attendees, on average, are at your shows? On a good night?

Christopher: Its weird you know. Lately we’re not playing as many shows locally. We don’t bring a crowd here in Boston. Maybe it’s the city. Maybe it’s not what Boston’s into right now or whatever. Boston is kind of a strange bird. We’ve had some really successful shows in NY.

EOL: Are there any particularly memorable/significant Gem Club shows that come immediately to mind?

Christopher: We played a living room / loft space in Brooklyn for a great crowd. People actually listening. That’s the kind of audience I love to perform for. Holy Spirits had this idea where they wanted to play a set with Nathaniel Whitcomb’s (ThinkorSmile) work playing behind them and they wanted us to play alongside Brianna’s videos. I don’t get to perform to Bri’s work very often, so those shows mean a lot to me.

EOL: I’ve always been curious, how many people cry at your concerts? Is this a regular thing? It should be. Thoughts?

Christopher: Um. No one I hope. Or if they do let’s say they keep it to themselves. That wouldn’t be what I would want to do on a Friday night–go have a good cry. You?

N.N.E.L. #1- Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu)

This post is the first in what will become a longer-running line of interviews with crucial figures from outside of New England. For this, the first Non-New England Luminary feature, we proudly present an interview with the one and only Jamie Stewart of West Coast legends Xiu Xiu:

(Photo taken by Jamie for Evening of Light)

EOL: It’s been over a year since ‘Dear God I Hate Myself’ was released. I see on the Xiu Xiu site that a new album is in the works. What can we expect from this record?

Jamie: It’s too early to give it away! It won’t be out until next year so. A little winking first, a little kiss on the ear…

EOL: Xiu Xiu, for the majority of its existence, has been largely a two piece outfit. How has the recent addition of Zac Pennington (Parenthetical Girls) and Sam Mickens (The Dead Science) been changing things? They’re both very interesting songwriters in their own rights and have really individual approaches to song-craft. I’m curious if their visions have been interweaving with yours and, if so, how they’re blending, or if they’re primarily helping to flesh out the live sound and arrangements of your newest stuff?

Jamie: We are all writing songs, as is Angela Seo. It’s really exciting for me to be able to add to something they have come up with and of course to have them add to something I have written. For the first time in Xiu Xiu there are 4 lyricists. We all have known each other for such a long time though that we have, I think, a clear grasp of what works for us to write about for each other. We are also all singing.

EOL: You have said before that your records are hugely informed emotionally by the recent happenings in your life, that: “If it is a year that is entirely filled with hilarious things, then it will just be hilarious. I hope the next record will be hilarious, but if it is a year that’s entirely filled with doom, then it will be doom-filled.“ If it’s still too early to answer my first question regarding the new Xiu Xiu record, do you have any sort of internal psychological barometer reading that points toward a ‘hilarious’ record or ‘doomy’ record yet?

Jamie: This year has been so mixed. The songs are about reflecting on a truly horrible time when Zac, Sam and I lived together in a house in Seattle called “Clowne Towne”, and about the sport murder of Gul Mudin by the US military, incest, pro wrestling, embracing and trying to find some company in the dark side of one’s existence, the factory labor of asian women in China, Haiti, and the idea of suffering, suicide attempts, divorce, abortion, being beaten up by jocks and the aforementioned loneliness. Oh, i guess that is not so mixed really.

EOL: In my mind, part of what makes your work in Xiu Xiu so distinct is the way you so freely combine noise and melody. I’ve always wondered where this inclination in your music comes from. You’re a fan of Morrissey, Bauhaus, and Queen, and you’ve covered Nick Cave’s ‘Jack The Ripper’ before, but who or what inspires you to work with jarring textures and noise?

Jamie: Are you asking what noise and experimental people I like?

Prurient, Blind Cave Salamander, Merzbow, Burning Star Core, Yellow Swans, Whitehouse, and Infinite Body are my favorites. Modern classical composers like Penderecki and George Crumb make more dissonance with acoustic instruments than anything possible with electronics. Certain South East Asian vocal oriented musics sound, to someone who has grown up listening to western music, incredibly dissonant and harsh, but they still are only voice and maybe very minimal percussion. But probably more than anything, my favorites would be animal sounds, frogs, red deer, hyena, certain bird songs like the Capuchin bird, insect sounds. These are the most noisy and beautiful to me.

