Oneohtrix Point Never with Gastr del Sol

Hi, this is Carrie Brownstein. This is D.D. from me. This is Darren Ardalski. You got the lizard right here. Right here. I like the Tyler. A trot colt quest for it, Armistone. For its fall. Have you ever been yourself? My crazy Cosmos. My load. Hi, we're Hi. I'm Anger listening to the Talk House podcast. Hello and welcome to the Talk House podcast. I'm Josh Modell. On this week's episode we've got a fantastic chat featuring three boundary pushing musicians that turns into a bit of a love fest. It's Daniel Lopatin, better known as One O'Tricks Point Never, along with David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke, who in the 1990s were known together as Gastardell Soul. Now Lopatin has created an incredible body of experimental records over the past 20 or so years. His woozy, sample heavy early material had impegged as the inventor of vapor wave, but he never stays in the same musical place very long. He broke through with a bigger audience with soundtracks for the Safty Brothers movies Good Time and Uncut Gems, and he's also heavily responsible for the sound of the Weekends records where he's credited as an executive producer. The 10th One O'Tricks Point Never album called Again, came out late last year, and once again it found Lopatin utilizing a new set of inspirations, one of which was the post rock movement of the 1990s, which figures heavily into today's conversation. More on that in a minute, but first check out a little bit of again, the title track from the latest One O'Tricks Point Never album. A featured on that track was none other than Jim O'Rourke, an experimental musician and producer, perhaps best known to the pop music world for working on Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and a ghost is born. But O'Rourke's CV is far too vast to dive into here, and the focus of this conversation is his 1990s collaboration with fellow musician David Grubbs in a band called the Gastardell Soul. That duo burned bright for a few years, amassing a catalog that's difficult to pin down, ranging as it does from arch or orchestral pop to more ranger experimental songs. They disbanded in 1998, leaving the world on a high note with their poppiest yet perhaps weirdest set of songs, Camouflour. Gastardell Soul's legend has only grown in the meantime, and they finally got around to releasing some new old material just this year in the form of a combination live album, Rarity's set called We Have Dozens of Titles. True to their ethos, it's neither a standard Odzenens package or a greatest hit set, but rather combines an excellent live recording of what turned out to be their final concert, and songs that had been previously orphaned on various compilations. Check out a little bit of the season's reverse here, which is referenced in this chat. Speaking of this chat, talkhouse conversations are usually more two-way streets than this one, but it turns out that Daniel LaPatin is a huge Gastardell soul geek, so he ends up asking most of the questions. He's got deep-seated opinions and interesting theories on their music. They chat about getting into music, about specific passages and gastro-songs, about the idea of Indy Rock as a genre, and about the time Gastardell Soul was asked to license a song for a tentacle porn movie. Oh, and Daniel calls Gastardell Soul's music trashy. He meets it in a good way. Enjoy. Okay, well firstly, congrats on We Have A Dozen Titles. Oh, thank you. How are you guys feeling about it being out in the world and doing this? Essentially, this is your version of a press tour, which is completely anti-social. There's not going to be a show. There's not going to be anything. Like, fuck you guys. You'll get the rarities and we're out, but you are doing some interviews and some press. I don't want to ask you anything that you guys are already sick of talking about, so if there's anything, what don't you want to talk about? Let's put it that way. Yeah, I don't know. We'll let you know. I'm not a journalist, so this is going to be very awkward. Yeah, but we're going to ask you questions also. Oh, that would be absolutely a nightmare. Thank you so much. I was going to say it feels good to have made this one record, and I feel like I've had conversations with a couple of friends in the last few days who said, like, oh, I've got seven albums, you know, like from my archive that I need to release and what should I do? And I don't know, that just sounds like a nightmare. The idea of there being like an open-ended reissue program, like as the live recordings, you know, get become like worse and worse performances that sound worse and worse. I don't know. I'm just really happy to have this one one and done, and that's it, because we found that or somebody found the live recording for us from the CBC archive. I felt like we could set a pretty high threshold for, you know, quality of the live material, and the uncollected studio material is what it is. And that's it. This is like the inverse, antithetical kind of after the fact, greatest hits, kind of cat, you know, let's catch it. We need one. We owe the label one more thing, or we need a little re-up or whatever. This is really like from what I can tell, and we'll talk about the record because I spent quite a bit of time with it, and I want to talk about the music for a change. But it's to me, it has that feeling of your other records, which it's tight. It's very thoughtful. There's not this crazy overabundance, like, you know, kind of content for content's sake, which is a thing. It's not four CDs worth of stuff. It's a kind of a journey, you know, of itself, even the way where you begin, sort of at the end, with this performance. I love this as its own kind of artwork. I don't want to compare it to some sort of like, rarities thing, because I don't really think it is. But that said, since you guys are fucking musos, what is a good rarity's record? I remember there's one, I mean, it's probably a bootleg, but there was a good, like, live rarity's record of egg that was really, really good. God, that's a good question. Yeah. I mean, some people are really into those like nuggets things. I mean, I've never heard those things, but I mean, that's when it comes to my nuggets. Well, now it's like a YouTube is this giant rarities machine or whatever. I probably sound outdated saying YouTube. I have no idea how people are comprehending this vast library of stuff. But for me, definitely nuggets on some level is a, you know, I'm a little younger than you, but I'm old now. But I wanted to talk about tape culture and this explosion of sharing music that kind of that you guys lived through and was so instrumental in what happened in both of your lives and then kind of coming together. But it's funny that you say that about that those nuggets come. So I mean, I had those rhino records funk CDs when I was, I had those kind of things. We would gave it and I were growing up the probably the big sort of rarities compilation records where the Warner's loss leader records. You remember those, David? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's like the only place you could get like these rare like Van Dyke park tracks like commercial, commercial, commercial. