Highway 62

This is a conversation with one of these practitioners, these acolytes. You might know him from a Los-Angeles based band who attained some notoriety on both sides of the pond during the years of 1982 and 1983. The band in question is the Dream Syndicate who were rightly known for their sound, especially in live settings. Today they’re probably known more for their debris, for the bands that spun out of the various comings and goings of its membership. For the most part, all the former members of DS are still out there making music. However, one member of DS, in particular, has gone some 13 years unaccounted for. That was until reports from Virginia noted that one Karl Precoda, had surfaced in a band called “Last Days of May,” performing in various venues around one of the state universities there. It was reported that they never played the same song twice.

I spoke with him (under the aegis of PTOLEMAIC TERRASCOPE) on a myriad of subjects, in a handful of sessions. Here is what we could best translate of our conversations. It is divided into roughly three sections, but going far and afield in each of them. Enjoy.

Process -
Art Versus Craft; Production, the Hidden Nature of Rock and Riding That Line

K: This is why these interviews take a long time. I was talking about this to Joe before you called, long before you called. I was meditating on my inability to do interviews.

M: It’s not an interview; it’s a conversation.

K: Yeah, but what it amounts to is a complete disinclination to talk about myself. It’s like what T.S. Eliot said: you want an extinction of personality. You don’t have good poetry or good art unless you first extinguish the artist’s personality. I mean, that just gets in the way, right?

M: Right.

K: I mean, that’s just hype and nonsense. It obscures the work, or it stands in for it, in too many cases. So this extinction, I was just meditating on it today. I’m completely disinclined to discuss myself.

There’s just way too much personality out there, and I just can’t contribute to that. The last thing we need to do is hear about another person write their own take on things. There’s too many narratives.

M: So, is that something that you’re trying to do with LDOM? Get away from narratives, stories? More like taking pictures, right?

K: Painting. We’re action painters.

M: The Jackson Pollocks of the music world.

K: We’re essentially illustrating linear time. That’s what it amounts to. The old-fashioned way of making music is to construct it according to some other framework, like a ballad form or anything.

M: Or a symphony.

K: Right. That’s just old-fashioned. The whole notion that music has anything to do with narrative as we understand it seems utterly passé. And you know, it seemed that way to me a long time ago too.

This is why there’s so much crummy stuff that you have to listen to, because people are confused: they think that they have to work in traditional forms, because that’s what they dictate. So you have artists presenting songs that are all verses and choruses.

M: And bridges and...

K: And it’s all designed. But it’s so incredibly rigid, and actually foolish. Not to slander anyone, of course. I’ve heard songs I’ve liked. But it doesn’t make any sense to me as an artistic endeavor.

M: “I’m going to ape this form...”

K: Right. It’s craft! Do you want to do art or craft? It’s craft when you copy a form. That’s why a crafty artist isn’t all that admirable to me. There’s certainly lots of people are good at it, practicing this craft, this song craft. I think that there are enough ‘songs’ out there. Rock, or music in general, is nothing but energy. And people who don’t realize that make records that reflect that, I think.

M: All too plainly. Okay, in terms of the process of doing music with LDOM, it’s all just happening right there. You’re not working from a framework where “you’ll do this” and such.

K: It really starts the minute we get into the space, and it ends when we leave. And it involves (at the beginning and the end) some thuds and some swearing as you maneuver heavy objects into place. The real key is to be able to just start playing music.

M: Right.

K: There is no discussion, and we don’t talk at all. You don’t do anything, you just start to play. And you don’t even just start to play. It’s the nature of the medium, the instruments, the tools, that they play themselves.

M: You just happen to be there at the time.

K: Essentially, you’re channeling bio-electric currents that are swirling around. Obviously, there’s eddies and chaos and phenomena like that. But essentially, the instruments are the ones doing it. I found myself in the situation that there was some music in the air, and it just so happened that there were some people out there who could help me grab some of it. And they understood how to do it, without being lectured.

M: I have a feeling that if you had to lecture them on it, in this process, then they’re probably not going to be able to do it.

K: You might be able to simulate it. Which is why there’s certain guys out there, older jazz guys who we respect, who are able to go around and to tell a bunch of white guys what to do. And they’re sometimes able to simulate it, with some success. But the real question is “is your music simulated music, or is it real?” Most of it out there, is simulated. Just by the very nature of it.

M: Well, and the emphasis on production, as opposed to recording.

K: Production! Good grief!

(laughter)

M: Sounds like I tapped a nerve.

K: (laughs) That’s exactly right. I mean, a producer is just a middle-man. And that’s useful if you’re making a commercial product. You need a producer to get the dog-biscuit shaped right. Art is a little different. Maybe a producer can help, but usually not.

