You don’t have to dance if you don’t want to (The Faint’s Todd Fink on the politics of dancing)…

Category: Blog,Interviews — Tags: , , , — @ 12:50 pm September 13, 2011

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

I received some lively feedback (mostly on my Facebook page) from yesterday’s blog entry regarding House of Loom and Depressed Buttons, which made me want to share the following from last week’s interview with Todd Fink and Jacob Thiele that didn’t make it into the column due to space constraints.

I asked Todd and Jacob if people need to dance to enjoy Depressed Buttons’ music. Todd provided this rather profound response that cuts at the heart of people’s apprehension to dance in public:

“I just acquired a small couch or loveseat for the studio of my home where I just lie and listen to music. I have an awesome sound system in here with a sub woofer so you can make it sound just like a club. I’ll just lie on that thing and play dance music as loud as I can, louder than playing rock music — you can’t listen to rock music that loud because it just turns into noise.

“So no, you don’t have to move your body at all, but it’s physically cathartic, and it’s a good exercise for your ego to dance, even if you think you’re terrible, because you’re saying, ‘I don’t care. I’m getting to know my body enough to know I don’t care what anybody thinks about how I look.’ That’s a hard place to get to. We’re not conditioned to do that automatically. I’m proud of hippies when they dance — they’ve gotten above worrying about their dance moves. It feels good to connect with the rhythm of sound to the larger movements of your body instead of just the inner workings of your brain. I listen to dance music all the time, but I don’t dance all the time.”

There’s a ton more from this interview — including why it took The Faint so long to write and record songs (and the roll of band democracy), lyric writing and future Faint recording projects, what’s happening with Enamel recording studio, and the difference between Goo and Depressed Buttons. It’s all in this week’s column, which goes online (and in print) Thursday.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

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Column 340: Todd Fink on the future of The Faint and the rise of Depressed Buttons; Bon Iver tonight…

Category: Blog,Column,Interviews — Tags: , , , , , — @ 12:33 pm September 8, 2011
Depressed Buttons, from left, Jacob Thiele, Todd Fink, Clark Baechle.

Depressed Buttons, from left, Jacob Thiele, Todd Fink and Clark Baechle.

Column 340: He Disappeared: The Rise of Depressed Buttons

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

It’s not possible to talk about the debut of Depressed Buttons at hot new dance club House of Loom on Sept. 9 without first talking about the apparent demise of The Faint.

Three members of The Faint — frontman Todd Fink, keyboardist Jacob Thiele and drummer Clark Baechle — make-up Depressed Buttons. So before we talked about the new project, Fink and Thiele set the record straight on The Faint, who haven’t released an album since 2008’s Fasciinatiion or performed live since their appearance at the 2010 MAHA Music Festival. Is the band kaput?

“I would say that it’s not happening,” Fink said last week via a phone call that included Thiele. “It could happen again, but it’s not happening and there are no plans for it to happen at this point. Joel moved to California, and I guess he quit.”

Joel is The Faint’s bass player, Joel Petersen. “He doesn’t want to do the band,” Thiele said. “He really kind of lost interest a while ago. He doesn’t really want us to do the band without him because he wouldn’t like the music we’d make. This way he’s not embarrassed by The Faint’s music.”

“He quit the band and assumes the band was over when he quit,” Fink added. “But we’re not just characters in his life. We all have invested the same amount of energy into the band, and felt like we could do it. His quitting is just that, and if we did do some more shows, we would consider checking with him to see if he wanted to do it, but assume he would not.”

Fink said the remaining members of the band talked about doing a Faint tour next year in conjunction with a possible rerelease of Danse Macabre, The Faint’s career-defining album, released 10 years ago this past Aug. 21. The record sold 147,000 copies, making it the band’s all-time bestseller and among the best selling Saddle Creek Records releases. A new live show would be center on Danse Macabre “and maybe Blank-Wave Arcade,” Fink said. “I’d like to see those two remastered. I think they could be improved a lot.”

If Petersen declined an invitation, Fink said, “We could do it with four of us. There’s plenty of people in the band, or we could find someone else, too. I’d rather just do it with the four of us.” The band is rounded out by guitarist Dapose.

As for Petersen, Fink said his quitting was the right thing to do if he didn’t want to be in the band. “I don’t have any hard feelings about it,” Fink said. “People are just complicated.”

Through Fink, Petersen said he didn’t want to comment for this article. There’s more to The Faint story and everything surrounding it, which will appear in next week’s column.

Fink said Depressed Buttons grew out of Faint after parties DJ’d by Fink, Thiele and Baechle. “One thing led to another and we ended up doing that a lot,” Fink said. “We found ourselves wanting music that we couldn’t find, and thinking we should just make our own tracks, what we want to play.”

The trio soon began taking more bookings outside of the after parties. Fink said Petersen, who doesn’t like DJs, didn’t want the events to be listed as “The Faint DJs.”

“So we thought of a new name, Depressed Buttons, to kind of make fun of electronic music,” Fink said.

Last December, Depressed Buttons released its first EP, QWERTY, on Mad Decent, an L.A.-based label owned by Thomas Wesley Pentz, a.k.a. Diplo, the Grammy-nominated producer of “Paper Planes,” by M.I.A. “We plan to keep releasing our originals through them,” Fink said.

