Cake In 15

The Milwaukee-based band Kings Go Forth is a grand endeavor, a ten-piece soul and funk group fronted by a wailing, dreaded dude named Black Wolf and organized by Andy Noble, a musician, record label entrepreneur and owner of Lotus Land Records & Tapes, an independent record store with a specialty in hard-to-find music. By the time Noble and Black Wolf (born Jesse Davis) met in 2004 at Lotus Land, both had become fixtures in the Milwaukee area- Noble’s parents owned art galleries and brought him up in the local arts and music scene, and in the 70s, Black Wolf was part of a group called the Essentials, whose main claim to fame was having recorded in Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom Studios. They began recording in 2007 and in April released their debut full-length, The Outsiders Are Back, on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label. With a range of influences from Mayfield to the Philadelphia Soul Sound to reggae, The Outsiders Are Back is a propulsive argument for classic sounds and a great rhythm section. Before their Minneapolis debut at the Cedar Cultural Center on July 31st, Cake In 15 caught up with Noble to talk about keeping control of a group, prison bands and the importance of dancing.

Cake In 15: It’s good to talk to you- I saw Kings Go Forth down at South By Southwest this March but it’s surprising that you haven’t played Minneapolis yet. I take it with the size of the band, touring must be difficult.

Andy Noble: We do as much as we can, which is not as much as other bands. There’s just a lot of dudes, and you know, everybody thinks we don’t travel because of people having jobs and families and stuff, but it’s actually because there are so many guys in the band that lot of the trips are cost prohibitive. We just canceled a trip to California in late August because we’ll get good guarantees but we’ll still lose money on it. It’s so expensive to bring 10 guys on the road that you have to be making a lot of money before you even break even.

CI15: Have you been losing money on the band so far, or found a way to break even?

AN: Definitely losing money.

CI15: Fortunately Minneapolis isn’t too far away.

AN: I know; I’m really surprised that it took us this long to book Minneapolis, but it’s going to be great to have Minneapolis in the loop. That’s something that really helps, that the band has towns we can play that aren’t a plane trip away.

CI15: With Kings Go Forth, it feels like the relationship between your music and Black Wolf’s lyrics and vocals are the driving relationship in that band. Is that the case?

AN: It’s one of them. Really, it was just kind of a basement project, we were recording songs on an 8 track recorder in the basement and they got really popular and so we had to become a real band to back that up. The way that people, the world looks at groups, they think that every group is a group and they’re hungry to go on the road and make money and that’s what you do for a living and in our case that wasn’t really correct, it was just a little basement project and it’s had to become a real band to fulfill the public I guess.

CI15: What kind of records were you and Black Wolf bonding over when you started working on the Kings Go Forth project?

AN: Well it wasn’t any specific records and if it was it wouldn’t be anything that anybody would really know. When you talk about black music history it is these epoch moments and there are so many releases. I am very focused on single releases and 45s, I am not very much of an LP oriented person. I really like to hear 2 or 3 minutes of a band. So many people are capable of making a single that aren’t capable- very few people make full length albums that are worthwhile to listen to the whole thing. So me and him bonded over our knowledge and our enthusiasm of the local music scene from that era, 60s 70s and 80s, actual soul era, golden era. Acts like the Esquires and Harvey Scales would be the really famous ones but going on from there you’re talking about [bands like] Upheaval. The [track] “Paradise Lost” on our album is a cover of a song that only 20 copies were ever made and it was a group where everyone was serving life sentences in Waupon Prison. They were Milwaukeeans and they were in prison, and the song was discovered from one known copy, so things like that, hopelessly obscure things like that. But just the concept of local heroes, no hit wonders, people who self finance things where the artists paid to make the record.

CI15: You have a wide knowledge of under-appreciated and unknown bands. In the light of that kind of music history, what kind of success do you want for Kings Go Forth?

AN: Well, honestly, I want it to get to the point where it feels like we’re steering the ship. If you have success for one of your projects it should make your life better and not worse, you know? [Laughs] And that’s tricky, because where there’s a lot of demand for what you do and there are other parties involved like managers and booking agents and clubs it gets really tough and there are other people that rely on your band for income. It’s really tricky at this point when a band is beginning to establish a name that you establish a precedent that we’re doing this to make our lives better and not worse and so really trying to have the freedom to go play shows because we want to and not because people tell us we have to, to have the freedom to write and record music because we want to and not because we have to. I honestly believe that music is a byproduct of life and that life comes first and music comes second.

CI15: With that desire to retain your own control, what was the impetus behind signing with a label?

AN: I was planning on putting out the record on our own, I was not shopping it to labels at all and so they came to us. Yale Evelev, president of Luaka Bop convinced me it would be a good idea and I like Yale and he’s really into music, he likes a lot of music that I’m really into too and Luaka Bop had a good track record in selling CDs. I am such a vinyl person that almost all my connections in distribution and sales for the record were just going to be in LP and 45, I really didn’t know too much about digital music sales or CD sales and a lot of people aren’t even buying CDs any more but Luaka Bop still has a fairly faithful CD audience which is a bonus. We retained the right to create and distribute our own singles on 45 in our contract though, so those still come out on Mr C’s, which is our own private imprint.

