Mule Magazine: Issue 4 by mulemagazine

MULE MAGAZINE is a collaborative effort of

Editors

Writers

Design

Photography

E. Clayton, J. Shipp, L. Tapp, J. Brandel, C. Roberson, N. Dupey, & V. Job

Fashion Hidden Light: Explorations in Light and Darkness . . . 57

Liz Tapp Jennifer Brandel Jennifer Brandel Amy Cargill Emily Clayton Christina Connally Thomas Cordova Adam Hickman Ewing Michael Foster Plastic Crimewave Steve Greene Adam Herrington Molly Kincaid Ashton Montrone Joseph Shipp Elka Sommer Lynda Wellhausen Clark Williams Emily Clayton Nick Dupey Valerie Job Aaron Robbs Chris Roberson Joseph Shipp Liz Tapp

photographed by Aleks Tomaszewska documents the clothing of Abigail GlaumLathbury, Kristen Kennedy, & Aay Preston-Myint. The photographs document Kennedy’s crochet, zoom in on Preston-Myint’s hoods ready for the apocalypse in both radiation suit and faux fur, and show case both Glaum-Lathbury’s 6-foot insect wing silkscreens, contortionist worn pants, and last but not least, her tripe dress made of latex castings of cow intestines. ++ accessories by Amy Pinkston’s GLORY ALICE, Michelle Quick’s handmade shoes, and Soo Choi’s SOOSLINE.

Music Josephine Foster—“a pure state of empathy” . . . 10 Tim Kinsella and “the end of the Mayan Calendar” . . . 38 Pit Er Pat: Stacking Stones—”you can lose your body a little bit”. . . 32 The Heroes are Horses— “we write quiet music because the world is too loud” . . . 53 Takka Takka—“a sound that means nothing, really” . . . 35

Jennifer Brandel Jennifer McInturff Sarah McKemie Aleks Tomaszewska

Dave Fischoff: On The Crawl, On His Knees [looking skyward]—”visions of riding the Never Ending Story’s Falcor”. . . 28

Brendan Aaron Michael Foster Jonathan van Herik Lara Liesma Wolff

Reviews . . . 49

Ira Yonemura

Film

Tapp, Job, & Shipp

Kevin McAlester’s Roky Erickson documentary: You’re Gonna Miss Me— “There was always this question though after each shoot: was this going to be the last time we shot him?” . . . 25

Copy-Edit

Illustration

The Tenderhooks—a “vidalia worth biting into”. . . 52

Publisher Special thanks to: Paul Tapp, Susan Smith, Sam Billings, Gaye and Betty Tapp, Honey, Edmar Marszewski, Jamie Proctor, Eric Graf, Dan Sinker, Anne Elizabeth Moore. Matt Greenwell, Rebecca Targ, Paul Rustand, Marcelle Good, Ron Buffington, Elizabeth Kincaid, Mrs. Patricia Berne, Jessica Cloville, Tim Degner, Megan Terry, Chris Hutcherson, Tim Regan, Hunter McClamrock, Meg Vinson, Andrew Ciscel, Phillip Driskill, Joe Prouix, Jason Duvall, David Weller, Floy Shipp, Karen & Leon, Bobbie Carolyn, Perry Wayne, Virginia Ruth, and George. Thanks be to Jan. This issue dedicated to Charles Reddy. Thanks to Chris Young. The views expressed in Mule Magazine are those of the respective contributors and are not necessarily those of the publishers and editorial staff. Reproduction in part or full is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher. ©2006 Mule Magazine. All Rights Reserved. Mention of any artist/product does not constitute endorsement. Mule Magazine assumes no responsibility for return of unsolicited manuscripts, photos, art, or recordings. Please send submissions to Mule Magazine PO BOX 18138 Chicago IL 60618 or contact us at mulemagazine@gmail.com. Thank you for reading.

Printed in Canada

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On the Cover: Ira Yonemura. The first 300 copies of this issue will come with a poster of Yonemura’s full watercolor.

Usama Alshaibi’s Nice Bombs— “The smell of war is different” . . . 54

Other Some Good Strings: Investigation in Current Instrument Making— “I just keep filling the void with a new fiddle, til it leaves like all the rest” . . . 21 Marshall’s Arts: Chicago DIY Aficionado— “No, I haven’t abandoned hope” . . . 32 Ineeka Tea’s “first business priority is sustainability and responsible development” . . . 51 “A Thousand Words No Picture”— writing by Michael Foster . . . 13

Please visit www.mulemagazine.com Mule Magazine PO BOX 18138 Chicago IL 60618 3

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Visual stimuli for this issue 1. Reunions, one particular fall wedding 2. Travel to far away places, see next pg. 3. Ira Yonemura’s watercolors 4. Warmth and Sunlight 5. Seeing our homes in new ways 5. Imperfect combinations These are a few of the covers we tried, often somehow incorporating Ira Yonemura’s watercolor pattern which began to take on the shape of trees or clouds and of course it’s intent: an explosion. We moved around these pictures of our loved ones, images of our happiest moments and favorite objects with the aforementioned inspiration in mind. This issue brought to you by those attachments. This issue’s accompanying ephemera are brought to you by Ira Yonemura, Yee-Haw Industries, and Miracles.

Ira Yonemura paint the solitary eye on the cover of this issue, the eye of Anne Frank, over and over for weeks. As it became a strange, almost religious symbol, I felt a pious and strong yet uncomfortable connection with the eye—a demarcation of martyred youth. It reminded me of the weight put on youth, and how we mourn its loss, and also the stark truths that seem to come from the hands, words, heart of childhood. I later looked at Danny Greene’s prints and saw children seemingly struggling with and supporting one another’s weight at once, a beautiful and apt portrayal of childhood interaction. They seemed to embody this, our fourth issue, dedicated to re-findings of youth—the poor-judgement and novelty—the flamboyance, vigor, and truth. Also the hardships and the lessons into which we’re shoved. We try to find joy in things despite knowing better. We try to find hope in what is there—as Benjamen Walker* describes Andrei Platonov’s world as “an alternative reality of sorts . . . where there is still pain and suffering and unhappiness, but at the same time, always the possibility of redemption . . . never something cosmic or theological but rather human and always within our reach.” This issue is filled with interactions with youth, reflections of times past, the recapturing, reconfiguring, and re-living of youth. Phil Cohran sends instruction to the current generation of musicians, while Kevin McAlester documents Roky Erickson’s reclamation of life and career. Joshua Bennett is a virile apostle to another dimension, while Pit er Pat consider the temporality that surrounds us. As Greene explains to us on p. 42, “Baudelaire writes that the artist must inherit ‘the genius of childhood—a genius for which no aspect of life has become stale.’ I do not think I could say it any better than that.” And same for us. Sincerely, MM

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*to know more of Benjamen Walker visit TOERADIO.ORG We are also beginning an archive and a blog so visit MULEMAGAZINE.COM

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THE EGG OF EXPERIENCE: we keep hatching “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” [-Walter Benjamin] In our childhood, we play and talk to one another. We make friends in the bathroom. And we tell one another our stories—all of our stories. Is it true, that we are losing touch? Is the bird of boredom, scared from his egg, “his nesting places—the activities that are intimately associated with boredom”— like storytelling and imagining and the “weaving and spinning of thought” already extinct? And that when our boredom disappears also “the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears”? Can we foster, care, and beg—for that bird to stay? Can our childhood “retain its germinative power” and spring from our spines, like spores from a fern? Can we keep trying to hatch?

1 Megan Terry Johanna. Taken on Lower East Side, New York. 2006 Paul. Taken in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York. 2006 See more of Terry’s photographs at ﬂickr.com/photos/birdsﬂysouth

2 Caleb Wilson Sparkle. Taken in Tennessee. 2007 Joy. Taken in Knoxville. 2005 See more of Wilson’s magical realism at ﬂickr.com/photos/integral-lens

3 Sarah McKemie & Terttu Uibopuu Look In Mouth. Taken in Chicago. 2006 Bandaid. Chicago. 2006

4 Chris Roberson &Phillip Driskill

Selections from a Polaroid journal taken during an 8,000 mile road trip across Mexico, 2006

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3/23/07 12:28:05 AM

drawing by Jonathan van Herik 9

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3/22/07 11:35:56 PM

Interview by

Plastic Crimewave

What inspires you most, other’s music or nature? Both the same.

You recently collaborated with Michael Hurley—how did that come about and what was it like? Our paths have crossed here and there. He sat in on ﬁddle for my show in Portland and once I joined him in Louisville. I was living near the Wyoming border so he invited me to play a fest with him there. I didn’t know all the words to his songs, and he didn’t mind, and I was sort of trying the limits of all the folk harmonies as I sang with him. It was joy.

Why is Brian Goodman the best guitarist in the world? He may well be and I think it’s due to this unique combination of ﬁrst rate qualities. Firstly, he’s just incredibly smart and musically astute. In the best of ways his curiosities led him into the deep end of proﬁciency as a musician. So his chops shine but then he laid them in a sepulchre. When he reemerged it was like he arose out of Galápagos a brand new creature. Secondly, his temperament is just about pure fun, un-self-conscious, which is a blessing in popular music, that lack of ego and genuine disinterest in rock and roll tropes. Add to that he doesn’t have taste, and doesn’t care about sounding good or bad.

What items have you seen caught in his beard? Tempeh, broccoli, soy-nog.

Are fenced in yards really cages? More or less: for animals and children, in particular.

Do festivals suck? I ‘d say they’re difﬁcult to pull off.

What about the shakers interests you? Their male-female godhead and egalitarian view of the sexes was generally positive and progressive for the time.

What is the strangest or most meaningful dream you ever had? Its related to that dual male-female godhead, but concerning anatomy . . . I’ll just allude to it here.

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Josephine Foster, like recent album’s namesake, has a certain tenacity and wolf-like strength encased in the beautiful melodic lure of sheep’s clothing. An era-less stronghold of psychedelia & folkery, Foster’s voice is without disguise, free and rambling over reincarnations of classical sounds. Perhaps her album title refers more to the end of the fable in which the wolf is caught: as we know, disguises forever reveal their wearers. Without disguise, Foster leaves solid marks, her songs both stark and present. There is a darkness and an indulgence, a deepness perhaps pouring out of the classical nature of Foster’s newest works, but also a selﬂess unadorned sound to the very timbre of Foster’s voice. A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing rings with vibrance and vigilance. FOR MORE ON FOSTER VISIT 100SONGSISING.COM

What prompted your new anti-recruiting minded CD compilation for Arthur? My brother is in the US army, in combat right now in Iraq.

What about the German language holds special meaning to you? I appreciate it for its poetic mandability, it’s a sort of meaty language that I enjoy singing.

What sort of theatre did you used to direct? Short operas, my own vignettes.

How do you feel about Barbara Streisand’s experimental period? Just further proof of her versatility!

Is your favorite Christmas album by Willie Nelson? Deﬁnitely one of the best.

Do you think Ed Askew is one of the most under-appreciated songwriters of the 70s? Yes. He’s tremendous .

Why’d you do an 8 minute feedback dirge on your last album? Sheer laziness and for the fun of it.

What do you think your next album will be like? It keeps metastasizing. I’ve been waiting to record it for 2 years now so it could be pretty prismatic.

Is death a release or an end? I’ll let you know!

What does higher consciousness mean to you? Maybe just an emancipation from personal dramas and desires. Or it could be detachment from the animal quest for security—allowing for a pure state of empathy.

What classical pieces move you the most? Many, but heres a few: Borodin’s Prince Igor; Janacek’s Intimate Letters quartet; Canteloube Songs of the Auvergne.

Has magic left the world? No.

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3/23/07 12:31:00 AM

drawing by Jonathan van Herik 12

A Thousand Words No Picture Words by Michael Foster

Graphology involves the study of how one’s handwriting reflects the personality and pressures of the writer. It’s a science; we leave these little fingerprints every time we put pen to paper and just like a fingerprint, our scrawls are with us forever. It’s eerily omniscient: a graphologist can pick up lifelong tics and traits from the handwriting of a person at any point of life. If you’re afraid of the dark it shows in your first lines of cursive and your last credit card slip. A good graphologist can tell things about a person that shrinks could spend years getting a patient to vocalize. Like the psychologist and the psychic, graphologists have to spend a lot of time tuning out information—it’s burdensome to know a doctor probably has a drug problem or your boss likely beats his wife. Before we sat at the same table, the brilliant old woman with liquor-bottle thick glasses had been sitting next to me. A finished crossword puzzle of mine slipped from my table to the floor beneath hers and she picked it up for me, passing it back with the letters up. “That’s a really interesting hand you have,” she said as she offered the quartered newspaper. “I’d like to study it sometime.” If she weren’t many decades my senior I’d have thought the words a clumsy pass, but she was matronly and genuine. “Are you a palm reader?” I asked and she laughed outright. “Kind of—I’m like a palm reader without a spiritual side.” She told me a little bit about graphology and offered again to read my words. “Please analyze my writing: I’m fascinated, but I have something I’d like you to see; it’s another man’s handwriting. I want to know what you see in my handwriting but I’m even more curious about what you see in his.” When I was small there was a bus crash on a stretch of mountainside expressway near my home. In the night, a drunk driver crossed the median and ran head-on into a school bus full of children coming home from a church outing at a local amusement park. In an era before more advanced passenger safety measures the only way off the bus as its front caught fire was through the small door at the end of the rear aisle. While the driver fended off flames with a small extinguisher, a handful of children made it out the back hatch. A petite chaperone climbed through one of the front windows before the fire overtook the driver and the smoke made the inside unbearable: twenty-three children, the driver and two other chaperones died in the smoke with injuries the highway patrol tried to keep from families as long as possible. It was a tragedy to say the least, and a pall of eviscerating sorrow and pain descended on the area. The drunk behind the wheel never knew what happened and he woke up the next morning in the hospital to find that a night of drinking had rendered him responsible for the deaths of more than two-dozen middleschoolers and several volunteer church escorts. The man looked the part, and as the media helped him assume the role of the most vile and detestable human to have ever set foot on earth, he became a demon my small soul feared like a closet monster, like a truck-

driving wraith of hell and damnation. He got almost a quarter century for manslaughter. When I was 20 I was arrested for drunk driving under a law put into effect as a direct result of the man’s crimes. I seethed in jail for 15 hours—disgusted with myself. I’d made the same decision he had. Upon release I knew I’d spend the rest of my life blanching whenever I’d drive past the regularly placed flowers and crosses by that familiar side of a familiar road... 15 years and that DUI have passed since the disaster and my mouth still goes tight and dry when I see the ditch by the cliff and the pious hand painted signs that testify to the nebulous nature of evil. When I went into recovery for alcohol abuse, the man began showing up in my closet again: I wasn’t afraid anymore and it was puzzling to realize that I hurt for him and the ghosts that would orbit around him for the rest of his life. When I found that there was empathy in me for a man whose heinous decisions had haunted me for life, I decided to write him a letter in prison. I figured he’d been taking shots like a fish in a barrel for the length of his stint. Furthermore he would be out soon [he’d be sprung several years early for model behavior] and so I made my words as diplomatic and considerate as possible. I wanted to know if he’d been able to forgive himself. I wanted to know if he would ever see himself walk among us with fellowship. Could he ever be whole again? His handwritten reply came the same day I met the woman in the café. She told me amazingly subtle things about myself and I became enamored with her extraordinary alchemy. “It’s real!” I said with giddy daftness. “Tell me something you think I don’t know about myself!” “I think you probably swear more than you’d like to” she grinned. “No goddamn way!” I exclaimed as a joke. We sobered up when I showed her the letter from the man. She looked at it for a long time, visibly moved by the situation’s scope. “This situation’s really quite amazing and even though I get more credibility in courts than a polygraph, I don’t feel comfortable discussing the sincerity of his words with you; the mother in me believes you need to sort that one out in your guts...” she trailed off. I can tell you something interesting though, if you like.” My eyes answered. “You both write ‘sorry’ with almost the same pressure.” “Fuckin’-A” slipped out from my lips.

CHICAGO JAZZ VISIONARY, EX SUN RA SIDEMAN, AND FOUNDING FATHER OF THE AACM.

When Philip Cohran was ﬁve he won a talent contest. The reward? Piano lessons from a teacher who hit his hands every time he made a mistake. After begging his mom to let him stop, he picked up a trumpet and never looked back. He was lit up by jazz when the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong ﬁrst came on the radio. Then a move to Chicago gave Cohran the chance to work with Sun Ra and members of Earth Wind and Fire before branching off to lead his own group. On the Beach, a highlight of his musical vision, was recently re-released. These days, he plays his music at an Ethiopian restaurant on the north side of Chicago every Friday evening. I got the chance to talk with Cohran about the future of music and his spiritual consciousness over a glass of honey wine between sets. Lynda Wellhausen: You’ve spent a lot of your musical career on the cutting edge of music as an innovating musician and teacher, among other roles. What do you think about the state of jazz today?

LW: How did Sun Ra inﬂuence you as a composer? PC: Well, he didn’t inﬂuence me in my concept as much as he did in principle. I saw that he never did anything but his music. He refused to go outside of his music. That was a new thought to me. I found out I had to be on it all the time and once I did that things popped up. Sunny removed the borders for me. As soon as I left him, things happened for me. The whole universe dropped in my lap. I like to think that I extended his concept because he was reaching for ancient things. He introduced the fact that we are eternal people. We should be dealing with our eternity. America should be producing art for the world. We are world leaders. We should turn the world into beauty. LW: Art can have such a huge impact on peoples’ lives.

Philip Cohran: I think it’s dead. It’s been dead. Sun Ra said it was dead in ’59. I wanted to dispute him, but I had to agree. They’re playing the same thing, and it’s terrible to hear. All that Bird stuff and Dizzy, that was in the forties, and the ﬁfties, and in the sixties it’s ‘Trane but they’re playing that to death. LW: Why do you think there wasn’t anything to follow John Coltrane? PC: They cut the music off trying to copy it, so you just got garbage out there and you’ve got a lot of good musicians playing old music. But look at the young people, they’re dead, they’re not in it. You’ve got to capture young people in order to be progressive. But the music expertise is rising so high with Japanese, Turkish, Indian and Chinese people; their standards are very high. When I was in China, I gave a lecture, and for two hours I didn’t hear anything. LW: The class must have been very attentive. PC: Right, it’s another level that’s coming. This old raggedy level that we’ve been on is going out the window. And people don’t know it’s coming. Musicians from Africa and different nations have a high standard of tuning and rhythm and everything. That’s what I’ve been tuned into all along. LW: I’ve read about your interest in ancient modal tuning systems. PC: Yeah, I put it out there and everybody heard it working, so they jumped on the bandwagon. The system we have is chords, and the chords are wrong because they’re not based on the cosmos. We lose our cosmology playing chords. In India, they have the cosmos in their music. China, they’ve got the cosmos. Africa, they’ve got the cosmos. I’m not sure about America.