M: The performers into the recorder, screw-ups and all, that’s what shows up on the tape. That’s more interesting than what you can do when you sit in a million-dollar studio for a year and a half.

K: How about a week and a half?

M: Well, even that.

K: Yeah, it’s a disaster.

M: There’s a lot of very celebrated recordings that have been mixed and mixed and endlessly remixed and mixed some more, until they’ve basically had the life squashed from them.

K: And even the ones that they didn’t squash the life out of, they didn’t need to work on all that much.

M: Right.

K: It’s the accidents that are good. That’s a cliché.

M: It’s the cliché. But that wouldn’t be a cliché if it weren’t mostly true.

K: LDOM is taking that a step even further, though. We don’t even know what we’re going to play. We don’t even know what key we’re in.

M: You just do what sounds right.

K: Well, it’s all just swirling around out there. All you have to do is reach out, transport some of it, channel some of it, though those cords, those glass vacuum environments, that themselves change with heat and time. There’s absolutely too many things going on to even begin to articulate some kind of meaningful plan or plot. Or to even argue that anything’s been superimposed, or imposed.

I guess what we are is an extremely primitive, barbarian entity. We’re outside of the gates of civilization and kind of burning stuff just to keep warm, and the campfire of our horde varies, as with any chaotic phenomena. You have a genuine, primitive thing going on here. Primitivism, no calculation. Only rock.

M: I was about to say, but it most definitely is rock.

K: I can’t think of anything else that it could be. Rock is rock because it’s physical music. It’s physical, not intellectual. That’s the essence of it, that it’s physically moving. It’s physiologically altering. What’s that word? Transductor?

M: Transductive.

K: Transductive?

M: You’re turning the energy from the music into the energy of moving yourself.

K: Right. Even if you don’t appear to be moving. Okay, you’re re-orienting things. And this is, itself, a pretty theoretically-grounded idea.

I just have only one thing that I’m able to do, which is to channel sound. I can’t get the least bit interested in songs or forms or standard forms.

M: Well, they’re a little restrictive, for one thing.

K: I guess so. What we’re doing, though, is we’re riding a line: that line between “sound” and “music.” We’re along an edge, and it’s not a straight, hard edge. It’s a fractal and infinitely-varying kind of edge. It’s always there, but it’s always eluding precise capture. And that’s the line that divides ‘sound’ from ‘music.’

M: Okay.

K: So, LDOM is poised, or is surfing that line, right? It’s a constant process of varying back and forth across it. You can’t actually inhabit the line, since the line is nothing but a collection of points with no dimension.

M: You’re riding above it and the line is changing course beneath you.

K: Right. The idea is that you have to somehow balance, and you’re plotting your own course, which is just on either side of it. On this constantly snaking thing. Everything that you hear by the group is riding that line. In fact, it wants to not be music.

M: Right.

K: It wants to be pure sound. But then there’s this musical impulse, which I can’t tell you where it comes from in my own case. And certainly there are other musicians involved in this, and they have their own thoughts, but here’s what I was putting together in regards to this:

You can certainly see all modern, and some pre-modern art (but modern particularly, because of its self-consciousness) is playing with the dichotomy between imagination and reality, or in our case, ‘sound’ versus ‘music. ’ It takes a great modern poet, like Wallace Stevens, to find that line and ride it a little bit. His most common poetic figure for that is the waves on the beach. It’s not any surprise why waves are seen as a poetic image, though I don’t think that it’s understood why that is. You have this fractal edge, this constant flux of “Where is the shore?” You can measure it, but the closer you get, the longer it gets. The fractal principle. There’s a high degree of fractility in LDOM’s music.

It’s prickly, and extremely tactile. The psychic track, the bio-electric track, it leaves is extremely tactile. We’re not talking about imagination versus reality, though, we’re talking about sound versus music.

M: Instead of “tactile”, you might use “visceral” to describe it, to really get at the sort of gut feeling that you seem to be pursuing.

K: I like “tactile” because it rhymes with “fractal.” You know, dancing right on that edge, just playing along. Sometimes it goes too far in one direction or another. LDOM can be too musical sometimes. In which case, we need to take a break, do something else. But then we can also be not quite non-musical enough, if that’s ever possible. And I’m not too sure that it is. As long as there’s one tiny musical element, it counts. Although my next album is going to be cricket sounds.

M: Cricket sounds or short-wave radio?

K: Either one. Whatever I pick up best in the backyard.

M: Doing some field recording?

K: I was thinking about it. The problem generally with that, is that this stuff doesn’t rock out too much. So, you gotta have that component, the physical, demonic thing.

