{"id":7479,"date":"2015-03-25T05:30:25","date_gmt":"2015-03-25T09:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=7479"},"modified":"2015-03-25T05:30:25","modified_gmt":"2015-03-25T09:30:25","slug":"on-the-fringe-of-consonance-double-naught-spy-car-stew-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2015\/03\/25\/on-the-fringe-of-consonance-double-naught-spy-car-stew-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Fringe of Consonance: Double Naught Spy Car + Stew (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The members of Double Naught Spy Car<\/strong> don’t seem put off by the genre labels that (cough, cough) certain rock writers tend to apply to musical artists. In fact they’ve offered up a label of their own to describe their sound: \u201cspaghetti\/jazz\/prog\/surf\/twang.\u201d Now, if that doesn’t confuse listeners, their music just might. On their latest album Panorama City<\/em>, the southern California quintet are joined by singer\/lyricist Stew<\/strong>, formerly of equally-though-differently-quirky group The Negro Problem<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

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The project that gave rise to Panorama City<\/em> started its life more than a decade ago, the product of a grant from the American Composers’ Forum<\/strong>. The resulting tapes languished for years, but now they’re available in both edited album form and in their raw, largely unaltered state.<\/p>\n

I spoke with guitarist Paul Lacques<\/strong> about the development of the grant-financed sessions into a finished product that is decidedly avant-garde, yet somehow still accessible. And I’m also pleased to present a Musoscribe World Premiere<\/strong> in advance of Panorama City<\/em>‘s April 14 release: the track \u201cBumpin’ Morton Subotnick\u201d (see link below).<\/p>\n

Bill Kopp:<\/strong> The nature of improvisation is that you free yourself from preconceptions as to where you’re going with the music. I understand that’s how a lot of late ’60s and early ’70s Miles Davis<\/strong><\/a> sessions were done. But then Teo Macero<\/strong> and Miles would splice, chop, edit, and reassemble the results into something they liked. Frank Zappa<\/strong><\/a> did something conceptually related: he’d take tapes of his live guitar solos, extract them from the multitracks and then craft new studio backing around them. To what extent did you engage in post-recording \u201csculpting\u201d of these tracks?<\/span><\/p>\n

Paul Lacques:<\/strong> Our bass player Marc Doten<\/strong> did the lion’s share of it. For example, if we had a seventeen-minute song, we needed to trim it down to four and a half minutes or so, maybe six minutes. So eleven minutes vanish right there. I think he moved a few things around, but the general flow is somewhat how we played it, but with big sections chopped out.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/center>I think, as we were doing it, we had in our minds, \u201cMaybe we’ll chop this up someday.\u201d I don’t know; it really was leaping into the unknown when we started doing it. We didn’t really even talk about it. We just wrote this grant [proposal], promising to make songs up on the spot. Those were sort of broad instructions. But we actually did<\/em> do it; one of us would just start playing, and the others would just fall in. The rule of improv is that you don’t leave your partner hanging.<\/p>\n