TVHH Q&A

Our thanks to Steve Seigel for conducting words with us over the last few months.

The interview starts HERE.

TVHH Q&A pt.7

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bringing people in. But, the reality is that the scene in the Boulder area wants to hear that recycled din. And the crowd reflects directly back to the environment in this case. It is apparent that the scene is a byproduct of the attitude and the underlying foundation that stabilzies the social fabric of Denver and Boulder's identity. Boulder is a quagmire of hippie dropouts, rich DMB worshippers, and affluent Trustafarians, while Denver is mostly a conservative town heavily steeped in white culture. Of course, this is a gross simplification, but I find some truth in it. Without a good base of cultural diversity, you can expect the music produced in that area to be closed off and secular. And sameness usually breeds future homogenous cultures, and/or apathy. Of course, when the scales tip too far to one side, then a revolution of sorts often manifests itself. But Denver hangs pretty much in the balance between anything outstanding, and the suburban doldrums.

This boredom is apparent to anyone who has played out in Denver before. In fact, the reason a lot of bands don't like playing Denver is because the crowds are so zombie-like towards anything brand new, or anything out-of-bounds. That doesn't mean people won't come out to see something. I remember full draws for bands like Les Savy Fav and Sweep the Leg Johnny. But these influxes of counter-culture only pass through and seem hardly able to stick to anyone in the local music-making scene of Denver.

At the same time, it seems like people are only too happy to cop or play other people's music. First off, it is easy. Second, the audience feels secure listening to something already assimilated- so large crowds are virtually guaranteed when you play something already tried and true. The cookie-cutter mentality is all too prevalent in the Denver scene. The world has the Blood Brothers, and Aurora has Fear Before the March of Flames. The critics enjoy Joy Division and Interpol, and Boulder sends off Bright Channel. Do you like Adult? Well how about a watered down version of that called,Baby?

The list goes on and on- some bands with much closer compatriots in the musical chain of doppelgangers, and some, albeit rare, Denver bands who dare to try something different.

Like I said earlier- the scene behind the 'scene' is quite supportive of local artists. Outside of all the empty posturing and seemingly endless trail of post-punk acts are some smart, honest people pushing for change. It would be a crime for me not to mention the positive effects of people like Kim at Kaffeine Buzz, and the wonderful staff and volunteers at Radio 1190. There are great promoters and owners working at venues like the Larimer Lounge and the Hi-Dive and some sincere and creative people pulling the strings behind NIPP. Certainly not everything is doom and gloom for me in the Denver scene. But still, there appears to be a lot of elements in the metro area that seem to inadvertently push talent out of the state, and onto the coasts.

The more I listen, the more I appreciate the split in Mourir C'est Facile between "Long Live The New Flesh" and "Lighting will guide you." What strikes me the most in your instrumentation is the use of drums--many bands pursuing similar musical aesthetics have done away with such a raw, live drum track (take The Outskirts, or Eyes Become Rooms). It seems to me that there could be a fear that such an aggressive and organic sound could potentially throw the digitized orchestration out of balance, either weighting it too far to the maudlin (like Mogwai, on occasion) or making it sound too temporal, consumable, and dated--have you ever noticed how you can often tell which era music comes from just by listening to the drum tracks? In any case, how do you see the balance between the electronic and over-dubbed aspect of your music, and the live-studio elements that seem to place your music in a more visceral (and dare I say American) atmosphere?

PETER:

This split in the album refers back to something we talked about earlier. I believe it is very Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a way. The first section is a new cultivation of the raw sounds we harnessed through playing more live shows. And the latter section deals with a more contemplative side that is easier to explain through subtlety. Throughout we have tried to keep very 'live' sounding drums. This is a unifying element that counters the ebb and flow of the atmospherics. We knew we didn't want the Mogwai sound, which can be a little too overdramatic at times, but we also didn't want to detach ourselves too much from anything organic at all. So that's where the raw sounding drums come from. Maybe this dates the recording back to the late 80's/early 90's recordings of Steve Albini, but I am still in love with the sound of raw drum tracks. Suffice to say, our new album (title tk) is leaning a lot more towards complete synthesis, but in a much more dirty way than you may be used to.

