In January 2012, I got to meet Alice Bag, who is touring with her book Violence Girl: East LA Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story, and she is warm, open, and forthcoming. She tells me she considers herself somewhere between archivist and activist, rendering and conveying the electrifying aura of the original Los Angeles punk scene in both her memoirs and her collection of extensive online documentation. Alice’s book is a conversational glimpse into her life with music, in vignettes hilarious and dark. It moves through her days as the only child of two immigrants in a tense household in East LA, to musician embodying the Violence Girl onstage, to blogger and author.

***

The Rumpus: You’ve just returned from a book/music tour, during which you read excerpts from your book and coordinated with musicians from all over the country to form different backing bands. Were there any favorite moments?

Alice Bag: I was very excited and a little bit nervous going into it. I’d never performed on the east coast and wasn’t sure what I could expect. Turns out I had nothing to be nervous about because despite the fact that I didn’t know many people out there, I had an enormous amount of support from the onset.

Chris Strunk from Ladyfest Boston spearheaded the campaign to take Violence Girl to the east coast. He put me in touch with organizers in different cities who then put me in contact with local musicians. It was an amazing experience, the musicians were very generous with their time and talent. Each new ensemble added their own flavor to the songs. Along the way, artists designed flyers for the shows, my social media buds spread the word and I had great turnouts. I felt like I’d been adopted by a community I never even knew existed.

The reading at Bluestockings in NYC was especially sweet. If you’ve read Violence Girl, you’ll know that I affirm NYC as the birthplace of punk rock in the 1970′s, so in a way it was like coming home to where it all began for me. I’ve always felt like NYC is a taste-making city and so when I saw the room filling up I got excited. The audience laughed at the right spots and responded the way I hoped so I knew they were on my side. I floated out of the bookstore like a Thanksgiving Day balloon!

Rumpus: You said the book – originally a blog – started on a dare from a friend. How cohesive was it at first, and when did it start to seem like a book?

Bag: I’d been blogging for many years before I started blogging Violence Girl. I have a completely different blog called Diary of a Bad Housewife that one’s just for spilling whatever’s on my mind. The idea of writing a book seemed overwhelming to me and even though I was a blogger I didn’t think of myself as a writer so when I considered the idea of writing a book from that perspective it seemed preposterous. In contrast blogging my story was a manageable task because  it was a format with which I was comfortable and familiar.

Rumpus: How often did you write?

Bag: I wrote Monday through Friday as soon as my daughter was on the school bus. I’d pour myself a cup of coffee and get to work. My goal was to post a little vignette everyday. It was pretty straightforward from the onset. I had my mother’s photo albums which were in loose chronological order so it was easy to start looking at an early photo album and remember a story about the photo. I worked my way through the whole book by looking at photos, fliers, newspaper and magazine articles, receipts, letters, postcards, all this stuff my mom had packed away in the garage for years and years. She grew up during the depression, so not only did she have great recycling and DIY chops, she had hardcore hoarding instincts.

I imagined it as a book and felt it was cohesive from the beginning but my husband, who edited my drafts often helped keep me on the right track. It would have been too easy for me to tell anecdote after anecdote and lose track of the central theme.

Rumpus: Yeah. The book is intense and confrontational, but its anecdotes (and people) are also often hilarious. Are there, as I imagine, many more stories that did not make it in the editing process?

Bag: Yes, my husband kept me focused on the story. I tend to meander through my thoughts when I’m writing. Luckily I had two blogs, and The True Life Adventures of Violence Girl was the one I used for writing the book; Diary of a Bad Housewife is [the other blog] and I post a variety of content on that. Some of the stories that didn’t make it into Violence Girl were posted on Diary of a Bad Housewife.

Rumpus: You have said the book is a kind of oral history, one person’s perspective of a specific slice of space and time. You’ve also conducted a series of interviews under the flag “Women of LA Punk.” How did you find yourself taking on the role of historian?

Bag: I wanted to make sure that the scene was documented the way I remembered it, not because it’s better or truer than anyone else’s first-hand experience account but because it’s equal to any other first-hand account. Each person who experiences an event filters it and views it through his or her own perspective. To get at the truth, you have to have as many perspectives as possible. That’s why it makes me so angry that non-Anglo histories are currently being suppressed in Arizona colleges and universities.

The Women in L.A. Punk interviews are just a way for the women who were involved in the early scene to contribute their perspectives. Some of the ladies have their own blogs and websites but others don’t and the web page gives them a forum. I don’t know if I would call myself a historian. I think of historians as people who collect and interpret data, I see myself more as an archivist, except I have a point of view so maybe I’m more of an activist or an archivist?

I don’t think I can overemphasize how important it is to document your artwork and the work of your community. There have always been people of different ethnicities and different sexual orientations and gender identifications involved in meaningful art and social movements, but they are largely invisible because the people who were documenting – the historians – filtered them out.

Rumpus: Such an important point — the more perspectives the better and more complete the history. What kind of reaction have you gotten from the women you interview for this project?

Bag: It’s been really positive. What I like about it is that it’s not just the band members being interviewed, it’s the whole community that made the scene happen. With each story you really start getting the feeling that women were involved in every capacity. They were roadies, photographers, writers, musicians – everything the guys were doing, the ladies were doing.

Rumpus: Musically, you were at the helm of something completely unknown. Did it seem like brand new territory at the time, or did the realization that you were a part of something huge come later?

Bag: It did feel like it was brand new territory, I knew that participating in the punk scene was changing me but I had no idea that it would grow into something that would affect and inspire so many people.

