New Music: Corespondents; Interview

Four dudes, instruments for days, colossal amounts of talent and one bright orange cassette tape. This, my friends, is Corespondents. The music created by this quartet is uncategorizable even though many attempt to find just the right sized round hole for the square peg that is Corespondents. It’s ok, people. It’s ok to have a band that defies genre and category and blows your mind a bit. Just sit back, slip on your circa 1972 headphones that you got from your super hip, musically inclined parent (because you’re legit), lay back and let it happen. And, by “it”, I mean the magic of listening to something that sounds foreign, yet familiar, and all over the musical map.

I had a chat with the band about non-western instrumentation, cassette tapes, the importance of Ezra Dickinson, the non-importance of song titles and action figures.

See them play The Blue Moon Tavern on Friday, May 22nd!

the mixtape: You choose to incorporate non-western instrumentation such as the Vietnamese Dan-Bao and the Greek Bouzouki into your music. How did you come up with the idea of using these (and other) specific instruments? Are these the only instruments in your minds that can do the trick and get the sound you’re looking for?

Doug Arney: Both Kieran and I brought dan baos back from separate travels to Vietnam; Kieran took a knack to his, while I took the bouzouki Olie’s mom had brought back from Greece and left my dan bao in his basement. But, Olie was starting to play pedal steel about the same time we started as a band (waaaay back in ought’3) – which is an instrument that is most commonly recognized in country music, but he uses it in other contexts. Lately, we’ve been calling our genre ‘alt countries’, maybe that’s where it really comes from…

Olie Eshleman: I think use of both the Dan Bao and the Pedal Steel comes from a desire to have something that fills that vocal range. Something that is not locked down to equal temperament and western scales by frets or keys. Any way of being able to take the music out of the canon of american music (or back into, for that matter) is attractive to us. This also explains the bouzouki.

Kieran Harrison-Buhlinger: Yeah, really though, we’ll use anything that makes a sound to be a part of our music, especially on the recordings. You probably weren’t aware that on LOLcats there’s a fair amount of synth, bandurria, a field recording, is the saz on there? I can’t remember…piano, congas, the horns came in because we made friends with Orkestar Zirkonium and they started crashing the Corespondents recording parties. We’ll get Annie Fuckin’ Ford to come in and play on a Fiddle…slide whistle, whatever. Olie and I are both sound engineers so we like the challenge of mixing in new sounds, putting mics in weird places and manipulating things until you can’t recognize them. Corespondents has over 100 songs recorded now, with different members, just about every instrument you can think of, so there’s a lot of variety there.

Todd Arney: Yep.

tm: Why did you release LOLcats on cassette? Is it more financially strategic or do you just really love the cassette format?

Kieran: Ha! If finances were really a consideration for how we lived our lives then we’d all be accountants or something. We have a label which has a crazy person at the helm and they for some reason find it entertaining to put out releases of bands that no one knows about, on obsolete mediums that no one buys. But in all seriousness, Antiquated Future started out as a zine distro and sort of accumulated into a label, which, surprise, can’t get rid of CD’s any more because they’re pointless but CAN sell cassettes and vinyl. Let me tell you a short story: I spent a week going back and forth to the goodwill exchanging one broken cassette deck for another, just so that I could listen to our tape, until they were stacked 8 high, all broken and I had 25$ in store credit. I finally left there with a skillsaw. Do you think that a kid who grew up with an ipod in their face is going to have the same nostalgic reverence for cassettes? Probably not any more than you think wax cylinders are gonna make a comeback. Vinyl though…we’ve been seriously talking about buying/making a cutter, and just making our own records. DJs kept vinyl alive, you can buy a brand new turntable right now, whereas the economy/availability of working cassette decks is about to go the way of the serious collector only.

Olie: CD’s are basically garbage in my mind. Once I get one home and get the songs transferred to my devices, I never look at it again. It just clutters up my space. There is essential no difference listening to a CD or digital file, there’s nothing special about listening to a CD. Vinyl was cost prohibitive this time around and at least a cassette tape is still a special listening experience with it’s own pleasant idiosyncrasies. We included a digital download as well, of course.

