Mark is a true musician’s musician. He’s as comfortable supporting a fellow troubadour’s endeavors on guitar or lap steel – a list that includes, among others, John Hiatt, Gillian Welch, and Josh Ritter - as he is commanding the stage on his own. Mark recorded his eighth album of songs, Little Vigils, over the course of four days last October at a circa-1790 Maine farmhouse, and he’s allowing listeners to stream the entire album on his website (markerelli.com).
Category: Local Music
A little over a year ago, drummer/vocalist Jonas Canales and guitarist/singer Katherine Kelly of Tampa-area Sons of Hippies had just completed their first album, Warriors of the Light, a debut that earned all kinds of praise from critics around the Bay (including me). Warriors of the Light was a courageous album, a product of young artists baring their souls, daring to display nakedness and idealism to a world unaccustomed to the exhibit. Even that album cover – and SoH freely acknowledges the importance of cover art to the appreciation of rock – demonstrated their two-headed nature as if it wasn’t clear enough on record: the two principals faced in opposite directions, fused together at the back of their heads, unable to connect with each other – at least not visually. The music on Warriors was endearingly bi-polar as well, the seams between Kelly’s contributions and those of Canales left largely unmasked.
“It’s a small casserole,” says Cassolette singer Ciera Galbraith, 23. View full article »
About a year ago, my band started recording a full-length CD at Science Recording Studio on 10th Way in Sarasota – a street behind the old brick Binz Building just past the military academy, off Orange Avenue. Neil Parsons, who admittedly has little school-based training as an audio engineer but who is armed with unmatched ears and a love for hot sauce on Doritos, runs the studio along with J.R. Gunther.
Neil knows about bands and genres of which I have never heard, crazy stuff called downtempo or stoner, which he tosses off as though he was referencing common handles like jazz or reggae. When we were setting up equipment, loading stuff in and out of the studio, changing strings, or just bullshitting, Neil would invariably have something spinning that was bizarre and just far enough out of my comfort zone to make me feel uneasy and intrigued. On at least one occasion since then, my eyes have popped open in the early morning hours, an odd, angular melody floating around my head without any recollection of who the artist was or where I had heard it. Eventually I would realize that it was something Neil played in the studio. When he was not saucing up a chip, that is.
Neil’s favorite recording project at the time was a band called Great Friend of Mine. The band, in fact, consisted of great friends of his from Venice High School, now students at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. The band stays connected to Sarasota County through family and friends. They formed five years ago as Aim at the Kid. A little over a year ago, they honed their sound and adopted the new name. They replaced the original bass player with a new one. Clearly proud of what they captured in the studio, Neil played most of the dense, challenging concept album they called Desperate Songs, seemingly based on a surreal encounter between a narrator and a poetry-spitting stranger, for us. (On our dime? Hey, wait a minute…)
I would be lying if I told you the concept behind Desperate Songs made any sense to me. Nevertheless, one does not have to grasp art completely to enjoy it. I appreciate and applaud the incredible amount of time and effort it must have taken to compose and record the album, and I have listened to it quite a bit.
Still, I feel like I want to know what is going on, at least a little. Therefore, I emailed singer Paul Gonter about it, and he put it thusly:
The album has two spheres of influence that are not wholly different or the same. Both musically and lyrically we decided to take a more conscious and decisive approach. We did not want to write parts. We wanted to write songs, and we wanted these songs to not only function as entities on their own, but also as an overall movement from the first track to the last. This idea of cohesion came from many bands, but namely The Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come and Recover’s Rodeo and Picasso. The actual content of the music came from our desire to create what we consider good, heavy music. We all grew up listening to punk and all of its various subgenres, and we wanted to create something new (if not new to someone else, at least new to us) that still held on to the aggression and the responsibility of the punk world. This responsibility aspect goes into the lyrical content, which I wanted to line up with what we were trying to accomplish with the music. The most blatant philosophical influence on the lyrics was Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem. Though it was not the only influence, it was a perfect example of the conscious individualism that the lyrics are trying to express.
