"IN GLORIOUS TIMES" The new cd by SGM is now available on
THE END Records
Listen to trax from In Glorious
Times on Art Anomaly Radio
(photos/layout by Kris Swenson)
An interview with
Sleepytime
Gorilla Museum on their
latest release
- IN GLORIOUS TIMES -
+ the 'Electric Pancreas',
Fred Frith, the artwork and life of Per Frykdahl,
as well as constructing instruments and then
"hitting them with a stick" + more.
>>
IN GLORIOUS TIMES << ................................................................................................
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's new cd, "In Glorious Times" offers up an array of operatic, theatrical-sounding, harmonically lush as well as tasty dissonant flavors to enjoy. It takes you
and never lets you away - but don't worry, you won't want to escape this :)
In a carnival-esque manner, SGM presents us with a mélange of exotic sounds and on-stage theatrics, engaging our auditory/ visual senses, by using costumes and unique, (some even hand constructed) unconventional instrumentation.
In a blissfully bizarre, circus gone happily wrong atmosphere, blending classical and ethnic sounds with some experimental rock and heavy metal, the soundscape becomes climactically suspensful
and spell-binding. The experience of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is their own unique brand of intrigue.
Matthias Bossi: “I have a very normal drum
set … I ‘drive the bus’. I hold it all together, the backbone - I
would say that would be me for sure."
Kris Swenson:
I have noticed a lot of contrapuntal rhythms
and things like that – some progressive rhythms, ethnic
influences and some classical
sounds.
Matthias Bossi: “Sleepytime labors in the
studio, we’re all perfectionists and it’s not uncommon for 3 years
to pass between record releases. While we’re recording the new
album, or the minute it’s done, we’ve already been playing those
songs for a number of years and are already onto writing the next
thing and it takes a while for those songs to grow on tour and be
ready for the recording studio.
This record (In Glorious Times) actually
goes against the grain in that sense in that we took a year
off from touring to actually write the record. That was the
first time this band has done it since I’ve been a member. So
we actually sat in our rehearsal room, or our individual bedrooms,
and wrestled with parts and did all these things so it does have a
very learned style and feeling to it.”
Matthias Bossi: (on the chemistry of the band)
“Everyone is very chummy and familiar with the ins-and-outs of the
various personalities and it’s definitely much more than a rock
band.”
Kris Swenson: (Definitely - I
wouldn’t call you guys a typical rock band at all – there are
theatrical elements, an “operatic” feel - a dynamic/dramatic essence
and very strong visual presence. Not to mention all
these hand made percussion and drum instruments that are beautifully
'carnivalistic' and industrial sounding. How would you personally
describe it?)
Matthias Bossi:
“It’s preferable to hear these grand sweeping
gesture descriptions rather than bring up Mr. Bungle, or Frank
Zappa, which we often hear. And you know, we don’t necessarily
like to hear definitive references. I prefer these grand
sweeping descriptions - opera, carnival, cabaret... it’s all in
there.”
Kris Swenson: So, can you tell
us about your equipment setup?
Michael Mellender:
“There are acoustic and electric percussion instruments in my kit.
On the electric side of things, there’s the 'Action Lever'
–
the 3-stringed instrument played with either drumsticks or a metal
slide and it can careen from a Theremin sound with the slide on
these 2 very high bass strings like the G strings on an electric
bass.
There are 2 of them side by side in unison and played up there with
the slide. Then there’s also the actual lever part of the
instrument which is a piece of bailing wire attached to this hinged
blunt wooden lever that you just whack with a stick and it makes a
weird, impossible kick drum sound. It’s better to be heard than
described.
