Behind the Scenes: Aaron of Howlies and I huggin’ it out after their rambunctious interview.
Interview will be published next week!
Photo by Jen Killius
INTERVIEW : TORO Y MOI
June 9, 2010 | The Grog Shop | Cleveland, OH
Photos by John Danner
John and I had been pumping ourselves up for this show for weeks. I picked him up behind his apartment and looked at him with an eager grin as he climbed into the passenger seat. “Are you ready?!” I asked. “I’m ready!” he repiled. We drove the 2.5 hours to Cleveland excitedly chatting about music, past and future interviews, and life. When we arrived at The Grog Shop in Cleveland, the line for the show was already out the door and wrapping around the block. Eventually we made it into the dark, red, wide venue where I hunted down Toro y Moi’s tour manager and introduced myself. He informed me Chaz was going on stage in 15 minutes.
"Oh okay, would it be ok if we say hi before they go on? That way they’re not surprised when we walk into the green room after the set?" I asked.
"Sure thing!" He agreed and we were led into the small graffiti-ed bright red green room. I was introduced to Chaz who immediately struck me as lamb-like, timid and kind. He shorter than I first imagined, and gently shook my hand as I greeted him.
"I’ll see you after the set!" I exclaimed as I dorkily waved and stepped back out into the sea of people awaiting the show. John and I excused our way into a semi decent position, much to the disdain of the young short girls behind me who kept making rude remarks about how tall I was.
After the set, John and I worked our way back to the green room and sat down with Chaz, Andy and Patrick…
Chaz: Sorry, I have a cold… my voice is going away.
KP: Well, five weeks on the road… [laughs] I mean…
Chaz: Yeah. I’m not — I’m not contagious or anything.
KP: I don’t know. You sound pretty contagious.
Chaz: I thought I had bronchitis or something. Almost back to feeling 100%. Yeah.
KP: How many weeks do you have left on this tour?
Chaz: This is the second to last day. Third to — well, the second to last day’s over.
KP: Do you get to go home after the next show?
Chaz: Tomorrow’s Knoxville, then Columbia. Yeah, home.
KP: So, how’s it been touring with Caribou for five weeks?
Chaz: It’s been really great. We learned a lot. As a full band.
KP: This is your first tour as a full band, right?
Chaz: Yeah. And this is [the band’s] first tour.
KP: [To Andy & Patrick] This the first time on the road for you guys?
Andy: For me. Besides from just like playing here and there, this is the first, like, real tour.
Chaz: So yeah. I mean. We learned a lot. Like how to, uh, work the band as a business and as entertainment… as entertainers or whatever.
KP: Why the switch to full band? ‘Cause I know you were touring solo for awhile.
Chaz: Playing out with a laptop is sort of like the only thing left to do. I’ve always wanted to, even before like all this started happening, to try to get like a full band together. But I never had the time and there was really no main motivation to get it done. But the tour was pretty much was a good motivator.
KP: I know when you were touring solo, you got everything stolen from at one point. So how did you handle that… did you cancel shows after that?
Chaz: Yeah, I canceled like four shows.
KP: How did you get everything back together?
Chaz: Um, I took loans from my parents.
KP: What about the sounds that you had on that laptop? Did you have to recreate them or did you have them all backed up?
Chaz: I lost some sounds. Some songs like Blessa were sort of messed up for awhile. But I happened to have sent the sample out to someone for a remix, but they never did it, so I asked them back for it.
KP: Touring with a full band, how did you get everything to work so fluidly? I noticed when you [Andy] were drumming; you were always looking at Chaz, keeping up. It seems like it has be hard.
Andy: We use a lot of, like, eye contact. A lot of it’s like not structured exactly. It’s structured, but not like, you know, we don’t do things for a certain amount of time.
KP: What about the live video? Do you sync that up, or is that all randomized?
Chaz: Yeah, it’s just — it’s not really synced up, but… there are like several different animations for it.
Patrick: It was created by a friend of ours. He listened to the set and created it to sort of compliment the music.
