Twiddling Knobs, Spinning Plates: Zach Shipp's Studio Life

Shipps docking bay - photo by Doug Coombe

Zach Shipps thrives when he’s spinning plates.  He’s got a baby on the way while he’s finishing up production and mixing work on a half-dozen recording projects with a wide range of local music acts. He’s also uprooting his main studio space in Birmingham and shifting down to Ferndale while also still acclimating to a life-away-from a rigorous touring and recording schedule, having recently ended his long tenure in Detroit-based synth-rock icons The Electric Six.

“At one point, I realized I hadn’t had a day off in four years,” Shipps recalls. The end of 2010 wrapped a whirlwind of production for the metro-area native, recording, mixing, mastering and even doing art layouts and promo for four full length Electric Six albums in the small breaks provided between the band’s more than 500 scheduled tour dates during that span.

 “But I’m fine now,” he says with a light laugh, looking back at how ludicrous his daily life had become. He’s definitely still keeping busy.

 You’ll see Shipps’ name attached to a mass of new music coming out this spring. He’s worked with hip/hop duo Passalacqua as well as post-metal noise-rockers Child Bite. He’s also working on a new synth-centric experimental-pop project fronted by his E6-ally Christopher Tait (a.k.a. Tait Nucleus) called Belle Ghoul. Then there’s the forthcoming completion electro-rock quartet Lettercamp’s 2nd full length album.

 Lettercamp features Liz Wittman, a veteran of Detroit’s post-2000 indie-pop scene, belting her high wispy voice as lead vocalist while Shipps settled in as the band’s drummer (and in-house engineer) more than one year ago. Lettercamp haven’t performed live lately, Shipps says, but “that’s because Liz and I are having a baby in the spring. It’s crazy wonderful. And in the summer, we’ll have an album-baby.”

 Shipps says he started “screwing around,” demoing himself in the early 90’s on a humble Yamaha 4-track. Certain his story is not unique, he confesses feeling “powerless in ‘the studio,’  with a clock ticking… and all those barriers between you and ‘the mix.’”

Shipps couldn’t accept that so many decisions were being made by a person who wasn’t involved with his music. Keenly sensing “the writing already on the wall” in 1997, he started messing around with digital recording. He grabbed the essentials (early Pro-Tools versions on Mac) and started recording other people for free. He learned a lot working with Ann Arbor-based engineer Geoff Michael (Big Sky) and from playing with Brendan Benson, during his stint as the Michigan-native’s guitarist in 2002-2003. Plus, his 20-year-policy of refusing to get rid of any accumulated equipment, “ever,” finds him bolstered, now, him “with a lot of shit.”

 Touring 5 months out of the year with E6 meant his job options were limited. But with all this equipment (and an ever honing know-how in a studio, gaining confidence through his “Groundhog Day”-esque experiences of annually revolving recordings for the E6 and many other trusting Detroit musicians), he felt audio engineering was life’s logical path. “I like twiddling knobs… and I realized there were a lot of musicians and songwriters around me who were bad at twiddling knobs.”

 “I’m very mechanical. I enjoy tweaking. At some point I started to get good at it. My goal has always been to create recording situations that weren’t like the early studio experiences I hated. And, maybe help people see some other angle that wasn’t obvious.”

 “Some stuff I’m hands-on and super-involved in the creative process and other stuff I’m just engineering or mixing or mastering. I’ve never worked with anyone that I didn’t already at-least-kind-of know… I don’t have a flashing sign hanging on my door. But, also, this is a pretty close-knit and incestuous musical community.”

 Familiarity leads to comfort, Shipps knows it, but also, potentially, sprouts spontaneity and a nuanced creativity bubbled from that neighborly chemistry. “…or, inbreeding, I don’t know. It could go other ways too.”

Recording, inevitably, is “trial and error,” at least for Shipps, he admits. Know your equipment. Trust your ears. And…  “…don’t be afraid to do something that sounds shitty or pokes-out in a weird way. Embrace the shitty… Saying all that, though, makes it sound like I know what I’m doing, which, really, I don’t…  But I’m dug into this now. I wouldn’t go back; I love doing this.”

 Christopher Tait ("Nucleus") has been working with Shipps his entire adult-musical life. Somehow, they've  managed to keep their live- and studio- collaborations as two separate worlds, to their benefit. "I have a particular method of putting arrangements together," the Belle Ghoul singer/keyboardist said. "And its due to that format and our familiarity, that he and I work very quickly together."

