#ami dang

Mountains — Mountains, Mountains, Mountains

Before I started using synthesizers, I turned to a lot of synth-based music for clues about what to do with my guitar. I love guitars but had become bored with my playing. I saw Mountains at Union Pool in Brooklyn having never heard of them before, and it was this magical moment where I thought, here’s the exact sound I’ve been searching for but didn’t know existed. Something special about the beginning of Tacoma Park was that it was partially born out of mutual urges for John and me to step out of our respective comfort zones. For me, it was about sharing my solo practice with someone else, and for John it was about leaning into a more improvisational approach. Naturally, we shared a lot of music with each other, and Mountains was the first thing I turned him onto. Mountains, Mountains, Mountains became an early reference point for us. The blending of guitars and synths, the composed-improv approach, and the revelatory decision to make our first record a series of tracks (dare I say songs?) as opposed to one long jam — it was all largely inspired by Mountains. More than any other band, I’d say, they provided crucial guidance in our early days for figuring out how to make music together.

John Fahey

There are probably few things as obvious as the fact that John and I love Fahey. The way he plays an acoustic guitar hits me the same way synthesizers do. It’s hard to describe — something about repetition, drones, and following the way the wind blows. Fahey was a complicated man for sure. Not always a good one, from what I’ve heard. Made decisions scattered across the spectrum of the questionable. Like many others these days, I grapple with how to separate “the person from the artist,” if that’s even possible. I have clear lines that inform my choices about the art I support and engage with, but sometimes it’s foggy and harder for me to discern. To deny that Fahey is ingrained in the fabric of my creative and spiritual self would be disingenuous, and I feel like my John would agree. Whatever the case, the point is this: Tacoma Park is in some ways more a sonic manifestation of our friendship than a band. Practices involve sitting and talking for a long time, jamming, talking some more, jamming some more, and talking some more. The talk becomes the jam, the jam becomes the talk, the cycle is eternal. These ideas that Fahey — the problematic person and the composer of sounds from another Earth — stirs up are ingredients in the psychic fuel that drives us. For better or for worse, Fahey looms large.

Built To Spill — Perfect From Now On

Soon after we officially named our band, I went to see one of John’s other bands, North Elementary. They’re a Chapel Hill institution, but it had been years since I’d seen them and never in this configuration. Afterwards, I told him what I thought (I loved it), including that some of their stuff was giving me Built to Spill vibes. “Now you’re speaking my language,” John said, indicating a type of connection we had yet to identify, but I subconsciously suspected was there. Perfect from Now On is a funny title because it’s about as close to perfect as any record I’ve heard. For example, those guitars. For another example, those GUITARS. John and I went to see them a couple years ago, and it was the first time they’d come through with their current lineup (Melanie Radford on bass and Theresa Esguerra on drums). The whole show was great but seeing those songs from Perfect reimagined with this stripped-down lineup resonated deeply with both of us. It’s really amazing to see a band make songs last without losing an ounce of relevance or wonder for as long as Doug Martsch and co. have, no doubt due to the reinterpretation of this out of sight rhythm section. It’s inspiring, and it’s hopeful.

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Between the World and Me

Remember those pre-jam conversations I was talking about? This was an early topic. Certainly, there’s too much to say about this book here, but one thing I think about a lot is how it illustrates the perspective that a book is a document of where a writer was in their life when they wrote it, much like a record and a band. Coates got a lot of comparisons to Baldwin when this came out, and I think one reason for that might be their shared rejection of themselves as activists. Baldwin thought of his job as bearing witness, and I think Coates might too — bearing witness to the country, the times, and himself. To read this book, formatted as a letter to his son, after all his writing that came before it, is to see and understand how artists never stop. It’s a real act of generosity when someone publicly invites you to observe a small part of their life’s journey, and when it’s done as open-heartedly as it is in Between the World and Me, it’s a wonderful gift. I had an extra copy of the book and gave it to John in the early days of TP, and he read it over a weekend. It started with one conversation and led to many more. I know this book means a lot of things to a lot of people. To me it represents a definitive turning point in my emotional and intellectual growth, especially as a white person and an eighth-grade social studies teacher (my day job). It’s a very personal thing, and to have been able to share it with John was not insignificant. It became one of our resources for creating a shared vocabulary, exemplary, I think, of why we make the music we make together. Required reading imho.

Ami Dang — Parted Plains

Generally speaking, I am easily gripped by music that blends the traditional or classical with the modern. And one cool thing about synthesizers is that they kind of just do that simultaneously — instruments modeled after techniques developed decades ago, if not actually built then, still sound as futuristically relevant as they did on, like, Dark Side of the Moon or whatever. Parted Plains does this beautifully and expertly. Dang’s sitar playing cuts through her constructed soundscape, grounding the listener towards something more organic without losing that magical blurring of lines. This record was definitely a shared point of reference for us after we recorded our first album and started moving towards the sounds and style that became the new one. And to see Dang do this live is really something. We had a gig booked a few years ago at a coffee shop in Chapel Hill called Driade that had this incredible outdoor space for bands to play when the weather was nice. But then one of those mid-October storms started threatening to come through and after a fair amount of soul searching, we called it off. It was also supposed to be an unofficial birthday thing for me, so I was a bit extra bummed. But Dang was playing at the Duke Coffeehouse, so we went out for Thai food with our wives and then took an Uber to Durham for the show. That was a good one.

