Surfacing after a thirteen-year hiatus, American experimental rock band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is back with an abundance of enthusiasm and fervor for their highly anticipated reunion. Formed in Oakland, California in 1999, the band consists of Nils Frykdahl (vocals, flute, guitar), Carla Kihlstedt (vocals, violin, organ, autoharp, nyckelharpa), Dan Rathburn (bass guitar, vocals, lute, sledgehammer-dulcimer), with Matthias Bossi (drums, vocals, glockenspiel, xylophone) and Michael lago Mellender (guitar, vocals, toy piano, electric pancreas, euphonium) joining the band in 2004, SGM has made a name for themselves for their inability to be defined by a single genre, incorporating intricate stage routines into their live performances and their philosophical, often head-scratching, intellectual themes within their lyricism.
Their newest album, of the Last Human Being, is both an expansion of and a return to their signature sound. Tracks such as “Salamander in Two Worlds” and “The Gift” showcase their expert ability to unify elements of folk, progressive, industrial, and avant-garde metal and rock, all while exhibiting some of their most impressive instrumentation, interplay, signature changes and completely unexpected sonic journeys that the band is known for to date. of the Last Human Being certainly makes one thing clear: the band is just as full of creative resolve as before.
Catching the very busy curators just four days before their album’s release, mxdwn had the pleasure of sitting down with the band to discuss this new chapter of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.
mxdwn: Hi! My name is Riley and I am a music writer here at mxdwn. Just to get right into it, I know you all are set to release your fourth studio album, of The Last Human Being, at the end of this week. Congratulations!
All: Woo! Yay!
Nils Frykdahl: Thank you.
mxdwn: Could you walk us through the process of making the album? How did it feel to make this album and how did it feel to reconnect as a group since your hiatus in 2011?
Dan Rathburn: It felt pretty great actually. I’ve been thinking about how we put this band together really carefully. It’s not a band that just sort of came together organically. We created the grouping of people.
Carla Kihlstedt: But that happened organically! We were in other bands. Like anything grows, we grew together because we liked each other and it was a special thing.
DR: It was pretty deliberate.
CK: That doesn’t mean it wasn’t organic.
DR: Okay, okay. Fine.
{all laugh}
DR: But anyway, to finish my point, it’s a group of people who really enjoy being in the same room together working on music. It doesn’t feel like we have to get together. There’s no, “Oh, I have to be with that guy again.” A lot of reunions, I feel, are full of band animosities and this was not that.
NF: Yeah. We did not, thirteen years ago now, lay the band to rest due to personal animosity going on between the group. It was circumstantial, which often ends a lot of groups. I, having some experience of people whose time on the bus together had long been over before they parted ways, including driving while first fights are occurring, like, “Hey guys-”
DR: Gotta take that to the back of the bus!
NF: {laughing} Yeah, like, “You gotta get it together, gotta bring it to the back!”
mxdwn: Right! {laughing} Not taking it to the back of the bus!
NF: This was over the pass in Reno, while it was snowing. Yeah so it was really like, these guys needed to keep it together. But anyways, we were on opposite coasts, it was participation in this very rehearsal intensive music that had become untenable at the time. This last week we just now did seven days of solid rehearsal, morning to night and then into the morning again, more or less, to stuff four albums worth of material back into our heads. Our fingers are coming along nicely, but there are a lot of notes to absorb, but that’s part of the process. The sort of intensive work of working out the details of that music is something that we all have collectively enjoyed. So finally, after a year, well more than a year now, of all the organizing of it, getting the album finished, long distance, trading tracks and files across the country, along with all the organizational aspects of making the album, the movie and getting a tour happening, and all the details that go along with that. This week, in a certain way, is the payoff. To finally put all the work into actually getting back in the room with just the five of us. {laughing} I actually had the experience of feeling like a very small number of people when we all met up in the room, like “Oh, this is it?”
Michael Mellender: {laughing} Like, are you sure there’s not a couple more guys?
NF: We’ve been having these weekly meetings on Zoom where the screen is full of faces, because there are so many people that have been helping to make this thing go. But now it comes down to the five of us and having to get these songs back in our fingers and some of ‘em are a challenge.
DR: But they’re all good songs! I still like all the songs.
NF: I stand by them {laughs}!
mxdwn: Yeah I gave the new album a listen, I loved it, it was amazing. I got to get a firsthand listen which was great.
NF: Great!
mxdwn: But it’s also great to hear how happy you all are to be working with each other. I do think that’s pretty special with reunions, where people are genuinely coming together because they love each other’s perspective and want to continue making art together as a group.
MM: Yeah the rapport is very strong. We never really intended to never to not play again, it was just a matter of these enormous, logistical challenges that took {laughing} thirteen years to overcome.