Depressed Buttons also has remixed such acts as Of Montreal, Boy 8-Bit, Boys Noize, Shinichi Osawa, Teenage Bad Girl, Herr Styler, CSS, LOL Boys, Para One, Reset!, Felix Cartal, Tony Senghore, Tommie Sunshine, O+S, Autoerotic, Beataucue and Crookers.

The trio’s DJ stints have included NYC’s Webster Hall, Moscow’s Solyanka Club, shows in Vienna, Nottingham, Berlin, and a headlining gig in front of thousands at the mammoth Avalon Hollywood.

Fink said Depressed Buttons wasn’t made for Faint fans. “The point of it is different,” he said. “The Faint was songs. You could dance to them if you like the song. Depressed Buttons may have words, may have lyrics, does have samples, but think of it as instrumental music. If there are voices, they are used as other instruments.”

As for the upcoming Loom performance, which is part of a monthly residency at the club, “This is a dance party with club music,” Fink said. “There’s no performance aspect to it unless you like watching people tweak knobs and faders and press buttons. The point is to have fun and to dance and to expose Omaha to the type of things that are happening in the world in the electronic club scene. It’s some futuristic stuff; it’s not really for Faint fans, but we are people from The Faint.”

“Depressed Buttons is forward thinking, it’s one second ahead of the rest of the club scene,” Thiele added. “It’s sort of about the science of music. There’s a lot of new music being made that couldn’t have been made until now because the technology didn’t exist. If you’re in the right mindset, in the right club with the right vibe and sound system, it can be a really enlightening experience. I think some people prefer not to dance, but to close their eyes. It’s avant-garde.”

“You can’t go too crazy,” Fink responded, laughing. “It’s still dance music.”

Depressed Buttons performs Sept. 9 at House of Loom, 1012 So. 10th Street. The 21+ show starts at 10 p.m., cover is $5. For more information, go to houseofloom.com.

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* * *

Bon Iver, whose self-titled album (4AD/Jagjaguwar) received a whopping 9.5 by Pitchfork, and which now sits at No. 14 on the CMJ Radio 200 list, plays tonight at Stir Concert Cove. Tickets are still available at $35 a pop. Opening is Canadian alt-country singer/songwriter Kathleen Edwards (MapleMusic). Show starts at 8 p.m.

Also tonight, Ft. Worth dreamcore band Burning Hotels returns to Omaha, this time at O’Leaver’s. The four-piece opened for Thunder Power and Mynabirds a year ago last May at TWR (read the review here

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). Wonder if they’ll have room for those fluorescent light fixtures… With Rock Paper Dynamite (headlining) and The Big Deep. 9:30, 5 p.m.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Lazy-i

From the Lazy-i Vault, August 2001: The Faint prepares to release Danse Macabre; Bloodcow tonight…

Category: Blog — Tags: , , — @ 12:46 pm August 18, 2011
The Faint circa August 2001, from left, Jacob Thiele, Joel Petersen, Todd Fink (then Baechle), Dapose and Clark Baechle.

The Faint circa August 2001, from left, Jacob Thiele, Joel Petersen, Todd Fink (then Baechle), Dapose and Clark Baechle. Photo by Bill Sitzmann.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

From the Lazy-i Vault, Aug. 15, 2001:

There is nothing in Omaha or elsewhere quite like The Faint, and they know it.

Their ultra-stylized live shows have enough panache to transform even the bleak, wood-paneled, linoleum-floored confines of Sokol Underground into a be-seen-style glossy, New York City dance club. It’s not done with smoke and mirrors. More like smoke and light and heat, and a digital-pulsed rhythm that throbs in syncopation with the black-clad lads’ every twitch, their bodies bent in strobe-lit silhouette behind racks of keyboards, wires and gear.

Their stage show is a flawless marriage of tune and technology, driven by a style of music that is at once familiar to anyone who listened during the bad-hair days of New Wave electronic pop to bands like Human League, Berlin, Thomas Dolby, Front 242; a style that carried on into the ’90s with dance-house acts like Depeche Mode, New Order and The Cure. But though comparisons can be made — and always are — nothing from the Reagan-era on or since has really sounded like The Faint’s brand of dark, sleek, digitally driven rock.

It is high-style anywhere, but especially in a state that takes pride in comparing itself to choice cuts of meat cooked “rare, well done.” The Faint is an oddball outfit, too sleek to recognize how sleek it is, denying fashion while at the same time setting it.

So began a story that tried to describe what would become one of the hottest bands to emerge from the Omaha music scene. It was written to support the release of Danse Macabre

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, the follow-up to The Faint’s break-out 1999 album, Blank-Wave Arcade. Released by Saddle Creek Records Aug. 21, 2001, Danse Macabre is my favorite Faint album, and judging by the reaction that almost every one of its songs received during live shows, it was their fans’ favorite, too. More from the vault:

The Faint, Danse Macabre (Saddle Creek, August 2001)

The Faint, Danse Macabre (Saddle Creek, August 2001)

The difference (from Blank-Wave Arcade) both in sound and musical style is a slap in the face right from the opening track, “Agenda Suicide,” which sports the darkest, bleakest sing-along chorus laid over the band’s patented minor-key voice-of-doom-in-a-jumpsuit synth counter-melodies. And, of course, an irresistible house-dance rhythm track. The hyper-kinetic whirl of “Glass Dance” comes on like a video-game-colored rave soundtrack, but with irresistible, undeniable hooks. “Let the Poison Spill from Your Throat” and “Your Retro Career Melted” carry a distinct Some Great Reward-era Depeche Mode punch.

