Martin Bisi has a resume that is more-or-less unsurpassed in terms of the quiet innovation he fostered. Whether it was helping Swans piece together found sounds for the stunning double set, soundtracks for the blind, or working with Sonic Youth on bad moon rising, Evol & The Whitey Album, Martin Bisi was a guiding hand behind a sound that more or less defined New York throughout the eighties.
Last year, Martin put out BC 35 Vol. 1, an album that celebrates the studio in which he has spent his career, and which draws together a number of seminal artists including Cop Shoot Cop, JG Thirwell, Adja The Turkish Queen, Alice Doughnut and more for a once-in-a-lifetime series of improvisations recorded, edited and mixed into a remarkable sonic tapestry. The album made our end-of-year list, and I was very keen to have the opportunity to speak to Martin about the possible fate of his studio, the creation of the record and more. Now, on the eve of the release of the second volume of recordings from the exhaustive BC 35 sessions, I managed to catch up with Martin via Skype.
BC35 Vol. 2 is available now from Bronson Recordings:
https://bc35anniversary.bandcamp.com/album/bc35-volume-two-the-35-year-anniversary-of-bc-studio
This is really cool to speak to you – I had an opportunity to interview you a couple years ago for the video you put out, but it was a text-based interview and I really regretted the fact that we didn’t get a chance to talk properly, so this is a real highlight for me.
I remember, I think – you mean the documentary?
Yeah, that’s right. So, obviously quite a lot has happened since then the BC 35 album that you put out (you know, that was one of my favourite albums of that year), it was such a cool thing to listen to because it took me back to one of the early records that got me into music back in the 90s – I was kinda growing up on that sort of alternative rock and there was this ‘Teriyaki Asthma’ compilation which had Alice Doughnut on it, amongst other things. So, it kind of took me back to that.
I’m glad, I really hoped people would notice them in particular and appreciate them. It’s funny how some things just fade away and then come back. It’s something that’s very different than to how I imagined things going when I was a kid. And I guess the internet helped there. I pretty much thought things were kind of ephemeral – they just popped up and kind of, when they disappeared, they disappeared. I didn’t really imagine that things could come back.
In fact, we used to put down the idea of things coming back. You know the ‘reunion tour’ – that kind of stuff, which of course can still be kind of a drag but… not really. I guess when you’re in the middle of these potential reunions, things maybe look a little different and look a little more ‘real’ than when you were a kid and you imagined, you know, older people coming back together in that way.
But Alice Doughnut, that would be an example because they had a really big fanbase. They would typically sell out CBGBs 2 nights in a row – that kind of thing. There was just a lot of youthful energy, you know; a lot of slam dancing and stuff. So, there was a lot of passion there. They seemed to sort of… I think it was just their style, you know it’s whatever people care about at the moment. So, even a band like Cop Shoot Cop seems to resonate a little more now, even though when Alice Doughnut was kind of hot, Cop shoot cop had faded; but now they seem to resonate more, so it’s hard to tell.
It seems to me that a lot of these things – the myth builds up and I think you’re right, the internet puts a lot into that, because you get the stories circulating and then when something like this happens… or, you know, a band like swans gets back together; the myth explodes and people get to witness what they’d only heard about…
Yeah, there’s that and there’s also more of a feeling of grabbing… simply of people trying to seek out things that seem real. You notice I used the word ‘seem’ because, of course, that’s its own kind of artifice. Everything technically is real, but there’s just a feeling of some things being more real than other things. So, it might be vinyl that you can put your hands on and that seems more real than, I guess, a streaming experience. But also, I guess age sort of has its value and people recognise that – the value of experience – it’s a composite of that and then, on the other hand, the notion that age doesn’t matter… people need something. Age helps it along, so people feel that something about Cop Shoot Cop is relevant to the moment, then they’ll respond to it and the age gives it a sort of… a vintage… it gives it some value.