NF: The three of us right here (Nils Frykdahl, Dan Rathburn and Michael Mellender) have all continued in a group called Free Salamander Exhibit since then, and Carla and Matthias have continued on the east coast with their Rabbit Rabbit Radio project. We’ve crossed paths on our respective tours and visited each other’s spots over the years. It was always like, “Yeah we gotta finish up those projects, or yes let’s make that record! Oh, the movie!” We’ve talked about it again and again, so it’s so great to finally have the bearing fruit after so much speculating on how it might work. And here we are.
mxdwn: Yeah that’s amazing! Is there anything in particular you’re most excited for your listeners to hear? Or are you just happy to have these songs out in the world after such a long time in the making?
NF: Well it’s certainly going to be exciting to share some of the new material, some things that haven’t been done before. But I have to say, after taking such a long break on the old material, that also feels, to me now, just as exciting to be able to look back into the catalog and revisit things. It feels very fresh. Of course time and change, equipment and gear, all the arrangements had to be remade in a way. So it all feels pretty fresh. Maybe a little too fresh {laughs}. Like woah!
mxdwn: {laughing} Totally. Speaking so much on your past work and describing the new album, you all talk about how it aims to integrate the past and present, stating “What better time to bring out the apocalypse than now?”. Can you elaborate on that statement and what the release of this album means to SGM? What is the message you all are trying to convey to the world right now?
DR: Well {laughs}!
mxdwn: {laughing} Sorry! I know that was a lot at once, we can break it down as we go.
DR: Well the most blunt, simple message is just: Art.
NF: Art and community. Survival through collective, independent collaborations. Or psychic survival and being able to have a community that can reach across the country and around the world. After this, of course this time period where communities got very small for a few years there, necessarily, in a way. To have it become this once again, where it is very much people getting together in a room, the way a tour can be, it was extremely different. It’s pretty amazing to have been reminded of what life would have been like without that happening.
mxdwn: Yeah, it really does give you some fresh eyes and a new gratefulness for the life that we all had before, something that we took for granted.
NF: Yeah.
CK: Life got really small. It also got really connective, in the networking possibilities of our technologies that allowed everyone to connect in whole other ways. So it’s, I don’t know, I guess we have one foot in one foot out. This whole thing wouldn’t have been possible without the ability to have Zoom meetings and reach out in various ways to other musicians and musical creative communities around the country, which is kind of what we are doing on this tour. But then also, just being in this room bangin’ on wooden things with strings and sticks is kind of, you can’t replace that {laughs}.
mxdwn: Yeah, it’s really interesting. I was thinking about that earlier when you were talking about how you were working on the album while being bicoastal. It’s so interesting because it’s possible that making the album wouldn’t have been possible before, or it could have been much harder to do it before. So yeah, it is really interesting to see both sides and how everything does come together. But speaking of the album, it follows in the steps of your earlier work of being incredibly progressive. of The Last Human Being blends elements of metal and experimental rock with chamber music elements and compositions. How do you all manage to constantly push the boundaries with your music? Is it something that you think is a natural attribute to who you are and the nature of the band?
CK: I think the best way to push the boundaries is just to dissolve and ignore them all together, use the musical tools that answer the current creative question and then let the people who need to write about it, like you, and who need to actually be able to convey it to get someone excited to listen to it, then try to figure out what it’s called now {laughs}. We’re giving you the hard job!
{all laugh}
mxdwn: {laughing} Well, thank you.
NF: As are a lot of people, we are all huge fans of music and huge fans of many different kinds of music. Since right at the inception of the band we have always been determined to not let a genre or stylistic element put a border around anything that we do. If we like a certain kind of music we’re willing to let it seep into our own writing, however that might be. Sometimes you surprise yourself, like, “Wow! Can’t believe we’re writing a song like this!” Then another boundary we’re pushing is just the physical joy of trying to do something that you can barely do as a musician, it’s always there as a possible feeling. There’s an exhilaration to that, and that can be in various ways, whether it’s we all try to sing in five part harmony, can we do that? Can we do that or tune into that, or play some rhythms that we haven’t tried before or do something that is a physical challenge? Because when it comes down to it, you’ve got to be pulling different parts of your vibrating, hammering and wiggling body into it, so that’s part of the rush of it.
DR: Another thing I’d love to say is that we’ve just all come to realize that almost nothing is impossible. That something that seems impossible is possible. An impossible amount of information to memorize can be memorized a little piece at a time. We’ve had new tunes come in where we’re like, “I can’t even play the first measure!” Okay, well let’s try the first half measure then.
CK: Just to give you a sense, we’ve been in the rehearsal studio, the “rock bunker,” for a week now. We’ve been about twelve to thirteen hours a day and we’ve averaged three songs a day.
mxdwn: That sounds like some hard stuff, but it sounds like you all have real dedication though! Thirteen hours, that’s a long practice.
DR: We like the process. If we didn’t love rehearsing this much we would not be doing this band.
MM: Plus, we gave ourselves no options really {laughs}. Really, we have a week to prepare, we’re about to play thirty-three shows, so there’s only really one thing left to be done.
mxdwn: {laughing} Yeah it sounds like go time!
NF: Yeah!
mxdwn: Well as you all are obviously a large band of many curators, five people, collaboration and teamwork seems to be vital to SGM. How do you all navigate the process when collaborating and how do you think your individual perspectives, diverse talents and interests all come together to create your collective vision?