When did you guys start playing together (date?) and do you have any amusing stories from your history of playing together?

GRANT:

We began playing together in the summer of 1998, though the incarnation of TVHH did not occur until fall of 2002. I was recently at my mother's house and found a bunch of old tapes of our earliest material. Just drums and guitar at first, though synthesizer and drums eventually became our medium. Even then, we'd stop in the middle of writing a song and decide that it didn't sound honest, too much of a replication of some established act. Just as we were discovering our own collective and individual sounds and voices, we left for college, and a three-year pause ensued.

As far as an amusing story...I'm not sure if this qualifies, but it was certainly formative. We were opening up for TV on the Radio at Club 156, and as we were finishing setting up, our drummer, Lucas, slipped on a pair of sticks and fell off of the stage. Many people, myself included, laughed, though I felt terrible immediately after. He had done something very bad to his knee, it was all swollen and gross and he couldn't walk on it. His girlfriend took him to the emergency room, and we were encouraged by the promoter to play the show. I doubt that Peter and I have ever been more nervous, playing an unrehearsed acoustic set before one of our favorite bands took the stage. The audience ended up being one of the more responsive and attentive ones to date. We only played five or six songs, and I was totally relieved to be done. We took off for the hospital and visited Lucas. He lived, but needed a brace, and for our next couple of shows, his high-hat leg stuck out awkwardly like a giant beacon, but he played anyway and I will always admire him for that, even though he is no longer our drummer.

FIN.

TVHH Q&A pt.6

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identifying what it is about Colorado that irks me, and it's one of the things about the indie scene that keeps it from being nationally important, too. And that is the cow town, gunslinger mentality. Whether it's Pinhead Circus, or some psychobilly concoction that infests the Lion's Lair, you can't escape the nonchalant machismo associated with 'Where the West Lives.' For a place that prides itself on a heritage of breaking new ground and making your own life apart from the ideals of others, it is painfully ironic that the support and community needed to nurture a successful and culturally important movement is watery at best. That's not to say that no one is trying; it's less the musicians that are the problem, and more the audience. I mean, come on, if all it really takes for the audiences of Denver to enjoy themselves are guys in full body costumes playing video game music on keyboard guitars, you can't really call that a music scene unless you are prepared to acknowledge your own self-parody.

So we created our own positive environment in which to compose and perform. Our supportive label, and fellow like-minded bands (Bear vs. Larger Bear, Drop the Fear, ::tin tin::) helped to offset the established scene. But being very self-sufficient in the creation and composition of our songs, we decided to move near the ocean and leave Denver to those who don't feel so turned off by it.

PETER:

To begin with, we are a product of the Denver music scene, though more reactionary than anything else. We grew up around Pinhead Circus, and saw Blue Ontario open up for Built to Spill. We've seen the Apples in Stereo too many times and watched as the Procussions moved on. But instead of taking these standards of the Denver scene, and retelling them for another generation, we decided to try and break off and show our peers something different. How successful that ultimately was will only be revealed through time. The promoters and the scene behind the 'scene' were very encouraging and open-minded. The audience was a different matter though. Sometimes hot, sometimes cold. I won't go into the details, but here is a tip: never ever play for an electro-clash crowd. In any case, we would like to think that we left Denver in good intentions, and not because we only thought that we could be successful in another state.

It is most easy for me to sum up our past in Denver with two examples.

1 - Electric Summer. This band was an outside source that came and invaded Denver. When these guys took the stage, it was like watching an alien give birth to some strange outer space music that you weren't ever supposed to hear. I mean, Electric Summer was something that never could have wholly originated from the Denver underground. Instead, it was the displacement of another culture within our 'cow town' that helped spawn what came to be Electric Summer.

Grant and I got really excited about playing out after seeing the potential a live show could carry. Like Electric Summer, we wanted to bring something different to the mix. We didn't want to destroy our shit and play the bass behind our head, but we did want to branch out and do something really different that couldn't be easily imagined, or hastily thrown together.