EOL: I’ve read that you have a lot of background in experimenting with sound, outside of songwriting…

Jamie: Before I was a songwriter I was mostly an engineer. I spent much more time making odd sounds and experimenting with early digital recording than I did working on trying to say something narrative. Early on I played around a lot with slowing sounds down and stacking sounds to make something I had not heard before. Not saying it had not been done, but just new to my ears. I love this about music. Making new sounds is incredibly fulfilling and meaningful to my little musical heart.

EOL: When you say ‘I was mostly an engineer’, do you mean it in the traditional sense where you would have been working in studios as a producer’s assistant or do you mean it more in an informal sense (‘Sonic’ engineer, sound-tinkerer?.)  

Jamie: Probably somewhere in between. I recorded a bunch a bands and had a little home studio and worked at a college radio station recording live bands for on air broadcast, but I spent as much time by myself plugging the wrong box on the wrong box and turning the knobs all the way up. Since I started I have generally been inspired by a sound first and then by harmony and melody.

EOL: Do you have any early and secret noise recordings locked away in the Jamie Stewart vault?

Jamie: We have something like 50 releases. Does it seem like I keep anything secret?

EOL: In further exploration of the tonality/atonality issue, are you naturally inclined towards establishing some beautiful functional structure and then sonically destroying/eroding it OR is this something you arrive at incidentally out of multiple interests? Songs like ‘Sad Pony Guerilla Girl‘, for instance, seem to destroy themselves even as you listen to them. Still other songs have very subtle infusions of noise that seem to corrode or wear away at the edges of the tracks themselves (something I’ve always loved very much.)

Jamie: Thank you. There is no separation between the two. It is not as if we write a pop song and then go about wrecking it just on principle. Noise and beauty are both equally wonderful to me and they both elicit emotion in different but, I think, complimentary ways.

EOL: How does it feel to have nearly ten years of work in Xiu Xiu under your belt? Are you beginning to feel even remotely accomplished/legendary/majestic or does your self-loathing cancel all that out?

Jamie: When I am standing on the edge of a granite precipice, wearing an orange velvet cape, a scepter and orb in my hands, looking over the horizon flinging thousands of copies of the Xiu Xiu catalogue into the misty abyss below, only then do I feel majestic. Otherwise, I feel like a loser and am constantly worried I have no idea what the fuck I am doing.

INTERVIEW #1- The Body (RI)

(Photo taken in Portland, ME, by Ryan Eyestone)

 

The Body are a perfect band for the End Times. It matters little if you’re a believer in doomsday prophecies, when the fiery/implosive/stagnant conclusion to this planet finally comes rolling around the cosmic bend it’ll probably sound and feel a lot like The Body.

Their most recent effort, 2010′s ‘All The Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood‘, is a simultaneously horrifying and unnervingly beautiful fusion of cataclysmic noise and apocalyptic full-choir work, there’s really no other record out there like it. Vocalist and guitarist Chip King possesses a full-bodied, sweat-covered howl that comes out sounding as much like a strangled rooster (in a brilliant way) as an impaled Black Metal vocalist. I say ‘impaled’ here because King’s voice seems to be so much more honest and genuinely distraught than, say, Varg Vikernes or Nocturno Culto, but it still possesses all the bone-chilling intensity and high-end larynx-shredding tonality of these legendary figures. Point being, there’s nothing theatrical about the way King screams; nothing cool or spun to impress. It’s all desperation and confusion, all panic and aggression. At the same time that he’s shrieking with his entire being, body hunched over and completely tensed, his own guitar threatens to bury all of his vocal efforts. Drummer Lee Buford supplies nearly constant crash-heavy beats delivered with unbelievable force and concentration, further threatening to turn the proceedings into an insane pile of squalling violence. The duo push both themselves and their songs to the furthest reaches of power and effect, and to a level of skull-shaking abandon that suggests a powerful and entirely possible total collapse.

