 |
HIGH
WATT ELECTROCUTIONS:
An
Interview With Ryan Settee;
the Man Behind the Flabbergasting
Desert Opuses.
|
I
was blown away by Desert Opuses, the second solo work of
the one man instrument fiesta that is High Watt Electrocutions.
The album rocks like one or two
in and out of the stoner rock community. At times, soleman Ryan
Settee tips its hat to Kyuss' blown out tuning, at others you can
imagine him fucking Nico, reminding Lour Reed what it used to be
like and slapping Andy Warhol upside the head for being such a
pretentious white haired dead man, all at the same time. I was
in awe. So I had to ask him a few questions and he had a lot to
say. Read on and spread the word...
- First of all, excellent album. There are lots of things going
on Desert Opuses and you work on your own. Why is High
Watt Electrocutions a one man band?
Thanks a lot!
The reason that I started doing everything is probably moreso
due to the punk rock / independent credo of doing whatever you
can to save money (laughs). I love a lot of 80's punk and a lot
of independent and fringe music where there really wasn't any
demand to do things past what you wanted to see done, because
you believed in them, and there wasn't / isn't necessarily the
people or budgets or the industry support in a traditional way.
But there is
some truth to that in that you cut some overhead that way, while
doing it the way that you want to see it done. Ultimately, I
wanted to do this to create something that I didn't hear or
didn't see done enough, in merging disparate influences of
various types of psych and drone and mood music.
Ultimately, I'd
done this all--or as much as I could--to get it as close as I
could to the songs in my head, where I'd be hearing layers of
vocals and guitars and stuff like that. The studio becomes a
great tool to write and expand on songs, and that becomes tough
sometimes to do when you're paying a producer an hourly rate and
also having band members give you the evil eye when you're doing
a whole bunch of things that maybe they don't like....like
putting a melodica on something or whatnot (laughs). Then you're
sort of under the gun to compromise, and let's face it, the most
successful bands have usually been compromises, whether that was
between John and Paul trying to fit in George's stuff and
Ringo's stinkers (laughs). Or Mick and Keith getting into fist
fights, or even Jason Pierce and Sonic Boom merely tolerating
each other towards the end of Spacemen 3's career.
- Did you ever try working with a band?
For sure,
there's both, and I've been in other bands. The advantages are
that you have additional creativity, additional people to take
heat off of you and contribute things. That's when things are
going good, that's the ideal, and I love that ideal. But the key
word is ‘ideal’, I still live in a bit of a naive world where
all my favorite bands got along and were best of friends and
everything, but as we know, egos and the traditional ‘conflict
of interests’ gets cited, but really, you have to wonder if it's
just someone eating the last piece of pie or whether it's
because they're a true jerk, you know, like Danzig (laughs).
He's blown so many opportunities with great bands and great
musicians, because no one can be bigger or better than him.
That's the
reason why supergroups tend to be better on paper than in
reality, because someone's gotta lead and then the others have
to be accepting of that lead and not be contemptuous of it and
add enough contributions so as to not distract from what's
already there. And that's when you either get great variety, or
terrible infighting. Look at Rocket From The Tombs, David and
Cheetah resented each other's direction in that band and it tore
them apart....one wanted the more rock side, the other wanted
the more arty side.
The other
problem becomes that when someone's not pulling their weight, it
sometimes becomes difficult to get excited about it. As a band,
when you start getting serious and this guy's got to do that,
the other guy's got to do that, it doesn't always work, because
in anything, people move at different paces and have different
work ethics. In other bands that I was in, the priorities were
mismatched--I always found myself putting more priority on it,
wanting to practice more, work on recordings more, tour more,
etc. With just myself, I can scrap ideas without having to tell
anyone that it's not good enough, and I don't have to worry
about fitting musicians on any given song. That's why some songs
are instrumental and have no vocals, some have bass, some have
no bass....others have no drums, or just rely on sparse
percussion. "The Ruins of the Pyramids", the bass parts are
played via organ, because it has a drone-y sustain to it. If I
had to tell that to a bass player, he might think that it's code
for ‘hey that bass line really stinks so I'm going to play
this on organ’, you know? (laughs). I throw out way more
ideas of my own than I keep, so it's easier to be harder on
myself than to seemingly have people contribute things that they
may perceive as never being good enough. And it gets done
faster, more effective, and it's more cost effective as well.
- In your website you state that High Watt Electrocutions is
essentially a project derived out of the desire to break the
constraints of usual ‘verse chorus verse structure in most
modern music.' What motivated/triggered this desire?
A lot of
previous bands that I've been in--all of which had something
that I liked about them and never achieved anything past
Winnipeg's city limits-- were pretty constricting after awhile.
They were always open to my ideas, but in the studio, it got to
be the point where I really wanted to make mind-bending epic,
crafted albums, and they always seemed to settle for ‘good
enough’. I hate good enough (laughs). ‘This is good enough’.