DR: I mean definitely everybody in the band has different things that they bring, different kinds of skills. When we’re not rehearsing, we are doing very different things to make it go. When there is a project or an obstacle that needs to be overcome, there’s usually one person who is best suited to attack that situation. So there is a wide division of expertise.
NF: Right, so a natural division of labor happens. There is no board of directors that assigns us our respective tasks, but in the group people have always moved towards what they can do best.
mxdwn: That sounds great, just sort of natural almost, with everyone having their own natural roles or elements within the group. I know you all mentioned the three of you being in a band together (Nils Frykdahl, Dan Rathburn and Michael Mellender) and Carla and Mathias being in a band on the east coast, how do you think these various bands and side projects influence SGM? Do you find that these other projects help when you all come back together as a unit?
NF: Well actually, there’s several tunes that have come into this that have also been done in those other projects. I’m guessing maybe-
Matthias Bossi: Three!
NF: Yeah, three of them. A couple from Rabbit Rabbit Radio, Carla and Matthias’ project that is mostly a duo with guests, are actually on the new album that were done in very different versions. The song The Gift on the new album was recorded first, well performed first by Sleepytime but only at the very end of our run and we performed it just by the skin of our teeth, as they say, and only twice. So as the three of us got Free Salamander Exhibit going, that song was fresh off the block and we had sort of barely managed to get it working with Sleepytime, so we thought we would rewrite it and make it into something we can do with this other band. But now going back, finishing the Sleepytime album, and seeing how very different the Sleepytime version was, cause we did record it back then, we just didn’t finish recording a bit of it. So just this last Spring, we ended up putting vocals on this song that was tracked a dozen years ago. That was kind of a crazy experience, to try to reconstruct the song. {laughing} Like okay, this part of the song goes like “Drkdrkdrkdrkt,” and then the vocals are gonna be put here. Like, what did we intend back then? {laughs} So there was an interesting hybrid of stuff recorded way back then and stuff recorded just recently.
mxdwn: Wow, that’s amazing to have everything come together full circle. Putting in work that comes into fruition in ways that you could have never even imagined or just years down the road like that. Even just the song itself! As you’re constantly learning and growing as artists and musicians you are just always thinking of different approaches, so it’s just so interesting to see how a song can end up different so many years later. I know we talked a little bit about community earlier, you all mentioned the community effort within the group, but we saw that your latest album, the upcoming tour, and a short film were all funded from the help of your supporters via Kickstarter, where you all ended up making 44k past your original goal. How did it feel to have a community supporting you and wanting to help you bring this project to life? What was it like to have that level of trust in the community respected and reciprocated?
DR: It’s a lot of validation. But it’s also a lot of pressure.
CK: It was a real, tangible reminder that we exist not in a vacuum but in an ecosystem. A lot of people came out of the woodwork to help. Both in financial ways but like, a lot of designers came out to help design and such. We don’t, nor would we ever, want to exist in a vacuum, and I think that’s one of the amazing things about the connective social media stuff is that it gives a path for those conversations to be made tangible. All kinds of people reached out in really direct, personal ways. It felt like, and not to get really cheesy but here I am getting really cheesy, but it felt like, “Here I am! I’m ready!” {laughing}. Like in the desert when it just looks like nothing is growing, it’s all dead, and then the rainfall comes once every however long and all of a sudden everything blossoms, and it’s an explosion of color. That’s kind of what it felt like a little bit.
MM: Yeah, we’re filling out these membership cards for the Kickstarter backers right now. Basically, almost every name that I’ve been filling out it’s like,”Oh, I know that person! I know this person!”
NF: There’s so many of them!
mxdwn: Oh, those are so cool!
NF: Yeah. They’re glossy!
mxdwn: No, that’s cool! The cards are perfect.
DR: On a more negative note-
NF: Oh lets bring it down!
{all laugh}
mxdwn: Yeah, we gotta have both our ups and downs.
MM: Bring us down!
DR: Back to the Kickstarter campaign, it sort of underscores the brokenness of the music economy. The fact that we couldn’t really have done all this stuff without it, we required people’s gifts. There’s no mechanism by which we could make enough money doing this to survive. We required the gift economy.
CK: Although what we were trying to do, here my job is to be the optimist-
{all laugh}
CK: We were coming out of the woodwork after thirteen years of total hibernation. In what world do you just come do that and then be like, “Hey everyone! I need 100k to do my art project!” How else, in what world would that exist? And exist without the pressure of a big label being like, “Yeah of course we’ll fund that but then you’ll owe us your dog and your first born kid and you’ll never make anything.” I think the crowdfunding thing is actually a really beautiful way of funding something that has a long, long laborious tail to actually fulfill. We could have ran a way, way simpler Kickstarter campaign, we probably should have, but we just got carried away with all the fun.
MM: It takes some very carefully manufactured scarcity to really bring it home.