I think the unexpected effect of the punk scene was the sense of empowerment that comes from being part of a community that works together to achieve common goals, even if our goals as teens were mostly just to be creative and have fun. The punk spirit, the DIY attitude, the feeling that we can steer our lives and circumvent the powers that be lingers long after the pogoing has stopped.

Rumpus: You write “It seemed to me that the early LA scene was unconsciously egalitarian. [...] Everyone involved in the punk scene provided an accurate sampling of LA’s misfit population.” (195) How and when did this change? What shifted in the scene for that to happen?

Bag: As the punk scene expanded in 1979/1980 it reached different neighborhoods, different communities across America. The great thing about that was each community could add its own unique flavor to the mix, however as it spread into the mainstream, I think it picked up mainstream values. It became commercialized and instead of being an art movement that cherished originality, innovation and challenging the status quo, you ended up with some scenes that leaned towards homogeneity and mirrored patriarchal values. I can’t think of anything less punk than that.

Rumpus: The title of your book is from a Bags lyric, but you write about the idea of Violence Girl as something that precedes you (“the seeds of Violence Girl were sown long before I was born”), a transcendent force that overtakes you. The book also contains an emphasis on dualities, like in the passage where you describe your love of Bruce Lee movies and their well-defined roles of thugs and heroes. What do these doubles mean for you, the narrator?

Bag: There are several things that happen when, as a child, you see the adults in your life behaving in ways that seem inconsistent with how you have come to imagine them to be. Initially there’s confusion and maybe even a little bit of disbelief. We treat children to very simplistic explanations of humanity, we tell them people are either good or bad, so when people exhibit both traits and we all eventually do, it can be difficult to know what to do with that new information. It’s hard to figure out how to relate to someone who does good things one minute and bad things the next. In my book, my father is both a doting parent who showers me with unconditional love and the man who abuses my mother. I had to deal with conflicting emotions, I hated and loved my father equally. Experiencing these seemingly contradictory emotions forced me to have empathy for people because I could see the complexity of human nature.

I think it’s probably a feeling that victims of domestic abuse can relate to. Nobody marries thinking they’re going to get Mr. Hyde. I think we all expect our partner’s behavior to be consistent with what they’ve projected in the past. So when the abusive side shows up there’s an element of confusion and disbelief because that’s not the person you thought you were getting, but understanding that people can harbor both sides and that perhaps they are even two sides of the same coin can be another way of looking at that behavior. Sometimes the very thing that makes someone a passionate partner in one instance makes that same person a formidable foe in a different situation. I found a little bit of solace in understanding the duality of my father’s nature.

Rumpus: How do you think the idea of Violence Girl would have manifested without the presence of music in your life?

Bag: I think I would have found some other outlet and I’m certain that if it couldn’t be creative it would have been destructive. Music gave me a chance to express my anger in a more positive way. When I was just a little girl I had a recurring dream that I whipped my father to death and years later when I was part of Las Tres, I wrote a song called Happy Accident about a woman who kills her abusive husband. The song was inspired by my father. I think this is why the arts are so important to our society: they can be an outlet, a positive way to express all kinds of ideas, including subconscious thoughts that can poison someone if they aren’t addressed, ideas that we may not even be aware of and which are too fragile to be caught in a web of words can find expression in art. Music and art allow people to communicate the ineffable.

Rumpus: Despite the harrowing scenes of abuse that take place between your parents, you speak about your father with a kind of tenderness. You also openly discuss your conflicted feelings watching your mother’s abuse (“My mother’s inability to act – even to defend her own life – sent my anger rising to the surface”). Then, the sentiments echo in scenes like the altercations with your boyfriend Nickey. What was it like to confront – and connect – your memories of these experiences?

Bag: Writing the book forced me to face unresolved conflicts, like the feeling that my parents were trapped in a terrible relationship that they had created but which they had no idea how to repair. It wasn’t just my father who created the relationship; my mother chose to stay. I felt a lot of guilt about my anger toward her but I honestly feel that there was an alternative for my mom and she refused it. She used to tell me that she stayed with my father for my sake which made me feel that I was somehow to blame for her situation. So although I held my father ultimately responsible and I was angry with my father’s reprehensible and inexcusable behavior, I was also angry with my mother’s inability to escape.

This reminds me of the classic song “My Man”: I first heard the song being sung by Sarita Montiel. In Spanish, it sounded like a passionate love song about loving your man through thick and thin. A few years later I heard Barbara Streisand sing it and I started to think that it was a little depressing. Then I saw Marcus Kuiland Nazario perform it. He walked out onstage on crutches, his body covered with bandages, sporting cuts and colorful bruises and it finally dawned on me that the song I loved and had found so passionate was really sick!

Seeing the ways in which I was similar to my father was also a source of pain for me, but that’s the kind of pain that is helpful. At least when the problem is mine, I can deal with it. When I see my flaws, I know what I have to change. I do have a say over who I become, so seeing an ugly side of me is painful but it’s an opportunity to improve. Over the years, ugliness has moved in and out of my personality but I keep a look out for it and never let it get a foothold. I don’t want to accidentally end up looking back on my life to find that I’m ashamed of myself, I want to live a life I can be proud of.

Rumpus: It seems you did a lot of your commentary about growing is written through the lens of your female friendships, first with the girls at school, then later with Shannon and the other women of the community around you. You have also collaborated with women in many projects and capacities. How important has this been? How do friendships and relationships with women inform you now?

