Moha! + Rature
Mardi 12 mai - 20h - 5€
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3, rue de Bitche
Nantes
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Magnetix + Action Beat + Human Toys
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Chemin de la Peloussière
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Bethany Cosentino is one half of Los Angeles duo Pocahaunted (with Amanda Brown), known for their long, spooky, and almost meditative drone compositions. Their music is both calming and foreboding, often simultaneously, and can feel like being lullabyed into a nightmare-filled sleep. Amid war drums, lulling guitar, and howling voices, Pococaunted always seem to be beating, guiding, and gathering towards some sonic place, a place where we'll probably never arrive. But if we can't know where Pocahaunted are going, we can at least find out where they come from.

Alexander Frank: Can you tell me a little bit about your progression from more standard songwriting to the drone and noise of Pocahaunted? I know that before Pocahaunted, not so long ago, you wrote songs with lyrics and bridges and choruses and all that. So how and when did you make the transition something more discordant?

I was really kind of bored with traditional songwriting, and when Amanda approached me and asked me to start a band with her, we had no real concept in mind of what the music would sound like. Coming from a strong musical background, I figured I would go in there and attempt to construct something, but when the two of us came together, the Pocahaunted sound just happened. And we never questioned it or tried to throw a label on it, we just played the music that came to us, and came out of us. It was only later that people started to call us a "drone" band.

AF: Does genre mean anything to Pocahaunted? What would you label yourselves if you had to?

Well, like I said before, I think we play the music we play because it's just what kind of comes out. Amanda and I have completely different tastes in music, and neither one of us really even listens to “drone” bands, so I wouldn't necessarily say it's important to us to be categorized as a drone band. We make the music we make because it is somehow inspired by our varying tastes, and it just so happens that the mash-up of all these cross genres creates this droney, blissed-out music.

AF: Can you talk a little bit about those influences? The drone and noise influences are obvious, but I also hear the 20th century diva. Your voice is Buffy-Saint Marie, Elizabeth Fraser, and Mariah Carey rolled into one! Can you talk about some divas that inspire Pocahaunted? I hear Patsy Cline, too. Am I crazy?

Well obviously, I am all about the Diva. Amanda and I kind of joke around that we are both divas, but honestly, it's not a joke. We are loud, and demanding, and we require a lot of attention. But we are also really, really inspired by a lot of female musicians, and I think it's pretty clear in our music. I think there is a real feminine quality to the songs, and I think even without the layers of female vocals, the music itself portrays a very feminine vibe. I am really inspired by Elizabeth Fraser, which I think is pretty obvious. I also love, love, love Patsy Cline, so the comparison is amazing. I'm inspired by a lot of female soul singers from the 60s and 70s like Irma Thomas, Doris Duke, and, of course, Aretha Franklin. We're both also really into Nina Simone, and other women of jazz.

AF: Just knowing you as a friend, your personality seems so divergent from the sounds on your records. You're so talkative and verbal and present in person, but on record you sound sort of distant, far away, nonverbal, in a sense. Do you become someone different when you're recording and performing?

I don't think I act any different when recording or performing. Amanda has a hard time getting me to act “seriously” on stage. I think she takes it more seriously than I do from a performance standpoint. I mean, don't get me wrong, I am into it—but for me it's harder, because I'm the one playing the guitar, and carrying the song, so I get a little nervous and I try to concentrate a lot. We recently started playing with a more basic band, so it's easier for me now to ease up and put the guitar down at some point. And when I do that, I feel like I have more room to get into the performance.

AF: What's the process of writing and creating a Pocahaunted song or album? How much do you have planned out and how much just happens during the recording process?

Basically what happens is Amanda and I will brainstorm ideas, meaning, we will say “we want this album to sound like...”, and then we throw out some insane jargon like "Talking Heads meets Cocteau Twins thrown into a blender after smoking a lot of weed”. We basically don't write songs. I come up with a pretty simple guitar riff, and then we add on top of that. Most of our albums have concepts behind them though, and we go into them hoping that we will come across a certain way for a particular album. We have really tried to grow and change with each release, and I think our personal influences show through a lot more in the later albums than in any of the earlier stuff we released.

