Interversity: Redhooker

New York recording artist Stephen Griesgraber is the focus of our Interversity this week. Both a member of Brooklyn collective Slow Six as well as helming his own project in Redhooker, Griesgraber stays busy musically and the latter's new album The Future According to Yesterday is a testament to this with its intricate notes and theatrical interplay. This is a little about the man behind it... And by a little, we mean a lot. Enjoy.
Redhooker - Twelve Times Goodbye - The Future According to Yesterday (Soft Landing 2007)

1. Explain how Redhooker came about, and what about Red Hook inspired you to take the group's name after it.

I moved to Red Hook right after finishing graduate school. I had completed a masters degree program in classical guitar performance, yet I was certain that I did not want to pursue a career as a classical guitar recitalist. Red Hook was still one of those "fringe" neighborhoods in Brooklyn where artists were moving to find cheap work space. I moved there with the naive idea that I would become a part of a cool artist community. Instead, I found the neighborhood to be incredibly isolating. There were no restaurants or grocery stores open past 8:00PM. There were no cafes and just one bar. This made it very difficult to meet the neighborhood residents, and if there was a thriving arts community, I never found it. And because no subway line runs through Red Hook, my friends rarely visited.

And yet Red Hook is very beautiful.Its waterfront was undeveloped at that time and the decay of its unrestored 19th-century factory buildings provided a melancholic atmosphere that was consistent with my state of mind at the time. So I found myself in a situation in which I seriously reevaluating my creative direction for the first time in six years, was living alone in an unfamiliar and isolated neighborhood, and by day trying to negotiate the chaos that can come with working in Manhattan. I had never felt so stimulated, lost, and isolated by such short turns. And it was during this time that I began to think about writing the music that would eventually comprise "The Future According to Yesterday." So I chose the name Redhooker. And admittedly, I liked that the name might make eyebrows raise or eyes roll even though at heart, it does hold real meaning for me.

2. How did you manage to score the recording space in Manhattan for this album?

It's a long story, but a great example of the sort of serendipity that seems to happen every so often in New York.... A close friend of mine from high school was moving to New York from our home state of Minnesota. She had worked for Minnesota Public Radio as an assistant producer for Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion." Prior to moving, she asked Garrison if he could point her to possible job opportunities here. He recommended that she contact guitarist Leo Kottke who subsequently recommended that she contact his friend Mike Gordon who was the bass player in Phish. At that time Mike was looking for a personal assistant of sorts and offered my friend the job. This was shortly after Phish had decided to "retire" and Mike was in the process of giving up his New York apartment to move to his home in Vermont permanently.

Mike had lived downtown Manhattan and loved classic New York buildings. Years ago he had approached the management of the Woolworth Building about renting a small office where he could practice without the distractions of being at home.They found a very small single room for him on a middle floor and charged him somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 a month.

Well, after a couple of years, a tenant wanted to rent the entire floor, including Mike's office, and so management tried to get Mike to break his lease and give up the space.Mike was reluctant, and so management made him an offer.They had cleared all tenants out of the top eight floors to convert "the tower" of Woolworth into condos.

But then September 11th happened and they decided that it was the wrong time to convert and market the condos because Woolworth is kitty-corner to ground zero.

So the deal was, if Mike would give up his office, they would give him the entire 46th floor for the same price on the condition that when they decided to begin the condo conversion, he would willingly move out. So he took the space, which had previously been an accident-injury law office. When I heard that he was moving to Vermont, I asked him what he was doing with Woolworth and he told me that because it was so cheap, he didn't want to give it up, yet he couldn't justify spending the money since he'd never be there.

So we split it and for $250 a month, I had the most remarkable workspace I likely ever will. It wasn't actually a studio, and I didn't record "The Future According to Yesterday" there, I just used it as a place to retreat and write - with incredibly inspiring views and no distractions. Unfortunately, after five months, I got the call. By now, I'm sure my “studio" is someone's multi-million dollar apartment.

3. The Future According to Yesterday has been referred to as one movement in four parts. How do you approach the songwriting process? Did it change during the time you spent making this album?

I wrote these pieces mostly at a Rhodes and on the guitar. The Rhodes part to "Sometimes She Speaks Gently" just came to me while improvising. Initially, I expanded upon it, building it out so that it was not so static. But I later decided that I liked the idea that these long, languid lines would unfold between the violin and the clarinet, setting the stage and relating to the Rhodes ostinato in different harmonic ways as they pushed and pulled at each other before finally evolving into a clear melody. And that melody ends up being immitative - almost like a canon. This idea of the two instruments chasing - or shadowing - each other is central to the themes of the whole work.