The fireworks, however, don’t reach maximum height until midway through the CD. The streamlined “Poised to Death,” is a sassy head-shaker, while “The Conductor,” a song the band has opened its set with since they began touring this summer, is a regal, minor-key dance anthem, complete with vocoder-distorted vocals (just like Neil Young’s Trans, for you old-timers) and orchestral-quality piano tones. Next, Todd’s portrait of life on the edge, “Violent,” marries stark, grim images of violence and murder with Sputnik-tinged synth pings and an ever-throbbing thump-thump-thump house beat that’ll keep anyone shaking it. CD closer “Ballad of a Paralyzed Citizen” takes advantage of a gorgeous cello line played by Cursive’s Gretta Cohn to set the stage for one last dark fable, with the opening lines: “I’m paralyzed and things could change for you as well / You’re not so bad off now, you can move anything you need.”

Said Todd during the interview: ”Rather than analyzing different things about sex, this one sort of does that with death. Neither album is all about sex or death, but there is sort of a death theme this time.”

The record would go on to sell 147,000 copies, making it the band’s all-time best seller and among the best selling Saddle Creek releases. It came at the dawn of Saddle Creek’s (and some would say, Omaha music’s) Golden Age, with The Faint, Bright Eyes and Cursive jockeying back and forth as the most popular bands on the roster (a battle that Bright Eyes would eventually win).

“We’re not trying to get popular,” Todd said. “I think radio sucks and I’m not going to jump through hoops to get on it.” He yawned and put a CD in the stereo. “We don’t want to be millionaires. I don’t know what we’d do with the money.”

Back to the Present: Today, as far as anyone knows, The Faint are no more, though there hasn’t been an “official announcement” saying the band has permanently split. Last I heard, Joel Petersen was living somewhere in Los Angeles and was releasing music as Broken Spindles. Mike Dapose, whereabouts unknown to me, created death metal/electronic/experimental project Vvwerevvolf Grehv. Todd, Clark and Jacob — all now living in Omaha — started a new electronic dance project called Depressed Buttons, which will begin a monthly residency at the all-new House of Loom, 1012 South 10 Street, on Sept. 9. DP already has released music on Mad Decent, an LA-based label owned by Thomas Wesley Pentz, a.k.a. Diplo, the Grammy-nominated producer of  M.I.A’s “Paper Planes.” You can check out some Depressed Buttons music at their Sound Cloud page: http://soundcloud.com/depressedbuttons.

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Tonight at The Waiting Room, it’s the illustrious return of punk-metal madmen Bloodcow with Lo-Pan and Anestatic. Bloodcow never fails to put on a fantastic show. Do not miss. $5, 9 p.m.

* * *

Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

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Lazy-i Interview: The Mogis Brothers — Past, Present and Future…

Category: Blog,Interviews — Tags: , , , , , , , — @ 1:36 pm December 2, 2010
Mike and AJ Mogis

Mike and AJ Mogis. Photo by Bryce Bridges

The Mogis Brothers: Past, Present and Future

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

How important is the work of Mike and AJ Mogis? The brothers have been involved with every significant indie music recording produced out of Nebraska for the past 20 years. It’s that simple.

Along with Saddle Creek Records (which they were involved in creating), their studio work is a common denominator that runs through the entire story of Nebraska’s rise as an internationally known hub for indie music in the early 2000s. Glance at the liner notes for recordings released by Saddle Creek’s crown jewel triumvirate — Bright Eyes, Cursive and The Faint — and you’ll find one or both of the Mogis brothers’ names. From WhoopAss to Dead Space to Presto to ARC, their studios have been at the center of a conversation that goes beyond Saddle Creek to out-of-state national bands that are now their bread and butter.

During a 90-minute interview in the control room of ARC’s Studio A, the Brothers Mogis talked about the past, present and future, in a world where technology is making recording studios obsolete.

Their story begins in North Platte, Nebraska, where at the age of 2 (Mike) and 4 (AJ) the brothers moved after their father purchased a Chevy dealership there.  It was in the basement of their family home that they first began tinkering with recording equipment as an offshoot of being in bands in high school.

“Mike and I had this band called Inside I,” AJ recalled.

“It was kind of a Rastafarian thing,” Mike added.

“Which the band didn’t sound anything like,” AJ interjected. “It was a Bad Brains thing, but we recorded at Studio Q in Lincoln, and seeing that process opened our eyes that it was something we could do. In addition to that, we got American Musical Supply catalogs in the mail that sold home recording kits. We were like, ‘Hey, we could do this. This could be really fun,’ and we just pulled our money and bought an 8-track set-up and started recording ourselves.”

The earliest recording in the All Music Guide that lists the Mogis brothers is Fun Chicken, released on Dan Schlissel’s Ismist label in 1994. It’s not something either recommends you seek out.

“(Fun Chicken) was like a high school Mr. Bungle sort of joke band,” Mike said.  “It was recorded in ’92 or ’93. Prior to that we had been recording stuff on cassette decks using a RadioShack mixer. Then I got a four-track by working at the car dealership when I was 15 or 16. Then we bought the 8-track reel-to-reel that the epic Fun Chicken was dialed in on.”