AF: One last question. What's the best time of day to listen to a Pocahaunted album? Morning? Afternoon? Night, after a long day of work? Right before you go to bed?

At night, I guess...Yeah, at night. When it's most spooky out. And kinda foggy. And close to some mountains, or maybe the ocean. Yeah: listen to us at night in nature.

Interview by Alex Geoffrey Frank

Photo: Clare Kelly

Cool Tunes:

Pocahaunted, Island Diamonds, Not Not Fun, 2008
Pocahaunted, Chains, Teardrops, 2008
Pocahaunted/Robedoor, Hunted Gathering, Digitalis Industries, 2007
Pocahaunted, Mirror Mics, Weird Forest, 2008.

Continuing Education:
Pocahaunted on Not Not Fun website




Like what we're doing here? Just a lil' pocket change can help keep Visitation Rites alive

Like what we're doing here? Just a little pocket change gives Visitation Rites food to live on.

Yuri Landman, a noise guitarist and comic artist from Holland, put down his guitar and his pencils ten years ago to devote his life to building electric string instruments, “a universal art” combining “music, science, and the visual arts.” Landman draws on a vast theoretical foundation in acoustics, science (Helmholtz, Chladni, Jenny), and esotericism (Partch) to craft custom noisemakers for an international coterie of experimental music all-stars. In this extended interview, Landman speaks about his working process, his creations, and his collaborations with customers like Lee Ranaldo, sharing a few interesting tidbits on harmonics, consonance, and temperament along the way.

Sophie Pécaud: When did you start making instruments?

I started building in 2000, right after I left the band Zoppo. For years, I had been playing prepared guitars in the studio and couldn't recreate those sounds properly on stage, with the screwdrivers slipping out and different stage amps all the time. Also, audio feedback is a big problem on small stages when you prepare your guitar and overdrive the sound. With handmade instruments, this problem is easier to solve.

The black overtone zither, my first construction, was a very rudimentary instrument. It was the leg of a two-legged table. I painted it black, screwed some iron parts on it as best as I could, and added an old curtain rail system under the string positions that allowed me to “break” the strings with the curtain hooks. Working with metal is quite different from working with wood, so the instrument didn’t work very well. It was impossible to tune. But the sound of it was already very good and workable, just too atonal.

Sophie Pécaud: What are some of your favorite guitars, and whom did you make them for?

I made the Moodswinger first. That one was for Aaron [Hemphill] of Liars. The Moonlander was made for Lee Ranaldo. Then I made a Bachelor QS for Jad Fair, a very odd instrument and one of my favorites. And the fourth one was the stereo-guitar, the Springtime, which is my main commercial success, because it is pretty easy to play for a guitar player and doesn't require much knowledge about physics.

Sophie Pécaud: So you have worked with Lee Ranaldo!

After working with Liars, I approached Sonic Youth's managers to propose something similar to them. The message was forwarded, and one day later I received an email from Lee Ranaldo. Ranaldo mentioned he wanted an electric variant of a harp guitar, a guitar with an additional resonating string field. One month later, I met him at a festival in Holland and showed him the sketches and he agreed and was very enthusiastic about my work. After 6 months, the instrument was ready, and I delivered it to him in Holland in the summer of 2007. The Moonlander is a weird instrument, but totally spectacular in its own unique way. It sounds like you're standing in a cathedral: a very massive, broad sound.

Sophie Pécaud: How do you come up with ideas for new instruments?

I talk with musicians who want to have something done, and then I mention some solution, or show them rougher earlier models, and we continue with an improved or totally new design. Enon's Twister, for instance, is a 2.0 upgrade version of the Springtime. And I read about physics, or listen to sounds everywhere, and start considering how to incorporate them into a tonal device.

I’ve also become interested in Chladni patterns [a 19th century German physicist who studied the properties of sound waves, mainly by dropping sand on metal plates, EN], and the cymatic works of Hans Jenny [a 20th century Swiss physicist known as the father of cymatics, the study of wave phenomena, including sound wave, EN], trying to adapt these physical phenomena to my musical objects. White noise doesn't actually exist. Sound waves always shape themselves into a certain pattern. Within the field of white noise [frequency denoting a sum of all possible frequencies, EN], “flowers” appear. This explains why hard rock fans like the “atmosphere” in loud guitar music. When you are in a group of people and everybody is talking, you are capable of focusing in on a single person’s voice. A hard rock fan does the same. He excludes the “noise” and listens to the harmonic “flowers” within the noise. Those are the shapes I tried to recreate in the Moodswinger scale, and they also appear in the scale of the Guquin, an ancient Chinese instrument.

