Mule Magazine: Issue1 by mulemagazine

mule magazine premiere

When something is happening— when people are creating, either by themselves or as a community, it only feels right to somehow try to document that. And to document not only what is happening, but how it is happening. Mule Magazine is our collaborative experiment in publication design. Using art-project style interviews and conceptual as well as collaborative design, we’re attempting to create a different sort of journal. It’s creative theory lesson mixed with contemporary culture. Our hope is to document these projects without avoiding the genuine complexity of the creative process. We hope to make a magazine that’s relevant. The idea isn’t to somehow ‘grade’ or ‘give a stamp of approval’ to these projects. But to start to collect, to spread the word of what is around us. Hopefully there will be more to come. When you’re reading, please take note of the pieces that people have contributed, allowed us to use as illustration and mutilate in a million ways. They are all pieces we’re pretty envious of. From Holly Brigg’s stenciled buffalo pieces to Bryan Baker’s strange polaroid-meets-letter-press typography, it’s nothing we could have done on our own. You can visit our website at mulemagazine.com. Please get in touch if you have any ideas about support, content, or even simply want to advertise. Every little bit helps. Liz Tapp Jaythan Elam Valerie Job

8-11 12-15 jeff baron american analog set 17-22 24-29 dixie dirt 30-32 paul guest poem and interview forget cassettes interview IN TERMS OF TWO

nashville based duo talk about the duality and division of their twosome.

interview PSYCHOLOGY OF GEOGRAPHY

jeff baron (of the essex green and ladybug transistor) discusses the effects of topography on the towns he tours through.

interview

the american analog set discuss the nature of design versus spontaneity in their music.

interview UNDERSTANDING COMPLACENCY

dixie dirt talk loosely about the Walter Benjamin idea of rag picking, having to scavenge and compile, and working against complacency. MEMORIES OF COLOR

the poet releases a new poem called “Water” and answers questions about his own history with color.

34-37 38-43 44-46 48-52

jaythan elam editorial MASS MEDIA VS. PAINFUL ENCOUNTER WITH A WALL? a quick discussion of newly proposed FCC regulations.

paintings of chuck interview COMMODITY AND INSTITUTION

chattanooga painters, chuck draper and gabe williams, discuss their mutual paintings of chuck.

ron buffington critique A DECONSTRUCTION OF COLOR

painter/teacher ron buffington offers a deconstructivist critique of liz tapp’s josef albers color theory dresses.

liz tapp fashion spread INTERACTION IN COLOR

a fashion spread based on the color theory studies of josef albers.

photo by marcus tanner

When something is happening— when people are creating, either by themselves or as a community, it only feels right to somehow try to document. And to document not only what is happening, but how it is happening. Mule magazine is our collaborative experiment in publication design. Using art-project Tri-Layer Design: style interview and conceptual as well as collaborative design, we’re create a differentconceptualizer, sort of journal. It’s Lizattempting Tapp - The to Starter (interviewer, collaborator) creative theory lesson mixed with contemporary culture. Our hopeValerie is to document these projects without avoiding therelay, motivator) Job - The Middle Man (glue between, public something is happening— when people are creating, genuine complexity of the creative process. We hopeWhen to make either themselves or as a community, it only feels right to somehow try to document. And to document not Jaythanthat’s Elam -relevant. The Finisher (documentor, finalizer) a magazine Above all else, we reformer, hope that itbystays only what is happening, but how it is happening. Mule magazine is our collaborative experiment in publication true to our ideas and represents what we feel is taking place design. Using art-project style interview and conceptual as well as collaborative design, we’re attempting to Double around us. Writing Contribution:

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You can visit our website at mulemagazine.com. Please get in touch if you have any ideas about support, Super Duper Illustration: One friend weirdorplace: either byin themselves as a community, it only feels right to somehow try to document. And to document not When something isBryan happening— when people are creating, content, or even simply want to advertise. Nick Hughes - All Around Sneaky bastard Baker only what is happening, but how it is happening. Mule magazine is our collaborative experiment in publication either by themselves or as a community, it only feels right to Hollyand Briggs (see painting on left) design. Using art-project style interview conceptual as well as collaborative design, we’re attempting to somehow try to document. And to document not only what Liz Tapp create a different sort of journal.Joshua It’s Bennett is happening, but how it is happening. Mule magazine is our Jaythan Elam creative theory lesson mixed with contemporary culture. Our hope is to document these projects without Philip Swafford collaborative experiment in publication design. UsingValerie art-project Job avoiding the style interview and conceptual as well as collaborative design, genuine complexity of the creative process. We hope to make Triple we’re attempting to createCopy-Edit: a different sort of journal. It’s a magazine that’s relevant. Above all else, we hope that it stays Rebecca Targ _True Publication Princess creative theory lesson mixed with contemporary culture. Our true to our ideas and represents what we feel is taking place around us. hope is to document these projects without avoiding the Meredith Jagger _Best Checker-overer When something is happening— when people are creating, genuine complexity of the creative We Checker-overer hope to make William Flowersprocess. _Other-Best You can visit our website at mulemagazine.com. Please get in touch if you have any ideas about support, or as a community, it only feels right to somehow try to document. And to document not a magazine that’s relevant. Above all else, we hope either thatbyitthemselves stays content, or even simply want to advertise. only what is happening, but how it is happening. Mule magazine is our collaborative experiment in publication true to our ideas and represents feel is place: taking place One friendwhat in we weird design. Using art-project style interview and conceptual as well as collaborative design, we’re attempting to around us. Nick Hughes_All Around Sneaky Bastard Liz Tapp

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creative theory lesson mixed with contemporary culture. Our hope is to document these projects without You can visit our website at mulemagazine.com. Please get avoiding the in touch if you have any ideas about support, content, or even genuine complexity of the creative process. We hope to make simply want to advertise.

Valerie Job

Letters to the Start:

a magazine that’s relevant. Above all else, we hope that it stays

807 A Forest Ave

true to our ideas and represents what we feel is taking place around us.

Liz Tapp Jaythan Elam

Chattanooga, TN 37405

You can visit our website at mulemagazine.com. Please get in touch if you have any ideas about support, content, or even simply want to advertise.

When something is happening— when people are creating,

Liz Tapp

either by themselves or as a community, it only feels right to somehow try to document. Jaythan And Elamto document not

only what is happening, but how it is happening. Mule magazine is our collaborative experiment in publication Valerie Job design. Using art-project style interview and conceptual as well as collaborative design, we’re attempting to create a different sort of journal. It’s

creative theory lesson mixed with contemporary culture. Our hope is to document these projects without avoiding the

genuine complexity of the creative process. We hope to make

a magazine that’s relevant. Above all else, we hope that it stays

true to our ideas and represents what we feel is taking place around us.

You can visit our website at mulemagazine.com. Please get in touch if you have any ideas about support, content, or even simply want to advertise.

Pizza Calzones Salads Sandwiches 12 Market Square Knoxville, TN 37902 865.637.4067

Amanda Anderson is a media arts major in Knoxville, TN. Her work involves film, video, and performance. Her photographs of Dixie Dirt are featured in their interview spreads. Splice_here@hotmail.com

Bryan Baker is a visiting lecturer at the University

of Tennessee teaching Three Dimensional Studies. He is also currently a designer and printer for Yee-Haw Industries as well as director of the P.A.R. Association. He currently spends most of his time as a freelance Conceptual Assistant in Knoxville, TN. Contact him at parassociation@hotmail.com.

Marcus Tanner is a photographer living in Knoxville, TN.

He specializes in Polaroids and CD cover work. He has a photo on the first page of our Jeff Baron spread and was also involved in our Josef Albers fashion spread. Marcus is a freelance photographer. Contact him at johnjuansanchez@yahoo.com for a digital catalog or see his photographs on the website for startstheparty.com and thecheatmusic.com.

Caleb Wilson, a Chattanooga/Knoxville nomad,

is a photographer involved with The American Photography Project (see americanphotographyproject.com). Caleb takes photographs and shoots films for hire. His photographs appear in our Jeff Baron interview, our Josef Albers Fashion spread, and the last page of our Paul Guest interview. If you like what you see you should contact him at Fractal_orb@yahoo.com.