Other than that there’s a spring with a contact mic on it, a giant
industrial spring. What can I say about that – it’s kind of
like a weird sort of crash symbol sounding, just... distorted mess
of a sound. Then there’s the beloved Electric Pancreas, of
course. It keeps getting destroyed and rebuilt – each
incarnation of it seemingly better than the last. Right now
it’s taken the shape of 2 pieces of sheet metal side by side just
nailed down onto this wooden flint. And of course, hit with a
stick. We’re fond of saying that – after we describe all the
instruments – 'And then you hit it with a stick!!' ”
Michael Mellender: (on Dan Rathbun’s percussion
creations)
“I had wanted something that was like a table top kind of one-string
bass that could be played with a slide which became the ‘Lever’
which Dan Rathbun just had lying around. He just pulled
it out of the trash basically...(laughs) like he’d already
invented it in years previous for show that they had done with
Shinichi, The Last Human Being
– a piece called “Cockroach” where Dan just threw together
all these instruments in about 5 minutes. One of them was the
leather, seemingly throw away, instrument that I play all of the
time. I pretty much rescued it from ritual murder at the hands
of Dan Rathbun.
Then there’s one thing that was my suggestion that Dan sort of
perfected that was simply a bicycle wheel with the spokes and the
twirling gear thing that Dan amplified it made into an actual viable
electric instrument, at my behalf. I actually have a spoke
wrench for it to tune it up, but it’s in no particular harmonic – I
don’t sit there and tune it to equal temperament or something like
that.”
Kris Swenson:
Can you tell us
about who your influences are and who you’ve played with? I
hear bits of FM Einheit and Einstürzende Neubauten as
influences.
Michael Mellender: “Yeah,
Einstürzende Neubauten for sure – Swans is Also a
great influence. (The Swans were) part of the scene that came out of
New York that in the late 70’s, early 80’s – great minimalist,
eventless kind of music, very primitive, bludgeoning sort of music
that stays in this one texture; as a sort of a flowering ostinato." They’ll play a repeated pattern over 15 minutes that just grows and
grows and grows with intensity. It’s pretty amazing to behold,
I definitely recommend them. Also, the Art Bears – a
very influential band starring Fred Frith who has moved to
our neck of the woods, from England. The Art Bears, I guess it
was the mid-70’s when they were around. But Fred Frith, as you
may know, is part of Henry Cow and Massacre. He
does a lot of cool processed experimental guitar work - such as
dropping car keys into his acoustic guitar and rattling them around
with great fervor.”
Kris Swenson: Have you guys played with Fred Frith?
Michael Mellender: "… Some of the members
of Charming Hostess put together an Art Bears tribute band on
one memorable occasion which Fred Frith was a part of. They
made a cover band called Rats and Monkeys. So it was quite an
honor for them to play with the ‘Grand Daddy of Funk’ as it were.”
Kris Swenson:
Can you tell us what happens, what’s going on in your thought
process, during your vocal ‘rants’ onstage?
Nils Frykdahl: “Hmm, the vocal rants… You know,
that’s in some ways, an interactive thing whether or not the
audience is actually throwing things out at me or not because I feel
like I’m really talking specifically to the people that are there;
that I’m very much influenced by who is there in the room. Not
to go so far to say that it’s sort of a psychic thing or to elevate
it into something along those lines but that it’s definitely a
response to the energy of the people in the room. Of course,
the whole show is that, but to put it more directly, I don’t know
where most of the things that I say come from.
I will start a sentence and not know what the next
word is until it comes. It has an element that’s
very much automatic writing or channeling or something like that.”
Nils Frykdahl: (other bands he’s played with)
“Let’s see… the band that Sleepytime Gorilla Museum grew out of was
called Idiot Flesh and the bass player was in that group
along with me. Then Carla Carla Kihlstedt
was also in a group with Dan and myself
called Charming Hostess, so that’s another root band of this band (SGM).
Carla has another long term project she’s had called Tin Hat.
I have a group called Faun Fables that I’ve been in as long
as I’ve been in Sleepytime.”
Nils Frykdahl: (discusses the new video and
band imagery)
Kris Swenson: Who came up with
the concept of the Helpless Corpses Enactment Video?
