Podcast 2021.09 Stare It Down And Nourish What Comes Near You

TMODM: What does your music writing & recording process look like?
LA: i think its different with each song, but the most common way is someone will bring an idea or demo and we all jam to it and come up with ideas until we think its done, the recording process is very fun too, our home studio is very messy and chaotic and i guess that also influences the music
TMODM: How does the place you live — your city, town, landscape — feed into the music you make?
LA: We live in Baja, i think the duality of being surrounded by desert and sea makes it easy for us to take ideas and get inspired by different types of environments, we often talk about thinking of desert landscapes or tasting sea salt as we play
TMODM: Which musicians — living or dead — would you enjoy collaborating with?
LA: We all enjoy and feel amazed by music people did in the 60s and 70s, it would be interesting to collaborate or just jam with members of Neu!, Pink Floyd, Eno or Can just to mencione a few, but we also love newer music and would be interested in making a collab with John Dwyer, Tajak, Diles que no me maten, and the whole underground neuronal network

I corresponded with Justin Bendell of fuguers cove
TMODM: Who are your influences?
JB: For the latest record, my influences were the landscapes of New Mexico & my relationship with my 18-year partner, but the sounds that came out had whispers of Calexico, Wilco, Sufjan Stevens, & George Winston.
TMODM: What’s next for you?
JB: The next album will be influenced by the deep psychedelic tropics — dub, cumbia, chicha, along with raw, aggressive garage punk. It’s called “A Balm from Tropical Nature” & it comes out July 4, 2021 on bandcamp.
TMODM: What does your music writing & recording process look like?
JB: I write & record everything alone, so for years I’ve been refining my system. If I don’t have a song in mind, I start with drums. I record drums and write the guitar riffs and melodies based on the feel of the drums. If I have a song already in mind, I’ll usually start by recording a rough guitar track, recording clean drums over it, then layering guitars, bass, and other instruments — lap steel, cowbell, cheap keyboard — until the music gels. Then I record vocals. Vocals always come last.
TMODM: How does the place you live — your city, town, landscape — feed into the music you make?
JB: New Mexico feeds some of my records. Knights of June (2015) & the latest, Moon, are both heavily influenced by New Mexico. Most of my records have a geographic inspiration. Miami Beach Bodega (2016) is inspired by south Florida & the pan-Caribbean; Skeletons (2019) harks back to my youth growing up in northern Illinois.
TMODM: Other than music, what art forms inspire you and your music
JB: Books — I read all the time, I teach English, I write creatively, I host a podcast about crime fiction; Also: Film Noir & revolutionary agit prop. Those are the big ones.
TMODM: You have to wrestle a bear or swim with crocodiles. What do you pick? Why?
JB: Bear. Chance of not drowning is higher.
TMODM: Which musicians — living or dead — would you enjoy collaborating with?
JB: A multi-instrumentalist like Jay Bennett would be all right. He’d help ease my work load.
TMODM: What is your drug of choice when making music?
JB: Moderate caffeine, usually, to keep the tempo up. Sometimes I’ll have a beer and sometimes I’ll have a hit of weed; any more drugs than this & the recording process might be adversely affected. If I was jamming with other people, drugs might be useful, when for a solo bedroom project where I do everything, it pays to be coherent.
TMODM: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?
JB: Optimistic about the earth surviving/thriving on a geologic scale, but not very optimistic about late stage capitalism’s ability to fix the climate.

I corresponded with Chad Rauschenberger of Murder Not Suicide
TMODM: What does your music writing & recording process look like?
CR: MurderNotSuicide is recorded and conceived much differently than my band C.I.A Hippie Mind Control. For MNS the writing starts with a baritone with all open strings tuned to whatever key or chords I’m working on. This creates a bed and a tone for the whole track that’s a little odd and Sonic Youthy. Then, it’s all on in terms of what gets laid down after that. This track “would you even know” is a juxtaposed 11/8 with the open baritone and 7/8 with the standard guitar for the verse sections and just 5/4 for the other sections. Everything is recorded in my converted garage/studio.
TMODM: How does the place you live — your city, town, landscape — feed into the music you make?
CR: The Pacific Northwest has a particularly bleak and beautiful feel to it-it definitely influences my writing.
TMODM: Which musicians — living or dead — would you enjoy collaborating with?
CR: Dude! My dream would be to play with a Sean Rinehart and Sean (Shawn) Malone rhythm section, but alas, it hasn’t been a very good couple years.