Opium Taylor "Sun Foil" b/w "Livin'" (Caulfield, 1994)

That 8-track recorder, which the brothers still have and use, became the centerpiece of WhoopAss, their first recording studio, located in the basement of their parents’ North Platte home. In addition to that Fun Chicken debut, the Mogis Brothers recorded the first single by Opium Taylor at WhoopAss — a band that included Mike Mogis, Matt Focht, Pat Noecker and Chris Heine. “Recordings done to eight tracks January 1994 in North Platte, NE. Engineered by AJ Mogis. Mixed by Opium Taylor and AJ Mogis at WhoopAss,” says the liner notes for “Sun Foil” b/w “Living,” released on Lincoln’s Caulfield Records.

“Oli Blaha of Polecat named the studio,” Mike said. “We brought the band out to record, and he said, ‘You sure opened up a can of WhoopAss,’ or something like that. When they needed to put a credit on their cassette tape, someone called the studio ‘WhoopAss.’ The name stuck.” Polecat, which is reuniting for a show at Slowdown Dec. 23, also included Boz Hicks and singer-guitarist Ted Stevens. Another North Platte recording was Superglue, a band that included Ben Armstrong and Mike Elsener, who would go on to form Head of Femur, and Ben McMann.

Raw and reckless, each of those early recordings was a learning experience for the brothers. “We never learned how to record aside from just doing it,” Mike said. “We never went to (recording) school.”

But it was a school that drew them from North Platte to Lincoln, where they attended University of Nebraska-Lincoln and met most of the characters that would become part of Saddle Creek Records, including label chief Robb Nansel, Ted Stevens and Tim Kasher. Lincoln also was where the brothers’ next band, Lullaby for the Working Class, formed.

“Lullaby was a project that we did just for fun,” Mike said. “Ted (Stevens) played me some songs and said, ‘I want to do something different, acoustic.'”

“Everyone was very much ‘punk rock’ back then,” AJ said.

“Emo as well,” said Mike. “The idea was, ‘This would be a fun little experiment, making acoustic indie rock.’ We recorded four songs in ’94, right after Ted moved out of the dorms into his apartment. (The tracks) didn’t see the light of day for a couple of years. We didn’t make it a real band until a few folks had heard it and gave us some encouragement.”

By then, WhoopAss had moved to a different basement, in Lincoln. And while the brothers had gained regional attention recording bands like Giant’s Chair, Boy’s Life, Christie Front Drive, Sideshow and The Get Up Kids, Lullaby for the Working Class was the first band that garnered international attention with the 1996 release of Blanket Warm on Bar/None Records.

Lullaby for the Working Class, Blanket Warm

Lullaby for the Working Class, Blanket Warm (Bar/None, 1996)

“I don’t think about that time much anymore,” Mike said. “It was very formative, though. It instilled a good work ethic. Before the Internet, if you wanted to get a gig, you had to call and send a fucking tape. You didn’t e-mail; there were no cell phones. I was sending out Lullaby cassettes to get a gig in Iowa City. You really had to work at shit. I sound like an old-timer. I guess I am, I’m 36. This plays into the ever-changing landscape of music, especially independent music, which is everything now.”

By 1998, WhoopAss Studio had changed its name to Dead Space. “It was the transition to a ‘real studio,'” AJ said. “It was where we had a real console and Pro Tools, but everything was still in the basement. That didn’t last very long, because we moved to the 19th and ‘O’ location and renamed it Presto.”

It was the summer of 2000. “We had bought a 2-inch machine that we couldn’t get into our house,” Mike said. “So we ended up storing it in Omaha at Studio B, and did some recordings up there and went band and forth. It was such a pain in the ass. I remember going on a Bright Eyes tour and coming back and seeing a For Rent sign in a window in town that I knew used to be a studio that was being built by a guy with the lofty goal of making it the best in the Midwest.”

But because of personal and financial issues, that guy never finished the studio, and had to give up the building. “We moved in there amicably and bought some gear from him and said we’d finish it for him,” Mike said.

And that’s exactly what they did. Located on the very edge of downtown Lincoln, Presto was just a stone’s throw from the Foxy Lady strip joint on “O” St., a non-descript white building that went unmarked except for an ornate “Open” sign and the address in the front-door window. It was where I first met the Mogis Brothers in 2001 while they were recording Austin band The Gloria Record.

“It was probably our most creative time,” Mike said.

“There were a lot of things to learn,” AJ added.

“I still feel like I learn something and get slightly better at what I do, that hasn’t stopped,” Mike added, “but back then, it was more exponential growth. It was exciting.”

“I also remember being really busy because we were the only studio in Lincoln at the time,” AJ said. “Studio Q had closed, and the whole basement studio thing hadn’t taken off the way it is now.”

The Faint, Blank-Wave Arcade

The Faint, Blank-Wave Arcade (Saddle Creek Records, 1999)

From the late ’90s through early 2000s, the Mogis Brothers produced some of the most important recordings in the Saddle Creek catalog. AJ recorded The Faint’s Blank-Wave Arcade in ’99 while Mike is credited for 2001’s Danse Macabre. Both Mike and AJ worked on Cursive’s breakthrough album, 1999’s Domestica. How well the two worked together depends on who you talk to, although neither can remember arguing in the studio… at least not very much.