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those were kind of big for me when I was young. So yeah, I'd actually forgotten about those until just now. Yeah, I don't know, you know, you were asking like what's a good rarity as record? I was just sort of thinking the opposite, you know, like when when I first described this record to somebody, I feel like they cut me off in mid-sentence and they were like, oh, the odds and sods record, like super dismissive, like, okay, you're just like emptying out the closet. Yeah. Yeah. Now, and with this one, I mean, the organization of it, once we had that final concert recording, then I mean, it kind of became obvious that the album starts with the first song of the concert. It ends with the last song of the concert and proceeds by way of flashbacks to these studio recordings. Yeah, that organizing principle to me is very beautiful. Thank you. It's just a touch sentimental, like just a little bit, but not too much. I kind of have a knee jerk reaction against things like this that are like organized by default chronologically. Yeah. Like in the same way that reading biographies, like I was just feeling like, oh, the first 20% of it, like the childhood years, I'm kind of like, like, reading fast through. And then it's so sad because then the person dies at the end. And it's just not even realistic. It's just not even the way our imaginations work or our memories work. And I could easily tie in any of these moments of things I want to ask you about, like formally or technique about things you guys were doing as a band and ways you were actually going about constantly challenging those those norms, even in the music, but we'll get to it. And now I'm going to contradict myself. And then let's just speed run through your depraved little childhoods. Let's just get it. Let's just figure out why the hell you both end up making this colossal and brave, but very ultimately challenging decision to be a musician because I really don't know about your kind of respective upbringings and how you found yourself. For instance, I mean, were you writing poetry and prose from a very young age? Dave or where did it all sort of begin? I started taking classical piano lessons when I was six and did that for 10 years. I was not a super assiduous, hardworking pianist, but you know, I'm comfortable at the piano. I started playing guitar when I was 12 because all of the sudden I just had this idea that I needed to be in a band and keyboards didn't seem like that didn't seem like a workable tool for being in a band. Yes. And very soon after that, like age 13 or 14, you know, like reading Rolling Stone and having been into Led Zeppelin and stuff like that, all of a sudden I was aware like, oh, wait a second, all of that music is like more than a decade old or more than a decade out of date. And suddenly I'm reading like an interview with public image in Rolling Stone and from there it's like like a quick trip to notice all of the fanzines sitting by the door at the record store in 1980 or '81 in Louisville. And I suddenly realized like, oh, they're all of these kind of weird punk bands from Louisville. So at the same time that I was discovering stuff like whatever, the clash and divo, I was also discovering that there were, you know, strange bands from Louisville, Kentucky. And they had made records. And those are weird. Those are the records that I probably listened to more than any other record. Like the end tables, four-song, seven-enture, like the blinders, you know, single or things like that, just because, yeah, when you didn't have a million records, like when you had dozens of records, you just listened to them over and over and over again. Yeah, so, yeah, started playing in bands, played in a new wave band called The Happy Cadavars. Squirrelbait started when I was 15. - Oh, wow. - So you're just a kid. - Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. Squirrelbait was done. Were you a fan? I know you like country music, so you probably like Squirrelbait. - Wait, where'd you get, I like country music? - I don't know. - How many full statements are in that one? (laughing) Welcome to my world, boys. - Yeah. I didn't know Squirrelbait in real time, no. I knew him later, but I'll let David continue. - Yeah, then I don't know. Like Squirrelbait was on homestead records. My connection also, I was a fancy editor. I did a fancy and called Hit the Trail. It was one like eight and a half by 11 sheet, and then you pulled it in half, and then cut it in the middle, and then insert. And so then it would be like a little eight page of five and a half by four and a quarter magazine, and you stick a first class stamp on the back of it and put one staple in it and send it. And that, I mean, that's how, that's kind of how Squirrelbait wound up on homestead records, was that I traded fanciens with Gerard Coslo and Thirsten Moore, and all these people met Steve Albini, like when I was, when I was like a junior in high school, I don't know. Then I was in a band called Bastro, and then I was in a band called Gastro Del Sol. Here we are. - I have a very random Gerard Coslo, sorry, but I inherited all of his records by mistake at the town dump. In the town I grew up, and there was a little hut where people leave books and records, and tape players and whatever, wasn't wanted anymore. And there were these big crates of records one day. It was all the classic stuff that you need when you're like 14 years old. So there was like, you know, Nico and, you know, Transformers in there and Talking Heads and all the Staples or whatever that. Suddenly I had because I found these crates. But then there was these two compilations, and one of them was called the Blasting Concept. - Oh yeah. - Many years later I turned it over. I was like, what, how did I get these records? And those two comps always stuck out, and I flipped it over, and it's a Gerard Coslo, at the bottom there, and it was probably the beginning of me's Google searching stuff or whatever, you know, I was like, whatever I was searching. I look them up and I go, oh my God, this is the guy that founded. - At a door that went on to go do, and he grew up in my town, and I wrote the label, a letter, and I said to whom I may concern, I have Gerard's record. - I don't know if he wants a bag. - From $100,000 in a paper bag. - His parents? - Yeah, exactly. - His parents had just dumped him or something like that, and he was like, no, keep him away. - Onward. - But anyway. - A blasting concept, that was an important record. - I would have never heard about that in 100 years. - It's a good tie-in for my origin story, which here we go. - Because that's what people call it now. - So my parents are from Ireland, my mother cleaned houses, my dad dug holes in the street for the gas company, and I wanted a eight millimeter camera when I was six, seven or eight, whatever, for Christmas, 'cause I wanted to be a filmmaker, and instead I got an acoustic guitar, because I couldn't afford the eight millimeter camera. So that's how I became a person who played instruments. - Different than David, I kind of immediately was, because I was playing guitar, I was like into like, Alan Holt's worth, and more jazz things like Abercrombie. But also I got, oh man. - This is a gift. This is a gift for you, David, just for the people listening out there on the