Cock-Now: Under your influences you put at the end "...and all those little moments that save our lives...." Do you ever see music as a way of giving eternal life (or celebration) to those moments, kind of like ancestral worship only in this case for moments and the living (instead of the dead, but also the dead)...almost like abstract photographs (snapshots of time)?
Reflectiostack: Music is definitely about celebrating little moments that normally would go unremembered. It's about capturing the vulnerability, the joy, the sadness of that part of your life you can't see, or even understand. We are constantly moving in circles in our lives, repeating patterns and painful mistakes. When we grow, and the circle turns into an upward spiral, we have cause for celebration.
CN: ‘Golden’ is definitely my song of the year (~even though I guess it came out last year): it’s just as magnificent a song as has ever been written... ‘Mist of life it coils around your tender soul’ is such a brilliant line. My question is, why is the soul inherently tender? Why a lamb and not a lion? Or has it been humbled by the world?
R: In tenderness, the soul becomes both lamb and lion. It is an emotion that recognizes our inherent need for others, and demands a certain amount of vulnerability. Ironically, then, tenderness requires incredible strength to move beyond the safety of our solitary selves.
CN: I always wanted to hear the Dirty 3 w/vocals, and you guys achieve what I’d been hearing in my head (~more than with Nick Cave or Chan Marshall or their other collaborators) more successfully than the Dirty 3! I know when I saw the Dirty 3 live for the first time it was a life changing experience. (~I’ve seen them seven times since.) I can hear the heavy (or dirgy as your site says) influence of Warren Ellis on Fiona’s violin lines, especially ‘Whatever You Love, You Are’, ‘Horse Stories,’ and ‘Ocean Songs.’Can you talk for a bit about what the Dirty 3 has meant to you and how they’ve influenced your music? Who are some other violinists who have influenced your playing? (~I also hear The Rachels ‘Music for Egon Schiele’ quite a bit in there.)
R: Sometimes influence runs so deep you cease to be able to excavate it The Dirty Three open a dialogue between melody and dissonance, between architectural layering and minimalism, between tension and release, between structure and spontaneity, which has articulated many musical possibilities for us, particularly in terms of incorporating the violin as a crucial voice in that dialogue. There is a Hungarian violinist named Felix Lajko who continues to push the limits of the instrument through his explorations of folk and gypsy music. Interestingly, the Dirty Three cover a Felix Lajko song (the Zither Player) on Cinder.
CN: ‘Silence is all I can say to you when there are to many things floating around this head of mine’ is such a great line. And then the violin (in "5 Foot Bridges") just comes in at the perfect moment to express what the words can’t (~but what you allude to later, ‘fire rushing in into your eyes’). What do you think music is capable of expressing emotionally that words fail to?
R: There is something definitive about words. Music takes words to another level. It adds a meaning through emotion and dynamics; a truth that is timeless.
CN: Q: ‘What is reality when dreams they float away from you?’
R: When hope and dreams escape life, reality becomes indifferent, an invisible cog in that destructive wheel of nothingness. To capture your dreams is to carve on the rock of life that you existed, that you could see above the trees.
CN: There seems to be this ongoing dialogue in your songs about the relationships b/w reality and dreams or illusions. In the song "Who is Yuri Popovich?" (Ed. Note: which also, re: the violin, is the most ‘Venus In Furs’ song I’ve heard by a modern band since The Stooges ‘We Will Fall’ [which was also John Cale].) you say:
"Sleep tight for these dreams, they are what's real"
and later in the song "When I run away I'm real, when I run away I'm real"
Philip K. Dick says something like ‘reality is what’s left when you stop believing in it.’ Do you think music has the power to transform reality (like casting spells)?
R: Yes. Music is a reflection of our unconscious thoughts. And that's what makes it so important. *** Music has always had the power to express hopes and fears that have not yet been acknowledged. If you look at changing musical styles, from blues, to jazz, to rock, to punk, to rap, those shifts not only express the changes and disruptions of the times, but actually shape the way that people understand their present, their reality.
