Feral Myths was, without a doubt, one of my favourite releases of last year. A passionate, bold record it speaks volumes as to the identity of its multi-talented creator, Martin Bisi. Martin is not just a remarkable producer and artist, he’s also a vocal supporter of multiple causes, working hard within his local community to champion the equality that has been the mainstay of his work. It was, therefore, an absolute pleasure to sit with Martin to discuss the making of the album, his thoughts on feminism and the Black Lives Matter movement, and to get an update on BC studio, under threat from land developers for some time now and the subject (amongst of other things) of our last interview back in 2019.
Hello, how are you doing?
Good, thank you!
It’s nice to see you – thank you for making time to speak to me.
Of course.
The first thing I wanted to tell you, as much as anything else, is that listening to your music takes me back to being a teenager and digging through record bins and trying to find obscure Sonic youth releases, which in England were really hard to come by, and it’s really nice to find music that has that experimental vibe that doesn’t feel tied to any one genre. It’s inspiring to hear music like that, so it was a real pleasure reviewing your album.
Cool – your review was pretty great. It was song by song and I enjoyed it too, because I shared some of the little blurbs of each song, with some of the people who played on those songs, and just saying that it felt nice. For example, on Skin Suit, you noticed that the vocals were overlapping, for instance. That was a big part of producing that song, which has overlapping the vocals, because the singer, Mág Ne Tá, she had done – well, the reason I even asked her is that she has this band that is very early electronic in New York City, and she uses a lot of vocal effects and all that crazy vocoder-y kind of stuff. So that song has this Kraftwerk-y, we are the robots kinda vibe. And literally, when we recorded the verses, all I had in the verses was a voice occasionally going “turn on, turn off” and I didn’t know what else to do with it – I almost needed a robot to sing it, and so she did these things and then we couldn’t decide on the vocal effects. She had this pedal, and one thing was like [imitates creaking noise] octave down and flanger, so we did take – take – take and I realised I kind of liked them all, so we arranged it so they would all overlap.
And I’m not scared of, as you might have noted, of more in music! I think that the term “less is more” has been a real challenge for me. I could almost say that less is more has kind of ruined my life. I don’t like that phrase. I don’t like that phrase “less is more” – it’s like come on, it’s just a meme from what, 120 years ago or something. Less is not more! I understand occasionally you can say it, but it should not be imprinted on the wall of my studio as a motto. I like dealing with too much. And I think that that’s…
With BC 35 you have that. We just had too much. I don’t know – we had too much on a lot of levels. We had these big ensembles that would play and then I’d have to carve a piece of music out of it – that was too much. There were too many people – it was our thirty-five-year anniversary. We had not enough time – only two days. Fifty people! That’s too much. So, I’m accustomed to that. I even realised that I tend to choose the bands that were putting too much on their plate. There was a band from Boston, and they had too much – it was like six people on stage in a DIY space and it was a technical catastrophe, and I felt this thing, like I could work with them. And, you know, it was because it was a challenge, and they were crossing this limit that shouldn’t be crossed and I’m happy to cross it. Anyways, sorry to go off on a tangent there!
No, it’s really interesting! I come from that school of thought. One of those things that I find remarkably interesting when thinking about producing versus playing is that you can fall into that trap of just doing the thing that you’re *supposed* to do. You’ve got the guitars and the drums and you’re doing it right and, when you play, it sounds cool; but when it becomes interesting is when you drag something in that has caught your attention. I like picking things up and I might not be good at them, but I’ll try to mangle them until they do what I want them to do. And the result is much more interesting because it’s spontaneous and it’s got all these layers and I find it really exciting and that’s the vibe I got from BC 35.
Sometimes I do feel… not guilty… but a lot of that is done in the production, you know. Not always. Sometimes it’s tracked live in certain ways. But you know, in the analogue days, when everything was analogue, we did not have endless tracks. We still went there, strangely enough. I always had sixteen tracks, then it was twenty-four, and we’d still go crazy. We had like sub mixes, and I’d put extraneous stuff on a rack tom track that wasn’t a rack tom in the verses – you know, I’d put stuff there – all kinds of stuff.
