Jack: Hello, you guys. Welcome. Thank you for being here.
Zach: [In a scary voice] Hello Jack.
Ma: Thank you for having us. I'm scared. [laughter]
Jack: Yeah, I'm a little scared too, frankly. Maybe I will just go ahead and ask the first question. And how about we start with Ma. What was your introduction to music and how did you come to be in this sort of scene that you are in now and making the kind of stuff you do? What was your early experience getting into that? Do you remember?
Ma: Oh, I remember that I really loved to sing when I would go to church because my parents brought me to church every Sunday. So, yeah, I was having pleasure singing there and I don't remember really when it started, but I love to sing from the beginning, from the early years. And then by accident, someone gifted the keyboard to my young sister. And I don't know, I started to play around and then my mom was like, "Okay, do I want to play piano?" And I said, "I don't know." And then I started to take lessons. Learning music didn't stay so much with me. I took lessons for five years and then I stopped everything. Then I was mad, because I was a bored teenager so I stopped everything and then I met Zach by accident somehow.
Jack: Were you playing music at all with anyone before you met Zach, before you guys started collaborating?
Ma: I had a brief hard rock band in my twenties. [laughter] It was really cool because, okay, the music wasn't really the type of music and the type of things I was singing and we were interpreting wasn't really my kind of thing, but it was my first experience with the mic. So I learned a lot.
Zach: It was bad ass and it was bonkers. I've heard the tracks.
Jack: You've heard the tracks?
Zach: The tracks don't lie. When this music is released, Fievel will be over. [laughter]
Ma: It will never be released. [laughter].
Zach: It will be a joke. It will widely be seen as Ma's other band.
Jack: Wow. Well, that's very exciting. Definitely going to need to get that stuff out there.
Ma: I think I erased everything.
Jack: Everybody's gotta do that, you know? But so how did you guys meet? I guess we can go hop around atemporally and come back.
Zach: This is a story we've told a lot. Do you know the app Wavr?
Jack: I don't know.
Zach: Wavr, it's short for chillwaver. It's modeled like a dating app but it's for musicians who want to find each other. You list your aesthetic and what you're hoping to achieve through your inspiration and motivation.
Ma: So we all have chips under our skin. We apply and then they put a chip under our, in the back of our neck.
Zach: "I put mine in me anus!" [laughter]
Jack: So you were looking for love? For musicians?
Ma: No, someone was looking for us, made us meet, somehow.
Zach: "I was working in the bomb shop because I've been making bombs for years! Ma walks in with a keyboard under her arm, and I say, 'Let's make a hit record!' Put the chip in my anus!" [laughter] I'm sorry, I'm ruining the interview. This is what happens when we meet right after I wake up.
Jack: It's perfect.
Zach: I'm still dreaming, bro.
Ma: Someone is responsible for that, and it's our friend Eric, that's for sure.
Jack: So he was looking to do something and he got you guys together? Or what was the project for?
Ma: He was trying to make Zach do something. And I was just doing nothing. He was like, "Oh, you're doing nothing. Do you sing?" Something like that.
Zach: Very manipulative, right? Very manipulative behavior. Psychopathic behavior.
Jack: So he was trying to make Zach start a band after not...
Ma: He was trying to make him record.
Jack: You weren't making music at the time, Zach?
Zach: Intractable. Refusing. I think at that point, I had taken over 15 years off and everybody was calling me. Everybody was trying to get me back into the studio. I said no to every offer. We had Pino Palladino. [laughter] Practically, I had to switch phone numbers. Then Pino sics his kids on me! It just never ended. [laughter]
Ma: And I was just selling fruits and vegetables.
Jack: Wow, classic story: from a street vendor to a pop singer. When did you start going to see music, going to shows or something like that? Do you remember where you were living when you started to get into that?
Ma: I don't really remember my first show experience. I remember that I started to listen to music, but I wasn't allowed to go out somehow. It was not very far from Paris, but not really Paris in Versailles, this wonderful town. I had friends in high school, and because my parents didn't listen really to music, I didn't know anything really. So then I started to listen to music and I was like, "Oh, this is so cool." [laughter]
Jack: Yeah, it's pretty important.
Ma: Yeah, and then I moved one year after. It's very disrupted, my path through music, because I moved so much. So every time I would just lose my friends or be so distanced that I had to figure out some other shit. But then when I went to Bordeaux, which is another weird town in France, or I have a relationship to it anyway. But there were some venues and the record shop where I would go a lot. I started to enjoy really live performances.
