As far as the jamband scene goes, Baltimore, MD has always been a bit of an ugly stepchild. Stuck between North and South, the music scene is more likely to produce a band like Fugazi (who actually hail from Washington, DC, Baltimore's brother to the south) than the all-get-together-now type of outfit that seems to flourish so well in the jam community. So it's no surprise that Lake Trout, Baltimore's future favorite son once Cal Ripken, Jr. retires, though embraced by many in the tight, at times snobbish jamband fraternity, has never quite felt at home among that group.

In fact, talking with them, one gets the sense that they'd rather be nowhere but Baltimore, the city in which each of the five members grew up, both musically and otherwise. And just as they have settled into a relatively solid regional identity, Lake T rout has found their own distinct musical voice, which, as they would prefer, I believe, places them just outside any category currently subscribed to by the musical establishment, jamfans included. At times raucous and rowdy, prone to play one "for the townie in all of us," they are also capable of dreamy magic carpet rides and sinister psychotic mindfucks.

After talking with them, however, it is clear that the five members of this group are, each in his own right, serious students of all forms of music. And despite their possibly self-imposed alienation from the jamband scene, they have an immense resp ect for all forms of music, leading them to go so far as to skirt around the dreaded word, "noodling," when interviewing for an online publication dedicated to bands who, so very often, are accused of the dreaded practice.

I, myself, am a disciple of the jam doctrine, which proclaims, among other things, that it's always better live. In the following interview, Matt Pierce (Rhodes, flute, sax) and Woody Ranere (vocals, guitar) make it clear that the live experience is what it's all about. And though they approach their performances from a different, more minimalist perspective, their live shows never fail to evoke incredible emotion ranging from pure, flowery bliss to outright fear for one's sanity. What impresses o ne most about Lake Trout, however, can only be expressed through their own words: their musical knowledge is incredibly far-reaching and their musical philosophy is, as are their performances, definite, concise, fresh and most of all, compelling.

JAMBANDS.COM: The last time I interviewed you guys was August of '99 and you seemed to be in the midst of a transformation, which seems to be complete.

MP: We weren't really in the midst of a transformation; it was more of a refining.

WR: During the last year, we were in a serious transition, and I do think we've arrived, and now it's just finesse.

JAMBANDS.COM: And now you're just searching around this little area that you've found for yourselves.

WR: Yeah, yeah. We're in a place where we can do a whole lot more sounds, but it's still going to be from the same palette --

MP: For a while, we were a little more restricted just by the kind of places we were playing; we didn't know if we could do the harder, more aggressive stuff. Now we've gotten more where our shows are our shows now and we feel more comfortable doing wha t we want.

JAMBANDS.COM: Did you guys find there was anywhere where you tried to bring out the harder, darker edge and it just didn't go over well at all?

WR: It seems to be going over well. Sometimes I think it would [not go over well at] the "hippie" kind of festivals, but whenever we played hard shit, people loved it. People would really get into it. We slowly introduced it and started building it up , and now I think our audience is getting more into hard stuff, jungle or rock, you know, Pink Floyd or whatever -- which is cool. A lot of people tell us, "This is the hardest shit I've ever heard." But I can't think of any venues, especially now, wher e we can't do that.

JAMBANDS.COM: When you guys were going through that transition, was it a conscious decision that you were making? Were you consciously trying to move away from the things that you were doing before that or was it just sort of your tastes were changing and. . . ?

MP: I think it was more what we were all into originally being able to come out. We've all loved, rock and darker, harder things from the beginning; it just never came out fully that way. Even on Volume For the Rest of It, a song like "Bad Tattoo," whe re the idea of it is very dark and harder, but we didn't feel as free to go in that direction. We've always had that kind of melancholy thing, but for a while, we just had to ease our way into it.

JAMBANDS.COM: Yeah, compared to the stuff y'all are doing now, "Bad Tattoo" is still on the jazzier side.

MP: Right. But just the idea of it being dark, we've always appreciated that kind of thing.

WR: We've gotten to the point where we can play so much better together. Obviously, we don't do as much soloing; that was good for us, [but] we found a way to do it more as a group. We can get the same kind of intensity through improvisation but it does n't have to be based around a solo. We might, of course, all do our own little tangents and explore. But I think now that we've tried to improvise [as a group], we can do that dark stuff, because, normally, Matt would be playing a solo on the saxophone, and we'd take his guide and follow that. This way, it's even harder to know what line to follow, we all just know. . . there's no sort of light that we're following, so it's gotta be subconscious; we know in 10 seconds we're all gonna hit this or hit th at. It's less obvious.

JAMBANDS.COM: So you're playing more as a group.

MP: Yeah, definitely.

