THE VOICE OF ENERGY VOL. 096
Sitting on my couch, wondering if I have COVID. That's what's going on right now. My son had it, and had it bad over last weekend and beyond. But all the rapid tests that my wife and I have taken have come back negative. Even though I feel like utter garbage right now. How's that work? All that is to say, I'm a little foggy right now so please excuse any typos or fuck ups in this week's newsletter. I'm also getting a proper PCR test tomorrow. I'll let you know how that goes.
As I've been mentioning regularly, I'd love to get some more premium subscribers in the mix. It's only a $5 a month commitment. You'll get extra newsletters. You'll be in the running for a monthly prize giveaway. And through 2022, I'll be donating all the money from your subscriptions to the National Network of Abortion Funds. Funny story about all this: Looking through the back end of the service who handles all these transactions to see exactly how much money would be donated every month and I found out that they haven't been transferring any money to my bank account for at least six months now. Good news is I sorted it out and better news is that NNAF will be getting a nice chunk of money here in a few days.
Other news: I finally saw Bauhaus this past week and it was... something. I spoke to the nice people of the U.K. duo King Hannah. I'm going to be selling records at the upcoming Rip City Record Show, so mark your calendars and come say hello. I bought a ticket to see Joe Pera live. And I'm hoping to be disease free so I can see Destroyer on Sunday. Oh, and I had a nice Zoom call with the members of the ambient duo East Portal for this week's newsletter. Read on, friends.
East Portal
The preconceived notions I held about the members of East Portal — idiotic conjectures based solely on the photos I've seen of the duo and knowing that one of them lives in L.A. and the other in New York — were quickly blown asunder when I connected with them over Zoom recently. My assumption was, basically, that one was the other. In reality, it's the soft-spoken, bespectacled Patrick Taylor who is the working musician in L.A. who has been part of the touring band for a Jonas Brother and an in-demand studio musician, and it's long-haired, matinee idol-looking John Atkinson who has deep roots in the New York experimental and underground rock communities through his solo work and his membership in the group Aa. More fool me, I suppose.
The important part is that they make for a perfect complementary pair. Their very different personality types and influences and method of working dovetailed beautifully on their self-titled debut album (out now via AKP Recordings), with Taylor's exploratory work on a variety of acoustic instruments bent and manipulated into vast, colorful sonic sculptures by Atkinson's digital toys and software. Having met, as many men do, shit talking in the group chat of a fantasy sports league, the two bonded over their shared creative pursuits, leading them to a entirely modern collaboration trading files and fragments of sound back and forth until they came away with a piece of music that could be as creepy and creaky as a ghost ship ("Swords Reversed") or as breathtakingly lovely as footage of a field of tall grass slowly waving away in the wind ("Untitled #3").
Tell me about how you two met.
John Atkinson: I'm the commissioner of this fantasy basketball league. We started maybe 10 years ago, and Pat was a friend of a friend of mine. My friend was like, "My friend Pat is a musician, we should get him in the league." This was when I was living in Los Angeles actually. I lived in L.A. from 2011 to 2016. It was an L.A.-based league called Jock Jams 420. We have a cool logo where it's like the NBA logo but he's holding a bong. It's a super mature group.
Obviously.
JA: I mean, it's a pretty high level group. Everyone does pretty interesting stuff. And we've got a group chat. I mean, I hung out with Pat in L.A. and I lived in Australia for a few years, and now I'm back in New York, where I've lived most of my life. Me and Pat started hanging out in the chat, especially during the pandemic. The group chat became this daily thing. I think we've all gotten a lot closer during the pandemic, the basketball league especially, just because of that group chat.
Patrick Taylor: I don't remember how it began that John and I should collaborate. I knew that John was from the ambient / avant-garde world, and that he'd had a band in Brooklyn called Aa. I knew people who had known them. I thought that could be a cool little mixture. I think I maybe threw the idea on the chat and John was like, "We're gonna do it." Then I started sending short little fragments of ideas and John would expand them add his own fuckery to it and make it really cool. We just kept on going back and forth. I think we sent something like 1,000 emails over two years. We kept on it like, "I have to get it to 15%, then you get it to 20% then I get it 30%." A lot of file sharing.