M: Related to this, there’s the clichéd figure, talking about John Cage and 4’56”: music is what is around you, it’s not a construction.

K: I completely believe it. But I, even if I were a consumer, could not be induced into buying a record of what was going on around me. It’s already there.

M: That’s selling you what you already have. But where does that put LDOM in the scheme of things?

K: There are a lot of elements in LDOM; they might pop in and out at various times. But they’re kind of randomly retransmitted or picked-up. In other words, [musical] tradition is like the radio, the aether, in which you’ve got millions of competing signals at varying strengths. And some of them just happen to be picked up by my fillings at certain times, depending on my orientation. And then everyone else’s are doing the same things, too. Then you have this sort of clash of the dental patients sort of thing. That’s what the band is like. That’s how tradition gets assimilated into LDOM, by random re-transmission, having to do with the vagaries of antenna placement or transductive locations. And this of course, continually changes, because you’ve got this organic machine sort of stumbling over its wah-wah pedal, or getting a cramp or whatever.

M: Which could open another door, or triggers another association.

K: So that’s how traditional elements go. Tradition comes in when the receptors are clear.

M: So, tradition is when you’re thinking about it?

K: No, no. Tradition is an element which comes in. Rather than starting with tradition and fitting yourself into it, like bricolage. Rather than doing that, what you do is get to the point where you have the empty head and simply start to activate the device, and then various traditional elements filter in and out. This is why you can hear sort of a Cuban bit at the end of the first track [“Mercury Rising”], this sort of “hijacking to Cuba” episode. (laughs) Somebody’s world beat thing somehow gets triggered. But it wasn’t by me, not consciously.

M: “That wasn’t me. I didn’t make that happen.”

K: But it happened. However, not in a million years, did anyone go into the situation saying...

M: “And we’re going to have this little Cuban bit at the end....”

K: Right. Or that it’s even a possibility. That’s why we don’t talk. We just start playing.

Tangentalia -
The Famous Opposition of Lester Bangs, Dub, Irony, Drone and Muzak

M: I know this is all ego-formation, but did you want to talk about any records that moved you, but not necessarily influenced you.

K: Well any good record, any record that I’ve ever liked is an energy record. It’s a vibe. It’s physical, rather than intellectual.

M: It’s the Dionysian vs. the Appolonian.

K: Well you know, that’s an excellent opposition.

M: To steal from a famous rock critic.

K: Which one was that?

M: Actually, Lester Bangs used it first and used it best, talking about the Velvet Underground.

K: Well, I’d certainly agree with that. There’s no question that Appolonian is dullsville, baby. There’s no point in doing art that isn’t Dionysian. Otherwise you become... I mean, Appolonian art is didactic art. The last thing we need is to be instructed in what to do by our art. There’s enough instructions floating around out there that we can pick from. Most of them being wrong. You won’t discriminate any better between them if you put a beat to them.

(laughter)

M: We can talk about, and we’ve talked about this earlier, about how you were a big listener of Dub music. Not necessarily the early, early stuff, but the stuff that was coming out in the late seventies/early eighties.

K: Yeah. Well they knew exactly what to do. I didn’t realize that then, of course, but I unconsciously connected with it. I mean, it’s purely environmental what they do. I’m not particularly into the dance culture of any sort, but hat’s a perfect example of removing content and creating an environment.

M: Where they’re taking this thing that has a context, this pre-recorded piece, and utterly messing with it.

K: Yeah. You de-contextualize it, to be fancy. Exactly. That was the best music in the world when it was coming out. The Clash knew it. They tried to do something with it. And obviously a lot of other people did, but not that many at the time. It was pretty offbeat back then. But dub taught me how to use space, or at least how to conceptualize space in a sonic environment. And, not to get too specific, but you can hear the effect of that on a lot of things that I might have done.

M: What about some of the other places you were coming from when you first started out? Some people have pointed out that it sounded like you were coming from much more of a punk attitude than a lot of other people were.

K: Which is absolutely right. That’s what made things crazy, was primarily not giving a shit. That’s the attitude that I’m trying to bring across in this whole discussion of tradition.

M: So, tradition is there; it’s something over which you have no control. But then it doesn’t have to be a strait-jacket.

K: Right. Punk is essentially an anarchistic or nihilistic take on tradition. And it’s a destructive criticism of tradition, though what I’ve done in the past can’t necessarily be described as ‘punk.’ I ain’t gonna hype the other stuff that I've done, though.

M: Actually, it would be a pretty dull interview if that’s all you did, really.

K: That’s almost all anybody does.

M: I know.

K: Okay, sorry. I know how many people you interview every day.