CK: I for one, I’m excited to function outside the system of gatekeepers and the big business of music.
mxdwn: Yeah I understand. Especially as someone who has experience in a DIY band and the scene, it is really hard. Even as someone who just interviews many musicians, a lot of them are struggling to make their art their sole way of living. A lot of them have to have multiple jobs or have issues with their labels taking large chunks of royalties, it’s a real issue.
CK: Yeah we all have other jobs and ways of putting our lives together. This is a moment where we are trying our best to focus entirely on this but even that, I’m getting up at six in the morning to do my teaching on the East Coast, here in California. We all have ups and downs of financial reward, lack of, stability and then lack of {laughs}.
mxdwn: That definitely attests to the state of the music industry. Still, it must be such a validating experience to have people waiting, willing and wanting you all to come back, wanting to hear more and to go on tour. It’s such a two-sided coin.
NF: The extent to which that excitement was, that we were able to tap into that, was a surprise to me, to a certain extent. Just how many people were out there, still out there, and how many from our days of putting our time on the road and doing countless shows. But then also younger people who never saw us live back in the day, who have picked up the records some way or another and have listened to it, and that has also grown. You know, we’re playing bigger halls primarily now than we did back then. So that was really a surprise and helped to make all this happen, realizing that there really is an audience there, and if we can get it together, they want it.
mxdwn: You don’t hear about many bands making accompanying short films for their albums. Could you walk us through that experience, what it was like and what the film brings to the album as a whole?
CK: Can I just say you’re asking really good questions, you seem really cool and smart, so thank you! You’re like our fourth interview today and this one is just really fun.
mxdwn: Oh my gosh thank you! I really appreciate that!
NF: So the film started, a lot of the elements of what became the film started out as a live show. The theater element that had existed only in the San Francisco version of the show initially. Then we took it on the road with a dancer that we had been working with for many years at that point prior to the band in other projects and with his dance theater company called inkBoat, and Shinichi went on the road with us at various points bringing his Butoh influence. He certainly branches out and has influence from lots of things, but the initial impulse came from the Butoh dance that came out of Japan in the ’60s. So working with Shinichi at that dance form often emphasizes dehumanizing the human, taking the human body and trying to use it to get at something else, some other non living or animal form. The internal narrative that goes on in that dance form is really a challenge to the human perspective. So the idea was that it was a natural dovetailing of this idea of the Last Human Being. So in the film, this human being, he represents this specimen that’s been found that is a subject to debate whether or not it is, in fact, a human being, or whether human beings ever actually existed. I don’t really remember how that stage/touring show made that step to becoming a film. I can’t quite remember how we got the ball rolling but before we knew it, it was a whole steamroller of all the people that it requires to actually get stuff on film. It’s very nicely shot.
DR: So, once again by involving people who had connections and friends that they could pull in. There was so much volunteer labor.
NF: It was all just friends. Many of them are like, “Oh, well I work in a film company, I do video! Or, oh, I do set stuff now!” So everybody’s just combining their talents.
MM: The film community, which we are not really a part of being musicians, it’s just an amazing thing to behold where it’s all built on these favors and everyone knows an integral person that can be a part of it, it seems very improbable. It’s very awe inspiring.
mxdwn: Wow! That’s really interesting, especially with it being mostly volunteer work. People really have to care and get behind what you’re doing to be willing to commit free work and free time.
NF: Yup.
mxdwn: It’s really amazing. It just all goes back to this being built by a whole community of artists.
NF: The credits for the film are being worked on right now, so it’s so, so close-
CK: I’m literally putting them in as we speak {laughs}!
NF: {laughing} Yeah, Carla’s typing in the credits! So for all the people that did put in work on that, to have this finally see the light of day after it was looking a little doubtful for a while, a bunch of the footage was on a hard drive that was proclaimed dead, and so it sat in this sort of limbo. It was rescued from that storage medium and that opened up a possibility, which was a part of the steamroller of getting this band back out there, realizing, “Oh wait! We can finish the film, we can finish the album. If we do that when we gotta do some live shows, and if we’re doing one we might as well do thirty-three.”
mxdwn: On the topic of keeping it DIY and in the community, you all are well known for your innovation and creativity, often making your own instruments and incorporating those into your music. How do these custom instruments influence SGM sonically, the band’s identity and does the experience of making these instruments lead to a more integrated or complete feeling, like you’re involved in every single aspect?
NF: That would be this guy right here {points to Dan Rathburn}.
DR: These instruments were all built mostly by whim, through a little idea about the way sound could be made, and then the instrument would be built. But what I really think makes them come to life is the fact that this band, we don’t go into it saying, “Well, we have a song and we need a sound to fit into the song.” We’ve come to a lot of our songs by saying, “We have a new instrument that makes a new sound, we’re going to write a sound around that instrument so that the instruments really flower and bloom.” They don’t have to be squished into a hole, they get to be the defining factors of certain songs, the particularities of a given instrument.
NF: Then they’ll grow out of the players, like Carla and Michael who both do a lot of the playing of these instruments that Dan has built. Figuring out what they can do, it’s all kind of new since there is no long tradition of them. It’s a lot of experimentation and like {laughing}, “Oh wow! Listen to that, that’s a great sound!”