PC: Yeah, and we are in a position to do that. I think we’ll be condemned for not doing that. But Sunny used to tell them all the time. He’d stop in the middle of a concert and say. “You’re a bunch of heathens!” But, I’m convinced that music is changing and that people are changing. They want substance now. Not all this old everybody sounding just alike and playing the same rhythm. That’s out the door. LW: What about the scene in Chicago?

LW: Do you ever spend time listening to any music? PC: I go into the cosmos. I go into eternity. Why would I listen to anybody else? It took me years to get to this place. I’m a composer. If I listen to everybody, what am I going to write? That’s what’s wrong with everybody. They’re following the latest trends. They’re behind this sister or that brother. Music is supposed to come from yourself.

PC: Well, it’s waiting on somebody to make a move. Because this is where Jazz comes from all the way back to Louis Armstrong. We produced it. And they would come here to hear it, but I don’t see anyone going back with any serious effort. There are some individuals who are doing well, but I don’t see a collective music that can ﬁt what the young people need to grow and develop. I’m waiting to see who’s going to match up with

these children because they don’t want to work. They don’t want to play the same note over and over and over until it gets better. LW: How does the knowledge of your musical legacy affect what you play? PC: Well, music is constantly developing in me because I like to think that I found my eternity, and as a composer it just comes out on regular intervals, like laying eggs. If I don’t deal with it, it bugs me until I do. But I don’t have a band anymore so I can’t write. I just swallow it up and put it on the side. Everything is in cycles. It’s important for people to understand that you can’t play music and hide; your soul is out there. Some people think they can hide. They think they can play one thing and think something else. So we have slipped off into a period of very corrupt music. LW: On the Beach, recorded in the late ‘60s and re-released a few years ago, consists of music you recorded with the Artistic Heritage Ensemble. How would you characterize the environment that inspired the sound of the album?

PC: The environment is what you call a consciousness, or awakening. There were artists who were shaping their art into a better America. They began to see each other, and create some momentum. I began to meet with some women who had enough funds and a location where they could put in an arts program. No arts program had ever been done like that. Most art programs were done for wealthy people. We began to meet and draw up plans for this summer thing at the beach house and to develop painters, sculptors, writers, poets, everything. And everybody contributed. The album was released in August and the program had 16

started in May. The beach became like a sanctuary and all of a sudden the music just caught on there. We had a lot of fun. Everyone who experienced that beach will never forget it. LW: Listening to On the Beach today, it still sounds like it could be new. PC: It really wasn’t ahead of its time, it’s just that people have been copying me ever since they heard it. Woodstock deﬁnitely came from the experience on the beach. Nobody played in a park before that, and before it there was never anything artistic for the masses. LW: Many of the songs from On the Beach are structured around your Frankiphone, which you named after your mother, and built yourself. PC: Well your mother always struggles for you. And children always want to please their parents. My father wasn’t around us and I assure you that both of them could never live in the same house. My father was a very self-contained man. But my mother took me through a lot of changes.

LW: There is even a song on the album named after the instrument, “Frankiphone Blues”. PC: We couldn’t go anywhere without playing that song. Everyone who came to the theater would demand it and would join in. They wouldn’t let us off the stage and it just came from a rehearsal. You know the 8 bar blues and the 12 bar blues? LW: Yeah, I can play those on the bass guitar. PC: Well I got 16 bar blues on the Frankiphone. I used an ancient system of development. With the blues you come back to one, but we go even further. This was important because people had never heard sixteen bar blues and it became their favorite piece. But the key to the whole thing is that music in nature is different from music over the radio or on CD. My music is closer to nature and that’s the difference. Visit www.philcohran.com to learn more. On The Beach was re-issued by Aestuarium and is distributed by Chicago’s Hefty Records.

TERRY PLUMMING

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tp07

Terry Plummingʼs Bacon (excerpt taken from Vito Powers, the no-nonsense magazine inside of the nonsense Bacon.) ““ VITO POWER BACON TREATISE if you bring bacon you have to bring cowboys and astronauts. bacon is the human body in strange unbelievable spaces reduced to its sexual organs. common to all bacon is a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated gluttony, a ravening undifferentiated capacity for hatred. each slice is as if it were cornered and only waiting to drag the observer down to its level. bacon does not know why it is labeled as being horrible. it never thinks about horror, and pleasure is such a diverse thing, and horror is too. bacon is horror in such that it is so vitalising people come out of it like all the great tragedies, purged into happiness, into a fuller reality of existence. end quote Terry Plumming is a nonsense Audio / Visual / Literary magazine distributed by Chicago noise label Terry Plumming.

Terry Plummingʼs current issue Bacon (tp07) was released in October of 2006. Please visit WWW.TERRYPLUMMING.COM

Donʼt stop thinking about Terry Plumming 18

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HUNT CLARK

SOME GOOD STRINGS WRITING ON THREE PRESENT DAY INSTRUMENT MAKERS COMPILED BY ADAM HICKMAN EWING PROFILING:

HUNT CLARK, 37 TODD GLADSON, 31 SAM BILLINGS, 28 Hunt Clark lives with his wife Deborah McClary on the Cumberland Plateau, just outside the town of Sparta, Tennessee. On land rich with caves and a vast variety of tree species, the two have chosen a bare-bones way of life in order to make time and space for the things with which they are most enthralled. Their home is an old tar paper shack to which they have made only essential improvements. Water is hauled in from elsewhere and heat comes from an old wood stove. Inside, among the art and furniture they have created, there seem to be numerous projects in the works. A wooden sculpture of a face sits on the table. A painting hangs in the hallway, which also houses a toilet and saddles for the horses. Outside in the yard, past the horse barn and behind a small workshop, there

stands a large mound of yellow sawdust from the Osage Orange Clark uses in his sculpture work. Hanging from the workshop wall are three raw forms of instruments in their early stages. Having worked with wood sculpturally for so many years, Clark was naturally drawn to its sound. As he imposed structure on the wood, he became aware of the fact that he was changing the sound it made. His transition into instrument building began in 1998, with a collection of 1015 beat-up and broken cellos. As he restored 4 or 5 of them, he studied their composition, all the while developing his own process for the construction of his own instruments. In order to test his own sound as he worked, he took violin lessons for a while and sought out the opinions of players and makers alike. He then set out to work on everything from violins and cellos to acoustic and hollow body electric guitars, the unifying theme being that the body, neck and headstock would be carved out of one piece of wood. Therefore, when Clark begins work, he must ﬁnd a section of wood large enough to encompass the shape of the instrument in its entirety. After carving the initial form out with a

chainsaw, he grinds and scrapes the sides and back close to half an inch thick, then waits while the wood cures. This curing period is crucial for the for the ﬁrst two to three weeks, during which Clark all but sleeps with the forms. Checking them every 45 minutes to an hour, he often covers them with towels, spraying areas that may dry out sooner than others. Moisture content is of great concern when one builds an instrument. Traditionally, most makers use very old wood that has assumed its shape. When I went to visit him in late November, Clark was in the midst of working on a hollow body electric guitar. Meanwhile, he had three other instruments in their beginning stages, all of which had been cut out for nearly two years. The makings of a cello, a mandocello and another guitar all hung from the wall. “I’m doing this one,” he explained, “and those in there aren’t spoken for. So if someone says, ‘Hey, I’d like you to make me one of these’ or if I get bored one day, which... I don’t see that happening for a while. So, I’m going to put this one together, and then I’ve got those in there. If someone’s interested, I’ll make those for them, or if I ever have 21

SAM BILLINGS

TODD GLADSON THIS PAGE: FIRST ROW: UNFINISHED VIOLINS BY SAM BILLINGS BOTTOM ROW: FIDDLE BY TODD GLADSON, & GLADSON AT HOME IN TN.

NEXT PAGE: TOP LEFT: CLARK AT HOME IN SPARTA,TN SIDE COLUMN: TWO OF CLARKS VIOLINS, UNFINISHED BODY FORMS, AND A FINISHED VIOLIN OF CLARK’S

the time to put one together to do a show or something. I wouldn’t mind doing sort of a guitar show, just to get these out there.” Instrument builders seem to have many methods by which to gain interest in their work. Todd Gladson has traveled around playing old-time music for over 10 years, and has seen a multitude of instruments old and new. Every instrument has a story, and there is no one better to hear them from than Gladson. The first thing I saw upon entering his house was a civil war era banjo. Beside it hung a violin of his own making. Having recently left his home in rural Georgia for Knoxville, Tennessee, he and his wife are restoring a house built in the late 1800s - all the while roasting coffee beans and growing organic vegetables that they sell to local restaurants. He teaches lessons at a music store not too far from his home and plays in a number of old-time string bands. I visited him one early December morning, and over coffee, whiskey and a fiddle, he told me the story of how his interest in the fiddle came in the form of a gift: “My grandpa give me a fiddle when I was about 20 years old. It belonged to his brother, Clyde Gladson. He got killed in World War II. So he give me this fiddle, and this fiddle had the same strings on it that it had when he went to World War II. So I carried it down to this fellow I knew that could play it, and he tuned it up and played it with them same strings on it, and it stayed in tune. So those were some good strings.” After a few minor repairs, Gladson began playing the fiddle on his own, and eventually took an interest in building. He asked around, and was directed to apprentice under Ed Campbell in Boiling Springs, Penn-

sylvania. There he built 14 violins, keeping the first when he left for home two years later. He set up shop in Georgia and continued on his own, taking inspiration from those he met on the road as he traveled playing in string bands. People like Backwards Bill Birchfield in Roan Mountain, Tennessee, who claims to build his fiddles using only a pocketknife and a piece of glass for scraping. Like Backwards Bill and many instrument makers in the southeastern region of the country, Gladson prefers to use woods from the land that surrounds him. While holding a fiddle, he explained the make up of its parts, as well as their origins. “The sides and the back and the neck are all black Walnut, and they come from my Mama’s side of the family. They’re Hiltons down in North Carolina, right on the Tennessee line. Come outta their holler, up there where they lived at. The top is spruce. That right there come outta Washington state. I knew a fellow who harvested wood up there and I bought it through him. I’d like to have a top on it that would have been more regional to down here, but I didn’t have one at the time.” When I asked Gladson what set the fiddle apart from the violin, he seemed to take great pleasure in offering me an explanation. “On the violin the bridge is usually pretty standard. The curve on the top of it is relatively standard. But a lot of fiddle players will have a more flat bridge, so that they can more easily play two strings at one time. Now that’s to say Southern Appalachian fiddle players, ‘cause like your Irish fiddlers, theirs tend to be more in line like a classical violin because they don’t play a lot of two string stuff. They play for the most part one string at a time. But

your Southern Mountain fiddling or even all the way up into Kentucky and Pennsylvania, they play a lot of two string stuff.” In light of playing, restoring his house and finishing the outbuilding in which he plans to set up shop, Gladson has yet to fully relocate his fiddle making operation to Knoxville: “My mind’s been off it for a while,” he explains, “I haven’t built anything in a while.” Meanwhile, Sam Billings is working out of a small shop in Chicago, where he has been kept busy building violins full time since 2003. Upon the realization that people were making a living as luthiers, he began building in 1998. “I just got lucky enough to meet someone who would introduce me to it,” he explains. “I always liked working with wood, and I played classical double bass, so combining the two felt pretty natural to me.” Billings has found two respectable violin dealers who give him steady work. “I only wholesale to dealers. I like to keep things simple so that I can stay at the bench. I know a bunch of people who are stuck at a desk rather than a bench because they run a retail operation. Here in Chicago, I’m kept pretty busy by selling to Carl Becker and Son or Kenneth Warren and Son. I really respect both of these companies and am extremely lucky to have their business. Many violin dealers seem to be confused by ethics, but these shops are really good to work with.” Before setting out on his own, Billings had studied under a few violin makers, but says he learned more from doing restoration for these dealers. He found that they had a broader perspective on the craft and

business due to their exposure to so many different instruments. “Often times they have knowledge that is passed down through generations, and their vaults are virtual museums of violin making history,” Billings says. His main inspiration comes from 18th century Italian violins: “I love late Guarneri models. He was half crazy and half genius at the end of his life.

sin

With steady work as of late, Billings has been building at least one violin a month, and upon completion of his 47th instrument, he still finds that building one at a time is the best way to work. When asked if he had ever built two violins simultaneously, he explained, “I’ve tried, but I tend to get bogged down with repeating one step so many times. Each violin has eight corners, which you have to carve and inlay with purfling. Once that is finished, I don’t really want to look at corners for a while. I also think each violin is an opportunity to try out a new idea or process. Sometimes these new ideas don’t quite work, so I tend to try to make my mistakes on one violin rather than two. Maybe if I ever settle on a single way of working, I’ll start producing multiple violins at a time. Another problem is that I tend to feel like a factory rather than a luthier when my attention is focused on the repetitive details of a violin and not on style or concept.” Billings isn’t afraid to admit that he is still forming ideas about his building process. “Really the whole thing has been a learning experience,” he says, “but maybe the most important lesson I’ve had is in how to learn on my own and trust my instincts. Everybody in this business seems to be a ‘Master.’ You could go crazy trusting everyone’s advice or step on some toes

by questioning it. I figure that I can learn something from just about anyone if I filter their advice the right way.” In these circles, information and technique seem to be shared and passed around in the same manner as the instruments themselves. But upon parting with his violins, Billings has yet to see one in action. “It’s a real empty nest syndrome,” he says. ”I just keep filling the void with a new fiddle until it leaves like all the rest.

Adam Hickman Ewing currently makes prints for Yee-Haw industries. You can also hear his musical project at MOUNTAINSOFMOSS.COM For more on Hunt Clark visit HUNTCLARK.COM For more on Sam Billings visit SAMBILLINGSVIOLINS.COM

TOP RIGHT: VIOLIN BY BILLINGS. ABOVE: BILLINGS AT SHOP IN CHICAGO, CLOSE-UP OF SCROLL, AND BACK OF VIOLIN BY BILLINGS.

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step inside

KEVIN McALESTER’s ROKY ERICKSON DOCUMENTARY

STEP INSIDE THIS HOUSE: An Interview with Kevin McAlester, director of You’re Gonna Miss Me: a ﬁlm about Roky Erickson Interview by Amy Cargill

Listening to Roky Erickson’s records can be an emotionally crippling experience, the soundtrack to losing your shit, so to speak. Roky and his band, The 13th Floor Elevators, pioneered an entirely original sound from a scarlet red state during the Vietnam War before dosing a few too many times. Roky landed himself in jail and, ultimately, institutionalized. Choosing to separate themselves from the free-love sounds of West Coast psychedelia, Roky and the Elevators instead basked in an emotional violence. Each album brought forth a new and electrifying sound, his solo work channeling some of the most feral sounds to come from a human (or alien or demon). Through a maze of mental institutions, courtrooms, cluttered apartments, and therapy sessions, first-time filmmaker Kevin McAlester’s weighty documentary You’re Gonna Miss Me seamlessly weaves together the story of Roky Erickson’s life and music. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of ”psychedelic music” knows bits and pieces of Roky’s trouble with the law, electric shock therapy, and family dramaturgy. However, it is the quiet and intimate moments of this film that give it critical heaviness, providing a portrait of an artist’s grisly dropout and subsequent rebirth. Recently I had a chance to speak with the director about his film, which is without a doubt the best film I have seen this year. During the screening I found myself gasping, laughing out loud, and openly weeping. Roky granted the filmmakers permission into his cosseted world, which is in itself a triumph, but what they have emerged with is a stunning account on par with the legend.

AMY CARGILL: You’ve made a beautiful and amazing piece of work here. I heard it took you ﬁve years to make, is that true? KEVIN McALESTER: We shot for three and were sort of editing as we went along. This being my first film - we essentially started over once we got done. That’s not how I would do it now, but that’s what happened, and the editing took a couple of years. AC: So did you have the same editor (Victor Livingston) the whole time? KM: No, that was another thing. I think we went through maybe three of four editors. In retrospect, I know at least a couple [of editors] were really good. Completing the project was two-fold; I didn’t really have a good sense of what was required of a documentary director at the time. I was a journalist, so the idea of collaboration at the time was different. The way I was used to doing it was to lock myself in a room before deadline, and come out with it done. But that doesn’t quite work when you’ve got so much footage you just come out being confused. The guy who ended up finishing it was maybe our third or fourth editor, Victor Livingston, who was much older and had a bunch of experience. He didn’t take any shit from us. He was really good. AC: He edited Crumb. I had that sense of his editing style when watching it without knowing he was the editor. KM: Yeah, he is great. He’s edited a bunch of films, the most recent being a film about Charles Bukowski, which I haven’t seen yet but soon will. AC: And your cinematographer is from Texas? I know his name from Richard Linklater ﬁlms, Lee Daniel. KM: He was such a big Roky fan that he wanted to work on the movie. With this being my first movie and him be-

ing very experienced, he was very helpful and had lots of patience with my ignorance. AC: I know all about that feeling of ignorance. Can you talk a bit more about that? KM: It‘s probably boring - just really simple stuff like I had no idea how to get coverage; I really had no idea how to make a movie until I had shot a bunch of stuff in Austin and went back to Los Angeles and tried to edit it together and realized that none of it worked, that there was no way to edit it.There was a lot of good stuff but there was no way to edit it together as a coherent movie without thirty minutes of jump cuts. It was that, and just overshooting on unimportant stuff, not knowing when to get proper coverage. It was a weird combination of overshooting and not shooting enough, like I would overshoot interviews, I would film everything without some concrete idea of what I wanted, but there weren’t enough actual scenes to make. AC: One of the things about the ﬁlm that struck me was how it has this heavy element of cinema vérité while also maintaining these beautifully composed shots. I would notice these amazing multiple lines of perspective and lucky shots that after a while didn’t seem so lucky as just perfectly intuitive. I kept thinking it was amazing you could get these completely intimate moments while having it look gorgeous and cinematic at the same time. KM: I think it was a combination of when I started I had an idea of what I thought a good movie should be, you know certain sorts of rules you pick up or things you should do on principle, but I didn’t have any idea how this movie should be good or how to move past the rules to make something that people could watch. We wanted to avoid as much as we could the “hand-held” look and go mostly with a lock down on a tripod. AC: So did you use a Steadicam?