Holly Briggs is a printmaker in Knoxville, TN. Paintings from her Bitter Buffalo series are featured on our cover and our last page. Holly makes custom Bitter Buffalo paintings. Contact her at imabitterbuffalo@hotmail.com. Joshua Bennett is a painter and musician living in

Chattanooga, TN. He is currently working on his first recordings for And, I You, his musical project. His etching Vibrating Line appears throughout the American Analog Set interview spreads. He can be contacted at myownjunkyardparadise@yahoo.com.

Philip Swafford is a painter from Chattanooga, TN. His etchings are almost entirely linework. See some of his newer

etchings in our Forget Cassettes spread. philip-swafford@utc.edu

Cayte Nobles is a photographer from Murfreesboro who specializes in band photography. Her portrait of Forget Cassettes is used in their interview. See her work at caytetakespictures.com.

FORGET CASSETTES

In Terms of Two Doni Schroader - drums, rhodes Beth Cameron - guitar, voice

Forget Cassettes is a two-piece ensemble from Nashville, TN. Their release Instruments of Actions, among other things, is a study in the musical relationship between Doni Schroader and Beth Cameron. The two exist as a duality, a music that is both subdued and aggressive. This interview is based on ideas of duality, the idea of eternal return and the idea that the only things that matter are the things that happen more than once. Instruments of Action is available online at www.forgetcassettes.com. photograph by Cayte Nobles prints by

Philip Swafford

Liz Tapp: We’re

going to talk about ideas of duality and multiplicity and things that go together in terms of two or in halves. In terms of how the two of you interact as halves of a whole, how important is on stage set-up?

Beth Cameron:

Well, we always set up right next to each other. And, typically, I have to position myself in a way that I am both able to interact with Doni and also able to interact with the crowd. It’s an awkward positioning, but it has always been very strategic for him to sit sideways on the stage facing me.

LT: In thinking

about those space issues and interacting as performers, how does that carry over when you’re at home? When it’s just you two, what things are important? Do you play off of each other? Or is one of you the main songwriter?

BC: In every other band I’ve been in, I’ve been a main songwriter. I’d be by myself, and then I’d bring what I wrote to other people. Doni and I interact 100% together all the time, as far as song-writing goes. I will bring an idea, and we’ll play with it for a while and let it develop on its own.

LT: The two of you were previously in a larger group together. What was lost in that transition and what was gained? BC: The biggest loss for me, personally, would be the extra voices. I enjoy singing with other people. I’m used to it. As far as things that were gained, I don’t know...everything. Having just two people, just one person I have to bounce ideas off-of is pretty amazing. LT: You guys both have dual roles, so you double up. Does that seriously affect the outcome of the song or do you feel like it translates the way it would with four persons playing four instruments? BC: Objectively? From what I’ve heard from other people, everyone is truly surprised when they see that we’re just a two-piece, instead of a four-piece. And people think that there’s a bass guitar on our record, while there’s not. My setup is made to involve more bass tones in my guitar playing. But also, we have the objective to sound like we have more than two people. LT: Do you imagine you work really differently or similarly to other twoperson bands?

BC: I think a lot of people have the assumption that a two-piece band can only go one certain direction. You know, that you can play only really simplistic whole notes and chords to make it sound like you’re more people than you are. We try to accomplish being more complicated within a two-piece. And I think you can pull it off, it just takes a little more thought process. LT: Do you think

there are specific structures in your song-writing that help create that wholeness? Structures in general? Or things that occur more than one time, while we’re thinking of things in two?

BC: It’s interesting that you bring up the duality thing, because in our next record we kind of have a theme. The structure of all of our songs is becoming more complicated, in that we want one little part that you first hear for three seconds to reoccur at the end of the song. For the listener it’s the completion of a puzzle: “It all makes sense!” And that’s really the way I’ve always operated when I write, musically and literally, I like to have everything come full circle.

LT: That’s perfect. So along with song structures and thinking about things that happen more than once, are there ever recurring lyrical themes to consider? BC: The overall feel of the record, because it’s called Instruments of Action, is about just being able to get a message across that no matter what you do, no matter how small you are, if you’re only two people, or seven, you have the power to be huge. LT: When these themes and parts are coming together within your structure, there are a lot of parts that feel more organic, less structured. When I hear you play it feels like there’s a lot of swells, volume and intensity-wise that leave the structure. BC: You know that’s really a Doni question. I was just telling him the other day he loves swells in music. For me, just being my personality, everything I do is structured, everything has structure, everything has to have structure. He is extremely unstructured, so he brings the chaos to what I do, to my routine.

LT: If we’re going to

make pairs of foils, organic vs. structured, and how those two start to emphasize each other, I guess he’s the rhythm and you’re the melody. in those cases, is it annoying to talk about gender?

BC: No, I mean,

it’s a reality. Because I’m a woman and because I’m up there with an equal half. It’s interesting because he’s the rhythm; he’s the percussion; he brings the grounded beat. And I’m “it,” you know, all the melody, it comes from me; I have to hold it all. As a female, being the melody is a pretty big metaphor for me.

LT: When you talk

about being the front woman, do you feel more like a centerpiece or a part of a whole?

BC: I never feel

like a front person or a front woman, in this band. For the first time, on stage or in the studio, anytime, practicing in a room, I feel like I’m a completion, that I’m 50% of what’s going on, and I’m not a spectacle or an object.

LT: In other bands

have you felt like a “front person?”

BC: Yeah, I think

when you add more people, the roles become more competitive. All bands are pretty much family systems, and you have these little niches and roles you have to fulfill. Being a two-piece and having to multi-task instrumentally puts you in a different realm. It’s less showmanship and more, “I’ve got to pull this off. Concentrate, concentrate.” And I love that. It’s a challenge every time. Right before I get on stage and we’re practicing and writing these new songs, they seem so complicated and I know that all that pressure is on me, because there aren’t three other people I’m playing with to help stop and retune. But when I get on stage, because I’m exactly 50% and working really hard, it becomes so comfortable and so natural. I just go and don’t think about what’s out there. It’s really odd and it sounds cliché, almost.

LT: No, it makes

sense. It sounds natural. You’re a fraction, but it adds up. What do you do to make sure that it does add up?

BC: I really work

well buying into the bigger picture. I think, with Forget Cassettes, I see “the bigger picture,” and I see innovations.

LT: And there is

a response to how it all adds up, how important multiplying your parts is. The two of you doubling your roles and coming together to form one part.

BC: Yeah, it’s

interesting. I mean, I always get “when I saw that it was just you two setting-up on stage, I was really nervous for you.” I guess, in the beginning, there was a part of me that thought “Can we pull this off? What exactly are we trying to do here?” And basically, it was that we wanted to play with each other, and we didn’t really want to add anybody else in the mix, because what we were doing was so beautiful, that if we brought someone else in, might really mess that up. And we plan to continue doing that until something else changes.

LT: That you have

to depend on each other would be a constant. Are there times that you have to rescue one another?

BC: Having to pick

up each other’s slack? Most of the time, performing, I’m deliberately the constant which allows Doni to be more erratic. I’m more structured, and he’s the chaotic, and he really enjoys that.

But specifically, we help each other out. I can’t finish things without him; it just isn’t possible. The other day, we were trying to finish something new, and I was stuck on a melody and let him try to figure out a melody for me, which was really hard for me to do. He listens when I say, “I’m hearing ‘this’ drum beat.” We trust each other musically.

LT: What do you

think is the most important part of being half of something? When you approach that situation, what is most important?

BC: As far as be-

ing in this band, it’s important to try to work through discrepancies. Making sure that what you’re doing is relevant to the other person’s idea and theory of where they want the music to go. And I think with Doni, the biggest challenge for me has been to let go and sit back and let him go with his instincts, because he has good ones and he has great elaborate ideas. So just sit back and hear him through. Also, continue to try and challenge each other, not become too docile—keep it going and keep it chaotic— so it can add up to a whole that is worthwhile.

Derive- an experimental mode of behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of hastily passing through varied environments. Also used, more particularly, to designate the duration of a prolonged exercise of such an experiment.

