Music making sonic innovators talking gear and process.

Ed Schraeder’s Music Beat are Ed Schraeder and Devlin Rice: two friendly, funny dudes who make serious music in Baltimore, MD. I first saw them at a First Unitarian Church show in Philadelphia a few years ago, but when I heard their most recent album, Riddles (recorded with Dan Deacon), and caught their set at Hopscotch I was more than a little impressed at how much their sound had evolved and expanded: this set of songs boasts jocund jams; jagged, juddering jazz; and other jaunty jewels. I caught up with them in Charlotte, NC, where they opened for hometown friends Future Islands. Ed and Devlin were outrageously generous with their time, their insights, and their tour bus seltzer.

[Edited lightly for length and clarity]

Pedal Fuzz: When I listened to the song “Seagull” it made me wonder: what is your songwriting process? When I hear it, I imagine coming up with that bass riff and building lyrically and vocally from there. So, do you guys bring different parts, do you take turns bringing things, do you both bring stuff, do you just wait for inspiration? How do you build a song?

Devlin: Well, that one specifically–we did a lot of different things for this record. For the first couple of records Ed had a vocal melody and then I’d write to that. You know, the “Seagull” bass line kind of mirrors the vocal. But for Riddles, basically when we started recording with Dan, we came in with a bunch of songs and then to a click track just kind of put everything together with just bass and voice. Then we started just making a map of the song. “Seagull” was the first one that we worked on where he was like “Oh, let’s put in a kick here,” or “Let’s repeat this part…”

Ed: I remember I was listening to this show called American Routes and I was hearing all of these old songs, and I was like “Man, it’s all about the melody!” Then I came up with this little dirge that’s like five-tenths of the song, you know [Ed hums the jazzy, descending and re-ascending bass line here]. It was our usual old process of humming it, Devlin thinking about his thing, but then inputting it to Dan’s formula of kind of taking each piece one at a time, deconstructing it, and kind of building in steps instead of like “Alright, cool, we can get this done and get lunch!” You know?

Devlin: Yeah. And each song on Riddles had a different, like, inception or birth, ‘cause half of it was written in the studio, some stuff that was brought in got tossed…

Ed: Yeah. And it was so weird making a song from the ground. There were a few songs that were made actually in the studio, which is not at all what I usually do. And it was really fun, very freeing, and it puts you in line with that sense of improvisation. You know, like when you’re really in the zone and you’re like “Oh wow, I could do this for living!” There’s those electric kind of moments where the flow is really good and stuff’s coming out, and you’re like “Wait, maybe this will stay, this is good.” And being comfortable enough in a studio to get to that place was an accomplishment, you know, because normally I feel uncomfortable, and I feel like this was the first time I really felt at home.

Devlin: Yeah.

PF: So, do you enjoy playing live more than you enjoy recording?

Ed: You know, I used to enjoy playing live more than recording but now I feel like Dan has really opened up the process and made it fun to the point where I actually like them equally, if not recording is actually a little more fun because it’s like–

Devlin: You’re making something new.

Ed: –yeah, you’re playing, you know, you’re creating, you’re making, it’s like being a kid with Play-Doh. [Switches to an excellent David Brent impression] “The philosopher, not the toy.”

PF: Speaking of which, I loved your Ricky Gervais voice onstage at Hopscotch. My friend and I had been joking about The Office all day, so when you started doing that, I was like “Is he reading my diary?”

Ed: Oh, that’s awesome! It’s like [Back to David Brent] “Is he having a laugh?” Yeah, I don’t know what’s going to come out once I get onstage! I just let myself go, like “You know what? Just be a goofball and don’t worry about it, be yourself,” more so than I am in real life. ‘Cause, you know, if you’re standing in line a Dunkin Donuts and you start like, screaming, people are going to get concerned.

PF: Ha, sure.

Ed: But onstage I’ve learned to let myself go within reason. Not like, boring people, or reciting The Canterbury Tales or something.

PF: Right, right, which I’m sure you could actually do.

Ed: I can only do, like, the first twenty lines. It’s been a while!

PF: It’s so interesting that you’re bringing up letting yourself be yourself onstage, because I feel like, if I’m playing onstage, I’m notoriously bad at banter, and being natural onstage, so it ends up like “Hey guys...uh, what’s up?” Luckily, I play with people who are much better at that than I am, but are you saying that’s not your personality normally?

Ed: Oh, it is, but being who you are onstage is tricky, because at first I’m like “Oh, I’ll get onstage and I’ll just be Ed!” But you do that thing where you kind of go above yourself, and you’re kind of watching yourself, that does happen sometimes. And you have to learn when that happens to still be free enough to keep in the zone and keep that flow going and not get into your head too much. I think years of touring taught me that, being in different situations on different stages. Just learning to, no matter what’s going on around me, create that little bubble where I can just be myself. I just pretend like I’m at my friend’s living room and we’re playing Mario Kart and smoking weed, then I’m like “I’m gonna get up and do a song now!” That happy space, that good space, I always try to keep that around me, and then hopefully emanate that to other people.

PF: You mentioned working with Dan, and that’s actually the second question I had written down, so: perfect, I anticipated this wonderfully!

Ed and Devlin: [Laughter, because I am hilarious]

PF: I was reading on your Bandcamp, and I’m going to quote back to you what it says on there: “Ed and Devlin dreamed of a fuller sound—layered, breathing arrangements their early rapid-fire compositions always seemed to imply, without yet having the tools to realize.” I’m wondering how exactly working with Dan–what tools he brought and what tools you discovered together–helped you realize that vision that you think you didn’t quite have before.

Devlin: I think a lot of it was just having the time to–and I alluded to this earlier, because previous records were like “Get it done as soon as possible…”

Ed: It’s all about the money, and worrying about the budget.

Devlin: ...where Dan was more like “Let’s take some time.” And you know, a lot of the earlier songs, there’s stuff going on that it’s almost like your imagination can fill in, like “Oh, I hear a guitar doing something over here, or whatever.” But for this I think we just wanted to write a record and figure out how to play it live later. Because, you know, Party Jail and Jazz Mind were very much like “We’re a live band, how are we going to do things live? It’s just the two of us.” We just wanted to expand the sound because I think we both appreciate artists who aren’t just doing the same thing over and over again. I’m not saying Slayer should make a jazz record, but, you know, I feel like I don’t need to hear another Slayer record, I’ve already got Hell Awaits. We want to do something interesting and do something different, and having [Dan] we were able to really show what we could do as musicians, too.

Ed: We were restrained by necessity before.

Devlin: Yeah. So it was like “Yeah, let’s bring in a mellotron!” And especially Ed’s vocal performances, they’re pretty different than what was on a lot of the other stuff because now he’s like “Oh, I don’t have to play the drums and sing this.”

Ed: [singing] Now I can be free!

PF: Haha, yeah.

Ed: And sometimes Dan and I would do whole days where I would just get in there and make a pot of coffee and he’s like “Hey, sing that Billy Joel song you were singing the other night!” And I’d ask why, and he’d say “Just do it!” and I’d say “Okay…’It’s nine o’clock [on a Saturday]...’” And he’d say “Now change the words...ok, now just focus on that one word...ok, now change that”, and then all of a sudden the melody’s different, and then all of a sudden we’re not even doing that song anymore. And then we’re building something, and then an idea forms, and then from that, you know, it’s like we start making the roots of a song, but making it coming from a place of fun and excitement, versus etching something out in stone, sitting there at a cafe like “I gotta write this fucking song!” Instead, it’s coming from a place of “Oh yeah, I feel like I’m at karaoke night, I’m having a good time!” It’s getting to a place where I wasn't feeling a need to filter or gate anything, and I was really being myself, letting my actual voice come to the surface, more so than I feel like I would’ve had I made the songs months in advance and had in my mind exactly what I wanted. Like, putting me in a space where someone was like “Hey, do this, try this, try that!”– it was fun, and it was like a cross between a coach and a magician or something. And it was like “this might be weird, but wait: it’s not weird, it’s cool! He tricked me into making a good song!”