Alright, so what's the inspiration to be great, excellent,
challenging? Even if you fail at that, I think the most that any
artist or musician owes themselves is to at least attempt
greatness. The point is that you aimed for it, that it's the
intention.
The reason for
the lack of a lot of traditional structures with HWE, is because
I had found as a producer, that when you have a couple of
choruses per song, you're always trying to figure out how to
build them up.....and usually not enough time to make the point
before the 3 or 4 minutes is up. When you repeat things, it
opens up a lot of room for improvisation and experimenting and
groove and swing. If you listen to old blues songs, they're
super repetitive and they're often detuned to drop d or drop c,
some of them were the original template for stoner rock / drone
rock. But they've got style, attitude, personality. Same thing
with a lot of traditional hymns.....something repeated over and
over and over again. People really like repetition, I think if
you have a good enough riff, that it's what people are after.
Even in hip hop, they repeat things like crazy. It's only in
rock music that repetition is perceived as something that you've
got to hold off on, mete out, dole out in small doses in
choruses or that outro or whatever. When you've got a whole song
as a chorus, it allows you to really go nuts on the layers and
expansion and tension. Not enough songs have enough tension in
them or build up. It's sort of got slammed for being cliche in
the post-rock Mogwai / Explosions In The Sky genre, but at least
there's tension there. If that's cliche, it's no more cliche
than the verse/ chorus/ verse/ solo template.
- Previous to High Watt Electrocutions, what did you do as a
musician?
I'd always done
home recordings ever since I'd got my first guitar in 1995. Most
of those were ghetto blaster recordings, you know, the old
Dinosaur Jr "Poledo" liner note description ‘recorded by Lou on
two crappy tape decks in his bedroom’? (laughs) Well, previous
to the digital recording technology, to me, that was the
reality, and around 1995, the digital home recording setup that
most take for granted nowadays wasn't there......it was 4 track
/ 8 track cassette, or hand held recorders or boombox
recordings. The cool thing about boomboxes was that they had a
natural built in compression, which you don't get with digital
recorders.
Then I'd
recorded on 4 track cassette, then 8 track digital, now 16 track
digital for the longest time. I never take my equipment for
granted, because I know what it can do and I know how absolutely
different that it is to make a record in 2009 compared to 1995.
I'm lucky to be able to have a studio in my living space, it's
like a permanent huge blank canvas in which to create aural
paintings and textures and things that go beyond what people
expect. Night Songs (the previous album) ended up being culled
from many sessions where I'd got comfortable enough as a player
and producer to release the recordings as something that I'd
look back and be proud of, even though I'm always criticizing
anything I'm doing or done.
- Were you in any bands? If so, what kind of music did you
play?
The other bands
I was in were mostly regular rock bands. They were fun and the
guys were mostly all cool and everything, but it suffered from a
lack of maybe the band members taking it seriously to tour and
do what serious bands do. I think that the thing that we all
realized was that in order for it to be serious, that there
would have to be some risks--both in our everyday lives, and
monetarily. No one was willing to do either, so that was
something that I decided to do with High Watt---put a lot of
effort into recordings, put a lot of money into them, and promo
like mad. And do as many interviews as possible and get out
there and be happy to talk about it. A lot of artists get sick
of answering the same questions, but I don't. It's always new to
someone else.
People can't
hear something if they've never heard of it, but to expect
people to hear about it if you don't do any work is unrealistic.
In order to succeed, you have to be willing to fail many, many
times. Most people just expect to succeed, but if you look at
the stories of most of the fringe or more different acts, it's
been a long road to even being just a cult artist. If you're not
in it for anything but the music, you'll quit pretty soon,
because it's for the wrong reasons.
- Taking into consideration that you work alone and your
music seems to have several layers, how do you write music?
Well, that's a
great question. Some songs are based around a drum repetition or
sequence, others start with the guitar or bass and so on. Some
start from the rhythm section on up, which I think is an
interesting way to write, because I don't like having to write
just around guitars. Some also are created from synths / keys on
up, which gives it a different perspective. Sometimes I really
want to get a certain effect on there, like phaser or flanger or
something like that, and messing around with that creates other
textures or possibilities. Some are created around a vocal hook.
I've found that
the urban environment of being around cars and noises and people
jack-hammering and things like that have kind of colored the
sound, and that's why there's a big din of things happening in
the sound where it's almost too active, too cluttered sounding,
where you have all these things fighting for dominance. Most of
my favorite bands absorbed their influences and became perfectly
representative of the everyday living of those areas. Here,
we're out in the middle of nowhere in Winnipeg, so it really is
this vast landscape of open prairie fields, large open spaces,
and punishing, punishingly cold winters. The city is big and
noisy, but then there's all this open rural country space, which
I think is found in the loud to soft, cluttered to sparse
dichotomy of HWE's stuff.
- With so much music going on how do you know when you've
finished writing a song? Does it ever get to a point where you
actually have to strip the song of some music just to make it
easier to appreciate?