CI15: Who do you see as your target audience? From the promo I’ve been seeing it seems like you’re being marketed towards an indie or rock crowd as opposed to a soul audience.

AN: Anyone who makes a record, they’ll market you towards those people, I think it’s totally an economic thing, those are the people who buy the most music and go and see the most concerts, it’s not kind of a musical consideration. It works, I’m not slagging off indie music in general. There’s some of it that I like a lot, there’s some I don’t like at all, the whole gamut really, but they’re not that rhythmically oriented. Even indie dance which has been this big thing over the last ten years is really just a guy who obviously grew up in punk bands playing his version of a disco beat. It’s OK, but in our group, our rhythm section is coming straight out of Latin jazz or Afro rhythm and these are guys who really know their rhythmic stuff and have a great rhythmic sensibility, you’re coming from a lot more in-depth rhythmic place with our group and Sharon Jones and all that. Sometimes people want to sit at home and cry and listen to some indie songs and that’s fine and there’s a time and a place for that, but sometimes when people go see live music they just want to have fun.

Fort Wilson Riot are playing a show in Madison, WI, tonight (check out this post for all the requisite disclaimers) and in advance of their gig at Project Lodge tonight, they were interviewed by wide-ranging Madison blog Dane 101, which you can check out here. In the interview, they talk about what brought them from Wisconsin to Minneapolis, the difficulties of staying focused when your house is your recording studio and give shout outs to a lot of Twin Cities bands that they like, accurately noting that “a new one seems to pop up every couple of months.” With the CD release show for their new record Predator/Prey coming up on the 30th at the Kitty Cat Klub, expect so see and hear more from FWR in the coming weeks!

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings were the unequivocal hit of Rock The Garden, and if you missed their show or need another fix of hard-stomping, soul-funking, live-wire stylish R&B-tinged blues-rock, you’re in luck; The Heavy, who have opened for Ms. Jones on a number of recent state-side dates, roll in to the Fine Line Music Café on Thursday night for an already sold-out show. The English quartet have been making their own waves this year with a strong sophomore record, The House That Dirt Built, a name-making performance on Late Night with David Letterman and a Superbowl commercial soundtrack. With healthy dose of swagger and sonic influences from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Parliament Funkadelic and Curtis Mayfield, it only makes sense that the States are taking to their raucous live shows. Cake In 15 caught up with singer Kelvin Swaby from the road to talk about their most recent exposure, writing on the road and confirming what we already knew, that the Dap-Kings “are just totally fucking cool.”

Cake In 15: You’re wrapping up this American tour, how have things changed for you here since you first broke in a couple years ago with 2007′s Great Vengeance and Furious Fire?

Kelvin Swaby: I think the growth of the band is apparent. As far as what we’ve been doing, it’s a lot bigger now, we’ve been playing together for two years longer, so it’s tighter. We’ve had an album out and it’s been well received, it’s great because they’re coming back, there are more people singing along to the songs.

C15: You and guitar player Dan Taylor have known eachother for a long time, almost 20 years, how does that relationship change and drive the band?

KS: We just keep working, you know? As I’m talking to you, Dan has his acoustic out, we’re listening to tracks for the new album basically. We’re recording a new album, were just working out ideas, so we’re always working.

C15: Do you find that you’re able to write and work while touring?

KS: Myself and Dan, we get a lot of ideas down, for when we’re back home for however long it is, but I’ve got my audio here just in case I need to get vocals down or get guitar lines down, you know, themes, so we get an idea of what it is we’ve got to be doing on a particular track. It’s great because we work when we’re back home and then everything is in the computer when we’re on the road so we can write, you know, it’s not impossible. This is what we’re doing at the moment, we’re playing through a lot of the demos, working out the ideas, so that we get stronger. I think that we can afford to be a little bit more ambitious with this next record as well, do some of the stuff that we didn’t get to do with the first two. With The House That Dirt Built we got to do stuff on that record that we didn’t get to do on the first one. It’s still going to be rough and ready and raw, but as the relationship keep changing, we just become stronger, you know?

C15: How are you changing it up for the next record?

KS: We’ve always used horns, right from the first record, but I really think on this one there’s going to be a lot more cinematic. I think that’s what we’ve tried to do with our sound on the past records but with this one, I can a hear things being a lot more orchestral, sampled from movies and shit, you know? That’s the whole kind of vibe on the next one.

C15: You’ve spent some dates on this tour with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, what’s it like touring with them?

KS: They’re crazy. [Laughs] They’re really crazy but they’re absolutely fucking amazing people and they’re such wonderful musicians. You warm, you warm to them so much. We’ve been doing this for a long time, you know, and you meet a lot of people who are not cool about what they do and those guys are just totally fucking cool and they welcomed us with open arms. It’s such a ridiculous show though. To have us open for them, so many people have come up and said, “That was such an incredible show,” at the end of the evening. It’s been really, really cool.

C15: Her horn section backed you when you performed “How You Like Me Now?” on Letterman, which was apparently the first time that Letterman has ever asked for an encore performance. What was that experience like?

