doubledown magazine 02.99

I find I Am Spoonbender (collectively and individually) intellectual, incorporating all aspects of their personal interests as influence for their aesthetic. Displacement of mind and body from minute to minute, the textural sound vibrations within their music hold a surreal universe that lure the listener into worlds of confusion and abnormality. Music should (as films are meant to), in a sense, take you to another world. I feel that Spoonbender is a band that achieves that with conventional technology, while also straying from the traditional "band" type of arrangement (i.e. guitar, bass, singer, drums forming the band). What role does the drum machine or a synthesizer play into today's music?

One detail of Spoonbender's performance that caught my attention (besides the drummer Dustin playing a real set of drums and assimilating drum patterns through a mechanical device), was that Cup and Dustin processed their vocals through a telephone resulting in a static-enhanced sound. The way in which the sound waves traveled though the wires and speakers to hover above the crowd gave me a compelling feeling of perplexity.

The use of repetitive drum patterns is misleading and subliminal to the extremes of a hypnosis conducted though sound. The highways of sound waves pass though stale air, though stale ears, resulting in the gyrations of an unconscious quake of the brain. This causes a malfunction when attempting to comprehend simple patterns of raw sounds. I find people have trouble understanding what it's like to be in control of their own musical tastes. Consequently, they're spoon-fed from their friends and the abusive media sources of fueled by over-hyped and exaggerated performers who are as stale as Chips-a-Hoy.

It's pleasurable to find a band that, in searching for the unknown, has fused well individually. They are entitled to a big pat on the back for efforts that have been put forth in creating a music worth listening to. To some, it's still undefined and foreign. I have rambled enough. I now bring you the performers, Dustin and Cup of I Am Spoonbender.

Justin Wright, doubledown magazine 1/11/99

Dustin: I know all about it, unfortunately. In that situation, there are so many things going on that it's really hard for me to actually have feelings one way or the other. I certainly don't want it to happen, but at the same time there's this feeling if we don't show some sort of action to this person, that he's just going to do whatever he wants to. I think that the consequences of that might be worse, but at the same time we're still going to get some repercussions from it anyway.

D: Well, that's nothing new. And from his perspective, we are. terrorist repercussions, insidious attacks and those kind of things we're going to see an increase of anyway. It's just another one of the larger symptoms of the twentieth century, of things moving towards something very, very disruptive and ultimately bad for the universe.

D: Well the Spoonbender perspective on the whole thing is, that the collective belief on that whole thing will, in it's own way, will it to happen. It's sort of the idea that positive thinking, or any wishful thinking, will create an environment that allows something like that to happen. If you want to be a filmmaker, you'll surround yourself with tools that it takes to make that thing happen. Or if you want to be a writer or be a bum, whatever it is, if you want something you'll get it to some degree. I think that humanity does believe something is happening and what will be its result?

D: Oh man, that's a really large subject. That's really hard for me specifically to give a very perfunctory or succinct answer. By asking that question, do you mean belief in aliens or do I believe that there are unidentified flying objects that people see?

D: I don't want to take the super easy way out of this question, but that question for me is a two hour discussion. I've taken that question very seriously ever since I was a small child. I think that every person's experience is a subjective reality, an irrefutable truth to that person. Once again, I think that there is some aspect of this collective belief system happening here to will these things to exist. I have a theory about aliens specifically, where I think that it's quite possible that aliens could be us from the future, from a very distant future. If you look at the history of man, we started off as a lot of separate races within this species, but we're certainly moving more towards one collective race as the races all mix together. We certainly don't know what's going to happen on an evolutionary process to our bodies through the advent of less and less actual physical work. Industrialized society is on it's way out, we're going to spend more time in a stationary place. I think we'll actually "move" through consciousness, things like that, telepathy, time travel and those kinds of things. From a distance, I think that it is quite possible that there's something going on here that is possibly just us coming back to make sure that things move along smoothly. It's a theory, actually I have more to say on the subject, but we don't have enough time here to have it make sense.

D: Uri Geller was, and still is, a very, very famous "supposed" telekinetic. Meaning that he supposedly can influence objects through psychic power, basically moving them. The whole thing about us using the fork instead of a spoon is that when we were making the logo (Cup and I designed it-Cup actually drew it), we just thought a fork looked better. Also, just not to be so literal. Later on we realized that a three prong, like a trident, is the international symbol for psychic power, interestingly enough. Or just for psy-research in general, it's a very, very old symbol that signifies psychic power. The whole thing with Uri Geller is just really, in a way, tongue-in-cheek. It's not really that important to us whether he can do it or can't really do it. What's interesting to us is that it appears that he can. Either way he's a genius.

