Studygroup12: Could you describe your how you think about your music and your aesthetic for the general populace who might not have heard you before?

Robert Donne: It's a little difficult, because I think it's basically the most kind of natural songwriting the three of us can do when we work on music together, so we just think about writing songs, probably in the same way people think about writing pop songs, or something like that. I guess we're just more interested in different sounds, and collecting different sounds to use, in maybe a slightly unconventional way, but I'm not even sure if that's true. So it's about a soundscape kind of element, and maybe a slower sort of element, but I think there is some sort of basis of the pop music thing to what we do, really. It's really just about collecting sounds and writing really simple repetitive songs around them. [Laughter]

SG12: How much does the concept of keeping it simple - keeping your structures and melodies simple - play into what you do? It seems to be a large part of your music.

RD: Yeah, it is, and I think that's really kind of an aesthetic for us, more than anything. Things tend to get too busy.. Lately, we're interested more in what we can take away from it, rather than "what can we add?", and layer and layer and layer. You know, the fewer the elements may be the the better, in a lot of cases. Of the songs on the new record, I think I only played on like three out of the six songs.

SG12: Really?

RD: Yeah, so that's really kind of our aesthetic. Maybe partly inhibited by our actual skill as musicians. [laughter] If the truth be known. At least, for myself.

Mark Nelson: It comes out of playing slowly, too. Start with that, and the repetition of it becomes sort of the substance, in a way.

SG12: The pauses..

MN: Yeah, I think it's built to provide more of a sort of space or zone, for quiet or introspection. Keeping the melodies simple and repetitive I guess, hopefully promotes that.

SG12: Do you ever hope to induce a trance like state, or meditative state with your music?

MN: I think I'm really more into inducing the state of not paying attention, in a sense. As if you're somewhat removed from it, but it's sort of affecting you, silently. Rather than just a meditative state, where you're oblivious to it or completely focused internally, I think it's just ...

RD: In ways, I think it's more conducive to allowing the listener to think about something else, and not really have this thing in their face that they're forced to pay attention to. In live situations, that can be a problem, but it's intentional that there's a lot of room there for you to just _not_ concentrate.

SG12: You are suggesting something and people just fill out the rest?

MN: More that we're hoping it'll suggest things for you.

RD: There's no real one response that we're hoping to elicit from a given audience.

SG12: The style of your music has maintained many of the elements that we are talking about now, but in the seven years or so that you've been in existence the music has really gone through a lot of changes. As far as the recordings go, Labradford's 1st two records sounded more like clouds of relatively formless noise and sound, and you got progressively more and more "song" oriented. The songs on the self titled album are fairly simple, almost dirges at points, and on Mi Media Naranja they had kind of an orchestrated, soundtrack feel, reminding me of both the desert and Ennio Morricone at times. The new album though, seems like both a step back and forward in the sense that it still has some of the same atmosphere as Mi Media, but the structures seem to have more in common with the self titled one in their simplicity. How do you see the evolution of your sound? Was the Pan American album the bridge between the last few albums, in that it's more obviously sampler based, or is that just me?

MN: I think that's just coincidence, or a function of us sort of all being interested in the same things. Not something more obvious, like the rythm-driven aspects of it, which is something I don't think we ever really do. I think it's always been our goal to keep it as abstract as it could be but to still have a center. Not really a focus to it, but..

SG12: So there's no great design.

MN: No, it's just the process of developing, you know?

RD: And I guess it changes as our interests change. A lot of it has to do with us trying to force ourselves to use different kinds of equipment.

SG12: I see you had a mini disc player and was that a DAT, as well as a sampler going?

RD: A couple samplers. Yeah, we don't use a DAT at all. It's just as we continued to do it we had a pretty strong desire not to repeat ourselves too much. Even while trying to maintain the same sort of spirit. We didn't want to do the Stable Reference record twice, or something like that.

MN: Yeah, it just evolves as our tastes change. I mean, I used to love having a lot of guitar pedals and that kind of thing, and I've just slowly taken everything out of it, just to do something different.

