by Brad Rose

I was fourteen when I got my first guitar. A cheap, half-sized Kay, given to me by my uncle. I remember feeling old at the time—thinking I was a couple of years too late to really learn guitar. But I'd taken piano lessons since I was a child, and played clarinet in band since middle-school (and on through high-school), so I knew this and that about music, at least formally. The guitar actually sat around for a while before I started to play it. I might never have, but a friend of mine started and so I was spurred on by some funny sort of competitive teenage jealousy.

My taste in music was more or less derivative and commercial, just the kind of stuff any teenager would have been listening to on the radio in the mid-nineties. But (and maybe in my defense) before I really hit my stride vis-à-vis Van Halen solos and sweep arpeggios—long before that, actually, before I'd even touched an electric guitar—my dad gave me his old copy of Stephan Grossman's "Country Blues Guitar," the first volume. I broke the spine and taped it together again learning John Hurt and Furry Lewis tunes. I remember playing an instrumental guitar rag at a student recital (I took lessons for a couple of years). It's the very first tune in that book, one of the John Hurt ones, but I can't remember what it's called...

So I learned the alternate-thumb technique pretty early on. Then spent years listening to old blues: delta stuff, Piedmont style, Texas shuffle, the Memphis cats, etc. Fahey came late for me, and it took me a little while to come around to him—initially I had trouble looking past just how much of his technique was derived from those old blues. Of course now I regard him in just the same light: I've spent years trying to get Skip James songs down; ditto Fahey. There's just so much depth there.

For a couple of years I took the songster approach pretty seriously (I mean: half-assedly, though earnestly) and performed a lot of finger-picking songs with vocals. Pieces of my own, covers (Rev. Gary Davis, say), spirituals, and occasionally some more experimental stuff. I'd messed around a bit with transplanting right-hand pattern picking to non-blues based chord or drone changes, but never really went after it until I saw Jack Rose play. That opened my eyes up to a lot of things. I mean, just watching him play. Like Indian classical music, which I'd been listening to passionately for years—it was like: oh hey man, I can use that, too. Cool.

I had a punk rock band in high-school. Keyser Soze. You know, from "The Usual Suspects." I got some email from a guy in Colorado Springs, saying there was already a ska band with that name, and we shouldn't use it. Hah. We did a tape, made maybe fifty of them. Later I was in a bad metal band but that didn’t last long. It's only recently (like the last few years) that I've felt myself really musically maturing, and so looking back on past projects is somewhat embarrassing. It's always been hard, too, for me to find that sort of musical relationship—something really productive, fertile, organic. Maybe that's just an impossible ideal on my part, I don't know....

Norman. My father teaches at the University. We moved there when I was an infant, and I did most of my growing up in that town. It's difficult now to go back, but I don't want to be unduly hard on it. It's such a commercial city, though! The strip malls and chain restaurants and bullshit consumerism are all so exhausting! But my parents have a wonderful magnolia in the backyard—I remember climbing on it as a child, the limbs thick and sturdy as rungs; the highest place I would go, and sit in the crook of two branches, looking down....

I moved to Iowa City from Oklahoma, for college, and have not left yet, though college has been done for some time. It's weird to think about it, but those are the only two places I've ever lived (besides a year in Connecticut as a fifth-grader, when my father had his sabbatical) and they’re both college towns. But then all my family comes from the east coast, and I’ve spent a lot of time there, so my perspective is not entirely one-sided. Still, I guess I'm not really prepared to say (or know) to what degree certain environments have affected my playing.

However I can say that the things I do, if I do them, and when I do them well, are slow things. They are meditative. This sort of introspectional space—breathing room, almost literally—strikes me as somehow characteristic of the Midwest: one is not concerned so much with fashion, superficiality, social standing; much more emphasis is placed on depth of character and peacefulness as a life-style. One tends to be judged more as an individual than as a social signifier. And as a result, one’s interests (I am speaking here about culture) are dictated to a much lesser extent by concerns of signification. That is partly an idealization on my part, but from a defensive stand-point perhaps a legitimate one: people love to characterize middle-America as full of yokels and simpletons. It’s that sort of mentality (and the corresponding pressure to accede to it) that drives a lot of the creative, intelligent people away from here, to the supposed hubs of cultural sophistication.

Personally, I am using music to try and know myself, and know myself better. Music is ideally a conversation we have with ourselves, if only (or often) unconsciously. The pace of that conversation is related to the pace our lives, and therefore to the pace of the places where we live our lives. So maybe it is not so much a question of regionalism as of tempo-type. But hell, the tempo might be ours to begin with, and the environment just ancillary, I don't know. That's chicken-and-egg stuff, and I'm no sociologist.

Well we'd all been here for a while doing our own things before it really clicked. They're up to something really explorative and good; an organic, positive synthesis, which I admire. Maybe I'm doing something with a similarly constructive vibe. Anyway, it just felt like we're both working with ideas and themes that, while often different, are both conversationally relevant to a lot of things going on in contemporary music right now. I mean, underground music or whatever. Different veins maybe, but with more similarities than differences, taken in a grand scheme. I don't know. We're all friends. I think they're awesome guys, on all levels.

