Tell us a
bit about your personal background. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in
suburban southern California, hanging out in parking lots, going to the
beach, skateboarding, listening to punk records. Music was an escape,
something to get excited about. Punk was the big folkart movement of that
time...
Do you
remember when music really caught your attention for the first time?
I sang in
church when I was very very young; I have vague memories of watching John
Denver and Alice Cooper on the Muppet Show. I remember schoolteachers
singing folk songs while playing autoharp. My best friend's older brother
played in a KISS cover band and performed at his birthday party when we were
5 years old. That blew my mind.
When did
you start listening "seriously" to music?
Aww I'm not
serious. The first band I really loved was the Monkees, because it was
playing in re-runs at the time. I also dug the Beatles and the Byrds; I got
into 60's music and punk at around the same time. I was in elementary
school, pre-teen. I jumped around a lot in my bedroom pretending to be a
punk singer or 60's psychedelic guitar player. I didn't have much money to
buy records, so I would go to the record store, stare at the cover art and
imagine what the band would sound like. I bought the Ramones "Leave Home"
and the first Velvet Underground album for $2.99 each on cassette from a big
bin at a local bargain department store.
I grew up in
Fullerton, so there was The Adolescents, Social Distortion, Agent Orange and
many more. Another friend's brother was in a group called Medicine Man (a
Green on Red/Dream Syndicate/rootsy type of band). We used to hang out in
their practice space and bash away on their gear when they were gone.
Was it around this time you
went from being a listener to actually play music? Or did that come later?
I've been making music my
whole life. My parents had a big electric organ and I used to create a big
droning racket on it, messing with all the knobs and switches. I imagined it
sounding like a symphony. My friends and I would make tapes, playing
harmonica and drums or with someone playing two notes on a cheap electric
guitar. Not much has changed really! But I mainly sang in a church choir in
public school, then in garage bands playing songs like "Gloria" and then
punk music. I didn't really start playing guitar until I was 21.
What made you pick up the
guitar?
I wanted to write my
own songs.
When starting playing music
I guess punk was a natural choice, right? Tell us a bit about your early
musical development.
I took a few piano lessons,
but I wanted to do things the 'wrong' way, make new sound, just bang on
things and have fun. I think this is the natural way to create music.
Structure and theory comes after the fact. I want total freedom, and then
ideas can flow and maybe form motifs or themes appear and then you can get
engergised by them as well. I have a voracious appetite for hearing new
music; punk is what originally sent me off into the stratosphere. There's so
much energy and feeling, art and style in it.
There is
so much beauty and space in the music you do today that I often tend to come
back to the landscapes when writing about it. How important is this side of
things and your geographical location for you as a person and as a musician?
Thank you. I
love a big spacious sound. Like an epic movie, a vast desert expanse, an
enormous cavern...I love reverb especially, natural and artificial; it gives
the music a certain topography. I also like dry upfront sounds contrasting
with spacious, formless ones and having multiple layers, like soil strata or
dense underbrush, different species of plants intertwining. The landscape
literally has an influence on the sound when I record outdoors with Loren
Chasse in the Blithe Sons or on my own when I do the Ivytree. But more than
that, I love San Francisco and the Bay Area, the history, culture and the
parks and the people. This must have an influence on my life and therefore
the music I make.
Concerning the
environment of recording-- that's a connection among most of your releases
and something that truly sets them apart from most other stuff out there.
What do you think is added to a recording when recording parts outdoors and
including various field recordings?
Playing outdoors is a
humbling experience. You don't want to play too loud and disrupt the
silence or the birdsongs. That's part of the reason why sometimes we play so
quiet and minimal. If you play fewer notes, more of the sound of the space
can seep in. Field recordings add a visual element. You can see with your
ears.
Where does
your interest in the nature come from?
Years ago, I
took a lot of LSD and mushrooms and roamed around out in the woods down in
Santa Cruz, out in the Mojave desert and up north in Eureka. The combination
of drugs and overwhelming natural beauty was very potent. I imagine this had
some influence, but really experiencing these types of places before I took
any drugs was just as intense.
Can you tell us a bit about
Mirza and its formation?
Mirza was Mark Williams,
Brian Lucas, Steve Smith and me. Steve and I have played together since we
were 15 and we met the other two guys in college at Santa Cruz. We started
in 1994 playing pretty structured music. Listening to stuff like Pharoah
Sanders "Tahuid" and Pink Floyd "Echoes" and Sun City Girls and those jams
on Jefferson Airplane's "After Bathing at Baxters", helped us loosen up a
bit. Also 3/4 of the band was smoking a lot of marijuana at the time, so
things started to get more fucked up. I started getting bored with electric
guitar, so I started incorporating field recordings, casio, banjo, tape
loops. Brian Lucas used to "play" a reel-to-reel machine like Eno used to in
Roxy Music or Martin Swope in Mission of Burma. The band split in 1998 just
when Brian moved to NY and Mark to Spain.
