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Interview from Spew, #87 February 2015

(originally published in abridged form)

2014’s triple disc behemoth Harshest Realm is the self-titled debut release of a musical project spearheaded by one Garret Kriston, a based musician whose formative years were split between formal studies and basement recording before toiling within the city’s DIY/punk scene. Now he has emerged with a sprawling document of what surely is a vast arsenal of artistic capabilities. Harshest Realm is now available via Coolatta Lounge CDs, along with fellow traveler Marshall Stacks’s latest jammers Lost in Sim City and the Snake Eyes/Point Blank single.

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Let’s start by giving the folks at home some background information. I’m particularly interested in learning how your relationship with music has developed over the years, so as to better understand where the music on the Harshest Realm came from.

No problem. I’m going to not hold back from rattling off influences and favorites, if that’s okay.

Totally. The more the merrier.

I was born at home on March 3rd, 1990 in Oak Park, down the street from Chicago’s west side, near Harlem between Harrison and Roosevelt. My earliest memory of music was seeing archival footage of playing on the Ed Sullivan Show, which made playing in a band and original songs seem like the most appealing activity in existence. I might have been two going on three, and I don’t remember much else from then besides puking in my crib and seeing carrots in it (the puke.) My older brother was discovering “,” so there were rock related bootleg VHS tapes in the house that would get played over and over.

1 One was an Ed Sullivan retrospective that had the Beatles plus the Stones, the Doors, small tastes of Motown, the Rascals, a still photo of Bob Dylan since they didn’t let him perform. This was the early ‘90s so the tape also had the episode of Get A Life where Chris Elliott housesits and has nightmarish hallucinations about the pizza delivery man trying to kill him, which scared the shit out of me. I would also watch Stop Making Sense and even liked this New Kids On The Block VHS that my older girl cousin had, plus musical sequences in kids movies like The Gumby Movie, Kermit the Frog singing “Rainbow Connection, and Disney stuff like The Aristocats and Mary Poppins. Dick Van Dyke’s turn in the latter as a “one-man band” surely split my mind open a bit. We had a tape of a Saturday Night Live musical retrospective hosted by Wayne and Garth, too, so I got to see , Devo, Eddie Murphy as James Brown singing about getting in a hot tub, Andy Kaufman, Squeeze, Whitney Houston…sort of a crash course in what music became after the ‘60s. As a kid in the ‘90s I thought a lot of contemporary music sounded too weird. Moving beyond the Beatles meant getting into Wings...also the Kinks and Buffalo Springfield. was huge for me since he bounced between bands and always contributed their best songs, in addition to ruling it on his own. Obviously, I found any of his newer to be lightyears beyond the contemporaneous Crosby, Stills & Nash output.

My parents had sophisticated boomer taste so I’d hear Richard Thompson, Tom Waits, Van Morrison, Suzanne Vega...if records were getting play they didn’t sound like anything to me. My brother was getting into cooler classic rock bands like Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, AC/DC, Aerosmith…I liked some songs but wasn’t ready. The James Gang and the Guess Who were more my speed. Steve Miller Band. I might have been five when I saw a band playing at a street festival on Oak Park Avenue near the old Second Hand Tunes and they rocked the shit out of “Swingtown.” To this day I’ll defend just about anything on classic rock radio. My older girl cousin lived with my family for a bit and she had a weird “alternative” CD collection with Smashing Pumpkins and Red Hot Chili Peppers…lots of gross, creepy cover art with babies and shit. I do remember the booklet for Without A Sound by Dinosaur Jr. being in her CD wallet. I guess Candlebox was a thing for her, too. My brother’s friend was into Bush and Silverchair…13 certainly seemed like a ways off, let’s just say. Kids at school took longer to care about music. This is the mid ‘90s, by the way. In summer school before second grade I met some kid who I thought seemed like a cool music guy but he disapproved of my old person taste and proudly stated that he only listened to songs featured on VH1’s Top 10 Countdown. I didn’t have cable so I wasn’t familiar with the brilliance of Fastball and Marcy Playground. Kids my age then started getting into music for real. Before that I’d only get to talk about music with the occasional kid whose dad might have been into the Police. A couple years later that same kid was all about Third Eye Blind. I started noticing that my peers’ CD collections mainly consisted of Eiffel 65’s Euro Pop, Smash Mouth’s Astro Lounge, and Sugar Ray’s 14:59. The edgier kids had Blink-182’s Enema of the State and the Offspring’s Americana. Some dude slept over at my house once and he had both CDs with him, so I asked if I could tape them and this asshole said no, so I just did it while he was asleep. Later my mom told me to tape over both sides because the artists used foul language (90% of the appeal, duh.) Long story short, I didn’t. Cursing was one of the main draws of contemporary music back then, even with sunnier sounding acts like New Radicals, whose songs stood out from others on the radio due to sounding like early ‘80s Stones. Their CD could have been deemed “parental advisory” but wasn’t. Same with some Everclear CDs and Incubus and this terrible band I liked called Stroke 9. What a completely hilarious time in hindsight. Finally

2 downloading the “extreme version” of the South Park album song by song off some fan site felt like a major victory after repeatedly marveling at the 30 second RealAudio clips offered on CDnow.com. I had a Mac and had to jump through some hoops before getting the music piracy thing figured out.

When did you start trying your hand at learning and playing music?

Okay, I should backtrack a bit here. I played toy instruments as a kid, and dicked around on an electric upright piano that had no more than five presets including sexy harpsichord, vibraphone, and “EPIANO” sounds. I started taking piano lessons at six years old. In my own time I’d try to pick out melodies of songs I knew like “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” which helped develop my ear. For the lessons I practiced as little as possible but still did it every day. Sheet music books with fun pictures kept me engaged, so I wasn’t exactly diving headfirst into classical repertoire. Playing from memory during recitals was always terrifying, and I screwed up during my first one ever playing “Fluffy the Puppy,” although I did recover in a manner that was in all likelihood swifter than it seemed at the time. The whole time I’m of course thirsty as fuck to be a real musical artist, writing songs and playing in a band. “Recorder club” was very much my type of extracurricular activity. In fourth grade we got to pick out instruments to learn during school and I somewhat inexplicably thought clarinet might be a good choice, but my lungs were too weak because of asthma. Similar story to , I should note. The orchestra director suggested violin, so I learned that for four years before quitting since it was physically uncomfortable and just pretty lame overall. Meanwhile I was upping my game in piano a bit, playing more challenging pieces in a signature style that was often as fast, frantic, and intense as possible. When I was 10 years old, I attended a brief jazz-oriented summer program in New Orleans, staying with family friends in a suburb that I only recently learned was the shooting location for the ‘80s low- budget horror classic The Last Slumber Party. I learned some basic bop heads and improvisation tactics but was admittedly clueless. My parents thought it was a good idea; I was just really into and Weird Al by then. I remember “The Real Slim Shady” was massive that summer and black girls loved the Janet Jackson song from the Klumps soundtrack. I played in “” at school, which was a joke. We wore matching t-shirts that said “JAZZ” in big letters over a cityscape. The “J” was shaped like a saxophone. We played “Birdland” and the James Bond theme. Playing in the basement of the Music Mart was alright because they had Crow’s Nest and Sbarro and that candy store. The best thing that came of that was seeing Paul Wertico play in some high school auditorium at some band competition event somewhere further out in the ‘burbs. He wasn’t competing, I don’t think. It was a power trio with an electric guitarist and kind of slayed. That could have been 2002.

Had guitar come into the picture yet?

At that point it had. There was an acoustic in the house and I could have been 9 or 10 when I felt brave enough to generate sound on it. I recall thinking I’d stumbled upon being able to approximate a simplified version of what sounded like the main guitar figure in Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon.” Tablature was a godsend, and I was plucking out RHCP, Nirvana, , “Santa Monica.” My dad was having his first go at retiring and picked up guitar again, too. Jazz was the main focus for him. He wrote out a few chord shapes on a scrap of paper for me but I’ve been entirely self-taught from there. Early middle school was when kids were getting

3 electric , myself included, and occasionally someone would be lucky enough to have a . People’s older brothers were playing shows in church basements, so starting a band was seeming less like total fantasy. There was a false start where some kids wanted me to play “Twist & Shout” with them in the fifth grade “variety show” but I backed out because they couldn’t hear that they had the main all wrong. Later my friend Nick had a real drum set, and I had a rubber electronic one, so we’d jam at each other’s houses. As a fresh new creative activity, this quickly overtook the novelty of shooting and editing goofyass short movies with a camcorder, which would often be repurposed to capture heinous sounding audio of our performances. I named our band Cream Filled Fantasy. We played “Jingle ” like a song and covered “Say It Ain’t So” and “Anarchy In The U.K.” Originals included “Quinn’s Not Here,” featuring lyrics detailing the situation of our friend not attending our sleepover and thus not getting to be in the band (“Quinn’s not here/he’s off at Six Flags Great America/with his church”), and a brooding instrumental entitled “Cheese & Crackers.” I remember that kid who wouldn’t let me tape his Blink-182 and Offspring CDs had his mind blown by learning that I’d actually written and played this fairly basic, repetitive ditty.

I can’t not point out that this song was influenced by things I’d heard on CDs. My parents used to babysit the drummer when she was little and were friends with her dad. He visited us one time and would send our family his daughter’s band’s CDs. I heard they played with Nirvana and that they sounded similar. Challenge For A Civilized Society was their new one at the time, and it turned my understanding of grungey alt-rock in on itself. The drumbeats, guitar playing, long instrumental passages, whatever one might call the “hooks” of the songs…it all sounded wrong. Later I learned this was called “being artsy.” No one else in the house liked it but I kept listening. I got a single disc promo of Leaves Turn Inside You before the album came out. It was a little nuts hearing how they later extended the synth drone at the beginning for such a questionably long duration. Their albums were gnarly, dark, and twisted but not like nu-metal, which was huge at the time and sounded fine to me since I listened to radio for hours every single day.

That’s enough to make anything sound fresh and exciting.

It seemed like every hour they’d play eight Sublime songs. Lots of Pearl Jam, who bored me silly. I was a massive dork listening to They Might Be Giants, Weezer, Blur, and this fairly stacked Dr. Demento compilation CD I had. I got Licensed To Ill from a store called Evil Clown which had a poster of what I later learned to be the Windowlicker cover art. My dad and uncle had a good laugh at said image. Mall punk and were blowing up and I fell for that stuff, as well. And yes, that includes . I was into comic strips, Mad Magazine, and comedy movies so I leaned towards goofier bands like and the Vandals. I liked this compilation CD called Short Music For Short People with all these 30 second songs by mostly terrible ‘90s punk bands but then “I Like Food” by the Descendents was on there, too. I tried getting into Primus. What happened was that older fluke hits by the Flaming Lips and Violent Femmes would creep into the playlists on Q101: Chicago’s Alternative, while bands like the Strokes were breaking through. To my ears these “ revival” bands sounded more like the early Kinks and Yardbirds singles I liked as a kid and seemed like they were escaping the shadow of the ’90s, although that’s certainly debatable. Meanwhile other kids were either embracing nu-metal or emo/pop-punk. Hot Topic was this huge thing. Girls were dressing like Avril Lavigne, and guys were getting obsessed with skateboarding right

4 after the Razor scooter fad died down. I didn’t skateboard. My dad got me one and stepped on it and instantly broke his ankle. I’d say that seventh grade was about when kids were becoming more obsessed with who was or wasn’t “cool.” Everybody else wanted more of the same, while I wanted to hear things that were different, and in the process I wound up seeming like a total weirdo and a snob since I was majorly psyched about bands that people only associated with me and my crazed, devout fandom. Plus, I knew I was right. Hearing the Ramones’ first album made a lot of people’s ideas about punk seem pathetic and misinformed, and checking out the Pixies proved to be similarly revelatory. I was noticing “best albums of the year” lists for the first time, and flipping through my brother’s copies of the All Music Guide, Musichound Guide to Rock, and some Dave Marsh edited book of “Rock Lists.” I was looking for vintage punk, and the Buzzcocks proved to be a sick find in that department. One night I downloaded a handful of Pavement and Velvet Underground mp3s off LimeWire and that was it. The line in the sand had been drawn. I wanted to find these old records that were too original to get on the radio, and found them more creatively inspiring than the prospect of putting a band together and trying as hard as possible to sound passably generic in a pseudo professional way.

This is seventh grade still?