KS: Well, what you guys couldn’t see was from the second verse, of “How You Like Me Now?” was that people were getting up on their feet and starting to clap the song along, you know, so we knew we were making some kind of history or something at some point because people were getting out of their seats and clapping through. That’s without any kind of stage or floor manager trying to get people up, that’s just what was going on in the studio that day, so when we reached the end we just kicked it up a notch. We knew it was going to sound ridiculous anyway, because we rehearsed that in the day and I think by the sixth rehearsal we were like, “OK, that’s it, because if it’s anything like that tonight, it’s gonna be crazy, it will be crazy.” So going through our minds, you saw [drummer] Chris [Ellul]’s face, it was the same look on my face, ‘cause I was looking at him as if to say, “What the f…” you know? And then it was, like, “OK, let’s do it again,” and by that point the house band were playing it and then the Dap-Kings started playing the horn line again and then we just did it, the audience clapped it all the way through, they were up on their feet and shit, it was just crazy.

C15: “How You Like Me Now?” is also getting a lot of exposure through a Superbowl commercial for the Kia Sorento minivan. Have you been asked to sign sock monkeys because of that ad?

KS: That happened last night, I had to sign a sock monkey last night, which is kind of funny, and I think I signed one in Canada, I can’t remember where, Calgary, yeah, Calgary. This woman brought this sock monkey that looked like a four-year-old child, I don’t know where she got it from, it was so big. It’s a cool advert, it’s good to be associated with a good piece of art. I saw it a couple days ago and it’s good, and people come to the shows and are exposed to the other kinds of things we do, we don’t just play one thing and people enjoy all those other parts so its not just one thing, the exposure’s good.

C15: Do you feel any pressure, with the attention that the one track is getting to make sure your follow-up is in that same vein?

KS: No, because we don’t just play one kind of thing and I don’t think we’ll ever do that. All I can guarantee is that the next record will definitely be stronger than this offering, than The House That Dirt Built, the next record will be stronger than that. Just judging from some of the demos that we’re listening to here, we can’t wait to start working on this record in September. We’re not thinking, “Oh, we’ve been asked to do that kind of thing again.” We just know that we have plenty of strength on our side, there’s plenty of fire in the belly, fuel in the tank, whatever. There’s plenty more to come, there’s no pressure.

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Added bonus for Thursday’s show at the Fine Line- Cake In 15 pals and all-around awesome stompers & roarers City on the Make are opening, so get ready for a summer night that’ll leave you sweaty and wanting more.

“Music is a spiritual thing for me so I feel that a lot can be compromised if you are just trying to play the right notes or if I’m just trying to sing the right notes.” -Nona Marie Invie of Dark Dark Dark

On Thursday, The Cake Shop carries on it’s series of intimate houseshows, bringing musicians and audiences together in a comfortable setting unlike any other bar or venue. If you want to attend, follow the instructions linked here for details of tickets, time and address. With past shows from Pezzettino, Roma di Luna, Jeremy Messersmith, the Pines and Chastity Brown, the Cake Shop isn’t something you should miss out on.

***AS OF 12:15AM WEDNESDAY MORNING, WE ARE AT CAPACITY FOR RESERVATIONS. THANKS TO EVERYONE FOR SUPPORTING LOCAL AND TRAVELING ARTISTS!***

This time around we are proud to host Dark Dark Dark and Elephant Micah, giving you a twofer of talent. Elephant Micah is the stage name of Joseph O’Connell, an Indiana-based singer-songwriter who has been recording since 2001 and whose ambling songs are pointed with a wry sense of humor. He is a natural complement to Dark Dark Dark, a band who has made homes for themselves in Minneapolis, New York, New Orleans and everywhere in between. The core of Dark Dark Dark is accordion/pianist Nona Marie Invie and banjo/clarinetist Marshall LaCount, currently rounded out by Jonathan Kaiser on cello and Brett Bullion (also of Tarlton) on drums. Over a series of EPs (most recently the Bright Bright Bright EP released in April) and their 2008 full-length debut, The Snow Magic, Dark Dark Dark have crafted an exquisitely orchestral body of musical work that is as personally felt as it is grandly affecting. They have a new record in the can, due out this fall and before Thursday’s show, Nona Marie was gracious enough to talk about staying sane on the road, recording live sound and the magic of imperfection.

Cake in 15: Dark Dark Dark is a nomadic band, always traveling and setting up different bases. What would you do if you couldn’t travel?

Nona Marie Invie: Oh god. In regards to the band? I feel like we get so much inspiration from traveling and I know that where my songwriting comes from and when I’m meeting new people, I can’t really imagine a world where I couldn’t travel. I think it would be terrible.

C15: If you had to pick one place to stay, where would it be?

NMI: I bet if we couldn’t go anywhere, I bet we would just move to New York. Marshall always wants to move to New York but I love Minneapolis, Minneapolis is my home and I love coming back to it, to have it as a base. It’s nice to go off for a while but always have this place to come back to.

C15: With the stresses of touring, it can be difficult to be productive on the road. Do you find you can write on the road?

