HEALTH

Jake Duzsik of noise band HEALTH talks to Analogue about their new LP ‘Get Color’ and more.

Your sophomore album is called ‘Get Color’, I read in another interview that you took the title from a craft show of some sort or was that you winding an interviewer up?
I think that might be a bit of a misnomer. I think someone else might have said that, I don’t know anything about that one.

It’s funny because I was doing research for the interview and I think I saw it on Drowned in Sound. I can’t remember which one of you did the interview but it was like ‘ yeah we took the title from this TV craft show’ and then all of a sudden there’s a link to this TV craft show called Get Colour!…

Oh yeah I don’t know.

I presume there’s a meaning behind the title?

Yeah, we kind of wanted to think about it as sort of a slogan in the way that we’re trying to be, at least in our estimation, as close as possible, something that resembles a rock band in a modern sense. Not that we play like rockin’ music with riffs and solos but the way we associate rock music with aggressiveness, physicality, edginess, things that are really important to us when discovering music and we all have that bond as musicians and music fans. Like all of us can agree that Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin are some of our favourite bands ever. Or for me and John, Punk Rock like Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys and stuff like that. So in a way, it’s kind of like, our modern not cheesedick way of saying get ready to rock or like get rockin’. You know if you say ‘get ready to rock’, you’re a fucking douchebag.

And you’ve got the devil sign in the air…

But the devil sign, all that stuff, it still comes from… even if Black Sabbath fans were like dunces or if you look at that music , it’s still progressive in a very aggressive way and that’s sort of part of our, I guess, mission statement as a band. So Get Colour for us is our way of saying ‘Let’s rock’ but without doing it in an antiquated irrelevant way.

That’s a bit of a bold statement.

Yeah a statement of purpose.

So it’s been about two years since your debut album came out, a lot has happened in that time. A lot of touring,
supporting NIN, the world finding about the smell and going apeshit about it, your remix album and then more touring… After all this, did you go into the studio with a clearer vision of what you wanted to do?

Definitely. I mean we also went into a proper studio so we had more of a crunch time . There were certain things in the first album that were also figured out, because it was the first time we ever recorded an album, that were figured out while we were recording. Especially because we were doing it ourselves so there was more time for experimentation that can be both a burden and a blessing, but for me vocally the first album was, the early tours, the early shows were all places you know you’d play an art gallery or someones basement or a warehouse, and our stage volume was such or just how hard our drums are hit, I never had monitors so i couldn’t hear myself or anything like, so what the music was live, especially figuring out the balance and mixing of the instruments and adding things that maybe wouldn’t be done live or layering, and especially vocals was just a learning process. Since we’d already done that and we already knew. Like track-listing for the first album, we had to decide what order the songs went in we had to figure it out whereas with the second record we already knew before we even started recording. It’s like this is the first song, this song is going here, this one is last. I already knew all the harmonies because I already had prerecorded them, rather than coming in being like I’ll just do this on the day. Everything was worked out. So it was much more of a cohesive kind of thing. I think that’s something that just happens. To reiterate all the things you just asked me about as far as writing our first record, releasing it, having a remix record, touring, writing a new record, like there’s more of a solidarity that starts to form around your band, an understanding, just this cohesiveness you get with becoming more comfortable with each other as musicians and what your band is.

You mentioned that you recorded both albums yourselves…

The second one we produced ourselves, the second one was engineered by someone else whereas on the first one we did everything ourselves.

That’s pretty hardcore.

It was more out of financial necessity at the time.

It seems like there’s a lot of bands these days, I suppose just independent culture in general, recording and doing stuff their own way instead going ‘OK we want this legendary producer to come in and do it’, it just leaves a lot more room for yourselves to change it afterwards.

I think a lot of the revolution in recording technology is allowing people to make to make albums, for better or for worse, because obviously a lot of people are making albums in their bedroom studios that just sound like shit and even worse, big studios or big producers are using… just the way records sound are changing now. There’s always like an ebb and flow of technology, there’ll probably be, i think already is, starting to be a reactionary sort of feel to everything sounding so plastic and digital and auto-tuned and whatever. But I think for a lot of bands like us, not being able to work with a legendary producer or something, it’s a financial reality of the music industry. Doing it yourself is more viable now than it ever has been and you can, with know-how and some luck, you can make an album sound great without having to go to a big studio.