D: Absolutely. We just think that stuff is interesting. We have our own reasons for thinking that it's cool or not cool, but ultimately we just want to present fodder for thought. Basically, be entertaining on that level.

D: That statement right there is important to us on pretty much all the levels we're trying to work on. We try and present something that, if you don't want to dig into it, you don't have to. If you do, there's tons there. I don't really like being didactic about presentation of artistic projects like "it means this and there's no room for you" in it, where it's only about us and we're telling you what it is. That's pretty boring I think.

D: The process that we go through to do music is actually not... we can't really say we always do the same thing. Basically we're using what is generally considered to be state-of-the-art recording materials- Which is hard-disk editing, whereas people in the past used analog tape, which is the linear process. You record something and it is what it is. Later you actually have to cut the tape if you want to edit something. With hard-disk recording, like what a lot of stuff we did for "Sender/Receiver", we went and recorded drums and bass, a lot of it was just "jamming", just drums and bass. We would take, like, a ten minute section, go in there and find thirty seconds of something that we liked, cut it out. Literally cut it out using this hard-disk editor and place it, then loop it. Almost like what a lot of people do with sampling, but we didn't sample anybody else's work, we just in essence "sampled" ourselves.

Cup: Like a collage thing. Getting all these pieces from larger pieces that came out of the jam sessions and cut them into different pieces and put them back together to make an image or a mood, something that is really different from the original.

D: Like you brought up about film- yes, there are a lot of attempts to use film-editing techniques in the music. We started thinking of the music in terms of "what if it was a movie". There's a lot of specific language that is used in the recoding studio like (filmmaking) phrases and things. They’re the same kind of ideas in film, they're usually separate. Well, we decided to use all the sort of film techniques to the album, like, "Let's do a dissolve here", or do a ‘hard’edit. Like in a film when you want a dream sequence and all these things are sort of melding together, or if it's a jump cut to a guy in his house then a jump cut to the guy at the store. It's that kind of approach, you hear that all through the record, things that meld into the next thing. Then sometimes there's a hint of it being sliced in half and the next thing starts instantly. Notice there are no breaks in the record- it's basically all connected together like a film. That's what we're approaching this whole project like, to do an album that was approached like we were actually making a movie.

D: Well, the details of who else was going to be in it were really not solidified when I came up with the initial idea of what the band, the specifics of the band, were. For example, right from the beginning [I thought] we won't have any guitars. It'll just be drums, bass and synthesizers, ala Gary Numan's "Pleasure Principal". I like the sound of that (with no guitars), that kind of thing. Things like that were set up right from the beginning before anyone else was involved. This was in 1994 that I actually came up with the idea for the "Sender/Receiver" record, it just took this long, the right people had to be found. I didn't even know Cup, I didn't meet her until a year after the general idea for this record happened. All the specifics of it are different and that's fine because we just followed the general idea as set from the beginning. It was just going to be a recording project and then it just really worked with the three of us. Now Marc being the fourth person. This is something that became a big thing to us.

D: With Cup and Brian, "Sender/Receiver" is as much them as anything. There's really no new additions, as I didn't solely do "Sender/Receiver" by any means. The only way that is going to change is when we've all decided that something should change, but then I think it would be a different band. We leave room for other things to happen like side projects and those kind of things.

C: Our whole sound and the whole thing about I Am Spoonbender is a very specific and focused idea. Even though there are four of us now working on it, I think we all have the same kind of focus on what it is, what it should sound like, and where it should go. With Dustin and Brian's studio (Seismic Seance), we also have the capabilities of working on other stuff. Either with or without the other members of the band outside of the scope of I Am Spoonbender. It's total freedom, you don't have to go and really search out a lot of other people to work with because all the people involved are really versatile within the band, so it's great.

C: Exactly, you can just throw something together and if it doesn't really fit the Spoonbender kind of sound, just save it and use it for something else if you so choose.

D: We're very fortunate to be in that situation, we do everything basically backwards from the way probably ninety-five percent of other bands do things. In that they write songs, they rehearse them for a long time because time is money in a recording studio. all chance elements are pretty much taken out by the time they get to the studio so they go in there and record what they've already rehearsed and get it as precise and correct as possible. Whereas with us, we go into the studio and write. There's all sorts of chance elements that come into the process. I really do feel that chance is the fifth member for this project. So many things- somebody could set their water bottle down on the keyboard and something will happen and it seems just like, in a really bizarre way, it's at the right moment to suggest something that we'll then take and we can build a song around. It's a really great way to work for us.