Oh, yeah. Definitely. And don’t get me wrong, other kids would soon become fascinated with “ from the 1960s,” but it was mostly because they romanticized drugs and hippies and all that crap, so the Velvets were of interest because they had a song called “Heroin.” The noise aspect wasn’t really registering with other people. That “hole up and make freaky music” part was what I liked. Same with Pink Floyd. I was nuts about Syd Barrett’s guitar playing, not The Wall and Dark Side prism t-shirts. The whole “jam” concept had at that point been tainted by the completely moronic “jam band” culture that Phish fans had inherited from Deadheads. I’ve always given credit where credit’s due with the Dead, but the appeal seemed to have little to do with actual creativity, and if the music itself was what 13-year-old kids were digging, then that was all the more baffling. Everybody just had awful taste, as far as I could tell. I dug out some VHS tapes with a multi-part rock documentary series recorded off the TV, probably PBS. There was a psych one and a punk one. In the former they showed early Pink Floyd clips with Syd Barrett playing the Danelectro. The punk one had early Television footage confusingly synched up with “Blank Generation,” plus interviews that made David Byrne look like some straight shootin’ everyman. All this stuff seemed a thousand times more exciting than dissecting the lyrics to “White Rabbit” ad nauseam.

You’re still playing music with people during this period?

I would play with anyone who was around. Some kid would come over to my house to hang out and I’d write some god-awful song on the spot and we’d record it with the camcorder, and then I’d make up a band name. The one I’m thinking of is “Comadaizy” by False Knockers of Mortality. I stuck on a sample of the show Hamtaro that happened to be playing on the TV. My favorite album at the time was Slanted & Enchanted, so I wasn’t afraid to sound bad. Everyone I played that record for thought it was the worst shit they’d ever heard. Of course nobody could play or write songs as good…or at all, really. I was already a massive fan, which got me some flack but not as much as Pavement did. One kid wrote “PAVEMENT

5 SUCKS” in my yearbook. I thought the footage in The Slow Century of Gary Young drunkenly falling off his drum riser would be a gateway for people, but nah. Black Flag and the Misfits were as punk as it got for anyone. Basically, if something required an open mind, it had to be in a skate video for anyone to give it a chance.

I remember one time a larger group of four or five kids came over another time and I made them participate in an hour long “freak out” recording, which now seems clearly influenced by side four of the album of the same name. We watched Commando first which led to the incorporation of some keyboard sounds inspired by the musical score. I still have a CD-R of this with notes that differentiate all the various sections…there’s some discordant guitar solos, spoken word, helicopter sound effects. Everybody was clearly bored and thought I was annoying. Meanwhile they’re doing “cool kid” stuff like blowing up mice from Petco and loitering outside Jewel-Osco and smoking whatever and hanging out with some turd’s divorced dad’s house because he let them drink beer. I didn’t play video games, either. This is eighth grade. I was sick of everybody and they all thought I was gay. The most bare-bones punk/DIY ideal of music-making wasn’t even achievable, even though a lot of my favorite records had reputations as being “unlistenable,” featuring musicians who “can’t play their instruments.” This circle of assclowns were really excited when they managed to write and record a song without my participation called “Reggae Frog.” Of course this “band” didn’t last beyond this one “song,” if you can call it that. Nobody could get on board with taking dumb music seriously. I was reading about all these great bands’ histories and understood how creative situations blossomed, so I was thirsty and almost miserable. A low point was when I wound up in an attic with some Phish/Dave Matthews/Dead/Sublime/Bob Marley dorks and we jammed on the chord progression to “Soul to Squeeze” by RHCP for what seemed like an eternity. The last-ditch effort that I can recall was when my friend Nick and I had this kid play a bass covered in duct tape. We wrote numbers on the side of the neck to indicate the order of frets he was supposed to hold down to play the bassline. Earlier that day he swallowed some of those toy dinosaurs that expand in water to see if they’d grow in his stomach; probably the most moment of that whole era.

Were you in the headspace for pursuing solo music around this time?

By the end of eighth grade, I was there. It took a while, though, because most of the records I was geeking out over were by bands. There’s nothing quite like the appeal of a uniquely killer group of musicians getting their shit together. Even Neil Young had Crazy Horse and Frank Zappa had the Mothers of Invention. In eighth grade especially I was discovering brilliant records at an insane rate and having my world turned upside down on a near daily basis. I lived near both Borders and Coconuts and would get CDs once in a while like the Big Star twofer, but mostly I’d download albums song by song off LimeWire, and burn them on CD-Rs with my own hand-drawn cover art. Rock critic like the Mats’ Let It Be, Another Green World, , Future Days, Crazy Rhythms, In The Court of the Crimson King…I would listen to the radio show Sound Opinions every Tuesday night, so the hosts’ tastes rubbed off quite a bit. They’d namedrop Pussy Galore and do whole shows about Prince, Sly & The Family Stone, Fun House…they memorialized and Wesley Willis when they died. I barely cared about anything else except devouring creative guitar music and learning to play as many parts as I could decipher. Zappa’s early records and Trout Mask Replica were huge for me. I brought Trout Mask to school and played “Frownland” for my

6 English class when we had to bring in “songs that represent happiness,” most of which were off the latest Usher album. The Minutemen were a gas, too, and their “Dr. Wu” cover got me to reevaluate Steely Dan, whose Greatest Hits cassette sounded alright on a childhood car trip through southern Indiana, although later on I ignorantly decided that they were on the wrong end of some lame punk vs. “corporate rock” dichotomy.

At about the midpoint of eighth grade, jazz started to come into the picture more. I was still taking classical piano lessons and won a few competitions. I’d practice “Maple Leaf Rag” for a year and play it as fast as possible like some demented silent film score. I was still in the school “jazz” band, and we had a workshop where the host “drafted” me to take lessons at his house in Berwyn and play tunes in a small group. In theory it seemed cooler than classical piano but I was in over my head a bit. I’d borrow CDs and wouldn’t be sure what I was supposed to be connecting with. Now I know that the issue was too much Keith Jarrett, as if he was going to make me see the light. Same with the Bad Plus. Charlie Parker singles at least sounded punk to me. If a unique sound didn’t grab me, then I could have cared less about musicianship. This is my thinking at 13-14, mind you. I was listening to the Fall (pre- Brix), playing along with ’ Crazy Rhythms…jazz was a blur. I could dig a Monk tune like “Brilliant Corners,” but I didn’t know how to really listen, and I spent so much time around other kids learning to play jazz that I could barely distinguish between what they were doing and seminal recordings by supposed masters of the form. Any remotely straight-ahead jazz was the last thing I wanted to hear in my free time. Even back then I knew that this culturally and aesthetically important art had been co-opted as my parents’ dinner music, and as a way for suburban Phish loving white kids to show off whilst trading self-congratulatory acknowledgements of their own and each other’s perceived “hipness.” I found this behavior completely disgusting and alienating. It wasn’t hard to meet 15-year-old saxophonists who had surpassed Sonny Rollins on a purely technical level. If that sort of thing was interesting to me I would spend all day marveling at YouTube shredders.

But to tie things back to your question, it’s important to note that studying jazz forced me to engage with theory more. Big switch-up from just plonking out notes on a page. I was learning new chords and scales that could be used as tools for improvisation from which songs might possibly emerge. I happened to hear some crucial records at just the right time: Todd Rundgren’s Something/Anything?, Prince’s Dirty Mind, and Boards of Canada’s Music Has The Right To Children. The first two were largely written and composed by a single person, and the third one was notable for the use of artificial drums and ambient keyboard sounds. They all got me thinking about music-making pragmatically, since clearly I wasn’t going to be Zappa and my classmates weren’t going to be the original ‘60s Mothers. My dad had gotten a Fostex digital 8-track recorder for slowing down solos and studying his own guitar playing. I started tinkering with it and trying to make songs with me playing all the parts. Those early songs would have been either keyboard experiments or guitar rock simulating a full band. The first hurdle was learning to not go so overdub crazy that it ruined the song. I’d read about music I liked having “layered guitars” and figured this was as simple as piling on rhythm tracks and always having a crazed solo going. Even if you’re going for a busy sound more space is almost always the answer, somehow.

7 So were you buried in older music or can you relate any of this to the contemporary landscape of the time?

That’s a great question. At this point, I’m graduating eighth grade about halfway through 2004. I’d backed away from Q101 and MTV2 because I was sick of “Seven Nation Army” and Trapt’s “Headstrong,” and I had all these cool albums that I wanted to explore. Even Queens of the Stone Age were growing tiresome. Ween’s Quebec was the obvious “album of the year” choice in 2003 for me. I’d been on the hype train for the new Strokes album, which turned out to be pretty good but just not enough. Modern hip hop and R&B had been largely off my radar until that time, but the crossover smashes were becoming too ubiquitous and fascinating to ignore. I was into the Outkast double and would play Kelis’s “Milkshake” on an endless loop. I heard The Gray Album and suddenly knew all these Jay-Z songs, and knew them even better once I learned that some guy had made The Slack Album with Slanted & Enchanted songs. I gave Kanye West’s debut a chance and it was hooky enough for me. I blew some black kids’ minds knowing all these deep cuts while white girls were still calling him “Kayne.” I read and Stylus Magazine every day and would peep the overhyped buzz albums. The Todd Rundgren album that year was still better than everything else I heard, though.

2004 was big for “” breaking through the mainstream. Girls loved the O.C. soundtrack. I thought the latest album had too many shitty songs on it, but it still held more appeal for me than Three Days Grace, Hoobastank, Jet, Seether, Yellowcard…by now I can laugh about stuff like that and even appreciate some songs but a lot it is truly worthless. When I think about this specific period, like end of eighth grade and into the summer, I mostly remember older records rocking my world, while struggling to understand why anyone would be hotly anticipating, say, the new TV On The Radio album. When I was at a music camp in Michigan during the summer I met my friend Ian Finkelstein, and we were coincidentally both obsessed with Ween and Steely Dan. If he had actually lived nearby I like to think we might have united as a similar power duo. I’d trade him my copy of GodWeenSatan for his Pure Guava during “rest hour” in our bunks. He was all about that Boards of Canada CD I had. We’d keep in touch and nerd out over music; I’d show him Prefab Sprout and he’d inform me about Bark Psychosis, both of whom seemed to have a major impact on anyone else I played them for over the years. He was also an exponentially more advanced piano player than me, playing flawless two-handed arrangements of any song you could name by ear. I met plenty of teenagers studying jazz as something to do but he was the real deal...no, the REALEST. An actual product of Detroit’s rich history of black music, studying and playing and collaborating with elder statesmen and women of jazz and techno. That shit is fairly humbling. Yet another early musical encounter that makes it considerably harder to take most people seriously.

He was also real psyched about the band Tortoise, which segues nicely into me starting high school. I wound up going to a performing arts school in the city. Just east of Ukrainian Village. Half the day was “academics,” and then you go to your “department” for the rest. Another of my parents’ ideas. I was walking distance from the public school, so that made more sense to me than taking public transportation downtown every day, but since I ended up not having to take gym class ever again I’d say it all worked out. Apparently early in the year I won a TV in a raffle at the public school’s pep rally because they still had my name on the roster, but they

8 had to draw another name. Anyways, Millennium Park had just opened. I think Tortoise were the first musical act that performed at Pritzker Pavilion, at least that I was aware of. At 14 years of age I hadn’t started actively going to shows. I made my way over after school on a Friday in early September and saw Tortoise for free. The set started with some pretty intense loud rumbling heavy shit and it was an eye opener since Jeff Parker is a bonafide jazz guitarist, while John McEntire is pummeling the drums one second before switching to the vibraphone, getting (what I later learned was) all Steve Reich on your ass. Jazz was an aspect of what they were doing, but the music was all over the place. This was the kind of “fusion” that made sense to me, where anything goes, loudness is encouraged, and virtuosity takes a backseat.

Did being at an “arts” school allow you to explore jazz in this sort of new territory?

This is very much a yes/no type answer. When I was a freshman, the vibe was as lax as it would ever be. It was a small school, and you had all these kids of different races coming in from all over the city and suburbs. Hormones were raging and substance abuse was prevalent. Really interesting mix of different types of people in a close-knit environment. Specifically in the music department, I think I was given more freedom at times because I was good at ear-training and sight-reading. There were a number of killer senior drummers…a couple white metal/punk guys and this black dude who played funk and gospel and was always taking phone calls about professional gigs during department meetings. I got put in the jazz ensemble with him instead of with the other freshmen and a lot of times we didn’t even have an instructor. Everybody else seemed to think I knew what I was doing, but I disagreed. I was connecting with In A Silent Way pretty heavily and found that everything I played sounded better with the Fender Rhodes sound on my synth, which would occasionally make its way to school. I discovered , too, and would transcribe heads off The Shape of Jazz To Come. I liked the audacity of the title and the looseness and that it was mixed weird…like he took Charlie Parker’s music and messed it up a bit. I got my group to play “Lonely Woman” and realized that having an open structure could sound pretty aimless without the right level of purposefulness. We’d play “Footprints” and “Impressions” and some Joe Henderson tunes. I thought I sucked at playing bebop and rhythm changes but I apparently faked it well enough for everybody. I was definitely practicing my classical pieces more and winging the jazz part.