With Dresden Dolls, I was a big fan of blind recording things, which was very uncomfortable, but I like it. We had someone who had… you know, when you work with a string quartet, usually you don’t really… it’s four people, but you usually work with one person – the arranger – that’s the person you communicate with. So, we were communicating with this stuff, but I was into having this person direct the string quartet, but without the string quartet listening to what they were playing to. So, that was very strange, but that was the kind of randomness we tried to get. I mean it has a connection, but that connection is kind of floating up here, and then we see where we can tickle the listener’s orientation, so they’re not maybe in the spot they think they are. So, we settled on phrases, almost like self-sampling; we’d settle on string phrases that would be [imitates string patch rolling downhill] almost like a tumbling effect. So, they’d just conduct where it’s going to be, but the musicians weren’t hearing the actual track, so they were disconnected form the music. It’s a way of randomizing something that’s not purely like a digital arrangement or a mix where it’s performed that way.
Also, with a few drummers, I told them – one drummer specifically, Billy Atwell on Sirens of the Apocalypse, that record – I told him “I kinda like fills in the wrong places” – for example, if you go into the chorus, it doesn’t have the big fill anticipating everything. Instead, when you go into the second phrase, that’s where the fill can go; So, this kind of stuff that’s just not so cookie cutter, but it’s unexpected and surprises the listener.
I think a lot of people get surprised subconsciously. So, I’m kinda aware of that – with music, I love, sonically, the train wreck that you can’t watch, but you can’t look away from. It’s like leading the listener because they’re not getting what they’re expecting. And you know, I’m not expecting everyone to be that sonically tuned in and interested, so I’m aware of dragging people along subconsciously almost. And that happens to me too – sometimes I get enamoured of music while half listening – there’s a lot happening up here, in our brains.
I think, in general, we’ve kind of got used to people crossing genres, but on this album, you’re crossing genres that aren’t necessarily naturally sympathetic to one another, so you get some really interesting sounds – there’re are some operatic vocals, and then little hip-hop influences coming through – there’s a lot of the unexpected.
I’m not very aware of mixing genres – that’s kind of the thing. There’s a palette of things I have. Also, I realised one of the two drummers has a jazz background and I didn’t even realise it until I was looking at some videos of us playing live and I saw he was playing standard grip. That was like the original way that drummers used to drum a century ago, and I didn’t even realise that was happening on stage with me – but I was getting the viscerality. I could do what I wanted to do, but I felt what he was doing. Obviously, when we’re playing live, I can’t look at what they’re doing – so, when I looked back, I realised it was pretty jazzy and I realised that a lot of the rock that I listened to in the 70s had jazz drummers- Jimi Hendrix; a lot of prog stuff I liked like Frank Zappa and Yes. It was jazz drummers – Terry Bozio and the like.
So, I thought, maybe that’s a thing – pre-Steve Albini; pre-Nirvana, where rock had a more jazz approach… pre-punk, where a lot of rock had jazz mixed into the drumming. So, I’m not that conscious of crossing genres, it just happens.
As far as the hip hop stuff goes, it’s funny, because my interest in hip hop has waned a bit because I’ve never been that interested in vocals. I mean, I am interested in vocals, but if you look at when I was a kid and all the posters on the wall, it was all instrumentalists – there were no vocalists – that’s what I was a fan of. That was my… vocals are hugely important, and I love working with vocals, but at the end of the day, I kind of realised that while vocals are important, the music is more so for me. So, with hip hop, if it’s all about the vocals it leaves me a little cold.
The reason that I was so interested in hip hop at the beginning, was because, to make hip hop happen in the old days, a lot of experimental stuff was happening. And a lot of the hip hop kids from the Bronx – they were very forward looking, they wanted interesting sounds. They listened to old music; they just didn’t want to do that. It was very future. A lot of the hip hop kids I worked with; they liked Kraftwerk. The breakdancing was robotic, it was all very future. The Herbie Hancock record, for example, it had the title Future Shock and it was tough. A lot of sampling was out of reach for us because samplers were very expensive – they were like $60000 – just way out of reach for ordinary people. There was nothing that a consumer could get, so in that sense there were no samplers. So, I did tricks. I did tape loops. I’d find ways to manipulate delay unts and stuff. So, in that way I thought that hip hop was pretty experimental, and even trying to like lift stuff off – like do sampling of our own music. We’d self-sample. So those were all ways that it was experimental and trying to get these weird sounds.
