There’s an old gag about the relationship between technology and music, which goes something like this …
A man goes into a fancy electronics store to buy a new stereo. The salesman explains that they only carry top-of-the-line equipment here, only the very best that technology has to offer. Perfect, the man says. The salesman shows the man stereos that can do all kinds of wonderful things: ones that adapt the sound to fit the shape of the room, ones that learn what his favorite songs are and play them when he comes by, and a sound system that provides its own light show. But the man still isn’t happy. So the salesman asks him what he’s really looking for.
“I was hoping you’d have something that could make bluegrass listenable.”
OK, I didn’t say it was a good joke. The point is, no matter how high- or low-tech music becomes, the enjoyment of that music always boils down to a simple matter of taste. Yet, in a town filled with music lovers, there’s a surprising amount of snobbery when it comes to what gets plugged in and played. In some circles, a guitar is fine, but a sequencer or a laptop is heresy.
In others, even having a pick-up mike is a regrettable, if allowable, capitulation.
And what about the performers? How do they view the situation? To find out, I talked to three groups, the tech-loving Midnight Foundation, the inexplicably evolving Dig Shovel Dig and staunch acoustic loyalists the Barrel House Mamas.
Coming down the mountain
If there’s a fever dream behind The Midnight Foundation, it’s this: Deep in some lost mountain range, lurking in the twilight, is a towering castle. On its turrets and rooftop gardens throbs a party, attended by sleek, sexy people dancing under the moonlight. As the air slowly cools from the heat of the day, the music warms the air with increasing urgency.
“That’s what we’re trying to do with our music,” says Joel Goffin, setting the scene. “We’re getting to exude that sound.”
But apart from the mountain, there’s nothing about his vision that particularly fits with Asheville’s prevailing culture. (If there are sleek, sexy people going to midnight parties at the Biltmore Estate, they’re doing a good job of keeping it quiet.) Perhaps not surprisingly, the breakbeat-based sounds of Midnight Foundation haven’t found their local audience.
“As far as techno music goes, there’s really not that much happening in Asheville,” Goffin confirms. “I don’t mean to say that there aren’t DJs. What I’m saying is that I don’t know of too many other live performing acts that focus on the kind of music we make.”
Fair enough. Their stuff sounds like the soundtrack to a movie featuring black-leather-clad European vampires being chased by a lethargic, if earnest, club-hopping breakdancer out for revenge. It’s über high-tech—all samples, loops and effects—and it usually clocks in at a respectable 120 beats per minute.
Being so edgy, it’s not something likely to excite the jam-grass set. And Goffin doesn’t pretend otherwise.
“Here in Asheville, it’s been a challenge to find the ears for our kind of music,” he says. “We need electronic-loving ears to hear it. Some people here love our style of music to death, but they are always going to be outnumbered by people who love folk music, jam bands and bluegrass. And, since that’s the style of music that is most popular, that’s what’s going to get booked before we do.”
After a moment, he adds: “I’m not sure our style is ever going to be popular here.”
But Goffin, along with band mates Andrew Suhren and Matt Harder, isn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet. Instead, they’re adapting. They’ve recently begun working with singer Laura Michaels, adding an analog voice to an otherwise digital soundscape. They’ve also kicked around the idea of including other musicians, such as an onstage drummer, to their shows.
“We’re really trying to bring in some more instruments and sounds, just so we can bring a little more variety,” Goffin says.
Still, their ideal market lies in bigger cities with more established club scenes. They hope to open for bigger acts in Charlotte and Atlanta in the near future.
“It’s kind of lonely being a techno band in this town,” he laments. “When it comes down to production and a lot of things like that, our networking circle is somewhat limited. We don’t have a lot of people to knock the basketball off the backboard with.”
