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Todd Patrick is the major force behind the explosion of independently booked and promoted rock shows in Brooklyn, New York since the dawn of the millennium. His shows are characterized by a DIY ethic in the tradition of the D.C. hardcore scene of the 1980’s: inexpensive covers, unconventional performance spaces, and intermingling of performers and audience are the norm. When he moved to New York in 2001 he had already sharpened his teeth booking shows in Austin, Texas and owning an all ages rock club in Portland, Oregon called Seventeen Nautical Miles. Patrick’s simultaneously furtive and egalitarian approach to the business of event promotion has made him a minor symbol of a Brooklyn music culture that is beginning to attract attention nationwide. The growth of this culture has coincided with the growth of a culture of urban redevelopment in Brooklyn that has seen high-rises sprout along the Williamsburg waterfront and condos encroach on Mccarren Park in Greenpoint. I met with Patrick in April to discuss the parallels and divergences of these cultural trends, the branding of his practice, the urban and spatial dynamics of a burgeoning rock scene, and places of musical performance.

D: Was this (Seventeen Nautical Miles) the first time you had done something like this and had a space of your own?  How did you acquire it originally?  I understand it was a Laundromat before.

T: It was a dry cleaner.  We happened to walk past it a lot because it was next door to the Delta café.  It’s now part of the Delta cafe.  And we noticed it was not doing well and that it was on its last legs and we inquired and sort of got the jump on it before the Delta could get it.

[…]

D: So this was already a neighborhood and part of town where other similar events were going on?

T: No it wasn’t.  Reed (College) was nearby but that’s the only reason there was a creative culture of any kind.  The Delta was located there because the Delta had pretty poor business sense.  The people who originally opened it – Anton and Angelina - Anton had good business sense but the other woman did not and she just poorly chose where she was going to locate.  And the rent was very cheap in that building.  Rent on Seventeen Nautical Miles was 625 dollars and they had signed a year earlier so I bet their rent was five-something, so it meant that it was easy to rent there.  I was familiar with that area because I lived there and because I liked the sort of country-fied vibe of it and I knew that Reed was nearby and I sort of mistakenly thought that Reed kids would come in great numbers.

D: It seems like a very separate world from the rest of Portland

T: They’re a bunch of elitists.  They’re essentially the west coast equivalent of east coast blue bloods.  I don’t have any respect. It’s a bunch of kids who convinced their parents to spend too much money so they could go somewhere where they can get drugs.  I think those kids suck.

D: So how long did you own Seventeen Nautical miles for, four years?

T: Two years.

D: And then eventually you had to shut down because…

T: We didn’t have to shut down.  We opened another space that was much bigger and we put notice in on Seventeen because we didn’t want to do two places.  I didn’t think I needed two places.  And not to mention it was a bad location.  The other place was right next to the Office Depot on MLK Blvd.

D: I know exactly where that is.  There are a lot of clubs down there now.

T: There are a lot now.  We were the first.  Well the Stage Four Theater was there before, which became the Meow Meow but there’s a lot of stuff down there now and we were the ones who sort of brought it in.  And we thought we could get away with it for a while and we certainly would have.  The problem was at the time Portland was having a big political struggle wherein the lefty hippy dippies who run Portland decided that they were going to have this really tight growth plan where everything was going to be located within the city limits of Portland, Gresham…

D: You’re talking about the Urban Growth Boundary.

T: Exactly.  Which they were all proud of and they got written up in the Times Magazine for it and they thought it was a really awesome idea.  On paper it looks amazing.  In reality it doesn’t work at all.

D: You don’t think so?

T: Oh it’s bullshit.

D: Why?

T: Because it’s just fake.  Because it’s not real.  It’s all political maneuvering.  There are tons of exceptions.  It doesn’t really work.

D: So it’s not about limiting sprawl?

T: It’s about getting press.  And so that’s what they were getting at the time.  And so they had decided that the east coast of the Willamette (River) was going to be all industrial.  They were going to create all these working class jobs.  Without thinking of the fact that because they had this tight growth zone that was poorly thought out and not realistic they didn’t have any place for working class people to live.  So how could there be working class jobs in the center of town and why would there be?  Plus all the factories there were very outdated, all the warehouses would need to be retrofitted to fit current needs and so they had this huge industrial enclave written into their plan right on the east coast because it made it look like they were doing something for poor people.  But they weren’t doing anything for poor people.  In fact these warehouses were all vacant and empty which is why I decided to locate my club there.

D: So this second space you located in wasn’t originally a club space?

T: Nothing is originally a club space.  There’s no such thing as an original club space.  Everything is a converted building.  Nobody builds a club.  You always use a building that’s already there and you convert it. So we used a warehouse space.  Which seemed like a perfectly good idea.  Our landlord couldn’t rent that space to anybody.  He couldn’t get anyone to go there.  And nobody could get industrial warehouse space to get in there.  The only things down there were us, the Sheridan fruit company, and the Montage Restaurant.  But the city wasn’t pleased.  The city was unhappy that we were doing this.  And granted we were breaking the law but we were breaking the law with Seventeen Nautical Miles and they didn’t shut that down.  But they came in and shut us down hard for two reasons.

D: You were located at the center.

T: It wasn’t about that.  It was because we were located in an area that they wanted to keep an inner city manufacturing district, which was totally misguided, because look now.  It’s not a manufacturing district now.

D: It still is.  But there’s more of a mix of cultural venues, bars and manufacturing.

T: And now they’re going to put condos there.  Because that’s what happens whenever the city gets involved in things.  The only thing they can ever really get to have happen is to have high end developers come in and build high end bullshit, just like the Pearl District.  Just like everything else.  And it’s the same in New York as it is in Portland.  The city can’t do shit.  Those people are incompetent and they can’t accomplish anything.  But anyway the city came in and they shut us down.  They didn’t work with us, didn’t do anything, just caused all kinds of troubles and the level of red tape that they thrust upon us was ridiculous.  And at this point our landlord got really cold feet and evicted us.  By that time we had already put in notice on the other space so the landlord there had already negotiated a new lease on that space.  So it meant that we suddenly went from having two spaces to having none.  But Seventeen was never shut down or anything.

D: At what point did you move to New York?

T: I moved here in 2000…2001 I guess.  So like maybe a year later.

D: And you immediately started doing the same thing.

T: No I did other things for a while and I had a job and I didn’t want to do this.  This is not what I wanted to do with my life.  But it just came to the point that I was getting really bored because there weren’t many good shows happening in New York and all the shows that were happening were happening in places that I didn’t want to go.  Places like the Mercury lounge, places that just aren’t fun to see a show at.  So I slowly started doing it.  People started asking me.  The only shows I was going to were in-stores at this record store but then he didn’t want to do those anymore.  This other guy from Portland, Peter, he owned this record store that used to be on Orchard called Sound and Fury.  But he didn’t want to do in-stores anymore because he was upsetting his neighbors and sort of exacerbating his chances of getting kicked out.  And so I was like, if you don’t want to do these in-stores, which are the only good shows happening in the whole of New York City, why don’t you send them to me and I’ll see if I can get them a show in Brooklyn or something.  These were all for like really small bands.  At the time this scene which is now seen as being so dominant and so huge was completely marginalized and unimportant. And this was 2001.  In 2001 all anybody wanted to talk about was electro and the White Stripes.  So to do something in a different kind of vein, which was more intellectual music – there was no scene for it. So you could do it in really tiny places.  So we started doing it that way and it just sort of grew exponentially from there and the scene grew around it and now that’s what people see as the Brooklyn scene.

D: Where did you start booking initially?

T: Loft spaces.  And dive bars.

D: So residential spaces.

T: But they weren’t really residential.  I mean they were illegal lofts.