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KM: No. Lee has just done so much documentary shooting, it’s weird, he has this way of holding the camera where it’s perfectly still, and a lot of it was on the tripod. So it was combination of tripod work and experience. But to his credit, because we were shooting a cinema vérité film, he really got it and the film’s success is a large credit to him. AC: Well, he nailed it. There are so many moments when three car doors would open on three different planes of perspective as two birds would cross the frame in time with Roky’s exit, or some movie magic along those lines... KM: Well as I’m sure you’ll find as you go along, for every one great moment like that there’s five hours of crap. AC: Where did the idea for this ﬁlm come from, and what were the steps along the way to seeing it through? KM: I was a journalist before, and I really enjoyed it but I sort of got tired of it. I really wanted to work with film, and it took me a while to work up the courage. It seemed to me that the only thing people would employ me to create would be a documentary, since I was a journalist, a music journalist to be precise, and I was from Texas. And I loved Roky’s music. So the reason I chose to make a film about Roky was because one, he’s a great musician, and great music makes great records, but also his story is this archetypal tragic story. I was surprised no one had made a documentary about him yet. I decided I was going to do it, and I made some calls and found out that he was at that time a complete recluse. There was no way to get a hold of him at all, I had to go through his mom. So I went to SXSW one year and met her, and talked to her on and off for about a year, expressing that I wanted to make the film and started contacting people, making calls. That was July of 1999.

AC: There‘s so much ground to cover in a film like this - you’ve got this history to cover and you don’t want it to be a Ken Burns-y photomontage/talking heads film. You have this responsibility to present historical data while also making a portrait of an artist. How did you reconcile the two aspects? At what point during the shooting or in post did you start to really find the story and make these choices that identified the structure? KM: It was always a difficult editing challenge between those two story lines: Roky’s musical history and the present day recluse/family story. But very quickly after we started shooting, we realized that we were going to focus on the family story because it seemed more universal.The way it ended up was that I [unfortunately] downplayed its importance as I was shooting. If I had thought more clearly about it when I was shooting (how I was going to interweave the two stories), then I think it would have been much quicker editing. Nine months after we started shooting I went to Pittsburgh and met Sumner, and that’s when the whole family story started to happen. At that point it seemed clear to me that my job was to follow [the story] out and to see what happened. The bulk of our time was spent following that [family] story, and then when we got to the editing room we were like “Wow, there’s a lot of other stuff we forgot to deal with.” But I think that was the challenge, and that’s where Victor became instrumental. There were scenes that if I had my way would have been four hours. Roky’s mother’s storyboards could have gone on for hours - there was a ton of material. There was this PSA for television that she made that was so intense. It was the Aristophanes play Lysistrata, but in the form of this PSA that she’d entitled “The Sex Strike.” Basically it outlined that women should stop having sex with men in order to achieve world peace, and end evil and corruption. It’s great!

AC: How long did it take you to earn Roky’s mother’s trust and the family’s trust? KM: It took a while. You can imagine there have been dozens of people who have approached them over the years about making a film and various documentaries made with various levels of skill. At first I think they thought “Well, here comes another shit head.” As it went along it became more clear that we were definitely committed to doing it. She opened up to us. By the time we started shooting her we had established a relationship for over a year prior. So that was relatively quick. It was a small crew also—just me, Lee and two sound people. But Roky was a whole other story because it wasn’t exactly clear if he was even going to be in the movie, as he was becoming more and more reclusive. I didn’t meet him until I started shooting. We didn’t start shooting him until 6 weeks into the first shoot - so the whole time I was thinking to myself “how am I going to shoot this film without Roky in it?” But at the beginning, at first he would just come over to his mom’s house and talk to us for a little bit and then want to go home. Eventually, we got along better, and the next week we brought the camera, and eventually we shot him. There was always this question though after a shoot: was this going to be the last time we shot him? Not because anything was going to happen to him, but because he may decide he doesn’t want to or become more of a recluse as before, so it was touch and go for a while. I would usually go pick Lee up at noon, get to Roky’s at one, and he would sometimes tell us to come back later, so we would drive around Austin for hours, we would come back and he would rather go to his mom’s and not shoot, so there would be periods of days where we would be ready to shoot and we wouldn’t shoot anything because he didn’t want to. He finally became comfortable with us shooting. And at the time he was unmedicated, and he

would do this thing where he would make up this pet name for you, like Skippy or something and it would be a very normal name except that it wasn’t your own. So he called me “Sam,” and he called Lee ”Carl.” There was one time where he actually called Lee by “Lee” and then he corrected himself and called him “Carl,” which I always wondered about. When we went back to shoot the Pittsburgh stuff later on, Lee and I had gotten into the habit of calling each other Sam and Carl. So we’re on set and I called Lee “Carl” and Roky looked at me and said, “Why did you just call him Carl?” and I said, “Because you always did.” But he knew, you know; clearly he was fucking with us. AC: Well it seems since the ﬁlm’s been out, he’s been coming out of his shell and playing shows again. What was his reaction to the ﬁlm and did you show him various edits? KM: Chicago was his out of Austin show and he was happy. He’s playing in Montreal with the film screening. I think it’s fantastic he’s playing again. We have shown him cuts, but we premiered a rough cut at SXSW and I cut for another four months before it was complete. But before the SXSW showing I showed it to Roky and Sumner together, and Evelyn separately. That was two of the most harrowing screenings that I have had to date. Roky and Sumner seemed to like it and have been to a ton of screenings since then and have been really supportive so that was gratifying. Evelyn I think was understandably hurt by some of the stuff that was said in the film, but she was very gracious about it with me. I think she and Sumner have since reconciled their relationship, and actually they are all attending and doing Q&A, Roky, Evelyn and Sumner, which is incredible. Their reaction was very important to me. AC: Well, it’s crucial. You spend so much time, effort, and money, your heart and soul is laboring away - you wouldn’t have the opportunity to do the

work without their story to tell. It’s a shifting balance of labor and quite a strange thing, I imagine, to be presenting your art project back to them. KM: I’m very interested in having each of them do a commentary, because it’s always like another movie; them reacting to themselves and setting the record straight. I’m very interested to see how they react in general several years after the fact. AC: Can you give me a quick rundown of the technical specs, for the nerds like myself? KM: Of course! It was all shot on Super16 film, Lee owns an Aton with a Canon lens, one of the last of its kind with a super long zoom. We did not edit the raw film, we transferred all of the film to HD and cut on AVID, which was sort of fortuitous, and by the time we finished editing that was a viable way to complete it so that we didn’t lose any film quality. I’d always misunderstood the difference between shooting on HD and finishing on HD, and when you finish on HD it just means what you’re showing it on a higher quality. For all of the Super8 film in there, we actually got a projector and filmed it close up using the Super16 camera, so we didn’t transfer anything and that really captured the quality of literally watching Super8 film better than if we had just transferred the film directly. The rest of the archival footage was transferred directly to HD, which in a way isn’t the best for old television footage because it’s grainy, but depending on what your aesthetic is... AC: So what’s next for you? KM: Well, I’m about halfway through another documentary that follows three hardcore Dungeons and Dragons players. I was sort of doing it with a couple of friends of mine, and we ended up finding these great character players, two guys and a girl. I’ve been working on that for about a year and a half. Lee is shooting it and Victor will

edit it again and we have a great producer. So it’s very nice to begin on something else after so long with Roky. AC: Last question: Who do you look to for inspiration when making a film? What are the films you consume and study? KM: As I was going along, I kind of read everything I could and watched everything I could not in terms of documentary, but in general. I de facto put myself through film school. The obvious touchstones and the films it gets compared to now are Grey Gardens stylistically and thematically, because of the older person with their mother theme. AC: The recluse. KM: Exactly, so it’s often kind of referenced. That was a huge inspiration to me in terms of how they told that story and in the style of the filmmaking. The really great cinema vérité documentary filmmakers of the 60s - The Maysles Brothers, Frederick Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker, and then I’m a huge fan of Erroll Morris. I’m a huge fan of American Movie and Crumb. To me, Crumb is the best biographical film ever made by any standard. One of the five best! And a lot of the narrative stuff that I like played out in small ways. AC: The Erroll Morris interview style comes through too, and it’s refreshing to see that, yes - there IS a classy way to conduct a sit-down interview! KM: I hope so. AC: Kevin - thank you. Please make more films and thank you for making this one. KM: You’re welcome, and I will. For more about McAlester’s documentary visit YOUREGONNAMISSME.COM To see Amy Cargill’s documentary and film work visit NORMALPICTURES.COM

“SO HE CALLED ME “SAM,” AND HE CALLED LEE ”CARL.” THERE WAS ONE TIME WHERE HE ACTUALLY CALLED LEE BY “LEE”...

...AND THEN HE CORRECTED HIMSELF AND CALLED HIM “CARL” WHICH I ALWAYS WONDER ED ABOUT.”

Dave Fischoff

O Twice now I’ve sat down with Dave Fischoff to figure out what so reifies the music on his new album The Crawl. I’ve looked everywhere I thought “it” – this ethereal yet concrete element – could be hiding. I’ve dug into the particular elements of his complex process—his theory, his musical influences, his whole life philosophy—essentially the core of his music, but this “it” continues to elude me. What I’ve finally come to terms with is that the secret to Fischoff’s craft of cementing ineffable emotional experiences into music abides by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: the closer I get to locating and measuring “it,” the further away “it” gets from me. What I’m looking to find and define will forever orbit amorphously somewhere within the dense layers of his music, referenced powerfully, but only indirectly. Fischoff knows what I’m talking about and is thankful and flattered that I see it too. But even he is unable to provide a sufficient explanation, theoretically or literally, for how he has created his music’s triumphant and emotional crescendos. It’s some sort of magic trick made within the nexus of his computer (which is still running OS9), and through a MIDI keyboard, microphone, and phenomenal cache of 3,497 unique audio samples. In the era of the one-laptop-man band,

throwing a computer and some samples into the fold usually makes the creative process easier and faster. But with Fischoff’s computer technique, faster and easier is not an option. Rather than being merely a time and stress saving device, the Apple, along with its Reason and ProTools software, represents an infinite number of possibilities. With possibility comes choice, and if you’re Dave Fischoff that means you better damn well do something interesting. He says, “If there is an underlying theme through this whole long process of making records, it’s how to write songs and present them in a unique form.” And he’s committed to doing this at any cost. Proof is in the five years he stationed himself in front of a flickering screen, sacrificing his nights for the sole purpose of exploring an idea that he wasn’t even sure he could execute. Fischoff has loved musical expression and experimentation for as long as he can remember. Even as a skinny white kid from South Bend, Indiana, he was referencing Grandmaster Flash and the Wheels of Steel at seven while enthusiastically rapping into his cassette recorder. If you’re lucky enough to hear a sample of the young performer’s beat-boxing days, it’s clear that even in his high-pitched pre-pubescent exuberance, the boy was skilled. When the al-

lowance started rolling in and the teenage Fischoff could get away from the South Bend mall’s Coconuts, he scoured thrift stores in search of anything he hadn’t heard. In high school, Fischoff immersed himself in the alternative scene, fronting the punk band “Figurehead.” But it wasn’t until college when his longstanding appetite for the obscure and experimental could finally be fed. While earning his Bachelor’s in Psychology at Indiana University, he found inspiration in the footnotes and further reading sections of music theory textbooks. Indiana University was also where Fischoff found Jonathan Cargill and brothers Ben and Chris Swanson, the creators of a little label in Bloomington called Secretly Canadian. Fischoff credits his friends at the label for his ability to make music today, reflecting “I mean there’s no way that any established label would have put out my first record or two records. I just fell into it – and if that hadn’t been the case, I don’t know what would have happened. It’s probably pretty likely that I would not be making records now.” Fischoff’s first two records, Winston Park and The Ox and The Rainbow, were dark and spare, rooted in minimalist guitar but documenting his earliest dabbling in tape collage and found sound. Since then, advances in au-

photo by Steve Gullick

On The Crawl, On His Knees (Looking Skyward) WORDS BY JENNIFER BRANDEL dio software and technology have blown the doors open to computer instrumentation and excited the hell out of Fischoff. So much so, that he admits to diving head first into his latest album with no exit strategy. “I didn’t know what I was getting into. If I did, I probably would have tried to do something else. Something simpler.” To dig beneath his incredibly complex process, I start where he did in 2001, sitting on the old brown and orange plaid hand-me-down couch in his Ukrainian Village basement studio strumming an acoustic guitar. It’s here where Fischoff began emptying his mind onto a minidisc player, passing months simply recording his melodic ideas and saving the judgment phase for the future. This eliminated the problem all solo artists encounter – trying to discern if something is enough to make the cut. Creating, recording, forgetting and moving on, Fischoff had soon amassed eleven minidiscs worth of raw material. At this point, the individual chord progressions became audio puzzle pieces that he could shift and arrange into eleven skeletal songs. He playfully humors me by imitating his thought process: “You know I think this could work! I could use this somewhere and this over here, and maybe I could fit this with this over here.” Over time, his mind was able to cobble together a full album’s worth of songs he could play from start to finish on his guitar. But Fischoff still wanted something other than an acoustic guitar to wear his chords. So at the same time he was creating these guitar-based songs, he was collecting the thousands of sound samples that would come to replace the strums, rendering them not just unrecognizable, but obsolete. His manner of sampling was nothing like that in the traditional hip-hop or electronic variety; he wasn’t taking an entire phrase or hook or melody. He was working on a microscopic level, borrowing only so much as a single note or single chord from whatever his source, be it library sound effect CD, existing songs, or his own invention. In the end, Fischoff collected nearly 4,000 samples for The Crawl’s working palette, and gave names to them all. At his computer, he guided me through this impressive collection, pointing out names like “Cassavetes Tone” and “Bergman Piano” (both recorded off library movie rentals),

alongside “Hockey Puck”, “Dirty Angel Choir”, “Slightly Muffled Bell Tone” and “Atmospheric Slow Attack Tone.” Once he felt that he had collected enough samples, Fischoff began the heavy lifting: staging auditions and casting the sounds in each song on The Crawl. He likens this part of the process to “throwing a bunch of stuff on a wall and seeing what sticks,” which makes it sound far more mindless and far less taxing than it really was. On average, each song contains close to a hundred unique samples. Multiply that by eleven songs and you’ve got over a thousand instruments occupying less than forty-five minutes. The samples really are instruments. With a MIDI keyboard running through his computer and the audio program Reason keyed up, Fischoff took each sound sample and altered its pitch, thereby creating entire octaves of “Bergman Piano” and “Dirty Angel Choir” from which to work. Samples were transformed into melodies, percussion lines, and textural undertones, then packaged neatly into tracks and delicately layered on top of one another. Fischoff admits the trail he blazed for himself was not a particularly safe one: “I was having existential crises daily. I mean, what am I doing? I’m working a job in the day that’s unfulfilling, in theory, just so I can support this music thing that I have this dream to do. But music, it’s work. It’s not like I was coming home at the end of the day saying, “Yes! I can’t wait to get started on the music!” It really sucked for a while, and I was not happy. I have no regrets in retrospect because I’m really happy with the way this turned out and it’s really satisfying to have created something that I think is good. But, it was bad at times. I’m not going to look back on the making of The Crawl with a lot of fond memories. It was hell.” Fischoff’s not one for exaggeration. There is gratitude in his voice for surviving the four year stretch. Even after years of trial and error, arranging thousands of samples, building thick layers of sound to imbue life into his guitar tracks, there was still the lyrical process waiting. Fortunately, Fischoff had his method — create, collect, judge later — down to a science. From notebooks filled with single phrases and solitary words, Fischoff meticulously connected his lines into lyric.

Five years of these solitary efforts resulted in The Crawl – an album that can inspire waking R.E.M. and drug-like sensations. When I first listened, the opening song “The World Gets Smaller When You Dream,” evoked visions of riding The Never Ending Story’s Falcor through medieval landscapes. The song “Flip Books” took me on another aerial tour, but of a Miyazaki-like wonderland. At the core of every one of Fischoff’s songs are very real yet tragically nameless emotional states. The English language might resort to calling them something like triumph and transcendence. I ask the admittedly agnostic Fischoff what he thinks about non-denominational, religious music that makes no mentions of God. Not surprisingly, he has a lot to say about the subject. “It’s something that I’ve thought about a lot and wondered about – that maybe the arts might play some role in fulfilling whatever it is religion can do for some people. Religion, at least up to this point in my life, has not managed to fill any voids that I do believe exist. I mean, it’s obvious that religion has been a part of people’s lives across time and cultures – it’s everywhere and always exists. So how do I, as an individual, get by without it? I think in some ways, through the arts. Namely, that at its best, art gives you a sense of beauty in the world. It gives you a sense of meaning, even. While maybe it’s not something organized by some higher being, it can make you more aware of the world and your place in it. “Music is one of the more abstract arts, so in terms of music it can be a direct connection to emotions. When I hear Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ I still well up. Music in some ways is the most direct language. I don’t understand why that is exactly, but I think music and the arts in general are capable of creating what I imagine might be a similar feeling to a religious experience. I mean that by no means is for any old piece of art or music or film – it takes something pretty extraordinary. Of course no subject that dense can be answered succinctly. But Fischoff’s painstakingly crafted album is a strong, concise argument that within a thicket of musical layers or floating loosely in ether between individual notes, something transcendent can exist. Trying to find “it” may be a futile effort, but experiencing “it” is sublime.

