I heard years ago that you were a Tape Op reader. Am I correct?
Oh, yeah. I still get Tape Op. I told these publicists, “Your one directive is to get me in Tape Op, and then you will have effectively earned your money.” [laughs]
Well, there you go. It was worth it!
Yeah. I directed a movie years ago called No Way Jose in which I played a musician, and my friend Caitlin, she's a musician, and her husband John were in the movie – he's a musician too.
Oh, the Gutenbergers! They both used to work for Tape Op.
Yeah. She gave me a whole bunch of Tape Ops that are scattered all throughout the movie. We're in New York now, so we haven't seen them in quite a long time. They're great people.
Totally. I was in the studio years ago, and one of my clients said, “You’ve got to see this film (Untitled)” that you were in.
I'm super proud of that.
That's one of the coolest art versus commerce films I've ever seen.
Yeah, I love that film. That was such a fun character, and we got to go to Philip Glass' studio [The Looking Glass Studios]. I’ve always been into Steve Reich [Tape Op #15] and Philip Glass. But I didn't know quite as much about that kind of real out-there minimalist music. It was fun to do a deep dive and then get to play a fucking crazy asshole! [laughter] Some of my gear is in that movie, like some [Electro-Harmonix] Memory Man and Moog pedals and shit that I brought with me.
When you were portraying this avant-garde musician, did it help that you actually play music?
A little, but the character's a better musician than me. He's supposed to be a classically trained pianist, so there's a lot of bluffing that goes on there. But the sampling was relatable, so that was easy to get into. The basic premise of being such a purist is something that has, in a way, probably been a little self-defeating. It's definitely a thing that has consumed me, and maybe to my commercial detriment to some degree.
With music and film?
I guess. I don't know. Music to me is: I do what I can do, and it just happens to be whatever it is. There's no real ideology. I find that it's more of an impediment when I write. As a writer of screenplays and such, I find myself really self-editing. Sometimes, I won't write anything just because it's not up to my standards. I thought I was going to be a filmmaker when I was a teenager. I've written or co-written and directed three movies, but I assumed that's what I would be doing. I think part of it is that it's very hard to make a movie, especially one that breaks through. It's hard to make a movie that you even like. But I have found that I'll be thinking about writing something, and before I'm even at the fifth page, some combination of self-loathing and a dogmatic, puritanical, artistic self-consciousness shuts me down. Like, “If I would criticize this, then I shouldn't write it.” My friends think that I'm very hard on media, the movies, or whatever, but I'm no harder on it than I am on myself. But that's not necessarily a good thing. I probably should be more forgiving.
I'm sure you find that with music you have to have the doors wide open at first, and then edit or critique.
Yeah, 100 percent. This new record [When the Ships of My Dreams Return] was particularly challenging because there was no sounding board at all. In the past, there had been at least one other person; and in this case, there was no one. Having so much to do technically kept me distracted enough that I didn't have as much bandwidth to worry about the artistic stuff. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it got me through the process. There are parts of this which are up to some artistic standard I have, whereas there's music that I've done in collaboration with other people in the past that I prefer, probably because there was somebody else there and I wasn't worrying about all the technical details. But, having said that, I would go to bed each night wondering if I should even be doing this. I was split in so many different directions that one part of me couldn't overwhelm the other part, in terms of criticism.
When we're constantly learning, like the technical side of this, there's a beneficial aspect of that for our brains.
Totally. This whole thing was never like, “I want to be a rock star.” But I’ve always liked recording, and I'd always played music. I played drums when I was a kid, but I didn't really learn guitar. I didn't start writing songs until I was in my early twenties. In 1993, I bought a BOSS digital delay pedal, a 4-track TASCAM [cassette recorder], a Mexican [Fender] Stratocaster, and a small practice amp. I realized pretty early on that it was really recording that I enjoyed; fucking with the tape and reversing shit, and what the wah-wah pedal sounded like when there was nothing playing. I got heavy into Sonic Youth, so it was always more about sound, happy accidents, and being on this autodidactic journey. There were periods where I had a band, but I never felt that comfortable doing it and it wasn't really what I wanted to sound like. I did a demo in earnest at some point in the ‘90s and never really gave it to anybody – again, it wasn't really what I wanted to sound like. It wasn't until I started to sound like what I liked that I thought, “I’ll put this out.” That was many, many years later. The first time I put any music out was when I directed the film I Love Your Work in the early 2000s. I had become pals with Steven Drozd of The Flaming Lips, and there was a musical element in the film; sort of an ode to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. A film within the film, with a musical sequence. I had written a song with this band that I had met in Los Angeles, Black Pine, and I was recording a lot of music with them. We had our own band called The Room, but they had their own thing. With them, I recorded some of the music that needed to be available by the time we shot to use for playback. I had done a bunch of these weird loops that I created with loop pedals. Steven Drozd would come into the studio where we were doing post-production, and we would orchestrate it using Reason. Other than piano I don’t know that we had any real instruments, but there was this real orchestrated quality to it.