“We apologize if it seems like we are getting worse”
Dig Shovel Dig’s Mark Williams lies flat on a patch of dirty gravel, dead tired from a day spent making pizzas. In one hand, he holds a half-empty beer, and in the other is a half-finished cigarette. His band mate, Ted Robinson, leans his wiry, starved-looking frame against my car while fishing his own smoke out of a pack. The air reeks heavily of déjà vu. The last time I interviewed them together, some four years ago, the situation was almost exactly the same.
But, the band isn’t. Or maybe it is. They’re still experimental, but the experiment has changed from a lo-fi rock duo into something … well, we’ll get to that.
If you’ve never heard of Dig Shovel Dig, don’t feel too bad. Even they admit that the pop appeal of a band that’s made its name singing distorted droning vocals over chaotic melodies on drums, bass and a Casio keyboard played by Robinson’s toes is, well, limited.
Their success, such as it is, comes from a combination of art-rock credibility, word-of-mouth fandom and a series of albums that only a handful of people have ever listened to all the way through. Even rock critics who pride themselves on loving the most experimental of recordings are baffled at what DSD is trying to accomplish.
And, even if you have heard of them, the odds that you’ve got one of their songs in rotation on your iPod is very, very low indeed. You see, unless you possess just the right kind of ears, Dig Shovel Dig’s songs are—and this is kind—pretty much unlistenable.
“We’re not into people having a good time,” jokes Robinson.
And yet, for all the things “wrong” with the band, they’ve managed to outlast any number of local radio-friendly rock acts that, if common sense prevailed, should have done at least as well. Their “music” has never been the talk of the town—however, it isn’t uncommon to see fairly large crowds turn up at DSD shows. Credit their awesomely spastic performance style. They’ve spent much of the last few years on a series of short tours, playing house parties and shows at venues willing to take a chance on them.
As often as not, they get invited back.
They’ve also founded their own label, Searchwielder, which has released a surprising number of recordings on CD, vinyl, and most recently, the ultra-low-tech cassette format.
That’s right—tapes. (Including the one that sits moribund in Xpress’ local-music files, needing the old-school boombox that was, long ago, lost or stolen from the arts office.—ED.)
Could it be a gimmick?
“I don’t really buy CDs, but I buy tapes from guys like us,” says Robinson. “Tapes sound better, and they’re just funner. There’s something spinning slowly enough for you to see it spin. It’s also a cheap media, and I’m constantly broke.”
Far from turning off new audiences, their hard-line Do-It-Yourself aesthetic (Williams calls it “Do-It-Whatever”) has earned them a kind of lunatic respect.
In other words, their stubborn brand of anti-promotion is backward enough to actually, and quite accidentally, work.
But just when people had gotten used to the idea that droning vocals, bass, drum and foot-keyboard could actually make for a valid—even compelling—kind of rock arrangement, DSD tossed the whole thing. The drum kit and bass are gone, replaced by hot-wired little boxes crammed tight with dials and knobs. The old Casio keyboard is still around, but it’s played in the traditional manner, free of Robinson’s feet. And the vocals are distorted to the point that there’s nothing particularly vocal about them anymore.
Dig Shovel Dig, says Robinson, is now a “DJ experience.”
Whatever. But why the change? Wasn’t their music already weird enough?
“We got bored,” replies Robinson. “It’s five years later, and different s**t is going on. For years, we sort of played as a rock band. Even then, we didn’t think of it as a rock band. But people have to see a certain instrumentation to lock in on your music, which is ridiculous.”
“We’ve always been into electronic stuff,” adds Williams, now up off the ground and prowling around. He points out that long before there was a Dig Shovel Dig, both he and Robinson released their own lo-fi, electronica-infused albums (under the names Bummerman and PandaDub, respectively). “So, really it’s the same kind of music, just without that traditional lineup of bass, guitar and whatever.”
Both Robinson and Williams admit that their new sonic experimentation has come at a price. Their live show, they explain, is “a little more boring.” They’re quick to point out, however, that their new style has also opened up new venues.