It gets to be a
bit difficult to figure out exactly when it's finished, simply
because the best and worst part of a home studio is that the
cliche is that it's never finished! And really, that's kind of
true. I change a lot of things--track lengths, mixes, song
sequencing, etc often until the final pressing time and that's
part of the reason why Desert Opuses has some differences in
the songs between them, like, "Headphone Opus" is longer on the
album by a couple of minutes, and it seemed to fit the vinyl's
vibe, whereas I was going for a bit more brevity on the cd and
seeing as that the running length of the cd is longer by 5
minutes, I figured that it would work better as a faded in song
and shorter on the cd.
It's great to
have the time to work things out, but artists can also suffer
from not releasing anything. "Oh, this will be this much better
when this and that is done....". "Headphone Opus" is another
instance, originally it had drums and bass and guitar throughout
the whole running length, but i'd gone into a studio to do a
piano track over it and the first few minutes ended up being
quieter. "Stripped Ruins" had an alternate harmonica take in a
minor key that my friend did that was as good as the one on "The
Ruins Of The Pyramids", so that got stripped down (hence the
title), with a more haunting harmonica part. Technically it's a
bit of a remix or a reprise, but I like variations on central
themes anyways.
A lot of things
get changed in the sequencing of the album too.....some things
are better in isolation by themselves; other things that seemed
like they wouldn't work, work tremendously sometimes when they
weren't originally perceived. That's why it's good to try a
bunch of different textures--soft, loud, fast, slow, cheery,
melancholic, etc. Different keys, different vibes, etc. A lot of
what I'm originally going for doesn't make the mix or the end
track sequencing. That's why a lot of songs are faded in or out,
because they start sooner or go on longer amidst a jam that
really clicked at a certain point that nailed what I wanted to
hear as a listener.
I think that
the most effective bands can separate playing from
listening......sometimes when I play things, they seem great,
but when listening to them, they're out of tune, off time, or
just aren't as interesting. You have to know what you want to
hear as a fan, as a listener, of your own act, and you have to
be brutally objective as to what's working and what's not. I
wouldn't go so far as to say that I'd say everything that I do
turns out absolutely the way I want it to, but I work on it
until it's as good as it's going to get. But there are
definitely points where you can work yourself out of ideas,
where the initial idea was great, and then it mutates into
something that you don't really connect with, for whatever
reason. Sometimes it's good to walk away from an idea for a
couple of days, a week, a month, a half a year. With High Watt,
there's no pressure or deadlines to get anything done, which is
nice. The end product ends up being a bit of a greatest hits
from a bunch of sessions. (laughs)
- In your site I see a lot of instruments, amps, pedals,
percussion and other stuff. After seeing this all I could think
of was that one, you must be rich, and two, you must have a lot
of free time in your hands. Obviously you master several
instruments, which one was your first instrument? Which
instrument do you master?
Guitar is my
primary instrument, but I like to put emphasis on every part and
every instrument. The free time thing yeah. I work on this a
lot, kind of like a mad scientist in his lab. I wish I could say
that I was rich (laughs), but like most musicians, they'll
probably tell you that they owe money or that they're assets
rich, but money poor. In my case, I've spent a decade and a half
acquiring that stuff from the buy and sell papers, used
instrument stores, pawn shops, etc, and that's all to make
better albums, so with the pictures and descriptions, that's to
sort of let people know what's going into the albums, that it's
not just some tossed off demo with a shitty solid state amp and
whatnot. I can tell you, that the gear has come at a hefty
price—a lot of weekends spent saving money, sacrifices--I don't
spend much on clothes or vacations or stuff like that. But it's
nice to have those tools to work with, in case I want a certain
sound or texture or something like that.
With things
like the vinyl for Desert Opuses, that's yet more sacrifices,
because for most, that would be a huge vacation or down payment
for a house something like that. It's lost a lot of money, but
those are all risks that have to be done to be taken serious and
all of that. Shipping out promos really adds up, too, with
postage. And sometimes, I do wonder why I'm doing it at times,
because it's not for the money.....psych/ stoner rock is never
something that one makes much off of. But I love doing it and
have complete creative control, own my own masters and music,
and can offer more to audiences and fans that way. And I see it
as a way to contribute to the social/ artistic fabric of the
world, in that the music inevitably alters the way that the
world's course goes.....even if it's in a small way and if it's
just someone listening to the album for 40 minutes, you know,
even to do that to a few people has some sort of alternate
future/ effect on the world. Hopefully for the better, for constructivity. You look at nations and civilizations that don't
have music, and some of them are ingrained in hundreds of years
of war. Maybe if they had the power of music, they'd be more
constructive or happy, who knows? Music can bring people
together, like a religion or a sports team.
I'm 30 years
old and don't have kids or a mortgage--just an apartment where I
have really good neighbours (laughs) and a perhaps naive notion
that maybe music can connect with people on some level that
isn't just lowest common denominator stuff. And I love lowest
common denominator stuff as the Ramones, Motorhead and AC/DC are
big favorites of mine, but someone's gotta present something
different than that, and different from other things in general.
