Death Should Know Better
I can still remember the day I first heard You Forgot It In People- slumped on a beat up couch in college at 3am in a state of tired half-consciousness. The record created a paradigm shift in how I thought about and listened to music. It opened this world of full album listens; the soundtrack to just laying around and absorbing, or many a night drive. All comparisons aside the Oakland duo, Silian Rail, brings me to those ethereal places I first start exploring over a decade ago with their latest album, Parhelion, a beautifully flowing and engaging instrumental record. I spoke with Eric and Robin from the road who helped shed light on their studio approach, how they arrived at their current sound from not even owning guitar tuners, and why they’re a band without a mission statement.
TheBloodBeat: It’d be great if we could start with a little bit about your backstory…
Eric: Sure. We’re both from North Carolina originally and we knew each other when we were like 11 & 12. I was first starting to play in a really bad punk band. We parted ways with each other for a long, long time and randomly we met in SF because Robin was doing something with I was in a band in at the time that we both knew from North Carolina. And we started playing music together. Kind of a funny coincidence.
BB: And how’d you meet up with Jon over at Parks and Records?
E: Well, I met Jon through Daniel, who I was in a band for a while. And Jon knew some people in Daniel’s other band. We share a practice space now so it’s all kinds of random connections.
BB: It’s crazy how all of those relationship interweave when you’re in the same circles. Especially in San Francisco, it seems like a very tightly knit music community.
E: Definitely.
R: Yea, I’d say Oakland even more so.
BB: I know Parks and Records has a pretty strong green initiative. Is that something you identify with strongly?
E: Absolutely. Awareness and protection of the environment and our wonderful natural world is something we both feel very strongly about, and do much in our everyday lives to address from bicycling to recycling shower water, etc. We also like that its a label which is focused on good music, but also has a larger world vision and set of concerns that it integrates with its artistic aims.
BB: Great. So you guys just put out Parhelion on July 13th. And you’re actually I think the first instrumental band that we’ve interviewed. It’d be great if we could talk a little bit about how you approach building songs. Do you get an idea and you both jam on it… and then you slowly piece the parts together…? How do the songs come together?
R: Sure yea. I’d say that at first when we were a band it was much more me coming up with guitar parts and saying “This is the song” and Eric would write parts on top of that. But we’ve been a band for a couple years so its been much more collaborative. So I’ll come up with a part and show it to Eric, and we’ll work on the arrangement and transitional ideas together. It’s become a very collaborative thing. I wouldn’t say we jam a lot, that’s not really my personal approach.
E: Not in the sense of improvising on both sides. Robin will come with some really long and involved parts and play them over and over again for me. Then I’ll play everything I can possibly think of that would work. Then we’ll go back and figure out some of the things that clicked, what works dynamically and piece it all back together. It’s all pretty organic and involved.
BB: So Robin when you’re coming up with guitar parts, do you record them at home, see what you like from the sessions, and go back and restructure it?
R: No, I usually just write it and remember it. Sometimes I’ll record things on my voice memo on my phone, which I guess is kind of low-brow. But usually I’m pretty good about having ideas and keeping them in my head.
BB: Is there any sort of theme to the record? It’s sort of an abstract question. With instrumental music its difficult to tell if there is an overarching objective, you know?
E: I would say that question could be answered both yes and no. There’s definitely things that’s we’ve been working on to move things in different directions. But we’ve never been a band with a mission statement. We try to leave that really open and not focus too hard on that sort of thing. On this record, we definitely widened our dynamic range and break out of habits that some of the older songs fell into. So we got a little dreamier and explored more places. But it wasn’t necessarily a conscious thing.
R: We worked with a different engineer and in a different studio on this record. I think that was another goal of the record was to have something that was more representative of how we sound in a live setting and the songwriting has improved over time so we wanted an album that captured those things. Like we imagine we sound and to finally have that was really rewarding.
E: And our engineer did a really good job of using the studio to our advantage completely which was something we haven’t achieved as much on previous recordings. Something like finding the right tone for each song or part to really deliver it.
