Over the preceding few years a number of individuals have dubbed Disco Biscuits' keyboardist Aron Magner, a "covert sonic operative" (okay, more often than not they have used the less prosaic phrase "secret weapon" but the point is made). However sincere and well-intentioned such a sentiment may be, though, it fails to acknowledge Magner's urgent, defining contributions to the band's sound. Indeed, although he is often slightly obscured by the tiers of keyboards that surround him, Magner unquestionably operates full throttle in the visible (and audible) range of the spectrum. Indeed it was the addition of his new keyboard textures in late 1997 that helped to initiate the band's collective musical voice that individuals now refer to as "Bisco."

Magner's path to Bisco began with a series of jazz gigs in his native Philadelphia. While still in his early teens Magner performed professionally in a range of combinations, typically focusing on jazz standards. At that time his heroes ranged from Herbi e Hancock and Chick Corea to lesser-known, essential performers such as Red Garland. While he maintains an affection for these musicians and the styles they helped to engineer, at present he is much more interested in becoming the progenitor of his own no vel moods and emissions.

Magner is currently multitasking with the Disco Biscuits as the quartet remains enmeshed in a number of projects. While practicing and planning for its New Year's Eve run (which culminates at the Palladium in Worcester) the group is also in the final stages of producing its third album, set for a spring release. Information on these developments as well as the topics raised in this interview can be found at the band's web site, www.discobiscuits.com.

DB- Let's start off and talk a bit about your background. When did you start to focus on the keyboard and when did you begin to play out?

AM- I began on piano when I was really young, four or five. I didn't really take it seriously until I was thirteen, which is when I discovered jazz. It was then that I put classical music, which I had been studying, on the backburner. In the ensuing years I became more serious and started playing professionally- jazz clubs, weddings, bar mitzvahs. That's what I was all about. When it was time for me to go to college I chose to stay in Philadelphia to maintain my musical contacts. I was even doing that in college. Saturday night everybody was going to fraternity parties and I'm walking out of the quad in a tuxedo, carrying a keyboard under my arm, ready to go play a wedding or something. Then I met these guys {the Disco Biscuits} which basically changed my life. There's only so long that you can play "Willow Weep For Me" for eighty year old rich Jewish women. I was also seeing a number of my peers who were older than me, still doing the same thing at age thirty-five and not happy. Yeah, they had their brea d and butter gigs but that wasn't really what I wanted to do at thirty-five. It was fun at fifteen but I wanted something a bit more intellectually stimulating.

DB- Then you met the Biscuits which basically changed your perspective-

AM- It changed my life. It's much more fun to be a fucking rock star than be dressed like a penguin. At the time they were not the Disco Biscuits. They were Xex Sea or The Capital Regime or the Party Tents, a name every other fraternity show. So whatever happened with their old keyboard player, whether he wanted to move on or get more involved in school, they were looking for another one. We had a mutual friend who knew I played keyboards and had a background in jazz. But then there was some phone tag mis communication, and since we had never really met, Marc relayed to the guys that I was this forty year old black jazz pianist named Aaron Magnum. When I walked into that first rehearsal, an eighteen year old kid with my baseball cap on backwards and my key board under my arm, they were all looking for Aaron Magnum.

DB- How smooth was the musical transition for you?

AM- It was a pretty difficult learning curve. I needed to figure out how to play rock, coming from a jazz background where it was all about the keyboard player putting in all these sharp nines and sharp elevens, making sure the harmony was colored. I had to regress and figure out how to make triads, to wash away the theory, much of my background. It was difficult to strip it down and play bare without all these color tones that would confuse the rhythm and the harmony and the melody. This also took plac e in the context of four people, one of them completely new, learning how to talk to each other through their instruments.

DB- What sort of keyboards were you playing initially?

AM- I was playing a Rhodes and a pretty piss-poor electric piano. That's comparatively little to where I am now surrounded by keyboards on all four sides and I practically have to be harnessed in from the ceiling. That was basically it, there was no techn o, just a really bad organ sample made in 1987. Of course I was really frustrated about that and I was always in music stores- any musician is a pig in shit in music stores. Anyhow, I was checking out the new gear and looking at stuff I couldn't afford to buy and I found this keyboard and started playing around with it. All of a sudden it was like "ahhhh" the clouds opened up and I had this epiphany and thought, "This is going to change my life." I didn't know just how one keyboard would change my life bu t I was really excited about it (laughs).

I came home and my parents could see the excitement in my eyes to help me out and purchase this expensive piece of technology. I took it home and then on Halloween 1997 I busted it out. I had the manual out during the show and I was figuring out how to us e it. All of a sudden that keyboard player who previously was sitting in the background kind of playing air traffic controller, coloring different notes while Barber {guitarist Jon Gutwillig} assumed most of the leads here and there, was putting out these sounds and rhythms that we hadn't been doing before. Sammy {drummer Sam Altman} was saying, "Wow all those crazy techno dance beats that I hear all the time from people's college rooms sound pretty cool over the weird sounds Magner's emitting." Then Bro wnstein {bass player Marc Brownstein} laid down this drum and bass bassline and we found ourselves in a different area.

