Jack: Hello, guys. I'm joined today by the Beat Detectives. We've got Aaron Anderson and Chris Hontos. Welcome to the podcast.
Chris: What's up, Jack?
Aaron: Hi, Jack.
Jack: Hi, what's up? I guess I'll start with Aaron. I'll ask my question that I ask everybody, which is how did you come to get into music and how did you come to know that music was something that's important to you? And also, you work in video as well, that's a big part of your artistic output. I'm curious about all of that stuff, just how you came to know that art and music was what you wanted to do in your life. So what's your origin story with all that?
Aaron: I don't know. [laughter] I grew up in South Dakota, and I don't know, I just ended up... [laughter]
Chris: Sorry, go ahead. [laughter]
Aaron: No, I grew up in South Dakota. Early or later '90s is when I graduated from high school. I got into music when I was a kid through my dad having tapes in his car and we would listen to them. I was really into the side B of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," that one single long song. I definitely remember listening to that and that Rolling Stones greatest hits where it's just the head inside the head inside the head picture. There was a Pink Floyd album, maybe a Grateful Dead tape or something, but it was whatever was in the car and then radio type stuff. What else? I don't know. I was in a band in high school. That was probably the first time where I really got into playing music in front of people. And it was cool, we were called Kiddie Litter. [laughter] We played some originals and we played a couple Rage covers, a couple Deftones songs. I was pretty into nü metal for a period of time. And then I guess that's when I got into music. I had CDs and cassette tapes, I had a cousin that dubbed me a Korn album, the first Korn album, and I remember that being, like... Nobody else liked that music in South Dakota. And I grew up in a class of 40 people and went to kindergarten with all of them and graduated with them. So it was pretty in the middle of nowhere.
Jack: What town was it?
Aaron: I grew up in this town called Chester. I guess it's the closest town, which is, like... [laughter]
Jack: It's not even the town, it's the name of the closest town.
Aaron: Yeah, totally. It's ten blocks long and 200 people, that kind of vibe. But I don't know, it was kind of a weird era of music too. I would go to shows in Sioux Falls in high school and go to this place called the Pomp Room. There was a year where it was Marilyn Manson, Blink-182, Less Than Jake. All these Interscope bands, I guess on their third tier market tour or something. But it was cool and a lot of fun. It was crazy.
Jack: Do you remember how you found out about more of a local or DIY scene?
Aaron: I mean, there really wasn't one. I saw a band called the Muffins and...
Chris: Never heard of them. [laughter]
Aaron: Yeah, they were some ska band, but they played with Pansy Division and there were as many people at that show as there would be at Blink-182 and Less Than Jake, it seemed to me. But I didn't really know anybody else at the shows or anything. I was just some kid in the back, just sort of being like, "This is fucking crazy." But then in my band in high school, there was one other band and they played Radiohead songs and they hated us because we were, like...
Jack: The other band from Chester. [laughter] 2 bands.
Aaron: They were from a town called Madison, which is a little bit bigger. But yeah, it was pretty standard, I guess. But then I went to college and I feel like I stopped listening to music. I was hanging out with these people who hated music. I don't know if they really meant what they said, but...
Jack: That's actually really fascinating. [laughter]
Chris: Do you mean John Tapp?
Aaron: John Tapp is the person that I'm talking about. [laughter] He only listened to Talking Heads and Ween, basically.
Jack: He sounds like a guy who hates music, for sure. [laughter]
Aaron: I appreciated the humorous aspects about both of those bands, I guess. The first time I ever got into a scene or something was right after I graduated from college. I started hanging out with the Plastic Constellations and all these Minneapolis bands. And then these bands from Iowa City, I guess "post Ten Grand" bands, is what they would call them, like the Shadow Government and all that stuff, Will Whitmore. That was the first time where I ever was like, "Oh, these people all know each other and they're invested in each other's output creatively."
Jack: Where did you go to college?
Aaron: And I went to college at MCAD, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. I went to school for animation, that's why I moved to Minneapolis from South Dakota. That's kind of how I got into video. I worked as a projectionist at the Walker for a long time too, which was also a cool way to backdoor into learning about Terry Riley, or something like that.
Chris: But Aaron, was Radical Cemetery your first actual band in Minneapolis?
Aaron: Yes. And we started playing when I was 27 years old. It was pretty late as far as I spent my early twenties in an art collective where we worked with... I don't know, it's pretty complex and convoluted. Basically we were just a lot of kids hanging out, it was me and Eric Carlson and this girl, Crystal, and we just made a lot of work together. Crystal Quinn's her name. I guess the idea behind it was we were doing stuff with rappers and they all had this fake tough persona and we were interested in redirecting that. Or it just seemed fake to me at the time. And that's sort of how we started making art together, doing this weird noise band, rap performances or something, getting two different crews together to overlap in this way that felt unusual, subversive or something. Yeah, maybe subversive.