D: You mentioned before that there’s no such thing as an authentic club space.

T: What’s that?  I don’t know what authentic means.

D: There’s no such thing as an original club space.

T: You don’t build a building to be a club.  You retrofit an existing space.

D: You do if you have money.

T: But I don’t know anybody who has.   I can’t think of a single one.  I can’t think of a single rock club in New York that was built to be a rock club.  The Bowery Ballroom used to be a shoe store.  Terminal 5 was a big warehouse.  Hammerstein Ballroom was built as a ballroom in the 1800’s

D: But these are all places that are recognized as clubs now.

T: These are all places that have developed the legitimate paperwork.

D: Which is different than what you’ve been doing in Brooklyn.

T: I don’t think it’s so different.

D: You don’t think so?

T: It’s a different level of paperwork

D: So the repurposing of a space like Uncle Pauly’s for example…

T: Exactly the same process.  They just put more money in and have more resources and have more capital.

D: They also establish a certain level of duration though don’t you think?

T: No.

D: The space permanently becomes a club.

T: I don’t think there’s such a thing as permanence because none of these places last forever.  Because the moment these places stop making money they stop existing and the fact of the matter is there are many places that have come and gone.  Brownies used to be the big club in town.  Not a club anymore.  Used to be that the Cooler was the place where all the shows happened.  Doesn’t exist anymore. Used to be that shows happened at Sound and Fury.  Doesn’t exist anymore.  Legitimacy is simply a matter of what you do to create a space that will weather the elements that are thrown at you more than another.  They have spaces that have weathered certain elements but at the same time they’ve created a much higher watermark financially for what they have to do to work.  And so when you have a big place that has all these investors and all this paperwork its limiting to what you can pull off.  I can guarantee you that when the Bowery Ballroom closes people aren’t going to miss it.  I mean they might miss that place but they sure as fuck aren’t going to miss the Music Hall of Williamsburg, they aren’t going to miss Studio B.

D: Do you think they miss places that you used to book at that you no longer use?

T: There’ve been many many, many of them.  There are tons of places I used to book. I mean some of them still exist but I don’t want to use them anymore and some of them aren’t there anymore.  But there are places that occupy a consciousness.  We’re not just talking about a transaction, we’re talking about an event that is a community coming together and defining a certain moment in their own culture.  As much as we can think that what we do is unimportant – because we’re just privileged white people, we don’t do anything important, we’re just privileged white people who consume – it’s not true.  We are thinking individuals who are -

D: But that’s not what I’m saying.  I’m not being that cynical.

T: And I’m not saying you are.  But that’s how people think.  We’ve all been taught to think that our own culture is unimportant and disposable.  Well the one thing that isn’t disposable is what we create with out own hands.  And I think that what we create with out own hands is this small thing.  And the moment it gets to be this commercialized thing is when it becomes disposable culture and that’s when it no longer has permanence. Culture is supposed to be the definition of how we are as a people, as a group of individuals making a mark on our history.  I think the only events that make a mark on peoples minds, that stand out in people’s minds are the ones that are more intimate.

D: Then is this use of different spaces or hopping around booking shows in different spaces rather than one single space an effort on your part to disrupt a sense of permanence or disrupt a largeness?

T: Not at all.  I think the Seventeen Nautical Miles was a far more important place in people’s memories that anything I’ve done in New York. And that was a permanent place.  So no I don’t buy into that at all.  What I do now is an effect of the capitalist system.  I have no option but to move around frequently because these places get shut down.  And they get shut down for two reasons.  One they get shut down because of pressure from existing clubs to do so or they get shut down because of real-estate interests.  These are all direct effects of capitalism, money and power.  The last one is a reflection of the other two. The people who write the rules for what you need to have to be a legal and safe place are the very ones who have monopolistic control over the market as it is.  The people who are writing the code for what a club has to have are the same people who already own the club.  The rules are written to discourage competition.  This is not to say there isn’t such a thing as safety regulations that need to be followed but when the safety regulations are being written, when the rules of how much money you have to have – we’re really talking about money here – when the rules are written about how much money you have to have to open one of these places by the very players who would suffer by a new player being on the market – then you have a problem.  And that’s really a problem throughout America in everything that people do.  That’s a problem across the board in America and the West in all things.  All code, all regulation, is written by the people being regulated.  Which means that they can pick and choose what will be too difficult for independent people to do.  And that’s what you run into with rock clubs.  So I have no option but to move around.  Now I’ve luckily learned how to do it in a way that places have a lot of long-term value at this point.  The Silent Barn has been operating for four years.  Market Hotel has been operating for a year.  Death by Audio has been open for two years.  Monster Island Basement has been open for four years. There are many places that have found a sweet spot where they don’t get challenged.  Now that will not last forever.  All it takes is a tiny bit of pressure from vested interests to get these places shut down.  If somebody decided that the Market Hotel was taking away from their bottom line – and most of these people are very short sighted and would think that way – right now they realize that it’s a farm team for Bowery Ballroom, it’s a farm team for Live Nation.  If somebody were less smart about it than the people who are currently in power are, these places would be instantly shut down.  And this happens this way in most towns.  New York is in an interesting renaissance of independent music because the powers that be have decided to tolerate this for a while.

D: What I’m hearing you say is that this condition of having to constantly relocate is a result of a situation that is thrust upon you, that you are forced in to.  But surely you realize there is a pleasure in this as well.  You benefit from this.

T: How so?

D: Because it sells.  Because people are really attracted to it.  There’s a real pleasure in this “destination-show.”

T: New Yorker’s are real estate voyeurs.  We want to see property.  For some reason New Yorkers want to see how everybody lives.  They want top see what’s inside that building.  Also most New Yorker’s, most white New Yorker’s, most white middle class people are actually terrified of New York.  Terrified of anything they don’t already know about.  So this gives them an excuse to feel like – oh I can go into this place where a lot of my peers will be.  And they’re not just terrified on a crime level, they’re terrified on the level of not being cool enough to go there.

D: So they’re curious and they’re real estate voyeurs but they want it to be safe.

T: They’re curious on an adventure level.

D: But they want some kind of assurance that the outcome is going to be good.

T: So by becoming a brand that people trust, which is what has inevitably happened with what I do – and it won’t last forever because that kind of stuff is incredibly fickle – maybe I can keep that brand identity lasting longer by switching around and making changes.  Because the whole idea with having clubs – and I never wanted to be club or a rock space – but by being sort of a virtual club, a club in exile, you have to follow all the rules of what people think about when they go to a club, which is that it’s a destination, it’s a set of things that are cool right then, and cool is the most fickle concept in the world.  So yeah, by moving around all the time it does inject a certain amount of newness and novelty.  But I think there is a detriment.  And the detriment is that there are tons of people, who are either quiet and not seeking the party or else not quite socially confident enough to come out of their shells, that find this kind of situation intimidating.  Intimidating or else not pleasant.

D: Or elitist even.

T: Even though it’s not elitist but they have it in their heads that it is.  So suppose you come to an event and there’s no sign on the door and you go in and its really dark and all you see is a couple of attractive people and you’re suddenly self-conscious and the music is bands you’ve never heard of and you suddenly feel like oh maybe they are all judging me.  And that’s bullshit because honestly nobody gives a fuck.  But people feel that way and I don’t care how illegitimate that feeling is.  What I care about is that it’s keeping people away who I desperately want to get turned on to an underground world.  So the fact of the matter is there are a whole lot of people out there who could benefit from exposure to a more intimate, more homemade, more real, more “I could do it myself” kind of culture and instead all they get is Law and Order on TV or the Shins playing at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.  I want those people to be exposed to the idea that they can build things themselves.  And so by moving around all the time, if we’re losing some of those people who are exactly who I want to turn on, than that’s a problem.

