Jack O' The Clock interview

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I did an interview with Damon Waitkus and Jason Hoopes from Jack O' The Clock. It's here.

 Where do you live?

In the San Francisco Bay Area.

 Personally, I became a fan of Jack O' The Clock when at Bandcamp I discovered your album from 2011, "All My Friends", and especially the 13-minute epic from that album titled Old Friend In A Hole which is actually my favourite song from your entire catalogue. Can you tell me something more about "All My Friends" the album of which I really think that is one of the best albums of contemporary prog that are released in last five years?

Thanks, Svetonio. There are two pools of songs that we're always adding to: live band songs and studio creations. Eventually some from both categories glom together around a mood and loose theme and an album emerges. "All My Friends" focused on friendship in all its complexity, but intuitively rather than conceptually.

"Old Friend In A Hole" was written for a friend of mine who collapsed into paranoia and eventually committed suicide. I often think of the album as a whole as a pretty diurnal, sunny listen, and then I remember there's that heat sink towards the end which makes the album complete. "What To Do In Our Neighborhood" is actually its prologue, written in the years before the suicide when I was wondering how you go about rallying someone out of a dangerous depression. 
Musically, "Old Friend In a Hole" started with the drums/rhodes loop you hear close to the beginning, which is a slowed-down fragment of a jam a friend sent me. I was doing a soundtrack for a student documentary about freelance videographers who go out and collect footage at crash scenes and then sell it to news networks, and the director wanted something "with piano" to accompany grisly nocturnal highway scenes. I played all those cheesy piano parts as placeholders really early on, then of course got attached to them and the whole mood of the thing after the documentary was done and wanted to develop the piece into something of my own. Emily and I had been listening to a lot of David Sylvian, and she was inspired by Arve Henriksen's contribution to his album with Nine Horses and thought we should bring in a trumpet, so we asked our friend and fellow Mills College graduate Darren Johnston. He along with Jason (bass) really makes that song happen as far as I'm concerned. All first takes, I think.

 "Night Loops" the album in May 2014, contains one song titled "Ten Fingers" which to me sounds like a fantastic cocktail of hints of Robert Wyatt's aesthetic and Peter Gabriel's upbeat prog in the eighties, i.e. his Fourth, "Birdy" and "Passion" soundtracks. Am I too far from a stuff that really inspired you for that song?

Robert Wyatt is not a major influence on me. I like his personality as it comes through his work maybe more than the music. 

Some of Peter Gabriel's work I probably have been influenced by, namely "Mercy Street" and, later "The Family and The Fishing Net," though I hadn't heard the fourth album (or "Birdy" or "Passion" for that matter) when I initially wrote "Ten Fingers" back in 2005. 

The punchy production along with Tony Levin's presence on Gabriel's fourth album did help set a standard for me which may have played into the sound I was going for on "Ten Fingers," as well as some others like "Fixture," "Blue Tail Fly" and "Old Friend In A Hole." Peter Gabriel does technological alienation well, and the mood of the lyrics flows with the grain of early sampling technology, though in my book it is Laurie Anderson who really hit it out of the park. 

I feel like there is an audible excitement over sampling in the albums that came out in its earliest days, like Anderson's "United States:I-IV" and "Big Science," Gabriel's fourth and Kate Bush's "The Dreaming." It was all over by 1983. I think one of the differences between that brief Fairlight era and the age of cheaper factory synths which followed is that musicians were excited to go out to the junkyard and collect their own samples, which wasn't as necessary or convenient in the following years, and that encouraged investment in and ownership of the sounds at all levels. That's a rule I set for myself in my own production: all field recordings and on-location percussion I recorded myself. It means there's a lot more noise and imperfection to contend with, but also a lot more fun idiosyncrasies.

 At the same album, there's an instrumental track "Salt Moon" that justifies your avant tag. Do I hear a wonderful influences of Steve Reich and yet an impact of Far East traditional music?

Steve Reich is an ambient influence. I think of minimalism in general as a textural technique available to any composer who wants to use it these days. I wrote a lot of chamber music before Jack O' The Clock for ensembles which lacked percussion and found myself naturally using repetition and phasing-type effects to maintain pulse and drive, and some of that comes out in the middle section of Salt Moon. Others have heard Henry Cow in that piece, which is fair, and certainly an influence. Burmese, Chinese, and Japanese folk musics have figured into my listening in recent years too, though don't know how much they influenced Salt Moon beyond the presence of a few coloristic touches of guzheng which I added late in the game.