NMI: I’ve never been able to really write songs [on the road]. I guess what’ll happen is that I’ll get a line of something in my head or like a melody and Ill just carry it with me for weeks until I can get home and set up my piano and play alone. I can’t really write songs on the road, but I feel like traveling brings such a different energy to my life that I start to get itchy for traveling, it’s just a part of me. I feel like if I couldn’t travel, my songs would be more about how I have to get out.

C15: You cover Elephant Micah’s “Wild Goose Chase” to close out your most recent release, the Bright Bright Bright EP. What made you choose that song?

NMI: I’ve been watching Joe perform that song for a few years and it’s such a powerful, beautiful song for me. It just struck a chord especially, I think it was last year when I started playing it on my own for fun, it had been three years of solid traveling and I just wanted to be grounded and singing that song struck a chord.

C15: What do you do on the road to keep grounded?

NMI: I’ve found that I’ve learned how to take space for myself better, I try to stay calm, be intentionally calm and quiet in the band, I think that helps keep my energy steady. I’m not really a partier, I don’t drink, and so being in show environments every night can be kind of taxing if I don’t have the other side of being quiet during the day, I try and get up early and go for jogs, or if there’s water around, go swimming or take walks. I think that really changes touring for me, it’s part of my life, its not just this thing that sometimes happens, so I need to maintain a balance.

C15: I can’t stop looking at the tattoo on your forearm, can you tell me about it?

NMI: It’s a bird woman, my friend Sheila did it a couple years ago. It says “Dig a Grave “ [on the scrollwork]. We have a song called “Dig a Grave” but this was written before that song came about. I was in a different stage of my life [laughs], a darker stage.

C15: How has your life changed, was it something conscious that you did?

NMI: Well, I stopped drinking and that was a big change. I’ve just grown, I was just twenty, and I’m only twenty-five, but I’m living a little more intentionally now.

C15: You recorded Bright Bright Bright up in Duluth at the Sacred Heart Recording Studio a 100-year-old church with two grand pianos. What is it about recording in live or open spaces?

NMI: Well, it just sounded o beautiful in there and it felt, because of the natural reverb in there and the environment, it was such a special place to be. We recorded it all live, pretty much, and there’s something about all of us sitting in a circle and being able to look at eachother and playing in this beautiful place that just felt magical. Studios can recreate that sound with effects but it feels so much different sitting in a dead room, basically and playing with eachother and knowing it could sound like that later. The energy coming off of eachother is a lot different.

C15: Is it important to you that the live feel of playing together is captured on record?

NMI: It is for me because I am totally not a perfectionist. I can’t do a hundred takes of something and get it right or do it until I get it right or do it the same way every time. It’s more about the feeling. If I can’t do it in the first two times, I’m probably not going to be able to do it. Music is a spiritual thing for me so I feel that a lot can be compromised if you are just trying to play the right notes or if I’m just trying to sing the right notes. There is so much about the quality of the voice, what’s behind it that comes through.

By now, I am sure that with the great American marketing mechanism- word of mouth buzz- you have heard that Pepsi is giving away a bunch of money with their “Refresh Everything Challenge” to fund various arts, cultural and political proposals. As always, need is greater than resources and since television and marketing based competitions seem to be the last bastion of pure democracy (all you need is an idea and people!) here is something we think worth voting for: MNfashion has a proposal in for a $50K grant to fund a sewing co-op that would provide jobs, resources and support to local designers. We’ve written about this before, when we posted about MNfashion’s member drive, and when I interviewed Executive Director Anna Lee about Voltage two years ago for The Onion, it was something that she brought up then. So they need your vote- the top ten proposals in that category get funding and as of this writing, MNfashion ranks 174th. Daunting, yes, but no-one gave an untested Illinois senator good odds before the Iowa caucuses, and it’s just so much fun to be the underdog. Minneapolis likes to surprise you like that. Go vote here, and vote everyday until May 31st.

Also, if you are Art-a-Whirling this weekend, swing by the MNfashion space in the Grain Belt Bottling Building on 13th and Marshall. Not only can you vote from their computer there, but you can also check out Staciaann’s awesome photographs up on the wall, as she is an official MNfashion photog. Double win!

Also, again about the Refresh Everything Challenge, there are multiple winners in all categories and a number of local entries, so look around and find stuff to vote for. Since we pay for the companies to exist, we should be getting something back other than dentist’s visits.

Alright, so a couple weeks ago, we sat down with members of the fillmores and The Debut to talk about Punk Rock Prom V: Pretty Shitfaced in Pink, tonight at the Nomad World Pub. It was after rehearsals were done and Pancho Villa had 2-for-1 margaritas going and so as the people around our table grew and the drinks kept coming and my voice recorder taped we had a pretty epic conversation about the Punk Rock Proms, where they come from and why they are fun- essentially, the booze you had to smuggle in to your own prom is all out in the open now and there’s still making out and costumes. I really wish I had taken some better notes because now at the 11th hour I am having a technical (for the most part) breakdown and can’t get to that file and I have failed in my sponsorship duties and feel as downtrodden as a pimply 9th grader.