JAMBANDS.COM: If you could step outside and listen to yourselves as members of the audience, do you think that people still hear the jazz influence?

WR: I think so, but in very different ways. We used to actually play a line or a harmony that might be really jazzy and embellish it. Now we want to have a line that you might hear in a jazz song, but we're gonna stick to that and if you keep playing t he same thing over and over, it almost makes it harder. They're more in the mix and they're just a different part of the whole sound that we do, rather than straight-out jazz.

MP: It's more in the structure of what we do. Some people may draw a connection to jazz just by putting a chunk in a guitar solo. But actually the structure [of] what we're playing is not very close to jazz. Like Woody said, if you hear this sax line a nd you like this one little spot, I mimic whatever the idea is in that one little thing and throw it into the mix of whatever we're playing. I guess when [people] hear the sax line, they may think there's still a jazz element, and I guess there is, but o nly as much as anything else.

JAMBANDS.COM: So you've taken that jazz and just put it in a mixing bowl with all the other stuff, whereas before you were wrapping everything else around the jazz -- that's the way it seems to me. Especially way back in '97, which was the first time I heard you, that's the first thing I thought of when I first heard your CD. And now you've just thrown it in the mix with everything else.

WR: You get the saxophone line and that might be the jazz-oriented thing and then you get the distorted bass which would be like hardcore punk, and then you've got Mike's [Lowry, drums] huge, big beats which take off like a late-'60s, straight-up rock, Le d Zeppelin album. . . and then I just wanna draw the colors from all these different sounds. What you were saying about somebody soloing and how that used to kind of guide us, now it's really more about the songs and the tones.

MP: It's not so much that jazz is where we're coming from, but just the simple fact that we appreciate it. So people would probably draw the conclusion that, "OK, these guys aren't coming from that world, but they obviously listened to it at some point an d they appreciate it."

JAMBANDS.COM: You all seem pretty comfortable with what you're doing right now. Do you see another major transformation anytime in the future? Do you think you guys will ever get bored with what you're doing now?

WR: I don't see a big transition like what we went through in the last year or so, but I think we're definitely gonna borrow and go in and out of styles. But it's always going to sound like we sound. In the studio, some of the drum tones or Rhodes or guitar or bass sounds, may go more hard-core or in this vein. We want to do more, different tones, but in terms of the songs and what we do on stage, it's going to stay in this realm. But then, really, it's hard to say. I think we're open to whatever k eeps us happy. What we've always done is play what we wanna play. That's why sometimes we don't end up playing songs that we played 5 months ago: we're not feelin' it. We just play what we wanna play and that's the most honest we can be on stage.

On the last live album, there's one vocal song and the rest of it is harder and improvised. Right now, we're planning on going into the studio and there's going to be a lot more vocal elements in the songs. They're not gonna be totally, straight-up "ve rse, chorus, verse, chorus," that type of stuff, but they're going to have more of that element. Those kinds of songs you have to craft a little bit more. We're incorporating the voice as just another instrument rather than everything supporting the voi ce. It can be just another color in the whole view.

JAMBANDS.COM: Speaking of the studio, how do you guys go about writing songs? I know that you recently asked Nick [Caudle] for some live recordings that he has. What's your approach when you get into the studio?

WR: It varies completely. Sometimes we have stuff that we've been playing live, and over the course of several months, the fat gets cut off and what really seems to work, and how the audience respond, and what we keep and what we remember and what we ke ep coming back to -- that ends up being a song. Sometimes we go into the studio with that and we know our parts and it's like "boom!" Other times, we've got some ideas, we've got these colors we want to put together, we've all got parts, but it's not wo rked out and we go, "If it sounds like that then this would be cool." We definitely don't have a formula and we're always exploring new ways. Now we've got all these live tapes, and we're seeing that there's this whole year of live recordings, this whol e treasure chest of melodies that you just completely forget. We listen to it and we're like, "Wow, that could really be a song." That might definitely be a new way for us to get material. It was improvised, but because the crowd was dancing or it was just the right mood, we go back to it.

MP: I think we really trust the stuff that we came up with spontaneously. There are also things that we construct completely in the studio, but we appreciate a lot of the stuff that just came out at that moment. Obviously we still have to work on it and make it into something, but the initial idea is kind of cool. It's nice to go back and find some of those things that we had forgotten completely . . . but they happen for a reason.

JAMBANDS.COM: The three untitled tracks on the new album -- I know y'all have played #2 and #5 since the album came out. Was that a situation where you went back and listened to the tapes and decided we like that, let's work on it? Or was it something that just kind of got carried over from show to show?