KP: A lot of people put you in the genre of chill wave, low-fi, gorilla vs bear-core Do you like being classified in a genre, or do you like creating your own thing?
Chaz: It’s not that I like it or dislike it, I just don’t mind.I mean, I classify bands, so. People just do it to relate to the music. It’s like, Dan… of Caribou? They don’t talk about it anymore, but his first few years they kept calling him folk-tronic. And he’s been around for like two years and eventually that just kind of went away.
Andy: Yeah. The whole chill wave seems to be like everybody’s classified everybody as chill wave.
KP: It’s kind of funny.
Chaz: Yeah, it is.
KP: How old were you when you first started creating music? Did you pick up an instrument or were you always —?
Chaz: Yep. I was about 15 or 16., I got a recorder for my 15th birthday. 15ish.Took me like awhile to sort of get the guts to start recording with it. I mean, like it’s a really simple machine, it’s like a tape… what’s that thing called? I didn’t know where to start.
KP: You just evolved from there?
Chaz: Yeah.
KP: So, what was the whole concept behind Toro y Moi?
Chaz: There wasn’t really a concept. My thing was I definitely wanted to make sure I didn’t pigeonhole myself. That’s really hard. It’s kind of weird and confusing to some people.
KP: Is your next album going to sound anything like the first?
Chaz: Well, I mean, there’s going to be like similar attributes like melodies… it’s not going to be electronic at all.
KP: So, you going to keep these guys around?
Chaz: [Smiles] Yeah.
Andy: I mean for the recording process, that’s Chaz’s deal.
KP: This the first time I have ever seen you live. I never saw you play solo. There’s a really big difference from the transition from your stereo to the stage, and I kind of like it. It is a whole different experience live than it is when you listen to it.
Chaz: Yeah, that’s what I like. It’s hard to try to play songs exactly like the record. ‘Cause either the live show doesn’t live up to the record, or the record doesn’t live up to the live show. So it’s better to have them as two separate entities.
Patrick: I always think it’s kind of boring when you go to see bands and it’s kind of like they’re karaoke-ing their record.
Suddenly a hand popped thru a hole in the door. I thought it was the 16 year old girl in hot pants I saw giggling and trying into the green room earlier. Chaz, John, the band and I just looked at this pale arm grappling for the knob. Finally, it succeeded and the door opened to reveal Dan and the other two members of Caribou. I geeked out for a hot second and lost my train of thought.
KP: How are you feeling concluding this tour Caribou?
Chaz: Satisfied. I mean, I was talking to a kid about it and he said that we sound a lot better than we did when we first started on tour. And it’s like, inevitable, you know? It’s going to happen. It’s like practicing everyday.
Dan [Caribou]: We can all come up and do it.
Chaz: We what?
Dan: All grab a microphone.
KP: Big party on stage? That’d be a good way to end the tour.
Chaz: You guys playing the state fair song? What’s the secret song today?
KP: No! I don’t want to ruin the surprise! [Laughs]
"Causers of This" is available now through Insound. Chaz and the band are about to take off on a grand European tour. Check out the upcoming shows on Toro y Moi’s Myspace. Also, Chaz has a really cool photoblog.
Thanks to Kristi for transcribing this interview for me! It was a hard one to do!
The Wildbirds | Circus | May 27, 2010 | Columbus, OH
Photo by John Danner
Wisconsin band, The Wildbirds just look like the type of guys you’d like to party down with. I met a few of the band members after their show in Columbus back in January, when JackinthePocket was a mere notion floating around in my brain space. They’re all handsome brutes with tight jeans, rad shoes and Midwestern accents. They just exude casual cool. We sat down on a picnic bench outside of quirky music venue Circus, each sipping a tall cans of PBR, short tumblers of gin and tonic, or Jack and coke, and a few of us drew long drags from our cigarettes.
KP: So how was your drive down here? You drove 8 hours from Wisconsin.
Nick: Yeah, it was good; it was our first out-of-state trip in our new band van.
Quinn: It always seems like when I drive, the weather goes to shit.