Sophie Pécaud: You seem to be really interested in the link between physics and music. When did you begin to explore this relationship, and how do you integrate your findings into your work?

It was after finishing the Moodswinger, a more mathematical and polished version of my first guitar, that I started becoming interested in physics, and attempting to transcribe its principals into musical terms. […] It’s a really strange story, me being a noise punk rocker and all, accidentally discovering a very clear coherence between physics and loud noise rock that nobody had detected before. Cage's opinion was that every sound or tone is beautiful, depending on how you focus on it. I disagree with that. The 3rd Bridge Theory [an alternative playing technique that consists in placing an object, often a screwdriver, between the neck and strings of the guitar, dividing the chords into two sections and thereby producing a new harmonic field, EN] explains why I disagree. The theory is based on the works of the ancient Chinese and Harry Partch [the first American composer and theorist to have worked systematically with microtonal intervals, smaller than a half note, NDLR], but no one in the music literature had ever explained it the way I did.

The instruments are not just arty-farty oddness, or only boring microtonal physics. I think about the color of sound and how it could be enhanced by building a logical tonal device. Using physics is required to get this result.

Sophie Pécaud: So do you reject the idea that consonance, harmony, or the “beauty” in musical intervals is the product of cultural conditioning, and that any sound might considered beautiful if it is emancipated from our musical norms?

Cage is a great hero for many avant-garde music lovers. I like him too, but I dislike the big appreciation and following, since I am becoming more and more convinced that his opinion is not so solid at all. What is beautiful is not a human perception. Nature decides what's consonant and we, being part of nature, prefer nature, so we prefer the rules nature dictates to us with a small individual tendency called taste. Lets take it the tone E, and look at its series of harmonics, from strongest to weakest: E-E-B-E-G#-B-D-E-F#-G#. Take a close look at the beginning of the series, and you recognize the major chord. So humans didn't invent the major chord, nature did.

Many Western musicians agree with Cage’s belief that consonance is a normative value. But there is a difference between subjective fausse [the quality of being out of tune, EN] and objective fausse. Cultural development leads to certain aesthetic convictions of what's beautiful and what's not. In 1949, the very famous Dutch physicist Adiaan Fokker conducted tests with the Meantone temperament and the equal temperament. The audience agreed that the old tuning was more aesthetically pleasing. I went to a lecture in 2008 and the same test was done and the audience voted for the 12tet! My conviction is we are being indoctrinated by the 12tet, because we are born surrounded by recorded music. The people in Fokker’s audience were not born with that tuning around them twenty-four hours a day. So the 12tet is a normative tuning for Western people, but it is objectively fausse, and therefore not perfectly consonant. To avoid confusion, it's good to speak about normative consonant and objective consonant.

Sophie Pécaud: But the history of music demonstrates that the very idea of consonance, whether it stems from this “normative consonance”, or from what you call “objective consonance”, is the most cultural thing in the world ! The Ancient Greeks, for example, believed that only the octave, fourths, and fifths were « divine, » and therefore consonant. It wasn’t until the 16th century that the third or the major sixth were considered to be so as well!

I've read that too, yes, but really have strong doubts about this storytelling. In 2000 BC, the Chinese already used the major third, the major sixth, the minor third, and the 7/8 position.

What the Greeks did was calculation, not music. They wanted to create a transposable musical system derived from pretty smart calculation. Therefore they had to drop the major third 5/4 position. Which doesn't mean it’s not divine. Maybe that's what they called it, because they couldn't use it in their Pythagorean scale calculation. They chose the poorly sounding 81/64 instead. In other cultures, however, the 5/4 is always present and widely used. The Greeks were aware of its beauty, for sure, but it just wasn’t practical when they transposed.

Sophie Pécaud: What projects are you working on now?

I'm working on drum guitars for The Dodos and Liam Finn. I am very excited about those instruments. I'm also working on a harp guitar for The Veils and a guy from Barcelona. And some other rough new things for Lightning Bolt, These Are Powers, PRE, and maybe Melt-Banana.

Besides building, I do a lot of other projects. Gaspard Claus, a French musician, has been invited to curate a day of the Guitares au Palais Festival in Perpignan, which takes place from August 28th to the 30th. They are booking a group of famous artists who will perform on my instruments for a unique, one-time show. I will be present there with a friend from the Dutch band The Moi Non Plus to explain how the instruments function and then the musicians are going to adapt their music to my instruments. My 5-year-old son is also going to perform. I've asked the school board, and he can get a day off for doing a show in the Medieval Castle of Perpignan. He's very good at drumming loudly with sticks on stringed instruments.

Interview: Sophie Pécaud

Photo: Yuri Landman

Cool Tunes:
The Luyas
Blood Red Shoes
Enon

Continuing Education:
Yuri Landman’s Wikipedia page
Transcript from a conference at the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona, published in Perfect Sound Forever
Interview with Pitchfork

Click here for original French article, published in Fragil Magazine




Like what we're doing here? Just a little pocket change gives Visitation Rites food to live on.

Last month at the SOY festival, over a hundred concert hoppers packed into a tiny neighborhood bar to witness an ecstatic free-for-all by New England drum prodigy Chris Corsano and British drone guru Mick Flower. Perhaps we can leave up it to the good people of Nantes to turn out in droves for the kind of show that might ordinarily attract a small circle of improv and experimental music obsessives. Or we can leave it to Corsano and Flower themselves, who, with The Radiant Mirror, their first joint lp, just might have cooked up something verging on a cross-over record. Their set-up is simple: a drum kit, a bag full of odds and ends (singing bowls, a few twigs, some pieces of cloth, a guitar string and bridge), and a rare Indian instrument that sounds like a sitar on electronic steroids. And yet somehow, almost magically, Corsano and Flower manage to condense the full spectrum of human exaltation into a single, protracted, endlessly beating soundwave. Clearly, Visitation Rites couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask a few questions.

Emilie Friedlander: How, and when, did you guys start playing together? Was it with Vibracathedral Orchestra (Mick’s main project) or does your musical friendship pre-date those collaborations? What other types of configurations have you appeared together in?

Chris Corsano: The duo started in June of 2005 at a show Mick had been asked to do in Leeds. So he’s the mastermind. We had played together a couple of times in 2004 in a much larger group when myself and Paul Flaherty collaborated with Vibracathedral Orchestra. Later on in 2005, I guested in Vibracathedral a few times (a show here, a jam there), but I’ve never been a card-carrying member.

EF: What in the world is a Japan banjo, and how do you play it?

Mick Flower: It's an Indian instrument, a cross between a dulcimer and autoharp - it has 17 strings. The one I play is an electric version with pick-ups and a sunburst finish.

EF: When we listen to The Radiant Mirror, are we hearing just Japan Banjo and a drum kit, or do you guys work other instruments (or objects) into the equation?

MF: Yes, just Japan Banjo and Drum Kit. There's also an electronic tampura going all the time, often it can only be heard when we play quietly.

EF: Were you guys listening to a lot of Indian music around the time you recorded The Radiant Mirror? If so, what kind of stuff were you listening to? Was there a conscious effort to play off of these influences?

CC: I was/am listening to E Gayathri, Shruti Sadolikar, Nikhil Banerjee, Bismillah Khan, Debashish Bhattacharya, Veena Sahasrabuddhe, Alla Rakha, Zakir Hussain, and some Pakistani music as well (Nusrat Fateh, Ali Khan, and Aziz Mian, specifically). I wouldn’t say there was a conscious effort to emulate or adapt these influences, but we weren’t denying them either.

EF: About how much of a “game plan” did you guys have when you set out to record the album? Were there any structural or stylistic elements that were decided upon beforehand, or you were you just kind of riding the creative flow? I guess I’m just asking you guys to describe your joint working process a little bit…

CC: I think the plan was to hit record, play for a while, and worry about editing later. What we do is always improvised, though the instruments and tunings we use have more or less stayed the same. There’s still a lot of room to move within that set up.