R: For us especially being instrumental and having a lot of different dynamics going it really benefited us a lot to take the time and figure all of that out.
BB: And where was it recorded?
R: The Hangar. Its this studio in Sacramento.
BB: And who was the engineer?
E: Robert Cheek. Like tongue-in-cheek. He’s very, very talented.
BB: The quality on the record is really nice. One of the things I think is really interesting is that you do create this dynamic throughout the record but compared to some of the other bands I would loosely associate you with, bands like earlier Broken Social Scene or Mogwai, you seem to have a pretty pure approach to sound and effects. It seems like you spend a lot of time focusing on the tonality but you don’t muddle it with all of these effects like delay and what not that a lot of other instrumental bands fall into.
R: Definitely, I would agree with that. I try to be judicious in my use of effects. It has become a certain replacement for interesting songwriting and parts to just layer effects on guitars and I find that to be pretty boring. If you can use them sparingly and add them at the right time, I think they can be good, but I don’t need it in every song. It’s definitely a crutch for bands in this genre sometimes. And thank you for the nice comparisons.
E: I also think one of the reasons that it’s easier for us to have that approach is when we started playing, the tone consisted of just the clean guitar through an amp, I don’t even think Robin had a tuner at that point. So yea, we’ve adding things really slowly and when you go about it that way, you only add what you really need. Its making sure that a part sounds ok on its own without the effects and using them to highlight it rather than its whole basis.
BB: It’s a nice approach. It makes the album feel really pure, instead of some synthetic piece of studio work. It could feel like a live album.
R: I would say it was fun to be in the studio and be able to add over dubs, and we like to take advantage of that a little, because its fun and makes for a cool listening experience. But we try and keep it pretty close to how the live show would be. We didn’t go through tons of over dubs or other weird instrumentation. So it’s stayed pretty representative of our sound.
BB: And then xylophone comes in out of left field and you’re like ohhhh shit! There it is!
E: Haha, yea. That’s one of those things that.. over time we’ve added instrumentation but only when we really feel the part needs it.
BB: I’m just kidding, it was tasteful and totally fits. But going with that, on your website it looks like you have a pretty long list of people you include in your musical family. Is that more like a touring support thing, or is it more of a studio thing?
R: Touring is mostly just the two of us. We just started to collaborate. We have so many talented friends and musicians in the Bay Area that sometimes its fun to just work on something together and add another element for a show or recording. On the new album we have a guest guitarist on one song. We have an acoustic EP that has violin on a couple songs. Its just a fun way to add dynamic and have a little more fun and employ the talent of our friends. But for touring, 99% of shows are just the two of us.
BB: Switching gears a little bit, I don’t think we talked at all about what your influences are. I’m always interested, especially with smaller bands, in what each of you brings to table; where you come from musically speaking.
R: That’s always a tough question because we both have super varied tastes. I think we share a lot of the same likes but also very all over the place. There’s nothing specific. In the past I did listen to a lot of Broken Social Scene. It’s funny you mentioned it because I think you’re maybe the first person to pick up on that as being an influential band for me. I used to listen to a lot of that back in the day, but not as much these days. I’ve been listening to a lot of local stuff, there’s this great band called Worker Bee from San Jose that I’ve been listening to probably more than anything else in the past 6 months. So yea, local bands have been a big inspiration for us. I wouldn’t say to a lot of Explosions in the Sky or that kind of the stuff. It’s kind of comical how little I listen to that kind of music now…
E: And I actually probably listen to even less of the kind of music we often get grouped in with. I’d say oddly enough the place where our musical tastes overlap the most is probably in Americana and folk. And then the local band thing of course.
BB: There’s kind of a contemplative feel on the record so it’s interesting to hear where that comes from.
R: Yea I don’t know. It’s a combination to me having listened to all these things over the years and having a specific of style and approach to music that Eric happens to understand and compliment really well. It’s not an influence of a particular band or genre, or us going for a particular sound.
BB: It just must be intense sitting down to write a 6 minute instrumental. I imagine its a time intensive process creating it.
