I talked with Trey Gunn about topics such as finding the right venues for Quodia, the conception of 'The Arrow', playing live with Tool,
finding & using
elements that attract the use of imagination, his upcoming film score
for Dead Daughters (by Russian director Pavel Ruminov), the
success of his band KTU and much more...
(Quodia Trailer/Comp by Kris Swenson)
Kris Swenson: What is the vein in the
storyline of The Arrow, is there a particular theme?
> the
element of power
-------------------------------------------- Trey Gunn: "It's undeniable - the piece (The Arrow) is definitely about
power and where do you get it, and how do you incorporate it and
maybe even what you do with it. That is without question - I think I
can say that without wrecking anything for anyone.
Even if you don't see that, it doesn't really matter, there are all
sorts of threads around that, but it's certainly an ongoing theme -
where does power come from - do you work for it, is it a gift? Is it
free, is it both, what do you do with it, what happens? ... It
certainly poses those questions in many many different ways, from
the hands working
to the observer looking at the hands, to the boy
who encounters the strange thing out in the corn fields to ... where
does the arrow come from? You must listen to the kid's audio
commentary because they really delve into these questions and they
argue about them ... where does the arrow come from and then what's
happening at the end, where is he going, what's happening.
So if I
had to pick one thread, it's certainly about power."
(Gino Yevjedevich: hands clip)
Kris: While watching The Arrow for the first time, you get the
sense you think you know what's going on; as the DVD progresses,
however, you realize that you're projecting your own personal
experiences into the story line. Was this an intentional effect?
>
conception of the arrow
-------------------------------------------- Trey: "...yes,
that was the first thing that made me realize that we
were onto something. Joe & I made (in just in a weekend) the
first section. He flew into town, we knew we wanted to do something,
but we weren't sure exactly what it was, but we knew we wanted to
use video and we wanted to use language & text. I said, I've got this story, he was like - let's do it!
So we
made it & I took it around & played it for some people.
Everyone
I
played it for took the story & put their own experience into it; it
was like a tool that they could put their own experience into."
Kris: You chose to
do a children's commentary rather than a director's commentary about
the DVD, can you tell us about that?
AUDIO CLIP:
hear him discuss the children's commentary
--------------------------------------------
"Sitting on the Bank" Azam Ali (voice) with a beautiful solo by Gunn.
>
no faces to tell the story
--------------------------------------------
AUDIO CLIP:
hear it in his own words
Trey: "You don't ever see any geographical reference except for trees
and various states of season. You don't see any urban references,
you
don't have any clue as to whether this is 4,000 yrs. in the future on
another planet or 10,000 years ago anywhere on this planet. ... We
discovered that was one of our working strategies. It's just when we
had the option to put those things in, Joe & I were like, no that
doesn't feel right. Take that out, I don't want to see her face that
clearly, if we're going to have a face, it's going to be just barely
subtly making a face & then disappearing. We don't want to say this
is a black Woman in Morocco, or this is a white Grandmother in
Bulgaria, this is happening in Tibet, or any of those things that
you attach a cultural reference to that would, at least, undermine our
particular strategy. "
Kris: What role do various languages &
foreign influences play in The Arrow?
>
the function of language in 'The Arrow'
-------------------------------------------- Trey: "One of the fascinating things about this project for Joe
and I is
this whole thing of multiple languages, in both senses - verbal &
written. You have the horizontal sense of language like
translating into Spanish and Russian and all the different languages
of the places we played. Then there is also the multiple
languages of film symbols, archetypes, music sound design. So the whole thing is
really a big play space for us with throwing all these languages
together & seeing how you can interlock them in mutually/interdependently
useful ways. As opposed to just layering them on top of each other
which is what we encounter every day in the media.
Even a simple example, if you turn on CNN for a second, or at least
on some of them, Bloomberg or whatever, you're going to see a guy
talking to you, stock exchange scroll, another text scroll, then
maybe something else down the left side. It's crazy. So we want to
take that kind of ... 'look-at-me' media approach in a
different way & use language in a universal way.
