Interview with Count Labeefah

Last night Count Labeefah played its first show at the International Noise Conference at Skylab. Here is a brief interview I managed to grab.

What are some of your favorite TV programmes?

Pretty much Sunrise Earth and The Yule Log.

Oh, nice. So you guys smoke a lot of reefer?

Yep. Combined all three in the car once. 

So what happened?

I had to use two different windows to play them simultaneously. 

Yeah?

Yeah. Two different videos. One youtube, one DVD. 

Interview with Javelin

Every few days I'm stricken to check my computer's calendar. This afternoon I did just that and saw that Javelin, a Brooklyn-based kind of dancey, sort of lo-fi, sort of all-over-the-place electronic duo were to be performing tonight at the Summit Bar in Columbus. This was just a few blocks from my apartment so on this Sunday night I was happy to go. I talked with George and Tom after the performance. These guys were really cool and thoughtful throughout our conversation. Check them out! 

Two things I wasn’t expecting were vocals and live percussion, yet those were the most obvious things you guys were doing. Are those adaptations to the live environment?

Tom: Yeah, totally. We bring a different thing to the table live for sure, when we play. 

George: I think it’s just the most immediate way to inject some energy. It’s physical. Pre-recorded, sequenced music is kind of boring if you’re up there pressing buttons. 

Tom: But when we first started playing in Providence we played these sweaty little dance parties that were mostly just our friends. But yeah we had just made stuff on our MPC’s. 

George: That was less performance based, that was more like DJ-ing. 

Tom: We started having this… it wasn’t an identity crisis because we didn’t have an identity but an identity formation where we were like, “We really don’t want to be ‘DJ’s’, and we really don’t want to be a ‘band.’ “ So we arrived at this really weird medium that is not always reflected in the recorded stuff.  

Dance music has sort of been standardized according to the capabilities, as well as the constraints, of software. Do you feel that your hardware-based medium is better for coming up with something unexpected?   

Tom: I think so. 

George: I think so. I find… I mean, we use hardware, we use MPC’s to make our stuff. But I don’t find that the music we make is entirely reliant on the brain of the machine itself. A lot of our stuff is recorded live, into the thing, so it’s all physically put in, I don’t know. There’s a human… we play instruments, we record instruments into our samplers and stuff. There’s not a lot where the machine is doing something for us. You can use it like that, and that’s cool. But we tend to have a very hands-on approach with whatever we use. 

Tom: It’s funny I think whatever you’re using, you know, gives you limitations and little weird tools. Even there are things in the MPC interface that you know when you’re trimming a sample it’s totally, it’s like how meticulous do you want to get with it in that one second. Maybe it’s not very you just kind of figure out the start point and then that effects when it hits rhythmically and then if that’s changing too because you haven’t quantized it or something then. 

George: But someone like Prefuse 73, just really figured out how to make the MPC do these things that he wanted it to and he kind of mastered it. 

And you guys aren’t anything like that. 

George: Sometimes I think of it like a pencil drawing. You get the sense of how fast someone drew something by how thick the line is.  

Bar Owner: You guys are all Javelin right? 

Tom: Yeah... 

Well these guys are.  

Bar Owner: OK, what’s your plan for the evening? Do you guys play poker?   

George: Tommy hates fucking poker [laughs]. 

Tommy: Poker makes me feel bad. 

Bar owner: You HATE poker?

Tommy: It just makes me feel bad, as a human. As a reptile, I would do it. 

George: Um… what was I saying? 

Pencil drawing. 

George: Oh. You can tell how fast someone drew something by thickness of a line or how labored it looks, as opposed to sketches. There’s a lot of life, there’s energy to that. And so sometimes I think, cutting up samples or doing sequence-based stuff,  if you work really fast…. I don’t know, maybe this is just psychological, or psycho-somatic or whatever. But if you work really fast and just chop stuff kind of sloppily and just do stuff, your first thought your first intuition or whatever sometimes you can make for me the music feels a little more alive, even though it’s still obviously sequenced.

