David Barbe has a thing about having to take a two hour break and not working weekends; did you guys encounter that when you were working with him?
Joshua: Yeah, definitely. He was the daytime shifter. The way we had to do our recordings was on a small budget, too little time to do it at home and too small of a budget to do everything that we would like. When we get our six days allotted for making the record, it needs to be literally six 24-hour days. We developed a system where I would come in at nine in the morning and work with Dave until 6:00. At 6:00, Andy Baker, who has a little nighttime stamina about him, would come in from 6 to 2. Andy LeMaster, who's the wild man, night animal would come in later.
You don't hear about that too often.
I don't think it's so common, it's tricky for all parties involved, and there's a certain element of uncertainty...coming in cold. Fortunately, all three of them seem to have their individual perception and they work great as a team. Usually it was very systematic. I had to chart out all the instruments that were going to be tracked so we could have an idea of how we were going to get it done in time. We didn't get to experiment a lot; most of the experimentation was with getting the sounds.
Like how to mic something? You've got some unusual instruments.
Yeah, and they really change in the sound environment. We learned a lot from the first record. The first one had a more elaborate recording situation. On the second one, I learned from the mistakes on the first one — like the shape of the room and the mics we chose. The big thing with the first record was getting really nice sounds, because I was doing a lot of overdubbing one instrument at a time. When you're getting a nice sound in the room, one by one by one, when you pull them all together it sounds a little too diffused. After the first record they built these really great, huge baffles that can make a little room inside the big room.
That's a good idea, I do that with office panels, you can get them used.
These are just towering things that you hope they don't fall on you.
Do they lower them down from the ceiling?
No, they just have them on wheels. They've got the physics right- what seems like a very shallow base for such a huge baffle somehow sits right. Those guys work hard. They're so into finding the way to the greatest sounding recording studio. They really, really think about preamps and compressors, not effects racks.
What kinds of things were they pulling in when you were working there?
Kai: They had this plate reverb that we tried to use.
Was it working?
We used it a little bit but it was on the blink. I think it was on the blink on the second record.
It was in mono, wasn't it?
No, it was in stereo the first record.
Yeah, but on the second record it was mono.
One channel wasn't coming back?
Right.
In the sessions did you start out with a basic scratch track or rhythm track to build the songs on?
Generally it's two people laying down basic tracks.
Do you have charts to figure out what's going to be added when?
The arrangements are definitely worked out. We record demos at home on cassette 8 track. A big part of the stuff I talked about with the engineers was how I could get it to be a "not-so-professional" rock recording. I was really trying to get the sounds of our wooden room at home, and the good tape compression of a cassette multi-track. I'm really a fan of getting what you want with the sound that's going to tape. There tends to be so much that isn't decided until mix time and not a lot of mix time to do it. I'm really just trying to create the sonic panorama, I don't really want to be thinking of the sounds, themselves, too much. We're really kind of into the "true" sound, the way the instruments sound in the room with a wooden floor at home. We're in love with what we got. We use distortion or mild stereo delay. We really don't go too wacky with changing the sound; it's more like combinations of them to cause some kind of interference.
What are the non-rock band instruments you are using?
The vibes are in there a lot, the hammer dulcimer, the Fun Machine is in there a lot.
The what?
A Fun Machine is this organ, a Baldwin '70s home entertainment organ. You're at the skating rink if you listen to it straight up. Plug it into an amplifier and it goes wild.
What other instruments do you use?
The Javanese zither, the songs "Salty" and "Submarine Lover" both have it. It's that kind of twangy, zingy sound. It's a beautiful instrument from Central Java; you play it perpendicular to yourself. There are long sets of double strings with two legs at the end of it with a big resonator box that gets wider towards the end. We've got nipple gongs, which are tuned smaller gongs with a big strong nipple in the middle. Steel drums get a lot of use. We have a bunch of double reed horns.
Do you take a lot of stuff on the road?
Yeah, we take enough, more and more. Recording instruments is the live translation of everything.
Do you have little pick-ups on things?
Little pick-ups, we haven't been able to invest in proper amplification. We just slide a couple of Dean Markley acoustic guitar pick-ups in under the strings of the zither. We use a clip- on mic for the hammer dulcimer.
I thought there was some stuff you did with micro-cassette recordings on the first record. [self-titled]
Our first 2,000 copies of the first record came with a free second disc that was 70 minutes of Indonesian recordings. The pieces on there from Bali were from my first trip to Indonesia. I got nine hours of Indonesian music and sounds on micro-cassette. Some of it sounds really interesting because of the way it was recorded. I have so many micro-cassettes and I'm trying to find the hi-fi micro-cassette player. The only recordings that have been done in Western Java were done by the government for the Library of Congress. This is a cultural group that's kind of refusing to modernize, they haven't learned the national language, and they don't have any electrical systems of any kind. Certainly the sound of the music is quite different than anything else. It's much more like Aboriginal music all over the world. The rhythms are much more simple pulse rhythms. You could almost mistake it for Native American in some ways.
With a cultural group like that you're obviously an outsider. How do you go about...?
That's a special situation. Basically, we had to get a government escort to go into the place. It was an unusual circumstance; these people have kind of defied their government and modernization. It's like going back 200 years, they're still animist- they haven't accepted a modern religion. Indonesia is really weird; you have to declare one of five religions to be a citizen. So, you go and get a government official to escort you. We had this really great guy named Arif, he had been there many times, and he knew the language.
Where did you put your recorders and mics in situations like that? You probably wanted to be kind of unobtrusive about it.
Exactly, but it was just one mic.
Did you carry it on you when you were recording or did you set it up?
I carried it on me, circumstances would change in a lot of situations- there would be random people coming in. This one couple that we met had been married for 25 years; they played music on the street and he made zithers and she had a really beautiful voice. We went to their house to record them in their living room. On their front porch some neighbors were skinning this huge snake; they were completely wasted with this snake in their hands. We had to kind of move around them to get into the house and this guy followed us into the house. He sits down and starts singing along when everyone starts performing. He was so completely out of it, it was really wild. How do you work a set up for that situation?
With a situation like that, do you offer them some kind of compensation?
No, they welcomed us, I think he knew that we were going to buy some instruments at the time. We're talking of a place very different with interactive time than what we're used to here. Everywhere you go everybody says hello to you.
It's not like New York, huh? [laughter]
We went to Taipei for our somewhat contrasted Asian experience. We played a couple of shows in Taipei, going through Taipei, you look at people and they were always just looking away, they seemed scared of us.
How did you end up getting a gig in Taipei?
This band called Ladybug came from Taipei to Athens [Georgia] and I was curious to see them and I ended up hanging out with all of them. I invited them back to stay at my house. There manager who works for this label called Crystal Records in Taipei, Randy Lynn is his name, he was trying to bring in American indie bands over to Taipei. He wanted to bring us over, it was really cool, and we were the fourth band to go over.