The metro scene is too wrapped up in teenage angst, and novelty bands. Well, most cities large and small will never run the well of teenage angst dry. But I also notice that the larger metro areas tend to have an over abundance of ironic novelty bands. Hopefully, this will die out very soon. People eventually have to realize that these bands are not really making music you would listen to more than a few times; only providing a cheap fix for the grown-up ADD set and a few good laughs, but nothing else, nothing substantial.

Some people thought Electric Summer was a novelty band, and they certainly walked the line between parody, and genuine emotion. But most of the time, I saw them in the latter. Electric Summer really blew Pinhead Circus and everyone else in the Denver scene out of the fucking water. After they came along, it kind of made the Golden faux-punk-thrash scene obsolete. We grew up around guys like Scooter, in Golden, and they were really nice in person, but on stage... Ugh. It was like these guys couldn't see but thirty feet in front of them. That is, they were very near sighted, and their spirit eventually died out from that.

Seeing an outside force makes you really start to want to venture out and see other places. When the Dismemberment Plan came to town for the first time, I was like- "Why doesn't Denver have anything like this?" Well, was it the old-western mentality that is etched so deep into the mold of Denver's identity? Or maybe people are really more conservative in Denver than they would like to have everyone else think.

My point is that Denver has great things that come through, but they are never permanent. Electric Summer gets deported back to Japan; a great band materializes out of thin air, and disbands just as suddenly; the Elephant Six leave for greener pastures. Why can't Denver keep anything but a burgeoning scene? Why doesn't it ever blossom into something bigger, or something better? It would take a novel to really explain it.

2 - The Fox Theatre. Here is a great, independently owned venue that has so much potential with its great sound system and prime location. Then why does it primarily book jam bands and mediocre hip-hop acts? The short and long of it comes down to this: the businesses are only giving the people what they want. Really, the Fox would probably stop booking jam/blue grass acts if they stopped...

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TVHH Q&A pt.5

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with eye contact and body language. In that respect, the creative process remains honest and is not entirely unlike fucking.

PETER:

Sometimes we'll write a song and step away from it and be like, "Well, this is going to make our exes hate us," or, "This is going to make someone dance." But that is pretty much the extent of us discussing emotional content as pertaining to how it could cause reaction in someone.

What is more important to us is how the feelings of the songs themselves are sketched out. And our plan so far has been to present musical ideas followed by a hook that ends the song. This is our pull-and-release sound that is so satisfying for us to listen to. Emotionally, there is a small epiphany at the end of every song we write. Some are more obvious such as 'That Look', and 'Love, Like Love', or 'Green'. There are a few modern bands out there that have really honed in on this somewhat, 'transcendental sound'. Esp. groups like Interpol (on Turn on the Bright Lights) and people like Jeff Buckley (on Grace).

You also spoke of Mourir C'est Facile as an album that aspires to de(con)struct, unlike Washingsongs which voices aspiration and hope for change. Is Mourir C'est Facile, then, an expression of futility, a realization that the aspirations of the previous album were not drastic enough for this world?

GRANT:

I wouldn't say Mourir C'est Facile is an expression of futility. Washingsongs does express a hopeful expectation of change, but change will come whether you hope it to or not. Where Washingsongs is an expression of part of the cycle of change, Mourir C'est Facile is a more complete emotional construct. The first four songs are an angry deconstruction of Washingsongs' hopeful tone: seeing forever, drowning, spiritual vampirism, ripping one's own eyelids off--it's all imagery of destruction, but necessarily so. However naïve they are, when you're hopeful aspirations get kicked in the gut, are you supposed to be happy about it? To quote Lillard's character in SLC Punk, "What are you supposed to do when your foundation falls apart? They don't teach you that in school."

With the exception of the last track, the rest of the album picks up the broken bits of the first half and attempts to make sense of them. 'Coup de Main' is a synthesis of cynical destruction and cautious creation. The 'concrete' emotional content fits best under the implications of the title--dying is easy...it's living that is difficult- If you are to do it with compassion and dignity.

