The interview of interviews? Quite possibly. Either way, this is one long and mightily interesting reads, so strap yourselves in, get comfy and dig on it.
1 How did you get into making music?
I think I was singing little songs from a very early age, and I’m sure that my father would sing his (unaccompanied) songs to me as well, when I was very young. My first song didn’t really have a name, and was only one line long, repeated over and over – Òwe gotta do one thing, we gotta put the lights on the Christmas tree.Ó I was probably about 3 or 4 years old. I remember singing it while crossing the old (now demolished) blue bridge over the Eau Claire river, near my early home in the Shaw Town area of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. It is strange to be a kid.
My entire, ill-absorbed exposure to sheet music consisted of my stint as a trumpeter with my high school marching band. While the more technical fineries bounced off my brain, I’m pretty sure I learned several pretty important things in the band – first and foremost, that a band is not [!] about the lead player, (which I certainly wasn’t,) but rather about the balance and blend of different simultaneous tones that made up the music. I also had lots of practice moving in time to music. Nowadays it kinda works in reverse; when I move in time my brain just spits rhythms back out. A lot of my songs are written while I’m walking around.
Soon enough I bought my acoustic guitar and started playing songs with two of by best childhood friends, Brendon Hertz and Joel Rorher. We became Something About Pirates. None of us really knew how to play our instruments, but Joel had a bass and an amp and Brendon had an cheapy keyboard of his Grandmother’s. (I think he had taken lessons at some point.) The best part of the whole thing, I think, was that we learned to play our instruments together, however strangely. At first, we were really rudimentary, almost shockingly so. At some point we had a few songs and decided it was time to try our hand at recording, and with a single computer microphone went on to record ‘Goat Farm’. It’s a pretty bad album, but at that point, I was hooked.
I went to college, studied the (oh so sweet) patterns of nature and met Adam Gregory Pergament. His poetic brilliance/madness would strongly influence the way I looked at music, and how I went about it. By following his band, StoneFloat, I certainly learned a lot about the business of music – at first as a fan, but then carrying amplifiers, running lights, and eventually their soundboard. Most of all, I loved the wild energy of music. I became a passionate seeker of good environments for music to occur in. Streets and alleys are usually alright, so I did a little busking.
After a while, as all local bands seem to, StoneFloat broke up. Of course, Adam wasn’t about to give up, so he focused energy on a new project, CHIME Collective. Chime was practically a circus, but we called it a big band. We met at the (late) Madison Center For The Creative and Cultural Arts (MCCCA), run by Jon Taylor Hannah, a free jazz musician out of the Chicago AACM. The MCCCA really was a nasty, boomy box of a room and it always sounded like you were playing with reverb on. This was complicated by the fact that CHIME was huge – sometimes as many as twelve musicians would show up, though you never could really tell how many would attend.. Besides, CHIME was completely improvisational; partly, I imagine, to woo Mr. Hannah himself, or at least impress him, but mostly because we just enjoyed the freedom of flow.
Sometimes our music was a sonic quagmire; an impossibly multilayered morass of dischord. (To be honest, I sometimes really liked that washed out, oceanic noise…) At other times, it clicked, and was extraordinarily metrical or funky or sparse. I signed on with my guitar and began by playing short patterns of notes (or sometimes even single notes) for minutes at a time, as a background to the main players. I did a lot of experiments with relative amplitude and delay during these early sessions – and I think it began some reiterative calculations that my rhythmic heart is still computing today. This is where Def Mute comes into the picture. He’s a splendid keyboardist, but somehow he’d always take up a seat at the grand piano in the room full of amplifiers and drums. I absolutely loved his appreciation for the quieter members of the band, and I’d spend a lot of energy matching rhythms with him – sometimes we were really the momentum behind that avalanche-behemoth that was early CHIME.
Around that time I had a realization – my playing had gotten stuck in a rut. While using standard tuning, I kept on the same, boring patterns I had learned very early on. I didn’t know any other way to do things, I suppose. So, I retuned. I think it was in the middle of a jam, actually, when I realized a newly-replaced string on my guitar was very out of tune (as they tend to be). The only strange part was that I was enjoying the sound that it was making. So, I reached up and began de-tuning the entire instrument, experimenting right then-and-there with new combinations of intervals. That really describes CHIME best, I think – it was a sound laboratory. And we, of course, were the Experimentalists. Shortly thereafter, I settled on the open tuning that I’ve used ever since.
