Over the past 15 years, Phil Todd's Leeds UK-based Ashtray Navigations has pretty clearly led the world in the production of psychedelic noise freakout rock transcendental electrification drone music. Quoting myself here, describing the Ashtray sound: "free improvisation, lo-fi psychedelia, noise and found sounds, the raw power (though rarely the form) of rock, and the tonalities of various drone and ethnic musics. Pure underground sound, basically." Todd's ability to chart infinite variations within this ever-expanding musical universe, plus the seemingly endless flow of releases on his own and other labels, don't really have a lot of parallels in "rock" (Sun Ra might be a kindred spirit), and perhaps for that reason remain heard by far too few.

Since the mid-1990s Ashtray Navigations has released music on just about every format imaginable, much of it on Todd's own consistently far out DIY labels (Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers back in the 90s, Memoirs of an Aesthete more recently), amassing a catalogue that surely must stretch into the three-digits at this point, all the while maintaining a consistency that's really something to hear.

While often working solo, Todd has also collaborated with some of the heavy players in the UK underground. The regular Ashtray live unit brings in Phil Legard (Xenis Emputae Traveling Band) and Melanie Crowley (Ocelocelot), and has also included Ben Reynolds, Alex Neilson (Scatter, Directing Hand) and many guests... Plus of course there are Todd's other projects with Chris Haldowski (Scatter, Nalle, Family Elan) and Neil Campbell (Vibracathedral Orchestra, Astral Social Club)... Not to mention, back around the turn of the millennium Todd played in A Warm Palindrome along with future members of Sculptress (about whom Mats wrote a couple years back), whose avant-garde-meets-folk methodology was ahead of its time in much the same way as the Tower Recordings... And that's just scratching the surface really... The sheer volume of releases and range of high-quality sounds makes it tough to single out particular individual Ashtray albums; in fact, the recordings work even better in the aggregate, where the long-form experimentation can be appreciated comparatively. My best advice generally is to just acquire as much as one can lay one's hands on...

We've been wanting to do an Ashtray Navigations piece since way back in the primordial print days of Deep Water and, well, it took us a while to get around to it (though a couple of AN albums have made it into our year-end-bests lists [in 2006 and 2007], and we recently had the pleasure of releasing some fine Ashtray sounds on the DW label). But that just gave us that much more to catch up with Todd about when we finally did so, as seen by the epic discussion below, carried out via email in fall 2008. Thanks to Phil for all his time and input.

Did you have experience with music from early on, or was it something you picked up later? Were there particular artists that inspired you to start doing your own?

I always wanted to do it, since I first heard my uncle's collection of early 60s pop 7-inchers at a very early age - magic plastic circles which took you to another place when spun - who wouldn't wanna make ‘em? I was playing music from early school years onwards, and the "twanging on toy instruments" aesthetic of those days has never fully left me. Ashtray Navigations was the first band I did where I attempted to play "real" instruments (save for occasional stints on guitar and harmonica in other folks' bands). The big influence with early Ashtray was hearing power electronics and early noise stuff, and also 60s psychedelic oddities. Or rather bad cassette copies of this music. It seemed like something I could do, especially the tape hiss. I could hiss better than anybody and maybe still can (still recording everything on cassette 15 years later). Also Royal Trux's Twin Infinitives was an enormous influence as it proved that tape hiss could rock. Something like that anyway. I've still not got a handle on how that record works its unique magic.

When/how/why did Ashtray Navigations first come into existence as a recognizable entity? The first Ashtray music I heard was the Siltbreeze LP, but I seem to recall reading in a fanzine at the time that you had already released some 100 cassettes, can that be correct?

AN came into being in January 1994. I "released" a lot of tapes very quickly, though maybe not 100. This was because I'd just bought a four track (and what a shitty four track it was) and I wanted to see what I could do with it, and what I could do with music in general. The only way to see what I could do was to actually start recording things and putting them in order, as "releases" (though many of these cassettes were issued in runs of single figures). The only way I was going to improve was to generate feedback from a small audience (i.e. friends and contacts in the music scene). I couldn't sit by myself and listen to what I'd recorded trying to work out if it was any good or not, gotta have an audience (even if it is just one other person) for that. You could forget gigs, there was nowhere to play in the town I was from, so I had to do a lot of tapes. The recent 10xCDR reissue (Early Years/Tape Muck 1994-1998) has quite a few of the cassettes but by no means all. I don't have copies of a lot of them any more.

It does seem like the analog recording process is a big part of the AN "sound"... What is it about cassette (8-track?) that appeals to you? It almost seems like the compression and "instant decay" of the medium becomes its own instrument...

It was all I could afford; nope, not even 8 track but 4 track cassette and the worst 4 track imaginable in the early years (ever heard of Vesta portastudios? thought not!). It was held together with sellotape and I used it until at least 2001 or so. Me and a friend had a duo project in the late 90s and we recorded everything on his digital portastudio. One day everything malfunctioned and we lost 18 months of work in about ten minutes flat and I vowed never to use digital again (it just isn't "there" if you know what I mean). Also, yes, the compression and distortion of cassettes is very attractive but I'm not planning on restricting myself to it, especially as analogue equipment breaks down and it gets harder to get it fixed and cassette blanks become more and more scarce. Very recently, I've been experimenting with recording digitally and have been very happy with the results. Anyone who thinks that these recent recordings are going to sound cleaner or in any way less fucked-up is in for quite a shock!

Was it mostly you on your own playing at the start?

Ashtray is mostly me, and it is my "concept" I guess. Guests and helpers are always invaluable and were there from the start. They help take things in directions that I could never envisage by myself.

The Ashtray Navigations musical output over the years has been prodigious, to say the least... Any idea exactly how many? Is music something you're working on pretty much all the time? Do you have any particular favorites among them all?

There was an interview with Masami Akita where he was asked why there are so many Merzbow releases and he simply said, "I don't like to stop". What can I add to that? There's the answer for you entirely! I've no idea how many releases there are and I couldn't provide a full discography. I'm more into making music (and cover art and titles) than cataloguing it all, or even listening to it too much afterwards, though I quite often enjoy digging up "one from the vaults" of an evening. I like to record something every week, I feel a bit adrift if I go a week without at least playing. I like everything I've released (or else I would not release it) but yeah I guess I do have a few favourites, usually ones where I feel I've made some sort of breakthrough. Listening back to old things though, what always gets me is how much they change every time I hear them. Ones that I remember turning out really good often disappoint when I dredge them out again. Other things which didn't seem too much at the time can jump out at you. Also things I've released which I haven't been especially wild about, I mean they're OK but not especially stand-out for me, prove to be other peoples' favourites. This is one of the amazing things about music in general, I think.

It does seem like there are some consistent threads weaving through all the varied AN output over the years, even through so very many releases, clearly enough that it can't just be a random thing... Can you say a little more about the concept factor? Does concept precede action, or vice versa, or...?

Concept hardly ever precedes action as I don't believe in restricting myself in any way, but if it doesn't sound like Ashtray Navigations it doesn't get released, at least under that name. The criteria I have for what constitutes Ashtray Navigations is a hard thing to put into words. There are constant threads throughout everything but I guess that is partly to do with my own personal taste, and it being hard for me to disguise my handwriting, so to speak. I'll occasionally make "references" to previous things I've done, either in the cover art or titles or the sound itself, if it feels right, but I largely work through intuition.

I'll usually have an idea of what I want to do before I start recording. Usually everything goes wrong and it sounds nothing like I wanted to do, but quite often it sounds better than what I intended and the idea of the ideal sound in my head shifts accordingly. The fact that my intentions keep shifting in this way, and that nothing comes out "right" is probably the reason I've been doing music for so long and released so much stuff.

I'm really curious about your guitar & effects setup... You have an instantly identifiable sound across all the varied AN music; is gear a factor in that, or is it down more to technique? Any particular effects or equipment you favor?

I think it is all technique, or maybe lack of - I tend to gravitate towards certain intervals (5ths and 7ths mostly) and modes in my guitar playing partly through habit and partly because that's what seems to fit. I've recently gone back to playing in standard tuning a lot of the time in order to escape these routines. There was a while when I was playing in a "proper music" duo where we rehearsed several times a week and by christ did my guitar playing get good then. In recent years I've tended to only play guitar when doing Ashtray stuff and its getting too easy to fall into habits. If I practice by myself at home I tend to play the same shit all the time and I'm trying to change that. I'd like to either be a much better guitarist or a much much worse one. There's some brilliant examples of bad guitar playing on some of my early records and I kinda miss not being able to do that any more - sometimes it seems like the more you can play the less you end up trying to play, or something. I usually find incompetent or willfully perverse guitar playing much more enjoyable and inspiring to listen to that listening to someone show off their "chops" in the usual predictable fashion.

I also favour guitar playing with a blues feeling - most guitar players these days tend to play with an indie or metal approach but that doesn't do it for me. When I started playing my favourite guitarist was Carlos Santana, and I still think he plays great. Not a hip name to drop at all, but anyone turning their nose up at the first 3 or 4 Santana albums is missing some good shit (I'll pass on the later ones though). To come to think of it, we got compared to Santana when we played at All Tomorrows Parties, intended as an insult but I couldn't have been happier, especially as we must have really offended a fan of indie "music". I get compared to Sharrock quite a bit as well and I think he was just fantastic. I also dig very much Lou Reed's "ostrich" style and Matt Valentine's more exploratory stuff. Bits of all the above have no doubt worked their way into the Ashtray armoury.

Until recently I've always used the crappiest and cheapest guitars I could find, and I got through a lot of them - I can be pretty rough on them and most of them were so bad that they fell apart without me even trying. My basement is a graveyard for fallen guitars and other broken down equipment. I've used different stuff all the time as the stuff I use is usually old and cheap and breaks down pretty quickly.

All Ashtray guitar parts are recorded through small and usually crappy amps, or plugged directly into the 4 track. I'm a big fan of fuzz pedals and have several, though the Big Muff is king. Sustain all the way up, just like Carlos! Lots of other weird pedals tend to figure, I tend to use different ones all the time, the recent revival of the Roland Space Echo being a current favourite.

A lot of sounds on Ashtray records are guitar generated, as I use it to make sounds as well as play notes. Guitar feedback is just the best, an endlessly variable and mutable sound. Electric guitar is just the greatest instrument as far as I'm concerned. You can carry it around with you easily, use it for chords, bass parts, melodies, weird noises and screeching feedback and if you are Jimi you can do all these things at once. Unfortunately I am not him, but we have the same birthday.

In addition to the sound, there's also a distinctive aesthetic for a lot of the cover art and album/song titles. Is there a conscious theme, or do you just pull from whatever is at hand? There often seems to be a real absurdist/surrealist element to the titles especially...

I was very into surrealism as a young ‘un but think aspects of it are ridiculous now (it seems too bound by rules a lot of the time, classic surrealism that is). Absurdism is a hard position to avoid, as a working class person from the north of England involving himself in "the avant-garde", if you know what I mean. If you don't know what I mean, listen to a New Blockaders record.

The titles are hard to explain, I usually just settle on one that seems right, just an instinct I get. For example a recent CDR I did HAD to be titled The Night Time Is The Right Time, which has nothing to do with the contents or anything but I knew it was the only title I could release it under. Sorry I have no explanation as to why. It's not even a particularly thrilling title. A lot of the titles describe the sound in some way, or are a self-deprecating reference to it, a lot are completely irrelevant, just words or phrases that I am drawn to or stuff that makes me laugh.

Also "rock history" informs a lot of titles, as music has been going on for a long time and there are a lot of precedents for things I try to do. I've recently been putting the names of the instruments I use on the covers, which I never used to do. Some of them have very poetic names, like the Sunn Mustang guitar (actually a very crappy guitar but a cool name), or have some iconic significance - using a VCS3 (or a computer simulation of one) makes me think of Hawkwind or the Radiophonic Workshop. Using a Vox amp makes me think of the Velvets or Beatles or Stones. I can get that type of sound in my head just from the name. That's the essence of poetry surely, putting images and sounds in your head with words that don't really describe anything, in concrete terms.

The titles are the same process I think, something to make an image in the listeners head which has either poetic or iconic significance. That sort of thing. Mel has just pointed out that a lot of titles are to do with word play. This is what I grew up doing. In the town where I am from people can have whole conversations which consist of nothing other than fucking around with language, substituting metonyms or stupid words that rhyme all the time. It's a small, boring place with nothing else to do if yr not into fighting or drink/drug abuse.

Finally though, I'd say that the titles are completely unnecessary for understanding the music. I don't want to do stuff where knowing how to speak English is a prerequisite to appreciating my music, which is why I have very little interest in songs with lyrics, unless they are really good. To come to think of it, I once told someone that I thought "Surfin' Bird" by The Trashmen was the pinnacle of rock lyrics. Kind of a joke but I could still stand by that - "Papa Oom-Mow-Mow" and all that is much more fun that hearing someone whining about them being dumped or telling us all how we can save the planet or what have you.

Can you say a little bit about how your working process has developed over the years? How much is improvised, and how much is planned out? It seems like a lot of the playing itself is improvisational, but also with some larger structure or pattern that shapes how it develops...

There is a lot of improv, but its always structured around some idea or mode or mood. Usually its about getting a feel set in before I start rather than a specific idea about notes or even which instruments to use. A lot of the group pieces (i.e. the stuff with the Legard/Crowley bands or the Reynolds/Neilson bands) were purely improvised with no "cues" from anyone, but with lots of overdubs by me to try to rein in into a specific structure. I dunno. The Mingus quote, "You've got to improvise on something" is true, even if it's just a drone or the sound you make when you first twang a guitar string. "Free music" has too many damn rules for my liking.

Could you say a little more about that? I guess I'm looking for ways to differentiate AN music from a lot of other, perhaps superficially similar but ultimately less interesting, music out there... So much "avant-garde" music ends up kind of deadening, but AN is always, well, FUN...

I don't know if I'd call AN "avant garde" - you have put it in inverted commas as well so I guess we are both uncomfortable with that term. In fact, what does the phrase mean? It applied to various art movements in the last century but it doesn't seem to mean anything any more except a very marginal genre niche involving immensely unpopular music, so I guess I fit right in there - ha ha.

I'm just trying to make what I consider beautiful music, and to my taste that involves a certain amount of "pushing the boundaries" I guess. But I grew up listening to things like Motorhead, Thin Lizzy, Black Sabbath, etc. and always hope to have that kind of wild excitement in the sound of Ashtray Navigations, especially live, even though I know I'm not playing what most people would consider rock music. I want to have a good time, want other people to have a good time and want to move them, leaving them exhausted, drained and maybe a little emotionally devastated by my music, ‘cos that's what I'm into and I assume others will feel likewise. I certainly don't want to leave people thinking I am a clever bastard with a lot of interesting theories or anything like that.

Twin Infinitives by The Mighty Trux was a big ‘un for me - a weirdo record which your parents and friends would loathe but you can still sing along with everything on it, and still very much a rock record. Maybe I'm trying to do the same thing in reverse, only by getting rid of the song element. Of course, when rock'n'roll started it was considered beyond the pale, weird, dangerous and just not music. Same with hip hop and jazz and probably every "classical" musical form. The traditions of every musical form have been built by a few people with a unique vision - "avant-garders" if you like. How long would jazz have lasted without Charlie Parker? If it wasn't for the "avant-garde" (those inverted commas again!) there wouldn't be any kind of music at all. That first caveman who decided to bang two rocks together and call it music must have been considered a real freak and a weirdo, so I think the term is basically meaningless.

As for fun - not sure what you mean, it's a much abused word, usually used by people who want you to buy something or join the great inane cooler-than-thou consumer lemming party. I'd agree that AN is a good laugh though, and often deliberately funny. Standing up on stage in front of a bunch of people bashing a bit of wood with strings on it which is held at crotch-level is an intrinsically ridiculous act and not enough people realise this, let alone USE this absurdist factor. I think it's important to try to do this and remain sincere at the same time. For example, AC/DC or Acid Mothers Temple seem to be aware of how ridiculous they are and play upon those elements all the time, but are totally honest at the same time, i.e. they rock. I admire this very much.

Also when I first started doing AN in the early ‘90s, "raga rock" or what have you was considered beyond ridiculous, possibly politically suspect and best consigned to the dustbin along with the rest of hippy culture. I liked all that stuff but could see the preposterous elements and decided to use them. Calling a CD Four Raga Moods was obviously a semi-(cosmic) joke at the time, but now everyone digs all that stuff and bearded American guitarists can get on stage and play raga-inspired music and talk about their gurus with a straight face and nobody takes the piss. This is a very weird turn of events for me. Some of the people in Arthur magazine, for example, have me howling with laughter as much as watching a Manowar video does, but I suspect others are not moved in this way. I'm still in many ways caught up in the ‘90s, the age of irony.

More broadly maybe, what motivates you? The amount of effort and craft that goes into the music seems to speak of some larger idea or goal...?

There's no goal except that I want to make beautiful music. That's enough for me. And I want to keep doing it. I hate music with "strings attatched", i.e. the artist trying to get you to recycle yogurt pots or reach out and touch somebody's hand or whatever. I quite like art, but I don't really understand it or the point of making it, so making music that sounds good to me and hopefully to other people (about 100 of them?) is it for me. There maybe is a larger idea though, almost an "artistic" idea in fact, which I accidentally almost explained in an earlier interview I did. That was a mistake, you should try and figure out what it is, its more fun that way. I haven't fully figured it out myself yet.

So, on the face of it, that might make AN sound like it fits in with a long tradition of esoteric art...? Is there some kind of crazy wisdom behind it all? Or is it more like a mystery religion in which the mystery remains a mystery even to the high priest? Can you say a little more about the philosophy behind it all?

I'm really sorry, I don't understand this question at all! It's not religious, at least I hope not. Maybe spiritual, but that's a very big word which covers a lot of things in life. I have a very minor interest in esoteric/occult matters but I am not a "believer", I'm more interested in these things from a sociological point of view - the myriad inventive ways in which man has created god in his own image. This isn't Current 93 or anything, I'm not trying to take anyone on a spiritual or philosophical journey. Not sure what you mean by "crazy wisdom" - isn't that something to do with a branch of Tibetan Buddhism which involves attaining enlightenment by acting as outrageously and incomprehensibly as possible? I can sure dig that aesthetic but don't know if it has too much to do with Ashtray Navigations.

Music is quite a mysterious thing though. Abstract visual art has never really been popular, but music is an abstract art form which moves millions of people through sound. I don't know why this is, maybe music is more accessible as it is thankfully missing most of the bullshit which surrounds the fine art world (which increasingly relies upon words to explain to you why such and such a piece of art is "good"). But I still think it is mysterious how so many people can be moved in so many different ways by abstract sound organised into patterns, which does not reference the external world in any obvious way.

Earlier you mentioned having about 100 listeners... Given the motivations behind Deep Water, we definitely admire your dedication to a DIY aesthetic. But do you ever wish your music reached a larger audience? Or would the tradeoffs involved in attempting to do so have a negative impact on the music itself (which after all is the point of the exercise)?

I'm committed to DIY (do it yourself) rather than HSOFDI (Have Some Other Fucker Do It) because I've never found any other fucker TO do it! Ashtray releases on labels other than my own always seem to take months if not years to actually come out, and I've never been on a big label with a good promotion and distribution set up which would get my name in the papers and my name up in proverbial lights etc etc, but then I don't particularly care. I'm grateful for anyone to release my stuff, and I have been a recording artiste on some truly inspiring labels like Qbico, Absurd, Celebrate Psi, Siltbreeze etc etc. I don't have a lust for fame and have no desire whatsoever to be any kind of public figure. I'm not a born hustler either. Obviously I'd like millions of people to hear my music and to become outrageously rich and decadent etc etc but I can't see how this will happen. I seem to have 14,000 listeners on Last FM (I can't believe this either) but none of them seem to be buying anything and it seems I'll be waiting a long time for royalties from Last FM. I don't know what the price would be for having a larger audience as I've never had anyone offer it to me. Obviously seeing a lot of my "contemporaries" not to say people who came up after me doing very well and playing a lot of festivals and being on proper labels and the like gets a little depressing sometimes, but I know from talking to them that all that stuff isn't what its cracked up to be, and I never started playing music because I wanted to be an underground superstar or somesuch crap. I manage to release a lot of records and do my music in whatever way I want to, and people can buy them if they want to make the effort and that is really good enough for me.

