Italians Do It Better: These Streets Will Never Look The Same by sarah-wolf

ITALIANS DO IT BETTER

THESE STREETS WILL NEVER LOOK THE SAME

ITALIANS DO IT BETTER

Produced and designed for print by Sarah Joye Wolf. All images and content are derived from the Italians Do It Better website, Loud And Quiet, Pitchfork, Dazed Magazine, Revel, Discogs, and Noisey. Publication Date: 2016

THESE STREETS WILL NEVER LOOK THE SAME 09.

Interview: Johnny Jewel Johnny Jewelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dark Disco Empire

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Photo Essay Glass Candy Paris

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Interview: Glass Candy Hearts of Glass

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Discography: Glass Candy Featured albums: Feeling Without Touching, B/E/A/T/B/O/X

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Discography: Chromatics Featured albums: The Tick Of The Clock, In The City, Night Drive

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Discography: Desire Featured album: II

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Discography: Symmetry Featured album: The Messenger

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Additional IDIB Albums Featured albums: The Other Side of Midnight, Bronson, Lost River

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Photo Essay Glass Candy Los Angeles

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Interview: Ida No Ida writes on the beginnings of Glass Candy

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Interview: Johnny Jewel Chromatics and the complete independence of Johnny Jewel

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Photo Essay Italians Do It Better: Houston

INTO THE BLACK: JOHNNY JEWEL’S DARK DISCO EMPIRE How the mastermind behind Chromatics and Glass Candy perfected his distinctly mysterious brand of cool while cultivating a model of modern independence.

Johnny Jewel is fiddling with a brunch of steak and scotch on a Sunday afternoon at the Tam O’Shanter, a dimly lit Scottish pub in his adopted home of Los Angeles. The place is mostly empty save for a few weekend warriors who are either trying to kill a hangover or keep their buzz going. The 40-year-old producer is somewhere in between, having spent the previous night wide awake, working on new songs. His shrugging affect does not change in the slightest whether we’re discussing his selfmade empire of twilit dance music, his young daughter’s French-speaking school, or his vegetable-averse new diet—or even that one time he was kidnapped and held at gunpoint for 36 hours when he was 17. Maybe he’s repressing some serious emotional trauma. Maybe he’s just tired. As Jewel tells it, the harrowing teenage ordeal began when a Pentecostal van started circling him as he was skateboarding in an abandoned Houston mall in the middle of the night. It was the same type of vehicle he’d seen many times in the parking lot of Lakewood Church, the megacomplex he attended three times a week as a youth (televangelist conglomerate Joel Osteen is the head pastor there now; Jewel, who was born John Padgett, was named after Osteen’s father). But it became clear that this particular van was not spreading the Good News when its occupants opened the doors and pulled Jewel in.

“They chained me up, drove me out into the woods, and then asked me all these questions for a couple of days,” he recalls. “They were really concerned with my exact weight and height, and then they started asking me about skateboard ramp injuries.” Jewel suspected there was some kind of elaborate scam in the works, having seen a “60 Minutes” report on people swapping out bodies in house fires for life insurance payments. “So I started talking about how I had all these surgeries,” he says, “pins in my body, dental work, all this crazy shit.” At no point did it become clear whether the kidnappers were planning to kill him, or whether they even had a plan at all. “They didn’t hit me or rape me,” Jewel says. “They just threatened often and kept telling me to be quiet. They had a rifle and a revolver.” Eventually, Jewel was let go when his kidnappers realized there wasn’t going to be a quick or particularly big payday. “They dropped me off and said it was a college initiation prank,” he says. “They gave me a bullet as a souvenir.” He attributes his decision not to alert the authorities for about six months to a minor case of Stockholm Syndrome, but even to this day, he has a strange appreciation for his captors. He now says the entire experience was “the best thing that ever happened to me.”

While clearly a formative moment in his life, there has to be some kind of hyperbole to his account, because many, many great things have since happened to Johnny Jewel that did not involve the threat of a bullet to his brain. Over the past 12 years as a songwriter, businessman, and producer, Jewel has been the visionary guiding the Italians Do It Better label, a successful and massively influential trendsetter that’s dictated the slinky, synth-laden sound, style, and financial structure of independent music while remaining a paragon of effortless cool. He’s done so without even being the frontman for the vast number of projects in which he’s involved, which includes the dark-pop disco band Chromatics, no-wave subversives Glass Candy, cinematic electronic project Symmetry, deadpan synth trio Desire, and robo-funk act Mirage. Perfectionism is a distinguishing characteristic of everything under the Italians flag. This means that records might take years to finish, but the end products are often epic in scope, from Chromatics’ 2007 breakthrough Night Drive and its

expansive successor Kill for Love, to Glass Candy’s glamorous synth-punk hybrid B/E/A/T/B/O/X, along with both of the imprint’s showcase After Dark compilations. And now, the latest longawaited deluge is imminent, with Jewel’s instrumental score for Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut Lost River due out next week, followed closely by Chromatics’ forthcoming opus, Dear Tommy. (Glass Candy’s long-awaited Body Work album and the second Symmetry LP could come out soon after, though Jewel wants to make sure they arrive in the season that suits each one best.) And yet with all of these projects in the works, the odd thing is that if Jewel is actually famous for anything, it’s for something he didn’t even do: The soundtrack for neon gangster-car-chase flick Drive. The confusion is understandable. He actually was director Nicolas Winding Refn and star Ryan Gosling’s first pick to do the score. “I felt a bit like Chazz Palminteri at the end of The Usual Suspects, and that Johnny was my Keyser Söze,” Gosling notes, describing his early admiration of