What lead to the
decision to start Jewelled Antler? Was there a point at which you thought
"we could do this better ourselves"?
Loren Chasse bought a CD-R
burner and asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a CD-R label, a novel idea
at the time. I think this was 1999/2000. The CD-R label idea gave us total
artistic freedom, and we didn't need a lot of money. Indie labels got kind
of conservative for a while there I think. CD-R labels can exist for 4
people or 400 people. It doesn't really matter either way.
What role do you think
Jewelled Antler is playing in underground music today? Has that role changed
over the years?
I don't know.
Hopefully a few more people stop and listen to the wind in the trees for a
moment.
What's the
story behind Thuja's birth? Why the name?
Mirza was
incredibly loud. Our ears were tired, and we wanted to incorporate more
acoustic/unusual instruments/field recording etc. Mirza had these elements,
but it was more difficult to do live in the context of a loud rock band. So
after the other two guys split, we asked our old friend Rob Reger to play
with us. He had a huge warehouse space covered in vine-y plants and cacti.
Kind of a beautiful decaying industrial garden which had an influence on the
aesthetics of Thuja I believe.
I saw Loren
Chasse play in an amazing band called Ohm-A-Revelator (with Greg Saunier
from Deerhoof and Cole Palme from Factrix), and I took note of the
unconventional way in which he played the drums. A few years later he showed
up at a party at our house. I struck up a conversation with him because he
had a Magma belt buckle on. A few months after that, he joined our group.
I named the
group Thuja after the plant. The word was written really large on a jar in
an herbal medicine store I used to go to. Also the break-up of Mirza was
disappointing, so I think we consciously wanted Thuja to be loose and unlike
a "real" band, so there would be no pressure to practice or put out albums.
We played with no expectations at all, and it all developed rather at its
own pace.
Although
Mirza is no longer you’re still involved in a number of groups, some of the
better known being Thuja, the Blithe Sons, the Franciscan Hobbies, the
Skygreen Leopards, the Ivytree and the Birdtree. Care to give us a brief
description of each combo/moniker?
Thuja:
3 or 4 people listening to each other more than playing.
The Blithe
Sons:
two people attempting to merge 19th century Transcendentalism with 20th
Century Minimalism and folk music, but mainly just an excuse to get
outdoors.
The
Franciscan Hobbies:
a myriad of friends and ex-friends having a sound-picnic.
The
Skygreen Leopards:
two people strumming 200 year-old-guitar chords and trying to discover a new
mythology of love, hope and dreams.
The
Birdtree:
collages with bird-headed figures with sad music.
The
Ivytree:
yet more of those collages and sad music with thin rays of light coming
through the branches.
What do
you want people to experience from the Skygreen Leopards’ music?
Love,
sadness, humor, passion, confusion, joy.
Tell me
about the Skygreen Leopards’ debut album? How did it come about? What was
the response like?
We recorded
two CD-Rs in 2001 and then late 2002. Then the Leopards went to sleep for a
bit. Donovan really wanted to get some Verdure albums out. I was doing
Birdtree/Ivytree/Blithe Sons/Thuja and a million other things too. But I
really wanted to make more Skygreen music, because it is such a joy to work
with Donovan; he inspires me; he's one of the most brilliant people I've
ever encountered. Chris Berry from Soft Abuse offered to re-issue the CD-Rs,
so I convinced Donovan to record some 'bonus' tracks with me, and within a
month we had a new album. People seemed to like "One Thousand Bird
Ceremony", we got some very kind reviews and emails.
Are the
first two Skygreen Leopards CD-Rs still going to be reissued?
Yes, but I'm
not sure when or how yet.
Does each
release have a different unifying idea, or goal behind it? If so, what would
you say makes “One Thousand Bird Ceremony” on Soft Abuse so special?
I don't know
if it's special, but thanks for saying that. We pull our lyrics from the
unconscious, Donovan is a Freudian and I am a Jungian. So our songs have a
mythological quality to them, but at the same time they are very personal
stories about our lives and experiences. We are very sincere and serious
about making good music, but also we don't want the whole thing to be
ponderous. We want to make pop music, inspired by the AM radio
psych-pop/folk of yore, but we can't help but make it a bit strange, because
we are a bit strange. Each release does tell a story. It's a non-linear
saga. Like Life itself, we're not sure where it's all going. The albums are
about us and the people we know, our histories and dreams.
Earlier
you described the Skygreen Leopards as some sort of new mythology of love,
hope and dreams. How important are dreams to you? Do they play any kind of
role in the creation of your music?
It's hard to
'know' the meaning of a dream intellectually, but it's a poetic hint at
understanding yourself. The lyrics might come from the same place. Being
aware of dreams certainly influences my life and therefore the music I make.
When I'm
making collages, I feel like I'm in a waking dream. I always learn something
in the process. Also I sometimes dream about music, impossible instruments
and sounds. I once dreamt that I had my hands in a shallow creek and
discovered that if I lifted these small smooth stones in the creek-bed, a
watery organ tone would be emitted. So in my dream, I could actually "play"
the creek-bed like a primitive pipe organ. I tried to recreate that sound on
some instrumental passages of the Ivytree CD.