Situationists would make psychgeographic maps of cities working with the conceptual art of discovering a city or discovering a place. Lots of wandering and lots of walks recorded and conversations recorded. We should talk about the psychogeography of a place.

The Psychology of Geography photographs by Marcus Tanner and Caleb Wilson collaged letter sent by Elise Stoddard

Jeff Baron of the Essex Green and Ladybug Transistor

Situationism- A word totally devoid of meaning, improperly derived from the preceding term (situationist). There is no situationism, which would mean a theory of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism was obviously conceived by anti-situationists.

Jeff Baron plays guitar in the Essex Green and Ladybug Transistor. He is also a geographer. This conversation is about the topography of the cities he travels through and how he feels it affects those places’ inhabitants. It’s also about how that sort of interpretation of structure and rhythm relates to music.

Liz Tapp: For a situationist, psycho-geography involved a lot of wandering and lots of walks and conversations being recorded. They were trying to understand the psychogeography of a place. When you’re touring, do you have time to really go and explore different cities? And how do you purposefully go about it? Jeff Baron: I go about it a lot like what you just said, actually. We do have some time to do that. I like to walk around a lot and explore. At this point, I’ve been touring for a while. So, I have gotten to explore a bit, but now I don’t do it as much. But I do it when I can... just wander. LT: Do you find a sense of a place more by the people you encounter or the structures of things?

JB: Well, both. But in the structure first, because I’m not generally meeting people. So the way that towns are laid out: the topography says a lot to me, how old the buildings are, things like that. LT: You were a geography major in college. Are there any patterns you notice based on geography? Does there seem to be a relationship between the people you meet and how those different cities are laid out?

JB: Well, sure. I mean, if we’re talking America, the streets in towns closer to the east coast are laid out closer together. They’re more designed like European villages. And, as you go further west, they start to spread out. You see that in the Midwest. The streets will be much wider. I imagine that it’s because they had the feeling of so much land to work when they built those towns. They didn’t have to build things so close together. I grew up in Pittsburgh which is a lot like Chattanooga. It’s in a river valley with mountains, so those topographical layouts are different. On the East Coast, the topography causes people to build the towns and the roads closer together, like Europe, where people historically clustered together for safety. The majority of the old cities are smaller because they were built within walls. When you grow up close to people, in a village-type atmosphere, people tend to be more social, I think. In the West, people live farther away from each other, so they don’t interact as much. LT: Have you lived anywhere else for any extended period of time aside from New York?

JB: We’re in Brooklyn now. I grew up in Pittsburgh and I lived in Vermont and Chicago. LT: When you’re in Brooklyn, how far do you travel most days? JB: I don’t go to Manhattan much anymore, because Brooklyn, especially the neighborhood where I live, has geared itself more toward young people. There are more restaurants, shops and bars, so you can hang out there now. My neighborhood, Park Slope, actually feels like a college town now, because everyone I know lives there. I can stroll down 7th Avenue or 5th Avenue and see people I know every day. It’s a great neighborhood. It reminds me of Birmingham, Vermont, which is where I went to school, except for it’s in the middle of New York, so it’s something new. It’s sort of like the East Village or Greenwich Village: it’s a small, close-knit community. Up until this point, Park Slope didn’t have a lot of young people living there, there weren’t a lot of hipster bars or stores, and you had to go to Manhattan to do anything fun. So now, we basically don’t travel around that much.

JB: Then you go on tour. // LT: So how long have you been on the road? For this tour? // Three weeks. // And how many more? // Well ... just like three days. // Do you have any idea how many cities you hit up? // This tour? About twenty.// LT: Were any places more significant than others? Did you find things you hadn’t found before? JB: On this trip, I don’t think I found anything out that I didn’t know before. I would have been excited if I had. We went to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Chicago. Portland. San Francisco. LA. Tucson. Denver. Lawrence, Kansas, Norman, Oakland... LT: Tell me about Lawrence, Kansas. JB: Lawrence, Kansas is in eastern Kansas between Topeka and Kansas City. It’s a college town. And it’s kind of cool; because when you enter Kansas from the west, it’s all flat; it’s all grain; it’s all wheat, and it’s sloping downward all the way from the Rocky Mountains. But when you finally get to eastern Kansas it becomes slightly hilly. The town is set on a hill so you can see the college from a long ways away if you’re driving. It’s a grid—all the towns in the west and Midwest are grids. LT: Have you ever been to Knoxville, TN? JB: Yeah, I love Knoxville. LT: I’m from there, mainly—It’s where I spend a lot of time. I go back and forth, live there during the summer and come here for school... but it’s so different. Chattanooga is pretty finely laid out: there’s mainly downtown or you can go across the river where it’s calm, and there’s a little street of shops, right up against Coolidge Park.

JB: Isn’t that where the Blue Angel used to be? LT: Exactly. I live right there, and there’s the walking bridge. JB: I love that bridge. I’ve walked across that bridge. LT: It’s lined up with Market Street bridge and Veteran’s Bridge. It’s all really “laid out.” Knoxville is built on this big hill space and sort of jumbled up. And I love that. It makes it really hard to develop as a planned-out city, though. There’s no central focus yet, unlike, say, Asheville, NC.

JB: That’s one place I’ve never been, and I’d love to go. I’ve driven past it on the interstate but never stopped. I’ve always looked at it on maps and wanted to go. I’ve heard it’s great. LT: Yeah, It’s really easy living. And everything is centralized

psychogeography- the study of the precise effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acted directly on the mood and behavior of the individual.

around downtown: there’s a huge monument and, around it, shops and businesses are really well laid out. I read an article once that said the layout of Asheville had a lot to do with its political liberalness.

JB: Because of the layout, you think? LT: Well, it supports people getting together and working together; it’s community oriented and centrally oriented. But also the relationship to the Appalachian people is so much thicker there, and Appalachian people are, historically, open-minded about certain things.

JB: There’s also that writer’s college, right? Black Mountain? Is that what it’s called? // Black Mountain is there.// Isn’t that a pretty liberal place? // Yeah, and there’s Warren Wilson, too. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. // No. // Have you ever heard of the Black Mountain College Experiment?// Yeah.

LT: In the fifties, Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus school of the arts in Germany moved there. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns went there because Appalachian people were so accepting. But they couldn’t keep attendance going once so accepting. But they couldn’t keep attendance going once WWII started. They were really interested in form. That’s a good transition, because I’d like to talk more about structural forms—the psychology of repetition and form. Repetition and also repeated patterns, obviously heavily related to music. And thinking in rhythmical patterns, even as simple as something you might do over and over to feel more calm.

JB: Well, playing music definitely is one. And also driving. I drive 95% of the time when I’m on tour. I do all the driving, because it calms me. I get antsy in a car if I’m not driving. I drive a lot, and that’s more repetition, because you feel the rhythm of the actual road. You feel the pavement and vibration. I like to turn the dial on the radio, not even do the scanner, because the stereo light lights up. Then you know you have a station. So I can do that for hours and people are like “why are you doing that? Why don’t you put in a CD?” I like to do it, and I like to see what’s going to come on next. I don’t know if that’s what you’re talking about. LT: Yeah, exactly that. JB: The radio knob clicks every time you turn it, so I can feel that and then I see the light, and that’s kind of coming up, then of course the music’s playing. So there’s a physical feel, then the sound, and the visual, all at once. I can’t taste it. So, that’s the only one. LT: How does it work psychologically? Earlier I was thinking about how if I sit down and knit for fifteen minutes, then I can go back to work. And I feel so much better doing the same thing over and over. So I think repeated forms are very important.