airwaves. - This is Alan Holt's word t-shirt that I'm gonna give to Jim. - Oh wow. - All right. I never got to see him live. That's another story. So anyway, but I also was getting into Prague Rock, but when I got to high school, I was already more into like the weirder side of things. I was like listening like Cecil Taylor or at Coleman, but I had a friend in high school that I did a zine with. Okay, this is where the story's match with David. And he was totally into, like his favorite band was The Ramones, but we had bonded over Captain Beefheart, and we started doing this zine called Social Smegma, and the interesting thing is, he was already in touch with Jello Biafra. And if you remember, the Dead Kennedy's records would come with booklets filled with collages from, I think the guy named was Winston Smith, but also from people who had sent Jello collages. And I believe it's bedtime for democracy. There's one page in the booklet that my friend who did Social Smegma, and I did that got used in the thing. So but Social Smegma was mostly like things like pretty SST oriented, like we interviewed Mike Watt, but there was also things like that I was like, it would be like Cecil Taylor and blah, blah, blah. So that's how I got introduced to this other world of underground, do it yourself music, but the world I was coming from was sort of like underground, you know, electronic music like P16, D4, and you know, H and S and all that stuff. And so I sort of merged those two worlds in my head at that point in high school. And the blasting concept of Mero's really, really impressed with saccharine trust. So that's sort of how those two worlds sort of met for me. But I mostly wanted to make tape music. I was never in bands. I was never in a band before I worked with David, except for wedding bands. I just like sitting in a room in front of a tape machine. What was your first sound on sound experience? How old were you when you heard two fucking sounds layered on top of each other? Pretty young like seven or eight using two like mono tape decks and using the air to go back and forth. No, I was nine because I read in the liner notes to Zappa's "Sheik Your Booty," he talked about this technique called "Zenocropolis" or something like that. And he's talking about how you combine different performances that don't belong together and blah, blah, blah. And I tried to do that. So that really hooked me. Interviews with Zappa and also Pete Townsend that I read when I was young really hooked me on making things with tape. And then of course I found out about tape music. It's kind of cliche, but the first one was the Pier-on-Ree, A-Toot for Dorna Sye was the first thing. 'Cause that was really easily available in the States then. 'Cause it was on limelight. And it was like a library. So yeah, really young. It's this beautiful serendipitous meeting and it makes so much sense based on not just kind of, all these contingent factors too that have to do with this excitement around music on the fringes that suddenly became really discoverable in this primitive but unbelievably mind-blowing way, which was exchanging tapes and zines and all this stuff that was kind of at the heart of a kind of DIY culture. But suddenly you're listening to stuff that had previously almost been gate-capped or something like that. It was academic music and punk music and everything in between sort of in meshing in this way where suddenly it was like, look, if it's good, it's good. And the academic music was kind of bleeding into everybody's hands. I feel like I hardly ever even understood music to be academic just 'cause I knew it through recordings. I didn't know it through people teaching it to me or like contemporary music performer. I mean, Jim had more of a conservatory music school experience, but for me it was all just trying to make sense, like reverse engineer it and make sense of it through the recordings, which were not the ideal forms of it for most of the composers or artists. I did have that experience, and I want to call it training. When I was in college, when there would be time off, the summer vacation, I would go, but I would be in like over in Europe, I would be in Germany doing stuff. And I'd come back and the main professor would say, well, what did you do on your summer vacation? Well, I was in Europe and I did these shows and there's a record coming out of this thing and he would just look at me and say, maybe you should take a semester off to get these records and concerts out of the way. So you can concentrate on your studies and get a teaching position so you have students play your pieces. And that attitude made them my enemy for the rest of my life. - Yeah, made you sick, yeah. And it's still as true to a certain, a lot of that kind of music that I loved, look for our promuzioni, it was stuck in the academic world. And especially like P16D4 was a really big turning point for me because I realized you can make this music and it doesn't have to exist in this world. This world doesn't, you know, up to that point, it had to exist in that world 'cause that was the only world that could afford to build the studios that could make that music, you know? But that wasn't true anymore. Right around the late '80s, that was not true anymore. - Yes, and not only could you hear this stuff, suddenly and but you can make it you could make it yeah yeah yeah that's really interesting it was really like right around 85 to 88 that was really kind of the turning point it became possible for anybody to make this stuff so let's jump up to the first guest or the sole record and I guess this is kind of more directed towards you David because correct me if I'm wrong but Jim you join up on that second record right yes yes but I've read this really interesting thing about the first one I think it was a comment you made somewhere about a watery Kentucky and you were describing kind of feeling almost like uneasy because it marked this shift towards this much more gradually evolving kind of music and the piece itself was really long yeah yeah yeah and all that kind of stuff and obviously you know it's like a beautiful piece of music and the approach that you take on that piece of music you expanded on together as a duo and reached you know all kinds of heights with it and it influenced so you know it influenced so many people such as myself to think about you know arrangements in different ways instrumental music in different ways breaking off certain forms what to keep and what not to keep but I wanted to ask you about that kind of moment of like fear yeah I know the moment of fear is an amazing thing so like in retrospect it was incredibly fortuitous the tortoise started when they did and kind of took off when they did I had played you know the last version of faster was with John McIntyre and Bundy Brown like who were in the first lineup of tortoise and we came back from a tour I'd taken a semester off of school touring at the time was like you know kind of a serious commitment you know like you go for six or seven weeks or something like that and at the end of this faster tour in fall of 1991 I just remember sitting down with John and him saying like yeah I think you know like it's hard to imagine being able to do this again tortoise is taking off and bobo bobo Bundy and I were roommates