Songs and Sonics

In a world overrun with lifeless Autotuned vocals and perfectly Pro Tooled grooves, Florida-based singer/songwriter Marc Sirdoreus — who performs as Marc with a C — is like a breath of fresh air. His cassette 4-track recordings are unapologetically lo-fi. They’re imperfect by any technical yardstick. But, as everyone says (and rarely follows through with), the recording quality shouldn’t matter. At the end of the day, it should all be about the songs.

And in Marc with a C’s case, what terrific songs they are! Classic mid-’60s pop melodies and jangly guitars run up against witty ruminations on nerdy girls, teenage angst, and dating someone for their record collection. Marc’s songs go beyond the typical singer-songwriter vocabulary; they’re often astonishingly direct, delightfully funny, and painfully honest. The effect is not unlike having an enthusiastic best friend telling you about something amazing that happened to him the other day.

Marc with a C’s latest release is called — and oh man, the spambots are really going to find this blog now — Linda Lovelace for President. Don’t ask. Or, actually, I’ll ask, in the interview below.

Since 2002, most Marc with a C releases prominently featured Mr. Sirdoreus’s songwriting. This time out, Chris Zabriskie (live drummer for Marc with a C and a fine songwriter in his own right) contributed three songs, though it’s still Marc playing all the instruments on the album. The recording is appropriately rough around the edges, but it’s very much alive, very human, and brimming with lyrical gems from start to finish.

“I think everyone thinks I’m their little secret,” says Marc about his fans. He’s right. And you’re about to be let in on the secret as well.

Marc: That’s difficult to sum up. My first album, Human Slushy, was pretty polished — for me, at least — and the second full-length was gearing up to be a big ol’ arena rock affair. However, that second record was more the sound and performances of the producer than my own ideas for Marc With a C. At the eleventh hour, we ditched all of those recordings and started fresh for what eventually became Bubblegum Romance. A much more stripped down, lo-fi and fun affair.

Chris Zabriskie really helped push me in the direction of making the album sound at least a little bit like the shows felt, and his offer to pick up the production duties sold me. If you play the original sessions for the first draft of that album against what was eventually released, it’s pretty clear that I had little to no input on what was being done with my songs. Chris helped me make the most important decisions of my musical life, for sure.

After those initial albums, I stayed pretty bare bones with the production, doing it on my own. I like to think each album has its own theme, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever done better than a record I put out in 2007 called Normal Bias. It was one complete thought, and sequenced in the order it was recorded in — meaning that you can hear my voice going out by the end of the album. I sang a lot over those three days.

It’s actually pretty simple: though I thought that there was certainly an undercurrent of spiritual turmoil running through the lyrics of the tracks, I mostly wanted to try and make an album that was simply a really cool collection of pop songs. This backfired, of course. At the end of five straight days of recording, I plopped down on the couch to watch the film that the record takes its title from… and was shocked to find that all of these songs could serve as lyrical counterpoints to that film. Besides “Jessica, I Heard You Like The Who,” mind you.

This album also carries the distinction of having what are possibly the two longest songs I’ve recorded to date: the title track and “Satellite.” This surprised a lot of people, as I’ve sort of built my teensy little career on three minute long pop songs.

You know, my wife said the exact same thing about the song. That one had been kicking around on various demos for years, and we could never fit it into the grand scheme of whatever album we were working on at the time. The song was literally on Bubblegum Romance when we sent it off to the duplication plant, and I believe that Chris Zabriskie had to make some frantic last-minute calls when we decided to remove it.

That’s a hard one to answer, and this response will totally seem like I’m pulling your chain. The lyrics are fairly esoteric, and that’s because I was combining elements of the film with another subject altogether: the original beta testers of Quantum Link, which eventually morphed into America Online.

I saw an early tester going onto the service and becoming very involved with seeing how far the chat room personas could be taken, eventually reinventing himself as a woman. After this heterosexual man spent hours/days/weeks/months pretending to be a flirty girl named Nikki, there were some very notable changes in his behavior that I wouldn’t feel comfortable elaborating on. I would imagine that due to our ability to become a different person in a virtual world, there may likely have been a rise in multiple personality disorders.

How this related to the film for me is hard to explain, but in it, you see Linda trying to become a real actress, pretending that she had been forced into her porn career — even though it was the only reason anyone knew of her in the first place. And in the plot itself, she makes her freewheeling sexuality very, very well known while also attempting to sell herself as a wholesome and virtuous leader. For reasons that likely make no sense to anyone but me, I saw major connections between the film and what I’d witnessed firsthand. The lyrics in the song itself probably give no clues either, but it feels really good to sing about, and I’m very proud of that one.

I don’t actually have one. If I’m going to do some recording, I gather up the needed instruments from around the house, put them somewhere that won’t bother anyone else, and go to work until I’m tired of listening to the song. This is a picture of what my setup looked like when I did some simple acoustic demos a few days ago, and yes… that is my living room.

That drop-out in “Born Vintage” was actually present on Chris’s home demo of the song. He’d gotten up to answer the door and he left the drum machine running. No one was there, so he sat back down and finished the song, leaving in the “blemish.” I thought it was a really cool counterpoint, so I kept it in my own rendition of the tune.

I never really think of anything I’m doing while recording as a trick, so to speak.

Sometimes, I’ve been drinking and I try to sound sober during vocal takes. It usually works, so I think that might count. Often I’ll use as much tape as I possibly can before I start losing clarity on the magnetic strip, and then I’ll layer the last remaining parts onto a computer after transferring the material. The bad part about this is that the basic tracks end up submixed, and you can’t really go back and change anything you dislike later. You have to sort of be married to what you’ve committed to tape to finish a song in this fashion.

It’s always different. Sometimes I’ve simply got nothing to do, so I’m plunking around with a guitar, improvising lyrics. If something sticks out, I’ll drop everything and work on the idea until it’s finished.