What most
people spent/ spent on schooling or having a family or settling
down, i'm still trying to prove that there's something yet to be
done. It could be naive, but the music has connected with a
small but appreciative audience such as yourself, Hansel. If
people like you weren't, maybe i'd embrace the whole typical
lifestyle of having kids and leading the regular life and maybe
my friends and relatives wouldn't give me that, you know, "when
are you gonna give up this hobby and start contributing to this
world?" (laughs)
- Which instrument do you consider the hardest to master?
The bass is
definitely the hardest to master, simply because you've got to
take what the drummer is doing, and then consider what the rest
of the band is doing and arrive at a middle ground where it
makes sense. If you follow the root notes of the guitars or the
rest of the song too much, then you may as well just have a
bassier rhythm part like with detuned fuzz guitars, which could
often fill that void. I realized that my timing was off a bit on
"Night Songs", so I wanted to tighten that up a bit for
Desert
Opuses and make the bass lines a little more melodic and
developed. A lot of people have mentioned the bass lines, so I
guess it worked. That's great, because that was a focus of mine.
- Which one the easiest?
The easiest?
Hmm. I'm not sure if there's really an easy instrument, if you
really want to get great at it, there's always a lot of little
things and nuances that make things hard to master. It's easy to
take things for granted, like getting to a certain level where
you're comfortable with how you play something, but there's
always things to be learned.
- I haven't listened to Night Songs, but sonically, how
does it differ from Desert Opuses? Was there anything you
learned from Night Songs that you wanted to correct in Desert
Opuses?
One thing that
I can say that I probably wouldn't do now, is make another 70
minute record (laughs). The reasoning for that is 1) because
people's time is valuable, and 2) there's so many great bands
out there. I think that people want more concentrated doses of
more intense things. I love Night Songs in how it takes that
risk in running time, but now, I wouldn't do it. 40-45 minutes
seems to be the magic number, and if there was one thing that
influenced Desert Opuses, is that you can only fit so much
material onto the vinyl medium, while still having it be in
optimum sound and not having static and skips and all that. On cd, you can fit 74-80 minutes of material on most cds and it
costs you the same amount for duplication and pressing. With
vinyl, you get into double album territory when you hit that
range, and vinyl costs so much more to do and the profit margins
aren't big. Now, with the extra songs, I release them as bonus
tracks at certain times.
If you've ever
wondered why the hell there was skips and static on a brand new
pressing that you've got, it's because they either exceeded the
vinyl's recommended running time per side (18-20 minutes per
side), or had inferior pressing methods. Credit John Golden for
that information and his superior job, because he told me that
he doesn't like to master albums over 20 minutes a side, and
there's a reason why he did the SubPop catalogue and a good
portion of SST's roster. So I had to chisel the time back on the
album a bit, and added a bit of running time to the cd as a
slight bit of compromise. So the vinyl definitely influenced
what went on "Desert Opuses", just because it didn't have a lot
of time to meander, and that's why I think people like you have
caught onto the experimental nature of it within a 2-4 minute
context.
- HWE is based on a Middle Eastern theme, what is this theme
and why this approach?
Well, it's not
quite Maiden's Powerslave, but what is? (laughs) A lot of the
album kind of had some Middle Eastern leads--guitar solos that
weren't solos, but were lead guitars in place of vocals--that
drove it and I was reading about some Egyptian stuff, like on
King Tut and that. There was speculation that Tut was murdered,
that the throne was up for grabs to commoners, so you had all
this chaos and controversy back then. His tombs were one of the
few that weren't looted by robbers or artifact seekers......the
myth is that Tut's curse got 'em, and I thought that the track "Tut
Will Have His Revenge" was sort of an interesting take that even
in death, you can have the last laugh, that he's remembered all
these years and all the looters and backstabbers vying for the
throne are all forgotten. The chaos of the noise freakout amidst
drum breakdowns and that was meant to be metaphorical for the
chaos that must have happened then.
He'd been
erased from their history in all the books and literature and
even the hieroglyphs were doctored and changed; only one wall in
the Temple of Luxor acknowledged him even existing after
religious upheaval had happened when his father, Akhenaten, had
changed all gods to one god in Aten and moved Thebes. But his
grave still remains, and it's baffled all of the historians as
to why the grave would remain, but his history would be wiped
out
Also, the
harmonic scale was used alot on this album, and i'd never used
it a whole lot in the past......on "Night Songs", it was done on
"Sonic Maelstrom" and at points, but I never set out
specifically to use it, as I'd used the blues scales a lot, which
cover a lot of ground from a fuzzy, heavy death blues sort of
standpoint. The harmonic scale I call "the snake charming scale"
to those that aren't familiar with some of the more technical
aspects......because it really does sound like one should be
charming snakes with it (laughs). It's that dark, flat/ sharp
"black key on a piano" emphasis. Most steer clear of those keys
and it's not a revelation for heavy metallers, but i'm not sure
if enough bands point out the importance of the harmonic scale
in creating a really dark, unsettling sound. Iommi did it tons,
and what he did was essentially take classical music in with the
blues and created heavy metal by using more semi tones than just
whole tones. Others did it before him with rock music, but none
did it with as much emphasis, I think, before he made it a
specific part of his sound. But the point, I think, is to make
it harrowing, paranoid. I really wanted the leads to sound
paranoid, creepy, claustrophobic, where it would put off most of
the average audience to be like, "what the fuck is this?"