PETER:

Emotionally, Mourir C'est Facile's brethren would be Kate Bush's, Hounds of Love - an album also split into two parts to guide the listener through a metamorphosis.

Through playing out live and finding a sound that worked for jaded audiences, we became increasingly excited about transferring this new energy into our recorded work. While in the studio we found we had two very different voices. One was the hateful, reactionary, despondent 'live' voice. The other was a more compassionate side that wanted only to show how the anger was misguided- or could also be considered beautiful if seen in a better light. These two lines of thought were reintegrated and helped compose the emotions within the framework that help support the ideas hanging from Mourir C'est Facile.

You are right in believing that Washing Songs was not drastic enough for us. Even after the EP was done I was already thinking about how there needed to be something to justify such a tender response. So, finally, we get justification in our new album.

I think that Colorado has an interesting musical history, but with very little to show for it. It's certainly not in the ranks of the most fecund artist-gardens (like, say, Nashville, Kansas City, Austin, New York), but there's a certain Western machismo quality to the Colorado music scene--at least it seems that way to me. When I started going to punk shows at the Raven back in high school, I got the sense that if you were a musician out of the mainstream (a la Opie Gone Bad, Chris Daniels and the Kings, The Samples, Leftover Salmon, and other such blues/funk/jam band fusions) it was easy to be looked over. Furthermore, I remember watching Pinhead Circus a number of times and thinking that they had such an arrogance about them purely because they were the most revered punk band in the Metro area, with a song on some national punk compilation.

So what are your readings on the Colorado music scene, particularly in such a time when independently produced bands are acquiring more power and circulation than they have before? What's it like being a musician in Colorado? Is there a gritty underbelly or a competitive edge? Or is it a very positive environment in which to make both music and a business out of music?

GRANT:

First, it's important to note that we are no longer in Colorado. We moved to Oakland earlier this year, in part to live in an area that seems a bit more nurturing to the ideal of independently producing your own music. There is competition and a 'gritty underbelly' both in the Denver music scene. I don't think it's fair to say that Boulder has a music scene. Unless washed-out potheads making noise is a scene. I always seem to return to the same central idea when...

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TVHH Q&A pt.4

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had had these completely separate experiences that changed us quite dramatically in our own ways, and thus the music that we were compelled to create. Here, everything became much darker, more intense and somber, maybe even more mature, yet longing for the bitterness and frustration of youth that always breeds a feeling of invincibility.

The house was on a main street in Boulder, stuck between a fly-fishing store and a motor shop. It probably hadn't had a heyday since the Great Depression. It was under a pile of car parts and several feet of snow that we wrote our songs. It was also a mutual coming-to-terms and understanding that there are far too few artists in America, and that America is no place for an artist.

Another question. It's a bit tangential, but I wanted to hear what you have to say about it anyways. It was brought on by an evening out in Istanbul called Kumkapi, a street filled to the brim with fish restaurants that double as entertainment centers for the Turkish elite. Each restaurant has their own contracted band (sort-of Klezmer style) as well as a belly dancer that can entertain you if you wish. Somewhat cool, but mostly very kitsch, which put me back into a memory that I had when I was a little kid.

Thus:

Do you have any memories of Casa Bonita, fond or otherwise? If you can, give me your most accurate description of the place, replete with cliff-diving bandits.

GRANT:

The first word that surfaces (besides 'pink') is 'grime': a clattering mess of silverware and dirty dishes on a conveyer belt when you walk in, cafeteria funk everywhere; cheese fries, cardboard burgers, soggy sopapillas, too-sweet honey...a peptic disaster! Yellow flags you raise when you need something more, shiny-faced waitresses shaking their butts with a swagger, screaming children, someone blowing a whistle? Flashing lights, a fog machine, a megaphone, ridiculous papier-mâché rocks, a waterfall, tanned men in Speedos cliff-diving indoors, dirty carpet (was it green?), and strange, strange linoleum in the bathroom. I was there for a birthday party. Was it mine? I can't remember. I do remember Colfax--better than anything. What a street! And the arcade in that rundown strip mall...Oh, but Colfax...it's like a giant hypodermal squirting purple mountain majesty eastward to the plains, dripping a trail of filth and human depravity--Casa Bonita right at the base of the needle, celebrating the garishness and absurdity with all the eloquence of a loud fart.