You know what will cure that? A whole bunch of great music for $6. Seriously, down at the Nomad tonight for Pretty Shitfaced in Pink with Amen & the Hell Yeahs, Reckless Ones, Teenage Moods, Kitten Forever, the Goondas with The Debut and house band the fillmores on the floor playing prom standards and punk classics in between each set- they promised to switch it up for this year too. If you really need an interview, Switchblade Comb has you covered (thanks for picking up the slack!) But seriously- the chance for getting hammered and making your ex-girlfriend jealous about John Hughes zombies and off-key Marvin Gaye? Fucking priceless.

Cymbals Eat Guitars frontman Joseph D’Agostino sometimes goes by Joe Ferocious, a name that pretty well describes D’Agostino’s incendiary, fuzzy guitar talent as well as Cymbal Eat Guitar’s touring schedules. Cymbals Eat Guitars have been tour beast over the last year, ever since their strong debut Why They Are Mountains and an opening spot at the 2009 Pitchfork Festival in Chicago. They already came through the Twin Cities less than a month ago on a tour with Bear in Heaven and Freelance Whales and are slated to make their first Mainroom appearance tonight with Welsh boy-girl rockers Los Campesinos!. As D’Agostino and company set off on their most recent round of road dates, Cake In 15 spoke with the actually quite funny and mild-mannered Ferocious to get the skinny on who he has really admired out on tour, what’s in the works for new recordings and the prospect of meeting his hero, Stephen Malkmus of Pavement.

Cake In 15: So, how is the tour van smelling?

Joseph D’Agostino: We’re only on the second day, so it kind of smells like weed, but that’s it. It’s mostly clean, fresh scent but by the end of the two weeks it’ll be pretty rank, I’m sure.

C15: You’re coming back to Minneapolis after being in St. Paul less than a month ago. How long have you been on the road now?

JD: I started thinking about it. We went on a European tour for all of February and when we got back from that it was six days until we started on our tour with Bear in Heaven and Freelance Whales and then directly after that tour was finished a few weeks ago we were supposed to go right out with Los Campesinos but the elements held up the tour and we got a bunch of dates cancelled but I guess since February, and before that we did more European tours. It’s been pretty constant since last July.

C15: What have you been doing to keep yourself from going crazy our on the road?

JD: Well, I listen to a lot of music, I usually always have my headphones on. [Keybaordist] Brian [Hamilton] works on schematics for pedals and circuit board stuff that I can’t barely understand. He explained it to me but I’m kind of dense when it comes to that and I try and read when it’s possible and no-one’s talking. We used to have internet in the van and that was a pretty steady stream of entertainment but now we don’t, so we have our laptops but we don’t have internet so its kind of impotent.

C15: Who has been your favorite set of tourmates since you’ve been out on the road?

JD: I’m not just being diplomatic when I say I really enjoy every band that we’ve been on tour with. Bear in Heaven was just a real force. Maybe just because they are fresher in my mind, but I don’t think that’s the reason, I mean, Joe [Stickney], their drummer, is just the best drummer I think I’ve ever seen in real life, I mean, actually getting to watch someone. He’s much better than our drummer. [Laughs] They were just consistently pummeling and totally powerful and great every night. It was just great to watch them and get psyched up to play and it was also character building, because they’re so good.

C15: With being on the road so much, are you working on follow up material to Why There Are Mountains?

JD: Yeah, we have five songs right now, four that we’ve been playing live since February and one more that’s kind of in the cooker. Next time we get to rehearse, we’re gonna flesh it out and begin hammering it out. We try and eke out work where we can but on a tour like this when we’re opening we don’t really have really long luxurious sound checks so we don’t really get to play much new material. But I’m always thinking about it and that’s where most of the composing goes on, just thinking and thinking on it and really ruminating on it. That’s what I did with the first record for two and a half, three years. I hope we’ll have four more songs out by next spring and then make a record.

C15: Are you finding that the new material relates to the Why There Are Mountains material or are they separate thoughts?

JD: They are definitely completely independent of each other. The songs from Why There Are Mountains were written over so many years that it’s difficult to compare them because I have written so much material over such a relatively short span, by my own standards, it usually takes three or four months to write a song. I just feel that everything is more focused and I know that when we get in there we won’t be overdubbing for months like the first record. We sound good as four people, maybe an overdub here and there, but it’ll sound more like our live thing, I suppose. The songs are way better, at least I feel that way, they flow a lot better an move more naturally and the lyrics are more dense. I’m really happy with the way things are shaping up so far.

C15: You guys are sharing some festival bills with Pavement this year. Have you figured out what you’re going to say to Stephen Malkmus when you meet him?

JD: That’s a good question. Really, I have been thinking about but every time I think about it, I think, “How can I summarize my life-long, well, half a life-time love of all these songs that have meant so much to me and brought me to the heights of what music can provide?” How can you summarize that? “I love your music it’s so important to me”? I’d have to have a longer conversation with him but I don’t know if I’d be able to keep it together. So I just plan on watching. At Sasquatch, I’m just going to be in the audience enjoying myself. I don’t know.

C15: Then hopefully you can get passed the slack-jawed moments to get it together to figure out a meeting.