“We can do what we’re doing now cheaply and tour anywhere,” says Robinson. “Before, we wouldn’t play through a PA. It got to the point where we hated not having our own sound system to play through, because running a bass, drums and keyboard through a PA makes it sound dumb. But, with techno gear you can use a crappy PA’s limitation as a creative element.”
Undoubtedly, this reinvention has made the band’s already difficult-to-grasp music even harder to get into. (In a way, they cop to this. On their MySpace page, the band shows a series of videos running chronologically from 2003 to 2007. At the end, they’ve placed a single line of text that reads: “We apologize if it seems like we are getting worse.”) Not too many bands would relish having a reputation based more on a talent for weirdness than for listenable songs.
But they’re fine with it.
“It’s not like anybody is paying us to do this,” says Robinson, stubbing out his cigarette. “We’ve got some good tapes out, even if nobody ever buys them. … I think the recordings are really worth it. I have to believe that, because kind of the only thing I’m riding on is that I’m doing something worth doing.”
Luddites with a loophole
“What’s drawn me to music in general is songwriting,” says Jane Kramer Edens, one of the trio of old-time performers known as the Barrel House Mamas. “I love the pared-down-ness of roots and acoustic music, and the more simple the instrumentation, the more the gesture behind the song comes across. That’s what got me hooked on acoustic music, for sure.”
Edens, along with collaborators Molly Rose Reed and Eleanor Underhill, met while attending Warren Wilson College. Their shared love of, as Edens puts it, “really pure, really true and really raw” music forged a kind of bond between the three performers. They’ve been successful, too, touring the festival circuit and releasing a debut album, Gathering, last year. (Full disclosure: The Mamas occasionally add testosterone to the lineup, in the forms of stand-up bassist Sean Lallouz and drummer David Mack, though you won’t see the guys in most promo photos. Call it the Ménage school of marketing.)
They’re a decidedly low-tech band, preferring their wooden instruments over fiddly bits of electronics every time. Edens explains that “for me, the music that we play happens best when we’re sitting on the front porch and can see each other’s faces. That’s the essence …
And yet, as true as they try to stay to their low-tech roots, Edens admits they’ve had to make a few concessions to the 21st century.
“When we recorded our album last year, the process felt very counterintuitive to all of us,” she says. “We didn’t do it in a live-music setting, where we all stood around one mike like some groups do. We did it in a very dissected process, which tends to yield a balanced recording. But we also struggled a lot to make it happen. Thankfully, we found a producer who was able to help us create a sound that was really true to us.”
However, she says, “it still felt foreign.”
But since they’ve now tested technical waters (albeit unwillingly), would the band ever, like some latter-day Dylan, plug in a song on stage?
“I think it would be hilarious,” laughs Edens. “We’ve never really considered going in an electronic route, and it’s definitely not a direction I’d ever see us intentionally choosing to go in.”
There must be something of a Luddite-like tendency in roots musicians who so purposefully shun the trappings of our inescapably high-tech world.
“I was one of the people who got e-mail very late,” says Edens, as though offering credentials. “I had this silly argument that it took away from basic human-to-human contact. But, to be part of the music business and to network, it’s really helpful. I think if we were completely reliant on digital marketing and distribution, I might be a little more bothered by it, but we’re not. We’re not that rigid.”
[Freelancer Steve Shanafelt is based in Greenville, S.C. He can be reached at unknowncity@hotmail.com]
The Midnight Foundation performs next at the Cicada Music Festival at Deerfields, held May 25-28 (cicadafestival.com). Dig Shovel Dig performs next at Gourmet Perks (165 Merrimon Ave.) on Monday, May 28; 254-4777. The Barrel House Mamas perform next at the Asheville Music Jamboree, held June 1-3 at Deerfields (www.amjam.net).
Just before anyone gets the idea that I don’t like Dig Shovel Dig’s music, let me just say that one of my favorite songs recorded by any local group is “Electricity” from their first album, Number Yum Taste (2003). I’m kind of a fan, actually, but even I have a hard time getting into some of their newer stuff.