JB: Sometimes, if I’m working at home on the computer, I’ll do the same thing. I’ll stop and play the guitar for fifteen minutes. And if I’m playing country music or something, it is the same feel. It is the same three chords, the same resounding feel country music has about it. It always starts and ends in the same way; you know where it’s going to go. And you can turn it around in a circular kind of way, the same with bluegrass and Irish music. I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but something that works in the opposite way that doesn’t suit me is if I’m driving – the van’s always a real mess, especially between the front two seats, and it’s always cluttered and things are falling down on my feet – I like to get it nice and neat, even though it usually isn’t. Right when I start driving, if it’s a mess, my shoulder knots up right here. That may be a personal thing. LT: I’m not always like that. JB: Nice. Yeah, I live alone now, which I never have before. I’m a slob; I’m very unorganized, but I keep my house perfect. When I live with other people I don’t, and it’s strange. Or I’ll come back from tour, and I open my suitcase, and everything is everywhere, so I’m late for things and I’m trying to get a lot done. If it gets messy it will stay messy. Then it will be disastrous, and I won’t be able to see the floor. But then the minute I clean it, it will stay perfectly clean for three months, until I have a visitor and things get hurried. LT: And it’s sort of a cycle, like a process. Everyday things are infused with a process; mundane things take on a process. I love it.

knoxville rock visit www.thecheatmusic.com to hear THE CHEAT

go to shows

THE AMERICAN ANALOG SET design and psychology of rhythm

prints by joshua bennett

In this interview: AK= Andrew Kenny: Guitar, Vocals SR= Scott Ripple: Vibraphone, Guitar MS= Mark Smith: Drums

The American Analog Set

present an understated beauty of processed yet organic rhythms with repetitive, melodic structures. Their melodies are overlaid with washes of warm keyboard tones. Upon initial listens, their albums seem to embody subtlety, but it is a subtlety with an emotional integrity. The structural significance of the American Analog Setâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s music lies in a sort of repetitive gentleness. Lizâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interview is about that sort of structure and the psychology behind it. Their newest release Promise of Love should be available in your local record store. - Will Flowers

Photographs by Christian Johnson www.chrisnj.com

Interview recorded December of 2003. These members of AAS sat down with Liz Tapp: AK= Andrew Kenny, SR= Scott Ripple, MS= Mark Smith

Liz Tapp: I’m wondering about ideas of design –when you first begin working on something, do you think that things are usually preconceived and come from an idea of design, or do you think they come from a certain spontaneity, inherent in the nature of making music? Anonymous: Orange is what

color?

Andrew Kenny: It has to start from somewhere. You can’t just all pick up instruments and play together and expect to be playing in the same key on the same song. So you have to have more than just an idea of what you’re going to do when you start. Unless you’re making crazy-people music like free jazz or something… Mark Smith: Hey, there’s a lot

of structure in free jazz, anybody who’s seriously playing it there’s a lot of–

AK: You need an idea. I thought the big thing about free jazz was that it was all free?

MS: You play in reference to

what other people play. You play with certain understandings of what other people are playing.

AK: So it’s like America it says it’s free– but–

MS: Well, for instance, there’s

the Lounge, which is this free jazz/interpretation place where a lot of the guys who play are the people Ken and Mark and I grew up listening to. And it’s very possible for those guys to

just stroll up on stage and play wherever they are, but normally it’s an ensemble of people who know each other who have played together before, and they know who’s generally in charge of each song. Or they raise their hand and say, “Listen to me for a second,” or “Follow my lead,” I think it’s still free in that any one element can be introduced to extend or compress a part of a song or a passage, but all the guys playing are still listening to each other.

AK: So when you join in and “enter the boogie zone,” if someone wants to key in or work off what you’re doing– they can.

MS: I’ve seen some jazz

festivals just about every year. They’ll just be sitting in the bar and if they feel like it, they’ll just bust out. It’s not that they’re playing without relationship to what’s going on around them, but it’s that everyone is open to the idea that anyone can push it in one direction at any time. Especially this drummer Tommy Drake, who can play 16th notes at any given time, and is just a really hot-shot guy. With every song there’s definitely a recognition of who’s pushing it and where it’s going, but in everything he plays there’s an idea that it’s up for grabs.

Scott Ripple: Well, what

about taking music that you are trying to present as a finished form, a recording, when you come from a place that doesn’t have a specific game plan,

and you’re kind of intuitively trying to find something, this weird sense, by process of elimination. I do that all the time in the Red Hands thing. It’s not until we go into a band room and try to figure out…

MS: Yeah, but you guys are a jam band. But that’s what I’m saying; seriously, I think that there’s another aspect of composing when you try things differently.

LT: When you guys are composing, it’s more structured than that–

AK: –Yeah, I think we have

more pre-design, more preproduction than anyone else I know. It’s not that we just go in and learn songs. We never jam.

LT: I was making the drive

back from Knoxville early this morning listening to your work, and there were things that sounded very regulated and controlled, but then these unexpected rising moments would occur. How often do you think that more spontaneous things are incorporated into the creation process?

AK: By the time our stuff

goes to tape, barely anything is spontaneous. It’s stuff that may have happened more spontaneously over the process. Just like natural selection of ideas.

MS: A happy accident is always nice.

AK: But they normally happen before tape.

MS: And then you just hope

that you can remember what you did. And then it comes more by design.

AK: All of the things I really like

are accidental. It’s not just “Let’s go ABABC and then”-- it’s just something cool happens one day when we’re practicing, and then that’s endeared to the song and as a band we like playing it. And over the next two to six years…

MS: When does the trained

monkey part come in there?

AK: I think we have a lot of

design, more than the two other examples of what we’ve discussed so far (Free Jazz and Red Hands Project.) And we know what we sound like. We’re like, “Okay, let’s make the song in the spirit of what we do.”

LT: I hear that deliberateness;

it seems thoughtful. So I have questions about the desired effect, the psychology behind the rhythm. Are there rhythms that reoccur in your music?

AK: I think so. If you listen to our

records in order, no one record has the same one or even two patterns. But I can go back and think, “Oh, I sure liked doing that on this record,” and then the next one I won’t hear it so much, and the next one I won’t hear it at all. I hear a new pattern come up on the second record that is all over the third record. And then something that we don’t really do any more. The rhythms we use

in songs– the closer in time we write two songs, the more likely they are to have the same elements. But they get mixed up on the records. If we ever recorded a record in the same order we wrote it, it wouldn’t mean that all the fast songs would go together or all the slow songs would go together. I think the process would be more obvious if you looked at all the structures of the songs; if you sat down and played them all on one instrument you’d notice them all. Within a certain microsequence.

LT: When you have those

recurring patterns, those themes of sound, my belief is that you’ll get a feel of calmness, the way that mantras are repeated. Are there repeated actions in which you feel that you can find a sense of calmness?

MS: I think a lot of times, if you

think about things that you use to torture people, they can be repetitive too. I think you have to be looking for calmness for repetitive action to be calming. In a lot of early industrial and ambient music, for instance, I think that people were looking to disturb others through repetition. It doesn’t have to be a beat-worthy repetition; if it is just cyclical then it can be unsettling.

SR: So what do you think,

Andrew, do you have things that produce a calming effect?

AK: Yes, working in a laboratory, engaging in experiments. It’s all repetition; you have to get a data set for so many trials... When you experiment a lot of times you

have to do a hundred, a hundredfifty of the same thing over and over again just to get enough numbers for your data to mean something. Also, I silk-screened posters for a number of years; not professionally, I just loved doing it. I wasn’t a designer, I’m not any good at visual arts; I just loved the process. So eventually I found another artist; she would design stuff and I would print it. I’d just sit in the garage and do it over and over again, the five-step or six-step process, all weekend. Very soothing.

LT: How do you know the

separation; that is, how do you know that the repetition in your music is calming, rather than disturbing?

AK: I think it’s the context. If

someone has never seen us before... Well first of all, I think in our case, people may not like it, but I don’t think it would ever be unsettling; I think that everything is organized in such a way that it is impossible to pick out any one distinct thing from the cohesive rhythms that are produced. Overall, you may not like the effect, but it’s not unsettling, whereas like with other kinds of music that I was talking about, people will center on one thing and focus on it. Maybe they do put it to the background sometimes, or maybe the sheer fact that it is up front is the unsettling thing. It’s the context; I think that people are either looking to be unsettled or looking to be calmed. And I guess, that at least with this band, that’s not something that we’ve set out to do. Although, I ‘m sure we’ve done it to some people before.

AK: Yeah, exactly. It’s not the

kind of thing that you could probably get away with more than once, because then the repetition becomes nullifying.