“Me, personally, I would not argue, but I’d say what I was thinking,” Mike said. “We would work together on Lullaby records and earlier records like Commander Venus, where AJ was the engineer, and I was just helping and learning. In our professional adult lives, I don’t view us as being argumentative. The only times I can recall is Lullaby, where I could sometimes be, not stubborn, but assertive.”

AJ said he didn’t remember any conflicts between the two of them. “There were times when you would get mad at the band, The Faint or something, and I would come in and smooth the waters,” Mike said. “I had the ambassador role. Domestica was one of the first ones I tried to do by myself. The Bright Eyes stuff I did myself as well. Bright Eyes was my learning curve tool, fromLetting Off the Happiness, that’s how I learned how to record.”

Mike would go on to record all of the Bright Eyes albums, eventually becoming a permanent member of the band with 2007’sCassadaga. Through the years, there has been speculation as to Mike’s role in creating those early records. While there’s no question that Oberst wrote all the songs, just how much influence did Mogis have on the final product? Was he The Great Oz pulling the strings behind the curtain, especially considering that Oberst’s musicianship was questionable back then?

“He jokes about having the best right hand in the business — all he can do is strum a guitar,” Mike said. “But back then he couldn’t even really do that. He was really shaky. Now he’s a very solid musician and plays a lot of keyboards and is really good at it. Back then he gave me a lot of leeway.”

AJ remembers finding musicians to fill in the blanks. “There was always people saying, ‘Hey, we need a clarinet on this thing,’ and we’d find someone who knew how to play clarinet.”

“Those Bright Eyes recordings and Lullaby as well are the reason why I learned a lot of instruments,” Mike said. “I thought ‘I’d like to hear banjo here,’ and I’d go find one. Same with mandolin and pedal steel guitar, which I still never learned, but know how to play. Same with recording — there’s intuition to almost everything aside from physics. Music is very intuitive, every step of the process, if you have the ability.”

Early in the Presto years AJ’s role at the studio changed. “I bowed out at the point where I needed to focus on my electrical engineering degree,” he said.

Superglue, "Circles" "Ball" b/w "Violet Secorah" "<3<3<3"

Superglue, "Circles" "Ball" b/w "Violet Secorah" "<3<3<3" (Novelty Yellow)

“So basically I took over managing the day-to-day recoding opportunities,” Mike said. “After that I did three or four Cursive records in a row, and he did the newest one, so it still switches up. It’s not like there’s one exclusive person, it’s just during the period where everybody was getting attention, I was doing all the recording.”

The rise of Saddle Creek’s status came as a surprise to some, but not the Mogis brothers.

“I wasn’t surprised at all,” Mike said. “I liked that music, and at that time it was some of the best stuff people were putting out. The Faint were cutting edge. Cursive had a great blend of good songwriting and storytelling, powerful rock grooves. With Bright Eyes, the songs that Conor was writing rivaled music anyone was making at that point in time. All of that was happening in Nebraska — three totally different sounds in the same group of friends and scene — the power rock of Cursive, the dance rock of The Faint and the, whatever, sorry emo folk, poor whiney kid… I’m just kidding, but with Bright Eyes, those three sounds getting national attention, I wasn’t surprised, and I wasn’t being biased.”

It was during the height of the Saddle Creek hype that Mike Mogis considered moving to Los Angeles. “I had an offer,” he said. “A guy was willing to relocate me out there and set up a studio, but it didn’t pan out because it cost so much money.”

Instead, in 2006 Mike built ARC Studio — which stands for Another Recording Company. The complex, located on the edge of Fairarcres, includes Mogis’ family residence, a house for visiting bands and the studio facility. It was Mike’s wife, Jessica, who found the compound online. “She forwarded me the listing and thought it would be perfect,” Mike said. “It was listed for $1.2 million, well beyond what it was worth. I gave them what I considered to be a complete lowball offer and they took it, and then lowered it a little bit more after the home inspection, and they took that, too. They just wanted the fuck out.”

To pay for it, Mike got a loan from Saddle Creek Records (which he’s already paid back), and through a bank. “There’s no reason I should have gotten the loan I got for this place,” he said. “I haven’t paid it off obviously, but I make my mortgage payment and I plan on doing it until I pay it off. I don’t have that much money because pretty much everything I make goes to the mortgage.”

It was money well spent. Go to anotherrecordingcompany.com — the studio’s website — for the full equipment rundown of both Studio A and Studio B, which is essentially a replica of Studio A but smaller and without Control Room A’s crown jewel — a Neve 8048 console that was custom built by Rupert Neve for George Martin — yes, that George Martin.

Bright Eyes, Lifted, or the Story's in the Soil... (Saddle Creek)

Bright Eyes, Lifted, or the Story's in the Soil... (Saddle Creek, 2002)

Mike said he put a “feeler out” for a Neve board with 1081 modules “because they’re the best Neve EQs ever made, which would rival the best EQs ever made,” he said. “The company I bought most of our gear from had bought a guy’s personal studio in Santa Barbara, including one of 13 boards commissioned by George Martin. There’s nothing special about it, but it was made for him for Air Studios in Lyndhurst. I have two pictures of him at the board. The layout is the same, but it’s been refurbished. There are only a few in the world like it with its center section. There’s one at Capitol Studios, and that’s one of the elite studios in the world. This facility has the goods to compete with anybody.”