[…]

D: I want to talk about the neighborhoods that you throw these shows in.  Do you agree that there’s a destination mentality that revolves around shows that you book?

T: Sometimes. These days I book most of my shows at Monster Island Basement which is right in the middle of Williamsburg.

D: That’s true.  You aren’t as active.  Or there aren’t as many events you do in crazy weird locations as there were a couple of years ago.

T: Probably because the crazy weird locations simply aren’t crazy and weird anymore.  But that was because there weren’t any other options.  It had to be where it was.  It was always about what you could get away with legally.  I do throw weird events.  From time to time there will be something in a warehouse.  That’s because the event will be so big that I have to find a new place.  I’ve never fetishized…I mean I love the spaces and I sometimes love the experience but the thing is that new spaces bring new complications.  New spaces bring a new set of assholes you have to negotiate with.  Be it the people who run the place, be it the people who are neighbors, be it the cops who respond.  None of this is fun.

D: So finding new spaces is not a major aim.

T: No I’m not trying to be a real estate agent.  I’m not trying to expose beautiful properties.  What I want to do is find functional places that work.

D: In this vein, do you ever think about the relationship between your activities, between the work that you do, and processes of gentrification in these neighborhoods?

T: I don’t think it matters.  Because, bottom line, our culture is important.  Me, as a white guy or a middle class guy or whatever, I need to be exposing and having a chance to express my culture just as much as the next guy and if the cultural and legal obstacles force me into using a certain area than so be it.  There is nothing evil about visiting neighborhoods and I will not accept that criticism because I think it’s bullshit.  For one thing the people who most want to bitch about gentrification are exactly the people who are most likely to move into the neighborhood.  Be it the punkiest of the punks or the leftiest of the lefties.  They’re the ones who are moving into Crowne Heights.  I will never feel guilty about finding a place for my culture.

D: Again, I’m not being cynical about this and this is not a moral question.

T: So what am I supposed to do?  Make my culture cost more money because I have to do it in Williamsburg?  Williamsburg itself is gentrification.  There wasn’t a majority of hipsters in Williamsburg fifteen years ago.  What about the Lower East Side?  Let me tell you something about the Lower East Side.  That same fifteen years ago it was a largely Hispanic neighborhood.  Nobody owns the neighborhoods.

D: I’m asking because I think there’s a big difference between gentrification in downtown Manhattan in the late eighties and gentrification as it’s happening now in Brooklyn.  It’s not as…

T: It’s not as sudden.

D: It’s not as sudden and it’s not as sinister in a way.  In Manhattan there was rampant speculation and flipping.

T: That happens in Williamsburg too.  The thing that’s really different and the reason you see such a different process is that in Manhattan all of the prices are so high that nothing is rent controlled anymore.  The reason you don’t see such a dramatic flipping situation in Williamsburg or Bushwick or further out is that the rent control keeps people in their buildings so the buildings stay diverse.  Now most of those buildings are getting kind of close.  The rent control limit is 2,000 dollars.  Last year in Williamsburg, pretty much everyone who still had a lease that they signed in 2000 or ‘99 or 2001 finally saw their rent creep above 2,000 dollars which meant that every one of those people, at the time that their lease came up, got kicked out on their ass, which is why so many people now live out by the Market Hotel, because its a lot of people who used to live in Williamsburg and just last year their leases came up.  Just last year they got kicked out.  Now that happened probably to the original residents of the neighborhood just a few years before.  I wouldn’t say its less sinister its just that the law protects it from happening too much.  Honestly I’m not a big fan of rent control.  Even though I live in a rent control building and I benefit from it I think in the long run its makes rents more expensive.  Because what it makes is it makes the few vacancies that do exist in an area much more expensive. So the average rent in the neighborhood can be low but the vacancies are incredibly high.

[…]

D: you don’t think that your activity or the work that you do fuels speculation

T: It might but so does anybody’s.  Like somebody might open a coffee shop somewhere.   I think what I do is temporary.  I’m not doing anything permanent.  I’m coming in, throwing an event, and getting out.

D: But there’s still a value that accumulates.

T: Sure.  It gets eyeballs in the neighborhood. Yeah, so?  That would happen no matter where I did this.  Would it be better for culture and society if I forced these spaces to remain in what we see as white enclaves which would make the events much more expensive to do?  Which would mean the prices would be higher? Which would mean I’m limited to what I can present to people, which means the art is less edgy because I’m making this hamfisted attempt to not fuel gentrification?  When that term itself is very vague. There’s a lot of gray area there.  Again there are still a lot of Latin people in Williamsburg.  It may be hard to believe but there are many kids who live in suburban areas of New York City who have never heard of Williamsburg.  And I’m sure some of them would come to the shows, and some of them still do come to the shows for the first time and some of those people are being exposed to Williamsburg for the first time.  And we all know that Williamsburg is already gentrified and already lost right?  Not to those kids.  They’re going to be driving up the rent in that neighborhood and they’re going to kick out those last Latin people who are still there and those last Black people who live in the projects, those last poor people of whatever variety.  You’re getting into such a ridiculous concept when you think we should be self-policing ourselves to not encourage gentrification.  How does that work on the ground?  What am I supposed to do? Only locate in the suburbs?  Where all the white people are?

D: What I would really be interested in seeing is you doing this in a deli in midtown Manhattan.

T: You can’t get those spaces.  I’ve tried it.  The rent is so high in those areas that the people who own those delis are people who are making like one percent profit because their rent is so high, their expenses are so high, the amount of payoffs is so high.  Every detail makes their business so expensive that they run their business like a war.  And to them they see an event happening in their upstairs as being an unnecessary risk that they don’t want to take.

D: Even if it brings in business?

T: Why would they think it brings in business?  Based on what I have to tell them?

D: Because you’re known.  People know what you do.

T: I get press in our community.  In our community maybe there’s some currency to what I do.  Outside of my community of little white hipsters who went to college, or middle class hipsters, I keep saying white hipsters but it’s really middle class.  One of the great things about America and about bohemian scenes in general is that they’re generally relatively color blind as long as you’re making enough money and you’re into the right stuff it’s colorblind.  That’s not such a bad thing.  We hate ourselves over it but its not.  There are lots of good things about hipster culture and cultured white middle class America that we should stop hating ourselves for.  But getting over that…The reason that I can’t do those things and those events is because they don’t want to do it.  I could give them a pile of positive press and they’re going to see it as risk and the reason is because their insurance is already ridiculously high.  They’re already worried.  Do you realize that if you’re only making one percent profit, can you imagine how terrifying the prospect of two days of interrupted operation is?

[…]

Its easy to think of all these opportunities being there but they aren’t in reality and the reason they aren’t is because when the stakes are as high as they are in New york City, because of the cost of doing business here, people are more apt to say no than to say yes.  And in my opinion if you’re worried about being predatorial and upsetting hardworking poor people, what about those people that work at that bodega? What about that bodega owner who you’re basically taking advantage of and saying, “oh don’t worry about it there’s no risk in this.”  If some little rich kid from Williamsburg falls down the stairs and cracks his skull open he’s gonna get fucking sued.  You talk about trying to avoid predatorial situations where you’re taking advantage of people but there are always situations where you’re taking advantage and trying to pull the wool over someone’s eyes.  And you can only do what’s reasonable and by renting the space for myself like Market Hotel or Silent Barn I’ve taken the risk onto myself and off someone else.  In some ways that’s really charitable.

D: And like you said before you don’t want to be a real estate speculator.