Even though repetition is important, so is the basic tenet of pop music; that is tension resolution - tension - resolution. The chord progression that you do over and over again; you get to feel it resolve every time it comes around again. That gets to be very soothing. Even though we didn’t create a three or four chord progression that is tense and then resolves, this is something that exists in everybody that has ever listened to popular music and liked it a little bit. So we take advantage of it, or all music takes advantage of it, and if we repeat it, I imagine it can be a soothing thing.

SR: I don’t know if it actually

relates, but you know what I find really soothing sometimes? You know, Ken, in your old band, when you guys used to play one of your songs live, you used to have the build up, and it was just noise, so when you went back to the chord progression, it was even more–

AK: –Super? SR: It was repetition, a chord

progression that resolved. Every time it went around, it went around maybe eight or ten times, then it just went to a related chord, one that wasn’t in the progression. It sort of destroyed all the resolution that you had been trying to achieve...

LT: You were talking about

how you had one version that was recorded a specific way, and one version that was live. I was wondering, when you guys play your music, and perhaps in comparison to other bands as well, how similar is the live version to the recorded version? When things are simulated over and over, copied and repeated, how do they change from copy to copy?

AK: Most of them are pretty

similar, but the way we play things tends to change over time as we keep playing it, if just in tempo. Many times it’s intentional, when we are trying to find a way to play it better. But also, even though the songs change, it’s not as though they’re degrading or drifting on their own. Each time you start from scratch; you start over. It’s not like you have an idea in your mind of how you played it the night before, and you start from there. You start from scratch. I mean, you know how to play the song, but it’s more as if you remember how to play your idea of the song. Your idea of the song isn’t necessarily the same as from the nights before.

SR: If you’re copying, in a live

sense, to me it seems that what you’re doing is always trying to play towards the idea in your head that you consider to be the ideal performance of the song. I’m not saying that in an

AK: It was nice, because you

weren’t necessarily unsettled, but it was definitely...

MS: Maybe unexpected the first time...

immediate sense, but more in an abstract sense, this is what we’re trying to do. And generally speaking, it’s not a live scenario that I’m consulting. I’m thinking about source material; I’m thinking about “exhibit A,” and I’m using that as a means by which to perform a song. At the same time, in a live sense, you’re also kind of in the moment, with everybody else, trying to make what’s best out of the situation at hand, as opposed to really, ultimately, personally consulting some source material. You’re playing with each other, so if you sense rhythms going at a certain tempo at this time, then you have to try to be with that rhythm as opposed to trying to hold your own version of what that rhythm should be.

LT: That’s all about design. AK: We also record stuff and

creation of music every night, if it changes, if it follows the pattern that you’re thinking of...

intentionally degrade it, but not with an effect or equalization. We just keep sending it back to tape and kind of let it trash itself out. A lot of the drums had at least one round of that on the last record. They were too bright-sounding, so we just took them from one tape, ran them on another tape, then poured them back to the original tape. Some of them we did a couple of times, because every time you do it, it flattens everything a bit; it makes all the sharp edges harder to discern. So that’s kind of the same thing, but it doesn’t happen by accident.

LT: Well, I guess you could think

LT: You sound like you know

AK: So I don’t know about the

of an album as a photograph of the music, or you could think of a live performance as a manifestation of this thing that you made that was recorded, but I don’t know if you were saying that there is always this ultimate that both were going after.

AK: To a certain extent, I guess

everybody’s doing that. I think that there is definitely, inset within everybody’s getting on stage, a perfection that everybody is going for. I think that’s certain. If there are variants in what happens, I think that it is because, ultimately, you have to move towards each other.

simulacra.

AK: No, I thought that was baby formula.

LT: Did you say baby formula?

Eww. No, it’s a whole other concept. The final result is that the simulation becomes the reality. Baudrillard’s really negative about simulation. For instance, he uses Disneyland as the simulation of American culture. He’s really negative about it, but a lot of postmodern artists embrace the idea of simulation. So that’s good, when the process of the copying becomes the actual reality.

AK: I didn’t know about that. That’s hot.

AK= Andrew Kenny, SR= Scott Ripple, MS= Mark Smith, LT=Liz Tapp

Dixie Dirt is (clockwise from top left) Kat Brock guitar and lead vocals Pete Bryan drums Angela Santos guitar and vocals Brad Carruth bass and keyboard photographs by Amanda Anderson polaroid type study by Bryan Baker

The Cat Power comparisons exist, but someone said “more like Cat Power without the affectations.” “Slowed-down Sonic Youth” is another one. That was supposed to be derogatory, but it was hard to tell why. A year or two ago, when a friend was singing Dixie Dirt praises, I begged him “just say something bad about them.” My friend answered, “You’d say they just sound like Modest Mouse.” The comparisons, more than most, are inconclusive. As hard as it is to put a finger on some sense of style, actually getting Dixie Dirt recordings in hand to figure that out can even be harder. But it’s worth it. The reason, the one thing that feels accurate for me to say, is that it’s not just a spectator event. Neither seeing a Dixie Dirt performance or listening at home alone feels like a one-way interaction. It’s a give and take, and it feels like you’ve done something. That you’ve learned or felt and not only watched or heard. Dixie Dirt music, regardless of what tone it takes at any particular time, is always pretty. At it’s most gravelly it’s still pretty. Kat Brock’s vocals sometimes wail, but even in those times, they find a shyness of sorts. And Angela can play guitar. Dixie Dirt work slowly, but within the next few months there will be two releases, an EP called Small Town Crisis and an LP that is not yet titled. Both will be available from their web site www.dixiedirt.us. Between changes in lineup and rounds of recording, it’s been a while since their first album Springtime Is for the Hopeless was put out. But the release of these two recordings and an emerging project The Whole Fantastic World, from previous drummer Simon Lynn, both announce a new season of productivity. This conversation is loosely about a Walter Benjamin character called the “rag picker.” It’s about having to rag pick, having to work and scavenge and find. It’s also about the compilation and assemblage that occurs because of that working process. And all in all, it seemed appropriate. LT

This interview with Kat Brock and Brad Carruth of Dixie Dirt was recorded January --- 2004 by Liz Tapp

Liz Tapp: Walter Benjamin had this idea. He was studying all the people and things he would run into on the streets in France. He started to gather archetypes of people: the gambler, the aristocrat, the rag picker, etc. The rag picker became really important because he represented a foil for the bourgeoisie, whose leisure had made them complacent. This figure became relevant to a contemporary concept of the creative idea because the nature of rag picking involved compiling and scavenging. And from compiling and scavenging we have concepts like collage and homage that drive modern creation. It’s also pretty relevant in terms of socio-political economics and for its relationship with the state of complacency. Because it says a lot about having to dig for, work for, scavenge for what you’re after. My first question is, in thinking about complacency, are there any main ideas that you want to activate with your music? Are their feelings or ideas you want to introduce or motivate people toward?

Kat Brock: Yeah. One is finding something more than complacency in the place you call home. I’ve been around a lot of complacent people, and it gets really frustrating. It’s contagious, so, I feel it periodically as well. And I think that when I was writing lyrics and ideas for this record, I was feeling those issues of complacency. I wanted to leave this town as much as anybody else who says they want to “get out.” So, I guess the emotions that I want people to feel are the need to wake up, to be frustrated, and to do something about it. Either get over it or leave.

Liz Tapp: In the construction of songs, do you think that most of the time you attempt that activation on a direct, interpersonal level or on a more over-all, general level? Are you talking to a specific person or to society/community as a whole? Kat Brock: Very personal. It’s very strange, because I think that all of us were personally feeling a lot of the themes of the record, and I think that’s why we were able to pull it off and make it feel personal. Brad Carruth: And there are broader songs, as well as more personal songs. Some of the songs are really about this town, and others aren’t but might still seem like it. Like “Lipstick” is really personal, and “Parachute” is really personal. But on “Small Town,” and a lot of the instrumental stuff, what you get from it is up to you.

LT: You talk about it being really important that you all feel some connection to the themes for them to translate properly,

and that’s another thing I want to talk about. In relation to ideas of compilation and coming together, could you talk about how you come together, how you compile as a group, and how you work off of each other when you’re playing?