M: Actually, the only other person that I’ve really interviewed is Stan Ridgway. And it’s funny, because he described the early Wall of Voodoo stuff as being the same sort of thing as you've talked about LDOM being. You know, primitives not knowing... He learned a little music from David Lindley, who you might know.

K: Of course. Kaleidoscope. [the band]

M: But I don’t think that he had any formal training. They just had some guitars and electronics and beat boxes.

K: On the other hand, there were certainly a lot of sort of recognizable elements in that group. Certainly the Morricone-styled guitar is extremely clear. And the, I guess you’d call him “Lord Buckley for an Era of Limits,” kind of thing that he used to do. He had a lot of antecedents, and they were very much a collage act. A lot of traditional elements collaged together in new ways.

But see, I never had the option of playing Morricone-styled parts.

M: I don’t think that’s something that you could do.

K: I can’t. Or any other kind of part.

In other words, they had the ability to actually select these units. And obviously, there was a lot of primitivism, a lot of unconscious accidents that went into the conglomeration. But, me lacking those elements, or access to those elements, I couldn’t channel them. It caused, a rather more purely primitive folk art to emerge, in LDOM's case. Whereas I have to say, if you think of anything in regards to that group, you have to think self-conscious and ironic. Dripping with irony. Back before irony was cool.

The worst, of course, are those artists without the capacity for irony. That’s what’s always troubled me: artists who seem to lack the capacity to see themselves with any kind of detached objectivity. I mean, irony stems from your own relationship to tradition, and your own consciousness of that ironic relationship. So what do you do if you’re James Joyce? You reduce Ulysses to a day in the life of a guy walking around the city.

M: You take the grandest epic and make it the most prosaic occurrence.

K: Right. That’s obviously your thing. But what is particularly amazing are those who lack irony entirely.

M: Whether its a willful practice or just a complete inability.

K: I think you have to have a certain degree of intellect to have irony. I mean, irony is smarter than no irony, and it can be smarter still to get past it.

M: Too much irony isn’t very smart at all.

K: That’s certainly true. It can be a reactive mode if applied indiscriminately.

M: You’ve mentioned some music that you’ve liked, and you enjoyed. But this isn’t the same thing as the “transcendent” experience of music, which gets talked about a lot.

K: Well the problem that people have with rock is that every couple of years or whatever, there seem to be a whole bunch of bands that appeal to a lot of kids, but basically stink. In fact, what they’re doing is meeting a very simple, programmed need. Rock has always had a bad reputation of being a bunch of noise. For some reason, there’s a need to keep feeding certain age groups product with a certain potential of actual Dionysian, liberatory rock. Thus you have a industry which exists to cater to that market. It’s not all that different from muzak.

M: It’s just different programming, or a different flavor.

K: Different programming, but it’s the same thing. That isn’t particularly rewarding to be part of. You may as well be in any industry.

But, yeah, it’s foolish. Anybody can do it, almost. And somebody will, whether or not you do it. And that’s the key. Why not do something else? Do something of actual use. And that may not be music at all. Maybe that should be the only comment about the missing years that I should actually make. Maybe that what’s actually useful to do may not be...

M: May not be doing music or anything like it?

K: ...may not be trying to impose your music on other people just for the hell of it. Just for the reason that your ego-formation demands it. There’s certainly many other things out there. Somehow I sensed, many years back, that doing the music for the sake of doing it was not an essential act. It wasn’t essential to the world. That’s what Eliot was getting at, I guess. The essential personality is irrelevant. The world’s gonna be there whether or not that person expresses themselves. (pause)

What was I supposed to talk about? The Dionysian experience? (laughs)

M: Actually, another thing I wanted to get at was the inability of many people to articulate, on a rational level, the sort of experience that they undergo when feeling music, when actually experiencing it. Or creating it.

K: Well, is it more accurate to try to capture it metaphorically, with language? Is that better and more accurate to approach it from a musicological level, in terms of facts and dates and names? I mean, musicology is essentially the history of commodification. That’s all it is. The history of turning music into commodity, and good grief, who needs that? I mean, once you sense the absurdity of that, and a lot of people haven’t and in fact, like it. Once you sense the absurdity of it, you can’t get back.

M: It’s like you’ve been shown the other side, and now you can’t get the image of the dog biscuit factory out of your head, when you’re supposed to be experiencing ‘music.’

K: Well, this accounts for my relative non-fandom. It’s not disdain for other bands and musicians. It’s just an objective disinterest, almost a Buddhist disinterest. Having no desires for any kinds of commodities, which I picked up many years ago. Because of that, musicology and the music industry just doesn’t seem like something worth putting effort into perpetuating for its own sake.

