By: Tony Price
I recently spoke with Calvin LeCompte about his new album “Laughed At An Attachment”. We talked about his recording process, the sonic semiotics of tape hiss, the hilarity of psychedelic aesthetics and more.
TP: I really love your show on NTS Radio. I think we share an infatuation with music that feels like it has fallen through the cracks of time, sounding sort of “half produced” or “demo-like”. What is it about that set of sonic qualities that appeals to you?
CL: Absolutely, yeah. I would assume that an entry point to talk about something like this would be intimacy. Perhaps it’s appealing because it feels intimate? I’m not saying that a demo is always better, but it has an energy to it that is often times a little more exciting. Even tape hiss itself adds a level of excitement, It’s more intimate, it’s looser, it feels more exciting.
TP: That excited energy bleeds through the crackle of your new album Laughed At An Attachment. How did you make this album? Do you have a home recording setup or do you have a work space that you go to?
CL: Me and my girlfriend live in a two bedroom in Chinatown. One room is a bedroom and the other is a studio. As far as for how it was recorded, I have, for lack of a better way to put it, fetishized that type of tape sound and the home recording tradition, so to speak, and I just gravitate towards it. An artist like Tonetta, although he doesn’t record to tape, has always resonated with me. I started recording into a computer with Garageband, so this has been a sort of backwards learning curve. I think most of the time, or at least with those a generation before me, people start with tape because that’s what’s available. For instance, learning a four track like a Tascam is not entirely intuitive. Figuring out bouncing left and right, activating certain tracks, etc. But I finally found a tape machine that I can comfortably work with. My understanding of it is that it’s the last four track cassette recorder ever put into production, maybe 2006, 2008? It’s called the Korg CR-4. It’s a wonderful machine. The nature of it is that it has built in speakers, which is cool, but it also has built in effects and amp simulators. You have to look into this machine. It’s fun. The inputs are direct, and this sounds trivial, but they are in the back of the machine, so you’re not reaching over the back, blindly hoping you’ll find the right input. Little things like that add up while you’re recording. It’s just a pain in the ass, you know what I mean? You just go in right through the front, you don’t have to pan it to the left or right, it’s just direct. Being a musician you usually end up, on some level, becoming some kind of a gear-head or something, and I don’t have a ton of gear, but you’re always looking for new things to make your process easier. I’ve kind of called it quits and decided that I’m only using this machine, hypothetically, for the rest of my life. I actually have two that I use at the same time. Otherwise, I’m done. I’m done looking for sounds! This machine has been good to me. I like it a lot. That’s how I made the album.
TP: I can imagine that between those two machines, bouncing ideas down, running them back through each other, all of that movement back and forth between two machines adds more life and character…you can almost hear those machines breathing on your record.
CL: Yes! The thing is, with a computer, everything is so intentional. I’m not saying that this is bad, but with my process, the accidents are actually real, and this works better for me on some level. For instance: I write pop songs. I’m not that really that “experimental”. I mean, there are some experimental elements on the record for sure, but typically, I am shooting to write a verse-chorus type of thing, and it can become a bit, I won’t saying “boring”, but predictable, which is fine. I like predictable. But to have real mistakes that I can’t really touch up helps me find the sound that I am looking for in the first place.
TP: With regards to computers, what role, if any, do they play in the music making process for you?
CL: They are exclusively used for the final step. I don’t use them for anything other than to digitize the tracks and share them with people. It just complicates things for me. I try to finish a track in four hours. The point of that is, and I’m sure this happens to everybody, but I can go as far as dedicating three weeks to a month to a song, and it is no better than the a song that took 25 minutes. I try to create something in four hours and the caveat is that it’s allowed to ‘suck’. It might turn out great and it might be something that I never want to hear again, but at least it’s done, you know?
TP: Very interesting. Do you find yourself making music more frequently in the day time or the night time? Does it really matter at all?
CL: I’m usually quite a night owl, although recently I’ve somehow managed to get on more of an early riser type of schedule which is a bit unusual, but yea, when I’m staying up until eight in the morning that usually means things are going pretty good!
TP: You are located in Chinatown in Manhattan. Space is obviously usually quite limited. What is your relationship to physical media like? Are you a record or book collector?
CL: That’s a good question. Very much not so, actually. I get by with the internet. The things I have, I tend to use. I do read often, and I have what I have, but I’m not, you know, seeking out first editions… I don’t even have a record player. It would be really special to own some of the records I play on the Uline show, but I’m okay not really collecting.
TP: What about with your digital files? Files and folders that you accumulate for your NTS show, or your own music…do you organize and archive this stuff and save it on harddrives?
CL: Well it’s all archived on my laptop, and I have put it on thumb drives before, but the show is archived on NTS, thank god. When I do the Uline I tend to really make a point of not bleeding the songs together because the songs are possibly so rare that they’ll never show up again, and if anyone needs them again, they won’t have any bleed from previous songs and they can be extracted from those archived shows.
TP: Incredible. When it comes to uncovering this stuff, is it a really time intensive process for you? You are unearthing and presenting music that in many cases is so obscure.
CL: I dedicate the last four to five days before my deadline to be like, “I’m not doing anything else”. I order food and spend 12-13 hours going through all of my bookmarks. I’m not ever familiar with any of the songs before they go up there, so I enjoy the program as a fan of it just like anyone else does, it’s basically all that I listen to (laughs). And knock on wood, I don’t know how the fuck I keep finding stuff!
TP: This reminds me of your album cover, the image that presents you as some sort of doorway. It’s as if these songs that never got their chance the first time around are out there, swimming in the ether towards you specifically, passing through your brain to find their way to us.
CL: I hear you man! Sometimes if I’m on a psychedelic or something I can get on that wavelength, I know what you mean.
TP: How would you describe or sum up the Uline catalogue show?
CL: Hmm. Not to be so clinical, but it’s just primarily an expression of my taste in music. What I exclude from the Uline is important. I don’t really fuck with music made beyond 1983, I don’t fuck with proto-punk too much, if that’s even relevant. I just like to stay in my zone, and I definitely don’t mean to sound xenophobic here, but I do tend to stick to English speaking music. For instance, there is a lot of very beautiful Japanese folk out there, extraordinary stuff, but I don’t know Japanese. I don’t know the history of Japanese music. I just feel that I can kind of understand the UK and the USA stuff, so I feel like I know where it sits in relation to everything, but if you are a Japanese artist you might be commenting on another major artist that I am unfamiliar with, so I think that’s a show for someone else.
TP: In both your music and your show I can recognize a particular sense of humor, a ridiculousness and absurdity that bleeds out of the lyrics, music, and aesthetics of 1960’s psychedelia; it’s something that has kept me drawn to and in love with this stuff for decades. Is this something that you also pick up on and intentionally showcase?
CL: Some of that music is certainly funny as hell. But first and foremost it has to resonate.
TP: Of course.
CL: Yeah, funny is good. If I find something funny I’m happy to put it on there.
TP: My last question is about a song you played a few months ago by Linda Finkle, called “Welcome To The Race”, the Hillary Clinton song. (Laughs)
CL: You see, that’s funny. But it’s also important because it’s a moment in time. With all of this stuff, its really a chain of people who bring this stuff to life, uploading, archiving it online.
TP: I could talk about this stuff for hours, but I’ll let you go. I look forward to putting this record out together.
CL: It’s been great working with you. It’s been a perfect fit and really, really positive!