The main theme from that piece actually came out of an improvisation that Emily and I recorded when I first picked up the piccolo electric guitar. That instrument, paired with her baritone violin, gave us the opportunity to reverse our accustomed registers. The first 8 bars and much of the following section–basically everything except the bass solo in the middle, the minimalist section–were transcribed almost verbatim from that improv. I then went back and wrote a counterpoint for the bass and bassoon, which progged it to high heaven, but what can you do…

 After "Salt Moon", following song at the album is "Down Below" which reveals a country-rock influence. And there is, generaly speaking, a lot folk / country influences in your work. Your are listed in the Prog Archives as a Prog Folk band as well. Is there some folk / country act that you particularly like to listen? 

I love the expressiveness of some of the sounds native to folk and country, particularly slide guitar and pedal steel, which inspired me to work on playing the hammer dulcimer with a slide on "Down Below" and a few other songs. I've also been under the spell of "American Primitive" guitar for a long time: John Fahey, Leo Kottke, and more recently our local master Chuck Johnson. Also Bill Frisell. 

I've never been a big listener of country music per se so much as a seeker of interesting and original songwriters wherever they happen to fall, and I get my country influences secondhand through some of them, say Gillian Welch or, more in the country-rock vein, The Band and Grant Lee Philips. Lately I've been really inspired by Vic Chesnutt's early "West of Rome": I can't think of another recent songwriter with more honesty, intelligence, and vulnerability. He ups the ante. Songwriting that puts a premium on story, mood, and the creation of character has a genuine allure for me, though the push-pull between this and the hunger for musical richness, which just doesn't hang out with good lyrics all that often, is a central struggle in both composing and listening. Simon and Garfunkel's "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme" was a crucial part of the soundtrack of my early childhood, and I'm still listening to it, along with the rest of Paul Simon's catalog, because it strikes that rare balance. Joni Mitchell and Joanna Newsom have done it too.  

 Tell me something about your recent album i.e. the covers album titled "Outsider Songs" (btw, my favourite track is "Hyper Ballad")?

We'd talked about various covers we'd wanted to record for a while, but I honestly didn't think I'd ever really want to devote the time it would take to complete even a 3-song EP of them with so much new original material always being generated. But I was kind of worn-out compositionally when I finished "Night Loops" and wasn't immediately ready to start again from the ground up with the new band songs. We already had two covers underway: I'd started "Chinaberry Tree" myself just for fun over a fragment from the documentary I mentioned earlier, and we'd actually worked up "Hyper Ballad" as a live song a few years ago (though it was quite different), so it was just a matter of choosing a few more to make a substantive project of it. I wish I could say we chose them democratically, but I kind of dominated. Jason chose and had most of the arrangement ideas for "The Chauffeur," and Emily chose "Think Too Much," and I pretty much chose all the rest. With the exception of Vic Chesnutt, the songs are from long-familiar, mainstream artists who have been a part of my listening for so long I can hardly even judge them anymore. Ives was a major gateway composer for me, literally adding a dimension to my listening, and I felt his gorgeously spare Serenity was ripe for re-interpretation.  

In general, I thought it would be a lot more fun to take relatively simple songs and mess with them–in a way that wouldn't undermine their impact–than to try to render already-complex work from within our supposed genre in a different way. I don't understand reverent covers that try to reproduce every element of the original, it seems like a prescription for failure. In some cases, like "The Wrong Child" or "Mute Witness," our touches were limited to instrumentation and little changes in the melody; in others like "Chinaberry Tree" or "The Chauffeur" we really re-composed the songs. There are others that would be fun to do, but I think that's it for a while, I got it out of my system.

 How is with the progressive rock scene in your city?

We've only just recently started playing on bills with bands that might throw "prog" into a list of hyphenated genres in describing themselves, like Inner Ear Brigade, Reconnaissance Fly, and miRthkon, but I don't know if this constitutes a progressive rock scene. What we have is a community of musicians, largely in the penumbra of Mills College, trained in experimental composition and free improvisation, whose latent love of song-based music is gradually and more or less bashfully filtering up from some older place and causing some really interesting music to happen. Slightly older Bay Area presences, like the folks from Free Salamander Exhibit (formerly Sleepytime Gorilla Museum) with whom we share a practice space, Moe! Staiano, Vacuum Tree Head, Dominique Leone (now in New York), and of course the lynchpin Fred Frith paved the way to a great extent. I've noticed that "prog" is no longer pejorative, which seems healthy enough, but it's usually tempered with an "avant-" "post-" or something, just in case you thought there were going to be Mellotrons. This too seems healthy, some of us got there by a different route, even if there are some stylistic convergences: to a lot of the musicians in our scene Anthony Braxton, say, looms larger than early Genesis.   