PITerPAT

photograph by Melanie Schiff Words by Liz Tapp

Stacking Stones The members of Chicago-based Pit er Pat (Fay Davis-Jeffers on keyboard/main vocals, Butchy Fuego on drums, and Rob Doran on bass) not only make music together but as individuals create visual art. In asking the band about their work, certain themes arise in both mediums. Pyramids, their most recent album, was named after the recurring shape the band members found in their lives and often in their drawings. Not just referencing the pyramid as a platonic shape, it’s other references like the consideration of death, time, and the human condition are all prominent themes in Pit er Pat’s work. The band’s connection to and ability to work in both audio and visual seems integral. In writing songs, they sometimes use visual charts “to sort of map out, instead of writing stuff out,” Doran explains. It becomes clear that visualization helps the trio more immediately connect, using the charts as emotional guides: “I think it’s important to all three of us while we’re playing or writing to get to an energy that can be transformational through the level of music or sound,” Doran explains. ”Even as a listener, you can bring yourself to a different energy plane. If you get into that, you can lose your body a little bit. It can become meditative.“ There is often a very meditative quality to Pit er Pat’s work. If their sounds were part of building a pyramid, they would be found in the methodical, rhythmic laying of stones, blocks, and bricks. Fuego’s drums alongside Davis-Jeffers’ keys sound like bones being shaken, hammers being purposefully hit, stacking and building. The music hauntingly slinks and nods forward. Fay croons with calmness: “Last night the world slowed down / just to change direction on the longest night / we became still, for a moment / waiting for you to come / for you to come / and interrupt this pause.” The symbol of a pyramid seems appropriate for Pit er Pat, who like the building subtly manage to cover a lot of territory thematically. “I’m not entirely sure where they come from, but I’m really into symbols and mysterious . . . you know, scratches in the pavement,” Doran explains. For the bassist, symbols like gang graffiti present an interesting concept as “remnants from somebody else” whose “meaning will change from one person to the next.” Doran’s visual artwork implements iconic and sometimes primitive or more native looking line work. It makes sense when he explains his interest in imagining marks as coming from “something alien or otherworldly, or maybe from the spirit world” left for you to find. As for his own thoughts on pyramids, Doran explains, “pyramids are one of those symbols that are such a simple shape. But it holds a lot of power in it. It’s really just a few lines, but it has some sort of quality about it that you recognize. It means different things to whoever but its got that really simple direct quality to it.” The pyramid shape seems torturous in the way of the Inferno, with varying rungs of hell to ascend, while their shape conversely offers an ultimate redemption—as if the pinnacle, in fact, might be Heaven itself. Pyramids are undeniably about the human condition. As houses meant for transformation, a place to deliver a body to another life, their redemption is juxtaposed with the direct oppressiveness, toil, enslavement, and deadliness inherent to their very construction. The album Pyramids pits the idea of temporal lives against the omniscient: “Time doesn’t care... It just moves round the circle... as it always has and always will./ Reminding you in it’s stableness / of your own temporality / your brief life / your dying.” This sort of questioning isn’t necessarily a negative thing. In reference to his visual artwork, Doran explains “there’s a lot of darkness in the world. I think I can work with that a little bit. I see it in a positive way as well. “ Doran sees death with a certain positivity: “I think it plays a really powerful and beautiful role in life.” In questioning the group about the gravity connected to the idea of pyramids as a concept, Davis-Jeffer’s references the purpose of pyramids, the death relationship and spirituality of the buildings: “I think two of the ways conceptually that pyramids really worked: First, I think it’s a really amazing, baffling idea to spend decades and tens of thousands of people building a tomb to carry your body when you’re dead. I’m not sure how other animals work, but one of the things about being human is knowing

that you’ll die and how people deal with that differently and how people approach that. And the idea of preparing that much for your death is pretty fascinating for me . . . all the work that goes into that and sort of paranoia is really interesting . . . [And] pyramids are sort of a symbol of inequality because of the pharaohs—at least the Egyptian pyramids— using the poor people to build things for the rich,” she explains before attesting: “The struggles for freedom that poor people have are completely different than the struggles that the rich have for freedom.” Fuego responded with thoughts about working and struggling, the kind of struggle it takes to create community within the larger socialstructure: “A lot of the songs have a little bit of a Chicago vibe almost, when I think about the Chicago artists that I really respect, they tend to focus on the grittier aspects of art and living—there’s almost like a working class thing. For me, Pyramids the record is a lot about struggle and people and groups that struggle together—that are able to embrace a more positive aspect of things.” Fuego was also quick to point out the more negative parts of social-class and struggle: “I also think about the pyramids in Egypt, and how they were all made by slaves...it’s a feeling I can relate to—building a pyramid in a sense of trying to create within a city . . . it’s cheap and easy [in Chicago]—but It doesn’t feel like the general culture in the city really appreciates it. I think what we ended up making really illustrates a lot of those struggles.” Struggling towards an idea of collectiveness, both inside and outside their city, seems to be recurring for Pit er Pat: “I think it would be hard to say that we’re not affected by the city that we live in. I mean Chicago’s a really heavy city . . . just the weather,” says Doran before explaining that he’d rather consider their music more related to a mass unconscious than just that of their city: “I would like to think that it’s just out there and channeled through us and it doesn’t really matter where we live. I think the collective unconscious of the world is a really strong one . . . a lot of stuff comes from outside, from out of the universe.” What might seem abstract in writing, isn’t in application—when Doran explains the community and camaraderie he feels among musical contemporaries— the universe seems it might just be speaking on the same level to quite a few: “I think there is definitely a collective consciousness and people are making music in a certain realm. There are so many bands that I love that sound completely different, but there’s a reason I relate to it.” Doran explains that there is of course another side of music to which he really doesn’t connect. But where people are making music without trying to turn it into money, Doran finds a common trajectory: “There’s a lot of people making music because they love to make music and they’re frustrated or concerned with the times right now, or just life in general; they’re effected by it—the news or things that are going on in the world.” The commonality Doran talks about is beyond cross-genred: “I know a lot of noise or ambient musicians that are thinking about the same things and it comes across even though there aren’t any words.” I ask Doran if he feels Pit er Pat has discernible shifts as a band and he tells me: “I definitely think that we are growing as musicians and as a band also. We’ve been really busy touring, but we haven’t done a lot of writing yet for a new album. We’re leaving on Sunday to go to Europe . . .We haven’t been actually able to sit down and write. We’re still kind of working on the Pyramids tour. I think we’ll get back from this tour and it’ll just pour out of us. “ Pit er Pat’s newest release Pyramids is out on Thrill Jockey. For more Pit er Pat visit PITERPAT.COM or listen to their new home recording of Yoko Ono’s “Dogtown” at MYSPACE.COM/PITERPAT.

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watercolors by Ira Yonemura 33

by Moll y

Kincaid

You might have, as I did, learned about Brooklyn band Takka Takka on a music blog, probably in reference to their recent tour with friends Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. But, once you start listening to their recent independent release “We Feel Safer at Night,” an eclectic, intimate record that either makes you wanna dance around sock-hop style or snuggle under some covers, that ingrained association with the electronic rock of Clap Your Hands starts to dissipate. Then you might go see them live, and wonder when they started rocking so hard. I sat down with frontman Gabe Levine and drummer Conrad Doucette in Park Slope, Brooklyn to talk about their evolution over the past year . . .and lots of other randomness. Molly Kincaid: What influences you more in life, words or sensory input? Gabe Levine: Definitely sensory for me. I actually was just thinking about this today, because the colors of the trees were really beautiful with the light. I was thinking, since I’m pretty blind without my glasses, and I play rock music— so I’m probably losing my hearing—that I’m just like slowly losing all my senses, which is a sad thought. Conrad Doucette: I think my senses too, most of the time, but I wish I was more turned on by words. I saw there was this new Thomas Pynchon novel coming out, that I probably won’t read but I really want to. MK: I’m curious about the impetus for the song, “The Native Astronaut Grows Restless,” because I get riled up about how everything is named after Native American terminology, cultural theft and all that. It also, though, makes me think about how no one is really native to any place. GL: I just had this image of an actual Native American in an astronaut outfit. But then I was thinking I should research if there have been any Native Americans to become astronauts. Maybe there have been. But there’s also the idea of just being completely foreign, like this Native American going into space. I don’t know, it’s just this image I had in my head. CD: I think that song’s representative of us, because all of us besides Gabe don’t have one place that we’re from. We’re not really New Yorkers, we’ve all moved around. GL: I grew up here, but my mom’s from Indonesia. Growing up with her being from another country, I always felt somewhat out of place. And as a band, I think we don’t fit into any established circles. Nonetheless, it’s such accessible music. In some ways, the whole Takka Takka thing has been like a feeling of outsider-ness. I feel like New York is a place where you can simultaneously feel connected and then not connected at all. CD: I feel that too. When I’m here, I almost feel connected, because we all do the same things and

read the same things and go the same places, and then we go out of town and people ask about the Brooklyn scene or the New York scene, that’s when I realize, we don’t really know anyone.

GL: It kinda does, doesn’t it? Well, it’s about a friend of mine. She works in banking. Am I making any sense here? No, I don’t shroud anything in metaphor, do I?

MK: I read a review that called the lyrics of your more protest-style songs “palatable.” It made me think of quintessential protest singers like Guthrie or Dylan. Their stuff could be really straight-forward.

MK: How does the city effect you?

GL: We don’t really write protest songs. So when something comes up, it just comes up. I feel like it’s better to have that language enter the song as it is, as opposed to some sort of shrouding. Really I don’t think about it that much. Maybe I should, but we just write songs. I’m not trying to be Guthrie. MK: In your life, what constitutes the good old days? GL: I guess I miss being a kid in the 80s. We have this new song that has a countdown in it, which reminds me of “3-2-1 contact.” I was such a Spiderman fan, too. Because he was from Forest Hills— which is where I’m from. Me and Peter Parker, we go way back. No, but being a kid in the 80s, New York was such a different place back then, a lot scarier, in good and bad ways. MK: How was it different? GL: Well, like today I was in the park and I thought about how I was brought up to fear wooded places. And here it’s 2006, and I’m not fearing for anything. It’s nice. It’s funny because my dad still has like 30 locks on his door. And it’s such a nice neighborhood, too. But of course a lot of people love the idea of New York in the 80s, because there was a lot of great stuff going on. But I was a kid, so I wasn’t into it. I don’t know. It was good back then. I’ll leave it at that. CD: My dad once told me, “Whenever you hear people my age talk about the good old days, don’t believe them.” And he just meant that today is just as good or bad as it was 10 years ago or 40 years ago. MK: In the song “She works in Banking” you say, “In the deepest space we find the human race has yet to embrace time, time, time.” The theme of time seems to come up in several places. GL: Really? I feel like I talk about phones and phone calls a lot. I’ll have to look into the time thing. I definitely latch onto a couple themes ... I think it’s about communication and miscommunication. I’m a pretty piss-poor communicator at times. I’m in a band with some piss-poor communicators as well. That song is about a friend of mine who doesn’t really fit into a place and time. Or I guess it could be about not embracing your time. MK: Well that changes everything.

GL: Sometimes I’m a little overwhelmed by all the things going on around, all the sounds. But then it also forms a nice tapestry to wrap yourself around. You can space out in it . . . I either write songs in the park or on the subway. I had a job with an hour commute, so I just had a load of time on my hands, just to look at people just living their lives. Everybody rides the subway, that’s the greatest thing about New York. MK: It’s my favorite thing. GL: There’s nothing that defines our experience [as New Yorkers] more, I think. One reason for the name Takka Takka is that it’s sort of the sound the subway cars make. It’s this sound that means nothing, really. MK: Your live show is very disparate from the record. Does that have to do with your relationship to the audience? GL: I love the audience. But in terms of why the two are different, we’ve just changed a lot as a band. For that record, we recorded a lot of those basic tracks in the studio, but a lot of it was overdubs we recorded in my apartment. And we can’t be that loud in my apartment, or people will bang on the walls. So it was sort of a function of the space it was recorded in. Plus, when we started recording it we were still relatively new as a band. Since then, we’ve figured out more of what we want to sound like, and it’s definitely a louder, more guitar-oriented sound, rather than an acoustic guitar/keyboard sound. We’re gonna be recording an EP soon, and it’s going to be more guitar-songs. CD: It’ll be a lot more like our live show. MK: Your recent tour [opening for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Architecture in Helsinki] probably propelled you guys a lot. CD: Before that we had made a point to not play out a lot, because we wanted to get to know each other musically. Then we reached a point where we were really excited about what we were doing. GL: For that tour, the 15 dates on it was triple the amount of shows that we’d played, ever. We came back a completely different band. Because you know playing right before Architecture in Helsinki, it was like, we can’t just chill out on stage. We gotta bring something. So that was really good and challenging, to try to be captivating enough to precede those guys. CD: It’s really exciting to me to see how we’ve evolved, with all these outside factors sort of happening to us.

“One reason for the name Takka Takka is that it’s sort of the sound the subway cars make. It’s this sound that means nothing, really.” 35

MARSHALL’S ART CHICAGO’S DIY AFICIONADO SPEAKS TO HIS CRAFT: MAKING IDEAS = REALITY 2000 W. Fulton #310

has not suffered from an identity crisis - it has actually beneﬁted from one. The 3,500 sq ft box overlooking the cutout Chicago skyline has played host to legendary concerts, well attended art shows and DIY craft extravaganzas, in addition to permanently housing a large-format printing company. Behind the curtain of it all is the shadowy, benevolent wizard of Oz: Marshall Preheim. Preheim is a busy man with a lot on his mind. At 34 years old, he’s already managed to start two veritable cultural institutions in the arts community of Chicago. Preheim’s ﬁrst project was “open-end”—a sporadic art gallery and music venue that has played host to such legendary events as the annual mid-winter indoor badminton tourney, the barn dance apocalypse, a competition based Superbowl show (which included a 15 foot-long, pornography-crammed, Mike Ditka piñata with Superbowl ring), and buzz-worthy live music acts like Joanna Newsom, Will Oldham, The Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, and other like minded folks. Then there’s DEPART-ment, Preheim’s carefully considered response to the Renegade Craft Fair’s successful spin on the craft world. DEPART-ment’s tight-knit community of Do-It-Yourselfers hawks home made goods at the Fulton Street space four times a year. Preheim’s two passionate endeavors wouldn’t be possible without his large-format printing company, ideoTech. The company is the engine behind the expansive Fulton Street location. Their oversize inkjet prints require a large amount of workspace, but lucky for Chicago, ideoTech doesn’t need all that space all the time. And it’s in that time and space in between where Preheim gets to work his magic and bring to life an open-end event or DEPART-ment sale. I caught up with the ever-busy Preheim at the Handlebar, and over the course of a few beers and hours tried to shed a little light on the man behind the curtain. Jennifer Brandel: Open-end seems to have a reputation for live music shows that turn into all out dance parties or veritable happenings. What’s it about being in that space that creates an environment conducive to history making? Marshall Preheim: It’s a unique space for the types of things we like to do and projects we foster. When there’s a performance event there, who knows how you’ll categorize it. I like when people take advantage of how it isn’t your classic music venue, and do something theatrical or tweak it in a way you couldn’t at your standard bar. We don’t make money on shows, so we only work with bands and performers that we really love and respect. 36

Those times when we take a leap, and do something with someone we’re not familiar with, we almost always end up being thrilled by the outcome. We’ve had a great relationship with the Empty Bottle and they pitch us shows—they know what our tastes are and they know what would work there. JB: Who’s on your short list of dream performances for the space? Are there any acts you’ve missed? MP: I think that any music by people that feel free to experiment is deﬁnitely a good match. Bands like Alog or The Books or the Danielson Famile. People who hide behind racks of equipment and create elaborate sets, alternate personalities. I’d really like to see some chamber music in the space...maybe a couple of grand pianos. A friend of ours did a full jazz orchestra piece a while ago “Never Enough Hope” and it’s one of the most amazing things that I’ve seen there. Thank you, Tobin. Dream performers? The Rachel’s playing there was pretty great—all sorts of instrumentation. It’s that big thing I love—when the band is taking up a third, if not a half of the space—the one-on-one experience with the crowd. JB: What’s your role in DEPART-ment, the other love of your life? Do you craft yourself, or are you more or less a “crafting pimp” at this point? MP: A crafting pimp? I’m going to need a whole new outﬁt if I’m a crafting pimp. For a while I was making a lot of stuff for myself. I like the process of trying to learn that sort of skill. At the time I started DEPART-ment I was trying to learn as much as possible about making the things that I needed, like clothes. It’s liberating and it changes the way you think about almost everything. If I make something good, it’s almost always a happy accident. They’re unique in the truest sense of the word! I may be the slowest user of a sewing machine within the sun’s gravitational pull. JB: Yeah, I know what you mean about creating things you don’t necessarily want to make a run of. I love the ideas and construction process for the prototypes of the things I make—but I never get to a point where I want to make a hundred of the same thing. I get bored. My style of working is not exactly cost-effective... MP: That’s why I think DEPART-ment can work for anyone—when you’re feeling that urge, go for it, bring it in. You don’t spend any money to participate; you don’t need high volume. We’re really trying to get people who are interested in dipping their toes in but haven’t really committed to getting wet.

JB: So I guess I put the “art” before the horse there. How did DEPART-ment actually come about? MP: I came up with the idea for DEPART-ment after getting very frustrated at the first Renegade Craft Fair in the fall of 2003. It wasn’t anything specific about the Renegade, I think it’s great and for someone like me— who knew a ton of people who make their own stuff, but never really went to craft fairs—it showed how much was out there. I did, however, find it incredibly frustrating—I saw all of these beautiful, handmade things that I really liked. I just spent the day thinking “Wow there’s so much here—why would I get this anywhere else?” But the structure of a classic booth based craft fair has limitations in terms of practicality. I’d see something great at the fifth booth and I’d buy it. Then at the tenth booth I’d find something I liked even more and just couldn’t pass it up. So I tried to browse the entire fair and intended to go back and get the items that I’d decided were the pick of the litter. But more often than not they’d either be sold or I couldn’t for the life of me remember where I’d seen it. I can’t shop—have absolutely no skill in this area. Spending the day at the Renegade, seeing all of your friends, meeting great new people is fantastic but that’s not really why they throw it. I just thought that there must be a better way to make it work for both buyer and seller. The original idea was: OK, people are making everything. A lot of the people I know are just starting to make things and they’re not quite sure if that’s really something that they want to put all their effort into. There’s a pressure to be successful—that if it doesn’t work then it’s not worth your time, so it’ll stay a hobby. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when you get the bug to make your living doing something that you love, it would be nice to have systems and environments that foster that. So to resolve the issues that I had with traditional organization, one of the main ideas was that rather than booths you’d have it organized by category. If you’re looking for a shirt, you don’t have to hit every booth to find the right one. Organized like a traditional department store, the whole thing changes from vendor-oriented to customer-oriented, while freeing the vendor from the anchor of their booth. I wanted to make it as convenient as possible for everyone involved, a model that could work toward allowing people to procure everything they needed from people like themselves. JB: To what extent do you want to implement the original idea now, the idea of a community and place where you can get everything you need to live?

