The Chicago-based Crown Larks closed out Saturday night, 29 September, at Rozz-Tox (2108 3rd Ave, Rock Island, IL), performing a set as part of The All Senses Festival. The fact that the show might have been better attended spoke more to the Festival’s coordination between the venues which hosted it (RT and RIBCO) than to any perceived demerits in the Larks’ sound, a combination of psychedelic distortion, solid melodic construction, and keyboard-infused, sax-skronking, flute-browed, post-punk madness. One looks forward to their return to the QC.

In the space of their career, they’ve released one EP (2013’s Catalytic Conversion; favorite track being “Blue Lobsters” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmTHZUY3sEo]) and two albums (2015’s Blood Dancer, with “Chapels” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFyxdRiBJl8]; and 2017’s Population, with “React” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yTicI1C6yI]). Since 2013, they’ve been touring like bank-robbers and leaving witnesses to spread the word of their legend; stopping every other year to record, and then touring behind thatone. Whatever rest they can grab, they deserve. Yet onward they press, borne aloft on adrenaline and the feel of amplification against their backs (or, in the case of Bailey, sides). When they aren’t chasing the white lines of the highway, they play gigs around Chicago, like their ’13 appearance at The Observatory (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hApAb_b5n4Q) and their spooktacular Subterranean show (“spooktacular” because bassist Matt Puhr chose to wear a “Scream” mask rather than sear his visage upon the spectators’ eyeballs) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbGN1rj5UGk).

Everyone on board? Splendid. Let us proceed.

I spoke with Jack Bouboushian (vocals, guitar, organ) and Lorraine Bailey (vocals, keyboards, alto saxophone, flute, synth-bass) post-show; drummer Bill Miller was elsewhere throughout RT. Presently, we were joined by bassist pt Bell. [Ed Note: That’s the actual rendering of his name. Not a misprint.] Bell, who had worked with the Afropunk band Blacker Face, was subbing for Puhr. That night was the first time Bell would perform with CL. All agreed that he had pulled it off, that he had handled the more involved basslines with aplomb, and that he could breathe again. And so, as the tape picked up, he did.

MH: This far this year, how many shows have you played and how far afield have you gone?

JB: This year has been our first year off in about five or six, actually. So this is only our — I don’t know, third show this year. Last year, we played about eighty shows; the year before that, about a hundred; the year before that, about a hundred, nationwide, like, Canada as well — coast-to-coast, I guess. So, yeah, we kind of stepped back this year, been writing, working on new stuff; just kind of trying to not get too burned out on the project. So, yeah, we’re kind of back at it, somewhat recently.

 

LB:We have plans for this spring to go out again, but, I mean, we’re just trying to get back in the studio.

 

JB:Yeah. Because we were just in a cycle of record/tour, record/tour, for five years there. So it’s good to kind of step back, let things percolate. Tours are great, but they’re definitely exhausting.

 

MH:I could hardly think of a worse season to be touring than dead winter.

 

JB:Yeah, yeah, unless you just go to the southwest. But there are only so many shows you can play that way. [laughter] But, yeah, we’ve usually done our biggest tours in the spring, for sure.

 

MH:How did your gauge your performance in terms of your interplay with one another tonight?

 

LB:Oh, we had a lot of fun. It’s our first show with pt [Bell], who’s filling in on bass for us this show, and it was really fun to play with him, and look forward to that for a while. It felt good; the energy felt good. It’s the first — you know, you never know what it’s going to be like when you actually get on stage.

 

JB:Yeah. Especially someone playing like a foundational-rhythmics sort of role. If you have somebody up there doing textures that can like come in and out, it’s different. But he definitely had a pretty major role to play. So we did a few new songs, which was fun.

 

MH:That’s great to hear. I thought the interplay you had I felt was smack-on: everything clicked together and you were formidable.

