Cock-Now: In the words of my friend Dustin (or, appropriating his thoughts), Aydin sounds like the climax of most bands songs the entire song. Although this is an exaggeration, a lot of the songs on 'Space Affects the Spectator' just burst with sunshine joy the whole time and are extraordinarily feel good. The Aydin sticker is a picture of dynamite exploding, and on your myspace page you describe yourself as 'what is thought about while driving 80 mph on the highway with the windows down and the sun warming your body.' What led you to this sun worship and attraction to bursting, joyous interstellar music?
KAREN: Wow, what a question! It seems to me that in our different musical influences we share a love for the "anthemic" kind of song, whether it be classic shoegaze, punk or some other pidgeonhole. Not to say this is the only kind of songs we like, nor that all of our songs are like this, but I would say an unconscious influence we share is that type of song, and that it seems we often strive toward a growing, intense, fist-in-the-air feeling with our own songs. It isn't something we've discussed explicitly. (Some "anthemic" examples from Karen, the guys may want to add their own: Pixies - "Gigantic", Spiritualized 5 "Lay Back In the Sun", Jane's Addiction "Mountain Song")
SHANNON: I’m not sure it is sun worshiping, but it does feel really good to stand in the sunshine after weeks of gray winter skies and be reminded of the positive forces in destiny. In a way that’s what our music is to me. It’s like a tightly wound ball of energy inside that makes me want to freak out and scream at how depressing life can make me feel, but instead I’m fortunate enough to be able to hit the overdrive and blast the music forward.
MARK: I’ve always had an attraction to music with a big, shimmering wall of sound. The songs that I love, the ones that influenced me the most, are the ones that sound greater than the sum of their parts. They stop existing as an arrangement of distinct instruments and voices and become a unified burst of unique sound. There’s a lot of joy in reaching that moment, as both a listener and a musician.
CN: A lot of shoegaze music is kind of mopey, and is associated with anglophile fixations (British mopiness), but it seems to me Aydin appropriates some of the aesthetics of shoegaze into a uniquely feel good music that radiates optimism. Almost like an American optimism
(~I'm thinking like Walt Whitman, Emerson, Thoreou, that feeling of hope, of the great frontier and future [not bogged down in history, like, say Europe]): Do you guys perceive yourself as an American band and, how do you think where you grew up and where you live affect your music?
KAREN: Again, that's not an aspect we've discussed or even thought about (at least I haven't), but I would agree with your American-perspective theory. I have read and enjoyed those authors and other classic American Transcendentalists and their influence probably does seep into the music and lyrics. Plus although Pittsburgh may not be in the greatest financial health, we're certainly not all on the dole as some British bands were.
On a personal level, I think we're generally optimistic people, and our music does express more of an exploration of the world rather than reacting to it. We do have the occasional angry moment, but something interesting I've just recently realized is that none of the songs on the record have "naughty" words in the lyrics, again not because we deliberately avoided it, but I think because we tend to write about more positive subjects. Will we never write an angry, cussing song? Don't say never… but that's just not our prime motivation. The energy we have is positive.
SHANNON: I definitely think that we are an American band with deep midwestern roots. We don’t have enough drama to be a British band. I grew up six blocks away from the SunOil refinery on the East End of Toledo, Ohio and didn’t think that I would live to be 25. I think the guitar portion of the music represents the hostile environment that I grew up in and tried not to become. Sometimes it did and does get the best of me, but with music I’m able to release the anger and frustration a way or quiet the music down and be content with the beauty in my life.
MARK: I think Aydin does owe a great debt to many musicians from across the pond, not just because they’ve influenced us, but also because our music collections would be pretty sparse without them. That being said, I definitely identify more with American bands, and I think our sound resembles home-grown talent like Yo La Tengo, Galaxie 500, Sonic Youth, and the Pixies more than British shoegaze icons like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, or Ride. Even more so, I identify as a Pittsburgh band. Even though none of us are native to Pittsburgh, it’s really become our home. It’s a city overflowing with great music, and practically all of the bands here are filled with talented musicians and really nice people.
