An Interview With Zach Phillips
A foray into music writing
I don’t “know” how to do music writing, but I am really bummed at how few people who present themselves as serious thinkers extend that approach to music. I think there are not very many actual critics anymore, in terms of people whom we respect specifically for the harmony of their tastes, and even argue with one another about the validity thereof. Probably the closest is DJs. It might happen on youtube, but I don’t pay attention to that. But so anyway, I am going to start writing about music from time to time. Trombley and I had recorded a couple of episodes of a podcast that were very much about music, so maybe we’ll recycle some of that here. I had planned to “study harmony” this year in my free time, but it is probably for the best that I am playing drums with friends instead.
Incredibly, for my first piece, I scored an interview with the only musician whose work I was really interested in the last time I was paying attention, around 2016: Zach Phillips. He used to play keyboard in a band called “Blanche Blanche Blanche” who were part of a big loose scene around the Wesiman brothers, Ruth Garbus, and King Tuff, if navigating economically, and Brattleboro VT geographically. Zach ran the label OSR Tapes, which put out a lot of really good tapes that he usually either engineered or played on, or both. I got very into it around 2015, for a reason that I remember reading in a Chris Weisman interview that I can’t find a link to, that when someone is audibly recording to tape – by say, how squashed and hissy the rhythm track has gotten in order to accommodate so many tracks on a 4-track – you “know they’re making decisions that they have to stick to” because of the way bouncing multiple tracks to a single track works. I had gotten sick of digital audio recording, and was very much under the influence of this book from David Grubbs about the argument that audio recordings are fundamentally kind of destructive, and hearing people do harmonically-complicated music with an approach to recording that implied the finality of decisions was really compelling to me then. I still think the music is very good.
His new band is called “Fievel Is Glauque,” a name which they are on the record regretting but which I think is fine (pronounced “gloak”). Live and on record, they’ve got a singer, Ma Clément, with a French accent, drums, bass, guitar, wurlitzer and a saxophone. I saw them open for Stereolab and the show was very good–there are probably not that many bands who would be as good an opener for Stereolab over the history of Stereolab, let alone just right now. I think the music is extremely tasteful and enjoyable, but it also definitely demands attention in a “this is not great background music if your environment is quieter than a busy cafe” way.
They have a new album out: Flaming Swords. It’s available on bandcamp, and all major streaming services:
So, without further ado, the questions I emailed Zach about his music and also the practice of recording:
Alex: Both songs on the new single are re-recordings of earlier songs (Go Down Softly from God’s Trashmen (2021), The River from Wink With Both Eyes (2010)), and from your past work, it is clear that you put more than the usual care and effort into thinking through recording philosophically. I also, frankly, adore the sonics on the new single. So, with that in mind, what drove the decision to rerecord and what most distinguishes the two in your eyes?
Zach: I write quickly, with evenly-suspended attention to what emerges materially and to prospective paths occurring to my mind and hands. What comes out doesn’t usually stay “alive” long and most popularly requests the quiet dignity of being taken off life support. “Go Down Softly” was one of those few talisman-like tunes that spontaneously generate every couple years to show me the gas is still on. Ma [Clément, co-leader of Fievel] liked it and “the River,” too, so there, Ockham wins.
If you really want to know, these days, we write together, but from 2018-20 we would “pick” a crop of 12-15 songs to rehearse with a fresh band for a few days before playing a show or two and spending a live day in the studio. “God’s Trashmen” comprises recordings of these rehearsals; the “Go Down Softly” reboot is from our Los Angeles group’s studio session just ahead of the pandemic, only a few months after the song was written and hashed out in our 2019 French group; our friend Logan Hone wanted to do a last-minute four-track cassette version of “the River” before we flew out of California and it turned into an anomalous-for-us collaboration-by-overdub with Fievels from afar (Marta Tiesenga, Thom Gill, Gaspard Sicx and Raphaël Desmarets). So happenstance, basically.
Alex: In recorded classical music, there seems to be a reasonably strong hierarchy of “being,” where performances are instantiations of scores, and recordings are instantiations of performances. When composing for recording, how do you think about each of these moments of being?