Jack: Are there recordings of this?
Aaron: I don't know. Probably somewhere.
Chris: There's Radical Cemetery tapes out there! They're really crazy and really good and they have amazing graphic design. I have to request that you have to tell them about Purple Rain.
Aaron: Oh yeah, Purple Rain. That was pretty... that was stupid. So, I'd never seen Purple Rain before and people in Minnesota, in Minneapolis, are very proud of Prince in this way, that not being from there it felt weird, kind of culty or something like that. I love Prince, he's amazing, he's super cool and I agree with everything but there it was just the way that people talked about it. I felt an outsider to that. So the first time I watched Purple Rain, Eric and I ran it through a couple delay pedals and a Kaoss Pad and we recorded it. Then we did a screening of that at this micro cinema in Minneapolis. It was pretty torturous in my opinion. [laughter]
Jack: You got run out of town after that?
Aaron: No, nobody really cared. But it was just, like, bad effects. And it would do this thing where it would cut back 5 minutes, kind of randomly. And it happened twice throughout, but it made it feel like it was just going to keep going, you lost any sense of beginning and end.
[Radical Cemetery Stoned Minors]
Jack: Why don't we then cross over and go over to Chris? Same question: what was your early experience with music and how did you get to know that's what you wanted to do?
Chris: I actually still don't know if that's what I want to do. [laughter]
Jack: Good man.
Chris: But it's something I just do compulsively anyway. Yeah, I don't know. My dad had a tape, it was one of those clear Memorex, it had neon yellow and pink on it. And he had written on it "Bob Malrey - Reggie Music." [sic] So that was pretty cool, I loved listening to that. Let me think. The first album I ever bought was Ace of Base The Sign, which kind of was embarrassing for a minute. And then I revisited the record as an adult and I was like, "Oh, this is a fucking awesome album, actually." A digital rasta production is really cool and I fuck with that still. Let's see, I really liked Guns N' Roses Use Your Illusion 2, that song "Estranged" really got me every time. [laughter] I don't know why, I have not revisited that one. I played piano for about five years and that was fun. It was fun until I realized you have to fucking practice every day and I was 12 or 13 years old. I'm like, "I don't want to do this anymore." So that was the end of my formal education in music. My dad owned a Greek deli in downtown Saint Cloud, Minnesota, and next door was the Electric Fetus.
Jack: Totally, I used to go to that.
Chris: My favorite place. I would work a lunch shift and I'd walk out of there with about $4 in change and tips. And then I would go over and buy two or three used CDs with that money, I basically would just look for whatever looked really punk and then I'd take it home and listen to it. That was huge for me, listening to that stuff. I never had ambitions of being in a band, I never thought I could do it. But I met someone really cool in high school named Geoff Hamerlinck, who's a really, really good friend. We started a band called Check Behind Neck. He was playing wild free jazz drumming, just insane person stuff. And I just played guitar or bass, or I guess in the case of our second show, I played my motorcycle. I drove it into this little DIY venue, and revved the engine.
Aaron: I was at that show too.
Chris: And Aaron was at that show! That's right. But we didn't know each other at that time, coincidentally.
Jack: How old were you at that point, Chris?
Chris: I was probably 18. I don't know what year that was. I guess 2002/3.
Aaron: 2003/4, probably.
Chris: Yeah, so maybe I was 19.
Jack: Was this in Minneapolis?
Chris: St. Cloud.
This was in St. Cloud. Why were you [Aaron] in St. Cloud?
Chris: I mean, I grew up there.
Jack: No, I know, but why was Aaron at it?
Chris: Yeah, why were you there?
Aaron: I was there with the Plastic Constellations. I was just hanging out. I was just a groupie, ultimately. I mean, they were fun. They were awesome to hang out with. You know, friendship, rock & roll...
Jack: Having grown up in Minneapolis and my mom being from St. Joseph, I'm just like, why would anyone ever go hang out in St. Cloud if they lived in Minneapolis?
Chris: I share the sentiment. [laughter]
Aaron: That band Kill the Vultures was playing. I was really into that band.
Chris: Oh yeah, that was cool.
Aaron: Yeah, spooky rap.