CN: What do you think is the appeal of outer space? How do you think music is able to reflect this?
KAREN: It's just so… big. When you start to read and think about the way the Earth works, the way the solar system spins, and the vast network of the universe, it really makes our struggles and dramas seem so insignificant. It's at once scary and comforting. One function of music is to express anger and frustration with the situations we're caught in, but another is to carry us away from all that and toward a more centered and positive frame of mind. Considering our tiny part in the vast machine can do this.
SHANNON: I think that the appeal with outer space and music is that the future is wide open and not everything is known. Space and music are not tangible, they allow me to dream, and make me feel like there is still room for hope in the world. It’s all pretty fresh and childlike.
MARK: Back in my childhood days in Toledo, my dad and I used to listen to this program on public radio called "Music from the Hearts of Space." The music was really esoteric stuff, especially for Toledo radio: anything from new age to electronica to recordings of humpback whales. While I wasn’t always into the music, the program established an early connection in my juvenile mind between ambient sounds and outer space.
CN: Why is faith born in the sun?
KAREN: (Mark and I wrote those lyrics, although he did most of them and they came from his idea… he's got a fair amount of book learnin' about theology… so I'll let him explain.)
MARK: This is a lyric from "Warm-up," which started out as a nifty little riff we used to start practices and became a power-pop song about the mythological role of the sun in early religious practices – kind of a Brian Wilson meets Joseph Campbell experiment. A culture that depends upon the sun for light, warmth, and agriculture is obviously going to assign a cosmological primacy to it – that’s why faith is born in the sun.
CN: What led you to this instrumentation? It's not your standard rock trio, but it works so wonderfully and, is definitely recognizable as rock (albeit accordion rock) Accordion is not an instrument normally associated with shoegaze but you guys really make it work. Do you run it through effects? What inspired you to go with this sound in the first place?
KAREN: Mark and Shannon were already functioning as a duo when I started playing with them, and had already created a fair amount of material. At first I wasn't sure about the instrumentation, having had no experience playing with accordion and having never heard it being used in rock except by They Might Be Giants, which although I like that band I didn't necessarily want to emulate. But as they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it; I just tried (and still try) to add drum parts that highlight the interesting stuff going on without burying it.
SHANNON: When Mark and I first started playing together these are the instruments that we both played. It was never planned that we were going to be an accordion space rock band, it’s just that nothing has changed, except we found Karen and her drumming and personality fit right in.
MARK: I’m not a very accomplished accordionist, but I have a great affection for my instrument and an unshakeable belief in its ability to rock. I’ve tried a lot of other instruments, but I simply have the most fun playing the accordion. The first time Shannon came over to my house to jam, I pulled out the squeezebox and we’ve never looked back. With the two of us, it’s always been a really intuitive combination of styles, and when Karen came aboard, it all locked into place. That was the easy part. The hard part has been getting the proper volume. When we started playing shows, I was just playing into a microphone and no one could hear me. Now I have pickups and an amp and a variety of effects pedals, and my sound is a lot more consistent. It’s funny; for a long time I felt like I existed in a musical no-man’s land: I didn’t have anything in common with other accordionists, and while I had a lot of guitar accoutrements, I certainly wasn’t a guitarist. Then I saw this band, Those Darn Accordions, at a folk festival in Johnstown, PA. They play original songs and a variety of covers, and the music itself is not really much like ours, but they rock nonetheless. When I saw them, there were four accordionists in the band, and they were all decked out with vintage amps and tons of pedals; one of them even had a MIDI accordion and a rack of effects processors. It’s no exaggeration to say that this was a life-altering show; afterwards I felt less like an outcast and more like a guy who was in on a really cool secret.
CN: What do you think group vocals are capable of expressing that solo vocals aren't? How do you work out your vocal harmonies?
KAREN: I think the chorus-style harmonies go along with the anthemic feeling. Generally one of us comes up with a vocal part, then if we agree it needs a boost, we'll add some harmonies as they come to us. We try things out by recording to a four-track. No real theory is implemented, although I guess my main singing influence is church hymns and spirituals, and sometimes that style is apparent.