M: I’m not sure that I’d totally agree with that, because there are people within the “industry” who are still... Commodification is a process that they have to go through in order to continue to get more money to put out records to etc. I know people at a handful of labels, and none of the labels really makes money, because it all goes back into some release that they want to put out, but will only sell a hundred copies worldwide. But it desperately needs to be out there.

K: But in effect, they are working in an industry.

M: Right. I make no bones about that.

K: It’s more meaningful than making soap, certainly. There’s no question about it being better than that.

M: But, it’s still the commodification process. Still putting it into a bin to sell at your chain record store.

K: But who wants to talk about that?

M: Well, then how about being lumped into another category? Like maybe some of that drone stuff that I sent you.

K: The drone music seems to be an attempt to map a psychic topography. The idea of the drone is this kind of fuzzy, warm thing that exists from A to B over this period of time. And over that time, other things happen around it and with it....

M: But it itself is unchanged...

K: Yeah, but of course it’s completely changed, too. Maybe not completely changed, but it’s like a brain thinking from A to B with the random electrical flashes, that consciousness amounts to, going off. When I hear a lot of the drone stuff, particularly when it’s one guy playing into a 4-track, playing to a sequenced... There’s still a rather mechanical quality, or rather a bio-electric quality. You’ve got these pulses. You’ll hear a little of that in LDOM, that kind of pulsation. But what you have in LDOM is a psychic topography that approaches the level of complexity that you’d expect in a consciousness. A lot of the drone stuff, the one-guy unit drone stuff doesn’t have a lot of that going on.

M: Because there isn’t much chance for interplay between musicians.

K: Rock and roll in general is about psychic topography. Drone is just a particularly refined way of doing that. The reason that I like musicians playing with each other is that then you get that complexity, random clusters of impulses colliding with each other. So when I listen to that [LDOM] record, I hear it as a sort of drone record, oddly enough, in that it’s doing the same kinds of things that seem to be at the center of the drone esthetic. But it’s also got a level of neural complexity, that these others don’t have. We’re after a more complex psychic topography, but the music itself is pretty simple. Maybe even more simple than a lot of the drone stuff. In general with drone, or at least the stuff I’ve heard, is that things are more calculated. And they have to be if you’re playing to your own tracks.

M: Working by yourself it has to be.

K: Having said that, it seems like there’s a lot of people out there that are looking for some organicism instead of the urban-programmed digitally-sequenced sounds of something like Trip-Hop...

M: They’re calling it “Electronica” now. But that’s another conversation.

K: ...but at the moment, they’re caught up in some rather childish-sounding indie music.

M: And a lot of it, that’s how it’s sold. It’s a regressive....

K: Yeah. Wow. It sure is. It’s a relinquishing of maturity. I’m completely horrified.

M: But isn’t a lot of Rock the same sort of thing?

K: Whew...

M: It gets back to the same sort of thing. One’s Dionysian. One’s regressive.

K: Is being Dionysian being regressive?

M: It could be.

K: It could be.

M: It could be that you’re regressing past being a teenager, past childhood and gettin’ right back to the animal. You’re back in the cave.

K: But there’s an awful lot of technology involved in our case. Not that we use sequencers or anything. But we still use fairly sophisticated tools in our primitive cause...

Tradition -
Surpassing the Narrative Urge, Why Karl Precoda is Absolutely Useless, and the Dog Biscuit Factory

M: So, LDOM is trying to surpass the narrative tradition of music, so to speak. Getting past telling stories through music, and just making sound.

K: Think how spurious the narrative actually is. It’s a confusion of realms, right? You confuse the sounds that they make with some linguistic sensibility. Content, right? Content basically sucks.

M: (Laughter)

K: Why impose content, when every human being imposes content on everything they observe? In every perception that they take in, they impose content.

M: Now we can interchange ‘content’ for ‘meaning’?

K: Absolutely. This is just going back to Aristotle and Plato, content vs. form. When you try to impose your content on the form of rock... The fact of the matter is this why people mishear lyrics. This is why nobody actually gets the lyrics right. Or at least good lyrics right. There’s this complete miscommunication. It’s as if no two individuals even speak the same language. In an abstract way.

M: Right. But somehow we manage to muddle along.

K: Look around. Listen to all the stuff that you have to hear. That’s muddling for sure.

But that’s the biggest mistake. People don’t relate to music as sound, but as part of their own ego-formation. Or they relate to it as hype. They relate to it as all sorts of things that are not sound, that are not music. They relate to tradition in how they conceive it. Which is of course why the number one question in situations like this is “What were you listening to when you wrote that?”

