Brightest Young Things

All words by Jared T. Fischer (of MR.Moccassin)

Back in May, in one of my eccentric and giddy Shit Show posts “Genius Level Shit” I included the young Seattle band Talbot Tagora among other startlingly unique musical (e.g., Cocteau Twins, William Walton) or literary (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Christina Rossetti) voices that have baffled my imagination and caused me to wonder what else I might be missing.

If it makes sense to say, many bands wear their identities on their sleeves in attitudes and postures, but Talbot Tagora is the rarer case from which a giant personality arises not from the musicians themselves (this band seems unassuming) but from something genuinely unthinkable in the architecture of sound. A new vibration causes one to pause and think, This could be influential. This has potential.

My sense of almost frightened awe continued when BYT invited me to interview the noise rock trio of Mark Greshowak (guitar, bass, vocals), Ani Ricci (drums) and Chris Ando (guitar, vocals). Busy with the start of tour, hitting the road with LA party punks Abe Vigoda, Talbot Tagora requested that the interview be conducted via email, which worked wonderfully for me, giving me a chance to refine my questions and drive around a couple days blasting their new album Lessons in the Woods or a City (Hardly Art).

What details can I use to lay the sound of the band at your feet? Well, imagine three youth who have extracted the harsh roots of Sonic Youth’s guitar sorcery to plant a new noise arboretum in a metropolis—who have drummed and bopped to the quirky riot funk of Erase Errata, and have learned more than simple math from Hella . . . . Ah! Comparisons are just not right. More than that, I note in Talbot Tagora a musical intersection between organic rock and roll and a more sinister futurism, with robotic leanings: the male vocals and occasional female voices are purposefully flattened by a seductive distortion. Standout tracks include “Mouth Rainboy,” “Johnny Lazor” and “Perception Stick.” The whole record is solid and mysterious.

In the interview that follows, the band’s written responses to my questions are voiced as a group, without individuals claiming certain comments. This kind of supports my feeling that the personality of Talbot Tagora is coming mainly from the music.

BYT: I am intrigued by the original theme of your new record Lessons in the Woods or a City which, in a weird Wordsworthian way, suggests that your band and music have been somehow shaped by nature and by city life. How did you arrive at this subject, and what are some of the “lessons” you hope to share with your audience?

Talbot Tagora: This is like homework. : )

Yeah, the album title does suggest that we’ve been shaped by nature and city life. We've noticed that anywhere you go, you can find similar themes or patterns, with different outfits, whether in an atmosphere such as the woods or in a city. So in a way, we kind of look at nature and city life in the same vein.

Anywhere you go, you'll have to do some sort of work to maintain a living—you'll have to learn things and figure out the rules in order to reach your goals (in staying alive). Some of the artwork for this record suggests that every being has different things to attend to and different lessons to be learned in order to find their niche/place in the puzzle. The art also suggests that it might be harder for everyone to find their niche when they're being taught by force the same lessons as everyone else. This was being thought about a lot during the making of Lessons, so we decided that it would be an appropriate name for the album.

BYT: Who is responsible for the really abstract but imaginative and politically/socially conscious lyrics? Is the writing a group effort?

Talbot Tagora: We write everything except for the lyrics as a group; Chris, who also plays guitar, wrote all of the lyrics for Lessons. In the past though (mostly on a CD-R we made called Volcano Girls), we've written lyrics as a group.

BYT: At a time when synthetic, computer-generated music holds sway over much of underground art, it is truly refreshing to hear such a noisy, organic and rhythmically unpredictable record played on guitars, bass and drums. What is your relationship to these “rock” instruments, and how are you able to be innovative with them? And what’s up with the cool linear, distorted vocal effect throughout your music?

Talbot Tagora: Thanks! We feel that regular pop music can sound just as weird when you look at it as a bunch of patterns following rules similar to those of other patterns with different textures. It's fun basing these patterns and textures off of other ones. I think that when we started Talbot Tagora, we all looked at pop music, or music in general, this way. And as we wrote more music, I think everyone in the band started to find their niche in the group and the ways we could work with each other (bouncing around ideas that worked or didn't work for some reason).

We're excited that people are using what they can nowadays to make their art, and it's not that we're opposed to synthetic, computer-generated music (as it is just another batch of patterns and textures). It's just that we decided to use what we have (regular rock instrumentation) when we play live. When we record though, it's sort of a different thing—in some of the recordings we'll add things that we aren't able to play when we perform live, like keyboards or vocal effects. And in that sense we usually use what we can get our hands on, if we feel that it fits the texture we're aiming for. On Lessons, we experimented by running the vocals through the vocoder setting on a Kaoss Pad. We put it at a low volume, but when we compressed it, the vocoder voice stood out more, making it sound like it does . . . .