Jack: Do you remember what kind of stuff you're into then?
Ma: I remember listening over and over and over to this song from the Communards, or maybe it's just a cover, I don't know. "Don't Leave Me This Way."
Jack: Classic.
Ma: So I remember meeting this song and it had a huge impression on me.
Jack: I love the original one, by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, which is a Philly Soul record. And then it was covered by...
Zach: By the Communards?! [laughter]
Jack: It's a weird euro dance cover of it.
Zach: Fuck!
Ma: Yeah, I really love that.
Zach: We should cover that, Ma.
Jack: It's such a good song. You know the song, I'm sure.
Zach: Yeah, I do. We should do the Euro dance version. I didn't know they were called the Communards! That's amazing.
Jack: Really amazing.
Ma: That's the one song that I remember. I remember also meeting with the band Cocteau Twins. That was very important for me to explode in my mind. A friend of my dad gave me a CD. He was like, "Listen to this." It was like, "Okay." So I listened and it was like, "OH MY GOD!" I also remember listening to the radio, a ton of really not so great music or not so underground music. French radio. And voilà.
Jack: How about Zach? What's your early experience with music and how you found out that was what you wanted to do?
Zach: I grew up in New Hampshire, and I too went to church, but I did not enjoy singing there. But there was a really cool organist there and he would play really long cadenzas, like walk out music, you know, every day just improvising. And that was really cool to see. Later I got into James Booker through that kind of thing. But I just really liked classical music of all kinds. My mom showed it to me. She was an abortive conservatory student in piano. She had a really mean professor who kind of dissuaded her from pursuing studies and piano, who was actually French Belgian, or French speaking Belgian. This was at Louisiana Tech or Louisiana State University in the early sixties.
Ma: Evil European. [laughter]
Jack: Yeah, typical.
Zach: Anyway, she had an investment in exposing me to music, I think, and I was really into it, man. Really listened to a lot of Mozart and Bach and kind of eschewed any vocal music. I remember really not liking choral music and sung music in general. And then when I was about five or six, I had a babysitter who wanted to go to a They Might Be Giants show and took me. It was on their Flood tour. So that was my first show. I don't remember it, but I liked them, so after that I started listening to that stuff, the Beatles, all that. And then it got pretty weird from there, Jack. Got pretty weird from there.
Jack: We have a shared history for some of it, having gone to college together for at least two or three years, I think. But I'm definitely curious about the plunge after getting into more or less popular music, quote unquote, and then how people get into the depths of local scenes and weirder stuff. Do you remember what the next step was for you getting into more esoteric type music?
Zach: Yeah, not really exactly sure how it happened, but I ended up running a private server on KDX using external hard drives. I think I stole one, a 200 gigabyte external hard drive, and taped it under a computer at my high school. No, I think it was at the local college now. I think it started at the high school and I got busted there and then I started looking for other computers downtown to tape a hard drive under. This would have been around 2001, 2002. So I was 14, 15. You know, everybody was reading The Anarchist Cookbook and the hackers guides that were out, we all knew the phone tricks and shit. Or when I say we all, I mean me alone because I was a loser. [laughter]
Jack: Yeah, you didn't know anyone else in person.
Zach: But yeah everybody was internet dating without any concept of ever meeting anybody. It was that burgeoning Y2K, post Y2K Internet culture, where it wasn't just Napster and LimeWire anymore. There was a more involved dimension, even for kids who were kind of scraping the cultural barrel, you know? And through that KDX thing, it was a client server kind of thing, and you would become friendly and end up trading with people running. You could use your own wares. And I was controlling this on dial up from the woods in New Hampshire on a remote desktop app that was incredibly slow. So I would just be sitting there waiting for the cursor to move so that I could type something in to download from a server. But one of the servers was run by some WFMU DJ, so they had insane archives. There was a weird psychedelic record collector from out in the Pacific Northwest, and he had an unbelievable collection, like every Syd Barrett bootleg, and that's the tip of the iceberg. You know, these people were really serious collectors, which was my first exposure to collector culture that made me realize that I didn't want to participate in that or care about that at all, right? But I was really into downloading this shit and then listening to it. And then I met Quentin Moore, Big French, who has played in Fievel, who you know, and we were kind of going through the shit together. We were going through all kinds of phases, this is when we were 15 or 16. So we were the number one 16 year old fans of - I want to say they're from Wellington, but I'm probably wrong - the band Wreck Small Speakers on Expensive Stereos. Shit like that. We were into esoterica and just curious about all these weird sounds, you know. And then Sarah Smith from Blanche Blanche Blanche, we met when she was 15. I was 16 and she was incredibly... Right from the beginning she was exposing me to all kinds of shit I had never heard about. Mostly books, but also a lot of music too. So those were key contacts. And then older siblings also showed me important things. And that's the boring long answer. Oh, and then I'll just cap it off. When I was around 17 there would be local punk shows and stuff like that. They'd be held at a VFW or whatever, you know the drill. But except that this was more rural New Hampshire shit, so instead of there being 40 heads at the Florence VFW in Massachusetts, we're talking there would be, like, 4 heads, you know? Like a VFW that's just a little barn kind of thing and then a local punk band. And me and my friends who started to exist at that point started being like, "Well, we should do a noise performance or something." We would never use the word performance, but so I had various noise bands starting from then. And when we met, we were both, I would say, involved in the noise scene in Western Mass, right? That was what we were doing. Ma, you never made noise music, right?