E: Yea, I would say more so in the last year its gotten much more involved. I’d also say I’ve played in a lot of bands, and this band is better than any of those at playing and not over-talking or over-thinking things which makes the process a lot easier and enjoyable to just try ideas and play them out; see what we both end up feeling like.
BB: Well I know you’re busy on the road… you’re on a short west coast tour and then you’ve got the album release party at Rickshaw Stop on August 1st. Do you think you’ll be hitting the road again this year after this one comes to a close?
R: Yea I think so. We were talking about touring again in October which will probably be another west coast thing and hopefully in the spring doing a more extensive, full U.S. thing.
E: We do a lot of the Bay Area even when we’re not touring. So we’ll have a bunch of local shows between then as well.
BB: Well I’m looking forward to catching you guys play on the 1st!
- matthew hunt
As far as I’m concerned, epicsauce.com has single-handedly put Milk Bar back on the music map in San Francisco. We recently caught a show that strongly buttressed that opinion, and we here at thebloodbeat take our strong buttressing seriously.
http://www.myspace.com/whirlband
You know what kind of evening you’re in for when the venue is handing out earplugs (a generous service) in anticipation of the noise to come. From the looks of it, Whirl had about as much amplifier power as any band has ever graced the stage at the Haight-based venue. The band came out to a lengthy sample track, as they prepped their instruments for the squealing feedback and heavy shoe-gaze to come. The sextet unrolled a deep and dreamy set, with deep My Bloody Valentine influence in both the style and volume. It was a questionable coincidence that the house played Loveless when the set was through.
http://www.myspace.com/terrymalts
After a brief interlude to let everyone’s ears drums return to normal size, Terry Malts took the stage with upbeat, Ramones-channeled melodies. When you’re lead singer sports a denim coat, a flat brimmed old San Jose Sharks hat, and a Rickenbacker bass, and your lead guitarist looks like Buddy Holly, retro is going to be a chunk of your repertoire. But Terry Malts pulls it off with a modern fuzz, beneath dribbling semi-hollow guitar parts. The culmination of the enthused set was toward the end of “I’m Neurotic,” the set favorite for me by far, when a certain fan got on another’s shoulders and spit PBR at the remainder of the crowd. What’s bubble gum punk rock without a little beer shower? All’s well in the universe.
Ty Segall – Girlfriend
Ty Segall is a bit of a mythological punk star in San Francisco. This being my first exposure to his music, it was easy to understand why. Ty played a solo act this night with a mic, a guitar, a bass drum and a high-hat. The energy teeming out this kid is unrivaled. His topped out, tremble vocals are the keystone to his snotty, ruckus attitude. Supported by a crisp, yet surprisingly heavy guitar, he howls out punk rock-meets-60s pop with a Kink’s flair and Cobain progressions. Sounds like a nice mix? It is! It was a loose rumpus, his long sun-damaged blond hair hanging beside an unsettling Here’s-Johnny grin. At one point he dragged somebody from the audience on stage to sing an impromptu song, and later remarked, “It’s pretty crazy. I used to walk by this place all the time and never played here…” His confusion was genuine, as if disoriented by the full body performance.
Weekend – End Times 
The evening closed with BB favorite’s, Weekend, who we recently had the chance to sit down with. The shoe-gaze punk rockers came out with an extra-terrestrial set at high speeds. While still at a considerable energy level, they offered an ethereal paradigm to the evening. But don’t be fooled, while the fiercely hissing feedback and reverb added a textual element, the crowd erupted into somewhat of a mash pit (the first predominately female one I’ve seen). Without a doubt one of the must-see rock acts playing San Francisco right now. We look forward to their forthcoming album on Slumberland in the next few months.