T: It’s not my job and I don’t care.  I mean I just don’t think that what I’m doing…It’s very easy to look at what I do through this lens of how important it is in our particular little community.  We’re a very small part of New York.  In the grand scheme of things there are so many other things at play that effect where people are living.  Yes, there are a lot of people of our variety who now live near the Silent Barn and the Market Hotel but that’s not really the main force of gentrification. When you think of the main force of gentrification you’re talking about actual yuppies. You’re talking about people who actually have enough money.

D: But you are highly visible.  And the culture that you facilitate is research and development for what will become mainstream popular culture, or for the culture of groups who are the main force of gentrification.

T: I’m not a household name.  I’m not that visible.  It seems visible because everyone we know knows about it.  Everyone who goes to shows.  But the amount of people who go to these shows is a tiny droplet of the city.  It’s so miniscule.

D: But it gets spread around.  It gets detached from your name – the culture that you facilitate.

T: It depends how wide a lens you let it be.  If you talk about everything up to MGMT sure but that was never really part of our scene.  These things never really existed on any level on the underground.  You talk about TV on the Radio, sure they’ve heard of that.  But that’s not me.  That’s not what I do.  That’s very much the property of the bigger players that only do things at these crazy legitimate places.  And not to mention that none of these bands have ever played a warehouse show in Bushwick.  So yeah, it’s true.  You talk about the McCarran park pool as being part of it but its not. They’re taking what we do and painting a veneer of what we do to make it seem more legit.  But in reality they’re just corporate America doing it in a different way.  There’s nothing independent.  I’m happy for them that they make a lot of money for themselves and that they do occasionally good music.  Maybe half the time the music is pretty good.  And that’s cool but they’re totally at the mercy of and play to the tastes and whims of the power structure.  Yes, that stuff is a household name. That stuff is well known to a lot of people.  What I do – even though they sometimes use what I do without using my name in order to paint what they do in a better light, and they certainly steal the bands – does that mean what I do is part of that?  I don’t think so.  They’re just co-opting.  Even when MTV runs a story, they may mention my name but they’re really marketing MGMT.

D: But you yourself were on MTV.

T: Because they were trying to market MGMT and make MGMT seem more legit.  And I know those guys and there’s nothing evil, there’s no evil anyway, its just the way their marketing machine, which is a combination of major label might, press marketing and their management who is trying to get their songs in commercials because that’s how you make money now.  They’re trying to paint them as coming from this underground that they don’t come from.

D: But this is completely related to what you do.

T: It’s just an extra element.  It’s basically an accessory.  They’re wearing a little ring that says Brooklyn DIY.

D: But it’s incredibly important.  It’s essential.

T: But it’s phony.

D: But that’s how it works.  It’s how culture circulates.

T: It hasn’t helped more people be at our shows. It hasn’t helped more people care about what we’re doing.  They’re just using the legitimacy we’ve built up to paint what they’re doing.  And I’m only using this to discount how well known what I do is.  It’s not that well known.  It’s something that’s useful…You take a pre-existing look that has some legitimacy with a certain crowd and has very shadow awareness among a larger populace and then you use all of it’s good qualities to make you’re mediocre thing seem better.  It’s very common.  What I’m saying is that it’s really easy to mistakenly think that that means that we have mainstream, legitimacy.  We don’t.  We’re still very much marginal.  It’s still very disposable.  If anything it actually makes us more disposable.  It makes us more in danger because it means that it makes us look like a trend.  Which means we’ll be unseated by the next trend.

D: Someone will always come in to fill you’re role.

T: What I’ve tried to do in the last several years is create a framework by which people are encouraged to replace me.  And it’s working.  There are enough people doing it as well.  And I list everyone else on my website.  And also I’ve tried to mentor certain people and try to keep certain clubs alive that I don’t even use.  I haven’t put on a show at Death by Audio for six months.  You know how often I have to field calls from Death by Audio telling them how to keep from getting shut down?  All the fucking time.  The point being I want there to be an underground that is not dependent on me and I think its there.  So that’s great.  If anything it means that I have a lot less authority than I once did.  Which is great.

D: Do you consider yourself a promoter?

T: Sure.

D: Do you consider yourself a curator?

T: Those are just words that mean the same thing.

D: Not exactly.  For me what you do is more closely related to an art world curatorial model than it is to the world of popular music and club booking.

T: Perhaps but I’m not the first person.  The problem is nobody respects music as being a serious art form.  It’s seen as teeny-bopper bullshit which is sad.  I mean I don’t think I’m the first one who’s tried to do things in a more heady way.  I’m glad that maybe there are people who have noticed this.  And I certainly try to talk about it as being what I care about.  That the show is more than the sum of its parts.  It’s about relationships between different bands.  And it is curating audiences as much as it is curating bands.  You can’t just book a bunch of bands you think are awesome.  You have to book bands where everyone in the room is going to at least on some level be pleased by the other bands playing.  Even if they’ve never seen them or heard of them before.  That is a challenge.  A friend is not just someone you like or someone who likes the same things you like.  It’s someone who hates the same things you hate.  And this is all about friendships and scenes and coolness and hanging out.  So when you book a show it’s a delicate balancing act so that you don’t just fill the room with people you think are good.  It’s booking with the people who are good who also have this in common with this other band so that the audience that is attached to one band is going to find interest in the other.  So it’s creating scenes and communities of bands.  The good news is that as bands get more popular there’s more overlap.

[…]

D: And this is where the curator role comes in.

T: So it’s kind of a combination of those two things.

D: Would you ever do a show in a museum?

T: Sure.

D: Has anyone ever asked you to?

T: Yeah, the Brooklyn Museum wants me to do a show very soon.  The problem with that is that it’s a headache.  Usually the sound is really bad but that’s not even a part of it.  It’s just that I don’t like working with bureaucracy.  I don’t work well with them.  I’m an independent person and I’m headstrong and it’s my way or the highway really. It’s just the way I work.  I see what I do as having an element of being an artist to it.  So working with these institutions where I have to jump through hoops and where its more about playing the game and working the system than it is about the nuts and bolts of booking a show.  Being institutional is something that I usually shy from.  I’m doing it more now because I’m getting older and I’m a little less hotheaded.  As much as I may sound really self-righteous when I’m telling you the basest elements of how I think, these days I’m much more practical and I think about how things are.  So I would do it now.  And I’m starting to do that kind of stuff.  Like institutional work, trying to do work with museums, trying to curate city funded stuff, even curating stuff that’s corporate funded if its in the right framework.  The PBS model is the one I like to go with.  I don’t mind the idea of an underwriter.  I don’t mind the idea of a quiet corporate funder who simply wants to be attached to the ideas.  But somebody who wants to sell their cell-phones at the event?  That’s tacky.

Upcoming Todd P. shows are listed at www.toddpnyc.com.

Born and raised in Anacortes, Washington, Phil Elverum began writing and recording music as a teenager in the backroom of his small-town record store.  His tape experiments eventually turned into a series of full albums released under the name The Microphones on Olympia’s K Records, including the highly regarded The Glow Pt. 2 of 2001.  In 2003 Elverum began recording and producing under the name Mt. Eerie, a reference to the geography of his hometown.

Mountains in their own right, Elverum writes large songs and epic records about big things.  Yet he posesses a knack for drawing the intimate and the intensely personal out of the most common of experiences.  His talents for poetic description of the grandeur and vastness of the natural world and the corresponding vastness of the human emotional world are matched only by his ability to create stunning sonic representations of these spaces.  Elverum’s largeness is not really about celebrating the boundlessness of the human capacity for generosity, nor is it framed by an expansive global acoustic consciousness.  His sense of largeness is derived from the constant slippage and conflation of a psychically expansive world located inside a small physical body positioned in an unthinkably large physical universe.  It is largeness derived from forced perspectives and changing scale.