EF: When you guys play this stuff live, how much does the project transform from venue to venue, crowd to crowd, or mind-state to mind-state? Are there any constants that carry over to each Corsano-Flower performance, asides, of course, from Corsano and Flower themselves?

CC: I’d say things vary a good deal. Just thinking about the shows we recently did (Aalst, Nantes, Paris), there were a lot of differences in the three sets’ lengths, structure, dynamics, etc.

EF: What were some challenges that came up when you guys recorded the album? In what ways has this collaboration been a learning experience for the both of you, or a departure from your “usual” working styles?

CC: It doesn’t feel like a there’s a difference in how I approach playing with Mick vs. playing with other people. I’m basically reacting to what he’s doing while at the same time trying to put my two cents in. If the music sounds different than other things I do, then I’d say that’s down to Mick’s sound being unique.

EF: This question might seem either too obtuse, or too much of a no-brainer, but I thought I’d give it a go anyway: What does freedom, in music, mean for you guys? I’m not talking about the “Land of the free, home of the brave” kind of freedom, or even necessarily about “freedom” as in “free jazz” (which the French affectionately call “le free,” funnily enough), but just about the kinds of open-ness you guys strive for when going about the business of playing and recording together? “Free” is word that’s definitely thrown around quite a bit in music journalism, but it’s ultimately just as ambiguous within a musical context as it is within the sphere of politics. So I’m interested to hear what you two have to say, especially since you’ve been tagged with this word quite a bit.

CC: You’re right, it’s totally ambiguous. You could look at it as being free from some constraints such as preconceived structures/scores (which we are) and/or a constant pulse (which we sometimes are and sometimes aren’t) and/or having an open mind to what shape the music can take. Truthfully, “free” and other genre tags are just shorthand, and I don’t get too hung up on them.

Interview by Emilie Friedlander, November 2008

Photo: Hrvoje Go

Concert on November 2nd at the Grimault (Nantes) as part of the Soy Festival.

Cool Toons:
Chris Corsano/Mick Flower Duo, The Radiant Mirror, Textile Records, 2008.



Like what we're doing here? Just a little pocket change gives Visitation Rites food to live on.

Thursday, October 30, 2008. Coup d’envoi for the sixth edition of Nantes’ SOY Festival. Outside the Barakason, the impatience of the Yamoy crew and the festival’s annual supporters is at fever pitch. The Yamoy association has cooked up a storm for us this year: more artists than ever before (twenty), more venues (a dozen, disseminated throughout Nantes and its outskirts), and headliners fit for the biggest independent music festivals on this side of the Atlantic. On the bill for this first installment, Son Lux, Volcano and Why?, three groups sharing an affinity for beard growth and an ambitious take on pop music.

Ryan Lott, aka Son Lux, is one of the latest additions to California’s Anticon, a historic-hip-hop-collective-and-label-turned-pop-music-talent-scout. With Son Lux, Anticon gambled on a pale young man with a hesitant smile, a Mac chocked full of samples, a MIDI synth, and a parsimonious playing style. On stage, Ryan Lott seems a little bit out of his element. But when he sings “Don’t be afraid,” the recurring leitmotif of his first song, his lightly scorched folk tenor is not without a certain melancholy charm. Who is he trying to console? Hard to tell. As the suspicion that the entire set might plod along on the same register sets in, we begin to hope that he is speaking directly to us. But when fellow Californian and tourmate Ryan Fitch joins him on stage, everything suddenly begins to make sense; bolstered by Fitch’s percussion, Son Lux’s music can finally shine through in all its richness.

With Son Lux, 60’s baroque pop enters the electronic age; synthetic retro strings, techno bass and hip hop beats dialogue in a virtuosic counterpoint carried by Fitch expressive drums. Though contrast is clearly the central element of Ryan Lott’s craft—that of the majesty of the low notes and the explosiveness of the high ones, contemplative drones and hypnotic loops, calm moments and tempestuous ones—the ensemble is strangely monotonous. Ryan Lott pulls from the same old bag of tricks, contrasting the same elements and riding the same dynamics. We allow ourselves to be seduced for a couple songs, but we finish by focusing in on the least convincing elements of Ryan Lott’s music instead of its inherently successful core. The cheap synth effects, in particular the very high pitched ones, get pretty irritating after a while, and we cannot help thinking that Ryan Lott’s voice, systematically covered by instruments, is ultimately more hesitant than scorching.