BC: Every person works off of every other person simultaneously. There aren’t solos, really, and we don’t take turns. We pretty much do everything all together all the time. We don’t have a day where one person writes one thing and then a day when one person writes another. It’s usually that we all dive into it, and if we don’t come out of it with something, then the next day we just keep going. It’s hardly ever just two people working on one thing. Although Kat and Angela do that sometimes just so that they can bring something different, they’ll end up changing everything they’ve written originally because of something that Pete and I will bring to it. KB: And a lot of time, as for ideas and feelings in songs, we’re nearly always on the same page. And if for some reason

someone is not on the same page, it’s almost like it doesn’t feel right to keep going, but that doesn’t really ever happen much. Lyrically and musically, I feel like we’re all kind of there together all the time. I don’t know. I feel like when Brad sings “Parachute,” he feels it as much as I feel it when I sing it. And I wrote the lyrics. But I still feel like as though there’s something he feels deep down, and that’s why it works, and that’s why we can all sing together. And it’s the same with what we’re playing.

BC: Sometimes we’ll start out with this little two minute thing, and by the time it’s ten minutes long we can’t remember the beginning of it because there is so much compiling and so many parts that don’t seem like parts once they’re a whole. But when it is still in parts, half the time there are so many parts that we get lost in the song while we’re writing it, and the song kind of takes us over rather than the other way around. KB: The song just kind of takes the spirit. LT: The process of creative evolution seems really important to you guys. BC: The songs evolve over several months, usually. We’ll write a song and know something’s just not right, and then two months later we’ll work on it again. And the song just pops up out of nowhere and grabs us. LT: When you think about that evolution, how do you feel that it’s changed from

your first release to these upcoming releases? Do you think about it specifically at all?

BC: Well, we work well together, even more so as time goes on. We just know each other better and know how one another play better. I mean, we change frequently, all the time -KB: We’re very moody. It’s God’s honest truth. We’re going to play a set tonight that’s completely different from anything we’ve ever played before.

BC: And that’s why we want to do it. KB: We wrote it out in ten hours because we wanted something completely

fresh and new, and you may never hear any of it ever again. It’s just a rock opera we wrote. We tend not to hold onto certain things very much. Personally and musically. And I think it shows in the music. It makes me think that we should record everything, because a lot of good material could be lost. The music and how we play it are constantly evolving and changing.

BC: And it’s leaving this trail of songs that are just gone, and we can’t play them anymore. KB: Yeah, we can’t play the songs on the first album. If you asked me to sing the chorus, I’d have no idea.

BC: It kind of comes down to what we’re feeling at the time. If we try to work on those songs then we stop halfway through, because we’re not enjoying them. We’re not trying to get a big song bank. KB: And that’s the problem with the records that are coming out. We’re going to start writing again next month whenever we get some more free time. And it’s going to be different.

LT: In the process of making music and holding the idea that it will keep

moving after the moment in which you are playing, when do you get a feeling of success or accomplishment?

KB: When we finish a song in our rehearsal space, and we’ve gotten it down. BC: When you play it through the first time, and you get it, and you all sit down and hear it for the first time. Listening to your album for the first time is totally different. When you’re the listener instead of the supplier, that’s really satisfying sometimes.

The Pilot Light supporting local and

KB: For me the records are more for other people. I don’t give a

shit really about putting these records out, but I know it’s necessary. I’d rather not put these records out. I mean, I definitely want that kind of archive and that kind of proof that we’ve written these songs. But, I don’t consider that for us. But that’s part of it. And that’s why we’re not in a rush to get these records out. So the successful part is not the records, it’s the songs and being able to perform them, and not feeling like you’re going through the motions when you’re performing.

independent music

www.thepilotlight.com 106 E Jackson Ave, Knoxville, TN tel 865.524.8188 Wednesday • April 7 • 9pm ROBOTNIKA with TBA 18+ $5

LT: Going back to this idea of not being complacent and of trying

Friday • April 9 • 9pm TYLER KEITH AND THE PREACHER’S KIDS with TBA 18+ $5

KB: I think complacency. Life in general, with the music, with

Saturday • April 10 • 9pm MANBAND with GHOST TO FALCO 18+ $5

to compile everything and working together, what do you think you as a band or these albums as a release are a foil against? What can they contrast with?

everything. I don’t ever want to be complacent. I think it is the nastiest word. It’s scary, and it creates a domino effect. Before you know it, you’re in a hole somewhere and can’t find your way out. It’s the beginning of depression I think.

BC: I think we’re working against a lot. We practice almost 20 hours a week and try to keep busy when we’re not practicing. There are so many people not doing anything. And we’ve been them. I’ll find myself starting to slip back into that, and I’ll go to band practice. That room is our little hole where nothing from the outside is going to bother us, or if it does it’s gone in a few minutes. Sounds silly . . .

Wednesday • April 14 • 9pm KING MISSILE with BRADFORD REED AND HIS AMAZING PENCILINA 18+ $7 Thursday • April 15 • 9pm TAIWAN DEATH with the JADED SET and THIS WITCH’S SEED 18+ $5

KB: But there can’t be negativity there.

BC: And we’ll spend 15 minutes venting and letting each other know what’s going on; but it’s not a counseling thing. There’s no “Oh, it’s going to be alright.” It’s more like “Get your shit out, let’s do this.” KB: I think that is the biggest thing.

Saturday • April 17 • 9pm the STRUGGLERS with BURD EARLY and TBA 18+ $5 Tuesday • April 20 • 9pm DEERHOOF 18+ $7 Wednesday • April 21 • 9pm VOLTAGE with TBA 18+ $5

LT: A foil against the outside world of complacency? KB: And against yourself. I think it’s very easy to get locked into

Thursday • April 22 • 9pm OLD TIME RELIJUN 18+ $6

simple routines, and it’s not satisfying. By doing the same thing every day, you get locked into the motions. I don’t want to do the same thing every day. So I don’t, and I think that translates in the music. We don’t do the same thing every show, and with the records too, that’s just one version of a song you will never hear the same again.

Friday • April 23 • 9pm the JUAN PROPHET ORGANIZATION with BLACKGRASS and REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM 18+ $5

BC: With the two records that are coming out, some of the same songs are on both records. And they’re all recorded pretty much around the same time. But they’ll sound totally different. And that’s a foil; that’s how we are. One version emphasizes the differences of other.

Saturday • April 24 • 9pm LOW SKIES 18+ $5 May 2 CERBERUS SHOAL and THE WHOLE FANTASTIC WORLD 18+ $5

8th saturday LIVE MUSIC ACCOMPANYMENT DEVIL MUSIC ENSEMBLE (Music to Silent Film: Big Stakes by Clifford S. Elfelt) 18+ $6

Paul Guest

WATER How I wanted to graze with my hand the armored hides of sturgeons aslosh in their shallow tanks I did not tell you, nor did I think to say how the garfish, sentry-like in their dull brown orbits, with their pen-shaped snouts skimming food, were named by someone who knew that gar meant spear in Old English. I forgot my place in the story I idly told you, as we rose in the elevator, as your hands found in my neck a knot your fingers could untie with ease. Love, you know that language failed me early with you: in my mouth you found a hidden stammer. In all the days since, what have I said that was right? So little. But know: when we stood on one side of thick glass to watch a world of water ignore our entire lives, I kissed your fingers and each one in that light was blue.

Memories of Color Paul Guest is a poet living in Chattanooga, TN. His book The Resurrection of

the Body and the Ruin of the World is worth tracking down (for more info contact us online). Guest’s poems feel a lot like memories. They don’t feel like someone recounting a memory, per se, but more like actually experiencing that past history, suddenly finding yourself then. These are some questions the poet answered about his history with color.

LT: Do you have any early significant memories of color? PG: This is an interesting question for me, though maybe not in terms of color: I never seem to be able to formulate memories in terms of ‘earliest.’ Having been asked before what my earliest memory is, I’ve always drawn a blank. So remembering a specific color association would be difficult for me. I do remember in elementary school, the whole school was polled for eye color and I wrote down blue-grey. Later, when the graph was posted there was just one blue-grey. A dork, even then. LT: Are there colors that you remember noticing a lot as a child? PG: The colors of spring. What was it Frost wrote, “Nature’s first green is gold”?