M: But all that means is that you happened to be listening to this at the time, but it doesn’t necessarily have an impact on what you’re doing.

K: Well, generally it does. That’s why influence-hunting is profitable is most sorts of rock criticism. Because most people who are doing it are copying other things that they’ve heard. And that’s what it means to be in a tradition.

M: You have specific forms...

K: And this is where LDOM departs from T.S. Eliot. Eliot wants you to exist in tradition.

M: Be subsumed by it.

K: Yeah. The idea of being self-conscious and talking about music in other terms. This is why I personally feel that I’m irrelevant.

M: “Karl Precoda is absolutely useless.”

K: Well, in terms of understanding the music, yeah. You can’t possibly put together what you hear with anything that I could say about anything in traditional terms. Although, I’ve explained to you what’s going on in some nebulous technical terms. But that’s got nothing to do with me, from this perspective.

The related problem, is that most people in bands want to be in bands first. That’s their primary concern.

M: Right. Instead of expressing some sort of... Being a craftsman instead of being an artist, let’s say.

K: Yeah. “I wanna be in a band to: A) Get girls. B) Get famous...”

M: “C) Get rich.”

K: Right. Or it could be as simple as: “my ego formation demands that my identity be of someone in a band. I have to be in a band, or my ego threatens to crumble.” Right? “My sense of self would vanish, dissolve...” And that creates all sorts of rather precarious individuals.

M: Not a good combination.

K: But they’re out there, flooding the marketplace right now. They’re absolutely determined to be validated in that sense. But if you take this other tack, you can easily go for many years without being in a band.

M: Because you’re doing what comes naturally. It’s not even a namable thing. It’s just you being you.

K: Exactly. It’s wholly organic, the situation. There’s no pre-thought here. There is no self-conscious, self-creation going on here. It’s completely by accident, one gets in a band. And that’s been my experience.

M: You’ve not “been in” bands so much as it kind of happened; with LDOM, too? Accidentally, like the music?

K: Right. It’s sort of like the Romantic myth. You’ll hear everyone nowadays saying things like that, right? Everyone wants to be a William Blake or Wordsworth or something. Of course, those guys in fact, worked like crazy over their poems, right. Don’t think that they didn’t struggle and cross stuff out. It didn’t all just flow from the bottle of laudanum...

M: I was about to say it was like, talking about Eliot, the manuscript edition of The Waste Land, which is a mess.

K: Which was worked over from here to forever with outside editors. No question about it.

M: It wasn’t just Eliot by himself.

K: Nope, some future fascists involved in that. But because of this [the Romantic notion of accidents], you have this cliché. So everybody’s going to say the same thing. “We’re into accidents. We just knocked this out in a day.” You’ll hear that sort of thing over and over again. While that is rarely the case, I think.

M: I could name some bands that actually use that as their modus operandi, but really there aren’t too many.

K: It’s funny, because I’ve definitely had a sort of Viet Cong sensibility about music for a long time now. I’ve been down in the tunnels for about 13 years here. With the rest of my cadres. I guess you can say that I play topographical music, and the topography of the last decade or so has been underground.

M: The subways.

K: Quite literally underground. Invisible. Inaudible. But you know, down there, we have a whole civilization.

M: Just a bunch of mole men...

K; We’ve got supplies, ammo dumps, even hospitals. (laughs) Holy cow. Time to get out of the tunnels.

You might say that we play Rorschach rock. It’s a blob, without inherent meaning. But, you can count on any audience that exists to create meaning out of the blob. Therefore to create meaning yourself for it would be an utter waste of energy. If you have to do that, then you’re not playing music. You’re doing something else. You’re creating some other thing. Maybe you’re writing poetry. Maybe you’re creating a musical comedy. It has nothing to do with making music. You can always count on the listener to create what meaning they need. So the idea is to construct an ideogram, an inkblot, that is rich and alluvial.

M: Alluvial?

K: “Composed of detrital material.” Detritus was what I was after, a sense of detritus. Detritus is everything.

M: What Philip K. Dick called “kipple.”

K: That’s right. And William Gibson had that Japanese word...

M: Gomi. “Garbage.” Junk.

K: Yeah. Levi-Strauss called it bricolage.

M: Or bric-a-brac.

K: Like Wall of Voodoo, where these individuals combined and formed out of cultural fragments. But I would be detrital or alluvial. I’m not working with products of culture. I’m working with biologic, bio-electric or even electromagnetic impulses. I mean, I’m actually working at moving air. I’m not working with sampled fragments out of various cultural discourses, as you’d hear on say a hip-hop record.