SHANNON: In our case, I think group vocals are capable of expressing a togetherness and a like-minded belief that brings us closer together. Vocals are an expression of experience or thought and with us group vocals fill more dynamics and add texture. I like the plainness of solo vocals too and the way they personalize a song.
MARK: As a band that doesn’t assign prominence to vocals, I think group vocals generally emerge as a better match for our songs. Who needs a distinct vocal lead when you can disperse many voices throughout the sonic landscape?
CN: Your music (especially tracks like 'Little Galaxy') really give me the sensation of being this tiny thing looking out onto the universe from planet earth ('to navigate the world outside', disoriented, 'makes you wonder where you are'): this childlike sense of wonder at the natural world (and how small we are, and how large it all is): its like a questioning, a wandering, a searching, a building towards. What do you think in childhood leads to the development of the psychedelic mind? (Or the minds attracted to the psychedelic mindset.)
KAREN: Well for me I guess it's from living close to the woods, and being intimately acquainted with nature early; that led to studying biology and being continually amazed at the inner workings of it all. Being able to see the world in different ways leads to an appreciation and wonder, and to seeking out more insights. Mark could tell more about this I'm sure, but I've read, and it makes perfect sense to me, that the birth of religion was in psychedelic experiences with mind-altering substances.
SHANNON: I think that being alone in childhood makes you develop ways to entertain yourself. You live in make believe and as you grow the limits of entertainment are stretched by music, movies, and books. Before you know it most of your young adult friends are the same way and you are doing drugs with them, skateboarding with them, and becoming competitive against their tricks and music collection. And it grows to who has the coolest, psychedelic experience that can be shared.
MARK: You’re definitely right, a lot of our songs are written from that perspective. Shannon, Karen, and I all share a penchant for solitude and introspection, and that’s probably something we’ve all had since childhood.
CN: Where does the inspiration for stellar meltdowns (instrumentals) like 'Half-gramme Holiday' come from? (Or 'Screenful's sense of dynamics & space creating intense sensations of aliens fondling you...)
KAREN: Whoa! Never thought of it like that… Well, as with all our songs, we don't really set out to write a particular kind of song. They just grow from little bits that each of us brings to the table. See question #11 below… But with some songs we throw in some noise to bring it to another level, almost like an overdrive or "hyperspace", like in "Half-Gramme Holiday."
SHANNON: The guitar of half-gramme holiday really came to life after it was given a name. The inspiration for me was reading ‘Brave New World’ while coming up with the melody. I love the way that the characters were expected to take drugs, a half-gramme holiday, if they began to feel blue, and one person resisted and wanted to feel emotions and share it with a woman that wanted the same. For me, ‘half-gramme holiday’ is that chaotic struggle and how you may not get what you want.
MARK: One of the things I love about this band is that our songwriting inspirations come from a great diversity of sources, from snowboarding to chaos theory to Lando Calrissian. The sky is the limit, really. By the way, every time I play "Screenful" from now on, I’ll be thinking about the alien fondling, so thanks for that.
CN: When did you realize you wanted to be in a band? Tell us a little bit about each member and their backgrounds...
KAREN: As long as I can remember! Of course that’s only one of many childhood fantasies... but I started playing drums as a band geek in high school in West Virginia - had wanted to start earlier, but the various music teachers wouldn’t let me switch from flute - and I continued taking lessons through college in Pittsburgh. After graduating I was in a few short-lived punk bands here, but then I started getting into mountain biking and working at a bike shop, and let the drumming fall by the wayside (not without regret) as I got promoted and the hours got more ridiculous. After five years of retail hell I decided to quit, and in the month before I left, Shannon, who had just started working at the shop, talked me into jamming with him and Mark. I still have a "demo" tape he gave me with some things he and Mark had recorded, including an early version of "Airbomb", on one side, and a shoegazey mix of some of the bands he was inspired by on the other. I had very briefly got into that stuff in college (mostly Lush and Curve), but had since listened to mostly post-punk and indie stuff at that point (as far as "rock" music) - Pixies, Fugazi, various Touch-n-Go and Matador bands. Oh yeah, it was Led Zeppelin in jr. high and Rush in high school that got me through. And I’m infinitely grateful to have been led back to drumming again. I don’t know what was wrong with me that I ever stopped!