"Animus" was conceived simultaneously with "Sometimes She Speaks Gently." They really are one piece. The same is true for "Sunday Silence" and "Twelve Times Goodbye" - they, too, are one piece. And there's no doubt that when I wrote "Sunday Silence" and "Twelve Times Goodbye" I was thinking about how they would work as a program with the preceding pieces. I'm always conscious of the fact that whether it's a recording or a concert, I'm presenting a program and that program is more successful if it has continuity to it. Ideally, each piece can stand on its own, but the whole should always be greater than the sum of its parts.

4. How did you get involved with the Max/MSP technology? I'm interested to hear why you used electronics at all.

Max/MSP is an object oriented programming environment for Mac or PC specifically geared toward allowing the user to design audio control and processing software applications. As soon as I started thinking about the music I wanted to write, I knew that I was interested in manipulating the sounds of live musicians in real time - as opposed to using prerecorded samples - and I knew that I was not interested in achieving this through the use of typical pedal effects or whatever. When I started playing with Slow Six, Christopher Tignor introduced me to Max/MSP, and I quickly realized that it was exactly what I was looking for - an environment that would allow me to build tools for audio processing from the ground up.

The music on "The Future According to Yesterday" was originally written for a concert that Redhooker performed as a part of the 2006 New York Guitar Festival. The venue we were performing in, called The Monkey, is wired for 5.1 surround sound.

So I built a "patch" in Max/MSP that allowed me to capture five samples of any length from members of the ensemble. I could then play these samples back using a MIDI foot controller. I could play them forwards and backwards, either as “one offs" or as loops. I could also transpose the samples in each of the five "banks" chromatically using one of ten preset transposition modes that I could choose using an onscreen interface. I specifically chose five sample banks because this allowed me to "spacialize" the sample banks so that as they played back, they would move around the 5.1 surround sound environment within the space.

We opened the concert with a sort of structured improvisation using this software. I then incorporated it into "Sunday Silence" and "Twelve Times Goodbye." "Sunday Silence" begins with the guitar, violin, and clarinet all playing their lowest available "e" pitch. The violin and clarinet sustain theirs in long notes and I tremolo pick my guitar as fast as I can. Meanwhile, I capture five long loops of this and pile them up on top of one another.

The effect is that of this huge drone that becomes rich in overtones. And because the loops are all different lengths, repeating at different intervals, and because the source material is purely organic in that it comes from live instrumentalists, the drone is completely dynamic. This is a marked contrast to much "electronic" music which is based on repetition of the same, often prerecorded, material.

At the climax of "Sunday Silence," the drone reenters, this time transposed down an octave, and becomes the foundation of "Twelve Times Goodbye." As the instruments move through their different harmonic areas, the drone moves with them, constantly underpinning the bass. I liked the effect of this both aesthetically and conceptually. On a pure aesthetic level, I like the thickness that it lends to what is essentially the finale of the program. Conceptually, I like that these relentless and emotionally charged melodies in the clarinet and violin weave around the steady gait of the Rhodes and guitar, which in turn move over this amorphous bed of sound that ultimately has been generated by the ensemble itself.

5. The artwork, like the music, is pretty minimalist. What is its significance and how did you decide upon it?

The Woolworth space had unbelievable views and those views inspired me in my writing. Again, I knew that I was writing this music for a particular concert, and I happened to be able to project video at the concert as well. So I bought a video camera and would set it up before I set out to write each evening. I would capture different things every night - the cars snaking up Manhattan's major arteries, pedestrians walking to the subway, the skyline as the city's buildings' lights would come on.... The artwork for the album came from stills from the video I ultimately used to accompany Animus. The pedestrians you see are on Barclay and Church Street - right outside of the ground zero site.

Audiversinquiry (10 Questions We Ask Everyone)

1. What did you specifically remember listening to as a child that triggered a notable response?

The Beatles' "Please Please Me" was the first record I asked for and received when I was about 6. Around that same age, I used to ask my mother to stop playing her "prehistoric music" - I meant Beethoven and Mozart. At some point I had a change of heart about the merits of that music! The first music I bought for myself was "Who Made Who" by AC/DC. I did this specifically because my neighbor and best friend at the time - who was 14 to my 10 - used to make me mix tapes of stuff he was listening to that I liked. I was really into "You Shoot Me All Night Long," but he wouldn't make me a tape of it because he thought my mother wouldn't approve of the line, "Workin' double time on the seduction line..." So I had to buy it myself.