Our first 2 or 3 years playing was to purely non-English speaking
audiences. Also the piece, itself, was a real challenge, it was really
new to us, so we didn't even know the piece that well. We didn't
have it as organized as well as we do now, obviously the piece is
(now) complete. To a degree, at least. Although we
continue to evolve it and just added a percussionist for our last
west coast tour. We also changed some of the music a fair bit.
At the time when we started, a lot of the music wasn't even
there that now you've heard, and the visuals were not as fully
developed. We were also dealing with non-English speakers and one
of our first gigs in Italy there may have been 2 members in
the audience that spoke English. So we've had to try to tackle
the idea of language as a challenge as to how do we this: what is ok
or not, how are the audience doing out there. Because one of the obstacles we've found was that
even if you're an English speaker... if you're just watching the
performance for the first time, you can follow along for a while and
then eventually your brain kind of gives up, I think (laughs). That's some of
the experience I've heard from people. I've never had that
experience because I can't watch the piece fresh. There's a certain
amount of being lost while you're within it."
> various doorways
-------------------------------------------- Trey: "If you're not an English speaker, you may
feel lost in the
beginning -- feeling like you're missing something. Which is
actually ok, because even English speakers feel that. In completing
the piece, we had to look for ways to make doorways in for everyone.
So there's a music doorway, a visual doorway, there's a text
doorway. We bring in multiple languages in the text on
screen, we have audio of the "Water Woman" story in Russian and Spanish...
All of this is to be generous with the audience, to give them lots
of different doorways in to the piece.
Eventually we came up with an
introduction that Joe would give in the local language. He would
learn it that day... he would say something like "Hello, we are
Quodia. This piece is called The Arrow. It is a story in seven
parts", kind of to let everyone know that as it's going through, if
you’re beginning to feel disoriented, you can still hold on to a
sense of the overall structure. This is because when you go into a
performance that's unknown to you, you have no idea how the
structure's unfolding. You don't get a map, you don't know how to
pace your attention.
That's one of the reasons we have the countdown
numbers in the piece, to help you pace it. We tried handing
out programs, but we decided we don't like that. So Joe would give
this introduction that it's a story and, he didn't state this but he
tried to present the intention, "don't worry if you're lost, it's ok.
Just enjoy, just connect to with what you can connect to." Hopefully that's enough, if it's not enough for you then you won't
be back and if it is enough for you then you will be back.
So coming to playing shows in America, we've only done 5 or 6, they
were a different challenge. The English speakers expect language to
function in the way they're used to having it function. And that
isn't quite the way this piece works. It's more like stepping into a
combined dreamscape. Everyone has their own little challenges."
Kris: What have your experiences been like playing throughout
Europe?
>
cultures that Quodia appeals to
-------------------------------------------- Trey: "Entertainment, the purpose of it, is to take you
out of yourself, to get away from yourself, to escape yourself.
What we're trying to make is completely the opposite - so I know
that's not going to appeal to certain people because some people do
not want to be with themselves at all. They make every effort in
their lives to not do that, so we know that’s part of the challenge
for certainly a chunk of the population.
I don't know if you could say it's a lost art to be able to do that
but it's a certain kind of audience participation that's certainly
not cultivated in our culture. It was definitely was more so
the case in the European cultures, Russia & definitely in South
America. The Spanish speaking cultures that we have performed
to responded enormously strong to us. Mexico was a little bit
hard just because we found that there's not a really strong literary
tradition in Mexico like there is in South America. In
Argentina and Chile, for example, people are so well educated
regarding literature -- how to read it, how to let your imagination
go into it and not try to intellectualize it's significance. At
least that's my experience."
>
European music festivals
-------------------------------------------- Trey: "The thing that Europe has that's admittedly
different than the US, is all these summer festivals that are
sponsored by the local governments. You have many jazz and world
music festivals. We played this festival in Portugal 2 summers
ago, I think we're doing it again this summer, that is in this
incredible little town up on the coast, actually down south on the
coast, and there's this big, old medieval castle up on this cliff,
and in the castle they do this performance.
There were three days of performances, including many
big named jazz guys, experimental jazz (including Hermeto Pascal
from Brazil), African groups (Konono #1) and other kinds of world
music. We went on after the Master Musicians of Jujuku, and
[there we are] - this rock band/crazy world stuff. The local
government puts this on and we got paid well.