(laughs). Confusion and terror are perfectly valid emotions--as
much as happiness or contentment. I think that dark music like
the Swans or Godflesh or Spacemen 3 all put people off, because
they're having to confront emotions that they don't normally
feel. Good art should also provoke, I think.
- Desert Opuses was recorded in three different
studios, what did you use each studio for?
Mostly it was
done here in my own studio, but I had did some piano parts in a
big studio here, they had a big Heintzmann grand piano there, so
I wanted to work on that. I'm not much of a piano player--fairly
utilitarian-- but I can approximate what I want to hear.. The
ballistics/ attack of a real piano are interesting because when
you play keyboards, they have a fast attack, in that the
reaction time from your hands to the note being played is
faster. With piano, the keys are heavier and you can't approach
it like playing a regular keyboard or synth.
Another place
was at a friend's place that we'd tracked harmonica at, and the
other was at another friend's house, Don, that we'd tracked some
Moog parts from his stash of vintage Moogs. The pictures don't
show up so much on the back of the cd cover, but you can see
them better on the back of the vinyl jacket.....the pictures are
kind of there, but not, they're obscured, so you have to look
harder for things there.
- Did you produce the album yourself? Did you take any
tips/advice from anyone while recording?
I produced it
myself, yeah. I love sound and the whole process of setting up
mics and hitting record and doing EQ and mixing and mastering
the material, because you learn a lot about how the ear hears
things versus how electronics hears something or processes it,
and the challenge is to convert the soundwaves into something
that's a good facsimile of what you're trying to accomplish with
the writing and the performances. And that's easier said than
done in a lot of cases, it takes a lot of work and a lot of
trial and error and getting better equipment and training your
ear to hear what you want to do more.
I have a really
general way of having a really specific sound, if that makes any
sense. There's certain guidelines, but in some ways, not. It
depends how things flow or whether it needs more of this or more
of that at any given time--maybe the mix needs more bass, maybe
the song is missing vocals when it seemed like a good
instrumental track, etc. I'm always open to tips, as that's how
one gets better. I always try to improve or learn more about
playing or recording or just being more happy or comfortable
with my own range of limitations, because I do have them, and
i've found constructive ways to get around that. Namely, i'm not
really that great a vocalist, but I can do three part harmony
stuff, which has this weird but effective vibe to it, and what
people react to is overall execution, not whether someone hit
the notes completely right or all of that. I could shout or
growl the vocals, but it's not my personal style.
- Are you 100% happy with the album? Is there anything you'd
change?
I'm not really
sure if any artist is 100 percent happy, but that being said, I
don't know how I personally could have done anything to get
closer to what I was after, it was the way I wanted it to sound
and people are getting 100 percent creative vision with High
Watt to get my idea of what's the best way to transpose what's
in my head to the final listening medium. If I got a producer to
do it, it wouldn't have turned out the same, because they would
have no idea really to transfer what parts are in my head to the
medium, and everyone has different versions of what they call
"warm" or "transcendent", or even "great". One thing that I've
realized is that people's definitions of something that should
be pretty narrow, is usually pretty wide. I mean, if someone
would go into a studio and tell the producer, "hey man, make me
sound great", there's so many specific factors that differ with
everyone's taste in that there's no way to really get that if
you don't know what you already want.
- I am guessing most people would categorize HWE's Desert
Opuses, a stoner rock album. And I am guessing that that
won't piss you off, but that you would categorize it as
something else. What would you categorize it as?
The stoner tag
is cool, I've done a lot of categorizing it as that, myself,
because music sometimes.....no scratch that...it often becomes
difficult to sum up to an average audience, and however people
want to do that is fine by me, since audiences need to know what
they're dealing with. I like a ton of stoner rock bands, but I
never really totally exactly wanted to emulate what they were
doing, because that's been done before. HWE isn't not a stoner
rock band, but its appeal also extends to some people that I
know aren't really into stoner rock a whole helluva lot.
I prefer to
call it psychedelic, because I think that the term has been
narrowed down to so many subcategories that it's got forgotten
about (ie: post rock--Mogwai....they're a psychedelic band!), or
maybe the term seems to refer only to a bunch of grizzled
hippies, but in my case, i'm a more regular clean cut type of
dude that used to smoke drugs that doesn't anymore, and I think
that people think that I'm some sort of grizzled bearded wizard,
but you never know. Psych music is very liberating, because the
best part of it is that there's often no rules with it. Stoner
rock is just psych music.....you know, you can be heavy, you can
do long songs, experiment some, dispense with traditional song
structures, etc. The freedom to do that, to me, is why I
gravitated towards this. 5-10 years ago, I was more into garage
rock and metallic rock n' roll, but in a weird way, it mutated
into this because I never really wanted to be that direct, and
wanted the music to be more mysterious and veiled.
