Interview with Jeff Zagers

Jeff Zagers - Still / Alive

There's something spectral, historic, and familiar to Jeff Zager's music, like the visitation of a lost loved one in a dream. I'm at once placated and disturbed by Still / Alive, his excellent, new LP on the perennially great Wharf Cat Records. There's a chance I feel this way because Zagers' music, like an ancestral tapestry, pulls from a wide net - I'll say right off the bat that I've never heard anything quite like Still / Alive, and I consider myself a fairly well-listened individual. There are jazz, folk, rock, and electronic elements alive and teaming under the surface of this disembodied pop record. Somehow it doesn't sound cluttered or overdone - it's moving, actually. A song like "A Hole to Hollow" is as heartbreaking as it is pleasantly pensive, and that's an indication of the record as a whole.

It's not surprising, though, when you consider how long Jeff has been working on it, having started writing back in 2009 and entering production in 2012. It shows. Aside from the intricate, layered song structures, Alive / Still is sonically impressive. Simply put, there's a very high sound quality on this release. Knowing that Jeff did the mixes himself makes it an even more staggering feat. Zagers recently completed an eighteen-day tour alone. That's serious commitment, but what else would you expect from an endeavoring, earnest, and exceptionally-talented individual?

Still / Alive is streaming on Spotify, but I recommend checking out the "Still Alive" single on Soundcloud and buying the whole record. It will surely be one of my favorites of the year.

Jordan Reyes: You play a lot of instruments! When and how did you begin picking them up? What makes you want to learn more?

Jeff Zagers: There was an acoustic 3/4 sized Kay guitar given to my family when I was born. Around the age of 8 or 9 I started attempting to play along to recordings. I stayed on guitar for years, taking lessons here and there from a music shop. Then I took lessons for a couple years by David Kimball in South Carolina. He taught high school classes in the morning, private lessons in the afternoon and performed in orchestras or theater plays at night. On top of that, I don't remember what his primary instrument was but if it had strings, he could play it. I learned a lot of things from him, but what resonated most was triads. 

JZ: I discovered multi-tracking and learned bass and drums. Moved to Savannah, Ga in 2005 and started diving into newer music outside of what was available to me growing up. I was finding kinship with folk forms. Jazz and country, and noise. The echoing of your surroundings. 

Photo by Shaye Garrigan

JZ: The situations on how a lot of instruments came to me are rather divine and hard to talk about. It was never to sought after, but rather a natural curiousness of wanting to learn an instrument and sometimes having it just show up. I have been stepping back from learning anything else and practicing taking care of the instruments I have and keeping them tuned up. 

JR: Tell me a little bit about Still Alive, your new record on Wharf Cat. When was this material written and recorded?

JZ: Hmm, what do you want to know? I was approached by Carson Cox about getting a record together of my solo work. He spearheaded the idea and later it morphed into him working with Wharf Cat to assemble it all.

JZ: I was working with decomposing material to make new soil for the surrounding area here. To ripen and to rot. The tidal wave that is humanity is teetering on its last resources. Wasting so much as a planet. A lot of thought was given to the ocean and the land of this earth. 

JZ: The material was written over a number of years going back to 2009. The production itself took place june/july 2012 - december 2013.

JR: I can't think of many other artists I know from Savannah, GA. Are there any names I should know?

JZ: The birds here are a kind of revolving door ensemble. There is an orchestra in my back yard on a nice day. They line up on the telephone wire and just sing. The coast has very nice sounds too. Maybe some of the most moving moments of my life were caused by the sounds and movements of the ocean.

JZ: It’s a very peculiar town where the art line is blurred due to the fact that you see everybody everywhere if you are out and about. You know them as people, not as personas. Being attracted to the type that stays busy is natural in most "artists". Mike Williams comes to mind. Might be hard to find online but you can find a few things. 

JR: The first thing that sticks out to me is the layering in your music. There's a lot to grasp before you fully understand it. Do you yourself do the mixing of the record once you assemble the component parts?