MP: If we had decided to take those examples and put them on a record that we did in the studio, we would have refined them more, but since that already came out on the live album, we probably won't mold those things into songs. They're already on that album the way they are, so we just play them.

JAMBANDS.COM: . . . more of a theme than a song. . .

MP: Yeah. Considering they're already on the album, I don't think we wanna take those two ideas and make them into songs. We'd rather come up with different things. There are things that we play live that, when we go back in the studio and listen to th em, we'll put a couple ideas together and we'll change it a lot more. But because [those two songs] are already on that album, we never spent time changing and refining those ideas.

JAMBANDS.COM: I posted a message on your message board asking people to submit questions. A couple of people were curious to know how you all felt about this new "movement," these new jambands that are coming out -- Sector 9, the Disco Biscuits, the New Deal, and you guys. People just want to know how you feel about that. Is it a movement? Do you guys feel a sense of community with the rest of the bands? How does this whole new group of bands fit together?

MP: Well, I definitely think we're coming from different places, completely different places. I don't know if it's a fact, but I feel like it. From what I see and what I hear, we're coming from completely different places.

JAMBANDS.COM: I think a lot of people see the connection in the electronic. Everyone seems to be bringing in this aspect of electronic music. You guys bring it in with your repetition.

MP: But we don't really have any electronic [elements].

JAMBANDS.COM: Right. Some of the other bands bring in samplers or DJs. You guys have played with DJs, and I think that that's probably where most people see the connection. Playing a festival like Camp Bisco, did you guys feel like there was a movement?

MP: I don't personally feel part of a movement. You don't see or hear anything like that or about that here in Baltimore. There's no "jamband" scene around Baltimore. I don't think we live our lives as that kind of band. But we also go into other sit uations, a rave or something and we feel like we're visiting that. We certainly don't feel like we're part of a rave scene or anything like that, but we're happy to be able to play to those people, knowing that they're receptive. The same goes for the j am-band kind of thing: we're happy to be received there and we like going and seeing those other bands and hanging out with them. But we always come back here and it's something completely different. I don't think we probably listen to a lot of the same kinds of music. We'll go other places and it'll be more of a kind of rock thing and we feel like we're visiting. It's not like we're wanderers with no home, but I don't think that we feel part of that scene all the time. When we go to those situations and events, it's definitely nice to be a part of that and we feel that the people who like them like us. It's a good feeling.

WR: I agree. I don't think I've heard enough of any other bands that are considered in this movement to really comment on them. I've heard some of them live, but I haven't listened to a lot of their recordings. We're doing more electronic concept stuf f: it's more conceptual in its repetition. We also borrow from the minimalists -- Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and all that kind of stuff. Our whole lives, growing up musically, we've been listening to classical. In the jazz [we listen to], there's Colt rane doing his eastern stuff, more trancey, repetitive stuff. I think our avenue into that electronic-type sound is repetition, rather than we just added a synth or something like that. I guess it's always been there, the hippie scene with the trance mo vement. But the audience has become more open to different timbres and sounds and colors. We're a little harder-edged and not as flowy. Our shows don't stay at a similar tempo the whole time. We change tempos drastically, up and down, from real slow t rip-hop, to jungle and breakbeats. Obviously, with any band there's gonna be lots of specific ways we're different, but there is something going on. It's notable or people wouldn't be seeing the connection. I do think there's a kind of movement. All t he bands that are out there right now wouldn't be able to do what they're doing if certain bands hadn't come before. For instance, Medeski, Martin and Wood opened a lot of doors, sonically, in terms of what we can do on stage. There were a lot of places where we'd start doing this sort of hard stuff and people would be just like, "Can you play 'Brown-Eyed Girl'?" But certain bands have paved the way and people's ears are getting more open to sounds; we're just taking advantage of it. If people can hea r this distorted scream and growling, as soon as they can deal with that, we'll do something worse.

JAMBANDS.COM: Trey Anastasio has, many times, given credit to the Grateful Dead. He's made it known that [Phish] tire of the comparisons, but he has expressed his appreciation for the doors that [the Dead] opened for them. I think that bands like moe. and String Cheese Incident probably owe a lot to Phish. You mentioned Medeski, Martin and Wood -- are there any other bands that you guys feel a debt to?

WR: I think Sonic Youth.

MP: Yeah. Sonic Youth came in and started making noise and people just had to learn to appreciate sonically, the noise.

WR: Also, Nirvana comes in [with] the gritty, hard, noisy stuff and then they also drop into this really beautiful thing, and people are all of a sudden aware that you can combine these two things and that these are appealing. Suddenly you can take thes e totally different worlds and stick them together. A lot of what we do is from DJs -- DJ Shadow. . .