How do you view Ashtray Navigations in relation to other music going on today? With the Internet and all, is it easier for people making independent sounds to share their music around now than it was when you started out?

Maybe it is, I don't know. I grew up with the idea of music coming out of a machine spinning magical circular objects, or a live band, rather than it being piped in down the phone lines, so I don't really think of that. It's true that the Internet has made selling CDs and stuff a lot easier, but I don't really put as much effort as I should into that either. I've got a Myspace if that's what you mean, but Mel updates it more than me. There is of course a lot of people visibly making music now. There's exactly the same number of people doing it as there ever was I'm sure, but thanks to the Internet you can see them more. Not sure if that's a good thing, as musicians should be seen and not heard and definitely not in your face all the fucking time with their big gurning mugs. Music definitely took a downturn with the invention of the picture sleeve, I think.

More positively, I suppose there are a lot of people doing great stuff now which I wouldn't have heard otherwise, and a lot of great old "lost" stuff being dug up and put up on music blogs and the like, and a lot of old musicians moaning that they aren't getting any royalties. Both edges of the cyber-sword gleam yet again...

Are there other artists/musicians/writers/etc., past or present, that you feel a particular affinity towards? And what is it about them that draws you?

There's probably quite a few actually - ha ha. I have to mention David Jackman's Organum project which is probably the biggest single musical inspiration for what I do. Every time I hear records such as Sphyx and Submission I feel inspired to do more music. Jackman's stuff is inspiring both for its beauty and sonic inventiveness, and I also dig in a BIG way his lack of a public profile and his refusal to align himself with the sort of crap that other people in the UK underground music scene have saddled themselves with (I'm sure you know who I mean!) - he just does his music and shuts up.

I've also always felt an affinity toward experimental film makers, especially the marginal (i.e. independent and non-subsidised) ones, such as Brakhage, Maya Deren and especially Jack Smith. Again this is because they have worked intuitively on something which is beautiful and evocative of a very personal and unique vision without disappearing up their own arseholes by spouting on about theories or "the meaning of art" too much. And because they never made advertisements (which is all that Hollywood and most European "art""films are) or sucked up to the art establishment.

How do you feel about performing live? Do you enjoy taking it to the stage, or would you rather do the mad-scientist-in-his-laboratory thing? You've had some great collaborators, I'm guessing they play into that experience?

Yes, I'm finally enjoying playing live - the Todd/Crowley/Legard band is very good for this and I'm finally getting over the urge to want to go back and "edit" every live show before the audience can hear it. Live shows rarely go according to plan and maybe they are all the better for it. Yeah my collaborators have all been great and have taken the music in directions I never envisaged, what more can I ask than that? Ms. Crowley has also helped a lot with this interview by pointing out a few things and I should thank her for that as well.

You're from Leeds, right? How much would you say your environment has helped shape AN music over the years?

No, I'm from Stoke On Trent originally, I moved to Leeds in 2001. Being from nowheresville had a big influence as nobody expected anything, I didn't know anyone in my hometown who was doing any music like mine and there was no audience or interest at all except for a few friends. It's pretty much the same in Leeds actually. There are of course "the Leeds droners" (you can name ‘em I'm sure) and we are all friends but they don't play here very often and AN started completely independently of that scene, though knowing good folks like Mr. Campbell and Mr. Bower through the post and phone back then is sure to have influenced me in some way.

Real life -- what do you do when not Ashtraying? Interesting day job? Fascinating avocations?

Ashtray Navigations is my real (public) life - what I do for money is usually boring to do and even more boring to talk about so I won't.

Favorite food and beverage?

Well, I don't really want to think about food right now as I made some dodgy leftover curry today which has given me stomach ache. Vanilla yoghurt is really fucking nice and I might have some of that later. I've sort of lost interest in booze lately, but the beer we have in the UK (the small brewery stuff, not the muck) is a good reason not to emigrate, maybe the only reason. Also I drink tons of orange juice mixed with grapefruit juice which has just the right pleasure/pain alchemy to satisfy me.

Favorite film(s)?

There's quite a lot of those, but I have yet to see one which I would consider "perfect", but I thought Chumlum by Ron Rice came quite close to my ideal of beautiful moving images.

Best thing you've read recently?

Piero Heliczer's collected poetry has been really inspiring. Don't understand much of it but I guess that's the point, but his bravura word and image pile-ups sure fire up my imagination.

Push comes to shove, top 5 favorite albums ever? (I'm guessing Twin Infinitives is right up there...)

Maybe it is, but picking just 5 Neil Hagerty-related records would be a major chore, let alone 5 from the whole damn history of music. I'd have to have the first Velvets (maybe that acetate version too for variety). Starsailor by Tim Buckley. CCCC, Bismillah Khan and Hawkwind would have to be there. Can I include every free jazz record made between 1965-75 in my top 5? I honestly like them all.

Favorite Saturday night activity?

Played a gig in Glasgow with Blood Stereo and Chris Corsano/Heather Leigh Murray last Saturday night and that's as good as it usually gets.

Supposedly fun/interesting thing that you've never quite "gotten" or just don't like?

Any kind of sport. Especially watching it which seems spectacularly pointless though I can see the fun in playing it.

I just have to ask: The band name - originally a play on the early 70s private press album Astral Navigations?

I'm asked this one all the time. Yes. It's a terrible record, though.

Best piece of advice you ever received?

Someone told me to stretch new guitar strings before you put them on and they'll go out of tune less. It works too. NOBODY else ever told me this and I never read it anywhere (not that I, er, read guitar books or magazines and that). A DRUMMER told me that as well (thanks Neil!) so go figure.

Final words of wisdom?

I am 38 years old tomorrow but that doesn't make me wise. Just old.

Zelienople is a Chicago trio that takes their favorite bits of atmospheric sound from the last four decades and places them in one big pot of simmering ambience. Their music glides elegantly through cinematic dreamscapes, urban fog, stretched-out tone clusters, free-flowing improvisations, corrosive string ceremonies and detailed mantras of fragmentized noise. Given their sonic focus, most of their output is surprisingly moody and melancholic; never letting things to slip away too far from the organic base they refer to as home.

What they do is to construct stunningly delicate and convincingly toned down sound sculptures, slow building, trance inducing improv and texturally challenging drone music that is packed with so much emotion and darkly seducing beauty that it sucks the listener in time after time. We got in touch with Mike Weis and Matt Christensen to learn how they're capable of turning blurry shots of empty city streets or natural landscapes into immortal music.

How did you initially hook up and what lead to the decision to form Zelienople? Who was in the band at this time?

Mike: Zelienople was started by Matt Christensen and Brian Harding back in ‘96 or ‘97. They started to get together to make 4-track recordings and began titling the cassettes "Zelienople" after they returned from an ill-fated trip out east. They took the name from the town where their car broke down at in Pennsylvania. I rented a practice space a few rooms down from them in this old haunted building above an antique shop on the far north side of Chicago. Most of the other rooms were occupied by shitty metal bands and Smashing Pumpkins-wanna-bees, so when I heard these incredibly loud drones coming from their room I was intrigued. We met and started as a trio shortly thereafter, spending loads of time on recording and jamming, finally venturing out three years later to play shows in Chicago.

Where did you all come from musically speaking?

Mike: At the time Matt and Brian were really into the ‘90s Space Rock vibe and heavy shoegaze acts like Flying Saucer Attack, Spaceman 3, My Bloody Valentine etc. I also think Matt was way into the ambient stuff like Eno and the early electronica scene like The Orb, early Aphex Twin, Orbital and others I can't remember. I was into all of this stuff too and at the time I was really getting into North African Sufi music after a friend took me to a Master Musicians of Jajouka concert. That show changed how I thought about music. Shortly thereafter, I started taking lessons from a master drummer from Ghana and eventually playing in his ensemble for a brief period.

It's fascinating to hear how much getting into North African Sufi music has meant to your own musical development. Care to describe what it was that initially caught your attention? Do you think it has influenced the sound of Zelienople in any way?

Mike: I was initially attracted to the hypnotic, ritualistic aspect of Sufi music. It was like a 1000 year old pre-cursor to My Bloody Valentine to my ears! I realized that the emphasis on that kind of music wasn't focused on one thing and separated so clearly by who was doing what. I really responded to that, it took the ego out of the group which was something that is so distracting to me in a lot of western music, especially Rock. It's like looking at a sunset and only admiring the fiery ball on the horizon instead of appreciating the whole landscape before you. With Zelienople, we're a somewhat conventional rock band because Matt is writing the songs and then he's presenting them to Brian and me but I still think it's an ego-less project because he's open to us to interpret his songs instead of mapping out the direction the song should go. Most of the time, the finished song is practically unrecognizable from Matt's initial demo version. The three of us contribute to the general mood and atmosphere of the song, which has always superseded any linear narrative or obvious rhythm which usually demands attention and focus. Instead, we spend much more time on sounds, textures a mood. Our individual parts end up sounding incredible subtle which can be frustrating for someone who is looking to scrutinize our technique.

How would you describe your early sound compared to what you're up to these days? How did your first official recording come about?

Matt: Our first recording that we ever sent out or sold at shows was a 4 song EP called Green As A Feather. There were plenty of recordings before that, but nothing that anyone else has heard. We used to work on recordings and songs and not worry about using too many tracks or instruments in a song. If we'd use a different keyboard on each song, we wouldn't worry about it. It would get to the point where we'd either have a song that was near impossible for 3 people to do live, and/or require a full van-load of gear to take to a show. We were also doing a lot of programming and sequencing. With Pajama Avenue (our first label release), we didn't do any sequencing, but there's still plenty of synth on that record. That record was inspired by Talking Heads' Remain In Light and an interview with Peter Gabriel where he said that "Shock The Monkey" was intended to be a tribute to the Motown sound. I thought that it'd be cool to do a rhythm-heavy album. Sleeper Coach was another kitchen sink record, but inspired by George Harrison's All Things Must Pass. That changed when we recorded Ink. I really wanted to do some Phil Spector type recordings. We started to record live, and I switched from bass to guitar. As a result, our sound really started to change. It may not sound that way to other people, but it does to us.

It's interesting to hear that Talking Heads inspired that first album of yours as terms like ambient, drone and cosmic exploration would feel more at home when describing your slow motion grandeur at this period of time. Given the inspiration, what would you say makes it sound (in my ears) more like Landing or even Windy & Carl than... well... Talking Heads?

Matt: I can see Landing more than Windy & Carl. I don't know. I just remember thinking about that band a lot at the time. 

Mike: We probably share a lot of the same influences as those two bands, we were just late to leave the practice space. Honestly, I never heard of Windy & Carl and Landing until someone noticed the similarities in our sound. That's kind of how I find out about new bands. I understand that someone would say that we have an affinity with those bands but I can't say that we were influenced by them. That dreamy, spacey sound probably comes from our interest in early ‘90s dream-pop, space-rock and shoegaze. All three of us were way into Spaceman 3/ Spiritualized, Flying Saucer Attack, Slowdive, etc. when we met in ‘95. Matt has always been obsessed with the Talking Heads album Remain In Light which Brian Eno had a huge hand in the producing and collaboration of that record. At the time, we were both crazy about anything that Eno did so we tracked down nearly everything that he touched. Our tastes have definitely broadened since then but I still go back to those records occasionally. There's been a resurgence of that sound lately but nothing seems very inspired to me with the exception of Grouper's last record which is absolutely gorgeous. 

I totally agree with you that Ink somehow meant a slight stylistic shift for the band. I think I once described it as an album that elegantly glides through cinematic dreamscapes, urban fog, free-flowing improvisations, corrosive string ceremonies and detailed mantras of fragmentized noise. Given its sonic style it's somewhat surprising how organic and deeply emotional it is. Is that sort of effect something you intentionally aim for when creating music?

Matt: We do try to get the most "inspired" take of a song. To me, that's one of the most frustrating things about making music. You always want it to sound great, but that doesn't stop a fight between you and your partner, a cold, or just an especially shitty mood from affecting the outcome. All of those things I mentioned can also be a boon too. But sometimes there's no explanation for why something sounds dull, and that's the worst.

Mike: I think we subconsciously work towards a very emotional end result, even though the means might seem antithetical to what most would consider "feeling-laden" or "expressionistic". I mean we don't scrape and bow and produce ugly sounds for the point of making some kind of avant statement or to be overtly difficult, it's just a means to produce a record that you can sink into instead of study. I think our goal is to always produce a record that is beautiful and that you can respond to emotionally whether we're using guitars or home-made instruments, multi-tracking or free-improvising while the tape is rolling. 

It's interesting to hear you describe how it sometimes is difficult to describe why something sounds dull, and I guess the same can be said the other way around. How significant is improvisation and chance to what you do?

Matt: Improvisation and chance are a huge part, but I think that inspiration would be a better word. You know, fuck it. You were right in the first place. There's been plenty of times where we'll really try to iron out a song to where the playing is right where everyone wants it and the recording quality is as good as it can be. 9 times out of 10, the recording quality is usually the only thing that ends up sounding better, with each subsequent take getting more and more limp performance-wise.

Mike: Yeah, the more we attempt multiple takes of a song the flatter it usually ends up. You always think, it can be better but then you end up beating it into oblivion and you've found that you wasted the night trying to recreate a once inspired moment that you lost and will never gain back. When I listen to past recordings of our stuff the best songs were the ones that seem impossible to recreate, that happened to occur quickly and luckily the tape was rolling. That said, we don't openly "jam" or improvise for hours, we usually have a pretty good idea of the path we want the song to go and just start playing and it might decide to take a totally different direction. That's why we radically change most of our songs when we perform them live because it's futile and boring to just play it like a cover song. Luckily our song structures are pretty elastic anyway so it makes for a more inspired performance when we fuck with the tempo or texture or even the instrument arrangement from the original recordings.

You mention that you change a lot of the songs when playing live. What can the audience expect from a Zelienople show? Do you play live on a regular basis?

Matt: We try to come up with a new set every time we play, with revamps of our recorded songs. We also try to compose a new piece for every show. That doesn't always work, because we tend to change our minds about stuff right up until the last minute. You can really be into a song, but the next day realize that it's not up to speed. We do play live on a regular basis.

Mike: Well, "Moss Man" has been a regular in our sets for the past year and it's one of the few songs that we play live that is close to how we recorded it although the second half is always a free-for-all. Other than that, most songs get a live make-over...looser and more open so that we can adapt our surroundings and how we're feeling during the show. We also construct songs specifically for a performance that may or may not ever be played or recorded again. We've been doing this since we started playing shows. I like that quote from Eric Dolphy, "When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air. You can never capture it again." We play out in Chicago quite a bit, at the most once a month but usually every other month. We don't get out of town much, a few one-offs in the Midwest and last spring we did a short tour out to New York with Xela which was a lot a fun.

How have you been received by the audiences that you have played to? Any special live anecdotes you'd wish to share with us?

Matt: Oh man, that really varies. I think that in general, most people don't like us. I think that some people get the impression that we try to challenge the audience or that entertaining the   audience is low on our list, and the second half may be true by default. I hope that clubs continue to support us. In the last couple of years I've been happier with our live shows. We tend to walk away from performances knowing that we did what we wanted to do. We've had a few shows where funny stuff happened. Mike lost bearings for a little bit once on stage, and he walked over to Brian for some support. Brian ended up spitting water on his face (not intentionally) because he was laughing so hard. We opened for Mum once, and I was having some digestive issues. It was either try to make it through the packed house in the middle of the set (and in the middle of singing), or go in my pants. I decided to go in my pants (it didn't happen). I guess that these anecdotes aren't that cool.

Mike: I'd have to disagree with Matt about this one. We usually get pretty positive feedback from the audience. Most shows, people will just sit on the floor in front of us or lay down and stare at the ceiling. More people are coming out just to see us these days rather than the other bands on the bill which was the case for many years. The New York shows were really incredible with large turn-outs and very attentive listeners. I was kind of surprised by this. I thought New Yorkers were jaded but it turns out I think Chicagoans are probably the ones who have the "guilty until proven innocent" charge for bands.

Tell us about Stone Academy. How did that one come about and how would you say that it connects and differs to your previous work?

Matt: Stone Academy is definitely more song based than some of our more recent stuff. I guess that when I look at the timeline of the releases, Stone Academy was the start of a departure to more free-form songs. I guess I shouldn't really refer to one record being more song based than another, some songs are more conventional. We just started to get weirder around that time. I think that free jazz started to have a big influence in that record. Most people don't hear it, maybe I don't either, but I know that we were all thinking about it a lot more during that period. We also started to use our homemade instruments around that time. In general, the record was a collection of songs vs. a "concept album".

Mike: I think this album is where that elasticity of song structure that I was talking about began. Ink was a full-blown improvised experiment with the home-made instruments but Stone Academy is where we took this freedom and applied it to songs. Matt's right, we were really getting into free-jazz and improvised music in general around this point and finally found a way to include it into our vocabulary. Also, this is when we started recording stuff live straight to tape instead of the multi-tracking methods of our first two records. Again, this was a way of being more free with our approach and also a way to have more fun with the recording process. Multi-tracking can get pretty tedious. I also think the experiments with Ink opened us up to a wider range of sounds that we were capable of making just as a group in a room, making the most of the instruments in front of us instead of relying on overdubs.

I know that this probably is like choosing a favourite child or something but I am curious to hear which album you're most pleased with. How come?

Matt: I would have a hard time deciding, but I know that I listen to Land Of Smoke more than anything else. We were really all on the same page, and it reminds me of driving at night.

Mike: Stone Academy still surprises me, sometimes it doesn't even sound like us for some reason. I think there were some really inspired moments during those recordings. His/Hers is a very tight record, nothing to shrug off as filler.

I love the artwork for most of your albums. That sense of blurry urbanity somehow captures the spacious dream world that your music seems to occupy. Who is usually responsible for the cover art? Any favorites you'd like to point out?

Mike: Thanks Mats. For the most part, we've used my photos for all of our designs with the exception of His/Hers, the vinyl version of Stone Academy and Ink. I think my favorite design is the first one, Pajama Avenue. I shot photos for that album of solitary pedestrians among the architecture in neighborhoods of Chicago. I shot those in 2001 and five years later most of those buildings were gone. During this time Chicago went through a real estate boom and the tycoons were eager to put up condos in every crack of the city. It was a bad few years for architecture preservation. It's easier and cheaper to tear down buildings rather than restore them and of course the Real Estate companies have a shit-load of power in this corrupt town so they trumped (no pun intended) most attempts to save older buildings, especially in the neighborhoods. It's ridiculous, because the buildings that they replaced with the ones that they tore down in those photos were just modern imitations of the originals. Greedy people have no interest in aesthetics, now the neighborhoods are stuck with these eyesores and the ones who made these shitty buildings split for the suburbs. I'm sorry, we were talking about album art right?

Matt: I really like the Bachelor's Grove EP artwork too.

Do you feel a part of any musical movement?

Matt: We're not part of a movement. I think that if you had to define us, we're a combination of blues, jazz and drone. Someone once tried to convince me that "drone" wasn't a genre.

Mike: I can't say that we really align ourselves with any sort of movement although we've definitely formed some close relationships with like-minded artists within the last few years. We've met a lot of people via music trades, setting up shows and hosting out-of-towners.  I guess one would say our common link is that we all seem to fall in the all-encompassing pile of the neo-psychedelic underground, even though this may refer to an expansive aesthetic, from delicate folk to harsh noise. There's definitely a community of us out there around the world that share a lot of things in common that bring us together to help each other out with releases and shows, etc. or to simply turn each other on to new music. It's funny, we've been a band in Chicago for nearly a decade but I've never really consider us part of the Chicago scene. I think we have more in common with what's going on in New Zealand or in Portland than what's going on down in the Wicker Park neighborhood!

When doing my mag and the small record label I have like you never really felt part of a local scene, rather part of some vague international concept of things that in one way or the other connect to one another. Even though that's the case I am still curious to learn more about Chicago. Tell us about the city and how you fit in there? Does your surroundings color your sound?