Lately, the work has gone like this: I don’t smoke in my house, so I’ll go to the garage or patio to indulge my habit. I almost always have a notebook within reach, and I’ll scribble things out with no real purpose. Sometimes I end up with fully formed lyrics, other times I’ll just get maybe a scattered verse out of it that I’ll later use as a middle eight. And there are days when I wake up and simply feel like completing those things, so I scour notebooks and see which ones hold up the best. But often, if I don’t immediately have a melody in my head to go with the lyrics, it’ll never be finished. I do finish quite a bit more than I release, though.

Ah, would a gentleman tell a secret like that? I’m not sure. I can say that in my dating days, gals without good taste in music didn’t last long on my meter of interest. I can also say that in the past I’ve been more guilty of trying to get into the tape decks of possible girlfriends than underneath their clothes. Some actually found that more offensive.

I will honestly answer “no.” I’ve also been told that I can convince myself of anything, no matter how far-fetched, melodramatic or simply untrue it may be. So… I might have done so without realizing. I often don’t write about something nowadays unless it’s in the pretty distant past, but writing pop lyrics is really nothing if you’re not making mountains out of molehills, no?

I guess it’s really a fair mixture of both. I do my very best to only sing lyrics that I can stand behind, and I’ve been known to retire songs when I no longer relate to them. But honestly… the craft of the song itself is just as important to me as what I’m saying in it. Should the lyrics ever become more important than the entire unit as a whole, I’d probably be better off writing pamphlets than pop tunes.

Oh, yes. I was actually threatened with a lawsuit once. It seems that a gal wasn’t happy that I mentioned her by name in “Blowjob Queen,” but the joke is really on her. I thought the song was a stupid throwaway, but I decided to play it live to sort of underhandedly get even with her for being so ridiculous about the whole situation. Now it’s requested at nearly every show I play.

I attempt to steer clear of things that would upset my family, but that doesn’t always end up as a hard and fast rule. It’s more that I’ll write about anything I need to express at that moment, but just how much I’ll perform it after the fact remains to be seen. There are really personal songs that I haven’t performed live for years, (”Well Fucked Sailor” from my first album is a great example), but I still really love that I got the chance to express those sentiments. But when it comes to playing in front of a live audience, that’s when any sort of fear about my writing comes into play. Seeing facial expressions while people listen, you know? Sometimes performing live is a bit like being a film director that is expected to re-enact the audiences favorite scenes from your pictures.

I didn’t receive this advice directly, but… I was watching a documentary about Mystery Science Theater once, and one of the writers said something to the effect of “we don’t worry about making sure everyone gets it, just that the right people get it.” That sentence is constantly in my mind when I’m creating anything.

I don’t know. It’d have to be for a label that I already really liked, and the producer would have to be a perfect match. I’m mostly into the lo-fi recording side of things because I don’t think that the songs I make up call for much more sheen than I give them. I’m not shooting for mainstream radio play, I don’t want People magazine rooting through my garbage, and best of all… If the recordings are “warts and all,” then the listener knows exactly what I sound like, not so much what an experienced producer can make me sound like.

For the first time in a while, I’m not totally sure. I’ve made quite a few recordings in the last decade, and I think it’s time to take it on the road again. You know, enjoy what I’ve made and watch others hear it for the first time. As far as writing goes, I’m not exactly in a hurry to finish another album. I’ve written a few new songs, but they’re quite long, melancholy and esoteric. Of course… that’s the exact same thing I said right after we finished making Normal Bias, so… anything goes at this point.

Vinyl records.

My family.

Religious confusion.

Death.

Bubblegum.

Codeine.

Showering.

Limitations.

Insomnia.

People that let me ramble until I eventually make a point.

Marc with a C’s web site | Marc with a C’s MySpace page | Buy Marc with a C’s albums

If the present day were the golden age of Looney Tunes cartoons, Mike Langlie could easily fill the shoes of an electronic Carl Stalling.

Mike’s recording project, Twink, is toy piano-fueled electronica. It’s delightfully bonkers, and a perfect soundtrack for stories involving… bunnies. In fact, bunnies figure prominently in Twink’s CD packaging, web site artwork, and song titles.

Bunnies? No, not Bugs. And not Playboy. This is kid-friendly music with an avant-garde edge, equally enjoyable for adults and children. Mike began experimenting with toy pianos after becoming disillusioned with the rock band scene: “The more I played with [the toy piano], the more fun I had — something I was missing in making music,” he says. And toy pianos seem to naturally lead down the path to… bunnies.

However, there’s another level to Twink’s playful sound — something slightly sinister seems to be lurking underneath instrumental songs about rainbows, blindfold bird races, and toadstool tea. The hints of darkness are fleeting; they won’t scare off the kids, but they’re enough to keep adults off-balance and intrigued.

Twink’s just-released album, A Very Fine Adventure, is aptly-named. From the clever packaging and gorgeous illustrations (Mike is a skilled visual artist) down to the music itself, Twink serves up twisted orchestral toy piano goodness which surprises, delights, and sometimes amazes. In fact, I can’t remember the last CD I’ve heard that made me smile so consistently throughout.

Mike’s already got some insightful interviews on his web site, and, true to Songs and Sonics fashion, we won’t be rehashing the subjects covered in those articles here. Instead, we’ll talk about A Very Fine Adventure and Twink’s previous remix collaboration release, Ice Cream Headache, along with some previously unreleased sound clips from that project.

Oh, and one last thing: Mike also has an excellent blog, Yip Yop. It’s chock full of cool, quirky, funny things that you might find worthwhile. Kind of like Twink’s music.

Mike: As a kid, I’d keep myself busy making my own cereal boxes and cardboard cities. I didn’t know what a designer was, or about art-related careers. It wasn’t until college that I actually considered pursuing that path. But even before then, I’d done my share of freelance work for posters and things.

I do web and print design for a living, and in my down time I’m usually juggling several projects for myself or friends. I’m glad I got to be a part of the ‘zine years. I miss that tactile-ness since the web took over. Nice packaging wins me over every time, which explains my haphazard CD collection. I’ve done a lot of album covers — it’s one of my favorite things. Honestly, at least half the reason I make music is to create the packaging and related goodies. Mp3s are quickly killing that market, but I continue to put out discs anyway.