PETER:

Yeah, I've been to Casa Bonita probably more than I would have liked. You enter and then you get corralled like sheep through this cafeteria-like maze. The food is similar to Banquet TV dinners, and the whole place stinks like industrial strength cleaners (chlorine especially).

Anyway, I had a friend who was a cliff diver at Casa Bonita. His name was Jared. I knew quite a few people who worked at Casa Bonita. In fact, the whole community of Golden seems deeply interwoven within the shoddy quilt of that strip-mall restaurant/extravaganza.

Here are ten songs that remind me of Casa Bonita:

1. Def Leppard - Rocket
2. Warrant - Cherry Pie
3. Kenny Loggins - Danger Zone
4. Slaughter - Up All Night
5. Kris Kross - Jump
6. Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby
7. Whitesnake - Still of the Night
8. MC Hammer - Can't Touch This
9. Mötley Crüe - Dr. Feelgood
10. Winger - Seventeen

Grant, one of the aspects you liked about Debussy was his inclination to describe, in text, the instructions that a pianist must take to perform his songs. In a sense, he was able to verbalize the way a song should be played through poetic, rather than musical, terminology. When I came across Peter's response to question 3, during which he wrote, "We are not (yet) a band that is interested in only focusing on a literal translation of our work..." I was interested by the tension created in any attempt to put musical sentiment, be it instructional or expository, into words. Did you two ever try to speak about the emotional content of your songs, or was the songwriting process one that evaded words entirely and relied solely on musical communication?

GRANT:

Our musical communication tends to be eerily telepathic. Much of this can be chalked up to similar childhood experiences, and not an altogether differing worldview. We have vastly different emotional landscapes to express, but the process of release, for both of us I think, is very similar. We do not specifically discuss an emotional arc for a song ahead of time, but in talking through the state of the world, or the state of our minds, that dynamic automatically embeds itself in our music. Sometimes, a hive-like consciousness develops between us while composing wordlessly. We communicate, to borrow a brilliant and cheesy Asia lyric, "in the heat of the moment," mostly...

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TVHH Q&A pt.3

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Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck all did the same thing--so I guess what I'm saying is that the inability of the sensitive soul to find an emotional connectedness anywhere in this country has not changed since the 1930s.

Rather than be depressed by that, we create our own world in our music. Washingsongs is all anticipation, for a change in the weather, in people, in seasons, and knowing that it will never really come. Mourir C'est Facile is the resulting scream, the release of a chakra in your throat.

After that you can break the world you've created apart and reconstruct it to match how you're feeling. You have to either do that or expatriate.

I want to know about your transition from classical music to TVHH. Is there something that classical piano LACKS, something ineffable, that you sought to express with your work in TVHH? Does it allow you to communicate more effectively?

GRANT:

We both began our classical training at a very early age. I was six or seven, and I believe Peter was maybe even younger than that. Of course it was tedious, maddening, sitting there for decades, playing sometimes one measure over and over for an entire day and when it was finished and flawless it might last for only one second. But it trains the way your mind works. The one common thing that exists between classical piano and the music we make is the ability to sit there for as long as necessary until the phrase is correct. And the focus on melody. Nietzsche described melody as wrathful. That may be the keenest explanation of it. It burrows into your head and changes you if it's really effective.

The creation of melody is what drew me away from classical performance. I still play sometimes, but the allure for strictly playing classical has worn thin. It's pleasurable to listen to a beautiful melody, and let it echo in your head. But it is an entirely different experience to create something that echoes in your head, and the heads of others. To see the expression on someone's face as their emotions shift when they hear it is eerie.

But the real crux of the issue boils down to wrestling with an idea and pounding it out on the ivory until it exists in the real world the way it exists in your head. I feel so much more worthwhile doing that than trying to work my way backward through the syncopation and counterpoint to the original melodic inspiration that drove Schubert crazy, or imagining what the inside of Beethoven's deaf head sounded like.

