Short Superficial Interview with Greg Anderson from Sunn O))) about Monoliths and Dimensions: Tuesday, July 21 2009

This is something I can do with this "blog": house transcripts of interviews I do. In my articles, I often only use about three quotes from a 15-20 minute interview, meaning that a fair amount of material I'd like to use just goes down the shitter. Here I can make the unused gold (a.k.a. interview chaff) available and provide commentary about the interview and article writing process. Hopefully this commentary will help me become a better writer (it won't).

This was the second time I've interviewed Greg Anderson. Based on the first time I knew he'd be a very considerate interviewee (during out last interview he needlessly apologised for potentially insinuating that his stereo was better than most people's), so I wasn't too stressed about it. However, in an interview with The Wire, Stephen O'Malley said that journalists have a responsibility to get an accurate experience of the music they write about by listening to it on high quality speakers. I constantly worry that I'm doing a cut-rate job because of short deadlines and bad prep (didn't get sent a copy of Monoliths & Dimensions, had to download it the night before the interview), so that just reinforced my anxiety, because I was listening to their album on a shitty microsystem that I went halves with my sister in when I was about 18.

Plus, it only became evident a few minutes before the interview how much I liked the album, how much one could think and say about it, and how much more time I'd need in order to draft a proper set of questions for the interview. Then the phone rang and this happened:

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MG: OK, where are you?

GA: I’m in Los Angeles, in the Southern Lord office. Working away.


MG: On Sunn O))) stuff?

GA: I’m always working on Sunn O))) stuff, but I’m also working on some other stuff. The new [Sunn O)))] record came out recently, we just came back from touring the mid-west, and all summer we’re doing two week jaunts to different regions of the US. Then there’ll be some European shows, and hopefully some in Australia and Japan in January.


MG: [Inaudible]

GA: When you’re working with any group that’s usually the case, but we worked so hard on this record. We took so much time with it, more than we’d taken with any record in the past. We worked everything out to its fullest extent.


MG: What was more satisfying, the creative achievement or the logistical achievement?

GA: That’s a really good question because both were equally challenging [laughs]. To me the most satisfying is the creative part of it. The logistical side is satisfying too but on a different level, because so many things can go wrong, and most of the time things do go wrong. So when things go right or when you figure things out, that’s a good feeling too. The creative aspect of this record, I feel a real sense of accomplishment. We pushed ourselves in a new way, in a lot of new ways that we had never done before, and by challenging ourselves we came up with things that were way beyond any of our expectations.


MG: What’d you do to incorporate all the instruments and sounds?

GA: We had to be patient, open-minded... we really have to thank all the players who were involved that they were patient and open-minded in creating stuff for this record. A lot of the work and sounds you hear on this record are the result of mixing and editing that Mell Dettmer and Randall Dunn did, because blending 36 tracks of strings with 24 tracks of guitar and bass is a large task, and they did a really good job. We really wanted it to sound natural and heavy and alive, and they really achieved that.


MG: With the separate players on the album, were you around when they made their parts?

GA: It was different for everyone. As far as the brass or strings go, Eyvind Kang organised the players and [inaudible] composed the score for them to play. In so many words we hired him and the majority of his contribution is the arranging and composing and organising the different ensembles for the record. Out of those ensembles, we didn’t talk to each person individually, that was something Evan did. He was basically responsible for communicating with them. The choir, that was four different women that are part of the Viennese Women’s Experimental Choir group, and Eyvind’s wife, Jessika Kenney, who is also on the record, had worked with them before, and we wanted to have her on the record, and she said, “I’ve been working with this choir group in Vienna, I think they’d be perfect for this,” so she told them the ideas she had, and the score she had was from Eyvind.


MG: When did Eyvind hear the music he was going to be doing arrangements for?

GA: He came into the studio when we were tracking, so he was listening to that and getting ideas. When we finished something that was a foundational idea he’d listen to that and digest it, and try to come up with ideas to expand that piece of music. By adding the different ensembles, that’s what he was hoping to do.


MG: So it was like, do the Sunn O))) noise stuff, then do the Eyvind other stuff?

GA: There was stuff that was added later, even after Eyvind was done. You can look at it like a call-and-response thing where we recorded something, Eyvind added some tracks to it, then we listened to that and added some things we wanted to add. But a lot of the moulding of the final versions of these songs was the result of blending or editing these tracks, because like a lot of Sunn O))) records we basically went in there and recorded three or four hours worth of material, then what we’ve been doing over the last couple of years and last couple of records is sorting through this material and finding moments that we think are strong and piecing them together.


MG: There’s no plan?

GA: Not really. A lot of the way we approach these records is we try not to think about what it’s going to sound like on the other end, it’s more about focusing on the music in the moment, and the surprise is what comes out in the end. When you’re sitting there in the editing stage of the recording there’s a lot of surprises that reveal themselves, because we try not to have a lot of preconceived ideas that we have at the beginning and we methodically try to see through to the end, it’s more about surprises and happy accidents. The pieces of music take on their own different directions based on us trying not to impose these strict boundaries.