Heady stuff, to be sure, but it is well worth the time investment, and the music rewards your efforts blindly. Much of the album, beginning with “We,” is intoned in the voice of the stranger, his voice “an uncouth symphony of rasp and cracks; his song was a quaking mountain on a burial ground,” an accurate description of Gonter’s vocal delivery. Eight songs later, at the end of “The World,” so to speak, a long, droning fade-out based on two alternating chords with peppering drums, will make you forget about anything else you have to do today. “The World” returns the voice of the narrator, who brings the listener back to the unfolding scene: “As the heat rose from the street and the passing cars created an incredulous beat, I took his dirt-covered hands in mine and we (the World) sang in unison until the sun did shine.” They begin to sing together:
A journey tells what a book can’t read-
A master sells only what he can see-
So this is our ledger, this is our coin…
… Finally, “Nothing above me but the sun” (3:15 on the recording), after which GFOM treats us to guitar-soaked sonic splendor, captured brilliantly by engineer Neil. On the very last track, “Tisina (5-3000),” Gonter sings the last line in the voice of the narrator, “The only thing to know for sure is silence,” repeatedly, to great effect.
Listening to 7:31 minutes of “The World,” followed closely by “Tisina (5-3000)” (that’s how you should listen to the two tracks posted above), pushed up at dangerous levels of volume over Science’s monitors a year ago, I remember feeling mesmerized, old, irrelevant and galvanized all at once, and nothing has changed listening to it now. No, you do not beg the DJ to play Desperate Songs at your wedding, but these are serious, heavy songs laid bare and committed to 1s and 0s (and cassette) in our own backyard by ambitious young musicians.
The CD is for sale (click here), but as many bands are now doing, GFOM allows listeners who visit their website to download the whole album free of charge. “We all download a lot of music and it would be kind of hypocritical if we didn’t want people to download our music,” wrote Gonter. He feels strongly, however, that fans want even more: “The music industry has changed over the past 10 years, and though we have no ties to the industry itself, we have an understanding that as post-Napster music listeners we are going to want a little more out of releases than a few promo shots and typed lyrics. The Indie and DIY scene has really grasped onto this idea to help fuel a new form of creativity: the physicality of the release. I think this is why there has been a resurgence of vinyl and even cassette tape releases over the past decade… Artists are able to add an extra, tangible layer to their music that holds more weight than an mp3 in a labeled folder. So, we offer the free download, but also the hardcopy of the CDR with a zine style booklet that we have conceptualized, designed, and assembled ourselves.”
A company called Intellect is releasing Desperate Songs on cassette. GFOM recently recorded two new songs with Neil for a split seven-inch with friends Ghosting from Burlington, Vt., and are currently writing new material without anything specific release in mind. “Other than that,” Gonter stated, “we are playing shows whenever they are offered and are trying to set up a tour for spring break around Florida with our friends in You Blew It.”
Album Info: Desperate Songs (2009). Download an album sampler on Jamendo, and purchase it here.
Paul Gonter – vocals
Marko Kurtovic – guitar and vocals
Zach Frimmel – bass and vocals
Kyle Obney – drums
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW!!
PART THREE
Names: Andrew Wyatt (21): synthesizer, vocals; Alex Zalo (26): sequencing, vocoder
MH: What’s the process of putting the form together?
AZ: I think “U R”, the way that song came about, I don’t even remember how it started. One of us started playing something, and we kept feeding off of each other. The first time we played the song, it was an hour-and-a-half jam.
AW: I’m sure my roommate was like, “What the hell are they doing?”
AZ: It kept going on and on. We kept messing with stuff, and I kept recording what I was doing, and then I went back and basically polished up all the separate parts so that they all actually worked and there wasn’t any random stuff coming in. Then it was just sitting down and saying, “Okay, this part sounds good, this part goes into this part well…” The way that our songs come together are very much like puzzles.
MH: Addition and subtraction.
AW: And that’s the way we play it live, because of how the sequencers work, how everything’s there. Alex chooses part A, you know, part 1 and 3, 1 – 2 and 3, 1 and 5, you know. He’s basically doing that. He’s got it in his head, the pattern. It’s just amazing. I don’t think i’d be able to do that.
MH: If you didn’t get it right, nobody knows. It’s all good, because it’s all beat-oriented and everyone’s going to dance to it.
AZ: Yeah, and everything in one track all fits together, so I can mess up, but at the same time… it used to be like, “Yeah, dance party!” Nobody really knew. Then, we released the CD, and I kind of shot myself in the foot, because now everybody knows the way that it’s supposed to sound. So, some parts definitely come out weird.
MH: Do you have to tap in rhythm a lot, or is it more “start – stop?”