 Tait said that his longtime (and now former E6-ally) has "...always been helpful with ideas when recording original material, and he's very, very good in the world of remixing. He just knows which sounds/samples work together.  It goes without saying that it helps to have such a multi-faceted musician there when I'm flopping...particularly on guitar, 'cuz what is in my head and what comes out are often two different things."

Says Tait: "... the years in which I've worked with him are a testament to what I think of him as an engineer/producer/musician. 

The Electric Six (still featuring Tait), perform the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor next Thursday night, but Shipps will be off spinning plates. Freedom from E6 has fostered him packed roster of clientele (including local rapper EsQuire, Toledo’s synthy-rock duo Silent Lions). There’s also been a bit more time for him to experiment with composing and licensing arrangements for TV spots.

And then there’s the baby. “I like keeping those plates in the air,” Shipps said. “But now I know better. Like, when to stop working and walk around the block. I make lots of lists, also, on little pieces of paper.”

Shipps’ production work can be heard in March when Silent Lions self-release their E.P. The Parliaments on vinyl. (silentlions.bandcamp.com) He’s also completing work on Betty Cooper’s full-ength, and recently mastered George Morris’ debut solo album Organ Solos –premiering in late February on local label FiveThreeDialTone Records (fivethreedialtone.com) .
__________________________________________________________________

Shipps on Child Bite: “The most dangerous band in Detroit. The quartet has this on-going series of vinyl, where they do a split 7" with a few other Detroit bands, doing covers of good stuff. Mostly 80's punk. So far they've done Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Misfits, Dead Kennedys, Suicide Machines and Black Flag... I'm mixing some Anal Cunt tracks of theirs with Phil Anselmo (Pantera) doing a guest vocal. It's fucking crazy. Phil Anselmo is on my hard drive.”  

Shipps on Lettercamp: “We tried to go for bold strokes. Lots of electronic sounds obviously, but anything that makes noise got used. There's a song where Panic (Gerald Roesser) is playing a bicycle pump through a piece of aluminum gutter, for fucksake. There's cool textures and vocal parts. Sometimes there's drums, sometimes no drums. Sometimes there is even an "electric guitar.” 

Shipss on Belle Ghoul: “The best band that was never on Creation Records. (Christopher) Tait's an interesting songwriter, really great with melody and layering. We've got a process now, after almost 10 years of working together, where he brings in these heavily-arranged laptop sessions and we systematically replace the tracks with other stuff, percussion, hand jive, moog, spoons, what-have-you.” 

Past Projects:

Electric Six : producer / co-writer / player / mix : six albums
The Hard Lessons : producer / contributor / mix : three albums
Ladytron : remix
Brendan Benson : guitar
Prussia : engineer / mix / remix
The Hounds Below (ex-Von Bondies) : mix / master
Tesco Vee's Hate Police : engineer / mix
Midnight Juggernauts : remix
Lettercamp : producer / drums / etc 

Works released under Metropolis Records, Warner Bros UK, V2,
Nettwerk, 53DT, SlimStyle, RykoDisc Records

Sampled Sounds:

Silent Lions:

GOLD Blowout

Sounds like:

and... also:

and yet more...

Local Music in the Library

Frontier Ruckus Open It Up

This weekend, Michigan music-poets Frontier Ruckus release their grandest recorded statement: Eternity of Dimming. They celebrate the double-vinyl album (spanning 20 songs and nearly 90 minutes) with a performance at the 36th Annual Ann Arbor Folk Festival (at the Hill Auditorium on the U-M campus). 

An Interview with Matthew Milia

Photos: Doug Coombe

Dimming will prove to be "the apotheosis" of their characteristic haunting-nostalgia, as sweeping and cinematic, likely more so, than their first two albums' already-pressingly-poignant, head-spinning coils of richly jangled folk-rock jaunts into deep dark forests of memory's murk, of Michigan's geographic viscera, of their own nervous nightminds.

Mentally exploring the glorious phantasmagoria, through song. Mythologizing -through-melody- the supernatural charms inherent to coming-of-age in the Mitten.

"...you get used to answering the same questions a lot," said singer/songwriter/guitarist Matthew Milia of the consistent querying the band receive out on their consistent tours, listeners curious about all the various locales, freeways, parks and ponds dotting the maps of Frontier Ruckus' canon.

"The whole "Orion" concept was a big enigma to people, geographically, it seems," Milia said of their 2008 batch of knotty nocturnes, The Orion Songbook. "I could tell how far from Michigan I was in a given moment by how the person would say the word, like the constellation or lake Lake Orion as it's supposed to be. The word "Or-eeeeee-un" itself is so Michigan-nasal-sounding to me and beautiful."