Zach: Composition sounds more intentional than what I do, which is more like prayer, a formulation I offer at every risk of perpetuating the facile secular discourse of “the spiritual.” What is prayer-like about my writing activity is simply the dimension of courting and consulting the unknown. I sit down at the funny wooden monster which is not at all un-pew-like, perform my ablutions by studying a bit, and find out if something is to be sung, something is to be played, something is to be said, et cetera.
I’m in it until I’m not, and often, then, a song seems to suddenly and incontrovertibly exist in perfect identity to itself, despite not really “being” the piece of paper that records some of its attributes or “being” the recording of its first rendition or definitively “coming into being” in some sense sufficient to that designation at any particular moment during the writing. No hierarchy ever asserts itself and it is unclear to me what my relationship is to the material, although sometimes I’m momentarily “proud” of some deft intervention I made that helped things along, and sometimes I’m “ashamed” or “nonplussed” by some expression I had not intended to make but seems easily legible in the words, et cetera.
Later, I may decide to record some of these songs, alone or with other people, often according to some predetermined methodology that allows for a plan to be procedurally fulfilled and avoiding the excessive thinking-through that would inflect the process of representation if no parameters were set in advance. Examples of this include getting a Fievel band together and scheduling several rehearsals and a day of recording, or choosing to re-arrange the original piano voicings for layered monophonic guitars and only using specific instruments for overdubs, and so on.
Alex: At the barest level, what is a recording?
A representation. As in painting, one’s assessment of the relative simplicity or complexity pertaining to the material parameters of whatever representational process is hardly dispositive of whatever question one might formulate about the linearity or abstraction of whatever representation itself. As concepts go, representation is particularly well-suited for apprehending artistic processes precisely because its terms are so constitutively unclear. Although even this is overly simplistic, one could say that on the “barest level,” what is being represented in recorded music is a performance (if recorded 100% live) or series of performances (if overdubbed), where the media of representation is one or more microphones (ears, effectively, with all the corporeal, physiological, and subjective resonance that word entails) capturing and transcribing the sound of that performance in a space via a certain angle of perception and modulated by electronic circuitry that further selects certain of the information for accentuated representation.
If one considers a live band of seven people (unified and separate) performing (representing) a song that is itself represented by some kind of musical chart, if one considers that recordings are often edited and that the layering of multiple “ears” must be re-represented into a form perceptible to one person’s two ears, if one considers the representational attributes of the ear or the eye vis-à-vis whatever material they apprehend, and if one finally asks if a song itself can be considered a “representation” and of what, it’s necessary to imagine a concatenation of representationality, and I believe the most honest perspective in relation to that concatenation is one that apprehends its essential mystery and refuses to make more than hypothetical judgments about its nature.
Speaking generally, it’s with real and figurative respect to these complexities pervading musical processes that the practitioner’s view bypasses, eclipses, and renders obsolete, academic and over-rationalistic the pontifications of critics and the reductive systematizations of those who would pretend to solve the question of how the music they enjoy or do not enjoy comes about and reaches them. The practitioner’s perspective is, in a word, infantile, in the originary sense of being ill-disposed toward speech; one does these things, one wonders about them, one strives for difference and finds repetition, one strives to repeat and finds difference, one is eternally confounded and, if a survivor, survives only on the trail of breadcrumbs that wends through every chamber of the concatenation.
So in my view, ontological questions concerning recording are best explored experientially; one could even say that palpating these questions has always constituted the vanguard of the art of recording. On a level of theoretical apprehension, one should be circumspect in these matters and ground any discourse in comprehensive materialism in order to avoid adding to the pile of abstrusely overdetermined ruminations embarrassingly divorced from experiential practice and material reference.
Alex: At the most grandiose level, what is a recording?
A representation. See the previous. The bare is grandiose, the grandiose bare, etc.