AZ: Right now, the way that I have things set up, it’s in the middle. Animal Collective does a lot of live pad sampling. They don’t do a lot of sequencing. A lot of our stuff is sequencing. It is a lot of start – stop, stuff like that. But there are fills in songs that are controlled, and it is live, tweaking knobs. More so than hitting a drum sample over and over, I do more starting of the kick drum, and while the kick drum’s going, I’m switching parts and messing with the knobs, controlling what the sound is.
MH: Controlling the tone.
AZ: Yeah, controlling the tone and how it sounds, much less when it sounds. That’s more pre-recorded and ready to go for us, and then I’m just tweaking it as it goes.
AW: I that makes it easier for people to get into it live, because it keeps going and they can catch everything while it’s going. We can go into songs with no breaks, just keep it going the whole time. I think that’s why people find it so interesting. Every time we play, people come up and they are like, “We’ve never heard anything like that before.”
AZ: Playing for the group of people that we play for generally, a lot of those sorts of people have a hard time necessarily finding rhythm, so locking in a constant kick drum in there helps them out. They think, “Yeah, I can get into this now,” because it’s constant. “I can dance to it.” Once you start your own electro-group, you are so gadget-oriented that you have to know what’s making the sounds that you are listening to.
MH: Is it a secret, the equipment that you use?
AW: If people ask us, we tell them, because I don’t think they’d be able to tell HOW we use it. I don’t think I ask anybody what they are using. I just spy on them, because I don’t know how they would take it.
AZ: I normally tell people. You have to be keen and stare harder to figure out what people are using now, because they’ll have a piece of equipment in a single-space rack, or down there, and now it’s a lot of looking at computer screens, because people are using 90% computer-based music, and stuff like that. It’s a lot more spying and a lot of sticking your head around corners to look at stuff.
AW: We are constantly getting new stuff. We get new and upgrade stuff all the time. The stuff that comes out is so amazing. So, the way that we play music right now, in a couple of weeks we won’t be playing it the same way. We are going to be getting new equipment.
AZ: I actually have a piece of gear coming in that I’ve been waiting for for six weeks. It’s been on backorder. It’s to the point where I’m PREPARING to have the gear, like, “Once I have this, i’ll be able to do this, and i’ll be able to do this…” Maybe i’m taking the fun out of it, but it’s also that a certain piece of gear is so complex that if I don’t plan for it, i’ll just be dumbfounded when I get it. We are always looking for something new. Each new thing you get, it adds something. Live, you get another thing to mess with, another thing to do, so you get a little more creativity from that.
AW: A coffee shop in Palmetto was our first show ever.
AZ: The way we set up back then was completely different.
AW: We thought we’d play more like a DJ. We piled everything onto a bass cabinet, so it was like a table, and so the bass was going out through there. We basically set up so that we were up here and the crowd was in front of us. Since then, we’ve moved our stuff to the side so that we have more crowd interaction.
MH: What are your thoughts on the Sarasota music scene these days?
AZ: I think we went through a really dark time the last couple of years. There are a lot of people out there now, playing music, getting together, and it seems like all the bands from a few years ago … the standout members have all recognized each other and then met each other, and then kind of started forming the Sarasota supergroups. Now you have five or six solid-quality bands play together a lot. Right now, this is the threshold. Kids didn’t have anyone to look up to, really, like “Man, they are really good. I want to be in a band like that.” I think in the whole area we are starting to emerge into an actual quality music scene, and i’m really excited about it. There were 101 really bad hardcore bands.
AW: I think people are opening up and listening to different kinds of music. We love playing with meteorEYES. We feel like we fit with them so well when we play shows together.
AW: We are from Bradenton.
AZ: For the first year, it was at least once a week. We’d get together, work on music, do stuff like that. Ever since recording the CD, we’ve taken a break from that, and we’ve been out promoting and playing shows.
AW: We’ll still try to practice once a week and go over everything and play songs. Once we feel that we’ve maxed this CD out, we’ll probably do an EP or something like that. We’ve got stuff cooking in our heads for the future.
AW: The end of August, we are talking about starting a tour, and I got us a couple of dates for the summer. I don’t know how stoked we are about a summer tour, because it’s going to happen so fast. Playing music, it seems hard, because people are always doing stuff in the summer, and there are a million things to do. Especially going to towns you’ve never been to.
Album Info: This is an Adventure (2009)
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW!!
PART TWO:
Names: Andrew Wyatt (21): synthesizer, vocals; Alex Zalo (26): sequencing, vocoder
MH: Since i’m relatively new to this genre: if you had to name a couple of different artists that people know that you guys think you sound like or that you look up to in some way or are influenced by with this project…
AW: The first one that comes to mind is Daft Punk, probably. The way that they play music is different than ours, but people always say, “Oh, you guys sound like an indie-r version of Daft Punk.