Getting back to the question…I went into this situation thinking of myself as some amateur home recording enthusiast, and that if you’re at a school with “arts” in the name then that means being around people with similar aspirations. But music education is different than visual arts, filmmaking, and writing, and I identified more with people in those disciplines, for the most part. Because in music there’s so much focus on playing competently so that you can execute other people’s compositions in a manner that’s considered acceptable, whereas in the other areas you focus on fundamentals so that you can execute your own projects. I saw plenty of terrible student films but they were a lot more entertaining and personal than listening to half-hearted jazz solos from kids who were clearly more comfortable playing classical pieces. Creativity and expression barely entered into it. The main emphasis was on hammering home how much you have to agonize over theory and memorize the Real Book in all 12 keys so you can compete with other professional gigging musicians, which I think explains why going on to major in music in college wound up being less common than you’d

9 think. Occasionally there were people with professional songwriting aspirations but they were usually fixed in the realm of banal adult contemporary pop, like really bland ‘90s shit when this was the mid ‘00s. Even the edgiest kids seemed to mostly be drawn to the technique aspect of music, and plenty of them were coming at jazz from a metal perspective. I could occasionally relate to that, but anything more left-field was just sort of an amusing joke to those guys. Mike Patton seemed like the kookiest fella to them. So I think I was a little taken aback by how being thrown in with supposedly artsy types meant just a bunch of new flavors of rigidity to reckon with, none of which seemed to encompass my strongest interests. I was checking out the Residents, and I’d hit up Virgin Megastore and come out with Negativland’s Helter Stupid, Bongwater’s Power of Pussy, and Zappa’s Uncle Meat, which had notation of the title track and “King Kong” in the booklet, so I’d try to play them on piano for fun. Maybe the most modern thing we did in jazz ensemble was some Dave Holland tune, which had an interesting melody that I enjoyed playing doubled with a vibraphone. The seniors would do recitals at the end of the year and they’d squeeze in more personal selections, like the gospel/funk drummer I mentioned did the theme from Shaft and let me sing it, and I got to play the chorus’d on “Purple Rain,” which was a real honor. I declined to solo over it, which probably would have gone better than expected since I’d developed a passable J. Mascis-lite playing style by then. But I’d never played a guitar solo in public before and thought I might ruin the performance. After that first year the powers that be put the kibosh on that sort of thing, though. Polite renditions of standards were the order of the day.

Was home recording still an active pursuit?

As much I could make it one, yeah. Anyone I might befriend at school didn’t live nearby, so I wasn’t going out much, and there’d be some recording activity on weekends. Weird mix of melodic synth instrumentals, noisy “pop” songs with the levels cranked up in the red, noodly multi-tracked experiments that were inspired by In a Silent Way and whatever I understood “post-rock” to be…one of the better things sounds like a Spacemen 3 pastiche. There’s an acoustic cover of Eno’s “St. Elmo’s Fire” and some sample heavy Residents/Negativland inspired musique concrete. I was learning as I went, so I’d do things like lay down parts in a goofy order, like not doing the drums first and ending up with moments where a song would totally fall apart. Then I’d do a mixdown so I could add more tracks and realize that something was off balance and I couldn’t fix it. I’m glad I was forced to record songs without the convenience of a home computer, but it led to me feeling like a lot of stuff was unsalvageable. One night former Cream Filled Fantasy member Nick showed up with his parents who were visiting my own, and I made him play some pretty legit on a New Wave of British Heavy Metal style song I wrote on the spot called “Satan Train,” which would have ruled a lot more if I hadn’t mixed the solo too low.

I got my cousin Chad into recording songs when we’d hang out at Thanksgiving or whatever. We named our “band” the Republicans after laying down our first creative foray, “The Emu Who Stole Christmas.” We’d crank out some goofy jam in one take and then he’d improvise vocal parts. “Dance or Die” was demented house music with vocals spoken in an ambiguously foreign accent, “Elmo” was a cartoonishly shambling emo parody, and “The Doorway Between Fantasy & Reality” was a semi-serious foray into instrumental prog balladry. “Jake Remix” was the most musically solid thing we did, kind of a Jock Jams style arrangement with Chad imitating some apparently insufferable fellow teenager. I learned later

10 that these songs somehow became “hits” amongst other kids at Chad’s massive North Shore public school via CD-Rs and mp3s shared on AOL Instant Messenger, since this was immediately pre-MySpace.

The aforementioned “Dance or Die” made its way into the hands of somebody in my school’s Media Arts (film/writing) department, and the people there liked it so much they used it as intro music for one of their shows. That’s where I started getting the sense that my sensibility was meshing a lot more with non-musicians who had “arty hipster” leanings, and from there I would get regularly tapped to provide music for student films. This led to a lot of interesting little recording exercises that I otherwise wouldn’t have stumbled upon. Some stuff wouldn’t get used, or what ended up getting used would be something older that happened to fit better. Even before all that I think the first exposure anyone at school had to my music was when I recorded a song for a biology class project called “DNA Rocks!” It was like crazed ‘80s metal with pitch-shifted vocals. It starts as a conversation between a high-voiced child named Billy and his teacher who sounds like an enormous black man, and then the music comes in and they sing a duet about the components of DNA. I played it for the class and might have freaked them out a bit, but the teacher was a slightly crazy pregnant lady and the song seemed to really do it for her, so much that she wound up subjecting the class to it at a later date.

There was this guy a couple years older than me named Danny who made movies and dressed super punk. He seemed to know every scuzzy hardcore band that ever existed and was an encyclopedia of ‘80s trash movie culture, but he also had this goth side and was genuinely psyched about Interpol, which I found hilarious. He told me to record a goth song for his movie and call it “I Fart Bats,” so the best I could do was rip off the first track on the Cure’s Pornography and hope that would fly, and he seemed into it, although the movie never materialized. We got kicked out of world history class once because he was drawing cocks all over his legs and I couldn’t stop laughing. I’d mainly talk about music and movies and stuff with filmmakers who were slightly older. This guy Jack Gorman came up to me in the halls one day, put his headphones on my head and said, “Listen to this,” and the song “Dish It Out” by & The Contortions was playing. It was rackety as hell and I thought the saxophone was a violin. He burned me a custom “expanded edition” of No New York with 8- Eyed Spy songs. I think I burned him some early Fall stuff he’d never heard like Grotesque. I remember his MySpace music section was mostly “now wave” bands. My friend Vinny Di Giulio had me score one of the more ambitious film projects I saw anyone do…it might have only been 30 minutes long, if that, but was nonetheless a psychedelic Lynchian nightmare of sorts entitled Pizza Box Head: The Movie. I started off giving him an occasional song like “Night Watcher Theme,” which was a solid disco number that I then had to play for a visiting alumnus who was having actual success scoring movies like March of the Penguins and Anchorman. His advice was to hire a real sax player instead of playing it on a synth, and then he told another film student that being too artistic leads to insanity.

Meanwhile I’m still trying to work on my own personal music. I’d think I was making an album, which would turn into an EP, and then some time would pass and I’d work on another album that would turn into an EP, and so I’d think about combining all that material into an album. I was 15 years old and had barely been recording music for a year, so I was just growing accustomed to losing interest in my own projects. There’s a way to document your

11 development as an artist and come away with something you can stand by as being adequately representative, but I was still working out the kinks. Back then I was better at zoning out and working quickly but would sometimes end up slightly embarrassed by the results of that process for various reasons. We’re in 2005, by the way! Not far into the year I had to do a project for American literature class based on something called the New England Primer, which was this old timey book or document of some sort that taught kids how to read along with various lessons about how to be righteous and moral and all that. I ended up recording a short song for every letter of the alphabet in a weekend, and that was my project. 26 songs in about 16 minutes. I’d been listening to the music writer Mark Prindle’s home- recorded albums and the ones he made with his band the Löw-Maintenance Perennials, so he was probably the biggest influence at the time. I’d also somehow heard a similar album that the singer/guitarist from Nerf Herder had just released called For Those About To Shop We Salute You, which was basically bite-sized commercial jingles. Familiarity with side one of A Wizard, A True Star and the Residents’ The Commercial Album was likely a factor. All these songs I made were all under a minute and extremely silly, encompassing a whole mess of musical obsessions along with my wacky teenage sense of humor that was largely informed by watching Mr. Show episodes over and over. I played it for the class start to finish and ended up giving out a lot of CD-Rs to anyone who wanted a copy. One guy told me his friend played it over the sound-system at Urban Outfitters where she worked. I posted it on the Sound Opinions Message Board which had a lot of music writers on it, and this Canadian metal guy sent it to a writer at the Toronto Star, and he included it in something called “The Anti-Hit List” along with Ryan Adams, Jenny Lewis, and Green Day. There was a spike in downloads that dropped off almost immediately but it was exciting nonetheless.

That’s not a bad outcome for such an impromptu project.

It certainly wasn’t, especially because I’d been reluctant to compile and release what I’d made leading up to that point. I also had mixed feelings about writing and singing my own lyrics, so it was liberating to go all-out with a funnier, more cartoonish approach. Although it kind of messed with my head that trying to deliberately make good music had proven so difficult and that this thing I tossed off in a weekend in order to get a decent grade in a class had come so easily and was now the main thing I’d be associated with among anyone who knew me. And I was still constantly discovering all sorts of daunting records. Looking back, I had a real “” fixation. I think I really just wanted to make music that tapped into what I liked about Bark Psychosis and Disco Inferno. I suppose I wasn’t much different from all the people overrating Radiohead but of course I was convinced that what I liked was “the good stuff.” Boredoms had been seeming pretty God-like, and Leaves Turn Inside You was still blowing my mind on the reg. That all gave way to progressively more extreme and abrasive sounds. This Heat and Sunn O))) were major discoveries for me at that time. This whole /avant-garde/metal axis was seeming especially appealing in light of what was going on in so-called “indie rock culture.” It sure seemed like music was being overtaken by an aesthetic that was far too precious for my liking. Nothing was stopping the glut of mediocre bands named after animals and all these guys with dumb looking beards. In 2005 I remember the debut album from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and that Sufjan Stevens concept album about were practically collector’s items since the labels that put them out didn’t think the hype would be so strong that they’d need to press more copies. This girl Kate (loved the Unicorns) gave my friend Dan and I free Animal Collective tickets and we went and it was

12 horrible. We were in the balcony of Logan Square Auditorium, and looking down on this crowd losing their shit and jamming out to this stuff was more than a little disturbing. It’s likely that what I perceived as cultural shifts were just me becoming aware of things that hadn’t been on my radar, since I was only a sophomore in high school. But it did seem like just a year before that the crop of buzzworthy records was somewhat diverse and interesting, and that what seemed like a passing trend of “freak folk” was overstaying its welcome and infecting the whole landscape.

Were you able to combat this with your own musical activity?

I attempted to, yeah. I was sticking with shorter songs, albeit stretching the runtimes a bit. Kind of a combination of past methods of music-making. I was trying to distance myself from stylistic pastiche and pseudo ambient pleasantries. I guess you could call it “idiosyncratic pop vignettes” with unexpected sounds and what may or may not qualify as surreal wordplay. I did an EP’s worth in early ’06 that was of course intended to be a more expansive project. But I would get busy with school, and so not working on more songs left too much room to reflect on everything I didn’t like about the results I was getting. And of course the music I was listening to was upping the stakes a bit. In addition to This Heat, I’d say Faust were a key obsession, and I was feeling far too constricted in various ways to approximate the creative magnitude of The Faust Tapes, which was something of an ideal. And so this was the beginning of a slip in solitary music-making pursuits that would subsist for years. Although that summer I did record a few instrumental tracks that my friend Dan was supposed to sing over. We bonded over Ween and an affinity for raunchy punk like G.G. Allin, and he wrote a bunch of song lyrics with titles like “My Dog’s Penis Is Ugly” and I printed them out for close analysis and consideration. Somehow my mom stumbled upon this tome and was appalled. Oops!

Were collaborations at least happening with some regularity around this time? I know you’ve played in a handful of bands.

The tail end of sophomore year was when I was drafted to join my first “real” band, which was an unjustly time-consuming experience that didn’t last much longer than a year but certainly felt way longer. My friend Brendan knew I played guitar even though piano was all I did at school. He was in a band called Poison Control with some Northwest side buddies from the old all boys Catholic high school that he’d transferred from. They were a “punk” band who had experienced a moment of glory when they played an early slot at the first ever . That was when they had it at the Congress Theater, among the crappiest venues in the city, and the main lineup was exclusively punk bands with few if any essential members, including the Misfits without Glenn Danzig, Dead Kennedys without Jello Biafra, and the Germs featuring Shane West of A Walk To Remember fame on vocals. I think some iteration of Angry Samoans was on the bill, as well. Brendan wanted me to join as third guitarist so that they could pull off “cooler” arrangements while the main guy Tim Poison would be able to act like a rock star but still get to hold a guitar. I was more than a little desperate to play in a band, and was so sick of piano I probably would have said yes to playing guitar for any purpose. But I thought of punk as being hugely important to me, and I figured there would be enough common ground there. I think we played a show at the Beat Kitchen a week after I first rehearsed with them. I remember casually pushing for us to begin the set with an overlong

13 drone intro and being told that we might not be taken seriously. This was a running thread in my experience with joining pre-existing bands, since willingness to defy expectations is what would cause me to take a band seriously, while others seemed to feel the opposite. PC had quite a few songs, which had choruses like “These teenage years are the best years of our lives! Whoa oh oh!” It sounded vaguely like Screeching Weasel, who I had some affinity for. That might have been the least awful point of comparison. The mid- songs sounded like bad hair metal. I managed to write a song with sort of a feel that wasn’t too controversial.