Tom: Like gestural.

George: Yeah. That’s the way I like to record. 

Going on the same thought, what in particular about hardware is irreplaceable as compared to computer programs? 

Tom: Well the sound of a computer live, I think more than anything that’s what may make people sound more like each other. Because a lot of people are using the same drum machine sounds, which is fine. They might be the same exact sounds that you might use with hardware. But a musical machine is built as such, and it has… output level differences and… it’s designed to play music. So I see a lot of computers on stage and have forever, but I have yet to…. You can always hear that no matter how good the system, you can hear that it’s a computer, I don’t know why. 

George: I think it must be something about circuitry, or a processor that everybody has the exact same one, so no matter what sound you get it’s always going to be within the same general range. 

Tom: And it’s weird, even audio programs, the sound differs between one another. I can tell sometimes when Ableton Live is being used. It’s weird but I can sometimes tell the difference. George: Live has a sound. Tom: Yeah, Live has a sound but you can’t explain it. 

Do you think an MPC has just as much of its own sound characteristics as a computer? 

George: Definitely. I would say so. It’s got a different kind of punch. Computers can be punchy as hell too, but an MPC has a different…. Something about the… Tom: It’s a mystery. People will tell you there are no differences, but as an example people used to say that about old drum machines, as in, how can one sound snappier than another? But people have used midi data to figure out what’s happening, and a lot of times the internal sequencer is warbling, basically, the tempo so it’s not constant. According to power source fluctuations and crap the tempo would actually change. And that used to be true with old synthesizers. The older Moogs would warble because they hadn’t figured out the power yet. 

Your songs are heavily disjointed, which to me comes off as an instinctual response to an eclectic listening environment. Given that you are exposed to such a range of ideas, is it possible to make a more traditionally focused album, while still remaining instinctual?    

George: I don’t know. It’s hard for us to make more than like three songs, in the same vein, in one sitting. Maybe it’ll happen more in the future. 

Tom: On the same tip as what George was talking about with gesture and pencil drawings, I’ve always had a theory that if you got very inspired and were using the same equipment during like a three month span, you would naturally just… 

George: This record, a lot of it has been worked on for like four years. So it’s different phases, it’s all over the place. Performed in different houses, different apartments, different… 

Tom: Lifestyles. Ages. 

George: Different whatever. If we record an album right now in three months it would probably all kind of sound the same.   

You get a good deal of attention from the internet. How does this affect your reality?  

Tom: Great question. 

George: It’s exciting sometimes. It’s kind of annoying sometimes too. I also don’t know enough about it. I’m not much of a blog enthusiast. There’s a couple things I read, but if you go down that rabbit hole of Googling yourself and reading what people have written about you, it can be a weird experience. It’s so immediate. If someone sees a show that’s a bad show, or you fucked up, or the sound was weird, or the audience was weird, they just post that! And it gets aggregated amongst a hundred other blogs and it’s like… what the fuck? [laughs] Come on, that’s so harsh. 

Tom: On the up side, what’s great about the internet is anybody can write, and it’s also the double-edged sword. Just as crowd-sourcing… Jamz n Jems [Self-Released, 2009] wasn’t a finished thing; it was never meant to be a finished thing, but a lot of people heard it through the internet. And comments about it wound up influencing the finished product that wound up on the album. Someone said Vibrations wasn’t long enough, I think Pitchfork said that. And it was like, shit, yeah, we gotta extend that, and we did! 

George: It was like a giant focus group. 

Tom: Yeah, and that’s what we used to do without the internet, our friends, every show was like that. You’re shopping what works and doesn’t work, so it’s cool. 

 

How much of your sample sources come from the internet?

Tom: Really not much actually. 

George: Yeah I don’t do that. I experiment with it occasionally just getting hits of things…. I don’t know, I’m not the kind of person that’s like, “Oh that’s cheating, you gotta really work for it,” it just hasn’t happened. 