Devlin: “You tricked me!” Do you want coffee?

PF: Uh, I just had one and I’ll die if I have another one, thank you.

Devlin: [Laughing] Gotta know the wall!

PF: Exactly!

Ed: But yeah, I think in general I just felt more free in the studio.

PF: Huh, that’s interesting! So, this is a complex, multi-part reply-slash-question: when I hear you talk about making an album without having to worry about performing it, without that being the primary concern, and then I hear you talk about Dan being this coach-magician, who sort of gets things out of you that you might not have gotten out of yourself, it really sounds like...well first of all, my first thought when you were talking about not having to record based on practicality–and this is the least original observation ever, but–it made me think about when the Beatles just stopped worrying about making songs they could play live and just started fucking with layers and tapes and multitracking things they couldn’t possibly have done live. Then that led me also to think about when you were talking about, again, the magician-coach: I was just having a conversation with a friend about how a good music producer can be like a good theatre director, they can elicit a performance from you that you couldn’t necessarily get from just, say, running lines by yourself. Is that crazy? Does that sound kind of like what you’re talking about?

Devlin: No, that’s right.

Ed: Yeah, and also I think also a person who is either A) good at observing, which I think Dan is, and then B) has known me for a long time, and is also an avid fan of the music, is perhaps seeing things objectively that I might not see from sitting in the cockpit. “Hey man, you’ve been singing out of your nose for the past two albums; that’s cool, sounded groovy!” And you know, there were definitely some sonorous, kind of a capella moments on those first two albums, because I grew up listening to Billy Joel, Elton John, Sting, Patti Smith, REM...you know, a whole slew of things, but a lot of these pop musicians who are writing these three minute, encapsulated ballads, where I was doing these thirty second songs, like [delightfully staccato] ‘ba-da-dah-da-dat! Wa-wah-wa-wah-WA!’ So, going from more noise-experimental into this thing that was the thing that drove me in the beginning...I mean, it’s funny: my first experience singing live was Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It”.

PF: Excellent start, excellent start!

Ed: Yeah, it was at an open mic and I sang it and got asked to join a band! Then, we did a bunch of Smashing Pumpkins covers and stuff like that.

PF: This keeps building, I love this setlist!

Ed: We didn’t have any shows, we just practiced. Then I tried doing dance moves, and they kind of kicked me out of the band! But in any event, the initial dragon that I was always chasing was trying to be those people, like I wanted to be [Michael] Stipe, you know, I wanted to be up there. But then, as I got older, I ended up working doing dishes and tough jobs and stuff like that, and being like “Oh, I guess I’m not going to be famous but I’ll work on this as a craft.” And I remember I took an art appreciation class, and I was just like “Oh, art!” And I watched this Jackson Pollock movie: “Oh, interesting!” You’re just learning more about being quote-unquote an artist, and that’s interesting. So, stepping away from, like, the indie-rock/Smashing Pumpkins stuff I was doing, and moving to Baltimore and seeing performance artists, minimalists, and noise musicians who were more in the performance art realm, and going into that world, that kind of shaped the pop thing that I was doing, and, I feel like made it better because it forced me to deconstruct, and then in that deconstruction re-amalgamating who I was. I was actually thinking about it much more than I was before, when I was just trying to sound like Built To Spill or whatever. If that makes any sense…

PF: No, it makes a bunch of sense, and you just name-checked a billion bands I like.

Ed: Hahaha!

PF: I’m really glad you talked about Stipe because I hear so much Stipe when I hear you sing, in all the best ways, so I’m glad I wasn’t wrong about that. The Billy Joel ties in too, we’ll definitely talk about that later on. So, you were talking about Baltimore. It seems like–again, when I was watching you guys at Hopscotch and listening to your superlative stage banter–you were talking about how a lot of the songs were inspired by a particular place. “Kid Radium” you said was about Baltimore, and “Culebra” is about Puerto Rico, so I just wondered if the sense of place, of spatial association, informed a lot of what you do?

Ed: You know, I’ve actually never thought about it, but even going back and thinking about “Sermon”, that was a lot about red tape and Baltimore politics and people trying to do good things and not being able to get them through because of bureaucracy, and so that’s about a place. “Rats” was about my fear of rats when I lived in a warehouse space where I would see rats and be like ‘Ahhhhhh!’, but then also metaphorically it was about communing with God. I saw this Tori Amos video-–and she might have been stoned out–but she was talking about this one religion where people would let rats actually crawl on them, because they felt that that was a way to kind of commune with God, and I found that interesting. And it’s a very limited understanding from a VH1 interview, but I just thought that’s an interesting thing juxtaposed next to this fear, because we look at one end of the spectrum and it’s like “Rats! Vermin!” And then it’s like “GOD!” And it’s just kind of interesting, there’s got to be something there. But you, know, for ‘place’ in that song, it’d probably be the warehouse space I was in. And then I was also listening to Swans a lot at that time–that guy’s always singing about God and power, you almost feel like he’s an X-Men character or something, like Thor.

“Kid Radium” is definitely Baltimore, but also at the same time I saw a play called “The Radium Sisters”, and it was about women that worked in a factory who were exposed to radium, and so just about the toxicity of an environment, using that as a metaphor for the kids being in an environment that was toxic, and the long-term effects of that, similar to working class women whose bodies were falling apart because of this exposure to radium. And toxicity comes in different forms, be it verbal, mental, emotional, and is affecting people in those ways.

So, as far as location goes, maybe it’s not the centerpiece for every song–but even “When I’m In A Car” is about driving around Utica, upstate New York in a car. It’s kind of the first time I’ve actually ever thought about that and it’s a really good point. Location is...you know, I remember as a writer, they’re like ‘Where are you? What’s in the room, what’s around you? Describe it–don’t overdescribe it, but describe it.’ I guess location is there at least two-thirds of the time unless I’m singing out something very abstract. Like air!

PF: Again from the Bandcamp–sorry, but the Bandcamp is a goldmine–it sounds like all three of you went through kinda some shit while this album was being recorded. One of the the things I noticed when I was listening to it in my kitchen while I was making dinner is that a lot of the stuff is either very anthemic, or it felt like it was very sort of meditative, with loose and repeating phrases, and I wondered if any of that could have been either consciously or subconsciously a way to...well, things that are either very exuberant or very repetitive are good ways to shut down the mind for a second and escape. Not that you haven’t tended to sound like that anyway, I just didn’t know if you guys found any of that to be the case while you were recording, or if that was intentional, or if it was a means of escape to clear your mind of things, or if I’m just pulling all of that out of my ass.

Ed: I think moments of introspection and meditation kind of go tandemly with intense life things like death or big changes or transitions and things of that nature. They’re so intense that you almost need to recoil and go into that meditative state to process it. So, it goes from “Griiiieeeef!”, to “Now I’m going to think about the grief” to “GRIIIIEEEEF!!!” again.

Devlin: That’s just the cycle of grief, it oscillates.

Ed: Yeah. The grief snake!

Devlin: The closer you are to the event, the more your swings are completely erratic; you know, petal on the water kind of thing. Also, at the time, I was living in Rhode Island.

PF: Yeah, so you were commuting back and forth, right?

Devlin: Yeah, so we weren’t even seeing each other. It was like every six weeks or so.

PF: Were you driving that, or flying, or bussing?

Devlin: Driving. I think a couple of times I took the bus. It’s six or seven hours depending on the traffic in Connecticut and New Jersey. But I think that every session all of us had something else that was happening, or had happened, or we were experiencing a certain peak or valley. Like, ‘Riddles’ for instance, we were working on one other song and Dan was just like “All right, I’ll be back in an hour, I just gotta say ‘hi’ to my girlfriend. Here’s the setup and things, just dick around.” And we came up with the chorus for that sort of by accident, we didn’t set out to make a U2-style anthem. So I’d say it wasn’t all necessarily by design, it was just sort of what came together, and we were excited about it, and we followed it that way.