We’d also do extended club mixes back then and that was much harder than it is now. Now, you have plug ins and you can just have fun with it. Then, it was kind of a lot of work – it would take longer. So, hip hop was sort of overlaying with experimental music to me. Now, when a bit of hip hop influence comes in, it comes from that. It comes from being experimental with pieces that don’t really fit, but you put them in anyway, because we’d kinda stick stuff in that wasn’t even in key with hip hop. If we liked it and it fitted, then we’d put it in. It was about the sounds.
A lot of that early hip hop is really cool, it was kind of lo fi and grungy and had an ebb and flow of its own, which on this record I thought was most noticeable on A Storm Called Ida, which anyway, I thought, had… speaking as someone from England who has not had the opportunity to visit America, it sounds how I imagine New York should sound, if that makes sense…
I’m glad you felt that way. The thing with the opera vocals is… I wondered myself why I had an affinity for that, and I think it’s because it really contrasts my voice. So, you hear the person there doing the opera (Sarah Fantry) and there is no confusing her and me! On that song I just needed… that. Sometimes I do want… and I think it’s a little Swans too… always wanting the most. Everything has to reach eleven on some level. Something has to be over the top. So, I wanted the highest note possible, right? And that’s not something I could reach with my voice. So, it went up there.
And I wondered with the opera thing and having an affinity towards it… I thought maybe it was the theatricality. I used to love Frank Zappa and used to go to Frank Zappa shows. And also, with the Dresden Dolls – they were very theatrical. I have this affinity for drama. I want all these things. I want drama. I want it to be overly dramatic and theatrical at times. But, I also want to be grungy and very in your face. So, everything is all the way, and nothing is middling. So, of course, let’s get a female vocal. It should be dramatic and operatic and that’s why I asked Sarah because she had some training in opera. And she’s in this great local band, Weeping Icon, and it came through some posts of hers, where I saw she trained in opera, I asked if she’d sing on my record.
But yeah, the most experimental thing on that is the percussion – there’s a lot of cowbells and stuff, so it has this Voodoo meets Samba kind of thing and that is very New York city, because it is a Latino town. So, there is that. Also, it’s a funny song because it’s sort of punk but not really punk. And I deliberately made it as New York friendly as possible. That was unusual. That was what I was driving for. I wanted it to be accessible. I wanted it to be for people in our neighbourhood who were impacted by that storm.
And I rarely come at it this way. I rarely say: this is for the people. I mean I’d like it to be, but this song needed to be more for the people in terms of their ears. So, I wanted people, regardless of the music they listen to, I wanted them to be able to hear it and relate to it in terms of their experience of the storm. So, it’s good to hear that it’s very New York because it had to be.
It feels like the record that you wrote, and I know you’ve said elsewhere that it’s not a pandemic record, but inevitably the experiences of the Pandemic and the Black Lives Matter issues emerged at that time, and the storm of course, they all played into the lyrical content. The album is more direct, I think, than your previous works.
Yeah. I pretty much put the finishing touches to it during 2020. I was really hoping for the pandemic to flip our society upside down. I was hoping for an unrecognizable post-pandemic. I was hoping that pre-pandemic was this other world that we could leave behind… and I wasn’t naïve in thinking it was all going to be beautiful, but I didn’t want to go back to some kind of “normal”. I wanted change and stuff.
So, where that was going to go was debatable, and no one knew exactly what would happen, but I thought it was inevitable that some things would change, somewhat permanently or indefinitely. And some things have, but not enough. I’m a little disappointed that things have gone back to same old, same old…
And it was this weird existential moment, kind of like the 70s. Especially the Black Lives Matter thing reminded me on some levels of the 70s in New York – anarchy in a good way. And it was also the time. The reason we had these massive demonstrations is that people weren’t quite as tethered to their jobs as they had been. People got their stimulus checks and it showed what people could do and how they could mobilise, rather than just remain enslaved… in a way… to the system – which we are at the moment. You know, a job five days a week is pretty intense and when we’re liberated from all that, it is amazing how effectively people can organise. We had an encampment down by St Carl and that also played into the term Feral – because that’s kind of how it felt. It felt wild. People that had been formerly domesticated in a way were returning to a wild state, which is how it felt.