Then also, there’s a lot of fear and concern about how fast things are changing. How things are just disappearing in droves. So, for instance in New York City, things will just kind of go in phases, where suddenly there’ll be, even within one month, this slew of closing – record stores, venues or whatever. It’s a wave of circumstances adding up and all these things disappear at the same time. And the speed of it, I think, is kind of concerning. In this over-heated world we have now, things just… literally overheat and there’s no… it’s not an organic thing where things just age, go away and let something else new come along. It’s almost more like things are disappearing because they’re bullied out of existence. So, I think there’s that concern.
I think those three things kind of panned into the phenomenon of nostalgia not being the experience that I thought it was when I was a kid. It’s a little different now and it’s not as easily dismissed. Whatever that thing might be, that you could call nostalgia, is actually a little more of the moment; more even than I thought it could be.
One of the things I really liked about the record, and what I’m really looking forward to hearing in the new one, is that, although there’s the kind of nostalgia in the familiarity of the names, the creative spark is very of the moment and seems to be forcing these artists out of their comfort zone. So, that’s what’s cool about this project – it captures that same spirit that I fell in love with in the 90s – it’s something completely new and evolutionary in the way these artists are operating.
Exactly. Well it’s a good conversation to have… for instance, I’ve never really… I mean, even as recently as ten years ago, when ‘retro’ was a genre… (I mean ‘Retro’ with a capital R) I would look at it askance and I’d get into these discussions with people about what Retro was and couldn’t a lot of things be categorised as “Retro”? You know, I’d ask if some of what they did was “Retro” and that discussion would happen, and some people would defend it, but these things have an arc, right? Each genre has its own tradition.
So I would look down, for instance, on something too traditional, like roots Americana – it was too traditional for me to be very interested in. But then, people would say that these things have their own life and their own arc, and even though we think of it as traditional, that doesn’t mean that the people who like that are stuck in a box. The thing itself sort of evolves.
So, for instance, you have to ask if No Wave could be in that category, you know, where you could think that there’s something that sounds like No Wave and you might talk about it and reference it as No Wave. But if it’s happening now, is it part of an arc? Was No Wave just a snap shot in time, as maybe some might think, or did it evolve and have its own thing, and does it keep going? Is there current No Wave?
And, I mean we certainly say that about avant-garde, right? There’s like new avant-garde and no one questions whether that has its own arc and tradition… or future, for that matter. And young people are coming into it, which is of course an essential component, so yeah – it’s still spontaneous and some of these things do exist in an arc in a bona fide way, so I’ve I’ve sort of come round to that way of thinking a bit.
I have this discussion sometimes with sort of progressive musicians, because there are two schools of thought as to how that genre works: There are those who are rooted in 1974 and recreating the sounds of Genesis or whatever; and then there are those who always want to push forward and progress… so, I guess, you can take something like No Wave or progressive or anything else and move it forward and that’s what gives it that life and stops it from becoming a “Retro”-type thing…
Yeah, and I think it takes a bit of will. But there’s a point where you can bona fide say that… like metal, for instance. You can definitely see it with metal – it’s really obvious you can take things that are kind of not really metal, like Led Zeppelin, and say “well it kind of is metal, because it inspired it, so let’s put it in that arc…” So, with metal, you do have that and I think jazz has kind of reclaimed its place as something that’s evolving as well.
Usually when people insist that you can legitimately hyphenate a genre – so it’s jazz-this and jazz-that… then, that means it’s still relevant. You can call it jazz. But, for instance, grunge is something you really wouldn’t do that with. You wouldn’t say you were doing this “jazz-grunge” or something like that. Grunge is really something people abandoned and let go of and it’s done. Or maybe even goth would be something that people don’t really hyphenate. A little less than with something like grunge, which people just seemed to run from because of how it was marketed and all of that.