JD: I saw him at a festival we played in the Hague, the Crossing Borders Festival and I saw him walking around and he had this furry parka with the hood up and he just kind of looked unapproachable but I’ve heard from many people that he’s really nice. I’ve been reading all the reunion interview and everything, I especially liked the Chuck Klosterman one for GQ, it was really excellent and very funny.

C15: Cool. Safe travels, and we’ll see you in Minneapolis.

JD: We’re really excited to play First Avenue. [Bass player Matt] Whipple pointed out to me that the Wilco documentary [I Am Trying To Break Your Heart], that’s where they’re playing a lot of the live stuff from the Summerteeth tour footage, so yeah.

In the nine years since Joe Denardo and Kevin Doria decamped from Olympia, Washington to Brooklyn, the band known as Growing hasn’t really stopped doing just that. What started as blasting guitar-minimalist noise with the 2003 release The Sky’s Run into the Sea on Kranky morphed into more giant drone with 2006’s Color Wheel and then veered into sample-heavy and accidentally rhythmic constructions through 2008’s All The Way, out on Social Registry. These guys, it seems, can’t settle on a fixed sound, making all their records transitional and curious. They changed it all up again with PUMPS!, out now on Vice Records, with the duo adding DJ/vocalist Sadie Laska into the mix and flipping the drone in favor of full blown beats and sequencers. CakeIn15 caught up with Denardo on the road before their Saturday gig in the 7th Street Entry to talk about not being satisfied with the sound, paying the bills and the world of fine art.

CakeIn15: PUMPS! is a new direction for your sound, with the beats based sound moving away the layers of drone and noise on your previous records. How did that shift come about?

Joe Denardo: Well, I feel like every one of our records move along in some new line, we try to work in some new jams and work in a new direction, so in a way if you listen to all our records they move forward in certain directions and you get a feel fro where the next one might go to. Part of it, a lot was, Sadie’s introduction to the band, it’s the first record she’s on, so a lot of the direction the songs take have to do with her involvement, her sound, where she wants to take things and what she’s doing and our reaction to that, especially in the studio, making new jams.

C15: How did Sadie join the band?

JD: It was nothing we ever sat down and thought about, we never had a discussion and said, let’s get a third member, or we need someone else to bounce things off of. She was a friend of ours for years and we played some shows with the band she was in called I.U.D. and we kind of just felt like she was on the same kind of wavelength as us. Watching her play live, she was interested in the same kind of processing techniques that we are and we played a few shows where I.U.D. played and we would start playing at the end of their set and jam off of what they were doing and then they would go off stage and we would finish our set, so we had a little bit of an introduction to playing with her and one day we just kind of asked her to start playing with us just for fun at our practice space. It went really well considering we had never played together before. We had a tour coming up and we asked her is she wanted to come one the tour with us and we’ll work out what happens and if you like it at the end of the tour you can stay in the band. She was stoked and it went from there.

C15: You mentioned your shared interest in processing techniques, could you talk about what kind of gear you guys are using to get your sound?

JD: Kevin uses just like a Korg Electribe drum machine and he processes with different delay, him and Sadie both have the old Boss Dr. Rhythm samplers, I think Sadie has a newer Roland sampler. A lot of our stuff is samples, vocals with others processed through pitch shifters and tremolos and then she also processes her vocals through a pitch shifter and some delays too. And I work mostly with guitar through another Korg Electribe, like a synthesizer model and a bunch of delays and phasers and that kind of stuff. We use a lot of consumer grade, easy to get stuff, we don’t really have any boutique, specialty effects.

C15: With each album shifting sounds, what do you point to from Growing that you are excited about? How do you describe Growing to somebody?

JD: Maybe just like what the jams are that night, you know? We stick to a fairly strict set each tour, we kind of plan it out and there’s not a lot of variance to it. Every record is one that when we finish it we are very excited about it as it happens and the recording process transforms the songs and playing live will transform the songs again and then making new songs and having them be part of the set can change things. It’s one of those things where we are never finished completely by at the point where were playing them is when we’re most excited about them.

C15: But when you are in the studio you have to try and fix the song in time?

JD: We try and track them the way we think they should feel or sit or be structured but when we start mixing it’s no holds barred, we don’t want to be real strict about how it’s going to end up, we try to be as free as possible and let it go in as many directions as it can go and make it something new.

C15: Are you getting people dancing at the shows now? With some of your previous material I can really only imagine guys standing around nodding their heads.

JD: Yeah, we have a good mix of dancing and concentrating [laughs]. We definitely had some dancers last night, we’ll see, it’s kind of a mix, a mixed group. Some of the newer stuff, the stuff that’s not on PUMPS!, there are a couple songs in there that have a booty-bass sound so we’ll see. I don’t really care what people do, as long as they enjoy it, it doesn’t matter what they want to do.

C15: You have bounced around from a couple record labels, how did you wind up on Vice?

JD: A good friend of Kevin’s is one of the editors of the magazine and they’ve always been pretty, not that he has anything to do with this, but their reviews have been pretty positive of our records. They were one of the labels we asked initially. We financed the record on ourselves, recorded with a friend, so when it was pretty much finished we started talking to everybody and they were one of the more active responses based on the people we talked to and our relationship with the magazine.