 

JB:It felt good to get back out there. I mean, like I said, we’ve only played a couple shows this year, which is really unusual for us. Since 2013, we’ve just been playing nonstop, you know, so it’s kind of take-a-break-and-get-back-out-there-and-try-to-get-back-into-the-groove. It’s kind of daunting, but it felt good tonight.

 

MH:I had asked previously about influences on your band’s song. I’ve seen many reviews that have said “avant-jazz”, [http://www.crownlarks.com/press] but you took umbrage to —

 

JB:Yeah. I hope I didn’t come across as like too aggressively dismissive. [giggles] The label is —

 

LB:It’s really more about semantics than jazz in that, you know, we don’t have any chord structures the way jazz —

 

JB:Well, I feel, like, there’s — there are kind of (how do I put it) — I mean, like I said in that interview [with me for All Senses], I listen to jazz as much as anything, and the jazz scene that’s happening right now in Chicago is really solid. But I just think what we’re doing is different. Without getting into the ring of arguing over, like, what constitutes jazz. I feel like —

 

LB:Sure.

 

JB:— you mean like the Larks —

 

LB:— you listen to the music, it’s a rock band first, with —

 

JB:— yeah, I mean, we’re playing riffs. It’s very rhythmically-oriented. There are a lot of vocals that are not particularly melodic. I mean, it’s weird. I think the way that we try to write, and the overall vibe of the band, is much more influenced by the free-jazz notion of having multiple voices that express themselves independently, but also coalesce into the whole — which is something I think a lot of rock bands pay lip service to, but if you really — if you really tune into it, it’s mostly about one person’s idea for a song, and a group of people executing that idea. And I feel we’ve always tried with thisproject to make it a more collaborative, sometimes chaotic, like [laughter] varying-degrees-of-control-and-chaos project. So, I think that mentality is more at home in jazz, and we use a lot of textures that I think are more at home in jazz. But I would say, overall, again, it feels more like a rock band to me. Like as a listener. Like when I listen to what we’re doing. [laughter] But, you know, one of the people involved. [laughter]

 

MH:So, either of you would have an idea to bring to the table, and you submit it to the scrutiny of the rest of the members to see what they might add to it: “making room to chance and chaos”.

 

JB:Yeah. It’s definitely a collaborative process. It does vary song to song. There are some songs that I’ve brought or Lorraine has brought that are eighty-percent, ninety-percent —

 

LB:— fleshed-out. Sometimes, though, there’s been, like, “Hey, here’s this drum beat” —

 

JB:— “Here’s a riff”, yeah, yeah —

 

LB:— “Let’s see what we can bounce off each other.”

 

JB:Yeah. Lorraine and I have been the primary writers and producers, but, yeah, some of the songs have been much more open to interpretation, as far as —

 

LB:— and we always work, even as they come most fully formed into the practice space, there’s always something that’s added by someone else.

 

JB:Yeah. It’s very rare that something would be through-composed, or just kind of sit that way, go through performances that way, and then end up on the record that way. You know, even if the changes aren’t happening immediately in the space, something will evolve over time. I mean, hopefully.

 

MH:When it all gels, is it still exciting to you? Is there a feeling of intense satisfaction?

 

JB:As far as like…?

 

MH:When you get a song finished, you say, “This is it. This is the definitive version.”

 

JB:Yeah. I think a lot about that. I mean, it’s tough because there is a certain satisfaction that comes with completing a piece when you’re in a project like this that ninety-five-percent of what we’re playing is — well, I shouldn’t say that: I mean, eighty percent or something [laughter] of what we’re playing is written. It may have been written by us improvising for hours in the basement and then listening back and [saying], “Oh, we should do that.” But we’re not pulling stuff out of thin air on-stage, typically. [Indiscernible] like, “Keep it here.” These are repeated riffs, vocals, coming in and out. They’re set, with some wiggle room in some. It’s satisfying to get it there on one hand, but I feel like there’s always this since that, when you first come up with the germ of an idea, the possibilities seem really endless, and the creative process in many ways is a subtractive process. If I give you a drum beat, especially, you can do millions of things with it; and the first day you hear it, you probably willdo millions of things with it if you sit there for a few hours — but, eventually, you’re going to be, like, “Okay, well, let’s work with this”; and “I get it: this is definitely, the best idea”, you know? And you work with that, and you’re, like, “Man, this is so great.” A couple weeks later, you’re, like, “Ah, I’ve got this whole fleshed-out thing.” You finish it and, like, “Fuck yeah, we made this piece!” Then you listen back to one of those other ideas that you discarded from set two of fifty: “Man, that’s actually — maybe it would have been way better. Maybe this should have been this minimalist thing with just that drum beat, and I just fucked it up adding all this other stuff.” There’s always that feeling, I think.

