(cross-posted from Stillepost.ca. Actual article is here:)
INTERVIEW WITH RANDY RANDALL (NO AGE), SUN, MAR 2, 2008
[Note: this transcript is not cleaned up — sorry, CMW is super busy tiems kthxbye — so the questions are only vaguely transcribed and all the likes and ums and aahs are included. If I have time later on I'll go back and clean it up. Thanks to everyone who came to the show!]
Is the new album for Sub Pop finished?
We are finished. It’s all turned in, the last couple moments are a few design elements.
Working on the cover art?
Yes, exactly.
And can you tell me about the album? Is it a collection of disconnected songs like Weirdo Rippers?
I think this is definitely written to be a record. So no, we definitely took our time and kind of crafted the songs. I think part of our style is to kind of have, we have sort of eclectic taste so definitely it’s not all the same song, it’s different. There’s different sounds, it was recorded in three different locations. I think there’s still some kind of difference in the songs in terms of how they fit together I think we were hoping to craft more of a singular cohesive record.
Where did you record the album?
We began recording at Southern Studios in England, which was a big high point for us because so many of our favourite records, like Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy was recorded there, and it was built by John who does Southern Records and those folks from Crass, an amazing anarchist punk band that was a huge influence on Dean and I growing up. So we were excited to get to be there, and they even had like Crass stencils from when they first built it still on the walls. So that was a big exciting part. We began recording the record there in a break we had on our European tour that we did with Mika Miko. We had a few days off so we were able to go into the studio there. And when we returned from that tour we worked on it at the studio Infrasonic Sound here in LA and finally we put the finishing touches on it at home, it was a small studio we’re building at home.
I can’t picture you guys in a record plant style setup.
Yeeeeaaah, nothing too big. We play all the music and sort of craft it ourselves so it’s a bedroom laboratory kind of feeling, you know?
What led to signing with Sub Pop rather than Fat Cat?
Um, Sub Pop’s an amazing record label with a great roster and bands like CSS and Wolf Eyes. Not that Fat Cat doesn’t also have an amazing roster but I feel like as we were talking about future plans and how we wanted No Age to grow as a band and opportunities that we would like to take advantage of, and we felt that Sub Pop had a lot of fun and exciting young artists who were pushing music forward in some interesting and diverse ways that were also exciting to us, and just working, just meeting them and working with them, we were really excited to explore the possibilities.
And so things were amicable with Fat Cat?
Oh yeah, definitely. From the start when Weirdo Rippers first came out, it was a funny thing first, I think we were taking the long road, I mean Dean and I, we never imagined anything like this could happen especially so soon. We were really hoping to put out five EPs originally on five different labels and make these kind of underground, grassroots kind of records that people would maybe find ten years from now. ‘Whoa, I found this cool record, I never even heard of this band’, you know. And then maybe at that point we might put them on a retrospective or something. But when Fat Cat approached us and asked if we would be interested in compiling this for those songs, it was within… I think most of them hadn’t even come out yet. So it was sort of like, wait a second, we were expecting to do this thing ten years from now, not a month into it. So it’s just like everything was happening so fast that as we started working with Fat Cat we kind of let them know that it was like, hey, it’s just this record, we have no idea what the proper full-length is and we haven’t even written it yet, and we quickly had to realize how the more mechanical parts of things work, how you plan one month and then eight months later it’s realized. We were still kind of going from the idea to concept to product. Straight through, we had no plans far in advance, so.
Is there stuff that you guys wouldn’t be comfortable with in terms of commercials?
No definitely, I think Dean and I eat a vegan diet and kind of live a vegan lifestyle, meaning we don’t eat meat and dairy or eggs or things of that nature and we’re not shy about talking about that because those are important things to us. And I think it’d be safe to say we’re fairly liberal Noam Chomsky kind of band, in our politics, so there are many things that don’t make sense of us. We wouldn’t support anything without having an idea what we were doing, And I think the music we make is kind of idiosyncratic or anachronistic in its own right, and I could never imagine, it would be difficult for me to see the kind of Army asking to use those songs.
I’d love to see them try.