Ma: Uh, not really. I wouldn't consider it noise. I did some weird recording alone, like five recordings alone in my room when I was living in Brussels. I think right after meeting you, I did some, I don't know, some shit in my room alone. Scratching...
Zach: You're scratching?!
Ma: Yeah, I was scratching bottles, like glass bottles in a mic. In the mic of my computer because I had no gear, so I would record everything on GarageBand. I'm a bit ashamed of that.
Jack: Sounds great!
Ma: I think that disappeared too, when my computer broke.
Jack: Oh no! That's too bad. Maybe we could recreate it, you know?
Ma: I don't know if I want to recreate it. [laughter]
Jack: That's probably for the best.
Ma: That's my noise experience.
[Fievel Is Glauque "The Dream Team"]
Zach: Super important for me was this local radio station, I mean, I think it was probably Clear Channel already at that point. But this local radio station Oldies 104.3. They wouldn't really go later than, like, "Every One's a Winner." But that was how I heard, like, "Crimson and Clover" or "Dizzy" by Tommy Roe. Just these kind of footnotes, that culture, or girl group, quote unquote, music, that culture of innovation and novelty and recording trying to push the frame but keep it really, really tight and perfect. That was in a way more impressive to me than the art experimentation of, say, the Beatles or the Beach Boys. I really gravitated toward the early Beatles. I liked the bubblegum radio stuff, but completely left cold by its revivalist imitators in the nineties and 2000, like Kill Bill vibe or whatever. Or not left cold, I thought that shit was fun. But you know what I mean? It wasn't like, "Oh my God!" But yeah the noise thing, it's interesting because, well... What's possible to say about this that doesn't sound like haterism? There's some indie culture out there that... I don't know, I feel a direct line of connectivity to the noise scene. And when I say the noise scene, I'm not talking about the serious experimental scene which maps on to the noise scene to some extent. But you know what I'm talking about here. I mean, it's ridiculous to talk about scenes as if we can do anything but hypothesize on them. But what I mean is that there's this feeling of, like, we're all plumbing the same... Well, we're all dealing with the same shit. Like when I used to go see Fat Worm of Error or Jeff Hartford or something like this in Western Mass, the feeling that I got from some of these people, who... I mean, well, it's funny, right? That I'm describing a difference between the noise thing and the experimental serious thing, because who is more serious than Jeff Hartford? The man is serious! He's completely serious and yet there's something light about the whole thing, about the stakes of it, about the understanding of its import, about how it's supposed to be operating, how it's supposed to act on you, you know? All of this is really left open where in some of the serious experimentalism, it's kind of offered to you the way that a museum offers you a piece of art with the full authoritative backing of the museum institution and the board of directors. You know what I mean?
Ma: Yeah, the strong frame.
Zach: Yeah, the super strong frame. But then we had this lightness. You could be serious within that lightness. Anyway, these kinds of procedures that I felt like I was getting from these people in that scene, these kinds of gestures and these kinds of relationships to making sound and stuff, that's still what I do. It's absolutely not related to a kind of broader culture of indie rock, you know, everything is very removed. Far be it from, I think, me or Ma to think that we could... We'll cover music to get inside of it and learn how it feels to make those sounds, and also the finery of an arrangement, even the simplest arrangement, like when we covered that Lenny Kravitz song that was one of those studio afterthoughts.
Jack: Yes!