Nils Frykdahl: “The visual core of it was
the director Adam Feinstein. In terms of the idea of
setting it in that particular time period, and most of those
elements, came from Adam. When he heard the song, (said) ‘oh
I’d love to do it, and I want to use a lot of beautiful imagery, and
a lot of elegant imagery and things that you wouldn’t associate with
a heavy metal song,’ because it’s very much a metal song and he
wanted to do a very non-metal video for it. So that’s how that
palette came about.
A lot of our previous photography that we’ve used,
band photos and the packaging on the first couple albums, reference
the early 20th century, the Victorian era, having man as the
botanist. Sort of a key element in having powers in there, (as well
as) the theme of insects… Those things have long been a theme
of the album packaging and also the music in general: the theme of
the place that the human world has within a continuity which also
includes the animals and insects. Many songs which would
pertain to that macrocosm-to-the-microcosm
of the little world, the big world, and the human
perspective is just one place in that big chain.
Nils Frykdahl: "It’s very easy to get
myopic as a human being and see the whole world as our stomping
ground or have done everything we can to turn it into that.
That’s why stepping back looking at the other elements, the things
that change very slowly in the midst of our very quickly changing
world, gives us a little perspective about our own pace. The
idea of the world of mineral and stone comes up in a couple of the
songs on the new record and that’s a happening change within the
mineral kingdom at a rate that we can’t really comprehend very well
– it’s so slow and yet of course it is happening and changing
and probably the place you’re talking from right now was once an
inland sea.
Nils Frykdahl: (the origins of the Sleepytime
Gorilla Museum logo)
“The rectangle with the frame that points in toward the center -
that is a simplification of what has been the SGM logo from the very
beginning. It initially started as the word ‘museum’ and if
you look on the first album 'Grand Opening and Closing', or seen that logo with the whole
name Museum spelled out and it’s not quite readable as such,
but that’s where it stands anyway. It arose from just playing
graphically around with the letters of the word museum and coming up
with that, the 2 M’s – one upside down facing each other make that
shape and then in the course of working with it and simplifying it
and later finding out that that shape is also the Anglo Saxon rune
for stone. So I was very pleased to find that out. It also is a
Native American Indian symbol for clouds reflected in water.”
SGM logo
Kris Swenson: How would you
best describe the overall vibe for “In Glorious Times”, and were you
a large part of the influence of the artwork, or was it a collective
of the whole band?
Nils Frykdahl: (on selecting the new cd title
and his brother’s artwork.)
“The title 'In Glorious Times' has a variety of meanings.
Glory being used in various ways through the years and certainly the
most prevalent, the single most influential thing for me on the
shaping of the album, and the choosing of that title which was
already in the song lyrics for “Companions” (which was one of the
1st songs, the earliest songs written for the album): ‘All the desperate people in the town are coming out tonight.
They’ll be here soon, they want to be here in our glorious times.’ So that phrase was already there.”
"Then in the course of working on the album, my brother and band
artist from the beginning, actually going back to our previous work
with Idiot Flesh the t-shirts and so forth, Per Frykdahl (my
brother), died. This ties in with the artwork question – all
the artwork on the new album is his and much of his artwork is
currently being assembled into an art book. I brought almost
all of his work to this publisher in New York and when I was working
on the packaging for the new cd. Then I realized what I had
left over were all the things that I had rejected and decided were
probably unfit for the publication were a bunch of pages from his
mental hospital notebooks. He had spent on and off in time
over the past 10 years in a mental hospital so it was a bunch of
really crazy stuff with all the writing all over it – it is collaged
some, but what you see on the packaging, his drawings with the
writing all around it, were from those notebooks."
Kris Swenson: Is that the artwork on
the new cd as well?
Nils Frykdahl: "Right. His art name for many
years was Ward C. Picnic directly from his notebooks. He
actually got the name from a ‘Zippy the Pinhead’ comic years
earlier in which Zippy the Pinhead was observing a group of mental
patients out on a little field trip and there was a little placard
stuck on the grass named 'Ward C Picnic'. So he thought that
was funny and adopted it as his own art name - started signing his
artwork in that way. And then probably 10 years later he
himself cracked up and ended up in the mental hospital and when I
went to visit him I was shocked and horrified and amused all at once
that I was visiting him in Ward C.