Yeah, it would be a funny sight but there’s no way in hell that I could ever see them, you know in good conscience. There’s a number of things I have no interest in purchasing myself. The world we live in is a gray area, living in Los Angeles I have the option to drive or not to drive and I’ve done both, and I can appreciate using public transportation, riding bicycles, finding alternative modes of transportation and also understand the point where people do buy cars and do drink Coca-Cola or do drink beers. It’s topics like that where it’s like, okay. There are things in my life where … I’ve purchased a beer or two in my day, you know what I mean. I don’t know if I would be the best salesperson for it yet, but it would be hypocritical for me to tell people not to drink beer. So I think our politics are very personal and ??? on our everyday lives. Anyway noones asked us anything really, other than skateboarding videos which we gladly support because we love skateboarding and we’re avid skateboarders, so.
Grew up in suburbs?
Yeah, in the suburbs of LA, yeah. I think it was very much our sort of introduction I think in a lot of funny ways to music even, cause you know in the early ‘90s us growing up skateboarding we watched so many videos and kind of pored over them for hours and hours and it was just playing such great music you kinda heard on that, either legally or illegally, I don’t know how that stuff worked especially at that age, but I learned about so much cool music through cool skateboarding videos. And there was many a time I’d go to the record store and I was like, ‘oh there was this one song that Ed Templeton used on his Toy Machine video and I’d wait til the end and it’s like, oh, it’s Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Go out to the store and buy it and, oh, it’s awesome. So yeah across the board I think for us the kind of creativity that came out of skateboarding I think there’s no rules the way we knew skateboarding pre X-Games culture, it was very much like, go find something that looks interesting and explore it and kind of view the world in a different way; what everyone else might see as just a curb, suddenly it was like hours and months of dedication and work and practice and you find an abandoned swimming pool or ditch or something and everyone else says it’s trash, to a young skateboarder’s mind it’s a whole playground. So its that kind of idea of exploring and looking at the trash and the detritus and things that look used in the everyday straight world; to a creative, not necessarily law-abiding youth — you don’t have to break the law a little bit but you can have fun, you can find a way to do that and get with a community and build strong bonds in communities and express yourself. As we get older I think that’s definitely, it traveled into music. I kind of, I went through several major sort of injuries at a young age that sort of prohibited my… they lightened my need for dangerous activities, to a degree. They tempered them to a degree when the hospital bills started piling up, and the pain, you know, you can only have so many casts before you start going, hmm, maybe this guitar over there, maybe that doesn’t look so bad.
Write songs you can skate to.
[laughs], yeah, which I was doing already but as more and more time came out at shows my shoulder would dislocate and stuff like that in high school, it was like, wait a second, it’s one thing or the other. Which is not to say I don’t still skateboard but I was just talking the other day with some friends about that idea of like breaking your wrists….like Reggie who’s in this great band from LA called Abe Vigoda, just broke his wrist and he’s a drummer, so they’re going to have to cancel their South By Southwest shows.
You run PPM?
No, Dean does.
But yeah I noticed Abe Vigoda from reports about the scene.
They’re great bands, it’s a lot of fun. LA has a really vibrant, cool community, there’s really just a lot a lot of younger bands that maybe wouldn’t necessarily be welcome in the kind of bar club hip kind of scene of LA. I mean LA has a lot of venues, a lot of places for people to play but a lot of it comes with this sort of cool cachet, like you gotta kind of know the look or have a vibe about you, like… I don’t know like you ????? or something. Versus something like the Smell is sort of like kids in clothes that definitely aren’t cool. You know it’s funny to watch the pendulum turn. Uncool is always the next cool.
It’s really nice though, because too much attention can put a burden on a place, but what’s really cool and what I’ve seen about the community that’s involved with the smell is that it’s very much a welcoming community. SO you might see a couple new faces down there but really it’s sort of, here, this is what we do. There’s no place to park, the sound isn’t always that great, it’s kinda cold or it’s kinda hot, and if you’re into it, if the music still interests you outside of all of these environmental factors, then you’re more than welcome to be involved. But what will happen is, somebody’s not really all that psyched on them, who are really just curious, want to see what all the vibe is about, and they’re like, oh, it’s kind of scary, there’s homeless people asking me for change, and the food’s all vegan and the bathroom stinks and there’s all this graffiti, it’s like hmmmm…. Maybe you better go to the posh-y bar in Hollywood. It sort of has its own weeding-out factor. Which means that the people all there; at least everyone I know who’s involved with it, they’re all really nice and have these big happy faces and want to welcome more people to be involved with it because the more people you… the more rich and interesting the artistic sort of you know pool becomes, but I think there’s an inherent filter process, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s like if you don’t want to be there, then don’t be there. It’s hard to see, you don’t see to many poseurs is what I’m trying to say. It’s hard to look cool… If you show up with sunglasses and a big haircut, you’ll quickly realize you’re the odd man out. And retreat back to your, wherever.