Tom: I think the reason we each started sampling was… I mean it sounds cheesy but it’s true, like when you find something… you’re just like, “This exists? This object exists? Someone made this?”
George: Like, this is someone’s big project? Tom: Yeah! And I walked out of the house today and decided to go to this place, and look through this bin, and you don’t really get that with the internet. The internet always feels like someone was there first. Or eighty people will be there after you. 

Tom: Yeah, and you can look and see, oh, three hundred people have viewed this. But that record is just yours. You find that weird cassette and you’re just like, “What the fuck?” 

George: Yeah and your enthusiasm about it is a product of your own ignorance. Like maybe you don’t know about this thing but maybe there’s thousands of other people that do, but they’re not there. 

Last question: What would you have done differently in the past few days? 

George: I don’t know, I had a really good past few days. 

Tom: The one thing I can say with certainty: I was in the thrift shop. I found a tape that was Growing Pains theme song and other instrumentals for television by the guy who wrote the Growing Pains theme song. 

George: And I don’t know that they were official theme songs. I think they might have been music inspired by My Two Dads. 

Tom: Exactly, it was the same composer who did Growing Pains. And it was a whole tape. I was so excited about it I showed it to George, and then George passed it to our friend Johnny who was with us, and Johnny was like, “Oh cool,” and just put it somewhere. And then I couldn’t find it. And I had a nightmare about that exact thing, finding something like that.  

George: This was a salvation army in Bloomington, Indiana. 

Tom: Somewhere in Bloomington, Indiana is a Growing Pains cassette. 

George: Find it.

Five minutes with Outer Space

Outer Space is Jeff Hatfield and John Elliot of Emeralds. To me there is no better place than Skylab, where Outer Space played last night. I walked in to the stairwell and heard a woman's voice practicing scales over music I can't describe. It was awesome to hear, but unfortunately it was the end of Outer Space's set. 

Both these guys were really cool about doing an interview. There's something very lame about interviewing. You come off as someone who has these unresolved questions about what you see and hear, as though you're missing the point. Really I just like talking to people who are excited about art. I realized shortly before that I had only come up with four questions, but that doesn't really matter.  

How important is volume on the effect you want to have with music?

John: I guess in a recording scenario it's important for the dynamic of the way a record's gonna work and in a live scenario it's important for a live performance, so I guess it's kind of different for each thing. But I think the entire range of dynamics is important. Live and recorded. 

I missed a lot of your set. But right when I walked in I kind of heard something completely different, at least in the two or three minutes I picked up. Do you make a point of distinguishing your shows, and doing something different week to week?

Jeff: Distinguishing shows... 

John: Yeah I think we try to make it different each time-- we'll talk about what we're gonna do. It never goes that way though. 

Do you think talking about it directs it in a way you can't control?

Jeff: Yeah we do sketch them out. 

John: Depends what the P.A.'s doing. And what the room's doing. Because then it can change, and you have more room. Sometimes you don't have any room because the P.A. sucks. 

So do you talk about dynamics, something vague like that? How specific do you go in talking about it?

John: There's not really too much talk about dynamics. It's more just talking about what everybody's gonna do. We don't talk about a lot of things or about how quiet it's going to be. It just ends up that way. It's kind of strange. Just depends on whatever's happening. 

I asked this question to Mark a couple weeks ago, but it’s one I think any musician can be asked. Do you see your music as something that you create to effect yourself, or do you see it as something through which you express an idea or statement from within? 

Jeff: Probably a little bit of both... 

John: Yeah definitely both. It's really important to kind of put your character out in what you're doing. It's really good to kind of take what's happened to you and try and put it into what you're doing. 

You had all the lights turned off throughout your last skylab show. Do you see darkness as the best visual in which to hear music?

Jeff: Yes.

John: Definitely. Blackness. I like playing in the dark completely. And I also like playing with specific, organized imagery or something like that. But if I don't have it together I just have to play in the dark. 