Volcano! Three nerds from Chicago who, like all the other musicians in the habit of dragging their clothes, their instruments, and their amplifiers through the back alleys of urban America, still seem to find the time to trim their facial hair. Singer and lead guitarist Aaron With’s mustache, for one, would probably have turned Don Diego de la Vega green with envy. But hair growth is not the only attribute marking their membership to the new generation of American musicians. Like their illustrious antecedents (Deerhoof and Animal Collective, to name the two most obvious), Volcano! like to pogo between pop and mayhem, combining the buoyancy of a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah with the shrieking guitar transports of a Parts & Labor.

Volcano!’s live set is enjoyable, if not particularly original. Their music boasts a solid rock and roll backbone; rock and roll enough, at least, to match the celebratory mood of the crowd that evening. Aaron With’s airy guitar melodies climb aboard a chunky bass, often minimal and repetitive, and spirited drums, always eager to throw out a disco beat for the ladies’ dancing pleasure. Volcano definitely possess a strong pop sensibility, and they craft their riffs with care. But they deconstruct them with equal relish. Their song structures are always somewhat unruly, resisting the systematization of the verse-chorus form to dissolve into off-kilter polyrhythmics. Sending their public flying between pop rapture and experimental discomfort, Volcano compose music for the feet…and for the head. Too close a reading might spoil the fun.

With three albums and a handful of EPs, what began as a solo project by Jonathan “Yoni” Wolf, the son of a Cincinnati rabbi, has become one of the most visible groups of the Anticon collective. Following the unrelenting assault of fractured samples on Oaklandazulasylum (2003), their first lp, Why? decided to blow some air into their songwriting. With Alopecia, released this year, the group offers up a massive art rock album; the ravishing flow of their early work gives way to silvery vocal harmonies, the lo-fi guitars to carefully chiseled arrangements. Compromise? Probably just maturity. Why? are a lot more levelheaded than they were during their Oaklandazulasylum days, but they are no less inventive.

On stage, Why? are all modesty, vitality, and warmth. On drums, Josiah Wolf holds up a vibrating pulse with his left hand while weaving in a melodic counterpoint with his right. Suspended above the bass drum, not toms, but a vibraphone, played with such lightning virtuousness that we can’t help looking for a third arm. Less conspicuous, but by no means less dexterous, bassist Austin Brown and keyboardist Doug McDiarmid support an adrenalized Yoni Worf who, with his characteristic nasal voice, alights upon our daily foibles with tenderness and irony. Here are four real artists, all devoted to their cause: music. Their live appearances are free of ego and free of wankery: the four members of Why? are extraordinarily good at what they do, but they seem erase themselves behind their songs, swapping instruments throughout the set in order to offer their texts their most appropriate line-up. The guitar, “rock star” instrument par excellence, never stays very long in the same hands. Ever precise, ever delicate, their compositions rise upwards like a tower of cards: a stable, yet oscillating foundation, a harmonious, yet unexpected architecture, a muscular, yet ephemeral grace.

We exit the Barakson with a smile on our lips and needles and pins in our feet. Vive le festival!

Words: Sophie Pécaud
Translation: Emilie Friedlander
Photo: Rémi Goulet


Cool tunes:
Son Lux, At War With Walls And Mazes, Anticon, 2008.

Volcano!, Paperwork, Leaf Label, 2008.

Why?, Alopecia, Anticon, 2008.


Click here for the french version of the article, accompanied by more photos by Rémi Goulet, on the Fragil website. Giant portfolio of images of the entire Soy Festival should be up soon.



Like what we're doing here? Just a little pocket change gives Visitation Rites food to live on.

Ben Chasny, a.k.a. Six Organs of Admittance, has been roving the pacific hillsides of psychedelic folk and the vertiginous valleys of noise rock for over ten years. His work might be described as ongoing quest for the perfect sound, at once reminiscence and recreation of the long-lost "mystery records” that he has been trying to track down since his teens. As enigmatic as his music itself, Chasny indulged our request for an interview but denied us any straight answers. Perhaps his upcoming performances in Europe this month will allow us to peel away some more layers of the onion.