 

LB:Yeah. I have problems with that because I have lots and lots of songs that I maybe write up until seventy-five percent and then I discard them because I know that the last twenty-five percent is going to be just not very much fun anymore to me. It’s going to be, like, grinding it out. It’s like, “Ah, how should this really go? Which of these lyrics really be…?” And then I just kind of move on to the next idea, which seems really way more exciting to me. [laughter] But, I mean, we still enjoy playing the old songs in their finished formats. It’s not like I get tired of the material.

 

JB:Well, yeah. Sometimes, if we’re out there playing a new song for fifty shows in a row on tour, the old songs seem like a breath of fresh air, even if it seems a little retrograde or whatever. But, yeah, as far as that creative process goes, it’s always — yeah, difficult to know like when to quit, because that’s really what you’re doing, right? I mean, at a certain point, you’re, like, “Okay, this is what this is. That is what it’s going to sound like.” Especially if you’re recording it, you know. That’s the def — and I mean whether it’s the definitive version, it feels like some sort of a mile-marker, some sort of a stopping-point so you can move on to other things. But, yeah, I think there’s a melancholy inherent in that process, just because it will never have that initial spark of, “Oh, shit! This is — ” Yeah. It’s just a novelty in the sense that you were just sitting in a silent room with this idea there. Over time, you look back at something from five years before and it’s, like, “Wow, I can’t believe that I made that.” So, yeah, it goes both ways.

 

MH:I spoke with one band, and they regarded a recorded work as almost — not a suggestion, but a solid structure, and if they wanted to play with a particular part, maybe elongate a particular passage, or play around with the guitar sound from what it was on the record, they would give themselves that leeway. But I gather, not so much in your case?

 

JB:Mmm. Let’s see. I’m going to think through the set we played tonight.

 

LB:Every point has a tendency to make you — I want to say — a lot of times, you tend to go back to the record and be — at least I tend to go back and be, like, “Oh, so I chose to play saxophone thisway, and I really thought that was what sounded best, and so let me do it thatway from now on out, whereas before, it might have been any number of new things.

 

JB:Yeah. There’s like — I think there’s a logical side where it’s, like, “Okay, we’ve thought about all these possibilities, and this is what we felt was best,” so, you know, that’s what’s best. But then there’s a psychological side, too, where it’s, like, “Yeah, you have confirmation bias, right? You choseto do this on the record. So it’s validating to that choice to play it that way live.” But it’s definitely a mix. I mean, thinking about the material we did tonight, I would say, about a third of it, there was some significant differences —

 

LB:Yeah.

 

JB:— from the record. But they’re probably not structural. Like what you said: elongating a passage, shortening a passage, different tones, different textures, maybe a different —

 

LB:Some things work better live —

 

JB:— like a saxophone lead. But it’s not like —

 

LB:— than others, than maybe the way we did it on the record.

 

JB:Yeah. Yeah. That’s definitely the case, too.

 

MH:Sounds encouraging, leaving things open for discovery.

 

JB:The record is a record of a time and place that you were at and it’s — for me, setting a studio date is, every time I do it, every time I finish a record, I’m, like, “Okay, I’m not setting another studio date until we have a full thing ready. I’m not going to rush this into the studio.” But then, it starts occurring to me, “I’m never going to set a date. I need to set a date — ”

 

LB:You’ll never be ready until you set a date then.