But progressive is kind of a funny thing, because that definitely is an arc and people talk about how progressive has become a lot dirtier. It was almost a bad word, it was something like grunge, something that you would never say about what you were doing – progressive – and it could definitely be a pejorative term. But now, you can take really gnarly bands, almost with a punk ethic – edgy, disturbing and bright… so, you know, sonically a punk band; but then musically, in terms of what they’re fingers are doing, you realise that some of that’s kinda prog. So, people have reclaimed that word. I have too! I never thought in a million years I’d use the word progressive (slightly) to describe some aspect of what I do.
‘BC35’, from what I understand, took nine months to shape the actual final album from when you did the original sessions – I love the way the record (like so many of the albums I enjoy), has that ebb and flow that you would expect from a coherently-planned album rather than something culled form a weekend of sessions, so I was wondering how the process of putting the record together went for you?
By the way – what you just described is one reason why I resist using the term ‘compilation’. I personally never use the word ‘compilation’ to describe this album but, unfortunately, technically it kind of is because it’s various artists. But it’s a little different to a traditional compilation because of what you’ve just said… because everything was meant to hold together.
A lot of choices, even in the original sessions (which was actually a sort of live event). It was really a live recording session – plural – two days. Even with that and some of the choices that I made with the co-producer (Genevieve Fernworthy) – I had in mind that we were trying to balance the flow and that the record was making a statement about what the studio was about. But then, also, a bit of eclectic-ness is also part of that statement; so, it’s basically pretty clear that there’s a bias in the record, but it’s not only that, right? It’s definitely a kind of No Wave / Post Punk thing, but then trying to find that eclectic-ness. And that’s spread out to volume two – to try keep that going.
But yeah, it did take about two months and it was really just because I think that, to take things that are improvised and use them as the raw material for something that feels like a piece of music – that’s really hard. And that’s really what happened, and everyone knew it was going to happen. So, in other words, it’s not a strict representation of the live improvisations – for instance, I would mute people and bring them back in and mess with the arrangement – I would take pieces out. At the same time, though, trying to maintain that sense of improvisation while making it into an actual piece of music.
It is extremely hard and time-consuming, and it is funny because I see a lot of people attempting to do that and thinking that it’ll be easy… and then it’s like “well, I’ll see you in about a year!”
And people are like “We’ll do this song – we have an hour left, maybe we’ll do an improvisation so we can take some pieces of it and make something about it and some of the ideas that came and develop them…” then you get to the mixing, editing and development – something that seems that it would be super easy, but it’s actually quite difficult, so when people say that, I’m like “O….K, I’ll see you in a year!”
So, that’s where the process unravels – any one piece might take… a month or a month-and-a-half… and that’s on one piece of music. It’s also… it comes back to almost writing. You know, it wouldn’t be weird to write a song over the course of an entire month (or even two) but that’s almost what happened with some of these pieces, which started from improvisation.
One of the really cool things is having it on vinyl, because it’s definitely sequenced with vinyl in mind – I love the way that you go through the first side, almost getting that completely deconstructed, beat-boxy tidal channel and then you get that really hypnotic opening on the second side, which is the JG Thirwell stuff – that’s an art in itself, creating that kind of trip for the listener to take. That, for me, is a very interesting part of doing this. It’s interesting to hear you say that you kinda had to put it all together in that way – I guess, in some way, as you only played on about half of the record, it was helpful to be able to stand back from some of it and almost take on the role of musical director.
Yeah, I play on a bunch of the tracks for sure, maybe a third of the record; not quite half.
Yeah, one thing that’s kind of easy is how sort of obvious the sequencing was. Because, usually that’s a big hang up for people (the order of things). So, I usually try to inject that I think that there’s no perfect order and no matter what you find, or what seems like a good order on paper – it might have little issues. Some things are the perfect opener, but then it’s a bit long. Or something is the perfect palette cleanser, but it’s a bit short. Or these two songs go well together, but they’re in the same key. There’s always something that isn’t 100% smooth, so I find that you almost have to give up a little bit when you’re putting the order together and, you know, as you didn’t write the pieces to be in an order that’s kind of the problem.