Nick: Yep, that’s why I always drive!
Quinn: Maybe its karma.
Nick: it was raining a lot.
Quinn: We drove through a storm.
Nick: Hugh was spraying contact solution in his eyes while he was driving.
Hugh: The air conditioning was drying my eyes out!
Nick: Quinn was sleeping on equipment in the back.
Quinn: I made a little nest.
Nick: We brought our dog along.
KP: You brought a dog with you?!
Nick: Yeah, she’s at the hotel.
KP: So, what’s it like piling into a van and driving 8 hours together to a show.
Quinn: Semi hilarious, semi-irritating.
Nick: Fiscally irresponsible (laughter) But fuck, I mean when we’re at this point in the stage when we’re writing, and recording and stuff, it’s just a break from the routine,
even if it costs us money. It’s just nice to see another city.Drink the same beer in a different city, but…
KP: So, the last album came out in ‘07, right?
Nick: Yeah.
KP: So what happened in between that time?
Nick: It’s a totally different line up besides Hugh and I. We just got exhausted. We ended up taking a year off, I mean, the rest of the guys, permanently off. Took a year off, and just realized we weren’t quite as happy without it. So I moved back from Portland to hang out with Hugh. We started forming all these quasi bands, and it took us about a year until we found something we were all stoked about, that was worth bringing into the studio. We just got our mixes back and we’re pretty stoked about it! I don’t know if other people will be.
Quinn: I’m happy!
Nick: I’m happy, that’s all that matters, that Quinn’s happy!
KP: Do you have a projected date where you guys are going to release it?
Nick: July 22!
KP: That’s coming up!
Nick: 6 songs, it’s not a full length
Quinn: It’s been going super quick though.
KP: What’s your creative process like as a collective?
Nick: You ask good questions. Creative process… I start, and most of the time, not always. We finish, like I get 20% of the way, and then it either like writes itself, or it just fuckin’ flops. So, We’ve kind of gotten past the stage where we try to nurse the song along that is just not wanting to be written. Most the songs that we kept have all just sort of written themselves.
KP: So, the new guys, how did you guys meet? All these newbies…
Nick, Oh. The first addition was Quinn. He and another mutual friend, who was playing drums actually last time we played Columbus. They both kind of offered to come and jam with us coz we were just a two piece at the time. He (John) kept saying “I really wanna bring my friend Quinn by, he’s a ripper!” [Laughter] I was like yeah, fine, fucking bring the guy by, and he was a ripper.
Quinn: We weren’t really practicing. It was like, let’s go the bar and then at 4 in the morning. “Let’s go to the practice space!”
Hugh: First 6 months we did not play together sober, and we go no where because of it.
Nick: Now we pretty much only play sober…In the mornings…
Quinn: Noon practices.
Nick: First time I met Quinn, he was talking about shaving his balls.
Quinn: I was?
Nick: Yeah.
Quinn: This is pretty good for a website! I don’t remember that, but…
Nick: You were saying that you wanted to. NO! We were talking about waxing and you were asking if there was any place in town that did.
Quinn: Where did this happen?
Nick: Um, Slim’s. That was the first time I ever hung out with you.
KP: Did you repress this memory?
Hugh: Yeah. This sounds made up
Quinn: I remember hanging out at Slim’s, but I don’t remember this conversation.
Nick: We were all drunk. It was in passing, a conversation in passing.
Quinn: Well, you got me all red faced!
Nick: You’ve never waxed your balls and…
Quinn: She’s going to have to edit this.
KP: Ohhh no, I don’t edit!
Nick: Yeah, see, she doesn’t edit.
KP: Oh, it’s ALL going up there!
Quinn: Great.
Nick: Let’s talk about your balls, Quinn!
Quinn: I’m going to email this to my mom.
Nick: How high are they?
KP: Look mom, I’m being interviewed!
Quinn: Let’s um, go on to the next question, concerning the band…
KP: Did you guys initiate him or something, because I know a lot of bands have initiation processes.