JZ: Wow, thats cool to hear. For the "discerning ear". Yes, I recorded and mixed the whole album. The mastering is a separate process with professionals involved, but I complete all final mixes on my own. I think I spent a good two months mixing the record after I finished recording it. No computers. Just a digital 8-track and a 4-track. Mixed down to a CD-R recorder. I really enjoy mixing and sequencing at the end of working on a record. It just comes together, and segues show themselves through listening back and I just follow what feels right. No fuss.  

JR: I often hear that people say there's not as much room for guitar-based music anymore in terms of music's trajectory. I don't really think that's true. You synthesize guitar and rock-based instruments with electronics and are successful with it. Do you think you have to combine rock with something else to be doing something worthwhile with music?

JZ: Wow, music's trajectory. A duality arises when thinking about this subject. No, I don't think music has to have guitar in it to be worthwhile. This is a pretty loaded question. I think people still really like guitars, and I don't think it is fading away in the grand scheme of things. But new music has been born for years. I enjoy minimal synth music, which sounds like dance music without the drums. It makes me dance more! I don't know why but without the all too common sound of a kick and snare, not hearing those very regular tones and just these new tones, is stimulating.

JZ: Most of this music was written on a keyboard or piano and was not written with guitar but simply has guitar as a rhythmic effect. 

JR: What makes music a worthwhile pursuit for you?

JZ: My fellow composers, past composers, present composers. The exercise of improvisation, the breakthroughs, the places you go, and the lessons you learn. 

JZ: I ENJOY music. 

JR: There’s also a bit of jazz in this record I think. Maybe that's just what I get from hearing woodwind instruments like a sax. Do you have any sort of history with jazz?

JZ: When I moved to savannah I was discovering Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk through a used/new record store and the public library's cd section. All of them just really blew me away and immersed myself into their worlds for years. True composers. I hold them very dear to my heart.  

JZ: I lived in Durham for a couple months in 2008 and was finding a lot more of their recordings available up there. It’s a great area to find music. I started mixing guitar/sax/bass/ and drums when I was living there and brought this sound back to savannah with me. I tried to make a more full sound. I called it Rock Band. It was a live set of songs consisting of guitar/ bass and dueling saxophones on tape. I would play drums atop of the tape with each track being sent to its own amp proper and it would have the effect of a full band playing. This was the era that those composers music started to make its influence in the sound. 

JR: Your previous solo ventures have come out as tape and CDs, I think. How has the transition to having a physical LP been? Are you pleased with it?

JZ: Yes I am very pleased! The transition was fairly smooth. I had released 3 full lengths before this record. I gave just as much time and thought to those as this one. 

JR: Along with the new LP, you also put out a music video directed by Carson Cox. It's really sort of fourth-wall-breaking at times and reminds me of Videodrome a bit - I don't know if I'm completely off but that's my read! What were some of your ideas behind the video? How'd you and Carson link up for it?

JZ: He thought it would be fun to do a video. While recording the album, I had a day out of the blue where I recorded tons of songs in my house. Different ways of hooking up the camera and audio. Just getting a feel for all the ways to capture something using an old video camera and an audio mixer running AUX into a VHS player. This resulted in a day of musical renditions ranging from lip-synching videos, acoustic numbers, pre-recorded music mixed with live vocal takes. I changed the scene/lighting for each song. So those original tapes are all full takes of songs. A good hour’s worth of material. I sat on that for a year or two and thought a video for the record would be cool, using new or different material. Around a year later I took the same camera and realized it only picked up light in the lens so I used it to capture windows, and bright objects. Kind of an infrared feeling to it with anything that exposes light. So I was moving the camera rapidly back and forth and sort of shaking it around to make trails using the VHS tape. I sent both those tapes to Carson and he edited them into what would become the music video for “Still Alive.” He did a great job editing it and made it really, really busy. I still have yet to see Videodrome. 

JR: You’re also doing a bunch of touring for the album. I haven't seen you so I have to ask. What's your set up? Do you end up having to loop a lot of stuff?

JZ: I just wrapped up the tour yesterday. Eighteen days on the road. Driving myself and performing every night. It was a blast. As I type this, it is 9:30pm and I just want to go somewhere because I am so used to being out at this time right now. But I am going to restrain myself and get some house chores done. :)

JZ: I used pre-recorded material and have a number of instruments to work with to keep it fun and alive. If you want a list, I was itching to see what this looked like in print and try to imagine it with out hearing. Here goes.