The business comes mostly through word of mouth and on the strength of Mike’s reputation as a producer. “I don’t really advertise,” Mike said. “I don’t even list it as a commercial studio. It’s in my back yard. I have a family. I don’t want people just rolling up to my house with ‘I heard there’s a studio here.’

“It’s not even really profitable,” he added. “I’m not running a recording studio to make money. I’m trying to keep it maintained, really. I like to break even, and that’s what we do. The insurance, the property tax, all of that shit is expensive. I have a studio because I play in a band. That’s essentially why we started recording music, and my main interest is trying to keep making myself interested in music.”

Still, Mike said the key to keeping the studio afloat is having two recording rooms. Mike primarily uses Studio A, while AJ, who no longer is a part owner in the studio after Mike bought out his share of the business, books Studio B as a freelance producer, though anyone can book either room if it’s available. “We’ve lowered the rates to make it more affordable for bands,” Mike said. “It’s been fairly slow, but a few projects a month that come in pays the bills.”

The guest house for visiting bands is an obvious attraction. “I like local music, but getting out-of-town bands is really the key to our success,” Mike said, “not recording local bands.”

Bands like Jenny and Johnny, who recorded their debut album at ARC this past February. Despite being on Warner Bros., Jenny Lewis paid for the sessions herself. In the case of Philadelphia band Man Man, who recently wrapped up recording at ARC, the band’s label, Anti Records, paid for the sessions. While AJ’s current project in Studio B, Des Moines band Envy Corp, is paying its own way.

“Now more than ever, bands are not looking for major labels to support art, they want to do it themselves so they can have a more autonomous role over their careers,” Mike said.

“At the end of the day, bands who pay as they go own the recordings,” AJ added, “With most major-label deals, you don’t own the record.”

“Bands just want to find some place to get their music recorded cheap, and then they can license it to a label,” Mike said.

That’s part of what’s driving the move to home studios. Suddenly anyone with a laptop and a few hundred dollars in software can make a respectable recording if they know what they’re doing. Ironically, it was the initial shift to digital recording technology that allowed the Mogis Brothers to get started.

Cursive's Domestica (Saddle Creek, 2000)

Cursive's Domestica (Saddle Creek, 2000)

“I wouldn’t be sitting here in my own recording studio if wasn’t for the technology,” Mike said. “The ’80s were the glory days of recording studios. To open a studio in ’80s you needed $200,000 to buy the DASH Digital Recorder and the board and all that stuff. But in the ’90s ADATs and D88s were undermining the big recording studios, and that’s how we got into it, and that’s exactly how these kids are doing it now. We had to invest ten grand into some recorders and a Mackie Board. You still had to buy the compressors, the board, the recorder, now all of those devices are in your laptop. And I don’t see it as bad thing.”

“It’s been going on for a while, the democratization of the technology and the ability to make records,” AJ said.

“To some degree, it’s made records a little sub par, even starting in the ’90s,” Mike added. “If you go back to the stuff in the ’60s and ’70s, the musicianship and the tones, you can’t beat that stuff. Technology’s been a blessing and curse.”

But just how good are home recordings? “I remember reading a thread on a discussion board about what was needed for a good home studio,” AJ said. “One guy said, ‘I was just working with Marc Riboud with an SM57(microphone) and an MBox (Pro Tools personal studio), and it was amazing.”

“If you have talent, you can fucking open up your iPhone and make a good recording,” Mike said. “It depends on who’s doing it. You can make a great recording at home.”

But doesn’t that threaten studios like ARC? Not at all, they said. “There is a certain set of skills that an engineer or producer brings to the table,” Mike said. “There’s no ‘Mike Mogis plug-in’ that can get that pedal-steel sound or drum sound or guitar sound. As long as I can maintain a level of quality with the work that I do and push myself to make as good a record as I can, I feel like it’s going to be OK.”

A bigger threat to traditional studios, AJ said, is the breakdown of the economy of the music business in general. “There aren’t budgets the way there used to be,” he said. “There’s just less revenue for recording, whether it’s due to the record labels not selling as many albums or the fact that they’re tied to these major corporations that are losing money in other ways.”

The iPod generation doesn’t appreciate the quality difference between a home recording and a studio recording anyway, Mike said. He pointed to the new Maroon Five album, recorded in a studio, and the most recent Vampire Weekend album that was recorded in a home studio. Both are equally as popular.

“Fundamentally, I think people just want good songs and want to be moved by something, and you can do that outside of a studio,” Mike said, adding that Simon Joyner’s early low-fi albums “are still in my memory as classic records.”

“If the song is awesome and the performance is awesome, the recording quality doesn’t matter because people will love it,” AJ added.

“And it’ll be around forever,” Mike said. “That’s what I try to focus on, and I find myself sometimes frustrated because to me it’s not about technology, it’s about trying to get music to mean something and be relevant to me, and hopefully other people.”

That’s certainly what he’s finding with his current project — the next Bright Eyes album that Mike said has sprawled out over several months. “I’m supposed to be finishing one of the last songs today,” he said.

After the Bright Eyes album is released next year, Mike said he’ll be on the road touring with Bright Eyes for year and a half. “We’re going to take breaks, and I hope to do little things during those breaks, but it’s hard to plan,” he said. “When I get back, I hope I still have a job.”

