#boomish

How has the tour with Donny McCaslin been?

Well, it's over! This is the last date but the tour went well. 

You have Nate Wood playing bass with you tonight, is that right?

Yeah, Nate is with us. He's done the last few gigs. My friend Owen Biddle, who is part of the project Edit Bunker that I have, he did a chunk of dates in the middle. At the beginning of the tour we had Jonathan Maron for one gig and before that in the States we had Tim Lefebvre. So we've had four bass players over the course of a month and a half.

Do you remember the first time you played drums? Was it something you felt you had an immediate connection to?

I don't know that I remember the first time I played drums but it was at a very young age. My parents are both musicians and I grew up watching them. My mom was a professional singer and my dad was a piano player, and I remember going to see them perform in night clubs as a three year old and I eventually gravitated towards the drums. I don't remember exactly when but I might have been five or six years old, but as I was so young I sadly can't remember any of the feelings involved with that.

What were your parents like? Were they good mentors for you as a musician?

Yeah, they were both in the music scene, plus I grew up in Greenwich Village in New York City, so those two things alone were a big advantage and gave me a leg up. They had better judgement perhaps than if they weren't musicians, as well as an understanding of whether or not I had any talent.

Now, with the internet, it doesn't matter as much where you come from as we all have access to the same information. Everybody puts up everything that they've got and it's all there. Back in the day, when you wanted to hear good music or if you wanted to find good drum teachers, you needed to be hands on and that came from where you lived and who you knew. It's not like that anymore. It's much easier.

Did you study music formally at college?

No. I went to a performing arts high school for a couple of years but outside of that I took lessons at the Drummers' Collective in New York as a young teenager and that was kind of the extent of it.

People tend to go to college to figure out what it is they want do but I was already touring a lot as a musician throughout high school, so the advice I got from the musicians I was playing with was to just carry on.

You incorporate a lot of technology into your playing, across a lot of different projects. How does technology influence how you play or are you using it to mainly expand your sound palette?

These are questions that I think about a lot and I don't know if I have the answer yet.

Technology for me has had more of a production value means rather than a drumming means. Whether it was something I could use to augment my own drum sound for a particular aesthetic or if I had a production sound in my head when programming drums for sample based stuff. I'd then use it to figure out how to arrive at that.

So if I wanted to get an old school seventies funk drum sound, I'd figure out how they would mic the drums, what effects were used and what types of rooms they recorded in. It wasn't so much technology directly being used to augment stuff in a live playing situation. I mean, that’s something I now strive for but initially it was to get recorded material to sound and feel a certain way, not only from the drums but across the board. I used technology to get something in my head out that couldn't have been achieved without it.

How time consuming is it to create a single song for Edit Bunker? Does the process still challenge you?

The process is excruciating. There are times where I can write something that is ready to be performed in a matter of hours, and there are other times where I can sit for days and not even get out of the gate in terms of what I want to do with it. It's a constant struggle and the process takes a long time.

What software are you using for Edit Bunker?

Mainly Ableton. I don't want to throw any companies under the bus but I'm having certain issues with the new computer that I have where there are drop outs of audio. I'm trying to call each company, but neither is aware of the problems. So I'm getting sent a laundry list of things that I should try to solve some of these issues. It's frustrating but for me there is no option to turn back.

Right now in my life I have zero interest in not doing what I'm doing. I have zero interest in just playing the drums. I would sooner go into a different line of work. If someone were to say that I had to throw out all of my computers and just focus on playing the drums I would say no, because I can't fully express myself in that way, it'd be too frustrating. I'd rather not express myself at all and just go and open a restaurant.

There's a frustration that comes in knowing how much I'm having to compromise that pure drumming thing in order to see this vision through. What I do is the hardest, most frustrating thing but I have to do this. I feel like I'm playing drums with my hands tied behind my back because of all of the limitations of what I'm struggling with with the electronics. I want to be able to give the same amount of focus to it that my favourite drummers give but I can't. So that's where the frustration lies – but I won't give up the electronics. I'd rather suffer as the drummer right now.

Are you using any electronics with Donny McCaslin?