JZ: A CD dj player, sampler, mixer, microphone, acoustic guitar w/ pick-up, a synth, a reverb tank, and tambourine. Fully-mixed versions of songs with more instrumentation and samples on top. I have no shame playing pre-recorded songs for I would rather have it sound good then try to juggle so many things and make it sound half as full.

JZ: I can't count on my hands and toes how many sets I have seen with loop pedals lately.

JR: What all is in the future for Jeff Zagers?

JZ: I would like to get my green thumb back. It’s been too long.

JZ: I’m ready for the next record. Working on the pre-production now, which will take a while.  So much can be spontaneous, but it would be nice to finish the compositions and sound design before starting the actual recording this time around. Sometimes you get too far and can't go back when you realize that you might want to leave it open for change. I’m looking forward to it. Expect guests from the outer ground on this next record. 

JR: Anything else you'd like to say?

JZ: Thank you for this opportunity. Music is Still Alive!

Interview with Bichkraft

Bichkraft - Mascot

Bichkraft is minimal, intense, and rather danceable. The group, comprised of four Ukrainian boys - Dima Novichenko, Jenia Bichowski, Serzh Kupriychuk, and Jenia Machina - makes music inspired by both the industrial pop of Wax Trax and the DIY ethos of a band like Minor Threat. It's also psychedelic. I find myself wedged into the groove and creak of a band like Spacemen 3 at times - leaning and snapping along to a whirring, undulating bassline. Wharf Cat Records just put out their excellent debut LP Mascot, an eight-song meditation on being disoriented, but perceptive in an oppressive place


Coming from Kiev/Kyiv, Bitchkraft is fairly unique, at least to me. I personally can't think of that many bands from the area other than Pseudogod (from Russia) and Kino (from when it was all the Soviet Union) and this Soviet Punk comp. I know that it's both an advantage and disadvantage because a listener like myself may concentrate too much on context and not enough on the substance, which is more than compelling in itself. But on the other hand, it might draw in someone curious. To me, an already-more-than-a-little-paranoid type, I find myself in odd solidarity with the band. Trip Warner, one of the three people who runs Wharf Cat Records, sent me an English translation of their lyrics. The record starts out with "There are erased numbers on your road/Of flowers that fought all night when/Water was washing off their youthfulness/And all of them are with me/All of them are with me/I did not even know." And I can't help feel a shiver - does the narrator identify as someone watching the flowers or the flowers themselves? And where the hell are we if we can't read the numbers on the road?

I don't know. And I don't think I ever could until it's too late.

Jordan Reyes: Tell me a little bit about the bands in Ukraine. What are some of the bands that myself and others reading in the USA should know about?

Dima Novichenko: Bryozone, Indirect, Karr, Pree Tone

JR: What are shows like in Kiev? Do you guys get many touring bands that come through?

Jenia Bichowski: Shows in Kyiv are like anywhere else. It’s usually clubs or bars for about 50 people. Some people get crazy and some don't. We often have problems with local venue sound-engineers and we don’t have as much free beer for musician as we want. Also we have great D.I.Y festivals/gigs. For example we have annual festival in forest near Zhytomir which is pretty unique for Ukraine and other nearby countries. It's commonly believed that Ukraine is visited by a small amount of touring bands, but we’re not talking about RHCP. For example The Obits performed here for the same 50 people and Michael Gira drove through in his cowboy hat and his ex-girlfriend was here. Even Genesis P-Orridge performed here not long time ago.

JR: When did you guys start the band? How did you guys meet and know each other?

JB- We played in different bands before Bichkraft, on the fringes of the same scene. So we knew each other in one or another way. After we played in garage bands together, we started Bichkraft. We’re often moving from place to place, but it looks like we have enough equipment and skills to settle anywhere we want.

DN: We all knew each other except for me and Serzh. We barely understood that we'd play together when it all came about so when we first met for rehearsal I said “Looks like we’re going to play together today” and Serzh was like “Who the fuck are you?"

JR: When did you write and record the music for your debut LP Mascot? Did you record it yourselves or in a studio?