And it sucked.

We sat in the key of D all night. I think eventually to switch it up we busted into "Run Like Hell" and then right back into D (laughs). Of course it was D with crazy sounds and cool drum beats and stuff like that.

DB- I've heard that on occasion you'll still come on stage with your manuals.

AM- That happens mainly because I'm buying a new keyboard every other month and using them in a way not intended. Some of these are meant to be used in the studio and controlled via midi, or meant to be used as a sequencer. I'm figuring out uses because I don't like to loop anything that was looped before. I don't want to press play and there's that loop I programmed two months ago. I'm doing everything live, tweaking all the sounds out. Even the factory presets- by the time I'm done ripping through it I have completely different sounds coming out of it.

DB- Describe your philosophy and ethos of improvisation.

AM- When I was starting to play jazz, there were these books I had which analytically compared mathematics to jazz improvisation. It was kind of a cool concept, there are almost mathematical formulas how to improvise and you can correlate all this stuff but I had problems with that. Improvisation isn't something that can be taught, it's something that you feel. You can't just follow some prescribed method from point A to point B.

What I enjoy about the concept of improvisation is that it's a moment of spontaneity and that's what is intended. Whatever is on your mind at the time, that's what comes through. It's like when a psychiatrist shows you a picture and you don't have even a split second to think about it and you just say the first word that comes to mind. That's what it's all about for me.

We're definitely prone to go back and listen to our music. When we do we try to edit and refine it and talk about what works and why it works and what doesn't work and why it doesn't work. I feel our music is better because of it although I still feel im provisation is meant to be for the moment.

As for my ethos you'd have to take what's going on my brain at the time of any particular moment of improvisation to really get to the root of that question.

DB- Given your collective propensity for improvisation, since you are producing this new album yourselves, I would imagine that it has been somewhat difficult restraining yourselves in the studio, where one can spend a lot of time creating and recreating.

AM- For our other albums we went into the studio as a band. Our thought was to go in and get a really good crisp clear recording of what we do live. Yes, we did take advantage of the studio- we threw some overdubs in there and added some instruments that we don't normally play because we only have two hands. This time though, we really took advantage of the studio.

What we do live, we do live and there are all these tapes circulating which reflect that. This time we really wanted to realize the concept of the studio. We've approached this album as if we are building tiles for a mosaic. Conceptually we're looping stu ff, so we'll set up eight bar or sixteen bar loops and work from there. Then we're taking these different loops, these different tiles and putting them on top of each other to see how they fit- what works, what doesn't work and then switching it up. Then we're going in and adding another keyboard line, another bass line to create additional iterations of the same loop. Of course all these loops are generated from us, so microcosmically we're doing what DJs do when they remix a tune, with the exception of the fact that DJs are mostly using someone else's music.

We're putting down our own loops and making songs out of them. For instance one of the tunes on this album, "Mindless Dribble," had a thirty minute jam in it because we had all these different ideas and different loops and we pasted them together. One of those things that was once part of "Mindless Dribble," was this really cool riff and a cool keyboard line. We busted it out in Vegas and then in Burlington and it became known on tour as "the Big Happy." Well we took that the other day and started manipul ating it- removing elements and putting in elements of other stuff and freeing up some room to put some vocals on. Then Barber dropped some unbelievable lyrics over it, put in some crazy effects and all of a sudden we've got ourselves this song.

What's great about it is we're really able to do stuff in the studio that we weren't able to do live and then try to transplant that to our live show. Granted because the album's done on electronic drums we can't get the same beats out of Sammy and we can 't get some of the sounds because he plays a kit. What we have in the studio doesn't really sound like the Disco Biscuits that any of knows and this could only be done there. To what extent it can be replicated live is a question but a number of those ide as that we hope to recreate or reconfigure in the live setting wouldn't even have been there if we hadn't been working the way we're working in the studio.

DB- How much resistance was there from Sammy to the idea that the album would be all electronic drums?

AM- At first we really didn't know where we were going and our plan was to do a combination of both. But then as we got started it sounded weird with both live drums and electronic drums. So once we got rolling with electronic drums we decided we wanted t hat to be concept of the album, for it to be all electronic-oriented. There really wasn't any fight with Sammy to put in live drums. In fact the recent fight was whether we wanted to put in a live track and Sammy successfully defended the idea that this a lbum is all electronic so why put something that might be refreshing to hear but would fight the concept.

DB- How have you guys divided the duties in terms of producing the album?

AM- Everybody's really taking their own crack at producing. Of course Barber has this unbelievable schedule where he wakes up at ten o'clock at night and won't go to bed until ten o'clock the next morning. So he'll be in the studio alone, we'll come back the next day and he'll say, "Guys, check it out, I'm really not sure how this is gonna sound." And we'll be like, "I can't believe you did this." It will be unbelievable.

We've also made quite a bit of collective decisions in terms of putting together the larger mosaic. Frankly, if there wasn't pressure from the label we could always put on more tracks and remix to our heart's content which is what we love doing. We'll fin ish up, though, by the nineteenth of January and the disc will be released by mid-April.