Bag: My relationships with women are very important to me. When I was growing up, it seemed to me like my mother isolated herself. I think that isolation creates a hospitable environment for abuse. If my mother had had strong female friends to support her she may have been able to find her own strength to fight back or escape her situation. I think I’ve always intuited the importance of surrounding myself with women I admire who can inspire me and I also try to be there for women who need my strength, especially now that I’m older. I feel like a very powerful crone.

Rumpus: What is next for your work, both musically and for the book?

Bag: I’m always writing songs but I don’t have a regular band to play with in Arizona. If I did, I would love to record some new music, maybe some old songs too. My plan right now is to explore the possibilities for Violence Girl. I’d like to see it on the big screen, and I’d also love to see it in a graphic novel format which is how I originally imagined it.

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In an interview with the LA Times from 1981 archived in Rock’s Backpages, Moog recounts the unexpected success of his invention in 70′s pop music and reacts to “recent” synthesizer hits from Jeff Beck, Bowie, and Funkadelic. Even in 1981, only 17 years into its long history, the instrument had already gone through one cycle of ascendancy, decline, and resurrection in the music world. Moog, a great believer in the vitality and musical possibility inherent in his invention, isn’t afraid to get philosophical about its use, either:

“The use of sequencers and pre-set patches, these electronic assists of some sort, raise a philosophical question,” he reflected. “What is the musician really doing when he plays something that’s preprogrammed?

If he keeps busy, he can get as much musical content into manipulating something that’s already preprogrammed as he can by playing every note on the keyboard from scratch.

“On the other hand, I just had to wonder, when the Donna Summer tune is played live, what do those guys do? The audience expects a musician to be doing something and if he’s not doing as much as they except, it’s more showbiz than music.”

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Various Artists
We Are the Works in Progress (Asa Wa Kuru)

Songs that belong together make each other better.

And when those songs are gathered from different artists, combining ideas and perspectives, they speak to each other and emerge as a new, whole thing.

We Are the Works in Progress was put together by Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead. Born in Kyoto, Makino responded to last year’s devastating tsunami by seeking out musicians she admires. The result is a compilation marked by its continuity and coherence, even as its tracks stretch and shift with a restless urgency.

There’s a distinct sense of possibility in both the album’s title and the name Makino chose for Blonde Redhead’s new record label: Asa Wa Kuru, Japanese for “morning will come.” Many of the tracks are in fact unfinished, presented as one potential direction for the music to go, which reinforces that sense of possibility.

Tragedies beget benefits, but We Are the Works in Progress avoids the traps of slapdash genre mashing, celebrity hand-holding and the “look-at-me” gloss of affected compassion. Fourteen songs won’t heal a country. Still, this is music that speaks the language of post-tragedy necessity: reinvention, recombination, rebuilding, the essential fluidity of decision-making, and a nod to impermanence.

The album begins with the icy electronica of Four Tet’s “Moma,” with its repeating keyboard melody that ultimately gives way to layers of pulsating drums and percussion. As “Moma” fades away, all that’s left is the jittery beat, leading into the wordless vocal of “No Face,” from Karin Dreijer Andersson of Fever Ray. The endlessly reverberating echoes of the latter bring to mind a vast solitude.

Following that, composer Terry Riley provides a newly reworked song from the 1970s. At nearly nine minutes, “G Song” is a reworking that won’t sit still. It’s a pop/soul song at its core, but it’s handed first to electronica, then to baroque pop, then set to spin wildly, winding down in a swirl of chanting and lost melodies returned.

Riley’s vocals are a rarity on the album, a fact that makes Makino’s contribution stand out as well. Blonde Redhead’s “Penny Sparkle” is presented in a new remix from Drew Brown. Set beside a haunting, slow-drop trip-hop beat, Makino’s fragile vocals drift and glow, flickering with sorrow.

As if in reply, Pantha Du Prince’s eight-minute “Bird on a Wire” follows, with ambient tones and a steady, calming rhythm.

Makino’s skilled and insightful sequencing gives the music a continuity and fluidity that make even the most electronic of the songs bristle with suggestions of nature, of vastness and energy.  The side-by-side transitions that link these sometimes fragmented tracks and musical ideas create seamless moments of overlap.

Because of the strong cohesion across its various songs, We Are the Works in Progress functions as a cohesive work of art. In that regard, its conceptual function is realized as well. Even approaching the album without knowledge of its occasion, its curator’s vision or the tsunami that left much of Japan in ruins, a listener will discover in the music an ever-shifting sense of tension, guided by the eerie expansiveness that unites the songs.

Makino describes the songs as under-explored versions of songs that wouldn’t typically fit on an album. The compilation’s achievement, then, is its conveyance of optimism in response to tragedy. We Are the Works in Progress is somber and meditative, an album that evokes a complexity of emotions. In showcasing vulnerability as well as strength, it’s neither a downer nor incongruously bright. It’s an album that drops the notion of big answers and suggests simply an eagerness for a new day.

Makino’s skilled and insightful sequencing gives the music a continuity and fluidity that make even the most electronic of the songs bristle with suggestions of nature, of vastness and energy.  The side-by-side transitions that link these sometimes fragmented tracks and musical ideas create seamless moments of overlap.

Because of the strong cohesion across its various songs, We Are The Works In Progress functions as a cohesive work of art. In that regard, its conceptual function is realized as well. Even approaching the album without knowledge of its occasion, its curator’s vision or the tsunami that left much of Japan in ruins, a listener will discover in the music an ever-shifting sense of tension, guided by the eerie expansiveness that unites the songs.