 

JB:— “or it’ll never be ready.” Because when I set the date, I just think about — I think maybe I said this to you in that interview [he did] or maybe it was somebody else [quite possibly], I don’t remember; but there’s so many cases of truly, transcendentally-talented people like [My Bloody Valentine’s] Kevin Shields or Shuggie Otis, who put out these records when they’re twenty-five, but then they just kill themselves trying to match it: “How am I going to make anotherLoveless[from 1991]?”, “How am I going to make anotherInspiration Information[1974]?” It’s debatable what’s best for the world, but I think for the person actually creating it, it’s better sometimes to just get something out there, get it out of your system, instead of trying to make the perfect version. Because I can listen to any of the songs on the records and think of ways that they could be better. But, again, psychologically, that’s just me second-guessing myself. Yeah, I know more about what kind of drum sound I want now or whatever, but it’s — you can look back on a relationship you were in fifteen years ago and think about what you could have done differently [laughter] — it’s like that. You know what I mean?

 

MH:Yeah.

 

JB:It’s a similar thing —

 

MH:All too well.

 

JB: — where you just tell yourself, “You know what? I just need to burn certain bridges behind me and be, like, that’s the thing I did.” I can see it. I’m not going to constantly spend my life fine-tuning. But yeah, it’s easier said than done, for sure. I think recording, especially digital recording, it’s hard for it not to be a neurotic process. I remember we did a Daytrotter [session] here, [https://www.pastemagazine.com/crown-larks/futureappletree-december-15-2016.html] and we just did straight to tape. And we were so much better with the songs by that point. The Daytrotter — you know, they’re not fully produced, but the performances, like the raw performances on the Daytrotter, were in many ways better than the ones on the record. And they were one-take performances, because we had been touring on that material for a year. Which is another thing. But — yeah, it’s live and learn [laughter] with that stuff.

 

I think — yeah, the next record, hopefully going to think even — I think like overthinking the fine-tuning, like raise-the-kick-drum-half-a-decibel-type shit, or put-a-multiband-compressor-on-this-thing or whatever — for me, that part of the creative process has a limited — I feel like I need to limit it. I like production/engineering to a degree, but it can become a little too obsessive after a point.

 

MH:What didyou think of My Bloody Valentine’s third album [2013’s m b v]?

 

JB:It’s funny. We saw My Bloody Valentine not too long ago. When was that? July 27.

 

LB:Yeah. It was an awesome show. First time for me.

 

JB:I think m b vis a cool record. A lot of it is stuff from the mid-Nineties [laughter], stuff he made and then revisited. I feel like Shields will go into some new territory rhythmically, like some drum-and-bass-feel stuff. It’s never going to feel as out-of-the-blue as Loveless. I mean, Lovelesswas the first shoegaze record I ever heard, and as soon as I heard it, I was like, “Man, what a greatgenre of music.”

 

LBMH:[laughter]

 

JB:“I’m going to have to get every shoegaze record I can find.” And that began a couple years of me being, “I don’t know, Slowdive’s alright”, “Ah, Chapterhouse, they’re okay”. I could never find another record, in that genre, in that sound, that felt even remotely as powerful for me as Loveless. So it’s funny, because I guess like, yeah, I can see where Kevin Shields is coming from. If that’s the sound you’re going to do, nothing’s going to hit harder than [the lead-off track from Loveless] “Only Shallow”. [laughter] It’s like, boom. And when we saw them live, it was kind of like watching — with [Shields] and [co-member] Bilinda [Butcher], especially, when you really give yourself to this specific thing, you’re taking all the things you could be doing and just pushing them aside and saying, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to run eight Marshall stacks, and I’m going to hold the tremolo arm in my hand, and I’m going to strum,” and he’s just so good. [laughter] It was an incredible show. I guess that’s the big qualifier: from an aesthetic perspective, you know, as a listener, maybe he’s done the right thing. Why put five mediocre records into the world after you’ve put one incredible record? On a personal level, I just feel like, if I had to choose between putting out a record every couple years that are pretty good, or putting out one stellar, truly timeless piece, that takes me ten years, and then never putting out anything again, I think I would choose the former. I think that the latter is probably symptomatic of a really neurotic/romantic idea of the artist that is probably very damaging in a lot of ways [laughter], but, hey, also leads to a lot of beautiful and amazing work, so — that’s debatable.