How did
you get in touch with Jagjaguwar?
Soft Abuse
sent them "One Thousand Bird Ceremony" and Chris Swanson wrote me an email
saying come join us, and they've got Nagisa Ni Te who is the greatest band
in the world, so we had to say "yes". Also they told me that next up they
were working on a Supreme Dicks box set. I took this as a sign from the
almighty that we should join their roster.
I totally agree with you
on Nagisa Ni Te’s excellence. Don’t you think it is kind of odd how
relatively unknown they still are? I mean, they should have conquered the
world by now.
Yeah. Well maybe the
tastemakers just haven't caught on yet. They are just brilliant, emotionally
majestic songcraft... also the audio design of their albums conveys so much
vastness and beauty.
How does
your two Jagjaguwar albums "Child God in the Garden of Idols" compliment
"Life and Love in Sparrow's Meadow"?
Sparrows are
amazing singers; their notes are so pitch perfect, an orchestra can tune to
their songs. When Sparrow sings it summons the Child-God. The Child-God
brings wonder, mystery and confusion. In other words, the arrival of the
Child-God represents the birth of creativity (and thereby of everything).
I hear a
great deal of Nikki Sudden and the Jacobites influences on "Life and Love in
Sparrow's Meadow." What were you inspired by when making this record?
It's nice to
be compared to Jacobites, that stuff is truly amazing, the Swell Maps too!
I love the first two Jacobites albums and stuff like "Dead Men Tell No
Tales". I think the similarity comes from the fact that Nikki was into the
same things we are: Dylan, Bolan, Stones, Small Faces, Big Star and Neil
Young. Donovan Quinn never actually heard Nikki Sudden till recently.
It's hard to
pin down influences for "Life and Love". When we met we bonded over the
West Coast folk-rock and pop, the Monkees, the old Grateful Dead LPs,
Donovan's father's band Country Weather, the Byrds, Gene Clark, Kaleidoscope
etc. and other worlds like ESP-Disk, old Flaming Lips stuff and Television
Personalities. But that's just the launching pad. I mean we listen to a ton
of music. The basic structure for Skygreen music is pop or folk music, but
at the same time, I'm free to weave in field recordings, noise, whatever.
I’ve never really heard
Country Weather. What are they like?
They played
heavy psych-rock, some of their stuff sounded like a West Coast take on
Cream or early Pink Floyd; then later they had more of a country rock vibe.
How do you
and Donovan work together when creating music as the Skygreen Leopards?
We work very
spontaneously. We both sing, so often there is a second song within the main
song. Nothing about it is random though. We consider it "Pre-cognitive
Songcraft", aka "Backwards-shadowing". Each song is a remembrance of a song
not yet written. As Donovan Quinn once told me, "we need to travel backwards
through a forest twice in order to find our way back."
We spend a
good amount of time drinking espresso and listening to Creedence Clearwater
Revival or the Holy Modal Rounders together and discussing Art Nouveau
paintings and other foppery. Donovan is a bit of a country-dandy. Most of
the last two albums were recorded in his trailer on the back of a horse
ranch. The animal sounds you hear at the beginning of "One Thousand Bird
Ceremony" are right outside his window.
Care to
tell us more about the “so much is humored, in love” motto?
The four
humors are blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy aka black bile. Our lives
are influenced by the flow of these liquids, and love creates an intense
"humoring" in the body. This is only one interpretation.
What is a Skygreen Leopards show like? Any European dates on
the horizon?
We play shows as The Skygreen Leopards Skyband with Christine
Boepple on percussion, floor tom, bowed banjo, fuzz guitar harmonica, flutes
etc. I play 12-string acoustic/harmonica and Donovan plays acoustic guitar
and mandolin. I think live our country-folk side comes out more. It's pretty
strange and sometimes haphazard but mostly we enjoy it. I think the Skyband
is getting pretty good live considering it was previously an all studio
thing. We are starting to sound more like us if that makes any sense. We are
talking about more touring, but we haven't set anything up yet.
What do
you see coming round the bend?
I try not to
see past right now. Thinking about the future is a kind of black magic. If
you mess around with that too much, the demons will come and take you away.
Is there anything you’d
like to add?
I'd just like to add that I'm
grateful for all the wonderful people who I've met through music. I've
travelled farther and did way more than I thought I'd ever do. In the USA,
there are evil forces at work, very wealthy criminals who want to crush
culture and self-expression and kill innocent people in other countries.
It's a sad time really and that's part of the reason why we make this
music. So here's a big fuck you to George Bush from "new weird america" or
whatever it's called this week.
Written and directed by
Mats Gustafsson in 2005, originally intended for publication in Ptolemaic Terrascope
magazine #36. This edit
©
Terrascope Online, November 2007.
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