On that first album, "Orion Town" is mythologized as this "humungous, almost infinitely sprawling, kingdom—" representing the entirety of Metro Detroit's "crazy system of connections and mingling worlds of stark affluence and poverty and all the memory that rides the gradient of Woodward from Detroit to Pontiac."

When Milia admits that "writing is all I know how to do to stay sane," I can relate. But those rigors of the road, survived together as a band of brothers (with David Jones, Ryan Etzcom and Zachary Nichols) and the unwieldy weight of Milia's memories heaved from his heart and out onto the page in sometimes painful fits of creation, will soon be rewarded, with a recent singing to UK based Loose Music and a forthcoming European tour.



Curious as I was about his process, I asked Milia to share more upon the songs that became this album, altogether a "cluster of themes" proving to be their "most nostalgic record..." Rife with images of a darkening, or a drifting-away... A loosing of one's grip... "On the borderline of losing my mind..."

Milo: Is there a sense of quelling a kind of panic that you find in lyric writing?

Milia: I wrote the song "Eternity of Dimming" sitting on this bench outside my house in the fall—one of my favorite places to write. The cicadas get so outrageously loud out there at that time of year that it is like a heightening feverish panic. They represent an internal panic of memory passing futilely or present tense squandered—they are the "shrilly insect sound" referred to throughout the album. As I'm actively in the rhythm of writing, though, I'm typically calm or in a sort of glad hypnosis. The panic is totally present but I'm overwhelmed momentarily by my agency of transforming it into language that harnesses it all, like personalized mantras I can chant back to myself in reminder of my instrumental role within this safe world I've created. Every line is a trigger of comfort to me, even if the line is personally tragic to me or evocative of some horrible memory. That I was able to face it and give it lasting breath in the song helps me to own it and make it all my friend.

Milo: What are some of the most important things you learned, developing as a musician...in the days spent right after forming this group with Jones in the early 00's out of high school (Country Day, northern Oakland County, 2002). And, then, some of the most formative things you experienced having launched off on a now constant whirl of tours, writings and recordings...

Milia:
The most important thing I learned before "Frontier Ruckus" became the creative entity it is today is basically what necessitated it in the first place: just figuring out my self-identity in this system, what I valued. It gradually became clear to me that I was perhaps a bit more sensitive to the passage of time than most, that it hit me pretty hard. This is admittedly a detriment to most healthy lives but I made a strong shift in my life, around 2005 maybe, not to deny that phobia or tendency or whatever within me, but to embrace it with somewhat of an obsession. For better or worse, it allowed me to create these hyperbolically intense documents of memory that I reside in and others have the luxury of visiting from time to time when they need a subtle dose. I'm glad to provide that and it's made me who I am.

Milo: And, since the band formed and since-flourished, you've learned...?

Milia:
Coffee is the best drug. Spending every waking hour with the same four dudes for several years is an effective way for an only-child to get bros. Singing every night and smoking is hard to pull off. Treating people with respect is crucial and possible to achieve while still maintaining a cool ego and self-image. You can hurt somebody without even trying. Stretching works. Lies add up. The gulf between 22 and 27 cannot be underestimated. Shampoo every other day for better hold. Only enlist the services of people who you are convinced understand and believe in the overall ethos of your work.

Milo: You were an English Major (Michigan State), so I can't help asking you to assess Frontier Ruckus as though it were a work, a narrative...what themes have you found? What kinds of recurrent symbolism seem to haunt your tours' pages?

Milia:
One thing that's happened a bunch is the huge "break-through" opportunity being dangled in front of us, thrusting us into some existential decision of whether or not to take it, and then it being snatched away anyhow. It's pretty comical at this point. Like, a mainstream well-paying commercial that turned out super lame, or working with a celebrity producer who may have hurt the album had it happened—blessings in disguise when they dissipate. Another recurring theme in our story is comical misbranding or pigeonholing (which I don't think our band is unique in experiencing). There's always the megapopular band about that has a banjo that people lump us in with or attempt to compliment us by telling us we're "way better" than. And nothing against those bands or their success, I just don't hear the similarity in the sound whatsoever—any perceived resemblance is totally cursory to me.

Our songs do not have a  kick drum pounding on every beat with a constant air of epic triumph and danceable ecstasy. We're way sadder than that and I hope more interestingly complex. I think of us as an "album" band, and I like the Frontier Ruckus experience to shift markedly from song to song to form an episodic kind of trajectory through a record, throughout an interconnected catalog, yet always retaining some nebulous common denominator that vaguely defines our identity.