MP: You know, we have hand soap but not industrial cleansers. We don’t have much in the way of furniture. The services—I wanted to have people be able to get in touch with private practice lawyers. People who maybe work with a law ﬁrm but who could moonlight through DEPART-ment working with individuals directly. JB: It seems like you haven’t abandoned all hope to make DEPART-ment into what you’ve dreamed it could be? MP: No I haven’t abandoned hope. And it’s important for me not to abandon hope. Right now I think a lot of that hope is tied into a new website which provides the mechanism to implement all sorts of things that have never been approached with DEPART-ment so far. I’m not really the type of person to put all hopes of the future in technology, but I’m also the type of person who knows that I don’t have the organization skills to really hold something like this together with a bit of rhetoric and good intentions. In this case, serious structure and smart systems are what’s needed to get to the point where it can grow into what it always wanted to be. It’s time to replant in a new pot. JB: Do you consider your three projects - ideo– Tech, open-end, and DEPART-ment, successful businesses? MP: IdeoTech is not what you would really call a “successful” business. We are able to sustain ourselves—it’s what we do. It’s important to us. However, I’m the furthest thing from a businessman. Kevin, my partner, can attest to this. Open-end has never pulled in a real dollar and that’s the way we like it. It frees us up from the sorts of obligations that we have absolutely no interest in. DEPART-ment makes no money either and the people that organize it with me are also participants. They can at least look to their sales for some inspiration. They don’t really make enough money as a participant to justify all the extra effort. There’s some serious effort in there. I did say that I’m not a businessman? JB: How do you rank the importance of your three ventures? MP: DEPART-ment represents almost everything that’s important to me. I take it very personally and it’s incredibly important to me. Open-end is in the same category. They’re both practical applications of ideals that are important to me. If nothing else, they’re good

Portrait sketch by Tyler Engman All photoraphs by Marshall Preheim

real-world models and, because they’re not structured as moneymaking ventures. DEPART-ment needs to be it’s own thing. The last year and a half has been an experiment towards that end. It popped out of my head fully formed, was put on paper and preached (literally) to small groups of folks and took off running. But it’s really just a set of principles that started off as a manifesto. My good friend Marianne Fairbanks jumped in there with me and we made it happen. It’s been growing and changing and learning to be healthier and run smoother ever since. It’s really just been an issue of ﬁne tuning, tweaking out the kinks. What is important to me now is very much informed by the way that ideoTech, open-end, and DEPART-ment have all evolved. And I’ve come to the realization that what’s important to me, in the grand scheme, what I think will work to really help in some tangible way, isn’t going to come from anything that I create. Each one of those things has just been a lesson for me. These are my life lessons. DEPART-ment represented what I hoped would work for people to give them a sense of empowerment and allow them to work with more sustainability. Right now there’s still culpability in DEPART-ment and in the tools that we use and the resources that we rely on and the privilege that all of its participants come from. But real world change is not going to happen through a craft fair, and the more that I’ve tried to work on things that are important and that make change, the more I realize that that’s not it. Sometimes I just feel that desire to sit for a minute. Especially after taking this summer off. I know partly it’s because I’ve been spending so much time organizing my life. JB: Organizing your life just to make your projects run more smoothly? MP: This is my end goal; if I’ve grown up in America and know how we’re seen within the system—the federal system, the commercial system—as a statistic or part of a percentage—I really want to be something else, more than this, and I need to be able to step out of that [system]. I’ve been reducing my life, in terms of the ﬁnancial, commercial, and governmental aspects. I’d like to be able to put the formal portion that institutions care about, into an accordion brown paper folder. I think that if I can literally hand my formal life over to another human being and say “I’m going to sign power of

attorney over to you. You’re me if you accept it.” I think it would kind of be like dying and starting over. Just the very act would be liberating in a way that appeals to me very, very much. If I handed over that envelope, Open-end would shut down and DEPART-ment would become its own thing. My ideas in the end are clichéd—they’re not new. They’re amalgamations and accumulations of other snippets of ideas—things I’ve been exposed to. JB: But still, aggregating ideas and bringing people together shouldn’t be undervalued. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can’t pool the resources and people together to realize it, then it remains just an idea. MP: DIY culture in general is at a weird high water mark in my opinion because a lot of that “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” “I can accomplish anything” attitude is sadly starting to fade away. So many people I know who were doing it, who were working toward it through DEPART-ment and other places, many are now back to their day jobs. A lot of them now have to move towards high-end boutique life in order to be sustainable. It’s not what they originally wanted. But the original was wasn’t sustainable. Person X in their apartment is not going to be able to manufacture enough stuff to succeed through volume. As soon as you step out of your apartment and start your own company, it’s not really DIY anymore and it might not be why you got into it in the ﬁrst place. I don’t see the majority of people going right down the middle and saying, “Well, I just do this because I love it.” DEPART-ment was set up so that people who were doing it as a hobby could potentially make a permanent thing. And for people who craft as a hobby to participate in the social aspect—an environment for everybody. JB: Any words of wisdom you can offer an entrepreneurial spirit in Chicago? MP: Recognize that you’re in Chicago and you can do anything you want—you really can. You have to be determined. I’d just recommend for folks to take advantage of the ﬂexibility here and the fact that there is something still lingering about the Midwest that causes people to help each other. It’s a warm place.

Concerning No Less Than 16 Topics:

picture by

Chris Strong see chrisstrong.com

A Conversation with Tim Kinsella

by Ashton Montrone and Tim Kinsella

The problem with nearly every interview I’ve ever read with Tim Kinsella is: 1: The interviewer tries to understand the intangible, yet palpable intelligence that Tim has and tries to extract it by asking him about the music that he makes. Standard procedure, but ineffective in its task. 2. The interviewer tries to understand his unique musical perspective by asking him what his favorite bands are. If I’m not mistaken, they are something like AC/DC, Queen, and Led Zeppelin. 3. The interviewer asks if Cap’n Jazz is getting back together. They are never getting back together, so please forget about it. I’ve been fortunate enough to be friends with Tim for a number of years. Every time we’ve sat and talked for a while, I’ve come away with a new perspective, and it was rarely about music. I thought that this conversation could really be about anything and still achieve its desired effect. I chose politics because I know it is something that we are both interested in and it has the ability to cross-pollinate with other subjects. I had the upper hand in preparation because I selected the questions, but we were both very happy at the end with the results. I hope you enjoy. With Love, Ashton Montrone.

The Joan of Arc, Make Believe, and Cap n’ Jazz frontman, solo performer, and recently turned ﬁlmmaker talks life and politics . . . AM: Some people call the conﬂict between Hezbollah and Israel the beginning of the next world war. Do you agree?

irrelevant and the “winner” is the person who gets the money, and the means don’t count. Or it’s Elimidate.

the Republicans represent. But I just think until there are more parties, there’s not really an option.

TK: I would think that the next world war has been going on for a while. I remember sitting around stoned and paranoid with my friend Casey during the Gap era, during the “Golden Clinton Years,” and we had the luxury of conceptualizing and rejecting American culture. It was sort of heady and conceptual. We had three computers in the room, two were linked up and one was always on BBC. We were just reading it and he was like, “People are gonna need fucking tanks coming down Division Street to realize that the shit is already going down!” And that has always stuck with me. There is chaos everywhere in the world and we just live in this little fortress and we are allowed to forget about it. But all of the allegiances are in place; everyone already knows what side they are on. Well governments, not necessarily the people.

TK: I did an interview a couple of months ago and this guy asked me the funniest question. He was like, “I read you don’t watch television.” I was like “yeah.” And he said, “Well... How do ya now what’s goin’ on?” (Laughter) And my mind was so blown, because I thought I was having an okay conversation until that point. Trying to block out all of that information has become second nature—it’s so weird to be asked to explain it. Isn’t it so obvious TV isn’t going to explain what’s going on? It’s going to tell you the perspective of people who want you to think what they want you to think is happening.

AM: It’s so funny because my Grandma, I don’t know if you remember how she’s always watching MSNBC nonstop. She is totally a Bill Maher style party line democrat and loves having these political debates with people in the neighborhood that come in. But she just ends up having these talking point arguments. But she believes that she is this informed democrat.

AM: I think people aren’t as unified behind government as they used to be. Technology allows people to communicate as individual groups. They need not be informed of public policy by their governments—so there is more unified dissent. TK: Right, it’s a luxury that we’ve been allowed that dissent. Our grandparents’ generation, well I mean there was giant protest for WWI, but you never hear about it, and socialism used to be a viable option for factory workers and farmers. But it wasn’t “Oh my God, you questioned capitalism!” It was a realistic thing. Now that option isn’t made to seem realistic. Maybe our grandparents didn’t have that luxury. At least mine were so poor they didn’t have time to think about that. They had to think about these immediate things with all of their kids. They couldn’t have time to conceptualize this larger picture. They just trusted the little information that they had. AM: Yeah. It is this luxury, but people can now feel more that they are being misrepresented by their government because the government moves as one unit whereas there are several stratified groups of people that have their own ideas about the way things should go. Which I guess is the way things have always been, but they’ve just never been so connected and strong. TK: Once you have a luxury it’s hard to give it up. I didn’t have a car for twelve years then I had one for two weeks before I couldn’t imagine without. Now I just gotta get rid of it. It’s this evolution—how people think as individuals and collectively—there’s no pretending that you don’t know what you do know—that the government isn’t necessarily working in the ways everyone thinks they do. AM: Do you believe that cultural coordination happens? If so to what extent and who is responsible? TK: Oh for sure. Clear Channel just bought out House of Blues. That doesn’t affect a band like ours at this point because we operate on a small level. Bigger bands used to have two options in cities, but now just look at the Dixie Chicks. They have to cancel shows because of one critical statement— which is so obvious to everyone. (Laughter) But you’re not really allowed to say it at that level. It’s coordinated to look invisible so people believe that they have a choice. That’s the ultimate mechanism of control: the illusion of freedom of choice. AM: Yeah that’s the one thing that I say to my conservative friends in Utah. When they talk about defending freedom, I think the major premise of freedom is having a choice. How many choices do you really have? Half the time the companies are the same company. TK: Keeping that mechanism hidden is what keeps our entire culture sustained. It flatters everyone to feel they’re making choices. I believe firmly that happens. It’s the cultural branch of the political parties, and the political parties are the political branches of the financial institutions. AM: I was thinking about when you turn on the TV and you have your choices, but all of the choices reaffirm our political situation. We’re in Iraq and there are either people overtly saying that we are in there for money or not for money but it’s an argument. So what’s on TV? It’s Survivor. Ethics become

AM: I think it was Christopher Hitchens that said “I became a journalist so that I didn’t have to read the newspapers to find out what was happening.” TK: Oh, infuriating! That guy drives me kinda crazy. He made that great Kissinger documentary. He wrote this book about how Henry Kissinger should be tried as a war criminal and I was such a fan. Then when the war started he came out saying, “This is in defense of our civilization!” He is super smart and articulate which is probably why he frustrates me so much. (Laughter) I know that if I had to talk to him I know he would just beat me down. I had this friend who when Hitchens spoke in Chicago, got swept up in his entourage after his speaking engagement, and he ended up going out to dinner with this group of fifteen people. Christopher Hitchens was at the center of the table, and he never ate but just drank about 75 bourbons and remained completely articulate. He never stopped talking and had this group of people just mesmerized the whole time—and it was just him wasted, holding court. (Laughter) He is definitely very smart. It just bums me out, because I guess I just don’t think he is very wise. His pragmatic big picture scares me. AM: I like to hear well thought out, articulate conservatives, though, because they are such a rarity. Just getting an alternate perspective is nice. As forward thinking as liberals like to think they are, there’s a bubble that ends up happening. It becomes exactly like conservatives—there’s a party line. You find yourself saying things without thinking. TK: Yeah. It’s frustrating when liberalism stops before critiquing the idea of a duality: liberals versus conservatives. It frustrates me, someone like Bill Maher...Or “Air America” type people. They have this conceptualization of liberalism that stops short of critiquing how there is a realistic duality of conservatives versus liberals. It seems that if you look in a fucking dictionary liberal would mean “open minded.” Isn’t that the general use of the term, right? Conservative would mean a narrow definition of things. AM: The root word is conserve. It’s to not alter the way the social structure and political structure and financial structure of things are. And that’s usually just the way that it plays out—them dragging their feet on every issue and the liberals are trying to expand definitions. I think I have this essay by Emerson maybe and he describes it as two people. One person on the back dragging their feet and the conservative is just hugging them and trying to stop and the liberal is just trying to walk forward and progress and that is the most basic definition. TK: I’m talking about a wider scope, not a political use of the words. But a liberal definition should be, “Oh, if I fold this paper right, that could be a cup.” Or anything could be a cup. You know? And maybe that’s radical and not liberal. It frustrates me that there are people who—if they supposedly represent a liberal world view that is supposed to be open minded, but they can’t see around a world view of conservative and liberal tension that is sustaining the way things are. Any sort of real progress would have to happen outside of that friction. AM: Do you think the Democratic or Republican party is better or do you think that they are the same thing? TK: I don’t doubt that people really invested in it really see the difference. Like Ted Kennedy really believes that he is fighting for freedom and opportunity for more people that he thinks that

TK: No, I don’t remember. But right, because she’s informed by the same corporations that are benefiting from this structure. AM: And she literally doesn’t know what is going on aside from her talking points. TK: My Mom and Grandma and all my Aunts and Uncles are all really politicized in a way that they hadn’t been before by the radicalism of Bush. It means a lot to take back the idea of God and the idea of patriotism from those people and their agenda. My mom works with troubled teens and does social work. I don’t doubt that she has the best intentions for what she thinks Democrats represent. But still, Hillary Clinton was on the Wal-Mart board forever. (Laughter) As far as the earlier question—I guess the ultimate testament to the fact, that I believe happens, would be the way our bands operate. This sort of faith in art or poetry functioning as a way to make people reconsider relationships. I know it’s a romantic stretch, but if someone is like, “Whoa, with drums and guitar, I’m used to hearing them like this. And I’m used to their relationship being this but if they can do this [other thing] and still sound musical . . . “ Maybe it makes people reconsider relationships between things they know. That’s a cultural expression of our political beliefs. I’m not saying we’re politically motivated with our music. But we are politically aware. Does that make sense? AM: Yeah. What do you think has been the most damaging policy of the last thirty years? TK: I don’t know. There’s so many. I would say Abu Ghraib and the okaying of torture is certainly the scariest one. Or infinite detainment without charges being pressed, those are definitely the scariest policy changes. I’m not afraid of being killed, but I sure am afraid of being infinitely detained and tortured. (Laughing) Kill me, I don’t care, I won’t notice, but I don’t want to be left alive in some scenario without a trial, and that is really happening. I think the double speak that prevails now is really scary. I know that’s not an explicit policy, because by definition I guess it can’t be, but as a tactic that’s the scariest thing in the world. When they say, “Freedom, freedom, freedom!” they mean, “Conquer!” or “Oppression!” You know what I mean? AM: Yeah, like “Liberation.” That’s my favorite one. TK: Using words as their opposites is really scary. AM: If you could change any policies, what would you change? TK: I would say mandatory mushrooms for every person maybe when they are 21 or maybe when they are 25. No, it should happen earlier. You got to be old enough to appreciate it and not just be like, “this is fun” you know? It’s got to affect you in a more conscious way. AM: I think I was 19 when I first did them. But I did way way too many and I don’t think I would dare to do them again just because it was so fucking intense. TK: There would be mandatory dosing. AM: Based on your body mass index? (Laughter) Like very scientific? TK: Yeah! They could know what the proper amount is because you got to blow peoples minds and you want to freak them out but you don’t want to ruin them or turn them off from the experience. Maybe it shouldn’t be just a one time thing but it should be a social program where once every six weeks for six months you have to trip. You could be in a perfectly controlled environment where you...feel safe, and you have different forms of sensory input that would increase accordingly. That would be a big thing. It would be a much better world if everyone was forced to have a

sort of mystical experience. AM: Do you believe art changes anything politically? TK: Yeah, I think another one of the most dangerous policy changes now—you said the last thirty years—but it’s probably older than that, but the idea of politics being a separate compartment of life. (In a mocking voice) “There is entertainment and it has no political aspects. There is work and it has no political aspects.” There are all of these divisions from politics so that people really think of politics as a separate little space in their mind and politics means war is far away with abstract allegiances. If you conceptualize politics in a broader sense then it definitely does. Even a great painting shows you the light source in a different way. Just even that. It doesn’t even necessarily mean that you need to have a consciously political response to it. I know that this is a little abstract and we don’t have that luxury with the religious war of America going down and shit. And the endless slaughter all over the world for our conveniences. It can to a degree, if people are open to it, but, I know a song isn’t going to stop a war. But, people can stop a war, and if people can all hear some song for whatever it is and they can react to it then sure. It’s like a food chain. AM: It trickles...up? TK: It trickles up the chakras. It’s better for me to believe at least. (Laughter) I can’t believe it can’t happen, because if art can’t make a political difference and everything is politics, then all of the negotiations of who gets to survive and who lives in pain, if that’s what politics is, then I have no say. No one has any say unless... AM: They believe they do. On a side note, I think it’s really true what you said about putting politics in a compartment aside from your life. I think that the reason that people do it so much is because it’s just the way a fantasy works and it’s just so you can believe whatever you want to about politics, by not connecting policy to reality or action, so you feel okay about it. Because in reality, it’s like you were saying, it’s in everything from what you think about to being in your work. TK: To lunch! I mean it’s a little thing but, the fuckin’ plastic bags at the grocery store. All the paper that they wrap your lunch in. Just put the fuckin lunch on a plate. Yeah, I think fantasy is a very good analogy. AM: I think that’s really right on, just that they are changing definitions of the individual, well just the expansion of that idea and that’s the problem with gas, and they are now starting to believe every individual should have a minivan, which is not to say that they shouldn’t and we should obviously, but like you were saying, it’s not an option. TK: Right, maybe we shouldn’t already. Moving out to my Grandma’s house has been the biggest bummer because now I need this car. I guess I don’t need it, but it’s the only way I can do what I do out there and me and Amy everyday are just like, gotta find an apartment, gotta get rid of the car. AM: It’s like trying to catch an avalanche. It’s frustrating because the system is set up so nobody can change it. I was talking to my friend yesterday and they were like, “Do you think that if I shoplift from a bad place it’s okay?” And I was like, “It’s not okay,” because if you do that, it’s not like the CEO’s are not going to have a yacht or something like that. What’s going to happen is either A: The working middle class families that buy the stuff are going to have to pay more or B: The workers in Indonesia are going to have worse working conditions. Or if you even go to that CEO’s house and steal his yacht, he’s insured for it, which gives him the yacht back and passes the cost back to the middle class families. There is NO way to steal from people that are rich. (Laughter) TK: The benefactors of the system certainly have designed a tight security system for themselves. AM: They have made it so they will stay rich forever and there is no way to change it.