 

MH:The Sturm und Drang of the artist writhing on the floor in agony over a block in the process — yeah, that’s allkinds of romantic.

 

JB:Yeah. When you’re — I don’t want to speak for everybody, but I feel that’s a widespread sensibility about the creative process in our culture that is something I definitely have dealt with myself, in my own process. What I love especially about jazz, for example, the best jazz is that — I was just listening to, what, [1959’s] 5 by Monk by 5today, or [1967’s] Straight, No Chaser— early Thelonious Monk records — and, you know, there’s just so much levity. I mean, they’re really playing. They’re playing. And that’s something that I think makes music special is, when you stand at the canvas, or you sit at the typewriter or the laptop or whatever, there can be a playfulness to it and a levity to the art you’re creating. What’s really — you know, be working with other people and just bouncing ideas off them; and when that actually happens, I think really only music, and maybe dance, kind of capture quite to that degree, you know. Certain types of theater — you know, there are examples. But that’s really what I feel maybe we all need most: that sense that this isn’t just something that I sit in my room by myself and obsess over from the dark recesses of my soul. There are elements of that in our music, and I’m sure there always will be, but I think, for me, I’d like the accent to be on the communal kind of play process, that — which doesn’t mean it’s going to — I mean, it could sound like anything. It doesn’t necessarily refer to a certain aesthetic or something. It’s just a process and a mentality in probably a lot of the stuff that I find really fun and find myself laughing and smiling while what I’m making is really brutal and aggressive and ugly and noisy. [laughter] I think there’s a wide range of aesthetics that could come from that process. But it’s definitely not purely a guy-in-the-studio-obsessing process.

 

MH:I have a question for you, Lorraine. But first, a sidebar question [for JB]: concerning Slowdive, you were nottaken at all by [1994’s] Pygmalion?

 

JB:[amused-sounding] No, I like — don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem with Slowdive. I would just say that, for me, hearing Lovelessfirst kind of ruined shoegaze for me [laughter] because I could never find another shoegaze record that hit as hard as Loveless. No problem with Slowdive, really: I wish I would have seen them when they came through a couple years ago. But, yeah, [1993’s] Souvlakiis a good record… What I loved about My Bloody Valentine live, you know, they’re just like a really hard-hitting pop band ultimately. There’s just —

 

LB:With a lot of guitar techs.

 

JB:Yeah, with a lot of guitar techs. Do you know what I mean? It’s very — if you turned off all the effects, you just would be hearing plain power chords. It’s really powerful because it’s really direct, but it’s this super-direct thing wrapped in fifty layers of gauze. I think the cover of Lovelessis one of the best correspondences between a sound and an album cover, where it’s just this hand playing a guitar, sort of photo-distorted to the point of barely being perceptible; but you can still tell it’s somebody doing it to a guitar [laughter].

 

MH:And suffering from carpal-tunnel syndrome —

 

JB:Severe, yeah. [laughter]

 

MH:— a quarter-century on.

 

JB:Yeah, but that’s what I mean! That’s his whole thing: he’s sacrificed himself for this thing. His ears are just gone. The stage volume is incredible, you know? And what’s funny is, playing in big venues, it’s not like you need all those amps to be that loud, you know what I mean? Nobody’s — but it’s, like, he wants to be bathed in this — which I understand: being bathed in this noise is an amazing feeling. I mean, after — my ears are ringing really bad right now, and part of me is, like, “Oh, God! What am I going to do when my hearing gets reallybad?” But when I’m on stage, I just want to stick my face in the amp. The louder, the better. Not oneverysong, maybe, but the loud moments you want to be loud, like you want to feel loud. [laughter] It’s crazy.