The covers were printed by a company called Vitagraphics. I always freak out and lose sleep anytime I get a job printed, especially when it’s something complicated like a die-cut. They were very patient and helpful with all my neurotic concerns.

For a while now, I’ve gotten the discs themselves made by CDMan in Canada. This was one of those projects that required lots of manual assembly at home, which I enjoy. It adds more personality than just a pre-packaged product.

I come from the school of “whatever works.” I’m no purist in recording, and love using the studio as a creative tool. Toy pianos can be pretty noisy, not to mention hard on the ear at certain pitches, so I tweak the heck out of a signal to smooth things out. I’m a pretty mediocre player, and am rarely satisfied with my own performance. It’s not uncommon to stitch a tune together from lots of takes or chopped up parts. Sometimes songs are written from pasting random bits in a different order. I’ve got a background in electronic music and audio collage, so it’s a natural way for me to work. These days, most of my tracks are made with the program Reason. It’s not meant for live audio like Pro Tools, so I treat all my recorded parts like a remix. It’s kind of a backwards way to do things, but I like the process.

Most of my toy pianos look a lot nicer than they play. There are a few that I rely on the most, and the rest make little cameos here and there. I try to use every one at least once, even just a couple notes, shaking it, or using it as percussion.

Most often, it’s a particular instrument that determines the direction a song will take right from the beginning. Some are tuned strangely or are missing keys, or have a few notes that sound so weird that I just have to use them. Songs like Flytrap and Lost in the Mysterious Mist were done with really wonky pianos and couldn’t have been written any other way. I try to dig out all of their personalities and embrace the quirks.

You got it! For such a terrible game it’s got some great sounds. I’ve always loved the sound of Atari 2600 and am in heaven now that the chiptune movement is in full swing.

This disc doesn’t have so many nuggets like The Broken Record (an earlier Twink release) but I did manage to include bits and pieces from whatever electronic toys and old children’s records were at arm’s length. What the Dickens is built on a loop from a cracked 78 with no label. A bunch of tracks are sprinkled with circuit-bent or malfunctioning toy keyboard rhythm sections.

That’s a weird and totally unconvincing pan flute sound I’ve been determined to use for a long time. I believe there are no bad sounds, it’s all in how they’re used. Of course, I listen to bands like Merzbow. That sound reminds me of Peter Gabriel’s early 80s stuff.

It’s one of many sounds I’ve collected for Reason’s soft synths which is so weird that I had to give it its own song.

I guess this is my World album, appropriately enough. I’m always looking for different directions to take the toy piano. And working with electronic music tools, I try to add elements that aren’t the typical techno-ish sound, though I like that too. Friends that I’ve collaborated with have turned me on to things like Caribbean and reggae. I like mixing different elements together to keep things interesting, especially to me.

There have been at least a couple of tunes where the main piano chosen didn’t have the range needed to hit all the notes. I’d record one note from two or three other pianos to fill in. It’s a maddening exercise of layering tons of tracks to complete a seemingly simple part. I’ve also gone back and forth with a couple of collaborators, each of us re-recording our parts several times because we just couldn’t get out instruments in tune. The worst is living in a busy neighborhood and having a good take blown by karaoke or someone fixing their motorcycle. That’s another reason I tend to work in chunks.

It really ran the spectrum. Some people kept the parts as-is and embellished with arrangements. Some came back totally unrecognizable. Some were more typical collaborations that built up gradually over turns.

The ones that changed the most are Peanut Butter Crunch (with Ergo Phizmiz), Plastic Spoon (with Evan Morris), Strawberry Swirl (with nonnon), and Dreamsicle (with Bardacid). Everybody did a good job at extracting the true essence of each track. Many were real surprises at first, but then seemed like they were meant to be.

Here are some before-and-after examples.

Dreamsicle is notable for being based on a 4-note Little Tykes toy piano.

Tom Glazer is great. He was prolific in a wide variety of styles. His albums ranged from circus to science themes, and even his silliest songs never spoke down to kids. They Might Be Giants even cover his tunes.

I wouldn’t call it the worst, but Little Marcy (the religious singing puppet) never ceases to astound me. Simultaneously fascinating and abrasive. I recommend her to everyone, and am usually not thanked kindly.

I don’t know if there’s a common thread to what I listen to. I haven’t heard music on the radio in years so I’m probably very out of touch. Some bands and artists I dig right now are Ratatat, Venetian Snares, Daniel Higgs, Birdy Nam Nam, Johnny Dowd, Lykke Li, anything by Danger Mouse. I’ve gone through phases that I return to: 1980s West Coast skate punk, 4AD goth and dreampop bands, John Zorn’s Tzadik label, German industrial, ambient techno, 1950s yodelling cowboys.

It seems like I mine the past more and more for interesting stuff. For Christmas, I gave Karen two great CD collections of early 78s. People Take Warning is all murder ballads and songs of calamity. Victrola Favorites has a ton of strange crackly wonders from around the world. It doesn’t hurt that both sets come in incredible packages.

Since the duo FM3 released their Buddha Machine, a plastic iPod-sized device with several looping ambient pieces and a built-in speaker, we’ve been collecting ones with actual monk chants that inspired it. Some come shaped like little idols with glowing red LEDs in their foreheads. One has its own trippy light show. They’re fun to get going a few at a time and Karen even uses them in her live set-up as sound sources to manipulate. We love finding odd musical toys like the pling plong or Japanese Knockman toys. Bleeplabs’ Thingamagoop is a big hit in our house.

I appreciate hearing familiar things done in unexpected ways. Another thing that appeals to me is the ability to conjure other worlds. The first album I bought as a kid was Kilroy Was Here by Styx. The whole theme fascinated me, a story developing through the songs and the band members as characters. But it’s not limited to concept albums. Certain pop songs can transport me somewhere magical.

Absolutely, right from the start. I always have at least a vague idea of the kinds of places I want an album to explore. Along the way, some songs seem to write themselves and take things in unplanned directions. A lot of thought goes into the track order. It can add a whole new context to the songs, changing the overall mood of a sonic landscape. You can play with the song-to-song dynamics to set up different suggested scenarios of conflict, resolution, punch lines, etc.