Ma: You listened to it?
Jack: I think maybe, Zach, you sent it to me as just a file. So good.
Zach: I knew that was right up your alley.
Jack: Of course.
Zach: You're trying to get inside that music, too.
Ma: I learned how to say "Yeah!" with that song. [laughter]
Jack: "Yeah!"
Zach: But I was just going to say, we like to cover stuff sometimes and all that, but I see one essential differentiator as there are people out there, and they're not wrong, it's just one modality of relating to music, it's completely it's foreign to me, but so is, you know, Versailles.
Ma: So are we for them, or something like that.
Zach: But I'm saying that there are many people who believe - whether this is actually how their music comes to exist is another question - that they can take a bunch of things that they like and strive to make something like that. What I feel like I learned from being involved in that noise scene - and again, that says more about me than it does about anything, nobody was feeding me this message - but that - insert a stupid reference to beginner's mind or something - there is no need for an original thought or an intention.
Ma: It doesn't exist.
Zach: Yeah, let's try to translate this moment into something, an object that we can have an uncertain kind of transitional relationship to. And this is going to happen within a social space, right? Where we have to deal with the X factor of how it's going to hit the other people and how they're going to act. Because some of these people who come to these shows are pretty weird. You know?
Jack: You're telling me. [laughter]
Zach: It's a wider array of possible responses and behaviors than maybe you would encounter if you just played at the local museum. You know what I mean?
[Fievel Is Glauque "Fly Away"]
Jack: Do you guys want to talk about the sort of the origin of the band? I guess you talked about the actual origin of the musicians app, but then what was the genesis of you guys getting together? I know at least with Zach, there's obviously a whole period of Blanche Blanche Blanche, you were in the CE Schneider band, OSR Tapes, all of this stuff, but then coming out of it after all of that and then the beginning of starting Fievel. I'm just curious about the genesis after that, how you guys came to start actually writing music and playing shows and things like that.
Zach: Ma, do you want to talk about why we kept going after that first month?
Ma: It was cool. [laughter]
Zach: Yeah, it was cool. [laughter]
Ma: I don't know, I remember at the end of this first session ever, Zach Phillips telling me, "Oh, you should come to New York." I was thinking like, "Yeah, in your dreams, I don't have the money." But you were like, "I know a way to make you come over to visit, then we could record some stuff, we just have to set up a show and we pay for your ticket." I was like, "Yes, sure. Is this guy serious? How could that happen?" And then he made it happen. I was like, "Okay..."
Zach: Yeah, a few months after we first met. And it was fucking cool
Ma: Yeah, in February 2019. And we met in August 2018.
Zach: I think the night after our gig, we went to Blue Note and saw Thundercat. Is that right? Was that that same night?
Ma: And I cried.
Zach: Yeah, and it was incredible.
Ma: Yeah, so I was like, "Okay, if this can happen, maybe God exists." Something like that. [laughter]
Zach: Thundercats is another, I mean, I wouldn't want to make an example out of him, he's an American original, but he's somebody who comes out of a context who got kind of transposed into a more of a jazz context. I mean, I know he has lots of history going back with connectivity to that music, but I don't know, he's inspiring because he's somebody who comes out of a broader world of music and then delivers this thing that... I was talking to our mutual friend Christopher Forgues the other day. We were listening to Thin Lizzy and talking about how there's basically not a kitchen in the world where Thin Lizzy isn't welcome. Thundercat's kind of like that. You can talk to the biggest harsh noise purist in the world and they'll be like, "Thin Lizzy is pretty good, though." [laughter]
Jack: Oh yeah, they're the great leveler, for sure.