MP: Yeah, DJ Shadow's whole thing is he took a lot of different records and made a song. He would take a guitar riff from a Metallica song and then drums from a Zeppelin song and then flute from Herbie Mann or something, all these different elements. Y ou've got jazz, and you've got hard rock or whatever. He introduced the big, rock drum sound to the kind of music we're playing: not the tight, computerized, drum machine thing, but the big John Bonham drum sound. Or somebody like Amon Tobin, who we're playing with next month at the Knitting Factory. I heard somebody call [Tobin] the Gil Evans of electronic music. He's more like an arranger. He takes these sounds and arranges them into these beautiful compositions. Some of it's very dark and very pow erful. The sounds are pretty much all analog -- they're not electronic -- but he's just arranging, and that's basically what we're trying to do on stage.

WR: We don't have any synths or anything, but we have delay pedals and shit like that. You know, Matt takes the Rhodes and puts a delay on it and fucks it up, so it sounds electronic, but he's just manipulating raw organic sound, which, to me, is the re al signature of what we do. It's five instruments, and yeah, we're fucking with it, but it's not a synth. I mentioned Medeski, Martin and Wood: I remember when Friday Afternoon In the Universe first came out, we saw them and it was the first time in my life where I was like "Wow! That can be done!"

MP: People would just stand there and watch these people play.

WR: Yeah, and it was like, "That's in us! We want to do that!" Sometimes I feel like we're this horror show. People go to horror films and they want to get scared -- I want people to go out and get scared. I want people to be like, "What the fuck! W hat am I listening to and why do I like it?" Do you like it for some weird, subverted, deviant reason? I want to be on the border of offending people who go to our shows. We play our best when we're just like "Fuck this. Let's scare these people. I ho pe they're scared." There've been nights where we've just cleared an audience out and we've been just like, "Fuck yeah."

JAMBANDS.COM: That's the one thing that's really impressed me about y'all, especially over the last year and a half. What impresses me isn't your musical ability, but the ideas that come out of your collective head.

WR: That's our hope. That's what we want. I remember a couple of years ago, we played at the Boathouse in Norfolk or Virginia Beach and I remember we were doing a song where I played this Santana-type rock solo. The crowd was twelve- to fifteen-hundre d people and it was just like [cheering]. I had never heard anything like it in my entire life. Me and James looked at each other and I was just gloating up on stage: "Do you hear these people screaming?! I will do this solo every night for the rest of my life!" It was unbelievable. But it's just funny, because a couple months later, we never played that song again.

JAMBANDS.COM: What song was it?

WR: "Alcino." But it was like boom! It was this total crowd pleaser and people were coming up to me, "That's one of the greatest rock solos ever!" And a couple months later [we said], "Ah, we got such a good response. . . let's start doing something e lse." [laughter] Like I was saying, we used to do that, we'd just go off: Matt would play these big, long sax solos and then Ed would play leads and then Mike just rips it up. . . we quickly cut all that out, because it really wasn't what we were all abo ut.

MP: I'm not sure there ever was a good sax solo.

WR: Yeah, I never believed we were all ever really that good. When were soloing, the focus started becoming chops and speed and all that kind of stuff and we're so not about that, even though any one of us really could play if we had a gun to our heads. But it's not about that. I'm always really impressed by a great player; there are some combos like Coltrane and Elvin Jones, players that we listen to so much, but with us, it's really about the collective, and soloing just sort of takes away from that . It's not what it's about.

JAMBANDS.COM: One more question I really wanted to ask you guys: I know you guys are friends with Ellis [Goddard, Mockingbird Foundation]. How did you guys react when he asked you to record a track for the Phish tribute album?

MP: At first, I was like, "Why would we want to do a Phish song? Why would we be asked to be on the album?" I didn't really want to, and then we heard who was gonna be on it and why they were doing it and we started getting ideas for it and then. . . watch out.

JAMBANDS.COM: How did you guys go about picking what tracks or what song you were going to do?

WR: Well, the one Phish album I ever bought and listened was Picture of Nectar. That was the album that we all sort of were familiar with. So we went back to that album and said, "OK, what really affected us?" We decided what we wanted to cover just ba sed on little ideas, just even a note, that really affected us. I always respected what they do and what they did at live shows. But after Picture of Nectar, I bought the album, listened to it for a while, went to a few shows and beyond that, they reall y weren't that big of an influence. But we all remembered that album and a few small things -- you hear a riff and you wanna do a remix, you go, "That would be cool in this situation." You'll just have to wait and hear.

MP: It's a rockin' song.

WR: It's crazy, crazy. Balls to the wall!

JAMBANDS.COM: Are y'all gonna do it live after the album comes out?

WR: It depends. If people really like it, then we'll give it to 'em.