M: It’s funny how you bring that up. You say that dub music was so interesting because it de-contextualized things, but it seems that rap and hip-hop (which grew out of that, to a degree) are interested in the context of things. They seem to want to make sure that people hear enough of the sample to know what song it came from, and see this whole chain sort of going back in musical history.

K: Well, they’re very consciously working in an Eliotic sense, right?

M: Just don’t say that to their faces.

K: Oh, I’d say that. I mean, Eliot wasn’t so bad. He was a little old-fashioned. But sure you’ve got guys like Amiri Baraka [born LeRoi Jones]. He’s one of your famous black poets. He was a Beat, or associated with the Beats. But then he got involved with the Black Arts movement in the Sixties. Which was an attempt to succeed the Harlem Renaissance, and it was a black nationalist arts movement. He changed his name to Amiri Baraka and became swept up in this sort of maintenance of tradition. He appeared on a great album with some jazzers; I’m thinking David Murray for some reason was on this record, called In the Tradition.

Tradition is more strongly a part of African-American art in a way, then it is for “white” art, for lack of a better term. “White” always pretends to be universal and almost never is. But the fact of the matter is, that the white artist for most of the 20th century, has a primary interest in demolishing tradition. And Eliot recognized this, and as an essentially conservative guy, wanted to preserve tradition. But he’s talking about the same process that everyone was engaged in. So, destroying tradition has been the concern of every significant artistic movement from the beginning of this century, if you want to begin with Dada. Or earlier. You want to destroy tradition, or put such a spin on it that it’s unrecognizable.

M: It’s the whole confrontational mode.

K: Whereas, African-American art has been explicitly, although much of it has been technically innovative, it’s been about assembling, or consolidating, or codifying a tradition. Because, in fact, the history of African-Americans has been the destruction of their tradition. So they’re primarily concerned with re-assembling it. So that’s why hip-hop has the kind of content that it has. They’re really following that same impulse that somebody like Baraka had, or Gil-Scott Heron, or anybody you want to name.

M: So, in terms of this, do you think that LDOM is transcending tradition? Or continuing another tradition, like ‘free music?’

K: I think that there are going to be those who see it as in a tradition of free music. I will only say that I don’t know anything about that tradition other than what people try to argue me into.

M: You’ve taken the position that you’re a folk artist, that you’re sort of a naïve.

K: Not exactly. That just seems the inevitable objective analysis. Simply because, when I started trying to play rock years ago, I wanted to be in the [Rock] tradition. I wanted money and girls and fame. For about a minute.

M: Say it isn’t so...

K: Oh, well. When you’re 16, things look pretty bleak on the other side of that Pink Floyd album cover. You start thinking about ways to re-invent things. But that lasts for about a second until punk rock comes along and blows things away. And then the lifelong project to destroy all music...(laughter)...starts to take form.

I was just contemplating this question of just what LDOM does. And I cannot conceive of it exactly in terms of tradition. Certainly there are going to be people who can listen to it and say “indeed this is in the tradition of free music.” But it seems to me what we’re actually doing particularly, is a very singular thing. But LDOM is not consciously avant-garde. We’re not pushing the theoretical limit of art. We’re not trying to stretch a conceptual boundary, or to challenge a listener in any way.

M: You’re not bemoaning “the tyranny of the 4:4 beat.”

K: Hell, no. We like that. The only reason that makes it worth listening to is that it rocks out. That’s the problem that Rock has, is that stuff that rocks out is really rare. Lots of people plod and some of them thud. A few of them swing a little.

M: But very few rock?

K: Actually, a lot of people rock, but it’s pretty predetermined. That is, you’re not too often surprised. And generally, audiences don’t want to be surprised.

M: No.

K: You’re riding a border: “How do you rock out and still surprise people?” That’s really hard, I have to say. There’s no way to plan it. The minute you plan it, you’re not rocking out. You’re KISS, or something. I don’t want to slag KISS or anything, but, good grief!

M: Not to defend them, but that’s musical theater, not rock. It’s another beast.

K: But there are people who think that they rock. Just as there are dogs that think dog food tastes good. It depends on what you are. If you’re a dog, I guess... (laughs)

M: But if your standards are a little higher...

K: (laughs) If your standards are as lofty as mine, forget it. Forget ever being satisfied with anything you hear. I hate to present myself as a Buddha-figure...

M: (laughs) Well, you know, people are going to forswear their lives and start following the teachings of LDOM.

K: But the teachings are non-teachings. That’s a problem.

M: The same ‘problem’ of Buddhism, then. Or the same situation, in which the teachings are “don’t learn anything”, but still people are trying to teach themselves.