MM: {laughing} Like, “It does that? No way!”
NF: Or like, “The melody on that one section, let’s build the song around that.” That sort of thing.
mxdwn: That’s so cool and interesting! You don’t often hear about artists making songs around one specific sound. I feel like it’s usually around how the instruments sound as a whole, or for some people it’s centered around the lyrics. But I like that idea of focusing on the singular sound and how it’s constantly changing.
DR: There’s a reason why the electric guitar is such a popular instrument, it’s extremely versatile. You can play an amazing number of things on an electric guitar. A lot of these homemade instruments are not that versatile. You can’t play anything on these homemade instruments. So that’s why we’ve made the songs to fit the instruments rather than the other way around.
mxdwn: Trying to highlight the specific uniqueness of the singular instrument, that’s cool! On the topic of incorporating various different projects into SGM, it’s no secret that you all are multi-talented and diverse artists, and I couldn’t help but see even more additional projects for the album. Like the aforementioned short film, Carla also made handmade “SLEEP IS WRONG & HAIL SATAN” pillowcases. Is it a similar feeling with these projects as it is with the instruments? Does it help you to feel more connected to the group and project as a whole?
CK: Yeah, I don’t make enough time in my life for crafts in general, so I kind of used our Kickstarter project as a really unavoidable excuse to get myself way in over my head in craft world. I keep on learning that lesson over and over again, but I guess it’s because I don’t really want to learn it. I just kind of love making stuff. I did find this time around, as a person with three jobs, two kids and way more going on in terms of extra music things out of my band life than I did thirteen years ago when we were doing this last, that I just didn’t have the bandwidth to do it all. We made these rosettes, these handmade rosettes, and I was all kinds of optimistic that I could do it myself. I totally couldn’t {laughs}. I actually hired two teenage daughters of friends of mine, hooked up some sewing machines and big fabric scraps and showed them how to do it and put them to work. I mean, we paid them an hourly rate {laughs} but in another world I would have made them myself. The short answer is yes, for me, I love all the weird ecosystem of stuff. Then you start making the music and it’s like, {laughing} “Oh right, this is why we’re doing this!”
NF: It is a great platform. The basic act of going out, bringing a show to a live audience has always been something that we enjoy, a sort of platform for introducing extra musical elements of things other than music. Really early on, in sort of Idiot Flesh days, really anything could have happened at the shows. At the last minute we would be pulling friends in like, “Here! You wear this cow head and stand in that corner with these cymbals and at the right time when somebody comes around the corner, bang those cymbals at them! And you, stand up on that balcony!” The show would just be an opportunity for sharing all sorts of things. We’d hand out tracks, pamphlets and literature. Music doesn’t need to exist in a vacuum of just being about those songs and that sound. It’s a whole evening of people coming together in a room. We like to get the audience involved in various ways. Let’s have some math lectures, for instance. At one point we did a lot of math lectures at the show.
MB: Oh yeah, what was, who was the composer?
NF: Ming Tsao, our black mathematician who has gone on to become a famous twenty-first century music composer based in Berlin.
MB: Now he writes the most impossible music ever {laughs}.
NF: {laughing} He is definitely applying black math to his music. He gave me his dissertation, he got a double doctorate in mathematics and music and I could not read page one.
{all laugh}
NF: It immediately goes into what looks like calculus symbols on the first page. Nothing I would recognize as music, but theoretically it’s about music somehow. But yeah, music naturally ties into all kinds of things.
CK: It’s like a container. You can add all kinds of people and energies.
NF: There’s a definite inspiration, looking back, from vaudeville and the history of that. Anything could have come on to the stage, like, “What is your act? You got two minutes.” In our early inspirations, the early twentieth century avant-garde movement, the Dadaists, the Futurists and the Surrealists. All those folks were putting on events, evenings, where there might be music involved, but there might be all kinds of other things involved, certainly costumes and manifestos. That ethos was already something we were steeped in as we formed this band.
mxdwn: Bringing it back to your concerts, it does all seem to go back to this idea of music being a sort of living art, this thing that incorporates so many other elements to come together. Even touching on the whole performance art aspect also shows how it relies on the community. It’s something that takes a whole community to make, a whole community to inspire, it’s all connected.
CK: We all have to remember that we’re in this soup of a culture that celebrates the buying of stuff, just consumerism. The system of how we share music and buy albums, no one buys albums anymore, but putting a song out there, the noun, it’s like a noun verb thing.The more we can all shift our thinking to have the noun just be a manifestation of the bigger picture, which is the community, the conversations, the live shows –
MM: The music.
CK: The fun and the music, playing the music itself every night in a different way.
mxdwn: I agree, I think it really does make it about the music. Instead of going to a concert you’re going to an experience, an experience which you all have put so much thought and intention into.
CK: The concert stage, not to get anthropological about it, but we are higher up and facing you and there’s a line in-between us and the crowd. That’s a very new, Eurocentric formation, but it’s what we have and it’s the closest thing we have to a kind of ritual, communal space in a way besides church, whatever people’s religious experiences. I like to think of it more like, it’s always fun to try to use that format, because it’s what we have and know collectively, but also do as much as we can do to make it more interactive.