The first Twink album was a fun experiment in telling an instrumental story. The picture book that comes with it doesn’t follow the music exactly, but they share a similar journey from beginning to end. I try to do something similar with each disc, even if the world is just in my own head.

After almost every piece I wonder if I’ve reached that point, but fortunately I’ve still found new things to try. If I really think I’ve hit the limit, I can always record them being broken as a grand swan song. Maybe they know that and learn new tricks to keep me from going to that extreme!

Old photos found in thrift shops

Mechanical music machines

Colorful mismatched socks

Japanese candy packaging

Cheap electronic gizmos

Mysterious late-night shortwave radio transmissions

Mini golf course architecture

Paper and ink

Serendipity

My best friend, my wife

Twink’s web site | Twink’s MySpace profile | Mike’s Yip Yop blog

There are a few requirements I have for conducting a Songs and Sonics interview with someone. Beyond enjoying the artist’s music, an ideal interview subject should have most of the following:

An album to sell.

A real web site. (A MySpace page doesn’t count.)

A bio.

A history of interviews.

I recently stumbled upon The Sonic Executive Sessions, who had… none of the above. But after about ten seconds of listening to their music, my unwritten rules quickly evaporated. I had to talk with these guys!

Despite the jokey appearance of their MySpace page (complete with Anchorman references and monkey pictures), upon hearing what they do, it’s clear that the Executives are a musical force to be reckoned with. This is seriously accomplished pop, in a Steely Dan sort of way, with a strong Beach Boys undercurrent. Jellyfish fanatics, Ben Folds aficionados, and admirers of the artists parodied in the Yacht Rock video series take note: The Sonic Executive Sessions could very well be your new favorite band.

Christian Phillips (guitar, keys, vocals, and principal songwriter), Ryan Aston (drums, percussion, and occasional backing vocals), and Tim Hamill (recording engineer, guitar, and whatever’s left) are the studio assassins with the playing, singing, writing, and recording chops that even the most staunchly low-fi indie musicians secretly wish they had.

The Executives don’t play live. They don’t even have an album. Instead, they cut their tracks when there’s down time at Sonic One (Tim’s impressive recording facility in South Wales), and post the results on their MySpace page. In an alternate universe where the lowest common denominator doesn’t rule the mainstream, these songs would instead probably be at the top of the charts.

Christian was my contact for this interview, and he says that any plans to release an honest-to-goodness Sonic Executive Sessions album are up in the air. If an album does happen, I have only two modest requests to ask of the band: one, please get someone to build you a real web site with a good bio, and two, let me be the first in line to purchase your CD.

Christian: I got into session work purely by accident. Ryan and I were in a band (The Millionaires, and we were very Beach Boys-like) that got a lot of label interest. But instead of getting a deal, we ended up as a backing band for Sony. After that happened, the work just didn’t stop. But the writing stopped for a few years.

No. I play by ear (my dad was the original bass player in The Ivys, who became the mighty Badfinger). I wish I could read and had more knowledge of music theory — it would come in very handy for some things.

I’m just lucky that I’m able to hear and explode chord progressions in my head. But I’d much rather be able to write them out. I’ll record all the parts and give the separate lines to singers to learn. Some of them will write out their own parts.

Lots of children’s television. That’s fun to write for. Most of my work is writing music for TV: signature tunes, incidental music, that kind of thing.

My main instrument is guitar, and then vocals I guess. Anything else is a bit hit and miss, but I’ll try and play it if you need it — unless its violin, trumpet, or bagpipes!

Any time I’ve had the chance to work in Abbey Road. Studio 2 is a magical place. It still looks like the Beatles are there and have just popped out for a break. You won’t believe what it’s like to actually play the Mrs. Mills piano.

That’s becoming more frequent these days. Of course, it works the other way around too, where people who may have been inaccessible before are just on the end of these wires. For example, Tim recorded an album a few months back and the band had Dio to sing a few lines for them. They did it in their home studio and sent it over. Exactly like the Alessi Brothers did for us.

Yeah, how cool is that? I love the sound they make, and to have that happen on a song you’ve written… Amazing.

Best: Making a living out of what you do. Worst: Some of the awful stuff you have to work on for some of the rudest, most arrogant people you could ever meet.

About seven, I think. Not many. It tends to be like, “Tim’s got a few days free — better go write a song!”

I was listening to Born to Run. Somebody gave it to me and said, “You have to listen to this — it’s Phil Spector times ten.” Not being a fan of “The Boss,” I stuck it on reluctantly — and really liked it.

There are some lyrics in the first song, Thunder Road, that got me thinking how you can write about a person or place, and it gets frozen in that moment. Whenever we go and listen to that song at five or fifteen or fifty, the song never changes… but we do. Pet Sounds, for example, I was born listening to that. It has so many reference points in my life like when I was fifteen and used to run home from school every dinner break so I could listen to that and Spilt Milk and then run back. So that’s what made me want to write that song.

I wanted to write a song where the chorus was as for away from the verse key as I could get and then get back. And make it sound easy. I don’t know if I got the last bit. Brian Wilson did this all the time.

So that was the idea — to write a Smile-type tune with some nice modulations which turned into a Steely Dan 70’s slice of Yacht Rock. How did that happen? I guess I got carried away with the chords!

For the recording, we got Nigel Hopkins in to play Fender Rhodes and Pablo in on bass. I like everything to be real on our songs and there was no way I was playing those parts live!

He has no second name.

No. Ryan went in first with Pablo. Nigel came in later to replace my keyboard with the real thing. You have to appreciate that I’m spoiled when it comes to these guys. They really are amazing musicians, and I’m so lucky that they live a phone call away.

Eventually, Probyn Gregory from Brian Wilson’s band will be playing the brass on it. Can’t wait to get it finished, but he’s kind of busy at the minute.

Nope, it’s all me triple tracked. Takes about one to two hours to do, but Tim’s a patient and fantastic engineer.

Ah. You really have done your homework. That’s a bit more involved. That’s more than me. You’ve got to have four of you to recreate that sound! It takes AGES.