- matthew hunt, all photos by lorna pacheco
End Times
Deep in the SOMA district of San Francisco there exists a room that resonates with some seriously charged shoegaze about 7 nights a week. Its the practice space shared by Weekend, The Young Prisms and Leagues. Residents within a 5 block radius should be issued ear plugs by district government mandate. The ratty white canvas on the back wall spray-painted “Punx Not Dead” should begin to paint a picture of the environment and influence in the room. If your sense of smell is stronger, the scent of burning plastic permeated the room from a blown out PA speaker. Elsewhere, the floor is littered with pedals, guitars, speakers, recording equipment, and three drum sets. Needless to say, it’s a busy room. But it’s not all about aggression and topped out amps in this grungy practice space. I spoke with Kevin and Shaun of San Francisco’s own Weekend, who gave me a rather cerebral run down on why their upcoming record is anything but lo-fi, the reason they turned from punk to something more aesthetic, and why their music is like a kamikaze jet.
TheBloodBeat: Alright, maybe you could take me from the beginning, we can cover some of the stock shit first. How’d you guys get to playing together?
Shaun: Ha! Alright, I get the stock shit. Well I’ve been playing music with Taylor, our drummer, since fourth grade. We’ve been in various bands off and on. We’ve known each for 15 years or so. We knew Kevin since middle school as well. He moved to Truckee for a bit, and we were both doing our own musical things for a while, but we’ve kept in contact. We’ve always wanted to collaborate, and finally got the chance. We moved to SF from Santa Cruz, we started something for a little, but it sort of fizzled out because I was into other things besides music at that point. Then a year or two later we met up again and we got way more adamant about starting something up. So we started a band again, and wanted to make it something serious.
Kevin: I moved up here to go to school. That was around 2005. And we tried to start the band but there was just too much shit going on. I ended up dropping out of school and picking it up again in another place, so the music was put on the back-burner until a year and a half ago. I moved back up here, we got this practice space and got Taylor in on it.
BB: How long have you guys been in this space here?
K: A little over a year I think. Maybe a year and a half.
BB: And that was around the time you started playing full time together?
S: Yea we went through a month of, sort of a teething period first. Taylor officially joined in October 2008 I think? We started writing our first real songs in 2009 though.
K: It’s been a project in development for many years. It’s been an idea for a long time.
BB: Tell me a little bit about how you got started with your labels. Seems like you’ve worked with a few different guys now. The split was on Transparent. You did the 10” with Mexican Summer..
S: Yea, and then the full length is going to be on Slumberland. I guess when we first started we didn’t have a recording budget or anything like that. I did some rough demos on my computer at home, sort of like placeholders of how we wanted things to sound in the future, sketches of how we wanted things to sound. Keith from Mexican Summer contacted us looking for some recordings and we were really into their philosophy of making music tactile again and really pushing vinyl again. Then we saw the roster and were really into a lot of the bands on there.
K: They were the first label to contact us. We were pretty clueless really…
BB: You were lucky to fall in with such a good group. Those guys have great taste.
S: Yea Keith has been great. He just heard the demos, asked for some recordings, and it just so happened that day we got out of the recording studio to clean up the demos so we sent those along and he said great, lets put something out. And then Transparent was one of the first blogs to put out one of our original demos. They were the first ones to write about us and give any recognition.
BB: And they are in the UK right?
S: Yea they’re in London. They’re great, we met up with them at South By South West.
K: They were just such a small operation back then. They seemed like some cool guys in the UK, back before they even put out the Washed Out 7”.
S: We were really into them because they actually took a lot of time to listen to our music and write about it, not just some circular blogging atmosphere. They do something that’s actually original which is great.
BB: So did Keith see you at a show or something? How’d he find out about you?
S: No, no, I don’t even think we’d played any shows at that point. Maybe a couple I guess. I think it was truly just a myspace find.
BB: So he just saw some of your friends, heard your stuff, and said cool I should talk to these guys?
K: Yea pretty much. I think added Captured Tracks to our friends at one point and maybe Keith saw us then.
BB: Great. So where did you do your recordings?
S: We’ve recorded all of stuff at Function 8 studios. A friend of ours does all of the engineering there. Ruminator Audio is his production company. He’s actually an old family friend of mine. He used to play in a band with my dad in the 80s, so it’s a pretty funny connection. We’re stoked to have him on board because he truly understands what we want to do, and has the technological know-how to get there.