Jewel. “I had been a fan of Glass Candy, Desire, Chromatics, and Mirage independently of one another, but I had no idea that Johnny was behind all of them.” Over the span of a year, Jewel made music intended for the movie, though a more experienced composer, Cliff Martinez, was eventually brought in. (Jewel ended up using one track from his Drive material on the Symmetry album Themes for an Imaginary Film, made with Chromatics drummer Nat Walker.) “I know it’s not a nice thing to say, but my score was superior,” Jewel told The Guardian in 2012. “It was the director’s choice, Ryan’s choice… but in movie production, there’s a money side and a creative side, and they don’t always meet in the middle.” Even so, there’s no mistaking Jewel’s influence on Drive’s seductive noir mood, an aural eeriness that has since inspired everyone from synth-pop breakthroughs Chvrches, to UK pretty boys the 1975, to R&B upstart Banks. But as it happens, I am at Jewel’s house in the summer of 2014 because of a soundtrack he did complete. We’re in his home studio, a dark basement chilled at least 15 degrees below normal room temperature to protect all of the gear. He cues up a rough edit of Lost River on his iMac—the only non-analog device in the room. The movie is one of the most confusing things I’ve ever seen. Granted, it’s not the final version; some of the colors are off, not all of the special effects are put to tape, and it’s split into six files of approximately 15 minutes each. But still. It is extremely confusing. The actors all seem to have indeterminate Southern accents even though it’s set in Detroit; co-stars Christina Hendricks and Eva Mendes work in some post-apocalyptic upscale pleasuredome where feigned bodily mutilation is the new striptease; and there’s a threatening dude who rides around

sorta dressed like RiFF RAFF. I have absolutely no recollection of how it ends. I’m not alone. When Lost River premiered at Cannes last spring it was followed by a spate of gleefully harsh reviews, and after a few delays, it will finally hit theaters in April. Jewel wants me to watch this movie twice, but I don’t think he’s interested in ensuring I catch the nuances of its plot, which he describes as “dark Goonies.” Perhaps he just wants me to get to the point where I can pay attention solely to his score, an often subtle and ghostly work that bears little resemblance to Drive. But while Lost River represents one of the biggest opportunities of his career, Jewel mostly thinks of it as “cross-training” for future endeavors. “It’s pretty low on the chain,” he says, “the pop albums are the highest thing.” In a way, though, Lost River unintentionally proves Jewel’s mettle as an artist—this sort of self-indulgent art piece is what happens when Gosling gets free rein just once; Jewel does whatever he wants all the time and has yet to slip up. Describing his life philosophy, Jewel once told me, “I just prefer to make my little castle in the gutter.” And besides being pithy, the mission statement is backed up by a resolute rejection of typical music-biz ladder climbing: Though Chromatics have been asked to play Coachella, they turned it down because the festival insisted on streaming the performance; music industry titan Jimmy Iovine once called Jewel to discuss a buyout of the Italians catalog, but the negotiation turned out to be a non-starter; talking about the prospect of contributing to a recent project featuring artists making new songs inspired by the music of Drive, Jewel says, “I just think it’s tacky, and I can say whatever I want because I’m fully independent and I have no allegiances.”

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m fully independent

I have no allegiances

In spite of this fierce independence, in reality, his “little castle in the gutter” is more like a big house on the hill—I seriously doubt any actual indie rock musician in Los Angeles has a nicer place than Jewel’s. As with so many things in his life, he has it both ways: He’s within the artsier enclave of Los Feliz, but in a spot that has the physical inaccessibility of the Hollywood Hills. Once you get within the vicinity of the house, Google Maps is of no help; it will make you drive over a grass embankment. The ceilings are high, the rooms are spacious, and there are barely any decorations other than his daughter’s Lite-Brite box illuminating the foyer. Though Jewel will not allow any sneak previews of forthcoming Italians releases, the works-in-progress around his house are fair game. The producer is a sizable dude—not hulking or chiseled, but substantial in a way that high school football coaches may refer to as “Texas big”—and he’s quick to show how he can work with his hands outside the studio. My awareness of his new backyard seems of paramount importance to him, even though it’s pitch black outside and the backyard itself is apparently painted black. He tells me how he dug out the rock underneath his daughter’s bedroom and then built his studio in the excavated space, eliminating the nasty, time-sucking business of actually leaving the house for just about any reason. “I don’t go out to eat, really,” he shrugs. “I barely drive.” Cutting out the commute between home and studio is about the only way he could find the necessary time to spend with his daughter and girlfriend. Jewel puts it bluntly: “I have to work in order to be a good person.” A couple of weeks later, Jewel and I meet for brunch at Pacific Dining Car, which is noir in a touristy kind of way, a place you’d take a visitor if they insisted on recreating an L.A. Confidential bar crawl (and I’m not just saying that because L.A. Confidential author James Ellroy is actually here this afternoon). The place does everything in

its power to distract from the fact that it’s 1 p.m. on a Sunday and downtown L.A. feels like a dry-roast oven. While discussing his youth in Texas, I ask him about director Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which chronicles the life of an adolescent boy, Mason, who also grew up in Houston. “The mood of all of Linklater’s movies that are in Texas [capture] exactly what it’s like,” says Jewel. “In the movie, when the kid is photographing the lantern wearing brown corduroys and he’s got the awkward skin—that was me in ‘94.” Jewel may havwe identified with Mason’s disillusion, mistrust of authority, and artistic temperament, but his actual biography is less wholesome. He did not get along with his father, who he claims was tone-deaf and unable to hear music; in all likelihood, he was just partially deaf. Either way, the handicap required Jewel to learn sign language and use a teletype machine—a kind of primitive text-messaging device—to talk with his dad on the phone. In hindsight, Jewel figures that he gravitated towards music as some kind of psychological ploy against his father. Despite showing little interest in academic achievement, Jewel claims his impressive test scores got the attention of nearby Rice University, but he preferred to freak out the squares. His high-school teachers saw enough potential to have him join a bunch of college-bound kids in submitting poems for a public demonstration at a local exhibit, where Jewel contributed dioramas made from hollowed-out books, with dead animals and scrawled missives about his parents stuffed inside. “My mom went and she just was weeping,” he recalls. Jewel’s artistic self-actualization coincided with his father’s death and his subsequent move to Austin when he was 18. Though the actual name would come later, the development of Johnny Jewel as a persona begins here.