we just like kept writing music but it was I was the first time that I'd you know played acoustic instruments in a long time except for you know playing the piano and yeah no it was really possible to do this like disarmament you know this like you know respect your neighbors kind of music and to get rid of the rehearsal space it broke the frame of the band which before that for me had been all about kinds of like you know a band is a unit and you know like like the hardcore trio like when they're like thinking about adding a second guitar player like that's a real commitment you know like you might talk about that for months and like who might that second guitarist be and you know like you got to choose wisely because you only get to choose once but yeah so I mean gastro drill still soul really broke the frame of the band for me it was right around the same time that I met Mayo Thompson and was playing in the Red Crowell also which had I mean kind of begun by breaking the frame of the band I remember asking Mayo at one point like how many members have there been in the Red Crowell do you think and he said you know like there are no members in the Red Crowell it's a non-membership organization and I don't know like that yeah it made it possible to reimagine being in a group but yeah but the fear yeah I remember listening to the playback of a watery Kentucky and just being like it's so painfully slow like who could possibly listen to this what was I thinking it felt really good and now to take the instrument out of my hand and listen to the playback of something that had felt like a good take this is a fucking disaster what was I thinking right and then like six months later you listen to it and it's just like it moves along to a nice measured clip you know it's really weird when your sense of time gets reoriented like that David I'm not saying necessarily you but why do you think a lot of the people that you knew that we're making music why was everybody getting slower yeah yeah exactly there was there was only one direct we had gotten faster before and you know we were slowing down I don't know you know I think a lot of people would say like getting high that wasn't my reason for getting slower but maybe I was playing with a lot more people who were getting high yeah I guess I never would have thought of that yeah yeah faster it was like a pretty like fast aggro band but before that I mean it's probably it was like a thrash band yeah yeah and so yeah we weren't gonna speed it up I guess you know like if you if you got to move in another direction then like slowing it down was the way to go this kind of par ladies into my next thing because Jimmy you come into the band and this thing is slowing down I'm gonna continue to kind of come back to but not just in terms of tempo or something but this sort of time dilation aspect or the drone aspect of formally what's happening in the band that continues to become more and more kind of revelatory as the records but there's this spaciousness and doesn't just become more drony or something but certainly there's a more and more kind of refined and more painterly kind of development of those things I know Jim for instance you're really have dedicated a lot of your energy in supporting drone music and I mean I know you love Kevin drum like nobody else on the face of the planet Rafael Taral I mean Tony and his effect on the band what is it that drew you in so much and that you've spent a lifetime really discovering or exploring well there's sort of like this you know holy trinity of three people which is Feldman Chelsea and Rowan King which I was insane about like from my college years but there was a quote from Feldman that really we was a story about Feldman that really kind of struck me like at Darmstadt like or one of those like really high-minded things stockhouse and heard a piece of early graphics court piece of Feldman's and he was you know stockhouse and was like kind of in the middle of his moment form phase which that's a whole hour talking itself and he asked Feldman it's like how do you do it how do you get how do you do this and Feldman just told him I don't push the sounds around yeah and stockhouse and replied not even a little bit which sort like just just in those two tiny sentences there's such there's such depth in how you think about music what it means like not just about music but what your stances in life politically yes and the implications and that's stuck with me that doesn't mean that's all my interest in music but that was a Keith that really set me on the path just that simple sort of reading that thing it might have been in the Niamon book I'm not sure yeah the Niamon book was a big deal also but that's what set me on that path and made me understand space and music and time in music the Niamon book is that experiment yeah most experimental music or yeah experimental music cage and beyond which is absolutely essential for me it was really just about like for the first time experiencing that music was a place where your mind could be free to like drill in on on what's happening sonically or to be someplace completely other and you know like come back whenever you felt like coming back I remember you know lying on the floor and wondering what the hell we'd done with a watery Kentucky the first time playing ten years alive on the infinite plane with Jim and Tony in Jim's apartment was a similar kind of experience for me where I was playing the long-stringed instrument so Jim is playing this pulse 60 beats per minute and the center pitch of the long-stringed instrument you know which is just like it's a plank of wood with it's a monocord right a two-string monocord with guitar pickups on either side and I'm doing upward moving glissande and Tony's one I mean I think that they were like two ideas for that instrument one is that you're moving towards the center pitch which is what the base is pulsing on but you never arrive there I mean it's just like so simple and such an amazing idea just like move towards that pitch but never never arrive there never you know never be in unison with the pulse and the pieces 90 minutes long in the second half like you can do downward moving glissande but like I mean Tony was like it was kind of like a comedy routine like if you're ready like and you may not ever be ready and it's a big decision you know like to change direction and every time we did it yeah it was only like in the last ten or fifteen minutes of the piece that I felt good about like moving from upward glissande to downward glissande but yeah I mean I mean that was like for me the kind of paradigmatic experience of like my mind was free you know like I could focus on the like the micro details of the glisses or like no one was controlling my mind and certainly the music wasn't yeah exactly and then I can't help but skip ahead now to like camel floor and like it's funny because there's that live version of blues subtitled note sense of wonder on the new record like an instrumental version right yeah and it has a few other interesting sort of alterations that were made for the live and it's funny to hear you talk about this kind of procedure you were doing with the glissande is because my favorite part of that song on the record version is sort of out of nowhere