OK, here’s the secret. Take a four part harmony. Start on the lowest notes you can sing. All (at least three) of you sing the first part in unison. Triple track it. Sing the next part and the next and the next and the next until you can’t sing any higher. You’ll have about sixty parts or so. Play them back and its Queen. Dramatic vibrato on some parts help with the sound, but not too much because the harmony will become a bit unstable.

Oh, and try to do it with an English accent — something us Welsh guys struggle with!

The Gabe Dixon Band… and LOADS of John Williams soundtracks. I’m scoring a film at the moment — it’s a Christmas TV movie. The budget for the music is small, so it’s just me at the Mac trying to make it sound like the London Symphony Orchestra in Abbey Road.

Perhaps the Eagles/Steely Dan episode when Michael McDonald gets a rock chucked at him. They’re all VERY FUNNY. Please don’t make me choose, Jeff!

No, but I bet they are out there.

Well, maybe. I guess Toto and their ilk were and/or used a lot of studio players. So if there is a thread, it would be there on tunes like Cold Front, where I had to get guys in who can play like that.

But it was Roger Manning from Jellyfish who dubbed us ‘Yacht Rock.’ I was a bit offended at first because I didn’t know what it was. But when we went to find out what it was, everyone I loved was there, so it stuck. I’m glad we have a bit of the Yacht in us.

The sun (we don’t get it much here)

Anything that makes we want to try harder (Rufus Wainwright does this a lot)

Anything that makes me think there’s no point — may as well give it all up now (Brian Wilson does this a lot)

A good biography by someone who’s old enough to write one (David Niven’s The Moon’s A Balloon is a good start)

The fact that there is music out there that I’ll never get to hear that’s probably amazing (so I have to find it and hear it)

Standing on the Empire State

A new chord

Singing harmony (There’s something very special about singing with people)

An old cliché, but you can learn something new every day

Writing a list about the ten things that inspire you (A cop out… Sorry, but I ran out of ideas!)

The Sonic Executive Sessions MySpace page | Christian Phillips’ MySpace page (contains a couple extra songs) | Ryan Aston’s MySpace page | Tim Hamill’s MySpace page (contains a couple more Sonic Executive songs) | Sonic One recording studio

Pea Hix (a.k.a. Dan “Pea” Hicks) is the world’s foremost authority on Optigans.

What’s an Optigan? Glad you asked.

While Pea will explain it better than I ever could, the short version is this: The Optigan was kind of like a poor man’s Mellotron, intended for groovy early ’70s family room sing-alongs. Pea began collecting Optigans when nobody cared what they were, and when their eBay prices commanded virtually nothing (if anybody bothered to list them in the first place). He created not only the definitive web site on Optigans — optigan.com — but perhaps one of the most entertaining, well-written web sites dedicated to a specific musical instrument.

The story of his quest for Optigan information goes deep, culminating with his legal ownership of the Optigan master tapes and creating the definitive set of Optigan samples.

But wait, there’s more! He teamed up with singer/songwriter Rob Crow from Pinback to form the duo Optiganally Yours, featuring Pea’s Optigan stylings and Rob’s vocal and guitar work.

To date, Optiganally Yours have released only two albums: 1997’s Spotlight on Optiganally Yours and 2000’s Optiganally Yours Presents: Exclusively Talentmaker. Sure, there’s a couple tracks that are laugh-out-loud funny, like their brilliant reworking of Jimmy Webb’s Witchita Lineman, but both albums rise above being mere novelty music. It’s just plain great stuff to listen to, sometimes oddly touching but always full of solid pop songwriting hooks. And the most amazing thing is just how utterly… modern Optiganally Yours‘ music sounds. (To my ears, it sounds a bit like a lounged-up Beck.) Yet, at the core of their sound is a cheesy ’70s home organ from Mattel.

In this interview, Pea takes us on a multimedia tour of some of his gadgets, his other adventures in sound (like his Lucas & Friends project), and explains why the other half of Optiganally Yours just can’t keep his clothes on during a live show.

Pea: The Optigan (OPTIcal-orGAN) was kind of an adult toy chord organ that Mattel produced in the early ’70s. It’s brown, ugly, and not very interesting-looking. The reason why we love it so much is that it produces sound in a very unique way. Unlike most typical home organs of the time period, which produced sound electronically, the Optigan utilizes LP-sized celluloid discs, which are encoded with concentric rings of optical waveforms. These waveforms are the same thing as optical film soundtracks — except they’re bent into circles so that they can loop.

The important thing is that these soundtrack rings contain recordings of actual instruments and real musicians playing, say, a bossa nova pattern or whatever. So the Optigan was like an early analogue sampler, only you couldn’t record your own sounds on it — you could only play back the pre-recorded discs. Your left hand plays the chord buttons, which has the band, drum loops, sound effects, etc. Your right hand plays the melody on the keyboard, which also utilizes recorded sounds (Hammond B3 organs, etc.). The sound quality is very poor — think AM radio quality, at best. But that’s what makes it so cheesily haunting-sounding.

I actually have a lot less hardware now than I used to, as I tend to do most of my work on the computer these days. But I have a small collection of oddball instruments. My current fave is a Moog Sonic-VI, mostly because I just got it a couple days ago. It was a lucky Craigslist score — got it for about 1/3 of the usual price. What an amazing, weird synth!

Of course, I’ve got lots of Optigans — I don’t know how many, but at least eight. Then there’s the Optigan’s cousins: the Vako Orchestron and Chilton Talentmaker. I’ve only got one of each of those. I also have a Chamberlin Rhythmate, which is an early tape-loop drum machine:

Another early drum machine I have is a Wurlitzer Sideman, which was a totally tube-based monster made in the 1950s:

In the synthesizer dept, I’ve got a Sequential Pro-One…

…an Electro-Harmonix Mini-Synthesizer…

…a Yamaha CS01-II…

…a Casio CZ-101, an Ensoniq ESQ-1, a Kurzweil K2000, and a MicroKorg. Then there’s the Wurlitzer 200 Electric Piano I scored at AmVets for $20! Other than that, I’ve got loads of Casios and other toy keyboards.