So, since you didn’t write them to be in an order or write them to be anywhere particularly on the record – usually that’s stuff that’s undecided, right? Like what the actual opener is… You’re lucky if people even know what the opener and closer is – that’s unusual – and that’s just the beginning of making those kinds of choices.
But for some reason on this album, I think because it was all different people on each song, the choices… they just became a lot easier. Also, vinyl gives a great take on ordering an album: the whole idea of having an intermission is a pretty-established concept. We have that in theatre for instance – is kind of obvious: you do this, you take a breather, and it makes a lot of sense. Then you come back and things are refreshed and you start over, so you can give something like the Thirwell piece the power of opening side two, but yet having the whole other part of the vibe of the record already established made a lot of sense That track is a great palette cleanser, plus it’s a very powerful piece. Also, it was not collaborative… I mean it was done collaboratively, because it was Jim and Dana Schechter, but it wasn’t like a group improv, you know; so, I wanted to establish the collectivism of the record first before veering from it… so that’s why that song is the opener of side two. It’s kinda perfect.
…and then, a personal favourite of mine is the closing track – take this ride, it’s a lovely curtain call for the album, I thought.
Yeah, I think, in Vol. 2, Adja has another track on Vol. 2. It’s called Bobby’s Car and it’s also near the end and it’s funny, because I was trying to tell her… this is what’s also good about a proper sequence. Actually, it’s one reason why I don’t favour very long records. I think a record should be of a length where you’re comfortable putting a favourite song near the end. Where, like, the last song can be a powerful place for a song to be and it’s funny because on the vinyl for this record, there’s also a 7” that’s inserted. That also made the sequencing kind of easy because I could take a song that’s really at the end (I guess where it would be on the CD), and it’s on the 7” insert – that also gives it a certain power where you can put one thing down and then pick up the other and reshape how you think it fits together. So, those songs that are sort of the end songs – they’re like one piece of the puzzle.
But yeah, she’s also near the end (either last, or second last) on Vol. 2 and I thought that was a powerful place to place her. It helps clear out the unadulterated noise of a lot of the other stuff and just end with something more melodic. It’s interesting because Adja the Turkish Queen is really important – her other band (called Black Fortress of opium), that was the band that she came to B.C. Studio with and they were kind of gothic. It wasn’t classic Goth like Sisters of Mercy, or something. It wasn’t that… and it wasn’t Steam Punk, but it sort of had that drama and also it had a sort of… it touched upon a world sensibility. So, in a weird way, it tied in to a little bit of that Gypsy punk kind of vibe. So, that was her band, Black Fortress of Opium. Also, she’s Turkish; Turkish American so it’s funny, but I thought I had a little bit of the Gothic (with a capital G) side of B.C. Studio represented with that track.
With the movie that came out a couple of years ago, part of the purpose was to raise awareness of the gentrification of the area – so not just looking at the legacy, but also the challenges that surround the studio – has much changed in the wake of that film being made? Is the studio under threat from changes in the area or have things become a bit more stable?
Well, one thing that seems to happen is that all the intimidating… something might happen, and it might not be clear that it’s an actual threat but it’s a little scary. What’ll happen is that the intimidating things seem to kind of come in waves. So, there are moments when things really do get scary and then they sort of plateau away a little bit. But things seem incrementally to be heading towards an outcome that could be… it’s definitely imaginable that the end of the studio could happen.
There could be an end for the studio, and it would be… it’s not that I would ever leave or that business wouldn’t be good enough. It would be because of Real Estate pressures and its foreseeable. It’s very complicated, so we’re (and I mean we as in the building) – the whole building that I’m in is sort of strategically trying to sustain itself and it’s complicated because even if things are good for the building, in other words if the building manages to stay here; there could still be a problem for me because a recording studio takes up a lot of space and that seems to not be the trend.