But I often
approach this as the "sober approach to non-sober making music",
because I realize that a lot of music comes from delving deep
into one's mind and their perceptions of music, and I can come
up with something that makes me feel like i'm being taken to
some place that maybe I'm not normally taken to. Electronically,
chemically, naturally, however you do it is great. Music is an
incredible high for me.....sitting back, listening to it. I
still listen to my favorite records on the headphones and/ or
lying on the floor in the dark. I mean, it beats having music be
a soundtrack to vacuuming or doing dishes or something like
that, where people are hearing the music instead of listening to
it.
I like
challenging music. Because if it make people uneasy or they
don't like it, that's cool. I know that it's not because it's a
knockoff of something commercial or bland or whatever. I've seen
tons of bands bomb playing the most commercial music--and I love
a lot of mainstream and guilty pleasure type stuff--but
considering the competition, there's no way to stand out. So you
might as well do something different and something that reflects
your individuality, even if it's something that most people
won't connect with. Even within the stoner/ psych scene, I
wanted to do something that was different--a more metallic
version of Spacemen 3 and Hawkwind with the same weird trappings
and buried vocals that they had, but sludgier. SP3 also never
(or rarely) had lead guitars. There's huge lead guitars all over
HWE records, and I love the tradition of big guitar solos. At
some point, people became afraid to play them for whatever
reason (or couldn't do it technically), but why not? A great
solo has feel and character. If that's excessive, then a lot of
people don't consider the cliches of singing about chicks and
whatever for 5 minutes a song as being unnecessary.
Instrumentals get a lot of flack because I guess people need
imagery told to them and are used to someone slamming them over
the head as to what to think, but I like the mystery and the
element of thought process and imagination.
- One of my favorite songs is "Headphone Opus", i love
everything about it. The drums are stellar, I love how you
arrange this instrument with such simplicity into your music Can
you talk a little about how this tune came to be?
Thanks! That
one took a bit more work to conceive and was a late bloomer, so
to speak, as it wasn't going to be on there as it had lost a bit
of focus or maybe didn't have much focus. Originally, as I'd
mentioned earlier in the interview, it was all heavy straight
through for 8-9 minutes, then I thought it dragged a bit too
much and had no up or down or light or dark to it. The focal
point is when the louder part kicked in--the lead guitar, the
tremolo and phase guitars, all kind of built up, then I thought
that some piano would be cool. It had a good apex, a good blast
off into something exciting, I thought, but the build up along
the rest of the song wasn't as good as I wanted it to be.
The first part
is maybe the most stripped down part on the record for half the
song with just vocals, Farfisa organ and piano. The Farfisa is
this beat up old Farfisa Bravo organ that i'd got out of the
used ads here for 40 bucks--you know, a real underdog-- it has
this crackly, warm feel to it like the transistors are gonna
blow up, this wild anomaly to some of the more predictable and
controlled digital equipment that I work with. That's one of
those songs like on "Obliteration", it has this almost Mellotron
sound to it....that's the Bravo, this otherwise left for dead
and unwanted piece of gear that rose to the occasion in a great
way, like an actor that people wrote off but puts in the
performance of a career. Was it on another album? I don't know.
But it is here (laughs).
In the mix, i'd
hard panned the vocals to one speaker, and put the delay in the
other speaker, so it's this weird bouncing effect that I had to
work a lot on the timing of the delay on to have it have that
effect, where it was really pushing and pulling against itself.
It really shows up on a headphone listen, hence the title, and
the original working title for the album was intended to be
"Headphone Opuses From Egypt", so it is still a bit like the
title track.
It's
interesting that you mention the drums.....the drums are either
a love/ hate affair--they're either too monotonous and too much
of a robotic bludgeoning into oblivion, or people love them.
Some of the record is real drums; some of it is drum machines.
Big Black, Jesus Lizard and Godflesh taught me that the music
could have a more harrowing vibe with drum machines if they
weren't over programmed and if they were embraced from the
perspective of hypnotic and rhythmic worth. It's a highly
modified Alesis SR-16, which apparently was the same drum
machine that Godflesh used, though I didn't know that at the
time. It has four separate outs, so I can process the sounds
differently. To get a more rigid and claustrophobic sound that
also is a little less tame (drum machines can sound crazy
sterile at times), I run the sounds through mic preamps that are
in the red, they're overdriven, angrier, clipped. Digital
recording--what I record on--is naturally a bit colder, so I
think that it suits the overall vibe well. But you get old tube
amps and old synths and stuff like that on there to balance it
out a bit.
-"Tut Will Have His Revenge", it's got a bit of an early
Monster Magnet flavor to it. Am I off?