NF: Rock music evolved, essentially and there are various threads that lead into rock music, but one of the most direct and essential threads is the American Gospel Church. It helped to create this jumped up music that became Rock & Roll. There’s a lot of recognition that’s given to blues in the roots of early Rock & Roll, but blues as a form is very contemplative. Whereas, probably a greater influence on the energy, even though the scale of blues is pretty fundamental to what became Rock & Roll, but the ecstatic gospel music is much closer to the energy that kicked Rock & Roll off to begin with. The whole room getting live, getting the spirit, and that’s really still, in spite of our rock against rock intentions of putting all of the elements of rock into question, but certainly not leaving behind that intention of getting the crowd ecstatic. Like, “Let’s get this, let’s raise the roof!”
mxdwn: The whole process of making the energy in the room. Oh wow, this is so interesting, I’ve never thought about it in that way before, the connection to the church. It is similar, that whole idea of a stage, listening to someone up front and the gaining of momentum and energy.
NF: There’s the format where the audience sits in chairs, the performers are over there, and you kind of just listen. Which is certainly best for a certain kind of listening and a certain kind of music. Like, I love some thorny chamber music and you really don’t want the person next to you being like, {headbanging} “Oh, yeah!” You want to be able to catch the nuances of the very subtle music, and not that rock music doesn’t have room for subtlety, but it really has to be this participatory, energetic thing where the audience are throwing and knocking themselves around, they yell and shout, yelling at the performers on stage. That give and take is something we really thrive on and what makes it feel like something happened that night, as opposed to just being like, {monotone} “Okay, and the next song will be about horses.” To really see what is different from night to night, those elements that are always going to be unpredictable and that make things different, and how much the audience is and can be a part of that. How different they can be from place to place, room to room.
MB: Dan’s grinding coffee in the bathroom again guys.
NF: Just a head’s up.
mxdwn: On the topic of audiences, do you have any memories of favorite ones that come to mind?
MB: Oh!
NF: Come on in Matthias.
MB: Well, there was the night in Pensacola, Florida in 2005. It was just after Hurricane Katrina and we were going through the Gulf. We played in a place where the club of the roof was blown off and the power had only recently come back on. I think their freezers had been fried, we’re serving drinks out of coolers. Also, the local mental institution had run out of electricity, so everyone had been let go and was at our show.
{all laughs}
MB: They were drawing pictures for us. It was a good, memorable show.
NF: {laughing} That’s right.
MB: I’m trying to remember other memorable concerts –
NF: Audiences.
MB: Oh, audiences –
NF: Just thinking about memorable audiences, our introduction to the East Coast progressive rock scene in America, which I hadn’t even really realized until that punk festival in 2003 — I didn’t really realize the extent to which there was a scene like that there. There was a progressive rock scene stronger on the East Coast than on the West Coast in terms of organization and whatnot. We played NEARfest out in New Jersey and there were some heavy hitters, including Magma from the history of progressive rock. We had arrived the night before and caught half of Magma’s, no doubt four hour set. Then we were the 10 a.m. Sunday morning opening band for that festival. There was a lot of skepticism, I later learned that among even the festival organizers themselves, about whether we were appropriate for this setting. We had somebody in our corner who really wanted us at the festival. So I thought, “Well, here we are given the 10 a.m. slot after Magma’s epic set, nobody’s going to be here, nobody’s going to be in the theater that morning. It’s going to be us playing for a nice crowd of fifty out of a hall that holds a couple of thousand.” We got up after just a few hours of sleep to get our gear loaded in and ready for our set, and it was the kind of set where we got everything set up. We got our costumes and our animal masks on, the curtains were shut, and they opened the curtains and it was 10 a.m. and the place was packed to the rafters, already there was not an empty seat. I realized that’s the way the progressive rock crowd works. Even if they’re up till four in the morning at the convention they’re not going to miss a note of any of the bands. That’s the way. They don’t go hang out at the bar waiting for their favorites, they’re meticulous, we’re going to see everything. At the end of that set, that was our first exposure for a lot of those folks to our music, and they were sold. We had our first album, which was handmade by us, and I mean like hand-glued with hot glue guns, putting in the tray and then putting in the CD. We had extension cords going out of the bus and the hot glue gun going, three of us on the bus assembling the CDs as fast as we could. There was a line for our merch that was out the door, out the entire building. There were hundreds of people lining up to get our CD that day and we had only fifty ready to go, and those were gone immediately. I was like, “Everyone, go work on those and we’ll stall them, we’ll be signing CDs!” That was fun.
mxdwn: Having to beg them to work faster! {laughs}
NF: {laughs} No, right!
mxdwn: Those are great stories. Especially with the progressive rock crowd, yeah they’re not missing anything, they want to hear it all.
NF: Right right, and they want everything signed too. Which helped slow down the merch line, like, {laughing} “Well of course you have to have your T-shirt signed and the CD signed.”
mxdwn: Don’t forget they want one from everyone too!