SHANNON: I began skateboarding and going to punk shows in the late 80’s and loved how music pulled all the freaks together and created some strong bonds that I still have today. Hearing ‘I Wanna be Adored’ by the Stone Roses completely opened my mind to music and people, and helped me not to be ashamed of the poverty I was growing up in. I had crazy hair and my best friend was black, which led to a lot of fights while growing up in a racist part of town that had no direction. But driving 45 minutes to Detroit in the early 90’s to see Swervedriver, Slowdive, Verve, Ride, My Bloody Valentine, Jane’s Addiction, Medicine, and all the amazing tours of the time just blew me away and I knew I would never be like my neighbors, plus I was too fucked up to be around them.
MARK: I think I’ve wanted to be in a band since I first started being an avid music listener as a teenager. Playing music was always a hobby for me, and I drifted between instruments and various jamming partners until Shannon came along. We became friends almost instantly, and our common backgrounds and musical interests led naturally into a songwriting partnership. When he found Karen I couldn’t believe our good fortune. Both her musical contributions and her leadership are invaluable to the band, and on top of that she’s a lot of fun to hang out with. The three of us have been through so much together that it’s really hard to imagine us doing anything else.
CN: The drumming style is really unique (the accents falling like falling stars or comets), and on top of this you sing. Drumming & singing simultaneously is really difficult: how do you do it Karen? The way things fall apart and come back together, woozy, drunk on stars, then picking itself back up again, does the singing and drumming together difficulty lend itself to this type of woozy feel-good composition (of instrumental breakdowns collapsing, then bursting out
[into outer space] again), or, is it a conscious attempt to reflect a state of mind? (A woozy state of mind)
KAREN: Our singing parts usually come last in the songwriting process – in fact for a while we struggled to come up with lyrics and singing parts, we’d been just having fun jamming – so the drum parts come first. Singing and playing is actually not all that difficult; one learns to use all your limbs playing drums by adding them one at a time, so the voice is just like a fifth limb.
Hard to say exactly where my style comes from, but I have tried to choose my influences to an extent – the lessons I took were from jazz guys, but I’ve listened to and tried to play many styles of drumming, and have enjoyed listening to classical music as well from an early age. I strive for a balanced approach, both physically in how I play, and sonically. Shannon and/or Mark typically starts a jam and I try to listen and play what is suggested by what they’re doing. I used to lament not playing drums from toddlerhood on, but I’ve come to appreciate starting later, as I think I’ve gained a more melodic sense, plus I’ve been able to escape the kind of cookie-cutter virtuosity one often sees in drummers.
CN: 'Half-gramme holiday' is my favorite song, as if the whole orbit of our solar system were falling apart, out of gravity's pull, and yet, it all comes together, that feeling of falling while wrestling to keep it together: do tracks like this come out of improv jams or are they composed instrumentals?
KAREN: That song, like most of our songs, is made up of parts spawned from jams (see question #19). I get the same sort of feeling playing it – we go way out, then back a bit, then further out, then bring it home.
SHANNON: ‘Half-gramme holiday’ was born of a composed melody that grew to an improv jam.
MARK: I remember this song coming together pretty quickly, and the improvised portion fit very nicely into our intended structure for the song. It’s one of my favorite songs to play; I’m glad you like it.
CN: What do you think the interstellar feelings reflected in your music say about the emotional state within (bursting to get out)?
KAREN: We have a good time playing. We’ve gotten to the point where when we practice, there’s not a lot of talking involved – we can just pick up and jam. It’s very liberating.