Interview with Ben Chasny, October 2008

Six Organs of Admittance recently turned 10 years old. Looking back over a decade of activity, would you say that your project has evolved significantly from what is was at the beginning? How did the project begin, and how has it changed over the years?

I think it probably has changed a bit in some ways and in others it has stayed the same. I am much more at ease with using a studio now, where as before I only recorded on a 4 track at home. I’ve also traveled quite a bit more, met more people. I started just wanting to release sort of mystery records from Northern California. As the years passed, the mystery began to dissolve but my sense of the greater world took over, so it was a fair trade.

How would you categorize your music in terms of genre (or combinations of genres), and why?

That is hard to say. Sometimes the band will be solo acoustic guitar, sometimes it will be an all-out noise assault, and sometimes it will be between the two. That is the problem with people who try to categorize the music. They sometimes set up expectations that are off. Sometimes people will come to the shows expecting a mellow hippie affair because that is what they read from some misinformed source and then be disgusted when they hear so much feedback. Or sometimes people will expect all noise and then be bummed because it is a very quiet show. So I don’t know.

You have played with musicians from a broad range of musical backgrounds, and your sound is often talked about in terms of its fusion of noise and folk. Do you consider yourself more on the noise side of things or the folk side of things? How would you describe the compatibility, if any, between these two traditions?

I don’t recognize a distinction between the two. What is noise anyway? Didn’t Cage kind of re-arrange that paradigm? There are a lot of solo acoustic guitar players that I would consider noise, simply because I don’t want to hear it! I don’t think it should be considered in terms related to “noise.” I would rather use the word “intensity.” Or “texture.”

What are your biggest “influences” at this very moment?. How have these changed (if at all) since the beginning of the project?

My influences right now are the same as they have been since the beginning, and although I have mentioned them in the past, nobody remembers, because they either don’t believe me or they are too busy listening to what other people say about my project than what I say! Everyone seems to say Fahey. Wrong. More like Organum, Nurse With Wound, Talking Heads, This Heat, and Sun City Girls. I would say if there is any new influence, it would probably be David Allen Coe.

You are often considered a forerunner of the psychedelic revival that has been taking place in American music over the last decade, which also goes hand in hand with a resurgence of interest in non-Western musical traditions. How would you explain the attraction that these musics have for you? In a broader sense, how would you explain the attraction that they seem to be exerting over our generation at large?

I don’t know why people find it attractive now. I suppose probably because some tastemaker said it was cool, then people followed. Tomorrow the tastemaker will create a backlash, nobody will care, and things will carry on. I don’t concern myself with it. As far as psychedelic music goes, I think it comes down more to collecting records. The best records, the most prized grails, so to say, are usually the psychedelic ones, especially private press. So when me and my friends were younger, listening to some treasure that we had just found, it was cool to think, “let’s start a band like this!” Nowadays, though, any record can be found on the internet with no searching at all, thereby annihilating that idea of the "treasured" record. So I really have no idea at all why someone would want to start a psych band now! It seems pretty retrograde to me.

What kind of line-up can we expect to see for your performance in Nantes?

This time around it will be Elisa Ambrogio on lead guitar and Alex Neilson on Drums. The last time I played Nantes I was solo, so I am looking forward to playing with this line-up. I had such a good time last time I was there. I am looking forward to this very much.

Interview with Ben Chasny, Sophie Pécaud and Emilie Friedlander, October 2008

Words: Sophie Pécaud and Emilie Friedlander
Photo: Delilah Winter

Tour dates 10.24.08 - Diksmuide, Belgium - 4AD
10.26.08 - Copenhagen, Denmark - Venue KIB
10.27.08 - Arhus, Denmark - Musikcafeen
10.28.08 - Stockholm, Sweden - Debaser
10.31.08 - Istanbul, Turkey - Babylon
11.02.08 - Nantes, France - Yamoy Festival
11.03.08 - Rouen, France - Emporium Galorium
11.04.08 - Bordeaux, France - CAPC
11.05.08 - Gijon, Spain - Savoy Club
11.06.08 - Madrid, Spain - Caracol
11.07.08 - Lisbon, Portugal - Caiaxa Economica Operaria
11.08.08 - Porto, Portugal - Maus Habitos

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French version available on Fragil.org, a Nantes-based online culture magazine. Link here



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On Friday, April 4th, the Western Massachusetts noise trio Grey Skull drive 7 hours from Amsterdam to Paris for a set that would clock in at just under 13 minutes. A bit brief, yes. But quite a feat for a group who use up so much energy live that they can only promise to "play until [they] can't anymore."