C15: You guys just played a show at the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art. Do you do that often and what’s the difference between playing a museum and a club gig?

JD: We’ve done a few, we played in LA in a museum. They’re more apt to set things up the way we want them to, we’ve played a few gallery shows too, it’s a little more free because they see what we do as art instead of just popular music, they are more liable to, they don’t have a PA setup in a certain corner that has to be dealt with the exact same way every night, they’re willing to let us do whatever we want to do, which is nice and free. There’s not one in every town on every tour we go on, so it can be rare, because we want to exist in a pop music setting as well, because that’s more accessible to more people.

C15: Pop music plays the bills but sometimes it’s nice to feel like an artist.

JD: Well, I don’t know if anything pays the bills, at least thus far nothing has really. [Laughs] But it is kind of true, we personally are populist in the way that we go about our lives and we want everyone to feel like this is accessible and easy to be around and exciting so we don’t want to feel above anything and sometimes the fine art community can feel detached.

L-R Timmy Wreck, Zachary Johns, Ben Smith. Photo via MySpace

Even in the city, Ben Smith likes to feel like he’s in the country. Sitting on his rooftop porch jutting off his wood-beamed apartment, the drummer for The Gleam seems well at home with the tree-tops and Bob Dylan’s warbling rendition of “The Boxer” coming through the speakers as he spoke of the new record Sunrise, to be released this weekend, almost four years to the day since the last Gleam album was put out. (Full disclosure: I worked with Smith when he was a member of Fort Wilson Riot on the stage presentation of the rock opera Idigaragua.) The core of The Gleam, Zachary Johns and Timmy Wreck, had been through a succession of drummers until Smith joined them around two years ago, initially just to sit in on some recording sessions, but within the first session, there was a good feeling about the combination and the band set to work. Known mostly for their fast-burning, hard-drinking country-punk shows, the image of six tallboys of PBR lined up on an amp fits most Gleam shows, but Sunrise contains a lot of surprises, grounded in the ballads of classic country players and even featuring a session player for George Jones, courtesy of producer Rich Mattson at Sparta Studios up on the Iron Range. With a CD release show at the St. Paul Eagles Club tonight and then across the river at Sauce with Crossing Guards and The Rockford Mules on Saturday, The Gleam are set to step back out with their new material and fleshed out live support. Don’t worry, the playing may have gotten better and they may take their time with the songs, but Smith promises they’ll still get rowdy.

Cake In 15: You guys rehearse out in Wyoming, MN, where there’s a Sunrise River, is that where the name of the record comes from?

Ben Smith: Yeah, the name “Sunrise”, there’s a lot stuff up there, the Sunrise River, there’s a Sunrise Factory so there’s a lot of history, that’s one of the things the name references to. It was all written up there. About half to two thirds of the record was written when I started playing with them, just the general songs and we worked on structure like that and then started working on new songs. The song “Dead Boyfriend”, which is now super slow piano-driven song was kind of pop-punk/country, so we just stripped it down. And that’s basically what we spent the last year doing, we were actually practicing in the factory for a while, now we’re practicing in an old chicken coop behind Tim’s house, which is awesome. We usually just go hootenanny style, we don’t have mics or anything we just sit down with brushes and acoustic guitars and work on arranging and writing and getting a feel for it.

C15: When I first threw on the record I was surprised at how some of the songs really took their time to unfold.

BS: I think that’s just reflective of how much time we spent on the songs, that we didn’t really rush anything, even the recording process took almost a year. So we spent a lot of time up to the recording process just working on songs and arrangements and trying different things out. Definitely the Gleam that most people know is just “get drunk and barrel through it”, I think they were trying to get away from that and work on songs and just play well, which hadn’t necessarily been one of the bigger concerns [laughs]. They’re definitely fans of old country and good players and so the focus was that instead of rushing through and recording really quick and not worrying about it, it’s like, “Let’s take time to get it right.” It’s been what, four years now since Lookout for Evils came out and I think it shows, it’s a much more mature record than the last couple, I didn’t play on those but they are some of my favorite local records, and it was really fun to work on the progression.

C15: What were you listening to while making the record?

BS: We were sitting and hanging out we were listening to Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Willie Nelson, they would always be on when we were playing.

C15: Do those guys influence Zach and Tim’s singing?

BS: They sing so well together, the blend really well, they’re very different. Tim’s is more of a higher pitched voice and Zach’s a little more of that Creedence-y [feel].

C15: Which if you are talking about trained, “good” singing, like you’re talking about taking the time with the instrumentation, that’s not what it is.

BS: [Laughs] No not at all, but there’s a lot of feeling in it and that’s what carries through most of the tunes.

C15: How did you set up this record to differentiate it from the older Gleam discs?

BS: The sequencing was a hard decision to make. “Rapid Falls” was another one that we thought about opening up with because it’s fast, but we thought that might be too much like the old Gleam, so we thought it be more fun to put the more classic rock, Stones-y folk rocker [“Away Like a Song”,] right away to kind of set the pace. The first lyric is “Ain’t they got no more new ideas?” which I thought was appropriate too, to start.