Chris: Yeah. So Check Behind Neck, that was my band, and it was literally just a performance art project before we knew what performance art was. It was our way of being the only weirdos in a small town and just being like, "Fuck all you people." Not antagonistically, but in a way of just being the weirdest possible vibe to set off the most normal possible vibe, you know? Classic teenage shit. And that was it. I mean, we just played a few shows and it was purely us blowing off steam. I didn't play music again for almost ten years. I feel it wasn't until my late twenties that I actually picked up a synthesizer and started actually having an ambition to realistically play music. But in that time, I just listened voraciously to every possible thing, you know, loved music, loved jazz, loved John Coltrane, loved Velvet Underground, loved Aphex Twin, punk and hardcore, Discharge. I think the first electronic music that I got into was probably Aphex Twin, but actually the deeper one is this album that I was telling you about last week, Jack: Bomb 20. It's on Digital Hardcore Recordings, and it's this guy who passed away, but it's this one album I bought at Media Play in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and I had no idea what it was. I put it on and I was like, "This is the most fucked up thing I've ever heard." And it blew my mind. That album still is actually one of the coolest albums I've ever heard. Everyone should give that a spin. But that kind of opened up my mind a little bit. I remember one distinct moment in my early 20s, maybe 21, 22, whatever year Beaches and Canyons came out, and Dead Hills by Wolf Eyes. And I got both of them because I worked at the radio station, 2003/4, maybe even somewhere around there I had heard noise music. I was into some things and I was really into anything adjacent to punk and hardcore, but those two albums came in to the radio station that I worked at and I brought them home and I was like, "What the fuck is this shit?" Mind blowing, absolutely confounding. Like, "What? Who are these people and how, why would they possibly do this?" You know? That was the impression, I was just like, "This is crazy." Never in a million years did I think I could ever do something like that. I don't think I've ever done anything as good as those two albums. But that was so far away from my mentality. I was just in awe of what this shit was.
Jack: When did you move to Minneapolis?
Chris: Probably right around that. Probably that same year, 2000. I don't know the numbers, to be honest. I was 20... 22. I graduated from college, moved to Minneapolis.
Jack: Where did you go to college?
Chris: St. Cloud State University. A very prestigious university. Got my philosophy degree.
Jack: Wow, very interesting. I'm sure that still plays a very large role in your life, everything you studied in undergrad. [laughter]
Chris: Yeah, I think about Descartes every day. It's crazy. [laughter]
Jack: Totally. So then you moving to Minneapolis, obviously, from...
Chris: A small town. I mean, I actually grew up going to shows at First Avenue and doing all the Minneapolis things, going to the Church, going to 1021 House. Is that what that one was? Is it 1021, or something like that, House? I went there twice. Yeah, and of Organ House right before I moved to Minneapolis, which is a key historical player that Aaron and Eric had a lot of crossover at.
Jack: I'm curious, how did you get into going to DIY shows?
Chris: It started with a place called the Medusa. I mean, there was Mala's and then there was the Church. But then when those places were done, Medusa came up. You know, you go to those places as a shy young kid and you're like, "This is the coolest thing I've ever seen. I cannot even process trying to talk to anyone because they're still much cooler than I am. These are the coolest people that I feel akin to, but I also don't feel I belong in any way to this scene." And then because of the particular Minnesotan way of how people communicate and are bonded in these experiences, you basically see the same shows with the same people for five years, and then you start to open up a small conversation and then you become friends. I was also a pretty shy person, but I feel I put in my time and I barely got any real social interactions out of that. But it was still just so inspiring and so awesome to be around it.
Jack: How did you hear about what shows were happening?
Chris: Well, there was a website, a message board called the Modern Radio Message Board. This guy, Tom Loftus, ran this label called Modern Radio Records in Minneapolis, and there was a message board. And I remember a few key figures, everyone would post all the DIY shows there. People would shoot off their mouths. People would pontificate about which Wire album...
Aaron: You could learn about Captain Beefheart there. That's where I learned Beefheart chronology and hierarchy for the first time. And I was like, "Oh, this is a thing."
Chris: It was very guitar oriented. I feel the scene in general in Minneapolis has always been very guitar centric. So it was a lot of guitar. Anything that fully had no guitars in it was pretty much not in the realm of what people were interested in. But still, there's a lot of great guitar music. So I learned a lot about all that stuff and connected with some people on that board. Got out to the shows at Medusa and then one day eventually played a show there, and then that kind of triggered everything.
Jack: You said you didn't really play music for another however many years.
Chris: And then what happened was I was working at the Hennepin County central library, and there was this guy named Michael Wethington, who I worked with, who I bonded with, became friends with, and he had a Moog Little Phatty synthesizer. And I was like, "Huh, maybe we should start a band. Here's what it's going to be: it's going to be a Neu! cover band. We just play "Hallogallo" for 45 minutes and that's it. That's easy, right?"
Jack: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Chris: As it turns out, it's literally impossible.
Jack: It's one of the hardest things you can possibly do.