forget the Queen’s Park ‘ghetto dude’ incident — you want real civil service racial stupidity? peep smilin’ Julie Myers, seen giving a prize for best costume at a halloween party … to a man in blackface pretending to be an escaped convict. clearly this woman is being disingenuous about not noticing the makeup. and when satirists like Dave Chappelle blur the lines about what’s acceptable to say, you are required to actually think a little harder about what you can get away with (unless you want to just play 100% safely within the lines, which just isn’t any fun).
but when somebody transgresses those boundaries of good taste, let the punishment fit the crime — if you aren’t sensitive to questions of race and yet you work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, you deserve to get bounced to the curb for tolerating ignorant assclown behaviour. bol knows i’ve thrown up enough shapes in party photos to have a twinge of guilt about the issue myself, but hi, it’s called blackface, people. surely america can teach its children one simple lesson: darkening your skin and shucking and jiving for comedic effect is bad and wrong. do we need PSAs running on daytime television? and can we get bill cosby?
I am completely addicted to Urban Dictionary: Word of the Day. Some highlights:
blacking out To turn off any device that people can reach you with (cell phone, two-way, computer, home phone, morse code, etc.) in order to avoid someone.
Megan is blacking out Brent because he was acting like a dick. She don’t play that!
askhole Someone who asks many stupid, pointless, obnoxious questions.
God! Jimmy is such an askhole. He won’t stop asking me about my favorite teletubby and im about to smash him in the grill, kid.
Leave Britney Alone An exclamation made when your friends or family are teasing you to a point where you can’t handle it anymore and a hissy fit is in order. Derived from a YouTube user’s famed outburst following Britney’s lackluster performance at the 2007 VMA’s.
Sarah: ‘OMG Susan, I can’t believe you are wearing the same skirt as yesterday. Oh, and by the way, EVERYONE knows what you did with Kevin on the weekend. Plus you look a little fat, are you retaining water?’
Susan: ‘LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!’
… and the one most likely to be ascribed to me:
Hobosexual Adjective. The opposite of metrosexual; one who cares little for one’s own appearance.
un-be-fucking-lievable piece of history. absolutely smokes. apparently this is from the Blues Brothers DVD extras — they should have kept this and left out the movie! (via mefi)
you bags should read this profile of jazz musician darcy james argue in EYE WEEKLY cause i wrote it and shit. are you happy now work?????? no just kidding i love you guys. download this slick rick mix it’s amazing. here’s a video, longer posts to come
There’s only one thing on earth that says ’60s louder than Devotion’s LP cover, and that’s the hazy fusion-psych metal lurking inside — in all its post-Tony Williams Lifetime / pre-Mahavishnu Orchestra, Hendrix associate Alan Douglas-assisted glory (assisted is the wrong word, but there’s no good descriptor for the combination of vague direction, post-production and weed-carrying Teo Macero once pioneered). Buddy Miles does what can only be described as heavy soul skin-pounding, organist Larry Young reminds us why rock bands used to have keyboard players back before Ray Manzarek became the only one anybody could remember by virtue of his being so annoying, and McLaughlin lays down what he thinks is totally serious, important harmonic fiendishness when in fact all anyone remembers after hearing it is a bunch of vaguely modal licks and a lot of gratuitous whammy bar action. And it’s fucking great, it really is, even if it doesn’t quite reward active listening. Rhythmically it’s more psych and less funk, but melodically it hits the same spot for me that On The Corner does, like an a bag of sour candy that lasts all day.
What this has to do with anything is that having been recently bombarded with indie bands obsessed with Black Sabbath — who could really be called the link between metal and prog, not that this is a novel observation or anything — I notice that while they revel in the whole air of darkness and jams and twelve-minute songs, something always seems to be missing. Listening to Devotion, I’m convinced now more than ever that what they lack is chops.
