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Thee 2000s
When I was in my early twenties, I had the chance to play in a band with Paul Roessler of the Screamers. Paul did not have the best life at this time. He had a wife named Helen from hell, two children, lived in Culver City, and worked night and day at 100 different jobs to try and keep everything together. Geza X (Producer of the Germs, Black Flag, and Dead Kennedys) was the singer in this band, and one night the three of us were at a party. Paul said, “No matter how difficult my life has been, music has always been the one thing that is there for me.” Geza, who had been famously fucked by the music business over and over again, brushed it off with a cynical and sarcastic, “Oh, how cute, Paul!” and the conversation turned to other things.
That statement from Paul would not make sense to me until this past decade. This is the decade that music became the reason that I live. It has rescued me from suicide more times than I want to consider. While I have failed music many many times, its unsolvable mystery and emotional fortitude always waits for me to try again.
Thank you, music. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
The band that I play in is as moved by and interested in pure timbre as it is by harmony and rhythm. A timbre, frequently, is the inspiration for an arrangement as much as the linear ideas of the topic and lyrics. That which goes beep in the night is as important to Xiu Xiu as is the night. Without the things that make sounds, there would be no sounds. It is sounds that have saved me and to have given this existence meaning. BONGO!
This list is of the musical objects that have made this decade for me. I hope this is not silly and I hope this not idol worship.
01. Harmonium
“The sound of Xiu Xiu,” I have heard several times. A harmonium is a hand-pumped reed organ that begs you to create dissonant and beautiful chords. The first one I ever saw belonged to Don Dias, a brilliant accordionist who was in Xiu Xiu for a brief time and played on our first record. He left it at my house for a while, and I tried to steal it after he quit. There have been six different harmoniums in the fold since. One I bought from a church, and one was destroyed by a Russian airline. It is the only instrument wherein everything one plays feels like something. It is the most haunted and alive instrument. VIVA SWEET TUNE BINA! It awaits, and I will give it back whenever you want it.
02. Fuzz Probe fuzz pedal by Zvex
Effects pedals, aside from using cheap distortions for synths, had never been interesting to me until we experimented with omitting the drum machine on tour for the first half of 2008. (Although it makes a triumphant return for 2010!) I leaned on making a lot of crazy sounds by programming and needed to figure out what to do instead. Pedals provided an obvious solution. The most amazing one I have in a sickening array of sickening little boxes is the Fuzz Probe. It issues the most ground up explosion ever and, on top of that, it avenges blindness with a piercing feedback tone that one can bend with the use of a light sensing plate that you control with your foot. If you move your foot quickly, the feedback zips up and down the microtonal scale. Placed before other effects in a chain, it makes you want to fuck a boulder to death.
03. Late-90s Pro Tools pitch shift
The version of Pro Tools that I use is Frankensteined together from cards and converters that my late father pulled from the trash when he worked at Digidesign. It is of an essentially vintage variety. The pitch shift plug-in that it has is all wrong. Nothing sounds merely pitch shifted when you run something through it. Invariably it adds some beautifully strange transient and warp that would never have been there other wise. I use this more than anything else. It is perfect for something unexpected and odd. If you stack several pitch shifted (mangled) tracks upon each other the symphony you create can be horribly unique. An engineer in Torino once yelled at me, “¡BASTA PITCH SHIFT!”
04. Roland MC 307 Sequencer
At a show with Final Fantasy in Hamburg, Owen Pallet referred to this drum box as the “Xiu Xiu grand piano.” Almost every drum machine song from 2003 on was composed on this. I have three of them, as they are getting to be old, and if one died during a tour we would be without hope. It does not sound the best or have amazing sounds, but it is very, very easy to use and this ease of use keeps it out of your way as one pursues the elusive song panther. One thing that I love about using sequencers is that one can be unencumbered by the distraction of physical playing and really listen to what is happening. It leads to bizarre or pretty electronic accidents that one could never really play.
05. GHS flat wound guitar strings
Having been a bass player primarily before trying to sing (sigh), I always had a hard time with how flimsy guitars felt. Flat wound strings wrapped themselves around my neck and strangled me to the other side. They sound darker, they require more tension at pitch, so they are more resistant when you play, and they are thicker so you can beat on them very, very hard before they break. Dark, resistant, thick, and can take a beating… Let that lead you where it may.
06. Room reverb
A mastering engineer once asked me how we got certain reverbs, and, although I was not smart enough to have done this consciously at our onset, I think about it all the time now; I answered him, “It was just the room.” This is no great secret to anyone who records at all, but natural reverb is an ace. It is such a, well, joy to me. I clap my hands in almost any quiet new space I go into. When recording, we try every hall, stairwell, bedroom, closet and bathroom that the oft-transplanted home studio has proximity to. I wish i had a tiny, tiny microphone and a heap of dead bodies to see what the inside reflections of a pelvis or skull would sound like.
07. Guild classical guitar
As a gift from a former Xiu Xiu member, I have a very psychedelic guitar that has 10,000,000 song ideas trapped in it. If I have a particular, but un-describable feeling and I pick it up, the first steps of a song will come out. 100% of the time. It does not happen with any other guitar I have, and I would be lost without it. I never really play it casually, but only when this premonitory feeling occurs. There is a Slayer sticker on it. I have never thought if this has any significance. Maybe it has a lot?
08. Korg DS 10 sequencer for the Nintendo DS
This is an analog model 2 track sequencer and drum machine for a fucking Nintendo DS. It is perfect. It is tiny. It sounds amazing. It is easy to use. It allows for tremendous creativity. I wrote about half of the newest Xiu Xiu record on it sitting on a plane or lying on my back falling asleep. Most electronic instruments require a certain amount of commitment to use. But one can turn this on and, in 30 seconds, be making music. Because it is a toy, essentially, you can play with it and that makes you feel free. I have never had the money for real analog gear, but I feel like I would know what to do with it now. I think that also, because you can use it for ten minutes while waiting for someone to pick you up on the corner, any moment could lead to a work of art.
09. Stagg Guillotine cymbal
Ches Smith found this cymbal at a really good guitar store in Seattle called Trading Musician (not to be confused with my favorite guitar store ever, the Starving Musician in California). It is four feet across and, I think, costs $800. It is so massive that it is almost hard for one person to carry. Being obsessed with gongs and bells, I worship this as the Kali of them all. Sadly, Stagg is a b-rate company and it kept cracking while on tour, so I think it is now reserved for recording here and there, but during its tenure, it made such a splash (Rim shot, please. Oh dang, another rim shot, please! Ugh.) that I could feel it through my chest every time Ches would hit it. The most wonderful part about it was, because it is so big, it has very long but delicate sustain if you play it softly and, because it is so big, it is really, really fucking loud.
10. Mandolin feedback through a Leslie speaker
Where I used to live in San Jose, in a crappy, cock addled, roommate, nightmare house, God at least allowed us to be incredibly noisy. No one cared, and if they cared, you could remind them that you did not care. Cory McCulloch, who started Xiu Xiu with me, lived here, too, and bought a Silvertone mandolin with a pick up in it, plugged it into his Leslie speaker and cranked it. He could sit in front of the speaker for, like, an hour getting really good at controlling the feedback, being melodic with it. There is no way that this could happen at any sane living situation. AN HOUR of this on several occasions. I am so thankful that at the beginning of Xiu Xiu we had the freedom to try anything with no restrictions on volume or harshness. Cory could take the wrongest of combination and work to make it touching. I learned so much from that.
If you have anything from this decade that makes sounds and has given you something, write me a note at
willitburn@hotmail.com. I would love to know what it is. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox
