By Andrew Lee
Daily Bruin Contributor
It’s not often that an audience can witness an entire
musical performance without the slightest idea of which sounds are
coming from which instruments. But with a band like Subthunk,
trying to discern the sources of every sound truly is an exercise
in futility.
In the same vein as post-rock acts Tortoise and Sigur Ros, the
five members of Subthunk use traditional instrumentation but
electronically modify and embellish their sound to come up with a
clearly unconventional product ““ something guitarist and
primary songwriter Antony Neely likens to playing electronic music
organically.
“DJs mix in ways that bands don’t,” Neely
said. “For example, they’ll do a reverb swell or
they’ll cut out the low ends and drop it in later. They use
mixes that bands don’t tend to use live. We wanted to use
them and play the music that we hear at clubs, and do it with a
strict structure but also be able to change things up.”
Two guitars, a fretless bass and a drumset rounded out all the
familiar instruments on stage at the Cooperage Wednesday night. But
as the show began it became clear that the several anonymous black
boxes that adorned the stage made the biggest differences.
Band members like Neely and Alex U’ren play instruments
hooked up to machines that distort their sounds into a variety of
spacey tones, while percussionist Mike Silverman makes his beats
with a sampler and a number of different exotic instruments from
South America and Africa. Meanwhile, bassist Pharoah adds funky
bass lines behind Joe Nugent’s drum beats.
Add into the fray an Apple Powerbook running basic samples and
beats along with something U’ren likes to call an FX Harp, or
a harmonica fed into a sound converter, and the result is a somehow
seamless combination of technological and natural
instrumentation.
But true originality comes from the band’s ability to
combine the mechanical invention of DJs and artists like Autechre
and Aphex Twin with their improvisational roots.
“The band metamorphosized relatively rapidly away from a
strictly jazz group into this amalgamation of two styles,”
Neely said. “Sometimes I’ll still go for the
traditional jazz or blues sound (with my guitar), but other times
I’ll decide to make it into something like an analog
synth.”
Neely grew up in Glasgow, Scotland and performed around Britain
in several jazz outfits before moving to the U.S. But the
electronica movement that burst onto the U.K. scene and developed
in dance clubs throughout the country sparked his interest,
ultimately influencing his musical direction.
“I really started to get fascinated with the stuff that
was going on in the U.K. with bands like the Propellerheads and
Orbital,” he said. “I wanted to play music with that
sort of feeling, but in our own way. We use a lot of our
instrumentation to mimic sounds that people will be using software
samplers to do.”
The band on record sounds more like a strictly electronica-based
group, with cool, cerebral grooves and funky bass lines that
dominate over the band’s more spontaneous capabilities as a
live act. “Pretty Groovy Man,” the exotic-flavored
lead-off track from the band’s first full-length release,
“Project 8,” garnered airplay from several radio
programs last year, including KCRW’s “Morning Becomes
Eclectic.”
But the band’s tendency to cut loose and jam is what makes
Subthunk such a potent force on stage.
“One thing we did take into consideration when making the
record was that we wanted to keep our songs at a reasonable time
length,” Neely said. “But live, things can stretch out
a lot longer. We can stretch out one section one night and another
night do something different; it really depends on our mood. We
didn’t want to be slaves to machines ““ most of us come
from improvising backgrounds. I know I can’t play the same
thing every night, I’d go mad.”
The advent of desktop recording changed the way Subthunk
proceeded with the “Project 8″ recording sessions.
Primary recording was done at Post Logic studios in Hollywood, but
most of the editing was done with computers at home, cutting down
on recording costs. As a live act, however, the elaborate stage
setup can lead to plenty of confusion.
“If anyone told me “˜I’m thinking about forming
a band incorporating musicians with computers’ I would say
“˜don’t do it,'” Neely said with a
smile.
“If we weren’t so stubborn and hadn’t spent so
much time on this, I’d be looking for another way.
You’ve got a spinning hard disk with you in a fancy club,
something’s bound to go wrong.”
“But on the positive side,” Pharoah adds,
“your computer never argues with you.”
Neely ponders this, and agrees enthusiastically.
“That’s true,” Neely said. “It’s
always on time to the shows, you don’t have to pay it, and it
never gets drunk and falls of the stage.”
Subthunk plays with the Funnies at the Knitting Factory on Feb.
23.