When you're performing classically, it's less about your own expression of self and experience than it is about your interpretation of the composer's self and experience. I feel that we have too much to say to be able to accomplish that by monkeying around with Liszt. The world is sound and also infinite and classical is such a very small slice.

PETER:

The issue of classical music is difficult for me because it was something I ostensibly failed at. That is, my mom, my piano teacher, my peers; they all expected that I was going to go all the way. You know, full ride to Julliard, world class Glenn Gould/Michael Tilson Thomas sort of shit. But it was too much pressure and so I snapped at the very last moment. Everything was building to this critical mass and I just snapped like a little twig underneath all of it. Who's got the balls to flawlessly play an hour long Concerto with a full orchestra in front of five judges? Well, not me--that's for sure.

I'm not too upset about my upbringing and my time with classical music. It was invaluable in helping me understand melody. For me, a lot of classical music is about filtering all the noise out until you only have melody, and silence. In this way, the music feels perfect.

How did you get to know each other? Give me a little background on this relationship.

GRANT:

I met Peter in Golden, Colorado, home of COORS Brewery. I had transferred from a small private academy. We had several of the same classes. After school, we began playing music together, though in a much different form than The Very Hush Hush. I think the only existing copy of anything our band at the time, The Jettisons, recorded is on a very scratched up tape in a bag somewhere. It was very punky stuff, very influenced by the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, and Pond. It was loud and heartfelt and exceedingly ugly at times and reflected perfectly the angst and trash of that bile-pit where 'The West Lives'.

Much of our time was split between our friend's house where we practiced and the school painting studio. Lots of free time, open-endedness, and knowing that college loomed indiscriminately on the horizon. We both took a year off to work and begin serious composition before committing to school. Although we never named our project at this point, this was really the earliest incarnation of The Very Hush Hush. It was spacey guitar/synth rock that was Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk meets Sugar and the Buzzcocks. Peter went to California, and I to upstate New York. All I really did was smoke a lot of stuff and drive around the country wondering why the hell I felt so sad. I ran out of money after losing my scholarship and transferred to Boulder, where Peter had transferred a couple years earlier. We got a house, and well...you can't really call it picking up where we left off, because we each...

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TVHH Q&A pt.2

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hallucinations as would be expected. Everything in the outside world was starting to close in, and so I had to finally finish the album or risk losing my well-being. Thankfully, the album finished itself. That is, a stopping point was reached where nothing more could be done without toppling over the whole house of cards. One more card, and... 'Boom!' the whole thing would've collapsed.

The reason I was so consumed and obsessed with the album was that I wanted so badly to preserve that feeling of longing. To really capture that is very hard. And yes, it is scary when you start to lose yourself in an imaginary land that you have made up for yourself. A place where the rules for the songs work, but when you take that isolated view, or that prerogative outside your created world, well, people may think you are acting a bit strange.

I believe it is evident when an artist wants you to see how much time was spent working on a piece. Apparent, like... you can tell how much time Captain Beefheart spent arranging his songs for Trout Mask Replica. But, you don't know how long Gil Norton spent producing and polishing Catherine Wheel's, Chrome, or the Pixies', Bossanova. Gil's job is to make everything appear seamless. To make it seem effortless. Captain Beefheart's songs showed what an insanely articulate and discriminatory person he was. And that shines through in his manic arrangements. As for us, we are obsessed with every little detail. We are not only interested in creating a self-sustaining entity that can exist outside our own reality, but a perfect one at that. A world that is seamless once inside, and tangible enough that you can take a step back and realize what a spectacle it all is.

I'm very interested in the emotional and imagist concepts that came out of your work on "Washingsongs." In your bio, you remark that the EP treats "emotional dislocation attached to obligation and to being forced to live in an environment that refuses to feel like home." You also mention your decrepit (and perhaps haunted) house in Boulder, which seems to relate quite well to the hollowness and vagrancy of being unable to find comfort in a physical location. I'm interested in all of this from a musical standpoint, of course, but also from a personal one. How does your music relate to the physical landscape around you? Do you draw influence and inspiration from the surrounding landscapes, or are they a source of frustration that asks you to react against it?