JA: More like you would get it to like 80% on some of them. I remember when he sent me the first song. I didn't really know what to expect. I had been eager to do this for a minute because I was like, "Oh shit, that's a real musician." I didn't really know what to expect. I forget If I sent you an inspiration-type things. But then he sent me the "Untitled #1" song — the main pedal steel and upright bass parts — and from that first chord, I was like, "Oh yeah, this is exactly the kind of music I want to be working on.
PT: John is really good at keeping the ball rolling. He helps me a lot with momentum and finishing things and moving on. When we listen to the record, it's easy for us to tell what our contributions were. The main dry instruments you hear are usually from me and the ambience and percussive elements and digital-sounding elements are coming from John. A lot of the reverb and delay and things are coming from him as well. This band was cool because I got to clarinet from it. My mom left me her clarinet. She's still alive, but when she moved to Hawaii, she gifted me her clarinet. I would write parts on MIDI and then learn how to play it for real. I was squeaking on a clarinet for hours and hours for weeks specifically for the track, "Untitled #3."
JA: That's the kind of shit I'm dealing with. Real musician shit.
That's the order of operation for this project, then — Patrick would record some stuff and send it off to John, and then John would manipulate it and add to it?
JA: All the sounds on it are from Pat. I guess I recorded a little bit of the bells. My friend Nick Podgurski played a little drums on one. But almost everything was just me using his acoustic instrument recordings as field recordings, then twisting them into instruments. I used a couple of MIDI controllers. This weird Swedish breath controller that you can turn into a wind instrument that includes how you move your head and the bit and stuff. Kind of like an EWI, but with no keys. Then there's this hand controller used for VR games. I hooked that up to do other kinds of instruments, like pressure sensitive pads. I basically just took his real instruments and reconfigured them into virtual instruments more or less. But all the sounds are from him. There's very little reverb, delay, or effects. Part of what I like about the sound that we hit on is it's relatively dry ambient. It's all about the hyper detail, digital in a way...
PT: That's my bad, by the way. I always think that you're using reverb and delays but that's not really the case. It sounds like that, but it's not really what's going on.
JA: I'm actually super anti-reverb. I love a lot of the ambient music, but the reverb-core... I just hate shit that sounds like that. I've become really allergic to it. The methods that I use in my solo music and definitely in this project is like, I don't want it to sound like effects. I want it to sound like real things but in a hyperreal way. It's not trying to be an illusory thing. I wanted to capture the nature of this moment in all our lives, especially during the pandemic. We are human beings in our meat sacks existing in physical space but your life is so mediated by digital technology. How do you find that sense of human connection? How do you balance the things we like about being human with the new possibilities of digital. I mean, there was the group chat and I ended up in a couple of groups where we stream TV shows and we have group hangouts. All these virtual ways of hanging out. Also seeing a bunch of shows like the ESS shows in March and April were really special.
PT: This was a Twitch thing?
JA: Yeah. ESS is a Chicago-based institution but they were doing these Twitch streams. At home performances from a lot of musicians. I remember one where it was Dustin Wong and M. Geddes Gengras. The music was fucking sick and beautiful and felt really meaningful. And I looked at the viewer numbers and I was like, "Man, there are 400 people at this show." I love those dudes, but I don't know if you'd get 400 people to see them in real life. They had a PayPal link up, and I would hope that they might make a decent amount of money from that show. I felt like an inspiring new model for the way to do shit. That's what I want to do in making music, too. Something that proactively tries to take advantage of technology, while also keeping it super real and organic and not on the grid. We don't want to become grid people. I don't want to know that Facebook and Instagram have my personality broken down to a grid of fucking characteristics. I'm not following YouTube tutorials and using the standard processes. That's the manifesto developing as I'm talking.
For you, Patrick, it feels like this was almost like a trust exercise for you to just hand the pieces over to John and see what happens. Was that a comfortable place for you to be in?
JA: I'm curious about this question.
PT: I haven't thought about that actually. I've always been a lover of collaboration in general. I produce a lot of music and co-writer with people weekly, so it's definitely something that I've always loved doing. When you hear someone else's process — their tone, their feel, how they hear your music, what they bring to it to get that new angle to it — it's so refreshing and liberating. The more you chip away at something, the more it gets good. The heart of the song becomes clear. Because I would just start things without a destination. I didn't know where the songs would go. We were never side-by-side. We never had any FaceTimes like, "I'm gonna work on this. You do this." It was like, "You take this piece and spend your time with it and I'll spend my time with it." John never came in and was like, "I'm gonna rearrange or reharmonize this," or like, "This part's too long. I'm gonna chop this off." He was always super positive. I guess the cheesy thing they say in improv is, you say, "Yes, and..." It's like that. I think we were both eager to hear what the other person did, just bouncing these ideas off one another. It re-energizes you and re-inspires you to complete the song.