Pig Roasting

The sentiment that one wants their bandmates to be people who, at the end of the day, they just like hanging out with is far from groundbreaking. But it’s not one to take for granted. John and I love to eat and we love to cook, sometimes together. One time, we were sitting around his fire pit and started talking about how we’ve always wanted to roast a whole hog. It seemed like such an impossibly daunting task, but as we talked through it, we realized we might be able to pull it off. We sought counsel from our friend Alex Livingstone (who plays bass in John’s other, other band, Jphono1), because he’s an expert brisket smoker, and while he had some thoughts, he was ultimately on the same page as us: he’d never done it and always wanted to. So we did some research, built a pit in John’s backyard, loaded Alex’s truck with 700 pounds of oak and hickory, and got to it. The first time was just the three of us, and we started at around 5:00pm, thinking it would take the better part of 24 hours, but then found ourselves pulling pork and making sandwiches in John’s kitchen at three in the morning. Once we got our timing and a few other things figured out, we invited friends and family to partake and made a night of it. We’ve done three altogether, and each time it’s been glorious. Roasting a pig involves a lot of sitting around, and we’ve found a fun way to pass by listening to as much of an artist's catalog as the hours will allow. Chris Forsyth, ZZ Top, and Ween have featured prominently, as has another band who’s name I won’t mention here (it rhymes with the title of the Smashing Pumpkins’ first record). I love cooking for many reasons, the two biggest being that it engages a very specific side of my creative self that I can’t seem to live without, and it brings people together, just like playing music.

Bitchin Bajas — Bajas Fresh and Bajascillators

It’s a challenging thing to make music with roots in the experimental or fringe without it sounding too cliche and unoriginal, especially if that music is less out than it once was. To say Bitchin Bajas pull this off is a gross understatement. Bajas Fresh and Bajascillators are two records that John and I love and have looked towards for education on our approach to Tacoma Park. Where Mountains conjure up the soil of the Earth with acoustic guitars, Bajas do so with percussion and woodwinds among other things. This is the kind of stuff that John is especially drawn to. Something that elevates electronic music for him and makes certain bands stand out. A testament to his sophisticated, top-tier taste. One thing I love about Bajas is their blending of sequenced synths and real-time, human-played melodies, or at least that’s what I think they’re doing (see “World B. Free”). It creates some interesting sonic mind games, the blurring of lines between person and machine — super instructive to me as a synth player. Also, John and I found our way to this band around the same time, totally independently of each other. Some might call that a universal plan or a sign; others might say it was meant to be. Whatever it is, I like it.

Chris Schlarb — On Recording

Chris Schlarb has prolifically produced some versatile and mesmerizing work as Psychic Temple, and he also owns and operates the Big Ego recording studio in CA. I’ve listened to an interview or two with him, and he has some great things to say about music, coming at it from varying angles informed by his vast and unique range of life experiences. John sent me On Recording, a kind of manifesto-guidebook hybrid, which you can buy as a hardcopy or audiobook, the latter of which I did. I listened to it over a few drives to and from work and grounded is a good word to describe the way I felt. It’s not a super technical perspective — though there’s definitely some of that — rather it’s a philosophy, an approach to recording that can be applied to any number of disciplines, music being just one of them. It’s about doing the thing, realizing you love something and finding a way to keep it going any way you can, whether that means driving a truck to make ends meet (as Schlarb did) or utilizing cheap (but wonderful) gear until you’re developmentally and financially ready to upgrade (also as Schlarb did). A certain kind of person will relate to this and not just a musician. Yes, I found it relevant to the double LP that John and I recorded at our respective home studios, but I also found it relevant to, say, the ongoing way I’m trying to find myself as a teacher, or a cook, or an expectant dad. On Recording gets at all of it without always saying so.

Claire Rousay — Sometimes I Feel Like I Have No Friends

Claire Rousay makes some of the most honest, pure, and futuristic music I’ve ever heard, and it hits me like Elliot Smith or Joni Mitchell. It’s honest, heart-on-sleeve and breathtakingly innovative, yet rooted in tradition. It’s a wild thing to be able to pull off the heart wrenching brutality of a certain human condition alongside a niche, sharp sense of humor, and Rousay does so on a masterclass level. Her whole catalog — and she is prolific — is worth a deep dive, but Sometimes I Feel Like I Have No Friends is, to me, on the same level as, like, Marquee Moon or Aja. It’s a tour de force, something that doesn’t just come around, a journey and a classic record (even though it’s only one twenty-eight-minute track). Part sound collage, part drone, part field recording, part emo bedroom demo, part other things, or maybe none of those — perhaps it’s not for me to say — it’s all great. Of the two of us, I’m the bigger head, but it definitely informed the new record. Her music is the kind that makes me imagine how it was made. From interviews, I know that musique concrete techniques have a place in her life, as does free improvisation, and I speculate that a lot of the compositional work was done after playing, during the editing/mixing process. That’s very much how John and I have written and recorded over the last few years, and whether I’m right or wrong about Rousay’s approach, she was a guiding light towards ours. She’s the kind of artist who makes me feel like I know her. I hope she gets to hear our music one of these days.

Jeff Parker — Slight Freedom