Is it because of some emotion you associate with it, or because people can create their own thing with it, or something else?

John: It's just because it kind of creates more space for everybody. It just kind of changes the way things go. I don't know how to say it. Lighting's really important. Whenever I... Now I'm just rambling, I don't know. I don't like lights. [To someone touching his head] He's asking me if playing in the dark has to do with the way I feel emotionally, or if it has to do also with what we're going to do for the audience. And I said it has more to do with doing it for the people. Giving them more space. 

Woman [muffled]: Well then why do you do this?

John: Because I'm waiting around. And I'm listening to Jeff. 

Woman: Is this the sound of listening?

John: I have to get myself together. I'll fiddle with stuff if I don't just... [in reference to the way she stands] That's very Italian. Sicilian. 

Woman: This is what people do, and most of old people, in countries, walk like this. 

John: Yeah. Sicily. 

Woman: Yeah. Bolivia. 

John: Bolivia. 

Woman: Peru. Japan. I haven't been to Japan. 

What countries have you been to in touring with Outer Space or Emeralds?

John: With Outer Space? I haven't played anywhere outside of the country with Outer Space, you know I don't think we've been outside of Ohio with Outer Space, except for like a show last month, and then these two Columbus show and then the Michigan show. I've never played solo outside of the state. Yeah, that's it. I don't know though, things are gonna change this year. Like I'm gonna do a... there's a record coming out soon. And I'm gonna do a double LP for Hanson, it's gonna be a CD as well. And that'll be out, middle of next year probably next summer. So that's what I've been working on.

Biff Boff Barf & the Family Chapter live @ Skylab

This Friday night I took it upon myself to go see Wolf Eyes. I brought my computer along-- I try not to feel too douchey for it. Anyway, I got there and figured I'd just start recording. 

The first band I saw was off to the curtained room with the fire escape. I couldn't really tell for a bit what instruments they were playing. Kind of the same thing happened with this band Face Place. But yeah I heard some drums and guitar and saw a dude croud-surf. This made me wonder if I should just close my eyes and listen like I was doing or get up and actually watch what's going on. I probably should have opted for the latter... it was sort of a hardcore band. But I was mostly cozy. 

Towards the end of this set I remember hearing what sounded like some movie dialogue playing over the music. In my blind state I imagined Kevin Costner talking, which made me think, "Ah. Hardcore and Kevin Costner." 

Around two minutes in there is some curious youth banter. 

I hope this is called Biff Boff Barf and not something else. 

Then played a super drone dude. It was kind of a zoney show but it looked like people got impatient. I was sitting in a chair which probably made it more enjoyable for me. He played a lot with samples that were deeply distorted, big, slow, and delayed. 

Moving out into the front hallway, something called The Family Chapter commenced after a bit of a break. I couldn't remember (or see) much of this one, with the extreme exception of the end, which I was moved to film: 

THE FAMILY CHAPTER @ SKYLAB COLUMBUS MARCH 5 2010 from Colin on Vimeo.

Anyways, this piece of performance seemed to illuminate how fried I was feeling. I took off, pretty tired and hungry and out of it. Didn't stick around for Wolf Eyes. I regret that but only in retrospect so it's whatever. 

Mark McGuire and Outer Space live at Skylab in Columbus

These are further amateur recordings probably useful only to a tiny percentage of the planet. But hurr they is. 

Mark McGuire live @ Skylab 2.25.10

Guitar through a couple loop pedals and other effects. Really guitar jammy but really textural. Sounds like Robert Fripp. 

Outer Space live @ Skylab 2.25.10

The bass on this set was beyond words. A lot of distortion on the recording. Droney rocket propellor bass and arpeggios. It gets kind of funky toward the end. It's interesting to hear how my microphone interacted with the final bass swell. They kinda developed the music by changing the EQ.

Paraphrased Mark McGuire (of Emeralds) interview

So I recorded a Mark McGuire + Outer Space show, as well as interviewing Mark, and of course my hard-drive filled up twenty seconds after I began recording the interview. I wrote down everything I remembered and then I sort of reduced it to fairly preserve the gist of the conversation. 

