How do you get so much love to tape?
P: We don't use tape — it's hard drives, actually. N: By protecting our high end — between 5 and 20 kHz. No cymbals. That opens up the love. P: Be good to your ears. N: It's a sensational quality that we are looking for. It always involves something totally human — sounds that meet you halfway, not in your face, but they don't recede into the background, either. They are there to be played with. We put together a body of sounds that all have a quality. It's like cooking — if you have good ingredients, you can't go wrong. There are those things that you can listen to over and over and still love the millionth time you've heard them. That's the kind of thing we're looking for — the perfect hook — but hopefully not that annoying.
How do you feel about the Lost And Safe reviews? Many said the same thing — that you were writing more conventionally.
N: I don't get that at all. It's a complete misinterpretation of that record. The idea that it's conventional or pandering to an audience is just ridiculous to me. That's never how I thought about it.
They needed to have something to hang their hat on and they all read each other's work. They seized upon your singing, Paul.
N: That's exactly what happened. That's why I stopped reading criticism in general. It's not helpful to me anymore. We're looking for a kind of integrity in the compositional process and you know, the voice is the most powerful sound that we have because it is so rich in every possible way. It tells you about identity, it tells you about gender, the intellectual world and the purely physical sound world.
I can tell if someone is clenching their ass by how their voice sounds.
N: Yeah. You really can tell. It's nice to have that kind of directness. Having said that, our interest in the voice is not to tell our story, it's to tell a human story, a more universal kind of story. So the fact that it's my voice [on Lost And Safe] is completely arbitrary to me. If I could get somebody else to sing I would. We've been coming across a lot of texts — from ancient Buddhist texts to opening up the newspaper — as well as found sounds. Videos now are also a big part of what we do. Automatic lyrics wherever you go. We are always listening with ears that are trying to remove pretensions — our own preconception of what it is — to hear it for what it actually is in that instant. We look for those things that will allow a re-contextualization that brings a higher level of meaning to it. It's an old style of working. The Zen masters had the whole idea of giving people these absurd problems to work on in order to undo their rational minds to the degree that they're open in a subconscious way to reality. I think that's a wonderful technique and music is really good at doing that.
Where do you two believe you fit in the world of music?
P: I don't see much of a music world at all!
N: That's a good answer! I think our sample collection by now sort of tells the story of our own aesthetic. We are just not concerned with the mainstream and we never have [been]. Of course I grew up listening to '70s rock music — everything from Aerosmith to Billy Joel.
P: I think there is some kind of devotion to music that is entirely unpretentious that runs through almost the entire history of music as we know it. Bach for instance — it's complete honesty. I believe he had very little interest in putting his ego into his music. Pure devotion.
What did they call it before it was "classical"?
N: Church music.
P: They certainly didn't call it "baroque."
N: It was always in the context of religion.
I believe the reason we first made fake reverb was to make it seem like the music was in a cathedral.
N: That makes sense. I hate reverb for that reason.
P: Yeah. Reverb screws everything up.
How's a song constructed? Take "The Lemon Of Pink", for example.
P: That's an interesting question because that song and that whole record began with that first sample. A loop of that sample, which is from a record — a cosmetics 7" single — the "Lemon Of Pink" is a lipstick color from the fifties.
And the walking on gravel?
N: That was me on a playground swingset. And I had one of those pull chains made from little chrome balls and I was rubbing it over the corner of a file cabinet, too.
P: African workers are in there...
The woman's voice — what does she say besides "Subtle details"?
N: "Subtle details have to be eschewed."
So you started with a loop?
N: Anne Doerner was a big part of it. She is a woman I met when I was down in North Carolina after I hiked the Appalachian trail in 1991. I ended up working in a bed and breakfast — The Sunnybank Inn — but everybody called it Elmer's. Elmer ran the place. I basically took Anne's job when she left there. Elmer is a total Luddite. So picture these electronic musicians clandestinely setting up shop in his basement.
P: It was all very quiet — everything we did was very closely mic'd. I don't believe he even knew what was going on down there.
N: That's where I met Anne. We ended up traveling around and playing music together a lot. We spent three weeks in the Utah desert. I made some recordings there where all you can hear is the noise floor of the recorder. I still use those recordings every once and a while to create digital silence that has body. I would lend Anne my DAT and she would make these amazing full-length tapes — field recordings — her yard, chickens running by — every eight minutes or so there would be these two-second fragments of violin solos. So that's where those come from. We snipped them out, tuned them up a little bit and put them over that loop and that's all it was.
Is it Anne singing, "We went through hell"?
N: Yeah! That was an improvisation that she did. She would never take on that musical persona — like this kind of Ricky Lee Jones voice — if someone was in the room. Every once and a while she'd pull it out. I'd never heard her sing like that before ever. When I heard it I was like, "Whoa!" But she can pull stuff like that off. She's very evasive.
Is it a piece of a longer passage?
N: She was singing about our trip to the desert. I selected pieces of it for their sound. Not so much for the literal meaning. I think "hell" refers to the dryness and the hotness of it, that and the emotional intensity of spending so much time with one other person in that kind of environment.
It's one of my favorite moments in music. How about the banjo? You're chopping that up a lot.
N: I played Anne's banjo made from a walnut tree stump from her friend's front yard. I'd make improvisations and then cut out the parts that would speak to me — tiny little six beat loops — something unexpected that would fall outside the idiom of what would normally come out of my fingers.