Mike: How do I answer this question without sounding like Jim O'Rourke! Let me say first that we've had great support from the beginning from Pete Toalson at the Empty Bottle. He loved our first demos that we sent him when he started booking at the club and he has booked us great shows ever since. Also, the local press here is really good for underground music. Most cities don't have a weekly newspaper that will give the same amount of coverage to experimental music as it does mainstream rock. We're fortunate that there are writers in this town that are enthusiastic and have a wide range of interests. On the downside, I've noticed that the days of mixing up the genres has kind of disappeared and everyone's back to the boring ways of sticking together in cliques. Back in the nineties, there was so much cross-pollination in the underground. You could see Gastr Del Sol and Peter Brötzmann on a bill together for example. The experimental scene coalesced more back then. John Corbett and Ken Vandermark were booking free-jazz shows at the rock club, Empty Bottle on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. It was great ‘cause it introduced free jazz and improvised music to a lot of indie-rock fans, myself included. Other venues that were open to this kind of vibe closed down, I'm thinking of The Nervous Center. Sadly, the jazz shows retreated to their own DIY bookings at various spots around town, which is totally commendable but they just kept an exclusive seal on the little niche that they were carving out for themselves. Same thing for the noise scene, the electro-acoustic scene, electronic and drone scenes, etc. It's nice that we live in a town that actually has this wide variety of underground music but 10 years ago it was all mixed up together and it was expected that you might have Vandermark playing on the same bill as Kevin Drumm and Frontier. Now the only time this kind of hybridization happens is when The Wire magazine curates their festival here for a week. Pete at the Empty Bottle tried to bring this back but I think turn-out was too bleak for them to keep that series afloat. I try to do this when I have the luxury of putting a bill together but few people seem to be receptive to it anymore, especially the free jazz clique.

As for how our surroundings color our sound, that's more difficult to answer. I was recently listening to Valet and Grouper, who are both from Portland, and immediately I get transported to that northwest landscape. Water and the ocean seem to be recurring themes in Liz's lyrics and the vibe of both Valet and Grouper has this dense lost in a pine forest sound. I was thinking that our music has a similar feeling but with a different landscape being portrayed like alleys and decaying architecture perhaps.

Matt: Mike pretty much summed it up. I would add that in some ways, I'm glad that we don't have as much of a "scene" here, although I am a little bit envious of Portland.

What's new in terms of recent/upcoming releases?

Mike: Root Strata recently released a very limited DVD-r called Land of Smoke, which is kind of like an ambient video of sorts in the vein of Eno's Thursday Afternoon. The Type Records sub-label, Rite will be releasing a long ambient piece that we intended to be used for an art installation of mine. This will probably be a winter release. We're currently working on a new album for Type. Other than that, there are some miscellaneous compilations coming out sometime soon they say: an A Capella 7" compilation on Root Strata, something on the Australian label Sound & Fury, another comp on the Seattle label Omiimii and we have a song on the audio portion of an art book called Signs of The Apocalypse or Rapture. There also might be a split 7" coming out later this year on Sound & Fury. Some side project releases coming out are the new Good Stuff House CD (which is me, Matt and Scott Tuma) on Root Strata, Scott Tuma/Mike Weis duo LP on Digitalis, Xela/Mike Weis LP on Digitalis and possibly the Xela/Matt Christensen collaboration will hopefully see the light of day.

Matt: Yep. That's enough for now. I'd like to add some more of our outtakes for free download on our website. I've been posting a few here and there in the last month.

Scott Tuma is such a criminally overlooked musical genius. How did you come to work with him? I just love the results on that first self-titled Good Stuff House disc. How do you think it turned out?

Mike: Yeah, I agree Tuma's solo albums are so incredible. He has such a distinct sound, very original. He has a way of adapting his vast knowledge of the history of American music into his own creation, stretching it out and blurring it. The whole Post-Rock thing took this idea of adaptation and made it a bit cheap. Just because your influences are vast and obscure doesn't mean you're creating something new, just representing it really. In a way, Scott's in league with Loren Connors who also takes the history of a tradition (with Connors it's blues) and constructs into his own statement. Both of them seem to arrive at a common end, which is highly emotional, melancholic music.  We met Scott in 2003. I was putting together a show in town and I was really into his first solo album at the time. When I found out that he was from Chicago I tracked him down to see if he wanted to play on the bill, which he did. After that I organized another show at an old church in town and asked him to play and possibly collaborate on a song. I think that might've been the first time that we did an all-improvised live set. Things went well with that so we continued the relationship. I think initially the reason we got to together was to add some instrumentation to some of Scott's solo songs but it just kind of took off on its own direction so we decided to give the project a name Good Stuff House, which was the name of a Chinese restaurant near my house. I think Matt and I have learned a lot from playing with Scott. The experience has made us more comfortable with improvising. It's super easy to play with these two guys, it's effortless and the ideas just come quickly. I really love that first GSH record, I think the results really reflect the collective approach. The new album dilutes our separate styles even more and stands on its own legs a little better.

Matt: I don't have a copy of the first one any more, but I used to listen to it a lot. I need to burn one from Mike. Scott's great. Mike said it all.

Dreams for the future (except for a Scandinavian tour that is!)?

Matt: I'd love to do a film score. I wish that there were more places to play within 4 hours of Chicago. I'd like to get on the road a little bit more than we do now. It might be kind of cool to have someone outside of the band produce us too.

Mike: I'd love to tour Scandinavia, show us the money!

One-man folk/psych/drone ensemble The Goner AKA Daniel Westerlund is unquestionably one of my favorite sonic discoveries of 2008. He delivers spiritual music that accompanies dreams, as it organically flows across the sky when you're walking to work and creeps up on you when you least expect it to. It's tempting to place his work along the lines of Hush Arbors and Six Organs of Admittance and although that's true you can also hear his background in the lo-fi scene. We got in touch with Westerlund to learn more about where he's coming from and what's next.

Do you remember when music really caught your attention for the first time?

While growing up I quickly followed my older sisters' footsteps in that I got interested in electronic/danceable and goth music. My sister was in it for the social reasons - her boyfriend at the time was a Dave Gahan-clone and she spent every night out clubbing, but I was interested in the sounds. So while she was out meeting people her eleven year old little brother borrowed the records to his room. And I was deeply into this sort of music for five-six years. But when I heard the Palace Brothers single "Come In" played on MTV's Alternative Nation (the episode was guest-hosted by Belgian artrockers dEUS I remember) I guess we can say it was the first time when music "really caught my attention". "Come In" changed how I listened to music completely, I was in awe of its simplicity, the voice of Will Oldham, the timeless feel of the recording. I sold my record collection immediately to the nearest goth chic and started collecting singer-songwriter, lo-fi and to some degree American folk music. This was in 1993/94 so there was the whole lo-fi scene of the period erupting and having an international impact. At the same time Internet was becoming a household word and I remember being on the Palace Music mailing list trading bootleg cassettes and getting a lot of good recommendations for similar bands and record companies. So not only was "Come In" an eye-opener for me musically but the way these bands released records and interacted was a whole new scene for me. I mean the grass root feel of the whole thing.

What did your earliest recordings consist of? How did The Goner come to be?

Well the absolutely first recording I made was probably my own rendition of "The Robots" by Kraftwerk on a really bad-sounding digital synthesizer. I must've been about twelve. Fast forward about sixteen years - past bad lo fi-rock and later Shellac-influenced projects that never amounted to anything substantial - and we end up in and with my present situation and interests. When I started writing and recording music again I hadn't been playing seriously for years. Instead I had been caught up in literature. Publishing books (in 2005 I started the small Eolit Press with a friend) and at the same time trying to write a novel of my own. Running Eolit Press has been and is a lot of fun but it takes a lot of work, and I realised just about a year ago that creatively there is no comparison between editing books and playing music. And not just in the music itself but also with the technology and communities that are available for musicians. With music you don't limit yourself language-wise like you do in writing and publishing as a Swede. Sweden is a very small country and the literary scene seems unable to handle more than one trend (or quality if you like) at a time. So it was important for me to have the The Goner recordings as a sort of limit-free zone. I wanted to find something other than the frustrating slow machinery of releasing books.

Did you have any specific goal in mind when you began recording as The Goner? Do you see any philosophical overtones in what you are doing?

The only goal I had was to launch the H-TRILOGY and see where it led me. When I started I only had material for the first part Halartrallar and a few sketches for the rest. I was still learning the laptop studio while recording Halartrallar and I discovered new toys all the time. Production-wise that first part isn't very good. It doesn't sound that good to me but it was necessary to finish it and get it out in order for me to understand how to get better and what I wanted for the next parts Hind Hand and Haven. For each record I found new things and new doors - that is: new instruments and functions of the studio. You have to be exposed to your limitations if you want to grow.
For Hind Hand I found a bomb shelter that some local graffiti-kids had transformed into a nightly hang-out. It had amazing acoustics so I decided to record some parts of the CD-R there. One afternoon while recording in the shelter - which I named The Drone Hut - I got an audience with some of the aforementioned graffiti -kids and one confused elderly man. They seemed to like the banjo.
Philosophy-wise it is too personal to discuss. There are definitely spiritual aspects of playing repetitive music but recording it has so far been a little too "dry". Hopefully in the future I will be able to be more spontaneous while recording and have more of the improvisational aspects of the instrumental pieces represented on the records.

When it comes to that repetitive aspect of what you do I am curious to know if that is something you intentionally strive for or something that just happens.

It differs from song to song. Surely when you start moulding a looped beat you're pretty much certain of what's going to happen. And I like that way of doing music. To start with the rhythm and continue upwards. For Haven I bought a bodhran drum and I had a lot of fun just banging away on it and then adding stuff. But occasionally the repetition just kicks in unintentionally while recording. For example the second and slower part of "Field Ceremony" happened that way. And on most songs on Hind Hand I just pressed record and started playing with whatever instrument I had in my hands. I strive to co-operate with the random factors and "mistakes" as much as I can, since recording at home on your laptop is usually a pretty rational process.

You mention that you previously were really into writing.  Do you see your songs as stories or is it purely music? The reason I am asking is since I often feel that your music (also the instrumental tracks) tells a story.

It's very hard to release something on record and perceive it as purely music. Even if I would have untitled songs and just blank or no covers at all the music will be interpreted in whatever context it is in. So to some degree there's always a story. But I have no problem with this. And when it comes to the instrumental tracks I like the play between song title and music. I like to throw the listener (and myself) in a certain direction. The title of the track is often with me as a starting point during the recording process.

What do you want people to experience from your music?

A very hard question to answer. Certainly I have ideas for each song of what I want the emotional range to include. But it is so intangible and volatile and it differs from day to day. And I think it could be dangerous to verbalize your thoughts on this too much.

I'm going to throw out a few words/bands that come to mind while listening to your music and feel free to comment:

Repetition   Yes I am interested in applying repetitive structures to droney/ambient sounds. I like that mix very much. Creating danceable music with instruments from the psychedelic rockband formula or with only acoustic instruments is something I'd like to do more of. I like the feeling of the repetitive rhythm or riff in my feet while doing whatever I want with the guitar or microphone through a thousand or more effect pedals...

Appalachian folk   "Appalachian" is a real buzzword with me. Not only musically speaking but also the topography. And I haven't even been there, mind you. I have a friend living in rural Alabama and hopefully he will invite me over soon... I bought my five string banjo with the intention of learning to play old timey and bluegrass material the way it should be played. But being a very restless person I couldn't bother learning the exact finger-picking technique, now I just play it and tune it the way I want. I think that the process of recording the H-TRILOGY has taught me to have a more relaxed relationship with musical instruments than before in that I am more interested in the sound of the instrument rather than the tradition of the instrument. So for example a lot of the drumming you hear on the CD-Rs is just me banging away on the skin of the banjo....

Psychedelia   I use the word "psychedelia" as a synonym of "eclectic". Layer upon layer. Through music blogs such as Mutant Sounds you can expose yourself to a whole world of forgotten psychedelic music, in the traditional sense of the word, but really it's the music blog scene of today taken as a whole that is truly psychedelic. Endless sound exploration. It is as invigorating as it is scary!

Six Organs of Admittance   One of the few bands that I have been really interested in following in the last five-six years. And as with many artists the first releases are the most interesting. A release I have been playing over and over this year is the amazing The Snowbringer Cult out on Students of Decay. Part of its appeal for me is that it brings to mind some of the early work of Ben Chasny. It's the esoteric feel of the recording. The cheap recording equipment. It sounds otherworldly.

Drone  For all my devoted listening hours to drone music I haven't been comfortable in working fully with drone myself. I haven't felt confident doing it. Maybe because I have spent most of life writing songs but also because I have lacked a proper studio/rehearsal space where I could turn up the volume.

What is the future of the Goner?

Well, it's been a lot of fun inviting other musicians than myself to the recordings and just recently playing the first proper gig (with Thorbjörn Skoglund on bass and Johan Knudsen on acoustic guitar). We received a lot of nice feedback after playing live so the next step is to set up a good rehearsal studio and then invite more musicians to the line-up in order to do more gigs. And I hope to find a record company to discuss a proper release. Self-promoting and self-releasing is quite tiresome in the long run.

Do you recall when you first got interested in music? Who/what first inspired you to want to make sounds?

First of all I have to say that my childhood memories aren't very clear. So what I mention here might have some kind of a fictive touch. I've heard that my mother did some singing with my sister and me from the start. My own first warm musical memory though is about jamming on bongos and dancing very intensively around to this fantastic swinging LP music called Something New from Africa. Miriam Makeba and a lot of South African kids playing tin whistles and swinging so very nice. I loved that LP! I must have been around 6-7 years or so. And about a year or two later I got my first used ‘Premier' jazz-kit and started some very nice duo jazz/impro-sessions with my father in our basement room. He's an amateur sax and flute player. My mother played her classical amateur clarinet too, so her music and practicing also flew around somehow? Around that same time I borrowed and explored a huge marimba and loved to jam and improvise jazzy and bluesy stuff on this warm wooden instrument. And the piano was there too. So my first musical lessons were more like jazz, impro and blues than rock or classical stuff. I think around 12 years old or so I started to play with my father's amateur jazz groups around. Kind of a strange upper sit situation compared to many other kids at that time, being able to ‘swing' a whole lot, but not really being able to play a proper heavy 4/4 rock beat! Musically it was another world being in quite early on...I mean compared to and in musical relation to most other kids of the same age.

That's a pretty unusual way to kick things off. When did you start doing your own music? Care to tell us about some of the early projects/bands?

At the age of 15 or so I met same aged great Danish guitarist Stephan Sieben and we started to collaborate and did some intense duo impro explorations the following years with him as a sound wizz guitarist and me on drums and trash metal percussion. I have a bunch of minidisk recordings of these sessions. Long weird, hypnotic and freakout scapes. Will maybe let some of them out sometime. We later started a band including bass and sax called Fumier for which I wrote quite a few compositions. It's something like weird structured themes and grooves mixed with impro/etno/punkfunk. Some of the late music from this quartet is probably going to be released on LP on Qbico sometime in 2009. Fumier broke up 2002 and meanwhile Stephan and I developed a trio called Trio Trash. In this constellation I got very ambitious with writing longer and more complex compositions with space for impro-parts here and there. We also collaborated with a string trio and recorded a CD-R and two CDs. This music was indeed about breaking down boundaries between so-called ‘classical' and ‘rhythmical' music. We aimed at a disintegration of musical genres in a very explicit manner. Some of this music is available through the distro on my label ‘empty sounds rec.'. Trio Trash broke up some years ago.

Did you have any specific goal in mind when you began recording as Elektronavn? Do you see any philosophical overtones in what you are doing?

During the Trio Trash period I slowly began not being satisfied with playing the drums anymore. I had always been integrating strange found objects in my drum setups, because I wanted another sound than just the traditional drum-kit sound. I wanted weird sounds! And if I couldn't get my musical colleagues to produce them, I realized I had to do it myself. And suddenly I realized I had to open much more up for other objects, instruments, technologies and thinkings, and the drums just had to be dropped for some time, to be able to reach some steps further in my musical and artistical development. It was kind of a hard time not being in touch with this very befriended instrument I've always been playing on. But it was a good and developing decision.

I met Marc Kellaway (Exquisite Russian Brides and Pink Luminous Invocation) on the University of Copenhagen. He introduced me to computer programs where you could put in your recorded sounds and twist them around. Thanks Marc :-) This was how Elektronavn started around 2004. The first couple of CD-R releases were aesthetically very much something like explicit post modernistic playing around with musical traditions and genres. I still had this urge for mixing genres. I liked the sound and the aesthetic of cultures clashing. Putting together elements, traditions and feelings that earth-wise didn't match traditionally. An urge for The big clash!

Today I prefer what we could call an implicit pluralism as musical method. We could also use another word like ‘syncretism.' It's a more smooth and subtle way of using and mixing different traditions. Maybe in a way like the 20^th century spiritual path ‘Theosophy.'. Not that I consider myself as a "declared musical theosophist," I generally just admire an open-minded mixing of methods and thoughts.

The last couple of years I've been very interested in practicing Yoga/meditation and studying Buddhistic philosophy. Yoga and meditation opens up your mind for larger Cosmic Scales and Buddhism urges a.o. Altruism. These beautiful recognitions I continuously try to integrate in my newer music. The problem is just that I also know of suffering and therefore also need to communicate this state of mind. Lately I read this fine statement from a very spectacular Buddhistic monk called Matthieu Ricard: "Western art aims at awakening passions, sacred art aims at damping them down" [transl. from Danish by m.o.m.]. Maybe we've heard these quite smooth soundscapes in so-called ‘New Age Music' and think it's ‘too nice'? Well...I agree to some point. There must be a way of making interesting complex constructive abstract music that has lots of differentiated earthly facets and still doesn't damage our body, minds and energies...a kind of music that helps and heal our earth and fellow human beings! Even though this statement might sound a little naive in some ears and minds, I think I would like to explore such a constructive way forward from here :-)

It's interesting to hear that you aim for a sonic combination of that spiritual side of things and the general state of suffering. Personally I feel both these poles are brilliantly displayed in your music. What's the key to your success? How do you do it?

There are of course different ways of explaining talent and why you choose whatever you do in your life...spiritual explanations...western academic explanations...and subjective understandings. So we could use terms as ‘re-incarnation', ‘social and cultural heritage', ‘genetics' and ‘chance'. I really find the idea of re-incarnation very interesting, but that doesn't exclude the rest! If you look deep inside maybe via spiritual contemplation you'll find resources and capabilities. Also have to mention that what you call ‘my success' or talent is not seen as talent/success everywhere ;-)

Another answer would be that one and a half years ago I decided to make music very focused! Why not create music with all my powers I told myself, and so I did. I also found a rehearsal room where I could play louder than in my "home-studio". So the last year (2007) has been kind of manic and prolific related to music production. I also decided that my music shouldn't be concerned with moneymaking. So of course I don't earn much money but as a Buddhist would say: "If you have nothing and you're content...you're the richest" :-)!

Your music is pretty much impossible to lump into any particular genre but there is a strong folk vibe that runs through a lot of the music, even the more experimental and psychedelic parts. Do you play folk in the traditional sense of the word?

I really love almost all kinds of folk music from around our Earth. Indian spiritual music, South Indian folk singing, Armenian sad heavenly duduk, Scandinavian folk., Africa, the Middle East. There's some kind of immediate vigor and warm timbre in much folk music that I really admire. To answer your question... no! I'm not a folk musician in the traditional sense of the word. I've never really been interested in copying styles or genres explicitly. But whenever I can get my hands into all kind of exotic instruments from around the world I grab them and try to learn to play and how to use them in my music. Just to mention a few instruments from my active arsenal: mridangam, zurnai, bansuri, kyotaku, udo, gongs, cello, clarinet, flute, violin ...

Personally I find a strong bond between Elekronavn and cross-pollinating groups like Vibracathedral Orchestra, Pelt and even Sandoz Lab Technicians. Do you agree?

Actually I've primarily heard the names and not the sounds of these bands. The last couple of years I couldn't really afford buying music, so what I hear is either myspace or what I can borrow from our library and friends and what I trade with labels that release my music. That said, I just got my hands on a Pelt CD some weeks ago though...that was through trading. Would love to hear these bands ;-) By the way I think inspiration/relation comes a lot more from e.g. films by Russian director Andrej Tarkovskij's Stalker or Mirror or maybe from philosophy and spirituality and human moods than from bands.

When did you first realize the creative possibilities of incorporating field recordings into your work?