Chris: I know, it's a fool's errand. So there's this other guy named Chris Farstad, these are two of my oldest best friends. We started a band called Food Pyramid basically to replicate Neu! "Hallogallo." We did that band for five or six years after that and every single time we put out an album, we tried to do that. We never even got close. It just became this other thing where it was like, "Okay, we just can't do that, so let's just try and replicate other krautrock music that we like, or let's just take acid and go to the cabin and jam for a weekend and see what happens." So Michael had a Little Phatty. I was dating this girl who had a microKORG.
Jack: The gateway drug. [laughter]
Chris: The gateway drug! I used that thing for so many years, but after that girl and I broke up I had to buy my own, which was incredibly sad. And spending $250 on a synth or whatever it was, $200, at the time was, like, that's what you paid for rent in Minneapolis in 2005. That was a mental amount of money. So that was a huge investment. But we didn't even know what MIDI was. I had never recorded anything. I didn't know that you could just record something direct in. I didn't know what a PA was. For the first three albums that we made, they were all recorded through miked amps, and it was all synths and drums and some stuff, but it was just through miked amps. There was no concept of GarageBand or ProTools or or doing it in any way that made actual sense. It was purely a trial by fire, didn't know what MIDI was, didn't know anything. Basically that band just pieced it all together the hard way, trying to figure out not only what music is, but what synthesizers are, and then how to play music with a group of people that have all different backgrounds in playing music or not playing music, including myself. It was a trial by fire.
Jack: So is that the band that played Medusa?
Chris: Yes. So we played Medusa, and I think that was the most nervous, stage fright anxiety I've ever had in my life. I almost vomited, and it was such a low stakes show. I can't remember what bands were playing, but it was our moment to do something in front of these peers that I held in such high esteem that I couldn't possibly live up to. And we did not. [laughter] We really didn't, it was pretty shitty as it usually is, but we got through it and we did it and then we kept doing it and eventually we kind of found a groove.
Jack: What did the band sound like?
Chris: It sounded like krautrock. We loved Cluster, we loved Neu!, we loved Ash Ra Tempel, and we tried to basically replicate that, but we were also kind of weird and couldn't do that, right? So sometimes it comes out as really mundane music, sometimes it comes out as a really fucked up prismatic version of it. So some of it's okay. I'm not proud of it, but I'm also not that embarrassed of it anymore. But it certainly was a work in progress. I don't think of it as an artistic statement or a statement that actually was successful, but what it was successful in doing was having some of the best experiences with a group of friends that I'll never forget and was so fun.
Aaron: So I would disagree with Chris here. I thought Food Pyramid was quite successful and their live shows were really good. The recorded stuff was great. They would play at all these art shows and we were like, "Who the fuck is this Food Pyramid band?" Like, "Where the fuck did they come from?" But it was good, you know what I mean? It wasn't that the music was bad. You're, like, jealous of it or something. It was competitive. Sort of like, "Damn people are raising the bar here," you know?
Jack: That's quite a drastic difference in opinion. I mean, you can never really judge your own projects, obviously.
Aaron: It's hard.
Chris: There was this guy named Steve Rosborough who started a label called Moon Glyph, which is still active and they put out a couple of things before us, but we were one of their early flagship bands. This was back in the days of MySpace. We had a handheld tape recorder demo or something and he was like, "Cool, let's do a tape." We ended up doing a trilogy of tapes because we thought that seemed something that krautrock bands should do.
Jack: Yeah, like, I, II and III.
Chris: That's what they're called, yeah. [laughter] And so those came out and it was in the days of the internet of the early days of blog culture. Mutant Sounds, 20 Jazz Funk Greats, these types of places, Pitchfork was around.
Aaron: Prog Not Frog, that was a big one.
Jack: Man, I used to... It's all on old computers, you know? All the bookmarks.
Chris: I actually thought about that, I wish I had access to that.
Aaron: Well, it's cool that they all had the list on the side of the page, too, so if you just go to one site, you can just see all of the names, which is sick.
Chris: So we got around a little bit on the blog circuit and got written about. And it always felt so nice when someone from anywhere else in the world, basically that isn't Minnesota, was like, "Oh, this is cool stuff." I was like, "Oh my God, really?! That's crazy. Someone actually likes this too." So yeah, we got around a little bit and we made a bunch of other albums and we did a couple small tours and then some side projects came about from it as the band started to separate a little bit because of people moving away. Actually it was about midway through the Food Pyramid years that I met Aaron. And I'll tell that story: I knew Aaron, just only had hung out with him a couple of times. I don't know if we ever really hung out one on one, but we kind of knew each other from around. And I knew he was a visual artist and we had our album coming out, a CD on a label from Seattle called Debacle Records or something like that. I don't remember much of anything from that label. But anyway, I asked him to do the artwork. I was like, "Hey man, you're an artist. You want to do artwork for this?" And he's like, "Yeah, sure." We hung out and he came through with the artwork and he showed it to me and I was like, "Are you making fun of me? Are you fucking with me?" [laughter] "This is the most ******** thing I've ever seen." And in retrospect, it was so totally perfect and actually way more forward thinking than I could have ever come up with. But it felt like he was making fun of the fact that we were trying to do new age or krautrock music. And I'm like, "But you're making a joke of that." And I just was so self-serious at the time that I couldn't process that. There is a sense of subversion that isn't just ironic in the way that he had presented it. Ultimately, we did a compromise on the artwork, and I think it looks amazing, but the original thing that he wanted to use, I was like, "I'm sorry, I can't."