Ed: Yeah, and I feel like kind when we first met with Dan a lot of the stuff was more the concise, beat poet, kind of slam style that we usually did in terms of just like one minute little haikus or whatever, or like a minute and a half with a little bridge, verse-chorus-verse. I think he manipulated space and composition to make the songs, to give more space to them, to let them breathe more, and then they developed more richness and nuance because of that. But I think it was also with him changing the composition, it made me also think differently about the song itself.

Devlin: Yeah, like how you’d sing it and everything.

Ed: Yeah, and to live in the space of the song for a little bit longer, and therefore to maybe contemplate some different things in terms of melody and structure, like ‘What am I saying here, and how do I want this to end?’ And making it feel more natural too, because I feel like with the earlier songs, they’re great, but because they’re so short–and I wanted it to be that way and I think it was a good reflection of the time, because I’ve always liked songs like “I’m On Fire” by Bruce Springsteen, which is like a minute and forty-eight seconds, and it doesn’t need to be any longer, and I always thought “Well, I’m just going to make music like that”–but, you know, started myself listening to things more along the lines of Massive Attack where space is definitely in the mix in terms of what makes it good, just giving it room. And I feel like that for us was good because we were just like [in a spitting staccato] “DAT-DAT-DAT-DAT-DAT!” And then Dan would be like [crooning in a smooth legato] “Daaaaah, da-dah-di-daaaah, di-da-da-dum, let’s unpack it a little bit and slow down, and have fun!” Not that there’s nothing wrong with, like, a one minute Buzzcocks song, but it was nice to put on a different hat, and I feel like that brought out different things.

PF: So let me ask you then: what’s it like playing the songs without Dan? It seems like you guys were all a unit while you were recording it. Is it difficult or weird?

Devlin: No. I mean, it’s definitely a new setup, playing to backing tracks.

PF: Right, you guys have the tracks, obviously.

Devlin: What’s interesting [is that] I was always resistant to it because it was just sort of like ‘What’s really happening [live on stage]?’ But then when I actually listened to the tracks [by themselves] without the bass or the vocals it was like, ‘Oh,wait, those things need to be there.’ It’s not like at any moment we could stop performing, or stop playing–the bass needs to be there because otherwise it just sounds completely bonkers, and realizing that, it was like “Ok, this isn’t really too far; even though we’ve adapted and added this other layer, the essence of the band is still really just Ed and I.” And I think even a lot of the melodic content, some things that Dan and I would be kicking around like making up chords or experimenting with different things, there was more of a back and forth in terms of composing that stuff, so it was more of a collaborative thing, and not that he was just like “Do this, do that.” Because we always knew that it was going to be just us, anyway. So I guess I haven’t really thought that.

Ed: Yeah, that would be fun. I would love, love, to do it with Dan, but he’s got an album to record, he’s on the road. And in terms of being pragmatic, you know, at the point we’re at now we’re still a band that’s coming up, so having two people makes it something that’s feasible and sustainable on the road, you know, versus like if we had all the instruments that are on the album. It would be awesome, but that would be like a ten piece band. I don’t think we’d be able to even cover everyone’s transportation!

PF: Right, right.

Devlin: Some people would only be playing two songs, you know what I mean?

PF: Right, ha! Like, flugelhorn guy would pop in…

Ed: Down the road it would be cool, knock on wood, to get to the point where that is a possibility, but in the meantime wanting to evolve and make something new but at the same time finding a way to bridge that until it’s reality–I feel like Dan did a good job of giving us the tools to do that on the road. You know, and going forward, I think we’ll be bringing back live percussion into the mix, which I’m excited to do. But I think for this phase, we needed to do that–just the two of us go out there with the backing tracks and do our thing on top of it. And there’s so much show on top of what’s there, in terms of what’s physical, Devlin’s putting a lot of texture and style and working with the energy that’s right in the room too, and then I’m cracking jokes between songs [chuckling].

PF: I have a weird tendency to describe band dynamics in terms of romantic relationship dynamics, but it sounds like–well, the whole time I’ve been thinking “Man, it sounds like they had a really successful threesome, like: they brought another person into the bedroom, and it was cool, and no one was weird about it, and they moved on or whatever, and everything’s fine now.”

Devlin: Ha! Yeah, we’ll call each other again sometime!

Ed: It challenged us!

PF: Exactly! It expanded your horizons, but in a good way. You know yourselves a little better now.

Devlin: That’s funny.

Ed: That’s a good metaphor, yeah.

PF: Ok, I’m going to ask you two more questions. This is something that I ask all of my friends, or really anybody interesting I’m talking to–and it doesn’t have to be cool, because my answer isn’t particularly cool, but I’m curious: what are the first albums you ever bought? Like, with your own money, you went to the store and bought this. I will tell you right away that mine was Billy Joel, Storm Front. I was in the fifth grade…

Ed: [singing] “There’s a storm front coming…”

PF: Exactly, yeah! 

Ed: Downeaster Alexa!

PF: Man, you’re just naming the tracks! Delightful.

Ed: The first thing that I actually bought was [REM’s] Monster on cassette tape, I think. That was the first thing that I didn’t borrow from my sister and/or find like, in the garbage, I bought it new, like a brand new album. I think the first thing I got was Elton John’s Greatest Hits Volume II, but that was used, like one dollar. This was Monster, brand new, sealed, ten dollars: “Oh wow, that’s expensive!” I got that and I played it over and over. The second album was Sting, The Dream of The Blue Turtles. I bought it in Spanish for my friend who hated Sting and was having trouble in Spanish class, so I was like “Here you go, Happy Birthday!” as a gag gift. He was like “I don’t want this” so I took it home and listened to it, and I was like “Wow, this sounds good in Spanish, maybe I’ll try it in English. Whoa, this is actually a pretty cool album. He was in this band called The Police...oh, they’re really good, this is really good stuff!” and from there, then kind of discovering other things. But I’d say yeah, Monster and The Dream of the Blue Turtles were my first two purchases. That’s pretty weird…

PF: No, I love it, it’s a pretty good mix. What about you, Devlin?

Devlin: Ones that I bought by myself that I remember...I think it was Nevermind and Bush’s first record?

PF and Ed simultaneously: Sixteen Stone?

Devlin: Yeah! And then those got taken away.

PF: Did they? Like, by a parent?

Devlin: Yeah. I used to just listen to like, oldies radio, all the way up until high school; I just was not down with contemporary music at all, so that was my “Well, people like these, let me try that,” and then I was like “Yeah, I really like this Nirvana, this sounds crazy!” Then I ended up finding out what I really liked by going to punk shows and stuff like that. And then, you know, fucking Ride The Lightning comes along…

PF: Yeah, yeah, it’s a jump from The Swingin’ Medallions to Ride the Lightning for sure.

Ed: Ha, there’s a little in between!

PF: Yeah, some space to be filled in for sure.

Ed [once again in Gervais mode]: A bit of a chasm!

PF: Bit of! The last thing I want to ask is–whatever, I was super touched by this. Again, when you guys were playing at Hopscotch, and I don’t know if you do this all the time, but at the end of the set you shared this wonderful hug–I wasn’t even drunk but I thought “Man, that’s so awesome!” The shows are super high-energy, and you give it everything, and you spend so much time together. How do you manage to...I mean, I’ve been on the road with people I wanted to kill eighteen hours into it, you know, “I might stab this motherfucker to death in the car right now.” How do you guys–again with the relationships–but how do you keep it fresh?

Ed:I think it’s like...I think we’re lucky because we are actual friends. I mean we’re best friends in real life, we get along and actually hang out anyway. Being in a band with anybody, yeah, there’s going to be times where it’s like “Oof, I just need a minute to decompress,” or it’s like “What were you saying? I’m sorry, I’m zoning.” Everyone needs their Zen time and their space, even if the relationship is perfect. It’s like family, you know? You’re going to drive each other crazy sometimes, that’s just the nature of being on the road and you’re both going through a very stressful thing where you have to be vulnerable and there’s just going to be moments when you’re like “Dude, I need a minute,” but in general I think that we do have very good chemistry as friends. Devlin’s even looked us up on astrological charts.