 

MH:[Shields’s] hearing’s shot, his wrists are frayed, and I’m gathering his psyche is fragile as well, as he was really big on the whole lateral-thinking aspect of creativity as it applies to sleep-deprivation. From what I understand, Lovelesswas done after twenty-four to forty-eight hours of no sleep.

 

JB:Yeah. I know he would do that. He would have Bilinda sing when she would — they would stay up a while and write, and she would fall asleep, and he would wake her up after half an hour so she could sing, so it sounds like that on the record, this sort of whispery…

 

MH:[To LB] What kind of training did you have? You are versatile on so many instruments: the saxophone, the flute, the keyboards…

 

LB:I played in band as a child in elementary school, back when public schools still had programs. Then I continued with some classical training. But I took a long break from music for a while and then came back to it in this format. I had no experience at all with composition. Saxophone is totally new for me, so that’s been a real joy to get into that. Yeah. Just exploring a whole new side of thinking.

 

MH:So when you said you might rethink a sax part you had done previously, you’re thinking in terms of these notes instead of those, or more like maybe the approach should be more like Albert Ayler than Ornette Coleman, or some shorthand reference?

 

LB:A lot of the parts going into [indiscernible] have often been totally free and improvised in the studio. I mean, a lot of them still are improvised on stage, too. So that’s what I meant as far as sometimes the recording process for my horn parts sometimes can fossilize — that sounds negative. I don’t mean it to sound negative.

 

JB:Solidify. [laughter] Coalesce. It sounds fancy.

 

[In walks PT. He admires the high ceiling. He stands well over six feet tall.]

 

PT:It’s really so nice in here. You might have noticed that the ceilings in our apartment are up to here for me. [Holds hand about neck level.]

 

JB:I think that’s pretty much why I started to go to yoga regularly, because the ceilings are so high.

 

MH:We were talking about how tonight was your inaugural gig.

 

PT:What is this? Is this an interview? [Laughter all round]

 

MH:It’s the post-performance interview.

 

PT:Alright.

 

MH:Sorry if I’m interfering with your process.

 

PT:No! [Indiscernible, but conciliatory-sounding]

 

JB:We’re just hanging in the nice room [the library upstairs].

 

PT:Yeah, okay.

 

MH:Chilling.

 

PT:This is my inaugural gig. I did it.

 

JB:Yeah! When we started out, he asked how we felt about it, and, yeah, I feel the work we put into it paid off. You know, I feel it’s weird because, for me, I always want practices to be, like, “Okay, we’ll drill stuff for a while, but then we’ll just play, we’ll fuck around, we’ll, like, here’s just a riff, or here’s a thing, or let’s just make noise or whatever, and then we’ll run a few more songs.” But with pt, we really had to drill, because it’s a long, forty-five-minute set, and the songs, with this set, they don’t tend to be, “Okay, here’s a chord progression, hit the roots, and stay in time.” The bass parts are pretty fundamental to the whole thing, because it’s pretty rhythmic pieces, so [laughter] thanks for coming through. I felt like it went really well tonight. Really nothing went off the rails. Ifucked some things up…

 

PT:I was more than happy to. It’s like each individual gesture is pretty — not easy to pull off, but not extremely virtuosic, but pretty structural. It demands attention and care, and I love work that demands that kind of attention and care. I probably talked Bill [Miller]’s ear about how much I doubt [indiscernible] they’ll ask me to do this, or keep doing that [laughter]. It definitely feels great. Thank you.

 

MH:So your level of confidence going in tonight was where on the scale?

 

PT:Seven-and-a-half. [laughter] It’s always somewhere between zero to seven-and-a-half. [laughter]

 

MH:Well, what might have sounded like clams to you sounded awesome to these ears.