Olivier Messian transcribed bird singing into orchestral music. Varese and Russolo imitated noise. Anthropological auditive scientific work, Musique Concrete, Cage! The 20^th century story about everything's possibility of being understood and used as possible music or art ...even ideas and concepts. Well... my mother gave me a minidisk recorder 10 years ago and since then I've had a lot of interesting recording sessions in the city and in nature with my auditive "camera". I make archives and just use them creatively in my compositions whenever possible. I also manipulate them. I've made one early Elektronavn album called Rationale Mystique that really has this technique very much in the foreground. And later albums just use field recordings from the old or new archives whenever needed. I love field recordings mixed into ‘traditional music'. Something that can be explored a whole lot more I think.

I totally agree with you that field recordings can be used a whole lot more in music in general. Do you see the field recordings as "just another instrument" or is it deeper than that?

Hmmm....well? We have to define the term ‘field recordings' then? This earth is where we live and we want to tell some stories more or less abstract about all the facets of being on this earth using the elements of what's around here and limited to the capacity of our state of mind. Is a ‘musician' limited to the audible world? Well...the artistic areas have been expanding and transforming a lot during the last century. And of course music has been used in many different ways through out history of humanity e.g. sacred and ritual music, dance music and nowadays for e.g. commercial purpose.

If we compare composing music with a painter painting a picture, the palette is e.g. our Earth and it's up to the artist and his mind capability to use all or some elements on several levels in his art. So to answer your question: "Is field-recordings ‘just another instrument'"? Well...it depends on how you define and relate to this communication tool called ‘an musical instrument'. Do you think everything is separated from everything...or that everything is related to everything somehow? I think ‘field-recordings' used in man-made music is just a natural integration and transformation of everything's around. So you can ask..."Why isn't there e.g. sausages in music" ;-) and I would answer... "there is...somehow". Compared to most other animals, mankind just has the possibility of choosing what to use and not use!

Your music somehow seems equally drawn to the pulse of the big city as to the vastest countryside. Do you prefer being in the nature or the city?

In the city all our energies are very compressed. We live in small boxes on top of each other and it can be a challenge to find space for contemplation and fresh air. On the other hand the city is culturally multifaceted, you can easily socialize around and you're confronted with your fellow human beings and their good and bad sides. So the city is interesting but not always very healthy! My beloved just moved to the countryside and here you can relax much more and interact with the old nature which I love very much. When you are in nature it's like you remember yourself and ‘essential being' much more intensely. That said, both city and nature have "cruel" and "lovely" aspects. If you're trained everywhere is just perfect.

My first introduction to your music was through Songs of Impermanence on the Finnish Ikuisuus imprint. How did that release come about? Did you have particular ideas in mind for the album as a whole, how it was going to sound?

You can say Songs of Impermanence reflects a spiritual development or realization. We move from ‘Loss, grief, perishableness' and further on to ‘Impermanence, Emptiness'. This realization is to find out that everything's impermanent and thereby empty. That's the intellectual theme of the album.

When it comes to the technical composition, the album shows us two of many varied ways I work out Elektronavn compositions. The first track is based on an Elektronavn live recording I brought to my home studio and did a lot of additions on. The second track is all built up from scratch in my home studio. The album is also kind of distinct Elektronavn-wise because of the very explicit use of my voice with words. The last track is kind of a long strange folk song. I really have many different working methods...sometimes determined, most often intuitive and just letting go. Often a composition features elements from very varied work stations, methods and places.

If you'd compare it with your other outings what would you say are the unifying links and what sets them apart?

All my albums are actually quite different even though I hope you can hear some kind of a connection!? There's a gap from 2005-2007 where I didn't make any albums. 2008 will bring us quite a few new and very different Elektronavn releases. First of all there's a CD coming out on Ikuisuus called Cosmic Continuum. I think this is really a synthesis of everything I've done until now. It has a great production too I think. Qbico will release a LP in 2009 with strange hypnotic, repetitive impro stuff. Digitalis will release a CD where the instrumentation is very simple...only rusty piano, chant and cow bells! And then there's some CD-Rs coming on Rural Faune, Students of Decay and Secret Eye and more. All albums are quite different!

There seems to be quite a few releases in the pipeline. Do you see a risk with letting so much out at the same time?

In general I prefer quality much more than quantity. But what could I do! 2007 was such a crazy prolific year related to composing music...I just had to let go. And the labels were so very kind to release it in different ways. Of course I hope it's all quality...that's maybe up to you to decide? I didn't want to hold the stuff back and wait for the right offer and format. Besides from the quality/quantity issue I don't see any risk in letting all this out? Now I'll take a break though.

How do you describe your music when someone outside the "scene" asks, "What sort of music you're playing"?

Hmmm? Most times I just say ‘strange stuff' and tell them to listen to it. Other times I open up like in this interview.

What do you see as the ultimate environment for listening to Elektronavn?

I think people have to find out this for themselves? The environment is created in correlation between the music and the listener. Sometimes headphones are ideal, sometimes it has to go out into a big room and work in the room and the music gets more physical then? The best environment is maybe if everything absorbs into each other...the music the room the listener the sky the universe etc.

Do you play live? What can someone who is lucky enough to catch one expect from an Elektronavn live show?

Yeah I do play live. Often with a lot of instruments...hypnotic, freakout, singing. Sometimes just very simple! I've also been integrating some performance now and then. I really like playing live, the spontaneous nerve and interaction. The spirit of the Now!

Any plans of playing outside Denmark?

No, but I would love to! Maybe we'll do some touring in the future with co-band Pink Luminous Invocation and maybe we can put some Elektronavn acts in there? That would be cool.

Dreams for the future?

I'm actually fine where I am right now. Everything may change as well...and that's fine too! If I continue playing music, I certainly hope my music is going to help in some abstract way in healing up our Earth.

The reason I started thinking about contacting Montgomery for an interview was the release of Inroads, a dbl CD collection of singles and unreleased tracks that that truly works as balsam for the soul. In the liner notes Bill Meyer writes that "Montgomery's sounds do the trick because he's infused them with the power of his own memories and emotions, by drawing on his, he summons yours." It's obvious that you don't share his memories but that doesn't really matter as the effect-laden guitarscapes does an impressive job at transporting the listener wherever he or she feels it's necessary to go. As for myself these two discs made me see two entirely different things, first of all the heart and soul of a friend that recently passed away. He shared my love for Montgomery's music and to hear these classic singles played again is like walking on a vibrating guitar string straight to the place where he currently is. It's saddening but also powerful and intensely beautiful. On a happier note these tracks makes me revisit the dramatic natural vistas that my wife and I explored in New Zealand in the late ‘90s. Until we find the time to go back to what simply has to be the most beautiful part of the world, I am happy to relive those scenes from the south island and memories from the rugged coastline through the eyes and ears of Mr. Montgomery. Or as Meyer puts it: "This music carries a fade-resistant charge, it's ready to spark your own mind and help you map a life with sound. Time to hit the road."

DW: What are your earliest musical memories, Roy?

RM: I lived in Cologne, Germany in the early 1960s (my father was German). My mother worked at the British Forces Network radio station which meant a steady diet of British and American pop music at home rather than what Germany had to offer at the time - either knee-slapping oompah tunes or schmaltz around the clock. Saw GI Blues at a base cinema in about 1961 when I was 2. Elvis and I were in Germany about the same time. From there it was the Beatles' Hard Day's Night film which I saw in New Zealand in late 1964 and Rolling Stones live in Christchurch with Roy Orbison in March 1965. I can only say I saw the latter as the screaming drowned out the Vox amps. My Aunt still hasn't forgiven me for cajoling her into take me along (I was 5).

What did your earliest solo recordings consist of?

I started very informally doing acoustic recordings in about 1982 many of which mutated into later recordings of the early 1990s. They were mostly riffs or patterns rather than songs. I tend to work from that basis; if words or other parts follow, all well and good, if not, the riff may be enough to create the whole piece.

Have you always been interested in the more abstract side of the sound spectrum?

Always? No, but a few things really struck a chord, so to speak. The first was getting hold of a Hendrix EP with "Hey Joe" on it. That bent me a little out of shape, even at the age of 9. The first "abstract" (read "art rock") album that really made me sit up and listen, unlikely though it may sound, was the first Roxy Music album which of course had Brian Eno on board. That album, which I listened to every night for well over a year from 1972 into 1973 combined with "Virginia Plain" and "Pyjamarama," was a catalyst in terms of thinking that I wanted to get close to some of those sounds. In a pre-cursor of the Pin Group circa 1980 called Compulsory Fun we used to cover Virginia Plain and the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" at speeds equal to Hüsker Dü. I still have the tapes...

Did you have any specific goal in mind when you began recording as Roy Montgomery?

I think I probably had a series of sonic goals i.e., to get down particular sounds rather than express intellectual, political or other kinds of sentiments. That said, by doing solo material I wasn't bound by the idea of finishing works completely. I found the great advantage of four-track solo recording was that if I stuck to the principle of no more than four tracks for each piece in most cases it made me try to extract as much as I could from each run at it. Four on the floor and leave it at that.

Do you see any philosophical overtones in what you are doing?

If by that you mean some kind of weltangshauung, quite probably. I find Schopenhauer, Gogol, Kafka, Handke and W. G. Sebald a lot funnier than most people if that's any help.

You have a very unique voice when it comes to playing the guitar. Is this something you developed early on or something that has changed over the years?

This is a difficult question. From an early age I was something of a sponge if not discerning consumer of popular and slightly left of field music. For better or worse I am self-taught and have absolutely no idea of musical notation and am lucky if I can remember how to play a particular composition again after six months. The flipside is that I have always had a pretty good ear for music and can find out how others have made music by trial and error and consequently can experiment in my own headspace to come up with material. That seems to have held for more than a decade. Anyone can tell that my technique is not refined but I know how to layer relatively simple patterns to useful effect. The more I think about it the more I see the thread as Hendrix, Velvets, Stooges, (first three albums) Roxy Music, Pere Ubu, Wire because they all bend the guitar out of shape in some sort of primal way. I'm a footnote to a footnote to a footnote in that story.

I spent about a month on the southern Island in the late ‘90s and I have to say that I can't think of anything that better describes these dramatic landscapes than Scenes from the South Island. How do you think the natural beauty of NZ has influenced you as a musician? Care to tell us a bit about the background to this specific album?

Bluntly put, I came from a single parent family where a) Mom did not have a driver's license and b) we didn't go on many holidays when I was young whether overseas or around New Zealand. Consequently, shortly after my fifteenth birthday I bought a car, went for my driver's license and went into the hinterland of the South Island on any premise available. A lot of that hinterland was the more barren part of the Canterbury landscape which we call the High Country. Also, I'm still an immigrant at some level. I was born in London and lived in Germany until nearly five. Perhaps I don't take the landscape so much for granted. The thing I like most is the absence of things in the New Zealand landscape, especially people.

A lot of your releases have appeared on some of the finest labels on the planet (Drunken Fish, VHF, Kranky, Majora, Roof Bolt, Rebis to just mention a few). How did you first find a way into that "scene" of sorts?

Deep breath as I try to remember...I think I owe much of this networking to colleagues and friends e.g., Dadamah collaborators communicating in the early 90s with US label people and NZers such as Bruce Russell and Peter Jefferies acting as roving ambassadors in advance of my sorties to the US. I also owe much to the "radar" of mag and/or label people in the US like Leslie Gaffney (Popwatch), Jay Hinman (Superdope), the two Dans (Drag City), Scott Rutherford (Speed Kills), Mike Trouchon (Gyttja, Your Flesh), Sharon Mackenzie (Hecuba), Tim Adams (Ajax), the inimitable Bill Meyer (lots of mags and Roofbolt), the formidable Tom Lax (Siltbreeze) and of course the irascible Byron Coley (Forced Exposure). These people more or less roused me from some kind of slumber and are responsible for nurturing avant-garde music here in a way not matched by any others bar the odd German. For that I will always be grateful.

It was such a highlight to see all those singles compiled on the Rebis double disc set earlier this year. How did that release come about? How do you think it turned out?

An instrumental compilation was always envisaged as a complement to the vocal singles compilation, 324 E. 13th Street #7, and it was also slated for a Drunken Fish release. Somewhere in the early 2000s life got more complicated for me and for Darren at Drunken Fish and it went to the bottom of the ocean for a while. What refloated it was a visit down under a couple of years back by Mike Hinds of Road Cone fame. I mentioned the project gathering dust and he came up with Rebis as a possible outlet. For my part it felt good to reconnect with Chicago in some way and both Chris and Jeremy at Rebis acted in a very professional manner and I am pleased with the results.

I know you've played live in the past but is this something that you still do on a regular basis? What can you expect from a 2007 Roy Montgomery show?

I doubt whether I have accrued more than 30 performances all up since 1981 so no, I do not, and never have, played live on a regular basis. To be honest I'd rather be recording than performing. What can you expect? Pretty much what I've always done - frowning, mumbling and a lot of staring at my instrument. Riveting stuff.

You're a senior lecturer and group leader at the Environment, Society and Design Division at Lincoln University. Care to tell us a bit about what you do? Has it ever been difficult to combine an academic career with a musical one?

Basically my job is to train up future environmental policy-makers and managers. I lecture undergrads and post-grads and supervise Masters and PhD students researching environmental management topics. Not difficult at all to combine careers since I don't have a musical one. The musical work is a fitful activity and the pressures are more with family life and being a volunteer firefighter in my twilight years.

There is also a new musical project called TorlesseSuperGroup that (if the rumor is true) will see the light of day as a Rebis release by the end of this year. Care to fill us in regarding this project?

TSG is Nick Guy and myself. Nick was guitarist in a Christchurch drone unit of the late 1990s called Barnard's Star. We muttered then about a collaboration and it took a mere four years for something to be initiated. We have been accumulating material since 2004 and have a rough cut of an album now completed. Nick is more computer and sampling savvy than I am but we are both interested in aural topography and soundscapes and the album will reflect this focus. We both have a particular affinity for the South Island...

This interview was done by e-mail in the fall of 2007.

Ed. Note: A lengthy chat w/Roy M. was one of our all-time favorite pieces in the original print version of DW back in the mid-90s (copies still available!), & it's a genuine pleasure to have him back in our orbit. Thanks for Mats for making it happen.

Up first is one of the most infamous analog specialists operating without a budget:

Los Angeles-based Not Not Fun has become something of a blue chip company since its inception back in 2004. Unfortunately, they're not getting write-ups in Spin or becoming the subject of gossip fodder on Pitchfork, but the label's track record for sell-outs on their limited-run releases may be the highest west of the Mississippi. Their success is based around a cross-genre, cross-platform love fest for some of the wildest strains of underground expression burrowing in deep these days. There isn't a format too niche for this private press, offering their unique take on DIY hand made analog production as it burns bright years beyond its practicality. CDRs are the new blood of the independent-minded (cheap, quick, and widely accessible) and pro-pressed CDs are still the industry standard, so the commitment of Not Not Fun to analog formats is truly astounding. Let's just mention the high-quality tapes by the dozens, from the hulking C-90s to the throwback cassingles (even a pro-pressed tape planned for the future), and only briefly look over the list of two full runs of the Bored Fortress 7" subscription series, 12 pieces of vinyl pitting 24 of the best units in today's experimental scene with their (il)logical counterparts. Even with all that put blithely aside, the legacy of Not Not Fun on full-length wax is staggering, a heroic effort of independent ingenuity and passion for seriously strange sound-craft.

I got a chance to talk with label head Britt about the brief but amazing history. "Manda and a friend started the label, officially, in February of 2004 with me in the ‘tentative assistance' capacity. But within a month or so I was onboard full-time..." And this husband and wife dream team out of Eagle Rock, CA has been slaving over the sounds with a work ethic more suited to the sweatshop than a short-run label. With only two-and-a-half years behind them, the catalogue is already reaching up into triple digits. Even if this was a straight CDR label that would be impressive, yet each release is like a love letter to the artists who provide material and the fans that voraciously collect each hand-crafted artifact. Hand-screened, hand-painted, wrapped with beer cans and ribbon, random junk collages... their very first tape compilation actually offered a free tape deck with purchase (but please don't bug them about that!). Couple this with some heavy neon/day-glo/juxtaposed color schemes, and you've got a hundred-plus releases worth the random distro hunt. For anyone who likes buying random bullshit at Mexican swap meets, I've got the label for you.

Though there's no way to discount any format they produce, the Not Not Fun LPs are what stand out to me. As a vinyl addict, they perfectly play to my obsession. And as a fan of obscurities, the label gathers some of the oddest yet most accomplished nice-guy freaks around. The strange thing about pressing wax is that, in both sound and preference, vinyl has become associated with lo-fi, independent music, though the means of pressing vinyl remain a product of industry. While you may find a few companies busting crazy lathe cuts (for crazy prices) once in a blue moon, LPs on private press labels like Not Not Fun still need to be shipped to processing plants, so, unlike CDRs or cassettes, the manufacturing of these artifacts is completely out of their hands. The process for an amateur operation can be slow and confusing according to Britt. "In the beginning we had to just ask around friends/acquaintances for random tips and info and you end up writing a lot of checks for steps you don't entirely understand, and the whole process can be a little overwhelming. But, like anything I guess, you do it 25 more times and it comes to seem not so complicated. Now we know what steps to INSIST on and which can totally be ditched (even if a plant technically ‘advises' customers to)."

Yet, when the vagaries of the production cycle are dealt with, the imperfect nature of this physical format and its means of shipping play a role in the quality of the release. "Vinyl's a tricky format, especially if you're even slightly obsessive or a perfectionist, cause there's often slight scratches on reference lacquers, or test pressings can sound off, or a plate gets damaged en route and messes with the audio. It's a very physical process so naturally it's a million times messier than replicating digital files on spindles of pristine compact discs. Luckily we're not really audiophiles and have zero problem with lo-fi vibes so vinyl always rules to us and is totally worth the extra effort."

Much of the label's early catalogue showed a definite love for the lo-fi So Cal locals very much in the tradition of the first/second wave of underground labels. "I know Manda worshipped all the late 80s/early 90s K and Kill Rock Stars 7 inches...but I think the appeal was more the DIY style than the actual vinyl (though they go pretty hand-in-hand I suppose)." Staying local barely seems possible for a label in the internet age. Moving product through mail-order has brought the label to the attention of many like-minded artists from across the globe, yet locating material outside of the internet can be a lot more challenging. "Unfortunately most underground vinyl stuff is very limited, so unless you're connected to that world for some reason it can remain pretty hidden...not much rare vinyl shit just shows up on some record rack in a store (despite the most heroic efforts on the label's part!)."

I seem to be among the fortunate few who can buy one of these records at a store. I first came across Not Not Fun vinyl at Poobah Records. The store had moved a few miles away from the location my father frequented, and I had recently moved back to San Gabriel (5 miles east of LA), mere miles down the road from their stockpile of strange oddities for reasonable prices. With the extra cash from my public workers paycheck and the disturbing realization that I'd become my father, I immediately picked through the well-stocked experimental section for the choicest goods to blow my brain clean of unoriginal thought. You'd think that in 2006, after years of television media and a mind-blowing internet info barrage, watching Mike Tyson bite off a dude's ear and even once listening to a 70-minute album by Masonna, I would no longer be surprised by anything. But I was totally spooked and in awe of that Haunted Castle/ Grey Skull split 10" hidden in the miscellaneous stack.

Just the cover, man that fucking cover just pops with the sleeve as a cut-out skull and the fake spider webs and plastic spider! How could the music be anything but noise! And though I'm not quite as gung-ho about the plethora of generic pedal noise outfits out there these days, I had no hesitation in buying up a record like this. Haunted Castle has since become a favorite of mine with a strong chain of tape releases last year, especially the split tape with Robedoor on NNF and the one-sided collab they did for Arbor. They are definitely one of the most original units blurting out jagged-yet-droning noise jams these days. Regrettably, I've yet to hear any more from Grey Skull. Their side is pretty cool, but not something that really stuck to memory.

The LP certainly wet my appetite for further NNF releases. And as I toured the record stores of Southern California, Not Not Fun vinyl kept popping up around me. I would later run across a copy of Abe Vigoda's "Sky Route/ Star Roof", a nice 12" full of ADD-inflected noise-rock. It was in the stacks Rhino Records in Claremont, famed home to lo-fi loyalists the Callaci brothers (aka Refrigerator). While I don't bust out such Chino reppin' skittery-rawk madness too often these days, it's a dope piece of grey marbled vinyl for the collection; I especially love the silkscreen covers that display James Bradshaw's bare line art.