I guess it breaks down into three categories: composed songs that I play the same way every time ("Spell For A Sweeter Past," say); songs with composed elements, or themes, but which are also largely open to improvisation and exploration (in "Deep In The Comb" there are a number of melodic “riffs” which I use to ground myself); and finally I do sometimes play strictly improvised music, though it takes a certain physical and mental harmony to really do it well. On the “Three Spells for Six String Guitar” cassette release, both “Spell against Indifference” and “Spell against Forgetfulness” were largely improvised. Improvisation is definitely the most exciting and liberating way to be; I tend to find that I lose interest in songs of the composed category most quickly. Either way, everything I play had its genesis in improvisation.

Touring with those guys was a blast. It went great. In a sense it was challenging, being that the shows we played were generally more skewed toward the "noise" end of things, which was a little nerve-racking for me. Even though, in the end, there wasn't a single disrespectful audience. Maybe some disinterest or skeptical bemusement here or there, but nothing worse than that.

I feel like I ought to have some pithy anecdote here.

I think the best memory was probably from the show in Belfast, Maine, at Dan (and co.) from Impractical Cockpit's house. There was the most amazing meal—with everything from local fiddlehead ferns to couscous to vegetarian shepherd’s pie—and then I played in the room where people were eating: a stripped down, almost bare room in terms of physical accoutrements; there was a large table piled with all the food, chairs clustered round a dusty wooden floor; and as much human warmth and merriness as could have been hoped for in any room—with the sun in the windows, going down through the pines and over the bay. This was mid-May, and it was cool enough to build a roaring bonfire. Raccoo-oo-oon played in a barn, along with Kites and Visitations and I can't remember who else. And then there was a damp dark basement with half-covered old well-holes in the floor, where Russian Tsarlag played a set in what had once been the root cellar....

New York City, though for non-tour reasons.

Yes and yes. I've been starting to sing again, and liking it. As a would-be serious guitarist, is that a faux-pas? Of course that’s a facetious question; there are no rules for personal expression.

(As a side-note: It has been very liberating for me to realize—and what an elementary and obvious realization!—that one does not need words to sing. The voice as instrument, as drone, etc. There is a lot of room for exploration here. I am trying to find a way to make use of these possibilities, taking into account my limitations as a vocalist. We’ll see what happens, I guess.)

Nope!

Well man, I got all kinds of tension.

But I guess we can speak of tension in two different ways. First there are physical, mental, emotional tensions. These are part of our lives, and we are forced to work with them as best we can. Then there is musical tension, the (cultural, institutional, social, etc) conditioning that makes us feel like, say, this here seventh chord has got to do something, it needs to be resolved, as though it would be a problem for it to just exist as what it is. Tension as an implied, perpetual return to the tonic, the resolution. That sort of tension was a classical paradigm that all those 12-tone modernists tried to tear down back at the turn of the 20th century. It is also the modus operandi for what we've come to know as pop music: a pop song's success is largely proportional to its ability to manipulate and resolve, generally to the tonic, various (nostalgic, superficial, romantic, sexual, etc) forms of tension.
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There are other forms of musical tension, too. When playing melodies in a major scale, I often like to come to rest on the 2nd. That adds a certain tension, because we expect the melody to be resolved to the tonic. But once we become a little more used to hearing it, it stops seeming like such an unnatural end point. We have shed the conditioning that inclines us towards hearing it as tension. There is still some tension in it—I mean, I guess technically the vibration of the strings is not in as sympathetic a state of harmony—but it ceases to feel like an error, and the tension becomes simply an implicit fact of the sound. I also like flat-sevenths a lot when thrown into a major scale. That adds a really dark, churning mood; it reminds me of the sea.

I guess this is all just to say that modal-based playing is of more interest to me than chord-based. Once you get into chords you’ve got no choice but to deal in a certain type of tension, and you almost end up pandering to it. (Even jazz, except for its more avant-garde extremes, answers to this formula.) Henry Flynt wrote that in music he aspired to an “ecstatic and perpetual” beauty. The chord progression is really the antithesis to perpetuality: it is going somewhere; it will get there. Minimalism’s idea (which was just an amalgam of ideas they adopted from others, say Pandit Pran Nath, and then synthesized) of endless melodic exploration over a pedal-point or drone is really very attractive and liberating for me. It seems the most organic way for music to unfold.

(And what about conceptual tensions? Paradigm tensions? Inter-cultural tensions? Social tensions? Racial tensions? There are infinite directions one could take a discussion about the role of tension, whether in my music, music in general, or in the world at large.)

I am, perhaps conservatively, trying to express, or at least point to emotions when I play. (Flynt again: “to be emotionally profound, music must be fiery, but at the same time it must have charming surprises and encourage intimacy.”) I think most people on the underground are. We don't have the luxury of the academic musician's clinical interest in formalism, yet we share the avant-garde impulse to reject traditional (read: conventional, complacent) methods of expression. (Maybe that’s a little too optimistic though; we have cynicism in lieu of formalism.)

Think of emotions as a sort of elaborate cat's cradle. A slight pull here, a twist of the fingers: in length the string remains the same, but the shape has vanished, been born anew. Tension is what gives rise to these changes. It is a catalyzing state of imbalance. Music then, without necessarily causing these changes (though it may and often does), shows us our capacity for emotional profundity, and reminds us of the fluid relationship we must maintain both with ourselves and with the world around us—after all, we are here, aren't we?