D: We appreciate that insight into what we're doing, I'm really glad that you enjoy it. We didn't set out to do any of those things that you just mentioned, just to try and do something well. Just to do it as well as it could be done by us. If people like it, we're completely happy, we're very happy specifically with "Sender/ Receiver".

C: Ultimately you have to do what you enjoy and what you personally find fulfilling. It's great that a lot of people already have responded really positively to "Sender/Receiver", but at the same time if we weren't getting that same kind of feedback- I'm finding it really personally fulfilling to be able to do all this music. Changing instruments from guitar to synthesizer, experimenting with all the different sounds and textures you can work with in this environment.

D: The thing is for me, I don't believe that people are being honest when they say that they don't care if anybody else likes it. I just think that's a lie because if you didn't care if anyone else would like it then you wouldn't release it. If it was really truly just enough for you to be happy with it, you'd just have your master CD or DAT at home and go, "OK, I did this thing and it's done". You release it because you want people to hear it, of course you hope they enjoy it. I want people to like the music we do, but if they don't it's not going to kill me. I understand that people like or dislike certain things. Can't hold that against anyone, I'm all for it. We release records because we hope that people will like what we do and give us opportunities to continue what we like to do.

D: I don't think we're exceptions to that, actually. We, Spoonbender, certainly don't claim that anything we're doing is original at all. I know exactly what the source references are, the places we're coming from. Yes, we are pulling from five or six relatively obscure sources and sort of re-configuring that into a final single source.

D: I don't think there's any art that's used that isn't pilfering from obscure sources and bringing it to new audiences. I mean really, truly, if we had the courage to do something that was completely original, we certainly wouldn't use drums or we probably wouldn't even use sound. To be completely original means that we would burn firewood at our concerts and say "listen to this". We're starting off using clichés right off the bat... drums, synthesizers, harmonic elements, that itself is a cliché in music. We can just pull it apart and pull it apart till we're sitting there listening to crickets and camera shutters. That might be considered more original and maybe more listenable to the average person. We do that kind of stuff also. We're interested in anything that makes a sound which can be reconfigured into a rhythmic pattern or a melodic pattern. I don't believe the role of a synthesizer is the "ultimate sound maker". Children on the playground is pretty interesting to me.

D: That's also the film influence, bringing in more "soundtrack" type elements.

D: I think a lot of people do that, but it's not popular. What I mean by popular is that no one is banging down Spoonbender's door at this point to do a Coca Cola commercial. But then again, at the same time I've been constantly surprised, I've heard Apex Twin in a Bank of America commercial. That's just bizarre to me. (since the time of this interview, spoonbender was actually approached by a large agency about using one of their songs in a popular car ad series)

C: It's very structured actually because we really like to approach the live situation as a performance. A complete show, we have our own lights and this whole barrage of instruments up on stage that we use to put on a full on production. Within that idea, it's just like you were going to see a stage performance of a show, a dance recital. It's very choreographed. It's very specific, the timing of everything. A lot of it may seem very random, but within it's very, very down to the second.

D: I don't necessarily feel that it's so much like a play per se, I think it's more of a rock show. I would consider it a rock show, but my take on what she just said is also that, in the studio we leave a lot up to chance- Live we try and leave nothing up to chance because we are presenting prepared material so we want it to be solid. Basically, we want it to be a rock show. A show that people are hammered by because things are (hopefully) done well. That doesn't necessarily mean that we accomplish that. That's what we're striving for. It's hard for us to play live because we can't just throw a drum set up on stage and rock out- which I really like to do to but.... This has some elements of that kind of thing. Sort of... people that have seen The VSS, that kind of thing- a rock band with synthesizers. There's also some purely abstracted soundtrack stuff where people aren't moving, where it's not about watching people rock out, it's about listening. Hopefully it's always about listening. If you were only there to listen, you would stay home and listen to the record.