First off, Skylab is probably the illest venue I can think of in Columbus. It's basically an apartment, on the fifth floor, and all kinds of novelty items, instruments, posters, machines, etc. And with a lot of cool people hanging out.  Bring some drinks along and any night there is well-spent. 

Is your music more an expression of something within yourself, or is it something you create as a means of emotionally affecting yourself?

He basically opted for the former. He said it came more from within and spoke of how second-nature and instinctual his approach is. 

Your shows involve building something out of individual parts. When you are writing music, do you ever find yourself forgetting the blueprint of a song?

He agreed for sure that this happens, but he said that this makes it cooler. He mentioned this as a reason for why it’s good to record everything. 

Is there a particular imagery you associate with your own sounds and music?

He said that he does associate his experience of imagery with his music, but also brought up that other people bring their own experiences and imagery.

There is a wide spectrum of artists who use repetition to different extents and for vastly different purposes. Still, people perceive a divide between repetitive music and non-repetitive music. Can you guess where this attitude towards music might stem from?

He could not guess, and said he doesn’t know why people think some things. He suggested that some people can “zone out” while others suffer from ADHD. 

I had a conversation with a friend of mine where we discussed whether the use of tapes is a purely formatting decision, or also a textural one, and even a compositional one. Do you see putting one group of songs onto “Side A,” and another onto “Side B,” as creating mini-suites?  

He agreed that this can occur, but more after the fact for him and not as a conscious or pre-meditated thing.

Does knowing whether music is improvised or not change your perspective of it?

He said that it does, as well as saying that if someone knows music is improvised, that it could be good to see an artist develop a fully-formed piece of music on the spot. 

Were you improvising tonight?

He said that he had a couple rough ideas.  

Do you associate the concept of looping music with spiritual concepts such as ritual?

No, he did not.

Mount Eerie live in Cincinnati, 11.5.09

This is a recording of the Mount Eerie set at the Art Damage Lodge. It's pretty much useful for diehard Mount Eerie fans only.  He plays most of Wind's Poem here, with a full band featuring Julie Chirka, Nick Krgovich (both of opening band No Kids),  Tara Jane O'Neill (who also performed that night), and others. There were two synths, guitars, two drummers, maybe a bass? I don't remember. 

00:00 Wind's Dark Poem

05:06 Through the Trees

13:46 My Heart is Not at Peace

18:55 The Hidden Stone

22:43 Wind Speaks

28:55 Summons

33:05 Between Two Mysteries

39:17 Ancient Questions

43:03 Lost Wisdom Pt. 2

46:18 Stone's Ode

Recorded with onboard Macbook mic into Garageband. Changed EQ a bit there and converted into iTunes mp3.

54:26, 74.8 mb, 192 kbps. 

Download

Interview with Mount Eerie

Below is an interview I conducted with Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie, and formerly The Microphones fame. I always remember Phil shows fondly. This particular one occurred November 5, 2009 at the Art Damage Lodge in Cincinnati, OH.  

The vocals on Wind's Poem (2009, P.W. Elverum & Sun) are mixed low. Is there a rationale to this? Do you expect that people's ears will naturally go to the voice? 

That's an interesting question, to start with. Yeah, it's intentional-- in hopes that people will turn it up, because their ears do go for the voice, so you need to hear it better. That way the bass notes and the atmosphere is louder and more... inescapable. 

Have you heard the new Karl Blau album and do you have any thoughts on it?

Zebra? I haven't listened to it that many times. So I haven't listened to it enough times to form any thoughts. 

You are, or you have been, a huge The Big Lebowski fan. What other Coen brothers movies do you like?

That's a good one, that movie. They are all really good; I love No Country for Old Men, that was very beautiful. I like them all though. 

Does contradiction inspire you? Would you have delved so deep into the Norwegian hardcore scene, for example, if it wasn't so foreign to you at first?

