: : : Interview with Carla Kihlstedt @ Music Unlimited XVIII: : :

I met her right before her great show at the even greater Music Unlimited festival in Wels, Austria. To those who know her work it’s needless to say that there’s more to her than an absolutely staggering smile and the most heartfelt laughter one can imagine. Read for yourselves:

So, you’ve been on tour with SLEEPYTIME GORILLA MUSEUM recently...

CK: Ha, yes! A deep long tour...

Tonight you’re gonna play with 2 FOOT YARD, is it part of a tour?

CK: We’re just doing 2 shows, this one and tomorrow night in Graz and that’s it. I can’t even tell the venue but it’s a single concert.

Is a new album on the way?

CK: Indirectly. We’re just working out the plan when we’re gonna make it, but we almost finished writing the material for it and we’ll probably record it in the first half of next year.

You said „we“, isn’t this your solo project?

CK: The first record was written all by me and then those guys [Marika Hughes and Shahzad Ismaily] came in and helped arranging. On the second record a lot of it will be my songs again but there’s a few things we got the story to write together as a group. So there’ll be a more wider presentation of material and it is a fixed line-up. We really became a band through the process of making the first record already, which was mainly supposed to be a solo project for me and I was getting them into it just a couple of weeks before we hit the studio. By the time we’ve done the recording it really felt a good idea to keep it as a band, so the next album will not be released under my name but under “2 Foot Yard”.

You mix different approaches when it comes to music. Do you see this as the last hope for the arts or will there ever gonna be such milestones as Schönberg or Stockhausen set?

CK: Ha, well they for sure also mixed things they came across. When you say “last hope” it sounds like we’re at the end of art. Are we?? (laughs) I don’t think we are, but I guess it’s a more complicated path to find your own voice, so it’s more common that people mix different things, but I think the process of creativity will always be alive as long as you choose to really tap into it in a true and real way. And I guess that can happen whether or not you mix different aesthetics and there’s still some wonderful art being set into one kind of field. You know, I happen to be drawned towards things that don’t fit into one category or another, so that’s just my personal thing, but I wouldn’t say that this is the only resort and hope. As long as you’re being true in the process of writing and you’re challenging yourself – whatever that means – then it’s fine. (laughs)

I think with Stockhausen in some aspects it’s just the form of presentation that changed, the way it appears to the listener, the technique so to say.

CK: Right, right.

So it’s your idea of being an artist to challenge yourself on different accesses to music, like improvising, composing, songwriting, whatever...

CK: Yeah, definitely, and I think that can manifest in so many different ways. Actually, to write a great pop song is NOT easy. There’s not any guideline you can follow to challenge yourself, but this is the idea for myself.

For example, with TIN HAT TRIO (THT) you draw lines between different cultures. Do you think that all approaches to music stand equal to each other or do you make differences?

CK: Oh no, I could never make kind of a hierarchy of what is worthy. Maybe some people do, but I think there are as many approaches to music as there are people playing it. So who am I to say “oh, composing is more worthy because” – whatever. There are composers whose intentions are not real and honest and there are improvisers who absolutely can think compositionally and are able to improvize phenomenal structures. I would never dare to make a hierarchy of how to play music.

Sometimes a stupid question can make a good answer. So, in 2 FOOT YARD you’re the boss, or you were the boss. Do you feel more satsified by creating a vision on your own or is it more important to you to have people around bringing their own ideas?

CK: I’m much more drawn to having groups and collaborators where everyone feels like they can put in their two cents. My other groups are collectives as well that work in a collective way. I.e., SLEEPYTIME GORILLA MUSEUM (SGM) has a vision that is much bigger than any of our individual ones could be. That to me is really rewarding and pushes me into ways I couldn’t find on my own to push. This project started out as kind of a reaction to that. When I started 2 Foot Yard, the idea was to find out what I sounded alone. With SGM and THT lots of processes happen collaboratively and it felt like being a good exercise for me to have a solo project, just as a curiosity. It was like: “I know what I sound like with Mark [Orton] and Rob [Burger] [both co-members of THT], I know what I sound like with Nils [Frykdahl] and Dan [Rathburn] [both co-members of SGM], but what part of that is especifically me?” So I just started experimenting with songs based on voice and violine, but then I was still drawn towards collaborating so I got people into it who I really love working with. So you see, in the end it still became a band, which I’m really happy about.

