I AM A ROCKETSHIP

[ Interview with I Am a Rocketship by Diego Centurión. Photographs: Katja Bjorn, Alison Lindley. ]

COSMIC INDIEPOP WITH I AM A ROCKETSHIP

We’re meeting this Atlanta, Georgia duo for the second time: we first spoke in issue number 53 of April 2019 about their album, "Mind Graffiti". On April 30 of this year they released their third album, “Ghost Stories”, and we wanted to talk to them again during these strange times.

Link to the previous interview:

https://issuu.com/revistathe13th/docs/the13th_n_53

Hi guys, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. I would like to know how and where does this quarantine find you?

ERIC: Hi, Diego. It’s great to hear from you again. We are in Atlanta and doing well: we are both healthy and are lucky enough to still have jobs. It’s been strange of course, and our hearts go out to those who are suffering. Every crisis ends, but this has been terrible for so many people.

I think we are facing a great paradigm shift: today music is lived a lot through the networks, through the "lives" in the networks or reissue of unpublished material or videos ... How do you see this moment?

LINDA: That’s interesting. It is an opportunity to think, and to create. And music is a way to process in some way what we are going through now. I believe that in ten years we will listen to music from this time and hear the worry, the hope, the emotions of this time. But music is about people sharing and connecting, and it’s not the same online. When people share a feeling, it’s physical, and we will be glad to perform again.

How are you doing as I Am a Rocketship while in quarantine?

ERIC: We have a small rehearsal room in the city where we meet to rehearse and try new ideas. And I’m always writing songs in my head, while L E keeps notebooks with lyrics. The songs seem to come even faster now, honestly.

Before we talk about the new album, there is a beautiful song that has come out and is not on the album and has a beautiful video. “Shooting Star”. Tell us about that track.

ERIC: I was sitting outside drinking coffee and thinking how the coronavirus had left us in new worlds, often alone. Then I imagined a lone astronaut, orbiting the Earth. Below, there is a virus taking the human race away, and he dreams of being rescued by angels, but each angel is only a shooting star, and he finally is told to turn his spaceship into the sun. The song wrote itself, and we recorded it the same day.

Why wasn't it included on the new

album?

L E: Sadly, the album had been finished, and we even had the CDs then. We decided to put it out anyway as soon as we had recorded it, as a sort of musical postcard to all the people we can’t see now. But the good news is, we have since written three more songs for a new collection, and it will include Shooting Star.

Returning to last year's interview, you told me that the difference between "Mission Control" (2016) and "Mind Grafitti" (2019) was that you had more confidence. What would be the difference between "Mind Grafitti" and "Ghost Stories"?

L E: I’m not sure. Mind Grafitti was hard work, and we spent a lot of time thinking about how we wanted the album to sound. For Ghost Stories we kind of went the other way, and just let songs happen. They could be any style, any subject. If we liked it, we recorded it, even if the album would sound a little mixed up.

A year passed from the previous album and from what I perceive, in this album you vary your sound a little, you expand it. What happened in a year for this change?

ERIC: Maybe we are still learning who we are as a band. When we started, we wanted to be a pop band. Not pop like Rhianna, but simple songs that are melodic and not trying to change the world. With Mind Grafitti, we found a little more darkness, and new musical

muscles. Ghost Stories I think is us feeling free to be anything we wish. The melodies are still there, I hope, but now we are willing to try anything we want, and just be ourselves.

I've read that the song "Ghost Stories" is one of the first songs you've written for the album and that they thought of an EP first. Tell us that story.

LINDA: Eric got this old guitar, and immediately wrote that song and shared it with me. I really liked it, and suggested we add a few more unfinished ideas we had. But the recording went really fast, and we didn’t want to stop, it was fun. We actually recorded some songs that are not on the album. Maybe they can be on the next one.

Tell us, how is the support of the album from the quarantine?

ERIC: Our little album means nothing compared to the loss people are experiencing. But for supporting the album, I don’t know. We had started booking a tour of the UK with a wonderful artist, Ekat Bork, who also has a new album coming. There were also some US dates, and maybe a European tour in the fall. That’s all gone, so we are just playing live on Facebook some, like everyone else. We did play a show for the neighbors once, and it was beautiful. People came out to listen, staying two meters apart, and it was a very special evening.

Today it is difficult to talk about plans ... but when everything returns to normal, what do you plan to do?

LINDA: Everything may not return to normal. It’s difficult to imagine now how this will change us. It may be better, but very strange. I’m sure somehow we will be performing again, and maybe the European dates will happen. People will always need to share music, love, and ideas, to feel connected. We will

be part of it.

And to end this interview, thank you for your time. Where can you find the music for I Am A Rocketship?

ERIC: We’re on Apple Music, Spotify, all the digital places. If you want to get our albums, we love Bandcamp, and you can get them on our website, iamarocketship.com

Thank You!!!!

LE: Thank you, Diego. Stay well and be good!