Quinn: No, no…
Nick: But, I thought he played too newly at first. I was at first like let’s find a bunch of cool sloppy players.
Hugh: Cool, young guys
Nick: Quinn’s a really slick guitar player, we weren’t used to it. He was just better than what I was used to, and now I can’t imagine playing without any of these dudes.
Hugh: Quinn and I live together and Brad and Stu live together. Brad started playing with us about the same time. I’ve known Brad for about 8 years, 9 years. We grew up together in Appleton which is a small town in the middle of no where Wisconsin.
KP: What’s it like being in a band in Wisconsin?
Quinn: Cold.
Nick: Cold, it’s just like everything else in Wisconsin, it’s just cold.
Quinn: It’s hard to get things done, well, especially in Milwaukee. Anytime you go out its like, let’s just go to a bar and it’s really easy to stay idle, and drunk. That’s why we practice at noon.
Nick: Otherwise nothing would get done.
Quinn: It’s cheap and you can travel easily from Milwaukee, I think.
Nick: The band is a good distraction for us. Something to keep our mind on when it is boring or cold or everyone else is at the bars. It’s a reason to not be…for an hour or two.
KP: So have you guys toured together, all of you, or is this your first show playing together?
Hugh: We haven’t really done any tours, we don’t really have a reason to tour until we have a record. But Nick and I were on the road together for about 6 months straight it was hard. Six months on the road is a long time.
Nick: We did it the worst of ways, but now it’s all fun in retrospect. The pictures make it look really fun, with our veggie oil bus and we’re all like, greasy, and sleepy.
Hugh: Sleeping on slabs of plywood.
Quinn: Still equipment with vegetable oil on it
Hugh: Fuck yeah!
KP: So, in your six months on the road together, did you guys have any crazy stories, or anything completely insane?
Quinn: There’s so many that I’ve heard… so many! Sleeping half in the bus, and half with your feet on the side walk…
Nick, Oh yeah! Yeah, we had a CD release show at the Troubadour in in LA. The label opened up a bar tab for us, and multiple friends showed up, and it got really fucking stupid. We stayed up drinking like lots of shots of whisky and a lot of beers with uh, that band Hanson.
KP: They’re coming through town really soon. In August.
Nick: Are they?
KP: Yeah, I’m trying to get an interview with Rooney, they’re supposed to open.
Nick: Yeah.
Quinn: Don’t say anything bad, because Hugh is a huge proponent of Hanson.
Hugh: They’re nice guys.
KP: No! I’ve heard really good things about them.
Hugh: Yeah, and they can drink, surprisingly! We had to leave in the morning, and the drummer and I were responsible for taking the bus back to Venice Beach early in the morning, which didn’t happen. Nick came by to see if we were moving. I think he was trying to text us, and we were not responding. I was sleeping in the bus and Nick walked up. He found the drummer, his torso was on the few stairs that we had, and the rest of him was out on the sidewalk and the doors were open. It’s just like a school bus with like the ratcheting door and he’s just passed out, his head resting on one step. We didn’t make our flight!
Nick: That happened to me too in a different show in LA. Yea, I don’t know, the city doesn’t do very good things to us.
Quinn: I think we all have a drinking problem!
Nick: These stories will pretty much just make us sound like alcoholics, so lets not talk about it.
KP: Well, that’s how a lot of my interviews have gone.
Quinn: It’s only a problem if you admit you have a problem
Nick: Deny you have a problem
Hugh: Deny deny deny!!
Nick: so I dunno, what else? Theres some other pretty ridiculous ones, but they all sound something like that… We’re next right?
KP: Yeah, I think you guys are up next.
Nick: I didn’t brush my hair yet
Quinn: Don’t you have to wax your mustache too before we get underway here? I mean, not wax it, but do you have your pomade with you?
Nick: No, I didn’t bring it. Just coz I brought up your balls doesn’t mean you have to talk about my hair.
Quinn: I think it looks good!
Nick: Thanks dude, I think your balls look good!
The Wildbirds 2007 release Golden Daze is available here. But keep and eye out for their new 6 track release due out on July 22!