That’s not to say indie bands aren’t technically proficient — a lot of people raised on Pavement are embarassed to admit that they can pull off some pretty challenging material night after night, and it’s pretty rare these days that you see a touring band of any renown whose sloppiness, if they have any, isn’t cultivated or even rehearsed. I’m talking about chops, harmonic facility, the ability to improvise at length without recycling your material inside of a couple of minutes. Most indie guitarists can bang out the same chords and sometimes even complicated riffs night after night, often while jumping around the stage to a certain degree. But ask them to jam and they’ll either bust out the effects pedals and generate a shitload of feedback or just bang out whatever three pentatonic licks they cribbed from Clapton when they were 14 until the singer cuts them off.
Admittedly admiring jazz and other forms of wankery — Yngwie Malmsteen springs to mind — is a slippery slope which can lead to all sorts of pitfalls. Part of the reason people don’t want to practice their fucking scales is that the people who once looked and sounded like the guy in the picture up top eventually start buying albums by people who look like this guy:
Who is of course the same guy, and sadly that really is the cover this album is sold under in some cases, and god help the poor bastard who buys it hoping for some tasteful Jan Hammerisms. (Actually fuck that, it’d probably do him some good.) But some music just doesn’t work without adherence to its core values. Imagine a punk rock band whose singer idolized Scott Stapp. This is roughly akin to how annoyed real prog and/or metal fans must be about some of this stuff, and I can’t blame them — I’m no purist, but prog/metal without the solos is not an improvement.
(Aside: is twenty- and thirty-something indie fans bitching about ‘manufactured pop’ the post-1980 hipster version of bitching about how x band ‘can’t even play their instruments right’??)
By now we’ve figured out that there was good prog and/or fusion, so why can’t we imitate the good stuff? Is it just that it’s so much harder to write decent songs and be able to knock out a solid ten minutes of sturm und drang with a few tritone subs or lydian dominant patterns scattered among the blues licks? (Look it up, motherfucker.) Steely Dan is a hip musical crush, but you’re not going to hear a lot of bands emulating the writing on, say, Aja or Gaucho because most of them haven’t got a clue what’s going on in it. (I’m not entirely sure I do, and I took lessons from their touring tenor player, if only for about three months.) And you know, that’s actually OK that they don’t get it — better that they stay away than fuck it up, because you know what Steely Dan is without the harmony? Kenny G. The indie-metal guys are admittedly in less trouble, but you’ve got to wonder why they don’t just hunker down with their Slonimsky for a couple months - or failing that, at least the less offensive end of Zappa. You don’t have to turn into Pat Metheny or anything (and this post is worryingly starting to sound like my other former music teacher’s argument for the supremacy of James Taylor based on his superior grasp of harmony), but — to paraphrase an old slice of wisdom — lazy, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
The generation weaned on R.E.M. and the ‘Mats has hit middle age and is using what power it’s gained to promote and preserve its own. Just look at the soundtrack to Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There for proof: The only baby boomer present, besides Dylan himself, is Richie Havens. Putting Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth and Stephen Malkmus of Pavement up front in his version of Dylanology was a polite way for Haynes to say, step aside, fogies, we’re the canonizers now.
It’s weird for us aging indie hipsters to be in that position, since our youth was spent warming up the margins. But we’ve adapted. – Ann Powers, Slate
Remember: they said it first. When we have to come for the heads of their ’80s icons (and we never bothered to make our own anyways — maybe Radiohead, and Jeff Tweedy) (?), we can point out that they of all generations should have known better.
New Year break = makin’ beats, surfin’ links, but mostly sorting through stacks of CDs. I have about 250 CDs in my “not listened to enough to add to the collection proper” pile, and another bunch in my “not even sure I want to make room for this” pile. It’s one thing listening to bits of CDs deciding whether they’re worth assigning for review, but it’s a much weirder other thing when you’re listening to bits of CDs to decide whether you want to listen to more of them later. (Yes DJ Benzi tape, no Swizz Beatz album, yes Deerhoof, no Datarock etc etc). My attention span now officially rivals that of an ADD-addled fifth-grader on a sugar binge. Speaking of which, someone take away this bag of chocolate before I have to be airlifted out of the room like Big Pun.
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