Planningtorock "W" album stream
Electronic artist and affiliate of the Knife, Planningtorock, releases her second album W on May 24th. The people at the Hype Machine have made available the stream below. Enjoy!
Archive interview: Will Oldham (Palace Brothers), 1993
The Palace Brothers first visit to Ireland at the end of 1993 was a brief but busy affair, as they crammed in three shows in Dublin, plus one each in Cork and Belfast. To put things in context, they had released some great music that year - the debut album 'There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You' and the masterpiece single 'Ohio River Boat Song'. The line-up at the time included the ever present Will Oldham as well as ex-Slint (and future Tortoise, Royal Trux, Papa M) guitarist Dave Pajo. It's also worth bearing in mind that Oldham is one of the most awkward interviewees I've ever come across. Clearly he has no time for the publicity machine which drives the music industry, and back then I found him a bit childish and annoying, although I subsequently heard about his background as a method actor and it makes a bit more sense. Maybe he was just playing with us. Here's the interview then.....
- Will Oldham, the central figure in the Palace Brothers set up is clearly a man only interested in writing and performing his music. The peripheral elements of the music business have no interest for him, and who can blame him? We met up after his band's brilliant gig in Queen's Student Union Speakeasy. He's a notoriously difficult interviewee, he prefers to ignore questions and talk on random subjects instead. Bizarrely, psychoanalysis rears its head first.
Will: "If you want to talk about the songs we're going to need to talk pyschoanalysis. Do people do that still? Are there still Freudian analysts? I would love to set that Freud guy down for about a month and just talk things over."
- He's kind of discredited now though, a lot of his theories don't hold much sway anymore.
W: "You mean he's disbarred? He doesn't practice anymore?"
- Erm, he's actually dead, he died in the 1930s, I think.
W: "Oh never mind, I'll just go and see another analyst I guess."
- Do you think acoustic music is a reaction to more hi-tech stuff?
W: "It's more economical. It's much cheaper to record like that. You can buy a four track recorder and an acoustic guitar, or you can go into an expensive studio. The album ("There is No-one...") was done on 8-track really cheaply, although the next releases have been on 16 track. With the line-up changes the songs always have different people playing on each one - the line-up changes on virtually every song. Although tonight's line-up bears little resemblance to the records, that gig tonight is as hard as we rock!"
- Tonight's gig was free and there were some puzzled jocks behind me who were booing.
W: "They were booing! Would you recognise them if you saw them again? If they had any balls they would have come down the front and faced us. That's one of the drawbacks of having a free gig. They're probably students anyway, they're living the high life - it's Disneyland in high school."
- How has your music been received generally on this Irish tour?
W: "Cork and Dublin were really good, Cork was wild, it was like America! We didn't go on til after midnight. There were people listening to the music and dancing - they weren't just there for late drinking."
- What about America? Is it is easy to get your type of music heard?
W: "The advantage of Britain is that it is much more concentrated, in America it's quite hard to get anything out of your own area. There are some worthwhile outlets - fanzines like 'Forced Exposure' have been going for a while - it would have things like tour diaries from Thurston Moore and Steve Albini - it's a real Homestead ghetto."
- Were you involved with any of those musicians before the Palace Brothers?
W: "I was around, on the edge of things, in Louisville Kentucky." (trivial fact: check the credits on Slint's 'Spiderland' - Will took the cover photo!)
Talk returns to tonight's events and Will learns of a few parties and 'a dance' (he's playing with us again I think- that's a disco to you and I) going on downstairs. He seems surprised at the level of activity in Belfast which is at odds to what he has heard from recent news reports. If my memory is correct, this gig took place a few days after the Shankill Road bomb, so things are actually rather subdued. Having said that, the Palace Brothers played for ages and got a great reception - most of the first album and a few yet to be released songs. They are pretty special, and they certainly don't pander to the whims of the press.
interview by Jonathan Greer (modified from Weedbus issue 6, early 1994)
This interview was first published in Weedbus fanzine issue 12.
Pigeonholes are a real nuisance aren't they? New York's Chavez have been struggling with metal and hardcore accusations since their fine debut 'Gone Glimmering' came out in mid-'95. These are puzzling comparisons, especially when you hear Chavez creating their mesmerising psychedelic free-rock, with good tunes and high-end parts a speciality. The fab recent album 'Ride The Fader' (Matador) should go further towards the band being appreciated in the right light. We let Matt Sweeney (gtr/ voc) out us straight on a few things.
Yourself and Clay started off the group -were you in any bands previous to this?
"Yes, Clay was in Bullet Lavolta. We both had been in bands, and we hated being in bands after a while, so we tried to make a band that was something that we liked doing. We just talked about doing something different, and then the two of us played together for about six months - just droney weird stuff, holding one note for ages, more on the high end spectrum to Earth and the like! There was no low-end rumble at all, but we started doing low-end stuff because we didn't have a bass player. Myself and Clay had a lot of nerdish conversations about how we liked stuff like that. We had been playing for a long time when James Lo (ex-Live Skull) offered to play drums with us. After about a year we finally had a line -up as my friend Scott who I'd known for about ten years decided to move to New York, so we had a bass player. Ironically we started playing together the week that Kurt Cobain killed himself."