How did the idea of Optiganally Yours come about?

When I got my first Optigan, I immediately had the idea that it’d be fun to do some sort of lounge act with a singer, just singing cover songs with the Optigan. Rob immediately volunteered to sing, but before we ever got around to working up any cover songs, we ended up writing four originals, all in one afternoon. We just made quickie four-track recordings of these, and realized that we had something good. So we kept writing more songs.

Rob came up with the band name, which I hated and I still hate, but it is what it is. I wanted to call the band “Mattellica.”

It was sort of a fluke. Rob’s in a successful indie-rock band called Pinback, and they were supposed to do a short tour of Japan a few years ago, but had to cancel at the last minute. Since they had already sold tons of tickets, a compromise was worked out, and it became sort of the “Rob Crow Variety Show” tour, which included a set by Optiganally Yours. It worked out well, because we had already released our second album on a Japanese label, and the Japanese are into stuff like what we do anyway, so we got a very enthusiastic reception there.

Well, I’m not really sure — somebody has probably written their doctoral thesis in anthropology on it, though! I guess probably the question is whether this is a post-war phenomenon, or if it comes from deeper within Japanese culture. All I can say is that, in our case, whatever popularity we have in Japan comes from a mix of the pop music and the gadget factor, the gadget being the Optigan, of course.

Yes, unfortunately. You kind of have to see the whole show — he has several costume changes (Ed. note: Here’s a concert photo, possibly not work-safe), more or less amounting to a gradual striptease over the course of the set. Believe me, it’s nowhere near as great as it sounds! Spanish Flea is the last song in our set, so he’s pretty close to naked at that point.

It’s pretty simple. I’ve never been much for writing melodic material — mostly I’m interested in chord progressions. So I usually come up with a chord progression and song structure, using Optigan sounds, and send it to Rob. If he likes it, he’ll write a melody and lyrics and record his parts over the top of it, sometimes adding guitar parts as well. Then he’ll send it back to me, and I’ll do keyboard overdubs and final production/mixing. We almost never work together apart from rehearsals and live shows.

Well, as far as the lyrics go, only Rob could answer you on that. Sometimes I don’t even know what lyrics he’s singing, or what they’re about. We wrote that song the same way we write most of our songs, as I already described.

Hmmm… I thought there might have been some sort of connection between the lyrics of that song and Optigan collecting! (”How come he’s not like any of them / I don’t know”)

Nah… Rob writes all the lyrics, usually off the top of his head, and he’d never probably never have any reason to write anything explicitly about the Optigan. I’m very conscious about not doing the whole Optigan “theme” to death — mostly we just stick to using those sounds. Apart from that, the songs can go anywhere. So, on the one hand, we’re in a closed loop sonically, but on the other hand, things are wide open thematically.

Well, funny you should mention that, because actually I tend to take a very purist sort of approach most of the time, and tend to shy away from “tricks.” I prefer to present the basic sound of the Optigan as it is, and work within its limitations.

The most simple/obvious “trick” you can do with an Optigan is to insert a disc upside-down, which results in the music playing backwards. We’ve never done this on any Optiganally Yours song because it’s kind of like saying, “Well, I like the Optigan, but it just doesn’t do enough, so we’re going to use every last little trick to get as many weird sounds out of it as possible.”

If I went down that road, the next thing I’d be saying is, “Well, I like the Optigan, but it just doesn’t do enough, so I’m going to send it through this phaser pedal and then add some delay and distortion…” But then you’d end up with something that sounds nothing like an Optigan, so why even use an Optigan in the first place?

Obviously, there’s something to be said for using whatever gear you have to arrive at whatever sound it is you’re ultimately looking for. But I guess my mind is just sort of wired in such a way as to think, “I want an Optigan on this recording, therefore the Optigan I record should sound like an Optigan.”

All that being said, something I have no qualms about at all is using other technology to bolster the sound of the Optigan and make it easier to present. To that end, I use the computer a lot, like recording the Optigan and making .wav files of loops and arranging songs in software like Sony’s Acid.

That’s hard to say. I do remember always being fascinated with tape recorders from a very early age, and my dad was a ham radio operator, so we always had electronic equipment and strange disembodied sounds in the house. But other than that, often I think my preoccupation with sound as a medium is more or less arbitrary. I could just as easily see myself having gotten involved with, say, assemblage sculpture or photography instead.

Although, I will say that I do tend to have a fascination with found objects in general. When it comes to writing music, I like to use found sounds because it’s just another way of collaborating with forces outside of my own mind. People collaborate artistically with all sorts of things: other people, folk traditions, drugs, chance processes, etc. I like to collborate with seredipity and found objects. In a way, the Optigan is sort of a meta-found-object, in that it’s really a cultural discard that contains all these faint messages-in-bottles in the form of fragments of long-forgotten musical recordings.

Well, there’s always more to explore, if only because we can always bring new musical ideas to the table, and interpret them using Optigan sounds. Within any closed system or palette, there’s an infinite amount of exploration you can do — it’s just a matter of getting the most out of your limitations. I personally find that much more liberating than being constantly faced with a much broader, general palette.

In other words, I don’t think I’d ever get any Optiganally Yours stuff done if I was constantly saying things like “Well, I like the Optigan sound on this, but could I make it even better if I added some Kurzweil K2000 to it?” I have a very hard time working that way, with too many options. I’d spend all my time considering the options, and never get around to doing any actual writing or recording.

I’m a casual fan — I only have a couple of his records. But every time I read an interview with him, I tend to find myself agreeing with a lot of points he brings up. I had an original Oblique Strategies deck several years ago, but I never actually used it for anything. I ended up selling it on eBay for like $400 or something.

What’s the status of the next Optiganally Yours album?

The third Optiganally Yours album, Optiganally Yours in Hi-Fi, has been a frustrating project. It’s been in the works literally for years. Rob and I just can’t seem to get our schedules together to finish it up. In terms of the songs, it’s about halfway finished, though we have plenty of song sketches from which the remaining songs will emerge.