PETER:

Washingsongs helped us 'practice' what later came to greater fruition in Mourir C'est Facile . Already, even on the EP, we knew how important it was that we stay connected to imagination and our burgeoning sensitivity. This was an underlying purpose that Grant and I have been carving out since we were playing years and years ago.

A large part of our emotional well is drawn from surrounding environments. My favorite cup of tea would be: rainy city streets, dark mountains, unending ocean, mirror lakes and Colorado's snowfall in particular. On our new album, instead of working against these natural forces, we work tangentially with them. In this case, we are not the plow, but the sled.

These environmental cues are directly tied to our emotion. They inform the latter. Mourir C'est Facile can be taken as an organized hierarchy of pure, emotional realizations. Starting off with everything hitting at once, then picking through the innumerous fibers to find and focus on a singular idea/thread. For me, the architecture worked like this: childhood, or raw emotions leading into complex, but clear, concise epiphanies. The feeling of aging and being overwhelmed by everything, and then growing up and understanding what was really going on when you were younger. The process is perpetual and continually repeats until the very end. Our ideas are all interconnected with their natural environments, and this in turn ultimately speaks through emotions. For us, nature is one giant emotional complex.

In short, the album, and our band, is strictly aligned by a collective 'feeling'. We are not (yet) a band that is interested in only focusing on a literal translation of our work- or providing a medium for political discourse. We avoid the post-modern punch line, and go straight for the heart.

In thinking all of this over, I am realizing how self-conscious we are about our art. But we decidedly chose the path of curiosity: listening and studying everything under the sun. Once Pandora's Box was open we either had to deny its existence by only alluding to/making fun of it (ie. the ubiquitous sarcastic gimmick band in any city right now), or exploit/explore every thing that had come before us (ie. the peculiar DJ Shadow methodology of writing music in the 21 st century).

GRANT:

I believe everyone to be affected by their environment, whether they know it or not, regardless if they choose to recognize it. In moving to Boulder, I had just come out of three years of solitary travel across the country, intermittently going to school in upstate New York. Until I forced myself to stay in one place, for better or worse (in Boulder), it was as if changing my location would change what bothered me. But I found that every place I was in America made me feel the same. Sure, some places are more beautiful than others, but there is an inherent ugliness of spirit everywhere you go...

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TVHH Q&A pt.1

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This interview was conducted by Steve Seigel during the spring and summer months of 2005 before the release of Mourir C'est Facile...



Steve:

You said that both of you were classically trained pianists. I know that it is difficult to provide any cogent theory on how classical music influences current, non-classical compositions. But in your case(s), the grandiose process of recording Mourir C'est Facile seems, from what I can gather, to be rather orchestral in scope, what with the layers upon layers of instrumentation (you mentioned, in fact, an "orchestral aesthetic"). Are there any composers or even specific pieces that proved influential, either while you were studying piano or currently? If so, what specifically drew you to those pieces, and has it played a significant role in how you write music?

GRANT:

The most influential classical composer for me is Claude Debussy - 'Claire de Lune', 'Jardins Sous la Pluie', 'Arabesque', 'Sarabande'-- his in large part because the instructions on how to perform a song are given poetically out of form. Not pianissimo , but quietly, like the first raindrops of an approaching thunderstorm , or suddenly forceful as crashing waves upon a ruined cathedral . John Cage said once that in his music and in his life he endeavored to find perfect silence; his search led him to a soundproof chamber, where, much to his horror and frustration he found that the human heartbeat is inescapable--when all other sound is removed, the heart beats in your ears. Debussy encapsulates the layering of aural imagery upon imagined silence to a degree that is crystalline. His melodies ring in your ears long after they have ceased, such as Cage's inescapable heartbeat.

I let silence do the majority of the work, only providing notes and layers and textures where the absence of sound is subsequently enhanced. A screaming note is only powerful once it has stopped.