Elverum’s latest record, White Stag is the product of a week long residency at the newly refurbished White Stag building in old town Portland, Oregon.  The historic structure, which dates from the turn of the last century and once housed a logging machinery company, a tent and outdoor supply factory, and a china importer, now serves as the Portland campus for the University of Oregon’s program in Architecture and Allied Arts. Matthew Stadler, project initiator and director of public programming for White Stag, had been impressed with the Mt. Eerie record and challenged Elverum to make a record in, about and using the spaces of the historic structure.  I spoke with both Stadler and Elverum in the White Stag building and in a coffee shop across the street as we folded the packaging for the finished album.

I.

David Knowles: Could you describe the general scope of the project?

Matthew Stadler: Sure.  I guess I’ll start by saying that we met because Phil Elverum is at the White Stag Building in Portland, Oregon making a composition out of the building.  The reason that Phil is here doing that is because I heard his piece Mount Eerie long ago and in particular heard the piece Headwaters in which he laid out the source materials that went into the composition Mount Eerie.  In this piece you can hear the recordings of TV shows and ferry foghorns.  In Headwaters he unpacked all the materials that made up the piece Mt. Eerie and I loved that disc and it made me aware that he’s someone that exists in a particular relationship to space and place and makes music out of that relationship.  I love music but he’s one of the few people who make a real place in music.  And when I came to the White Stag Building where I work one of the goals I had was to get people to imagine and think about the building more richly and I thought Phil Elverum could be in it and turn it into music.  It’s an older building and it has a location in the middle of downtown Portland at this particular spot where a guy named Captain Couch had a boat that he parked here and built a dock.  And it was the travelers who came and went from Couch’s dock that allowed the city to grow, moving pillaged resources out of the region and bringing money back in.  And I thought Phil would be interested in that layered history and that the physical space of the building itself would produce ghosts of its own past and sounds.  And my motivation for asking Phil to come to the building then was to have the place made into sound and in doing so, and recomposing it, you make a document that is thought provoking and enchanting and connects people to a place without them actually being there.  It’s portable.  It’s a portable space.

DK: Are all of the artists in residence that you’ve planned out so far working with sound or music?

MS: I thought that it would be great to have a series of people to come and work with sound and turn this place into music.

DK: Why sound and why music?  Why not sculpture or visual art or photography?

MS: I can think of two retrospective reasons.  One is the portability.  I think the complexity of an architectural space can be conveyed richly with something that is totally portable.  This thing that he’s made can go anywhere now.  It’s not like a piece of visual art which is object based -

DK: Or doesn’t lend itself as well to replication.

MS: Right.  Because now that I think about it the visual production could be portable too.  But I think the richness with which you can express the spatial qualities seems easier in music somehow.  Which leads me to the second point.  We’re going to have discussion on Saturday at the show.  We’re going to talk to him and Daniel Menche, who is doing a piece where he recorded waterfalls at the Columbia River Gorge and is using those soundscapes.  It seemed to me.  There’s something similar about sound and the past.  Sound and the past are more like each other than the past and a photograph or the past and a piece of writing or performance.  Particularly the idea that it happens and then disappears.  So sound seemed like the right medium.

DK: A photograph is about preserving an instant of the past than the experience of becoming past.

MS: It’s certainly a very different relationship to the thing you’re trying to interact with.  There’s a necessity to fix it in a certain moment.  There’s finality to the act.  Part of the attraction is Phil’s being here and making this piece of music and he will perform it and it can then be re-performed.  The relationship you have to the source is very different than you would have in a photograph.  And I know that I don’t have thought out or refined ideas about all those differences but I do have an un-ignorable impulse that music is right.  And that’s what led to the choice.  And when you start talking about the aspects of the question you were asking about the different relationships music can have to architecture, about different spaces that can house music performance or ways in which music can express something spatial, it reminded me of how much the complexity of musical space is like physical space.  I don’t feel like the dimensions that you can explore in a photograph or even in object-based practice or performance introduces me to architectural space as easily or thoroughly as music does.  Somehow the definitions and distinctions made in space by music seem very like the ones I experience in buildings.

DK: It may be because sound plays a huge role in cognition.  The inner ear is what allows us to orient ourselves and maintain balance in physical space.

MS: And it’s multiply patterned in ways I can deal with.  When I’m dealing with things visually I tend to think very analytically about them.  I make logical relationships and explain them.  Whereas with music I experience the same complexity without ever resolving it.  I’m much more concerned with inhabiting it rather than figuring it out.

DK: What is your role in this building?  Besides running the residency program?

MS: I don’t run anything.  One of the people who hired me here described me as a squatter.  He said what you’re doing is a lot like squatting and when you’re a squatter you try to set up positive relationships between people around you.  A lot of programs from U of O have been moved in here and they have all sorts of different things they do.  They realized that there is common ground that could be interesting for them.  That they could have a speaker who they are all into or a workshop that has to do with digital arts as well as architecture as well as journalism and I was hired because that’s something that I think about a lot and something I have done in the past is to make that common ground between disciplines.   And so my place here for six months is to think about that stuff.  How can the building get full of more things we can do all together.  And how can that become visible to and known to a larger public who might also be interested.  So they call it Public Programming and Publications Studio and so those are the two things I do here.

II.

Phil Elverum: The direction I took with the project was pretty dark.  The thing that ended up happening was a lot different than what the invitation was.  The invitation was ‘come live in this building and make a project about the building.’  To write songs about it basically.  But I actually didn’t write songs about the building, barely at all.  Some of the songs I ended up focusing mostly on what was there before the building.  So like the river banks and the swamps at the end of the river.  Completely imagined  things.  But in kind of a dark way – like maybe this city shouldn’t have been here.  I think this started because I heard a rumor that other cities were more suitable sites for a city geographically but that Portland succeeded because some entrepreneurs just started bragging about it.

DK: The founders of the city were speculators and hustlers.

PE: I think that’s the case with most cities in this part of the country.  Like Anacortes is similar.  Basically mid to late 1800’s real estate speculation.  I think I could get some boats to park here or I think I could cut these trees down and ship them to San Francisco.  It’s pretty brutal and economic.

DK: So the record didn’t end up being as much about the building itself?  You’re music for me is very tied to place and space.  These are consistent themes in what I’ve heard.  And I was curious how your process would change when you were working with a manmade structure or an architectural structure as opposed to a natural environment or something more pastoral.

PE: It didn’t really work.  I knew that was the intent though.

DK: Or that was the challenge of the project.

PE: Right.  And I kind of side-stepped it by focusing on the time before the building was even there.  But in a way it’s not just ‘before the building’ it’s about thinking what’s underneath the foundation in the mud.

DK: The background.

PE: Right and the spot.  The haunted spot.  Also I can’t really imagine what it would be like if it was about the building.  Would it be like (singing): ‘The light switch is on the left, there’s three rooms…blah blah blah.’  It’s harder for me to find poetry in that kind of thing than it is in something pastoral or mythical.

DK: I would imagine that it would be less about the objective qualities of the architectural space than it would be about the subjective experience of such a space.

PE: Well then in that way I didn’t sidestep it.  Because my subjective experience of being in the space brought out these feelings of dark shit happening here.  And I wanted to explore that by looking beneath the building.  I think it’s true that my work is typically referential to a space.  But I don’t know how intentional it is or how much control I have over it.  I think it might just come out like that.

DK: I read that, I think it was in Willamette Week (‘Going Stag’, issue #35.25), that you wanted to ‘become the building’ while you were working on this project.

PE: Yeah.  I don’t remember saying that.  I read that too.  I might have said that.  I wonder what I was thinking.

DK: I’m interested in what kind of approach you take to the spaces you work on.  Do you try to distance yourself from a space in order to achieve a more objective or descriptive approach or do you want to lose the boundaries of your consciousness in a way that allows you to become part of a space?  Do you position yourself in a space or do you allow yourself to become possessed by a space?