BB: And originally you did a couple of the demos on your computer at home?
S: Yea, just on GarageBand, slapped together a few things. It’s great if you’re going for that lucent, sloppy aesthetic. There is a certain charm to the haphazardness.
BB: That lo-fi, DIY sound. Totally. Going along that direction, you obviously listen to a lot of My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth type of music. Do you all have a similar taste? Or is there a dynamic where somebody is really influenced by a certain style and that meets the other interests in the middle? Or is it more collective? Help me break all that apart.
K: I think Shaun and I are really closely related musically. We both grew up listening to a lot of the same stuff. We’ve experienced a lot of the same musical discoveries together. We’ve analyzed and interpreted a lot of those things together. The interesting thing is bringing Taylor into it because he’s just incredibly eclectic and digs on all the stuff we like. But he also comes from this super deep history of grind core and metal, so he kind of gives it all a new spin.
S: We all grew up listening to hardcore, metal, punk and whatever. I’d like to think all of that is still alive in our music, and Taylor certainly brings that out of the songs.
BB: So, when you think about noise and feedback… A lot of the lyrics seem to be going for that incoherent, drifty style. Reverb obviously seems to be a big piece of it as well. Could you talk me through how you think about all that, how you approach it?
K: For me getting into shoegaze music was a very punk rock thing. To me it was a very punk idea to make your guitar so noisy and inaudible. I stopped listening to punk because to me the music got uninteresting. It wasn’t punk anymore. So for me I think the draw to shoegaze music was that punk rock aesthetic. Something that’s just totally weird, and new, and fucked up. I think a lot of people make shoegaze to be personal and pretty. But I think there’s also another side to it that’s really punk. We saw My Bloody Valentine play and it was just insane. It was the loudest, most aggressive, intense show I’ve ever been to.
BB: They had a reputation for that.
K: Yea but when you listen to their records you just think: lost in translation.
S: I guess for me I still really favor the shoegaze stuff that’s really aggressive. I’m not particularly into that dreamy, ethereal stuff. My favorite shoegaze record is Isn’t Anything, the first My Bloody Valentine record, just because it still has that aggression in tact while they were messing around with textures, noise, and you’re not just totally floating there.
BB: [points to the A Place to Bury Strangers record on the wall] Those guys are pretty aggressive, speaking of all that.
K: Oh yea, we played with them. It was amazing. Their live show was just…
BB: Full throttle?
K: It was full throttle. But still in such an intense, controlled, wonderful sounding way. I was totally blown away. I hope we get to play with them more.
BB: You guys listen to that band Suicide? That’s a band I think you are hearing a lot more of shoegaze today. Its a more beat centric and all that.
K: Yea. That’s a band that could write something totally weird and fucked up, but still groovey. That’s the other side of it I guess. Is not wanting to write something totally atonal and textural because that’s not the world we live in. There are still other people in it and other melodies. There’s a lot happening outside of that dissonant noise.
BB: That’s a great point. I’ve never really thought about it that way. Shifting gears a bit, you have the full length coming out in September?
S: September or October.
BB: Cool, so how many songs is that going to be? Is it continuing on a similar trajectory? Are there many surprises?
S: Yea I think there are going to be a lot of surprises.
BB: Haha alright good, well don’t give the whole thing away.
S: I think the releases we’ve had so far have been written knowing that they’d be released in that matter. We knew we had a 7” coming out so we wrote a song for a 7” so it was a little more concise and pop centric. The 10” even that was pretty tight. On the full length there is a lot more space in the songs. I think there is a larger emphasis on the atmosphere.
K: We had the time and space to really develop ideas. We hopefully have pulled a lot of tracks together into this larger thing and don’t have to convey the whole message in one or two tracks. So that gave us some liberty to do some new stuff.
BB: And is it entirely just the three of you?
S: Stef from The Young Prisms sings on the track that’s on our 7”. So that track is on this as well.