Contradiction? Yes! Contradiction is super inspiring to me. But, the Norwegian hardcore thing, I don't know about that, or if it was the contradiction that drew me to it. But yeah, I'm into contradictions... like absurdity, the absurdity of "nothing is pure, all the way," everything that everyone does is always partially this, partially that, nothing's black and white. So I'm into embracing that kind of full spectrum. 

What visual artists have you been liking lately?

There's this Norwegian fairy-tale artist named Theodor Kittelsen. He's probably my favorite. And he's not very famous, or traditionally "good" at drawing.

Like an illustrator?

Yeah, like an illustrator. In Norway he's kind of like a national hero. But outside Norway, he's not really well-known. But his dark forest imagery is so beautiful and dark. Very dark. 

Is that what you're going for?

Yeah, it feels like the type of thing I try and do in music, but like in paint. 

Did you ever become self-aware about the fact that you were channeling wind as a metaphor and did you fear that it would come off as contrived what with you having done this with other elements in the past?

I wasn't trying to do so much... I mean, I've never really straight-up tried to do a themed record, like, "I'll channel this element now!" No, I didn't really worry about it being contrived because it was sincerely inspiring to me; I was very sincere about it. It didn't seem like a gimmick at all. Though it does come close on this album to being gimmick-y but... fuck it. I don't care. I was sincerely inspired to do that kind of thing. Whole-heartedly. 

There is one photo in the Mount Eerie book that is all grain, all texture. It's pretty much brown but with a bunch of other colors and shapes if you look close. It seemed drastically different from many of the other photos, but it also seemed to resemble the effect delivered by the distortion you've been using live and on your album. Can you say anything about this picture if you remember the one I mean?

I think so. I think it's of moonlight on water. But it's... the camera happened to crop the moon. And the horizon is there but it's just it was so foggy, or not foggy but like... something about the way the light on the film interacted... there's no crisp horizon line and there's no clear water. And the colors turned brown because there was a lot of city lights. But the moon is cropped off so there's just this faint glow. It's like a photo of the space between the moon and the horizon, without the moon or the horizon in it so it's just like this weird... wall of... nothing. I don't know how that relates to music or anything, but that's what the picture's of. 

You've mentioned My Bloody Valentine a couple times in connection with Wind's Poem and that you were into them as a teenager. Do you have a preferred My Bloody Valentine song?

No. I don't really listen to music as individual songs. Except for Top 40 hip-hop. But yeah. 

Speaking of which, you mentioned The Blueprint 3 as something you were listening to at one point. What's your favorite song there (if you have any)?

I haven't actually listened to it that many times since then because I've been on this tour. And it's always a battle for what you get to listen to in the van. So I don't want to assert my power too hard. So I don't know... I am pretty sick of all the songs they're playing on the radio from that album though.

The singles? 

The singles are like Death of Auto-tune...

Empire State of Mind and Run this Town.

Yeah-- Death of Auto-tune's pretty cool though. 

One impression I get from you is a de-emphasis on the importance of music. Is this an accurate impression, and if so where does this sentiment come from?

I guess I probably do feel like music is important-- secretly. But maybe because I exist in that world I feel like I want to de-emphasize it because I'm humbled by it all the time. Being on tour, playing with other bands... I love music. I buy records. But I guess maybe what that question comes from is... it is an extravagance, you know? In relation to people trying to subsist in the world. And in the United States all these people, like myself, touring around, living this life of luxury, but basically doing no real work. And playing music, it's like smelling flowers for a living. I just feel like it's important to have that kind of perspective.

So do you distinguish between music as an extravagance and music as it exists in a sub-saharan tribe? 

That's a different way of music. I guess the way I'm complaining about music it's...

Like the indie scene in America or something?

Yeah, this sense of entitlement about the importance of music. Of course music is a human thing that's going to happen in all levels of poverty, and that's the beauty of it. It just comes out of people. But it comes out of people after they've eaten.