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Feature
Article - August 2000
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DRUMS FOR DRIBBLE:The Disco Biscuits' Sam Altman, Camp Bisco, and What If...? |
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by Jesse Jarnow |
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Preparing to host the second annual Camp
Bisco All-Star Loon Fest - to be held this year on August 25th
and 26th at the SA:w Mill Ski Area in Williamsport, Pennsylvania
- the Disco Biscuits are poised on the cusp
of the next generation - hell, this generation - of jambands.
Having tossed aside the increasingly stale conventions of bluegrass,
tepid white-boy funk, and watered-down jazz that many jambands seem
to make their forte, they have - through the integration of electronic-influenced
drumbeats, perilous composition, and deconstruction techniques -
helped bring improvised music into the present day.
Deny it as they may sometimes try, the Disco Biscuits are also
perhaps the quintessential product of the jamband scene itself.
Having grown up going to places like the Wetlands Preserve in New
York City, they all seem to know precisely what it is they want
out of a band -- and are now full-well in a position to give it.
The ultimate "what if...?" band, their exploits sometimes read like
the late-night musings of a thousand stoned college kids in dorm-room
listening sessions.
"Man, wouldn't it be cool if they played along with a movie?"
(Done. New Year's Eve. "Akira.") "Wouldn't it be cool if
they played the ending of the song first, man?" (Done.
Quite often, at that, with "inverted" songs.) And so on. Wish fulfillment.
Electric instruments existed for a good long while before Miles
Davis integrated them into jazz for "In A Silent Way" and "Bitches
Brew", albums which divided rabid jazz followers neatly in half.
While it may be presumptuous to compare the Disco Biscuits to Miles,
the Biscuits - among other bands including Lake
Trout (also appearing at Camp Bisco), Sound
Tribe Sector 9, the New
Deal, and Plexus - have attempted to modify ideas that evolved
around and for another genre of music and integrate into their own.
Likewise, they have caused considerably controversy within the jamband
scene -- at least in the sense that people either seem to go apeshit
about the Biscuits or decry them as minions of Satan (seriously).
Me, I go apeshit for 'em.
To my ears, the music is something wholly new, combining the interesting
elements of progressive rock composition with a new way of looking
at improvisation. Describing the first time the band played what
they now call "trance fusion", drummer Sam Altman commented that
the primary difference between electronic beats and more traditional
rock stylings is that "there's no turnaround. I was playing on every
four and not doing a fill." This lends a breathless quality to the
music, where the listener's mind, expecting a short pause at the
end of a beat cycle, will have to chase the beat in order to catch
up.
This lack of turnaround also leads to what is probably the most
common complaint about the music of the Disco Biscuits: that it
all sounds the same. This is an interesting complaint, if not an
outright closed-minded one, from people who have no problem with
other kinds of improvised music. To most people, all jazz sounds
the same, or everything the Grateful Dead ever did sounds the same,
or Phish, or anything else that carries on for long periods without
vocals. If one can hear the progression of a jam over a rock groove,
there's no reason why he should deny that such a progression exists
on top of an electronic groove.
The improvisation that the Disco Biscuits play is linear, but
not in the sense of a guitar solo that goes from point A to point
B. "A lot of the time we try to fight the concept of soloing," says
Altman. "A common thing we'll say to each other in practice is 'you're
soloing' and that's not what we're trying to do." The band members
play in loops, cycling patterns that the improvisation builds around.
It's an extremely patient kind of music, almost in the same vein
as the minimalist progressions of composer Philip Glass, which changes
gradually over the course of time. Picking out the change as it
occurs is rewarding, but also requires a new way of listening to
improvised music.
Always experimenting, the Disco Biscuits spent the first seven
months of the year separated from bassist Marc Brownstein, who parted
ways with the band in January. Spending most of their time at home
practicing and writing new songs, the remainder of the of the band
- Altman, guitarist Jon Gutwillig, and keyboardist Aron Magner -
became known as "the penalty killing unit" and caused a great deal
of stir within their own fanbase through drastic rearrangements
of classic Biscuits' tunes, the occasional integration of beat-box
master DJ Mauricio while
Altman moved to bass, and a succession of guest bass players. In
early July, though, Brownstein rejoined the band after a reconciliation.
Since then, the band has been at work preparing for Camp Bisco
and their fall tour (beginning in September), which will be their
first full tour since last October. At the same time, they are busy
recording a new studio album, their first studio work since 1998's
"Uncivilized Area" in a way which may surprise many fans (see interview
with drummer Sam Altman). The festival - also featuring Lake Trout,
UV Ray (featuring Sebastian Steinberg and Yuval Gubay, late of Soul
Coughing), the Ally, the
Ominous Seapods, and others - will surely be another step towards
being the quintessential jamband, as they integrate their favorite
aspects of summer festivals into something new.
On August 5th (after several weeks of frantic cross-country phone
calls) I got a chance to talk to drummer Sam Altman about the new
disc...
SA:: The album is going fantastic. We were up to 6:30
in the morning this morning working on [Mindless] Dribble.
JJ:: How is the process different this time around?
SA:: It's totally different. "Uncivilized Area" was
a studio album with a real live approach. It was us pretty much
doing jamming live in the studio, almost no overdubs. We tried to
get a good take. Here we're basically looping everything. We're
trying to do what we do live, take that approach to electronic music.