Devlin: Yeah. I forget exactly what it is, but it’s supposed to be like fire and air signs. I think that in the Secret Book of Relationships it was like “As a working partnership this pairing tends to make something that’s familiar and recognizable but completely different. The Week of Genius is always floating up in the air and The Week of Balanced Strength is the centering thing.” As I was reading it I was like “Man, this is pretty right on…”

PF: Yeah, that’ll work.

Ed: I also think Devlin has a lot of patience, and I actually learned a lot of patience too growing up, I just had a real smorgasbord or personalities I dealt with. I think both of us had challenges we dealt with, and I think it taught us both to have more patience, perhaps, than most people do, coming from those different situations where we had to be not the center of attention and/or giving to another person and/or kind of a nurturer, in a sense. You know in most relationships I tend to be like “let me cook,” or “I got it!” or this and that, but there are definitely times where I’m like “I need some help today”. I feel like we’re both those types of folks, I like to think that we put others before ourselves and we go out of our way to help people. Coming from a big family, for me, being youngest with seven kids in the house, getting the hand-me-downs of the hand-me-downs, having an older brother who was autistic and needed to be looked after at times–it’s like, it’s not about you and you’re not the center of attention. From that experience growing up, and I think from just knowing an array of different personalities and situations, and having different jobs, we had a lot of life experience prior to the band to learn that kind of patience too. But getting back to Devlin: yeah, I think he is very patient, and I think that there’s definitely times where a lot of people would’ve thrown me into the river, where Devlin was like “Alright man, I just need a minute. [Pause for a beat] Arrrggghhh!” A lot of grace under fire.

Devlin: Our favorite sitcom.

Ed: Also, our favorite sitcom!

PF: Isn’t it the best? Well, I think that’s it. Thanks so much guys, it was fun!

Moogfest is returning to Durham, NC, April 25-28, and as usual it’s pulling on patch cables from an eclectic mix of genres. Pedal Fuzz has a handful of highlights below, and you can see the full lineup for daytime and nighttime shows, the schedule for workshops and talks, and you can grab your tickets while they last right here.

Inventor, composer and 2012 Moog Innovation Award winner Thomas Dolby is joining the lineup for three rare appearances, including a live performance and a two-way interview with Buzzfeed News Sr. Investigative Reporter and 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist Jason Leopold. Dolby and Leopold will converse on their shared passion of truth seeking among creative topics.

Daniel Miller, founder of seminal synth-pop and industrial label Mute Records, is joining for both a conversation and a modular live set;

Tim Hecker will participate in a conversation about his most recent record which incorporates Japanese gagaku music and joined by The Koyoko Ensemble for a nighttime performance;

Craig Leon will hold a joint conversation with William Basinski, who will lead the Sleep Concert and perform an additional live set including songs from his acclaimed new album;

GAS and the founder of Kompakt records, will share his philosophies behind his seminal project and perform at nighttime;

Renowned for his work at the intersection of visual art and live performance, techno artist Max Cooper will hold a lecture on integrating these concepts into the new A/V project he’s performing at Moogfest and perform an afternoon spatial set.

Meyer Sound Laboratories will provide Spatial Sound to The Armory, Fruit Co., the Carolina Theatre, and 21c in collaboration with Virginia Tech (ICAT). Afternoon spatial sets by Jim Lang, Patrick Gleeson and nighttime with Matthew Dear (live), The Field, Kimbra, Jlin, Stephan Bodzin, and Mount Kimbie (DJ set).

21c’s Main Gallery will use a six-channel system to enable an immersive sound experience for durational performances by A Place to Bury Strangers, Richard Devine, and Greg Fox.

The Fruit Co. will include a quad system to provide new spatial opportunities for DJ sets by Daniel Miller, Matthew Dear, nd_baumecker, Mor Elian, Bergsonist, Ouri, Minimal Violence, Brooklyn English, and the afterparty with The Floor.

Moogfest is also excited to welcome Ash Bowie of Polvo and Helium fame, who will perform a very special set with a band of his friends and close associates.

Sound designer Richard Devine will explore synth design with renowned author of modular synthesis techniques Kim Bjørn and various instrument designers.

Kim Bjørn will teach workshops on modular synth patching techniques at the festival.

Kimbra will discuss her creative process, her career, and her production work.

Mount Kimbie’s Kai Campos will be in conversation about the contrasting expressions between a live set and DJ work.

Contributors from Pedal Fuzz have weighed in on their favorite albums of 2018. there was (thankfully) no shortage of excellent music released this year. We hope you give these artists a listen, a share, and maybe even smash that ‘buy’ button on Bandcamp or at the counter of your local record store.

***note***these are listed in order they were sent to the editor

Dustin K. Britt

Al Riggs, WE'RE SAFE BUT FOR HOW LONG

David Byrne, AMERICAN UTOPIA

Father John Misty, GOD'S FAVORITE CUSTOMER

Florence + The Machine, HIGH AS HOPE

Gorillaz, THE NOW NOW

Janelle Monae, DIRTY COMPUTER

Mary Lattimore, HUNDREDS OF DAYS

Neko Case, HELL-ON

Sarah Shook & The Disarmers, YEARS

Troye Sivan, BLOOM

Jon Foster

The Nels Cline 4 – Currents, Constellations – Nels Cline is one of those figures that’s always been on my peripheral. His name has floated around progressive independent music for decades. His association with Wilco didn’t cause me to go through his discography. This record just popped up this year, a little promotion from a devotee helped a lot. Seeing him play at Big Ears this past year solidified my interest.

 Currents, Constellations is fascinating, the interplay between Nels and technical wizard Julian Lage keeps pushing the music forward, sometimes noisy and sometimes jazz freak-out. It’s a perfect gateway record, not all the way jazz and not all the way progressive rock. After listening to the record for a few weeks I ordered the last two Lage records and a couple Cline ones. Julian Lage’s Modern Lore is also on my best of 2018 list.

 Similar Fashion – Portrait Of – I don’t know anything about this band. I don’t know where they come from. I have no context other than a simple post from the producer, John Dietrich of Deerhoof fame. Just that last bit of information caused me to click on the link, a task any music fan can do dozens of times in a day when the music is in front of you all the time. Another Bandcamp link, nah…I’ll pass.

 Thankfully I clicked on the link and heard a record I immediately loved. It was energetic and progressive, a little silly even. How many records reference the TV show, Scandal? One thread going through the record is this quasi-Raymond Scott feel. He’s the guy who wrote a lot of music for Looney Toons, and I love him. Imagine Bugs Bunny chasing Foghorn Leghorn through a forest while a small group of music majors raised on jazz and rock and roll score it. The best songs on the record are full of exuberance and sugared up energy.

  Oh Sees – Smote Reverser – Oh Sees have a lot of records. They might have too many records. Because they have so many records it becomes difficult to get excited about a new one. Although I listen to all of their new records I don’t buy them automatically. I feel like I need to sample them. Recently they’ve been going through this tour of the outer fringes of rock and roll subgenres. You know, last year’s record was the folk record with psychedelic touches. They’ve done the garage record with psychedelic touches. Smote Reverser is their early 70’s hard rock record with psychedelic touches.

 When trying to describe the record, I feel like I have nothing positive to say about it. At the core there’s the usual really loud Dwyer leads over the top of everything. You know they’re coming, they’re always there, it should be an annoying cliché but they sound so good. His tone is delicious. Mix in dueling drums and an interest in letting songs unfold for no particular reason, and it’s a record to fall into.

Palberta – Roach Goin’ Down – This is a punk record. It’s ragged and personal and it feels like it could fall apart at any moment. Sometimes I think the musicians are superb players, while on other songs I feel like it’s the first day of them playing their instruments. The songs are short blasts of postpunk joy that could have been made in 1980.