No, I'm not. It's funny because he asked me if I wouldn't mind throwing in some stuff, but it's like – it's all or nothing for me. I don't just want to sort of do it. It's got to be something that's fully fledged where I'm devoting a lot of energy to it, because if I just went up there with a pad with a couple of samples on it I'd be just half-assing it and I don't want to do that.

At what point did you become interested in incorporating technology into your playing?

1993.

Wow! That's pretty specific. What happened in 1993?

I bought a sampler and wanted to see that vision through a little bit more.

Was there anyone during that time who doing something in drumming that was interesting to you?

No, not in '93. I just loved sampling, and it wasn't even the influence of hip hop, which I loved at the time, I just liked recording sounds and being able to manipulate them, so that's when I decided that it was something that I wanted to pursue. 

The first thing that I did which spoke to that was a project called Bluth, which not a lot of people knew about in 1996. That was me and the bass player Tim Lefebvre, which was before our other band Boomish. It was a lot of sample based stuff which was humorous. People likened it to Frank Zappa, though we never listened to Frank Zappa. I actually felt that the Zappa stuff was over my head and I never gravitated to it, so that wasn't an influence on us. No doubt, if you hear humour in music you think about Frank Zappa pretty quickly, so to say that it doesn't sound like that wouldn't be true, but it wasn't a target for us.

So in 1993 I decided that I wanted to sit behind my computer more and make music that way, and again in '96 when I heard drum and bass - Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. That was where I heard something specific which made me sit up and say wow, but in '93 it was just an idea because I loved sampling, computers and sequencing and I wanted to do more of that.

Have there been any other points between 1996 and today where you've heard players that have made you feel the way that drum and bass did when you first heard it?

Yeah, I'd say more and more. The biggest one for me was when I met Mark Guiliana. We often joke because he claims that we met numerous times between 2000 and 2009, but I'm really bad with names and faces, like embarrassingly so.

We finally had a proper introduction and we met and spoke about a bunch of different things over lunch. He mentioned that he had some gigs coming up so I went to see him play and I thought, wow, this guy is playing the drums the way I'm hearing them in my head. His approach was more that of a beat maker and producer than a drummer. So I liked what Mark was going for. We became very close.

There's a new crop of guys within our network, where we'll hang together as friends and share different ideas about what we like. We all pick up things involuntarily from each other.

Nate Wood is playing bass in the group tonight and personally I would like to hear him play bass and drums on this gig at the same time, I would enjoy that more than hearing him just on bass. I'd rather hear him do both, but that's me. He loves the way I'm playing on this gig and we both sincerely like the other person's thing as much or better than our own stuff. It's very sincere and we both pick up things from each other. He's learning the wrong things from me, as far as i'm concerned. He should just stick to what he does because it's just way better than what I'm doing, but we do trade knowledge, and you end up having similarities in your mindset and in your approach.

I'm older than those guys so they came up listening to me just because I'm the older guy here, but I feel like I came up again, in an almost second incarnation, listening to them. I feel like that kid in the bedroom listening to these new players that I want to be like. We're all helping each other – or maybe not, I dunno, but that's what seems to be happening.

Well, that's a cool network to have.

Yeah, it is. It’s something that I value a lot.

What's the creative approach for writing with Edit Bunker? Are you starting with a particular piece of film in mind or does music come first?

It can be either way. We can have tracks written without any particular piece of video in mind but we can also see something on the web, or remember a movie that we loved as a kid, or even see something happen on the streets and grab a video of it to turn it into something.

We're doing some gigs soon and I want to have some new tunes for it so Owen said, 'Hey, I've been thinking about this one scene in a movie that's kind of cool which involves phones dialling, tones and spoken parts', and I immediately thought that we could segue into one of our Mister Barrington tunes called Wrong Number, which also has a similar concept. So now we have a tune from ten years ago which all of a sudden has the potential to be merged with this.

Sometimes the video starts and we wonder how we can write music to it, and other times we’ll write a track and have to think about what visuals could be used. So things don't have just one way in which to operate.

Are you improvising ideas to the films or are you working away from the rehearsal space and then coming in with new ideas?

I would say that we're writing them first and then improvising with them later. I wish I could say that there was one way in which we approach it but there isn't.

Do you still live in New York city or are you in L.A. now?

I would actually say that, at this very moment, I don't live anywhere right now. I'm bouncing between both but I really don't know where I'm going to end up.