A special thank you goes out to my friend Tracey for transcribing the audio of this interview! :)
Behind the Scenes: Interviewing Alan Palomo // Neon Indian at Brillobox in Pittsburgh, PA.
Photo by the amazing Laila Elizabeth Archuleta. I can’t wait to reveal the interview and rest of the photos to you on JackinthePocket.com in just a few days.
High Places | The Summit | May 25th, 2010 | Columbus, OH
Photos by Ed Luna
It was a quiet Tuesday night in Columbus when I arrived at The Summit. I was a bit early for the interview, so I sat down at the bar and called up Ed. He was just getting off the exit. I looked around curiously. The crowd at the venue was thin, which surprised me. About a month earlier, High Places had to cancel their show in Columbus for a reason even unbeknownst to them. It was rumored their van had broken down, but during their set, Rob clarified that the van had been nothing but good to them, and didn’t want to jinx it with whispers of malfunction. “We don’t want bad karma,” he said. ”It’s actually ‘vanma’!” joked Mary followed by a dorky laugh.
We had stepped out for the interview in front of the venue just before their set. The streets were quiet… until I pressed the record button on my phone. Planes soared noisily overhead and macho men on crotch rockets kept zooming by.
KP: To start out, how did you guys meet each other?
Rob: Well, Mary lived in Michigan in Kalamazoo. I lived in New York and friends of mine were on tour. They played in Michigan and she played one of her first solo shows with them and they became kinda friendly. So, she came and visited NY just for a bassoon lesson, because she plays bassoon. We ended up linking up through our mutual friends that she played with. Kind of immediately we were like, “Oh you have a solo project? I just started a solo project too!” This was the days of Myspace when people actually used that website. We listened to each others things and thought it was really cool. We kinda became really good friends. A couple weeks later, I mean, really fast, we just started talking all the time on the phone. Then she set up a show for me in Kalamazoo when I did a tour with this other band I’m friends with in NY. We became even better friends after that. A few months later she asked if she could move in with me in NY and then we just started making music immediately. It kind of just snowballed from there.
KP: So what is your creative process like?
Mary: Well we both make little recordings all the time. When we lived together we would just be checking email or something and the other person would be tapping and we would record it. We have a ton of those files.
Rob: Really lo-fi media type recordings of different sounds.
Mary: It’s kind of like a sketchbook. We might have an idea for a beat and we just like, basically, say the beat and make a recording out of that. A lot of times when we craft our songs we end up using those really raw recordings for the basic structure of the beat. We just edit them a lot to make them fit together. But it’s a lot of layering different recordings. We make a good part of our music just with those recordings, cutting and pasting, doing a lot of things to manipulate the sounds and the change of the pitch.
Rob: It’s like scrapbooking. It is like making a zine out of using only a photocopier.
Mary: We use guitars a lot. Like, our early music was, I’d say like 60% plus percent of it was guitar just manipulated. On this record we decided not to manipulate the guitars quite as much so we could play them live.
Rob: Yeah, before everything was like slowed down, sped up… you know? So the mixing of the records were impossible to recreate live.
Mary: And then vocals come in at some point. Usually towards the end. But not always, sometimes we start with vocals.
Rob: So its pretty immediate and really back and forth.
KP: I hear your cats interfere a lot. [Laughter]
Rob: Yeah they have, for sure. But, its ok.
KP: So you just came back from a tour in Europe. How many days ago did you get back?
Mary: We just got back about three days ago. Saturday night.
Rob: We were in Europe for 5 weeks. Then we played Baltimore, D.C., and then here.
KP: That is pretty… bang! Bang! bang!
Mary: Yeah, I think we may still be jetlagged. [Laughs]
Rob: We left on March 19th, so it was kind of a long time ago. We like it, we’re not complaining.
Mary: We just haven’t had adequate sleep in a couple months.
Rob: My sinuses have a hard time catching up. Literally it was like, 2 shows in Norway, 2 shows in Portugal, then Baltimore, then D.C. and then here.