Everyone thinks that a great solution is to shrink sizes and have co-working spaces and to have shared studios where they’ll take a large space and subdivide it and people lose privacy (but no one’s concerned so much with privacy anymore), so there are a lot of these kinds of spaces around here, where they’re trying to make it work by shrinking everything and I am like a behemoth from like another era where I take up like two floors and a lot of space – like big drum rooms and all this kinda stuff.
And, you know, I have to fight the narrative that I take up too much space when there’s all this need and there’s a housing crisis and all these artists – tens of thousands of artist who live in New York City or want to come to New York City – and where are they going to go and we have to make room for them. There’s definitely that; and New York City right now sees itself as being in a boom economy and there’s just not enough room for everyone and people are coming to New York City.
I also think it’s so obvious that these are the sort of things that come and go, so I’m hoping that things swing the other way. It has to – bubbles are meant to burst, and things don’t go as planned. Like, for instance (I don’t know if you know), there was this Amazon bid. They were going to move to New York City and have a second hub here. That was not going to be far from me and that was going to bring tens of thousands of jobs, but there was a lot of opposition to it. The city itself was really gung-ho about it. They mayor, all these so-called progressives were very, very into it but there was a lot of neighbourhood… like grassroots opposition, and actually they were defeated, which was a huge surprise, because everyone thought that was going to go through and bring like thirty thousand jobs. And literally people in the city were going “yes, but where are these people going to live?” So, that was defeated, and Amazon pulled out… so hopefully that’s kind of a sign that this sort of growth-based economy and growth-based solutions – where the path forward is to get more and more development – hopefully that’s abating a little bit. But anyway, I’m not holding my breath – things come, they get scary, then they slow down.
Even the election of Donald Trump, it slowed things down actually, because everything was set up for a different reality. Hillary Clinton, who’s very based in New York, things were going a certain way – there was a whole narrative and then, when Donald Trump came along there was all this uncertainty. For instance, this canal that’s polluted, right? That was going to get cleaned up. Basically, the clean up was going to be overseen by the federal government, but with Trump suddenly in office and pulling back on all this environmental stuff, there was doubt that it would get cleaned up at all, or it would be at least postponed. So, that delayed some of the development because it was relying on what they expected (or took for granted) to happen, which was that the canal was going to get cleaned up. So, that slowed things up for like a year. Anyway, so it’s complicated. Just now, when they proposed rezoning the neighbourhood (which was like a month ago), that bumped things up to the higher code of alarm and it sort of stayed there. It’s incremental. So, we just had a big scare because literally no one knew what was in the rezoning package and there was a mix of things that were really bad and things that were kind of not as terrible as they could have been.
Did you find that the documentary and then these albums… have they helped in giving you a wider opportunity to speak out? There’s been quite a bit of support from the artistic community, I think.
Yeah, there was also some attention to the documentary and even the BC 35 record and it was attention from music fans because, you know, this was initially just local news and it was mainly just these very corporate, talking heads and they were all over the local news… [at this point the signal dies out completely]
So, for instance, there was cable news, like local New York City cable news had covered it – the BC 35 record – and also the release show and that was news. Just the fact that it was 35 years and that it was really positive. It was like “this is important!” and they were saying “Wow! We’ll keep covering this story – this is amazing!” and I started realising that I was slightly, in a small way… the studio had taken its place alongside other, sort of, notable places in New York City history like, say, Coney Island (obviously in a much, much smaller way) – it was taking its place.
It was that sort of narrative – “these are these things and they’re old and it meant something. We’re not exactly sure what it meant for everyone involved, but it means something and all you need to know is that it’s Brooklyn.” So, it’s an identity thing, where people would focus on the identity of place. It’s clearly a thing and clearly part of the dynamic of gentrification in and of itself. It’s all very ironic, of course, so I continue to contribute to the sort of cultural context of Brooklyn and then, at this point in time, that’s exactly the thing that can undermine the existence of all these things.