NF: Exactly.
mxdwn: Switching gears a bit, we spoke earlier about your ideas of Futurism and the whole philosophical aspects of your music. I wanted to apply these concepts a little bit differently and apply them to the music industry as a whole. What are your thoughts on how technology has changed the way the music industry works, like how we talked about the physical act of being able to make the album bicoastal, but even thinking about the audience and the physical experience as well. I know Carla once mentioned “a concert with the option of donning VR,” but do you all have any thoughts or ideas about incorporating technology in the industry in other possibly unconventional ways?
CK: Us specifically or other projects in general?
mxdwn: Either or, whatever you would like to talk about.
MB: I think as long as it’s made out of wood, felt at home and I had-
DR: Sticks.
MB: And sticks, I think that’s about as cutting edge as this band’s gonna get.
CK: I got the chance to work with a really amazing engineer last year named JP Beatty who does ambisonic speaker arrays in live settings. That was super exciting because it makes the sonic dimensionality so, so dynamic and pretty viscerally compelling.
MB: I think a lot of the messaging within this band is stubbornly resistant to technology in some ways. It’s part of what keeps the magic alive, is that in some ways it’s so primitive and animalistic. It’s fun to have taken a thirteen year hiatus and to have tried to make it through some Zoom meetings and all the other things that bands were just getting their feet under in 2024, the language they’re expected to speak as digital natives. I don’t know. Maybe it has accelerated so quickly in recent years that this is a reminder, or a refreshing blast of the primitive past, that is still possible.
NF: I have to say that realizing the generation that I am, it represents a hinge, a hinge to a time where I was a fully formed, artistically engaged adult already traveling country and the world, networking in community, already making stuff happen on a national and international scale before the invention of cell phones, before the Internet. There were elements of euphoria around the possibilities that were going to be coming, as the nineties came along the Internet really proved to expand just as far, and much farther, than initially expected. I feel like there’s an element of what we have underscored and represented in our lyrics that represents a viewpoint that predates that. I’m happy to have been born when I was born and to see this hinge that has happened, to in some ways, represent aspects of the way things were done before this was all possible. People are so used to having these certain kinds of ways of doing things now, who have a hard time imagining how it would have been possible to travel a country, travel the world, when you didn’t have a telephone. We didn’t have that. People have been moving, communicating and organizing things on a large scale for thousands of years, and so to not forget the use of these other tools –
MB: Paper maps.
NF: Right, paper maps. Talking to people face to face, asking people what their favorite restaurant on the strip is, just stopping people. I never really have gone to the Internet myself much. I have an email but there’s definitely been years where I can count on one hand how many times I checked my email in a year, or even turned on the computer or the Internet. I am not a digital native and it’s fun to play the devil’s advocate. An element of metal culture, which is one of the cultures I have been involved in, is dystopian visions. It’s hard to find and easier to grab a dystopian vision than that — that of some kind of techno hell taking over the world. That is certainly a viewpoint that’s fun to play with, because you need to fuel some of the more aggressive elements in the music, you need to have some sort of devil in a way, to justify the vocal style. It’s fun to play off against that too, to do something friendly with that in that style.
MB: There’s a new song on the record that’s friendly metal. That’s what I would call it, the new genre. Nil’s paying tribute to his oldest friend.
NF: Yup, yup.
CK: New genre?
NF: Indorphine.
CK: Indorphine!
MB: They’re fun metal, they’re not friendly metal. They’re still talking about, like, Cheetos and keg stands, Nil’s paying tribute to his oldest friend,with the Cookie Monster vocals.
NF: Right, right. It’s pretty sweet, yeah.
MB: If you listen close –
CK: It sounds like a Margaret Wise Brown children’s book.
MB: {laughing} Exactly, it’s like Totoro! We’re drinking coffee here, would you like some?
mxdwn: As much as I love coffee, it’s a little late for me to have coffee over here. I have my water though!
MB: Where in America are you?
mxdwn: I’m in Richmond, Virginia!
NF: Oh, you were asking about special audiences! Richmond, Virginia definitely stands out as unforgettable. We played there with Sleepy Tom on an early tour. I don’t remember the venue or anything, but there was somebody who was on MTV, or some kind of early version of a MTV reality TV show where they just go into people’s houses and whatnot. She was from some show like that, she was a local gal, also a singer-songwriter. We were on a double bill with her, she played before us and the place was packed with her friends, which is all well and good, but it was definitely a very different kind of music, she had kind of a pop music thing going on. When she finished the room was still full, we took the stage and started into, I remember we opened up with “Sleep is Wrong.” I remember that by the time we finished the song, we extended the crazy ending so that it was a dizzying, spinning circle of confusion, by the time we were done people were lined up to get out of the room. People couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. By the time we were done with that first song, there were like eight people left in the room. They were really into it, whoever it was that stayed. They had so much energy that we just really had fun, we gave it our all. But definitely, that was one of the few times that we really cleared the house.
CK: The other, like, transitional audiences, was always Kansas City, Missouri.
NF: Oh yeah!