TMODM: What does your music writing & recording process look like?
StD: We jam until the pieces fit together nicely. Anyone can bring his idea to the table, then everybody tries to adopt and adjust it so it becomes ‘shivaesque’ enough.
Many pieces had not passed this filter, still sitting there and waiting to be finished some day.
Regarding recording, we tell ourselves that the next one will be different.
We’ve recorded Find the Others in several studios. The first one we wanted to record got on fire and burnt down to ashes. So we recorded drums at one place and then the bass, guitars and vocals at another. Later we recorded more sounds ourselves from the comfort of our homes.
Then we’d come to mixing and mastering — and it took literally years to make recorded stuff sound as we wanted.
TMODM: How does the place you live (your city, town, landscape) feed into the music you make?
StD: We just enjoy the time, moment and the freedom we have here in Kyiv. Some of us use traveling as a source of inspiration — getting away from the mundane and being away from the usual surroundings help clear the mind and bring new ideas.
TMODM: Which musicians living or dead would you enjoy collaborating with?
StD: The list is going to be quite diverse, as each of us has widely varying backgrounds.
Al Cisneros, Maynard James Keenan, Thom Yorke, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Nick McCarthy, Daron Malakian, Billie Joe Armstrong…
TMODM: Other than music, what art forms inspire you and your music?
StD: Cinema, as it is one of the most powerful story-telling media. Not only can it bear powerful ideas, but also it provides visual aids and clues for interpretation.
TMODM: You have to wrestle a bear or swim with crocodiles. What do you pick? Why?
StD: A clear advantage of wrestling a bear is that one is most likely to do it on solid ground, and I don’t swim too well. On the other hand, swimming with them crocodiles does not necessarily involve any wrestling the way the question is put. So I think I’d go for crocodiles.
TMODM: What is your drug of choice when making music?
StD: Enthusiasm 🙂
Some of us stick to more conventional drugs widely accepted by society — alcohol, nicotine and caffeine, while the others… are currently on their vacations and are not available for comment.

TMODM: What does your music writing & recording process look like?
DT: We always are writing new stuff, after we released an album normally we have a few weeks later new ideas. We are also fans of bands which release a lot of good records, we don`t like it when you rest on your latest release.
So normally Danny comes with a riff and first of all we (guitar and bass) have a look how you can make an interesting part of it. Then Matze join us with the drums and when all sounds like a good song Danny write a text and the whole idea gets more and more into a whole finished song. But sometimes we also write a song within 10 minutes, you start jamming and it could be that it is so easy, that you even did not recognize that you have a new song.
Our recording process on Oumuamua was a new one. We recorded all live and in our rehearsal room, we rent some really good mics, we also build the whole room like a studio have to be and a friend of us help us to record everything. For the new album, we will record it this month, we also did a preproduction on an old Tascam four track recorder on cassette, it was simple and sounds really good.
TMODM: How does the place you live — your city, town, landscape — feed into the music you make?
DT: well we live in western Germany, the city called Dortmund, maybe some soccer fans know about it. It is an industrial area (years ago it was the biggest coal area in Germany called “Ruhrpott”), but of course you have nice places and you are very central to the rest of Germany. It is also a cultural thing, we in western Germany are completely different to the north, south or east, this is what other people also like on this area. But I have to say that our music is not really based on where we live, it is with every new album another feeling and on every record we also play different music styles, so I can say, our place here is really inspiring but has nothing to do how we create our music.
TMODM: Which musicians — living or dead — would you enjoy collaborating with?
DT: oh man this is tough… There are a lot, so I try to speak for all of us, Chris Cornell, Sonic Youth, Layne Staley, I think our drummer would prefer everyone from Queen (the rest of us not 😉 ), then of course all people from Nirvana, Kathleen Hanna, Rory Gallagher, Roky Erikson, Smashing Pumpkins, Pixies, Lemmy, Brody Dalle, DeWolff, J Mascis, Josh Homme, Brant Bjork …. I think I cannot stop, so I hope you get a little impression.