Makino describes the songs as under-explored versions of songs that wouldn’t typically fit on an album. The compilation’s achievement, then, is its conveyance of optimism in response to tragedy. We Are The Works In Progress is somber and meditative, an album that evokes a complexity of emotions. In showcasing vulnerability as well as strength, it’s neither a downer nor incongruously bright. It’s an album that drops the notion of big answers and suggests simply an eagerness for a new day.

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The Line interviews writer and rapper Dessa of the Doomtree collective. Dessa discusses collaboration, what attracts her to hip-hop, and the Twin Cities music scene.

(Via Hazel and Wren)

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***

The Rumpus: What is your earliest musical memory?

Jeremy Thal: Growing up I remember listening to my parents’ records (or were they tapes?)– Joan Baez, Emmylou Harris, James Taylor, Dylan, the Beatles. The first time I played an instrument was in Ms. Schumacher’s Suzuki violin class, where I began my ultimately unsuccessful attempt to catch up with you.  I remember they first gave us cardboard-box violins and wooden dowels for bows, contraptions that mercifully made very little sound, but, when torn apart, yielded a bounty of fruit rollups.  As a kid I didn’t like lessons or practicing very much — I once in a lesson insisted on playing my latest book four assignment while lying on the floor — but I always was humming some sort of original tune.  I have always had a very bad memory for music and lyrics, so to keep my head filled with tunes, I’ve had to invent things.

Rumpus: How did the Briars of North America come together as a band?

Thal: The Briars is the brainchild of my cousin and friend Gideon and myself. The two of us really met as adults, when we both moved to Brooklyn after living in the Midwest and East Asia.  We have been a part of several groups:  the free improv collective the Hadacol (after the imaginary cough syrup Father Christmas drinks in Brent Green’s Califone video), and then became part of the New York version of the Instruments, with bandleader Heather McIntosh, who is an inspiring creative spirit for us, (and, incidentally later went on to play bass for Gnarls Barkley and L’il Wayne).  When Heather left Brooklyn for the big time, we started our own project, at first by improvising songs in Gideon’s old place in Ditmas Park.  At one point Gideon sent me a few tracks he had edited together and they showed up in my itunes as being by the “Briars of North America.” I immediately liked the name — though have at times doubted it over the intervening years — it struck the right kind of chord, it hinted at something of the bucolic post-Americana that we were trying to conjure. It was intended to be part of collective of  ’North America’ bands, in the style of the Elephant 6 collective, although the original member,  Bob Doto’s ‘Thistles of North America” hasn’t made much noise in a while, but should!

Rumpus: What makes your music distinct?

Thal: I’m not very good at keeping track of all the musical trends that swirl around the worlds of indie rock/folk/classical, so maybe there are a lot of folks doing what what we are trying to do: which is to mix a sort of roots americana sound — shape note singing, old-timey string music, and classic folk and country songs — within experimental, new classical, and electronic music frameworks. So in our music there’s a bit of Robert Wyatt, Brahms, Walt Whitman, Jeff Mangum, a touch of dubstep, all the music that’s been filtering into our heads over our lives. In the end this album ends up feeling unique to me because it’s personal; it draws directly from our stories, major life events, the friends and music that surrounded gideon and me in Brooklyn and in Hudson, NY, where Gideon and I spent the last year.

Rumpus: How did you develop your singing voice?

Thal: I have learned a lot from Gideon, who’s been singing in groups since he was a youngin’ way up in northern Vermont. As an teenager I was a pretty dedicated French horn player (much to Frau Schumacher’s disappointment), and didn’t singing much outside of choir and musical theater in high school. I think I worked on my singing most when i was living in an apartment in Sunset Park,and my roommate Jessica regularly insisted that I sing for her. I quickly realized that I had a repertoire of two or three songs, so I learned songs that she and other friends requested.  Eventually I found some element of my voice that I liked. It’s a very fragile thing — it comes and goes a lot. I often feel that my voice is quite plain and blank, but every once and a while it takes on a special aspect, and that’s when i know that I’m in the right headspace to sing.  I find that singing is a sort of a barometer for how my life is going at any moment.

Rumpus: How did these songs come together?

Thal: These songs each have their own stories: Some are purely Gideon’s (“Orisis,” “Died to Heaven”), some are purely mine (“Annalee,” “Mischevious Child)” and others are a mix. For Sunnytown, Gideon came up with the framework and I came up with the lyrics and melody, for Liza Jane it was the inverse.  Part of the joy of working with Gideon and our other band members (a rotating cast:  Greg Chudzik, Otto Hauser, Simon Jermyn, and others!), is that you bring in a song with a certain sort of intention, and they help make it weirder or deeper or groovier or spacier, and you end up with a much more fleshed-out and multi-dimensional version of the song.

Rumpus: What are you doing to try and get the album out into the world?

Thal: We are not very good self promoters. Anyone want to help? (wink wink!)  Right now the album is up on Bandcamp and Facebook. As of yet we have no label, haven’t scratched on the doors of Pitchfork or the like.  So for the album has been spreading by word of mouth.  One of the things that heartens me a lot is that our friends and family who have the album seem to listen to it a lot, and know the songs. We’ve got a lot of incredibly touching feedback.  So although I’m shy about saying this sort of thing, I hope lots more people hear the album, and it helps them figure out something that’s happening in their brains/hearts/souls. That’s a big sort of goal, but that’s why I think we all make music.

Rumpus: Why did you switch from violin to French horn?