Zach: Oh, but you asked how this all came to pass. I'll just say this, this is something I maybe haven't said before. Around 2017, '18, I had made quite a lot of overdub records and I became more and more curious. I made this one record with friend Calvin Grad, where we both recorded it live to 4-track, just guitar and Wurlitzer. And that was actually released by Eric Kinny, who introduced me and Ma, and who has played in multiple Fievel bands and runs this label Santé Loisirs. So after making that with Calvin, I was kind of like, "Well, honestly, this is a much faster way to document the songwriting and it's a lot more fun, actually, to do it with a friend live and work this stuff out and work on problems in the music." It was a learning experience. And then I got this little band together called Lilith Outcome with Ryan Power, Marlon Cherry, Derek Baron and Annakalmia Traver. And Billy McShane. A band named after one of Laura Riding, the kind of hater poet, one of her personae. And that was all recorded on this little Marantz cassette recorder that I had had since 2010 or 2011. Chris Weisman and Danny Bissette in Brattleboro, we used to have this band called the Marshfield Set that was a secret band that never played a show. But we got together every week and we would everybody would bring a song and we would just kind of jam them out and recorded to Marantz. And yeah, so with the Lilith Outcome stuff, I guess I was just feeling kind of curious about what it would be like to just do it to the Marantz using the onboard mic in the tape recorder and just setting it up in the right place in the room. First time we recorded like that, I was like, "Oh my God, this is great. This is the first time I've liked hearing my own voice. I can hear the air, I'm hearing the setting. I'm hearing a picture of the setting." And anybody familiar, like Ma, you're in there on your computer making scraping noises on bottles into the computer mic, there's something occult - and I always say that word wrong, occult - and magic about the sheer fact of recording anything at all. You can get a lot out of that. You're like, "That's how that microphone hears that and that's how that audio gets spit back out to me. Wow, I couldn't have anticipated that." And so when Eric introduced Ma and I, I was like, "Yeah, come over and we'll play some music." So she came over, we did "Life After Love" [ed. "Believe"] because it was the first song that came up that we both knew, and recorded that to the Marantz. And we're listening back...
Ma: It's a Marantz recording?
Zach: Oh yeah! And we put that on Nina, in fact.
Ma: Ah yeah!
Zach: But just listening back to it, it was like something new happened to me. So I was keenly aware as we were recording, we did this string of visits where I would go to Brussels, or Ma would come to New York or we went to L.A., and we did five sessions like that. And each time we went to a studio, whether it was a totally DIY tape studio vibe or a proper studio, we ended up with all these studio recordings and it didn't really do it for me. I didn't really know how to mix them. But I remember whispering in Ma's ear at one of our first rehearsal, "These guys think they're practicing for the studio recording, but trust me, this is the shit." [laughter]
Jack: Which is the greatest thing, that's a classic thing. You trick them into thinking that it's the rehearsal when it's the final...
Zach: Yeah, trickery. Loving trickery is really helpful. And to lovingly trick yourself is so important, too.
Jack: That's right. One of the hardest things to do, when you can achieve it.
Zach: I might have been saying that to Ma, like, "Oh, yeah, this is the shit." But that was really just some art posturing, you know? I was still tricked into thinking that we were actually practicing for the studio recordings as well. And so was Ma, I think. We were like, "That trash? I don't think so." But anyway, I'd be in there on these same headphones, because it's mono, mixing the vocal signal and then the one condenser mic on the band and trying to get the vocal to band blend right and often failing and being like, "Wait, can we do that again?" Everybody's like, "This is our fifth time playing this song. Can we just play it all the way through?" I'm like, "Yeah, but the beginning wasn't good." [laughter] We're already at the session, you know.
Ma: Screaming, having the headphones on your ears and not hearing yourself, being like, "This sounds great!!! This is the take!!!" [laughter] That was cool. I had no idea of what you were doing, Zach, honestly, when you were doing it. So yeah, I was surprised.
Zach: Well, I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. I just literally threw up one shitty Samson condenser mic. And now we're working on a very nice studio record and we're working with a label and we have people to talk to about our failings and inhibitions and confusions and desires. But actually the stuff that is popular that we've done is that shit. And that continues to interest me. And I'm not so heroic that I wouldn't strive to just repeat. You know how sometimes on social media someone will get caught posting something that was successful before, but they change a couple parameters of it because they're trying to get another viral tweet or something. I'm not above doing that. [laughter] I'm not above trying to recreate the Marantz formula, but at the same time, it's kind of a dead letter. Because of the Western Mass noise heritage, we have to doggedly pursue the current moment's hidden inclination.
Jack: Very well stated, I have to say. [laughter] Well, I am curious about that, actually. Because a lot of your music throughout the years that I've been familiar with has, either due to technological constraints, but I think a kind of love of that sort of sound world, of 4-track or maybe people could call it lo-fi, or whatever. That's been an aesthetic that is part of your work for a long time, Zach. So I'm curious how people who do that kind of thing - you can think of, like, a Sebadoh or something like that - how they translate that kind of sound world into doing a studio record that is professionally recorded. So I'm very curious to hear the pro studio Fievel recordings.
Ma: I'm wondering about pro or not pro. I have also a little comment on lo-fi. We say "lo-fee" of course.