CHIME bottomed out in the winter, when everyone in Wisconsin is glum and just trying to survive. We dwindled to three musicians – Adam, myself, and Tom Kourakis (the wildest and most undisciplined virtuoso I’ve ever met). As the ensemble shrunk, I found myself becoming more and more of the musical leader of the group. I think that was partly due to my intimate knowledge of Adams words, and my understanding of how to interpret them. We started playing as a ‘sonic setting’ for modern (aerial) dance, something I will never forget – watching dancers swing and whirl to your music is probably like nothing else. I became enormously infatuated with motion and dance – quite a bit of my music during that time was descriptive of something in motion. (see Cattle Tracks…) I also made enormous amounts of short recordings on cassette, worked at (the now defunct) King Club as a sound technician, and started to register thoughts on the relationship between a sound and it’s ‘sonic environment’.
That’s pretty much how I got into making the music I do today. Yowza. (You poor, belabored readers.)
2 Where are you from and what’s the music scene like there?
I’m from the state of Wisconsin, around the Great Lakes region of the North American Continent. We’re a heavily glaciated place, though not currently, despite common belief. Plenty of oak and pine, some lakes (~15,000) and lots of fresh air. I hail from Eau Claire – it was a lumberjack town, then a tire town, but now it’s probably known for it’s computer chips, I think. [I'm also happy to announce that downtown Eau Claire is finally bouncing back after the construction of the 'Urban Sprawl Shopping Mall' in the late 80's. Hurrah!]
In Wisconsin, the music scene operates at it’s maximum potential in capitol city, Madison. Honestly, it’s rather quiet. Madison is the kind of place that nurtures the music of human beings, which surprisingly isn’t ravishingly popular among most human beings. Wisconsin doesn’t kick out many famous musicians, (The Violent Femmes and Bon Iver come to mind…) but I do think that Wisconsinites appreciate live music; local music. I guess we’re a place with a lot of bar music. (There are a lot of bars, after all…) My time with StoneFloat and working at The King Club really shocked me into understanding that live music is still the black-market, traveling minstrel show that it used to be in the olden days, except with more electricity and drugs and publicity. I am often startled by what people imagine a musician’s life to be like – they account for a delicious creme puff diet of fame and wealth – while they manage to forget the long hours, weather, driving (=money), equipment/venue troubles, publicity(=money) and preparation actually put into a show. Besides, the resistance to new ideas expressed in sound can be enormously reactive and swift; especially in bars! I think it’s absolutely necessary to understand that as a modern folk musician.
The finest music in the upper midwest is probably made in Chicago. (Sorry, Minneapolis…) It’s a real pleasure to enjoy the solitude of the Northwoods and still be so close to that epicenter of music and art. I especially love the Artists for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) group, and the related musicians – Roscoe Mitchell the foremost. Venues like The Velvet Lounge or The Hungry Brain are special refuge for the waning sonic wanderer.
3 What is New Radish?
New Radish is a creative fellowship. By this, I mean that it is a network of generative individuals; artistic, scientific, technological, and physical. It is focused around the archive and transfer of creative information. Basically, it is a giant stockroom/taproot of magical alchemical ingredients, computer programs, short musical videos and photographs. I guess it came from the realization that if the ‘information class’ were more altruistic with their scraps of creative energy there would be a greater overall output of creative energy from the group. (For the same reason that recycling or thrift-stores are a useful idea – they concentrate excess energy in a single area so that it is easier to find.) The fun part is that anything goes with New Radish – the more it is like a piece of strange junk to you, the more likely it may be useful to someone else.
I can see The Utica Flower Company satisfying a lot of my New Radish goals – it’s probably just a matter of having enough space and organizing information appropriately. That Flickr site is a great start. As I see it developing, a Radish Fellow in Rhode Island could take a photograph today, and a Radish Lass in Great Britain could make a show-poster out of it tomorrow. Or, you could hear your own recordings from a dentist’s appointment turning up on one of my next albums – you never know.
4 You seem to have an endless back catalogue of records – what are they and where can they be got? Which is the best Simon Piler record to begin with?
I really do love to record, and since I don’t play out too often my albums are the bulk of my musical process.