Aaron: What was it?
Chris: I think it was a combination of the text being some unbelievably stupid Hallmark card kind of thing and the image being the most stereotypical, new age garbage.
Aaron: I remember the image, it was a cube that I had stretched and then put a gradient, pink blob in the middle or something.
Chris: Yeah, the actual final artwork is really cool. But anyway, that's how we met. And then Food Pyramid went into two or three other bands that I did. One was called Dreamweapon that was more about techno music and live electronics, basically combining Basic Channel and Discharge, was kind of the ethos of that band.
Jack: That's very much a you type thing.
Aaron: Very true.
Chris: Whether or not it was successful in doing that, that was the intention.
Chris: So I guess right before that was when Aaron and I had a side project called Beat Detectives, which is funny because in a way I still feel this is a side project, even though it's now been a ten year long project. But yeah, we started Beat Detectives. I don't know, do you want to tell the story of how that was for you?
Aaron: Sure. Okay, so playing music as an adult, is that where this started?
Chris: Were we adults? [laughter]
Aaron: You were an adult! [laughter] So I started playing music probably when I was 27. And I definitely was interested in all the same things Chris was probably. And I definitely remember going to the Church in Minneapolis, Halloween of 1999. That was the first time I ever went there and it was awesome. Saw a lot of good shows there, saw a lot of cool bands, became friends with a lot of people who lived there. But yeah, the one Minneapolis band that was cool was Quad Muth, I don't know if you ever heard them.
Chris: They were the predecessor to the most important, mutually between Aaron and I, maybe I'm speaking for more for myself, but probably the most important single band in our, my musical history, which was Skoal Kodiak.
Jack: Ah, Sophie [Weil] mentioned them. I'm not familiar with them.
Aaron: Yeah, Quad Muth was their first band and it was kind of parallel Fort Thunder type stuff. So they made cool artwork and they would get grants and make holograms and beer bottles and weird, mutant paintings and stuff. It was cool. So anyway, yeah, just hung out watching weird noise stuff. And then I'd done this art project called Hardland / Heartland with Eric and Crystal and all these people. Then as a result of that, I sort of just met tons of people indifferent sort of scenes in Minneapolis that were, like...
Chris: But also throughout the country.
Aaron: Yeah, we did some shows and that's how we met Britt [Brown] from Not Not Fun, we did an art show at this gallery in Los Angeles and that was cool. They would do a lot of music shows there and Sun Araw played in our show two days after we installed it. But I mean, we didn't communicate with one another, they just booked shows at the gallery, kind of thing, but it was cool. We'd end up, Eric and I, doing something and Taterbug would just be there too. [laughter] He was kind of, like...
Jack: Shout out! I gotta get him on the pod.
Chris: You have to get him on the pod.
Aaron: But I used to play music with this guy Will Kapp, who was from Iowa City, and I went down there for a couple of weeks and recorded an album with him. We called it Webelos. We played a show in the park that really nobody showed up to. And then we played a show at Taterbug's house that was Peaking Lights, Wet Hair and two other people or something. It was kind of just everybody in that Iowa City zone there at that point in time or something in this way. So that was the first music I had started playing. And then I started that band with Eric after a lot of the art stuff slowed down a little bit, or we were kind of growing apart that way. And Sophie actually named Radical Cemetery. She was in, like, Art 2D or something like that in school, and somebody kept calling radial symmetry "radical cemetery." [laughter] So that was cool. And we just had a bunch of junk, you know, we both had Yamaha PSR keyboards and then a couple of delay pedals and some distortion. But then it was, like, five different amps of different sizes, kind of shreddy... We subjected people to our performances, it felt like sometimes. And then when we'd practice, we'd play for 4 hours at a time and just kind of be the loud guys in the basement while these weird kids were hanging out upstairs, which was cool. [laughter] Then I met Chris at some point in time. And in my opinion, when I met Chris and we started Beat Detectives, I was tired of making music that was off-putting and was more interested in making enjoyable music that people can have fun to.