Jack: Yeah "weefee," wifi
Ma: But I'm wondering what's professional and not professional. Because if the intention is just to put meaning into something you do, then a lot of things can be professional and then a lot of things that are supposed to be professional aren't. So I don't know. I don't know if just the gear and the final audio quality, just frequencies, clarity or anything is really a way to define professional and unprofessional. I'm wondering.
Jack: No, no, no, I think you're totally right. I'm an audio engineer, so of course that's this lingo that we use, like "pro recorded," I think that's more just a proxy for recording it in a "professional" studio with expensive equipment, you know, like, high frequencies in the recordings or whatever. [laughter]
Zach: Nice converters.
Jack: Yeah, clean recordings that then you can make dirty if you want. Clean, isolated recordings that you can edit. But professional in the sense of having artistic merits or having some standard, that's not at all what I mean. [laughter]
Zach: What I learned from this kind of personal renaissance and using the Marantz and really, really preferring the results that came out of those recordings to do anything else that I was doing with overdubs... Because we were also in tandem with that working on overdub recordings on the 4-track and digitally, and we also did these studio sessions... So at this point we've recorded probably about 200 songs together or something like that.
Ma: Really?
Zach: Close, I think easily 150. So there was a lot of material to listen to, but the stuff that stood out was just the Marantz stuff. And what I learned wasn't anything about my fealty or feelings about lo-fi versus hi-fi or anything like that. What I learned is that behind these kind of illusory descriptors that obfuscate more than they reveal, behind that, you know, as an audio engineer I'm sure you can relate, it makes a great deal of difference just the way you go about doing something. And if you are recording to one microphone, you are creating a sound picture. It doesn't matter if we did that digitally with the best possible converters and a $50,000 microphone. Well, actually it would matter. It would matter tremendously, right? But the fact of the matter is that recording like that with one microphone on a live band is fundamentally just going to lead to a very different representation than getting a bunch of close miking on every source and then mixing the result in the box later. And so that's all I have to say about lo-fi versus hi-fi, or whatever. But my dream is to go into a really, really, really nice studio with a killing final band and have the engineer be like, "Alright, listen, we've got this really, really nice Studer mastering reel to reel," or half inch or something like that, I'm betraying my ignorance about these things already, "And and we're just going to set up like a cross stereo mic, a stereo pair of really, really nice mics with these nice converters. I'm going to position you in the room, and I'm going to go around changing your amp settings and all that to try to get the right balance. And I'm going to be riding... Maybe there's an extra boom up for the vocals or something to make sure that that level is sitting pretty and that's it." You know? It doesn't matter if that's recorded to tape or digital, what matters is that you end up with a sound picture that you can't really intervene in that much. And it's coming from something that is a lot closer to a human organism, a set of ears, you know? This is not naturalistic thinking, it's more like I've noticed anecdotally that I respond in a different way to recordings that were made with a setup mimicking what it's like to experience sound in the real world.
Jack: 100%. I mean, John Bonham's drum set was recorded with two mics [ed. three mics], you know? It's one of the greatest drum sounds of all time.
Zach: This is really something you can track with the history of drum recording. You can really hear that in the old recordings, in all those old jazz records. This is not a close miked, you know, seven mic set up these kits. [laughter] They didn't have that.
[Fievel Is Glauque "Life After Love"]
Jack: I'm curious about how the Stereolab tour came about, first of all, and then just maybe if you have any anything to say about the experience of it, because that was a big tour that you guys did. Your biggest tour.
Ma: Yeah. I think the first thing to say is thank you Stereolab. Because it was an experience and a unique one, I think. Yeah, that's the first thing I would say.
Jack: Absolutely.
Ma: Maybe it's also the last thing I would say. [laughter]
Jack: Of course, I'm fully open to there being nothing to say about it because it was probably a very intense experience. I know at least talking to Zach.
Zach: No, we can talk about it. Ma was in town to write and to do a show with Cities Aviv, you know, Gavin [Mays] had asked to play a show and we met and did a show at Market Hotel. But I had another show while I was in town with Alice Cohen, who I was playing bass for, and I was at rehearsal and I got this Facebook message that was like, "Hey, so you guys said no to the Stereolab tour?" And I was like, "What?" "They've been trying to reach you for weeks." And I was like, "What? What do you mean? Why didn't they just..." You know? And then I found it was a Bandcamp message hidden in the updates folder of Gmail or whatever from their manager Martin. So then we got on the horn with him and talked about the logistics of it and we're just like, "Alright, let's do this. Let's do this thing."
