Relix love
Posted: Tue May 24, 2005 7:04 pm
the new relix gots a little blurb of SMMD at the knitting factory
check it out!
check it out!
yes. i get it mailed to me, with my name on it, and i never subscribed. also, relix is written by degenerate journalists. bleh.Tara wrote:Does anyone else just get this thing mailed to them? We never subscribed to it and we get them all the time. I kinda hate Relix, but I always read it anyways.
Andrew Barr discusses his current focus on improvisation:
"I think right now my focus as an improviser has been about creating a space—making sure the sound of the drums are going to create a warm space for Brad and Marc to play on. I’ve really focused on my time so that it’s solid enough so I can get really open, and not push the music in a direction that’s going to force them to play something. It’s kind of like creating different orbits all at once—where we’re all on the same page with the sound. That’s really where I’m at these days with the focus of my playing. It’s this really big pool of rhythm, not where I’m playing really fast and then the soloist has to play very fast. It’s more like I could be playing really fast, but you’re feeling these huge cycles happening underneath. Or I could be playing really slow and so sure of the time that you can break it up any way you want on top. And we still do a lot of this within a 4/4 groove that people can dance to. I like to keep a groove going so people can grasp it and latch on to it. I don’t like to abandon it too quickly. I like to watch people dance. I think it’s healthy. I’ve noticed that I've been sweating more lately—more than ever before. I think it's because the sound is more aggressive and bigger. I used to play with a smaller drum set with smaller cymbals, where the music had less atmosphere. That’s coming from me as a drummer; the songs are happening within these rhythms and atmospheres I’m talking about, but that can be totally different from Brad’s perspective. He can be playing a straight-ahead folk tune, but I still like to have that polyrhythm and atmosphere pool happening underneath it. We were talking the other day about the difference between instrumental music or electronic music and somebody like Bob Dylan. I have a true love for both of them, although in my life they’ve had different places. Sometimes I like to just lie down and close my eyes and listen to instrumental music that can fill my mind with intense imagery, and other times I might be feeling certain emotions and I look for that voice to nourish it with some insight—like a Bob Dylan love song. I have a love for both of those and they have a different place in my life. But with our music, we’re trying to run them down the same road and see if there’s a way to create music that has a lot of mystery and imagery on it’s own instrumentally and then have that lyrical insight as well."
"As a trio, we really like having the voice as an instrument. I know a lot of people don’t even know the lyrics to our songs. They will love a song and know how it goes melodically and how the form goes, but not even know a single word (laughs).
Andrew on The Slip’s current live show:
"A lot of our songs we just couldn’t play the same two nights in a row—they’re built for change. I think some people think that we have two sounds…or just that our older stuff was more instrumental than songs, and they might like this or that more. I feel that now we’ve been able to marry the two better than ever, but I guess some people see that as alienating the instrumental aspect."
Andrew on the progression of their sound:
"It keeps things alive. The music is not stagnant. It’s not like, “They sound like this, they will always sound like this, and you either like it or you don’t.” Now there’s room for new people and maybe…I understand that over the years our music has had a certain effect on some people’s lives and maybe now they’re done with it. That’s fine and that’s great, and maybe now there are new people who will like us for different reasons."
Here’s an excerpt from Mike’s conversation with Brad regarding set lists:
Brad Barr: If you looked at the set list you might see a lot of similarities and say, ‘Wow, I don’t see how it’s different every night.’ I think there are a lot of subtle things happening, from our perspective, that keep it different. We’ll get up to sound check and spend twenty minutes discovering new sounds that we can use that night, or new arrangements for the songs. But every show is different, even if the show had the exact same set list, the show would be completely different. We’re embracing that idea that it’s all right to play three or four or five of the same songs every night. First of all, they’re your favorite songs right now, you’re going to play them with the most energy and conviction, the audience you’re playing for each night is different, and there are only a handful of bands out there that make it a point to play a different set every night. Phish was obviously one of those bands, but that’s a standard that we don’t necessarily feel obliged to hold ourselves to. Naturally, the sets change up. There were some complaints recently on our web page—people bitching about us playing the same songs. I want to just explain to them that it’s a core part of entertainment—it’s a show, and you have something that means something really important to you, you want to take it out on the road. The standards that they set probably come from Phish and the Grateful Dead and the jamband scene where you’re not supposed to repeat songs.
Mike McKinley: Right, right, where it’s against the rules to play the same song two nights in a row.
BB: I don’t know where that law comes from or whose business it is to uphold it. We do that naturally with our sets, but we are going to repeat songs because we love them.
MM: Right. And like you said, those are the songs you are playing with the most energy and conviction. I had a discussion with my friend Pablo about this, and he was saying that he’ll go out and see you play a few nights in a row and you’ll play your new songs every night, and he said it’s like watching them develop and watching you perfect them. And that’s not only with the song, but also with the different avenues you can take for improvisation.
BB: If it’s a new song, you become more familiar with it and it becomes a recognizable thing to the audience. When “Sometimes True to Nothing” came out nobody responded to it at all. It just didn’t go over. We kept playing it and working at it and finding places where we could open up on it or where we can add cool effects like Andrew bringing the drums in and out. Eventually, we learned it so well that we could convey the emotion that made it a classic song.