While Not Not Fun definitely shows love to the youth wave brigade of fucked up So Cal rock bands, their vinyl catalog tends toward the darker, as for instance the stoner folk vibes of Madison, WI's Davenport, whose NNF LP I got from some mail-order I can't remember. This album is as dark and psychotic as the blood red vinyl and the psycho-killer collage covers. It seems like, when I was barely getting a sniff of all these different crews and scenes, Not Not Fun was hastily cutting, gluing, and stuffing for their cause-definitely the case with the recently repressed Magik Markers LP Feed the Crayon (which I believe I snatched-up at Mad Platter over by UC Riverside). This LP is prime. Amazing. And I'm not going to say anymore on that; I'll wait here while you go get one of the few remaining copies...

Poobah's has the most consistently interesting stock of unknown labels like NNF, and with me dropping my meager earnings there so often, I've been fortunate to learn about various not-so publicized goings-on. The shop has been known to cater to LA hip-hop/electronic DJ sets on the weekends (pretty cool even if that's not to your taste), as well as the odd LAFMS-member performance - Poobah's being their famed meeting ground in the days of yore. That was probably around the same time my dad was shopping there, come to think of it, though probably not in the same dimension. Anyway, Ron, the owner, had let me know that he was hosting a free GHQ performance on a Sunday afternoon; I must have said something like "Get the fuck out" or "hell yeah" or "dude," something surely inane as I'm not the most eloquent speaker. I don't have to tell you that Marcia, Pete, and Steve Gunn proceeded to create amazing layers of reverb-drenched electric guitars, playing deeply American music - even with a harmonica at one point - that somehow connects the dots all around the world in a way that only the best drone can. It was fucking amazing to see them on the balcony, in their own world. But I was shocked to find I was the only person in there who actually came to see the show. Well, me, and two other people: some dude and some girl who I stood behind and completely ignored, two seemingly anonymous figures who turned out to be the NNF brain trust and who would go on to release the fine California Night Burning Dreams, a blue-marbled record by GHQ featuring recordings from that same tour.

And while listening to a record isn't comparable to seeing these players live, the sets on California Burning show the crew at the height of their improvising prowess. Acoustic guitar patterns lay down the pace while electric guitar drones beneath and over, smooth waves of feedback and light distortion, all cued up with a percussive drive that enters the tracks at key moments. All four pieces (including the fantastic three-inch CD that comes with the record) run off different cues that unite different moods and tempos, from blown-out atonal cacophony to the spacious fret wanderings. As with GHQ members' other projects (Double Leopards, Spectre Folk, the Vanishing Voice, Zaimph), there is a touch of mystery and mysticism in their sound. Even when it moves into ecstatic realms, a place of ego-loss or ego-subversion, reaching for something different than the sum of its players, its dissonance does not reach the white-knuckled noise of their other projects, nor does it have the immensity of sound. GHQ records succeed or fail on their minimalist nuance, and California Burning is among their most successful collections, an essential document from a highly-inspired trip through the West Coast.

GHQ are a unit made for vinyl consumption, and when you're dancing in the lo-fi side of town, a whole lot of great units deserve a couple miles of grainy grooves to run across. "Format is as much an aesthetic choice as silkscreening vs computer printing, or hand-drawn vs stamped, or anything else like that. I don't really think that's debatable. Enshrining an album on vinyl or cassette or CD (or reel-to-reel even) inevitably makes a statement about that particular music... bands and labels who choose to ONLY utilize one format are clearly saying something aesthetically. To us though, every format has merit. Just depends on the context." For some, recording on vinyl puts them into the continuum of past artists they admired as a child; other artists don't play toward the nostalgia, but rather the texture and sound of vinyl, really focusing on the physical, lo-fidelity nature of the recordings with the belief that this enhances the experience of the sound they produce. "Occasionally bands/artists have been like ‘here's our music...we recorded it SPECIFICALLY to be pressed on vinyl.' Family Underground did that....same with the new Inca Ore LP. Sometimes you can hear that quality in the music and sometimes it's just subjective hyperbole on the artists' part, but I like the idea regardless."

But can a sound like the Family Underground's really owe such a huge debt of success to the format? It's hard to tell. Their NNF album Riven is indeed a monster, and if you're at all familiar with the crew, it doesn't deviate too far from what you've come to expect: massive, Mesozoic noise-drones. It's definitely worth the cash even if you already have a ton of their releases, because this is an amazing piece of vinyl (though to be honest, I think a few of their CDRs sound better). The experience is always dependent upon the material. Few of us are in the position to really compare the same material on different formats. Label operators usually have a deeper perspective of how material sounds on digital versus analog formats. "To my ears, MOST music sounds better on vinyl, but there's certainly a gradient within that opinion. There's been a number of instances where I didn't really 150% fall in total love with a recording until I heard the reference lacquer/test pressing...the recent Mudboy record was like that for me. Hearing it loud and slightly scratchy and deeply analog just made it burn with such a deeper energy than the CDR demo. The Heavy Winged ‘We Grow' LP made a similar leap for me... those songs explode so much more colorfully on the turntable."

And these two records represent two completely different sounds. The Heavy Winged LP, We Grow, is perhaps more volatile than anything the band has recorded thus far - two heavy-ass jams housed on a nice piece of dark blue vinyl that shine a light on some of the best aspects of the band's sound, drum bashing and electric fret scorch that's just unrelenting. For a band that can encompass cool-out grooves, stoner drones, and metal head guitar runs, the vinyl format works with the referential nature of their style. Meanwhile, Mudboy's LP Hungry Ghosts! These Songs Are Doors may be one of the crown jewels of the label's ingenuity in both music and packaging. The cover is blindingly psychedelic, laser-cut with fiery, serrated designs on front and back using the sleeve as an extra layer of coloring. This is actually my first experience with a Mudboy album and man does it fuck me up. While some songs have a deep, dub-influenced percussive style, others work under his idea of "dark cinema" to incredible effect (read the recent Mudboy interview on Foxy Digitalis for more on that). Droning notes color the backdrop as more abrasive sounds attack the senses with all kinds of echo-drenched vocals agitating the frontal lobe, creating a sound that's shamanic without sounding typically ritualistic; the organ solos from those giants he modifies are truly awesome. The record can be spacious but dense, soothing and terrifying, usually within the same song. Each side is a beautifully complete experience, that when taken as a whole, becomes a radio-play for the FX-pedal generation.

I've barely scratched the surface of NNF here - check out the label's catalogue to see everything I couldn't mention (that's quite a lot). But I know that these records will outlast any of the hundreds of CDRs I have bought over the last couple of years. Time and effort spent on the hunt for vinyl can only deepen our appreciation of its worth. Yet, while I'm putting out a twenty and some gas money, the labels put out at least a hundred times more effort, and they can definitely end up losing a lot more than that. "When you press vinyl yourself, and understand what a brave/risky move it is to embark on, it's hard not to respect the labels out there who keep it alive and push weird projects on to wax...these days for vinyl I always love/follow Ultra Eczema (no one even comes close to Tyfus' art-packaging), Woodsist, Weird Forest, Animal Disguise, Qbico, S-S... and I'm really glad when larger labels like Load and Holy Mountain and even Sub Pop and Drag City bother still doing vinyl versions of their big albums when they can afford it...it's important somehow. The thing you can't take away from vinyl is that the shit LASTS. I can dig up some DESTROYED-looking copy of Blizzard of Ozz from a Goodwill - a copy that's seen a solid 20 years of total environmental assault - and when I throw it on, the riffs still just RIP out of the speakers. On the other hand, CDRs I've owned for 4 days sometimes won't play anymore if I've dropped it on the ground or something. I need something that can withstand some life abuse. Cause life is brutal!!"

Vinyl will prevail, in spite of the seeming odds. Imagine this scenario: NNF recently pressed up three-hundred and fifty copies of the recent Feeders of Ravens LP by San Francisco harsh kill-jazz noisemongers Ettrick. Now, you've got to believe that there are at least two-hundred people out there who will cherish this record for the rest of their life, and it's totally worth the comparatively paltry price if you dig heavy bass drums and free jazz (I know I do). But I'm already seeing some reviews dismiss it as a cross-genre novelty, which could leave maybe one-hundred and fifty copies on uncertain terms. I'm sure some of those will be stored away forever by record hoarders who maybe like the cover and don't mind the couple millimeters space it takes up on the shelf; it's hard to reduce vinyl like this to puerile commodity status, but maybe a hundred people who buy this record will, seeing it just as a collector's-item investment. So that leaves fifty spare copies floating around in distros and mail-orders, or in a box at the Bored Fortress, to some day be sold en masse to record graveyards or the Salvation Army and once again become an anonymous artifact. Then one day, when vinyl once again faces extinction and a future obsessive record archeologist digs through stacks of generic vinyl crates, he will dig up a destroyed copy of Feeders of Ravens, perhaps expecting some dynamic Nordic heavy metal riffs. And that person will put that record on their player and... who knows? Maybe these kinds of sounds won't be so shocking in the future. Maybe NNF will be known, reviewed on Pitchfork or its future equivalent, celebrated on Rolling Stone covers with bright pink T-shirts and all, and that archeologist will realize he just hit pay dirt, with a beautifully preserved rarity from a label in its prime. Maybe the digger will have stumbled upon one of the most obscure records imaginable and his friends will never be able to find it and love it themselves, so that collector will learn to love it and jam it loud like some declaration of independence. Vinyl will prevail because the experience is unique, self-evident and perfectly imperfect, a task for posterity worthy of all purveyors of sound.

All by way of setting up the context for a discussion with Phil Legard, chief geomantic sonic cartographer of England's Xenis Emputae Travelling Band. Since 2001 XETB has released a near-steady flow of lovely and varied CDRs charting various mystical regions at the heart of that country's land and culture. Particular XETB pieces and discs are often related to concepts from myth and folklore, especially as those connect to natural patterns and specific places, to the extent that Legard often records in the field (sometimes literally) to capture the special properties of certain spaces. Sonically XETB's sounds cross from misty drones (sometimes synthesized, often made by adapted acoustic instruments) to traditional folk song, inflected by everything from Medieval/early musics to avant-garde noise. And it's all quite lovely, perhaps drawing comparisons to the music of Ireland's United Bible Studies, Oklahoma's North Sea, or PA's own Tim Renner, but with a fog-shrouded depth all its own.

Some of XETB's 16 or so releases (discography here) have been found on such stellar small labels such as Barl Fire, Ireland's Deserted Village (home of the above-mentioned UBS), Phil Todd's Memoirs of an Aesthete, Brad Rose's Digitalis, and Clay Ruby's 23 Productions. But as Legard has taken the mythic bull of self-produced culture by the horns, many of them have come from his own Larkfall label, usually as limited-edition CDRs housed within simple but elegant black-and-gold bordered covers. Larkfall has also featured releases from similarly-minded artists such as the North Sea and Jani Hellen (of Sonic Temple Assassins), plus XETB's alter ego the Pneumatic Consort, not to mention a brand new compilation based around the theme of Reynardine, the trickster fox of folk legend. Legard recently introduced another promising label, Oneiros, devoted to more extreme sounds; the first pair of releases features Italian cosmic free-jazz wunderkind Valerio Cosi, and a split CD from Legard's over-the-top doom-noise project the Neon Death Slittes and the abovementioned Phil Todd's amazing Ashtray Navigations (with whom Legard guests regularly; this all gets pretty incestuous, doesn't it?). And as if all that weren't enough, Legard also scribes a fascinating blog called Tintinnalogia (named after a 17^th century tome on the art of bell ringing) that showcases his musings on topics ranging from alchemy to medieval music to nature magic to punk rock to dew.

Basically, Legard is a kind of postmodern polymath, someone with a genuinely unique aesthetic and worldview whose work can take root and hopefully thrive in the fertile cultural soil discussed above. As such, we were thrilled to have the opportunity to engage Phil in a somewhat epic email interview, presented here for your edification and enjoyment. Thanks to Phil for his time and thoughts!

DW: At the risk of breaking the mystery, can you tell us a bit about your personal background? How did you begin playing music?

PL: My musical background - well, I come from parents who were part of the folk and blues revival of the 60s and kept going to folk clubs throughout their lives. My earliest musical memory is sitting under a table one summer Sunday morning listening to Paul Brady and Andy Irvine singing "Arthur McBride". It's a song about two fellows walking on the beach one Christmas morning and meeting an army sergeant and corporal. They try to get Arthur McBride and his cousin to enlist, telling them about the ‘very fine life' of the soldier. Of course, Arthur takes exception to this - it being obvious that in the army's eyes men like him and his cousin are no more than cannon-fodder for the French. Well, to cut a long song short, they beat up the sergeant, corporal and drummer boy! An action that I don't condone, but it's better than the alternative, I suppose! I think that song probably gave me a healthy mistrust of authority - I'll certainly be playing it to my children.

My parents were into folk, blues and the local folk-clubs. Unfortunately my mother largely stopped dancing, playing and singing when I was born, but got back into it during my teens. I remember that my mother bought me a penny-whistle when I was 16, which I still use on XETB recordings. Shortly after that I got an acoustic guitar and began recording songs and improvisations on an old cassette recorder, inspired by Syd Barrett. I was also studying computers at college around that time and got into sound synthesis and algorithmic/generative music, something that still plays a part in my academic/professional music (I've done degrees specialising in it and work in related areas), but not so much in the music associated with Larkfall.

Can you tell us a little bit about your musical background? How did you first start making music? And when/how did your current direction develop?

I was probably first properly turned on to folk when they took me to a sing-around at Whitby Folk Festival in the mid 90s. The sense of a community and these people singing old songs really touched me and made me delve deeper into the parental record collection - at the time I was mainly into 60s pop-psych stuff, like the UK band Kaleidoscope, Jason Crest, Bulldog Breed, Principal Edwards and so on... oh, and a real soft spot for Gong and their various satellites.

I mainly started making music as a cathartic experience in my late teens, starting out with an acoustic guitar but somehow finding myself in the noise scene that networked across the Internet. I mainly did stuff with processed feedback and some terrible FX pedals that I still use to this day, being too broke to replace them. I was never really serious about music until 2001 when I began XETB. I'd been exploring the coast of Cornwall and passed through the ancient ruined tomb of Men-an-Tol. Within a moment the landscape had been transfigured... an experience I can't quite put into words. Prior to that my mind had been inclined to the stars - the study of medieval astrology and stellar lore... I'd always thought of ‘earth mysteries' as an even flakier practice than astrology for tie-dyed stone-hugging hippies, but in that moment everything made some kind of sense... So, I spent my time making field recordings and improvisations, getting to know the landscape. Practically all other musical exploits fell by the wayside. It was a psychedelic experience in the truest sense - no drugs involved, just a life-changing revelation that has fed into almost all of my musical explorations since.

So, who or what is Xenis Emputae, and why does he or it have a Travelling Band?

Ah, odd... no-one's ever asked that question. I used to release my first experiments in music as Xenis Emputae in the mid/late 90s... who or what XE is will have to remain a mystery! The ‘Travelling Band' part was a direct result of the Cornish recordings that became Full Moon June... I suppose that the name started out as a light-hearted joke, but over the course of the recording became a really profound, life-changing experience. Everything since then has been XETB - I abandoned all the projects I was working on for XE after that summer.

You've really been at the forefront of the movement toward recording and releasing one's own music in recent years via your Larkfall microlabel. Could you comment on that, and how technology has changed the possibilities for artists? (And also, where the name Larkfall came from?)

Haha, you flatter me... I don't think I've been at the forefront of anything. I'm terribly lazy when it comes to releasing things compared to, say, Chocolate Monk or Digitalis Industries!

I started putting out tapes and CDrs in around 1998, initially under the umbrella of Stella Maris Recordings. Larkfall came about in around 2002 in order to release The Suffolk Workings, after Rob Hayler at Fencing Flatworm turned it down for being a bit too ‘gothic' for his tastes. I'm grateful that he did, otherwise it would have taken another year or two to get things going.

I love other people to release my music, but I also like having control over what's available. With Larkfall, it's been my policy not to do limited editions of the releases unless there are special circumstances. However, I think this has worked against the label in some ways - people seem a bit apprehensive about distributing, or occasionally actually buying, a release unless it's a ‘collectable' numbered edition.

Fundamentally I don't think that much has changed on the ‘underground' - people are still putting out DIY releases as they've been doing for decades. The big difference is how technology has made the whole process of putting together releases a lot faster (burning a CDr, versus dubbing a tape), and of course the Internet has replaced the stacks of flyers that you used to get from distros and trades... which is a bit of a shame!

Originally the label was going to be called Larkrise, after Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford. Around the same time I also heard the Padstow May Day song, which has the lyric "Up flies the kite, down falls the lark," which stuck with me for some reason. The name was finally decided on when I saw a reference to the folklore of the lark rising to greet the morning sun, which is a very appealing image to me.

At the same time as you embrace new technologies for releases, it also seems like there's an element of your music that draws on something more ancient... There are elements of folk and avant-garde sounds, but for some reason the word "liturgical" often comes to mind when I'm listening to your music... is that at all accurate? Lots of underground musicians try to surround themselves with the trappings of some kind of mysticism or spirituality (with, to my ears, varying degrees of legitimacy), but XETB seems to come from a kind of deeper understanding... Thoughts?

I've always been into the fantastic, mystical and spiritual... Although I'd class a lot of the music that comes out of XETB as something like ‘sonic daydreams', there is usually an impulse from folklore, music of Hermetic philosophy at the root of the recording. These impulses serve to me as useful starting points for exploring those ideas with music. I often make use of stream-of-consciousness imagery or intuitions that arise during, or either side, of the recording process - and often at a tangent to the original impulse! While I wouldn't say that the figures that sometimes come from the process, such as Hydriel or The Landless Lord, have an objective existence, they're real enough to me on a psychic level.

I think that the ‘liturgical' sound of some of my music is a natural effect of two things... as you know, I'm chiefly concerned with English landscape, folklore and culture, and most things that we think of as quintessentially ‘English' often have that calm, melancholic nature that we often find in liturgical music. The second reason is probably due to the mainly modal basis of music, akin to medieval chant and the melodies of folksong...

The occult, mystical and spiritual has been the catalyst for a lot of really bad music. Many people also have preconceived (and negative) notions about people who employ such elements overtly. Therefore I usually try to avoid being too explicit about these influences or tying myself into any kind of mystical or spiritual dogma, since I prefer the music to speak for itself.

A number of your releases feature "location" recordings, which is a cool idea... Can you say a little about those both in terms of the logistics and the ideas behind doing so?

The locations are usually picked because they have some meaning to me. Perhaps they're places that are visually striking, or maybe they have good acoustics - such as cave mouths. Other places may relate to the lore of the landscape - I do a lot of recording on Ilkley Moor, which has one of the most densely gathered collections of prehistoric rock art in the country, as well as interesting stone circles and geographic features. The surrounding area is rich in folklore, for example, standing at the famous swastika stone you can see Almscliffe crag in one direction and Simon's Seat in the other. The former of these is a place where Beltane fires are still lit, and is said to have been created as a consequence of the giant Rombald having a fight with the devil. The latter is an imposing rock outcrop, which the late 19^th century Yorkshire historian Harry Speight hypothesised may have had a druidical association. This seat overlooks the haunted valley of Troller's Gill, where the black dog and fairies are said to have been seen, and so on. All of these are areas that have featured a lot in the music of XETB.

Since I work alone the process is often to make field recordings and an extended ‘seed' improvisation, or several improvisations, which I build the rest of the music around - adding more improvised layers, editing if necessary, and so on. I usually take with me as much as I can comfortably carry - thankfully I don't own any very heavy instruments or recording equipment. The main problem is things breaking - sometimes because of atmospheric conditions, or more often because I slip over and fall on my arse!

Would you say that the cultural resonances of your music are the most important factor? Or is there something about the land itself that comes out in the music?

Great question, and one I'm not sure I can answer! The cultural elements of the music are often associated with obscurities drawn from the arcana of British folklore and the European magical tradition. Often these elements are tied in with the landscape, for example, I've done a lot of recording in an area associated with the ‘black dog', fairies, giants and folk-memories of the druids. Sometimes these associations will influence the way I play music, what I do with my recordings later in the studio, or what imagery may come to mind while playing. At other times the music might be free from premeditated associations. Often I think it depends on both my own mood and the ‘mood' of the place, which is closely tied in to weather and the seasons. For example, a valley may look like some kind of Elysian paradise on a summer afternoon, but take on quite a sinister appearance on a drizzly, monochrome day. However, I believe there is a constant, fundamental nature present in each place that transcends atmospheric colourations.