LT: Is there any history of color that you associate with important people or places? Is anyone a range of browns or blues for example? PG: Sure. Someone I once loved is all lilac. In poems I wrote at the time, you could find any number of references. It was a way of speaking to her without always speaking about her. Why lilac? The color is in some ways incidental. It became a kind of shorthand for me then.

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PAINTINGS OF CHUCK

Gabe Williams

ChuckDraperGabeWilliams discuss their newest paintings with LIZ TAPP and NICK DUPEY The two painters are graduating seniors at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Chuck Draper can be contacted at goldandmean@hotmail.com and Gabe Williams can be contacted at Gabe-Williams@utc.edu.

Liz Tapp:

To start, how are these series of paintings different or the same from your normal or previous themes?

Chuck Draper: Well, Gabe has been working figuratively for a while. This is actually my first time doing figurative work in a legitimate sort of fashion. Gabe Williams:

I guess figuratively, the semester previous to this work, is the first time I’ve engaged myself in “painting.” Usually I’m tracing and filling in, working with a more flat surface instead of actually building layers and making my own marks.

GW: Thematically, these are really similar to what I’ve been working on, which is engaging myself in a cultural dialogue with fashion in particular. I’ve been working on a critique of our consumer culture. The idea with these paintings is that the figure becomes an “every man,” not Chuck as Chuck, but as whoever would be viewing the original ad. It deals with how the original ad operates as a mirror—in the sense that, when you look at them in a magazine, the purpose behind them placing the ad in front of you is not to see this person wearing these clothes but to see yourself in them. Taking Chuck and putting him in that position kind of subverts the original ad. The fact that he looks back at you as just another personality, other than what was originally intended, rearranges the equation. LT:

Chuck, would you say that in your self-portrait paintings you present yourself as significantly yourself or less than?

GW: I would say he was kind of a hyper-Chuck. CD:

I hope it comes off as a caricature; it can’t be taken too seriously. My paintings deal a lot with a patient/doctor relationship, and doctor and patient both being the same. Whereas Gabe’s deal with fashion and consumerism, and mine deal with an institution. Particularly, for me, it’s about architecture as an institution, the painting field as an institution. They deal with those clinical aspects of me, but I’m less dramatic than the Chuck presented.

Nick Dupey: I want to know why you use yourself in this role as being clinical?

CD:

I’m pretty clinical, but not to that degree. There’s kind of a presence in those paintings that doesn’t extend to my life, something I fetishize.

LT: Can you explain how this series of paintings relate to architecture or that sort of institution?

Gabe Williams

CD: I think they deal with institution on a much broader level than simply architecture, or painting, or engineering, or poetry. There are facets of this doctor/patient relationship in any field. I find them kind of reprehensible, and on the other hand I kind of adore them. LT: Concerning Chuck’s paintings—let’s talk about the reproducibility factor, because they tend to emulate silkscreens. How is that significant or not? GW: They might look reproducible, but his process is a meticulous thing with no real way to replicate. CD:

I mean, it takes a little while to cut out. It’s no secret, basically I tape the whole canvas, project an image, and then pretty much draw with a knife and then fill in the blanks.

Chuck Draper

CD: The attraction for me comes from ideas of mechanical

reproduction. I like that it looks reproducible, just like modern architecture of the twenties that looks really industrial but is actually quite custom designed. It’s kind of a false representation of something modern in the sense that it’s reproducible. It’s a fraud and I like that.

LT: When we think about reproducible art and faking that reproducibility, and this sense of modernity, how much do you think these paintings function as or emulate icons/ pop-art iconography? CD: I think Gabe’s paintings are non-reproducible because of painting technique, but I think the images he chooses are reproducible. Just in the sense that you turn a page and they’re reproduced again. You throw a magazine away and another one comes in your mailbox. GW:

That stuff obviously links itself to being iconic. Just in the fact that you can open any magazine and see the same kind of pose. It’s automatically that pose, an iconic pose because of the nature of fashion photography—even without a tag—of Nautica or Ralph Lauren, you can tell the difference between a fashion pose and a click and shoot pose.

LT: So there’s this disposability of media sources—in the media sources you’re interacting with—how is the idea of the “fashion” or the “fashionable” dealt with? What judgments are being made about the idea of “fashion?” CD: Directly, the fashion industry doesn’t really have much to

do with my paintings. The character is clad in thick glasses and suits, it’s more of an icon to a time period or a reference point to me.

GW:

sixties.

It’s also like the way two color process worked in the

ND:

Your paintings are so graphically oriented to the idea of fashion, that it’s hard to deny it—it’s sort of a subheading.

CD:

There are only four elements to these paintings. They’re the psychological, the figure, a geometric element, and also the clothes I’m wearing—this costume. In that sense they’re 25% fashion. They don’t elevate fashion or have much discourse with fashion.

LT: Except for the fact that they’re “hot” and they look more

poppy, and deal with commodity more than other things you’ve done.

CD: I normally make a lot of quiet paintings and these are loud. ND: Can I make a point of saying that these paintings, that Chuck is making, are probably the most sterile, but most expressive paintings I’ve seen him make. They look very sterile and seem hip, and they really do function as graphic pieces. They’re pleasing and easy to look at, but they also function, in my opinion, as almost cathartic expressive pieces. GW: I think that kind of accessibility and that kind of hipness almost undermines the pieces. Placed in context of Chuck’s body of work they make a lot of sense, but outside of that it’s hard— CD: I was really sick of making paintings that everyone said “oh they’re cool, but they’re really cool when he explains them.” I wanted— Chuck Draper

Chuck Draper

Gabe Williams

GW: I think in the past that meant “Oh, I really don’t understand them.” LT: zI’m interested in you wanting to make them exist on a

more direct or immediately superficial level so they could be read more immediately by the viewer, which is a lot of what fashion deals with.

CD: I’d made sterile paintings for a little while, and decided to make something that had sort of a mid-range accessibility. Gabe and I have been talking a lot about superficiality and its link to seduction. He deals with superficiality, as far as fashion being superficial; mine deal with it on another level. GW: Fashion is almost secondary to me, but it’s the easiest way to bring in social critique with figurative work. It’s a means to get at how consumerism affects the individual. Because fashion, as consumerism, is most readily used against the individual. LT: How does that affect the painting? When using the medium

of fashion your painting actually becomes fashionable, is it successful or unsuccessful?

GW:

I think it becomes both in a sense. Any point I try to make is doomed to fail—any time you deal with visual culture, you’re dealing with something that is easily co-optible. The visual statement is always false. It’s always going to be read in so many different ways.

CD: But even at the risk of being fashionable, that’s your personal endeavor. Once it’s read in another way, it’s kind of out of your hands. Your initial intention is really what is at stake. LT: Would you hope that your paintings would be considered fashionable, or terribly unfashionable?

GW: When it comes down to it, I think every artist desires to be accepted— ND: Then it is successful. If what you painted is a sort of commodity art. If it comes across in terms of being co-opted that is success, in a postmodern medium, in a post-post modern ultra modern medium--that is success. GW: That’s because anything that is in any sort of spotlight is co-opted. When there is any sort of success, there is going to be someone outside of that, a certain sect, who views it as something that they don’t have, something that they want, so it’s already— ND:

What the fashion industry wants, what the magazine industry wants when they’re turning “it” into what everyone wants. Finding the desire of every American, they want it to effect you, and everybody who reads these things. And we read it. We’re not denying it.

LT: Finally, when your paintings are dealing with fashion and commodity, where does it stop and what are the repercussions of introducing too much fashion in your art? Are there any more? CD:

Fashion and art are peculiar because they’re not commodities.

GW: No, they’re both commodities.

Ron Buffington is a painter and teacher. He is currently head of the painting program at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Aside from painting courses, his curriculum includes a color theory course based on Albers’ studies and a course on post-modern art history. Buffington’s own work involves a study of structures as well as the deceptive force of color.

