CN: The insert to your album states, ‘This recording began with one song and a bottle of red wine...subsequent overdubs, dismantling, and reassembling was to follow through the spring.’
This technique (to me) sounds very much like how Can used to record their masterpieces ‘Tago Mago’, ‘Future Days’, etc. in the early ‘70s in Germany, or how Miles Davis put together ‘Bitches Brew’ in ‘69. The vocals of Zelda, to me, even resemble Damo Suzukis at time (in their reach and breath and inarticulate articulations). What do you think improvisation-based exploratory song writing can reflect that more traditional song writing can’t?
Zelda Pinwheel: At it's best, improvisational music taps into the subcontious; feeling the moment and reacting. In that sense, it can allow for a more natural building of a song.
CN: There’s a real feeling of friendship and chemistry that comes through in the sound of the band. How did you guys get together? How long have you known each other? Who are the different personalities involved in Zelda Pinwheel and how does each personality influence the music?
ZP: This is potentially a very long answer, but lets just say that steve and james are cousins and have been playing music together for the better part of 15 years. Ralph came into the picture some time in 2002 when steve was hanging a drummer wanted flyer in the new jersey percussion shop wher Ralph worked. Ralph saw that they liked the same bands and decided to learn to play the drums. That was when Zelda Pinwheel started to become a real band (and not just a fancy name that steve and james put on their demos.) We recorded 'One Tear to This Fabric' in James's bedroom that year. A year later, a little band called Celesphere broke up. We immediately snatched up their bassist, Brian Dominiecki while Steve took to recording their guitarist Brian McGarry's first solo record. Dominiecki played with us for about two years, recording on 'With an Unending String or Patchwork' and the new full length that we just finished before moving to California last spring. That was when Mcgarry (who had just lured Steve to Philadelphia) stepped in to fill the bassist roll. Discussing everyone's personal attributes would just lead to embarresment.
CN: Why do you think editing such improvisations is so important? How does editing aesthetically control such spontaneous creation? (And transform aimlessness into beautiful paintings where nothing is superfluous.)
ZP: In the most beautiful painting, everything is superfluous. Like the canvas could shred itself, or the paint could wash. The most beautiful image in the world is all its women, girl to granny, in one place, aging in round. If you could see it, how could you stop looking? Beautiful improvisation depends on that. It moves on feminine gestures: it intuits, it seduces, it receives shiny objects. By contrast, postproduction is the ultimate male opportunity. You lay the map on the table, you intellectualize, you divide and conquer. It's very easy to destroy a woman the next day, to keep editing until the performance is reduced to a matter of fact. But beautiful paintings are not documents. And the most beautiful recording defies the memory of prior listens. You return to it often, lest it disappear altogether.
CN: There seems to be a building, a lifting, a reaching towards in your music that’s looking for something...searching (I’m thinking specifically of ‘Alone at the mimespeak,’ but a lot of your tracks have this.) : what are you searching for?
ZP: All art is about seaching. It's hard to know at any point what it is that we're trying to find... thus the chaos... thus the uncertainty. They key is having the patience to trust the music to guide us through, whether there's a pot of gold or the edge of a cliff on the other end.
CN: Has jazz influenced you at all?
ZP: 'Humbled' is perhaps a better word.
CN: Do you ever play the same thing twice?
ZP: The record that we just finished is more song oriented. Kind of our rock-out showpiece. These songs are far more concise and even though they still have elements of improvisation in them, we tend to stick a lot closer to the writen forms.
CN: Why make music at all?
ZP: All of us have been touched deeply by music. Songwriting is a lot like parenthood, really... The idea of creating something that hadn't existed before. You raise then, send them off into the world and hope they do right.
CN: Let me be the first, in the same way that Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’ shall be forever linked in peoples minds by whoever put those two together, to put together Zelda Pinwheel and The Big Lebowski, which, eerily fuse in super-natural ways that makes you seem like natural twins. You don’t have to believe me. Try it for yourself, put on The Big Lebowski and Zelda Pinwheel’s ‘With an undending string or patchwork’. How do you feel about being the new Pink Floyd in this sense?