My full discography is included on my myspace page (myspace.com/simonpiler). All of my recordings are available in CD (hard copy) or electronic (MP3) formats, save for the ‘music journal’, which is only available on cassette tape. I really hope to have the capability to distribute all of my music on cassette soon, because I’ve become quite a fan of the sound of tape. Are other folks, too?
You can download ‘songs from home’, my latest album, from the Quixodelic Records store for free. (Yes, FREE! Boogie!)
Otherwise, if you’d like to listen, you can contact me via myspace (myspace.com/simonpiler), or send an email to The Utica Flower Company – our email address is theuticaflowercompany (at) gmail.com. CDs are send through the mail free of charge. You can also contact me by snail-mail at our physical address:
Simon Piler and The Atom Band
1325 S. Farwell St.
Eau Claire, WI
54701
Just make sure you indicate what recording you’d like, and how we can get it to you - that is, provide either an electronic or physical address.
Ah, but which recording are you best suited to?
I will be honest. I cannot give you a very direct answer – but wouldn’t you like to decide for yourself?
I think that ‘songs from home’ may pick you up and move you. I believe in strong winds, and I think it’s worth a listen.
However, I’d really recommend ‘garden.’ as the best album to start with. It is concurrent to my time spent playing with CHIME, and the indirect product of a related boom of minor recordings, my ‘music journal’. (The music journal was sort of a running sketchbook of sounds and musical bits that I kept for reference.) The summer that I recorded ‘garden.’ during was a happy, carefree time for me, and the tone of the album reflects that, I think. It’s the very essence of me at that time – sympathetic, whimsical and strange. It is fine music for alley-listening.
If you’d like to try a slightly darker fare, I would recommend ‘Short Score’s Album’ (also called ‘EXIT’.) I was quite sick with pneumonia, but too stubborn to go to a doctor and living in a filthy little room in one of the snowiest Wisconsin winters on record. In addition, I was going to school full time, running sound at night, and playing with a psychedelic garage-folk/metal band as a bassist.
The record spans the time of my sickness and some of the following recovery. Needless to say, it deals with death, apocalypse and convalescence in a very palpable way. I think it may be the most important record to me, regardless of its significance to others.
In the spring of 2008, I moved out to the Great Plains of the North American continent. It’s a truly open space, and very vast. The volume of the space begins to act on you almost immediately as you settle there – the tips of your toes are just aware of an unimaginable depth and stillness. The Plains are a place of wind and soil. It is a simple place; even stark.
I worked for a bit as a field-scientist and met Scarytoes, a very friendly Texan (and subsequent member of the Atom Band). While we were out on a work hitch I dreamt the entire setting and plot to the short play, ‘A DISASTER’, in a single night (while sleeping/sweating in the top bunk of a trailer during a tremendous summer thunderstorm at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota).
The play is a musical (specifically, an oratorio,) and the music from the play along with the rest of the recordings I made with Scarytoes on The Plains make up ‘A DISASTER’. It leans towards Americana and folk quite heavily – probably the most of any of my albums. So, if you’re into drama or folk music, ‘A DISASTER’ is a good bet.
Around the same time I wanted to release three EPs simultaneously. It was sort of a way to laugh in the face of rigorously marketed music. In the end, the EPs weren’t released simultaneously, but I did eventually release three: ‘theatre music EP’, ‘Test’, and what would become ‘songs from home’. [Note: Actually, none of the original recordings for 'songs from home' made the final album! The originals were extremely loose and raw - all of them recorded on the same boombox I used to keep the 'music journal'. Most of the tracks were short improvisations on electric guitar recorded in my childhood bedroom at my parent's home while I was visiting for my brother's high school graduation party.]
‘Theatre music EP’ is strange. (Please don’t listen to this album first!) It’s not for those predisposed to the law-and-order of pitch. It IS for those who like drama, especially comedy. It’s also for the few true clowns left in the world. (Released Halloween, 2008.)
‘Test’ had an alternative title – ‘Five Goddamn Love Songs’. It is for people who like love songs but don’t know the first thing about being in love. Do you think you are in love? Who are in love with? If you can answer the first question but not the second, ‘Test’ is for you. (Released Election Day, 2008.)??
5 Who are The Atom Band?
The Atom Band cannot be found as the solution to any equation and are at best probabilistic. In short, they are illusory. They are the mythopoetic accompanists to my music, and consist of the few icons of tall-tale and legend that I have encountered and collaborated with over the years.