JA: It's awesome to have a second set of ears. A different set of ears. A lot of these compositions that Pat wrote like "Untitled #3," which, to me, is the most Pat song. He just dropped that on me, and I was like, "Holy shit, this is great. I wouldn't change a thing." Then there's songs like "Breakfast On Ground" where I think the original song was super dense. There were so many cool parts and I was like, "I think there's three separate songs in here. Let me take and separate these things out and have these weird stretches of music because these parts are so good they should be heard on their own." I've done a couple of collaborative albums with my friend Ned Milligan and a friend Talya Cooper. I've worked in this mode of remote collaboration, but this is definitely the most hands on where I felt like I was composing in a way I hadn't before. Then there are songs like "Tendo" and "Sub Nest" that are the most me songs where I took little bits from his other songs and was like, "Let me just fuck with this." "Tendo" is, I think, from "Untitled #3" — maybe a 15-second stretch of it with all the different instruments spun out in different ways.
PT: I sent John a lot of what you would call "one shots," which are short, unaffected sounds. I would pick up my upright bass, like, "What does it sound like when I put my upright bass on my hardwood floor? What does that sound like, the creaks of the bass? What would it sound like if I let my slide roll down the strings of the pedal steel?" You hear those all over the record. John could use those and sprinkle those around. I think of "Sub Nest" and "Tendo" as being his because those don't really have any real chord progressions or movement as defined as the others do. I'm always coming from the songwriter, folk, indie rock, pop music mindset. That's always been my background so getting away from verse chorus verse chorus bridge was a welcome departure.
JA: And vice versa for me. Because my solo stuff is more like "Tendo" where it's drone-based. No chord progressions. No verses and choruses. Just to be working with that... I used to play punk and rock music back in the day. It was cool to come back to it in a different way.
PT: We're very yin-and-yang. Coast-wise and personality-wise and definitely musically-speaking. Which is so sick. John has such more open ears than so many of my peers. And his love of music sometimes feels more genuine than the session and touring people that are a little more jaded. It's refreshing to be working with someone where it's not where he makes his living.
JA: It's a serious hobby, alright?
I ask this question a lot but it feels entirely appropriate here: with this back and forth creative process, when do you know when a piece of music is finished?
JA: You tell me, man. I would love to know. I'm terrible at that. That's why I need collaborators.
PT: I would say in this ambient world I felt more comfortable wrapping things up. If you're working in pop production you have to go through songs hundreds and thousands of times. So many layers. We're not dealing with vocals, which honestly, just for our time's sake, is so, so nice. We're not trying to make songs that are going to be on Top 40 radio.
JA: That's what makes it hard, right? I had this problem all the time. I work in this realm that... I mean, it's experimental music. Or I guess you could call it fucking amateurish. There's no rules. So it's genuinely a problem I wrestle with all the time. I remember I was asking someone this question, someone who is kind of a mentor figure — a really awesome ambient artist — and he totally avoided the question. I was like, "Come on, man. How do you know when it's done? How long should it be?" I did talk to someone who had a good point — who said, "You need to free yourself." Especially when making this kind of music, because so much of it is about attention. Even over the course of a day, your own attention varies a lot. Different people's attention varies even more. So it's like, "Is this part long enough to me?" I can listen to it one time and be like, "Yeah, this is great." Another time I can listen to it and be like, "Ugh, I'm bored. This should be shorter." It doesn't really give you the answer but you have to tell yourself that. Even if you're just doing this for yourself, there is no right answer because it will be different every time. At some point, you need to just put your pencils down. But you can kind of triangulate. You should listen to it at different times of day, in different mental conditions. Before and after drinking beers and smoking whatever. In the morning, in the night. When you're distracted, when you're super focused. Then you can get a sense of where that sweet spot is.
PT: I always err on the side of keeping things brief. I'm glad that on our record all the songs are around six minutes or so.
JA: "Untitled #3," man! That one's nine minutes!