Milo: Another English-major question: you're most formative writing-influences? Be they authors or songwriters?

Milia: Diane Wakoski affected me most immediately as she was my mentor and the writer who taught me how to construct poetry. A lot of my usage of catalog and recurring trope or graphic images comes directly from her influence. I think someone like Whitman taught me not to shy away from grandeur in seemingly crude things—human anatomy, sexual physicality, sweat, the abject. Having attended Catholic school for 13 years, Christian iconography was unavoidable in my psyche and made its presence known, though that's waned a bit lately.

It's safe to say Dylan's left the biggest impression on me. For someone into lots of words and getting away with harshly caustic delivery there's just no one better. Then Young, Simon, Cohen, Mitchell, Sill. Eternity though, for how wordy it is, is actually our record most influenced by a heightened focus on chordal detail.

Milo: What about the prominent influences leading into last year's creation of Dimming...?

Milia: 
I got really obsessed with chord changes and pop music trappings—from Big Star to Gin Blossoms. Lots of 90s alternative rock influence in the electric guitar jangles, which in itself evokes the Byrds. Lots of Lowrey and Hammond organ, which is now as much the Wallflowers as it is Blonde on Blonde. Elliott Smith or the Beatles. All these now imaginary decades merge for me as, simply, shit I listened to a lot in a minivan in the 90s on the way to soccer practice. It was such a beautifully mindless absorption.

Read more on Frontier Ruckus in this week's issue of the Metro Times.

The 36th Ann Arbor Folk Festival, a fund-raiser for The Ark, Ann Arbor’s non-profit home for folk, roots, and ethnic music is presented by The Ark with the University of Michigan Center for Campus Involvement. The Festival takes place at Hill Auditorium on Friday, January 25 and Saturday, January 26, 2013 at 6:30 p.m. each night.

FRIDAY
CITY AND COLOURRODRIGUEZTRAMPLED BY TURTLESDELTA RAECARL BROEMELFRONTIER RUCKUSBROWN BIRDCOLIN HAY, MC

SATURDAY
THE HEAD AND THE HEARTLUCINDA WILLIAMSDAR WILLIAMSFRANK FAIRFIELDTHE STEEL WHEELSBROTHER JOSCEPHUS AND THE LOVE REVOLUTIONDREW NELSONCOLIN HAY, MC

Springtime

http://blowout.metrotimes.com/

Best-Worst Year (...Michigan Music)

Look. Listen, I implore you...

I’ll only have your attention for the next 47 seconds at best and that’s why it’s been the worst year but it’s also been the best year because you already endorse my satire for endemically-shredded attention spans. You already know.

You know how fucked it all is, how fucked we all are; you already know because it’s the internet and we’ve heard everything that I’m about to rail against: like our reserves of morality and empathy now emptied down to crusty flakes as we hunger for escapism as insatiably as locusts. Glowing gadgets keep us connected as we stay-mobile and the 24-hour-news networks remind us how many children died (and how) thousands of miles away from us as we slept, and day jobs still feel like devilish treadmills.

But it’s been the best year because of how oddly rewarding it feels to have retained perspective in days of modern madness – - that there’s always solace if you know where to look and where to listen.

This was the best worst year because it will still feel like the last one: We’ll still basely sum up some new band’s new song as if it sounded “Beatles-esque” and we’ll still think a pop-song can take the pain away and we’ll still feel self-conscious if we haven’t yet heard of the band being talked about by your perfectly-strange-stranger-Facebook-friends-in-the-flesh, rapping at the bar between local bands that might be breaking up in a matter of months anyhow…but Hey…you are here, and still alive and you aren’t being shot-at in the streets or being mercilessly zoomed by drones and earthquakes are not on your list of concerns, nope, nor are volcanic eruptions or sieges of zombie hordes.

This was the worst best year because, well, floods, droughts and fatal, and sometimes futile street-protests are all the new norm, as is an incompetent, if just intrinsically dysfunctional national legislative body, but then there is the catharsis that does come, however fleeting, in a song, in a musical recital or recording, whether at the edge of a stage where a guitar neck skims the hairs of your chinny-chin or whether with heads-viced between cushy headphones as the rich tones, snapping percussion and fuzzed timbres emitted into your ears and into your body because no matter how sordid the shuffle of superficial Facebook flumes, you can still feel something, you can still tap into something, the sound is still tangible.