Actually, Karl Evangelista of Grex and I have been working on how to accurately describe what we're doing in a way that acknowledges the freshness of our current place and time. He had the idea of doing a compilation album in the coming year which includes other bands that perform song-based, composed music and possibly some improvisation–you can see why this language needs tightening–most likely to include contributions from vibraphonist Mark Clifford's Dirty Snacks Ensemble and perhaps some inter-band collaborations and improvisations. Mark and Karl have a lot of jazz and classical composition in their backgrounds I believe, but the songs when they emerge have more in common with rock than the vocal traditions within those meta-genres. 

 What is your view about the prog culture in general?

I should say first off that we've never viewed ourselves as a "prog" band, and this is not music any of us listens to very much. Actually, Jason and I are the only members of the band with any history with it to speak of, the rest view the label as something of a curiosity. I think of "prog" as a genre with particular stylistic characteristics derivative of some of the the post-psychedelic music coming out of Britain in the early 70s. I loved that first-wave progressive rock when I was in my teens and early twenties, but by the time I was 24 I was turning towards the world of contemporary composition and listening to a lot more jazz and nonwestern music. Prog rock has no exclusive claim on what is progressive in music. I think what the first wave of progressive rock did for me back then, though, was demonstrate that it was possible to be ambitious within the song form and rock instrumentation, and in a sense I've never been able or wanted to pare that ambition back in order to fit into something more cozy like straight-ahead country rock.

When Jack O' The Clock first started trying to get our music out into the world we described ourselves as "majestic junk folk" and thought we might find a toehold in what was then called the "freak folk" movement. But it was the listeners of progressive rock that responded to us, in part probably because we had the endorsement of Fred Frith, whose early work with Henry Cow is often listed under that genre, in part because a level of complexity sometimes enters our compositions and orchestrations. I'm grateful for that support, and it seems there are a lot of open-minded people in the  progressive rock community when it is defined loosely, who listen to all types of music, I just want to clarify that we're not deliberately trying to create this thing called Prog. 

JASON HOOPES: What spoke to me initially on first hearing something like ELP's Brain Salad Surgery, or especially Tarkus, and other now-classic records of that era by bands with a harder edge was a sort of bridge between my young and naive fascination with European classical composers, and my then-nearly-exclusive obsession with death- and thrash-metal of the 80s and early 90s, particularly coming out of the Bay Area and Florida. Later prog groups like Sweden's Änglagård and Death Organ hit even closer to that mark, Death Organ having close ties to Opeth and Peter Tägtgren for example. But I came to recognize a dissatisfying sameness to the sound of prog, in the same way I became dissatisfied with a lot of metal, until eventually I became uncomfortable with the whole idea of genre. I wouldn't say I love prog, but I would say that I love progressive music. Of course, what dictates what is and isn't progressive is subjective to a large degree. To my ears, artists like The Flaming Lips or Beck, certainly Björk, and Neurosis on the edgier end of things sound more progressive than much of what might be called prog. In my view, Radiohead are probably the most important progressive band of the late 20th and early 21st century. When I was asked to play with Jack O' The Clock in 2008, what struck me right away about Damon's vision was not only an openness to timbral complexity, an ambitious sense of composition, and the challenge of a need for diverse technical facility, but also a deep and earnest emotional reflection (largely found in the lyrics) on a uniquely American human experience. It hits me as a sincere personal response to a kind of collective spiritual anemia - a dedicated hunt for a way to articulate the dominant mythological forms of contemporary American existence, but with an uncontrived intention. To me, that speaks to what I mean when I say that I like heavy and progressive music - the musicianship pushes a high bar, but the intention is accessibly human. But...well, you know, that's just like, uh, my opinion, man.

 What do you think, isn't prog become less and less socially impactfull as a youth music in the countries that once were superpowers of the progressive rock like UK and USA, while we right now see a huge reborn of prog and a new prog audience in other places, like Latin America, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, in countries like Sweden and Poland for example?

Damon Waitkus: It's a good question, but I honestly have no idea!  

 Please keep make such a great music. Thank you for the interview.

You're welcome, thanks for asking!

Edited by Svetonio - May 05 2015 at 23:50