TK: I think as more people get frustrated there will be a changing of people’s minds. There is a greater awareness of inequalities and how locked into structure everyone is. I think that in itself is a big difference for people. There has to be some boiling point. It will inevitably be violent when the system crashes because it can’t last, but that violence will just be one more process of earth working through its problems. AM: But the next generation will have it sweet! Ha. TK: The next generation won’t have language anymore. Everything is going to be localized. It’s going to be nice. The new culture is going to have it good. AM: What happens is every civilization does the exact same thing. There is that boiling point where every civilization gets to its peak, and says “This isn’t fair.” As long as the people with the yachts that are running it give people that aren’t running it peace at home, they don’t care. TK: Yeah, that’s why I was saying it’s a luxury for us to be informed even slightly to even know we don’t like the designs of this and know that it is crumbling. Whereas our grandparents didn’t have that luxury when they were our age. The barons were scooping everything up and said, “We will let you work 80 hours a week each so that your family can barely be fed.” And they were like, “Well thank God we’re getting the kids fed!” AM: Is there a difference between the way you and your generation handled issues and interacted with politics when you were in your early twenties and the way early twenty somethings now are dealing with the same things? TK: When I was in college, there were a lot more politically motivated bands. Bands like Bikini Kill, Nation of Ulysses, and Huggy Bear were finding really interesting ways to communicate radical ideas. It was much more fused. There were lots of bands and an infrastructure existed. Just the simple act of expression and being able to communicate with these people, make records and travel, see places. Being able to share ideas was success in itself. There was no drive as in, “We’re going to break through to some big audience and sell out our radical ideas.” It was much more nurturing that way. There weren’t people involved who didn’t assume they had these political things in common. Everyone was involved. I think that makes a difference. Very few of [ my friends from then] are doing music anymore, or any sort of scene. They are out there on their own, applying those politics to whatever field of specialty. But I don’t really hang out with twenty-one year olds anymore. It was really sad to go to protests [then]. There was this giant gap. Everyone was either over 50 or under 22. Other than that it was really rare for us and our friends to see other people our own age. There’s this culturally bred aloofness or cynicism of, “Well it doesn’t make a difference.” Maybe it doesn’t make a difference, but it certainly has a great resonant energy to be downtown and see people in their office buildings getting freaked out. AM: I think protests are good for people that insulate themselves with A/C and homogeny in their houses and don’t leave because at least they see those images on television. Protests are just awareness. It’s not the same as change because while those people are getting freaked out up in their skyscrapers, the next day their routine is identical. The only thing they listen to is money, so instead of shoplifting at a bad place, pay extra money for a good place. I decided recently to really get into American Apparel. I know they are super fashionable and stuff but . . . TK: Their means of manufacturing? AM: Yeah, they take care of their workers. They are trying to make organic shirts. That’s good. So you should go pay extra money for that kind of thing. TK: It’s hard—how they sell those shirts is repulsive. AM: Yeah, for sure. That aspect sucks about it but I’m not going to wait around for Jesus Christ to make a clothing line. (Laughter) I have to go give money to those guys because

they are making good looking shirts and they are taking care of their workers. I can’t control where anyone else’s money goes. I can only control where mine goes. TK: I have to say I’ve gone back and forth on this a lot when I was younger. Everyone would go to shows and everyone I knew was trading radical black literature from the sixties. I go back and forth a lot on violence and thinking about it. In a more immediate example, does art affect politics and can you make a difference? At a show I was talking about how I thought we could make a difference politically with the instruments having different relationships than people are used to. I still feel compelled to grab people at shows—I want to freak people out, make it physical—you aren’t a passive spectator here. This isn’t a movie screen. You can be grabbed and this affects you whether you like it or not. I can’t necessarily define my motives for that as more violent than loving, you know? But there is certainly an inevitable loving violence that is going to have to happen for any change. AM: That’s my favorite thing about your shows, how it’s not a movie screen. I think it’s really interesting—the only physical contact people have with each other is either sex or violence. The only time that you’re going to touch someone is to fuck ‘em or fuck ‘em up. There are other ways that you can touch someone. TK: Right and breaking that bubble of space that everyone assumes they have around them is shocking and violent in a way. Will anything ever change before violent overthrow? I don’t know. I don’t want to get into my militia talk. AM: I started thinking that I should get a hand gun for that. I can’t tell if that’s a good idea or a bad idea because part of me thinks that buying a gun just plays into that, and part of me thinks that when it comes time, I’ll be really happy I did. TK: Well, the ultimate thing we need to defend ourselves from is martial law. It’s going to happen. (sighing) I don’t know. AM: Its hard because like you were saying, politics and government and people are all interlinked and when you attack someone you’re not just attacking a government your attacking a someone, and with martial law, if you were to kill a solider that was walking down the street, you would kill some neighbor’s dad. TK: I just rewatched Notre Musique, a Godard movie from a couple years ago set in Bosnia. An Israeli journalist travels around while there are these Native Americans hanging out. There’s a great quote, you know how most of his movies are just floating around looking at stuff. There’s this line, “Killing a man to defend a political idea isn’t defending a political idea, its killing a man.” AM: That’s what makes it really tough. Reciprocating violence isn’t necessarily justified, but at the same time perhaps necessary part of the way the struggle works to keep it from... TK: Being totally oppressive. AM: That is what keeps Big Brother from happening is the fact that maybe somebody is going to try to stop it from happening violently. TK: It’s all suspense. We might need that...sometime. (Laughter) That’s the way Big Brother happens in small increments and people don’t notice. Like cameras at all of the stoplights. Not that I necessarily need to defend my right to run a red light, but it’s weird that if no one is around you can still get caught in a surveillance culture. AM: When is Cap’n Jazz coming back together? TK: Funny you should ask. December 12, 2012. When everything comes back together. AM: The end of the Mayan calendar? TK: Yes.

Prints and Paintings by

Danny Greene Q &A Are these prints about children/childhood in a face-value sense? I am more interested in certain psychological and social ideas and situations that are implicit in childhood and how these implications continue into adulthood. Can we take their absurdity & struggling as a direct message? I don’t want to be too literal or heavy handed in conveying my ideas. People will bring different interpretations to any work. I am interested in the inherent absurdity and struggle of adolescence. What then does it mean when some scenes almost seem to offer a sort of redemption, when the children almost seem helpful to one another?

I think of the children coming together and forming a whole, both mentally and physically— in a way they become one. How do you feel about your own state of life at present— are you in a period of child- or adulthood? Baudelaire wrote that the artist must inherit “the genius of childhood—a genius for which no aspect of life has become stale.” I do not think I could say it any better than that. Based on that answer, do you feel you are in a period of naivety or renewed faith in life, or on the other hand, feeling the gravity and groundedness of adulthood? I am avoiding at all costs the feeling of “gravity and groundedness of adulthood.” I suppose that is somewhat naive.

DANNY GREENE’S prints present children seemingly helping and hurting each other at once, as if unable to not do so, or magnetized toward the destruction of one other. Alongside Greene’s other series of work, not quite frightening watercolors of monsters, the children seem appropriately matched.

FROM TOP LEFT CLOCKWISE Submerged Tough Love Monster 3 Connecting Monster 6 43

BRYAN BAKER

PATTERNS PA

Bryan Baker is an artist / printmaker working at Yee-Haw Industries in Knoxville, Tennessee. Bryan’s pattern series has mesmerized many eyes, particularly those at the Flatstock 9 Poster Convention, part of the Pitchfork Music Festival last summer in Chicago. He was kind enough to give Mule a little insight into the process behind his patterns. How did the pattern making begin? The pattern making began years ago, way before I even knew what printmaking was, let alone ever having a single thought that making prints for a living could be possible. When I say years ago, I mean third or fourth grade. I’ve always kept my interest in patterns pretty much separate from my greater body of work though—it feels a bit like I’ve been putting it off, not out of procrastination, maybe out of shyness. I guess I was afraid to mix the two together. I always had so many other ideas to pursue, and my patterns just hung out in the background. Until one day (metaphorically speaking) I opened the pantry to find it packed floor to ceiling with “zebracakes” - I knew that something had to be done. The first of what you could call my pattern prints was the poster I did for the Eastern Seaboard. I was trying for a combo of argyle and polka dot. Can you explain your process for creating the patterns or your favorite part of process? Working in layers and creating systems of alignment—that is the basis of most forms of printmaking, and it just gets super amplified when you happen to be focusing on patterns. The bulk of my work right now is hand-set letterpress. That is actually a very sculptural process, and I very much love the activity of constructing the forms I print from. The poster I did for Flatstock Eight was literally made with thousands and thousands of individual small pieces of lead and wood type, and to actualize it three separate compositions were built and printed on top of each other.

Are there speciﬁc patterned objects that are inspiring you? A tabletop of Lorna Doone cookies would make a great simultaneous grid and diagonal line pattern. Check up on Bryan and see more dazzling Letterpress artwork at /////////////// www.yeehawindusties.com

01 Flatstock 9 Hand-Printed Letterpress Poster

02 The Eastern Seaboard Silkscreen Poster

03 Flatstock 8 Hand-Printed Letterpress Poster

04 / 05 Pattern Cards Hand-Printed Letterpress

Interview by Joseph Shipp Joseph Shipp During your senior exhibition, where you first showed all your works of Paintie Land— you pushed Paintie Land off the canvas and into more interactive media with video starring yourself and an original soundtrack, brightly colored helium filled balloons, confetti, and even did a painting on an old mattress. It really forced the viewer to interact and break down the wall between viewer and subject. Joshua Bennett To talk about Paintie Land, you first have to understand what Paintie Land is to me and I guess Paintie Land is more the concept than paintings themselves. It’s an idea of… it’s like this world of Escapism that I… I want to make art that’s important to me but I don’t want to be political or religious or trendy with it either. So, I guess what I wanted to do with Paintie Land was bring the viewer into it—share what I was thinking with everyone else. And essentially when I first wanted to paint these, the idea of nostalgia came to mind or of like working off of cartoon imagery and stuff like that. I was hoping that the viewer would say, “I don’t know this imagery but I can imagine what this imagery is doing.” Because, the history of cartoons and the history of when (the viewers) were children taking crayons and coloring outside of lines instead of inside. When you’re a kid looking at a coloring book you may not know what you’re coloring; what the image is that you’re looking at—it could be a boy or something that’s playing in the sand—and you’re not necessarily interested in the history of who that boy is, what he’s doing in the sand or with that dog—but all you’re interested in is coming up with your own story as you color it. I was hoping to evoke some kind of feeling in 46

viewers with these paintings. It’s not as interactive as handing out a bunch of crayons with blank spaces asking people to color it, but maybe that’s in the future. I was hoping to evoke some kind of child-like innocent idea—which is interesting to me. I wanted to involve the people in it, and I felt the confetti and the balloons would provide a venue that was acceptable for that kind of feeling. In a gallery, people have to be tight and make sure they don’t fart and stuff like that. But in my space that I had, I wanted to welcome farting, I wanted to welcome having those kinds of feelings, I wanted to welcome playing with balloons. And with the video it was nothing more than me acting like a fool dancing so that they could laugh at it and feel okay to feel those feelings. JS This brings up the question of scholastic or high art- all the stuff they teach you in schoolwas there a point that you realized all the scholastic theory was taking away the purity and fun of art? Was this your way of kind of revolting against that and as you said, allowing people to be able to be themselves and relax in this environment? JB I don’t think theory takes away the purity of art, but it deﬁnitely probably takes the fun away. I think that art can be pure at all states. Art should be fun, art should be something that people do because it makes them happy because they want to do it. It shouldn’t be a thing where they have to be really laden down with complex ideas, you know? It’s deﬁnitely not a revolt against theory or against being bogged down with that, because there is

plenty of theory in Paintie Land… But, I don’t know... in making these I was having a lot of fun and I wanted to extend that invitation to people- to have as much fun viewing them as I was making them. And I still do today. I hope that people look at them and make up their own narrative… even if it’s different than the one that I have, even if they think the “Digis” [the negative inhabitants of Paintie Land] are the good people… whatever, you know? I would love for people to look at the “Fantom Creatch,” which is this friendly little scary ghost and say “Oh my God. That guy is evil looking, but to me he’s like the cutest thing ever”. JS Can you talk more about some of the characters in Paintie Land and some of the roles they play? JB Yeah… the characters just came out of just doodles really— ideas that I’ve had for a long time that gave way to becoming characters. As I painted, more characters would show up or I would see a mark and I would think, ‘look at that, that’s cool... let’s make that into a character,’ and essentially more than half of the characters became that, or came from that. But there are several characters that play roles and there is a balance of good and evil in my head. I don’t know if it manifests through the paintings or matters to the viewer whether the roles are important—but there are different “Races”— there’s the “Dipshits”: two-dimensional house structures that personify what is closest to the good in people. They are hard working, live sustainably, love life, and look at the bright side of things— they love play. There is also the evil

side, the “Digis”, who are part of an on-going battle with myself. As much as I embrace technology and love the conveniences of such, the Digis represent this digital age coming in and converting everything. I associate the Digis with Christendom in general. In Paintie Land the Digis are hardcore Roman Catholic and they live in a cathedral, but they are just these broken up… actually they came from these paintings I did previously of digital cells from a clock. Where for instance the formation of an “8” and every number can be made out of an “8”. So that’s where the Digis came from and they’re just essentially fragments of those but they just swarm in like bees and they kinda do their thing on everything including mountains and the trees and the land and all that stuff. And then there are other characters who just are there to be there, just like this world there are characters just like the trees who are there just to provide a certain function to the world, like taking carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. But there are several characters that perform different deeds - some are good, some are bad, some are neutral. JS Which make up the greater whole of Paintie Land. So can you talk more about the manifestation of the concept. You said it was a lot of childlike energy like cartoons, were you going back to your own childhood bringing up speciﬁc images or was it just like pure stream of consciousness kind of stuff? JB I was a really serious kid as far as I remember, maybe my parents could tell you differently, I felt

pretty grown-up as a child. I guess now in my adult years I’m trying to explore that idea a little more because I felt like I didn’t get to experience it as much as I should have. JS So you’re reliving your childhood you never really had or wished you had? JB Wished I had more… I mean because I had the capability of having that. I mean maybe I did. Maybe I’m just insane. I actually had this dream one time—I hate to even consider [the Paintie Land] idea is from a dream, but you know half the Bible’s written from a dream—I had this dream that I was being led by two dimensional characters through a land. They hired me to lead them, they ended up being the Dipshits later, hired me to illustrate these brochures they were making so our dimension could visit their dimension. I essentially became the Apostle John in Revelations . . . he pretty much describes the end of the world. I guess I arbitrarily took that role as Apostle for Paintie Land… the job given to me by the Dipshits. I know it’s bizarre but… so the Dipshits hire me and I am doing journal entries which later become Paintie, paintings, and there’s a whole idea of Painties resembling the word ‘panties’ and if anyone seriously is trying to talk about it they’re going to have to say ‘painties’ and that’s the decision there because they’d probably slip and say ‘panties.’ So yeah, language plays a lot in this. So essentially I’m describing this world through these paintings and you could arguably say these are brochure pictures for another dimension. 47

IMAGINATION HEAD | MAKESHIFT | MYSPACE.COM/JRANDERIN Imagination Head live performances consist of a wealth of entertainment: impromptu product placement commercials, TV heads, cakewalks, even a funhouse (complete with dream research, curtain mazes, creepy clowns, a stenographer, glass eaters, and crude oil drinking). Needless to say, the band lives to entertain their audience. So now, a full length CD? Expect an invigoratingly directionless jaunt through a world of crooked landscapes with grand horizons. Perhaps the sky can talk or whimsically change color. Who can say for sure? The Stale and Sparkly Air, the aptly named debut album, opens with the song “Driver’s Got No Head.” Frontman/songwriter JR Wicker rolls through the verses, vocally stomping on all the right syllables: “In a black box I’s locked / With no key and no lock. / I prayed myself into the air” while Erin Baker (keyboard/vocals) and a handful of cohorts from Makeshift Records join in on a few rounds of rambunctious “Hey!’s.” The debut is refreshingly optimistic despite itself. Yes, despite itself. There’s no questioning the combination of negativity and frivolity in many of the songs. “Age of Crap” is an anthem-like dirge for the death of the thinking man. “Man’s Not a Man” lambasts imperialism and machismo, but through a twangy, horn-ﬁlled honky-tonk number. “Country Vs. Country” delivers an anthem for petty warmongering, while dripping sarcasm all over the place. Wicker’s tone in these songs is bitter and hypercritical. Occasionally, the listener suspects he might teeter over the edge. The album’s self-conscious and playful presentation is its parachute. Serious statements are undermined by cheery keyboards and pop stylings—thus the album never takes too harsh a turn. Overall, The Stale and Sparkly Air is a strong debut with catchy, insightful lyrics over sounds patched together from nontraditional instrumentation, all presented with a lithe spirit. + Adam Herrington

JASON ZAVALA | MAMMOTH KNIGHTS | MYSPACE.COM/THEELEPHANTS Lexington Kentucky’s Jason Zavala sounds like he’s walking home with a cup of coffee, making up tunes to illustrate his pressured thought. Turn on Zavala’s debut album, “Lazer Crust” and you’ll be greeted with off-handed wolf howls and male Deerhoof yelps punctuated by bouts of playful but not totally insincere falsetto. The band/cast of collaborators manage to keep up when Jason trots along, breaks into a run or kneels down to pluck a ﬂower. Give into the current of “Lazer Crust” and you’re in for a frantic ride. The album has the highs and lows of a rag tag rock opera. Crooning vocals pick up into quick little tornadoes and blow away again and again leaving the listener spinning. The handclapping, pot and pan hitting, and lackadaisical doo-op backing vocals are carefully but choppily introduced, giving the album a ship wrecked Mr. Bungle feel. + Elka Sommer

“Mr. Cool, how do you do?” yelled from the background of a live recording, reportedly made some evening in Murfreesboro. “Singing all aboard the train,” they yell in one verse, “you can here that whistle calling for you,” in another. And I’m aboard. Lyrics and sounds you’ve heard, but not so alive in years. We know the sounds of Mother’s Best: fiddle crying in the background, low grade/low-fi/strumming-like-crazy in the fore. . . something sounds familiar . . . but this is no semblance sound, no zombied dead reconstructions of the real, so often foud in previous generations sound. Mother’s Best is ALIVE. It’s not recitation, needs no resuscitation. For years, we’ve worried for Nashville—the same sounds, the same posture. Music too petrified, swamped with fear to play out, to play different. Now blooming wet and landish, these songs, and the songs of their friends—Horsehair Everywhere, Young Wife, & contemporaries Angel and the Airbag among others—prove the stagnation is over, fear vanished. Who cares if the elder, hell, even the previous generation of Nashville music ever hears it . . . eventually they’ll just feel it. + Nanny Carr

Ed’s Note: The Imagination Head release comes housed in handmade pieces of art by Baker, Wicker, and friends, as much a joy to hold as to hear.