C15: Is it important to you then that people listen to the record as a whole album?

BS: People can do what they want, but we made it as a record, we made decisions based off of having it being cohesive. Ultimately we would want it to be on vinyl. Money’s a factor there but eventually we want to release it on vinyl, that’s what we’d prefer for it to be listened to because it kind of has that old sound. Both those guys have kids and not a lot of money, we don’t have all that much saved up so that was kind of a decision just to get it out there and see what we can do. We sent it out a bunch of places and if we’re lucky we might get some support from somebody.

C15: Has having kids and making time for that added to the maturation of the sound?

BS: I’m sure, they’d probably have to answer that for themselves. Obviously there’s priorities, we can’t just pick up and tour for three months, we’d love to but were trying to do some more small tours in the summer and fall here. Yeah, but having kids is a big priority over music, but the fact that they’ve persevered and kept up the band after this many years is impressive.

C15: What’s your favorite song on the record?

BS: From the changes, “Ballad of Carlos Avery”. “Damn City Lights” is just a classic country tune. We actually had this guy who Rich knew come in and play the pedal steel; Mike Randolph, he used to play for George Jones. He was this old dude and he just came in one afternoon and sat down and we were all pretty much crying because he sat down and the first time he played on it, it was like, “Holy Shit!” And then he stopped and he was like, “Well, that wasn’t very good.” [Laughs] We did three more takes, and I don’t know which one we took, but it was brilliant, and when I listen to that song I just think about the day he was in because it was so much fun.

Mural Detail- Photo via Cult Status Website

The destruction of art is bound to create a buzz, and the Cult Status Gallery might just reach that, based on the reaction to the martyrdom of the fresh Deuce 7 mural on their outer wall. The newly formed gallery makes it’s home at 2913 Harriet Avenue South in the LynLake area and just opened its doors this winter. In celebration of the opening, Cult Status got ahold of street/graffiti artist Deuce 7 (who has shown locally at SooVAC and been celebrated in New York) to paint a mural. With the apparent blessing of their landlord, painting began on March 10th, and was a big step up from what had been outside of the building; in conversation, gallery honcho Erin Sayer noted that, “before…it was disgusting, it was just this gross garage where they kept all their stuff,” and in a blog post on the controversy, says that the outside had been graffitied with anti-Obama and pro-gun epithets. Not your family-friendly fare for South Minneapolis, nor something really to be proud of.

Quickly into the painting process, though, Sayer received a worried phone call from her landlord, expressing surprise that the mural used so much color. The landlord had been expecting Sayer to be painting one of her own two-tone silhouette works on the outside wall and expressed concern about the progress of the mural. Sayer convinced her landlord to let them finish the mural and appeared to have the support of the other tenants in the building as well as neighborhood residents. When Cult Status held an opening on March 30th, Sayer noted that the new neighbors came over, some bearing cookies. Things seemed to be going well.

Photo by Matt Porath via Facebook

Then on April 2nd, Sayer received a call from her landlord informing her that one of the tenants was uncomfortable with the mural, to the point of threatening to move out. In lieu of losing the business, the landlord decreed that the mural had to be painted over, and initially slated Wednesday the 7th as the destruction date. Unwilling to reveal which of the tenants was offended by the mural Sayer set about to try and convince the other tenants that the work was worth preserving. As she said over the phone, “it’s not even offensive material. It’s totally benign, it’s like Chagall. I think that’s the only reason that they don’t like it, because it’s graffiti-style, even though it’s the best graffiti you’ll ever see.”

A Facebook post unleashed an outpouring of support and so far, Sayer says that 2 of the 3 other tenants, Shelter Architecture + Design and the Healing Garage seem to be on board with the mural, and they have been granted a stay of execution in order to meet on Wednesday the 7th at noon to discuss the fate of the painting. If all does not go well, this weekend is going to be a sad day for art in the Twin Cities, but Sayer says they’ll make the best of it, with full documentation of the event, and an open invitation to come down and support the art/protest the cover up. Hopefully, though Deuce 7’s art will be allowed to stay in it’s street context where it functions more subversively and powerfully than in a reduced gallery setting.

There are, of course, take-away lessons here. Should Cult Status had been more clear about their intentions for the mural? Yes. Should the landlord have been more clear about his expectations for the mural? Yes. Should there have been more communication with the other tenants about the mural? Probably.

However, we live in an age where so much of our publicly viewed space is mediated by private ownership, to the point of mass disempowerment, that if there is not privately sanctioned public art, all you are going to be left with are crass tags and puerile spray-painted phrases. Paintings on public walls like Cult Status’ Deuce 7 mural can mitigate that destructive impulse associated in the public’s mind with graffiti by creating personality and ownership to counteract the bland, sterile inoffensiveness of latter day America. Sayer said it over the phone; “I think mainly [this is] just the age old discussion of what is graffiti and why is it all bad. I think the public’s thoughts about graffiti need to change. It has such a bad connotation with so many people. It’s been going on for thirty years and its just never going to end, it’s going to keep growing. I think this movement is our defining art movement of this generation.” Here’s to fighting the good fight.

Photo by Matt Porath via Facebook