I listened to Holy Sons' 2006 album, Decline of the West, today.
Has your take on that record changed over the years?
Well, I'm still blown away by how young you were at the time and that you played every instrument on the record.
I would've been about 25 years old. I don't think I could make that record again. When I moved to Portland in 1999, I had a lot of insecurity about having spent the entire decade of the '90s recording strictly on 4-tracks. No one was listening to that cassette-based, lo-fi style anymore. It felt like I was its last, lone practitioner, still fully engaged in a dead language. [laughter] Cassettes were my entire canvas. Then, when I heard Will Oldham [Tape Op #40] make I See a Darkness [as Bonnie "Prince" Billy], and Smog do something similar with Knock, Knock, I was like, "Oh no, everybody's leaving me behind."
Did you feel a pressure that other lo-fi artists were moving into a mid-fi recording space, and you weren't sure if you were going to go along with it?
I'd been living up near the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina for four years before moving out to Portland, so I'd been completely outside of the music world. When I came down out of the fog, I realized that everybody had already abandoned lo-fi, and I started sweating. I wasn't totally comfortable in the studio yet. Becoming a true "studio musician" was still a psychological frontier I had to surmount.
Was that because you had to deal with another person in the room watching you perform all these vulnerable songs? Maybe you needed to be alone to create those projects.
That's a good guess. I definitely couldn't imagine operating on drugs in the studio in the same way that I'd grown up recording at home. I wasn't going to be in my own world anymore. The late '90s were a strange time for the underground, because the new trend was to try and make extremely digestible music. I was pretty aware that there might not be a place for people like me anymore. The Mountain Goats had abandoned the boombox for the studio and Guided By Voices [Tape Op #6] were no longer out on this weird, schizophrenic planet. I was going to have to learn to adapt quickly if I didn't want to be left behind.
But you weren't left behind. How did you find your footing while moving towards the world of hi-fi?
My dad was close with Fred Neil and David Crosby when I was a little kid in Coconut Grove, Miami. Somewhere underneath all my punk brattiness, there was some deep folk vocabulary stored up in my unconscious mind. I'd never reached into that bag to fully dive into the "mature" aspects of my style.
You eventually figured out how to record in hi-fi settings in an authentic way. Did it feel as cathartic to you as recording had been in your early stages?
Not at first. It took a couple years of practice before I got comfortable. Cassettes just sounded the way I imagined a human being sounds in a room. Switching over to the new digital workstations that were coming out in 1999 was going to require a complete shift in the material I was bringing. I'd loved Pavement [Tape Op #15] in their earliest incarnation, and was I was especially impressed with Stephen Malkmus' aesthetic jump from Slanted and Enchanted to Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Crooked Rain… was a big moment because it meant there was going to be a legitimate way forward in translating our lo-fi culture into the larger world.
Did it feel like you'd be losing some level of integrity by moving into a more digestible sound?
The world was going to move on without me either way, and there was going to be a new technological paradigm whether I liked it or not. The idea of punk music continuing on in the underground at that stage barely felt like a reality if you turned on MTV or remembered the whole Woodstock '99 vibe. Aggression and "rebellion" had been fully commodified by then, so the underground was trying to differentiate itself by moving in the opposite direction, developing slow-core and much softer sounds. I still wasn't comfortable presenting myself yet… I was only comfortable in my own world, recording alone. But you're seduced by your idols to believe in the dream. Malkmus had such an effortless persona, and I didn't know if I could find that kind of grace within me. I still felt extremely angsty, and had been making this kind of schizophrenic, psychic-voyaging music in basements across America for what was bound to be an extremely small audience.
I listened to your first official record Lost Decade [1999] today, and it's still so strong. How does it feel to be firmly in a more hi-fi realm now?
I'm honestly still kind of doing the same thing I always did. It's not me who's changed as much as technology itself. The best art that's made in the crest of any artist's career is usually made in transition when they're not exactly sure where they're going. Where they end up in the end isn't usually what most listeners were even looking for. I still see myself in a constant technological transition, and still hungry, changing, and learning all the time.
What gets you excited when you're approaching a new record?
The more leeway and opportunities I get, the more I'm going to try and make stranger records that may only satisfy myself. For some artists, that might be like trying to break inside the prison instead of trying to get out of it. But anywhere I see a kind of true freedom in music, I'm always drawn in that direction.
Your recent solo record, Zone Black, was a "library record." What do you consider library music, and why are you interested in it?
"Library music" generally means that it's music composed for use in television or film. As a field of sound, it's one of the most lawless, bizarre areas of record-making. Over the years in Grails, I came to the realization that certain library composers were allowed much more freedom than any rock band generally is, and I'd grown really jealous of those freedoms.
Because you felt like your band was stuck inside of a genre?
Yeah. There are times when you get the feeling that the rock band format hasn't really been updated from its original inception point in the '50s or '60s. And just because you're in a rock band doesn't really mean you're an artist. That seems like a title that has to be earned in some kind of Sisyphean way. For Zone Black, I was looking for a sonic concept that had no ceiling. A place where I'm allowed to explore extra dark feelings without worrying too much about what kind of audience I'm courting. A band like Goblin got to go to some very bizarre and beautiful places, and their records still stand tall as a totally unique contribution to film music. There's a total freedom in library music, and that seduced me towards the realm the classic film composers got to inhabit.
It seems like you've been fighting a world that wants to pigeonhole you into a genre, which probably explains why you have so many different types of bands.
My love for other people's music is out of my control. It's so rabid that it leads my own music in directions that may not be very wise, in a business sense. It seems pretty obvious that moments of brilliance in music occur when people don't give a fuck about what's in fashion. But it can be a very lonely island to uphold that world view. Music that exists outside of social scenes doesn't reach people with the same efficiency as music that's located upon very obvious genre shelves. I'd set out with a love of outsider music from the age of 13, before realizing how the music business really worked. I couldn't grasp that most people are only drawn to the glossy recreations of art that come way after the inventive moments that've generally occurred in obscurity. The true success of an artist is to create a world in which you can keep experimenting. That's the goal. Not some plateau where you make so much money that you don't have to perpetuate the art anymore.
Do you call yourself an engineer?