PE: I think most of my work is sung from the perspective of an observer positioned in a space or outside of a space, not from a God perspective.  And a lot of my writing outside this project is from a first person perspective.  But not necessarily in direct relation to space, but more in the world and what it feels like to be in the world in between spaces or among large spaces.  This record I just finished for example, thinking about it in these terms, I think that the way I write is very visual.  I have a very sophisticated angle and quality of light and time of day, an almost cinematic angle that I’m writing from, which doesn’t necessarily make it into the song but in my mind it is there and its very clear.  It’s there and occasionally parts of it end up in the final song.  In this record I just finished there are parts where a song happens on a specific street in Anacortes at 5pm.  I think that eventually I should start making movies.  I think that’s what I really want to do.

DK: Why?

PE: Because I think that’s how I think about creating things.  I actually have all the images in my mind already worked out.  All the colors and flow and pacing, and I make records out of them instead of films.  But I think that all the material is there to make it into an actual film.  I used to make movies.  That’s what I thought I was going to be when I grew up when I was a teenager.  That was my thing.  It’s complicated.  You have to work with other people to make movies, which is not something I’ve figured out how to do yet.

DK: It depends on the type of movie you want to make.

PE: I want to make big ones.

DK: Big cinematic feature films?

PE: I would want to if I were doing that.

DK: That’s how your music sounds: expansive.  Not polished though.  There’s a sheen on big pictures that doesn’t strike me as compatible with what you do now.

PE: Right.  A big rough thing up on the movie screen.  A 70 foot movie screen with beautiful distortion.

DK: Like a YouTube clip blown up?

PE: No, not digital distortion.  Analog distortion.  Like David Lynch’s last movie Inland Empire, all shot on video.  It’s weird.  Three hours long and definitely weirder than anything else he’s done.  That’s an example of beautiful distortion on the movie screen that doesn’t mean anything.  I’m very inspired by that.

DK: The reason I asked about this, about this idea of separation from a space versus becoming possessed by a space is because you chose to take the name of a very specific place as your performance identity, allowing it to consume you in a way.

PE: I think my thinking behind it wasn’t related to the place at all.  That was just a bonus, the fact that it was referential to a place I liked.  But I thought that those two words together, Mount Eerie, evoked the vibe I was going for with my music: a gloomy, creepy, invisible force.

DK: I want to talk about this record that you just finished.  I’m interested in what kind of tension occurs when you have this architectural space at your disposal as opposed to just the natural landscape.

PE: There are lines like “roaring machinery” and “humming ventilation”

DK: So it is about the architecture.  That phrase you were singing about the light switches isn’t such a joke.

PE: I guess not.  Lets see…ventilation…I use the words ‘architectural students,’ ‘urban honking,’ ‘sustainable harvested thin veneer.’  I guess I tried to be pretty overt about the fact that I was singing about a building.  Way more than I would be outside of the project.  I mean, that was the assignment.  And it was outside of my comfort zone, it was a challenge.

DK: Do you use recordings from the building itself?  How did you work with the building as a material or an instrument?

PE: Some of the songs I just recorded in a really beautiful sounding place or a really beautiful sounding room and just moved the microphone far enough away so the sound of the room was audible.  But I think I set out to use it a little more than I did.  Like I did a lot of field recordings of a specific hum in a specific corner in the basement where a fan was really loud and was meshing with this other fan and doing this weird thing.  I don’t know that it ended up on the album so much.  A little bit.  But it just wasn’t quite as exciting or interesting to listen to.  It was interesting to look at me recording the hum but it doesn’t really translate to a CD.  So what’s on the CD is basically me recording songs on a four track with an electric guitar.  It’s simple. And sloppy too.  Because I would record them and then sing them for the first time into the mic and usually keep that first take.  So you can hear my voice figuring out how it goes as its being recorded.  I mean one possibility would be to come down here and spend a week amassing samples and then take it home and make it in to something that was a lot more constructed.  But I didn’t want to do that.  I feel like it’s more evocative of my experience here.  Of being immersed.

DK: You said that you spent four months last year touring.  Where did you go?

PE: In February I went to Texas.  That was really a vacation.  Drove down to West Texas and back.  Played a couple of shows.  Drove up California on my way home.  In April and May I went all over Europe for six weeks.  And Quebec.  I’m trying to remember.  All over.  A big US tour.

DK: What kind of places to do you usually play on tour?

PE: I only play all ages shows so that can lead to some weird shows. Colleges when I can. When school is in session.  Conference rooms, chapels, art galleries, art spaces, cafes, community halls.  All over the place.  Basically I write to someone in the town who has set up a show or has invited me to come saying, ‘what’s the situation there?  Where do you do shows?  What’s you’re favorite place to go to a show? What is it like?  Is it all ages?’  So usually we just try to get a space that works and bring in a P.A.

DK: What’s your favorite place to play?

PE: Cathedrals.  Not only is the sound amazing but it feels like a big happening.  And I can swear and talk about really evil shit and its cool and you can just do that in a really beautiful cathedral.  You can talk about pagan gods in the dark forest or whatever and it feels good.  Churches are built to make the people inside them feel something big and important.  But even an empty room can be amazing.

DK: You’re music, for me, is very inspired by this part of the country.

PE: Again, it’s probably not that intentional.  And that’s just the perspective I have to write from.  Actually…no.  It is intentional because I care about it.  I care about being form a place and letting people know about it.  I think that’s something that’s getting lost as we move into the future.  People are becoming so decentralized and disjointed and no one knows where they’re from.  There’s no regional identity or at least it seems to be getting a lot weaker.  But I read somewhere, some study that regional accents and regional slang in North America are actually getting stronger.  But at the same time everything is nowhere.

DK: The idea of home and this idea as a metaphor in your music is interesting to me.  Because a house or a home is an architectural space that illustrates the immateriality of certain architectural concepts, because it can slide out of it’s material structure, be carried around with someone in their head, or then reinvested or reinserted into a different structure.

PE: Not only that but often times a sense of home is not rooted in the actual structure but in the place and the neighborhood or if you live in a town where your family has gone back many generations than all of those places where your family has lived as well and where you’ve spent time.  It’s a web of home.  That’s the case in Anacortes for me because my family goes back there and I have a very deep sense of home.  And I feel like that’s rare these days, especially on the west coast where everything is so new.  So I hold on to that pretty tightly.  I still live there.   I just bought a house. I’m putting roots down.  And it feels amazing.

DK: How much of the largeness of your sound comes from the space you are recording in and how much is manipulation of sound that you’ve already recorded.

PE: When I’m recording and putting the instruments down I’m mixing at the same time and establishing how loud things are in relation to each other.  It’s like working on a collage or something.  So making things sound huge is something that happens from the very beginning.  The question is always: how do I make something that sounds way bigger than possible?

DK: Is it possible for you to achieve this without effects or manipulation.  You were talking about playing in a church earlier.  Things naturally sound very huge there.

PE: Oh right.  I don’t really use any effects like delay.  I use distortion.  I don’t use reverb.  I use large rooms.

DK: So what we’re hearing on the record is an index of the space you are recording in.

PE: And I even try to EQ as little as possible and make it sound as close in real life to how I want it to sound at the end, which I think is pretty standard practice for recording.  I used to EQ everything so extremely, like when I was in high school I just thought this is what it was for.  Like when I would record a tambourine it wouldn’t matter how it sounds when you do it because you’re just going to twiddle all the knobs.  And eventually I sort of changed the way I was doing it and my ear was actually attuned to how it sounded coming into the microphone and how a thing actually sounded when it was in the room.  And in a way it was being mixed before it got to the microphone.  Like it was being mixed in the air.  Just the raw sound waves mixing themselves.