I mean that’s the thing, Metallica releases whatever album, what’s that one? St Anger, with the fucking snare drum that sounds like a calypso drum. I mean how much money was spent on that record, whereas not talking the music one way or another, those Grizzly Bear albums that were self recorded sound incredibly rich and sound more like the old fashion of recording things in a space, where you feel the space, you hear the space, it’s just a different style. We’ve learned more and more too, because we recorded this album analogue rather than digital. Most musicians who are even slightly geeky about engineering technology or history are going to have sort of a, like a hard on for recording something analogue because it’s like every great record that you love recorded on analogue technology. Like two inch tapes, it’s like something you either just go with and get out of your system or you’re going to end up talking about it forever. And the reality is that analogue tape certain components that just are amazing and makes things sound warm. The natural compression is just like the way you compare digital technology and photography. You can have a beat up manual 35mm Nikon camera and take photos and it just looks magical, and you can have someone take photos on a ten thousand dollar digital camera and technically speaking, there’s higher clarity in the image and the same thing can be said for digital technology and analogue technology in recording but there’s something about the older one. That’s the thing, whether it’s photography or music, a record is not what a band sounds like live, it’s an approximation of what that band sounds like, it’s actually symbolic. You’re taking technology and trying to translate to exist in another medium so making that sound good is not a question of what is the clearest representation in terms of ‘oh the sample rate is much higher on this digital technology so it must be superior’. In a roundabout way of getting to what I’m saying is like, as far as bands recording albums themselves, the one thing no matter what, how much gear you have or whatever, there’s just no accounting for taste. It’s like the number one thing. So it’s like if you go record an album with a great producer but he’s lost his fucking stride in his step, if you don’t know what’s up you don’t know what’s up. Or if something is not right for that music or whatever. That coupled with us being incredibly neurotic about everything we do…

It’s another sense of control, creative control.

Yeah absolutely.

Although you’re sometimes classed in the experimental genre bracket, ‘Get Color’ seems quite measured and balanced, quite thought out, with melody and noise in a shifting equilibrium. Did that come during the song writing or the recording?

Song writing process yeah, I think like I said it takes any band awhile to sort of come into their own and figure out, and hone in on what their sound is. And that’s true of any band, especially with a band as weird as we are where figuring out our sound was like this bizarre process. It wasn’t like we were ‘we’re going to be this type of band!’. It was just like this strange evolution of not wanting to sound redundant or to recapitulate to whatever was going on at the time but still wanting to be heavy and structured so not wanting to just make, no offense as far as the monarch that people apply, “experimental music”. Mostly if I hear experimental before some type of music, I’m like ‘ah this is going to be boring and just a waste of my time’, just masturbatory.

I think we are experimental, absolutely but I don’t want to be associated with most of the things I hear as “experimental”.

Grizzly Bear at Vicar Street November 1st

Analogue managed to blag the wonderful Cáit Fahey a photopass to Grizzly Bear at Vicar Street a few weeks ago. A little of the magic of that gig is bottled below… Highlights of the night for me included ‘Ready, Able’ and ‘He Hit Me’.

Analogue Episode 1

Analogue Episode 1 from Analogue on Vimeo.

Analogue is proud to announce the launch of Episode 1 of a new bi-monthly web series featuring interviews, music videos, short documentaries and live performances.
—
Episode 1 running order:
Kronos Quartet & Wu Man interview
Interlude: Music vid for ‘Finds you’ by Patrick Kelleher
So Cow interview and performance of ‘Bat Toes’
—
Directed by Graham Seely & Tim Gannon and produced by Brendan McGuirk
—
All feedback welcome.

The Juan MacLean

Still riding the wave of his excellent The Future Will Come, The Juan MacLean was in town to grace the Heineken Expressions tour and show the masses at Tripod what disco sounded like before nu-disco. Having spent much of the year touring with his live show, and then took off across Europe on a two-week DJ tour. All of this travelling might get a little dull, but he has ways of keeping himself occupied. “That’s how I spend most of my time, reading. My favourite thing of the year is probably The Road, the Cormac McCarthy book. Right now I’m reading a book by James Ellroy. His newest book just came out, called Clothes Like Blood or something [Blood's a Rover], it’s like 1000 pages or something. It’s part of a trilogy that started with American Tabloid, it’s in the late 60s.” For the uninitiated, have a look at this clip of Ellroy on Conan O’Brien a decade ago.

Juan had just come from playing Manchester’s Warehouse Project alongside Erol Alkan, Aeroplane and more, a popular fixture on the UK clubbing calendar. “It was good. I think there was like 1800 people. It was just rammed with people, big huge space packed with people. I asked to be in the small room actually. I hate those big main rooms. It’s not as fun.” I asked him how that show compared to April’s gig in The Deaf Institute. “I thought they were pretty similar. That show at The Deaf Institute was good. Just really packed with people who seemed really into it, having a good time. I like smaller places better, but it’s hard because they want you in a bigger room a lot of the time. I think it’s so much more fun playing in smaller, like 500 capacity is nice. When you get up to big huge empty room, well, not empty, spaces that are more wide open, sometimes it doesn’t sound very good.”

The Future Will Come, as is probably clear from my many posts on the subject, is my favourite album this year, but it works just as well on club speakers as it does on headphones. Making an album and directing it towards one particular experience is obviously something that requires very careful attention. “It’s a big issue that I think a lot about. It comes down to making in album, I don’t really about dancefloor atmosphere. I’d rather make something that you could listen to at home. So on my album there’s a lot of shorter, more pop structured songs, and then I think 12″s are the best to reserve for longer, loopier, more dancefloor-friendly things. That’s always been my philosophy.” The Future Will Come works best, in my opinion, because of the balance between short and snappy songs like One Day and dark, twisted, eight-miunute burners like The Simple Life - but not everyone can get that balance right. “I think it’s always the downfall of electronic musicians - some of my favourite 12″s of all time, like those artists will go on to make albums and they just don’t work very well at all. I think 12″s and albums are two entirely different things, albums that are just collections of instrumental tracks are really hard to do. Like the first Field album [From Here We Go Sublime] I love, I think it’s great. But a lot of the time it just doesn’t work.”