CK: It would always transition into a late night dance party.
MB: It would be the Kansas City Chiefs and us in drag all dancing to Hip-Hop at 4 in the morning. But I mean, it was great. Another thing I’d like to mention, I think this was even before I was in the band, but there was the only place we could play at in San Diego, a place called the Casbah. If you’re like James Taylor, or Slayer, or the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, you play at Casbah, which is like a landing path of the airport, so planes are landing on the roof of the club. I think, and tell me if I’m wrong, but the first time you played there, you were all a replacement for a wet T-shirt contest.
{all laugh}
MB: People went there expecting a wet T-shirt contest but got Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.
NF: {laughing} We are a wet T-shirt contest of sorts. In our own way.
DR: A wet blanket.
MB: {laughing} Constantly disappointing since 1998.
mxdwn: I do want to apologize on behalf of Richmond. There’s a really good metal and rock community here. The ones who are down are totally down.
MB: Are you going to try to come out to any of our Southernly shows?
mxdwn: Yeah I’m going to try! I would really like to go.
MB: I think the closest to you might be Baltimore, or Carrboro, North Carolina.
mxdwn: The thing about Richmond is that it is right in the middle of both of those places. For concerts I usually do end up having to go to either Maryland/DC or North Carolina.
MB: Cool. Just let us know and we will put you on the list.
mxdwn: Thank you so much! I think I’m going to try to go to the Baltimore show, it’s probably just a little bit closer.
MB: The Ottobar is a nice spot too. I like me some Baltimore.
mxdwn: That’s one of the venues there that I haven’t been to yet, so I’m really excited. I just have one more for you all and it’s perfect because speaking of your tour, I just wanted to know if you could give us any hints at your upcoming tour? Are there any special plans for this reunion tour?
DR: We have our dancer, Compatriot, who will be on all the shows from Denver to Knoxville, so that’s a two week leg he will be participating with us. We have a show up in, what’s the name of the town called?
MB: Estes Park.
DR: At that same location there will be a museum exhibition in between where we’re gonna show off artifacts from our past, and the past of various other bands.
MB: It also happens to be where they shot “The Shining.”
MM: The TV series, “The Shining.”
MB: What?!
MM: Yes. “The Shining” was written there, by Stephen King –
CK: About that hotel.
MM: The movie by Stanley Kubrick was shot somewhere in Washington, I believe.
MB: But I thought the interior shots of the movie were done at the Stanley Hotel?
MM: Those are all in a soundstage, cause it makes no geographical sense.
DR: It’s about the Stanley Hotel, but the Stanley Hotel wouldn’t allow the shooting to be there. They wanted no part of it.
MB: No shit?!
MM: Yeah.
mxdwn: But don’t they still claim it’s haunted?
All: Oh yeah.
MM: Well some say it’s haunted.
{all laugh}
DR: Another special guest will be Nils’ other band, Faun Fables, which consists of Nils and his wife and children. They will be joining us for the second half of the tour.
MB: My son, who’s ten, Mike, is joining us for the entire tour. He did bring his guitar and there is a pause in our set where he may appear out of a hazer on his seven string Petrucci, just some chugs, then disappear. I think he’s actually, probably, going to hold us to that {laughing}. Anyways, I don’t know, there’s always going to be some[thing] unexpected. There’ll be some processions, maybe, there’ll be some monologues, some storytelling while people break strings and otherwise need the audience to be distracted {laughs}. You never know what’s going to happen. There’s a lot of un-planning in the works.
NF: We have been working for the last seven days building a set including material from all four of our albums, so going back to the very beginning, and we’ve got a lot of material that’s almost under our belts, so by the time we get to the East Coast it should be really clicking.
mxdwn: Well I can’t wait to experience it! A full arsenal from all of your albums, that’s going to be a really amazing show.
MB: It’s going to be a cornucopia. A bountiful feast.
MM: We have more music than ever before {laughs}.
MB: It’s true!
mxdwn: Especially hearing how hard you all are working and rehearsing, I just know it’s going to be an amazing show.
MB: I’ve sprouted a beard.
NF: We’re working so hard the hair is starting to push out of his face {laughs}.
MB: Yeah, I don’t understand. Anyways, jeez, you’re great! What does your necklace say?
MM: Yeah!
mxdwn: It’s just my name! And then it has some little birds on it.
MB: Oh nice, very good. Are you a guitarist?
mxdwn: I do! I play a little bit of guitar and also play the bass. I started off as a violinist and cellist, so I got there a little bit later, but I love playing. I love it so much.
MB: That’s great, awesome. You have asked probing and personal and direct questions, you proceeded with fearlessness and confidence.
CK: {laughing} He’s giving you a review of your interview.
{all laugh}
MB: Yeah actually, I might just write an article about you and mxdwn.
mxdwn: {laughing} Well, I do like a good run for my money!
{all laugh}
mxdwn: Thank you all so much for talking to me today. You all were amazing, and once again congratulations on the release of your album!
CK: Awesome, thank you Riley!
MB: Thanks Riley! Stay classy, San Diego!
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