like total non-secretary you get these beautiful bends yeah and for the first time ever like I don't know who's shredding on organ or what's going on but there's like a pentatonic shred if it's pentatonic it's probably me it's you it's you mother faggot I knew it which song are we talking about a blues subtitle no sense of wonder like the original studio version oh the or yeah the organ on that's me yeah and I remember recorded it at solid sound really yeah well it's so it's so sort of like an outlier amongst all these amazing outliers throughout your your discography but it's one of my favorite moments ever because it's so it's such a unique interruption, but it's also, it contains all the stuff we're talking about. It has all, that piece of music has all the freedom you're talking about, but then, you know, it has a certain kind of theatrical flair that is also what you guys are, like, and what makes the music highly enjoyable and interesting is that tension even, you know, like I was thinking about it the other day and I was like, "This music is so funny." If I played it for my 73-year-old mother, she might be frightened, but she's. I was gonna say, I remember the reason why I wanted to put that because I thought it was funny because I knew it was gonna get cut off by that telephone sound, you know, that "can't hear." Yeah, you know, this guy's like, "Yay!" I'm on my way, I'm on my way home! It's really wonderful. It's here, it's the band sense of humor and it's that whole thing I'm talking about this kind of like, like the 90s have this wrap for like eclecticism, you know, it was kind of packaged a lot and it was a marketing term in the 90s. Me growing up, I was like a victim of it because I was in middle school and suddenly you're getting all this kind of information from the world and music marketing and all this stuff, but the thing is there's certain aspects, I wouldn't call it eclecticism, I call it alchemy, there's an alchemical thing happening in the group where this is why I was talking about this sort of like the history of Sharon tapes and bringing sort of the academic music down to your home. Street level. Yeah, street level. Your part of Studio 424 or whatever. It's all almost kind of like, there's this dense kind of microcosm of all that stuff happening and so many of your pieces are so wonderful and speaks to how funny and how free the stuff is, I don't find it, drab, I don't find it melancholy, I find it very beautiful and when people talk a little bit about the slowness of like say like a cootie or something like that or how it's kind of related to shoegas in certain ways and stylistically, there's this introversion and this depression, but I don't hear that in gastro-disual at all. I hear this kind of very playful way of calming things down and going inward and it's very expansive and beautiful so I love that record and I'm just thanking you guys for it. Damn, thank you. You had me on the edge of my seat. With you reading it seriously. I don't know, outgoing and forward-facing and yeah, weird and funny. Yeah. It's doing all this crazy stuff, you know? It's probably because it wasn't a band, it was two people making things together. Yeah. One thing to, I mean, band dynamics make different music. But even this idea of kind of like a day where you're talking about forced cohesion or something like, like there are certain things that almost seemingly carry you through all the way to the edges of gastro-disual where it's like whatever I got structurally, whatever is going on no matter how sort of obtuse it may seem, I'm going to, I'm going to find a way to deliver like a sort of cogent vocal melody or a rhythmic sort of a pentameter of some kind is going to emerge from these sort of dislocated structures. So this is what I mean, it's constantly like this beautiful battle of like the things that make music really fun and normal and trashy and great and kind of over-determined or whatever in a good way. And the things that make us feel so good sort of from the inside out, the freedom that you guys were seeking, it's all at play, all it wants. I mean, I'm really happy to hear you use the word trashy. Yeah. This is like setting my brain moving now. Yeah, because I don't think that ever once I've ever heard anybody refer to gastro-disual soul as trashy, but I'm like I'm here to like understand that. Yeah. Well, it's not, it's trashy in the sense that it's almost like formally there's a sort of, or like as a formal abstraction of trashiness. It's like there seems to be a playful kind of messiness at times that is happening that's so wonderful and also like the dryness of things like I love that I love that there's not this kind of like over reliance on a fix. If I could have afforded them, they're probably would. [laughter] Yeah, yeah, yeah. We tried. Well, you were dubbing stuff out and you guys were getting pretty dubby with your stairs. Man, I have to say like from being in the room watching Jim do the final mix of the season's reverse was fucking insane. So it wasn't like Jim had been like doing live dub mixes every Friday and Saturday night for three years like in preparation for that. Like I just remember John had, I mean everything sort of like recorded out of order like he probably began with a click track and the acoustic guitar part. And I remember just in the final mix Jim just being like, oh yeah, I'll do like this dub thing. It's like whack! Like all the, you know, like the snare drums and just like doing it as a fucking live dub mix. Like while, you know, rolling the final mix of it. And I was just like, how the hell do you know how to do this? I mean it's sort of like the story of working with Jim. It's like, how the hell do you know how to do that? But like so cool. Live dub mix for the final mix of the season's reverse. Really was really kind of one of the most insane things I've ever seen Jim do in real time. And I've seen Jim do a lot of insane things in real time. I don't know Jim, does that even ring a bell? You know, you were so incredibly nonchalant about that. I remember the, I mean, I don't, there wasn't any click track but the drums were actually put into a an emu sampler. It's basically just one sample and I had a filter on it. And because there was no click track, I was, I made the drum track by playing the keyboard and following your guitar part. Oh damn. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, I had forgotten that. Yes. But Camoufla was the first record, was the only record that I had a computer for. And I was using this software called Deck 2. And so it was a combination of my eight track and the computer. And the crazy thing is there was no sound card. There was no way to sync up the eight track with the computer. And the sound in and sound out for the Deck program was the headphone jack. The final master of Camoufla came out of the headphone jack of my like Mac G whatever, three G2 G3, whatever it was. I have no idea how that thing didn't sound like garbage. Yeah. No, a friend like who's a high-end audio consultant and Manhattan, you know, like a couple of months ago when the when the box set was about to come out, said, you know, like, I just listened to Camoufla on this amazing system. And, you know, like, it just sounds so incredible. I was like, all right, you know, like, yeah, I mean, I like the music very much. I don't know. I feel like maybe I've never listened to Camoufla on an amazing system before. It's that mix, baby. Jim, were you saying that you kind of were like, hey, I regret doing all that stereo widening? I was obsessed with dynamic range because I had gotten this portable dat recorder. And also because there was a lot of music that was really interested in at that time. And also the tape music I was making at that time by myself was becoming extreme. I think that's around the like, making sand and scand. And I was really into Bernhard Gunter. And I got really deep into the dynamic range. So that had to be fixed for this box set. And all the grunge guys are redlining everything and everything's loud. I probably didn't even know about it. I don't know anything about popular culture. Like after 1998 or something, I probably don't know anything. Thank God. Yeah. Hello friends. It's Josh Modell, Talkhouse Executive Editor and host of the Talkhouse podcast. I'm interrupting your listening to talk about Direct, which is Distro Kids new Direct to Fan platform that allows artists to create merch using their album artwork. Whereas before you might have needed some tech help or a bunch of startup money, Direct allows you to set up a professional looking merch store in minutes and they take care of printing, shipping, and support. So you're not sorting through boxes and mailers instead of making music. And just like with their distribution platform, Distro Kids doesn't take a cut of your merch earnings. You just go to distrokids.com/direct and decide what you'd like to sell. They've got t-shirts, mugs, totes, and more. You pick the artwork in price and then share the link with your fans. It's that simple. Once again, check it all out and open your own store at distrokids.com/direct. You come to the New Yorker radio hour for conversations that go deeper. With people, you really want to hear from whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Quest Love or Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney, or the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence Jeffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well-informed colleagues at the New Yorker. So join us every week on the New Yorker radio hour wherever you listen to podcasts. If you love hip-hop and I mean really love the culture beyond the beefs, playlists, and hype, you need to check out the Almanac Arap. I'm Don Will. I'm a rapper, producer, and hip-hop obsessive, and the Almanac Arap is a two-time webbeer world-winning show where we build up a topic just to break it down. If you love hip-hop conversations that actually go somewhere, or sometimes don't, subscribe to the Almanac Arap on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen. like, "Hey, you know, clarinet, no, but bass clarinet, yes." Like, what were the acceptable instruments for Gastro de Solon? Which ones were off fucking limits? What didn't you want to hear? - I can't think of anything off the bat that was off limits. I mean, it sort of began with like, who is the player, are they available tomorrow? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was like, I was like, "Oh, can Vannemark play clarinet?" Yeah, that makes sense, rather than, you know, him playing whatever, tenor sax on Black Horse. You made the clarinet sound absolutely beautiful. I hate that instrument with a passion for some reason. I don't know why. I think that I immediately think of Woody Allen in his like, band. But you guys made it sound so good. - Yeah, but wouldn't my son switch from clarinet to bass clarinet? It was like, "Yes." - Yeah, yeah, but I think that's a critical. - Yeah, yeah, like Dodge that bullet, yeah. - Yeah, that's a great, small, but important alteration. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, I was really down to like, the people we knew. - Yeah. - They played. I can't think of like maybe more than once that we use someone who wasn't like someone we played with a lot. - I want to pivot to lyrics for a second. And I'm not going to claim to know what is going on in your beautiful mind, David. I love your books. I love the mystery of your lyrics, and I would prefer to keep them that way. But I'm going to read you back some of your lyrics, and I want free association. I don't care about what they mean or where they came from. I'm just going to say them, and then both of you guys, whether you like it or not, you just got to tell me what goes through your mind. If it's historical, that's great. If it's what they're about, that's fine. But really, I'm just interested in seeing what emerges on the fly. So, from work from smoke, two lines, two dogs approach, they make work from smoke. - Yeah, that was in the subway station in Munich. - Jim. - Oh, first thing. David once told me that it was in a train station in Munich. (laughing) - Perfect, this is going great. Eight corners off of Mirror of Parabits. I love Mirror of Parabits. Eight corners, Western Avenue, Taylor'sville Road, Blackstone, Armin Avenue, North Avenue. I can go on, but you know the rest of it. - Yeah, Ethan Buckler from King Kong, who's from Louisville, and also played in Slent, lived in Chicago for a while, and he was haunted by the fact that the streets go on forever in Chicago. So, I imagine streets extending from Chicago to Louisville. Yeah, so I think in eight corners, it would be like seven Chicago streets and then one Louisville street. So, Taylor'sville Road, Logist Avenue, those are all streets in Louisville. - Awesome. I always really love the cadence on that one. When it gets to the last of each group, it just seems inevitable, even though I don't know what it is really. But they always seemed inevitable. I always really liked what David did on that one. - Beautiful. - Okay, we got one more from the relay on Upgrade and Afterlife. Cooked corn and formaldehyde, popcorn and an airtight jar, cornflakes under glass. - It's a description of a display case at the, it's like the anthropology museum in Paris. I mean, so much of this is just like descriptions of objects and or descriptions of images. My mother was a photographer and I, you know, spent a lot of time with her in the dark room when I was a kid. And so yeah, just like describing photographs that sort of like my go-to for writing most anything. - Love it. - Thank you. - So I was laughing because at one point, although David doesn't remember this, we got approached by an animation company in Japan to have, they wanted to use a track in this Japanese animation film. And so I got a VHS cassette of it. And at the time, I was living with Kevin Drum. And so I said, hey, Kevin, I think, hey, I got this video from, they want to use a gastro sun. We start watching it. It's like one of those tentacle porn, you know, like where the octopus has sex with busty women. And I remember, we're just watching that. And all of a sudden Kevin goes cornflakes. (laughing) So unfortunately, that will always be my memory of that lyric. It's some most, most aic tentacle porn. Incredible. Sorry about that, David. - No, no, it's good. (laughing) - Look, it is what it is. I asked and I shall receive. - It happened. (laughing) - Okay, enough waxing poetic about the past. You have this near release. And we have to continue waxing poetic about the past I just realized. I can't even break away from it. I just randomly, I have some silly fan questions. But are those gunshots at the end of season's reverse or is it something else? Like during the recording of the conversation with the kid, the French kid. - They're firecrackers. - Oh, that's so good. That's so good. It's so like phenomenologically fucked in my sort of experience of it. 