AZ: Other than that, a lot of my influences would be old video games. A lot of the sounds that I go for are from that… There are other artists out there who are more spot-on with doing the 8-bit sound and they are only using Game Boys and things like that to make it, and I relate to them in some ways, but at the same time i’m creating sounds on synths and sequencers and whatnot. A lot of Nintendo soundtracks.
AW: People who have never heard me like this before, they will say this sounds like the Game Boy, they get that. But, if they listen to some of that music out there that’s like, “Whoa!” Because it’s coming out of a Game Boy when they make it. Compared to that, we don’t sound like that at all.
MH: John [Lichtenstein] does that.
AZ: John does that, yeah. And I really like what he’s doing. I really like where he’s going with that.
MH: There’s a dichtomy in your music between happy, danceable music and singing about stuff like, “You’re on a road trip going nowhere fast.” You sing about some pretty dark stuff at times. Is that typical of the genre or is that something you try to do?
AW: I don’t think so, because there’s a lot of dancy music and dancy artists out there that are all about love and happy and upbeat and all that stuff, but the way we wrote lyrics at first, at the time of my life and what I was going through, everything was really happy, and we were writing fun music. And then, some stuff happened in my life, and so you can tell the tracks now, if you listen, between “Drink” and then listen to “U R,” you can tell the difference between what I was going through.
AZ: “Drink” I feel is right on that cusp, though.
AW: “2 Nite” was probably our poppiest, happiest song.
AZ: It’s all about, just, dancing and having a party. “U Can Dance” would be another.
AW: Those were the first songs we wrote that we were still trying to have a poppy, fun attitude with it. So, Alex wrote a song, and then I put these vocals on top, and they were completely different, and then since then I’ve just kept writing like that. I like the contrast between the dark vocals and the upbeat.
MH: “U Can Dance,” I think that one and the one after it… They are the most complex sounding in that the patterns aren’t simply repetitive, not that they simply repeat in the other songs. If you take “U Can Dance,” and there are four different phrases, and in each one, because of the way those melodies work together, you get a different melody for each one, especially in the third one, in which the melody steps up and down in an interesting way. I wondered how much of that is intentional and how much do you fall into that when you are writing? Is it an accident of the parts coming together?
AZ: Some of that stuff is planned out, and some is accidental. It falls on both sides of the coin. Let’s say you write a bassline, or something like that, and then that bassline will be playing as I write the next part, and then that part will be still be playing when I write the next part, things like that. So I will hear the sounds that come out of it in the end, but there have been times when I write two halves of a song where the first half will be like this and the second half will be like that, and then just by happenstance or whatever I play them at the same time, just to see what it sounds like when they mesh together, and strange things happen. The way my synth is set up is that it actually runs through a set of power tubes that you’d find in a guitar amp or whatnot, and it adds compression and brings out harmonics, so it actually creates sub-harmonies that I would have never thought of. There are a lot of strange things that happen. A lot of it is controlled chaos, musically. I’d say it’s about 50/50 in the end.
MH: Do you generally write the music first and then the words come after?
AW: This would be the normal songwriting process. Alex has a lead, bassline, or drum part, or i’ve come with a lead that i’ve written on a synth, and then we bring it together. We’ll just keep playing it over and over again, like he was saying, and so we find everything. But this whole time, i’m thinking of stuff. I write stuff down. I keep journals. I write notes in my phone when I think of lyrics, so I think about all of the stuff I’ve written down or stuff that goes with the music, so while Alex and I are writing the songs, normally Alex takes it and does his thing with it, and then I can step away and say, “Okay, now I know what vocals to put on there.” So, i’d say music and then vocals, but the whole time, it’s kind of a buildup. As soon as Alex takes it and goes away and puts the song together, I can put the lyrics to that, and it’s magic.
Album Info: This is an Adventure (2009)
This is an Adventure, “U Can Dance”
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW!
PART ONE:
Names: Andrew Wyatt (21): synthesizer, vocals; Alex Zalo (26): sequencing, vocoder
Base of Operations: Bradenton, FL
AW: We normally play with hip-hop artists or punks.
AZ: Next month we are on a show with five electro-death metal bands and us.
