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.