 While I’m enthralled with this record, and enjoyed them immensely when I saw them live in Raleigh, I worry about them. I worry that this perfect moment will be ruined if they become a little more adept at their instruments. Taking away some of the passion in their playing might neuter their effectiveness. A better scenario might be for them to break up and move onto other things leaving this batch of songs as their only work.

 New Optimism – Amazon to LeFrak – New Optimism is basically Miho Hatori, most notably of Cibo Matto fame. It was a record I didn’t know existed until I started down a random google search hole. It was one of those days where think to yourself, “Oh, I wonder what they’re doing” and then six hours have past. Not setting out to find new music by her and then there it is, was like a wonderful present. Unfortunately it’s only an EP. Unfortunately I haven’t heard anyone talk about the record at all. It came out in July and I worry it’s already buried under mounds of other new releases. Googling Hatori again I realize she has produced a full length record I didn’t know anything about. This last surprise was released in October.

 The music on Amazon to LeFrak is right in line with her work in Cibo Matto and her painfully underrated Ecdysis from 2005. The music is colorful and dancey, vibrant and a little quirky. I hope this flurry of creative continues into the New Year.

Eddie Garcia

In 2018 I listened to and focused on music from films as much or more than straight-up albums. Here are my favorites, they’re all magnificent and worthy of your time.

Favorite Film Scores & Soundtracks

Hereditary - Colin Stetson

Mandy - Jóhann Jóhannsson

Suspiria - Thom Yorke

Black Panther - Kendrick Lamar

You Were Never Really Here - Johnny Greenwood

A Star Is Born - Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper

Vox Lux - Sia / Scott Walker

Revenge - ROB

Kin - Mogwai

Thoroughbreds - Erik Friedlander

Eighth Grade - Anna Meredith

42 Grams - Takénobu

*Honorable mention* Halloween (2018) - John Carpenter. I mean, it was great to hear The Theme loud & revved up/industrialized in a theatre, but not really doing much new here if I’m being honest. Love to John Carpenter forever though!

Favorite Albums

There was much that I ‘liked’ this year in music but less that I ‘loved’ (gonna blame that partially on a shortage of deep listening time). I also had a few instances where live greatly outweighed the record, no matter how much I tried to listen. So rather than list out 40 albums, here are the ones that really affected me, so much so that I even have physical copies of 90% of these.

Sons of Kemet - Your Queen Is A Reptile

Bill Frisell - Music Is

Ohmme - Parts

The Nels Cline 4 - Currents, Constellations

The Messthetics - s/t

Mary Lattimore - Hundreds of Days - Meg Baird & Mary Lattimore - Ghost Forests

Dark Prophet Tongueless Monk - Insides

Yo La Tengo - There’s A Riot Going On

Shane Parish - Child Asleep In The Rain

Low - Double Negative

Marisa Anderson - Cloud Corner

Mind Over Mirrors - Bellowing Sun

Renata Zeiguer - Old Ghost

The Sea And Cake - Any Day

Oh Sees - Smote Reverser

Yonatan Gat - Universalists

Julian Lage - Modern Lore

***I just picked up The Hex by Richard Swift and Mattson 2 Play ‘A Love Supreme’ but as they haven’t gotten a full spin yet I can’t include but they sound mighty fine so far.

Favorite Pop Song

Kimbra - “Top Of the World”

*I don’t really listen to much modern pop music but this song slays and instantly appealed to me the first time I heard it.

Patrick Wall’s Top Ten

Knee Meets Jerk, or: In Which a Semiretired Music Critic and Journalist Offers Brief, Non-Critical and Non-Sequitur Thoughts on His Favorite Music of 2018. Because, Hey, Music Is Personal and Subjective, Right?

*Results listed in alphabetical order and subject to change.

Bad years look better when they’re gone.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt more unstable — professionally, personally, psychologically — in my life than I did in 2018. In the past eighteen months, I've moved twice — from a new home to an old home to very, very far away from home. I bounced from a solid if unexciting job to no job to high-paying but infrequent freelance jobs to steady and cool but low-paying jobs to a high-paying but stressful and wholly unfulfilling job. Commutes went from long car rides to long bike rides and long walks to long train and subway rides. As summer faded to fall and turned to bitter winter, the world just felt increasingly, incontrovertibly, ineffably doomed. New homes didn’t feel as such. Old ones seemed gone, unable to be returned to — no man, Heraclitus mused, can step twice in the same stream.

If things were roiling internally, they weren’t any better externally. The planet is doomed. The authoritarians won. The world got colder. Some of my friends got cancer. Some of them, their cancers came back. Some of my friends got sad. Some of them came to the brink of death. Some of them got help, got better. Some of them didn’t make it through the year, taken either by illness or by their own hands, their voices now silhouettes, never coming back.

All this is to say: I have done far less critical listening this year than in the past. My time is more limited. My tastes are broader and more tolerant now than when I was a quote-unquote critic, but they’re harder to fathom. The things I connected with this year, I don’t know that I could explain why. I don’t know why Cave’s “San’Yago” spoke to me on the same level as Janelle Monae’s “Make Me Feel,” Jeff Parker’s “Blackman,” They Might Be Giants’ “Last Wave,” The Fearless Flyers’ “Ace of Aces,” Superchunk’s “What a Time to Be Alive,” The Messthetics’ “The Inner Ocean,” Fucked Up’s “Normal People.” I don’t know that I can qualify why none of the records those songs were on made the list below, or why I connected with those records in times of existential crisis. (Though, were I to give it some good, critical though, Monae’s Dirty Computer would probably grade out as the best of the year.)

How do we measure out our worst years? What defines them, shapes them? What do we reach for when everything feels bad? What do we reach for when we just need things to get better? The sensitive among us, we to turn art — the gear-minded among us, to music, in particular. But how do we code ourselves to forget, when the music we listened to — the music we connected with the most — brings us back to those places?

If you’re lucky, you get to close that part of yourself off and forget about it. If you’re luckier, you don’t. You recognize those sounds — those emotions — when you hear them again. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to close that part of yourself off and forget about it — but you’ll recognize those sounds when you heard it again. You just need to realize that you were lucky enough to have heard them in the first place.

So here are eleven records released in 2018 that I listened to that I enjoyed more than the other ones I listened to that were released in 2018. These are the records that provided some small comfort, and that will reinforce, in the years to come, that bad years look better when they’re gone. We hope.

Rafiq Bhatia, Breaking English [Anti-]

The Body, I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer [Thrill Jockey]

Khruangbin, Con Todo El Mundo [Dead Oceans]

Julian Lage, Modern Lore [Mack Avenue]

Low, Double Negative [Sub Pop]

Makaya McCraven, Universal Beings [International Anthem]

Mount Eerie, Now Only [P.W. Elverum & Sons]

Ohmme, Parts [Joyful Noise]

Miles Okazaki, Work [self-released]

Tangents, New Bodies [Temporary Residence Limited]

Ryley Walker, Deafman Glance [Dead Oceans]

Patrick Wall is an infrequent contributor to Pedal Fuzz. Sometimes, people pay him to write things. He used to live in North Carolina; he currently lives in Massachusetts. The record he actually listened to the most this year? Psychic Temple’s Plays Music for Airports.

Tom Sowders

 This year I listened to a lot of music that did not come out recently. BUT. I did have some favorites in 2018.

Eric Bachman - No Recover

The National - Cherry Tree Vol. 1

The National - Boxer Live in Brussels

Big Red Machine - S/T

Cat Power - Wanderer

The Love Language - Baby Grand

Shopping - The Official Body

Waxahatchee - Great Thunder

Speedy Ortiz - Twerp Verse

Surfbort - Friendship Music

 Lee Wallace

To make this as absolutely accurate as possible and to allow for any sudden last minute submissions, I am writing this at 8pm on New Year's Eve.

My best of 2018:

Guided By Voices - Space Gun (Rockathon Records). This has already become one of my touch stone GBV albums, in roughly the same status as Mag Earwhig! or Class Clown Spots a UFO or even Vampire on Titus. Fifteen concise psych pop rockers, not a micro second wasted.