And it’s funny because the picture on the front, which is sort of supposed to me on fire, came from a photograph that a person had taken and the person who took the photograph is coming here later today. Laura … it doesn’t really matter, but she’s an Apache Native American and she was living in her apartment, watching the BLM demonstration coming down. She saw me on the street, took a photo of me and in it I’m by myself in the middle of the street, in that weird position. On one side there was this mass of demonstrators with banners and signs coming down Flatbush avenue – they’re not in the photo – and on the other side of me were police with riot vans marching towards me, and I was in the middle. Anyway, the photo captured that moment of me, by myself, without any conflicting parties.
Anyway, I saw some of Laura’s stuff, with people on fire and it just fed into the feeling of being in New York City during this time and being on fire which conjures up a lot of different meanings… Sometimes you don’t make a statement, sometimes you create the context for a question, right? So, there’s a few answers as to why someone would be on fire, and I like that, so I can tell you one reason why there’s a flaming person – it seems like they’re being consumed by the moment or they’re being purified, or that’s how they feel… or maybe the world is on fire. So, there’s more questions than answers.
And then there’s that aspect of ours, where for a while, people always wanted to know exactly what you’re trying to say, whereas I like to keep things a little more…
The song, Proud Boy Two Way Mirror. That song’s been lingering for a while and we’ve played it live and I was like, I don’t know what I’m trying to say, I was just always upset that the Proud Boys came from New York City. They originated in Green Point Brooklyn, and they were always around, which was upsetting because they were like co-opting our space a little bit, but they’re not us. So, I wanted to talk about them and us, but what I’m actually trying to say is not clear. And then I figured that, in the old days, people would state something without necessarily understanding what they meant. It was more common that they were just presenting a situation and that there was no clear answer, but the questions were being asked, and that was understood as valid in art, but then we lost that. So, I kind of reminded myself of that in the finishing touches of Feral Myths, where there are little bits where I can’t tell you exactly what I’m saying, but it’s a kind of space where there are conflicting questions or statements or vibes. Is it positive or is it negative? I don’t know, but there’s space.
I think that obliqueness is necessary in art and you’re right, the last ten years it seems that we’ve pushed into this era of over-analysis. Everything has to have a back story, an origin and an explanation. You talked about the cover and being on fire and, to my mind, there are so many interpretations of that – I enjoy that. You’ve got the protest analogy you get from the RATM cover art. On the other side, you’ve got a kind of Jimi Hendrix-esque spirituality. Not knowing and bringing your own interpretation into it is so much more interesting than having it stated a-z in the cover.
Yeah, I mean it’s an unfortunate outcome of social media, maybe, where people can state exactly what they’re about. But I feel and I’m hoping that some of the stuff that’s happening now is a reckoning of that, because there’s been a lot of marginalised voices that need to be heard. Some people want to examine that, you know, and they like backstories…
To be honest, I know I’m bad that way too in some ways. Like even the fact that I had to mention that the person I’m working with today is a Native American… it’s a back story, right? Anyway, I was shocked recently, because there was this little article about me, and the editor of this Hispanic friendly Zine put this headline: “The Latino Engineer behind Sonic Youth” and that kind of blew up. Even Sonic Youth… they never repost stuff about me, right? They’ve got too much going on, so they don’t need to. But that one they did. They put it out there and then people started liking – much more than anything I’m normally in. And it was crazy – the thing I thought was not particularly interesting – what language I spoke at home – was very interesting to people. And , you know, I’m not opposed to that, I just think that, in the end, you kind of over analyse where someone’s coming from.
And it’s always been there, we’ve just brought it to the fore. I’ve always been into – I’ve told people that the heart of art is how you talk about it. Freida Carlo is an artist whom I love and her story, really, embellishes the art. She was paralyzed, and she was a communist; her husband tied into that world and they hung out with Trotsky… That’s interesting and it embellishes the art, but there’s a part where it’s too much, potentially. And you don’t always have to… I mean I do enjoy the analysis that you provide in the reviews. I enjoy the deep dive into that, but there are very different layers, and you have to honour all the layers. The stuff that works subconsciously and consciously; the stuff that doesn’t have an answer. You have to sometimes analyse and sometimes not analyse at all. You have to sometimes not have a reason. So, all of that works together.
Thinking again about A Storm Called Ida, the lyrics are interesting because obviously there’s the impact of the storm itself, but then there’s also references to climate change and even to people like buying land out from under others, which is obviously something you went through with the studio – so there are all these layers of meaning in this one song, and I think it’s open to interpretation, which makes it enjoyable on a lot of levels.