MG: The big difference I see between Monoliths and Black One is that Black One seemed kind of claustrophobic and hopeless whereas this one is more soothing and open. Is that a result of a change in mood?

GA: I don’t know if we verbally admitted it. The album is a reflection of where our personalities were at at the time too. It had been three years since we recorded Black One, and a lot had happened to us personally and each of us had changed in that time. This album has a lot more depth and showcases a lot more emotional characteristics than just darkness. There’s a lot of light on this record. It wasn’t a conscious decision, that’s just where the players were at in their heads at that time.


MG: Monoliths sounds more akin to the record you did with Boris.

GA: That was a really valuable and intense recording experience for Stephen and I that we hadn’t had before. I think any experience you have in life ends up becoming a reflection of what you come up with at that moment. It was especially familiar since we not only recorded Monoliths & Dimensions in the same studio as Altar, we recorded with the same engineer, and the same woman helped mix the record. It was a similar vibe in a lot of ways, but obviously we wanted to challenge ourselves and not make music that was too derivative of Altar. Especially the use of dynamics on Altar, and the song The Sinking Bell, where it’s a lot more subtle and there’s a lot less distortion in the sound, I think that definitely was an influence. But also the fact that we accomplished Altar, that we challenged ourselves and we were happy with it, to me that was a great success. It was like, we can do something without being a massive wall of sound if we want to, and there’s some of that going on in Monoliths.


MG: How do you come to pair up with some of the very different, very talented contributors you work with?

GA: There’s not a set process, but this record we really wanted to work with Attila. He’s someone we worked with in the live setting a lot, he’s been on some of our records as well, but we’ve never worked in the studio face to face, so that’s something we wanted to do with this record. He responded strongly to some of the pieces we wrote, and wrote lyrics based on how the riffs and sounds made him feel. And vice-versa, his lyrics inspired us to have a visual when we were creating these tracks. On the last track we though it would be very strong to have no vocals at all, and because it doesn’t have any vocals you focus on the music and where the music is going, rather than having a voice guiding you there, and in some cases having a voice distracting you. There’s a distinct and strong movement in that song that I think is stronger without vocals, I don’t think it needed vocals. Attila is on three out of four songs, which I think is really appropriate. It’s kind of based on what we feel is appropriate for each song. We judge it on how it feels and what it’s begging for.


MG: What effect does that have?

GA: Well, I think it’s cool. It gives you another dimension to the music, another thing to think about. It’s something we strongly decided to do on the Altar record on the first track Etna. I had a concept like, let’s make this song like an erupting volcano, something really simple like that. I had some pictures that went with it as well, the actual volcano called Etna. I had some articles as well, and it was a tool that we used to conjure or create some music based on visuals and text. That’s exactly what Attila brought into the studio for all the tracks. Argartha is his concept about the hollow earth, and he had all these pictures and texts about these theories, and being able to bounce these ideas off each other in person helped strengthen the collaboration.


MG: Why is collaboration such an important part of your music?

GA: I just think it helps expand the music and helps make the music unique. I don’t get bored, to put it simply, when there’s different people involved. It’s interesting to see how different personalities work together and what kind of chemistry can be created between these personalities. For Sunn O))), it really helps take the music beyond the individuals and create something that is completely different and stands on its own force.


MG: It sounds very process based, where you’re not focused so much on a final vision but rather the act of creating.

GA: There’s a little bit of both on this record actually. What you first mentioned is actually what Ayvind did, he had a vision and he brought in different players to realise the vision, but it was this multi-layered thing where his vision was based on what he was hearing in the sounds we’d already created. But what you’re saying rings true for the majority of the way we do things, the direction of the music evolves out of the chemistry of the players. It’s not the players dictating the direction, it’s a group sound rather than an individual sound of a person saying ‘do this, play it this way’. It’s about us playing together without a lot of boundaries. The overall sound is what is important.


MG: Do you get a lot of people asking to work on your records?

GA: Here and here, but a lot of it is based on relationships that are already existing, or that happen, or there’s a natural desire for each of the players.


MG: In an interview you said that this album contain your most “abstract” set of chords yet. What do you mean by that?

GA: That’s difficult to define, but maybe in that context abstract means opposed to what is considered a normal set of chords, or a normal sound. Maybe unorthodox is a better term for that. Something that is different from what we’ve done before and I guess what bands would normally play.

HERE WE A-GO-GO A-GO-GO-GAIN

This is a blog I've made in order to follow the various other Blogger-brand blogs I've noticed people blogging in. I'm no fan of blogs normally, but I like reading what people I know think about stuff. I'll try to make this blog useful for myself, but I have a terrible track record of doing that, so I make no promises. Then again, another motivator behind this blog is procrastination from my honours thesis, so perhaps that will spur me to create some content. (It won't.)