PT: That one I got carried away. There's not much repetition or dawdling going on with that one. I do find myself getting impatient often with ambient music, to be honest. That's probably why my contributions to the record tend to kind of make it move. I'm still trying to make hooks. They might be slow and woozy. What did someone say, like a...
JA: Like a woozy jazz.
PT: A woozy jazz! I think that's a good description.
As you were saying, Patrick, you've worked primarily in a pop context as a session musician and a hired gun for touring bands. Was the type of music you make with John something that you've always wanted to explore?
PT: Yeah, I think so. I've written a ton of music and I've always seen myself as a musician who primarily plays bass. But I've always been really into composing. When I went to USC, for my senior recital, I did a classical recital on upright bass. I wrote all of it for piano and bass. I wish I still had that music still. It's definitely in the vein of East Portal. There's a lot of minimalist classical, folky through composed songs. But I've also put out my own music that's folk music with vocals and more in the pop realm. Kind of that Chicago, post-rock kind of world. That's what I grew up listening to. But I've always had a love for film music and ambient music. I love jazz. I feel like composing without actually having to worry about, "How's my voice going to work? Is this going to work for my voice? Are my lyrics bad?" I'm not as self-conscious. It's definitely a very liberating and inviting genre to dive into.
Do you both eventually want to start getting together in person more to play shows or at least work in the same room at the same time?
JA: We did a little bit for the record release. I flew out to L.A. at the start of April. AKP, like most labels, want you to play a show. Or ideally many shows. At the start of the year, we were starting to work on new stuff. This trip in April is the first time I'd been to L.A. in two and a half years, which is the longest I've not been in L.A. So, I was like, "I'm going back to L.A. We should get together whenever that is and try this in a new way." Both of us just fucking love the album, why not see if we can figure it out. Because I think a lot of live ambient stuff is very boring. Computer music can be pretty boring. And Pat's got real gigs, and I've got a real job. I was like, "Are we really gonna have the time to make this work?" So were just like, "Alright, let's just do a listening party at Zebulon. I'll fly out a few days before and we'll just jam. And if it works, maybe we can do a little live set." We jammed and it was really fucking cool, man.
It was super interesting to see how it changed the process. Pat had sent me some song germs in the same way as before, but we were trying to be a little constrained because we can't multitrack Pat live. It's got to be him playing one instrument at a time. It was me playing samples of his stuff. It was still the same formula but it totally shifted the process in an interesting way. I think I was getting pretty frustrated trying to work with it separately. Honestly, I couldn't figure out how to square that circle. But before I flew out, I was like, "Okay, let me try making some of these virtual instruments, program some MIDI controllers and sit with these samples, and we'll just see." It ended up shifting in a different direction. I think the new shit is different. It has the same logic of the going back and forth, but it flows in a different way.
PT: John was able to drive the bus a little bit and I was kind of following him. The Zebulon party was cool but I'm really glad that we focused down and ended up following through and doing this performance. We probably had like 40-50 people in there, checking things out.
JA: It definitely brought in the focus. This whole thing is a less professional gig for Pat and like a serious project, but a personal project for me. No one's gonna get rich from this music. This is about this friendship. It's bringing people together. All these people came to the show who I hadn't seen in a while. It's a simple thing, but especially after the pandemic...
PT: My older brother was the DJ. He played some nice sets. He's all over this kind of music. He and John really bro'd down.
JA: Yeah, we mostly talked about the Afghan Whigs actually. He's more of a 1965 guy. It was a great reminder of why we do this shit. It was so much fun and so dope to make the first album, but it was also like, "Oh yeah, this can be the reason why you do this shit." It was a good excuse to get together and have a bunch of friends come out and just be an occasion for people to have a great night. I'm psyched to keep building.
PT: When John landed, we basically had two days to rehearse. We wrote two songs that we knew we could execute live. I played upright bass, fretless bass, and clarinet. We played for about 20 minutes. It was inspiring that we could knock it out and compose together. It wasn't just press play and play with some tracks or something like that. That would have been super weak.
That's all from me, friends. I have to go lie down now. Tune in next week when I will either be bringing back an interview series I have done for a few places in the past or will bring you a new Deeper Into Movies. Either way, I will return. Do no harm. Take no shit.
Artwork for this edition is by Caroline Kent whose exhibition is on display at the Ed and Jackie Rabin Gallery in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through June 12.