When did that lead to your solo albums?
A couple years later, I had accrued enough music that I finally felt comfortable with – between some recording with Black Pine, with Steven at Trent Bell’s studio [Bell Labs Recording, Tape Op #6] in Norman, Oklahoma, and new stuff with Aaron Espinoza [#43] at his studio, The Ship – to put out my first record, under the LANDy moniker [Eros and Omissions]. This new record began as more of an experiment. I was thinking, “Can I do it, from soup to nuts?” It began with just a USB interface and a 500 Series [module], but now I'm looking at this whole studio. In 2020, I came to New York to do The Equalizer, which was shooting in New Jersey, not far from where we were staying. It was the pandemic; we were renting a house here, and we had a house in L.A. My kids began to grow up here and the show kept going – it got canceled recently – but by that point we'd sold our house in L.A. I hadn't been playing music in a long time. I had kids and didn't have the bandwidth. The last record I put out [Home: A Nice Place to Visit] was a book, an LP, and a photography show. I’d used up many of what I thought were the most worthwhile of all of the hundreds of demos I had done over the years. I had all my shit in storage in Los Angeles, so bit by bit I started putting something together here and recorded some things. I called Aaron Espinoza, “I want a good channel strip. What do you recommend? I'm looking at 500 Series stuff.” He's like, “Do you have a 500 rack?” I was like, “Oh, no. Do I need that?” I didn't know the difference between that and regular rack gear! [laughs]
Yeah!
I started with a little three-unit lunchbox, and then one thing led to do another. I was going to outsource the drums to one of my pals – the drummer in Midlake [McKenzie Smith]. Then I was like, “Can I get a good drum sound?” I'm always obsessed with the snare sound, like everybody is. I'm not saying I got there at all, but trying to do it turned out to be the thing that was the most fun. Then I needed many more ins and many more outs [for the interface]. Cranborne Audio had just come out with this incredible system [the 500R8], and I have three of them. I started filling up these [500 Series] units. I had always seen people use compressors, but I wanted to understand it. I had a “no plug-in” dogma – in the very end, I finally used plug-in de-essers.
Plug-in de-essers are honestly better. Are you committing to sounds on the way in? You've got that Cranborne, which can even mix tracks together as you're recording.
I recorded almost everything, and then I would go back and think, “Well, that fucking sucks.” I started rerecording each track and mixing as I went. I would start to commit stuff. Some of these songs have been recorded twice. When I would record a mix, that was when I was committing.
It's interesting, because there's a gain and a loss to collaboration, or lack thereof.
The last few times I did this, I did it in Los Angeles in my garage studio, which was more music gear than it was recording gear. I had a USB interface. Andrew Lynch – who worked with Aaron at The Ship and also was in Earlimart and part of Black Pine – would come over and we would record me. Sometimes, he would play trumpet, my wife [Roxanne Daner] would play violin, or my friend Merritt [Lear] would play violin. Then Andrew would go away and mix. At the end, I'd go over to his house and we'd go over the mixes together. It was always a bit mystical to me, and I liked it that way. He's a talented musician, and he certainly knows what he's doing as an engineer and as a mixer. I'm extremely proud of these two records that I did with him [Home: A Nice Place to Visit, Stranger’s Morning] and the work I did with Aaron. The eponymous Goldberg Sisters’ album sounds like a proper record; Aaron is an extremely talented guy. I’d get all kinds of benefits from these people, but with When the Ships of My Dreams Return, I was trying to see how close I could get. I didn't have to pay anybody, I didn't have to worry about anybody's schedule, and I could be as grouchy as I liked!