Yeah, well that one in particular – we’d been asking how much these concepts need to be tethered. There’s the fact that there was the flooding itself, which could kill you. And then there are issues of pollution – because, obviously, when everything flooded, the sewers overflowed. We’re, like, at the bottom of a mile long hill. It’s not a huge hill and all the sewage came down, because we had double the record level of rain fall. So, all that just flooded into this area and it all ties into pollution… and, of course, greed is a big part of that.
If you took greed out of the equation, we wouldn’t put housing right next to the canal – it would be warehouses and industrial land and music studios that wouldn’t matter so much if they flooded. But they’ll put people there and they don’t care if someone dies in the flooding. So, greed is a component and it’s very messy to sometimes explain it all. So, I’m used to that, because when I talk about land use, I have to focus on one aspect of it. Because, if it’s all tied together, which I think our opponents love… I mean, it’s something they don’t want to change because it suits them.
So, in songs, when I bring all these other things in, there’s a certain chaos. But I’ve realised that, with my life, there’s always potential for confusion because it’s just complicated. The land use thing is complicated. Even BC35 was complicated. The studio used not to be called BC studio at all at the start, we renamed it after three or four years. Before that it was Operation All Out: OAL. So, there’s that detail that screws things up. Maybe that’s just life and everyone’s like that, but it’s definitely the case with me. It’s confusing, there’s a lot of stuff, so yeah: I kind of like having that in there. I don’t try to clarify it – it’s like “well, if you dig deep, you might find it or you might be confused…” but if someone’s that confused, they can always ask about it!
You went through a lot of stresses and strains at the time of BC35 so, just to follow up on that, how is the situation? When we last spoke, you’d done BC35 and a documentary, where you talked about this land grab, so how’s that panning out?
I would say that the needle went from hot to medium and medium is a better place. So, I feel like I’m stable for a couple of years and the factors are simply that the economy isn’t favourable to investment by developers and stuff – things I don’t really understand, but the housing market is down and all that sort of stuff. So, that’s working in my favour. The other thing is because of my group, The Voice of Gowanus, we did a lot of lawsuits. And they didn’t get a lot of attention in the press, so I wasn’t sure how much of an impact they had. Basically, we had two law suits that got thrown out, but they were still in the air for up to four months and what happens is that developers, with all that money, they don’t like all those uncertainties. They don’t like having potential law suits, where a court could come and completely flip the whole thing under… and we’re still appealing now, so there’s still uncertainty for developers.
Now I was surprised at what came out in the press. In the local press, after the fact, was that developers had all these pending litigations and stuff, and that held up some of the development. So, basically, we mucked up the works with our advocacy. It’s surprising what an impact that had on the ground with some of these developments. And, you know, the greedier the developments and the less they built in affordability, the more things got mucked up, because they were relying more on profit.
There’s also, politically, the massive tax breaks that these developers were going to get – thirty years of not paying taxes – which was a Trump era provision (Trump was a developer initially, in Manhattan – one of the reasons he’s particularly not popular there) [pauses] It’s so Trumpian – no taxes for thirty years and they’ll build – that was his idea. Anyway, that was unpopular on all sides, so it floundered. It was only the developers and the mayor – the mayor was begging for these tax breaks to be reinstated because the whole scheme had to be renewed and it all floundered. So that helped a lot.
The other dimension is that I really stood up for myself and this building – the building we’re in got sweetheart deals with the city and its value has increased to like seventy million dollars or something. The fact that the arts are in the building is something that they monetized because it allows the city to say “we are respecting the arts in Gowanus and we’re giving the building all these benefits to help them preserve the arts” … which is great, because they were going to displace me. The physical recording studio just happened to be in the wrong part of the building and takes up a lot of room, so I was going to be squeezed out. But, I think that what reduced the appetite for squeezing me out was that it could literally cost them tens of millions of dollars, because if they lose that status of being like stewards of the arts, they’ve lost a lot. So, I’ve sort of monetized my presence here… or rather I made it clear how much they had monetized it.
There’s also that tendency to not think of music as the arts. It’s crazy. When you look at all those people talking about artists and the arts, they’re usually talking about visual artists. They’re not talking about musicians. It’s weird how musicians are at the bottom of the rung when it comes to talking about the arts.