Adrian Legg - Live (self release). Adrian is surely one of the two or three best finger style guitarists on this planet, and for nearly forty years he has been traveling and performing solo gigs at house concerts, coffee bars, pubs and anywhere ears will listen.  As wonderful as his playing and composing can be, his arduous fans know that his eloquent, story like song introductions are half of the appeal of seeing him in person. This is perhaps the first time that Legg has released a live album with these stories intact. His ruminations lately have concerned greed, materialism, racism, and the destruction of the environment, all from the perspective of a sagely septaugenarian that has traveled the world many times over, but they are as beautiful as his delicate, astounding guitar playing.

Julia Holter - Aviary (Domino Recording Co.). Holter's third album takes an extraordinary leap from the intelligent chamber pop of her previous work to spooky, other worldly avantgarde. Since so many music reviewers tend to make lazy comparisons to Kate Bush when writing about Holter, imagine if “Lionheart” had jumped straight ahead to “The Dreaming” with 21st century technology. Batshit arrangements and sonic freakouts, lysergic orchestral pile ups that come from outer space, on first listen it all sounds like a mess in places, but hang in there, your brain will thank you.

Janelle Monae - Dirty Computer (Atlantic). Composer/singer/dancer/actress/ time travel enthusiast Monae can be high on concept sometimes but she is even higher on melody, groove and astoundingly great vocal performances. I haven't yet taken the time to dissect what all of this “means” in terms of her commentary about contemporary society and what not, but it sure sounds superb. I suspect that she isn't even close to her peak yet, either.

Harpist Mary Lattimore makes music that sings like a memory. Melodies peer out over layers of water, soil, and stone, transporting you to places you’ve been or imagined. Her latest is a collaboration with songwriter Meg Baird. It’s called Ghost Forests, and it’s available now on Three Lobed Recordings. The album pairs Lattimore’s experimentation with Baird’s songcraft for an album of reflective and tangled musical exchanges. Their sounds live and breathe - you can hear the musician’s give and take, the act of creation itself.

Mary Lattimore spoke with Eddie Garcia (1970s Film Stock) after she and Baird made their live debut at the 2018 Hopscotch Music Festival.

Pedal Fuzz: Tell me about your early days of playing the harp - when did you start, what kind of harp did you play, who did you play with?

Mary Lattimore: I started when I was 11, playing a small troubadour harp. In high school, I went on to play the pedal harp and played with my high school orchestra and the Charlotte Youth Orchestra. I then went on to study at the Eastman School of Music, only playing classical music for a long time.

PF: Do you come from a musical family?

ML: Yes, my Mom is a harpist and my grandpa played the piano and banjo.

PF: What musical experiences were you having leading up to the 2013 release of The Withdrawing Room? Were you playing in other configurations at that time before you went on the solo path?

ML: I was in Thurston Moore's band with Samara Lubelski, John Moloney and Keith Wood. Samara, Thurston, Beck and I made Thurston's record Demolished Thoughts together and then we all went on tour, minus Beck. The tour cycle lasted almost two years, I think, and then it was time for Thurston to work on a new record. He didn't really need harp on it, so I was encouraged by Kurt Vile and another Philly friend, Jeff Zeigler, to make something solo. I had never worked on anything alone like that, but went into Jeff's studio and improvised The Withdrawing Room. Jeff played synth on “You'll Be Fiiinnne” and the title came from KV saying I'd be alright even though I wasn't playing with that band anymore. Making something solo seemed daunting at the time but it all turned out alright and now it's my favorite thing to do, come up with my own solo compositions.  

PF: What can you tell me about your Lyon & Healy harp?

ML: It's about 50 years old and belonged to a student of my mom's. It was made in Chicago and sometimes I use a black Sharpie to fill in the bald spots.

PF: When did you get into pedals, and exploring ways to loop or change your sound?

ML: I was playing for fun with Tara Burke, who plays under the name Fursaxa and layers and loops her vocals and keyboard. We were also improvising with Helena Espvall, amazing cellist from Espers, and she was doing the same thing, so I was encouraged to see what the harp would sound like through pedals. I thought I could make something unique like they were doing with their instruments.

PF: The DL4 has been a big part of your sound and performance. How do you feel about their reliability? I interviewed William Tyler and he said he had gone through quite a few. Have you ever gotten the DL4 modded?

ML: I haven't gotten it modded, but I certainly should. They break all the time. I even flew to Iceland with a brand new one and went to play the show and it didn't work, so I had to borrow a friend's looping pedal and learn how to use it during the set. I'm on my 4th one in just a couple of years. I really know the DL4 so well, though, so I'm gonna stick with it while adding other pedals too, but yeah, William is right. They break and you can't trust them, unfortunately.

PF: What pedals are you currently using?

ML: I just bought the Strymon Big Sky and I loooove it. I have a bunch of Moogerfoogers too and those sounds really interesting, like the Ring Modulator and Cluster Flux. The delay is beautiful.

PF: When you play live, are you using an amplifier, or going straight to the PA?

ML: Straight into the PA. An amp feeds back all the time.

PF: What kind of pickup system do you use?

ML: The Dusty Strings Pedal Harp Pickup. It's gorgeous and rich and I couldn't be happier with it.

PF: What role does improvisation play on records and in live performance?

ML: I like structured improvisation, where I write a general theme but there's room for happy accidents and layers.

PF: The new album Hundreds of Days has other sounds, like synth and voice - tell me about the choice to expand from the solo harp.

ML: I love adding textures and experimenting with instruments that I don't really know how to use, like the Moog Theremini and am learning how to play guitar now too. I like the period when you don't really know where you're doing and the primitive instinct of it.

PF: You have lots of collaborations, how does that inform your solo work?

ML: It's all body-of-work style - collaboration and improvisation, classical music, solo stuff - it all influences each other in melody and listening.

PF: What is your relationship with sound engineers at venues like - do they have certain expectations when they see the harp?

ML: They do but I think generally they're pleasantly surprised that it's not too hard to figure out!

PF: Where did you record Hundreds of Days?

ML: I recorded it at the Headlands residency in the Marin Headlands outside of San Francisco in a Redwood Barn. I just used Garage Band and had a lot of freedom, space and time - also a lot of inspiration from such a dramatic, gorgeous landscape.

PF: How did you get your Headlands Center for the Arts residency, and what did you gain from the experience?

ML: It was through the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage in Philadelphia. I received a fellowship in 2014 and that made it easier to get awarded the residency. I feel incredibly lucky that both happened to me. Both changed my life so much. The validation that I am on the right track with music has meant so much, and the trust from them that I'd make something cool with the experiences.

PF: You’re incredibly active, is it hard to organize your playing schedule?

ML:  Yeah, luckily I have a great manager and a great booking agent who keep me busy and organized and I wanna take advantage of all opportunities and weird experiences - I love saying yes and bringing the harp to people who have never seen one before.

PF: Do you visualize images in your mind while playing?

ML: Yes, always. Little movies.

PF: What soundtrack/scoring work have you done recently? Any coming up?

ML: I recently wrote a part for the documentary about Mr. Rogers, Won't You Be My Neighbor. I also play the parts written by talented film/tv composers like Heather McIntosh's killer score for Amy Scott's Hal Ashby documentary that was just released.

PF: How has your musical life changed moving from Philly to L.A.?

ML: I'm working more for film and TV and making a little more money, being more active professionally. Philly was great for warmth, support, improvising and community and LA is great for work and new creative opportunities. Both are terrific places.

PF: How long has Ghost Forests, your upcoming record with Meg Baird been in the making, and how did the project come about?

ML: It's coming out on Three Lobed Recordings, an old friend of mine and Meg's label (Cory Rayborn) and he encouraged us to make something together, as we are close friends. We recorded and wrote it in only a few days and the synergy was apparent. It was super fun. It was engineered, mixed and co-produced by Thom Monahan.

PF: What was working with Baird like, how was merging your songwriting approaches?