From an outside perspective, it always feels like New York has a really strong sense of identity, even in the face of globalisation, there’s always this feeling that New York is one of those places where the inhabitants are very aware of where they’re from and what that means.
Yeah. One common thread is that New York City has always been a hard place. It’s always been a hard place to survive. For almost, maybe, opposing reasons. Whether it was crime or gentrification or whatever – it’s always been oddly synonymous with whatever trend is, which sometimes might be global. So, when Urban Blight was a global trend, maybe worldwide, but definitely in the United States – people looked to New York as being emblematic of that fall from grace.
And then, no analysis of gentrification would be complete without discussing New York City. So, it always felt like the poster child of these grand, social, urban landscape discussions and people are kind of aware of that; everyone wants to feel, when they move here, like New Yorkers. That’s part of its lure and continues to be. And that’s what’s disappearing, and the idea that’s concerning to a lot of people, even the politicians. That’s why there’s so much attention in my neighbourhood, at least politically, that there needs to be a space carved out for the arts. That’s part of the narrative. Even if it doesn’t fit me quite perfectly, that narrative is there, and that’s because they’re quite aware of the displacements and the fact that people are like “you know what? I’m comfortable leaving New York” – that’s been a big shift and it’s got some attention that there’s definitely a subset that no longer laments, and that have come to terms with, the fact that the New York that was part of their fantasies no longer exists, and that what they’re looking for might actually be in other places.
That community, where you can work and find people to work together with creatively and be left alone and not be judged – it can be found in other places. Maybe not even far from New York –it’s unfortunate that these people have left New York because that makes a big difference. The world being what it is now, someone being a hundred miles away, it’s kind of a problem. You can say that you’ll make that drive but time, the way things are, it’s harder to coordinate and get things together. And I think that’s a big part of New York, when this started, was it was a place where it was kind of easy to… the fact that we met Brian Eno and could bring him to the space and stuff like that – that’s something that couldn’t really happen now. It happened then because we would run into the person.
It’s a big change…
And, You know, I’d always been cautious about being the old person claiming that things ‘used to be better’, but I’ve sort of stopped worrying about that, because actually I do have the benefit of being able to evaluate both situations and I try to concede when I think some things work better now, but I’m quite aware of how things used to work better. It’s also relevant because I’ve realised things come in cycles so, you have to understand all this stuff. Things aren’t standing still, and they definitely aren’t going in a straight line.
I’ve only got one final question, which is whether you’re planning to tour Europe and, specifically, the UK?
Yeah, I think last time I was in England was 2016, I believe…
Around the documentary, I think.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I’m hoping there will be a couple of dates this November, but it hasn’t been solidified. But yeah, I’m hoping this November can happen. That’s the next time I’m hopping over to your side, so hopefully that can happen.
We’re so used to travelling around the UK and complaining about distance not really thinking that Europe and, of course, the US are just huge in comparison, so we’re always a bit surprised when artists pop over to Europe in that way…
The thing is that it is harder in the UK because there has to be all these work visa issues that don’t exist in mainland Europe. There’s… you need a sponsor and you really need some partnering. I’m hoping that, because there’s a European label associated and I kind of understand how it works, it’ll be easier but it’s not straightforward. And it costs something. It’s not expensive, but you do have to pay for it, which is something that doesn’t exist in the rest of Europe.
It’s funny, but it’s a threshold where artists can come over to the other side of the pond that sort of eludes a lot of artists here in the US, so it really isn’t everyone. I guess it’s just expensive and the logistics of it are difficult. Things work kind of differently. There work differently even within territories in Europe and things work differently just in how they’re structured, how the money works. All kinds of little things work differently in the UK than anywhere else and that somehow adds more red tape and more stumbling blocks. But yeah, I mean, I hope to go back – that would be great. We’ll see.
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