We blew our parents’ money on recording “professionally” at some warehouse compound in Humboldt Park. This guy’s studio was the practice space for his band Maps & Atlases, who impressed gullible kids by playing a form of neutered post-hardcore indie rock distinguished by this virtuosically gimmicky “finger-tapping” guitar style. They had that precious bearded indie aesthetic that I hated. The Poison Control drummer at the time audaciously played through the whole set of songs unaccompanied with minimal takes, I think without a click track, since he had to leave to attend some party. Our “producer” spent seemingly a whole day fixing up his wackass drum tracks in ProTools. The primary available reading material was old porno magazines. That sums up the whole process for the week of recording, plus driving to Taco or Bacci for lunch. Lots of waiting around between recording parts track by track to simulate the sound of an actual band while a guy meticulously edits all these heinous sounding performances. I played a theremin over the end of the aforementioned Wipers-y song, which was the most interesting part of those sessions, by far. The guy said it sounded like , which I didn’t mind. The final recordings sound about as shitty as overproduced can sound, and nobody in the band liked them enough to want to release and promote them.

We played a few shows, too, which were occasionally amusing, and the awfulness of the bands we’d play with was eye-opening for me. Middle aged men pumping out unimaginative takes on some lamedick idea of the “Chicago punk sound,” suburban “emo” goobers with healthy MySpace followings, members of the Turbojugend who were affiliated with some “punk” crew/gang calling themselves “’77,” ska bands from Indiana who’d drive up with a bunch of fans that would pack the venue and then get the hell out of there before we went on…I’d say this crap made us at least appear to project some kind of ragged youthful charm in comparison. The most interesting gig was when we played at a company party at a mail processing center, since Tim Poison’s dad worked for the post office. The audience was a bunch of Postal Service workers with their kids running around all over the place. Some black dudes played before us and the guitarist was shredding like crazy in an Ernie Isley type manner, and later he was nice enough to compliment my few attempts at lead playing. I mostly just felt sorry for everybody who had to sit through our set. Our drummer left to join a Rush cover band, probably because he thought I was a dick, which was probably true. At the very least, I was naturally asserting myself more because I couldn’t stand the thought of playing these pop-punk songs over and over. The morning of a show I had us learn the Replacements’ “Favorite Thing” so I could sing it. When we didn’t have shows lined up I’d try to get us to jam in a way that kind of hinted at black metal. Anyway, this guy left and after failing to get a handle on programming decent sounding canned beats a la Big Black, we started getting hooked up with random drummers. One guy sucked and suggested that we try incorporating more “live mic tricks,” and another would say, “Have you ever taught drums

14 before?” like an asshole while I tried to teach him the songs. We eventually settled on Brendan’s 12-year-old brother Colin, who I will say was considerably better than those other guys.

Did the direction of the band end up shifting in an interesting way at all during this time?

It did, and made for even more inner band tension. When I joined, I’d be showing Brendan rock bands that I thought were cool like Unwound and Shellac. I was getting into the and . I think he was consistently open to that stuff because he was studying classical music and could appreciate things from a compositional standpoint. But those guys’ tastes were largely conservative. The best takeaway was getting more into Thin Lizzy because of them. Tim Poison saw nothing remotely lame about striving to emulate Social Distortion and Blink-182, and he thought I was out of my mind for considering Flipper to be a great band. Covering “Sex Bomb” for 15 minutes seemed like an awesome idea to me. I was going to shows regularly for the first time ever and got to see a bunch of really intense shit over a period of a few months. The Fall, Kevin Drumm opening for Boris, Boredoms (maybe the best show I’ve ever seen), , and the Touch & Go 25th Anniversary Festival which had Killdozer, Scratch Acid, Big Black, and Shellac all on the same day. To see all that stuff in person as a 16-year-old was completely earth shattering. No way was I going to piss away my weekends playing subpar pop-punk.

I started writing finished songs and bringing them in since no one else was doing anything. I had it in my head that music in a “post-hardcore noise rock” vein might not alienate these guys while still leaving room for creativity. Verse/chorus structure was barely hinted at. There were usually too many parts, which included screwy time signatures and long open sections. More ugly and dissonant was better. and were solid reference points, along with the Lizard and other aforementioned acts. Brendan seemed into it all, but Tim Poison got real grumpy when we advised him to focus on singing and not play guitar, although I did convince him to spice up one song with some sax skronk. He was also learning about how to record bands, so we became guinea pigs for that ongoing project. Getting recordings of these songs that didn’t sound like crap was an uphill battle, and it wasn’t so much mic placement or quality of the gear but more that we just sucked too much to pull off a type of music usually played by bands that suck way less. The rhythm section was always an issue, and a lot of times one of us would be trying to play the drum track which none of us were equipped to do. When Colin came in he was pretty reliable but getting a 12 year old boy to sit still and learn these multi-part epics was difficult. And then our bassist John was barely hanging on. The bulk of our “practices” were spent trying to teach him these perhaps needlessly convoluted arrangements. Getting those guys to pursue any experimental approaches to recording was somewhat of a treat for me, though. Incorporating goofy samples was occasionally a point of contention. We recorded ourselves all simultaneously yelling in a tortured manner to give one doomy instrumental section a more “apocalyptic” feel. We hooked up all the various amps and guitars and recorded nothing but feedback which caused me to remark, “It sounds like the Dead C!” In retrospect, it didn’t. The highlight was usually eating buffalo wings. We played a battle of the bands at John and Tim’s high school and Tim was completely pissed that he’d subjected his peers to such apparently bizarre music. I don’t know if this was before or after he was named prom king. Some nerdier looking kids came up to us and said they were really into our set, which I found gratifying. We didn’t

15 “win” the “battle,” by the way. That summer Brendan and I both attended a classical music summer program at Northwestern University, so band activity slowed before fizzling out altogether.

Is there an official break-up story?

Having another year like what we’d just experienced simply wasn’t in the cards. The other guys were a year older than me and starting college, and I was ramping up the hours spent practicing piano for auditions. I would play synthesizer in the all-school musical every year, too, and the rehearsal/performance process for that would take up a good month or so. So I said I was too busy, and they didn’t really keep it going. Years later I heard a couple songs they tried to write the following summer that I’m assuming Brendan spear-headed featuring what I found to be completely hilarious “” elements. That was the last gasp. All I wanted was to pull off some slightly better than average punk music and get a couple 7”s and an EP out of the process, and throw it on a “Complete Discography” CD like bands on Gravity or Dischord had. That didn’t even happen, and I ruined a band in the process, which is a shame because they were having a lot of fun before I showed up. And of course the whole time I was thinking, “You know, it’s pretty much undeniable that I’m a thousand times more efficient at getting decent sounding, artistically fulfilling results when I make music by myself with me playing all the instruments.” But I was a bored teenager with a strict curfew and that was how I could blow off steam and not spend more time sitting in a room alone.

Even if you’re not making solo music, what’s going on in the rest of your musical life during this period?

Those last couple years of high school were a real circus. Junior year my school was up for some award or grant or some such thing, and there was a slew of related events that I’d play at. They’d always had fundraising events at various fancy Chicago spots where I’d play cocktail hour background music in a small jazz group, but that year I’d actually be onstage performing as some kind of poster-child. I’d written a solo piano composition that was assigned to me in an effort to push me more towards the academic side of music. It was this nearly impossible single note line that went all over the keyboard, played fast and frantically with lots of tremolo. I managed to learn it and got the muscle memory part down pretty solid, which was how I’d play anything without sheet music since I’d always be terrified and couldn’t think. Somehow I wound up playing this thing at the Museum of Contemporary Art and getting introduced by Ramsey Lewis. Most of the school went to Washington, D.C. on a bus and I played this shit at the Kennedy Center. I somehow contracted pneumonia before we were even past Grant Park, so the whole time I was even more miserable than I would have been otherwise. The piece was called “Seizurous Exhaustion Inferno,” which was a blatant nod to Kevin Drumm’s Sheer Hellish Miasma, some of the most highly regarded music for me at the time. Plunging deeper into the noisy/avant-garde end of the spectrum had me embracing and to a lesser extent 20th century classical music, which nearly had me intrigued by the prospect of studying music seriously in academic contexts. seemed like a model for this sort of cross-pollination, although he seemed to have schooled himself out of sheer force of will.

16 On the other hand, writing scores and obsessing over technique and putting up with all kinds of anti-rock sentiment from classical types was increasingly difficult when records like the Dead C’s Harsh 70s Reality were sounding like the pinnacle of music, cheaply recorded with little respect for technique. I could barely fathom how a lot of music I liked was made, but I’d had so many experiences just sitting down and doing it that complicating this sort of intuitive process seemed more than a little excessive and stifling. I’d go to the library at Northwestern that summer and they had an issue of WIRE Magazine with Maja Ratkje on the cover, and she was talking about her formal studies. I think the Dead C’s Invisible Jukebox was in the same issue. I’d check out scores by Xenakis and Cornelius Cardew and Conlon Nancarrow, and I’d look over this stuff and struggle to fathom how anyone would play it, realizing that it’s all so advanced you really need to put in endless hours of meticulous analysis, which is of course in addition to the five hours a day spent practicing a Chopin nocturne or some crap. Meanwhile no one I’d meet cared about the more avant-garde side of music even slightly. Even the composition students didn’t have anything but the most middlebrow aspirations. I remember stopping by Dr. Wax and picking up ’s Spiritual Unity and To Live & Shave In L.A.’s The Wigmaker in 18th Century Williamsburg. All this stuff sounded great but even raw, visceral music like that seemed daunting more than anything, like if I wasn’t transcribing and overanalyzing it then I wasn’t really getting it. And it was obvious to me that I felt the strongest connection to pop/rock music, anyway. For new stuff I dug Clockcleaner and Jay Reatard, plus I was rediscovering Neil Young and jamming a ton of Sun City Girls, Royal Trux, Fushitsusha, old and new Scott Walker…Peter Brötzmann’s Machine Gun was the best sounding jazz record I’d heard.

Thinking about being 17 and looking towards my final year of high school and any kind of future after that involves a lot of feeling like music was a giant pain in the ass and that all the fun had been sucked out of it. Being in a band was out, and I was unmotivated to record much of anything. Most of what was rocking my world seemed over my head and unattainable, anyway. I’ve never been a gearhead, so my understanding of technology was lacking, and it seemed like you either had to be a laptop wiz or find a way to hoard expensive analog synths and effects boxes, so I just felt like a schmuck with my Line6 Pod xt. On top of that, I’d be obsessing over records like Royal Trux’s Twin Infinitives and Pink Reason’s Cleaning The Mirror and realizing that this music got a lot of its power from being the product of circumstances much harsher than anything I’d ever experienced, and I wasn’t about to deliberately plunge myself into poverty and drug addiction for the sake of some shitty 4-track recordings. I remember the early part of senior year more fondly than that summer at Northwestern. I was always hearing records that inspired me, although feeling like I should be more serious about practicing classical piano repertoire didn’t leave much time for any truly meaningful creative activity. Discovering McCartney II helped brighten things up a bit and gave me some hope for future recording pursuits, as did the release of a lo-fi demos compilation by Rivers Cuomo. Jazz started to open up significantly for me, too, which I’d credit to Sonny Sharrock’s and a mix of ‘70s “” that Weasel Walter compiled and posted online. With Sonny Sharrock, I’d heard Paradise and was knocked out by the guitar playing. Ask The Ages sounded more along the lines of the kind of modern electric guitar-centric “fusion” that other jazz students seemed to respond well to, although in reality it’s way off from that sort of thing. It swung, but the melodies were downright catchy. The guitar was distorted and played with what sounded to me like a solid grasp of technique but could still go off the rails at times

17 The “Punk Jazz” mix was just mind-blowing, though. I’d mostly thought of jazz and ‘70s funk rhythms as being a dangerously corny combination. worship was a red flag, for instance. But the tracks on that mix were just completely wacked out and punishing and put a lot of superficially similar sounding angular/noisy rock music to shame. You had guys like stomping out these driving beats with tearing it up on guitar, and Prime Time playing what’s essentially disco except everybody is going nuts in a way that sounds chaotic yet precise. Some of “Bäbi” by was on there, which more closely resembled what I always imagined “free jazz” to be than anything I’d heard by then. Weasel’s vinyl rips sounding amazing, too. “Scud” by Sam Rivers was just out of control. I only knew him from having played “Beatrice” with my school jazz ensemble, and that’s like a nice you can find in the Real Book. “Scud” was more of a no-holds- barred assault except there’s this funky Latin feel through the whole thing. Ted Dunbar is playing almost recognizable jazzy rhythm guitar but getting pretty nuts with it. ’s “Rated X” was on there. I got into records like Dark Magus and Get Up with It, and wrote a school paper about the latter. There was this Italian saxophonist named Valerio Cosi who put out a whole bunch of records in that year alone…this was 2007, by the way. He could clearly play, but his stuff was more like home-recorded spiritual jazz with and drone elements. Jazz was gradually seeming less alienating to me. We finally got to bring in our own arrangements for a school jazz ensemble concert and I picked the two most “straight ahead” sounding Destroy All Music-era Flying Luttenbachers tunes. Nobody practiced enough, and having two guitarists and a guy playing vibes underlined that quite a bit, but it was certainly the loudest, most outlandish performance of the evening. I remember the music department chair congratulating another girl on her tasteful Henry Mancini interpretation and then saying absolutely nothing to me. I e-mailed Weasel Walter about it and he seemed excited enough to ask for a recording but I was honestly too embarrassed to even subject myself to the available video and/or audio footage of us butchering his music, although I’m sure there’s some entertainment value there.