Chris: Nice. [laughter]
Aaron: Which was what happened, you know what I mean?
Chris: For the most part, yeah.
Aaron: That was the result for the most part.
Jack: Everybody reaches that point in their lives making experimental music. It's like, "Why?"
Aaron: Yeah, I was 30 years old. I got out a lot of the angsty sort of angles earlier.
Chris: I think that mentality also speaks to my starting Beat Detectives. I always felt like it was a side project where we could make more pop oriented music. I think people have told me it's not as poppy as I think it is, but it was acceptable to do that because we had already done our other weird things. And it was like, "This is a side project. So we'll have our friend Oakley singing. We'll make sort of more danceable music that will get girls to dance at Medusa," or whatever, even though it was fully improvised for the most part. And yeah, that was kind of the genesis. It started with our mutual friend Derek Maxwell, as well, who actually named the band, right? Didn't he come up with Beat Detectives?
Aaron: You know, I don't remember. I don't even remember how the name happened. We'll keep it a mystery. But we should definitely credit Derek.
Chris: Yeah. Our first show was at Art of This with Bitchin' Bajas, which was cool.
Aaron: Two microKORGs!
Chris: Two microKORGs.
Aaron: That's what we played, just two microKORGs and then it graduated to a 4-track to make records and then just, like...
Chris: And an Electribe.
Aaron: Yeah and an Electribe, for a long period of time.
Chris: But you know, again, we didn't know how to record so we were using the 4-track, which was Aaron's. Aaron was really good at that and I had never really used it. But that was critical for us because for me especially, I was like, "Oh, I can overdub, I can actually record something on top of it. What?" And then the most mind blowing thing ever: Aaron literally defined our sound more than anything could ever, he had the most significance by doing this one thing where we were listening back on a jam we made and he just turned the dial down and pitched it, slowed it down to a point where I was like, "Wait, what? You can't do that." You blew my mind. I was like, "Actually, the chopped and screwed version is infinitely better." And that really to me opened... That blew my mind. That was critical point of my musical education where I was like, "What is this guy thinking?" But of course, as always, Aaron was like, light years ahead of the curve.
Aaron: That's all it takes.
[Beat Detectives "Picture of a Picture"]
Aaron: So we played what, two shows? We played in some basement. So it was fun, people freaked out and then I moved here in 2012.
Chris: No, we played more. We played a few shows. We played shows for six months or something before you moved away.
Aaron: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: And we recorded two demos, one of which still exists, which we can send you recordings of, that was fully made on the 4-track. Then Aaron moved to New York.
Jack: Wow. Big upset there. I bet that was a bit of a...
Aaron: Not really, because it was a side project anyway. And I had a four track here and I would record stuff and send it to Chris, although funny because I remember there's some early recordings where the imports aren't timed to the BPM, so they're not actually sync'd, the whole tracks are out of sync, which is cool. That definitely added to the sound for a period of time.
Jack: Where it would just drift.
Aaron: Not even drifting. It's all out of sync from the beginning.
Chris: Synchronization was not a concept until a few years later. [laughter] So we did that, at that point Beat Detectives were still playing in Minneapolis, Aaron was contributing. We were making the recordings together, but the live band was me, Oakley and my girlfriend at the time, Sarah Burns, who I roped into playing some keyboards and, you know, playing the chords and helping out with that. And we would play dance parties, people would love it, it was really fun. It was a fun vibe. But the recordings were always me and Aaron. The first album we did was on Moon Glyph, it was called Casual Encounters of the Third Kind. Revisiting that album at first, it's pretty poppy, but it's pretty weird. It also kind of contains the template actually, unintentionally, for the next ten years of our music in a weird way that I would have never predicted, minus the rasta elements that popped up a little bit later. But it pretty much had everything on it.
Jack: How would you define that? What would you say are some of those characteristics?
Aaron: I think Oakley's vocals are a huge part of that era. And I think she was really on one conceptually at that point in time, I would say too in a lot of ways.
Chris: She was an incredible vocalist and it takes a lot of talent and magic to be able to just pick up a mic with no idea of where the song is going to go and just improvise really cool lyrics. And I think she taps. She tapped into this sort of... Actually, Daryl [Seaver] described it to me the other day as being the sound of what girls sing when they're home alone, singing to themselves, and that kind of is where she was coming from. And she did such an incredible job of that. She was really fun to watch and dance to when she was singing. She just had a great charisma and energy.
[Beat Detectives "Oh That Felix"]
Jack: So yeah, I'm curious about the move, I think that was generally around where we were. Aaron, why did you move to New York? Also, do you want to talk a little bit about that stuff?
Aaron: Working with Eric on stuff?