K: I guess this is an actual body of knowledge. I mean, a genuinely destructive criticism of monolithic tradition. It actually is knowledge. You have to learn where to attach the explosives to bring the structure down. I guess there are some teachings here.

M: This might be at odds with you not wanting to talk about yourself, but are there some musicians that you feel some sort of kinship with?

K: To do that, the best thing to do might be to look at the [LDOM] album and how it might fit in tradition.

M: Okay. But you’ve said, and this is a paraphrase: “The act of putting a piece of work into a tradition imposes on it some content which it may not have had.” In other words, by defining it as something, pick a label, you are making it into something that it may not be, making it say something that it might not have said by itself.

K: I’ll endorse that. Which is, of course, the main reason why I’ve resisted this. I mean, the music on the album is the product of not thinking. Of having an empty head at the time that it happened. I can remember being there, but I can’t remember any structural moves of any kind. I can’t remember attempting to quote, simulate or copy anything; or to do anything conscious on a structural level. Every piece on the album is unconscious. And that’s what makes it really peculiar, really unique, and probably really annoying to certain listeners.

M: Difficult to classify through normal means.

K: A hard-core musicologist who approaches it through that standard filter might have a problem. But then again, they might not. It might be the opposite case. There might be dozens of things that they could say. I mean, the fact that someone described it as like Crazy Horse is astonishing to me. Because several other people said it’s like Miles Davis, and what could be more different from Crazy Horse than Miles Davis? At least, when you start talking about musical qualities. You can look at it now, and start to impose some structure.

M: Yeah. After the fact.

K: See, the real deal is to be able to walk in and let the music go. To let it actually occur, in the face of all the stuff that is working to prevent it, the urge to follow those traditional forms that you’ve been immersed in. This is why Emerson hated Shakespeare. Because there was this colossal figure that he couldn’t do anything about, or even approach, no matter what he did. It’s the same thing with people who follow music, with musicologists. I mean, there’s a lot of huge monuments in ‘classic rock’ that loom over everyone’s shoulder.

M: Even though some of it’s been reduced to being commercial jingles.

K: Certainly, commodified. That really casts a pall over the music.

M: And this seems like a reason for a lot of the urgency, particularly within the industry, and within individual musicians, to make something that is the Next Big Thing. To make something that is audibly different, to say that it is breaking from tradition.

K: This is why any fad draws any attention at all. Because it appears to be something different. Even though, as it turns out, there isn’t anything really new behind any of them. But then you’re in this situation where this traditional stuff is looming. There’s thousands of guys out there with their Marshalls, stuck in an old pattern, trying to sound like Hendrix. They can exactly simulate him, but they can’t be him, if you can see the difference.

M: Which is like a lot guitar players, spending half of their time talking about how to get the sound of somebody else.

K: That’s how almost everyone out there relates to music. “I want to do that. I want to play that song by that artist. I want to be that character.” And everyone seems to relate to music like that. So that they become these representations, pale xeroxes of art that was once vivid and hard-edged. Everyone is trying to present themselves as a commodity, to mechanically reproduce themselves. Trying to get people to buy “me.”

M: Instead of all the other “me’s” out there.

K: And that’s a big problem. That’s why the industry, both the indies and the majors are having a hard time. But then, how do I justify my random skronking? Especially in the face of my polemicizing about song structures.

M: But I didn’t think that you were putting down the very process of songwriting and pop songwriters. It seemed more like a criticism of those folks who take their little pieces, put them through the filtering process of “songwriting” and say “this is now art.” Like paint-by-numbers, which isn’t really art.

K: Well, yeah. It’s conservatism that I’m railing against. The inability to get outside that basic structure, that you’ve seen done a billion times. The inability to put yourself out of that context where things have verses and choruses.

Like I’ve said, with LDOM, the tradition is on the back end, not on the front end. And in 95-99% of pop music, the tradition is on the front end. It starts from someone trying to copy someone else or trying to find “what will fit here,” “who will like this?” Trying to imagine their audience ahead of time. And it’s difficult to think of much that doesn’t do that. In our case, once the process happens, then traditional elements can be spotted, but it’s not intention beforehand.

M: So, tradition is not necessarily an evil thing, and practitioners of tradition aren’t there to be laughed at, but it’s just not a consideration for you.

K: Yeah. What I’m hoping is that there’ll be some intellectual engagement going on. Or at least “He’s crazy!” What I don’t want to do is have them say “Well, he’s putting me down.”

M: “Because I like songs and he doesn’t.”

K: Exactly. I don’t want to say “you’re worthless.” I’m certainly happy to have them engaged and making theoretical points. Questioning the epistemology is fine. That would be the ideal outcome.

M: To get some neurons firing.

K: Indeed