“An ‘independent record label’ is an oxymoron. You sign an artist, and they’re no longer independent: Their rights are compromised, they don’t have control over their budgets, and the label is forcing them to pay for remixes they don’t like.” 19

At the time, he seemed more intent to follow the lead of artists like Bill Callahan and Jandek, admiring their capability to avoid the demands of the music press while making abstract music with an audience. He took on his first pseudonym: John David V, inspired by George Scott III of Lydia Lunch’s no wave band 8 Eyed Spy. “We looked the same and both played bass,” he explains. “I always loved the Roman numeral V, and my nickname in Texas was Johnny Five from Short Circuit.” Even now, Jewel still credits himself as “V” on his records. While still dabbling in photography and painting, his early recordings ran the gamut between pop and experimental, and were abetted by Todd Ledford, who would later start the Olde English Spelling Bee label, specializing in oddball outsider sounds. “[Todd] gave me my first 24-hour recording space,” says Jewel. “He lived above a print shop, so my bed was this mattress on top of a bunch of Xerox machines.” After living a “hand-to-mouth existence” in Austin for roughly two years, Jewel made a pilgrimage to Olympia, Washington in the mid-‘90s to see K Records bands like Lync, Versus, Unwound, and Dub Narcotic at the Yo-Yo a Go-Go Festival. He soon realized he wasn’t coming back: En route to Olympia, he had an epiphany inside Portland’s Greyhound station. “There was just this electricity in the air,” he says. “Something clicked.” The timeline gets a little murky here, but that’s how things go with Jewel—there isn’t much distinction between days and months and years. Only the longview remains. But in the decade between his move to Portland and the founding of Italians Do It Better, Jewel and his co-conspirators somehow morphed from aimless noisemakers into post-punk professionals. Jewel met his first collaborator, Glass Candy singer Ida No, while working at a grocery store in Portland. “He looked really intriguing,” No recalls in a handwritten letter. She would hover around the store despite living on the other side of town, snooping in on conversations he was having with another employee. “It was pretty creepy, but I wanted to know everything about him,” she continues. “Finally I got desperate and went and introduced myself, which is crazy because I have social anxiety—I never do that.” At the time, Jewel was going through a breakup that resulted in him being thrown out of his apartment.

As Jewel remembers it: “I had a suitcase with clothes and five Moogs, and it was horrible. So the second time I hung out with [Ida], I called her and was like, ‘Can I move in with you?’ And she’s like, ‘Uh, sure.’” Jewel describes No as his only friend in the city at the time and, soon enough, they started dating. “John said he wanted to be my robot,” remembers No, commenting on their musical partnership early on. “That was better than winning the lottery as far as I was concerned.” Eventually, their romantic relationship ended, but Glass Candy continued on. A similar pattern emerged with Chromatics frontwoman Ruth Radelet, but with an important part inverted: “Johnny and I had been living together for five years before we ever worked together musically,” Radelet notes. Chromatics had existed in numerous forms before Jewel joined, and founding member Adam Miller recalls starting Chromatics solo as a minimalist, noisy pop act after seeing Glass Candy perform in Portland in 1999. “We ran into Johnny downtown, and he was on a date and dressed in drag,” remembers Miller. “We had nowhere to stay that night, and he offered his apartment to us. He asked me if I had ever heard Here Come the Warm Jets and then returned to the room five minutes later with a blue Samsonite suitcase full of immaculately organized cassettes and then just dumped them from above his head onto the hardwood floor. We thought he was a total freak. The singer of our band wouldn’t even stay in Johnny’s house—he slept in the van instead.” By the time the band’s breakthrough, Night Drive, was released in 2007, Chromatics traded in punk slash for a moody synth haze with Jewel taking on the roles of producer, director, spokesperson, and label boss. Get into Italians Do It Better’s business plan, and Jewel becomes something more akin to independent music’s ultimate patron saint, Ian MacKaye. He’s amassed a sizable fanbase and an impressive money flow without sacrificing any control; both Chromatics’ Kill for Love and Glass Candy’s B/E/A/T/B/O/X have sold around 150,000 each, an impressive number for an

indie release in the 21st century. “An ‘independent record label’ is an oxymoron,” Jewel tells me. “You sign an artist, and they’re no longer independent: Their rights are compromised, they don’t have control over their budgets, and the label is forcing them to pay for remixes they don’t like.” His financial advice is downright practical: Make money to spend it, not the other way around. “I don’t believe in tour support; I don’t believe in credit,” he says, referring to the label-fronted money that allows new bands to hit the road and endure an album cycle without guaranteed income. “We’ve never gone in the red—there is no red because there’s no credit.” That’s great for Jewel, considering he has his hands in every single project on the label, but do the other Italians artists ever fight his decisions to turn down potentially lucrative opportunities? Radelet, No, Walker, and Miller all agree: Never. They also agree that Jewel doesn’t have any friends who are separate from his artistic life, while Miller calls him “the most private person I’ve ever met in my life.” The man himself bolsters that reputation, bragging about how he’s celebrated New Year’s Eve the exact same way since 1999: “I have a ritual of making a fire at home and listening to Air Supply slowed down.” It all bleeds into this idea of Jewel as a man of certainty, stripping back any and all excess, leaving nothing to chance. It makes me think back to his kidnapping, how it may have heightened his obsession with completion, time, and death, and how everything can be taken in an instant— especially if you’re at the mercy of someone else. When we last speak at the beginning of this year, he admits to wondering if the upcoming Dear Tommy could be the final Chromatics album, because he may not be able to top himself. “I’ve been writing music since I was a teenager and I always think, ‘Does it ever stop, or is there a point that’s a peak?’” Jewel ponders, considering what’s at stake for him in the year to come. A second later, he fires back: “I mean, I haven’t reached a peak yet, so I don’t know.”

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HEARTS OF GLASS A European jaunt with synth-punk innovators Glass Candy It’s 3am at Primavera. The night is cold and the wind is up. Onstage, Ida No moves her hips with purpose and mystery to a dance beat spun by Johnny Jewel, the mysterious figure to her left. She raises her hands in large circles above her beehive to clap out the rhythm and runs on the spot as she delivers her mesmerising atonal chanteuserie, with its sensuous whispers and occasional wild art-punk screech. Her loose lamé minidress catches the flashing lights like molten gold. Jewel punches out syncopated rhythms on a synth he bought in a Texas gun-shop at the age of 18. The crowd heaves with devotion as No’s voice cuts through the vocoder pulse like a laser through dry ice. “That’s right everybody, this is Glass Candy,” she intones during “Warm in the Winter”, the heartbursting Moroderish utopia that closes their thrilling set. “I love you, I love you, I love you.” This year Glass Candy release their third album, Body Work, on Jewel and Mike Simonetti’s label Italians Do It Better. It’s a record about breaking free of habitual behaviour patterns, and their first full-length since 2007’s widely lauded B/E/A/T/B/O/X, which, in its odd, quiet way, was perhaps the most exciting disco record of the century thus far – warmer than Confessions on a Dance Floor, more primal than Random Access Memories. Since then the seductive Italians aesthetic has come to greater prominence through the use of songs by Jewel’s projects Chromatics and Desire in Nicolas Winding Refn’s ultra-stylised Drive (2011), but the label still puts records like this year’s outstanding compilation After Dark 2 up on iTunes unexpectedly and without