Jack: Yeah, because I primarily know you've made a ton of videos for Justin Vernon and that crew.
Chris: And a lot of others too, though.
Aaron: Yeah, there's other stuff for sure. I guess I got into it through Justin and Bon Iver stuff for the most part. I moved here in 2012 and I had worked at the Walker Art Center as a film projectionist for a long time. And then I taught high school and animation, college level before I moved here. Then when I moved here, I just ended up getting in on museum jobs and I was doing a lot of A/V and I worked there the Guggenheim, I worked at the Met. I was the head of A/V at the New Museum for three years before. That was kind of the last thing that I did in that world before starting to work on the video stuff full time or creative stuff full time for bands. But yeah, I don't know, it was just another freelance job for me. I mean obviously I like being creative and working with people a little bit more than having to do a job. Not that working at museums isn't that, and you get to see tons of bullshit and meet a lot of cool artists. But yeah, that was the intro. I got a studio probably in 2013 and then Eric moved in a year after that. The Blazer [Sound System] guys were also in there. I shared the studio with them and it was cool because we would just all work all the time. And then, yeah, started working on band stuff and did lyric videos for the album previous, the 22, A Million album, and they were successful, I think, in the larger scale. But for me it was really just cool to be able to do videos for the whole album, to have that much space to work with and be able to start making things ping off one another and stuff, which is what I like about Beat Detectives too. It's the same kind of structural concept for it, that if there is one. I don't know, I've made videos for a bunch of people. It's fun. It's cool. I don't know what else to talk about. I made a Black Dice video that Chris stars in, actually. Check it out. It's for a song called "White Sugar." I think that's what it's called. And I made a couple of videos for Eric Copeland that are cool, I think. Or I'm proud of them.
Chris: Always awesome and he's made every Beat Detectives video, which are on our YouTube channel. It's some of the richest and most insane video art and music video wizardry I've ever seen. Not self-promote, but everyone should check that shit out.
Aaron: Heavy Chillers Only. [laughter] Yeah, I think that's what it's called.
Chris: Is that what it is?
Jack: "Click the link now showing up in your..." [laughter]
Aaron: There's just endless... You know, it's easier just to make stuff all the time than not make it at all. You don't have to show it to everybody, but...
Jack: Facts! That's facts.
Aaron: You definitely don't have to show it to everybody.
Jack: More people could learn a lot from that. [laughter]
Chris: Yeah, so I think at a certain point I moved to New York and then that sort of gets us up to speed on what the project is now. Oakley sort of phased out and we started just making albums here that were, for me at least, a lot more inspired by being in New York, being in an insane cultural diaspora of incredible music and history that really, really profoundly has influenced and changed me as a person. But we started making albums here. Blazer Sound System was a huge influence for, I think, both of us, playing shows with them and being friends with them. I can't even tell you how many Beat Detectives songs were the product of going and seeing Blazer and then going home and trying to replicate a sound that I heard, and it ended up being something entirely different, but a song that I made because of that exact one to one experience. So those guys are absolute legends, love those dudes, and they continue to inspire. They're the best.
Jack: Great little soundbite there, honestly.
Chris: Yeah, that's for the book. The autobiography of Blazer Sound System.
Jack: I'll get Nathan [Corbin] and Tony [Lowe] to come on and be like, "Yeah, I don't know, we don't really like those guys." [laughter]
Aaron: Yeah, "We've never met them before." [laughter]
Chris: Yeah, "Chris who?" [laughter]
Aaron: I'm trying to think of other influences on our music.
Chris: For me, not to interject, Aaron, but one really quick one, which is Sun Araw. Hearing when he did the album The Inner Treaty, which was the non-psych one the one that really went fucked up, I was like, "This is the exact music I want to make," but I didn't know how or why. That really was pretty critical for me. I love that record. I love that dude. And he's actually played with Nuke Watch and been a huge supporter of what we're doing, which means so much to me.
Aaron: Damn, I used to listen to Sun Araw and ride bike around Minneapolis after a bad breakup right after spring hit and everything melted. Like, what was it, "The Heavy Cop"? Is that the name? That's a great title. But is that the name of that album?
Chris: Oh, "Beat Cop"?
Aaron: Is there a song called "Beat Cop"?
Chris: There's an album called "Heavy" something... Heavy Deeds.
Aaron: Heavy Deeds, that one that. Those first three albums or something.
Chris: Like dubby psych stuff.
Aaron: Yeah, sort of tropical vibe, that era when everything kind of sounded like tropical music, but not quite.
Chris: What about you, Aaron? You're going to say there's other influences that come to mind?
Aaron: Oh, I think RP Boo.
Chris: Oh, fuck yeah. Dude Off 59th Street.