How has the UK responded to Chavez so far?
"I don't know. We've gotten some nice reviews but I'm not sure if people really get what we're about. We either get treated as another Matador band or else we're put in a Heavy Metal bracket which in particular is baffling to me. We would get these favourable live reviews, but they'd be comparing us to Husker Du or Helmet, and with all due respect to that shit, I don't ever listen to it! When we played here we were expecting a chilly reception (Guided By Voices tour early 95) but the shows went fine - Scotland was especially good, I think we were the best received out of GBV and the Amps! There was this one guy who came up and said 'my friend said you're a bit like the Grifters but I think you're more like My Bloody Valentine with those effects pedals you're using', and I had to tell him that we don't use any effects pedals. We seem to get compared to everything under the sun. This only happens in England - in Holland we get treated like a proper art-rock band! It's strange because we've only played four shows this year - we're not a full-time band, but I think since people have started to hear the new stuff they've been a bit more accepting and understanding that we do our own thing. People are now saying 'You're sort of psychedelic, aren't you?' and that's a step in the right direction! It's such a mystery why we get lumped in with hard rock. Maybe it's because Clay was in Bullet Lavolta and they were often misnomered as a hardcore band. People are now thinking more along the lines of the Soft Machine's first album or Wire, stuff that we don't really sound like but is definitely within the ball park of what I like, which is kind of out-there, free rock!"
What do you listen to then?
"I'm the guy in the band who listens to the most records, I think! The record I've been listening to most recently is 'Or' by Skip Spence, I have pretty diverse tastes but it's usually rock oriented stuff with some kind of a beat! I've also gotten seriously into 'The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter' by the Incredible String Band and I love bands like the Creation and the Who, and that definitely has a bearing on what we do. I also love teenage garage rock bands like Crypt records 'Back From The Grave' compilations. It doesn't have anything to do with how we sound, it's just something I'm into."
Have you a songwriting interaction with Clay?
"Kind of. This new record was very democratic, James (drums) was very involved in it, to the point where he has a lot to say about melodies and arrangements. He wrote the piano song on the record ('Ever Overpsyched') which is pretty much the first song he has ever written. It's weird because he knew how play piano and stuff but I've been pushing him to write. He was really turned on by Roxy Music's 'Stranded' and the piano piece 'Sunset'. Usually the songs start out with one guy having an idea and the others helping him out - we all react to each others ideas. Half of it is totally improvisational and the other half is totally tight-assed and humourless, trying to make sense of what we're doing!"
Glancing through the track names on your debut release 'Gone Glimmering', you could be forgiven for assuming that you have a fondness for 70s progressive rock - 'Wakeman's Air', 'The Flaming Gong'. Who came up with these?!
"All of our songs don't have titles when they get written, and especially on the first album they probably wouldn't even have had a vocal line for a while. Those titles are a little more flippant than I intended. I don't think we realised how silly we were being!"
Your drummer, James Lo, is known for having a bit of a reputation. Is it all true?
"When I was in high school and buying Live Skull albums, James was the definition of a scary downtown art-rock drummer! When I finally hooked up with him years later he turned out to be an incredibly nice guy. His attitude towards making music really affected me- has this 'don't think about it, just do it' way of working, but not in a straight ahead rock n roll way. Make it different, make it interesting. His background is that he was regarded as some sort of drum prodigy and when he was in high school he was allowed to leave whatever class he was in to go and practice his drums. He was groomed as a percusion genius and sent to New England Conservatory which he hated. He was totally turned off to the Classical approach and he developed a liking for playing with people who didn't know how to play. Any music that he could identify immediately and see the logic behind it lost interest for him, he's far more interested in stuff that confuses him."
So what's next for Chavez?
"We're going to do some proper touring in the States, hopefully with Fuck and the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, who are really great, but essentially we're going out on our own. Future plans are basically to support the new record, and to have as much fun doing it as possible. We don't make any money off this band, everyone has gotjobs so we slot Chavez in around those, so there's not really a lot of pressure to be successful. It was hard when we were recording this album because we couldn't all be in the same place at the same time, but it turned out great considering that."
stream forthcoming Gang Gang Dance album: Eye Contact
I haven't forked out for Spotify premium yet, so I'm getting a lot of this week's new music fix from web streams. Here is the new Gang Gang Dance album, which is out in the UK next week. I was a bit obsessed with them when I was in New York when Saint Dymphna came out - they played everywhere, and achored the NY leg of Boadrum 88. UK dates this month as well - Manchester 11th, Great Escape in Brighton 12th and the Animal Collective ATP that weekend, finishing up in London on the 16th (XOYO)