One aspect of the album that is most interesting is the lyrical interplay between Juan and DFA stalwart Nancy Whang. Happiness, heartbreak and every emotion in between feature in songs that seem to catalogue the peaks and troughs that affect every relationship. “That was pretty intentional. I think in dance music when people do have lyrics they tend to be throwaway, either party lyrics that are really meaningless, or really ironic things, or just really clever things, and Nancy and I sat down and just decided that we would try to write as personal, keep it very personal and honest as we could.” As far as Juan’s lyrics are concerned, they often seem to come from the point of view of a humanoid creature, devoid of emotion. “I think that’s kind of a stereotype that has a lot of truth to it in relationships in general. The guy is the one who more robotic and reserved and it’s always the girl who wants to be more emotional or something. So that’s why I’ve always used robots as a metaphor for that.” This robotic trope is turned on its head by Human Disaster, a bleak, desolate song that bares every hidden emotion, which precedes the epic Happy House. “Originally we had a sort of narrative arc to the album that we got away from for sequencing, but it was really a progression of two people coming together and growing apart, and coming back together again. I feel like it sort of getting bookended, in terms of vinyl, side one ends with the song Tonight, which is much more upbeat, happy, optimistic, and it was definitely ending with Happy House, to leave it on a positive, upbeat note.”

Getting back to the live show, Juan recently went into great detail about his setup for Resident Advisor’s Machine Love. I asked him to break that down for a layperson. “It’s hard, how much of a layperson? I think the best way to put it, now, most people in electronic music work entirely inside a computer, using software, synthesisers, all the sounds come from inside the computer, and everything I do is outside the computer, starting with live drums, and actually big collection of synths, and live playing of the instrument, I think that’s the most identifiable quality to it.” Bands like Holy Ghost! have talked about how difficult it’ll be for them to start touring, with the extensive setup they use, but they’re not the only ones. “It’s a big issue because it’s very expensive, especially when you start flying, it’s hard to get all the gear around. We’re in the same boat. Because we actually play all these synths and instruments, there’s a lot of stuff to carry around. Basically it’s a lot more engaging, a live show, than people getting up with a laptop and turning it on.” I recounted to him an experience last year when I saw Ulrich Schnauss start a show only for his laptop to crash within seconds of starting. “That’s embarrassing too. There was a Junior Boys show in New York, in Webster Hall, really big, like 1200 capacity place, and after the first song all their stuff crashed and they had to cancel the show. That terrifies me, I don’t ever want to have that happen. But everyone on DFA, LCD Soundsystem, you know, Hercules and Love Affair, we all carry around all this gear. I think it’s a standard at DFA that’s been established, you’re going to have a proper band.”

All of his recent singles have featured what can only be termed glorious remixes - Surkin, Matthew Dear and The Emperor Machine to name but three. “I usually try to go off the beaten path a little bit. I do so many remixes myself as well, I like the idea of having different things for DJs to play basically. Which is always what I think the point of any remix is, to have something for DJs to play.” And his favourite? “God, that’s a tough one. I think surprisingly it’s the One Day remix by Mark Romboy, which was really, people think of as a weird choice, but I thought it was amazing.”

A recent interview revealed a past spent teaching teenage delinquents in detention centres. Is this something that could follow a successful music career? “I don’t know, I think about it all the time. It’s so hard to say. Some days I think I’ll do it till I’m like 60. Then other days I think I can’t do it anymore, I don’t know. I played with Alexander Robotnick the other night, he’s like 68 or something. He’s 68 and he’s jumping around and going crazy! And I thought “Wow, that’s pretty amazing”. I don’t know. It’s one of the things with electronic music, like dance music, as opposed to rock music, like when I played in an indie rock band, I was like “I definitely don’t want to be anywhere the age of 30 and doing this”, like I found it kind of embarrassing. But with dance music I think there’s a tradition of people being revered as they go on.” Why not instruct kids on how to make a break into the music industry? “I could, I’d like to, when I was teaching I set up an electronic music programme, that was really fun. In the United States it’s looked at as a luxury kind of thing, there’s never money for it.”

I guess all that can be said to that is that, well, the future will come…

The Heineken Expression tour continues at The Classic in Cork on November 13, with Shit Robot, Dancepig and more. See here for more details.

Hipster Youth

Nope this isn’t another blog post obsessed with laughing at or glorifying hipster kids. Hipster Youth is the re-incarnation of Porn.exe, a gameboy infused one man electronic outfit. Dubliner Aidan Wall is on a mission to reinvent the way in which we think about the modern 8 bit aesthetic. Crystal Castles it ain’t but there are some parts that I could see Timbaland potentially shoplifting for his next producer gig. Hipster youth is fun, intricate and at times emotive music. Hearse Road Trip is a free 6 track Ep that’s well worth checking out.

Download Hearse Road Trip