MUSIC | ART | FILM

MOTHER’S BEST | NO KINGS | MYSPACE.COM/MOTHERSBEST It is ofﬁcially the age of the twenty-somethings, or nineteen... hell eighteen somethings. Only a few years ago, I was there—and you might have been there—and we were not so bold. We were starting here, meek, and not willing to sound so bad, so loud, or like something we’d heard before, sound like anything we believed in. None of us so abashed, true and proud as these voices sludging, clinking, and sinking down in it. There’s youth pouring out, between two Tennessee valleys, drying into solid pieces of BOLD. Where was that fervor in the water before?

REVIEWS

03 PHOTOGRAPH BY J. BRANDEL THE SOFT SHOP | PIMP MY SHACK | ILLCUTYOU.COM/SHANTY Most artists: 1) are happy to show their work in the safe and warm confines of a gallery setting preferably with toilets really nearby; 2) rank the idea behind a piece over its craftsmanship; and 3) aren’t much interested in having a bunch of random people help design and create their work for them. But the four adventurous Chicago artists of The Soft Shop aren’t ‘most artists’. In fact, they’re counting on their art and their friends’ contributions to keep them alive – literally - on a frozen lake in the Minnesota tundra. And if those friends can throw in a bit of camaraderie, community, and karaoke, this wouldn’t hurt either. The Soft Shop is Rebecca Grady, Ilana Percher, Aay Preston-Myint and Charlie Vinz: four Chicago artists, one of twenty odd groups selected to participate in the third annual Art Shanty Projects out of the Soap Factory Gallery in Minneapolis. Picture the little clapboard and corrugated metal fishing shacks that dot the frozen lakes of the Midwest between December and March, populated with portly fishermen decked out in plaid with a six pack at their boots’ side. Now picture those dingy little temporary structures pimped out with bright colors, pushing geometric boundaries and packed tightly with creative folks doing yoga, knitting, conducting science experiments, broadcasting radio shows or belting out “Stand By Your Man” on a karaoke machine . . . and you’ve got Art Shanty Projects. Originally looking for a way that friends could spend quality time outside during the middle of the brutal Minnesota winter, project founder Peter Haakon Thompson and friends got together and created the non-fishing fishing shack to do … well, whatever anyone would want do in them. Thanks in part to an excellent public building code loophole that allows almost anything to be built on water – and a shack permit costing only $12 - the project was born and artists began flocking. The Soft Shop collective learned of the event at last year’s Version Fest, where the friends decided to make their own and name their group The Soft Shop. For the shape of the building, they settled on something akin to the circular Mongolian yurt, a nomadic classic that preserves heat well and maximizes interior space. Vinz, an architect by day, is leading the design’s construction and the group has succeeded in getting a lot of reclaimed and recycled materials to build the shanty. From Chicago marathon detritus to donated fabrics and blankets, along with empty used soy milk containers for shingles, bright orange vinyl for insulation, and old doors and carpet samples for flooring, the group has been able to save tons of materials from the landfill and put it to creative use. On each December weekend The Soft Shop assembled in Grady and Preston-Myint’s apartment, inviting friends to come along and sew, embroider, and create the various objects that will end up filling the shack’s interior. The loose theme of the shack is soft fabric arts and among other things the group has re-created interesting objects in soft form such as fleece pyramids, plush stalactites, and stuffed nuclear missiles for decor. They plan on collaborating with friends and strangers alike to continue filling the space during the month that the project runs (January 13 – February 17). They’ll host dinner parties, gather friends for a frigid slumber party, and invite the Minnesota locals and visitors inside for some hot drinks and promises of sewing lessons and a really good time. + Jennifer Brandel

HORSEHAIR EVERYWHERE! - VOL. 1 | NO KINGS | NOKINGSRECORDCO.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/HORSEHAIREVERYWHERE The name “Horsehair Everywhere!” is aptly chosen for this group from Tennessee whose namesake can be used to make bows for various instruments. I imagine the group waking from an all-night chaotic music frenzy, parts of instruments scattered everywhere. Someone in great frustration remarks, “there is Horsehair Everywhere!” “Horsehair Everywhere!” seems like an order given by some unsung psychedelic filmmaker obeyed over the course of these eleven musician’s 70-minute journey of a live album. The album is not heavy with strings; in fact, it doesn’t have a dominant instrument or sound. It is an album full of various percussion—bells, screams, improv prophetic poetry (track “812052”) folky break-downs (in an Animal Collective tradition), horns, and adventure. In a city, this group would identify themselves as improvisational and tip-off the audience to their deep, I mean DEEP, free jazz roots. Horsehair Everywhere! stands a bit perpendicular to this tradition, proceeding with a good sense of humor, a humor that makes the album such a pleasant experience. Horsehair Everywhere! (the band and the statement) can also can be thought of as a young girl shrieking with joy—though her favorite horse (or pony if you will) has been brutally mauled by her older brother’s clippers, he has secretly spread the beautiful hair all over her room. What magic! I digress; each song stands on its own—a different musical path, with intensity to bemuse and entertain an enchanted listener. The opening track a menacing march, repetitive and devoid of gimmicky fireworks, is a great warm up for the musicians—a gentle wake up call for werewolves who give a long stretch and a howl to the moon at the height of the track (there are actually howl like sounds, I promise). After the opening, the group is off and running through a crisp night (pardon all this) with fast paced bells, accordions, tambourines and later a banjo. Do not make a face when you think about “improvisational” music. This album is worth your time. The liner notes claim they are “Improvisational sound/music collage & cathartic midnight noise party society,” and who doesn’t like that? + Thomas Cordova JEFFREY JAMES AND THE HAUL - SELF TITLED | MAKESHIFT MUSIC | MAKESHIFTMUSIC.COM AND MYSPACE.COM/JEFFREYJAMESANDTHEHAUL “Grandpa went to war when war at least felt right.” Jeffrey James and Haul’s newest release tells us the battlefield is “raging for the few.” Indeed, making anything these days on one’s own has become unassumingly part of that battle—i.e. strangely political. The new album is filled with songs that sing outside of any regime; delivering a mixture of truehearted reflections on life, politics, and love in a time of battlefields. JJ&TH encourage us to “Take a drink from the riverside,” though “it’s been poisoned by me and you.” Uplifting in tempo and surges of lyrical optimism, the album is counter-weighted with imagery of decay, in the style of of recent Neil Young. In “Rural Metro,” the narrator presents the metaphor of beginning a possible life-long relationship as turning onto a back road— departure into uncharted adventure. These songs give us the grave facts but still instruct us to celebrate life in the face of gravity: “Tapped on the telephone? / There’s trouble on the line” they warn. “Not much time in this life / Strike a match into the desert sky / tap a drum while you get high,” they reassure. Jeffrey James and the Haul is for days when you need the reassurance to turn onto a back road, or just know that someone else out there sees it the way you do. + Liz Tapp

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CURRENT PAGE 03 The Soft Shop Medicine Lake, Minnesota 04 Horsehair Everywhere

INEEKA TEAS | INEEKA.COM Yes it may be shallow, but I’ll freely admit that innovative packaging turns me on. A water bottle shaped like a flask? Interesting. Bubblegum in a toothpaste tube? I’ll take two. So when I spied a white pouch with batlike paper wings at Swim Café with tea inside, I ordered one despite my taste buds’ cry for coffee. This brew-taché is the visual signature of a tea company based in Chicago called Ineeka Tea, and I found out that their curious steeping contraption is only where Ineeka’s coolness begins. For starters – they have great variety. Greens, blacks, herbals – you name it, and they have invented interesting blends with top quality organic ingredients and packaged them in sleek silver tins adorned with sharp photography. In reading the back of the Green Limon box, I found that the brew-taché is not just for show but actually has a specific function. Since most tea bags are fairly flat and packed with crushed leaves, upon hitting hot water the leaves expand into each other, creating a fat little pocket that leaves flavor trapped inside. The paper wings on Ineeka’s brew-taché expand the bag to allow their whole, anti-oxidant rich leaves to fully unfurl and release more flavor. Since the brew-taché is served without a top, you can observe the colorful ingredients plumping up in your cup. (To my delight, this was nearly as mesmerizing as watching cream swirling into coffee.)

HYMNS | BROTHER/SISTER | BLACKLAND RECORDS | HYMNSBAND.COM The word “hymns,” in its traditional definition, recalls musty books of antiquated vocal music that’s steeped in religious fervor and fosters staid churchy manner. So it’s kind of an odd name choice for this unkempt New York band, composed of the type of bad boys you’d only wanna take home to mama after a good cleaning. Although, I suspect they know plenty of ladies who’d gladly take ‘em back to their apartment. Their music’s also of the gritty, sexy variety, with a heavy nod to classic Southern rock, no doubt due to founding members Jason Roberts and Brian Harding’s North Carolina roots. Brother/Sister is, while perhaps nothing groundbreaking, a very listenable, promising debut. What I like most about it is its resounding sincerity. There aren’t any superfluous tricks typical of so much music out there right now. It’s simple and slow when it needs to be, its guitar twangs drawling out comfortably. Even when it rocks, at which points Harding’s voice trades its lazy, hesitant quaver for a more cocksure sense of boyish animation, it’s still smooth. This is embodied on the title track, where the changes in tempo are anything but abrupt.. If you’re the kind of person that likes a comparison, you should know these guys probably listen to a lot of Neil Young. They also remind me a little of Kings of Leon, but not quite so brash. Of course, that’s not to say Hymns don’t pour on at least a spoonful of swaggering charm, especially when you see them live. And, if you do get the chance to go to a show, you definitely don’t have to adhere to Sunday school behavior. +Molly Kincaid

But what’s truly beautiful about this tea company, other than their look and the taste of their product, is what they stand for. The tea and additional ingredients (such as ginger, cardamom, rose, black pepper, saffron…) are entirely organic and are harvested according to biodynamic agricultural practices. Grown in the Himalayas on company-owned land, all of Ineeka’s teas are fair trade and certiﬁed organic as well as abide by biodynamic farming practices. Their tea plantations sustain 25,000 people who are paid higher than standard wages, and are provided with schooling, medical care, and housing. Ineeka’s ﬁrst business priority is sustainability and responsible development. I’ll drink to that. + Jennifer Brandel

MAY GRAY | THE MAY GRAY EP” | ASSOCIATED WITH EL DEATH| MYSPACE.COM/MAYGRAY So it turns out that the name “May Gray” is an obscure weather term for the resurgence of wintry weather during the late spring [kinda the opposite of “Indian Summer”]. I found this expression to be useful—it’s a great term—and so going into the album evaluation process I already felt enriched by learning a cool fact. More importantly, when I heard “The May Gray EP” I was only more [legitimately] enthusiastic about the review. The Knoxville “sometimes-quartet” is currently a duo while two members of the band are living elsewhere to temporarily pursue other careers. The May Gray EP was actually recorded after the group had amicably parted—they just couldn’t stay away from each other and the chemistry felt on the EP goes a long way to explain why. Fronted by singer Holly Briggs, the vocals carry with a crooning satin-voiced drawl redolent of a Chan Marshall/ Jolie Holland fusion. The rest of the band [a lineup that occasionally changes due to availability] brings exceptional skill to their roles as well. The instrumentation is conventional: bass, drums, electric and/or acoustic six strings and vocals. From start to finish the band plays with a tightness and proficiency that’s somewhat rare by indie-folk standards. Together May Gray puts out a sound that soothes and tickles at once, and like the best albums, the EP sounds nice at first listen and near-brilliant by the tenth. The only chink in the May Gray log cabin is found in the tracks that find Briggs without a mic. The few instrumentals, while deftly executed, sound like filler between gems. The group plays noodling country jams like the Flecktones without Bela. The band can play the bejesus out of their instruments but May Gray is at it’s brightest when Holly Briggs is shining. + Michael Foster

ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY Ira Yonemura CURRENT PAGE 05 May Gray

THIS VIDALIA’S WORTH BITING INTO

THE TENDERHOOKS DELIVER THE FIRST OF THEIR CROP | WORDS BY CHRISTINA CONNALLY

At about that same time Oyler was picking up a guitar for the first time. With a family he describes as music loving, some of his earliest childhood memories are of his grandfather singing around the house. The effect of their influence never seemed to fade and he went on to graduate with a degree in musicology. He performed with his cousins in the Knoxville band O Muse for seven years and gained a strong following. Robinson did not pick up a bass until she was sixteen years old, and back then it was to fulfill her dreams of playing in a punk band. But Robinson was well known for her powerful yet calming voice, a trait she became exhausted with and finally decided to learn to play bass. She joined Winstrom and Oyler in 2004 after they found positive comments about the band she had posted online. The band spent about a year with Travis Schappel playing drums until he skipped town in summer 2006. There were no hard feelings, but the three remaining band members were left with a new album recorded with Don Coffee Jr. of Independent Recorders, and no drummer to play with. After talking with more than a dozen drummers in Knoxville the trio finally found Honkonen. “Matt is really on the same page and that has never been the case before,” Oyler says. “It’s always been the case that the three of us are really amped up about it all the time and everyone else is not.” Honkonen, also the drummer for the band Llama Train, has only been playing with Tenderhooks for a couple months, but has started incorporating his own sound into several songs. A Chattanooga native, Honkonen played snare for his high school marching band and taught himself to play drum set in order to perform in a reggae-ska band and later in a heavier rock band. Honkonen explains that performing with Tenderhooks is rewarding because “they are all just really sincere about music. It’s not about anything other than creating art with them.”

PHOTO BY JENNIE MCINTURFF The Tenderhooks are: Jake Winstrom vocals, Ben Oyler on lead guitar, Emily Robinson provides harmony vocals and bass, and Matt Honkonen on drums. MARRIAGES DEVELOP OVER TIME, often originating in some fairly conspicuous places, a late night bar, the zoo, an online chat room. Everyone is out there trying to find somebody to love, cherish, and stick by through thick and thin. Tenderhooks, a Knoxville, TN band have gone through the searching it takes to find that match. Bassist Emily Robinson was found through a chat room, while the newest member, Matt Honkonen was found last December after half a year’s worth of interviews. Now there’s even a bit more momentum pushing the band forward; they will be the first band signed to a new record label, Rock Snob Records* out of Knoxville, and their new CD, Vidalia, will be the first off the label. The Tenderhooks are truly a rock band, but with nuances that set them apart from much of the rock music out there. “[Winstrom’s] voice has this truth, honesty and shakiness to it that is very similar to his personality,” drummer Matt Honkonen says. Indeed, his voice is pleading, a little raspy— always sentimental. Robinson’s angelic harmonies float gently above Winstrom’s voice, creating lush vocals throughout their album. During different points of our interview, Winstrom, Oyler and Honkonen all use the word perfect to describe Robinson’s unexpected harmonies, and it’s this kind of support for each other that reflects in their song writing process. Winstrom and Oyler write the vocals, but all the members collaborate to create each song. All of the Tenderhooks agree that they are a vocal friendly band, but they try to stay away from writing songs that lack meaning in their catchiness. Vidalia is named after a song that in many ways personifies the Tenderhook’s sound. “It was one of the first songs we put together that we felt was uniquely ours; it’s sort of the one that marked a point of change,” Oyler says. Their sound is completed by many different trends including Oyler’s ability to write guitar lines that follow Winstrom’s voice, often seeming to finish off where he ends. It’s the sort of thing that makes Vidalia the perfect southern ingredient in the overall charm of the CD. A listener can’t help but be sucked into Winstrom’s bittersweet lyrics, “If the words in this letter /don’t make you feel better/ it won’t be the first time I failed ya.’ / keep me in mind / give all my love to Vidalia,” Winstrom belts out in a mix of innocence and desperation. The final result is a colorful sound, complete with melodies and guitar solos that would make the Breeders proud. In “Quarter of a Century,” Winstrom draws out, “Tie yourself to someone/ tie yourself to something great/ tie yourself to someone soon before it gets too late,” and it is this kind of pleading tone that pulls at heartstrings throughout the CD. The history of the band follows Winstrom and Oyler back to their high school days when they both started writing their own songs. “When we were like juniors in high school he (Winstrom) wrote this song, and I didn’t really know that he was a musician… I didn’t realize that people our age could write songs that were that good,” Oyler says. From there, the two continued to play influential roles in each other’s musical lives. For Winstrom, music began with piano lessons, until a friend visited his house one day when he was around twelve years old and brought along an acoustic guitar, the age old axe of musical freedom. In his kind, soft voice Winstrom explains, “I thought if I could just strum a few chords and sing that would be pretty satisfying.”