There's nothing like that in America, you just don't
have cultural support like that for those kind of events here. So
here you're thrown into the 'rock & roll' market which is not very
profitable unless you have a big record."
Kris: How do you find
the right venue for an undertaking of this sort?
>
finding the right venue for Quodia
-------------------------------------------- Trey: "It's a very hard row being right along side the music industry,
but not really being part of it.
Just for example, most of the venues we get to play in aren't quite
right, they're not multimedia venues. That is to say, they aren't
real multimedia venues. But there are just starting to be
some. What we’re hoping for is a new kind of multi-media circuit."
Kris: What does your
live music setup consist of in Quodia?
> live
equipment setup
-------------------------------------------- Trey: "The live music setup is pretty simple. Joe is mixing us live
and he's got electronic percussion and keyboard sounds. Then I'm
just playing my instrument (played touch style) and I've got a microphone.
I get a lot of
different sounds out of my instrument, but that's
pretty much all of it. We try to make the video not step on
the audio. If the video gets more complicated and dense when
an actor is on the screen, we trim back the music. And then we
really wanted to use text on the screen. That's kind of one of
our trademarks. Certainly anybody can do that, and if they're
not doing it now they will be doing it soon, it's not like we
discovered it. But it's just one of the things that works well for
us... there's just a really strange effect when you're seeing the
performance and one of the words comes up on the screen and hangs
there, while other words are orally going by you. It's kind of like
reading, but it's kind of not reading. I mean, you don't go to
a music performance to listen to music and read at the same time.
And although we're not asking you to read per se, but you are using
the faculty of your brain that discerns the symbols of our language,
and so that's one of the elements we use. We have all these
things that pull you/pull your perceptions in different directions.
For example, one element may be pulling your intellect in a certain
direction while the music may be pulling you another way, or you're
following the story with a different part of you. So that's kind of
the basis of the video with a lot of symbols brought in, archetype
symbols, and all the different ways that we can represent things.
Water for example, or wind or fire."
Kris: How did you choose the lineup of guest musicians, and how did they
fit into place within the overall piece?
>
guest musicians -------------------------------------------- Trey: "Matt (Chamberlain) and I have been buddies for a long time
... he travels so much and whenever he was in town I was usually
out of town. He travels probably 7/8ths of the year. So we always
talked about doing stuff, and we actually still talk about doing a
duo maybe this fall playing together (2007). Anyway, I got Matt
to play on a track. Originally we never wanted to make an audio cd.
We thought this goes with the video so well, you can't
just take the video away and have the thing work. So we just gave up
on that idea. We thought - look, we're not a band anyway, we're a
multimedia performance group, multidimensional story telling.
Fuck making records, it doesn't make any sense - that isn't what we
do, so screw it. We’ve done it and now we're done with that.
But then we produced up one track and said “you know what, that
sounds like a record - what if we took it a little further.” And we
did. I got Matt to play on it & Joe took all the little bits
and wove them into this great fabric. And you know what? We
discovered we could actually make a record out of this. So the
recording process was very different than actually making the
performance piece because when you take the video away from the
performance it doesn’t work anymore. One of the reasons that
the piece works in performance is that all the individual elements
are missing something. So if you just look at the video and you
don't hear the story or you don't have the music, it's really
boring. Or if you just listen to the audio of the performance, not
the audio cd just the sheer audio from the performance without the
video, something's missing. So if you just look at the video
and you don't hear the story & you don't have the music, it's really
boring. Or if you just listen to the audio of the performance,
not the audio cd, just the sheer audio from the
performance without the video, something's missing.
If you take
any one element away the whole thing collapses, which was our
sign that we had made it right. This
meant that the jigsaw puzzle really fit well together. And when it came time, we thought, we can make a
record & should have a record because most people are going to come
in contact with us from the audio. We decided that we needed to
produce the tracks up and so that's what we did, that's
when we started bringing in guests. I think it turned out really
well.