A DECONSTRUCTION OF COLOR RON BUFFINGTON The figure of Thoth takes shape and takes its shape from the very thing it resists and substitutes for. […] In distinguishing himself from his opposite, Thoth also imitates it, becomes its sign and representative, obeys it and conforms to it, replaces it, by violence if need be. […] Sly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play. […] Thoth is never present. Nowhere does he appear in person. No being-there can properly be his own. Every act of his is marked by this unstable ambivalence. –Jacques Derrida, Dissemination There is no such thing as colour, only coloured materials. –Jean Dubuffet, “L’Homme du commun a l’ouvrage”

THE MATTER OF COLOR ”Color deceives continually,” opens Josef Albers’ canonical text Interaction of Color. He elaborates: “Colors present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related to changing neighbors and changing conditions.” According to Albers, this makes color “the most relative medium in art.” Albers contends that a color is “never seen as it really is---as it physically is” (Albers 1). Students of Albers learned this lesson (as have generations of color theory students since) through a simple, though endlessly fascinating, experiment: the placement of two samples of the same color into contrasting color fields, thus producing a “psychic effect” (the illusion of chromatic opposition in the original samples) at odds with “physical fact” (Albers 8). For Albers color was indeed a joker. Like Thoth, the mythical god of writing, color was devious, pure perceptual play. Albers’ entire career as a teacher was dedicated to demonstrating color’s instability and relativity. He designed exercises for his students that made opaque colors appear to become translucent, that made the physical boundary between two colors appear to soften or vanish, that saturated the light receptors of the retina and produced spectacular after-images, on and on. Taken as a whole, Interaction of Color might be understood as a systematic attempt to dematerialize color, and by extension to attribute color’s precociousness to its ethereality. For Albers nothing was more threatening to this idea than paint itself.

Albers encouraged the student of color to employ colored paper over paint, insisting on the elimination of “disturbing changes caused by varying application of paint.” Albers almost seemed to abhor the prospect of pigment mixing, both in his own work (he famously used paint directly from the tube, readymade color, as it were, in lieu of mixing paint for the Homage to the Square paintings) and in the work of his students (he warns students about the hazards of “brush marks and strokes,” about the frustrations one encounters when a color changes upon drying, about the interference of “hard and soft boundaries,” even about the “difficult, time-consuming and tiring” labor involved in mixing paint) (Albers 7). Even with colored paper there were “disturbances” to be “carefully avoided.” In order to produce the “delicate” color effects Albers desired, his students learned to inlay color samples (to place the colored papers “within each other instead of on top of each other”), a procedure Albers calls intarsia. If his goal was indeed to avoid tedious labor, he could not have devised a set of instructions more contrary to this end than the following: For precision fitting, so that the joints will not show, the papers to be inlaid are formed simultaneously in a single cutting. The finer the knife (best, the thinnest razor blade), the thinner the paper, and the harder the ground to cut on (preferably glass), the better the fitting will be and the less the joints will show. It is also essential that no glue seep in to mark the joints. As the selection of the papers here demands patience, so their presentation demands skill and cleanliness (Albers 65). All in all Albers treats paint (and in general the physical, material conditions within which color must always be experienced) as a dangerous supplement to color. Would that Albers had the same esteem for paint as the contemporary chemist Philip Ball, who, in his remarkable book Bright Earth, reminds the color theorist that ”painters need color to be embodied in stuff” (Ball 49). Ball attributes his appreciation for the material basis of color (which he calls the “substance of color”) to his education: “I have been trained as a chemist…. I relish paint and pigment as materials, with appearances, smells, textures, and names that entice and intoxicate” (Ball viii). Ball argues that the material basis of art has been neglected historically (though it may be more appropriate to say that it has been suppressed), and he notes a tendency in Western culture to “separate inspiration from substance.” Ball laments this state of affairs: To deny that color chemistry can have any possible effect on “great painting” is, in the end, to claim that great art is all in the head and cheapened by the sad necessity to reconstruct it from mere matter. (Ball 11) Ultimately Ball insists that “talk of color needs to be rooted in the physical substances that provide it” (Ball 18). And this is precisely what he proceeds to do throughout the remainder of Bright Earth, to trace the material basis of each and every pigment in common usage, both historically and currently. The crux of Ball’s argument is that pigment is matter, and as such it has mass and occupies space. In this regard, color is physically present; unlike Thoth, color appears “in person” (even as it conjures something absent, someone not-in-attendance) and “beingthere” (along with being-elsewhere) is one of its essential attributes. Color doesn’t simply “conform” to a pigmented surface. Rather, the material substance of a surface is pigmented. Color literally inhabits (resides within) a surface.

COLOR AT THE THRESHOLD OF CLOTHING It scarcely needs to be said what an absurd gesture it is to adorn a dress with a color chart. The peculiar nature of Liz Tapp’s color chart dresses doesn’t arise from recontextualization per se. The color chart is, after all, without context, or rather it is its own context, its own autonomous realm. What is most uncanny about these dresses is the way in which they disclose the architectural metaphor at work in both color and clothing. It is interesting to note that clothing designers draw a clear distinction between the inside and the outside of clothing. Issey Miyake’s mandate that “the outside of clothing should be perceived visually and the inside sensually” could just as well be applied to a discussion of color and pigment (Blaser 13). And as Tapp points out, clothing, after it is worn, is haunted by its wearer, “imbued with its wearer’s aroma, shed hair and sloughed skin” (Princethal 143); color, by analogy, is nothing if not haunted by the physicality of pigment, by its “smells” and “textures.” Finally, what is clothing if not a supplement to the wearer’s body, a kind of second skin (or, to follow Tapp’s analogy, a “shell”)? Inversely, where does color reside if not within the pigmented surface? Tapp’s dresses bear emblems of what might be called the liminal condition of clothing. One dress features a replica of one of Albers’ more recognizable Homage paintings consisting of a series of yellow squares nested within increasingly green squares. Because of the way the image had to be constructed in fabric (which behaves differently as a material, indeed as material, than paint or colored paper), the alignment of the corners of each square in Albers’ composition is literalized, rendered in material form, which serves to both reinforce (by creating lines of recession) as well as undermine (by dividing the colored planes into discrete bands) the perceptual qualities of Albers’ painting. Suffice it to say that a color theory class could never be conducted with fabric, at least not one of the conventional sort (Albers would certainly never have tolerated its “interference”), because of its assertiveness as matter. If, as Fritz Neumeyer contends, clothing disguises the body “in order to explain” it, then there may be no more fitting a representation of this condition than the color chart (Blaser 9). Liz Tapp’s color chart dresses remind us that what is at stake with clothing, as with color, is nothing less than spacing; if color occupies space, then clothing is precisely a space to be occupied.

Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975 Ball, Philip. Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001 Blaser, Werner. Ed. Habit Habitat: Christa da Carouge. Lars Muller: 2000 Princethal, Nancy. “Willard Gallery, New York.” Art News. Feb. 1985

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Interaction in Color— a clothing based on the studies of Josef Albers

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Architecture. Clothing. Constructs, shells, skins to be filled. The difference between the two— immediacy and vicinity. When architecture encloses us, it leaves a space between. When clothing surrounds, it touches our skin. Clothing is personal, too personal, and when it attacks us, as a force, as an assimilating industry, the effects are serious. We do not blame the industry or the principles of architecture for skyscrapers. But we are angry at the form of clothing, at the idea of “fashion,” for its extremes—for the skyscraper “industry of fashion.” Clothing involves the extremities of design. It exists as both an oppressive, commodifying force and, also, a most liberating, personal experience. Can we believe in clothing that liberates, that is infused with its wearer, while we critique an industry that conforms, converts, assimilates? I believe in the metaphor of clothing-- As a shell, as a skin, as a history of femininity. I believe in its ability to redefine and redesign. Photographs by Caleb Wilson and Marcus Tanner Dresses worn by Tapp, Farron Kilburn, Rachel Wili

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Geremy from The Fever. We’re also working on collecting music that’s being made locally, so feel free to send recordings or info to the address in our mission statement. We hope, in a following edition, to involve reviews and