In retrospect, abandoning classical piano studies as quickly as possible would have been more sensible than anyone realized. It’s not like jazz doesn’t involve a shitload of theory and technique, but there was always an emphasis on trying to balance the two areas of study. Jazz would inevitably get the short end of the stick, taking a backseat to this need to tirelessly work out classical pieces. So I didn’t feel ready to pursue jazz in college, and mainly pursued classical auditions because I was going to have to practice that stuff for my senior recital, anyway. Maybe I’d switch over to composition since trying to be some concert pianist guy long-term seemed stupid as hell. Long story short, I didn’t get in anywhere. Everybody was shocked and confused, but I knew I’d been a big fish in a small pond. Whenever I’d venture outside of that bubble, the bar seemed considerably higher and more competitive. There were a bunch of holes in my technique that I’d just recently started working to fix, while plenty of other kids had been practicing five hours a day since they were small children, possibly because they saw the work of these classical masters as being tied into their own identities. Who knows! Thankfully my days of screwing around with piano were numbered.

Did you manage to squeeze anything of personal significance into your senior recital?

There were interesting things in the classical portion like Shostakovitch preludes and some Bartók. More modernist leaning than was typical. I made sure the jazz half was up to snuff,

18 and was listening to the music more than ever in the months prior. Lots of Eric Dolphy, Mingus, and Blue Note stuff like Andrew Hill, Joe Henderson, Sam Rivers…some early and a solo piano LP of his called Monorails & Satellites. The group was a piano trio, and the set was “Brilliant Corners,” a song from Speak No Evil called “Wild Flower,” a chill modal workout off Sam Rivers’s Contours called “Euterpe,” and a medley of all the songs from Out To Lunch that had some more freeform improv sections built in. That latter half seemed like the highlight at the time, and revisiting the video footage recently confirms as much. My playing is more natural and relaxed when I’m not worrying about hitting a bunch of changes. All that listening worked and I think I pulled off fusing melodicism into a relative absence of structure while still letting things get unhinged at times. It accurately reflected my tastes while being just outrageous enough for anyone in the room. I heard Black Woman around that time, so I think ’s playing crept in a bit.

After that…not much. There was a decent jazz concert where I contributed a fairly pleasant- sounding large group arrangement of the song “Desapareceré.” I kept taking classical lessons that summer and was learning a couple impossible seeming Ligeti etudes, barely going through the motions. Both my piano teacher and I were checked out at that point, so that situation died in the water. There was a modern composition summer program at school that was valuable for me getting an alright piece entitled “A String Quartet Tribute to Bob Saget” performed at Roosevelt University. Not by a string quartet, I should note. It had a dissonant “A Day in The Life” piss take ending because I’d heard the same thing on the rather amazing Harvey Milk album that had just come out. The “new music ensemble” that learned it in 15 minutes immediately before the performance later went on to collaborate with, speak of the devil, Deerhoof!

I got into DePaul University at the last minute and went in undeclared. Lots of pulling all- nighters to write papers while listening to Dead C albums on loop. I had my guitar and would learn Thin Lizzy and Minutemen guitar solos and play along with Live at Leeds in my dorm room. I’d hear people playing the new Animal Collective album from the halls. My roommate was a guy I knew in high school who wore Dream Theater and Opeth shirts every day, and he started “getting into dubstep” and would be gone all the time seeing Bassnectar on ecstasy. Sometimes he’d walk in on me listening to Burial or Luomo and ask what it was. He dropped out and went onto some success as a producer of this new-fangled popular electronic that was taking mainstream douche culture by storm.

I took some film history classes and realized that was the only area of study that I had any real investment in, so I picked “Media & Cinema Studies” as my major. Throughout high school I got to see things like Slacker and Samuel Fuller movies...Stranger Than Paradise, Jacques Tati, etc. Netflix’s mail-order DVD service was a godsend considering how expensive Criterion DVDs were. A Woman Under the Influence in particular convinced me that there was a whole heck of a lot going on with all the elements that comprise a film. Of course, Cassavetes was barely mentioned during those four years. A few teachers had more esoteric tastes that they managed to work into the curriculum, but I think I watched American Beauty in three different courses…oof.

19 This seems to be getting towards the time that I became aware of your music, which was 2010. What you were doing then differs considerably from what you did before or since.

Yeah, so for a while I was mainly just playing along with records…, Neil Young, whatever. There were a few late-night GarageBand experiments in there. I had some piano gigs at weddings and church events for people I knew. Tim Poison of Poison Control fame wanted me to help realize his rock star fantasies, so we started jamming again in his parents’ basement. I got the sense that anything we accomplished was hugely dependent on my ability to effortlessly come up with riffs and develop them into finished songs, though. That sounds egocentric but it’s an accurate assessment. As per usual, I’d end up thinking, “Why don’t I just do this by myself?” and that’s how I ended up cranking out an EP’s worth of really gross, abrasive garage punk songs.

Yep, that would have been the first stuff I heard from you, on the Frankenjew compilation tape.

Okay, well, I can draw that back to a show in Adrian Rew’s mom’s basement. You probably know Max, who put out the tape, and one of his bands called Pig Takeover played that night. They were a hardcore punk duo but the set started off with what felt like an epic five minutes of poppy instrumental surf punk. Then Max would do introductions before every minute-long hardcore song explaining how they were all about pigs, e.g. “Pigs on Parole.” This was highly entertaining to me. M3thlaab and Lake Breeze were on that tape, too, and the former band was how I wound up at the show. In high school I remember giving this guy Nick a Burzum CD-R and shortly after he made some synth heavy black metal tinged songs on GarageBand with our mutual friend Raul singing. They had me play guitar at their first show at some 15- year-old kid named Vincent’s birthday party. A gang of crusty youth piled into Logan Square cafe Hotti Biscotti and moshed to us singing and playing along with the M3thlaab catalog playing off an iPod. Some middle-aged punk guys drove up from Milwaukee to play and they were like an actual band who expected to get paid, which didn’t turn out so great for them. Those guys got all bent out of shape when we covered “You’re So Dumb,” an early Skrewdriver song from back before they turned racist. Still a deliberate edgelord move on Nick’s part, I think. I was lucky to have gotten picked up for Poison Control practice and fled the scene. Anyways, a few years later Raul invited me to this basement show. I recognized Adrian because I saw him at the Feelies’ Millennium Park show the previous summer where he ran up to the stage during “Raised Eyebrows” convulsing like some kind of deranged muppet. His band Lake Breeze played, which was a duo with Michael, soon to be of Marshall Stacks/Coolatta Lounge fame. The night also included sets by Rogers Park’s esteemed Morgan McKinley Band and a gentleman going by the name David Diarrhea. He was a rotund fella who played some sludgy guitar whilst thrashing about. He asked if anyone could play drums on a cover of the Soft Boys’ “I Wanna Destroy You” and I happily volunteered.

After the show I got asked to play keyboards with M3thlaab, who had been recently revived featuring a new full band lineup. I guess they’d played some happening events attended by edgy, foul smelling students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who seemed to enjoy this semi-ironic take on black metal with titles like “Take Me to Your Dealer.” I joined as second keyboardist and then subbed for the other guy who had to go to South by Southwest

20 to play with some older guy’s questionable (?) band. We played some alright house parties and had some girl playing saxophone for a second. The guys hosting one party nearly fought us because someone punched holes in the ceiling during our set and then our crowd dispersed before the touring bands could go on. There was an unnecessary amount of drama involved in that band, though, since I’d find out they were having recording sessions without me and then later they’d tap me for shows without telling the other keyboardist but still get him to transport the gear in his van, and then he’d be practically begging me to let him play on some song called “Golden Hex,” which apparently struck a chord with people for reasons unbeknownst to me.

I just remember a lot of unwarranted self-seriousness on the strength of what were essentially some guy’s years old GarageBand demos. The idea was to glob onto the DIY/garage rock/“weird punk” scene that was stinking up Chicago at the time. There were a lot more underground venues that have since closed down, and you’d see a lot of intersection between more standard punk culture with an occasionally more diverse array of genres. There was a cultish obsession with cassettes and anything hyped by the store Permanent Records and disgusting venues like Mortville and the Mopery that were basically squats. Lots of zonked out crusty hippy types and SAIC students just looking to party. People were nuts about bands like Ga’an and Cave, who I didn’t care for but were clearly a cut above so much of the total garbage that I witnessed during shows from this period. All this stuff being talked up as “psychedelic” simply wasn’t. I’d grown up reading about all the scenes that birthed my favorite bands, thinking they would have been exciting to experience, so here I was in the early 2010s, finally old enough to delve into the underground which turned out to be more bleakly uninspiring than I could have ever anticipated.

Was Harshest Realm a response to this scene?

My thinking at first was that people seemed to be willing to embrace anything as long as it has a blown out, lo-fi sound. The slew of awful faux “trashy” garage rock records coming out wasn’t letting up. And I thought some acts were truly excellent, like Homostupids. I did love the U.S. Girls and Pink Reason stuff from that time. I was excited about the Siltbreeze reboot but wasn’t feeling their output after a while. Clockcleaner had some affiliation with all that and they’d called it quits. Jay Reatard had just died and to me his strengths as a songwriter weren’t even approached by anyone doing remotely similar music. To me he’d been a trendsetter, just for the worse. Drunkdriver imploded right after. I had a whole mess of musical aspirations that I didn’t feel like I had the resources to realize, so recording punk songs with the gain cranked up to in-the-red levels of ear bleeding distortion was a quick and easy solution. “Harsh Realm” had long been one of my favorite entries from the amusingly notorious “Grungespeak” article, but since some band with a MySpace had apparently taken the name I changed it to “Harshest,” and there you have it. It seemed to fit the songs. It’s better than releasing songs under my full name, plus it can be a band if the right people happen to be around. Also, I like seeing it listed between Harry Pussy and Harvey Milk in my iTunes library.

21 I saw the compilation tape release show you played, and the music was already super different from the songs I’d heard.

Those songs were the product of me recording seriously for the first time in a while. By the time I’d agreed to play that show only a few months later, my head was in a different place. I’d been seeing Harvey Milk play whenever they’d roll through town, and was feeling like rifftastic with occasionally more challenging, dirgey moments was what I most wanted to see in these dingy basement venues. You’d go see a band talked up as “” and it would just be comically bad. M3thlaab had turned out to be a bust, and it seemed like Adrian and Michael from Lake Breeze were just plain nicer to be around and had better taste in music, so I asked them to be the Harshest Realm band for the show. The song I wrote was a balls-out hard rock epic with way too many parts. We practiced it more than they would have preferred, and the final performance still ended up being a trainwreck, as was our attempt at covering ’s “Ten Years Gone.” Raul wanted to sing “Sea of Love,” so we did that, too, which was most certainly a bunch of noise. I’m sure the whole thing was amusing enough but in the moment I could never tell what was going on.

That summer I was also playing bass in a band that my friend Neal had been drumming for. They were called Pilcher’s List and changed the name to Canadian Pavers. No idea where those names came from. They were Oak Park dudes who liked Wilco. We sounded like a band that practiced, which was refreshing, and I’d never played bass in a band before. I think we only did one show, which was at the Taste of Westmont with the audience consisting of the other guys’ parents. We did some recording at a studio just west of Damen and Chicago, which was the same building where I’d attended a Lampo hosted Kevin Drumm and Leif Elggren performance in high school. A couple years later I did play in Neal’s somewhat Glenn Branca-ish guitar ensemble and got to do a record at Electrical Audio thanks to a grant from his school.