'Cause I always thought it was like, okay, this is too separate, sourced, collage. But just too, and it's really weird. It's really weird that there's gunshots. It makes me think, you know, like dick-chainy blew off some guy's lame or whatever. That's the image that I always was somehow always evoked for me. It's just like a swirr, like some hunters, like some real bad, some really bad kind of people. And then this sort of, - Those kids might have grown up to be bad people. (laughing) - Yeah, exactly, we don't know. But then this viewed kind of beautifully banal conversation happening in the gunshots. But now I understand. My dream is, my dream is shatterbits, all right. Album Opens, we talked about it, but the album opens with the first time from the final concert. Can you describe the mood of that last gig? Was it a sense of finality or just another gig? - I don't think we knew at that point. - Yeah. - Because the record wasn't done yet, but that was at this festival called Victoriaville, which was in Canada. And it was at that time, it was one of the few European style festivals in North America. I mean, now you've got these kind of things all over the place. When I say European style, I mean like funded, jazz, centric, slightly outside music, but large festival, which historically had been a lot of in Europe. And we had played in Europe. And it was a weird combination of people. It was the first year I think that the festival had had bands, because I had played at it before, like with. - Who did I play with a Gunter Mieler? About blah, blah, blah. It's a strange festival, because it's, like I said, it's like Europe in North America. I believe tortoise played that year as well. Is that right, John? - Yeah, I think so. - John was there. And our setup was, I don't remember, did you play guitar for the whole concert? - Yeah, I might have played piano on one thing, but yeah, I think yeah, almost exclusively guitar. - And I think at that time, I was not playing guitar so much during the sets, because especially the camphor stuff, I didn't play guitar a lot on that record, if I remember correctly. - Yeah, you were playing piano and organ and. - Yeah, yeah, I had a first piece of. -. take material. - And then I had some like CD, like the little mini CD players, and my first laptop, which was a 520C. We'd only did a handful of shows with that kind of setup. So we were still sort of working out how to do those live, because there was the first time where we had backing material that we played to, because the seasons reversed, the bass and the drums are actually coming out of the laptop. - There's like a brass section or horns on the album version? - Rob Miseric plays Kornet. - That's right. - Oh yeah, yeah, that's right. - So you were writing for the album, but already performing some of the pieces and kind of poking and prodding at them a little bit, but you had a record to make. So there wasn't a sense of like, "Hey, this might be the last gig." - No, I didn't feel that. - I think we had only done the basic tracks of the record up to that point. I think Dave was still in the process of writing lyrics. I think on that record, for more so than other records, there were some overdubs that required going to other studios. So like I would go out to solid sound and record the Hammond part and things like that. So it was the basics were all done in my little studio room, but that's where we were when we did that show. - And generally at that point and at that point in the history of the group, is there like, "Hey, we're gonna go off and write sort of the core concept to the song as a sort of a song form or whatever, as a motif or whatever is gonna happen independently." It's stuff that you guys work out and then bring to one another and then work out and build out together. - It's probably a mix. - I mean, almost everything that we worked on really began as a composition, as a kind of skeletal composition, whether it's one guitar or two guitars or piano part, and then the arrangement gets built in the studio. - Yeah, at the time, I remember people asking us for things for compilations, assuming that it was can or whatever, that we just had dozens and dozens of hours of this garbage. And it's like, "No, no, no, no, no." Like, "This is all there is." Yeah, yeah. But yeah, each thing really would begin with a composition. And even though, I mean, Jim was a fabulous improviser and improvisation sort of like loomed large in the way that we thought about music. - I love quietly approaching. I really love it. It's a never before heard one, right? It was on the compilation. Oh, it was on the-- - I think it was on the Red Hot and Bothered compilation. - Okay, my apologies. - Yeah, I don't know. - It was on a major label. - Yeah, it was on a record. - We were on a lot of major labels like doing tiny little weird music. - Weird music. - Well, here's my next question actually, because it seems like that was possible then. And we can-- - For a brief moment. - For a brief moment. And we're in a different place now and we don't have to litigate all of that. But I am curious kind of from the perspective of a project that did so much work during this like really sort of a prosperous time for Indy Rock. What was your impression of even that concept, the idea of Indy Rock at the time having like Dave, you went through punk, you went through hardcore, you went through every iteration of, trying to break away from all that stuff. And then, you know, how do we work with it? How do we individuate ourselves within that matrix or whatever? There's Indy Rock then and Indy Rock now. Do you remember how you felt about that as a sort of schematized thing for surviving? And what do you think now? - I mean, I didn't think it so much in terms of musical genre. I thought it much more in terms of labels, or venues, or things like that. And drag city seemed like sufficiently, I don't know, musically, and in terms of personalities diversified that it was fine. You know, like we weren't on a label of other bands that sounded like us. And venues in Chicago were open to, yeah, like a great range of stuff. There was an article about, it was either about drag city or about like several labels sort of on par with drag city in Spin magazine right around the time that drag city put out the first gastro-al-soul record on drag city. And Dan Kuretsky says something like, you know, like talking about offers from major labels to buy drag city and have them run it. And you know, Dan's like, what in the world would I do if I weren't running drag city records? And this is like in 1992. And I think that he feels the same way in 2024. So I don't know, you know, it's interesting. Indy Rock never, it never chaffed. Like, you know, like it never irritated me as a label. It seemed like a description of record labels that weren't in partnerships with majors. Rather than, you know, sounding like