His artwork was a real inspiration for me and you mentioned the
banter to the audience, and that his voice has always been a large
influence in that for me, he was really verbally, a sponge. He
would absorb stuff from everywhere and it would just come out in
different ways. He spent some time around some pretty unusual
people who were addicts and alcoholics, mentally ill people, street
people... At a certain point that would become his community, and he
would absorb all their accents and their voices and their ways of
talking and share it with us. I would visit him in various
places, so that sense of the type of madness and the characters that
speak in their own special way, (are all in my rants) definitely."
Kris Swenson: You are the one
that puts together these crazy yummy instruments, right?
Dan Rathbun: "Yeah, I am the
Mad Scientist – I have little bits of electricity
springing from the ends of the hairs on my head constantly
(laughs). Some of them are very simple – the spring and
the wheel are nothing more than found objects which have been wired
for sound. A bicycle wheel or a spring we found lying around.
Neubauten is a big influence.
Seeing those guys was an early inspiration to me
on the idea of picking instruments that are not like other
instruments and also that aren’t necessarily all about producing
pitches. You know - instruments that just make crunching and
scraping sounds. … Crunching and scraping sounds
can be gentle and beautiful also."
Kris Swenson: What was your
take on writing parts for 'In Glorious Times'? And how did you
approach that?
Dan Rathbun: "Well, some of it had to be done in
a hurry, so there was a certain kind of immediacy and intensity to
the way we put it together. The compositional process was
often moving fast enough that I felt I had to sort of do my homework
if I was going to keep up. So that was really fun. There
are a couple of songs on there that did get a long treatment … songs
like Companions, Ossuary and Formicary. Those
are all songs we got to work on for a long time."
Kris Swenson: It's
difficult to separate 'In Glorious Times' into individual songs, it
is so beautifully orchestrated as a whole – but in reference to the
song 'Formicary', what was your approach to playing on that?
Dan Rathbun: “Well, certainly on that song I got
much deeper into because that’s the song on the album that I wrote,
so some of the concepts that I was interested in doing on that were
to find and turn upside down some of the traditional roles played by
different instruments. So in many ways the bass serves more as
a melody instrument than as a rhythm instrument. Also, the way
that the various instruments fill out the overall rhythmic structure
is I guess what I would call pointillistic - every instrument playing just one
little role and then blending together to create a whole structure
that makes sense.”
Kris Swenson: 'In Glorious
Times' definitely has got that ‘desert island disc’ feel to it, it
has staying power and that is an extremely difficult accomplishment.
Dan Rathbun: “On that subject, one of the other
things I am always thinking of when I work on these songs is exactly
what you said about staying power. I’m always remembering in
my mind the feeling that I got from records in my past, that really
stuck with me and really changed my life and really satisfied me in
a deeply emotional and intellectual way. I’m always trying to
ask myself ‘what should I do to this album that we’re making to
produce that same feeling for other people?’ ”
Kris Swenson: What are some of
those influences?
Dan Rathbun: “As a kid I listened to the band
Yes, a classic progressive rock band, that got me excited about
music. Neubauten, you can think of them as primitive on one
hand, but I think of them as being quite progressive only in a
different area. They are progressive in that the way they were
pushing boundaries was not in such a way as - how we can combine
various keys and time signatures to make a new kind of music.
Their area of progressivism was - how we can combine new nouns and
new timbres to make a music that is no longer dependant on the
traditional sounds that rock has been built on. A music that’s
no longer dependant on drums, bass and guitar to make it what it is.
Neubauten is a very progressive band in that respect. It’s
really difficult when a word like progressive gets co-opted, it
makes it very difficult to use. I prefer to use it in its
literal sense because then it has more meaning.”
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's new cd, "In Glorious Times" offers up an array of operatic, theatrical-sounding, harmonically lush as well as tasty dissonant flavors to enjoy. It takes you
and never lets you away - but don't worry, you won't want to escape this :)