So, anyway, all those factors have put us in this spot where things have cooled off a little and, I hope, we’re safer moving forward. I think standing up for yourself means a lot. Just the fact that you’re willing to make a lot of noise and occasionally that noise gets through can scare people in these kinds of situations.
I’m so glad, because it felt remarkably close at the time you did the documentary, and there was a sense that you might get steamrollered by the system, and yeah, I understand what you’re saying about the weird status that music holds within the arts. Because it is one of the great arts. You hear a song that you first heard when you were sixteen, and it takes you straight back there – that same sense of excitement and those same goosebumps. It’s so open to interpretation, something you get much less with the visual arts, so yeah, it’s very special and needs to be preserved.
Actually, I’m surprised that there’s not been more neurological research on music. Or, at least, I haven’t heard it. Because it seems to me that music must have its own part of the brain. I don’t think there’s research, really, on that. I keep thinking that the way I am, there must be some dedicated pathways to music. Just like there is for language. Language is baked into us as a species. Is music baked into us as a species? I don’t think there’s a population in the present or the past without music. There are no humans that don’t have language and no humans that don’t have music. So, it feels like it has its own piece of the brain or its own pathways. And I haven’t heard research, or people talking about it.
I think it’s fascinating. I’ve heard people say “it’s the first language”. Well, it might be. I wonder if some aspect of music could have preceded the creation of symbolic thinking, because of rhythm. For instance, people tapping out rhythm before they asked themselves “why am I here?” [laughs] So, music precedes religion and magical thinking, maybe. So, no one’s looking into that. Why do some people, as we all suspect, have miraculous predisposition to talent? For some people it’s astonishing how much they have in their fingers. To watch people with intense talent. Is that a gene? Is there a music gene? It’s never discussed. I’ve never seen any research on that – I’m really surprised. It seems like that would be the first thing I’d be wondering about.
There was some interesting research looking at the impact of music on dementia, and it seemed like the only thing that continued to anchor people, even with other aspects of the mind badly affected, was music, and it seems that listening to music regularly can really help to slow the progress of the disease. I’m paraphrasing badly, but there must be stuff happening. People need that impetus to do the study, so we need a musician scientist – we need Brian May with his PhD to get on this I think.
Exactly! I have a friend who studies mental health issues that are specific to musicians for instance. So, I hope we’ll get there. In this information age, surely someone will want to do a deep dive. We’re a unique bunch. I’m in a building surrounded by visual artists. Mostly, there’s more mental health issues in our community of musicians. There’re more substance issues. I’ve learned from touring and I’ve had to familiarise myself with mental health issues and it’s partly because music is such a collaborative art form. A lot of visual artists work by themselves, and also a lot of mental health issues don’t necessarily disqualify you in this line of work. So, someone can have autism but, just because they can’t communicate well in social situations, it does not mean that they cannot be artists. So, it’s so common in a band for there to be an autistic person or for them to have someone bipolar. In music it doesn’t disqualify you. In other lines of work, maybe it is harder, but in music it does not make you dysfunctional to have these issues. So, I’ve had to familiarise myself with these things, because it’s part of our crew. Our crew involves people with these issues and it seems like we’re almost a refuge. If you’re “weird”, or not functional or you’re not alpha… in music it’s like: “hey, we love you!”
You know, the developer, for a while, they wanted to make a “poor door” for me. A lot of developers here, they make housing and it has a component that’s more affordable and they give them a different entrance! It’s been called the “poor door”. It’s actually that sort of thing. They wanted to make my clients come in the back way so we wouldn’t be seen, because we’re weirdos and there’s gender dysphoria and freaky people! We look weird and we’re nerdy or we can’t communicate or we don’t like looking other people in the eye – that’s music, right? And I realised that. I told the building owners: “you need me for this economic diversity and people – if it wasn’t for me, it would all be rich artists.” A typical band – I love this in a band – you kind of need someone to have money, so someone will have money and then, in the same band, someone is practically homeless, but they’re equal. They all hear each other out and I don’t think it really happens so much in the rest of society, so music is an interesting cosmos.