As that’s all happening, Lake Breeze morphed into an ambient jam band with me on guitar doing my best Robert Fripp impression. Before that their stuff was split between Adrian’s “shitgazey” indie rock songs and Michael’s more stoned electro punk vibe. Michael had been drumming in the Smith Westerns before they got big and apparently those dorks found his Neu! fandom to be too idiosyncratic. We were kind of just hopping on a bandwagon helmed by the Skaters and Emeralds, with maybe more nodding towards older Siltbreeze acts. Sneaking in to Michael’s tech support office job after hours to jam with all our gear was a highlight, as was getting to play on WHPK, the University of Chicago college radio station. I edited some jams into a long track called “Are We Alone?” that we hand-pressed in an edition of one to give to some guy at a Humboldt Park noise venue, which led nowhere, although the music did eventually come out as one side of a split cassette. Adrian went back to Oberlin at the end of the summer, so then Michael and I would hang and listen to Grand Funk Railroad’s immortal Live Album while playing Tekken 3. Lots of watching the RHCP documentary Funky Monks, too. We should have made actual music but we were lazy. When we were jamming once his dad said it sounded like “the kind of music used to play in the ‘60s.” He also yelled at us for being “WAY TOO FUCKING LOUD!!!!” Michael helped him pirate a James Gang album off the internet one time. We’d go through his records and find rad shit like Santana’s Welcome LP. The classic rock worship was strong.

22 This must have been around when you played that Ranchos Huevos show.

Yep, that was around that time. Michael did a Marshall Stacks solo set and sold some CDs of his solo debut Carny the Gift. There were some other bands from the punk scene, and then Harshest Realm ended up headlining over whatever the touring band was. It was Michael and I, plus Raul occasionally playing one finger keyboard basslines. We started with a barnstorming hard rocker that I may very well have written that morning combined with an outro stolen from the Vanilla Fudge’s cover of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” I was into putting a nine-volt battery on one of the keyboard keys so I’d have a drone to solo over. We played one of Adrian’s Lake Breeze songs, and I got Michael to learn the bass part for a song off the comp tape that we played with a drum machine. “Shitty Girl” was a new jam written about a colorful young lady that may have given gonorrhea to an unnamed member of our circle. Then the set raged on as Michael and I covered side one of KISS’s Alive! One second I saw the crowd eating it up with ladies playing air guitar, and a song or two later I looked up and nearly everyone had gone outside except Max Frankenjew and some other kid. Thankfully there’s video of the whole thing.

Were there more Harshest Realm shows after that one?

Sadly, no. Once Adrian was back from school, we did do a Lake Breeze show that was a direct result of the show at Ranchos Huevos and the Frankenjew association. This kid put us on a show thinking we were “garage rock,” and at that point we were playing deeply fried psychedelic power trio jams. We showed up to this house way out in the suburb McHenry, which is nearly in Wisconsin. The basement is packed with suburban high school kids, and their parents are upstairs. Not the typical punk show clientele. We were these older freakish stoned looking guys with way too much equipment that took forever to set up, maybe longer than the performance ended up being, since pretty quickly somebody’s dad at the top of the stairs turned the lights on signaling that our time was up. I suppose we were stupidly loud and conjuring up an offensive racket. There was an actual hugeass organ in the basement, and I think we got them to at least turn it on for us, although I’m pretty sure the set got cut off before I got to try it out. I was into wearing sunglasses and dark, near formal attire a la Takashi Mizutani or in that video of the Dead C playing “Sky” on a New Zealand TV show. It’s a shame that this vibe wasn’t adequately tapped into for more performances. Some kid said we sounded “like pot! Or acid!” We got Slurpees on the way back and I wound up with a KISS Big Gulp cup that I kept and occasionally still use to this very day.

We did some more full band Lake Breeze shows and at least one Marshall Stacks show, and we always found it too hard to hear what the hell was going on. Classic case of “that’s not how it sounded at practice!” Trying to arrange and practice actual parts was usually a mistake. During the summer we put in slightly more effort at being more than a noise hipster jam band, although the best music we made was all improvisations recorded on a Tascam Portastudio, some rock and some more out-there stuff. At best our hangouts seemed to lightly approximate what I imagine the early days to have been like. Adrian was feeling psychedelia really hard despite getting sick of my guitar solos, which were getting into ultra clean Quicksilver Messenger Service territory. We played a 4th of July party in Bridgeport where our set was just us covering Soundgarden’s “4th of July” after a droney noise intro. We’d learned it the day of and were reviewing the Superunknown lyrics booklet in

23 the car on the way over. A bunch of crappy garage rock bands played before we finally got to go on, at which point most people had left.

We did get paid actual money to play at the 2011 Bitchpork Festival at a venue called Mortville out west by Little Village. This “festival” was conceived as the place to see acts that Pitchfork wasn’t “cool” enough to host. I never went to the earlier ones but was told that they were supposedly better…sure. This was the year the cops showed up and told everybody to get off the roof, which due to it being late July coupled with the sheer number of crustyass sweaty attendees made for a more congested, less breathable experience. We played early and did another cover, this time some Ya Ho Wha 13 tune that may or may not have been co- written by Sky Saxon. Adrian’s idea. We were trying really hard to be Les Rallizes Denudes. It might have gone all right, I really don’t know. A short balding middle-aged man named Ray who was a fixture at those kinds of shows told me I was “the white Hendrix.” I remember hearing about him trying to trade “Beatles bootlegs” for Dead tapes. The night went on seemingly forever and aside from an Indian girl who opened the show playing sexy sitar jams and a couple white guys DJ’ing footwork and juke later on, it was all just a ton of half-assed, painfully loud shit masquerading as various artsy subgenres. A far cry from Harry Pussy, let’s just say. Instead of Bill Orcutt there’s David Diarrhea on guitar. By the time the band I was semi-interested in seeing (Warhammer 48k) went on at 2:00 AM or whenever, I could have cared less. That experience effectively killed my interest in being part of any sort of local DIY/experimental/noise/punk/psych/whatever scene…we might have done one more show. It could have been one of the stronger ones but I remember being too annoyed about having to miss seeing the Psychic Paramount.

Was Lake Breeze finished, too?

We continued to record improv jams on the Portastudio, which I found significantly more rewarding than any shows we played that summer. There weren’t any more after that. Our process of getting stoned and hoping something interesting would happen didn’t quite translate in public performance contexts. We could have had more discussions about what we were trying to accomplish, but we were just trying to play and not think about anything. Devoting time and energy to learning songs would defeat the whole purpose, although that seemed to be the next logical step. Adrian would go back to school at the end of summers, anyway, and we’d all be busy with other things. I felt like I’d ruined yet another band trying to execute my ideas. Also, we’d practice in Michael’s parents’ basement, which they weren’t exactly crazy about. Despite being pretty lazy about the whole thing, in some ways we’d been as serious as we could be and it didn’t pay off, so that was that. That whole period was tied to a proliferation of “blog music” which made it seem like you could build buzz with as little effort as possible. Actually, it just made for a sea of crap clogging up the internet, plus a bunch of cassettes. If artists I remember from the “scene” back then haven’t disappeared by now, they certainly haven’t broken out, although Ryley Walker seems to be doing alright for himself.

I know Michael and I both were veering off in directions that we could explore more in our respective solo music pursuits. It was clear that trying to fit in with whatever was happening wasn’t worth the little effort required. We were both listening to more jazz, ‘80s pop, house/techno…anything well-produced and sexy sounding seemed like a necessary palette cleanser. I know I had been intensely put off by the current watered-down state of various

24 “edgy” subgenres that had once seemed so intriguing. Every corner of the rock world was especially uninspiring, save for the occasional killer show like Foghat at Roscoe Village Burger Fest or . Michael got back into working on the second Marshall Stacks album, and I started playing around with my synth for the first time in a while, which turned into me making the song “Apartment Voyager.” Months before that I’d been working on a recording of the hard rock song that I played at the first Harshest Realm show, but the drums were so painful to listen to, and I’d been considerably turned off of noisy screamy shit by then. I was more into rediscovering jazz chords I knew, and finding neat synth and drum pad tones. That song was very much a reflection of what I’d been listening to. Galaxy 2 Galaxy, Kaito, Herbie Hancock, Orbital, Steely Dan’s Gaucho…Dire Straits, Prefab Sprout, and Bruce Springsteen circa Tunnel of Love. Jeff Phelps and the KLF were huge inspirations. I was rediscovering Todd Rundgren and Frank Zappa via ‘70s albums I’d never heard, and Michael would get into them and they’d rub off on his music, as well. That song started off as a straightforward house track, and then I started adding different sections and overdubbing guitars and the progginess took over. Very much a sign of things to come. I did the whole thing on the Fostex 8-track just playing the parts live without any sequencing or quantizing. I may have actually started that in the first place because Nick from M3thlaab said he’d make a music video with footage he shot at an anime convention, which of course never happened.

So this would be the beginning of the process of making the Harshest Realm album you recently put out?

That’s accurate, yeah. I had that hard rock song that I’d started earlier, but I hated working on it. I even went back to it after “Apartment Voyager” and it was looking like I might have to re- record some sections and that was all just immensely unappealing. I was also trying to graduate college on time. Time would pass and I’d look back on how naturally “Apartment Voyager” seemed to materialize, and getting back in that zone seemed crucial for my sanity and all-around enjoyment of life. Plus, Michael was always turning out finished Marshall Stacks albums at a more prolific rate, and since we were both Coolatta Lounge co-founders, me having this one finished song that suggested a promising addition to our catalog felt like a cruel tease.

I want to say that the rest of the album is in keeping with that song stylistically, although in another sense it’s also extremely diverse.

In other songs maybe certain sounds and approaches are more pronounced, but a lot of it is there in “Apartment Voyager.” The funkier electronic elements were natural outgrowths of me working with my synth again, but also made sense for music that allows me to explore the playing and production sides, while still mixing things up along the way. There’s a part of the song “BOOTYZONE” where the basic track was done on the program Logic for a film scoring class in college. I’d barely used the program, or any software, really, but what I came away with was more than satisfactory, and in some ways sounded better than what I could do using the gear that I’d been working with. Making the rest of the song was all about living up to that one section to prove it wasn’t a fluke, and I started it up again in early 2013. The 8-track recorder that I was using stopped working after a couple weeks, though, so that got delayed even further. During that particularly desperate interim period, I found myself editing the Early Matteo CD material together using GarageBand. It’s a collage of highly inebriated sounding

25 cellphone recordings done in Michael’s old Chinatown house. Matteo is a real guy who I can’t discuss for legal reasons. Eventually I got Ableton up and running and starting seriously working with recording software for the first time ever, and the timeline format made adding and extending sections a little too easy, so that’s why the song is 23 minutes long. Before the Fostex broke down it was shaping up to be a third of that length.

“BOOTYZONE” has somewhat of a footwork feel, which I hear in a few other tracks, as well.

That’s where the main beat comes from, yeah. I wasn’t hipped to footwork until that first Bangs & Works compilation…that and DJ Rashad’s Just a Taste Vol. 1 and the Ghettoteknitianz EP. Before I heard Just a Taste I’d never thought to build a song around a vocal sample. I saw some of those guys do great live sets, too. Pretty inspiring after having become so fatigued by the crappiest aspects of Chicago music. They really figured out how to combine the low-end feel of modern hip hop and R&B with an electronic/house approach, while also working in a lot of inventive sonic and rhythmic ideas. A footwork song can be raw and smooth and even kind of hilarious all at the same time. Once I started hearing that stuff it made a lot of other electronic music seem a little too reserved and humorless. There’s just more room for personality, even when things are kept at the same tempo with certain common sounds. What I got out of it was like all that crazed ‘70s avant-fusion, or Michael’s Marshall Stacks output. The groove is strong but always shakes you out of your complacency so you can’t zone out much.

That beat in “BOOTYZONE” was a jumping off point. I was trying to maintain a consistent pulse while moving through a number of different sections, like in a DJ mix, and then occasionally derail that feel to varying degrees of extremity while still making it hold together. Footwork and R&B were the main contemporary genres I was listening to, aside from Marshall Stacks and the new Van Halen album. There wasn’t any new rock music that I played as much as Jeremih, Waka Flocka Flame, and Marsha Ambrosius. Teedra Moses had a great mixtape out. Instrumental R&B with solos is basically , smooth or otherwise, and that’s what the music started resembling more and more. My biggest all- around musical inspiration was likely Robert Quine’s under-appreciated instrumental albums, which were on my mind a lot at various times. Escape, Basic, and Painted Desert proved highly instructional for getting different types of electric guitar playing to sit effectively over programmed beats. Quine was taking cues from ‘70s Miles Davis, who was also a common reference point, plus the whole extended network of musicians Miles was working with then. Keyboards were more Larry Heard. Sometimes I’d get stuck on how to improve a section and wonder what guys like that might do. The more I went on, the more guitar heavy jazz fusion seemed to loom large, as the emphasis on playing seemed more befitting to music from the ‘70s.