DK: So now the mixing process involves creating differences in position in physical space.

PE: I’ve done some sessions where I’ve just used one microphone and a bunch of people.  And it is like that.  It’s like, ‘okay your guitar is too loud, you need to step back ten feet,’  ‘you’re singing the third note too high, you need to tilt your head up when you sing that note.’  And it’s very mechanical.  It’s the same as like adjusting the levels on a mixer but you’re moving people around.

DK: Like you’re tuning a giant instrument.

PE: Yeah.  And it is mixing in the air on its way to the microphone.  I’m lucky enough to have a group of people around me willing to do it.  I love being able to make my eyes roll back in my head when I’m working on something like that cause they’re just not being used.  I’m just focusing so much on my ears.

DK: People also have eyelids.  You can even shut them.

PE: I forget.  But I love focusing that much on one particular sense.

DK: Does a kind of synasthesia, or link between sense faculties happen when you’re in nature?  I’ve had experiences before where I’ve gone out in the forest in the middle of the night and everything feels very close because I’m incapable of judging distance and all I can do is hear.

PE: Yeah I love that.  I think that does happen.  In regular life we forget how much stimulation and how much noise there is.  So we tend to build up dampeners on our sensitivities, so when it’s taken away those sensitivities are expanded.  It’s a weird time in 2009 for humanity and nature and this whole complicated way we have of relating to nature and thinking about nature as this separate thing.  Very complex times. And this idea of nature is this really sticky thing.  Especially for me as a person who writes these songs that tend to be pretty heavy on the naturalism. It’s not my intent to be like ‘hey lets go camping all the time buddy.’  It’s not what I’m saying.  It’s just that’s the world that has the most potent metaphors for me. The stone, the wind, the river.  These are things I think that are ingrained in our mind as these powerful symbols.  Like there’s probably a modern man made equivalent for stone or wind.

DK: But what do those things even mean for us now?  I feel like I can only understand these things as metaphors.  I have no real connection to these things.

PE: Sure you do.  The river is right over there.  They’re in our lives in different ways and they have been for the entire existence of humanity.

DK: That’s what I mean when I say I can only understand them as metaphors.  I can only relate to them as symbols because they’re not tools for survival anymore and they only appear as real things in the context of natural disasters, when they exceed the controls we’ve placed on them.  Because I have buildings that protect me from the wind or I have factories that filter water from the river and bring the water to me directly.  Nature is not part of my daily life.  Only its resources and products.

PE: It’s really tricky.  Because I still feel like fundamentally we’re living a life that is not that different from primitive people roaming the hillsides looking for firewood and killing animals.  All this stuff is built up but we still have the same drives and same quests throughout our days.  It’s just our tools are a little more advanced.  These cars driving by outside are not that different from mammoths or cattle.  So I feel like a lot of my poetry tries to relate on these universal levels.  So I use the word stone instead of cinder block or whatever.  Maybe that’s what I mean and that’s my justification for writing so many nature songs.  I feel like I’m writing using the original language of the subconscious.

[…]

I mean there are definitely fundamental differences between humanity now and humanity in the past.  But most of human history is here and then we got clothing and now we’re here.  But we have the same brains and they have the same issues going on.  We’re not that far from the raw period of a very tangible relationship to the world around us.  Like, I’m going to die if I can’t make this stick to make fire

DK: I can definitely appreciate this then. You’ve only been dealing with the first 8000 years of humanity and now you have to come up with a way to talk about buildings.

PE: Sometimes I make an effort to sing about hanging out behind Arby’s, next to the dumpster and suddenly there’s this beautiful light coming in from the side and there’s this plastic bag blowing in the wind and then I got in my car and drove for a little ways.  People write beautiful songs about the human place in the contemporary world.  I guess I’m not even really interested in writing songs that take place in a primitive world.  I just want to write songs that take place in a dream world.  In something that is in us.  Not using actual literal descriptive language about the real world but more talking about the way something feels.  And in my dreams and in my raw feelings I don’t often encounter things like a cinder block and a hummer and if I do I know that those things are just symbols for something else.  But yeah.  It’s tricky because its such a weird convoluted way of thinking about it that it makes sense that the end product of my work is often perceived as very pastoral or shallow nature appreciation.  Which is frustrating sometimes.

DK: What disarms this for me is that there is a real sense of danger and fear in the songs.  There’s a lot of fear.  Nature can kill you.

PE: Not only that but emotional shit that we all go through can kill you.  That’s what it means when that storm is happening and you fall off the cliff.  That’s what I’m singing about.

Phil Elverum plays music as Mt. Eerie, runs the P.W. Elverum & Sun record label and store and organizes Anacortes, Washington’s annual What the Heck Fest.

Matthew Stadler is the author of multiple novels, founder of Clear Cut Press, and initiator of The Back Room project among other endeavors.

Sarah Rara and Luke Fishbeck have been traveling the world for years now making drawings, music, performances, and other less immediately classifiable products under the name Lucky Dragons.  They have collectively released over a dozen records, many of which are available for free download on their website, and 2008 saw them play over 100 shows on four continents.  For their live performances Lucky Dragons utilize a dizzying combination of instruments: hand drums, thumb pianos, synthesizers, shakers, computers, and gongs, to produce a sound that at once embraces and transcends the distinction between electronic and acoustic music.  Most instruments are played by audience members and participation is further facilitated by a homemade synthesizer, played by many people at once, which generates sound when one person touches the skin of another.  In a Lucky Dragons performance participation becomes not only a cerebral experience of togetherness but a real physical act of reaching and touching.  Their performances are a series of beautiful confrontations with the sometimes awkward and uncomfortable role that technology, as that which facilitates but also inhibits togetherness, plays in the formation of a community - an awkwardness that is often downplayed in the celebratory rhetoric of techno-futurism.  I spoke with Sarah and Luke about the place and space of their performances on the occasion of their participation in the 2009 Transmediale Festival in Berlin.

DK: Would you consider yourselves first and foremost a band?

SR: No, because I always want to hold on to the possibility of having multiple identities.  So I wouldn’t privilege one over the other.  So I wouldn’t say my presence is going to be in a band primarily or as an individual primarily or that the drawing group will take precedence over the music or vice versa.  I kind of always wanted to have the choice of these identities and play them like cards, or use which ever one is beneficial at the time.  What do you think?

LF: It really depends on who you are talking to.

SR: Or what context we’re appearing in.  For instance in this festival were presented as members of a cohesive group within this theme and that’s someone else’s work too and that’s a collaboration with them…naming what it is that we do.  And that changes all the time.

[...]

DK: I’m asking because I was thinking the other day about how it’s acceptable and totally common now to be an artist and in a band.  Beginning in the ‘60’s even many different media and strategies began to be incorporated into what was properly understood as art, as visual arts.  So like performance art would still be considered visual art.  But I feel like you rarely see people who consider themselves musicians expanding their work in the same way.

LF: I feel like its unfortunate when people are so steadfast about the name for what they do.

DK: I feel as if people tend to fall back on artist because that’s –

SR: - is more open.

DK: - more open but also more respectable than if you were to say, ‘I’m a musician but I do drawing also.’

SR: I thought about this term Entertainer.

LF: I’ve always been so afraid of that one.

SR: It’s a slippery one because it includes theater, it includes television, clowns, magicians, there are so many kinds of entertainer.  And that term is even more open than artist.

LF: Well I think it’s open but it’s attached to something so vague as entertainment.  I don’t know what entertainment means.