I love Monster
Magnet, and at the time that I'd heard them in the early 90's,
i'd dug their blatant love of 70's sounds and culture because
there wasn't much else like it. In actuality, the song is meant
to be a bit like something off the Stooges' "Funhouse", but
Monster Magnet took alot of cues from them too, so it's all
cyclical. Whatever people hear in the music is fine by me,
because you can take the most obvious influences and then
everyone hears something different. "Tut..." was another late
song that wasn't intended to be on the album and got a new lease
on life and just seemed to fit with a bit of re-working.
- The Velvet Underground are definitely an important
influence on this record. What does the sound of this band means
to you?
I have to admit
the truth......when I was younger, I had no idea what they were
trying to achieve! (laughs) I think that a lot of bands may tell
you that they always instantly loved a lot of bands or acts, but
they're too afraid to admit it for being perceived as being
uncool. But saying that, there's tons of acts that I didn't
quite "get" when I was younger, only to love them later. I think
that there are bands that are beyond you or I or anyone else at
any given time. I think that even John Peel mentioned something
about that, that if he doesn't understand a band, that he said
something like it was his problem, not the band's, that he'd
eventually find a way to understand it or something like that.
That being
said, I really really connected with them when I heard "Venus In
Furs"--still my favorite song by them--and "Light At The Speed
Of Sound" is a fairly conscious nod to that. Not exactly the
same--but similar.
- Have you ever played live with HWE? Do you plan on putting
a band together?
There were some
shows, but it wasn't at optimum capacity and it made me realize
why I did the recordings......it's difficult to find people that
have a good blend of skills, personality, influences, ambition,
goals and tenacity. I've also leaned more towards being a
technical producer/ engineer for the longest time, and High Watt
was sort of a guinea pig as far as creativity, vision and
technical execution was concerned. Or it's the Steely Dan of
heavy psych (laughs). To find a band that was as willing to
spend as much time as was required here--in any genre--was
difficult. Most just want to do a live sounding album, which is
cool and all, but I wanted to see what could be done when studio
availability wasn't a concern in regards to time or money. It's
the exact reason why this type of album has never really been
made before--the specific influences aren't original, but the
presentation and flow and pacing and sequencing are.
- Please list the records that have influenced you the
most/your favorites?
Hmm. Wow. Where
to start? I love alot of different types of music, from old
blues, to 50's rock, to 60's garage/ psych, heavy metal, proto
punk, punk, power pop, shoegaze, noise rock, even 80's guilty
pleasures. There's no real rhyme or reason to it other than if
it's something real and honest, that i'll probably like it. All
the Stooges' catalogue is great, MC5, Blue Cheer Vincebus
Eruptum, Big Star #1 Record, T-Rex The Slider,
Sonics (anything), Nebula To The Center, Kyuss Welcome To Sky
Valley, Love Forever Changes, Zeppelin, Leon Russell,
Jesus Lizard Liar, Cheap Trick In Color, Hawkwind
Space Ritual, Spiritualized Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space,
The God Machine One Last Laugh In A Place Of Dying (super
underrated), Quicksand Slip, Mogwai Young Team, Velvet
Underground With Nico, Robert Johnson The Complete Recordings,
Chuck Berry The Great 28, Melvins Houdini/ Stoner Witch,
Spacemen 3 Playing With Fire / Forged Prescriptions,
Sabbath Paranoid/ Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Slint Spiderland, Slowdive,
My Bloody Valentine Loveless, King Crimson In The Court of
the Crimson King, The Who Quadrophenia / Who's Next, Moondog
(old homeless dude who composed his own classical music that was
pretty out there), Stones' Mick Taylor era, etc. There's tons
more.
Not all of
those influences seep into High Watt's stuff, nor would I want
them to--I think that the spirit of bands and music can be
transcribed to a different influence or creativity, where even
in abstract art, you're taking influence from non-abstract
stuff, and then making something totally different. Even if
that's just running music backwards to mess it up or sending
sounds through a delay set to full feedback or whatever. In that
sense, I think that if you mine just the surface value of the
most commercial music, you're not gonna end up with the same
spirit, either, just like you can't go into Abbey Road and then
touch the walls and go, "well, we've made a Beatles album!".
It's up to the artist to dissect what they can from the spirit
of those influences, not the surface value of what it
represents. But you were one of the people and writers that I
thought would connect with "Desert Opuses", because it's got a
variety of gears to shift to and some disparate influences that
work in the most appropriately conventional way, you know, it's
not a bit jazz and then a bit country, it's all centered around
moody psych stuff in where it would all sound pretty similar on
an acoustic guitar, no matter if it's heavy or if it's quiet.
The spirit is the same, I think, even though it's not
necessarily the same in the end sonic result. It's pretty heavy
in mood, but that being said, there's a variety of shades in the
bleakness of the moods--some are mildly confused, some are
desolate, some are playfully dark and mischievious, you know?
Alot of naysayers of heavy music just write it all off as being
depressing, but there's a wide variety of moods that many bands
had. Look at Sabbath, albums like "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" have
so many different moments and even "Master Of Reality" with
"Solitude" and "Orchid"....most people would almost never know
that was them.