Thal: I switched to horn because I wanted to be in the school band, and I needed an excuse to stop going to violin lessons, which I dreaded. I’m sure my teacher dreaded them too, as sometimes I would insist on playing my Suzuki tunes while lying on the floor. To her credit, Mrs. Schumacher let me do this. Also I could never keep up with the Widder sisters, who seemed to effortlessly glide through Suzuki’s mystical landscape.  Perhaps I sensed something rougher and more hodgepodge in brass pedagogy, maybe it was something in the metal itself that called me to it, a different sort of elemental resonance. Or it could have simply been that I thought the saxophone was cool, and when they wouldn’t let me play sax I settled for the oddly shaped French horn, which my 6th grade band teacher said I had a ‘good lip’ for.

Rumpus: How is singing different from playing an instrument?

Thal: Singing is fun because I’ve never been trained. I feel my ability to sing links directly to my state of mind.  In singing I can tell a story; I can mix poetry and melody. Vocal harmony triggers a different sort of psychological response. When playing the French horn I always know what note I’m playing — I have a personal relationship to each note, each one has a color, flavor, ideology; some are curmudgeonly and others promiscuous. When singing I have no concept of note; I focus more on story, the authenticity of telling it. But there are similarities too: coordination of breathing, diaphragm support, learning to relax…

Rumpus: Talk about what you remember of having Suzuki violin lessons together.

Thal: I remember they first gave us cardboard-box violins and wooden-dowel bows that mercifully made no sound.  When we graduated to actual eighth-size violins we tore apart the boxes and devoured the fruit-rolls ups they contained. I remember that you were always rather stoic and focused and at the top of our class by far… it was like you were from a family of master minstrels and I was a philistine.  This may have contributed to my boyhood crush on you. (This was of course a few years before I met Matt your awesome husband.)

Rumpus: Briars is a Brooklyn band and although you and Gideon are cousins you didn’t really come together until Brooklyn. Describe how Brooklyn is important to your music.

Thal: Brooklyn, for better or worse, was the incubating hen of the Briars; it was born of improvisatory jams in Ditmas Park. When I first moved to New York I was given a set at the Tank, and convened an improbable ensemble of almost everyone I knew in the city at that point: Heather McIntosh (my roommate at the time who became a close friend, and is an incredible composer, cellist, and bass player), the stellar percussionist Joe Bergen (now of Mantra Percussion), Isabel O’Connell (the world-class Irish pianist), and my second cousin Gideon, who I knew was a wonderful singer, but who I’d never really met, as he had grown up in Vermont and I in wisconsin.  At my grandfather’s memorial in 2006, Gideon’s charismatic father Steve let me know that Gideon and I were both living in Brooklyn (less than a mile apart as it turned out) and he assured me that if I did not hang out with Gideon in Brooklyn, he would come there personally and kill us both.  He said this without smiling.  Since then Gideon has become one of my closest musical collaborators and friends, and it’s our combined vision that created the Briars, but we owe a lot to our early collaborators and the others we have played with over the years: Otto Hauser (of Vetiver and countless other great bands), Greg Chudzik (a stupidly, freakishly awesome bass player and solid dude), Simon Jermyn (a super sensitive and inventive bass and guitar player), Chris Marianetti and Cameron Steele (my brothers in the production universe) who crafted the album into something a bit more hip and listenable), and others. All of these elements came together in Brooklyn in the context of the new music, old time, indie rock, and DIY scenes. But the album itself came together in Hudson, NY, the place that on many levels has become our band’s spiritual hub. The album reflects a desire to return to a life of simplicity, a sort of reinvention of the rural, the small town, a way to reorganize human relations outside the context of apocalyptic capitalism. These seem to be common notions among our upstate crew of friends. As one of our mentors Meshell up there says, Simplicity is the new wealth. Our crew of friends up there has been incredibly supportive, when we play up there people sing along and we feel the love (big ups to Shannekia. Cara, Sara(s), Sam(s), Kaya, Rob, Andrea, and many more).

Rumpus: Why do you play music?

Thal: I play music because it draws together all the disintegrating strands of life into something palatable, comprehensible, moving — it conjures the spirit behind all or disparate suffering and joy and holds it for a second, a kind of unique singularity in an expanding cosmos. Plus, it’s a good way to spend time, to communicate with people. If I can get people to dance or cry, I feel like we’ve spoken deeply, even if we have nothing to say to each other in normal life. Music exists in a ceremonial space, where certain kinds of emotionally crystallized structures become malleable.

Rumpus: You’ve been a session musician for the National. What was that like?

Thal: The National is a great band, real pros and hard-working musicians. I’ve learned a lot from their perfectionism and laid-backness. I particularly like Matt’s lyrics, and once asked him how he writes them, thinking that they all must come to him at once. He said, ‘I write all day, and then I throw away all but a couple of lines.’ This gave me a certain confidence in my own writing, as I realized that it’s not simply talent that makes a good song, but dedication and constant revision (or, this is one valid way of approaching songwriting).

Rumpus: Do you feel like you have to participate in a scene in order to be a musician/have your music heard? And if so, what is that like?

Thal: I’ve never been much for scenes… and am not sure what scene I’m in now.  I think to be heard you have to find your way into the lives of many groups of friends, many people’s ipods, and the music cortexes of their brains. I’ve heard that the key to getting heard is visibility, how much you tour and play, how much your name appears on blogs and tweets and Facebook posts. Gideon and I are very lazy in these departments, and have no record label or publicist so we exist really only within the very small scene of our extended friend family…

Rumpus: Where do you live right now? What are you doing to pay the bills?