DN: It all started in the garage in winter. So it was always near -20c and we drank pu-erh tea all the time and just wrote songs. Then, as the snow melted, we moved to another place where we recorded the album. It was in the basement of one of our houses.

JR: Where did you get the name Mascot for the LP?

JB:We were just smoking cigarettes on the terrace of the house and figured out that “Mascot” is the name of cigarette paper we were using. So we named the album after it.

JR: How did you end up linking up with Wharf Cat records for the release? Seems like a long ways to go!

JB-They deal with bands we like so we just wrote to them. Now we have great contact, and even introduced our cats via Skype, so it’s really serious and we must continue to work together because of a sense of duty to our cats. Wharf Cat is inspiring us so we can concentrate more on music.

JR: Are there any particular ideas or events that influence or inform the music that you make as Bichkraft?

JB: We mostly play our music intuitively so it's hard to say what influences us at that time. Maybe it was making drum-machine for one or gardening for other. Even now we can’t say something particular about it, each day isn’t like another.

JR: Does the political climate, especially between Ukraine and Russia, have a big impact on your music? How?

JB: Of course it influences us, but indirectly like any people who live here. We don’t want to associate our music with politics because there's too much of that here.

JR: There does seem to be a bit of paranoia in your music. As much as I enjoy the record, it is unsettling too. Is that indicative of how you guys feel on a daily basis?

JB – Paranoia? Who is asking that?

JR: Do you guys get to tour at all?

JB: We already toured this year and we want to make it as far as we can.

JR: What all is in the future for Bichkraft?

JB- We are working on new album and when our driver will come back from Georgia we’ll tour for Mascot somewhere outside Ukraine.

DN: We need to get our shit together and make many new things. At the moment we moved at new place again so it’s all a bit gypsy thing. who knows where we'll find ourselves in the future?

JR: Anything else you'd like to say?

Bichkraft: Thanks!!!

Interview with The Ukiah Drag

What's noise and what's music? Is it simply a way to bide time until death or is there a desperate hope inexplicably tied to the act of creation? I was born with the expectation to speak and listen. Communication and communion. I'm a student of the sublime - that feeling you get when you're on a flight and the PA clicks on and the pilot says, "Well, folks, we've been notified that the next thirty minutes might be a little bumpy so you had better fasten into those seat-belts lest you float from your delicate position and concuss yourself on the cabin ceiling," and you realize that even in our most powerful machines, on a whim, the dynamics of storm and wind have the wherewithal to snap their fingers and, like a candle flickering at the mouth of a lonely cavern, turn out the lights. But I'm also a student of beauty. In Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, he pits these two ideas and feelings against each other, but if I'm going to preach for a hot minute, I'd say that music, along with other artistic media, often succeeds in being able to capture both.

Which is, of course, what The Ukiah Drag does. You might be thinking me a wee crazy now, and you'd be right, but not because of the previous claim. Beauty is created by way of a dedication to form while the sublime is an overflowing. I'll give an example. At the moment of genesis, noise music began was sublimity in effigy, but as noise became familiar it was able to fill a form dedicated to the genre, which also makes it beautiful, like how a duck fits into our form of waterfowl. To an extent, there are familiar song forms here, but there's also a tint of controlled chaos that circumnavigates those forms: guitars and other noisemakers may, out of nowhere, decide to stray from the main piece for a bit and carve their own paths.

If we're going to play the genre game, The Ukiah Drag falls into a lot of categories. Punk, Blues. Psychedelic rock. Country. Noise. And this failure to pin the band down makes it that much more exciting. Just give their newest record In The Reaper's Quarters a listen, which you really ought to, and you'll see what I mean.

Jordan Reyes: Ukiah is an interesting word to choose in a band name. I only know it as a city in California. Why did you choose it? Where does the drag come from?

Tommy Conte: Ukiah is the county seat of Mendocino County where wine flows like blood through the Russian River; it was a sordid hotbed for burnt out hippie ruralists in the sixties. Jim Jones held his first Peoples Temple congregation in Ukiah. Charles Manson was a demigod there at some point, giving his LSD sacrament to runaways and with low self esteem; he and Susan Adkins were arrested there in June 1968 for peddling drugs and fucking underage girls. At one point the locals referred to Van Damme State Park as “Dog Blood Beach” because of satanic cults sacrificing animals there. And ad nauseam...The dark side of hippie culture is one hell of an American cultural priapism, a hard cock that was useless and bulging. Hence, DRAG.