As far as local
influences, a band called Kittens--they were totally out of
their element, playing Melvins/ Jesus Lizard stuff here in the
early 90's, and they'd got a great buzz for themselves by
getting videos on MuchMusic (Canadian equivalent of MTV). I
mean, most audiences here were totally stumped. I remember when
they went on a tour opening for Voivod, that the reviewer was
totally clueless--"solos non-existent, melodies chucked.....".
They were a totally different breed of metal/ noise. They were
more riff based and heavy than the Jesus Lizard, but more
abstract than the Melvins were. Their earliest recordings were
cassette based and really, really grimy and grainy sounding, and
of any heavy act, I actually can't think of many where their lo-fi
stuff worked for them as much as Kittens did.
And I mean,
this was in the early 90's when you had no internet, it was more
difficult then. The drummer, Dave, used to be in my art class in
high school, and here he was in one of the most cutting edge
noise/ metal acts in Canada and were signed to a fairly big
indie label up here, Sonic Unyon. Totally underrated, and they
can stand up with any of the best noise damaged metal acts that
ever were. Dave was into the Swans and really fucking out there
music, but then he'd be listening to the Cocteau Twins and stuff
like that. A major influence early on, and they still are. Dave
has since passed away, but i'd like to think that in spirit,
locally, what I do carries on in the tradition of abstract heavy
noise that makes people reconsider their horizons and boundaries
of what they like and what they perceived about music. Art with
heavy music. I love that whole concept.
I also think
that things that you don't like can be great influences, too.
Sometimes you have to know what you don't like, and you have to
get specific about what it is that you don't like about them, so
that you don't end up with elements of those things that you
don't like by accident or stumble into greatness or whatever.
I'm as specific in things that I don't like as things that I do
like. That being said, I love so many types of music that I
don't have a lot of negativity or capacity for music that I don't
like, so I don't waste too much time on thinking about the bad
stuff.
- What are you listening to right now (current music)?
Surprisingly
enough, Jason and the Scorchers' "Lost And Found"--country music
delivered with the attack of punk rock. That's another thing
that I absolutely wouldn't have understood when it came out in
1985. But it's honest, heartfelt, and from the gut. Other than
that, the Swans' 1990 vinyl reissue of the 1982 EP. They were
doing something so forward thinking on that record, that it
presaged a ton of noise acts. Also, the reissue of Suicide's
first album--the 23 Minutes Over Brussels show. That goes to
show you what bands were up against when presenting something
new--mics being stolen, a showering of boos, etc. It's
interesting hearing documents of the originators of something
very new and not easily understood.
- What's next for HWE?
It could be a
noisier album or a quieter album. I've got both pretty much
completed and mixed and vaguely sequenced. I've always thought
that the true test of a band was when they could strip the noise
back and deliver something that used different emotions to get
the point across, and I like optimism and light to temper out
some of the onslaught of darkness. When Alice In Chains released
"Jar Of Flies" or the Supersuckers released "Must Have Been
High", or even Slowdive's "Pygmalion" I didn't quite get them
right away, i'd expected more loud stuff. But those albums are
great and it took a lot of cojones to deviate from
that.....they're really well written albums on a more subdued
trip. I like bands and albums that take risks. That album that
i've done is more Spiritualized, Floyd, Love sounding--gigantic
strings, synth strings, more open space and friendly sounding,
dipping back more into the quieter songs on Night Songs like
"Into The Abyss", "Ascention", "Erosion", etc. Or it's like the
yin to the yang of stuff like "Slow March" or "Stripped
Ruins"--which are both kind of darker mellower songs.
But then, I
also like the idea of swinging even further from form and
structure, and doing more abrasive noise. There's plenty of
that, various tracks and 10-20 minute tracks of pure craziness,
and drop c drone stuff set to thunderstorms and drones set
around running a finger around the rim of a wine glass and
ambient noise that would go even further down that more bleak
path, but I always try to temper even bleak albums with some
shades of light, and trying to balance enough diversity on
albums that seems to flow well without being too unnatural of an
extention is sometimes difficult to do, where it shifts to the
next natural gear instead of being too unnatural in it's
shifting or moods. I don't think that everything that HWE does
necessarily has to be jarring or abrasive.
It's getting
tougher and tougher to do as I think that audiences generally
want something a little more narrowed down or specific than they
have in past eras, but the great thing about producing your own
stuff and releasing your own albums is that there's no record
company or anyone breathing down your neck to do anything that
doesn't move you. The interesting part to note is that by the
time that bands rehearse and release their material, they've
heard it a zillion times. (laughs) Whatever I release, is
something that I see myself being into as a listener that I
don't tire of listening to, but bands naturally evolve and I
think, have to put out something that moves them at that
particular time, depending on what they're listening to and what
they consider to be a challenge to themselves and the audience
and to have some foresight as to what the next challenge is.
That's what I really like about King Crimson, is that they never
made the same album twice, but still challenged people. I have
the albums by them that I like more than the others, but there's
no doubt that they were there to challenge themselves and their
audiences.
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