For this album, we’re actually not using any Optigans at all. Rather, we’re building songs from loops taken directly from the Optigan master tapes, which were the original studio recordings of the musical material on the Optigan discs. Sonically, this album will be different than our others, in that it will be all studio-quality hi-fi, but the songwriting process is the same, so it will sound like Optiganally Yours in that respect.

I always have a million things on the back burner. It just tends to take me forever to get around to finishing anything. As an example, I like to write chamber operas, and have had a few of them produced, but it’s expensive and requires lots of resources.

Yeah, I have a degree in music from UCLA. It’s not worth much, though. I mostly just hung around the Ethnomusicology department, messing around with all the exotic instruments they had there. I wasn’t really in tune with most of my teachers.

Here’s an excerpt from a workshop production of my opera The World Is Round, which is a setting of a Gertrude Stein children’s book. You can find some more info about this piece at operazero.org.

I’ve also been working on a sort of Lucas & Friends opera, which basically means an opera made out of found sounds. I put together a sort of short “demo” version of that last summer, it’s just a matter of getting the resources together for a full-length production.

You know, I’ve had many people suggest such a thing over the years, and I guess I’m just not the guy to do it. I tend to be good at gathering raw materials and information, but not so good at editing and organizing it. That’s why the web is a nice medium for me — I don’t feel any pressure to “finish” something before I present it to the world. Things can always be works-in-progress. If I were to make an Optigan book, it would take me forever, because I’d get bogged down in the minutiae of making decisions about what to set in stone, etc.

Well, these days most of the good stuff I find goes on eBay. I have to make a living somehow. I have this loose policy that basically says that if I find something I like, and I paid, say, a buck for it, and it’s going for, say, $100.00 on eBay, I just ask myself: “If I saw that on a store shelf with a $100.00 tag on it, would I buy it?” And if the answer is “No,” I sell it on eBay. In other words, NOT selling it on eBay for $100.00 is financially indistinguishable from buying it for $100.00. I’m choosing the thing over the money.

So… that being said, I’ve found lots of valuable old hi-fi gear, vintage microphones, records (I had a Bob Dylan promo recently sell for over $4k — I paid a buck for it at a garage sale), and countless other things. I’ve been doing eBay for ten years, so there have been lots of great scores.

In terms of great garage sale scores that I’ve kept, I suppose I’d have to include my Chamberlin Rhythmate, alot of my Optigan stuff, some art, lots of weird records, things like that.

Serendipity

Purity

Sincerity

Flaws

Repetition

Organic structures

Landscapes

Velocity

Myth

Lydian mode

Optigan web site | Order Optiganally Yours CDs and Optigan sample CDs from Optigan.com | Optiganally Yours MySpace page | Lucas & Friends web site | Lucas & Friends MySpace page | Opera Zero | Pea Hix’s YouTube videos

Count me in among those who really like The High Llamas‘ particular brand of licorice.

Over the course of eighteen years and twelve albums, the Llamas have cast a dreamy sonic spell. ’60s California pop, Steely Dan-like studio perfectionism, Moog synthesizer albums, Steve Reich-style minimalism, thrift store vinyl soundtracks, and a bossa nova beat mingle in surprising ways and are wrapped in a distinctly British sensibility.

Some are resistant to the Llamas’ spell, and the various controversies in the music press sometimes threaten to overshadow the band’s accomplishments. Certainly, what The High Llamas do is good enough for Bruce Johnston, who hired Llamas mastermind Sean O’Hagan to produce an eventually aborted Beach Boys comeback album in the late ’90s. A number of other artists have employed Sean’s arranging and session skills to more fruitful ends: Stereolab, Will Oldham, Cornelius, and Louis Philippe, to name a few.

While The High Llamas’ music might not be played in shopping malls around the world, Sean’s influence has certainly spread far and wide: the majority of artists already interviewed for Songs and Sonics have acknowledged his musical influence on their own work. Heck, he’s one of my influences! So it’s definitely a thrill to have him here.

Sean was nice enough to take time out of his busy schedule to chat about 2007’s Can Cladders, the Llamas’ well-received and most accessible outing yet. In fact, if you’ve never heard The High Llamas, Can Cladders is the ideal place to start. (Sean O’Hagan photo by Kev Hopper.)

Sean: I start on nylon string guitar usually, then go to the piano. The arrangements are already taking shape as I write. They kind of arrange themselves in a way. I write chords that lend themselves to arrangements.

I write in fragments sometimes and record these to MiniDisc. I then review the writing, and put these fragments together in a way that I hope defies convention.

A lot later, I start to arrange, even though I know what the arrangement might be.

Very short answer: Listening to records. No training, just listening and trying to work out what is going on. I taught myself to read music only recently and am still a very slow reader. Marcus Holdaway (piano) is trained and helped with the strings. He also helped with my sightreading.

I used old 4-track machines to demo parts. I crudely noted parts and worked with either Marcus or Andy Robinson as I dictated the harmony from piano or guitar. Yes, I suppose I used pencil back then. But the 4-track was essential.

Just getting older and wanted to be absolutely instinctive. I thought I went through a period denying that I loved pop (Carole King, Laura Nyro, Neil Sedaka, The Flamingos), and with age you just stop the fooling around and get on with what you are good at. I know Becker and Fagen are hated by some, but the early LP’s are full of crack pop tunes, as were The Specials, The Beach Boys, The Zombies, ELO, 10cc, Dion and the Belmonts. You can go to any era or style and find great pop — even today. I just wanted the pop I wrote to be a bit different.

Yes, it was happy. I worked at home a lot. But as a process draws on it, it becomes somewhat frustrating as well. I was determined to capture my pop positivity that I had rediscovered. Formerly, I think I was denying the instant melodic ideas I would churn out, mistaking the ease of writing with poor quality. I am glad for any idea now.

I really cannot say what the next record will be like. It’s not in my head, and will not be for a while. I have to do some other stuff before that time comes around again.

I often wonder whether the world can cope with another High Llamas record. We don’t exactly set the world alight when we release a record, and it is hard putting in a real commitment to writing and know that a great number of listeners will stare blankly at the product and wonder why we make this music. I always have to get over that image in my head.