Ma: We were scared and excited.
Zach: It was a cool experience and it was very challenging materially, that tour.
Ma: Emotionally too. [laughter]
Zach: When I look back on it now and I see videos of it I'm like, "Oh, actually we're playing alright, that's pretty good."
Jack: I saw you guys at Brooklyn Steel and it was burning. You guys were on fire. [laughter] It was great.
Zach: Oh, thanks. But it didn't feel like that at the time because the tour was so materially difficult that I think we weren't playing at the top of our game as a band. We weren't able to enjoy it at the top of our game, you know what I mean?
Ma: We were doing our best.
Zach: But it was really cool to see that we could go out and play for a thousand people, and probably less than 10% of them knew who we were or even looked us up or anything, and we had a pretty great response. And that was unexpectedly touching, because I think both of us - Ma, correct me if I'm wrong - share a kind of detachment about all this. We're not people who go around feeling really proud or identify with the things that we make. We just enjoy doing this stuff. So our relationship to the music that we make probably has more in common with a listener of that music than somebody who's going to go take this with commanding authority, you know, identify with what they've made and say like, "Well, this is what I do and this is what I intended and this is how it's supposed to be," and all of this, you know? It's a looser object for us than that. Right, Ma?
Ma: Yeah, yeah. It's something we don't control. Some parts are out of control. Or autonomous, I would say, more than out of control.
Zach: But then you have these victories occasionally that are surprises, like we played this show in Detroit, where I don't think any of us were feeling particularly good when we started the show, but it just went over so well with the audience and it was kind of uncanny and invigorating. And that was a new experience for me because I'm accustomed to thinking of myself as a weird, antagonistic piece of shit, basically. You know? Like in a good way.
Jack: Another byproduct of coming up in the noise scene in Western Mass. [laughter]
Zach: Yeah! You're like a thorn in the side of society, you're a fuck up and a mistake. And I still have that relationship.
Ma: Or a surprise and a gift.
Jack: You know what? That's the power of Positive Mental Attitude.
Zach: Well, that's the polarity there. Those are the two sides of the coin. It's a bit of both. You're like, "I'm a hero and such a loser."
Ma: Yeah, we're switching roles. [laughter]
Zach: But whatever keeps the locomotion going, you know?
Jack: But so, okay, I'm remembering some of the specifics of the Stereolab tour. Not to go into anything too specific, but I know that you guys had to rent a van. I mean, the tour was month and a half. How long was it?
Ma: It was 40 days, it was more than 30 shows, I think.
Zach: Come on, you've been there a million times, right? I mean, Jack does live sound for bands and he'll go on a tour like that, no questions asked. He won't even get paid! [laughter] "This just in: hire Jack for free!" [laughter]
Ma: We should have hired you!
Jack: Well, I would have loved to, of course. We convened about it a lot. And ultimately, my recommendation, which I assume is what ended up happening, was to make a list of demands, make a stage plot and an input list and just hit all the house engineers beforehand and you'll save $10,000 or something like that. Maybe not that much, but... Did you end up bringing a sound person?
Zach: No, couldn't do that.
Jack: It's probably for the best. You guys sounded great at Brooklyn Steel! Honestly, the sound was great.
Zach: Thanks!
Jack: You crashed with people every night, right? You never got hotels?
Zach: We got a hotel one night.
Jack: One night. Wow. Because how many people were in the band? Six, seven?
Zach: Six.
Jack: Six. That's a lot of people. But I'm sure you have, you know, stalwart fans and...
Ma: Resources? Zach has...
Jack: Yeah, exactly.
Zach: Yeah, I just called Daddy and it got all sorted out, right there, Jack.
Jack: Yeah, Daddy Warbucks. [laughter]
Zach: No, it was hard. I've been on longer tours before and knew that I couldn't really hack it, I was too much of a baby, but this one really made me keenly aware of what people are going through because for all intents and purposes, for openers, we actually had it kind of easy. It was kind of a nice vibe and the pay was slightly better than most openers expect. So even though we were stretched incredibly thin to do it, we were kind of all aware. We were like, "We're the lucky ones? Oh my God..." [laughter]
Jack: "This is what the lucky ones get?!" [laughter]
Zach: This is a rough game. But yeah, crashing with people all of the time. You know how it is.
Ma: I had no idea what I was saying yes to. [laughter] And then I discovered...