CN: I love how you straddle the moment of having to confront reality, while wanting to live in illusion. Do you think music is just a series of translucent illusions, worlds of illuminations we create to escape from reality? Or can it be used to discover a deeper reality?
R: Yes and Yes. Music definitely helps us to escape into different dimensions. It allows us to simplify to the point of understanding the complexities of our surroundings.
CN: What does Reflectiostack live look like?
R: The core of Reflectiostack has always been the interaction between guitar, violin, and voice. In a live setting, this remains the core, whether we add other dimensions or not. We have played with drums, bass, trumpet, and piano on and off over the years, but always tend to return to the core. Currently, many of the songs are being performed to pre-programmed drum tracks or loops, which add a rhythmic element and a depth to the sound. Fiona layers her violin parts through a looping pedal over Kirstys electric guitar and vocals. Experimenting with loops and delays expands the potential of the music, and allows us to achieve an often surprising range of dynamics with just the two of us.
CN: How much you can do with something simple (three chords and a dream), how many places you can take & transform (through slight [minimalistic] changes) repetition (something simple) seem to be a prevalent feature (hold a prominent place) on "Music For Torching." Not unlike the The Velvet Underground, The Dirty 3, Tony Conrad (or LaMonte Young) or Neu, just how far you can take one thing [like Stereolabs ‘Jenny Ondine’, or Suicide, Spacemen 3])(or jazz, like John Coltrane’s ‘Spiritual’ from ‘Live From The Village Vanguard): how do you view the power of repetition and it’s place in Reflectiostack’s aesthetic?
R: Minimalism pushes repetition and simplicity to the limits of its aesthetic utility where the danger is redundancy. But there is much to be taken from those kinds of explorations. Repetition is a way to meditate on a musical theme; a way to play with structural elements through building up and stripping away; an extended contemplation of a possibility; an attempt to capture a moment that may otherwise go unnoticed. For us, the repetition is a way forward, though. It must be purposive and express a movement. The patterns are always shifting, and there is rarely a sense of return.
CN: You say in the song "Comfortable State of Perfection": ‘What personality will I put on tonight,’ and the emotions that lay in the lyrics (‘I’m listening to the wrong part of myself again and again and again and again’) come apart in the noise cascades (breakdown), the ‘comfortable state of perfection’ shattering apart. There’s a constant questioning and answering in the music (often times the violin and vocal interweaving and having a dialogue within the context of the song): How does the songwriting process work in Reflectiostack?
R: The songwriting process works something like this: Kirsty writes the bare bones of a song: the guitar part and vocals and a structure. Then Fiona adds her violin parts, and then drum loops if needed, and the we rework the structure and nuances of the songs as the layers build.
CN: There’s a darkness, an eeriness or creepiness, in the music (especially the violin, but the vocals as well, sweet and cutting your throat) ...where do you think this comes from?
R: Life is hard. It's better to accept that fact than to ignore it. Sometimes we can only see the light after the darkness. It's all about hope. Life is great because its all that weve got
CN: Your sense of dynamics and space is so tasteful, the breakdown in "8 Months" (at 2 minutes and 30 seconds) where you sing ‘frozen like my love for you’ is just immaculate stunning transcendent: Where does this sense of dynamics, orchestration, and arrangement come from? Do you have any conservatory training? Are you self-taught? (Somewhere in between?)
R: Kirsty is self-taught. Fiona is classically trained. We have always been interested in playing with sonic density and space within the framework of unconventional structures. In making this record, we focused on bringing the most out of each song, which often meant experimenting with the arrangements in unexpected ways. We were very conscious of creating space. When youre recording, it is so easy to add things in, but much harder to take things away. Most of the time we thought, what would happen if we did this?, and tried it. Dale Morningstar became integral to this process, understanding implicitly what we were trying to accomplish.
CN: ‘Reconnect, oh my broken song’: The album has such a great flow to it, it really takes you on a journey (~it’s not just a collection of songs, ~it’s an album). Did this just fall into place, or did you very consciously try and make it a journey from one place to another, building, bursting, then gradually dissolving away? (And on that note, what are some of your favorite albums of all time?)