fanfare, refusing the banner ads and billboards favoured by such supposedly press-shy acts as Boards of Canada and The Knife. No also has a habit of nonchalantly declining interviews, citing either shyness or a desire to focus on the show, and Dazed’s request for a phone conversation is initially met with “she doesn’t have a phone”. Never before has The Germs’ punk manifesto “What We Do is Secret” so acutely applied to a pop band: as secretive heads of the family go, Johnny Jewel makes Charles Manson look like Kris Jenner. The bright afternoon after Glass Candy’s turbocharged performance, Jewel pads softly through a Barcelona hotel lobby in a leather jacket, “tears of a clown” under his eyes and two small apples in one of his dinner-plate hands. If he’s trying to go incognito, he missed a memo. “It’s an all-or-nothing kind of thing,” Jewel smiles, offering one of the pieces of fruit from his rider and biting into the other. “It’s dangerous and risky, but the rewards are remarkable if you get lucky, and we’ve been very fortunate to be abstract and oblique enough to hold people’s curiosity. I was working in a grocery store (in Portland) for ten years and Ida was working at a Dairy Queen. When we’d both get off work we’d go to the studio. It was always about the passion for the music and we never thought anybody was going to be listening.” Before Drive there was Refn’s unsettling crime biopic Bronson (2008), in which Glass Candy’s “Digital Versicolor” soundtracks an unsettling blue-washed scene of the murderous protagonist being leeringly intoxicated by a pole dancer.

“There’s a very erotic sense of building to the song,” says Refn. “It’s very operatic and borderline camp, and the whole point of the movie was to show Bronson in a kind of opera. ‘Digital Versicolor’ has that chaotic, erratic behaviour.” Like the output of the rest of the Italians crew, Glass Candy’s music is extraordinary not just for Jewel’s intuitive knack for a hook, which can be found elsewhere, but also the lingering raw-knuckled scruffiness in their epic, avant-garde pop. Sound designer Michel Gaubert, who used “Warm in the Winter” to accompany Balenciaga’s workwoman-meets-replicant AW12 collection, agrees. “What I like about Italians Do It Better is it’s lo-fi but so precise,” he says, speaking on the phone from Paris. “Ida’s voice against this music that’s completely controlled creates a tension – it sounds live but it’s not live.” As Jewel puts it, “I love the futurism of perfection, but I also like being the bloodstain on the perfectly white room.” It’s a tension between precision and animalism that germinated in the band’s snot-nosed early singles “Brittle Women” (1999) and “Metal Gods” (2001), released through Calvin Johnson’s label K Records under the name Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre. At a time when suburban kids with dial-up the world over were going into Mr Topper’s and asking for a Karen O, they were a Pacific northwest incarnation of the same bloodthirsty spirit that drove New York City’s art-punk revival. “Ida’s very punk,” says Jewel of the band’s lyricist, explaining that No is not a pop singer, but “microtonal, like a blues singer or a rapper.” Does he still think of Glass Candy as a punk band? “Oh yeah! Definitely. It’s mostly because of Ida. She loves The Damned. She’s very unaware of what anything means. She doesn’t care about business, she doesn’t care about fashion, she doesn’t give a fuck. She doesn’t understand where she fits in – she’s like a magical unicorn person.” A punk that traded her leather for lamé. Jewel’s hippyish hyperbole won’t be winning him prizes at the science fair any time soon – he goes on to attribute his and Ida’s closeness to an astrological connection – but what he lacks in logic he makes up for in oddball charm and wide-eyed sincerity. He dated No for two years, was married to Ruth Radelet of Chromatics for eight, and has now been with Megan Louise of Desire for four years. And while he declares that he has no friends apart from his collaborators, he can see the funny side of this uncommon closeness: “Every time Ida shows me lyrics, I’m either crying because I’m so moved...” He pauses, before continuing with perfect comic timing: “...or I’m like, ‘What the fuck is this?’”

“I love the futurism of perfection, but I also like being the bloodstain on the perfectly white room.” Born in smalltown Texas as plain John Padgett, Jewel loved to draw as a kid and was popular at school “in a punk rock, wild skateboarder kind of way.” Although he was prohibited from attending concerts due to his family’s strict religious beliefs, he discovered music via chart compilations sold by the registers of convenience stores, on which Donna Summer would appear side-by-side with The Doobie Brothers. At 19, he undertook a clinical trial to roadtest drugs that were not yet on the market. “The day before I found out my friend killed himself, and when I went in all I had was Unknown Pleasures and Seventeen Seconds on cassette.” The black circles he wears below his eyes are in memoriam to those close to him that have passed away. “It ended up being the perfect release. When they were dosing me I was floating above the bed. I’ve only had an out-of-body experience twice in my life. That was the first.” The other time was when recording Glass Candy’s “Warm in the Winter” in his Montreal studio in October 2010. “It was freezing and my studio was covered in snow. The whole song is eight minutes long and it’s all by hand. You can hear how insane the synthesiser is! I had a tape delay so I wasn’t hearing what was playing, I was just embed-14playing rhythm. I got into a trance and floated up above watching my hand do it. It’s like when you’re in a lucid dream, and you realise how beautiful it is but you don’t want to focus on it because you’ll wake up. That’s why at the end you can hear it fall apart. It sounds like finally losing it and trying to hold on.” Backstage at Koko in Camden a couple of weeks later, Ida No appears doe-eyed with pursed lips and blond hair loosely clumped with moisture from tonight’s triumphant headlining show, for which