Published in The Omaha Reader Dec. 1, 2010. Copyright © 2010 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved. Photo by Bryce Bridges, used with permission.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2010 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

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Missed opportunities; The Hold Steady tonight; Depressed Buttons’ ‘Ow!’…

Category: Blog — Tags: , — @ 6:26 pm November 16, 2010

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

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Apologies to whomever I spoke to Saturday night at the Digital Leather show at O’Leaver’s for not sticking around. I showed up at around 10, in time to catch Peace of Shit, but began to feel sick after downing a beer. It must have been something I ate. Regardless, I missed DL and POS, and hopefully will get a chance to catch both bands again in the very near future.

Good shows are becoming more and more rare these days, probably due to the onset of winter, so it’s a real bummer whenever I miss a chance to see any band. That said, tonight at The Bourbon Theater in Lincoln it’s The Hold Steady with Company Of Thieves and Omaha’s own Filter Kings. I’m not a huge Hold Steady fan, but if I were in Lincoln I’d still probably go to this one. $16, 8 p.m.

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Depressed Buttons, the new project featuring Baechle, Fink and Thiele of The Faint, is giving away its latest single, “Ow!” on Facebook and Pitchfork

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. Their debut EP, QWERTY, comes out Dec. 7 on Mad Decent. Check it out.

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So I see iTunes now sells Beatles songs. Why is this news?

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Tomorrow, right here at Lazy-i, another in a series of interviews with Tim Kasher. Be there.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2010 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

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In the aftermath of MAHA: What went right, what went wrong and where to go next…

Category: Blog,Reviews — Tags: , , , — @ 12:51 pm July 26, 2010
Superchunk at The MAHA Music Festival, Omaha, 7/24/10

Superchunk at The MAHA Music Festival, Omaha, 7/24/10.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

A more comprehensive review of MAHA’s music will appear as Wednesday’s column/blog entry, (though I found that 1,000 words wasn’t enough). The lead for that column: Have the MAHA Music Festival organizers gotten the monkey that was last year’s failure off their backs? The answer, probably, is yes.

I think no matter how you look at it, the festival worked. I certainly had a good time and so did the folks I spoke with. My personal highlight was Superchunk, whereas I think The Faint was probably the big winner — they’ll be the ones that people remember most. Spoon was merely OK, but I’ve never thought Spoon was a very good live band (I think they’re a very good recording project, though their new album is limp).

MAHA organizer Tre Brashear said that scanned ticket attendance was just over 4,000 (They won’t give actual ticket sale info). I thought the crowd seemed larger than that, especially during The Faint (When Spoon started its set, people began to head home). For a crowd that size, everything ran smoothly, which is a credit to Brashear, his team and their crack staff of volunteers.

Still, as is the case with any festival, there were problems. A couple people were arrested: “One idiot punched his girlfriend.  Another idiot punched the son of the Omaha City Prosecutor,” Brashear said. And apparently MAHA was unable to provide free waterbottle refills throughout the entire day — which is a concern at any outdoor festival. Brashear said it’s “the thing we’re most disappointed in ourselves about.” I didn’t notice it and didn’t hear about it until I read a complaint on Twitter after the show.

From a profitability standpoint: “Even though our attendance was below the 4.5K we were planning on, we came out ahead because of our beverage sales,” Brashear said. “We sold out of everything.  At the end, all we had left was Bud Light.” This underscores one obvious tragic misstep by organizers: I was unable to find a Rolling Rock anywhere on the festival grounds. Along with the water problem, this is something the MAHA committee must solve in 2011.

Brashear said he and the rest of the MAHA brain trust are going to “decompress” over the next couple of weeks and then begin planning for next year’s event. The two questions that burn brightest in my mind: Where will it be held and who will they invite?

I assume that they consider this year’s event a smashing success. Still, one has to consider that concerts like River Riot (or whatever it’s called) sell three to four times as many tickets as MAHA, thanks to the shitty pop bands that they book. If MAHA is going to keep its refined indie focus, it could take a long time until they hit those kinds of numbers — such is the nature of indie music. I’d hate to see them buckle under and book an 89.7 FM-style roster of bands to boost ticket sales.

In retrospect, this year’s main stage roster was a tip o’ the hat to ’90s-’00s indie — the kind of music that the organizers grew up listening to (presumably). Old ’97s, Superchunk, Spoon, The Faint, even Ben Kweller had his best music in the earlier half of the ’00s. The festival would garner a younger audience if it tried to book more up-and-coming acts, such as Sleigh Bells, MIA, Wavves, The National, Foals, Band of Horses, New Pornographers, along with the usual legacy acts. If they want to extend this event to two days, they’re going to need to book a couple huge bands — one to anchor each day. And I mean Pixies/REM/Wilco huge. That’s pricey. And risky. There are also those who think the line-up should be more diverse stylewise. Bottom line: You’re never going to please everyone.

Interestingly, the most modern bands were on the second stage, which is another thing MAHA needs to fix in 2011. The second stage was an abomination both soundwise and viewing-wise (unless you like your retinas burned off by the setting sun). If MAHA decides to stay at Lewis & Clark Landing, they’ve got to figure out the second stage “problem.” Maybe they can merely move it to the east side of the main stage, with the Mighty Mo as a backdrop.