This is the worst-best year because bands you love are making exciting, creative, invigorating music and its tangibly enriching and uplifting the culture and collective spirit of the community. It’s the best year because you feel a sense of community, even if we’re just gathering out for a show to drink some beer and hear some music and yes, whittling each weekend summit down to just that, then, again, it is the worst year because of how much things feel the same despite how much things have changed.

I know it feels the same, day to day, but if you look, if you listen, in the right spots... There's bands out there making music in refreshingly unworldly languages...Throwing their whole damn bodies into it, to boot.

It’s the best year and the worst year because I, and I’m willing to bet you, too, can’t recall a time when there were so many bands…anywhere, everywhere, even just locally.

It’s the worst because there will be a lot of noise. It’s the best because creating something (albeit anything) has become compulsive.

We could all be at a Nascar race sanctifying the wasteful burn of fossil fuels and toxic dump of RV sewage tanks, but instead we’re standing (not sitting) close together (no longer disparate as we are, this morning, on our respective facepaged-feeds) and nodding along, undulating in a weird but heartening meditation to the rhythm and the roar…of noise-made-by-neighbors.

What’s the harm? What’s the point? Wasn’t it great?

Or...What was so great about that?

There’s …just… energy here, though, and I feel that’s worth something. (Worth what? You ask? That answer doesn't come for at least another year). I don’t know why you or we do what we do…gather and regather, sing and re-cite and re-plug in and re-tune and re-string and re-position the bass drum after that last plod of kicks.

It’s fleeting, Frank Woodman told me, as a disarming pensiveness flared his slightly-bloodshot eyes, in just that moment, uttered before being drowned out by feedback from a fuzzed-out amp, a band tuning up behind him up on stage.

And if you’re so sure that it’s been the worst year, then you’re likely not to appreciate those two words from Frank. Come the end of 2013 you’ll wonder why there’s no good bands around anymore…when you might have been in the middle of a moment of our greatest (as of yet, anyhow) potential... Can we muster more? We’ll see in 2013.

Ten (from 12-) Locals

Jeff Milo's Top Ten Songs of 2012

10) The Anonymous - I Do My Other Thing...

A groovy, surrealist, space-funk rap jam about preoccupation, hesitation, delays and distractions from Woodbridge-based rap duo who (finally) put out their fine LP Why Am I Grinding My Teeth... hopefully they also (finally) get around to maybe doing a video for this ... if they ever finish that other thing.

9) Jamaican Queens - Water

This new-ish trio (born from the ashes of long-lost freak-folk quintet Prussia) are all abuzz across local (and, now, international) blogs, honing super-cool vibes and a sensibility for blending synth-fuzzed churnings into a tweaked, spacey indie-pop thing. This song was a staple in their various live appearances but won't be out until their LP Worm Food drops in February.

8) Child Bite - Scum Gene (Trash Vibrato)

It was hard to single out one of Monomania's battering ram, bristled beauties — each have approached the fullest potential of their signature freak-metal incantation, so we might as well rock the one with the band's characteristic circuit-bent joystick wailing its way over the murky monster grooves.

7) Doc Waffles & Self Says - Wings Over Detroit/This Year

Two of the most dynamic and quirky wordsmiths on the local hip-hop scene, SelfSays (Charles Vann) adds charming banter to the brass-bolstered R&B-tweaked rants of Doc (Ben Ness) against the transit system; "Year" is Self's gamer-allegorizing resolution to take total control of his life and his music and advance to the next level.

6) Chit Chat - Communication

Ann Arbor-based lo-fi shredders blend psych-pop to a disarmingly sweet, shimmering surf-rock thing; their debut demos had some cool grimy sock-hop moments and their recent 7-inch conjures Link Wray via a poppier Cramps.

5) The Ashleys - Kids Are Dumb

There are vibrant bands and nifty jams coming from all across the new class of local pop (HandGrenades, DeadBeat Beat, Kickstand Band) but the Ashleys' goulash spills over skuzzier slabs of distorted glam and riffed-out space-rock.

4) Frontier Ruckus - Black Holes

Major keys, cheerily percolated banjos gleaming over propulsive drum fills and hooky melodica. Characteristically dense, dark, epic-scaled folk-rockers lighten up a bit for this sure standout from the forthcoming double-album (Eternity of Dimming) for its palatability and rollicking pop vibe.

3) Johnny Headband - Hot Button Topic

It's like when old-school new-wave, disco or hip-hop acts released their "Extended Dance-Mix" versions — our charismatically kinetic space-funk party-starters go for the jugular halfway through their Who Cooks for You LP with this 8-minute track; it's bracing and buoyant and right at the end it pulls the rug out from under you and gets meditatively atmospheric.