Do you want to know the technical aspects of what we do?
JJ:: Sure, if you wanna talk about 'em.
SA:: Basically, the way the song gets made is -- like,
let's say Dribble, what we're doing right now. I programmed
in beats for Dribble, the way I thought it would sound it
cool; all these drum and bass beats, some crazy Latin beats, some
crazy really bizarre drum and bass parts, and then we strung 'em
altogether. And then we sit there in front of the computer and Jon
will lay down his guitar lines over different parts of the drum
loops, and Aron will lay down keyboard parts, and Marc will lay
down bass parts.
And then when we have all these different loops and lines in different
keys and different rhythms and everybody's played over everything
else - it's almost like everybody's played along with everybody
else at that point too - and then we sit back and see what we've
got and name each little lick. Let's say we have eight licks in
A minor over the "apple butter toast" part of Dribble. To
keep track of them, we'll name them. One of the basslines is called
Fuzzy Turtle. One of them is called Peasant Girl.
Jungle Fugue. We put all these things together and start
arranging them.
We're like "Jungle Fugue was recorded next to Peasant
Girl and Fuzzy Alligator" and this whole weird jam starts
to build out of that. It's a pretty sick way to make music, totally
different.
JJ:: Do you put live drums behind this at any point?
SA:: There are no live drums...
JJ:: On this track or on the whole album?
SA:: Probably not on the whole album.
JJ:: Oh, wow. That's a pretty different approach. How
has that been changing your mindset towards playing?
SA:: I don't know if I could ever play these beats.
Dribble is about nine or ten minutes along at this point
in the middle of the jam, where we are. I was just thinking if we're
gonna play this live, all the cool things that are in this jam that
everybody could play. One of the things that Jon dreamed up when
we first came up with Dribble... you know the part after
the intro where it goes [sings some stuff] where it goes from four
to three and then in?
JJ:: Yeah.
SA:: That was just a cop-out for me because the original
plan was going to be one beat over four, then two beats over four,
then three over four, then four over four, then five, then six,
then seven, then eight over four. I couldn't play that. You can't
really tap three over four let alone seven over eight... but, we
could do that with the computer. I programmed it all out. It sounds
ridiculous. We were just talking about whether or not I could actually
play that. A lot of things are like that.
JJ:: So, if you can't consciously or actively reproduce
this stuff how do you see it as being connected to the stuff you
do live?
SA:: Well, even if I can't play it exactly, it's certainly
going to influence the way I play live. As far as just me sitting
with the drums, when I sat down and was coming up drums for Dribble,
these are things that I'd like to hear Dribble over - like
a different style of Dribble - so I'll be able to approximate
some of the things. Like, I just won't be able to play mad 32nd
notes every other bar. I'll get pretty close. (laughs)
It was that way after "Uncivilized Area". The jams we did on "Uncivilized
Area" we really liked. A lot of those things ended up in the songs
[after that].
JJ:: What's a typical Biscuits' rehearsal like? How
do you practice improvisation?
SA:: We've had exercises that we do, and still sorta
do sometimes. One of the things we do - and I don't know if people
know - is that our setlists will be a song into the end of another
song into the beginning of another song or a song backwards. Or
we'll go from one song into the end of another song into the beginning
and then jam out the beginning and go into the beginning of another
tune.
To get that freedom so that we feel comfortable going in and out
of that, there are just simple things that we have to do: rhythmic
shifts: the "all the 1s" jam where you shift rhythms. We'll all
get to the point, where we're in four, and I'll start hitting one.
[Sings it.] And Jon will play triplets over those ones and then
I'll come around and the band will come around in order and then
we'll be in triplets. That sort of gets us in range. We sort of
feel that. That's one way we can go from one place in four to another
place in three.
We have all these harmonic and melodic shifts, too, called "drop
jams" and "majorizing" and "minorizing" jams -- techniques to get
us in and out of keys and in and out of harmonies and how to get
to chord changes that build and how to get to chord changes that
stick on something so that it gets really trancey. If we're in a
rock chord progression and we pick a chord to stick on, and everybody
can then - after we've done that for a while - feel where we should
stay on that and not be in changes anymore and it just starts revolving.
That's sort of like a "ball" jam where we get locked up in this
rhythmic and harmonic ball and, out of the changes into other changes,
and then we're rotating like crazy around in that, and then we shoot
out of that and into another set of changes, or into another song,
or into another key.
We used to work on that in practice all that time. A lot of times
in practice, we'll learn. A fun thing to do in practice is to learn
a new song. We'll learn new songs. Sometimes, we'll play a set --
play song into song. We'll do transitions in practice, but we try
never to do the transitions that we're going to do at a show in
practice. We almost never say "wow, that transition was really cool
in practice, let's do that one tonight".
JJ:: How often do you talk about the shows after they
happen?
SA:: We used to talk about them pretty relentlessly.
Like, in set break, we'd talk about them. We'd talk about the first
set. If the first set wasn't going well, we'd get back there and
either happily or unhappily figure out why it wasn't working. Then
we just sort of realized that you have to give things some time
before talking about them, in order to be calm about them -- out
of the moment before you really realize what was going on.
We pretty much talk about the shows when we're on tour. We get
the tapes pretty much right away and we listen to that night's show
in the RV or we listen to it the next night. We're pretty much on
top of what we're doing. It's pretty much the only way to know what's
going on with the shows.
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