More likely, MAHA will move to a new location that allows camping — that’s certainly part of the organizers’ vision. So is getting more involved in “the local scene.” The No. 1 criticism with the festival is their process for selecting the small stage bands — no one likes battle-of-the-bands contests where entrants perform for free. It’s cheap and humliating. It’s time that MAHA grow a pair and start selecting the bands themselves, or work with someone involved in the local scene to help select local bands. Considering the amount they pay bands for the event, they have their pick of the best Lincoln and Omaha have to offer.

Anyway… more recap Wednesday.

Lazy-i

Column 269 — Battle of the Blahs; O’Leaver’s dumps Myspace…

Category: Blog,Column — Tags: , , , , — @ 3:15 pm May 5, 2010

It would just be a shame if the best bands in Omaha never get a chance to play at the MAHA Festival simply because the Committee wasn’t willing to make the choice themselves… By the way, has anyone seen any posters around town advertising the event? Daylights a-wastin’, folks…

Column 269 — Battle of the Blahs

MAHA lets you pick the winner…

The fine folks at the MAHA Music Festival just announced two band showcases to be held this summer at Slowdown and The Waiting Room. It is through these free events that bands will be selected to play the festival’s Kum & Go local stage at the July 24 concert at Lewis & Clark Landing. The showcases are battle of the bands competitions where you — the concert goer — will choose the winner. Slowdown’s showcase is May 24, while The Waiting Room event is June 24. A third band will be chosen (again, via public vote) from those performing at an Omaha Entertainment and Arts Association summer showcase July 16-17. The fourth local band, Satchel Grande, already has been selected by the MAHA Committee.

If there’s an obvious flaw in the MAHA Festival it is this democratic approach toward selecting the local bands. Waitaminit, how could something democratic be bad? It starts with the nomination process. Only bands that are willing to play for free at the three showcases can be considered in the “election.” That immediately eliminates some of the area’s best bands, who have reached a point in their careers where they expect to get paid for their performances, and who look upon battle of the bands competitions as publicity stunts for those who haven’t paid their dues by recording, touring, doing what it takes to get their music heard.

In an effort to change my mind about their process, MAHA Organizer Tre Brashear sent me an e-mail where he argued that the showcases build community awareness, give bands a chance to promote the event (and sell tickets), and give the audience a voice in the selection process.

“We do not want MAHA to be perceived as three guys holding their own concert,” Brashear said. “Us picking all the bands would run that risk.”

Well, I hate to tell you Tre, but that boat left the dock a long time ago. The “three guys” already picked the festival’s headliners. Why not go ahead and pick the locals as well? One could argue that by surrendering the selection process to “the public” (which in the case of the OEAA showcase, is the folks who frequent Benson bars on any given weekend) you have backhandedly voiced a certain level of disdain — or your isolation from — the local music scene that you’re supposed to be supporting.

Tre goes on to say, “If we just ‘picked’ all the bands for the local stage, who’s to say that we’d pick ‘correctly’ in the eyes of the community? Some would agree with the choices, some would disagree.” That same argument obviously could be made toward their main stage selections. And in the end, it’s the concertgoers who will say if MAHA chose correctly when they decide if they’re willing to shell out $33 for a ticket.

The real problem with battle-of-the-bands situations, though, is that the best bands — the ones that truly need the exposure, the ones that are leaning out the furthest on the delicate limb of creativity — never win. What if, say, The Mynabirds were up against Paria, who do you think would get the most votes? How about Emphatic vs. It’s True? Or Digital Leather vs. any one of the area’s most popular cover bands? Who would the pubic choose? In the end, we’ll never know the answer, because none of those bands will likely be taking part in these showcases.

See, it’s not about ticket sales. No one is buying a ticket to see the Kum & Go local stage. They’re going for Spoon, Superchunk, The Faint and Old ’97s. MAHA is designed to be a sort of celebration of indie/alternative culture, not a money-grab. If it were about the money, they’d be booking Ke$ha or Justin Bieber.

Come to think of it, I wonder who would win a battle of the bands between Spoon and Justin Bieber. See my point?

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O’Leaver’s is gutting its Myspace page, which was the only semi-reliable place where you could find a schedule of their upcoming shows. Instead, they’re moving their schedule to the O’Leaver’s Facebook page. Go there and click on the Events tab. Remember when Myspace was thee hot music website just a few years ago? We’ll be talking about Twitter and Facebook the same way in a few years…

Tomorrow: An interview with Matt Pond PA.

Lazy-i

The Faint’s Depressed Buttons…

Category: Blog — Tags: , , , , — @ 5:38 pm April 27, 2010

Like everyone else, I like to keep up on the weekend party plans in San Francisco, which is how I stumbled upon this item about members of The Faint’s new “Euro-friendly DJ/production team” called Depressed Buttons. According to the SF Weekly blog, the team consists of Clark Baechle, Todd Fink and Jacob Thiele, who they refer to as “the three Omaha-based bandmates” — though last I heard, Todd and Orenda still lived in El Lay. The writer goes on to say they’ve “upped the distorted synths and head-knocking dance beats of their previous gig, The Faint.” Previous gig? So who’s that playing at the MAHA Festival this year? “There isn’t much music to hear from the act online, but we’d wager Depressed Buttons bring it like The Faint conducting a rave.

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” Hmmm… where did I leave those glow-sticks…

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Tomorrow: Jeremy Messersmith…

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