It’s amazing and you’re right – it’s remarkable how collaborative bands can be and I don’t know if it happens anywhere else apart from movies. If you’re a painter and someone comes flicking paint on your canvas, the artists is going to throw them out the window. Whereas in music, you have people bringing all sorts of different things to the mix, regardless of the songwriter, and that collaborative spirit mean you make something you genuinely belongs to everybody.
Yeah, and I have to help with that sometimes. There’s bands where I realise that nobody talks! In the recording studio, I kind of like to know everything possible. I like hanging out. What’s behind the music. I need to know that. I don’t think it necessarily needs to be explicit in music, but for me to be a part of it… sometimes I take in information like “oh, I wrote the song after I got fired from my job”. It’s not in the song, but knowing that can help me capture that kind of energy or something. Or understanding what’s behind certain words, and then I realise that the song is about getting double crossed, or something. Then, I’ll put something in there, and I don’t even know why, but it somehow helps to get across that feeling of getting double crossed by someone you trust. Something like that. I need to know this stuff and I kind of realised that, in so many bands, they really do communicate through sound. They don’t actually talk to each other.
And there’re so many layers – like how does the music fit into the context of music in general, or into the band’s sound? A band that’s been around for a while maybe knows where they fit, whereas a newer band might not necessarily know where they fit and you can lose that context. I think in a local situation, when you’re playing shows you kind of are part of the scene, you know where you fit in terms of the wider society or the planet. But then, sometimes you fit in a different place than you thought. I’ve had that happen, people become successful and suddenly realise they are actually part of something different than they thought. So, it can get kind of complicated and for a band to communicate amongst each other or something is just rare, so I’m in the job of trying to get people in the room to just talk. So, they might discuss how important rhythm is in their music, or whatever and, often, stuff like that was never discussed. So, the drummer thinks he’s just driving the music, but the writer thinks the music supports the instrument, so it’s about the type of beat – and that’s not discussed half the time. I have to get that communication flowing – it’s like therapy.
I’m suddenly feeling very guilty, like I need to send some messages to the guys in my band…
Hahaha – for sure!
The last question I have is really, the album feels like something of a tour through your history and I was wondering how much the things we discussed – whether it’s black lives matter, or the building being under threat, or even something positive like BC35 – how much those things played into you exploring your history on this record?
Well, there’s always been a bit of politics baked in. It’s sort of my path. Basically, I have a dream, I have a dream and it comes through occasionally in songs.
On the previous record, Solstice, there’s a song (I forget the exact title), I think it’s Ode to Freddy Gray. Freddy was a young Black man who was killed by police. Anyway, Solstice has a summer side and a winter side. On the summer side, there’s a lot of stuff about what you do in the summer, and I notice a lot of revolutions happen when the whether turns warmer. That’s when the revolution happens. Also, with Black Lives, it got reignited in the summer – in May – so there’s something about the summer solstice that’s more about action. So, on that record, there’s more about that – there’s Waves on my Mind, which is more about anarchy, and there’s Ode to Freddy Gray, a man who was killed by police in the back of the van – [sings] “you killed an innocent man, in the back of a van”.
So, my dream, in a way, is to be a bit like the Clash, where it’s like political driven punk. There’s a part of me that feels like that’s a great place. I don’t think I’ll ever be in that place where it’s very political all of the time, but there’s part of me that thinks that way. There’s a component of me that feels, at times, like being in the clash. So, that’s always been baked in.
In terms of genres, the reasons I did hip hop, apart from the music, was I got excited because I thought it was about black youth. I was around a lot of hardcore, which back then was like white youth out of Long Island, and I saw it as similar – you know, the hip hop scene was like the hardcore scene, except it was black kids and they obviously had some of the same structures and the self-sufficiency and the mutual aid. So, part of hip hop for me in the beginning was that it was black. And part of the reason I went to Sonic Youth and away from other music was because that whole realm of Sonic Youth was more feminist. It was more female driven, and it was better. I preferred it with the women in charge. It was more equal. It just worked better. So, Kim Gordon or Lydia Lunch… and the people I worked with previously weren’t in on that vibe. It was more patriarchal, like Bill Laswell. That was male dominated, so I went into this more female dominated era.