We've tried bringing some of those new audio elements back into the
live performance and it hasn’t always worked that well. It's,
often, just too much. Too much sound can, kind of, overwhelm the
room, the video, and it's much better going back to the very
stripped down duo or trio with the hand percussionist than having
all the little sounds that Matt did or Pat Mastelotto played. We do
use some of it live - Regina Spektor is in there live, Azam Ali, our
friend from Iran who sings in Part 2, she's in there. She's really
great, I've played on her recent record. Pretty much now days,
if you want me to play on your record, you've got to return the
favor, whether you pay me or not.
That's what we're doing
now, we're trying to bring in more guests and find places for them
because it does make the thing richer and we can use it in the show
or not. Ideally we want to film the guests too, like we filmed
Regina's lips. We weren't able to film Azam when she sang but
it would have been really nice to have something like the effect of
Gino’s hands in part four. We wouldn’t have wanted her face like a
music video, but you could have just shown her, she's very skinny
and has really long hair... we could have filmed her from behind and
just saw her swaying or something and we could have melded that into
the rest of the video.
That's how we ended up with guests, and
I assume in the future we
will continue to do that. We really want to use more and different
kind of voices too. My voice works really well live but it's nice to
break it up and have the stories come from different voices -
sometimes from the screen sometimes just from the speakers."
(Regina Spektor - WaterWoman clip)
Kris: You guys
(TU) recently performed on Tour with
Tool, how was that?
AUDIO CLIP:
hear audio clip of Trey's live
performances/long term
acquaintances with members of Tool.
--------------------------------------------
KS: In your online bio,
you mentioned being sort of haunted, or trailed by
Orpheus and Eurydice
by author Gregory Orr. Can you tell us about this experience?
-------------------------------------------- Trey:
"...That was a particular kind of wild experience I had, being
'haunted' by Orpheus & not really knowing the whole story, and
when I came across Gregory's book, I had been almost literally
haunted by this character. I would be typing randomly and his
name will come out or I'll have a dream and he would be there in
it. When I saw this book, I was walking into Powell's bookstore in
Portland, Oregon and was even thinking about it at that same
moment... I turned the corner & there was this book of poems,
Orpheus and Eurydice, and I said alright, I give up, I give, I'll
take it (laughs).
AUDIO CLIP:
hear audio clip of
this transcription of his experience with the
Orpheus story, it's great to hear him describe it with his own
inflections.
And when I read it, there was, kind of, a lot of my experience just
completely poured out on the page ... so I saw myth in a different
way, kind of as living archetypes that aren't old stories, they're
living breathing things that you can tap into in a present
experience kind of way, that's why they are what they are. They're
not old stories - they're living archetypes if you can tap into
them, of course not everyone can tap into them, not everyone can tap
into every tradition."
--------------------------------------------
AUDIO CLIP: hear audio clip of Trey describing one of his other projects.
>
KTU & David Frikk at SXSW
-------------------------------------------- Trey: "We ( KTU - Kimmo Pohjonen, Pat Mastelotto and
Myself ) played there (SXSW
- South by Southwest Music Conference) and it was cool. We had one of our
new fans, David Fricke, who is a senior editor at Rolling Stone, he
saw us in Denmark and he loved us so much that he especially came to
our show in SXSW..."
KS: You recently worked
on a Russian film score, can you tell us about the score for Dead
Daughters?
> Dead Daughters film score
-------------------------------------------- Trey: "When I was working on the score for 'Dead Daughters', they didn't have subtitles or
an English translation of the text, so Pavel
Ruminov gave me a rough
outline of what was going on. Although he had a script it was
done not unlike Quodia in that it that he discovered a lot of things
about the film as he was making it. So working on the score while
they were doing that wasn't like a traditional film score where you
could say this scene is about this so score it like that, we were
more or less just working with feelings. He would give me an edit
and I would write stuff in the mood of that and they would use it
wherever they wanted. Essentially I just kind of gave him (pieces
of music) as I do a lot of film and tv stuff. I gave him a toolbox
of things to work with and he would try them in different places and
then settled on what he settled on. ... It looks like it's going to
be really cool, I think he's done a deal with an American production
company that they're going to remake it in English."
KS: Continued
Success to you and all of your projects! Thank you for the
interview.