Have you been in IDIOT FLESH too? I read a few members got into SGM after they disbanded...

CK: No, there are two members of Idiot Flesh that now play in SGM, Nils and Dan again. I was in another band with them called CHARMING HOSTESS...

There’s another release of them coming, I saw...

CK: Yeah, it’s been done over the last 4 or 5 years and it’s finally coming out. The band hasn’t really existed for that time, but Marika and Jewlia [Eisenberg] still work under that name although it’s a very different group. It’s an a capella trio and no longer the rock band at all.

You’re no longer in?

CK: No, I was then, 5 years ago. Now it’s with Marika, Jewlia and Cynthia Taylor, another really wonderful singer. However, SGM really came out of Idiot Flesh when they called it quits. Dan and Nils got together and said “ok, who do we wanna work with, people that were interested in textures and in certain kinds of compositional processes”, so the three of us then started with another drummer and evolved from there.

Is SGM a rock band?

CK: Sleepytime is a rock-against-rock-band, so aesthetically it is definitely a rock band, but in terms of its attitude it’s a band that doesn’t want to have anything to do with the cult of overblown Hollywood persona, although we have a pretty major persona that we put on at the shows. But what has come to the commercial rock world is definitely uninspiring to us and also the content of the songs is more deeper and more intentional than most rock music. You know, it’s definitely more an experimental art-rock project.

Isn’t rock dead?

CK: It’s not in my nature to make allurging statements like that (laughs), you keep on reading these things up, but I don’t know: I’m in a rock band – is rock dead? I don’t know, it depends on what you mean...

I think what is meant that some of these classic rock myths have been taken over by the mainstream ‘culture’...

CK: Yeah, but rock was always a place for opposition and a place of the underdog. It only became or started when we were thinking of it as mainstream, commercial – whatever you wanna call it, but the original intention of rock was like: low budget, in your garage. In a way the media are creating a lot that makes people fight against it and so it again happens to become what rock was in the beginning.

Whoever said that rock died with and after Kurt Cobain, I guess he didn’t mean rock music itself but the myth of a man ruling the world with a six string and making the girls fall to their knees. That idea died obviously though it’s still sellable...

CK: The aspect of selling has nothing to do with what the initial idea of rock was supposed to be. In a way it maybe was the birth of a more real kind of rock and all these bands came up that flew way below the radar, which had aesthetically as compositionally more freedom. There’s a new wave of lots of bizarre rock bands that really stretch the boundaries...

Ok, let’s close that. How did you find out about the historical SGM. I explored that informative booklet in the first album “Grand Opening and Closing”...

CK: I found out about the Sleepytime Gorilla Press through Nils. It’s almost impossible to find anything in historical books on New York, because they made a point of erasing their own history as they made it. It’s kind of a secret little chapter in the Italien immigrant history in New York.

Yeah, you used a lot of questionmarks in the dates of these people...

CK: Yes, it’s because the whole press section burned down and all the information was being destroyed, actually because they burned it themselves while the Free Salamander Exhibition. They we’re like the first performance artists, they had the first happening! (laughs)

The concept of the band SGM is based on many aspects of the historical SGM. So was the music sort of built around these ideas or did the story just fit into your music?

CK: Oh, I think the music is its own process. We’re definitely inspired by lots of things happening around the Sleepytime Gorilla Press and the initials, but the content of our songs isn’t specifically linked to that. Some of the ideas they were playing with maybe we’re also thinking about, but not so directly. When we’ve actually done this last record, we were pitting – I don’t know, have you seen the booklet? There is a debate we set up between the Italian futurists and there are two songs that are very specifically about them and their concepts of progress and technology, the speed of machines. They were very excited about all these things and the concept of their location in time. We set up a debate between them and the unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

The song “Freedom Club” is about that, right?

CK: Yeah, and the songs before that one, especially “Phthisis” and “Bring Back The Apocalypse” are as well both inspired by the futurists and their ideas on human society, culture and how it is affected by machines, so progress and technology are totally opposite. We’ve kind of investigated both of these ideas. The lyrics in the second half of the album are mainly taken from various manifesti by the futurists. They wrote these totally dramatic overblown manifesti that are so dramatic...