2) The High Strung - Parachutes

I think ?Posible o' Imposible? proved to be the piece de resistance for these veterans of dashing, radiant, jitter-rock, so you probably can't go wrong playing it back on random. This tune, though, billowy and soulful, strikes a startling and sweet poignancy.

1) Matt Jones & the Reconstruction 
- Special Forces

One of the first songs I heard of the year; rousing, marching percussion, sunburst cymbal shears, soaring cellos and violins chopping into rhythmic cuts at the bridge as soothing harmonies and reverb-twanged guitar build and build into this explosive, anthemic chorus only to crash down so suddenly — coaxing you, then, to just play it back just once more.

...

More info from The Metro Times

Never Heard That

That's What You've Got To Not Worry About

THE GO -
FIESTA
(Burger Records & Tapes)
http://www.burgerrecords.org/
http://thegodetroit.com/

THE GO: FIESTA! Double album out on Burger Records Dec. 21, 2012

An Interview with Bobby Harlow
~

You could always say The Go sounded like some thing (or some one).

You could always say that one of the Detroit band’s songs had such-and-such qualities to it, a jangly 60’s-pop thing or a chugging garage-rock swagger… You could, if you wanted to whittle a band, any band of the billions, down to something more tangible, to quicken the deciphering of it, however unique.

“Oh, I get it, it kinda sounds like the Doors…” Or “oh, it’s like he’s blending old-school rap to techno, I get it…” “Oh, it’s like the Mumford & Sons, only better…” “Oh, right, I get it…”

I get it…

“If Paul McCartney, with those 18-year-olds tweeting in confusion about who he is when he performed the Grammys last year, if Paul puts out a new album tomorrow, who, then, should care?”

The Go singer/guitarist co-songwriter and co-producer Bobby Harlow crooks one frayed denim leg over the other, sneakers on shag, taking a break in his basement recording studio, as we discuss the death of the rock star, the haunting grasp of hero-worship and what could be some renaissance-esque spark struck in the exuberance and steady output of labels like Burger Records.

But more on that later…

Stream/Listen: Fiesta's lead single:

“Now, Paul (McCartney)’s just an icon. Or, like Elton John. At some point Elton John did come up with something like ‘The Tumbleweed Connection…’ But now, what is he…? We look at this generation, at the Grammys audience and judge someone for not knowing who John Lennon is…But, similarly, someone could look at me, Bobby, and judge me if I don’t know, say, The Mummies? What’s the difference though? It doesn’t matter.”

Post-Beatles, Post-Led Zeppelin, Post-MTV, Post-Napster, Post-Pitchfork, Post-Everything. Music still matters to the modern listener, but in what ways, if at all, do the creators of new music matter…

How is a band to operate now, in Internet-Music-World? When, all at once, everything and nothing seems to matter the most or not matter at all? Is there any trusty formula to follow any longer?

And so what if you sound like The Doors, or like Paul McCartney? What matters is what you’re saying with your music… (and distinguishing “what” you say with how you’re saying it).

Right? I’m thinking about this too much…

It seems to be the bedevilment of countless bands this past decade, many maddened by the lack of a roadmap, or maybe maddened by that freedom…

“You’re in your own world and it’s important to just be in your world and do what’s going to matter to you…” says Harlow.

This new-normal of Internet Music world, wherein/throughout you can enter and edify your own personal CBGBs, “your own world” erected as some digitized creative commons, a pressure-cooker feeding back inspiration from ever-connected-cliques of bands of the most shrewdly categorized sub-sub-genre. Freeing and over-stimulating all at once.

And sharing their sounds. Led Zeppelin and Elton John and Paul McCartney made millions off of these things, songs, songs that you now make in your living room and put up for free…Your own contribution to that terrific tradition known as rock n’ roll music. Freedom.

The Go, Harlow, with rhythm-guitarist/singer Jon Krautner, and drummer Mark Fellis) are not some new bandcamp-buzzer blipped across your latest blog. They’re coming on fifteen years together now, seemingly inspired-as-ever, but also wary and wise after a whirl through the Music Biz as it crumbled ten years ago under the tidal rise of the Internet.   

“There has always been ‘those few bands that stick,’” Harlow says, thinking of the perennial harkening to “icons.”

“But those big bands in the past, like Zeppelin, they had a number of circumstances that assured they rose above…”

Indeed, Robert Plant or Elton John never needed a kickstarter.  