pavement or, you know, something like that. - Oh, that's exactly it. It's a kind of just sort of like an economic framework for bands to sort of give themselves a shot at not having to be over-reliant on those other channels. But in that period of time when you guys were working together, there was some sympathetic thing happening. And it could be that it is now in some ways that I don't fully understand. I don't claim to be a music business expert or anything, but it's funny how it sort of morphed into a kind of a weird kind of taste distinction or something like that. But that's the cognitive dissonance. People just kind of describe a certain kind of music as it and I just get so profoundly confused. - Yeah, no, never really made much sense as a descriptor to me. But it was also never really applied to us so much. - Yeah, and this sort of sneaky, sticky concept of post rock and Chicago and the sort of mythology of this kind of Chicago sound. Basically the core root of that dissonance is English music writers. Yes. (laughing) Of the time. I wanted to add what David said is in Chicago, it was particularly politicized. The way the writers saw that and the way that it felt on the ground was two different things. But Chicago sort of was a sort of like testing ground for this which side of the fence are you on. There was a lot of feeling of that in Chicago at the time because there were people who decided they were on this side of the fence and there were people who decided they were on this side of the fence. And we all were running into each other in various ways and playing at the same clubs. And I wasn't coming from that world. So I really looked at it from kind of outsider's perspective. I mean, in my mind, drag city, what drag city wasn't in, you know, with the way the word was being used then, you know, the alternative press and a me sort of way, you know, alternative music, independent music. I thought of drag city as DIY, you know. The only thing from a suburban Boston kid's point of view here in the music for the first time in the late 90s, early 2000s, I can actually maybe a little bit latch onto as a stylistic regional thing. But I wouldn't say it's Chicago, it's the Midwest in a way, but there's also links to independent music coming from the South. It's that combination of a strum and a flam. That sort of particular, that particular arpeggiation, that sort of all. If people had only called it strum and flam, then, you know, like, I could have accreted to it. I mean, there were some parallels between groups and certain kind of-- I was on rate, rate your music. And at some point, actually, Jim probably around the same time we were first talking and we were talking about my record. And I was kind of fixated on this idea that this new generation of music fans were actually doing the sort of detective work and kind of siphoning out different aspects of this time period. And there's this particular sort of almost like a subgenre of post rock to them. I'm not saying-- I'm claiming it's real. But they call it crescendo core. And you knew the bands that were, we could list them. But you guys were definitely not one of them. And that's a particular-- Descrescendo core. Yeah, you were Descrescendo core. I mean, we were talking about it earlier, actually, with a water Kentucky. But it's almost kind of-- it's almost as if the band ends the same way it began. With this kind of like, hey, you know what? We don't have to-- when the drums come in, they don't really have to boom. They're going to come in and it's going to be disorienting after seven, eight minutes or whatever. But it's not what you think this is. And this idea of these endlessly repeating quotas, there are certain milestones that I would say you guys pioneered that influence people, whether they know it or not. And certainly the idea of, I only write quotas, right? That's my whole problem. That's my whole problem as a sovereign. Or that's why they'll never fully accept me. But where do you think I got that? That's how it works. Unfortunately, we only had five or six quotas. Not a dozen. But they were attached to these shriveled, detenuated songs, right? So they just felt like they were all coded. I have only the most random questions left. Young Nathan wants to know, this is my lovely engineer. If either of you went to Lounge Act's karaoke night, I co-ran it. It was, no, seriously, not every night. It was run by Fred Armason and his then wife, Sally. Sally Timms. Sally Timms. And if I was free, I co-hosted with Fred. But it was run by Fred Armason. Yeah. Amazing. Dave, what do you got going? You just had a record come out with a duo record, right? With Lauren Connors comes out in, yeah, in August. Two new bands. You're hearing about them here first, maybe. I don't know, "Bitter Viper," which is me, Taku Unami, Sarah Hennies, and Niko Svelyotis. Yes. Yes. Just made a record that'll come out sometime next year. And "Squandrers," which is me, Wendy Eisenberg, and Kramer. What are you doing? Kramer suggested it. It's from the voice in the headphones, right? But the filmmaker is baiting the person who's working on the film soundtrack and saying, you'll never see the inside of Studio A. It's only Studio B for you, "Squandrers." And where that comes from, the first time that I heard Big Star, when I was a teenager, it was the PVC reissue of Big Star's third. And it has these incredibly nasty liner notes that I feel like they must have been by Grill Marcus, maybe Tom Carson, somebody like that. But the whole point of it is the only person who perhaps has squandered their talent worse than Alex Chilton has squandered his would be Rod Stewart. And I was just thought, man, Alex Chilton, I'm sure he didn't even get paid for that reissue, but it's just like, and then you pick it up and you like the liner notes are like this person just like squandered it all, like they were so talented. That is the saddest documentary that by the way, that crushed me on Big Star. Yeah, it goes through all four records pretty much. And that's sort of the dissolution of the band and the spirit of the band as they progressed. So "Squandrers" is where the vibe is squandering comes from. That's amazing. Beautiful. Well, look, guys, this is all I got. All right. We'll have to reunite to interview you when you make your next record. I would be blushing. I would be so shy. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've got my interview notes, but I'll save those for next time. All right. Well, I really know. This was really about this fantastic new record of yours and an opportunity to thank you guys, not just for this new material, but the entire body of work that you guys created. It's a fun too. It's a nice moment to take stock, I think, and we're as fans, you know, we really appreciate it. Well, thank you. Well, thank you. This has been an awesome, awesome time talking with you. Likewise, likewise. Thanks for listening to The Talkhouse Podcast and thanks to Daniel Lopatin, Jim O'Rourke, and David Grubs for chatting. If you liked what you heard, please follow Talkhouse on your favorite podcasting platform and check out all the great stuff at Talkhouse.com. This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan and the Talkhouse theme is composed and performed by The Range. See you next time.