DB- Last time out Rob "Wacko" Hunter (Raven, Branford Marsalis) produced the sessions. I'm curious what you took away from that or how he prepared you for your current efforts.

AM- He was very helpful as a producer in terms of working with us on our harmonies, which are not one of our strong suits. He had these really high vocals that sounded great. In fact, Wacko did a little bit of singing on the last album.

DB- Speaking of which, how would you respond to critics who appreciate your instrumental skills but find your vocals off-putting.

AM- It's not the focal point of what we do. If somebody is going to walk out of a show saying, "Wow they're cool but I couldn't really take the vocals," then they really didn't get it because it's not about listening to the harmonies. The lyrics to most o f our tunes are extraordinary in my opinion. The harmonies are there and we may not hit them all the time but we sing our hearts out because a lot of these songs have a story to tell and the story just can't be told just through music, we need these lyric s. That's our shindig.

DB- Somewhat along these lines, what do you feel is the biggest misconception that people have about the band and your music?

AM- I think the biggest misconception is that we're a huge party band and it's all about having fun in the name of the party. Instead, it's really all about opening up your ears to different elements. We're taking elements from different areas of our liv es that we're exposed to- trance, tehcno, dub and all sorts of electronic music but the results don't sound like anything else that's going on out there. It a combination of life reflecting art and art reflecting life.

DB- In terms of opening up ears, talk about the inverted versions of your songs. How did those come about and to what extent do you sketch them out before a given show?

AM- We think about it beforehand because it gives us a very light outline of where we want to go with a particular set. For us it has less to do with the song than the set or a show as a whole.

Anyhow, this all came about because we had songs we loved to play and everyone loved to listen to with a number of jams written in. This is not to say the jams were written but that they would take us from one place to another and all of us knew where it was going to come out, at the end of the tune. The new approach gave us a bunch of different angles while still moving from song to song. So if we have to go from the key of G in a 4/4 tempo to the key of E-flat in a ¾ tempo that's a pretty hard maneuver , something we have to be patient with and something we haven't explored. It keeps us on our toes where we don't necessarily know how we're going to go to the next point. It keeps everyone listening really closely to the others to see if someone's going t o lead you in a direction or play off you in a direction. Everybody has an idea in the back of their head about how they're going to do it but they aren't really forcing it upon anybody else.

DB- For me that sums up one aspect of what I have always enjoyed about the Biscuits. I am an intense, involved and above all patient listener and I respect a musical experience that rewards patience.

AM- If you're patient you're not going to be waiting for that precise moment when we bust into another tune. Instead you'll just suddenly find yourself it in and realize that you were almost hypnotized by the last half hour of music where it was going in the back of your head and all of a sudden you're in it.

DB- Lets jump to the New Year's Eve run and in particular New Year's Eve. To what extent do you view that as a special event?

AM- It is a special event, it's fucking New Years, whether we're playing or not, whether you're going to a concert let alone be involved in the performance of a concert, that's the night when you want to make it count. From growing up, you'd always expe ct so much out of New Years, so we try to do something different from our normal shows. That difference goes well beyond putting some bells and whistles on stage which of course we'll have, with set design and stuff like that. We're working on a concept of a New Year's, which is not to say we'll be improvising to a movie in black monk costumes but people can expect something different and out of the ordinary that we never do at shows. Of course I think you can say that of every Biscuits show, on any give n night, but particularly at New Year's.

DB- You referenced the Akira set - what is your memory of it and how successful was it from your perspective {the band improvised a soundtrack to the film Akira during its third set last New Year's Eve).

AM- I thought it turned out great. I had never even seen the movie before and during soundcheck when we were testing out the monitors I looked down and there was a guy riding a motorcycle, so I knew that point was towards the end of the movie. Then during the set itself we were watching it and at one point I saw a guy riding a moto rcycle and thought, "Oh cool we're near the end of the movie, that was a great jam." Forty five minutes later I thought "Okay, I guess that's wasn't it, well here's another scene with a Japanese guy on a motorcycle." Forty minutes later there was anothe r motorcycle scene and then it was over.

DB- In thinking about last New Year's Eve that also marked the last time you would perform for more than six months with Marc Brownstein on bass. He was not in the band for a period of time-

AM- Yeah that sucked

DB- Then he returned to the band-

AM- That was great

DB- I'm curious what you learned about the band and your music during that period?

AM- What we learned is that in the month of July 1995 we all kind of embarked on a dream and it was a dream that only the four of us really understood. Other people can look into it and kind of understand it but it's all the little things that amass into this whole. The fact that we broke down in the middle of the desert on our first tour, the fact that we were playing all these tiny little hole-in-the-wall bars and everything else that we've given for this collective dream that the four of us shared. Wh en we played a string of show with different bass players, it was really nice to have someone else's musical input into what we were doing, although it was strange to revisit a structure that isn't the same anymore. I think that led us to realize that the Biscuits are Marc, Aron, Jon and Sammy. To me the great part of it was, we didn't make the decision because there was nobody else to fill the role. With Jordan {Crisman}, we found out that if there were any person to fill in the position of bass player then I think we had found him.