SHANNON: I think we are all dreamers with a lot going on in our lives. The music is a way for us all to keep sane after days of nonsense and hoping that we can make someone that is listening feel good and relate to an experience. Music is healing as we have learned.
MARK: The right mix of tension and release can do wonders for a song, and for the people playing it.
CN: Why do some of your songs lend themselves to lyrics and others are purely instrumental? What do you think necessitates lyrics in a song?
KAREN: Sometimes it’s tough to decide, but mostly we just recognize where lyrics would fit in, and where they wouldn’t. The singing is just one more instrument in the soup, not the focus with a backdrop. We’re starting to get more adept at adding vocals, and we’ll definitely do more harmonies, in fact all three of us sing in one of our new songs.
SHANNON: Some of the songs have lyrics to help carry the song and to fulfill more space. Other songs are able to stand alone and lyrics would just be a distraction to the melody.
MARK: Usually after we have the basic arrangement for a song, we decide whether or not to add vocals; it’s almost always the last step in our songwriting process. The criteria we use to make this decision are not really formalized, we just experiment with vocals and if we can’t find any that fit the song, we keep it instrumental.
CN: How do you make guitars reflect the big bang bursting sun? (I.e. explode)
KAREN: Shannon?
SHANNON: I have spacebees hot wire my jazzmaster.
CN: What are the five albums you'd say have most influenced Aydin's music?
KAREN: Well, actually, I think we’d each have a different set of five albums, and I think that’s one of our strengths, not all having the same influences. We aren’t just rehashing our favorite stuff – we have to meld it together into something different. Mark and Shannon might share a couple... Geez, this is hard, but here are my choices for what has influenced how I play in this band, in no particular order:
Pixies - Bossanova
Jane’s Addiction - Nothing’s Shocking
18th Dye - Tribute to a Bus
Taking Pictures - Friends Are Ghosts plus various mixes that Shannon has made, plus the Galaxy 500 box set I borrowed from Mark for a long time...
SHANNON: Swervedriver - Raise, My Bloody Valentine - Loveless, The Stone Roses - Stone Roses....
MARK: Galaxie 500 – On Fire, Built to Spill – Perfect From Now On, My Bloody Valentine – Loveless, 18th Dye – Tribute to a Bus, The Silver Apples – The Silver Apples/Contact
CN: Tracks like 'Strange Attractor' (which is one of my favorites, by the way) are kind of like jamming, but one wouldn't confuse it with hippie jam bands or jazz. Autumn Thieves spoke of a similar improvisatory element in their music, but they said the difference was their version was evil. But Aydin's music seems really joyous most of the time so that wouldn't seem to really apply here. What do you think separates your brand of space rock improvisation (which I'm assuming, tell me if I'm off here) from hippie style jam bands?
KAREN: You hit the nail on the head – "space rock jamming" is exactly what we’ve been calling it. I’m not even sure what is supposed to constitute "space rock"... I like to think we’re redefining the term... but anyway, I think we are more focused than most jam bands. We tend to have predetermined signals, or are able to read one another, so that rather than going on and on with one idea, we can change and evolve within a few minutes. Plus we know when to quit for the sake of our audience. When we practice, we may jam on something for 15-20 minutes, but I think we all agree that as fun as that is, it can get pretty boring to watch.
SHANNON: We keep our shoes on and try not to lose complete control of the exit.
MARK: None of us is really all that into soloing, and as a band we try not to be self-indulgent. As James Brown would say, we hit it and quit it.
CN: How do you think the accordion influences the drone of Aydin?
SHANNON: I think the accordion gives us a huge leap into galactic space. Mark has a very original sound that surprises us all at times.
MARK: Even though the accordion is the unique instrument, I think it’s really Karen’s and Shannon’s styles that define our sound, particularly the unusual time signatures and crisp sonic attack. I just try to fill in the space with some nice drones and the occasional melody.
CN: Aydin avoids typical loud soft dynamics. Your songs run more like interludes and pleasantly disorienting passages, floating satelites and parts seeming to fall into each other rather than your typical verse / chorus / verse pop songs. There's a really interesting use of space and dynamics at work here that sounds like an anthemic call to the aliens to come & celebrate life: how does the songwriting work?
