Long time Chicago composer Anthony Weis has a new experimental folk album out entitled Nature Has Forever. It’s a unique, accessible exploration of organic sounds and techniques in music making. From the title, you can gather there is an attempt to return to some unadulterated, back-to-basics, or “natural” aesthetic. Janky sounding stringed instruments (often home made) together with acoustic “found” percussion and the occasional field recording are used to create ever-evolving, instrumental funk-folk compositions. It (usually) doesn’t rely on some repetitive theme or riff, opting to evoke a sense of unpredictability while (usually) carefully staying on beat and in key. It’s easy on the ears except for some moments here and there of chaotic improvisation. However, the use of many of these aesthetic choices and compositional techniques is somewhat bumpy, uneven. Words like “usually” and “mostly,” as you’ve noticed, are useful in description. It’s eclectic and sort of evasive in a sense, which is most likely a product of Weis’s years of exploring different genres, as the man himself will tell you...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Caliper (C): There's obviously elements of a lot of different styles/genres going on here, folk, jazz, rock, progressive, musique concrete. If you had to give the style of music on this album a name what would it be?
Anthony (A): I was initially calling it “Experimental Acoustic Rock”, but I also saw one website classify it as “Experimental Folk” and “Music Collage”. I think all of them work. I’ve always tried to be a student of music and explore as many genres as I can. After absorbing the style to some degree, it usually pops up into my future writing. I really don’t try to force these disparate elements together, they just sort of bubble up and expand my working palate. Recently, I’ve been learning Flamenco guitar as well as Gypsy Jazz, just for the enjoyment of it. I don’t plan on incorporating those styles anytime soon, but they may well bleed into my next project.
The hard thing when distributing my music is trying to classify it and I think this album is more eclectic than my last. There is a solo piano piece, an extended guitar solo track, slide guitar riffs, break beats, etc., so it can be challenging to tell people quickly what it is about. I seem to swing back and forth between an album narrowly defined in scope, and one that is more varied and messy. “Nature Has Forever” is the latter.
C: The title “Nature has Forever,” what does it mean to you and how does it relate to the overall aesthetic, the music, and the methods used on the album?
A: The main theme of the album was “nature”, as many of the track titles suggest, and some ancillary ideas stemming from that were “organic”, “acoustic”, “homemade”, and “handcrafted”. These words all created an atmosphere of where I wanted to take the album, which would be a departure from my last record, “Smashed Against Infinity” (2017), which was electric, aggressive, heavy, etc.
This overall aesthetic was to inform the instrument selection, which would feature acoustic instruments, such as acoustic guitar, banjo, ukulele, and harmonica, instead of loud distorted electric guitars, and hand played percussion instead of a full drum kit in many places. The “handmade” element came into play from the various homemade instruments I created for the project.
C: What are some examples of these homemade instruments? Which was your favorite to play with?
A: I’m not an experienced instrument builder by any stretch of that definition, but through playing with manipulated audio and field recordings in the past, I realized that I could pretty easily and cheaply make instruments on my own. My goal was to create different timbers and tones than you get with most of the traditional instruments.
I was able to create 2 main types, homemade percussion and handmade string instruments. The percussion elements pop up in beats on songs like “Slide Slide Harmonica” and “Back To The Primitive”, the latter of which I was especially pleased with the results. That beat was created using the wood scraps from the building of my stringed instruments. The percussion parts also included the closing of doors/drawers and miscellaneous junk and household items banged against each other, just to name some of the things that I can remember.
The string instruments were all primitive, consisting of 1-3 guitar strings attached to cigar boxes and 2x4 pieces of wood. The lead instrument on “Up, Glorious Soil!” is one of these (I made three), and I recorded it into my sampler and played it with a keyboard instead of playing it live. It had a surprisingly nice resonance and it was so sensitive, if you moved your hand at all on it, the notes would wobble in and out of tune, which you can hear on the track.
C: You say your goal with this record was to “to create unique sounds all (your) own.” Which track(s) do you feel most lived up to this? Why?
A: The lead track “Four Strings” is a great example of this. I was in the process of recording another song with my acoustic guitar, when I broke a string. I started to restring the entire guitar and while detuning one, I started to play riffs on it. It was tuned so low, that I could get some great bends and tremolo effects. At that point I had four strings still on, so I tuned it to a very low open chord, and wrote the song “Four Strings”.
On “Banjo, Banjo”, I had 2 melody lines going at once in one section of the song, a ukulele and a banjo. I liked both, but didn’t love it. Since both instruments are in similar parts of the frequency spectrum, I ended up splicing the two together to make one melody.
C: You mentioned using some field recordings to create soundscapes. What are some of the recordings you used? How were they manipulated? What do think they added to the music?
A: The two main themes I had going throughout the album were nature and building my own instruments, and I have soundscapes around both. Uncharacteristically, I ended up with a lot of extra tracks, maybe an additional 15-20, and it just so happened that all of the nature soundscapes were on those. I’ll probably rework/release those for another album down the road.
The field recordings of my instrument building are most prominent on “Up, Glorious Soil!” where the lead instrument is the one I was creating. Adding elements like that always interested me, and I think great examples of it would be the early Books albums.
The other way I like to use field recordings/soundscapes is to give additional textures and layers to tracks. I’ll add ambient noise recordings, buried low in the mix, to give tracks a warmer, less digital feel. Also, I’ll slow down/lower the pitch 50%, 25% of the original, and layer them together to create deep, bassy, slow moving beds for different parts of songs.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Download of Nature Has Forever is available via Weis's Bandcamp.
Matt Ackerman, Anthony Weis
No comments:
Post a Comment