Instants Chavirés, Paris, February 4th. Something is not right when George Myers, Dan Cashman and Jeff Hartford of Grey Skull (Breaking World Records) take the stage last Friday at the Instants Chavirés. For one, their instruments aren't tuned—not, at least, in any way that might be expected to produce something deserving of the title of rock and roll. Second, some of the strings on Cashman's guitar and Myers' bass are broken—undoubtedly the fallout from the group's last thrash session in Holland, but a bit unsettling to see at the beginning of a show. Third, and perhaps most disturbingly, Hartford's high-hat looks like it has been run over by a car. Or at least bashed in so many times with a baseball bat that it looks more like a leaf of wilted spinach than an object designed for making sounds.

As the first thick drones ring out from Myers' bass, we witness something that seems more like a pantomime of a concert than a concert itself. Not just any concert, but the sludgiest, beefiest, most ridiculously heavy metal concert imaginable. Myers and Cashman slam their instruments up and down as though in the throes of the most virtuostic of Sabbathian guitar solos—only there are no golden riffs to be heard. Hartford emits a few lusty grunts then enters into his signature full-body head-bang, his long brown hair whipping up and down fast enough to knock out a small child. And yet there is no beat for him, the drummer, to rock out to. Yes, something is definitely wrong with this picture.

The antics that follow on stage constitute less a musical performance per se than a physical performance whose byproduct is sound. Myers fiddles with the tangle of mixers and pedals hooked up to his bass like an evil scientist executing the final operations on a machine designed to destroy the world—to random, and sometimes ear-splitting, acoustical results. Cashman, playing a kind of attention-deprived teenage caveman with a guitar, serenades the audience with his usual wordless blubbering, interrupted by the occasional defamatory punch: "Fuck You!" Before long, Jeff Hartford, a kind of hard rock Barney Flintstone who has lost his sense of humor, breaks up the dissonant wall of sound with his distinctive symmetrical pounding. As the sounds coming of Cashman's guitar and Myers' bass threaten to swerve out of control, Hartford's thrashing provides some order to the madness. All things considered it is only element of Greyskull's music that comes anywhere close to a melody.

There is something strikingly Paleolithic about Greyskull's music, something pre-verbal, pre-musical, almost. A group of three cavemen friends receive a gift of a guitar, a bass and a drum set, along with a letter describing what rock music is and what a rock concert generally consists of. Suspecting that this might be a way to sway the gods in their favor, they attempt to recreate "rock and roll" without ever having experienced it for themselves. Except that they never made it through to the end of the letter, where the writer describes the basic tenants of melody and rhythm. Nor to the stipulation in bold explaining that even though this thing called rock and roll might make them feel very excited—uncontrollably so, even—and that while they might be tempted to throw some punches over the course of the performance, they should probably refrain from throwing their equipment. But don’t tell that to Myers, who tosses his bass guitar off the stage towards the end of the set and breaks it in half. He would probably just shrug you off with a grunt, crank up the gain and hurl his amplifier on top.

Grand finale à la Grey Skull: Dan Cashman hurls himself off the stage, detonating an explosion of animal howling in the audience before climbing back up and collapsing in exhaustion. As the final feedback fades out, a voice from the rear of the bar pipes up: "Enough of this crap. Why not a little Beatles for a change?" A blaspheme to match Greyskull's 13 minute blaspheme, but also kind of the group's point all along. You will not hear anything like the Beatles at a Greyskull show, but you will certainly get an idea of what they might of sounded like if the group had been founded at Stonehenge in 2200 bc. Oogachaka.

Words: Emilie Friedlander, 2008

French version available on Fragil.org, a Nantes-based online cultural magazine. Link to original article here.




Like what we're doing here? Just a little pocket change gives Visitation Rites food to live on.