ZP: Our music tends to have a very moldable visual aestetic. When we were writing the songs on 'One Tear...' all of the songs were originally refered to by color. We'd work within a series of structured improvisations based on the mood that the color seemed to imply until the songs wrote themselves and then we'd record them. We've had our music on the televion and Steve has scored several short films. That's something we'd like to do a lot more of.
As far 'the new Pink Floyd' goes, let's just hope your readers try this little experiment, then turn on their budding filmmaker friends.
CN: Ok, what’s up with the song titles? For mostly instrumental music, this is some pretty whack stuff: 1. Circles for the blind 2. Alone at the mimespeak 3. If I had a tower... 4. India in a Box 5. The Disembodied Lady 6. In the east they build beautiful flowers 7. Nothing yet circles red robots. Cock-Now contains a lot of experimental poetry that uses cut-up to arrive at similar nonsense sense sound sense (that cuts away layers of reality and makes new sense), ~how do you arrive at your titles?
ZP: The titles come from a lot of different places. A lot of them are sort of disjointed sensory phrases that are conjured up while listening back... or lyrics that might have been... or maybe a red herring... The approach to titles is similar to the approach to music and vocals, to add shading and ideas for the listeners, not necessarily spell anything out. That way people get to bring more of their own personalities and experiences to it.
CN: Who would you say is the Zelda Pinwheel family tree? What are some of your touchstone albums (that have most affected your work)?
ZP: We all listen to so many different things that influence our music, some in ways that might not even be perceptable. It's a tough list to make. But here are a few: Sonic Youth (washing machine) , Mogwai (ep +2) , The Ojays (back stabber), Brian Eno (here come the warm jets), Nick Drake (pink moon), pavement (woowie zoowie), My Bloody Valentine (loveless), Ween (the molusk), Cerberus Shoal (crash my moon yacht), Steely Dan (aja), Do Make Say Think (goodbye enemgy airship the landlord is dead), gsybe! (lift your skinny fist like anteneas to heaven), Bowie's Berlin session, Talking Heads (fear of music), The Beach Boys (pet sounds), The Places (the autopilot knows you best), Neutral Milk Hotel (In an Aeroplane Over the Sea), Pink Floyd (piper at the gates of dawn), Miles Davis (get up with it), anything by Roy Orbison (although it seems best of's are the only thing we can ever find), Dylan (bringnig it all back home) ... Right now there's an Elvis's Golden Greats record on Steve and Brian's tuntable. Let's stop here. This is getting ridiculous.
CN: Back to vocals. I really love the vocals to Zelda Pinwheel (I think it adds a human element [a voice], but also, because of the crazy timbre to them, a fucked up element which lifts the music into a place that seems even stranger [which to me is a good thing!]): why do you use vocals so infrequently and, do you ever think about adding more of them? (They sound really great on tracks like ‘The Disembodied Lady’!)
ZP: Vocals were used so infrequently on the patchwork album mostly because of the nature of the compositions. The vocals we overdubbed in places that cried for them. 'One Tear...' , the next album, and our live set have a lot more singing.
CN: What do you think instrumental music is capable of expressing that vocal music isn’t?
ZP: It's a bare pallet. Even when vocals are there, we've always felt that they should function as just another instrument. Either way, the expression is on the part of the listener. Lyrics are either inclusive or exclusive. Either lots of people can sing along, or you've put up a wall, and the listener scales it, or (s)he loses interest and leaves. But with instrumental music, you have transparency. Whether you're a wallflower and it asks you to dance, or you're a headphone kid and it leads you to bed, an instrumental means the listener is engaged to a series of moments. It might not stick to your brain, but what's cooler? Hearing the annoying girl at the show scream your favorite lyric, or the fact that no two people ever imagined the same thing while listening to Debussy?
CN: When you do sing, why the urge to sing at those moments?
ZP: It's not up to us... The song decides.