R: The order of a record is so important. We tried many different orders. We would burn CDs with the different orders and listen to them for a while, trying to find an order where all the tracks sounded their best, where nothing was buried. It was interesting to hear how a song would change depending on where it was placed in the order and in relation to the other songs. When we finally hit upon this order, which seems so obvious now, we just knew that it was right. As Radiohead sings, Everything in its right place.
So Favourite Albums? (This list could go on for pages, but since were talking about album orders, here are some that got it right)
Fionas: Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home Tom Waits, Closing Time Dirty Three, Whatever You Love You Are Neil Young, Tonights the Night Miles Davis, In a Silent Way Will Oldham, Joya
Kirstys: Slint, Spiderland PJ Harvey, Rid of Me Radiohead, OK Computer Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation Pixies, Doolittle Jeff Buckley, Grace
CN: ‘This golden reality’ is such a great concept (Ed. Note: I love how the violins in this song conjure memory, as if the hesitation in their quavers were a symbol of memory itself): What does the line ‘this is unreality for the masses shade all colors into one’ mean to you?
R: "Unreality for the masses, shade all colours into one." can mean so many things, it's all about perspective; Watching the world care about meaningless things, a fear masked by consumption, a homogenized society that's forgotten how to think.
CN: You say in your bio "Reflectiostack can be placed in an on-going dialogue between folk, post-rock, and electronica...". I see the folk and post-rock, but the electronica (cause the loops I guess are so tastefully disguised) is harder to find. The electronic beats and loops (or whatever you’re doing) fuse so seamlessly with the violin & the guitar, ~ I’ve never seen a band pull it off with such grace. What on the album is electronica? The drums are so amazing on "Golden", is this a loop or live drums (or live drums over beats)?
R: There are pre-programmed beats on more than half of the tracks, which are the same beats that we play to in a live setting. The beats are designed to be organic, adding texture and dynamics, and accentuating existing rhythms. For the recording, we got Blake Howard to play drums on every song. Blake is an amazing drummer, and very intuitive (showcased beautifully on San Diego Serenade). He was able to play over top of the tracks in a way that helped draw a lot of things together, and offered an added dimension to the songs. The result was that it is often difficult to tell the live drums from the electronica. Sometimes both are there, and sometimes it is one or the other, depending on how we mixed the song (see question ..12).
CN: How did the two of you meet? What is the history of Reflectiostack?
R: Our history is boring, wed rather not talk about it. Lets all just live in the present.
CN: Who sings the harmonies?
R: Its all harmony. (if youre referring to the vocals on the record: bit of Kirsty, bit of Fiona, and our friends Scott, and Don)
CN: Is First Flight Records your own label?
R: No. Its a label based out of St.Louis. (www.firstflightrecordlabel.com)They have a great roster of bands and were pretty excited to be a part of it.
CN: ‘Fade a blow to your inner reality’: What else do you do besides music?
R: Kirsty: mom of a toddler, office manager Fiona: PHD student in Cultural Studies
CN: ‘Melted into your love,’ like the lovechild of Nico and Billie Holiday and the Dirty 3, the lyrics seem lost b/w yearning, melancholy, & eternal optimism: is this conscious or does it just come out that way?
R: Nope. It just comes out this way. I know myself better after I see what I create. Thank goodness for music. I feel less lost because of it.
CN: "New York", the last track on the album, recalls the nervous tension of some of The Rachels Music for Egon Schiele, and, perfectly recalls the feeling of life closing in, becoming more and more claustrophobic and uncertain, faster and faster, the building, the cascading, kind of like a landslide. Where did this song come from?
R: The song is maybe a culmination of everything that weve been talking about vulnerability/strength, reality/dreams, the aesthetics of repetition, dynamics/orchestration. With the exception of the minimal guitar and vocals, sparse drums, and solitary double bass run at the end, the whole song is one violin track built on top of an original loop. The violin adds new parts until the original loop decays, so that the piece is constantly in transition. Creation, destruction, and change: these things are fundamental to music and to life.
CN: What’s your favorite movie with Tom Waits in it?
R: Coffee & Cigarettes
CN: Thank you*
For more info on Reflectiostack or to order music please visit: http://reflectiostack.com
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