 

JB:Yeah. It’s one of those things, a lot of the time, nobody would know, and I feel like I — I don’t know. I guess it’s always like a work-in-progress, but I still feel like the most important thing is to just take it moment to moment. Because whatever you just fucked up, no matter how bad it was, it’s, like, “Okay, here’s a new thing: you can either do well or not.” [laughter] That’s what I love about, again, playing live versus a more plastic process, like producing a record, or writing a book, or painting a painting. To experience flowing time that way and to just confront the presence of what you’re doing over and over and over just feels like something that — not only just something I like aesthetically, but something maybe that’s fundamentally lacking in our culture. In a kind of deeply neurotic, plasticized culture, there’s a flow of time happening for forty minutes, and you just jump in on this bucking bronco, trying to hold on. I feel like I need more of that. Whatever form, whether it’s music, dancing, or anything that makes you not just feel like you’re just looking. [laughter]

 

MH:Where the rewards may be substantial and the losses humiliating.

 

JB:Yeah, you know, it’s funny. The song we closed with tonight is not recorded. It’s a newer song. It’s a recording I sent pt. I turned it on and listened to it and I was, “Yeah, it sounds pretty good. I’ll send him that one.” And then he sent me a text saying something like — or to just check in; I can’t remember the exact wording — and I was like, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to write you a transcription of it.” And while I’m listening, it just changes time signatures a lot. And I realized, whatever we had done on that recording was just like some bullshit. [laughter]

 

LB:So jacked up.

 

JB:We stayed together somehow, but I could not recreate it. We must have just been really in the mind-meld kind of moment, because it’s not arrhythmic, but it’s, I don’t know, there’s no set time signature. I think we were looking at each other, like, kidding. So I had to text pt and apologize: “Yeah, you definitely don’t need to recreate that. I mean, if you canperform, I can’t, so you can use that for something else to play” — [laughter].

 

PT:That was so terrifying. [laughter] So tight, but so aperiodic. I assumed that it was a fixed two minutes of through-composed material. [laughter]

 

JB:Well, because it was like he was saying, the individual parts, like the bass part will be something — like on this song, you know, the bass part is basically, [tapping a four-four] “Duh-DUH, duh-DUH [pause] duh-DUH, duh-DUH” — so if you can do that, but you know, you have to know — it’s kind of modular, you know, it’s going to happen on a cycle for a few times, and then it’s more the structure is kind of novelled into the thing your fingers are doing that are really all over the place. So, yeah, it was —

 

LB:But, you know, the performance matters way more than whatever notes you’re playing. “You can go up there and play anything” — I mean, yeah [laughter], you have to have somesense of time. There’s time flowing. But in that time, if you perform it, if that’s how it is, that’s all that matters.

 

JB:I feel some of the best shows I’ve ever seen are punk shows, where it’s fucking chaos but it’s perfect.

 

LB:[overlapping with JB] You can hear the most perfect thing, and the people are up there and they’re not having a good time, and they’re wincing it —

 

JB:Oh, yeah, wincing at mistakes is [indiscernible]. They’re not happy with it.

 

LB:— you know, whatever it is they’re doing, and it’s like, okay, you can’t enjoy it.

 

JB:Yeah. The time to — and I guess it’s another thing I love about live performance — the time to really focus on what you’re doing wrong is if you’re trying to practice a thing to perfection. Once you’re playing, you just — like the great man said, “You just forget that shit and play.” Because that’s it. It doesn’t matter. Nobody is saying, “Ah, man, did you really study your scales a little?” Even if they’re a music PhD, it doesn’t matter. They’re listening to a performance; they’re not checking in on whether you practiced or not. Because I’ve gone up there with shit that I’ve practiced exhaustively and fucked it up, because I outsmarted myself versus [indiscernible], we barely practiced when we first played it, but it just, I don’t know, worked, sort of. [chuckles]

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