KAREN: A lot of our music just comes from jamming out, then separating out and solidifying those parts that we like best, then mixing and matching until we get what we think is a complete song. Lyrics and singing come last, the icing on the cake as it were.
Somehow we avoid typical song structures – again, not because we set out to, it just seems to come out that way, maybe more from ignorance of how to write a typical song. Not to say we’re not concerned with song structure, we do arrange and rearrange and add and subtract until it seems right to us. That applies for time signatures, too: Shannon in particular doesn’t seem to have internalized the typical four-beats, four-bars thing. When I first started to play with those guys, there were parts that might have been considered mistakes, and I could have tried to fit them into a typical beat, but I chose to work with them instead, and it’s much more interesting.
SHANNON: We typically find ourselves under the influence and just let go of the weight of the day. One note leads to another leading to a melody into pieces that reflect the mood of the time.
MARK: Typically we’ll start with a guitar part and jam on it, and if we like the result we’ll use trial and error to build new parts and eventually a loose arrangement. At this point, the song takes a basic shape and we start looking for ways to round it out, like vocals, or an intro, or some noise breaks. It’s really a very informal process.
CN: What else do you guys do besides music?
KAREN: I work at Dirt Rag Magazine - it’s a national mountain bike magazine based in Pittsburgh. It’s a cool job, in that I’m in a great position to participate in and document the sport, while in a very laid-back and fun atmosphere. Funny, I’ve had more "rock-star" experiences – traveling, getting comped stuff, signing autographs – with my day job than with the band! Not that I could ever do without the band though...
For a long time I’ve felt like I’ve been part of two worlds that don’t intersect, music and biking, but in the last couple years they’re starting to collide more, which is great. More of my music friends are biking for transportation, health and fun. We even got to play a show put on by a local bike advocacy group, Bike Pittsburgh, this past summer.
SHANNON: I ride bicycles and work in a bike shop where I spend the day dreaming of how to break free.
MARK: I work full-time in a public library and I’m a part-time graduate student. I always bring home books, music, and movies from the library, and they keep me occupied in my occasional free time.
CN: Do you think outer space appeals to those who feel uncomfortable in their own skins? How do you think the spinning of the planets around the sun reflects itself in your music? Do you think there's life on other planets? What do you think their music sounds like?
KAREN: Yes, maybe... feeling like an outsider is another thing that leads to looking further outward... Ah, the Music of the Spheres. That idea has intrigued me since I heard of it... can’t remember whose it was though... but a classical idea that the solar system, and universe, operate like gears in a clock, and their perfection can be the basis and inspiration for celestial music. There have been, and are, creatures living on this Earth so strange you can barely understand how they’re alive. Other planets? The life forms may be so weird we wouldn’t even recognize them as such, but they probably do make music, and it’s probably beyond our comprehension.
SHANNON: I think outer space appeals to anyone that is a dreamer. We have songs that were written during different seasons which reflect our mood. If there is life on other planets I would love to hear their music and to get a hold of an instrument.
MARK: This reminds of me of something that’s been bothering me. Did it ever seem weird to you that the cantina band in "Star Wars" played ragtime jazz and not something, say, more indicative of their alien nature?
CN: What does your lyric 'each moment is in itself a universe' mean to you?
KAREN: Funny how you linked that song in particular with psychedelia in question #7: the line "each moment is, in itself, a universe" came to me while tripping back in college… I was trying to convey the sense of time appearing to be not steady and linear, but flexible and circular, and infinitely expanding the more one pays attention to it. The idea hung out in the back of my mind until writing the lyrics to that song, which were inspired by reading about mathematic chaos theory and its implications for how the world is ordered, how there are an infinite number of levels of complexity.
SHANNON: Each moment is so undiscovered that anything has the potential to occur.
MARK: Even the smallest measurement of time contains infinite possibilities.
To learn more about Aydin or purchase their music please visit:
http://aydin-music.com/
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