Thal: I’m back in Brooklyn, in Sunset Park. I had mixed feelings about this, as I love the clean air and beautiful bike rides that the Hudson Valley has to offer. But I’m also excited about this new project I am working on: OneBeat (1beat.org), which is a project of my other major musical project in life, Found Sound Nation (foundsoundnation.org). Found Sound, which runs music composition and production programs, has been paying the bills of late, and I’m grateful for that, these projects exercise a different part of my brain, while staying in the musical realm.

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Laura Gibson
La Grande (Barsuk; Jealous Butcher)

I recently heard someone on NPR use the term “desert noir” to describe the band Calexico. Having never heard the term before, I immediately took to it. I liked the juxtaposition of the words, the barren visual connotation of the desert with the lush, velvety danger of noir. It seemed like an accurate way to describe the feeling of a desert highway’s cooling asphalt as the day changes to night and the nothingness gets disguised by the dark, leaving one with the feeling that a stranger could be very close by, plotting your demise.

“La Grande,” the single from Laura Gibson’s eponymous album, epitomizes desert noir. The tempo of the song matches that of a nervous heartbeat, the excitement of charging off into the unknown. You can “smell sage burn” in the twangy phrasing of the guitar. While the rest of the record doesn’t keep the same pace, it makes lateral shifts in the same spirit, like spider-veined cracks in the brown and dry and dusty desert ground. “Skin, Warming Skin” has reoccurring 7th-chord guitar parts, and “The Rushing Dark” lends a campfire vibe to the record, with a Theremin-like saw echoing behind the rhythm. This visually corresponds to the cover of La Grande, and contributes to the desert noir atmosphere. Variations on this theme occur on songs like “Lion/Lamb” and “Red Moon,” both of which sound more like desert samba, egg shakers and all. Gibson’s voice is always accompanied by layers of effects that paint her voice into the audio landscape.

Gibson’s songs often express an emotional resignation without being melodramatic. There is no grief in the “seeds that could not have been sown,” as Gibson sings on “Crow/Swallow.” “The Fire” is both “saddened with brave ideas” and able to promise that “if you’re high as the sun I will not question your wings.” This stark and stoic phrasing compliments the mood Gibson fosters on La Grande. There is nowhere to hide in the desert.

The poet Catherine Wagner writes, “Things moralize to meet / my expectations because I want advice / on how to live.” By a similar logic, Gibson makes her conviction that “time is not against us” sound believable. Of course time is against us. It is nothing if not against us. But there is a certain charm and tenderness to pretending otherwise.

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Boris
New Album (Sargent House)

If, like a lot of Boris listeners in the United States, you were introduced to the band through its heavy yet accessible Pink in 2005, you’re probably aware of Boris’ ability to shift gears from album to album, even song to song. Each new Boris album feels like an exercise, a refreshing dip of the toe into some new tide pool. This is probably why Boris has been embraced outside of the metal community, and largely dismissed within it. It is not a band for purists, and its discography reads like a resume from a senior citizen who’s worked odd jobs his whole life.

Boris’ lack of commitment to a signature sound does not come across as an identity crisis, but rather a comfort with experimentation. In 2011, after lying dormant for a few years, Boris released three albums, the last of which was New Album. The title might come across as generic, but it speaks to the constant reinvention of the band, and the album’s strange structure. Every time you return to it, it will be New Album, and you can spend a lot of time tracing the labyrinthine origins of its 10 songs.

Alternate versions of six of the songs on New Album appear on the year’s two previous albums (which also contain 10 songs each)—“Jackson Head” and “Tu, La La” on the low-fi, doomy Heavy Rocks, “Spoon,” “Party Boy,” “Les Paul Custom ’86” and “Hope” on Attention Please, which seems like a warm-up for New Album. On Attention Please, the female guitarist Wata takes on lead vocals, and her voice’s lullabye-like sustained tones set us up for the brighter, sweeter, weirder turns taken on New Album.

On New Album, the skwee and buzz of Attention Please is traded for electronic bleeps, wave-like washes and tunnel filters. In a way, this album sounds more like a Westerner’s idea of something “Japanese” than anything else Boris has done. The dreamy, swirling psychedelic pop is broken into sweet morsels ready to be consumed by a world that rarely engages with Japan unless it’s to consume sweet morsels of culture. “Hope,” which is slicker and more heavily produced than its counterpart on Attention Please, is the song most representative of the band’s drastic shift. The three-minute song blasts forth at a quick clip. Boris’ insistence that New Album is “extreme” is only given credence by the way in which the song’s traditional structure—verse, chorus, verse, ooh, ooh, ooh— differs from the heavy, sprawling songs on past albums.

This all might come across sounding as if Boris has abandoned what made us excited for New Album in the first place. Though buried under layers of atmosphere, however, many relics from the band’s darker albums remain. Takeshi’s bass still chugs, if a little brighter, and Atsuo still punishes his drums with the same brutality he displayed on Pink and in earlier, raw-er albums. If there’s any indication that the pop turn on New Album isn’t just a temporary experiment, though, it’s how polished the album sounds. Attention Please is a sloppy demo in comparison, and even though Heavy Rocks finds Boris in more comfortable territory, it sounds like a collection of b-sides not solid enough to make it onto any album. Of the three albums released in 2011, New Album is by far the slickest and most satisfying. It’s an artichoke of a record, with thick meaty leaves to peel back.

