{"id":7481,"date":"2015-03-26T05:30:30","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T09:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=7481"},"modified":"2015-03-26T05:30:30","modified_gmt":"2015-03-26T09:30:30","slug":"on-the-fringe-of-consonance-double-naught-spy-car-stew-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2015\/03\/26\/on-the-fringe-of-consonance-double-naught-spy-car-stew-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Fringe of Consonance: Double Naught Spy Car + Stew (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One<\/a>…<\/em><\/p>\n

Bill Kopp:<\/strong> The press release that accompanies my copy of Panorama City<\/em> also uses the phrase \u201cgroup ESP\u201d when describing the interaction among you and your fellow musicians. I chuckled when I read that, because while I understand what was meant \u2013 an unspoken communication among the musicians \u2013 the avant-garde music also reminded me of the kind of thing that came out on ESP-Disk: The Fugs<\/strong>, Paul Bley<\/strong>, Albert Ayler<\/strong>, and Sun Ra<\/strong>, for example \u2013 all what one might term \u201coutsider\u201d music. Do you feel a kinship with those sort of exploratory artists?<\/span><\/p>\n

Paul Lacques:<\/strong> Oh, definitely. Absolutely. And occasionally, the textures will sound a little…I’m not even sure what the category is. Experimental? The tonalities certainly go out on a limb, and that is<\/em> how we approach our music. It’s not like, \u201cOh, we accidentally played a major seventh over a minor sixth chord.\u201d That is how we think as a band. We look for melodies that are kind of on the fringe of consonance. We look for memorable phrases, but they can be quite dissonant.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/center>It sounds kind of like…I don’t expect people to believe it, but we did start reading each others’ mind. You’ll hear the band switch on a dime. And hearing it now, I truly don’t know how we decided to change keys or chords, but we did. We weren’t looking at each other and signaling; we just felt<\/em> it.<\/p>\n

One of the things we’ve done is to make all of the raw tracks available. So you can hear it as it was played. We really hope people check that out, because you can hear the changes happening without any cues. It was an interesting experience, for sure.<\/p>\n

BK:<\/strong> As we’ve touched upon, Stew<\/strong> recited his more-or-less free-form lyrics live while you played. Did the cadence of his lyrics affect the organic direction that the music took, or did you more or less tune it out while you were playing?<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

PL:<\/strong> We were very much listening. We could hear each other really well; we were gathered in a fairly tight circle, and Stew was in a vocal booth. (He also played a lot of guitar, keys, and melodica.) He was very much \u201cin the room\u201d with us. We were definitely supporting what he was doing, and responding to it.<\/p>\n

Our approach was sort of, \u201cWe’ve got this recording date with this singer\/songwriter Stew, and we’re pretending like we have charts to play.\u201d Like a good Wrecking Crew<\/strong> or backing band, yeah. You support the lyrics, once they’re in.<\/p>\n

BK:<\/strong> The difference being that in your case, it was done on the fly, spontaneously…<\/span><\/p>\n

PL:<\/strong> A good studio band…you know, there’s that movie about The Wrecking Crew coming out. They played on hundreds of hits, and they<\/em> were making licks up on the spot, too. They didn’t have two days to work on a song; they were expected to crank out at least one song in a couple of hours. If they were hot, they’d do a couple<\/em> of songs. They made guitar licks and so forth up on the spot; that’s what they were hired to do.<\/p>\n