The first music I heard on CD was U2's "Joshua Tree." I remember when my father brought home a CD player and that CD as well as the Beatles' "Rubber Soul" and the "Dirty Dancing" soundtrack for my sisters. When the opening fade to "Where the Streets Have No Name" came on, I thought it was one of the coolest things I had ever heard. But the first time I completely lost my mind to music was listening to "Sergeant Pepper's" at night on headphones as a 12-year-old.

2. You are heading across town this moment and will have time to listen to one complete album during the trip, what would you listen to?

It's after one in the morning now, so I'm up for something broody, mellow, and relatively new. I'd have to say "Boxer" by the National. It's a great record by one of my favorite bands to break out in the last couple of years.

3. Are there any other media that you draw inspiration from? Books, authors, painters, actors, movies, celebrities, etc?

My two studio/roommates are both incredible artists - Jose Lerma is a painter and Mark Schubert a sculptor. They both do amazing work are fortunately doing quite well in their careers as artists. I love hearing what they have to say about art and specifically their critiques of my music because they understand the work from a perspective that I value, but one that is very different from what I get when discussing music with other musicians. Their values tend to be purely about the work as art and not as craft. Many musicians - including myself - get so caught up in craft of making music that we lose sight of what we're doing and why we're doing it.

4. Where do you go to discover new music and sounds?

I don't have a specific process for this, but I try to constantly reevaluate what I'm listening for in music and sound and why. Lately, I've been interested in examining the subtleties of acoustic instruments - "putting them under the microscope" as they say. "The Future According to Yesterday" is in many ways a very "clean" record. And as I've lived with it, I've found that the clarinet key clicks, the breathing, the scrape of the violin bow, the nail on the guitar string - little "human" details, artifacts that some would say “dirty up” the record - are things that I really enjoy. So the new music that I am writing and recording takes this into account.

5. What question do you get most often that you hate answering?

Oh, you're a guitarist? Do you play rhythm or lead?

6. Favorite instruments or specific sounds?

I love the sound of the human voice and especially great choirs.

7. The record store is closing in ten minutes and you are hell-bent on buying something before they close, what section do you head immediately towards?

Usually the "avant-garde" section, which must be a mistake because I'm almost always disappointed with my purchase.

8. What is the last notable daydream you had and where did it take place?

I'm a relatively young man. My daydreams are fairly predictable - don't they say something about “every seven seconds”?

9. What is the perfect album to you? Are there any? Is it possible?

In spite of what I said earlier about conceiving of my own music as a program, I've never really been an "album" person. But I think that "Pet Sounds" is a masterpiece both as a collection of individual songs as well as an entire statement. And I think if I were to come up with criteria for designating an album "great" it would be just that: the majority of the songs have to be great unto themselves and the entire collection has to mean something as a broader statement.

10. Do you keep up with blogs? Which do you read if so?

Honestly, not until recently. Since releasing the record, I've begun reading many more music blogs and webzines such as yours as well as The Silent Ballet, Quarter Life Party, Night After Night, The Rest Is Noise, Almost Cool, Stereo Subversion, Epic India, and Pitchfork. Beyond that, I pretty much get my news from the New York Times, Harper's, the New Yorker, the Village Voice, and my personal favorite, the Onion.

Interversity: Fog

Fog mastermind Andrew Broder was nice enough to answer a few questions for this week's Interversity column. His latest release on Lex Records, Ditherer, is a hearty helping of anthemic avant-pop, and it has yet to leave my CD player since I got a hold of it a few weeks back. His answers may not be as quirky as his lyrics, but they still provide plenty of insight into the wonderfully unpredictable musical world that is Fog:



Fog - "I Have Been Wronged" - Ditherer ( Lex 2007)

1. I credited the eclectic mix of styles strewn throughout Fog's avant-pop sound to your unconventional evolution as a musician, which I roughly and broadly described as "punk rocker turned acclaimed hip-hop DJ turned 4-track experimenter turned bedroom singer/songwriter turned quirky avant-rocker." Firstly, how accurate was my assessment? And, are these stylistic transitions inspired by a need to branch out and take on new challenges, out of boredom with revisiting a particular sound, or is it something completely unconscious?

I'd say that's reasonably accurate. Being the typical, whiny artist(e), I can say honestly that in the moment, I was never trying to be any of those things (except maybe the hip-hop DJ part), that I always just try to think of myself as a musician, and that I make an effort to transcend those boundaries, blah blah blah. The changes over time have been a result of all the reasons you mentioned- plus, in general, I have a tendency to mimic what I am predominantly listening to at a given time, and that changes frequently due to short-attention span.