Chromatics were the opening act. “The crowd was really pretty,” she says by way of explanation, her eyes wide and seemingly unblinking. She’s nothing like the disco-punk heroine onstage shortly before, when she flung herself into the audience three times to crowdsurf under the ex-theatre’s gargantuan glitter ball, and as she gazes with a ponderous expression it’s clear why Glass Candy manager Alexis Rivera describes her as “a female Bowie”. She is unconsciously aloof, indescribably magnetic, and secure in the knowledge of her pop-star allure. Warhol would have loved her. Accepting a bottle of Beck’s, she nips to the dressing room to slip out of her iridescent minidress. “She never fails to surprise me,” says Chromatics’ drummer Nat Walker, her boyfriend of six years. Actually, I feel really lucky to be able to hang out with Ida every day, because she’s probably the most unique person I’ve ever met – Nat Walker, Chromatics “Are you familiar with the physical realm?” No quizzes, speaking over her Portland landline for her first print interview since 2008. We’re talking about Body Work, which at the time of writing is about four tracks from completion. “There are different types of ‘body work’ to help people let go of addictive patterns of behaviour.” She herself is a believer in the therapeutic power of Rolfing, a technique similar to massage that disrupts unhealthy habits in connective tissue. “It makes it so a hunched person can actually stand up straight again – and start functioning properly! So it’s really cool. And for a lot of people, what’s being broken up has been caused by something that’s very emotionally connected. People will scream and cry and have blocked-out memories come rushing to their brain.” The appeal of this

mildly alarming experience is partly a reaction to our digital existence. “Facebook or Twitter is probably going to be an extension of whatever your social persona already is. You’re not gonna necessarily work things out through something like that.” No’s lyrics, which consider the world at its most cosmic, galvanise the spirit just as her aerobic performances work the muscles. It’s only in this mindset that she feels good about the world. Will Glass Candy ever enter the mainstream? “I hope there will never be a crossover! The internet has changed the way that the whole thing happens for bands like us, and I like our audience exactly how it is right now because I can be as weird as I want.” The cult of Glass Candy debunks the myth that hashtags and viral campaigns are the route to success in a digital age; Body Work will be released on iTunes without warning at some point in the next few months, and none of the recording process will be Instagrammed. This summer, Jewel moved to Los Angeles, and is currently working on scoring Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, How to Catch a Monster, as well as a Chromatics album due before the end of 2014. But isn’t it frustrating that more people don’t know about Glass Candy? “It’s hard to be frustrated when it’s constantly growing,” Jewel says. You don’t have to shout the loudest to get noticed. But if you do, as Ida No does every night of her performing life, that can feel pretty great too.

DUSTY SPRINKLES GINGER PEACH IDA CROSS IDA NO JIMI HEY JOHN PADGETT

STUDIO ALBUMS: Love, Love, Love (2002) The Nite Nurses (2005) 2112 (2006) Music Dream (2006) B/E/A/T/B/O/X (2007)

SINGLES AND EPs: Metal Gods (2000) Smashed Candy (2001) Love On A Plate (2002) Br채ckliga Kvinnor (2002) Bicicleta Emocional (2003) Life After Sundown (2004) Iko Iko (2005) I Always Say Yes (2006)

ADAM MILLER JOHN PADGETT MAXAMILLION AVILA NAT SAHLSTROM NAT WALKER ROTH RADELET

STUDIO ALBUMS: Chrome Rats vs. Basement Ruts (2003) Plaster Hounds (2004) Night Drive (2007) Kill For Love (2012) Drumless (2012) Running From The Sun (2012)

SINGLES AND EPs:: Beach Of Infants / Steps (2001) Cavecare (2002) Arms Slither Away / Skill Fall (2002) Chromatics / Die!!! Monitr Bats* (2002) Ice Hatchets (2003) Healer / Witness (2005)W Nite (2006) Shining Violence (2006)

JOHN PADGETT MEGHAN LOUISE NAT WALKER

STUDIO ALBUMS: II (2009) Under Your Spell (2015)

SINGLES AND EPs: If I Can’t Hold You EP (2009)

JOHN PADGETT NAT WALKER

STUDIO ALBUMS: Themes For An Imaginary Film (2012) The Messenger (2013)

GLASS CANDY

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LET’S TALK:

IDA WRITES ON THE BEGINNINGS OF THE GLASS CANDY EMPRIE

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CHROMATICS: THE COMPLETE INDEPENDENCE OF JOHNNY JEWEL Johnny Jewel explains to Reef Younis how he operates on a 27-hour day to doggedly protect his artist freedom and maintain the most successful cottage industry in pop music

“Hey Reef, this is Johnny. What is your bedtime tonight? I’m on a graphic design spree out at the airport… I’m in a really fluid rhythm and I don’t want to break it.” Johnny Jewel is in the zone. He’s been up since 6am, back in Portland on one of his semi-regular trips to design, paint, and pick up a stack of vinyl, CDs and t-shirts from storage. With a busy day done, and a hectic one set before flying back to LA the following day, we bounce a few texts to lock down a time and place to meet. It’s around 12.30am when he walks into the bar next to Portland’s Mississippi Studios and we end up talking into the early hours of the morning about his thirteen years living in the city, his move to LA, running a record label (in the true sense of the term) and working with Hollywood, amongst other scattered topics. Refreshingly, he insists on chatting for at least an hour, determined to have a conversation that isn’t squeezed into a quick-fire 20-minutes or sandwiched between nervous prompts from a PR. The result is a dialogue that digs into the drive and understated intensity of a man happiest in his own bubble, fiercely determined to work to his own schedule, and deeply reflective about everything he creates. The brain behind synth pop and Italo disco groups Chromatics, Glass Candy, Mirage, Symmetry and Desire, label boss of the fiercely independent Italians Do It Better, and an increasingly accomplished

composer with work scoring music for Bronson, Drive and Lost River, Jewel is a busy man. Relaxed and black-clad, he effortlessly blends into Portland’s latenight boho crowd and you feel he has all the time in the world as opposed to someone who’s been working for the last 22 hours. Juggling the responsibilities of touring, label releases and album output for multiple acts, he’s practically a one-man workshop. A musician, a designer, a producer, an engineer, a mixer, and a photographer, Jewel has always maintained he is happiest out of the spotlight, but when you’re involved in every level of the process the way he is, you quickly run out of shadows. Born in Houston, Texas, and currently living in LA, there’s been a healthy transience to Jewel’s life since he left Portland for Montreal in 2009. And after living in the Rose City for 13 years, it seems Portland still has a professional, emotional pull. “It feels more like home than Texas, than Montreal, than Los Angeles,” he says. “I’ve been in LA for two years but I don’t interact with the city at all. I still haven’t been to a show there; I’ve gone to the grocery store about seven or eight times… I really am super isolated but I’m lucky to be able to make it my own experience. I have friends and people I work with who are really into the city, and I hear it’s great, but I haven’t got round to that yet.