AW: Alex and I met a very long time ago when Alex was 17 or 18. We were super-young and we just knew each other through friends. We never played in bands together, but we always played in bands. And then, we kind of got together because Alex got this sequencer, and as a joke we said, “Let’s write techno music.” I had been in a techno band before that. We played house music just for fun. So, Alex and I said, “Let’s do this joke band.” The band name was “Bradenton, Florida.”
AZ: All the songs were under two minutes, and every song, the lyrical content was revolving entirely around us being rockstars, and that was it.
AW: It was basically to have fun. It was electronic equipment we had never played around with before.
AZ: And the songs were literally just scratching the surface of what the equipment could do. The music was like taking a supercomputer and then just using MS Paint on it.
MH: Because who wants to crack the manual?
AZ: Exactly.
AW: After that, I moved away. That was 2004 or 2005. I then moved out of the country for awhile. I moved down to Costa Rica to go have fun after high school. The whole time Alex was always playing music.
AZ: I was actually in a metal-core band and we were touring, so I was away for most of the time that he was gone. It was called Anam Cara, based out of Tampa. The members were from all over Tampa Bay. We were on Strike First Records based out of California.
MH: So you both played in bands.
AZ: I played bass.
AW: I played drums in the bands I was in.
MH: So you come from a rock/metal background.
AZ: Definitely.
AW: Alex plays in a band called The Turncoat as well.
AZ: Yeah, I do bass and backup vocals in The Turncoat.
MH: You still do that now?
AZ: Yeah, but we are actually going to take a hiatus coming up over the summer, because the guitarist in The Turncoat also helps out with This Is An Adventure. He helps, not really manage, but he books shows and stuff like that.
AW: He’s like the third mystery member. A lot of people confuse him for being in the band. His name is Jesse Coleman, and he does a lot of shows around here. To be in a band, and especially because we keep taking it to the next level and doing more and more stuff, it’s really hard for two people, especially because Alex and I both work full-time jobs. So we need another person to help us, and that’s what Jesse does.
MH: I’ve noticed that bands are getting smaller and smaller. I’ve noticed that a lot of them are two or three people now. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s just the economy of means.
AW: It is easier if you want to have a band practice.
AZ: Dividing up the money is a lot nicer too.
MH: How is it different playing in this kind of band than playing in a rock band?
AZ: From the live angle, especially for me doing sequencing, I feel like I need to move more than I normally would playing bass or singing in a different band, like in The Turncoat. I move around and whatnot, but I feel like in This Is An Adventure I need to be more animated, because if I’m not, it just looks like I’m pressing buttons.
AW: That’s why when I play synth parts and sing we do try to move around, and we do have a light show that we do. I have light controllers, fog machine, we do the whole thing. Strobe lights, we try to get it going. It’s not like we are just on iTunes and can just hit play and stand there singing to our own stuff. We can vary a song while we are playing. If the crowd is feeling one part of a song, we’ll play it over again and over again and then we’ll go to the next part, because we have that… Alex is able to do that with the sequencer. We can just feel where we are going to go to next.
MH: So there is some room for improv.
AZ: There actually seems to be a lot more show-to-show improv with these songs, with this music, than there is with any other band I’ve ever been in before. With a lot of those bands, you figure out the song, you figure out the structure, you play this riff for three measures, and then you are on to the next one.
MH: Because you can’t, unless you are a jam band.
AW: I don’t know if we’ve ever played the same song… we’ve played them in a similar way, especially with my vocals. I sing with a vocal rack on it, so everything’s kind of controlled with the way that I sing it, so it’s fun to play. And it’s really great when everybody’s into to it too, like last night everybody was into it, but it was kind of just standing around. But we played a house show a couple of weeks ago, and the floor was caving in. People were dancing so much. We played at Willard Hall in a church…
MH: With Shannon and meteorEYES?
AW: … yeah, and everyone by the end of the night, everyone was on the stage dancing with us, and glow sticks were going. It was a lot of fun.
AZ: Since there are very few groups around here like us, i’m just excited people are getting into it, that people are enjoying it. The fact that people did get on stage and started dancing with us, I couldn’t have been happier that people are so accepting of it.
AW: I think people are very accepting of it.
MH: I’m not surprised. People want to dance. They just do.
AW: Have you ever been to SOAP? And then Shock to the System, he’s a DJ. He does one weekly at the Cabana Inn on Monday nights, and he’ll have a couple of DJs come up there and play really dancy music and stuff, stuff that’s similar to ours but not live performers. They are all DJs.
Album Info: This is an Adventure (2009)