I was going to ask if any of this was a conscious attempt to distance yourself from what else was going on in music.

It’s more trying to incorporate whatever contemporary sounds I actually find intriguing, but use them for my own purposes so that the music is an accurate reflection of who I am and what I can do. That’s probably the case with a lot of other music that I’m just unaware of, but I can’t say I hear much about modern-day producers who are also known for their instrumental

26 approaches, and that strikes me as being a perfectly novel concept offering unexplored potential. You’d think that Michael dousing his Marshall Stacks songs in Ernie Isley worshipping solos wouldn’t be some anomalous thing that only he does, or that an updated throwback to a bygone era when albums like Jeff ’s Blow by Blow and Reggie Lucas’s Survival Themes were a common thing wouldn’t seem like some laughably absurd idea.

Guitars have especially fallen out of favor as of late, I think, and understandably so. They can be a pain in the ass to maintain or just to generate sound with, and there’s all this “rockist” baggage. The instrument had a kind of ubiquitousness for years, and the more music has become the domain of bedroom producers, keyboards and laptops have proven more practical, and genres more conducive to those tools have also taken over. I rely on a computer for music-making like so many other people do, but a huge part of me is compelled to make sure I’m spending long hours with an instrument in my hands, so I split the difference there.

For music that has such a strong electronic element, there’s quite a few rockier moments all across the three discs.

That’s just what happens when I start working in guitars and live drum sounds. My background is more in trying to record songs with me playing all the instruments than anything involving layered loops and sequences. After “BOOTYZONE,” which took nearly all of 2013 working off and on, I gave myself a break by learning all the riffs off Megadeth’s Rust In Peace, among other classic albums. The next thing I made was “Ghareeb Nawaz,” which is more ambient and is built around a recording of an Indian/Pakistani food restaurant recorded with the mic that was on my old Android smartphone, but it still has a guitar solo. I’m not great at striving to make the most generic possible approximation of an accepted style, since there’s no shortage of people already doing that. My mind sometimes goes towards incongruous ideas that might seem potentially disastrous or downright stupid, but the whole point is finding out how to make them work. Michael’s work on the second Marshall Stacks album Mannequin Dojo was the first time I saw someone really go all out in that regard, and it helped that I knew where a lot of the influences were coming from since I was around during the making of it, and also contributed some guitar parts. It’s a lot easier to do with solo music than in bands. People get too self-conscious. It’s probably different if they’re getting paid, though.

I’ve read interviews with Larry Heard and Jeff Mills where they’re talking about how they grew up as huge prog/fusion heads, and Larry Heard would say how he doesn’t really follow house and listens to Ramsey Lewis at home. So the musicality of those guys’ stuff is coming from all over, and it makes it less predictable. I remember noticing how younger people were becoming conditioned to perfectly quantized modern production sounds to the point where anything else sounded alien, so that kind of thing would make me take stock of all the seemingly disparate aesthetics that I appreciate and try to figure out how to work them into what I’m doing.

Would you mind going ahead and providing a walk-through of the rest of the album?

Not at all! I’ll keep going chronologically.

27 “News from Home”: Like “Ghareeb Nawaz,” this was based around a sample I had; another audio véríté field recording straight out of everyday life, this time recorded with the mic on an iPhone…a step up from the Android. It was just some street sounds recorded in the South Loop, and they’re in the second half. I tied that to the title due to it being an early Chantal Akerman movie that’s just various shots of city streets with narration. An old favorite. Like with “BOOTYZONE,” I had to figure out how to create a piece of music that somehow makes its way to this recording in a way that sounded acceptable to me. I wound up also working in a vocal sample from a semi-obscure ‘90s pop song that I repurposed in other ways until I had a structure consisting of loops and more open sections, which I dressed up with guitars and keyboards in the usual manner. Somehow I still got the street sounds in there.

“Kim Thayil”: I remember hearing him on the Sunn O)))/Boris collab album, and thinking how sick it was to hear Kim Thayil playing evil instrumental . Michael and I would talk about how cool it would be if we could listen to a Kim Thayil solo album that’s like all the best Soundgarden guitar moments stretched way out. That was the genesis of this track, which is just a rock song with the kind of long instrumental sections you might expect from more “experimentally minded” groups…basically putting the emphasis on the “good parts” in songs that you always wish more commercial rock bands would play for longer. There’s so many synths and electronic beats on the rest of the album that I wanted to have a significant chunk devoted to my guitar playing at its most purely rock leaning. The reference to “Kim Thayil” is more just a nod to the whole psychedelic heavy rock guitar playing lineage that goes back to Neil Young and and stretches through the ages. There’s plenty of Kyuss, Meat Puppets, Melvins, Earth, and ZZ Top in there…kind of me making up for not getting to play enough truly killer rock music in the bands I was in. I recorded several hours’ worth of guitar improvisations that I spent way too much time editing down and eventually working into the , which gave it the feel I was looking for but also turned out to be a way of working that I’d rather not explore ever again. I also managed to incorporate some of the stronger portions of that earlier hard rock epic that I abandoned.

“imsohungry (R.I.P. Phyllis & Hiram)”: I had enough for a double album, if we’re talking CDs. Nothing but long tracks seemed like a bit much, though, and after having committed to making a 76-minute song, I needed to speed things up a bit. This was based on samples I’d collected. I threw them together and they seem to complement one another. Phyllis Hyman is the greatest singer of all time, and someone I associate with the period spent working on “BOOTYZONE.” I saw her Unsung episode and learned that she’d been in a band with Hiram Bullock, whose career provides a similarly cautionary tale. He shows up on the Michael Shrieve/Klaus Schulze collab LP Transfer Station Blue, which is very much “Coolatta Lounge canon.” He’s someone that would occasionally spring to mind when I’d be recording guitar solos. I think the one on here was the longest I’d done for the album.

“Mangopolis, Pt. 2 (Visions of Mangopolis)”: The name comes from Michael hearing a short song I recorded in high school and naming it “Mangopolis.” He’s always been more of a song title machine than me. The main rhythm hints at footwork just a tad, and then gets more jungle, and the rock elements become more prominent as it moves along. Kind of goes through all the main flavors of the album in a short span. I remember feeling like the leads weren’t happening naturally enough so I went out and ate a footlong at Murphy’s Red Hots and then came back and was able to focus more.

28 “Buffalo Sauce I.V.”: This was an experiment in recording guitar parts first. Everything’s more grounded in riffs, as opposed to just coming up with parts that fit over a rhythm track. The day I started it I got the basic structure down and went to go see Richard Thompson play for free. Not bad.

“Nipple Lights”: There was a little downtime before this one. This might not make too much sense, but I was listening to a lot of early Laura Nyro. Her songs were real crazy with lots of tempo shifts. I tend to naturally complicate my song structures without thinking, so this was me doing that in a more purposeful way, trying to get the feel more solid. I remade the old song that Michael had named “Mangopolis” and stuck it onto the end. Some crucial spins of Midnight Love and On the Corner made this a step up production-wise. I never stop listening to music throughout my daily life when I’m in the midst of a project, so a lot of things end of rubbing off and providing “aesthetic guidance.”

“Late Night Asthma”: Dials down the insanity, somewhat. I kept being drawn back to this mid to late ‘70s commercial fusion sound. The Fender Rhodes makes that unavoidable. There was a sweet spot in that era where artists were trying to break through making instrumental records that were coming out of spiritual jazz and Miles’s electric work. Hubert Eaves’s Esoteric Funk is a prime example. It’s a more keyboard-oriented companion LP to Reggie Lucas’s Survival Themes, which shares a lot of the same personnel and was a major guitar touchstone for me. They both contributed to Phyllis Hyman’s debut and switched right over to commercial pop songwriting/production. But they did nail this more artful approach to what would become known as , and I found that all to be relevant to the music I was making, not just artistically but also by reinforcing that the ceiling for wider recognition isn’t very high, even if I’m privately finding a lot personal significance in these artists’ records and stories. Robert Quine and Fred Maher’s Basic is a similar case. Anyway…my asthma seemed to be reawakened around this time and was occasionally disrupting my sleep.

“Jammin’ with Jamaa”: Jamaa Fanaka was the most populist of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers. The title comes from the fact that I’d found myself practicing guitar along with his movies, which are all excellent. I was trying to make something with one constant groove without a bunch of breaks. Vocals are featured sparingly and pitched down in a faux British accent, sort of a Bark Psychosis/Shadow Ring/KLF nod. Having everything collapse into droney spritual jazz was a refinement of the similar route taken during “News from Home.” Throughout this whole thing I often found myself thinking that there’s no reason to leave anything at the door and that I might as well try to pull off some approximation of any type of music that I happen to enjoy using nothing but a synth, guitar, and recording software, as long as I could justify working it into a song structure. If something unpredictable happens it’s only because I was able to relate it to whatever else is going on.

“Pizza & Wings Damn”: Obviously that combo is always a great time. This track is a comedown from the whole project, which grew out of house music before going off in a bunch of different directions. So this is me keeping it simple, while applying what I’ve learned from far more convoluted working methods.

29 As different as these songs all are, can you identify commonalities or running threads in the processes of making them?

I always start by cobbling together a solid framework…usually drums. That establishes a sense of form, and sets the stage for whatever vibe that I have in mind, although that becomes clearer as the process goes on. I’ll occasionally leave gaps in the framework, either silence or long repetitive sections that I then have to make work. I’ll work on every section separately, but the foundation is there for it to make compositional sense in the end. The drums suggest a type of song, and from there I’m just jamming along, messing with sounds and parts, embracing happy accidents and little editing deviations until I feel like a given section can’t be significantly improved upon, and eventually it’s done. This process came to be especially efficient for the shorter tracks on the album.

Have you kept up the musical activity since you wrapped up recording?

I played some synth bass and guitar on the latest Marshall Stacks single “Snake Eyes,” a real butt rock jammer. We did a show at another , my first in over three years (aside from when I did guest vocals on the Melvins song “With Teeth” with Neal’s drums/tuba duo Korean Jeans in January 2013) and more than likely last for the foreseeable future. The low E-string on my guitar broke during the first minute or so. We covered “School” by Nirvana. Our bassist rarely made it to rehearsals, and it showed. I wound up with a fierce hangover and more faith than ever in the soberly disciplined solitary music-making routine that I’d adapted since college.

I do have an unreleased EP that I’d just started at that time and spent the next month finishing. It’s all interpretations of the work of the /improviser Maja Ratkje. My friend Neal has been getting his master’s at the Art Institute, and they have these colloquiums with visiting artists that he gets me into. Last year I got to see Charlemagne Palestine and Ikue Mori talk to some students in a tiny classroom. I missed somehow, although the performance I caught was wonderful. Anyway, at the Mori seminar I saw Maja Ratkje on the schedule, and I got the bright idea to record a piece of hers that I’d had a score of for years and give it to her in person. It’s from a book simple piano pieces written by various European “new music” …I guess you’d call them “intermediate level.” Hers is somewhat of a piss take on music. I got the book because I loved her album Voice in high school. One of the more brilliant artifacts of experimental laptop music from the early ‘00s. That was my idea of a great noise record back then, which only made exposure to any actual noise scene all the more disappointing. Her duo Fe-mail is also pretty classic. Lots of creative uses of different sounds and technology alongside the harshness and extremity, as opposed to just being some monotonous crap with nothing going on.

I recorded this piece with synth in the left hand and guitar in the right hand, plus some trashy synthetic jazz drums and synth embellishments where appropriate. Once I had that out of the way I started taking samples from Voice and another album called Stalker and building tracks around them, similar to how I’d made the tracks for my album. They’d move between noise/ambient parts and into more rocking sections and things would inevitably get pretty housey. I made some shorter guitar pieces using an approach inspired by Voice where I’d cut up improvisations and rearrange them into something more aesthetically pleasing. One was

30 done with a 12-string electric guitar, and it’s one of the more satisfying things I’ve made. I threw all this shit onto a CD-R with handmade cover art and handed her a copy after her seminar. She seemed shocked and amused to be reminded of that ragtime piece, and seemed to greatly enjoy the music once she played it in her hotel room. She wanted to use some of the tracks to fulfill a 7” offer from some Irish noise label that put out Merzbow and Charles Hayward releases. Amazing deal for me getting exposure in the “experimental” world, and not a bad deal for her since she has a family and more serious modern classical works to focus on. But apparently not such a great deal for these label guys, who turned it down. I had my hopes up for a month waiting to hear back but now it’s back to the drawing board.