But, Harlow says, sometimes there’s just “that thing…”

“There’s just some magic going on there, like with Jack White or Kurt Cobain.” Something in their voice or in their fresh, raw, visceral songwriting. “Everybody jumps on ‘that thing.’ But then, how did they record it? Does that matter?”

“…Was it really anything special?”

The Go found a way to forge something original for their latest album: Fiesta. Don’t think. Press record. Finish it tonight. And, no pun intended, Go with it.

Fiesta, the band’s 6th album, comes out on Burger Records, December 21^st.

As singer/songwriter and producer Robert Harlow admits he can feel “Hyper-conscious of” the creative-act in the moments leading up to it. “But when I’m in the creative moment, at the very moment of creation? (I’m) not conscious, I’m un-conscious! That’s what you’ve got to not worry about…”

Thus, they approached Fiesta akin to an abstract expressionist painter’s caprice, guided entirely by intuition and instinct

Layers were set down through lightly-improvised / lightly-guided jamming; they’d try wandering into funkier, or somewhat psychedelic terrain, but then maybe try a tribal rock twist or flitting off into some heady prog-slogged detachment.

After that, they’d fit lyrics atop their mad mud-pies. They were careful, though, not to strangle-away a song’s potential with over-conceptualization.

“I think now, from this experience, I realize that everything shouldn’t be kept so precious,” said Harlow.

“Or at least …not looked-at as precious. Just make music.”

For those who need catching-up at this point:

Some of the Go’s formative moments came a dozen years ago during that fleeting love affair Detroit’s “garage” rock scenesters enjoyed with fickle (feckless?) national music journalists (during which they caught the ears of major labels such SubPop).

Call them savvy veterans but don’t call them jaded yet – Indeed, still quite down to earth, (and still continuing to work in basements).

“We may try different things,” Harlow said of their approach to songwriting and recording. “And, because we try maybe too many things that might mean that, if we do have a sound, then, well, I don’t know what it is…”

“Which,” he adds self-depreciatingly, “may be a fatal flaw. I probably still live in the same bubble-world that I always have when it comes to new music…”

That “bubble” sense is flourished by our basement setting, nestled away from the bustle of the city and assured that our phones are switched-off. The meditative peace of sound-proof walls emanates. Harlow’s recording set-up glows behind him on the table as he faces me, swiveled on his desk chair.

He remembers his early perspectives of the music “biz” – back in the late 90’s when The Go “broke-out” (or “got signed”). Back in those days he’d seen bands selling-off their principals and self-consciously modeling for appeal, for radio-friendly fare.

Compare that to now, (particularly with Harlow’s experience collaborating in a producing role with a grassroots cassette-centric Anaheim-based label Burger Records), and he now realizes that maybe the “fidelity” of recordings doesn’t matter as much anymore, as long as there’s “good vibes,” and as long as what’s captured is truly the voice of the songwriters.

Toward the end of 2012’s summer, the trio wrote and worked in their metro-Detroit recording space, aspiring to record: “whatever” …or “anything.”

“Let’s just show up and come up with it, together, on the spot,” says Harlow, succinctly summing up the goal of Fiesta. Not that they even had a goal, per se. Thirty-two demos cut together in a little more than a month’s time, spanning long weeknights of experimental sonic sculpting, with none of the tunes having been written in advance.

Fiesta

Speaking specifically as one molded by his recent experiences with Burger, operating from an encouraging, improvisational, if-it-works-it-works ethos, Harlow says it “…makes perfect sense to be putting this album out right now.”

Right now, this intrinsically open album that sounds seemingly to lift from everywhere, coming out now, during this time of a Internet-Music-world’s jolting kaleidoscopic wring, where the answer of how the music biz works or how to make it seems ever more futile or unsolvable…

“Think of the absurdity of just being a human being,” Harlow astonishingly scoffs. “The absurdity of being a light-being, in space, is so crazy that whatever we think we ought to be doing…we probably should just stop thinking and just do it.”

Unsolvable? Need a solution? Need a rhyme or reason or whatever to write a song and put it out? The only answer is a response. The only answer is action.

Just make music.

Now, the Go, said Harlow, starting up in the mid-late 90’s, the days known loosely as “post-grunge,” instilled them with a bit of a rebellious urge to kick back against all these brands, all these dressed-up delusions on the radio, to clear out white-noise confusion and reach back to more of a roots-rock style, dashed with a bit of obnoxious, unhinged punk leanings and hewn with a subdued screw-you-if-you-don’t-dig-this lo-fi fuzz.