Of course, there are also a lot of outside influences - the music is never conceived in a vacuum and often whatever my current musical interest is will have some bearing on the music... Some parts of Gamaaea ended up sounding a little minimalist - for example, the track "Descending Form" with its repeating whistle figure toward the end. I'd been listening to a lot of Elizabethan and minimalist music around that time, which crossed with the XETB aesthetic.

In your blog you delve into a whole range of fascinating topics, most of them not directly musical, yet all seemingly central to your larger concerns. Could you talk a bit about that? How did you first get turned on to these interests? Have you undertaken any formal studies in those areas?

The material on the blog are notes on things that interest me that I think perhaps other people might like. Unfortunately I've not had time to update it recently - it's been a busy month - but there's lots in waiting to be put up there. My main areas of interest are music and mysticism/folklore, so most of the topics on the blog are tangents on that theme. I suppose that I've been studying Western esotericism for as long as I've been making music. My interest in esotericism lies in the writings stemming from the Neoplatonic revival during the Renaissance, up to the late 18^th century. I find both this Hermetic stream and also folklore and myth to be rich sources of inspiration, opening mental doors full of striking imagery. They saturate my perception of the world and have a huge influence on how I approach music and themes with XETB.

Music-wise, I'll probably find myself writing about anything! From obscure technical details to reviews of whatever I'm digging at that moment... Tied with Hermeticism is an interest in the music of the spheres - that is, the realisation of the otherwise inaudible harmonies of the planets and universe, which has been a theme straddling the boundaries of mysticism, music and science for thousands of years. I've not taken any formal studies in any of these, they're just tangential interests. The only formal study I've done have been in relation to algorithmic music, something I'm reviewing my relationship with currently - certainly as far as computers and things are concerned since I'm far more interested in acoustic music. The relationship between a person and a physical instrument is much deeper, especially where intuition and improvisation is concerned. However, from the start of XETB there have been some pieces that have started with basic algorithmic techniques (for example one of the tracks on Under a Soular Moon used a map of notes based on a diagram of the constellation Taurus, and the track "Horizon of Eternity" derived its overall structure from a geomantic chart). Typically, though, the structure of XETB music is more organic, usually deriving from improvisations recorded ‘in the field'.

When a lot of Westerners discover the numinous, it's often via Eastern sources -- Buddhism and the like. But your work and interests seems dedicated to a variety of strains of mystical thought that are part and parcel of the Western tradition, though often marginalized... Is that a fair characterization? What are the threads that tie it all together for you?

I think it's fair. When I was a teenager I remember being concerned that there was no indigenous religion or philosophy extant, so I looked at various strands of paganism and modern esoteric practice, none of which really convinced me. Perhaps, as has often been said, some trace of ancient belief and practice remains in the folk rituals of the land. However, we have to accept that there have been thousands of years of other influences and events shaping the land, replacing or at least moulding the old beliefs into new forms. These events have often led to very interesting hybrids - the Romano-Celtic gods, Christian saints taking the place of ancient pagan gods and heroes - a rich tapestry of borrowings from far and wide, which still remains ‘English' at its core - which is still tied in with the land. Western esotericism is just another influence - deriving from the classical authors in the Mediterranean, then travelling across Europe in the Middle Ages (perhaps before), but reaching its peak in the Renaissance. On one side of the Hermetic coin are the high-brow and intellectually stimulating works of people like Marsillio Ficino and John Dee. On the other side are the conjurors books of incantations and talismans - but it is precisely because of the ‘low-brow' nature of these works that they are so important to the already rich folk-tradition - someone was far more likely to consult a local cunning man because they wanted their stolen cattle returned than because they wanted a vision of the celestial city. An example of the overlap with folk-traditions is when Reginald Scot published his famously sceptical work The Discoverie of Witchcraft. He intended it to expose the dangerous foolishness of believing in witches, but it was perhaps a mistake of his to add a chapter containing sundry magical formulae from the books of two magicians T.R. and John Cokar. By including this material he probably intended no only to dismiss the claims of magical spells, but also to have a dig at the similarly superstitious rituals of the Catholic Church. However, he result was that for the first time Scot had let into mainstream circulation a treasure trove of magical lore - I suspect that it was the only part of the book read by many and probably copied innumerable times by the curious. The recipes given by Scott naturally became part of the village cunning man's store of knowledge. In Ralph Merrifield's The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic he publishes several pictures of magical implements and charms that had been found hidden in the walls of old country houses - almost all of the imagery upon them can be traced back to Scot.

In her book Ritual Magic, Elizabeth Butler makes an attempt to trace the progression of similarly low-brow magic through European history. After discussing how the literature of magic was dragged through bloody and horrific fantasies in Germany by authors wanting to cash in on the notoriety of Faust, she turns to England and identifies Scot's collection as representing one of the few idiosyncratically English works of magic. The terrifying pacts with the devil and his emissaries and bloody sacrifice -so popular in the Faust books - are gone, replaced by something gentler and more fanciful. Most notable is the chapter ‘An Experiment of the Dead', which begins in sombre mood - the magician obtaining the promise of a soon to be executed criminal that he will serve him in the afterlife. Later the magician and his assistant go to the grave of the criminal and command his spirit to appear in a crystal. Then things take a turn for the fantastic - the spirit of the dead man is used solely an intermediary for the magician to make contact with the queen of the fairies! The encounter ultimately leads to procuring a ring of invisibility, and there's even the implication of a sexual encounter with the fairy queen! It's a long way from Faust - far more in the realms of Spenser's Fairie Queen and mythical romance. It was because the experiment with the fairies summed up a lot of my aesthetic interests and tied the European magical tradition with English folklore that I decided to use it as the structure of the first Pneumatic Consort recordings.

Would you say that the music is a primary focus for you, or do you consider the music more of a vehicle that lets you explore the deeper ideas?

Since it's the music the people end up listening to it's the most important thing that I present publicly. What ends up on the releases is usually edited down from quite a lot of material - I really want to make my music engaging and re-listenable. This is one of the reasons that I generally try and keep my releases around 30 minutes in duration. I do have lengthier, more personal and meditative recordings, but I'm apprehensive to release them. That said, the process of actually recording the music is often a springboard for exploring other areas. With field recording and outdoor improvisation you can get very different insights into a location, while I find that letting my mind wander while playing can have striking results - both in the music that comes out and in mental intuitions and imagery. Many of the track titles derive from things I've imagined as I played the music. For example, while recording Last Voyage for the King of Swords while a sea-storm rolled in across Southwold I had a deep mental impression of a ship, crewed by the elemental spirits of the air amongst the clouds. Part of the fascination with this way of working is the building of a personal mythology that exists in parallel with the received lore of the local area.

Can you say a bit about your non-Xenis projects, the Neon Death Slittes and the Pneumatic Consort (and others?)? Are there lines of connection between those and the XETB (similar ideas, approaches to sound, etc.), or are they completely separate in how you approach them?

The Pneumatic Consort basically takes a lot of the same ideas as XETB, but concentrates almost entirely on wind instrumentation (including reed instruments and voice). While making the recordings that came out on the recent Pneumatic Consort album I was delighted to be able to visit a church where, according to local folklore, the fairy queen had was buried! I thought that was a nice connection with the first PC recording, which concentrated on the ritual of the fairy queen which I discussed above.

Initially the Neon Death Slittes also had similarly psychogeographic concerns. The genesis of the project is a vaguely amusing story, so I might as well tell it. I was wandering around a supermarket on the edge of town one day and saw a copy of the Clash's London Calling on a rack of bargain CDs. Someone had obviously decided against buying it, and in putting it back had rotated the cover 90 degrees clockwise. The word ‘London' now looked like ‘zodzor' - a name to conjure with if ever there was one... As I did my shopping I was quietly thinking about what Zodzor would be. In the vicinity of the fish aisle I was struck by an image of a giant dog on a throne, sitting in a long disused subway tunnel - not unlike the amalgamation of Zoltan: Hound of Dracula and something from Quatermass and the Pit, both memorable films from my childhood. Zodzor, then, was the genius of urban areas. It had a name that derived from human language, unlike the formless, nameless, organic spirit that permeates the rural landscape. So, to cut a boring story short, the Neon Death Slittes formed to play Zodzoric music. Unfortunately none of the explicitly Zodzoric recordings have made it out - they collapsed under the weight of their own conceptualism, since they involved convoluted lyrical and musical processes based on rotating things 90 degrees clockwise! Currently the Neon Death Slittes is an all purpose ‘loud stuff' project, although it does still tip its hat affectionately to Zodzor - especially with tracks like Battle Hymn of the Zodzoric Empire and Psychic Underground.

There are also a load of one-off projects that I usually do in very small editions for friends - just my way of trying new things. Names include Semantron, A.A.A.A.A. (pronounced ‘pentalpha'), The Rosette of Sirius, The Gamaaea Hermetic Ensemble, and so on... maybe one day the better things will be re-released in more accessible editions.

Are there any other current artists that you feel a special affinity with, musically or otherwise? I know you're part of the live lineup (and often on recordings too) of Phil Todd's Ashtray Navigations, how did that come about, and how does that work?

As far as I remember I got to know Phil Todd through going to gigs organised by The Termite Club, in Leeds. I'd seen Ashtray Navigations play a few times and had some CDrs of theirs. I got talking to Phil when I bumped into him at a bring & buy sale a week after seeing him play as a trio with Alex Neilson and Ben Reynolds. I was probably gushing about how much like the raw essence of Hawkwind it was, or something!

Anyway, we began trading recordings with each other, and when Ben and Alex relocated to Glasgow we began jamming in his legendary basement - a place piled high with instruments, amps and fx pedals... all of varying functionality and dampness. Around that time, Mel Delaney of Sculptress also moved to Leeds. We've been playing live mainly as a trio for just over a year. My first gig with Ashtray was released on the Cante Jodido Lookalike Contest 3" cdr released by First Person.

How does it work? ... I don't want to give away and of Phil's secrets! For live stuff sometimes he'll have ideas or loops to work with, other times we just see where we go... sometimes it's good, sometimes it's staggeringly awful! Things work similarly for recorded music, but obviously with the ability to edit and overdub. Usually there's a root note to play around, sometimes explicitly as a drone or an electronic tambura - but when the timbral qualities of the instruments exert themselves, along with feedback and whatever effects are in the mix kick in then it really has a life of its own.

Even though our aesthetics are very different, the Ashtray Navigations recordings usually bowl me over, or at least have me scratching my head in a good way. Phil's a very dedicated and creative guy in both music and imagery. Also his knowledge of any obscure band, musician, film or artist is incredible - he's turned me on to some great stuff in his time, most recently the genius of Fred Lane, with Ron Pate and his Debonaires.

As for other current artists I feel an affinity with, the minimal music of Johann Wlight and Jani Héllen has effected me quite deeply. I'm also consistently amazed by a local improvisation group called Inecto School. It seems that no-matter what the line-up, they're always linked by some means of psychic communication!

I also like a trio called Lanterns, two of whom who live up the road for me. I have a soft-spot for anything involving Neil Campbell. I saw him play as Astral Social Club in Manchester and it was a really atavistic experience. I find that there's often some kind of primal psychedelia in his projects that really moves me and takes me places. He played in a few Vibracathedral concerts of such intensity that I was sick! It was great to play as part of Ashtray Social Club a couple of months ago - he brings a really vital spirit to anything he does.

Finally, what do we have to look forward to from XETB? New releases planned? Other ideas or projects in the near or not-so-near future?

Lots of things have come out recently! At the start of the year Beyond Repair did a tape entitled Gamaaea, and I've just put out an archival disc of Pneumatic Consort material, along with the Reynardine compilation.

I've been getting very interested in the voice recently, so there might be some kind of vocal project, possibly with Rhid from Lanterns, who I'm also occasionally recording with for some as-yet-unnamed project.

I had a bit of a rest from XETB over the spring, but I'm about to start working on some new material. I was recently asked if XETB would like to play inside a henge of amplifiers/orgone accumulators at a festival in the summer, which I've tentatively agreed to - could be interesting at least!

My initial exposure to Kurihara and his trademark Gibson SG first came upon hearing the Ghost single, Moungod Air Cave / Guru in the Echo, released on the Now Sound label in 1994. Kurihara's blistering wah-wah freakout towards the climax of "Guru in the Echo" basically changed my life. Up till that point, I had no idea that modern rock musicians still played music like this. Its lacerating, melting groove whipped and whirled like a diamondback in a dust storm. It remains to this day one of the most mind blowing electric solos I've ever heard on record. From there I went directly to White Heaven's debut album, Out, the quintessential PSF heavy psych platter. Tokyo's revered PSF Records has released hundreds of psych/avant-garde releases over the years, including blown out head-feasts by Fushitusha, Acid Mothers Temple and High Rise. The raw garage excesses of Out stand out not only as a definitive example of the label's uncompromising vision, but also as one of its most influential releases whose shockwaves can still be felt in the sedated scorched psych punk of more recent Japanese ensembles like LSD-March, Up-Tight and Miminokoto.

Aside from appearing on a track on Ghost's self titled LP, Kurihara didn't become a full time member till the release of 1996's Lama Rabi Rabi (PSF in Japan/Drag City in the US), a masterful combination of progressive hard rock workouts and mystical Japanese folk ballads. He's appeared on every Ghost album since then, including the brand new In Stormy Nights, just released on Drag City.

In the mid 90s Kurihara also befriended Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang of Damon & Naomi, Magic Hour and Galaxie 500. The duo invited Kurihara, along with Masaki Batoh and Kazuo Ogino (also of Ghost), to expand the lineup to a quintet for the 2000 album, Damon and Naomi with Ghost (Sub Pop). An extensive world tour followed, a portion of which can be glimpsed on the live Sub Pop CD/DVD Song to the Siren: Damon and Naomi Live in San Sebastian, which features tracks from ...With Ghost as well as reworkings of earlier D&N songs with Kurihara's deft touch in full luminous form.

Since the dissolution of White Heaven in the mid 90s, Kurihara has also been a full time member of his heavy psych unit The Stars with old friend You Ishihara (of White Heaven) and guest performing with Japanese garage psych pop masters, Yura Yura Teikoku, a band whose records are next to impossible to find outside of Japan but come more highly recommended that just about any other hard psych group on the planet today. Most recently Kurihara has joined forces with Japan's premier prog/doom/psych trio, Boris, for the trance inducing heavy space psych opus, Rainbow (Pedal/Drag City). With Rainbow it's apparent that Boris has largely dropped the doom of earlier workings and focused more on the shimmering side of things with a fantastic mix of soft dreamy pop nuggets and stomping West Coast psych workouts, galvanized by some of the most intense, blistering guitar playing that will be heard on any album in 2007. It is our great honor to present an interview with Michio Kurihara, not just an amazing guitar player and composer, but also an incredibly warm, accessible and humble soul.

DW: Could you tell us a bit about your childhood and early life? You were born and raised in Tokyo? When did rock'n'roll first capture your imagination?

Up until my first couple of years at junior high I hadn't listened to much rock or pop at all. In elementary school by chance I heard Deep Purple's "Black Night" (I learnt the title many years later) on the radio, but all I remember thinking was, "what on earth is this horrible racket with the scary singing..." If I think back now I realize that I probably hadn't yet learnt to like rock and blues chord progressions (the so-called pentatonic scale). It took me a long time before I came to understand the feeling behind those progressions - probably because I spent my childhood listening to nothing but classical music.

In my third year at junior high, my elder brother introduced me to the Beatles. I really loved their songs, but at the time I wasn't able to understand the quality of their guitar sound. The first guitar solo that really impressed me was the one on "While my guitar gently weeps" from the White Album. I learnt later that it was Eric Clapton who played that solo. So that was my first experience of the possibilities of rock music and the electric guitar. That was my entrance into rock.

In high school I had more friends who were into rock and they introduced me to lots more bands - first Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, then the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and Japanese groups like the Jacks and Happy End. Thinking about it now, these were all groups from the late sixties and early seventies. But either way, hearing these groups was a decisive moment in my headlong slide into music.

DW: Were there any specific musicians or mentors in the beginning that inspired you to pick up a guitar?

There wasn't really anyone I can point to. There just happened to be a guitar lying around the house, I picked it up and the sound of it touched something within me.

DW: How did you meet You Ishihara? It seems you two have an almost spiritual connection on your recordings.

I met him through Ken Matsutani, who currently is the leader of Marble Sheep but who was also the original guitarist in White Heaven. After Matsutani left, I replaced him on guitar in White Heaven. Thinking about it now, it's been twenty years since I first started making music with Ishihara-san. It's been a long relationship... (laughs) I don't know if we have a spiritual connection or not, but my real connection with him is through music, and he is definitely one of the few people with whom I share a "common language" where music is concerned. I think you could say that we both understand each other's sounds. When I was recording my solo album, as a producer he was immensely understanding of the kind of sound and feeling that I wanted. It was thanks to him that I was so happy with the particular sonic universe that we managed to create.

DW: Was the raw fidelity of White Heaven's Out by design or more just a result of limited time and money? It's a rough production, but there is something incredibly immediate and pure about it all. It's one of the great "garage rock" records of all time.

Thank you for your kind appraisal of the record. At the time it's certainly true that we were unable to spend much time on the recording. The recording, mixing and mastering took just four days. In particular the last track, "Out", was recorded in one take with no overdubs at all. It was also the first time we'd recorded properly so none of us was relaxed enough to get involved in the technical side of it. But perhaps all of those negative factors came together to create that raw, live fidelity.

DW: One thing I've always admired, whether playing lead or rhythm, is your ability to compliment whatever ensemble you're playing with. Performances with Ghost and Damon & Naomi come to mind. How did you develop such a sympathetic ear in supporting roles such as these?

I'm very happy that you think so... Though I think that it is probably more likely to be due to the wonderful songs written by Ghost and Damon & Naomi than by anything that I might have contributed. In answer to your question, it might be too obvious but I think that it all depends on listening carefully to what other people are playing. And then creating harmony between all the different sounds, including your own. And getting on good terms with your instrument... Making sure to whisper a few words of encouragement to it before each show. And thanking it for its hard work after the show. That's all you need do.

DW: The first performance I ever heard by you was a smoldering lead on a single by Ghost, "Moungod Air Cave" / "Guru in the Echo" on Now Sound. I'll never forget the first time I heard that solo. It's so intense! Do you remember anything about this recording you could share with us?

Thanks! Those tracks were recorded live at a temple in the suburbs of Tokyo. I think it was also the first temple gig I played with Ghost. The venue had a unique sacred atmosphere that you often find at shrines and temples in Japan. The reverberation of the sound was miraculous and unique and this was the first time I experienced that too. I am sure that many holy objects of worship had to be moved in order to build the stage in the temple's main hall (though of course we had the head priest's permission!) As is usual in Japanese temples, no shoes are allowed so we had to play in our bare feet. I remember that I was hesitant to be in my bare feet in such a holy place, so I rushed off to a nearby Japanese clothes shop to buy some tabi (traditional split-toe socks, worn with kimono) and played in those instead. Anyway, it was an important experience for me.

DW: How did you meet Masaki Batoh? The new album In Stormy Nights is darker in places, especially on the epic second track, "Hemicyclic Anthelion." It feels like a kind of encapsulation of all the Ghost albums that have come before while still branching out
into newer territory.

I first met Batoh-san when he replaced me in Marble Sheep, probably around 1988. Matsutani-san introduced us. As with my meeting with Ishihara-san, Matsutani-san (who I met when I was playing in a band called ONNA) proved to be an important intermediary. But as for why Batoh asked me to play with Ghost, I still have no idea...(laughs) In 1989 I played on one track ("I've been flying") on the first Ghost album, and I've been playing live with the group on and off since 1994. I began to participate more fully in the group from the time of the 1997 US tour. In recent years the line-up has stabilized (previously touring and recording line-ups were quite different), and I think that the group's sound has also become refined. The second track on the new album was recorded live and I think it captures well the unique expressive powers of the current members.

DW: Will you be playing on Damon & Naomi's next album? Their music seems to have really opened up since Damon & Naomi with Ghost was recorded, and your contributions seem to be a big part of this. The performance of "Eye of the Storm" from the live CD/DVD comes to mind.