2. Ditherer sounds to me like the most assured, accessible and anthemic Fog album to date; was it intentional to write a lot of anthem-like songs or was it more an unforeseen characteristic that arose while writing the album?

It was very intentional to write songs with a certainty to them, and more thoughtfully structured and arranged. A lot of that has to do with a) recording demos first, which I had never done before and b) recording as a unit, rather than on my own.

3. You collaborate with a number of different artists on Ditherer (including members of Dosh, Why?, Pedestrian Mount Eerie, Low and Andrew Bird); how much influence did they have in rounding out the sound on the album? Has it caused you to approach writing music in any different manner than before?

I don't know if it had an effect on the songwriting itself, but it certainly helped the songs achieve more of a universal feel to have different voices and ideas in the mix. The album is in large part an attempt to get rid of the insular feel of one-man recordings.

4. One of the most idiosyncratic and intriguing aspect of the Fog sound is the endearingly quirky lyrics; does anything in particular influence your writing style? Are the lyrics written prior to or in response to the music?

Prior to in the sense that I usually amass a bunch of different ideas, and them try them out over different musical ideas in progress and see what works. Usually, something subliminal happens where I am working on some chords or a basic phrase, and some lyrics I wrote before that will magically slide into place. There is some luck involved. In particular I have influenced lately by books, rather than song lyrics. I like writers like George Saunders and Donald Bartheleme. I also draw from the language of day to day culture whether its slang, or things you see printed on products or in advertising, or just something you overhear somebody say that sticks with you.

5. With so many stylistic influences and such an unpredictable and diverse discography, do you strive to reinvent the Fog sound with each successive album? Is it getting easier or tougher from a songwriting perspective with each record?

I guess so. We don't want to be reinventing the wheel for it's own sake, but why be a musician if not to grow and change? That's where the excitement is, at least for me. As far as getting easier or harder, I don't know. After a record is finished, I usually experience a total drought of ideas, and have to force myself to get back into writing again. By the time I do, my tastes have shifted, and I want to hear new sounds.

Audiversinquiry (10 questions we ask everyone)

1. What did you specifically remember listening to as a child that triggered a notable response?

Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot. Then, U2. Then, Jimi Hendrix. Then Miles Davis. Then stuff like Living Colour and Fishbone, then De La Soul, and so on up until present day... Lots of different "phases."

2. Let's say you are heading across town this moment and will have time to listen to one complete album during the trip, what would you listen to?

Right now, either Panda Bear's album or Lil Wayne Drought 3.

3. Are there any other media that you draw inspiration from? Books, authors, painters, actors, movies, celebrities, etc?

See above authors... Right now, I am reading a book called "Gargoyles" by Thomas Bernhard . Amazing. "Three Novellas" by him is also amazing. I don't really watch movies. The last movie I watched was the one where Harrison Ford is the president and has to save Air Force One. I believe it's called "Air Force One", and it may be the stupidest film of all time.

4. Where do you go to discover new music and sounds?

Our drummer Tim has gotten me hip to lots of Black Metal, as has Aquarius Records(.org) where you can listen to samples online. There's a radio show in Mpls. called Strictly Butter that plays Minimal and Dubstep that I like quite a bit. The Wire is a good magazine to discover new stuff. Other than that, mainly friends just telling me about shit. I despise 90% of new music that I hear, particularly in the "indie" realm, but there's definitely a lot of wonderful stuff still, to seek out and is exciting.

5. What question do you get most often that you hate answering?

There's no question that I HATE answering, but I do think it's incredibly boring to talk about what label we're on, or things like that, un-related to what the music sounds like. Any question that is a re-wording of something stated on a press release.

6. Favorite instruments or specific sounds?

It's very hard to argue with how an 808 drum machine sounds.

7. The record store is closing in ten minutes and you are hell-bent on buying something before they close, what section do you head immediately towards?

Yo, it's 2007: What's a record store? What are records?

8. What is the last notable daydream you had and where did it take place?

Whew- I do a lot of that... Difficult to pick one out. I daydream about having my own professional recording studio. I guess that's the most prominent one right now.

9. What is the perfect album to you? Are there any? Is it possible?

Yeah, perfect is a funny word, but sure, I have albums that in my mind can do no wrong: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Ask the Ages by Sonny Sharrock, Illmatic.... way way too many to mention.

10. Do you keep up with blogs? Which do you read if so?

I do, but only in the vain and desperate search for my own name, or the names of my friends. My eyes glaze over the rest.