Zack Arrington: Yeah we get our name from the town, I've never actually been to but have heard stories and folklore that really builds this image of a haunted rural town, somewhere where people have a lot to tell but don't say much... and the word Drag just puts a stamp on that vibe.

Brian Hennessey: Zack named the band, it works well.

Drew: Because The Zombies was taken.

JR: There are a lot of interrelating sounds in your music. There's psychedelia, noise, punk, pop. Where do these sounds come from? Were they conscious?

ZA: We draw from an eclectic palate, and write on a conscious plane so when we're writing songs there is a well rounded pool of influences that pours out and we let it just come out as natural as we can. Never forcing anything - that's a real pet peeve of ours. Letting the song grow into its own and allowing it to align it self instead of relying a formula or assumed structure.

BH: Most of us have been playing in bands for a substantial period of time. As artists that have a continued interest in the outlet of making music, it only makes sense to keep your palette varied and fresh. Some decisions are made with a clear vision in mind, but we have a natural chemistry as a band, and this is the most important creative factor at the end of any day.

TC: I only listen to hip hop and country so personally I have no consciousness of the above mentioned music genres let alone music consciousness in general.

JR: Tell me a little bit about your new album. How did you write these songs?

ZA: For me, this record has been in the works for several years, a slowly focusing vision, very squinty-eyed, and trying to craft the pieces, some of these songs were written before the band really existed and it has been a process of first finding the band to write them with, allowing the band to form and come into itself and then having the perfect facility to record them in. It has taken a couple years, written between a couple of towns and cities but now it's finished. A period is marked and now it's time to move on.

BH: We recorded it in a church-turned-studio in Hudson NY. It was wacky. The band solidified this batch of songs over the last 18 months or so, and were able to embellish them nicely in the studio.

TC: We wrote them with our ass in the air catching a breeze, Ben Greenberg holding a very sensitive, expensive microphone between his teeth and Sultan’s carpet absorbing the large pool of jissom. As for writing, what happens when four Floridians lock themselves in a basement? We don’t have those in Florida so you go a little stir crazy.

JR: Are lyrics important to your music? What themes or topics do you find importance in?

ZA: I mean to me they are. Its like the accompanying narration to the music - it gives it a little personality. Not just filling in blanks with some sort of vapid karaoke routine but giving it a little bit of a soul. The lyrics are typically pretty personal for me but vague enough to assimilate to the listeners imagination and they can do what they want to do with it from there

BH: Sure, I care that they sound good to me. Anyone's interpretation though is up to them, and in earnest they are usually the last thing I hear when I am listening to music. I've heard it said that any song is about love, war, death or sex. While I don't think that's EXACTLY right, I'll say that all of those themes do resonate strongly with me.

TC: I like karaoke and sex and you’ll have to believe my word.

JR: Do you guys read a lot? Any favorite authors or poets?

ZA: When my attention span allows it, I love reading. It's a very fundamental stimulus for me but I usually need something that just hooks into my brain and doesn't let go until I've read the whole book or whatever or I'm liable to just shelf it and will come back to it like 6 months later... Been on a heavy WS Burroughs and Harry Crews thing the last year or so. We also pass a lot of books around among ourselves.

BH: Same here, my attention is a hard thing to wrangle. A biography on Tom of Finland by F. Hoover Valentine reeled me in real hard last year. Michael Chabon writes some entertaining fiction that I enjoy.

TC: I very much have to read, and there is a fine line between indulgence and compulsion. That’s why I can read the Holy Bible and a Haynes automobile manual and react on a visceral wavelength to both. A few slabs I've read recently that have resonated deeply into my cold, brackish heart: The Family by Ed Sanders (beat poet turned hard-boiled gonzo journalist), A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor; The Process by Brion Gysin (Nothing is true, everything is permitted); You Can’t Win by Jack Black; The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson (The Exploited ain’t the only idiots who like sex and violence); Ted Morgan’s revised biography of William S. Burroughs; Freedom is a Two Edged Sword by Jack Parsons; Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger; any and all Antonin Artaud, whether it be an absurdist manifesto or a dinosaur-like cat (cat-like dinosaur?) drawn on a napkin; Paul Krassner’s The Realist; Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby by Takashi Nemoto. I have no life so I must indulge vicariously through literature.