New Album also sees Boris using drum machines and synthesizers more than in past efforts. “Jackson Head” and “Les Paul Custom ’86,” distinctly dark blotches on an otherwise sunny record, verge on moody dance jams, but the sparseness of “Les Paul” and the sharp edges of “Jackson Head” keep them well within the realm of gloomy headphone music. In the context of New Album, and most of Boris’ output, “Les Paul” seems truly alien, a contemplative and minimal track among explosive and maximal ones. After it fades, the band returns to finish off the record with the pop hooks we’ve grown accustomed to from songs like “Spoon” and “Luna.”

The biggest surprise in such an unapologetic pop exercise as New Album is how strange it sounds. This is due in part to audience expectations, but also to the fact that Boris is still a metal band trying out more traditional structures, brighter sounds, and drum machines. It feels like they released Heavy Rocks (an album of the same name came out in 2002) to remind us of their brutal past before going down the rabbit hole with New Album. In its final two minutes, the album’s serene closer, “Looprider,” fades into an eerie siren skronk, and then into a pretty, music-box melody. It’s the thought of what Boris might turn to next that makes this childish twinkle sound ominous.

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***

“The dome guy” actually had a pretty colorful and intrepid name. Whether it was Richard Buckminster Fuller, R. Buckminster Fuller, Buckminster Fuller, or just “Bucky” — mention his name and most people will look blank until an additional qualifier is added: “you know…the dome guy.”

While it’s true that the geodesic dome — a pattern of self-bracing triangles that closely approximate a sphere, or partial-sphere — and the accompanying movement for inexpensive housing was his first major success, Buckminster Fuller dabbled in a lot of things. Under his Dymaxion brand name – a portmanteau of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension – he designed a house, car, world map, bathroom, and self-practiced sleep regimen of four thirty-minute naps a day. He published over thirty books, coined the term “Spaceship Earth,” and ultimately took to the world stage, lecturing about the application of science to solve the problems of humanity.

He was, in short, a decent inventor and engineer, but ultimately a much better self-promoter. He was a benevolent egomaniac. Because of his wacky futurism, the fact that many of his concepts never progressed past a prototype, his tendency for neologisms, his ultramodern worldview of Earth as a place with limited resources, and his push for alternative lifestyles, he was often viewed by the mainstream as a crackpot.

But to the Bay Area counterculture and communal-idealists of the 1960s, the 70-something-year-old man, who dressed almost exclusively in black suits and bow ties, was an icon. Despite never living in the region, it was here that many of his ideas were instantiated by “radicals” looking for a new doctrine to follow, and where his work continues to influence successive generations of experimenters.

It’s this local link that underpins The Utopian Impulse exhibition at SFMOMA (running until July 29, 2012), where Fuller’s work is laid alongside modern, local inventions inspired by his teachings, as well as backstory to his relationship with other Bay Area institutions, such as The Whole Earth Catalog — creator Stewart Brand apparently got the idea to petition NASA to release a photo of the whole Earth, after attending one of Fuller’s lectures while tripping on acid. Some of the links are slightly tenuous, some concrete, but it’s all a reasonable excuse to bring together a fascinating story that spans several generations, with Fuller’s genius as the centerpiece.

It is at this point that I must disclose a vested interest in the topic: my wife and I recently purchased a geodesic dome of our own in Sonoma County, but with little knowledge of Fuller or his philosophies. It was only after moving in that I began researching “the dome guy” a little more. An attempt to watch the unedited, web version of Everything I Know — Fuller’s 42-hour stream-of-consciousness lecture — failed after only 12 minutes, so I was excited by the prospect of a museum trip.

The exhibit showcases a lot of aesthetically-pleasing visuals associated with Fuller’s work, either his original notes and calculations, or derived graphic art by his devotees, as well as a 60-minute film from 1977 featuring some delightful insights into how his undiagnosed childhood near-blindness informed his later-life thought processes.

This, however, was all preamble to the improbable main event: a “live documentary” entitled The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Sam Green (The Weather Underground, Utopia in Four Movements), featuring an accompanying Yo La Tengo score, performed live by the band.

I was eager to see a modern interpretation of the day’s history lesson. After a brief introduction, the screen was filled with the captivating shot of a geodesic dome flying through the sky, its cover pulsating and flapping with the peristaltic motion of a jellyfish. The camera pulled back to reveal the source of its propulsion, a long cable attached to a U.S. Military aircraft, which then slowed and dropped the structure to Earth. A suited Bucky then seemingly steps out from inside and approaches the camera with a Hitchcockian menace.

The intensity of this grainy footage, featuring a real application of his domes — their lightweight-ness and strength made them especially appealing to the military, who deployed thousands — spliced together with Fuller’s own propaganda, was provoked further as Yo La Tengo took to their instruments.

And this is the live documentary — part slide-show travelogue, part TED talk, part concert. The traditionally-centered projection screen augmented by a band at house right, and the director at house left, narrating and orchestrating the event.

What’s interesting about the format is that, excepting petty breaks from the script to acknowledge obligatory represent-hollers from the audience each time a place name is mentioned, the live component initially seems unnecessary. The piece is essentially a classic documentary, so why separate the voiceover and score to be performed live? In fact, Yo La Tengo’s score was so accomplished and fitting that it, as all good film scores should, blended quickly into the fabric of the moving images. Aside from a couple of (enjoyable) volume-level freak-outs from the band, I kept forgetting they were even there, playing live. When I did remember to look at them, I wondered how they felt — it’s not often that the success of a popular band’s performance depends on not being distracting.