The Atom Band is:
Brendon Hertz (Yanpa) – Atom Band bandleader and player of trumpets, flugelhorns, and keyboards. Singer of harmony vocals. His side projects include Jump the Wagon, a splendid Eau Claire band.
Def Mute (Okaga) – Dr. Beat for the Atom Band. Plays saxophones, xylophones, keyboards, and electronic instruments. Accompanies me by shouting, whistling or waxing lyrical. Supplies sound and video samples. His side projects are many, but include Tycho Broham, a Chicago IDM group.
Scarytoes (Eya) – This friendly Texan hails from the hill country – Austin way. He acts as ‘Need-Be-MC’ for the Atom Band and plays occasional rhythm guitar or kitchen percussion. Supplies homebrew. He’s also necessary for our occasional bursts of clowning.
Emerson ÒHamboneÓ Betchkal (Yamni) - Our favorite muscular drummer and bearer-of-nicknames. Also known as Hammy, Hamster, or affectionately as Emmy. Philosophical compatriot and supplier of emotional stability.
Lieutenant Spark (Yata) – Our most mysterious member, principled by chaos and the unboundedness of nature. There is a certain, distinctive probability that he is any given person at any given time. We have reason to believe that Spark is, in fact, supernatural, and is probably drawn to most thoughtful sonic explorers of the world.
I should also mention at this point our most beloved electricity enthusiast, Sir Matthew the Mighty, Champion of Science, First Court of The Solar Corona (Tat?). What infamous group of tone-scientists is complete without their all-seeing engineer?
6 You’re into making musical videos – what inspires you and how do you go about making them?
I like to collect all kinds of creative information, and video is a rich variety thereof. I am continually amazed by the patterns and forms of nature and how video captures those over time. When I manipulate video, I like to make those patterns much more apparent.
In terms of drama, I like spontaneous, poorly-acted situations with lots of jump cuts. (Hee, hee, hee…) I guess I like ghost movies, too. Sometimes we do puppet theatres, though I have never managed to make a puppet the least bit expressive. I’d like to do some dance videos, but I have to get brave enough to ask people to dance in them and organized enough to clearly explain how I’d like them to dance. I would also like to mention at this point that Scarytoes and I are the unofficial mythopoetic spokespeople for GLEEM toothpaste.
When I make a video, I like to spend as little time as possible filming. It forces me to use scraps of video, sometimes the same clips over and over. I use a still camera to shoot all my video, which reduces the resolution quite a lot. When I edit, I like to really speed along, and let things fall into place. If I can edit a two minute video in less than an hour, I’m very happy.
7 Your music is very lo-fi (in a spontaneous good way) – is that by design or circumstance? How do you go about capturing a song (from conception of the idea to the finished recording)?
With honesty, the lo-fi textures of my music result partly by intention and partly by accident. I think certain kinds of noise are very beautiful. The ear has only such a threshold of perception, towards which information is frayed by noise. You can use this to a sonic advantage. True noise like a mist that partially obscures sounds. It offers a pervasive color and texture of frequency that you can’t get from an instrument – the incorporeal blur of dream, as I see it. Besides, isn’t randomness just delicious and creamy?
The other half, of course, is that my recording methods are far from perfect – I record pretty much everything on cheap microphones in almost any sonic environment. I use tape quite a lot, which is obviously noisy.
Process is important to me because recording is (typically) the end I work towards while composing. It’s kinda odd, then, that I spend a very short time actually recording sounds. Instead, I spend quite a bit of time/energy creating an atmosphere suitable for creativity. My geographic location has a huge amount to do with it, and the space where I live – both will undoubtedly draw certain repetitive behaviors, feelings, and observations from me. I believe that we are the sum of our experiences, insofar as they remain with us for a time and change us. So, I try hard to be aware – awake or asleep.