CN: Do you believe in possession? Spirits entering the room and possessing the instrumentalists (or at least guiding the way) and shaping the journeys?
ZP: Most of us would probably like to belive that there's something else guiding us. It removes a layer of resposibility. But cynicism and intelectualism and lack of faith are strong forces too, aren't they.
CN: Do you guys release yourselves? What is your take on the d.i.y. aesthetic?
ZP: We've self released everything up to this point. For the next one we may try to go in a different direction just for a change. Change has been the most important muse for this band. But aside from releasing ourselves, we do all of our own recording. It keeps the control in our hands. We didn't want to have any added layers between ourselves and the finished product, so we learned to do it ourselves.
CN: There seems to be a strong psychedelic streak in your work, I’m thinking specifically of the Pink Floyd-isms of ‘If I had a tower,’ or the Can ‘Tago Mago’-esque kind of incense and candles burning vibe (Indian rugs and magic), the sort of ‘everybody in’ quality that permeates a lot of your work. You perfectly capture that narcotic haze of falling on the floor through the ceiling...(especially in ‘If I had a tower...’)...the really sleepy red wine disorientation end of night confusion. What is it that’s so appealing about this uncertain feeling of strangeness and entering a kind of more mystical realm in your music? How do you think spirituality is tied into music, and do you think you explore the spiritual realm in your work?
ZP: That's a tough question to answer because there are four of us and we all have different relations to the spiritual world. THose relations color everthing we do in our lives, and when we put it all together, sometime they play nice, sometimes not so nice. We like music that takes the mind away. We like making music that does the same. Sound can be a very strong drug that paints pictures inside peoples minds, puts you in sort of a medetative state.
CN: The album is so varied in its breath, moving from noise freakouts to ambient bliss to psychedelic chill downs to spazz rock outs. What’s the cohesive thread in Zelda Pinwheel? Where does the continuity lie?
ZP: Evolution and a desire to create something drastically different from the last think we created.
CN: What’s the day job situation like? What’s the ideal situation for Zelda Pinwheel? Could you see Zelda being around twenty years from now?
ZP: 2 teachers, an audio engineer, and a computer guy. As far as the future goes, we have an eye toward owning our own studio were we can record, practice, and release other bands. Maybe in the next year if the gods of fortune smile upon us.
If this band is around in 20 years, none of us would be surprised. We love playing music together. But you ceratainly wouldn't recognize it.
CN: I love the piano track, ‘In the east they build beautiful flowers,’ (~it’s my favorite really, cause apart from all the great psychedelic madness the album contains, you seem to evoke more out of the minimalistic shimmering simplicity of the piano and bongos and bells and percussion than through all the noise, to me at least [or maybe its just a calm to the storm, which is what I need right now (even if the only place I can get it is in song)]) : it really gives off that floating feeling, that, feeling of suspension, like, the moment in the movie where you’re walking through some strangers mansion and you suddenly come upon a magic forest from the hallway and foreign newness awkwards it all (in the most wonderful way), everything’s glowing and it’s fantastic in a certain way...kind of that nostalgic feeling, down by the harbor or something, that...just a whiff of memory is enough to unnerve you but, at the same time gives that resolution of everything’s gonna be alright now...so my question is, how do you think memory serves music?
ZP: Sound has a way of evoking memories. Sometimes very specific ones. In that way, no two people will ever have the same reaction to any pice of art. It's all tinged with remnants of the past. It's like hearing 'When Doves Cry' and immediately thinking of the Bronx Zoo when you were six.
CN: The tracks fade in and out of each other. Ultimately, do you see the albums as one long song, or do you think of the tracks individually? (Is the album ultimately suppossed to be listened to in one long sitting?)
ZP: We look at the sequencing of an album as an attempt to create a complete listening experience. One continuous listen is ideal, but it can also be broken up in to movements which can be referenced at any time. The 2006 record is more permissive toward today's working youth.
www.ZeldaPinwheel.com
CN: Thank you.
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