It’s at this juncture between destruction and devotion, frenzy and sublimity, that The Body treads a territory all their own. Their songs are ruined dystopian landscapes. Towering bombed-out masses of guitar and drums threaten to collapse inward on a lone and insane voice, while the bizarre scraps of previous fanaticisms march their way quietly into and through the wreckage. Ghostly choral decoration, looped Pentecostal-style tongues-spewing, and distant radio transmissions all appear within the end grooves of ‘All The Waters…‘ and lend an air of perverted and bastardized spiritualism to the pair’s songs. Throughout, The Assembly of Light‘s all-female choir contributions summon up images of Christian Armageddon while the occasional scraps of shortwave transmission recall horrifying survivalist radio broadcasts. Buford and King can be readily seen sporting massive guns of all types in their press photographs, and their lyrics read like a completely depraved and utterly brilliant death cult prayerbook. It’s as if the pair has studied all of the great transgressive, paranoid, and hopelessly fanatical visionary leaders of the past 50 years (Manson, Asahara, and Applewhite all come immediately to mind) and effectively summarized their delusions into one perfect exploding soundtrack for any number of potential raptures.

Buford and King embark on a very special tour with The Assembly of Light starting June 17th in Philadelphia. Together, the two groups will be playing 10 (surely) incredible dates up and down the East Coast, ending in Providence (their current homebase) on Sunday, June 26th. I myself am considering making the three hour trek from Maine to Rhode Island just to see them play once more. Head here for official details.

One thousand thanks to Lee for the following interview:

 

EOL: How often have you performed with the Assembly of Light Women’s Choir? Is this something that has only occurred once or twice in a live setting? I ask because I was more than elated to see that you are performing with them onstage for the Blackened music series in NYC in June….

Lee: We’ve played with the choir once before at the record release show. It’ll probably never happen like that again. With the volume of chip’s amps it’s really hard for the choir to compete with that. It turned out great but we were really concerned with their mic’s feeding back when we were trying to compensate for our volume.

We will be touring with them in June for 10 days but it’s going to be more them playing their stuff & then us playing with a little bit of crossover. It’s so hard to know how a room is going to be and what the stage and PA will be like so we don’t wanna plan all this stuff out and get somewhere that can’t accommodate it.

EOL: How hands-on was the experience of getting the whole choir on ‘All the Waters…’? Did you compose and transcribe parts for them or was someone else involved with the process?

Lee: Chrissy Wolpert, who wrote the choir pieces and who started the choir, has been a friend of ours for almost a decade. She’s done vocals/violin/piano stuff on older BODY stuff and on some of our side projects. She had the idea for a choir and it got going around the time we started recording All The Waters. She’s kind of like our 3rd member so we trust her completely. We had all the songs written to give to her except “A Body” which she wrote the choir part for and we wrote the music to that. She is an extremely good musician so it’s an honor to work with her and the choir.

EOL: What are some unexpected inspirations within the working processes and music of The Body? Any artists that would really surprise us?

Lee: I love the Beach Boys, and we both love ELO, so we wanted to get that kind of dense sound from using a variety of instruments and voices. Our live show is very reliant on volume and the way Chip’s amps setup sounds so it’s hard to capture that on recordings. We wanted to keep the intensity, so we had to borrow the ideas of a lot of that 60′s and 70′s stuff, those ways of doubling up and using multiple instrument tracks. Working with the guys at Machines with Magnets is a huge help also.

EOL: Do you feel honored to be so often compared to Swans in your press, or is this a point of contention for you guys? It seems very prevalent in all the writing out there on you guys….

Lee: For sure, I got the chance to see them in Boston last September and it was the best live show I’ve ever seen. If we can capture any of the intensity that they convey live and on record then I feel like we’ve accomplished a ton.

EOL: Are there any details on the At A Loss re-pressing of  ‘All The Waters…’? I have read that this it’s going to be a 2xLP set, but I was curious if you had any secrets up your collective sleeve? Modified artwork? Colored/transparent vinyl? Posters? etc.?

Lee: The main differences is that instead of the screenprinted insert it has two embossed euro sleeves inside the gatefold. There are some white ones and some greyish ones too, but honestly we’re not big fans of colored vinyl so we made sure there’s plenty of black. It also includes a download code which the original didn’t have.

EOL: Favorite New England musician(s)/act on the scene today?

LB: There’s a lot of good stuff out there but these are our favorites: WORK/DEATH, who did noise stuff on every track of our record, is extremely good live and just put out an excellent CD on semata productions that is a must have. Also, SEWER GODDESS from the Boston area, HUMAN BEAST from providence, and BIG BLOOD from Portland.

WELCOME

Howdy to whoever may be out there. Currently working on re-posting the old stories to this new and improved site.