BYT: You recorded this very lush and tonally diverse record from March 2008 to March 2009. What was the recording process like, producing it yourself over the course of a year? Was it all fun and inspiration or were there some significant challenges?

Talbot Tagora: We wrote a batch of songs, and since we had a tour lined up ahead of us, we decided that we were going to record what we had for a tour CD-R, even if it wasn't completely finished. We weren't really expecting to release it as a full-length record, but as we wrote a few more songs that we thought would fit with the batch that we had, we decided to record those and wait to release them as a whole. It was easy for us to shelve this recording because we had full control of the recording and didn't really have time constraints. We're glad we did shelve it though, because as time progressed, things happened that inspired certain pieces of the record.

Hardly Art contacted us at the perfect time when our recordings were almost finished. So we put some finishing touches on it until our computer crashed, making us have to mix a few of the songs at a friend’s house. This was probably the only thing that made the recording difficult, but all in all we're very happy with the way everything turned out.

BYT: I’ve been enjoying your music since I chanced upon your band as a MySpace friend of Brooklyn’s Hand Jobs. I’ve noticed that you have been quite active with split records, tapes and other releases prior to this album on Hardly Art. Tell us a little bit about those works and collaborations. How did you become friends with Abe Vigoda (your present tour mates), Bipolar Bear and others?

One of the cool things about the Internet is that bands from across the country or from different countries can easily send messages to you. We weren't familiar with Hand Jobs until a tape label from London asked if we wanted to share a tape with this band from New York. So we checked out their MySpace and messaged with them back and forth. I think we already had a song recorded, so we sent it out and that was that. A similar thing happened with Bipolar Bear (from Los Angeles), who messaged us about doing a split on Los Angeles’ olFactory Records. We were already somewhat familiar with them and thought it was a really good idea. We recorded a batch of songs and sent them off.

We've been friends with Abe Vigoda for a while. Chris met them down in Los Angeles around 2004 and had been in contact with them since then. I think we had a connection in seeing something weird in our suburban backgrounds—they're from Chino, CA, and we're from the eastside of Seattle. So we continued to be fellow peers and would set up shows for each other in Seattle and Los Angeles when our bands were touring. We did a really great West Coast tour with them and We Quit from Portland in 2007, and then we decided that we should do a U.S. tour together, which we are on now.

BYT: Is this your first full U.S. tour? How do you feel about it?

Talbot Tagora: Yeah, this is our first U.S. tour. We're actually not that far into it, but so far it's been really great and really hot, and the van that we're sharing with Abe Vigoda is being sort of temperamental. But it seems to be getting better. We're really excited to play to a new crowd and visit new places. It's also really nice to have the record out and to be traveling with it.

BYT: How crazy/fun are your shows in Seattle and other West Coast cities? What do you expect from other parts of the country—for example, the Midwest or East Coast?

Talbot Tagora: To be honest, no one really reacts crazily when we play live, which doesn't really offend us . . . . Maybe our music just isn't danceable? We've seen people go into dazes and stuff, which we don't mind. So we aren't really expecting much of anything else in other cities. It's still really fun—each city has a different mood, so we just work with that and see how everything goes.

BYT: Tell us about your Elastica cover, “Connection.” Do you do any other sick covers?

Talbot Tagora: This tape label from Canada asked us to make a ‘90s cover of our choice, so we chose this one . . . and the tape never was released (as far as we know). We also recorded a cover of “Walking in L.A.” by Missing Persons, but Chris' computer crashed and we lost the recording. And we forgot how to play it. We once played a cover of “Flagpole Sitta” by Harvey Danger. . . .

BYT: Are you three close-knit friends? How did you forge this band?

Talbot Tagora: We've been friends for a while.

[Mark and Chris have known each other since Jr. High. They met Ani a bit later.]

We started to play music together and had a really fun time—pretty sure that's how it goes for most bands though.

[Mark lives in Los Angeles, and Chris is about to move to Santa Fe. Ani will remain in Redmond.]

Soon to be living in different areas, we'll be spread about but will still be close-knit through extrasensory perception.

http://www.myspace.com/talbottagora

DC9

Tuesday, July 14th

Talbot Tagora w/ Abe Vigoda

Doors @ 8:30 p.m.

Show @ 9 p.m.

18+ w/ valid ID