D: I didn't work with him, I actually got to know him a bit a couple of years just before he died. Specifically, I spent an evening with him at his house having dinner and talking. My relationship with William Burroughs, I mean before I even knew him, was, it seems, a common experience that I find with a lot of people, just a lot of people my age that have been inundated with this William Burroughs stuff- When I was younger, I was like, "Who is this William Burroughs guy?" So I found out a lot about him. Then I got all this, "Oh, you're into Burroughs just like everyone else" kind of thing. That's not really what it was all about for me. I just thought he was a very interesting thinker. I think that he's a great writer, but that's not what I particularly liked about him. I just liked the way he thought and his approach towards questioning control systems. Those kind of things. He, in a way, molded a lot of the way I think about things. I went through this period where I felt ashamed because I was into William S. Burroughs. Because it was this big cliché, kinda like when Nirvana got popular. That kind of thing, that weird guilty lame indie rocker guilt shit. I thought that was fucking bullshit, fuck this, this guy is an important thinker. I decided to get really farther into his ideas and really research where he was coming from, his whole thing. I just really like the way he thinks. I met him and we had a really great evening together talking about things that he and I are interested in. What we mostly talked about was coincidence, chance, telepathy, religion, control systems, drugs, those kind of things. We sat there and drank whiskey and he smoked pot, eating potato soup. His connection to music is very strange. I think because he's so openly pro-choice for individuals. He firmly believes that a man should be judged, (and I don't just mean a MAN- a human), whether they perform their job correctly, not whether they do drugs when they're not at work. He's been very outspoken about that since the forties. Those are important issues I think. He's been very outspoken about that so he's attracted a lot of musicians. Actually, he's notorious for hating most music. So it's not like he liked a lot of the bands he's connected to. He's been connected to everyone from John Lennon, the Rolling Stones, U2 on down to Pansy Division. Really cool guy, a great experience for me to know him.

D: Well, something that I would like to add, we've been talking about a lot of things that people would consider serious or heavy or whatever, it's not particularly about that for us. Really this whole thing for us is about having fun. We all made conscious decisions at a young age to not support working systems. I mean working our whole life for someone else, those kind of things. We made decisions to make things, create things and connect with people who are also into those kind of things. Or have shared those same kind of viewpoints on society basically, humanity and what it's all about.

D: People that exist because there's a dissatisfaction with the way in which things are generally run. I think that we all agree that there are some serious problems. I don't know that I have any answers to that. I certainly don't claim to have any answers on how to do things better, but at least we want to offer the suggestion to consider alternatives and keep going with something that just works. If that is Christianity, get it out of here. Update, keep moving. Democracy, communism, abortion, whatever these things are. I just think that people need to keep talking about these things and updating them.

D: Well it is a primitive way of thinking, and you can trace it right back to any society. one of the reasons that we're in the situations that we're in is because we've stopped thinking of ourselves as animals. But since we are just animals, an animal always stakes its territory. Any animal needs its own space. The problem is when someone thinks they need more space than someone else, that they deserve it somehow or that they're more correct. We're in that situation. Also something I think that is important- you brought up that you'd think we'd be more civilized by now, but I just think in the large picture of history, we're still a very, very young species. For us in our lifetime, seventy years seems like a long time and god, doesn't a thousand years seem like forever, but it's really not. I really think that as a species, we're just teenagers and we have a ways to go. Just looking around at the way things are brings me to that conclusion: that if we are indeed teenagers as a species, some teenagers don't make it- some get drunk and wreck the car. I think we're in the midst of a century-long car crash. A slow-motion car crash. We're really going to get hurt, we've been getting hurt for about a good eighty years. People keep talking about this apocalypse thing like it's something that's coming. What the hell are people thinking? Can't they see what's been going on this century? We've been in a literal apocalypse this whole century. Nagasaki and Hiroshima should have been wake-ups, but they weren't and so we haven't learned that we can't keep doing the things we're doing to the environment. Nature is much, much, much bigger than us individually, it will take charge and get rid of us - it needs to make sure that it says alive. Because we're a part of nature, not separate.

D: I sometimes like to fantasize that we have the whole priority system inverted and that we can't see that we're actually the lowest species because we're the only ones capable of destroying everything. A snail doesn't destroy anything, it's being the best snail it can be all the time.

D: Exactly, so are we the most advanced, brightest species? Or are we the most inept and actually literally stupid? Something to think about.

D: What is walking and talking? What is self-awareness and consciousness? What do all these things actually really mean? Is it important to know that there is another galaxy? Well, maybe, but maybe not. Is it important for a deer to know that there's another state forty miles over? No. I think in a way we need to return to some of those kind of things, understanding that we are just an animal. That will move us foreword I think. You have to step back a little bit to move foreword.