Should I pick up an instrument and play it, I try to ‘tune’ my style to my mood. If something is not sympathetic to the trajectories or patterns of my life at the time, I try to amend it, and make it better. It is through this process – somewhat similar to the scientific process – I can slowly improve my musical description of a complicated feeling or (e)motion. I like to record on the fly, that is, improvise, because it keeps my mind free for evaluation, not bogged down in wrote memory. Of course, improvisation can be frustrating, because you might not be able to capture what you had expected at first. It helps me to warm up by playing several ‘throw-away’ one minute song-sketches before recording. (Thankee, Roscoe Mitchell.) It also helps to have an idea for a song in your head and to knead it by walking about and singing it in all different ways (and in all different sonic environments). It’s sort of a beautiful yeast-like subconscious consumption of a song’s harmolodic sweetness – converting it to a rising sourdough soul-bread. Yes, time and motion can work out quite a few musical roadblocks, BUT, if I let my bread rise too long, it’ll collapse in the oven. I like to record a song no more than a few days after ‘kneading’ it.
Once we get the first few tracks down – usually guitar-bones or keyboards, then we add supplemental textures. I’m usually pretty particular about arrangements. The right mixtures of frequencies are very important, I think- they must be sympathetic to the overall feeling of the song. I rely on Def Mute extensively for his delicacy and attention to instrumentation. The physical recording environment is a big deal, too. When I was recording ‘Short Score’s Album’, I built a little blanket-tent in my already tiny room to make it sound even closer. At my current residence in Florida, the walls are stark wood – all very reflective surfaces, and so things sound a lot more roomy.
8 The pure poetry of your words are really great – what are the main themes you find yourself revisiting, and what other writers do you like?
Thankee, sir. I certainly enjoy writing.
Almost all of my songs are about things that I actually experienced; asleep or awake. So I tend to write a lot about my dreams and nature. I like to write about death, too. Most of my poems are mystical observations, but recently I’ve spent time on much more tangible topics. I appreciate myths, and so many of my songs end up using parallels to the old stories.
Besides myth, I read a lot of poetry and drama. Alfred Jarry, the ‘grandfather of dada’, comes to mind (though I’m not sure he’d fully appreciate a label like that). I also like August Strindberg, Gary Snyder, and Sun Ra. I can’t really discount the musical poets that I appreciate – I was hugely influenced by my friend and teacher, Adam Pergament, of course. I also like the way that Frank Zappa writes his lyrics – they’re almost like the words to a play or opera. Tom Marshall, the lyricist for Phish, was an early influence, as was David Bowie. And what list of musical poets would be complete without Bob Dylan?
To me, writing is about describing something. I’ve enjoyed quite a lot of technical and scientific writing for it’s sheer clarity, and so it has influenced me as well. Mathematics is an extraordinarily frank language, though I often have considerable trouble understanding it!
9 What’s the weirdest musical instrument you’ve used on a song?
That’s a hard one. I’m a diehard kitchen percussionist, so I use plenty of strange percussive devices – bicycles, washing machines, keys/silverware/loose change, and my favorite; the refrigerator-shelf washboard. Really, the weirdest ‘instrument’ I’ve used is a room full of noisy, cranked-up amplifiers, computer fans and radio static ‘washed’ clean by the noise filter in (the freeware program) Audacity. The effect-as-programmed is quite glitchy, and the result is a beautiful, warbling, birdlike melody. (Listen to ‘wizeen’ on the album ‘garden.’)
I also occasionally use a cheap microphone designed to record phone conversations (illegal in some of the states, I believe). I only mention it because it’s wonderful as a post-effect to introduce feedback into a previous recording. Call yourself up, place the ‘tapped’ phone in front of an amplifier playing the passage of interest, and hit record. The resulting recording with be similar to the original, but will include feedbacks at the resonant frequencies of the phone casing. Crazy. (If you listen carefully to ‘muse’ on ‘songs from home’ you may see what I mean…)
10 What next for Simon Piler?
Well, I’m back to the grindstone already, writing new songs and recording them with my usual fever. I’ve got the first threads of a new album working through the sewing-machine of my brain, and I suppose it’s only a matter of time until I produce a tangle of appropriate size and complexity…
I’m also collaborating with Namu the Disco Whale (a cetacean out of Chicago) on a short EP – should be quite interesting, I think… It has to do with the protein CYP2D6, one of the enzymes of the liver responsible for breaking down toxins in the body. Remarkably, it’s not present in some people.
Probably some jumping-in-dreams and pestering Sir Matthew the Mighty into making computer algorithms for me. Some cartoons for the WordPress page.
I will laugh at tree frogs because they are small and weird animals with sticky legs and arms.