Can you explain the idea behind the shows with all the maskerading and stuff?

CK: Well, it depends on whether we’re out of town or in town. We just played our last gig as a local show in San Francisco, which is our hometown. We had a cast of about 12 or 15 people with voodoo dancers and a little chorus on various stages in various parts of the club. So that was probably the most full-on show that we’ve done as a group. We actually toured with a voodoo dancer this time, he was kind of our gogo dancer. He picked up sort a whole physical vocabulary for our songs and developed his moves in a very beautiful way.
We also have costumes, I actually made them this time, they’re black religious looking dresses and robes with red striped down the middle and we use white faces. It really got some kind of cabaret feeling to it, on the one hand it’s very austere and on the other it’s very humorous as well and the humor kind of offsets this darkness of it, I think. We often open and close the show with the way the record does, which is kind of like these cabaret songs, like “The Hymn” at the beginning and “Cockroach” at the end.

The snoaring...

CK: Yeah, that’s actually our sound engineer. However, we tried to use humor as a way to open people up, so they’re more open to get the real content of the songs

Like in the hidden track where – I guess it’s Nils – communicates with a bird...

CK: It’s Dan! I did that, I record a lot of stuff on tour and this is a bird I taped in Fortworth at 5 o’clock in the morning, which had a million different calls. And I also recorded Dan during the vocal soundchecks without him knowing. He’s always just saying random words and making up stuff, afterwards I went into Pro-Tools, cut it up and made a conversation with the little bird.

Oh, I thought it really happened that way. You destroyed my illusion...

CK: (laughs)No, it’s just a little bird cut in with Dan during the soundcheck.

So, how does the new album fit into the historical SGM?

CK: Well, the most obvious is the futurist reference. Lala Rolo and Ikk Ygg, the two founders of the Sleepytime Gorilla Press were both from Italy and moved around here at the same time the futurists started. There are some more psychological connections that are less specific. They hadn’t any notions of a museum, they just kind of used these terms and turned them upside down.

You’re not a purist. How do you manage to stand apart from other bands without limiting yourself at the same time?

CK: I don’t even think about it. I do the music that comes to my head and then to the people I work with. It is what it is, we don’t really worry about where it fits or what it’s like and what it’s not like.

Do you think there’s non-political music at all?

CK: Anything can stand in a political context, though I think the term „political“ is misleaded: “Political” IS personal and I believe that if you choose to live in very small ways it has political ramifications, as well as where you shop, what you eat, what kind of interactions you have with people on a mundane basis. Recently, with the way American politics have developed I’ve gotten more overly political, because I don’t think we have the luxury of ‘not speaking’. Things are so terrible right now with that administration, with Bush in the office. I guess that also pushed a lot of people to be more overtly political than they normally would be. But you’re making a mistake when you think that politics are politics and life is just life, they’re more into twine than we’d like to imagine. Sleepytime has some overtly political songs, like “The Creature” which is a statement against corporate America and there’s another song I wrote, it’s called “Gunday’s Child” which is an entire war song and is based on a poem by Muriel Rukeyser. She adapted a Kenneth Patchen poem, took it and made it an entire war poem and we took that and made it into a song. It’s not a specific political song, as well as “What Shall We Do Without Us”, which is like a 60ies statement for peace: “Now when I come back here I expect to find all of you marching through the streets with great bunches of wild flowers in your arms.” That song is also on the first 2 Foot Yard record, but it’s very different from that one.

Did you take singing lessons in the past?

CK: No, not really. I maybe had five in my lifetime. I don’t consider myself a great singer, I never trained that. In Sleepytime I screamed so much I’ve really eaten holes in my voice...

What musicians do you admire the most?

CK: Honestly, the ones I admire the most are the ones I’ve gotten to work with a lot, because that way you really get to know them as musicians. So it’s Nils and Dan from SGM and Mark and Rob from THT and beyond that people like Fred Frith, who belongs to a group of musicians who found the freedom in terms of where they place themselves as improvisors and composers. There are lots of these people I love, but on top of the list I’d probably still put those who I already collaborated with.

Date: 7. 11. 2004, 18.30 – 19.00 Uhr

Interview done by: David Weidinger
Photographs: David Weidinger

To concert review (German)
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