The fact she’s willing to have her name associated with it says something, I would think.

That’s the most reassuring aspect, certainly. It was too good to be true. I don’t think I’m delusional in thinking that my music isn’t so lacking in that certain something so as to be “not quite there.” A lot of what gets written about at length online is a lot more amateurish and unremarkable. It’s hard not having ties to a label or scene associated with a certain type of music, and it’s harder when you’re doing something that doesn’t fit comfortably in a box, so I’m at a loss for how to reach beyond the incredibly small pool of friends who support what I do. Let’s just say my two hands provide more than enough for me to count the members of my fanbase. I was probably banking too heavily on word of mouth, which isn’t really panning out.

Do you have any plans to play live?

Well, the stuff I’ve made is too knotty for me to want to pull off live. If I knew musicians who were up to the task of executing it, then maybe. The prospect of doing it solo with backing tracks is far from appealing. I’d rather focus my energies on pumping out new stuff, and I’d have to deliberately keep live performance in mind if I want that to be the next step. If I was offered a show I might accept it as an excuse to think on my feet and throw something together, but left to my own devices I’m going to delve back into the recording process, and the music is going to be a product of that; probably not “songs” to rely on for a set that you hone through repeated performances. Any solo performance would be me playing guitar along with backing tracks. I can use my laptop to pull a track together, but have no “DJ skills” to speak of. No idea what people are doing with their mixing boards that have a bunch of cables running into some other thing. I’m a bit of luddite in that sense. The next step will be new music released in some form that will not be a three-disc box set.

That is a unique format for a debut album, or any non-archival release, for that matter. Was that the plan from the beginning?

Part of me was compelled to stretch out the project since adding tracks seemed to only improve the whole thing, and I simply enjoyed working on it. The turning point was when “Kim Thayil” pushed the running time over the edge considerably. I figured that would end up being more like a half hour, and then I’d squeeze in some shorter tracks to approach the capacity of a CD. But once it ended up taking up a whole disc, that plan was out the window, and then it was either fit the rest onto one disc or record enough to necessitate two. I actually think that splitting up the rest of the program into two 40+ minute discs is more approachable than just

31 having two overstuffed halves. I put at least a little thought into the sequencing. It plays like a movie. It’s as long as Apocalypse Now! or some Cassavetes films. I also have a slightly unfortunate affinity for box sets, just for how daunting and immersive they tend to be. Those Miles Davis “complete sessions” boxes are incredible. And there’s not much in this world that excites me more than seven discs of horribly recorded, haphazardly edited Charlie Parker solos in one package. I remember being captivated by the audaciousness of the debut albums from Ween and Frank Zappa, which pack in a lot of ideas and reach 2xLP length. Released on vinyl, Harshest Realm would be a quadruple album. The only comparable instance I can think of is Half Japanese’s first one, which is three LPs. There’s also , and it’s hardly conceited for me to say that any two sides of my album would blow “Apple Jam” out of the water, although that’s not saying much.

Is there any specific modern musical context that you see yourself as being a part of?

It seems overly generous and inaccurate to lump my music in with anything besides Marshall Stacks. We both admire footwork and house/techno artists from afar…guys like Kyle Hall and Theo Parrish. My friend Ian Finkelstein is actually involved in that scene. You can’t get around calling that stuff “black music,” which I’m clearly not a part of. But I’ve found that seriously engaging with black music makes for a useful jumping off point for creating personal work that’s a true reflection of my taste and experiences, like starting from a groove inspired by Anita Baker’s music and then taking it in a whole other direction. The predominantly white sub-genres these days are stale and boring and frankly undeserving of my commitment. I’ll hear some rock band with flaccid drumming and no songs, or watered down takes on “krautrock” and “psych folk” and “coldwave” and think, “Not more of this shit…” Same with techno that lacks any kind of soul or jazz element. Worthless fads like “vaporwave” sail right over my head. Obviously I’m just one of countless bedroom producers clogging up the internet, although I feel comfortable saying that my stuff brings more musicianship and unlikely influences to the table, and that’s all in keeping with the Coolatta Lounge aesthetic as showcased throughout the various Marshall Stacks releases. I’m admittedly out of the loop, though, so if “experimental bedroom prog/fusion” is a genre right now, then I guess consider me part of it.

You touched on this a bit earlier, but can you discuss how prog/fusion came to play such a large part in your aesthetic, and why it’s continued to endure? Is it just handy for being a “style” that can encompass nearly anything?

The sound has a lot to do with the technology at my disposal and the indulgences afforded by working alone. At some point I had to write off the analog fetishist gearhead mentality and just focus on making affective use of various guitar, synth, and drum sounds recorded direct-in. Before I got back into seriously working on music again, I was self-conscious about my guitar setup and lack of vintage gear. In Lake Breeze I had this fairly convoluted rig with two tiny amps running into each other and my 8-track digital recorder as a pre-amp of sorts. It was excessive and impractical. Meanwhile I’d go to these awful drone/ambient shows and see guys with a bunch of fancy pedals playing sets that sounded like nothing. It seemed necessary to ride the “neo lo-fi” wave, so I got ahold of a 4-track cassette recorder, but making the switch to that way of working wasn’t going to happen. Once I wrote all that shit off and got back into fooling around with my Yamaha synth, I was finding sounds that were a

32 natural fit for my playing and what I liked hearing, which included electric pianos, clavinet, smooth R&B synth leads that you’d hear in an R. Kelly or Isley Brothers song…I’d put these on top of housey rhythms and by the time I’d solidified the song structure and overdubbed guitars, the prog dimension would be difficult to ignore. I tend to throw in complex melodies played by multiple instrumental voices, harmonized guitar leads, possibly jarring rhythmic breaks, and other things of that nature.

Usually I’m just drawing connections between seemingly disparate influences, and doing that across a long-form structure that one might consider “proggy.” The song “Apartment Voyager” grew out of a kind of Galaxy 2 Galaxy/Underground resistance vibe but once I added (synthetic) live drums and put guitar on top of that it started to resemble the latter day Steely Dan records I’d been playing, not to mention the borderline smooth jazz sound of Pat Metheny, which has a nostalgic draw for me. And some people might shy away from that because it’s corny, but to me it didn’t seem significantly cornier than the rest of the song. Or whatever else was going on in music, for that matter. There was a lot of kitschy fetishism of “new age” around that time, and Dan Bejar had a whole record of ‘80s obsessed sophisti-pop. I’m pretty scrutinizing about what does or doesn’t sound right for a given musical situation, but compared to people I’ve worked with I’d say I’m a lot more open to seeing potentially dumb ideas through, as opposed to dismissing them outright before they can get off the ground.

So…yes. If one has to sooner or later pick a style, then I’m going to choose one that leaves plenty of room for exploration. And of course I’ve uncovered limiting aspects of this overall approach that I’ve been taking, but it’s still undeniably more open and unpredictable than past creative situations. If my intuition draws me to some idea about playing, or production, or compositional structure, I can go ahead and execute it and try to make it work. The earliest instance I can think of where a creative approach to music-making impressed me was Neil Young’s Buffalo Springfield track “Broken Arrow,” which is basically a repeating song fragment that keeps getting disrupted by various interludes. Total wonky psychedelic artifact. Apart from being a great song with a catchy melody, it stood out as a unique listening experience. Later on, I’d hear Frank Zappa’s early records where he’s writing songs with strong melodies and creative arrangements played by a crack ensemble, and then bringing all sorts of tape manipulation into the process. It all seemed like an exceptionally high level of music-making, plus he’d have spoken word sequences and Cal Schenkel’s album artwork adding to the whole effect. A lot of artists I’d be inspired by over the years were just re-contextualizing his ideas, arguably to more satisfying ends, but he’s still a massively looming figure in this regard.

I always had a complicated relationship with “normal” songwriting. Circa high school I think I saw songs as formal experiments that were more likely to take the form of either bite-sized miniatures or overreaching epics. Obviously the latter form was attractive for potentially occupying more space on an album, although it would prove to be more taxing, especially in instances where you’re trying to get other people to learn so many damn parts. This impulse obviously reached an extreme with “BOOTYZONE” and especially “Kim Thayil” and I think it’s out of my system for now. I see my prog fandom as having developed from a need to apply my formal music training to more personally satisfying ends while also being a pretentious teenager, albeit one convinced that his particular brand of pretentiousness was objectively more well-informed and sophisticated than that of anyone impressed by the Mars Volta. For me it was all about This Heat, Faust, ’s Red, but also Gentle Giant and

33 Yes...Soft Machine and Magma, for sure. were big for me. Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 were another one. These bands just set a high bar for going all out and doing it in style. I enjoy both the more brutal and melodic stuff. Making something “proggier” meant that it would be a bigger challenge to pull off, but worth it in the end. It’s really just about defying expectations in ways that are tasteful yet tasteless, which may or may not involve a bunch of 16th notes or whatever. At this point it’s just something that I’m naturally drawn to and can play around with if it’s musically appropriate for whatever I’m working on.

I think the “fusion” part is just something that happens when the focus is placed on solos and melodic lead lines. Obviously the term is associated with the 1970s and whatever sounds happened to be commonplace during that time, but actually the true spirit of the fusion concept implies that it’s adaptable across time. It’s like punk in that it loses its meaning when approached as an imitable sound as opposed to an idea. I was never all that comfortable pretending like I could play jazz, but over the years I’ve grown to appreciate how its influence has shaped me as a musician. Engaging with the history of that music through reading, listening, watching, and of course playing is a major part of my life and likely always will be. It’s probably obvious that my own work is thoroughly composed and produced, so the substantial moments of real-time improvisation are few and far between, although it’s also accurate to say that elements of improv figure prominently much of the time.

I’ve found that a lot of the most satisfying music from various genres is stuff that naturally works in jazz elements, whether it’s a harmonic approach or the role of improvisation. Hip hop producers sampling records would always just draw me back to the source, like J Dilla sampling Barney Kessel on “The Look of Love” from Fan-Tas-Tic Vol. 1. Likewise, hearing guys like Pete Cosey or Sonny Sharrock playing heavy distorted guitar doesn’t only suggest “rock music,” but more likely some of the most impactful, hardest hitting rock music imaginable. I like to think I’m handling the fusion elements in a way that steers clear of any noodly, decidedly unfunky “jam band” territory. That sort of thing was a point of contention for me in high school, even with decent older records like Mahavishnu’s Birds of Fire, which sounded moronic at the time. Devotion is more serious business, even though John McLaughlin hates it. That and the early Lifetime records get a lot of play from me.

If someone asks me what kind of music I make, I think “jazz fusion” is more accurate than saying rock or house or funk…certainly not “EDM,” or IDM, for that matter. I’m really just finding rhythms and textures I like and trying to work my playing in.

Care to name some concerts, films, books, or records that you’ve enjoyed in recent memory?

The best new records I heard in 2014 were from Marshall Stacks, D’Angelo, Moodymann, and Watery Love. Kevin Drumm and Jason Lescalleet’s The Abyss was very good. Stephen Tanner’s Music Blues LP, also.

For old stuff I’ve been listening to Roy Buchanan, blues and funky organ jazz, plus Jimi Hendrix and some James Brown compilations. Lots of Grant Green, early Detroit-era John Lee Hooker, and the Music Improvisation Company. I’ll add:

34 DJ Clent - Last Bus to Lake Park v/a - Drop Down Mama Lowell Davidson Trio LP Soft Machine - Middle Earth Masters Lee Konitz - Motion (Verve Elite Edition)

The best movie I saw in a theater last year was Larry Clark’s Passing Through from 1977. That’s an L.A. Rebellion guy, not the white one who directed Kids. It’s the best fiction film I’ve seen about a jazz musician, although the competition there isn’t tough. As of right now it’s super rare, so sorry about that. I mixed up the dates and missed a screening the year before so I’m lucky it came back.

For shows, I did just see Lee Konitz play with a pianist at Constellation, where I also somewhat recently witnessed excellent performances by Maja Ratkje, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Peter Brötzmann with William Parker and Hamid Drake, Fred Frith, Charlemagne Palestine, and Joe McPhee. I attended a Phil Ranelin show there, as well. He was playing with local pickup musicians and was at some point vigorously gesturing at the bassist to play a rhythm correctly. There were maybe six people in the audience. Actually not a bad way to nurse my hangover from the previous night’s Theo Parrish set I’d caught. Earlier last year, I saw High on Fire at a street festival, and witnessed Joe McPhee and Milford Graves playing a sick duo performance at the Art Institute. John Corbett hosted, and the openers were playing solo guitar to accompany a short film by somebody from the Contortions and Richard Hell reading from his memoir. My favorite show in 2014 was Steve Arrington at the Beat Kitchen.

The last book I read was Four Lives in The Bebop Business.

Harshest Realm live gig, Maman Cave, Chicago, IL, July 2010

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