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“I had such a good time living in Portland,” he adds, “and I wouldn’t be the person I am if I hadn’t lived here. Ruth [Radelet, Chromatics’ singer, and Jewel’s ex-girlfriend of 8 years] still lives here, Ida [No, Glass Candy’s vocalist, whom Jewel also dated when he moved to town] grew up here, and then I met Adam [Miller, founding member of Chromatics] in here, even though he was living in Seattle. I’d never have met those people if I hadn’t lived here. They’re my family now.” Isolation and self-containment become pretty consistent themes as we talk. At face value, it’s an outlook that sounds reclusive and withdrawn, but as Jewel continues to dig into the reasoning, it’s apparent that it’s a pivotal part of how he works. “I’m always alone except for the people I’m working with, so it doesn’t really matter where I’m at. I don’t get that claustrophobic feeling that other people get in small towns,” he says. “I lived in Austin and it’s kind of the same thing here where you feel you can’t really go out without seeing anybody. I never go anywhere so I never see anybody anyway, you know?” He chuckles. “I just need somewhere where I can work and there’s something about the air that helps me feel awake and motivated. I kind of operate on a 27-hour day, so by the end of the week I’m almost inverted. I just go until I’m tired or I reach the point where I quit being productive and it becomes compulsive.” Jewel’s move to a metropolis as sprawling as LA seems counter-intuitive to that intent, but the change in scenery proved to be the catalyst he, his girlfriend and his primary group Chromatics needed. Turns out switching Montreal’s snow with LA’s sunshine was less about the lifestyle and more about necessity. His mail was being sent to LA, his office is there, he was constantly in town to work on a film or a commercial or a television show. “I got sick of having to go back and forth,” he says, “and my girlfriend, who’s a Quebecer [and, as history dictates, the singer in Jewel’s third group, Desire], got sick of the

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snow and she was like, ‘why don’t we just move to LA?’ It’s the first time in five years everyone in the band is on the same coast. It’s been great.” Today, Chromatics are Jewel’s vision – so much so that many will presume the imminent ‘Dear Tommy’ LP to be the project’s third album, following 2007’s breakthrough ‘Night Drive’ and 2012’s expansive ‘Kill For Love’. The two albums that proceeded those records (‘Chrome Rats Vs Basement Rutz’ [2003] and ‘Plaster Hounds’ [2004]) have pretty much been wiped from history, predating Jewel’s involvement as producer, writer, spokesman and label boss, and resembling a completely alien group – one with different members apart from Adam Miller, and a bog-standard indie-rock direction over what we’ve become familiar with: the dirty, romantic sound of vintage synthesisers, crystalline drum machines and brittle, dystopian guitars to drift around city streets to after nightfall. It’s a similar story for Glass Candy – a group Jewel formed with singer Ida No, who were happy to express themselves as a glam rock/new wave band on their 2003 debut, before electronics took over for their first album on Italians Do It Better in 2007. ‘B/E/A/T/B/O/X/’ will finally get its follow up this year, entitled ‘Bodywork’. That’s an eight-year interim – a stark indicator that time and patience are non-negotiable factors for Jewel. Unwavering in his commitment to never rushing releases out, they’ve become two essential hallmarks that have made his work (in whatever form) enduring, and something he doggedly protects. “A lot of the stuff takes me years to do,” he tells me. “There’s things I’m still working on that I started in Portland, and I don’t mean songs, I mean actual tapes, actual recordings. Some went to Montreal and got worked on, some came to LA, and they’re getting worked on. The work is open-ended – it feels like it’s never finished, and because of that, it’s not tied to a place. I haven’t been on stage for 16 months, which is really exciting,” he smiles.

“Because I run everything, when I travel it all freezes… everything just gets backed up and that’s why things take so long. I like touring but I don’t have to do it the way some bands do, if they have to make money or are locked into a contract. For me, I tour when I want to tour, and when it makes sense.”

something in a healthy way, not having the schoolmaster yell at you about a pie chart or a graph around the fourth quarter. But it’s all good because they have a pocket of cocaine and they’re cool guys… it’s not my thing. It makes sense to me that the industry that that’s a part of is dying and it deserves to die.”

It’s a freedom created by design. Unbound by external label pressures or fixed release dates, there’s an element of control but perhaps more crucially for Jewel, it’s about ensuring that artistic creativity isn’t compromised by arbitrary timelines or soulless business drivers. It’s a commitment to being uncommitted where pressure isn’t the enemy; it’s simply finding and applying the right type.

“It’s still very structure-less,” Jewel later insists. “Like, where does an idea come from? I have no fucking clue. How do you write a song? I have no idea. How do you know when something’s done? – I feel like I’m getting better at ‘pulling the trigger’, as I call it. There are points where you know you have a song; you just have to know when to finish it.

“I’ve never allowed myself to be put in that position and I’ve never allowed anybody to have power over my output in any way,” he says. “It seems so absurd to me that external, non-creative entities can enter the creative arena and set a timer; it does not make sense to me at all. If you’re undisciplined, I guess you need external pressure, but I don’t think it’s good for creativity. It’s not about vibing and chilling out, it’s about appropriate pressure, competition, ambition… those things that can come from within inside yourself. They’re appropriate pressures that can stimulate you to complete

“I’ll let something marinate,” he tells me, “and I’ll wait for months until an element occurs to me to help harmonise or balance the song. I decide to wait but I’m not deciding there’s something missing, you know? That’s why the lack of a schedule is so important, because if you have someone telling me that this needs to be done by a certain time, or I’m telling someone else it needs to be done by this time, I’m not allowing for them to know when it’s done.” It helps explain the introspection and contemplation Jewel experiences with every release. Where some feel relief, he feels the finality; the acceptance that it’s as

close to finished as it will ever be, however frustrating. He tells me: “Any time I release a song or an album, I’m depressed afterwards for while. I’m functional – I’m not a wreck – but I feel a loss because I never want to finish it or close it in the way that’s released because they’re my babies. “When we released the first single for ‘Dear Tommy’ [‘Just Like You’] everyone was over at my house and everyone was really excited but I just wanted to be alone and I ended up pissing some people off because they wanted me to be joyous and I wasn’t feeling that way. I was really proud of the song but this shit is so personal, and it’s really intense because you put it out there.”