ML: I am more improvisational I think, and she writes beautiful lyrical structured songs, so it's a melding of our styles. I love how Meg's brain works!

PF: Your gig with Baird at Hopscotch was the live debut, were you happy with the show?

ML: It went fine! I was happy with it. We are about to embark on a 30-show opening slot tour with Kurt Vile and the Violators in Europe starting tomorrow, so the set will be really good by late November!

PF: Do you have any other upcoming tour plans?

ML: Solo tour after the KV tour in Europe and the UK!

PF: Last, I know a young harpist (17) who is beginning to experiment with pedals - he currently has an EHX Memory Man, and would like to play in a rock band. Would you have any pedal recommendations, or advice to him as he takes this less traditional musical path?

ML: I would love to hear what he's doing. I played through the Memory Man on Kurt's Smoke Ring for My Halo and it's a cool sound! I would say to just keep bringing our instrument into the modern world and advocating for it and experimenting with it. There's so much untapped potential.

EDDIE GARCIA PLAYS GUITAR AND ALL THE PEDALS AS 1970S FILM STOCK. YOU CAN ALSO HEAR HIM REPORTING ON NPR AFFILIATE 88.5 WFDD IN WINSTON-SALEM, NC. IN THE WEE HOURS HE RUNS PEDAL FUZZ, WHICH IS A PROUD RECIPIENT OF A GRANT FROM THE ARTS ENTERPRISE LAB / KENAN INSTITUTE FOR THE ARTS. 

Jphono1 is the sometimes-solo/sometimes-not project of Carrboro, North Carolina guitarist, singer, and drummer John Harrison. His latest album, Meadow Magic Hour, features a full band, and came out earlier in 2018. John also fronts the band North Elementary, and co-runs Potluck Foundation, a label /family /cooperative of like-minded musicians in The Triangle area (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) of NC.

Pedal Fuzz host Eddie Garcia (1970s Film Stock) spoke with John Harrison at his home in Carrboro, NC, just before heading out to a gig.

Speedy Ortiz singer-guitarist Sadie Dupuis’s craft is in full focus on the album Twerp Verse, released earlier this year on Carpark Records. Complex lead lines twist and careen alongside tightly crafted power-pop hooks that have the record already being counted amongst the year’s best.

After playing a catchy, caffeinated set at the 2018 Hopscotch Music Festival, Pedal Fuzz sat down in a cluttered greenroom with Sadie Dupuis, to talk pedals, songwriting, and fingernails. THE FOLLOWING EXCERPTS HAVE BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED

Pedal Fuzz: So first I would love to know about the guitar you were playing last night.

Sadie Dupuis: Yeah, I don't think they're making them anymore. The company was called Moniker, Austin-based—and they would do different custom guitars. That particular model is the Anastasia. It’s shell pink. It has like a like a crescent moon cutaway, and there are pearl details throughout it. And then the headstock has my Sad 13 logo on it.

PF: Cool, so it was made for you?

SD: Yeah!

PF: And do you move through the three pickups, or do you usually stay on one in particular?

SD:I put Strat pickups in the middle, but there are humbuckers on either side, so it's a little unusual. If I'm recording, I'll switch them, but for live I'm pretty much just in the middle.

PF: Is there a piece of gear—it could be an instrument or a device of some sort—that has changed the way you play, or changed something stylistically?

SD:I think every piece of gear has some impact in that sense. But I think the biggest thing for me over the past two or three years has been that I stopped playing with a pick. So, that's not so much adding a piece of gear as much as getting rid of a piece of gear. When we would record I would always have parts that I would need to fingerpick because I wouldn't be able to play them with a pick, and then live I was always playing with a pick. Going back and forth between the two felt kind of clumsy to me.

Or the things that I did have to fingerpick live wouldn't have the same presence or attack as the stuff that I would play with the pick. And so I would be modifying the parts to play it with a pick, and I kind of wasn't into that at all. I could never wear nail polish because—guitarists know—it just scrapes off. Especially the second fingers just get scraped off.

And we had a front of house engineer whose girlfriend was a nail artist who was like, “let me just do your nails. There's this kind of nail polish that won't come off. It makes your nails stronger.” And I was like, “Okay, I'll try it.”

And I sort of realized that I could just grow my nails out, have polish on them, and use these as picks [brandishes canary yellow fingernails]. So now I—Dolly Parton-style—have very long nails on my right hand, and I don't play with a pick at all anymore, because I don't have to - I’ve got five.

So that's been the biggest change in my style, I'd say, in the past couple years.

PF: You modded your hand! So, what pedals do you use now, or what are some ones that are important to you?

SD: I have a ton of pedals at home, and if I'm home-recording I tend to use totally different stuff then I use for the live setup. And that's partially in the same way that I don't want to eat hummus when I'm not on tour because I'm used to having it fed to me in greenrooms every day. Or I don't want to wear the clothes that I wear on tour when I'm home from tour.

The first thing on my chain is an Earthquaker Devices Monarch Overdrive, which is discontinued. It's just an overdrive pedal that's meant to model an Orange amp, and I use that basically as my clean tone, so that's on all the time. I have the gain turned up with not too much volume at 12 o'clock, bass at 9, treble at 12. I don't totally understand why they discontinued it. They do sell the Stew-Mac kits so people could theoretically build their own.

I got used to playing with that pedal because I was playing with certain Fender amps that just felt too common, you know what I mean? Like, a Deville is such a backline amp, which I like a lot, but I played it forever and I liked having this as part of my “clean tone” because it just made the clean a little bit different than the Fender stock sound.

Then I have a Catalinbread Callisto, which is a chorus/vibrato pedal. Again, it likes very mild settings.

And the Dispatch Master, which is another Earthquaker pedal. It’s a reverb/delay, but I'm using it to just give a little bit of reverb. Those are the three pedals that are on all the time. They make up my clean tone.

The second two that I mentioned kind of came onto my board later because I started playing with the Divided by 13 amp CJ 11, which I love, but the only knobs it has are master volume, volume, bass and treble. So, having played Fender amps forever, being used to having the vibrato and the reverb, I wanted to have a little bit of that so that’s what those two pedals kind of accommodate for me.

Beyond that, my overdrive, for when I want to do a cool solo or something, is Earthquaker stuff. I really like their tones. So I use The Dunes for when I'm playing a solo or I need to be loud. It’s another overdrive - I’m weirdly anti-fuzz.

Past that I have Earthquaker’s Pitch Bay, which is an octave plus overdrive pedal, so I'll use that if I want to make a solo a little weird and outerspacey, or sometimes to simulate a synth I played on the records, particularly older records. There would be a synth part that happens for eight seconds, and there was no reason for me to play a synth, so I would just learn the part and play it through that pedal.

PF: An octave up?

SD: Yeah, I have the tiniest amount of octave down that's basically inaudible but pitched off a little bit so it sounds like a weird synth, and then the octave up is pretty gainey.

I used to play a POG 2, but I could never make it not sound like an organ, which is why I like the Pitch Bay. I've always had an impossible time finding any kind of synth-emulating pedal that doesn't sound like it’s just an organ.

PF: I have an old Electro Harmonix Microsynth—one of the big ones—and it's pretty dirty and cool.

SD: Those are cool. I do have a Synth 9 on my board right now, also from Electro Harmonix. I use it on the Prophet-V setting for some of the songs from the new album that I didn’t even play guitar on during recording. The Pitch Bay is great, but it doesn’t really sound like a synth. It makes the guitar sound spacey and digital. So, I wanted something that could be a little more filtered and sound like the synth I play on songs from the new album.

I also have the Old Blood Noise Endeavors Black Fountain delay on my chain. Beyond that I use an ISP Technologies Decimator G-String, which is a noise gate. All of these overdriving pedals give me some signal noise.

PF: Is it noisy all the time otherwise?

