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How Noise Ruined My Life

I have written a number of justifications for what I do as a musician. As I have marginalized the time and energy I have to make music and sound art by being in school, my resolve has hardened and thought process has deepened, and my countless hours in front of a computer often suffer from veering explorations into what I really want to get back to “when I'm done,” if such a state will ever exist.
It is more realistic to look backward at this point and think about how I got here. Being a hack musician has done much for me and against me in the almost twenty years since I started playing in front of people.

We try to articulate our thoughts in various ways. Conversation, writing, these can fail us when we are on the spot. For those of us who grew up in the era of tapes, however, another medium exists: the mix tape. It is a safe way of giving the listener a set of ideas that can be ordered and organized to say quite a lot.

This is a modern take on that practice. I will attempt to write brief personal history through a condensed timeline of my musical influences.

Tripmaster Monkey – Shutter's Closed

This was the band from my hometown that was signed to a major label when I was in high school. I bought my first real bass from their bass player, Wes Haas. That the video was shot in a roller rink that rivaled the one my family began during the Depression didn't matter. This told me anything was possible. I find it highly ironic that this video begins with guitarist Jamie Toal counting off those muted chords in front of the old spider lights, which is exactly how my musical life began, staring into the much larger spider lights at the rink I grew up in. Toward the end of the video, one of the spectators grabs the microphone stand. That was Jeremy Anderson, the singer in the first band I was ever in.

Joy Division – Transmission

I got into punk rock in the most backwards way possible. In one of many articles I read on Joy Division in my pre-20s, someone said that where the normal ethic of punk was “Fuck You,” Joy Division's was “I'm fucked.” This appealed to me.

Low – Shame

I walked into a record store while I was on my senior trip in Minneapolis, and what I saw was basically this. Low's second record Long Division came out that day, and they were doing an in-store performance at 3 in the afternoon on a Tuesday. That's the type of band they were then. This changed everything I wanted from music, permanently.

I moved to Iowa City in 1996 and after one semester at the University of Iowa, I fell so far behind trying to write about music and publish a zine that I convinced myself that was more important. I met a friend with my first name, wandering around town on a break from the coffee shop I worked at, when I heard a Low song coming from the coffee shop he worked at. A week later we played music on the floor in his bedroom, and then he played these two records for me over the course of one evening:

Flying Saucer Attack – In the Light of Time

Stars of the Lid – Down

I thoroughly convinced myself that my ship had come in when my favorite band from back home asked me to go on tour with them, playing keyboards and guitar and singing. I had quit the coffee shop I was working at and now worked at the one my friend had worked at, where there was a piano I could play when the shop was empty. This was good because I had to go on tour in a few months and had to learn to play a piano.

Darling - Transformer

This was the end result of two years of commuting to my hometown to practice every week, writing while learning to play, and trying to hold together a band that did not get along and a van that did not want to go on living.

While I played in Darling, I was discovering other forms of Very Serious Music:

Steve Reich – Music for 18 Musicians

Tortoise I Set My Face to the Hillside

This is from the album TNT, which I first heard in the van on my first tour with Darling. I remember that hour or so vividly. On a crappy car stereo struggling against the sound of a Volkswagen minibus struggling up hills in the middle of Pennsylvania, it sounded like pure bliss. Two drummers, horns, vibes and marimbas, Jeff Parker's gorgeous jazz guitar tone and Doug McCombs's four and six-string basses against that gorgeous horizon seemed like everything was out there to be had.

Rachel's

This is an excerpt from a whole live show posted to YouTube in seven parts. This would be their last tour, as one of the core members of the band, Jason Noble, who also played in two of my very favorite rock bands, died of a rare cancer last year. This band made me really want to make something graceful and grand, and Jason Noble was just a guy from a rock band, which taught me that you really could do something seriously good without being a trained musician.

Around this time, as Darling was getting to play more and more shows, and becoming good friends with the members of Low, there became evidence that the heady music I was obsessing over was becoming marketable. Or so someone thought.

There was a pair of ads for The Gap one winter, featuring two of my favorite bands:

Red House Painters – gap ad

Low – Little Drummer Boy

The aforementioned Rachel's had a song appear in a Nike commercial. The Flaming Lips released the album of 2000, The Soft Bulletin, which honed their noise-pop goofiness into a sullen and gorgeous rock symphony, winning them nearly universal critical acclaim and solidifying their career. Alan Sparhawk of Low appeared in Spin Magazine, and in his “Top 5 records of 2000,” right after The Soft Bulletin, was “the new Darling record that no one will put out,” undoing the frustration we had with a record that Sparhawk recorded and performed on right in his own basement. We were four guys in a hang glider at the edge of a cliff, and then we broke up.

Godspeed You Black Emperor – Moya

Bands with ten to twelve people in them are a dime a dozen now. Most of those bands can't name this one. I started making slideshows for Darling shows because of them, and after Darling broke up, I started an experimental band with very long songs, field recordings, and tons of quiet-loud-quiet dynamics, mostly because I was listening to the first Godspeed You Black Emperor album and the two-song EP that contained this song, "Moya," over and over. It became the soundtrack to a personal unraveling in my 20s and was, in my mind, the music for a world falling apart under the second Bush administration.

Lightning Bolt was a secret reason I moved to Providence. At age 24, Providence had the same aura of weirdness surrounding it that drew me to Iowa City at 18, times ten. This was another band that redefined the live show, with 2400 watts of bass amplification and one of the most ridiculous drummers alive, all on the floor with crowd piled around them so you can't even see the duo playing the noise that is very likely damaging your organs. I was headed somewhere after seven years in Iowa City bouncing from one band to another, but I wasn't sure where. I don't know how culinary school became a part of the equation, maybe to justify to such a move to my parents.

Lichens

Robert Lowe is the only person I know who does music even vaguely similar to what I do. I began doing improvisational recording experiments with drones and textures a few years before I heard my first Lichens record. What he does isn't that hard, but only he has that voice.

Keeping Up Appearances: the mean reds from Elizabeth Alexander on Vimeo.

I have now begun to add experimental recordings to my girlfriend's installation work, at her request. She gives me only the most basic suggestion of a direction, or I simply record sounds of her working, and then try to create sound atmospheres around it.

Scott Walker – Epizootics

I make no secret of my exaltation of Scott Walker and I don't intend to start. I have already written at length on this subject, however, and I will spare the reader the grief of my getting started again. This is a song from his forthcoming album, Bish Bosch.

I end this with a summation, the total so far of all of this listening, playing, stopping and starting again. I am constantly trying to synthesize the thirty-one flavors of dissonance collected in my head, of which this is only a sneeze.

This is the last piece I have done, discounting my part-time rock band, and was the first time I was mentioned by name in a gallery show, in Elsewhere, presented at the Distillery Gallery in South Boston by FLUX Boston, again accompanying visual work by my girlfriend, Elizabeth Alexander.