I'm trying to make L.A. a base, at least for the near future. I have a rehearsal space out there but I don't officially have an apartment as I tend to rent through Air B&B. I'll leave a suitcase with clothing and things that I need when I'm there but I haven't signed that one year lease on an apartment because I don't want to yet.

I also honestly don't have the time to look for a place and to furnish it because I'm gone every other week. Being away gives me time to think, do I even want to be here?

If you were to move to L.A., what would prompt that move for you?

It would be based on my friends who live there and not a musical decision at all. It's also not necessarily a lifestyle decision either, because I like the New York lifestyle better - I like a real city where I can walk around. L.A. is different from New York and it feels like a little break that might give my brain the chance to think different things and to make different decisions, for better or for worse.

Again, I would look at it as something temporary. If great things happen there  and I start to have more of a settled life then maybe I'll think differently. But right now it's nice to have a rehearsal room there where I can work out ideas for my own projects.

What are some of the things that you've valued the most from being between the two cities?

Being in New York, I value the conditions of how the day is structured. You don't need a car. You can walk around and it feels like there's an immediate social impact. You're not alone in your car, isolated, like in L.A., because it's spread out. I mean, the weather is great there but I actually don't care about that. I don't love it when it's cold in New York but it's ok, you deal with it. So the weather isn't the draw for me there, it's friends. I like hanging out with them.

I haven't been to the clubs in L.A. as much as I've been to the clubs in New York, so it feels a little fresher in that way. It feels a little more unknown, even though I've spent a lot of time there over the years. Again, I do think that it would be a temporary thing for me.

I think that I would sooner consider moving to Europe longer term than I would moving to L.A.

Anywhere in particular?

Vienna, Stockholm, Barcelona, maybe Berlin or Copenhagen. Just cities that I like to be in, and not even musically speaking. London would be a smarter move professionally, so that's on my list by default, but I think I like places like Copenhagen more. I mean, I'm there for a few days at a time, and I might get bored if I were there for a longer period, but I like the way those places feel and I get a good vibe from them.

What have been some of the milestones in your playing that you feel have pushed you forwards creatively?

Oh, man. I don't think I've hit many.

An absolute milestone for me was playing with Wayne Krantz, but I don't love my contributions to the records that we did in terms of the execution. I can't listen to them because I don't feel like I played up to par for my own standards, but it was a milestone to have been a part of that, especially given what Wayne brought to it, and what his skill level and vision was. I feel like what it was, in terms of what we did, was beyond being up to par, but not what I did.

I wish I could do it over and do it better, and I feel that I could now, but back then I don't feel like I did as well as I would've liked to have but that felt like a milestone because I turned a corner.

Certainly the stuff I did with my own groups Bluth and Boomish, which is where the aesthetic in my head was realised, and again with a group called Bedrock with Uri Caine and Tim Lefebvre, and then for sure with the band Mister Barrington. I think Mister Barrington might be the only records that I can listen to without an ounce of regret on any part of it, where as with every other record it's like, turn it off, I can't listen to this. But I don't say that with those albums, at least not yet anyway.

That's been a very personal project for you.

Yes, we did three records together and every time I listen to them I still like it.

What's something that you've been paying attention to recently that's inspiring you, either musically or non musically?

That's a tough one. I would say just the commitment that I've invested in towards what it is that I'm trying to do, and the continuation of how much further I have to go as well as knowing all of the things that I want to do with the technology. I write everything down in a document, so whenever an idea comes to mind I have it there. The inspiration is in knowing how much more there is that is still to do. I see so much more beyond where I'm at, and not abstractly but very specifically. I know exactly what I want to be doing and I just have to do it. The reward of doing it will be worth it.

That's what keeps me going probably more than anything because you get to a point, or at least I do, where I get older and I like so many things but I don't like so many things for myself. I like very few things for what it is that I want to say, where I realise that I can only say a finite amount of stuff and still feel genuine, you know.

Knowing that I literally have it mapped out in steps of what I need to do, and getting better at the things I'm interested in, and allowing them to speak more clearly, that's what keeps me going.

Thanks so much for your time, Zach.

Yeah, man. Of course.

Interview by Dave Jones. 

Live photo by Julie Ann Rouquette.

https://www.instagram.com/zachdanziger/