Ed (photog): Let me here you complain more! [Laughter]
Rob: [Laughs] No that’s a minor complaint, pollen. I’m just complaining about my sinuses. Other than that its fantastic!
KP: Mary, you were in an orchestra all throughout high school and your child hood. I was an orchestra geek too…
Mary: Oh, yeah? Wait, string instrument?
KP: Yeah, violin.
Mary: Violin, ok. I have kind of a gift for guessing peoples instruments.
KP: Aw, I shouldn’t have said violin so quickly. What was your high school experience like being an orchestra geek?
Mary: Yeah, I took 4 music classes out of 6. It was choir, jazz band, band, and independent study band… which is a cool thing I made up. [Laughs] And then I did an orchestra outside of school too. Yeah, it was always a big part of my life. My mom is a music teacher. My grandfather was a music instructor. It was a big part of our family. I’m the youngest so I think I was the one who really wanted to go for it. But, I feel like I had to try a bit harder than my siblings with the music thing. They were such natural musicians. Maybe it made me appreciate it more because I’m not quite as natural at it? Then I studied orchestral music in college too.
KP: Had either of you done looping, layering, and mixing before you guys met?
Mary: Yeah, we were both doing different versions of that. Like, I was using cassette tape field recordings with my solo project. And Rob was doing pretty similar construction to High Places.
Rob: But the big difference is, when we met, we really hadn’t done too much outwardly with our solo stuff. I had been making recordings for a long time since probably about the late 90’s but I never let anyone hear them until a few years ago. I was sort of a late bloomer.
KP: Now to the really fun questions… Do you guys know the music blog Yvynyl? Run by Mark Schoneveld in Philly?
Mary: Yeah!
KP: He wants to know if you would like to go on a date next time you are in Philly.
Rob: Me? Or her?
KP: Mary. [Laughter]
Mary: [Blushes] Umm, I’d have to ask permission for that I guess.
Rob: She’s totally taken.
Mary: I said I’d have to ask permission!
Rob: She’s like, “I’d have to see him first.”
KP: He’s a self proclaimed urban woodsman. You’d like him.
Mary: [Laughs]
KP: [Laughter] Joe from Bear in Heaven asked, “When was the last time you popped one off?”
Rob: [Laughs] This morning. We popped off about a dozen. We stopped at a party supply store.
Mary: Yeah, we’re always popping them off.
Rob: We can’t stop. It’s a sickness. [Laughter]
KP: What exactly is popping off?
Rob: We’d tell you but then…
Mary: It’s when people have a balloon-popping fetish.
Rob: We were on tour with Bear in Heaven and Mary’s sister’s boyfriend had sent her a link to a YouTube video. At first it was really dark, and it kind of made me sad. And then I realized that this guy was just like, totally cool with it and totally stoked on himself. It’s a little old man in boxer shorts in a room filled with balloons. He has a thing for sitting on balloons until they pop.
Mary: At the end of the video he’s like, “Do you like popping off? Email me if you like to pop off. poppingoff@yahoo.com… or something.
Rob: I guess it feels…. Well we’ve tried it actually. We all tried it. We weren’t like nude or in our boxers. We tried it with clothes. You’re kind of sitting there and there is this tension like, “When is it going to pop?!” and then it pops!
Mary: Weirdly enough, whenever we play with Bear in Heaven there are balloons around.
Rob: Yeah, we played in Amsterdam and we showed up to their sound check and they had found this massive phallic display of balloons that they found on the street. It looked like a yogurt explosion but it was just what balloons. It was kind of uncanny.
KP: Oh goodness, well that explains a lot. He didn’t give me any background. He just texted me today and said, “I saw you’re interviewing High Places. Ask them when was the last time they popped one off.”
Rob: We played a place, I don’t remember what city it was. But Bear in Heaven were coming a few days later and we told the venue to make sure there was a bunch of balloons there. We didn’t tell them why…
High Places LP High Places vs Mankind is out now on Trill Jockey. Follow their photoblog of their touring adventures here.