Todd: Aren’t cassettes cool? I mean why else would we do it? No really, I don’t think Corespondents has released anything on cassette before (right?), and in keeping in the spirit of the responses on question #1, I would have to say format can play into how the music is presented. The batch of songs on LOLcats work wonderfully on our chosen format. We were able to choose a run time EXACTLY what we wanted, and bright orange at that.

tm: You have a video for the song “Manifest Destiny’s Child” from your album Land of the Low People. This video was made in collaboration with Ezra Dickinson. Who is Ezra Dickinson and why is he important? Why was this collaboration important?

Doug: Ezra is an inspiring and busy man; he’s a dancer, choreographer, street performer and a lot of other things too. I met & worked with him around the time we were working on Land of the Low People. I had a rough music video idea of a person splitting apart & multiplying, so I asked Ezra if he’d be interested in working on it. I gave him a few songs to choose from, and as I recall, he chose this song without knowing the title.

After we started making the video, he thought it would be a good addition to his piece, Mother for you I made this, which was a collection of performances presented to create a conversation about the failed mental health care system in America. His mother is schizophrenic, and he created performances as gifts to her and about his experience growing up, without knowing that he was caring for her. The video is pretty good on it’s own, but it was amazing to see Ezra use it in that context, which made it a much more powerful and personal message. It was also cool to see 20 people with headphones on staring at the wall in an alley watching a Corespondents video!

Kieran: That one is a great example of how goofy word play turned into a pretty cutting satirical phrase which then was totally re-contextualized by Ezra’s use of the piece.

tm: Do you have plans to work with Ezra again?

Doug: Yes! Well, sort of. We are making a trade with Rainbow Fletcher, who is choreographing our next dance video and we are going to supply her dance company, Hypernova, with some music. Not sure what this really is going to look or sound like quite yet, but it’s very likely that Ezra and the rest of the Hypernova will be performing to Corespondents music later this year.

tm: I’ve noticed lots of wordplay and the use of puns within album titles and song titles. Do you think song titles are important?

Doug: We gotta call them something, and there’s no lyrics to tell us anything, so we just have our minds, and puns come out of those a lot of times.

Olie: We used to try to come up with titles that had special meaning and encapsulated the song’s emotive or narrative qualities. Later on we found this to be futile. Plus, coming up with interesting puns is way more fun.

Kieran: The titles can sometimes come from a place that is descriptive of the song, but yeah, usually more just the result of word play while sitting on the back porch between songs at practice.

Todd: There is a game I play constantly in my head to help myself deal with the general public. And sometimes it is fun to play with your bestest friends, too. You have to be careful with both, but almost more so with your friends. I guess someone can think of it as sarcasm…basically what you do is train your brain to hear wrongly what the person has said, but has the same number of syllables and mostly rhymes with the original statement. For example, you say, “music on the radio”, and I hear “mucus on the dodo”. It can be real fun!

tm: If Corespondents was an action figure what accessories would you have?

Doug: a guitar and an herb grinder

Olie: A Passport and a ribbon mic

Kieran: a pack of strings and a hot air balloon.

Todd: A rotary phone connected to any musical movement in any place and time that we find inspiration.

tm: What did you have for dinner last night?

Doug: Curry Udon

Olie: Steak and Brussel Sprouts

Kieran: Beefy mac and greens.

Todd: Mushroom & sausage pizza with arugula and roasted radishes from my arugula and radish patch. Unfortunately, I don’t have a mushroom & sausage pizza patch.

tm: I realize you just released LOLcats but what’s next for Corespondents?

Doug: Prolly continue to complain about how much Seattle is changing; keep making music and hanging out. Maybe go camping. Hopefully get some vinyl made.

Kieran: We just had a cassette release party, but the cassettes didn’t show up in time. Since then we haven’t really been playing those songs, and have been writing a bunch of new songs that we’ll record and then try to figure out what to do with those…so we should probably go into the business of life-coaching, time optimization and prioritization.

Todd: We thought LOLcats was the heaviest music Corespondents has made to date, but I think what we have been coming up with recently might be heavier.