SD: It's not. It depends on the electricity of the room. It can get pretty bad when the electricity isn't up to snuff, so I have that [Decimator G-String] in case of emergencies, and that's why I play on the Strat pickup live because if I'm on anything that's humming at all, it’s just magnifying…

Oh, I also use the Walrus Audio Deep Six Compressor, so obviously that's also propagating any kind of signal noise I get. So, there's a fair amount of a harm reduction that has to happen in this chain. [laughs]

PF: I was going to ask you if your setup changes when you're on the road versus recording.

SD: If I'm recording a record, and we're in a studio, anything is kind of fair game. I'll use what the studio has in addition to whatever I brought. But at home when I'm just making demos, I'm like, “I've accrued all these pedals that I don't get to use live so I'm just not interested in even opening my stage pedalboard.” I assemble a separate chain for whatever the song kind of wants. On a lot of the stuff that we've recorded, I didn't use any of the pedals I just mentioned. But it doesn't have to be the exact same sounds live, right?

PF: When you're thinking about your next record, writing songs and demoing at home, is there an ideal Speedy Ortiz song you’re reaching for out in the ether? And what does the ideal Speedy Ortiz song do?

SD: That’s a tough one, because I think it depends. I mean, not every song has the same goals or forms or changes, but there are things that I try to make happen with every song, and I don't really like when a song gets in, like, a groove, and it's too comfortable - I always want a weird surprise.

So whether that's in the lyrics, or whether that's in the time signature, or whether it’s just how many measures something repeats, I tend to change things. So even if a chorus happens three times in the song, it'll be slightly different every time.

So usually my goals are to get somewhere with the writing of it that surprises me, and that I think would be like a fun Easter Egg for the person who's heard it a few times, and then is like, “Oh, the chorus starts on the three this time rather than the one.” Or something like that.

PF: Something surprising.

SD: Yeah, and, by extension, even if the form stays the same, maybe the sounds will be different. One thing I love is to have a second verse in which a lot of stuff drops out, and maybe a weird sound is introduced. If I go back through all my songs, I can probably check that off happening a lot of the time. [laughs]

So there are certain tricks that I definitely pull from song to song, but I just like it to change throughout.

PF: Are you aware of things that you do habitually in the structure of your songs?

SD: I don't think about it when I'm writing a song, but when I show something to my bandmates, they're like, “Oh, of course it's a measure of six this time at the end of the chorus, sounds like you!”

So, I'm sort of aware that there are certainly compositional tools that I lean into more often than not, but I think also they're not super common, so I feel fine repeating them.

PF: So that's, like, your…

SD: Little signature.

PF: Yeah! It’s part of your architecture.

SD: [Laughs] You know all those condos that look the same? That's like the choruses of our songs.

*main photo courtesy of Hopscotch Music Festival / Garrett Poulos

Out on cassette via Null Zone, Child Asleep In The Rain finds the Asheville, NC based guitarist Shane Parish (Ahleuchatistas) in an exploratory mood. Striking a much different tone from his last (excellent) solo acoustic album Undertaker Please Drive Slow (Tazdik Records), this one takes a deep dive into the sonic unknown.

The phrase "Shane Parish is a father" keeps appearing in my mind while listening. I hear the dread of now, wrestling with the hope of now - the struggle of “it’s all gonna be ok,” that idea you work to convey even if at times you’re not so sure. Parish is a gifted improviser, and you can trace the threads of thoughts connecting as sounds whir around you, the notes still intimate though often awash in effects.

Shane Parish’s notes on the album:

“I am going to try to briefly talk about music as an emanation since this album seemed to just appear on my computer one day.  I have strived to cultivate a way of life that will allow my creativity to grow and flow over my lifetime. I believe that if you steep yourself in the raw materials of an art form and you are honest with yourself about who you are, expression will manifest itself in many different shapes and they will all be you.  And they will also all be everybody and everything. There is one infinite resource passing through seven billion finite filters of subjectivity.

Mastery of the body can lead to virtuosity, but that can take a lifetime.  And we must imperfectly communicate and express our feelings as we move along the path.  Our limits reveal our shape. Technology can bridge the gap between mind and body, an idea and its realization, in performance and the production of artifacts.  Sometimes, our bodies are all the technology that is required. Sometimes we need more.

I have always attempted to allow intuition and a feeling to guide my work, even when I have introduced technical and conceptual obstacles to be overcome and employed.  I feel that my most relatable and musically successful endeavors are the ones that seem to emanate fully formed and with no effort. Still, I am committed to the practice.  And the letting go.”

Child Asleep In The Rain is available digitally via Bandcamp and on cassette from Null Zone Tapes.

Tour Dates:

9/21 - Grey Eagle - Asheville, NC

10/1 - If Art Gallery - Columbia, SC

10/2 - Duke Coffeehouse - Durham, NC w/ Polychord

10/4 - Rhizome DC - Washington, D.C. w/ Anthony Pirog/Jarrett Gilgore

10/5 - Jalopy Theatre - Brooklyn, NY w/ Iva Bittova, Eva Salina

10/7 - Downtown Music Gallery - New York, NY Shane Parish & Frank Meadows Duo

10/7 - Wonders of Nature - Brooklyn, NY w/ Ross Hammond

10/13 - Golden Pony - Harrisonburg, VA

10/26 - Go Bar - Athens, GA

She’s not a healer. But her music is medicinal. The revitalizing melodies and rhythms of Philly-based techno musician W00dy enter the personal and communal consciousness of her audience, targeting trauma through a sort of frenzied, dance-driven catharsis. Her live shows have created a kind of musical safe space, satisfying the hunger of the marginalized for an experience that is memorable, tangible, and genuine. Pedal Fuzz spoke with W00dy just before she travelled to Raleigh for Hopscotch 2018.

Pedal Fuzz: You’ve evolved from mostly vocal solo performance to producing dance music. Do you prefer to disappear?

W00dy: Up until fall of 2016, I was making experimental pop music where I would sing during my performances. It was getting increasingly hard for me to write lyrics and I was becoming frustrated with performances being centered around me as a vocalist. I was listening to so much techno and dance music that I had an epiphany--why am I still making "pop"? It was clear that I was more passionate about dance music so I dove in full force. I hope to maybe incorporate vocals in my music again someday, but playing this style of dance music feels very genuine.

PF: How are marginalized groups responding to your work?

W: I'm always humbled and excited to see that people are connecting with my music, especially with movement...healing through dance. Creating space for marginalized folks is something that has always been extremely important to me as someone who struggled to find my own place in the electronic music community as a queer woman.

PF: Is the final mix in mind when you’re developing an idea?

W: I’ve realized that I can't really go in with any expectations. As of late, the goal is the same: making fucked up but danceable rhythms. One of the most exciting parts of exploring dance music is the rhythmic possibility. Growing up I was classically trained on melodic instruments, and I never felt that rhythm was my strong suit until I started using the computer to make music. I try to always challenge myself with complex sounds and rhythms that I wouldn't expect on the dance floor.

PF: How are you getting those sounds?

W: Some might laugh, but I'm still using Ableton Live 8. All my music starts in Ableton, and then I run ten channels from Ableton out of an audio interface and into a 16-channel mixer. I have three different delays and a distortion pedal as aux sends in the mixer, and a midi controller that controls Ableton. I also use an Korg ER-1 Electribe (she's moody and doesn't always work right) to transition between songs.

PF: Is touring through the South different from going other places?

W: I think right-wing conservative people in the south are more open about their backwards views because that rationale has been normalized in the South for centuries. Driving around there it's clear that racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and homophobia are alive and well--just based on the conservative propaganda all around the highways. It's important to note that I am a white cis-woman. The South is significantly less safe for a person of color or a trans person. It's important for white people especially to be on the lookout for their safety.

PF: How do you keep spontaneity on stage?

W: The music is very preset, but the way I perform the compositions and process the effects can be totally different each time. Each song has its own customized patterns in Ableton: 20-25 clips that I play through. I design my own effects racks, which completely transform the original sound. As a classically trained musician, it took me years to figure out how to play electronic music in a way that feels tangible--like a real instrument.