JR: What differences were there between this record and the cassette releases that came before from labels like Ascetic House and Night People?

ZA: Well "Jazz Mama" and "Variations of Candy" were recorded in the basement of the apartment me, Tommy and Brian lived in in Boston. We were more of a recording project at the time wide open with a lot of ideas but still coming together as a band.  

ZA: When Drew join in, he kinda served as a backbone for us and since then we have really grown and matured and really started to articulate what we are doing with our music, so after a couple of tours and recording a single it was time to do the LP in a studio, we really wanted to give justice to these songs and were more than adequately facilitated to do so    

BH: Home recording vs. a studio environment was definitely the biggest difference.

TC: Mood, drug choice, tape hiss.

JR: Where did the art for the record come from? Seems somewhat similar to the recent zine you put out.

ZA: That's because I did the art for both.

JR: There seem to be some mystic or spiritual tropes in the artwork, maybe more archetypal. Do these themes have any impact on your music?

ZA: Not necessarily an impact as much as they're parallel. Two outlets from the same source. Sisters  

JR: You recently toured with Merchandise. How was that tour?

ZA: The tour was a blast, those guys are kin. It's nice touring as a roving herd because even if a city or show is a pit you still got 8 friends to get in trouble with, and when it's a good time it's even better because you have the crew, which is a mobile sense of the familiar.

.

BH: It was cool. I saw some places that I hadn't seen before, and got to hang out with a lot of old friends. I'll be hard pressed to go on a tour that is any more like a vacation than that one was.

TC: A highlight was eating Prince’s Hot Chicken in Nashville. Chris Horn from Merch is a fried chicken guru and that’s why he plays saxophone so well - the valves are lubricated with gristle. It was our first time in Canada as a band and I wandered alone in both Montreal and Toronto for hours, trying to get into sex shops and being denied. They knew I was not a Quebecois fuckboy, just a plain American one.

JR: What is the musical climate in Tampa like?

ZA: I would not be the guy to ask, I haven't lived there for over 2 years now

TC: Hip hop and country music

JR: Are you guys going to tour behind the new record?

ZA: It's looking like early next year were going to tear up the whole US

TC: Lock up your unibrowed sons and sweaty lawn boys! The Sultan is in heat...

JR: What all is in the future for Ukiah Drag?

TC: I want to play the David Letterman show

ZA: Sex? Drugs? Maybe some cash? Been thinking about getting a pet Tarantula but will probably settle for a ficus tree... hard to say.

BH: We'll write more songs and probably eat each others food on the sly until we leave for tour. A 12" EP coming is out sometime in 2015 too, so there's that.

Release of the Day: Boulders - Rock And Roll Will Never Die

Boulders, featuring Tommy Conte (of the Ukiah Drag, Cottaging, Cult Ritual) and Cameron Worden, was a project from Tampa Bay in a time before Merchandise became a household name, though the two band members have since split to Providence and Chicago respectively. Now, at the end of 2014, the band's first slab of wax rears its feral head.

Rock And Roll Will Never Die is an exercise in spontaneity. The record was recorded at Heinrich's Workshop in 2011 with minimal editing: there are no overdubs, or second takes, which makes it a rarity in the musical climate of today. Obviously, there's a sense of immediacy, but that doesn't do it justice: the record is urgent, woven with the importance of an exorcism or a cleansing. It needed to be recorded - something at balance was at risk of toppling to one side.

Boulders combine a lot of elements. The vocals actually remind me of Prurient or similar american power electronics, but the instrumental music is in the vein of psychedelic no-wave. A few chords and a plodding early Joy Division/Warsaw beat and the band blasts off. And it sounds like there are more than two people playing, which says something about how hard the band is playing their instruments. The careening, gritting-its-teeth guitar line atop an unrelenting drum beat makes for an intimidating sound, but also a rewarding one.