deconstruct the meaning of what’s being created. They’re questions and thoughts that clearly sit with Jewel from the early concept, right through to completion. “A more concrete example is mixing an album or mixing a song,” he says. “I could listen to a single drum all day long if it’s a good sounding drum. So I want you to hear that drum, and every nuance of the vocal, of the guitar, of the synthesizer, of the hi-hat. I’m trying to push all of this forward but not everything can be on top, so for me part of finalising something is marrying the relationship of those elements permanently. In my ideal world, everything would be the loudest thing. But it’s funny because I slave over the mix and I know that 99% of

“It’s not like I have regrets but only I know what I want it to be, and of course you can never achieve that because it’s an idea, and you can never really make ideas real.” He continues: “I started recording in 88/89, and I didn’t release anything until 94/95 because I was uncomfortable with people knowing I was doing something. It’s the reason I didn’t put anything out there for so long and it’s why when I went on stage I’d wear make up, because I wanted a shield or a barrier. For a long time I didn’t do interviews because I didn’t want to be out in front, but I knew it was inevitable once I started talking. I’m proud but joy isn’t the word when I release music – it’s very contemplative and personal. It’s not like I have regrets but only I know what I want it to be, and of course you never achieve that because it’s an idea, and you can never really make ideas real.” It’s an awareness and deeper-thinking that informs every step of the music making process – from the nuances of a single instrumental element to the more philosophical question of trying to

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the stuff is going to be heard on a phone,” he laughs. “It’s a Wagner-style tragedy that I find amusing. I schedule everything like vinyl, and I know it’s getting streamed like ‘the hits’ but I got to make the record I want to listen to, on real speakers, from a real turntable. I’m the one that has to live with that.” Listen to Chromatics’ gilded pop atmospherics and it’s hard to imagine Jewel not hunched over a mixing desk, 22 hours into a 36-hour session, trying to perfect every element, every harmony, every fleeting dynamic. The balance and beauty of Chromatics’ last record, ‘Kill For Love’, felt like an album that was obsessed over, and even though Jewel might be aiming for perfection, he doesn’t consider that to be a defining factor. He says that even though he spends so much time with a record that he’s labelled

a perfectionist, really he isn’t. “I like the blood and guts,” he says, “I like it messy, I like it raw, so anyone who says I’m a perfectionist hasn’t heard my record because there’s so many mistakes, so many frayed edges, and things that are out of pitch, or rhythms that are off, and that’s imperfect in its own way. “I love how raw something I recorded 10 years ago sounds compared to something I’m working on now, on the same equipment. We live in a time where musicians are so ashamed of their past and there’s this intense desire to start a new project, change the name, shroud it in mystery,

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and hope that no-one checks out what you used to do because it doesn’t define you as a person anymore. “It’s the only art form I know where change is a bad thing. It’s crazy because in film it’s celebrated, and each film is different. In music, people have this sort of hang up where if I’m going to make a certain type of music I have to dress a certain way and only listen to this type of record. For me, music is a journey and the music I make doesn’t reflect what I listen to, and the way I look doesn’t make sense for the music I make. None of it defines anything else and there’s no identity wrapped up in

it. I’m a person who happens to like certain things for certain reasons, but I don’t have to re-define who I am as a human if I want to make an artistic expression. ‘I’m a heavy metal guy, I can’t do this, I’m a house guy, I have to live like this, I’m a punk guy, I can’t do this.’” Change, though, is a factor. There’s defiance not just in the way Jewel works but in the creative decisions he makes. Taking years to release a new album is a bold stance but having the conviction to return with a different sound only happens with genuine confidence and a willingness to engage with fans. These subtle evolutions gave ‘Night Drive’ its dark disco nuance with the soft-funk of ‘I Want Your Love’ and the marathon, minimal slink of ‘Tick of the Clock’, but also enabled follow up ‘Kill For Love’ to bloom with grander, ghosting dynamics. Characterised by the airy ‘Running From the Sun’ and the languid ‘My, My, Hey, Hey’ twist of ‘Into The Black’, it felt like a big, blended step towards the winding scores Jewel has evolved into over the last few years. And, if recent tracks like ‘In Films’ and ‘I Can Never Be Myself When You’re Around’ – teased from the forthcoming ‘Dear Tommy’ – are any indication, this time Chromatics are set to amplify the aloof with more anthemic intent. “I never want to make the same record twice,” Johnny states. “Even though there’s a sound, the albums are eclectic and I can take a really hard stance as a producer to be defiant. It was like when I put ‘The Tick of the Clock’ on ‘Night Drive’, everyone thought I was insane. There’s no singing, there’s one note, it’s sixteen minutes long… it’s part of the album. If people are going to skip over it, fine, I don’t care. It ended up being understood years later but only after it was sugar-coated for people.” The self-sufficiency of Jewel’s disco empire has extended exponentially. His projects needed a label to release their materials without the need for buying into the conventional music industry, so he built Italians Do It Better; we needed to arrange a photo shoot for this feature, so Chromatics own Ruth Radelet took

care of it. Jewel doesn’t employ a PR team to execute the usual round of press interviews and promo trails, leaks and well-placed video premieres, which is essentially why we’ve been trying to interview him for three years. It’s about ultimate control, but also maintaining a personability, especially where Jewel’s predictably hands-on approach to social media is concerned. He doesn’t care for Twitter – in any of his project guises – but Jewel personally posts across the Facebook pages of Chromatics, Glass Candy and his lesser known Anglo-French trio Desire, while Soundcloud has become his invaluable distribution tool – he gave ‘Kill For Love’ away through the streaming site, and has so far followed suit with the first three tracks from ‘Dear Tommy’. He tells me: “I think a lot of bands don’t take enough time to interact with their fans in a way that the they can understand the evolution that’s happening between records. There’re a lot of things, conceptually, that you can share through social media that help prepare for directions that shift or change. It takes a lot of work but it’s an artistic process in tandem with the music that’s really fun for me personally. It’s a chance to experiment and share ideas that are visual or referential but that are part of the concept of the band or where the record’s going.” This idea takes us back to the importance of the creative freedom Jewel has built, not just for himself, but also for everyone associated with Italians Do It Better. With Glass Candy three albums and 15 years in, and Chromatics five albums and over a decade in, Jewel has diligently tended the garden beyond any fleeting hype – something he feels others neglect all too easily. And with so long between albums, Jewel’s work neatly avoids the trap of music fashions and fads – his records arrive when they’re ready, sometimes accompanied by kindred releases, but often isolated and always unapologetic. “Another thing that bands don’t do is protect their creative process,” he states. “That first album or whatever that has a breakthrough… there were a lot of people that hated that album, you know, you just