BB: Oh wow, I didn’t realize she was on that track.
K: She sang back up. She was on the “ooh la-las.”
BB: And then after the record comes out are you hitting the road to do some touring?
S: We’re in the process of figuring that out now. We’ve been working on this album for over a year or so, so we want to make sure we do it right when it comes out.
BB: And you guys have day time gigs for the time being?
S: I just graduated from school so I work at a bike shop and a graphic design studio right now.
K: I work for the city doing urban planning for bicycle infrastructure for the city of San Francisco. I kind of just fell into it. I studied art in college but during that time I was really involved in the bicycle community. So I decided I wanted to be involved helping to make San Francisco more like Europe: a lot more bikes, a lot better facilities.
BB: So, sorry back to touring, you made it down to play SXSW this year?
S: We shared a van with The Young Prisms. There were 8 of us… 9 of us? 8 of us. That was intense. Along the way we made it out to Denver, we played in Oklahoma, Arkansas. We got into some strange stuff out there.
BB: I think I saw the single most racist piece of anything I’ll ever see in my entire life in a bathroom stall in Oklahoma.
S: Haha, wow. I think we played one of our best shows ever in Arkansas. It was insane. We played at this house that some college kids owned. This nice, huge suburban house on this corner. They packed us, Young Prisms and Woodsman into there. A bunch of kids showed up and we decided to do a round robin set. Each band played one song and the next band played a song and the next band played a song, and all of the kids were just in the middle swirling. At the end we all played together for 20 minutes or so.
K: And all of the amps were blocking the exits. You can imagine it right? Young Prisms have some pretty big amps and lots of gear. We have big amps and lots of gear. Woodsman are pretty loud as well. All three of us playing for twenty minutes was just total white noise. Crowd surfing inside the living room, the floor was just wilting underneath the pressure of all these kids…
BB: A couple of grandma’s urns got broken…
K: Ash just flying everywhere!
S: There was actually a sorority on the other side of the street. They didn’t show up though…
BB: You also played on Day Trotter recently?
S: It’s funny, we recorded that back in I think January? Whenever Noise Pop was. A long time ago. It even says it just came out. I think it said “Recorded June 25th, 2010,” when it was recorded like five months ago. They came to town for Noise Pop. They took over this studio downtown, Studio Paradiso. They contacted us out of nowhere and said, hey do you want to come down? We put our amps in a taxi and went down. The whole thing was one take, no re-dos, no mixing.
K: It has a certain energy too it.
BB: It sounds really pure.
S: Live recordings usually just sound really bad but it has this charming energy that you can’t really recreate. We actually did a lot of tracks on the full length live with all of us in one room and just separated some stuff, maybe did some overdubs. We realized it was a) much faster to do everything at once and b) really hard for us to recreate that live energy sitting alone in a room with headphones on.
BB: And your type of music is well-suited for that recording style too.
K: Sure. We didn’t really cut any corners though. We had this opportunity to work in this really professional studio and we didn’t want to half-ass it. We tried to make the record as interesting and high fidelity as possible.
S: It’s anything but a lo-fi record.
K: Some people are really scared of the studio and having all of that potential to make their music sound polished. I think some of the most interesting records actually take advantage of all that equipment and those really interesting sounds you can get if you try. Just pumping shit out of a loud speaker into a cannon and recording that, but also doing that with a clean guitar track with a $4,000 ribbon mic or something and using all the sounds together. Not just sticking to some really plain aesthetic.
S: And not just throwing it into a mixer tape.
BB: There’s enough of that around.
S: It’s just dumbing it down.
BB: Last question, hypothetical: if you were to assign your style of music to a single mode of transportation, what would it be?
K: Bicycle!
S: Kamikaze jet!
K: Is that really a mode of transportation?
S: Transportation to hell!
Catch Weekend live at their upcoming show at Milk Bar on 7/15 with Ty Segall, Terry Malts and Whirl. And be sure to keep an eye out for their LP on Slumberland this fall.
- Matthew Hunt, photo by Lorna Pacheco