I play lots on their new album, which should be coming out this autumn. Playing with them has taught me so much. But musical influence between performers should always be a mutual thing, so if you feel that their music has indeed opened up I think that would be a wonderful thing. "Eye of the storm" is one of their older songs and one that I personally love deeply. It was a great song to begin with, but I think that the arrangement on the live version with that central axis of harmonium and e-bow drone was a decisive stepping stone in the development of our approach to expressivity as a trio. When we truly came together as an ensemble, with the vocal harmonies and the instruments just melting together... it was just such an ecstatic moment.

DW: Are The Stars still an ongoing concern?

Yes, the group is still very active within Japan. We have yet to play outside Japan, so it's a pity that not too many people know about the group's music. So far The Stars have released a mini album called Today, and two full albums, Will and Perfect Place to Hideaway. But again these records have all been Japan-only releases, so probably only the most committed overseas freaks will have heard them. I would really love for more people to hear the records and to give them the chance to experience the group's music live. In the last year or two, we've greatly progressed as a live ensemble and we've managed to really ramp up the tension. Our bassist, Kamekawa (from Yura Yura Teikoku) deserves special comment. I really hope that we can play some overseas dates in the near future.

DW: Sunset Notes is an incredible piece of work. Was it recorded over a long period of time, or did it come together relatively quickly? Can you tell us some about the composition and recording process for this record?

High praise indeed, thank you.

This was my first experience of recording a solo album, but it all came together a lot quicker than I had imagined. When we decided to record the album I had literally nothing prepared. But as I worked on each track, the images in my mind expanded and became more vivid, and I was able to create a sonic world that contains many things I think of as important. It was an album that came together in a very natural way, even though the preparation period and recording period were both comparatively short. Such a strange experience. It was also thanks to my friends who helped out with the recording, with the notes and the translations, that I was able to take this expressive world of mine and turn it into an album. I hope that the album interacts freely with the imaginations of those who hear it and that they enjoy listening to it.

DW: Will there be a follow-up someday?

I feel that various factors came together by chance to make the album possible. So, in that sense, I don't know when the constellations might next align in the right way to make a second volume possible. I'm making no promises, but if the right chance arises naturally in the near future, I would definitely love to try to make another record.

DW: How was working with Boris? Your tone compliments their sound so well. Will you be playing any live shows together?

It was a great experience. Especially since they seem to have steered their sound several steps closer to mine, and that made the recording process both painless and enjoyable. I think that we managed to capture a good balance of both of our flavours on the record. Then this February past we played one gig together under the title Boris with Kurihara. Of course this was the first time we had played together. The thing that most surprised me at the gig was just how loud their low-end roar is (laughs). But while it's loud it doesn't strike the ear in an aggressive, annoying way - it's more like the whole body becomes wrapped in the vibration. And at the same time there's a sense of song and of poetry about their sound. They have a very sincere, serious attitude towards music and that made it even more rewarding for me to work with them. It was a really enjoyable gig. We're due to tour the US together this autumn. I'm very much looking forward to it.

DW: We're covering much ground in this interview and I'm curious how do you make time for so many different recording projects?

Luckily, the various groups I work with are willing to be flexible and work around my schedule. Without their cooperation it wouldn't be possible, and I am grateful.

DW: In terms of influence and sonic kinship, John Cipollina is almost a musical ancestor to you. Could you tell us some about his tone and technique and how they have influenced you over the years?

The sheer expressive power of his sound and his phrasing are constantly amazing to me. There's a wonderful lustre and eroticism about that sound. Basically, as far as I'm concerned he's incomparable, a true original. But out of everything, it's his playing on the first Quicksilver album that hits me the hardest - it's just staggering! Of course I respect his guitar playing and it has had a big influence upon me, but rather than his technique per se, it's the sensations and the feeling embodied in his sound that are most important to me. Somewhere along the line I think I have absorbed some part of the feeling of his sound, and it has become a kind of sustenance for my own playing. But at the same time, I suspect that I have absorbed something from every guitarist with a wonderful sensibility that I've ever heard, not just Cipollina. And all of them are acting as subconscious sustenance for my music.

Selected Discography

• White Heaven Out (PSF)
• White Heaven Levitation 12" (Now Sound)
• Ghost Moungod Air Cave / Guru in the Echo (Now Sound)
• Ghost Snuffbox Immanence (Drag City)
• Ghost Tune In, Turn on, Free Tibet (Drag City)
• Damon & Naomi with Ghost Damon & Naomi with Ghost (Sub Pop)
• Damon & Naomi/Michio Kurihara Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian (Sub Pop)
• Damon and Naomi (featuring Kurihara) The Earth is Blue (20|20|20)
• The Stars Today (PSF)
• The Stars Will (Pedal)
• Michio Kurihara Sunset Notes (Pedal/20|20|20)
• Boris with Michio Kurihara Rainbow (Pedal/Drag City)

Special thanks to Naomi Yang and 20|20|20 for making this interview possible, and also thanks to Alan Cummings for his excellent translations. All photos by Naomi Yang. For a complete discography, refer to Robert Lim's invaluable Michio Kurihara Discography, originally constructed for a Ptolemaic Terrascope interview.

A bit of digging made it clear that we weren't alone in missing out on Anvil Salute, and we quickly concluded this was a group that deserved to be much better known beyond its local environs. We got in touch to try and help address that situation on various fronts, starting with this interview, and to be followed soon by a new CDR release on the DW label (which we won't rave about here if only to minimize the appearance of using the publication to flack our own product [questionable journalistic ethics? Sure, we got those...], though it is just great).

Currently the group numbers seven (or so), centered around Gabe Wingfield, who plays guitar, bells, bowls, chord organ, lap steel, shruti box, bulbul tarang, and some vocalizing (not to mention designing the distinctive graphics on their first two CDR releases; and also running the Maritime Fist Glee Club label [more on which below]).

Gabe: Officially the history is that Anvil Salute started in mid-2001 as a solo project of mine. I played a few shows of mostly improvised guitar noise and fractured folk meanderings. I decided that I couldn't make what I heard without other people playing. So I stopped playing out for a while. Then about two years later I set up a show in April 2003. I needed someone to play with. Todd Fagin & I knew each other from a local pirate radio station, and the two of us had jammed a bit. So I asked him to play with me. That's when I think Anvil Salute actually started.

Is there any significance to the group's name?

Gabe: I needed something to put on the flyer for the first solo show. I thought using my own name was a bit pretentious... I came across the term when reading an old travelogue. Some town in Arkansas apparently used to perform an anvil salute for the 4th of July. See, the town blacksmith would haul out his anvils to the town square, place one on top of the other, fill the hollow sockets with gunpowder (or blasting powder). He would light the fuse; the gunpowder would explode launching the topmost anvil into the air up to 30 feet or so. A huge noise and lots of smoke. Sounds like fun.

The group's membership fluctuated over the next several years, before stabilizing at its current size and lineup. The above-mentioned Todd Fagin primarily handles guitar (6 & 12 string, acoustic & electric), but has also added everything from bells to banjo, ukulele to organ. Jesse Butler plays esraj, tambura, some percussion, guitar, some flutes, and bowed flowers. Brad Fielder often plays drums and percussion, but also a whole array of instruments including trumpet and upright bass; he's also the group's recordist. Kelly Stevens plays bells, bongos, balaphon, concert bells, chimes, wood blocks and assorted drums. Kasra "George" Ahmadi focuses on saxophone and melodica, but also fills in on varied instruments as needed. And Rebecca Loftiss adds bowed guitar, bells, toys, and vocalizing. George and Rebecca play a little less regularly, but are still part of the core group, and most of the members are involved in other music projects as well (see the AS myspace page for links to those, and more info on the group).

As the list of instrumentation above suggests, Anvil Salute takes an expansive musical approach that embraces a range of sonic possibilities, incorporating everything from folk to free jazz to drone-rock to ethnic sounds, with the folk and free elements often predominating. In some ways, this puts them in the same sonic territory as groups like Tower Recordings, or OK neighbors the North Sea, though group members mention inspirations ranging from free jazz artists like Jemeel Moondoc and Hamid Drake, to drone-rock icons like the Velvet Underground, to American primitives like Moondog and Harry Partch, to avant-garde minimalists like Steve Reich and Morton Feldman, to traditional musicians such as Bukka White and Dock Boggs (not to mention Heidegger, Chuang Tzu, Robert Anton Wilson, and Woody Allen). All of these elements and more are distilled by the group into their own wide open spaces of sound, which draw on organizational strategies spanning a continuum from the composed to the freely improvised.

Gabe: There isn't really a typical way a "song" comes about. It could start with an idea brought in by someone, or it could be a group jam that falls into place. Once we have the kernel, we all sort of come up with our own parts, try different things, and let the pieces evolve naturally. Some parts are more formalized than others, but there is always room for improvisation. When we start a piece with a more formalized idea, that is to say, when we try out a piece that already has a bit of melody, a chord progression and more a passing sense of direction, it is usually because Todd brought it in to practice. He tends to work out & up ideas for the group to finish up or flesh out, and he has a lot of ideas. I don't think he ever stops playing the guitar.

Todd: From my perspective, I sit around my house, write bits and pieces of "songs" and sometimes entire songs. However, once I bring them to the band, everyone will add their own parts as they see fit. As a result of this, the songs take on a completely different aesthetic than they originally had when I was coming up with them.

Kelly: I just try to listen to what everyone is playing and add to it - play what I hear as I hear it. Sometimes the music is quiet and simple. Sometimes it swells and freaks out.

Brad: Group expansion on a singular idea - we usually seem to improvise until we reach what might feel harmonious or "right" and then script it from that point.

Jesse: The songs exist in a state of perpetual transformation, being molded and altered through subsequent performances. The palette of sounds, rhythms, and textures involved in any given Anvil Salute song shift over time, due to a variety of factors. Beneath the flux of change, though, there is an underlying consistency to most Anvil Salute songs.

Anvil Salute plays live fairly regularly around Norman, which gives them plenty of chances to try out new approaches in a focused setting.

Gabe: When we play out, the set is usually thought out in advance. That is, we have a general game plan with definite tunes, and those tunes have specific tones, moods, overall shapes, etc. Then, I don't know, maybe 70% goes according to plan. I think we've played together enough that we are comfortable with that. That is to say, we have a feel for what each one of us might do and we trust each other enough to come back to the song.

Live recordings (including those on the Discreet History of Bone CDR on Foxglove, and a self-titled cassette on Nerd Party) show a group unafraid to stretch things out, taking chances and following paths where they may lead, but always with a larger sense of development in relation to the underlying piece (something that's not always the case with this kind of music). I asked the group whether they felt any kinship with all the "acid folk" hanging around these days.

Brad: We use musical instruments that exist in the realms of Psychedelic and Folk music - and the acoustic stringed instruments are usually amplified leading us further in the direction to be grouped into certain genres. I would say compositionally, we're more of a 21st century chamber orchestra.

Jesse: Structurally speaking, I'd say our approach to music is actually more akin to free jazz than folk. Folk is also an apt label in the sense that we often use "folky" and acoustic types of instrumentation, including a variety of traditional folk instruments from around the world, though we don't generally use traditional folk song structures. I think that "psychedelic folk" is a fitting label for some aspects of Anvil Salute: we certainly have both psychedelic and folky elements in our music. I'd say that much of our music is psychedelic in the sense that it can alter one's experience.

That experience-altering quality is intentional, and an outgrowth of the group's attitude toward playing music.

Brad: Anvil Salute is trance and ritual music, be it for a formal preparation or a spontaneous psychotic episode.

Jesse: The point is that we actively use sound to create new experiential environments in which the listener (and I include ourselves in this category) can get lost for a while. I think that this is quite conscious in the sense that the members are actively and mindfully involved in the creation of these experiential environments, but there has never really been a time when we have explicitly conceptualized this as our purpose or goal. It happens spontaneously and naturally, or so it seems to me anyway.

Todd: When I am playing, I usually like to listen to this metamorphosis. For instance, at a recent show, Brad's drum playing on a particular song evolved in a manner different from what he had been doing in practice and past performances. I became so transfixed on what he was doing, I think I probably stopped paying attention to my own playing. Stuff like that happens a lot, at least the part of digging what others are doing. I tend to zone out on the sounds, and when things are going really well, I typically have a big shit-eating grin on my face.

Gabe: Occasionally, after we finish playing, I feel like I just woke up from being hypnotized and had a good cry while I was under... you know, the way you feel like you have slept for days, where you're completely spent, a little on edge, but everything around you is calm, almost peaceful and innocent... a rebirth or an awakening. Does that make any sense?

Of course, losing oneself in the transformative properties of music has a rich history in various traditions of mysticism -- Sufi dervishes, vodun drumming, many others. The members of Anvil Salute, while aware of these, aren't necessarily driven by any particular philosophy.

Jesse: Anvil Salute isn't spiritual in the sense that we all subscribe to a particular religious orientation or belief system that we infuse with our music. I, for one, do not consider myself to be spiritual and do not give much credence to supernatural accounts of reality. However, there is a sense in which our music could be understood as spiritual, in that it can be used to evoke an immediate "spirited" awareness of the present moment that transforms the perception of the participant and / or listener. I may only be speaking for myself here, but that is how I understand and approach music in general, as a perceptual tool that can alter one's immediate experience of reality in such a way that the mundane everyday-ness that our minds tend to get stuck in can be transformed into something else.

Brad: We don't try to put in anything subliminal or have a conscious higher purpose for the music - or I'll speak for myself and say that I don't - it exists as an autonomous entity that breathes and grows as it sees fit.

Gabe: The language used to describe my inner state when playing takes on a pseudo-spiritual vibe. When things are clicking, it seems like something else is in control. Well, maybe not in control, but directing things a little. I guess the best way to describe it is a loss of self.... given over to the moment, open to everything around me, taking in the sounds, the space, the smells, everything. It's as much an abnegation of ego as it is an ecstatic celebration of existence. Other times it simply feels good to make music that I like with people I love. Other times it's just shit. I don't think this really explains it any better.

Is the local cultural environment supportive of what you guys do?

Brad: Norman's a fun, easygoing place. Being a college town it supports a wide range of musical and artistic happenings.

Jesse: Norman is OK, but there isn't exactly a thriving market for our music here. We do get some support and encouragement from various folks, but more would be nice.

Gabe: It's a college town much like any other. Inasmuch as what we do is far outside of the mainstream, I'd say we've had more success than we could reasonably expect here. That is not to say the "scene" here is so closed-minded or anything. It's just that we live in an area that loves a well-crafted song. Of course, all of our friends are quite supportive, and we've been lucky enough to find more than a few places willing let us play. All in all, we seem to be most appreciated by other musicians and the art crowd.

What about the Maritime Fist Glee Club label? That's pretty much Gabe's thing, right?

Gabe: I started the label in 2001 mainly to release music by friends here in Oklahoma. I wanted to keep it loose and open. That is, I wanted it reflect my own musical interests. So it covers a lot of territory from lo-fi pop-rock to glitchy minimalism to space rock to folkier sorts of things. I released a CDR by Gown, our token international offering after I met him while he was touring with Christina Carter. That one has almost completely sold out here, but most everything else is still in print. I hope that more of these bands get picked up on. A few of them have broken up since their release, but I think that the albums are still worth checking out. Over the years, Maritime Fist Glee Club has become less and less active. I guess it's been taking a bit of a backseat to the band as that is where most of my energy has been going. There are a couple of non-Anvil Salute items on the horizon... like the Greebies (a throwback to early/mid-80s college rock performed by a couple of guys from Washington state and a friend of ours here in Norman). It was recorded and mixed by Allan Vest of the Starlight Mints.

So what's coming up on the horizon for Anvil Salute? More releases I hope?

Gabe: Actually, we are in the process of finishing up a couple of new full- lengths. All the Animals of the Forest will be out on LoFi Shit, Brad Fielder's label, in the next month or so. Four of those songs are currently on our MySpace page. We're piecing together another one for Deep Water; it's a little more straight rock than anything else we've done. We're also working on something for House of Alchemy. I'm not sure what that'll be just yet.

We're working on a few concepts, including a disc based on the past few sets we've been playing lately. It's sort of an homage to 60s free jazz. You know, skronking sax with insane drums and a lot of droning raga underlying it all. It's a lot of fun to play and get lost in. We're also in the process of working up a set/record's worth of Iranian folk songs. Kasra, our saxophonist, grew up with all of those songs, and he's wanted to work them up for who knows how long. The idea is to have 2-3 instruments doing the melodies, a bass, and the rest being percussion. For that we'll be enlisting a friend of ours, Michael Lee, to play some stellar bass. He's on a couple of Maritime Fist releases (>3 and Moment Trio). We talk about doing a book on tape type of thing with children's stories and Anvil Salute background music. We're full of ideas. Now if only we had more time.

Other than that a couple of us in the band are expecting children in October. So with additions to the families and such, I expect we'll be bringing in some new blood into the band in the next couple of years. Or maybe we'll become stage parents and form the Anvil Salute Children's Choir.

And man, they really took it. We quickly realized we were seeing some expanded version of the group, as a line of ten musicians filled the small stage from one end to the other. We later learned this was the literal first meeting of the US and Italian contingents of the group (the latter coalescing since singer/leader Jesse Poe moved to Florence a couple of years back), onstage opening the festival... So we had a rock-band lineup, plus horn section, cello, lap steel guitar, and two basses (one acoustic, played by a tall lanky Italian guy; the other electric, played by a petite poetess from Virginia). Not to forget of course the designated jaw harpist.

From a public performance point of view, it was a move that took some cojones, especially since most of the detailed arrangements necessary to keep a group of that size non-cacophonous were in fact improvised on the spot. It was also one of those amazing musical moments, 10 people each doing their own thing, and at the same time doing this one larger thing all together... Just flying, like a flock of birds... and not just any old flock of the same bird, but some open-ended association of city birds and country birds and jazz birds and red wine-drinking birds, all doing a big aerial-show dance as much for their own pleasure as ours. As high as we were by the end of their set, they seemed even higher...

So we were especially chuffed (as our Anglo friends say) to already have an appointment to interview the group that weekend. We met up with the infectiously energetic Mr. Poe, who had the excellent idea of getting the whole band involved. Most previous Tanakh articles had focused on Jesse (the best of those definitely Mats Gustafsson's piece at the Terrascope online), though he always referred to the group as a "collective" operation as much as possible and wanted to see if we could capture some of that in the interview.

So on Sunday afternoon we convened an assembly, and the whole group hunkered down in a crowded noisy basement of AS220 for the interview. Everybody was there, and we'll introduce them as they show up (though for the record let it be noted that Umberto Trivella [electric guitar] and Jason Andrews [jaw harp] were present but mostly quiet). In spite of the difficulty of rendering here the conversational dynamic, which often flew around like the flow of their live music, they all had some pretty ace things to say, and I think we got a lot of that. They started out laughing about the oddness of meeting one's bandmates for the first time onstage...

Jesse Poe (singer, guitar, director): Yeah, we got here five minutes before the sound check...

Paul Watson (cornet): These guys all just met one another. I was trying to get people to not shake hands on stage... It makes the promoters nervous...

DW: Was it a little weird?

Oretta Giunti (drums): No (laughs), because I didn't have time to realize what was happening...

Phil Murphy (lap steel): I think the nice thing about working with a collective is that hopefully you'll never experience the same thing twice, every night it's a different situation; and therefore it makes it pretty easy, you go in with no expectations and everybody does the best job they can, and you learn very quickly, it's a baptism by fire up there...

We spent a while discussing that "collective" aspect of Tanakh. Much of the publicity surrounding the group has understandably focused on Jesse's role as singer, chief songwriter, and guiding presence. But equally important is the group's status as a group effort, where each of the members contributes something of their own to the final outcome.

DW: Is the balance between songwriting and improvisation a key to understanding Tanakh?

Jesse: For me it's essential. I love improv music, and when we started Tanakh it was just Phil and I and all we did was improv. There's something so beautiful about a song, but then there's something so free and in the moment and exhilarating about improv, testing yourself and pushing yourself higher and higher. But then it's a song that kills you, you can sing it and put it on a mix tape... At least for me, I don't make improv mix tapes... So putting the two together, that is the reason to play music for me, that tension...

Phil: Jesse has the uncanny knack for being able to select co-conspirators, he just knows who is gonna fit together, and that inspires some confidence and the uncertainty is abated.

Jesse: I read that John Woo dreams about, not his movies, but what actor with which gun, and I lay in bed at night thinking "this guy on this instrument" "that guy on that instrument, that would be so cool..." A lot of it is the dynamics between people. I've been playing a lot of solo shows recently, and it does well but I don't like it. I mean, I enjoy doing it, but having somebody else out there, it raises the bar for you, gives you something else to jump on top of...