Indie rock, for its time, or early indie rock, was more feminist and that was a part of my being comfortable in that world. So, the politics always lay in there and sometimes more overtly. [Suddenly changes tack] Also, something like Silver Guardians came about because I would imagine all these mythic things. And, actually, I realised that Santeria, which is the religion… it’s like an African religion that was sort of combined with Catholicism – forcibly combined with Catholicism – in the Caribbean. I know a bit about that because, also, back in the day, I worked with a lot of Cuban Percussionists who came over during the Boat Lift of 1982, where Castro opened the gates and Cuba let a lot of refugees leave Cuba (that’s the backstory to the film Scarface). Anyway, they let all these people go and I ended up working with a lot of these percussionists. They’re on Rockit, the Herbie Hancock Song – so I learned a lot about their religion because there’s a lot of praying that happens through rhythm. So, it’s different than the Western, Eurasian thing of praying via droning instruments. They do rhythm and I thought it was really interesting. It’s the same end point. So, Silver Guardians had a lot to do with Deities, but I also mention Helen of Troy in that song, which is, of course, a Greek myth. But all the other silver guardians, in my mind, are like Santerian deities – demigods, which are interesting to look at.
Sorry, I lost the thread of the question and went off on my own thing. But, basically as a musician, I remember Bill Laswell (who I founded the studio with), he told me that being a musician means being part humanitarian and that stuck with me. There’s a foundation that’s activist – that was exciting about Jimi Hendrix to me – it was revolutionary. They were freeing their brains via psychedelics. They were freeing themselves from the conformity of the 195os and questioning things, like not wanting to go to war. So, always the political and social context for me has been extremely exciting and anywhere I can find it in the music, it’s exciting. So, there’s a lot of advocacy for things that excite me socially or demographically. So, I hope that answers your question.
I particularly enjoyed the digression into feminism – sonic youth in particular, I was listening to Washing Machine the other day and just realised how many of the songs are led by Kim. She dominates that record and it’s one of my favourite Sonic Youth albums, alongside Sister, and that kind of approach is really interesting, because the music industry has always been male dominated, and yet in the 90s, there was this really visceral art punk coming out of bands like Bikini Kill and Babes in Toyland and Dickless and it was really cool. I grew up with that and I felt it was very driven by equality and it was only later, when I started listening to other styles of music, that I realised how male dominated it was as a whole and how much these bands were actually fighting against convention. I was just so into that music – I was 15 in 1995 – it did not occur to me that those patriarchal structures were so powerful elsewhere.
Yeah, so that opera singer I mentioned earlier, she’s on Silver Guardians and she also has a cameo on Two Way Proud Boy Mirror, she quotes Klaus Nomi, a figure of the early 70s in New York who I found very inspiring. So, Sarah Fantry, she’s in this band called Weeping Icon that I’m hoping to record – they said they want to record with me. They’re a heavy band. It’s all women, but more as a cooperative, not as some kind of fetishist cliché – it’s more a collaboration of women. They’re heavy, they’re a heavy band and they’re all women and I like them a lot, so there’s no compromise for me.
But it also validates me a little bit because I don’t want to feel like I’m in this zone of patriarchy. I don’t want to think about heavy music as a bro-down. I just don’t want to think of it like that, just for my own self-respect. So, for me to support this all-woman heavy band… My answer to the lack of women in heavy music… the thing I really don’t get is this idea that heavy music or the making of heavy music is only for men because of this toxic masculinity. I don’t want that at all, so the way I fight back is not by making more feminist music or less heavy music, but by championing women making aggressive music.
So, if there’s a woman out there making aggressive music, I’m all about it. I go to their shows. I’m like “you’re amazing!” I just want to support it. With Weeping Icon, there is that. I know when I put together a bill, I’m embarrassed if there’s not more women up there. It’s not even about… yes there’s the politics of it, but it’s my self-respect. I would be… I think, I hope, I imagine, I see… my self-image of myself and my role in the community is that there’s an equal amount of women around. I work with woman because it’s just normal. That’s how it should be.
So, if it doesn’t work that way, I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed if there’s not enough women on stage at my shows, or in my clientele. If there were fewer women, I’d feel embarrassed, it’s my self-image. So, I support women making heavy music, or weird music, or nasty, or abrasive or all of that kind of stuff. So, Sarah Fantry, that band she’s in, Weeping Icon, I had them play my record release show and I’m recording them. They’re heavy and that’s awesome!
Thank you so much for the amazing interview – it’s been a pleasure to catch up.