Unlike a lot of bands, the members are all friends and consistently work positively with each other. “We’re all just really invested in making the songs good. We don’t have any ego trouble, like someone trying to commandeer the song for one person’s gain; that’s happened in every other band I’ve worked with. I think we all just really value working with each other a lot,” Robinson explains. They agree that they have a common respect for the process of creating music and this is always what keeps them driven. “We’re not really interested in going out there and just doing pure singer-songwriter music; we like to play interesting arrangements,” Oyler says. “The thing we are shooting for is to be able to make the albums we want to make [and also] make a living doing it.”

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If the words in this letter don’t make you feel better it won’t be the ﬁrst time I failed ya’. Keep me in mind give all my love to Vidalia.

” The common thread between the Tenderhooks seems to be their hopeless and irrevocable love for music. Their positive influence in producing good music takes precedence to everything else. When asked what the members might have in common, Honkonen says they try to stay positive about where they fit in the local music scene. A spark of laughter erupts when Winstrom jokingly says, “even if (we see a) show that is awesome we have to find something to detract from it, we’ll say, ‘you know this was really good but…’ just so we can rest easy that night thinking that we are still better, which is probably delusional more often than not,” Winstrom says. The sentiment is in jest, coming from four overly polite individuals. But they are part of a rock band, and that small bit of determination might be just what the non-confrontational band needs to break into the national circuit. FOR MORE OF THE TENDERHOOKS VISIT MYSPACE.COM/ TENDERHOOKS

* During the band’s recording with Don Coffee Jr., the group met Eric Nowinski, the entrepreneur behind Knoxville’s new record company, Rock Snob Records. Rock Snob is being introduced into the Knoxville music scene during a time when there are very few record labels available. With the help of Tim Lee, musician, Paul Noe, of Disgraceland Records, and Don Coffee Jr., of Independent Recorders, formerly the drummer for Superdrag, they are all working together to make their label progressive. “Our idea is to be a very artist friendly label and to help impart our knowledge,” Eric says.

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“ ”

I write quiet music because the world is too loud.

The Heroes are Horses - 4Bridges Arts Festival

THE HEROES ARE HORSES WORDS BY CLARK WOODHAM WILLIAMS Pablo Neruda’s poem “Gentleman Alone” contrasts a vision of the titular lonely gentleman with the world outside: a sweltering jungle of red-stained sexual insanity, writhing beyond the walls of his house. Out there, where the “bees smell of blood” in a “continual life of pants and panties,” the gentleman admits his weakness in the face of such force: “this twisting and breathing forest crushes me.” What power does this alienated man have against the immense volume of life? Perhaps all he has is quietude.

TO PURCHASE THE EQUINE POSTCARD EP VISIT: CDBABY.COM/CD/HEROESAREHORSES.

Buried in the dense brush of this poem is the phrase “the heroes are horses.” From this humble phrase, the experimental folk ﬁve-piece takes its name. Their music’s quiet expanse is a photographic negative of Neruda’s poem: The Heroes Are Horses blanket this sweating piecemeal vegetation with a graceful hush. Their calm hypnotizes the animal. “I write quiet music because the world is too loud,” says singer/guitarist Mark Bradley-Shoupe. When asked how often he seeks out silence, he replied, “I do not know if it is even possible.”

TO READ THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT PLEASE VISIT MULEMAGAZINE.COM/HAH

FOR MORE ON THE HEROES ARE HORSES VISIT THEHEROESAREHORSES.COM

Their serene, acoustic style naturally runs contrary to the logic of free-enterprise bustle, but it is not a misguided reenactment of a misguided perception of simpler times. The Heroes are Horses are insistently of the present moment—electronics and found sound are an essential component of their sound—but their sense of the present is one magniﬁed by the past. This fusing of time is made palpable by HAH’s use of found-sound collages, wherein ghostly voices weave their way through melodies that seem to be reasoning with themselves. The raw materials reveal the humility of the group’s vision: in the instrumental “Coos Bay,” multi-instrumentalist Jim Tate says, “Kenny used to play a video of his Dad and his wife showing him their place in Coos Bay, OR—the spoken parts are from that tape.” One gets the impression that some entity within the instruments is conjuring something lost into the present. “It’s like trying to remember a dream,” as Ryan Dixon, who sings and plays guitar in the band, describes it.

ki, ds. me sint er nd

One of the most fascinating aspects of the group is the way in which this consistently personal vision melds with the music, creating a collective, collaborative atmosphere. HAH’s lyrics are all written in the ﬁrst person, with realistic sentiment that frequently deals with loneliness. in “Letters in the Dirt,” the protagonist writes his name in the ground in hope that someone will come along and see; in “Hotel” he sings, “Don’t tell my wife where I’ve been / Been at the hotel drinking again.” Taken all together, however, the music remains as the group explicitly intends, “without ego” and free to enter into. Drummer Bob Stagner explains, “There have been many times I’ve been moved to tears without knowing what Mark or Ryan were even singing.” Their narratives tend to work as a unifying force for all present—performers and audience—and their lonely quality acts as a catharsis of that very loneliness. In this sense The Heroes are Horses’ music is like therapy for modern life. They don’t surrender to the ugliness and alienation of the chaotic outside world, like Pablo Neruda’s gentleman; they embrace it, and make it into what they love.

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What is normal? Is America normal? I think the reality of the world is reﬂected in the streets of Baghdad.

”

of the air, like there was something signiﬁcant and old in that smell. Although I have had similar experiences when I was in Iowa with the smell of soil and grass . . . but different. NEARING THE END OF THE FILM YOUR COUSIN COMMENTS WHEN HEARING AN EXPLOSION, “IT’S A BOMB. A NICE BOMB,” SHOWING HOW COMMON THE SOUND OF EXPLOSIONS HAS BECOME IN IRAQ AND IN TURN TITLING THE FILM. WHILE IN IRAQ, WHAT WAS A “NORMAL” DAY LIKE FOR YOUR FAMILY? I suppose what is normal is a combination of what you may consider normal and surviving on a day to day basis. What is normal? Is America normal? I think the reality of the world is reﬂected in the streets of Baghdad. I know that it is not so normal anymore. Things have gotten much worse. What was tolerated before is now getting really old. Imagine if the victims of Hurricane Katrina were still waiting for help. That is Iraq everyday right now.

Usama at a market in Baghdad

NICE BOMBS FILM MAKER USAMA ALSHAIBI ON HIS AWARD WINNING DOCUMENTARY | INTERVIEW BY EMILY CLAYTON

In the late summer of 2006, Nice Bombs premiered at the Chicago Underground Film Festival to a full house. Viewers experienced the 92 minute documentary that captures life in Iraq for the family of film maker Usama Alshaibi. Returning to his country after nearly 24 years. Usama finds an Iraq that is very different from his childhood, and reunites with a family full of warmth and laughter. Nice Bombs captures the Iraq that Americans rarely have a chance to see, and gives profound insight into what life is like during a time of war. Nice Bombs received rave reviews and was awarded Best Documentary Film at the festival. DO YOU REMEMBER THE IRAQ BEFORE SADDAM? – YOU WERE AROUND 10 YEARS OLD WHEN THE BATHE PARTY GAINED POWER. DO YOU REMEMBER A DISTINCT EVENT OR MOMENT WHERE YOU FELT THIS CHANGE? Yes. I remember when I was a child and vacationing in Iraq. I was at my Grandfather’s house and the TV was on. I distinctly remember Saddam Hussein on TV and there was a parade going on. I never felt anything sinister going on, but I sensed a tension or excitement in the air . . . something I probably had difficulty interpreting. Later when we lived in the south of Iraq, in Basra, I was part of a kind of Ba’athi youth group. I even had a poster in my bedroom of a young Saddam Hussein. Of course every public space in Iraq had a portrait of Saddam. Looking back it was all a bit weird. But on the other hand, just a few years earlier I was in Iowa City with my Boy-Scouts uniform pledging allegiance to the flag of America. There are many stories about Iraq before Saddam but by the time I was aware of Iraq, Saddam was pretty much in charge. SOUND AND TEXTURE PLAY A LARGE ROLE IN MUCH OF YOUR WORK. HOW IS THIS REFLECTED IN NICE BOMBS? HOW DO THE EVERYDAY SOUNDS IN IRAQ DIFFER FROM THOSE IN AMERICA, AND HOW DO THESE SOUNDS AND TEXTURES RELATE TO THE DUALITY OF YOURSELF AS AN AMERICAN AND YOURSELF AS AN IRAQI?

THE SITUATION HAS OBVIOUSLY WORSENED SINCE THE FILMING OF NICE BOMBS. DO YOU FEEL YOU CAPTURED AN IRAQ THAT DOES NOT EXIST ANYMORE AND WILL NEVER EXIST AGAIN? PARTICULARLY AS A FILMMAKER AND AN ARTIST. Yes. It is also a time that has been shifting in an accelerated speed since the beginning of the US invasion. In reﬂection it was not so bad when I was there. There was this sense of possibility and the insurgency activity was still mild.. That all changed when I returned to the US. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE APATHY THAT HAS INFLICTED A LARGE PART OF AMERICAN SOCIETY? I don’t think it is so much as apathy . . . perhaps it is indifference. I don’t know if our American society is sure of what it should do. But I don’t think pulling out all of our troops will beneﬁt anybody. That approach will come back to haunt us in the long run. If we can just calm the security situation down and give people some hope. The US or someone from International police needs to help the people of Iraq. The Iraqis never asked for this and they have been patient for too long. The country is falling apart in front of our eyes.

DO YOU SEE YOUR FUTURE WORK AS A CONTINUATION OF THE CONTENT EXPLORED IN NICE BOMBS OR A MERGING OF PAST AND PRESENT IDEAS? Yes. But I have something new that is also mutating ﬁction and nonﬁction. It is in a very early stage. YOU ARE CURRENTLY WORKING ON A ROCK OPERA WITH CHICAGO MUSICIAN BOBBY CONN AND THE GLASS GYPSIES. DOES THIS PARTICULAR PROJECT RELATE TO YOUR PREVIOUS WORK OR IS IT SOMETHING COMPLETELY SEPARATE?

I’ve always felt that sound could play a role in parts when the image should just be relaxed or almost static. But of course there is interplay as well. Much of the audio of Nice Bombs comes form the area and the time we were there. I tried to clarify some of the chaos and let certain sounds of everyday life stand out a bit more. I created areas to explore moods in this very deliberate way. A pause, or something that forced you to listen . . . even if it was nothing spectacular but a song from a distorted radio humming with sounds of a helicopter above your head. If I hear a siren in the USA it is probably a storm alert or ambulance. If I hear a siren in Iraq it means that bombs are about to drop. Perhaps that is the only way I can answer the question about the duality of textures and sounds between the two cultures and history.

I’ve done a few videos for Bobby Conn, so it is related to my work. I have done music videos for Chicago musicians I admire and he is one of them. We have talked about doing a musical for years. So my wife, ﬁlmmaker Kristie Alshaibi, myself and Bobby all sat down and hashed out the script. It is still forming and the ﬁnal production will be completed in the spring. I also have other projects in the works .

YOU MENTION THE OVERWHELMING SMELL OF GASOLINE WHEN YOU ENTER BAGHDAD. DID YOUR SENSES BECOME NUMB TO THE SMELL OVER TIME? Not numb, just used to it. I don’t know, it was not so bad- but the smell of war is different then what Iraq normally smells like. The thing is that I kind of miss the smell. There are also other smells, the smell

For more information on Nice Bombs please visit: www.nicebombs.com

For updates on Usama’s current projects please visit: www.dancehabibi.com

WOMAN - FIRST-SIXXX DEMOS | NO LABEL | Knoxvillians, Woman are another Sparks fueled night in the back yard of a basement show. To get downstairs you’d have to contend with a choppy sea of drunken slam dancers, so just sit outside and watch the bass shake the cobwebs off the little basement window. The men of Woman (and they’re men one and all) chant and pound their way through their “First Sixxx” demo like native art punks. The music is high energy and I imagine if you ever danced to Fugazi, you might use the same moves dancing to Woman. + Elka Sommer

CURRENT PAGE 06 Aleks Tomaszewska and Deric Cross 07 Film Poster - Nice Bombs 08 Cold Hands 09 Woman

06 DEAD MOON The greatest Rock & Roll band of all time, the greatest Punk Rock band of all time, the greatest Band. Dead Moon. To a few, yea, to all, no. Of course not, if that were the case we’d be living in a much different world, maybe a perfect world—maybe not perfect, but a better one for sure. Fred, Toody and Andrew. Real people playing music. Fred’s been doing it for a long time, since the 60’s, the heyday. Toody’s been by his side the whole time. Andrew was a fan. They were, they are Dead Moon, since 87’. Not that long in the great scheme of things. No one thinks of the 80s as when the Greatest Band of All Time came about. No it was the 60’s or the 70’s, not the 80s for sure. Fred did that; he played with those bands in the 60’s and 70’s. Lived the life so many of us dream of but get caught up doing other things instead. Working class like Springsteen was a long time ago. Songs that sound like if the Heartbreakers, the Gun Club and Otis Redding were a little three piece, Heartbreak, love, hope, youth and all the other shit that we go through. That’s a Dead Moon song. Real songs, Rock & Roll songs in the purest sense. Speaking to us all, every single one. Some listened, most didn’t, but the ones that did…the lucky ones. People that witnessed the shows, THE SHOW. Dead Moon live, no comparison. Soul, that’s what you got. Pure soul, their souls on loan for us to embrace. The essence of song and music and sound, nothing else quite like it. These aren’t just records and they were not just shows, but documents and experiences, events. Almost missed a college exam cause of these kids, almost didn’t make a Dead Moon show cause I wasn’t sure I was gonna make it at all: Spinal tap Saturday, Dead Moon Sunday- that’s a weekend to remember. That Sunday night I sure knew I was alive. All Beautiful things run their respective course. Something we just have to remember, like a ﬁrst love or a ﬁfteenth. But we always have the memories and luckily we have the records. Re-live those are a hell of a lot easier than those lost loves. I have my little sister to blame for Dead Moon being in my life, almost missed it, but she was unrelenting. Drove to Atlanta, never forget it, any of it. Timeless, like time itself. So remember, “It’s ok. We all seen better days.” + Steve Greene

For better or for worse the danceability of rock music can’t be relied upon anymore. Much of the genre’s evolution has taken the fan’s physical appreciation out of the equation. Cold Hands infuses its sound with a pulse that afﬁrms its connection to the listener. It’s been a little while since I heard a new album that’s inspired air drumming and the tendency to play the album to disinterested roommates. Cold Hands rocks relatively severely and it’s refreshing to see that in a band that isn’t from the northeast, the northwest or Austin. There’s no denying the pleasure of dancing to rock music and the rippling beats of the ”Self Titled EP” create warm feet from Cold Hands. +Michael Foster

The trio pulls off a sound that’s perhaps atypical of the folk-infused, uniquely instrumental, and often avant-garde sound that’s coming to typify the burgeoning Knoxville music scene. Cold Hands rocks with a driving, dancy edge, and while frontman Henry Gibson’s vocals carry a bit of the vulnerability of Elliot Smith, the overall sound has a jaunty, shimmer rock bite that leaves hips swiveling and heads bobbing. There’s some Afghan Whigs about their sound, some Interpol is in there too. Recent sensations TV on the Radio and Bloc Party share a bit of the same toe-tapping, hipster swagger.

ALEKS AND THE DRUMMER | MYSPACE.COM/ALEKSANDTHEDRUMMER One day browsing through cheap folk records, I found a funny looking Hungarian record from the ‘80s by Márta Sebestyán called “Muzsikas.” It was all instinct, but I bought the record and couldn’t listen to anything else. Similarly, or somewhat similarly, I went to see the annual “Million Tongues Festival” on a cold November Sunday—expecting to hear some heavy, consciousness raising, track bending, chorus-crushing psychedelia. I arrived early to ﬁnd Aleks and the Drummer kicking off the evening with keyboard player & vocalist (Aleks Andra Tomaszewska) with drummer (Deric Cross). There was no mystic tabla player, no dream machine to hypnotize and alter consciousness, no strange distortion pedals that I have never seen before (in fact, no pedals at all). What was most shocking was that the group seemed to be playing their instruments in quite a normal fashion. After initial shock, as they started to play, the group quickly became one of my favorite Chicago live acts. Their performance was refreshing and a head nodding. Aleks’s stage presence is conﬁdent and loose with a knack for incorporating hypnotizing “Castlevania” (the videogame) style organ in a non-cheesy way. The sound in an old-school Nintendo game fashion is fun in its own right, but the melodies are downright beautiful, picked up from somewhere in Eastern Europe. The drummer, Deric Cross, seemed to be backing up the J.B.’s on one song and one of those disco-punk bands on another. If you took some Hungarian folk from the ‘80s (like the majestic Mârta Sebestyân) and sped it up for everyone’s enjoyment, you might have something close to Aleks and The Drummer. Watch out for the band’s take over and please pressure them to record an album, so you won’t have to be lucky enough to just stumble upon them. + Thomas Cordova

COLD HANDS - SELF-TITLED EP | NEW BEAT | NEWBEAT.COM Several years back, Knoxville lads Henry Gibson, Zach Land and Jason Bowman came together to headline a Halloween show at what seems to be Knoxville’s most fertile musical melting pot, the Pilot Light. They joined forces to perform an evening’s worth of Jesus and Mary Chain covers, which clearly indicates their rock and roll hearts are pure and their electric souls are righteous. After listening to a small sampling of Cold Hands’ music in the form of their latest EP, I was impressed with the sound and found myself envious of any Knoxvillian that made it out to the Halloween show.

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This page: Abigail Glaum-Lathburyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Tripe Dress. Modeled by Chavva Previous page: Clockwise from top left: ragon fly jacket by Abigail Glaum-Lathbury. odeled by Danielle Hoods Aay Preston-Myint. Modled by Aleks and Derek. Hood by Aay PrestonMyint. Modeled by Kate. Pants by Abigail Glaumthbury. Shoes by Michelle Quick, Earrings by Glory Alice. Modeled by Clara.