Aaron: Chris and I definitely bonded over the Dude Off 59th Street megamix. You know, there was one time I saw Traxman at, what was that place, Elvis's Guesthouse? And there were nine people there. That was one of the coolest shows I've ever seen in my entire life. I'd never seen anybody... He would just watch people dancing and start playing songs that match them. And you could pay attention to what he was doing in a way. Oh man, it was awesome. Yeah, all that footwork stuff. That shit still sounds insane. Anything that anybody would ever ask me to turn off, I feel that's usually music that I love. I would play stuff before movies at the Walker and, you know, they would ask me to turn Taterbug off. There was one time my landlord was having a barbecue and I lived in this basement of this place in Minneapolis, and I had the stereo in the windows and was just playing music and some Taterbug came on and my landlord was like, "Can you change the music?" And it was just so abruptly, I didn't know what to do. I was like, "Yeah, sure," but...
Chris: It's not even, "Can you turn it off?" It's "Can you change it?" [laughter]
Aaron: It's the most beautiful music I've ever heard in my entire life.
Chris: Someone doesn't ask you to turn it off, they ask you just please change the artist. [laughter]
Aaron: "Can we listen to something else?" That happened on our tour once when we toured with Joint Custody, somebody asked to turn RP Boo off and I was like, "I cannot believe this!"
Jack: That's sad. Of all things to turn off.
Aaron: You know, it's just that they weren't ready for it. That was, like, 2012. That was a long time ago.
Chris: I remember when Dreamweapon was a band we did this absolutely amazing tour and our first show was in Chicago with Beau Wanzer, and I forget who else, in a basement of a funeral home. We played the show and we slept on the floor and it was so fun. We drove out the next day to go off on the tour and then we heard that DJ Rashad had died that night, one block down the street from where we played, I think it was in Pilsen. And that was pretty fucking tragic, obviously tragic, loss, but that kind of hit home. I was like, "God damn, this is the best music I've ever heard. I can't believe that this young guy died." It sucked. But yeah, that Rashad album, though, was also pretty critical.
[Beat Detectives "New Steely Trap Vibe"]
Aaron: Yeah, I feel like "crazy people music" was sort of a theme we would talk about back in the day.
Jack: Talk a little bit more about that. [laughter]
Aaron: This was after "preset music" or something, if we're "self-era-ing" or whatever. But yeah, "crazy people music" was just stuff you listen to and there's... It just sounds insane. The song itself is a logical thing when it comes out, but if you actually start to listen to it, you're like, "This music sounds broken or so disconnected from reality." It's what I think is cool about nü metal, to segue it, there's something so sonically dissonant that it just gets your attention. It might not even be appealing and people get over that just because it's so fucked up sounding, you know? It's detuned music, intentionally detuned music, which is not a new or interesting idea in any way, but it still works in a lot of ways. It's still is like a hook or whatever, to be cool or be more complex than something that's just successful or, like, "right." I think there's a level of authenticity there that is real. You could say it's self-sabotaging or something, you could be like, "Well, nobody likes that because it sounds intentionally wrong" or "it just sounds wrong."
Chris: But also maybe it's just a subversion of what musical norms are. I think about this in terms of growing up in St. Cloud, it's like, I didn't really know who I was at that time, but I knew who I wasn't.
Jack: You're coming up with all these perfect one-liners. That'll be the cover quote.
Chris: Maybe that's a through line, because if you know what music is or have an idea of what music is, it's a lot more interesting to play against that. Or it can be, you know? I mean, you can also be a student of Bach and get a lot out of that type of musical engagement, but in terms of improvised music and the idea of unexpected things happening in music, that's by far more interesting to me. And I think that's reflected in Beat Detectives and Nuke Watch and everything else.
Aaron: The fact that they're not songs that we're... It's not rehearsed songs, it's just rehearsed playing together, you know what I mean?
Chris: Yeah, it's like refined vibes that just transmute into energy. Who cares if it's... Some of our early music had more housey style and some of our more recent music has more dancehall style. The style doesn't matter. There's hip hop style, there's all these things, but it actually doesn't exist to any of that genre specifically, or it isn't actually participating in that scene or that culture. It's actually just doing something with those tools or with those formats. It is a testament to me and Aaron's verbal and primarily nonverbal communication, especially when we're playing music and how much that vibe has been honed in on over the years and how much it's changed and adapted to the changes and what interests us musically and who we are as people. So I want to shout out Aaron, my best possible version of a collaborator and person I respect musically the most.
Aaron: Shout out you too. [laughter]
Jack: Well, I think we're pretty good now. Thank you guys so much for joining me. This was really cool to talk about especially Minneapolis, my hometown, and just to get to know a little bit more about my friends. I'll talk to you guys soon!