PETER:

Anything written for piano by Hovhaness - East meets West. Lot's of Chopin growing up. Romantic through and through. Debussy, of course. I completely adore 'Jardins Sous la Pluie'. It is all about when the song suddenly transcends its natural tendencies and segues into an absolute sublime silence. The transition is nothing short of amazing.

Couperin for the Spring. And then Bach in the hotter days. It seems like I was always playing Preludes and Fugues in the summer. As far as sheer listening enjoyment, I like Henryk Gorecki. When I'm feeling down I will play Symphony 3 over and over again. Somehow this is uplifting although the music is sadder than anything you have ever heard before.

I've recently fallen in love with Alfred Schnittke's 'Psalms of Repentance'. Shifting voices, sudden key changes, and very, very dark/disturbing.

We are also entranced by Gas's Pop. This was almost always playing continuously for a period of two years in our old haunt. Now we're enjoying Basinski's Disintegration Loops. But really, nothing comes close to Gas's, Pop.

"This time TVHH logged several thousand hours of production, bouncing down hundreds of tracks into an improbable singularity, approaching the brink of insanity in the process." I'm an aspiring filmmaker myself so I understand the addictive, self-destructive, and often insanity inspiring process of working with creative, organic materials within a digital context. Can you give a little more insight into what happened when you neared "the brink of insanity"? Hallucinations? Soothsaying visions? What about the idea of revealing "a schism between the terrifying and the sublime" in your music? I wanted to know if that schism was revealed, and if so, how, during the recording process.

GRANT:

I've always felt that the most important music is that which provides the listener with a certain space within which they navigate, lost, looking for something. The best music is characterized, almost singularly I think, by longing. The terrifying part of the recording process was losing myself in a landscape that was undefined and indiscriminate, amorphous and hungry, and trying to shape it into something tangible. The tension is in creating a space and then finding your way out of it, somehow preserving the experience for others.

I find each song we write to be an expression of a moment, specific in its emotionality, yet maddeningly vague. For something so subjective as emotion, how can you ever really say, 'this is what murderous rage feels like,' or 'everyone's grief is the same color'?

PETER:

I did feel at times like I was losing a piece of my sanity during the recording and producing of Mourir C'est Facile . Some of the tracks we worked on had hundreds of overdubs, all in the name of making the perfect little noise buried beneath 40 other tracks of distorted strings. Maybe it got out of control. Really, the album was taking over everything in my life. Sometimes I would just sit and produce for days at a time. After a while I would get pretty strong audio/visual...

>>

The Beat Was Hot (we stayed in the water)

Pic from RuffRyders
A good dose of surreality brought to you by the Ruff Ryders' Playlist on iTunes.

Excerpts:

PIRATE

"Sucker M.C.'s" (Track 1): "The beat was hot and the style of rap at that time."

"I Need a Beat" (Track 2): "The beat had me and his voice on the hook."

"Don't Stop...Planet Rock" (Track 4): "It was a hot party beat."

"Jingling Baby" (Track 5): "The beat again had me hooked, the verses was also hot."

"Forgot About Dre" (Track 10): "The story was how people forgot about him and how he's making a comeback."

INFRARED & CROSS

"Money Ain't a Thang" (Track 20): "These guys have so much money that they feel its nothing: they can buy whatever they want."

DRAG-ON

"Oh" (Track 22): "The beat was hot."

"Just a Moment" (Track 25): "The hook on this song had me thinking about all my friends that die."

KARTOON

"Ain't No Fun" (Track 29): "That was a classic, it was about sharing with your homie."

"Feel Me" (Track 37): "The way he was, tells how he grew up and what's going on his life now."

FLASHY

"Time For Sum Aksion" (Track 48): "This nigga was from Jersey! Nuf said!"

"Takeover" (Track 49): "He dissed Nas!!!!!!!!!! Nuf said!"

"Ether" (Track 50): "Nas dissed Jay!!!!!!!!! Nuf Said! Great battle!"

...listen ad nauseam- all tracks: $69.30.