“That was a feeling of: ‘We’re doing something that doesn’t give a shit against any of this…”

Scruffy fidelity and roots-reaching swagger aside, the band has consistently tried (again, without trying too hard) not to concern itself with how it sounded or what they sounded like. “It was good enough for us, so why wouldn’t it be good enough for everyone else? It sounded good. It was about sounding-good and about the atmosphere.”

And maybe that didn’t fit so well back then… (Particularly in the early 00’s, when the Garage Explosion extinguished discouragingly swiftly and the band would go on to have two of their records rejected or scrapped-into-muddled-Frankenstines, navigating zealous label-heads and dubious publicists). 

But still, that sense of everything-goes seems the norm, now.

“I love what’s going on out there,” Harlow subtly gestures a hand upward, implying the stupefying grandness of new-music’s-frontiers. “I feel like it really doesn’t matter as much what the quality of your recordings are…” (And we can name-drop a bit here, Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, Ariel Pink, or Metz…or King Tuff or Iceage…)

“…as long as there’s good vibes on there. Which, is exciting and fun.”

Because who knows now? And what’s the difference, anyway? If Paul McCartney puts out an album, what’s the difference? What does that really mean to you, in your own world?

“If it sounds good to you, who knows, then, put it out.”

So you can try to say that Fiesta sounds like something… “You can,” Harlow nods, “you can try. We wear our influences on our sleeve. But for the first time, on this record, for both (Krautner) and I, we were ourselves. Our voices, the identities, were firmly in place. On (2007’s) Howl On The Haunted Beat You Ride, I felt singing as though I had something in my head, a style to suit a song, like an actor.”

Fiesta then, is less a revue of recognizable rock styles and more of a ricochet. A true blender.

“These are definitely our own voices. This record was entirely different from anything we’ve done.”

The group would get in a room and record, free of intent and relying upon instinct. Get the takes done and then pick a random tape. A random tape from a random day, a random session of their 32 experiments and only then determine how to approach. This meant, A.) that they were actually surprised to hear back what they’d pieced together, and B.) they’d then be refreshingly challenged to properly and purely complete the song, bring it to life.

“We’d get an idea…and then we’d commit to it.”

Talk about “roots.” They sang all the harmonies together into one mic, working with only four tracks and using pitch-pipes to tune their instruments. Guest musicians came in to flesh it out. Joey Mazzolla, another iconic Detroit rocker, added guitars with Justin Walker, himself more of the new-school of indie-psyche mutations. Then, the adaptable brass journeyman Rod Jones, brought in a funk-flaring saxophone.

“If I did anything, I would just encourage,” Harlow said of his producing-role. “There was no second-guessing anybody. We played whatever we wanted to play and we did that until we had 32 songs…Just being able to let-go… that was the exercise.”

“This album sounds…”

There’s this pregnant pause and it seems to last at least a minute even though I know it’s only nine seconds. But inside that pause I hear a roar of drums, a wail of guitars, a blinding whirl of bass – it is the sound of a wavy wobbly question mark.

“…I don’t know,” he says.

Better that way, right? To not be so conscious of it, of one’s sound? It goes back to over-thinking all this music nonsense. That can be unnerving. Just make music.

This one sounds like: I-don’t-know…

Let it be, then.

What Harlow does know, when it comes to Fiesta: “This one’s exciting.”

“The other ones were unnerving,” Harlow admits. And, by comparison to Fiesta, the other ones were contrived. “And when you do that, you know what you’re listening to. I know what I’m listening to…”

Just like everyone could always try to say that The Go sounded like such-and-such.

What it came down to, what it’s always been about in anarchic Internet Music world, was “Freedom.”

“Freedom,” Harlow breaths a hallowed sigh. “Everybody’s got their influences and their heroes. I’ve hero-worshipped rock stars since I was a kid.” He counts off:  Prince, Michael Jackson, Joe Strummer, Captain Beefheart. Such personalities. “Everybody’s got their heroes, but I think the harder you work at it and the more that you do, the more life experience you accumulate…”

“But, then, also having a conscious realization that you need to be doing something abstract, that it’s somehow gotta be abstract or that it’s gotta be the unconscious mind, uncensored emotions, conjured into music. And into writing and into whatever. And then, at that point, maybe there’s transformation.”

Intuition. Instinct. Unconscious creation. Transformation. Freeness…Freedom. Fiesta.

“…This one’s exciting.” 

DOUBLE-LP GATEFOLD JACKETS w/ TIP-ON COVERS PRESSED ON RED, ORANGE & GREEN VINYL! FIESTA! www.burgerrecords.com

Mittenfest VII

12.21.12-- FernCare - Loving Touch (Ferndale)