SR: And it has this connotation…

LF: But everybody thinks entertainment is good.  It’s a very unpretentious thing to call it as well.  I think sometimes calling yourself an artist is not very open and limits you in a lot of ways.  I have friends who are video artists and we’ve never seen their videos.  And unless we can get to the gallery show in London or New York or wherever than we wont see the video ever because its an edition of like five copies.

DK: And it’s not on YouTube.

LF: Right, definitely not on YouTube.  There are people I know who have made hundreds of videos and there’s not a single thing about them on YouTube.  Do they even exist?

SR: The means of distribution and sale of art are much more closed.  Even though maybe mentally it’s more of an open space. There are fewer means of getting it to people than music, which can arrive in so many different forms.

DK: Then it really becomes a question of your identity as being defined by the economy that you are working in or the way that your project is circulated.

LF: That’s why we’re going with entertainer.

SR: For the moment…

DK: I think that even in your work with Sumi Ink club or these other projects you’re still using the framework of the band.

SR: It’s very band-like.

DK: I heard your music before I knew about any of the other projects you do and I think that for me it’s very easy to consider you as primarily a band, but a band that is not strictly musical but is also visual or is also working in other channels.  But you use the framework of a band to produce things.

[…]

LF: But the first question everybody always asks when you tell them you are in a band is what instrument do you play?  And we’re like…uh…

SR: I’m working backwards.  Because I don’t play an instrument, I’m just using the pretext of being a musician to get all these people together.  And then I play anything.

LF: We don’t play instruments.  We play shows.

SR: But now I’m working backwards, so after being in a band for four years I finally picked up an instrument, which is the drums.  So I’ve been learning the drums for the past year and becoming a drummer just so when people ask me I can introduce myself as the drummer.  But then when I’m on stage it will still be totally confusing.

DK: So I guess if you consider yourself playing primarily shows rather than instruments.  Than there’s this question of the place that you play.  How does the particular place that you play factor into how the piece works?

SR: The number of people can determine the structure the show will have and the size and shape of the room -

LF: I think a lot of issues about the place and the way the show is put together and the access people have to it –

SR: If it’s all ages or not, if it’s for children or for old people.  Although we pretty much present the same show to everyone.

LF: And we’ll also pretty much play any show people ask us to.

DK: And any place too?

SR: Yeah.  It’s difficult to say that in a certain situation we act one way and that in another we change but it’s more of a surprise.  We’ll present a similar show but it will go in a totally different direction depending on the age and the room and the vibe and the energy around it.  Which is cool to see, because a different community comes forward and maybe one that didn’t exist before the show can happen, which is the best situation.

LF:  I was talking to my friend about Indie 103, I don’t know if there’s an equivalent station in Portland, but it’s like the indie Clear Channel station in Los Angeles.  We were talking about how it went out of business in L.A. and about how Clear Channel in general is not doing very well.  And my brother used to do pirate radio stuff and low powered FM stuff.  And there’s been this thing about Clear Channel being the biggest enemy and they own billboards, radio stations, television stations, newspapers, and concert venues.  And my friend Randy from No Age was like “have you ever played in a Clear Channel venue?”

SR: Have we?

LF: There was a point when I would have made absolutely sure that we weren’t playing in a Clear Channel venue just because it was part of this media hegemony or whatever that was completely ruining any attempt for people to do things on a sustainable level where people were fairly treated and things were transparent or anything.  But the fact of the matter is-

SR:  My strategy is that if you play a club that is within a monopoly and then the next night you play a DIY venue –

LF: Or the same night even –

SR: Than you are busting apart the monopoly because you are saying, “you can continue to exist alongside other things,” whereas saying, “you have to shut down,” is just another way of shutting down culture.  And people need culture.

LF:  There’s one way that’s trying to fight things head on and there’s another way that’s trying to do things in parallel.

SR:  When you bring something totally punk and totally small to a mainstream venue, you open things for the audience.

LF:  But I think as long as you’re doing that and then you’re also playing another show afterward in a house –

SR: - that’s important.

DK: I think there’s a certain type of band or entertainer who is able to do those kinds of things.

LF: There’s definitely a tradition for it.  Like the idea of jazz bands having the early and the late set.  Who are the people who come to the early set and who are the people that come to the late set?  And people that had to work until the late set, it’s good that there’s a show for them too.  But we try to play as many shows as we can in one night.

DK: I’m an old architecture student and also an old media studies student and I love bands.  But this question I’ve been working on is about the relationship between a band and the space that they play.  And not just how the places groups play defines their image but also the way in which a band playing in a particular place can actually change the architectural feel of that space or can alter the context in some way.  You’re a band – or you’re entertainers, that play in big museums like the Whitney Museum but you also play in houses or in little rooms –

LF: - and on top of mountains –

SR: - on a mountain, on an island, we had a kayak too.  We play everywhere.

DK: So you play shows all over the place.

SR: The context changes the interpretation of the show.

LF: Are you thinking about buildings in a physical sense, or buildings in a cultural sense?

SR: Like the function?

DK: Like the culture and function of a space… I’m talking about the way people use buildings, like the experience of seeing you play in a museum as being different from the experience of seeing you play in a house.

LF: For the one part this is really testing our intentions of stepping outside the performance and seeing it from a different perspective.  We can’t really answer this question because we’re so inside of the performance.

SR: The audience would really be able to answer this question of whether seeing us in a museum is different.

LF: I mean it’s difficult because we try to flip flop and go on the outside of things and look in.  I mean when we played in the Whitney Museum I went outside and waited in line with people while the show was going on just to see what it was like to see the show going on while you were waiting in line to get in.  But it’s still me being very much a tourist in this other perspective.

SR: I’ve had the idea recently that you should treat your heroes like your friends and your friends like your heroes.  Like you should lower one and raise the other to have this kind of sense of equality among people of all different walks of life.  And I’ve been thinking this about venues too.  So when a person I meet on the street says congratulations I say, oh it’s no big deal.  And then when we play a house show I want to tell everyone about it and brag about it.  It’s like the opposite impulse: playing down the prestige and playing up the more humble things that we do or the weirder things. So I’m always working against the context.  I don’t know…it’s a very difficult question.

DK: I don’t know that there’s an answer to it.

SR: It’s very deep.  It runs through everything.  But I’m always trying to give everyone the same experience.  When I’ve had the best shows ever I’ve felt a total connection with other human beings and seen them walking out of the club having a discussions with each other or with a stranger.  I want to give that to everyone.  So when we’re in a museum I want to give that to them and when I’m in a house show I want to give the audience the same thing.  And I also want to test the limits of playing the same show in different places and whether people can handle it in different places in different buildings with different functions.  And maybe that’s why our shows are almost like a discussion group.  Because we’re bringing them to buildings where discussion doesn’t happen very often.  So maybe the buildings with functions I really admire are like libraries or schools and there’s something about what we do in a rock club that is like that kind of building.  Or even a cafeteria or something.

LF: There’s also the question of the difference between doing something temporarily to change a place and doing something that will change it after we’ve left.  I don’t know.  I like to think that we’re working towards some change that stays on…

DK: That has duration.  Like it will always be the place where there was a Lucky Dragons show?

LF: No but it will be a place where the next time a band plays there people will have a different attitude about it or maybe people think of other ways to use the space.  I really like being part of a space where you have an ongoing contribution to the culture of that space and the way that it’s used.  A place like the smell in Los Angeles is a place that we’ve played over and over again and seen the same people and helped contribute to the development of the culture of the space and when we go play a show there it has a definite feeling to it that’s very unique.  It feels sort of like a book club.  People are seated very calmly.  It’s very strange because other bands, when they play there, it’s not like that but that’s something you can see continue to change.

Lucky Dragon’s adventures are documented extensively on their websites: www.hawksandsparrows.org and www.glaciersofnice.com.