Alex: Something that comes through on the new tracks equally as the old tracks are a somewhat “unconventional” approach to harmony - thinking of tracks like War Games from Hints to Pilgrims or 2wice 2wins from 2wice 2wins. What do all the extra notes and tensions do? What happens when there aren’t any?
Zach: That last, beautiful question hit me like a koan; I’ll have to sit with it. “War Games” is definitely abstruse. The first chord, written low to high: G C D# A C# E F G# (over-melody note: C). I’ve forgotten my old functional analysis of the song and a new one would likely differ… And playing through it just now from memory I found myself blissfully adrift in simply apprehending its specificities. Once an uncertain threshold of musical data is met, only interpretation can be determinative of what counts as “extra” or a “tension.” One could say that cluster-y confusions of this sort are productive of harmonic polysemy, which can unfurl in so many directions. If I imagine myself sitting down to write right now and singing a C as I play that first chord, I think I would be excited by feelings of possibility. It has a striking sound, disjunct/conjunct, wabi-sabi, pleasantly disturbed.
Whatever harmonic reduction I could make of “War Games” (and this reduction could be very effective, for example in representing the song on a chart for a band) would probably not, to me, have identity with that song. Someone told me, likely apocryphally, that Eduardo Mateo disincluded the incredible keyboardist Hugo Fattoruso in one of his final bands because Fattoruso insisted on ascertaining chord concepts and Mateo just wanted him to understand the specificity of exact voicings without interrogating the material analytically. I remember, almost ten years ago on Mt. Wantastiquet, asking my friend Chris Weisman how he’d analyze “War Games”. Though I’m sure they were important to me at the time, I don’t remember his thoughts on the subject. Well, what happens when there aren’t any?
Alex: If you could wave a wand and “fix” the social system of the production and distribution of recordings and performances, what would the world of those actions look like after you’d done that?
Zach: Nice one, you almost tricked me into theorizing a future beyond necrocapitalism. Unfortunately, the culture industry we love to hate and hate to love is probably the proverbial baby in the bathwater; if we consult our hearts, we all know the entire shitty bathroom must go.
Alex: What is an audience? What do audiences want? What do audiences deserve?
Zach: An audience is primarily taken to be a collectivity witnessing a spectacle, right? One time I wheeled around at a gallery and broke an uninsured sculpture. Everyone turned and gasped. Was that an audience? Do I have an audience with my psychoanalyst every Wednesday? Technically, yes to both. Once again, ontological questions of Definition run aground in the babbling brook of language’s aporias, and it all depends on what your definition of is is. An audience here wants to be rhetorically constituted; maybe it deserves to be contextualized. Who can say? I have a confusing relationship with playing for other people, probably because I’m mostly not me. I suspect they’re barely them, too, but you often wouldn’t know it. The “hidden audience” of a recording is a more comfortable form for my purposes: controlled, voluntary isolates, whose desires and deserts are not at all my purview.
Alex: There is a strong undercurrent of a reevaluation of “west coast jazz,” especially insofar as it also tried to trade in Bossa Nova, in a lot of the Fievel is Glauque work that I have a hard time finding direct antecedents to in your earlier work. What made you want to go that way?
Zach: I have never evaluated west coast jazz, so I can’t reevaluate it! I have never wanted to go a way. I try to be there for writing, “hold the space,” and encourage what emerges into a condition that seems to correspond to what it seems to need to be. The notion of a consciously determined product is antithetical to my motivations, which are heuristic and investigative. Conscious determination is incredibly important to processes of representation and corresponds to a sphere that might best be called “design.” I use design to help rarefy what emerges in writing; I use design to conceptualize the finished material and represent it to other musicians and my later self; and I use design as a way of “taming” the editing process of the recorded music. It seems probable that my deepening relationship to harmony has simply started to remind people of other kinds of music they enjoy. For a long time, many beloved outliers aside, I’ve mostly listened to American music that has been called gospel, R&B, soul, and vocal jazz, to the largely home-recorded music of friends, and to Uruguayan and Brazilian music from the 1950s through the 1990s.
Alex: Who is your favorite American thinker?
Zach: Tori Kudo.