On the first two Tanakh CDs, Villa Claustrophobia (2001) and Dieu Dieul (2003), Jesse wrote most of the songs himself, and constructed the arrangements with various collaborators in the studio. They both deservedly got a good bit of favorable attention within the frame of a "new psychedelic folk" thing, though they also included drones and ethnic and experimental influences too. And indeed, the self-titled third Tanakh release ended up as a double-CD of extended free improvisations, with a large group including Pat Best of Pelt among others; Jesse says, "It was kind of orchestrated, I was trying to run around and point at people and different instruments..." But Ardent Fevers (like the previous three released on the Canadian Alien8 label) was largely co-written with guitarist Umberto Trivella, the first time Jesse had written collaboratively in depth, which opened up new avenues, incorporating all the group's previous directions within an especially focused and forthright set of songs. The new CD Saunders Hollow, just out on Camera Obscura, was actually recorded at the same time as Ardent Fevers with much of the same expanded group. It takes the collaboration idea even further, made up entirely of songs written and sung by electric bassist Michele Poulos, with Jesse in an arranging and production role. More on this one below.

We asked about the sources of Jesse's songwriting, which seem to draw on American folksinger roots but stretch out into a variety of unexpected territories. Jesse acknowledged that, but stressed the openness and incorporative possibilities.

Jesse: Phil and I picked the name together, the T and K right, and the one part is the prophetic part - which might sound really arrogant, cause we're not prophets, leave that to Sun Ra - but prophetic in the way that, the way I see the future going is globalization, that everything is becoming one. For me it's like being able to put sounds from all over the world together and make one thing... Not like fusion, but... the Japanese do it so beautifully - consume everything and put it out as this new thing - Ghost is marvelous at that. I always say it's like "outernational" music instead of "international" music, just taking everything and trying to make something beautiful out of it...

Darius Jones (saxophone): It has this universal thing happening... I think we come from so many different walks of life, but at some point we all connected, and that's the place where Tanakh is - this place where everyone comes together, like church... And even if we don't listen to the same exact things when we wake up in the morning, it doesn't matter... It's really just the love of music, of sound.

Phil: Not to sound corny or whatever, but if you look back at American history there's this "melting pot" they tell us, so it only seems natural that you put together a group of people from all around, with different origins, they're all gonna come with something to contribute... So our sound, it's kind of American but it's also got so much more to it because it's coming from so many different angles and different backgrounds... The songs are like an incubator for it...

DW: So, how do those songs get processed by the group into the live experience?

Matteo Bennici (upright bass): We had to study from Jesse's songs and rebuild the core to play live. And for example with the rhythm section we made it as open as possible, so you can see every aspect of the songs, not only the American tradition and sounds but also something else... You don't know what will happen, so you have to be very open-minded, and what you play can be shaped and molded into anything.

Viola Mattioli (cello): In other groups, they might have cellos or strings, but they're not always this important thing, and they're not really given much room, they're just there for the chorus or to strengthen the song. But I'm happy that in this group I'm given a chance to really be a part of the band rather than just an addition, not just playing a set part but there's room to experiment and improvise as well.

Oretta: The thing that I like best when I play these songs is that they bring me to listen. You can be very open, you are stimulated while you are playing...

Jesse: Yeah, I listen to the point that sometimes I fuck up what I'm playing (laughs)... Sometimes people just blow me away, I turn around and I'm like "Wow!" I'm so happy with what they just did, that I forget what I'm doing...

Darius: That's the beauty of sound, it's everywhere and happening all the time if you just listen, but as a society we don't really do that. But when you get musicians together, we're really listening to one another hard, and more from the heart too: "What are you really trying to say?"

Jesse: I have a hard time keeping my eyes open when I play, ‘cause it's just too much to try and take in that other sense. I prefer to have my eyes shut, not in some poser-ish shoegazer way, just because it's too much to hear what everybody is doing, and it's all inside your head and corresponding... Think about somebody like Mingus, who's playing and while he's playing is telling you what he's gonna play next, playing his bassline and he's singing the next notes. And I think everybody, if they're really playing right, is kind of thinking the same thing - "Oh, what he just did is shit-hot, I'm gonna hit on that"... So you're hearing twice, and that makes it impossible to see anything... I would go mad if I had to look out there at the same time; if I'm doing that I'm not playing the music I want to be playing - it's about listening to space... Really though, I like D's definition of it:

Darius: It's just hot! (laughing) It's all about THE SEXY! That's all we said all the time we were in the studio for this record - "You gotta bring the sexy man!"

Jesse: That was a big motto during making that record, and Michele's record...

Darius: That was even hotter...

Michele: I must have heard that hundreds of times... (sighing and shaking head tolerantly...)

DW: So then, it's about bringing the planning of a good song together with something more primal?

Jesse: Yeah. That's why I liked Avarus so much (referring to their short and wild set at Terrastock), they were doing improv but I thought it was so raw and animalistic, I found it really sexy...

Paul: He was humping my leg the whole time...

Jesse: I felt like they were doing the same thing we were doing, but we were doing it with songs and they were doing it with just straight-up madness!

Darius: You have the craft, and at some point you have to lay that down and go back to the human thing. I think that's what's happening with this record (Ardent Fevers) - we've got great tunes, we've got great song structures, but then we just pissed all over it, shat all over it, spit on it, fucked on it, slept on it... Everybody I've played this record for, they just can't get enough of it, and I think the same thing is gonna happen with Michele's record, that was some special special mojo going on...

Jesse: Sometimes I feel a bit hindered by the manqué we've created. Sometimes it's really shitty, because I like all kinds of music, I like hip-hop, I like Ethiopian music... So with Michele's record it was awesome because it was a Tanakh record but it wasn't, so we could do whatever we wanted. It's all over the place because there was none of that boundary.

Michele's record is of course the brand new Saunders Hollow, where she steps to the front of the group for the first time. Michele has a long music-making history in her family - mother sang with a girl group called The Bobby Pins, aunt with another called the Pussy Cats - and she had been playing and writing music for years when she met Jesse and joined Tanakh back in 2002, playing bass on their first two CDs.

Michele: So when we came together to make Ardent Fevers, I'd already been working on some songs and we thought, since Jesse was going to be here in the states with Isobel and Alex (that's Isobel Campbell and Alex Nielson, who guest on both AF and SH), we should go ahead and record the songs I'd been working on. So I mailed Jesse a CD of the material, he thought the songs were pretty good, and we decided that he would take the role of producer, as well as musician, and basically put his spin on them, or shape them, which he did. The way the sound came together was pretty typically Tanakhian - which is to say, I think we may have practiced them a few times, but the recorded version of what you hear is all pretty much live. We, of course, go over some tracks later, like the vocal tracks, but the actual sound is very much a live sound - it's very much improvisational, like the other Tanakh albums.

If Ardent Fevers represents Tanakh at its most focused, Saunders Hollow finds the group in a playful and expansive mood, dressing up Michele's songs in a bunch of different outfits ranging from moody folk to jazz to dark drones, from the soundtrackian title instrumental to the harpsichord-led girl-group pop of "Longer Than Sorrow", and even a couple of numbers like the sultry "Kept" that make one feel dirty in the best possible way. Jesse details the strenuous coaching required to keep the sexy at effective levels during the recording sessions:

Jesse: (laughing) One time Michele got so fucking pissed at us... She was singing, and it just didn't quite have the sexy, and we kept saying, "You gotta bring it harder than that!" She was wearing this cool girly hipster sweater, and I was like, "No, no, take that shit off and wear my shirt..." It's like with Dr. John - the first thing he says is, "They call me Dr. John," and after that you just believe him. She switched shirts and afterwards she was the shit, she was just like a different person, it was amazing...

Michele: It's true. There was something about changing the outer that changed the inner too, it was a simultaneous transition...

Michele is also a published poet, currently working toward an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University (displaced there from New Orleans University when Hurricane Katrina hit), and that literary background had an influence on Saunders Hollow as well.

Michele: I'm writing a lot of poetry lately - it's incredibly stimulating and complements songwriting in profound ways. When you listen to poets read their work, their words, like Robert Creeley or Bukowski, you're listening to music, the beats, the way they accent particular syllables or phrases - they use their voice as an instrument, and it has the same effect as if you were listening to a song or a particular musical phrase. When I write poetry, I have to read it aloud, many times. Poetry has to sound good; it must sit in the ear like a good chorus. However, when I write a song, I don't begin with words - I begin with music, or even before that, I begin with an elusive or inarticulate emotion, for lack of a better phrase. It seems when I sit to write a song, I'm grappling with some incredibly vague notion or feeling, one that needs expression somehow that words alone cannot convey. I think that's where my songs evolve from - an inarticulate emotion or desire. I think words are very important in songwriting, don't get me wrong! But for me, they are probably the last part of the entire process.

DW: So what can you say about Saunders Hollow?

Michele: Saunders Hollow is a place in Connecticut near where I grew up, in Old Lyme. The song "Saunders Hollow" was actually written a long time ago, when I was living in New York going to film school. I could give you the really long story of why I wrote a song called Saunders Hollow, but it's incredibly sad and tragic and I don't really want to go into it - suffice it to say that I lost two really good friends there. So initially I wrote a song for them, their memory, but it's also a magical place filled with mystery and wonder. Okay, I recognize that I'm now sounding like a brochure promoting a vacation to Hawaii or something, so I better stop while I'm ahead.

Since the recording of both discs and the Terrastock gig, the collective has continued to develop, with most of the working European lineup having switched out, and only the sweetly muscular cello of Viola Mattioli continuing from Terrastock. The current roster also includes: Jacopo Salvatori (piano),Cosimo Santi (electric guitar), Nick Liceti (drums), and Fabio Mannelli (electric bass). "And of course," Jesse adds, "for our new record you can count on finding Mr. Jones on sexy sax as always, Phil, Watson and Michele and other of the usual suspects popping up here and there." According to Jesse, the latest Tanakh material has been taking a much heavier rock slant than in the past.

Jesse: We are hoping to record a new record this spring, but that is based on finding some money to do so and the right producer. I have always produced our records and I really want to work with someone this time... P.J. Harvey is my first pick, I think she could really bring out the intensity of what I am hearing in my head and wanting to communicate, and above all I know that she would not only preserve the integrity of what I have done in the past but she would raise the bar for me and challenge me to do more, give more, expect more, and leave no emotion inside but to spill all of it good and bad right onto the 2 inch tape, and that is what I think a producer should be/do...

The group is also planning a few European shows, and Jesse has some solo gigs lined up as well. In addition to the new album, recordings by Tanakh can also be heard on a pair of upcoming compilations, including a "France"-themed disc on the Ruralfaune microlabel, and the long-rumored Carnivale-themed comp promised from Camera Obscura. We'd encourage you to check them out.

(initial interview conducted April 2006 at Terrastock by KM and NR; additional information added later from Jesse and Michele via email)

Note: A late missive from Jesse tells us that as of March 2007 he's decided to try going full-time with Tanakh, quitting his day job as a teacher to devote all his time to music. To that end, he's trying to book shows (solo/duo/band) "all over God's green earth, anytime, anywhere". Anyone desiring more info can contact Jesse via a special website set up for booking purposes. We wish him all the luck in the world.

Let's kick off with At the First Sign of Frost, which was originally self-released on cassette in 1997 and was later reissued as a CDR on the Deadslackstring label. It has been unavailable for a goodly while now but can now be downloaded for free from the Deserted Village Last Fm page. This is a trend to be wholeheartedly applauded, as there is nothing that puts one in the right frame of mind for further exploration than elements of an artist's unobtainable back-catalog being provided for free. An atmospheric and relatively low-tech set of recordings, the 17 songs and instrumentals on Frost recall the heyday of the cassette Portastudio underground, with delicate observational folk-noir that sits nicely alongside the best output of key 90s labels like Xpressway and Siltbreeze. Alastair Galbraith and the Kitchen Cynics especially come to mind. There are moments when distressed drum machine parts head off at a tangent to the main proceedings like startled sheep, but Colohan was a gifted songwriter even at this early stage and ultimately that carries the day. That and the occasional surprising course change like the blistering eight minute psych-rock instrumental workout "Forgotten Heroes of Aviation", which could comfortably sit on an early Flyte Reaction LP.

Dave hails from Goldsmith Country - a reach of County Westmeath centered on Glasson at the county's western end. The area is named for Ireland's world-renowned 18th century poet, Oliver Goldsmith. Goldsmith's writings include the epic poem "The Deserted Village" (now you know where the label gets its name from), and the play "She Stoops to Conquer". In Goldsmith Country, presumably Dave's tribute to his childhood and roots, was originally released on the Deadslackstring label in 1999 and is theoretically out-of-print, but one turned up nonetheless, so it looks like Dave is home-brewing copies in some capacity. This mostly instrumental album works with evocation of place in the same way that Roy Montgomery's Scenes from the South Island CD does. Recorded simply but well; rich guitar timbres, keyboard figures and drones, found sounds and noise deftly come together to form a soundtrack to landscapes both interior and exterior. When vocals are present, as on "Early Morning Fog on the River", you can hear the influence of Richard Youngs above all. To obtain a copy I suggest contacting Dave via the ARP Myspace page. Leaving Goldsmith Country we skip a few releases and end up with Dave's impressions of backpacking around Australia, recorded for posterity as the 2000-2002 recordings A Drifting Population, initially released on Deserted Village, and now available in a numbered second edition of 30 from the same source. As an attempt to capture the fleeting memories of travel, it's pretty successful - you really feel both the freedom and aloneness of the experience in this series of melancholy solo-guitar instrumentals. It can be placed on a continuum with In Goldsmith Country, though the pieces are more fragmentary and impressionistic: blue haze over the Great Dividing Range, heat haze over country roads while you exist in suspended animation waiting to hitch a ride, night insects and a sky full of more stars than you've ever seen before. Tape hiss is a player in this landscape as well, a running stream through the recordings. The four-part suite "The Ebb and Flow of Distant Moonlit Grass" is central to proceedings, moving from the isolationism of quietly bowed drones to a dying campfire of night watch improvisations to morning rise through dense ground fog over silent fields. Fittingly, the final track was recorded direct to Dictaphone during Dave's Australian travels (the rest being recorded on return to Ireland).

Fast forward to 2006 and ARP's busiest year to date. Your Turn to Go It Alone, is a double 3" CD-R set on the Rusted Rail imprint housed in a really striking mini-gatefold sleeve, marking the beginning of a new phase in ARP recordings. Mostly deeply personal meditations on relationships gone wrong, and very well recorded, it nonetheless connects to the mordant atmospheres of earlier releases, building them into downbeat singer-songwriter statements that run the gamut from Jandek to Townes Van Zandt. "Emmet St. 1" functions as an intro to disc one, Colohan's bleak piano offset against Sean Og's thoughtful clarinet. One of Colohan's finest vocal performances amps up the heartbreak on "Hold Back the Sea", the refined agony of a recently fractured relationship laid bare. Townes Van Zandt haunts the striking "Get Well Soon", and there is something deeply iconic about line like: "And I don't blame you for giving up on me/One too many times I missed the loneliness in your kiss and the distance in your smile" and "There will come a time when I hope that you'll regret/Never telling me to get well soon/you know I would have tried". Elsewhere, "Last Ride" is splendid slice of psych-folk, culled from a dream of animated garden gnomes, talking cats and asylum inmates, and the title track is extraordinary in its evocation of a guy drinking away another broken relationship without having really learnt anything from it thus pre-destined to make the same mistakes again. Disc two contains two extraordinary pieces. "We Can't Last" takes the themes of disc one and wraps them in an epic almost progressive rock structure, with UBS member Colin Hoye contributing gut-wrenching trumpet and Pumice member Stephan Neville weighing in with distressed percussion. Dave's rich vocals come from inside a relationship this time, but with a level of pessimism that seems like a rehearsal of its ultimate failure. "The Barren Ground Assembly" finds Dave and his collaborators traveling through an improvised space recalling the live United Bible Studies release Airs of Sun and Stone, though lit by the moon rather than the morning sun. The title refers to a name given to herds of Caribou. In all, Your Turn to Go It Alone is an unexpected masterpiece.

ARP returns to the Deserted Village for The Days and Hills Grown Old CD-R, and reconnects with landscape and mist for a haunted outing somewhere between early solo guitar improvisations and the soul-searching of Your Turn to Go It Alone. "Saints Island" opens with deep earth humming and spare but emotive guitar plucking reminiscent of Mazzacane Connors and also not too far removed from the minimalist blues pickings of Tetuzi Akiyama's fine Pre-Existence CD. Much is carried by the silence between the notes. The spare lightly jazz-inflected "How You'll Fall" sounds spiritually exhausted in a chillingly effective way. Not easy listening, it forces the listener to get inside the heads of the male and female protagonists to try and connect with it - no easy task. The unaccompanied "Floodplains" and canonical "The Liminal Hills" are easier to plug in to; the former's ghostly tradition segueing into the latter's avant-folk. Taking up more than half the CD, the transcendent "And if I Remained in the Outermost Sea" is a 20 minute live improvisation based around the work of the same name by W. G. Sebald. Like "The Barren Ground Assembly", it blurs the boundaries between what one expects of an ARP release and what one expects of a United Bible Studies release. Inspired by the presence of Matthew Bower and Michael Flower on the same bill it builds from ambient drone to collective freakitude, fueled by zoned percussion and contemplative flute passages. The Days... suffered some hefty disrespect on release for not consolidating on the melodic song-craft of Your Turn... and it is definitely more detached than its predecessor, but nonetheless contains fine and lasting moments that sit well within the ARP/UBS construct as a whole. The recently released five track EP A Premonition (a free download from Rusted Rail) changes tack again, being an attempt to "channel something more joyful and ecstatic than the Pilot is used to" according to Dave. The tracks are largely improvised, with voice used as an instrument as well as to convey lyrics. From the opening title track, the listener is taken on a higher-key cosmic ride. This lightness of being of these tracks is new for ARP, with instrumentation like prepared piano, melodica, autoharp and lap steel leaving vapor trails in the mind. A fine collaborative release, the input of Sean Og, Aaron Hurley and Shane Cullinane seems to be given equal weight to Dave's. You'll definitely be reminded of Keith Wood's Hush Arbors. Beautiful...and free.

Also recent are two extremely limited CD-Rs on Deserted Village: Last Orders at the One Tree Hotel and The Light Is Coming From You. Both of these are purportedly editions of 20, though the fact that they are still listed for sale on the DV site suggests that the number might be somewhat mutable. The recordings on the Last Orders at the One Tree Hotel EP date from 2001, and it is a companion piece to the A Drifting Population CD. "A Thousand Years on the One Tree Plain (Parts I-V)" is a meditation on landscape and eternity; guitar, vocal and echoplex effects wielded with focus and purpose. For anyone who has driven from Adelaide to Sydney across the great nothingness of the Australian interior, Colohan's sonic mapping of the desolate Hay Plain in this work will resonate deeply. An odd omission from A Drifting Population, "A Thousand Years..." is arguably the strongest work to come out of those recordings. The title track evokes the abandoned hotel in question and its setting of red dirt and spinifex perfectly. Finishing off the EP, "Saw You There in Land and Weather" again brings Roy Montgomery to mind. The Light Is Coming From You documents the live Agitated Radio Pilot experience, with recordings culled from recordings made during a tour of Ireland supporting Charalambides in July 2006. Four tracks were recorded at the Bog Lane Theatre in Ballymahon and three tracks at the Boom Boom Room in Dublin. Concentrating on songs culled from Your Turn to Go It Alone and the forthcoming World Winding Down it finds ARP in mystical chamber-folk mode, though with occasional acid guitar explosions to spice things up, as on the opening track, an atmospheric version of "Hold Back the Sea". The four songs presumably from World Winding Down bode extremely well for that release, particularly the spine-tingling "Caroline Sings" and epic title track.

Significant releases missing from this round up are the very first ARP release A Lonely Trajectory, originally a 1996 double cassette, the 2004 EP Imaginary East of Longford CDR EP on Slow Loris, and Like Flightless Birds on Foxglove from around the same time. But with a relatively decent swag of the ARP back-catalog available at the moment (though who knows how long that will last) now is a good time to catch up with a fine body of work that has accreted virtually unnoticed over the past decade.