OK.

That’s a chap we know who was a tour manager and gave up touring, preferring the land locked middle England to constant driving for ferry departures.

Aluminum cladding salesmen (tin men… no prize for guessing) and beat poets, sort of meeting up in my little invention. I think it works very nicely. Who needs love.

I was DJing one night and playing Dorothy. The reaction of the folk in the club prompted the second verse:

They were rich kids. Then I brought Dorothy into it as a living person. I imagined the harp as a means of travel for her and the listener.

If there has to be one, lets say Clarion Union Hall. I love the girls’ voices on this tune and the ooh refrain at the end is as close as I got to a classic 60’s girl sound, which chuffs me up. Its my favourite moment on the record.

Once when I was robbed, and once when the good old US border guards really did not want to let me back to the US in El Paso. I had to give them a big load of cash to get over the border.

The line was born to be sung. It was always going to be that. I think the rest of the song wrote itself around that line.

I know what you mean, but do not agree with the premise. I will answer in spirit. How about Queen, You’re My Best Friend.

But that’s a good song! OK… I’ll let you off the hook for that one. What’s next for you and The High Llamas?

Right now, I’m in Rio making an LP with Kassin Kammal (Kassin + 2) . We are co-writing an LP. I hope it works and people like it. It is an experiment, really.

We spent time wondering whether there should be a name. I think it will be Kassin + Sean.

The Llamas have a big show in Ireland where we are doing the music for a narrative written by the wonderful UK novelist Jonathan Coe. The soundtrack is Llamas music from the last eight LPs played live with strings, July 20 in Dublin.

I started out as a construction worker at the age 15 before working in UK car plants.

I suppose they did. As you know, I write about everyday stuff in a narrative way, and an assembly line can produce a storyboard every bit as poetic as a love tragedy.

That’s pretty much where I am, standing on street corners looking up at architecture that most people miss and wondering who drew this stuff up. From there, a story begins.

Pembrokeshire

Birdsong (I’m a recent convert… it happens when you get to 45)

Architecture

Marcos Valle

Anything I hear that makes me rush to the piano

Paul Auster

French movies (1967-1978)

BBC Radio 4 (Embodies England)

School singing. When you hear your own children sing it’s quite wonderful.

Great pubs. Because they usually host great conversations, which in turn inspire.

Thinking about LA and New York as they were in 1968-1971…

The High Llamas’ official web site | The High Llamas’ MySpace page | Order Can Cladders from highllamas.com (UK) | Order Can Cladders from Amazon.com

While MySpace is often a fantastic place for checking out new music, the Swedish band Testbild! can’t be properly represented within that site’s conventional ADD-friendly structure. Then again, there’s very little about Testbild! that’s conventional. (Yes, there’s an exclamation point at the end of their name, and no, they don’t show their faces in their band photos.)

Testbild!’s latest release, Une Teinte Intense, is an atmospheric concept album about adventurer Isabelle Eberhardt. Sometimes the album sounds like a Middle Eastern Free Design playing lite jazz. (!) At other times it sounds like what might’ve happened if Pink Floyd recorded an alternate soundtrack to Lawrence of Arabia.

But even those far-out comparisons don’t quite describe what Testbild! sounds like or what the band is about. The only thing that can probably be said is that Testbild! doesn’t make background music; this is most definitely art which demands and rewards attention, preferably with a good set of headphones. And there’s some pop thrown in for good measure. If you’re willing to go along for the ride on Une Teinte Intense, the experience is one you won’t soon forget.

Petter Herbertsson is Testbild!’s mastermind, a polite yet slightly mysterious gentleman who prefers the shadows instead of the limelight. And as you’ll see in the following interview, he’s got ideas about art, sound, and making music that differ from the norm. And if you’re as taken with Testbild!’s sound as I am, you might be able to record your own Testbild! album one of these days. What does that mean? Read on. (Studio photos by Moa Andersdotter.)

Petter: Well, the short answer would be that we get inspired by artistic people, or visionaries, who do exactly the opposite of what society expects of them. Further examples would be Chris Marker, William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Bas Jan Ader, Mike Alway, Ferdinand Cheval (the French postman that singlehandedly built a fantasy castle called Palais Idéal in his garden), Delia Derbyshire, etc., etc.

Isabelle Eberhardt was the daughter of Russian nobles, had an anarchistic upbringing in Genève, converted to Islam, and travelled around in North Africa in the early 1900s dressed as a man. She was elected to a mystic Islamic brotherhood called Qadriya, wrote articles for French and Swiss newspapers (but weren’t allowed to return to her home, since she was considered a dangerous and subversive character by the government). And as if that wasn’t enough, she drowned at Aïn Sefra, in the middle of the desert, at the age of 27. Her life was fascinating, as was her personality. She seemed torn between her Islamic religious ideal, and her at some times wild way of life with the cross dressing, lots of alcohol and kif, etc.

And at the same time, she was an artist by definition; her descriptions of the myriads of colours in the North African sunset is totally unique. To make a themetic album about her is simply our way of paying our dues to one of our greatest heroes.

The manifesto said that Testbild! is a band wich doesn’t profess itself to a single musical genre, that one of the main assignments should be to investigate and dwell on the relationship between pop music and sounds that could be described as noise. Total honesty was also a key conception, i.e. the music could never have a commercial purpose, and had to come from our personal musical tastes only. These things are still followed, I guess, but if we were to write a manifesto today, it would be more developed in a way. But also more or less non-existing, depending on points of view.

We strongly believe that it’s an artist’s (artist in a broadened sense) duty to avoid clichés at all cost, to at least try to kill your darlings every now and then, to never underestimate the audience and to create something that is far beyond the music business and the establishment. On the other hand, Testbild! should be a band based on ideas of any kind; in that case you could say that the only rule is that there are no rules.

I started the band ten years ago, because I was fed up with playing with “normal” bands where you were supposed to stick to a genre, wear a certain type of clothes, write prefab songs that people could dance to, etc. Testbild! was supposed to be the antithesis to all that.

Back then, it was just me.