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never heard about it because the overall reaction was so positive. Nobody agrees universally that a first album is good, it’s just the band focuses on that and the people that don’t like it just aren’t writing about it yet. By the time the second album comes, people want to start attacking. You have to protect your creative process so that you can make a free record, an instinctual record like that first one. It’s very rare that people protect that space, either they think they’re great and they can do no wrong, which is often the case, or the personalities in the band are stretched apart and the chemistry isn’t there in the same way. All these things pollute the water and if you don’t take conscious steps to protect the band from that kind of shit, you’re going to make an inferior record second time round and it just diminishes from there.” Jewel also argues that lack of awareness can be just as damaging, particularly if egos are left unchecked. “I also think that bands don’t need to read press,” he says, “it’s ridiculous. Are you an artist or not? If you’re not an artist then why are you posing in an artistic industry? Go sell vacuum cleaners if you want to make money. I’m a curious person but I don’t have the drive to make a film and I’m not going to make a film just because I could or because I think it’s cool. “There’s a naivety with a lot of people’s early work, they’re unaware of how it happened in the first place and then they’re really quick to take credit for it. Ego is an enemy and that’s what kills great chemistry.” Manipulating publicity is also a major gripe for Jewel, and he has no sympathy for those that try and play the game but inevitably get steamrolled by the hype machine. “There’s a reason you hear about bands and then you don’t or a certain amount of time passes and then it becomes a comeback,” he argues. “It’s because they use publicity as a weapon and it’s their own fucking fault!

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“You’re an idiot if you think that when there’s a push there’s not going to be a pull. I don’t feel sorry for bands that cram stuff down everyone’s throats, but it’s lopsided how hard they push versus where they would have gotten by word of mouth. The thing is people are in a band and they go, ‘I want a manager, I want a publicist’. Bands have lawyers before they play their first show, which is crazy, and if you’re going to play that game, you need to be smart enough to know that it’s going to kill you.” It’s no surprise that these shortcuts elicit such a strong reaction, because they’re the antithesis to everything Jewel has patiently built over almost two decades. Put into the context of his story, even at close to 2am, his frustration and depth of feeling is palpable to what he sees as a cold cynicism fuelling dead-eyed capitalism at the expense of creativity. It brings us onto his role within Chromatics, Symmetry, Glass Candy and Desire, and whether each band is an opportunity to satisfy his curiosity and explore something different. It certainly seemed to be the case with Symmetry, Jewel’s instrumental duo that eventually became the outlet for his alternative soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s movie Drive. Jewel had been commissioned to score the film but was later overlooked for Cliff Martinez (who included Chromatics’ ‘Tick The Clock’ and Desire’s ‘Under Your Spell’ in his soundtrack), later resulting in the release of Symmetry’s two-and-a-half-hours-long LP ‘Themes For An Imaginary Film’ in 2011. (“I know it’s not a nice thing to say, but my score was superior,” Jewel told The Guardian in 2012. “It was the director’s choice, Ryan’s [Gosling] choice… but in movie production, there’s a money side and a creative side, and they don’t always meet in the middle.”). “It’s kind of about working with different people,” says Jewel, of his multiple projects. “For example, Natty [Walker], he’s with me in Desire, he’s with me in Chromatics, he’s with me in Symmetry and now he’s working on the new Glass Candy record with me as well. He’s incredible, a total genius. He’s really coming from

“There’s a nivety with a lot of people’s early work, they’re unaware of how it happened in the first place and then they’re really quick to take credit for it. Ego is an enemy and that’s what kills great chemistry.”

a hip-hop background so when we work we really get into beats where there’s no room for vocals… or the kind of vocals we would normally write. With Megan [Louise, of Desire], she has an incredible voice and a wider range than Ruth and Ida, and had a sound that was good for a type of pop that didn’t work with anyone else.” It’s a similar story with Ruth Radelet and how her rootsy musical background became the perfect foil for Chromatics’ evolving noir pop, or how Ida No became the ideal contradiction that made Glass Candy work. It’s a familiar story of opposites attract. Says Jewel: “One of the great things about Chromatics is that Ruth would have been the antithesis of what Chromatics used to be. It’s the difference of her coming from a blues and folk background juxtaposed with electronics and distance. It’s not about ‘you’d be perfect for this’, because that’s what a lot of bands tend to do. For me, it’s about the counter-balance. “Ida and I are so different in every possible way but we make a complete idea. There’s a strength in opposites and a lot of bands are kind of bland because they’re stylised and all going in the same direction. It’s opposites and polarity that makes bands. You need explosiveness, tension, friction – that’s what makes a good band. If you can find a way to have unity within that, it’s incredible. It’s difficult but if you don’t have that, the art isn’t as complete and you’re only telling part of the story.” From depressed contemplation to defiant confidence; happy isolation to a ‘family’ of friends, there’s a paradox to Johnny Jewel that sits just as effortlessly as his music. The make-up, designed to help mask early insecurities became a beacon in the same way Chromatics’ effortlessly enigmatic electronic pop helps shadow the intensity of its chief creative force. “There’s nothing anyone can tell me about my own work that I haven’t thought about for a 1000 hours already,” he tells me, “and that includes praise, criticism… everything. I have a severe lack of interest in what other people think about what I do

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but I am happy when people connect with it. I want more people to hear it, and I want it to spread because music is so important to me and it’s exciting to think that your music is reaching people, becoming important to them, and doing the same thing for them that bands did for you.” You wonder if Jewel will ever allow himself to enjoy the spotlight instead of simply accepting its inevitable glare, or if the post-release contemplation will become any less intense. At this stage it seems unlikely but there is at least time – he always makes sure of that. “As an artist you’re not realistic, you’re crazy… and it’s not because I kinda look gothic,” he laughs. “It’s the desire to transcend the conflict between concept and reality and it’s the idea that it’s beautiful and it’s unattainable. It’s what we chase and sometimes you just want to hold onto it, and letting it go is a reminder that you never really held it in the first place. I have to have my moment with each thing in that way. So much music I work so hard on I will never release and no one will ever hear it. There’s something beautiful about that.”

ITALIANS DO IT BETTER HOUSTON

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