While the source of the music became effortlessly forgotten, the inverse was true for the film’s dialog. Having Green step up to a spotlit microphone moments before he was to speak each time, before melting back into the shadows to watch the next sequence, was as fascinating as it was distracting. In a way, it laid bare the filmmaker’s techniques. The timing and cadence of the storytelling was joined by his on-stage movements and, unlike an un-live documentary, I was consciously aware that he was watching his own work back with us.

And this was the critical difference. Even though the media itself could be combined to produce the same technical result, it was the not-usually-seen nuances of the “crew” that made the whole affair so intimate and powerful.

Green’s warm voice and obvious enjoyment at performing, conjured up the same abstract personal connection I get to a good radio presenter, which is not something usually invoked by film. And when Yo La Tengo did occasionally rise from the aural background to become the focus, well, it was great remembering that Yo La Tengo were in the room.

After a day immersing myself in the wild, but somewhat coldly analytical, world of Richard Buckminster Fuller through aged documentary and museum walls, it was Green’s less-informational, emotionally engaging Love Song that brought me closest to connecting with Bucky’s ideals.

For all of Fuller’s egotistical self-hype, and the modern-day criticism that his views were too anthropocentric, his objective was one of the truest forms of humanism: a belief that nature’s systems have already solved our engineering problems, and that the world has enough resources for everyone to lead a higher quality of life, it’s just an issue of distribution. Not many thinkers of his time were looking at the Earth as a single ecosystem, thinking outside of geographical and political boundaries, and advocating renewable energies and affordable living.

On a personal level, I’m just happy to be back in my dome, sitting writing this, with a fuller appreciation of the physics and ideologies holding up the roof above me.

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White Fence
Family Perfume, Vol 1 & Vol 2 (Woodsist)

The first thing you have to accept when you listen to White Fence is that Tim Presley sings like George Harrison. Presley lives in California and was once a hardcore punker, a member of bands called The Nerve Agents and The Strange Boys. In 2004 he co-founded a psychedelic band called Darker My Love. White Fence is his solo project. It’s not an easy thing to come to terms with, this singing like George Harrison. It’s like a young writer writing like the literary equivalent of a Beatle. It’s not the least bit unpleasant, though; Harrison’s voice is lovely, even when it’s Presley’s. And it’s not an exact copy. This is Harrison in limited range, not his whole singing life, not the Traveling Wilberries, at least not much, more like a collection of splices from “Blue Jay Way” and “Within You and Without You” and just a touch of the Hare Krishna part of “My Sweet Lord,” all electronically manipulated, the way John Lennon fucked with his voice on all of his songs. These Harrison-cum-Lennon particles are combined with snippets from other voices, most of them singers of the ’60s whom we recognize but can’t quite name, and from them Presley builds the vocals on White Fence’s third release, Family Perfume.

Family Perfume is a double album released in two parts. Vol 1 came out at the beginning of April, and Vol 2 is out in May, along with combined versions on CD or cassette. A double LP will be released later in the year, presumably after the first pressing sells out. As with the vocals, the music on both platters feels borrowed, appropriated and/or stolen. It’s all so familiar: smoky guitar twang from a go-go dancing scene in a Russ Meyer film; folky harmonica; acoustic guitar; slide guitar; groovy organ; a galloping beat from a road-tripping-to-Lester’s-farm song; a couple of scratchy chords from an unearthed garage-band gem; a lopsided bridge from a Dylan crony; Buffalo Springfield; Zappa’s Freak Out!; Jefferson Airplane without Grace Slick or Marty Balin; late Mantovani played too fast on a five-string bass through a tube amp with an extra tube. In other words, White Fence seethes with the sounds of the ’60s. Presley has gotten grief for his derivativeness in reviews of earlier releases, and he’s always asked to defend it in interviews, and at times he’s seemed agitated, like when he replied to a Bay-Area music blogger, “What is modern? I feel that White Fence is modern songwriting, but with tools of the past.”

He’s right. White Fence and Family Perfume feel new, very new, despite being saturated with oldness. The novelty is in the composition. Presley’s arrangements are relentlessly odd, full of abrupt shifts and counterintuitive juxtapositions. At the end of side one of Vol 1, a bit of punk storms in and consumes the jangly pop and thrashes about for a while until it too is subsumed by a super-psychedelic breakdown of echo-y voices and bent-and-wiggly time-warp tones. On Vol 2, there’s a moment when everything slows down exactly the way it would if you were to flip the turntable from 45 to 33, and it’s still the same tune, and it still sounds right, only deeper and slower. Family Perfume is loaded with freaky sounds like this—reverberations and feedback swells and every note sung or strummed through all the distorting fuzz boxes a young artist could possibly afford to buy, all of which is perfect for when you’re a joint and two beers into a late Saturday afternoon. Perfect because it’s never scary or annoying, because the bits of tunes Presley builds his songs with sound familiar, and you can tap your toes to them, so you never get lost in all the weirdness. It works because Presley has one of the keenest ears for melody of any artist recording today. His melodies are at times transcendent, or at least euphoric, like the third track on side one of Vol 2, when he sings, “No matter Hell or rain, I’ll take it all, and sing this song, to push along,” a one-two-three-four refrain so simple and sing-songy it’ll cut through dense tangles of present-day worries. Family Perfume is rich with moments that would sound dated on their own. But here, mixed up in Presley’s psychedelic stew, they feel so ultra-mod they’re practically timeless.

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