Jack: Yeah, so Zach tricked you again. [laughter]
Ma: No!
Jack: That's the history of the band, Zach tricking you. [laughter]
Ma: No, it's just I have to learn somehow. And that was the way I've been taught.
Zach: We're in a perpetual state of feeling lucky that we have people, friends around us who want to play this music with us, because the conventional rewards aren't really there.
[Fievel Is Glauque "Less to Be"]
Zach: We didn't really get to talk about the nitty gritty of how me and Ma work together in writing stuff, because for the last two years, or more, actually, for almost three years now, everything that we do, 95% of it is stuff we wrote together.
Jack: That's really interesting, actually the music you write, not just the lyrics in addition.
Zach: Yeah, yeah. It starts with a melodic impetus from Ma, so she'll sing a little melodic cell and I'll try out different harmonizations and then Ma and I will agree or disagree about what should happen next. And my relationship to writing and harmony has been really advanced and pushed by this writing process with Ma to an extent where it's actually become pretty boring for me to write alone. I feel like something's missing, I need this voice that's offering new information and also some antagonism to my worst inclinations and laziness. So it's just changed it a lot to work with Ma. And I think we started out with an uneasy relation, it wasn't that interesting to us, the idea of "Zach will write some songs and then we'll pick the ones she wants to sing and then we'll do it." That was a limited form and I think we were keenly aware of those limitations. So when we started writing together and it actually worked.
Ma: That was lucky.
Zach: Yeah, Flaming Swords was the beginning of that. I couldn't have done any of the writing that we've done in the last three years without Ma being right there in it.
Ma: That's very sweet.
Jack: That's amazing. That's a rare collaborative possibility, you know? Composing things together, especially stuff of the complexity that your music is, both of your music. It's pretty remarkable. That's cool to learn.
Ma: I tried to do music with other people.
Jack: Yeah. It's never worked out the same?
Ma: No. I just don't want to do this with someone else.
Jack: Well, I'm excited for it to continue. I guess before we go, you guys are working on a record. Do you have anything else that you guys are excited about that is coming up for Fievel?
Zach: Well, it hasn't been announced yet, but we're going to do a show next month. Won't say more about that, but yeah, and we're working with people in Brussels. We just started playing with a new flute player over there and that's been really cool. We're trying to get together to do more writing and recording. We really want to do something at Paul Miller's tape studio in New York, really love him. And yeah, this band, we're slow. We generate a lot of material, but we don't decide what to do with it and we kind of just wait until something feels right. And that's that old M.O. of gestures needing to come from somewhere, come from the right place, not just imposing the intellect on things and deciding what would be strategic or make sense. It has to make gut sense and it has to be live, in a way. The decision making has to be live. You know what I mean by that?
Ma: Is it cheesy to say alive, also? That's maybe cheesy, maybe I don't say it.
Zach: I mean, it's a little vitalist, you know? [laughter] You've got that French vitalist tradition behind you.
Ma: Ah, my French soul. Nothing I can do. [laughter]
Zach: Our new single, "Scanning Things," the title is taken from this Pessoa poem. And I've been reading him a lot this year, just everything I can including his writing in English and all this stuff. He has kind of a vitalist, platonic idea about poetry and song and stuff like that. He's like, "These are creatures, these are human beings."
Ma: They have a spirit, for sure.
Zach: Yeah, and I think a vitalism would uphold that and say that's real, but a kind of psychodynamic curiosity approach would just bracket that feeling of like, "Oh my God, this song, it's alive, it's an organism, I need to respect it, I need to find out what it wants, need to learn how to speak its language and ask it how it wants to be represented or if it wants to be represented." That's kind of more where we're at.
Jack: As Morton Feldman would say, "Don't push the notes around."
Zach: Don't push the notes around, yeah, exactly. Which is so hard not to do. And at the same time, exactly what you must do, right? So this is kind of a very fertile field of paradoxes that we all dip into. And that's our shared quest, I guess, is for deepening the relationship to the old paradoxes that just don't go away, thank God. That's good stuff. Good for what ails you, bad for what hurts you. Bad for... bad for what aids you! Good for what ails you, bad for what aids you.
Jack: That's beautiful. And honestly, I think that's probably a pretty good place to end.
Zach: Well, thanks, Jack. Thanks for having us on.
Jack: Thank you guys for doing this.
Ma: Thank you.
Jack: This was fun. I'll talk to you guys soon. Enjoy.
Zach: Much love, chef.