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Para escuchar los programas on-line: https://ar.ivoox.com/es/podcast-testigos-del-crepusculo

JUST MUSIC

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www.mixcloud.com/fmpagliaro/edición-07/ www.mixcloud.com/fmpagliaro/edición-08/

[ Interview with Martin Bisi by Pepe Navarro. Photographs: Nicole Capobianco. ]

MARTIN BISI: FROM SONIC YOUTH, SWANS AND BRIAN ENO TO NEW 'SOLSTICE' LP

A renowned producer, sound engineer, and musician, Martin Bisi has been a central figure in New York music history for the past four decades. Founding BC Studio in Brooklyn in 1981 with the help of Brian Eno and Bill Laswell, Bisi recorded innovative music by these artists here, as well as Sonic Youth, Swans, John Zorn, Herbie Hancock, Helmet, Africa Bambaataa, Dresden Dolls, Unsane, Cop Shoot Cop, Human Impact, JG Thirlwell, US Maple, White Hills, Fab Five Freddy, and many others. Taking advantage of the release of a new single from his latest album "Solstice" (2019), we contacted him and we were able to ask him some questions ...

Hi Martin! Thanks for your time and for agreeing to do this interview. I would like to know how and where does

this quarantine find you? Luckily, I planned anyway to take this time and do more songwriting, and overdubbing on some existing recordings. I luckily wasn’t on tour when the lockdowns hit. I also continue projects, remotely that are in the mixing phase, though mixing remotely is more time consuming

I have read that your mother has been a classical music pianist and your father liked to play Tango on the piano as a hobby. Beyond who asks is an Argentine, which leads to love tango as a musical identity from birth. I am not going to ask anything about tango. The question is about the music that was heard at home as a child. That you remember?

Tango was not really appreciated by my mother, given that she was immersed in the classical world, so was rarely heard in the house - i saw my father play tango only once, but it’s a strong memory. With contemporary music, my mother was more interested in emulating classical guitar on piano. She was good friends with Andre Segovia, and an Argentinian composer, Alberto Ginastera who wrote pieces for both of them. Her name was Marisa Regules.

In your way of working, do you see something that your parents have taught you? Somehow all those years of going to the Philharmonic and opera with my parents, made me tuned into an orchestral quality, maybe also a certain drama - there is after all opera singing on my last 2 records: Solstice and Ex Nihilo. I also think hearing hours of my mother’s piano playing, from my room as i fell asleep, tuned my ear to certain sonics.

Within a studio you have worked with many artists, including Brian Eno, John

Zorn, Afrika Bambaata, Sonic Youth, Iggy Pop, White Zombie, Cop Shot Cop, Swans, Angels of Light, Lydia Lunch, Jarboe, Helmet, Human Impact, among many. What anecdote can you tell us that you have lived in a studio?

On the day that i brought Eno to see the studio for the 1st time, when we were waiting in the subway train station to go back to Manhattan, it was wet outside and Eno commented on the pattern our feet had left on the ground - that it was a record of our time there. There were a lot of these observations by Eno. He was very into related systems - comparing maybe weather to process in music. It seems like some of this went into the cards he made at that time -Oblique Strategies. I should also mention that when Iggy Pop came to the studio on St Patrick’s day, he was dressed head to toe in bright green, including a tall ‘top hat’.

Can you explain us how was you start with this new project? The latest project, my Solstice album, was recorded in different places, with different people. So it was a journey. And even the overall concept was revealed to me only half way through - mainly that it seemed divided into 2 modes.

How was meeting Scott Kiernan and how this collaboration starts?

I’d seen several of Scott’s installations and events over a few years. He also did a music video for the band Tidal Channel, who have a member Genevieve Fernworthy, who also plays on Solstice. Seeing that video made me think Scott would be good for “Let It Fall”, because he has a futurist vibe -which i wanted mixing with something more primal, but is also quite psychedelic.

As a witness of the famous

New York scene. Can you tell us a bit about those years? Those years were kind of a chaos. It’s amazing that with far fewer people in New York, in those music and art scenes, how much was going on, almost daily, nightly. And the scenes had some dramatic differences, take the so-called Downtown experimental scene, and Hardcore, or the sexier No Wave, or Glam Punk, and of course dance music. And even Ball drag culture in Harlem. Maybe because New York was so empty, these things were more visible, and you could see that they actually rubbed shoulders.

Much of what we heard on "Solstice" is based on improvisation. How was the process to find the right musicians?

All the musicians in the improvisations, were people i was already playing with for written songs. For instance, the improvisation that was the foundation of “Let It Fall” was recorded at the same session as the songs “Ode To Freddie

Gray” and “Waves On My Mind”. And the drummer who helped me build “You’re Sun” through improvisation, played songs on my old record Sirens Of The Apocalypse.

You just released the single "Let It Fall", tell us about the video.

As usual with the music videos i do, most of it has to come from the director. I just told Scott where i was coming from with the song, my general feelings about our current point in history, which was September last year,

and my thoughts on our distant past - our religions and perceived relationships to the earth and the unknown - all things on my mind when writing the lyrics, and let him take it from there. It was a challenge getting performance shots of all band members. For Diego and Oliver, we had to squeeze it in on tour, in the back of a venue in Italy with just general direction from Scott on background and color. Amanda in Boston, alone, just did a few lines in front of a green wall at her work place. Genevieve was easy because

she’s in Brooklyn. Scott and i went to the Cloisters in Manhattan, a medieval monastery, partly original, brought from France. So that’s what all the walls and gates are

To end this interview and thanking you for the time you gave us, I would like to know about the plans for the future, when this madness that we are experiencing ends. Maybe the next album will be the Equinoxes, ha, since I already did the solstices. So, i guess each side will be sort of equal, but going in different directions ? That’s probably a joke, but who knows

Thank You Martin!

The13th UNA REVISTA IMAGINARIA