RD: Yeah, if Labradford had recorded an album the first six months they were a band, it would've been an amazingly noisy record. But the band developed, slowed down, and changed so that by the time they actually did Prazision they weren't doing that stuff anymore. Before I was in the band, I used to go see them and it was almost Merzbow-y at times.

SG12: Really? Wow. That's kind of neat to think about. What other music that you hear influences you? You're into making minimal music, so do you only listen to minimal music?

RD: I really liked a lot of that stuff that came out on Chain Reaction in the last couple years, Porter Ricks' stuff. Monolake, uum.. Pole. Pole's not on Chain Reaction, but his stuff is cool. Just really minimal, minimal techno, but having just a lot of space and lush kind of sounds. Still all done very simplistically, and structured very nicely. That stuff doesn't give me the desire to drop a techno beat on a Labradford album, but it's really kind of inspiring in a way, because I just never heard techno like that before.

SG12: Right, but you have started to put more in the way of surface noises and digital clicks and such into your music.

RD: Yeah, we just kind of got interested in that recently. Making sounds on the computer...

SG12: What do you guys think about your contemporaries in the "post-rock" genre? Godspeed, obviously you must feel camaraderie with, but even the last Mogwai album was kind of Godspeed-ish.

MN: I haven't heard that.

RD: Yeah, I don't know that I ever heard that...

SG12: It's similar in a more guitar based, band shaped kind of way.

RD: I know that I've heard many people say that we sort of share something in common with Mogwai, but I don't know why, I've just never really listened to it.

SG12: Well, I wouldn't say you guys really share too much with them, but to me it's more like while listening to the newest Mogwai recording I was really reminded of Godspeed You Black Emperor!, who remind me of Labradford.

RD: I guess it's just like anything, some of it I like a lot, some of it, haven't heard. [pointing back to the Mermaid where we can hear Godspeed thundering through the walls] I was really blown away by their first record. I thought it was fantastic.

SG12: That was the vinyl or the cd version?

RD: I got the vinyl. I've heard the cd, which is a little bit longer, but I thought the vinyl was more concise.

MN: I like the vinyl better. It's more to my taste.

RD: I'm a big Low fan. I think they're a fantastic band. I don't know if they really fall in that category or not.

MN: What Godspeed has inspired me to think about, we've been in this phase, on this path of taking things away, and that's been what we've thought about, talked about. They suggest though, what the power of more can be, too.

RD: Yeah, they do a kind of thing that just eludes us completely. It gets so epic, it can be really really powerful, and that's something that never even crossed our minds to try and do.

SG12: They are in that way kind of the opposite of your mode, but in the same way, it seems like they may pile stuff on, but it never seems like they are just throwing something on, and it's just as well placed as what you guys may do.

MN: It's definitely composed. They don't ever make that mistake of falling into an abandonment, it's always contained within the sort of structure that they've somehow managed to make real. It's kind of a feat that they do it.

SG12: Do you guys ever feel the need to play in front of people and improvise? The way you're doing things now, with all the sequencing, etc. doesn't seem to lend itself to that.

MN: It doesn't really lend itself to doing anything live for the most part at all. Which is kind of a problem. There are situations where it works.

RD: In the most ideal circumstances, it works, and a lot of times... Like tonight, we left the stage kind of dissatisfied, just 'cause there were a lot of sounds that we just knew that were missing.

SG12: Was there a technology problem?

RD: It was kind of the room.

MN: The PA barely exists. We've sort of backed ourselves into a corner in some respects, because we're very dependent on being able to hear things, and hear each other. There's very little stage noise at all, there's just two amps, both of which are usually pretty quiet. Everything else is going direct into the monitors, and if that aspect is absent, as it was largely absent tonight, then it makes it sort of impossible to do what we do.

SG12: Is that why you played such a short set, or do you routinely have short sets?

RD: We generally play a shorter set. For me, it's personally just to my taste. When I go to see a band, even the greatest bands I've seen, can make me tired. [laughter] And I always feel like the first 45 minutes of it, they have my full attention, and then I start to lose it, and maybe I'm more likely to wander off and go get a beer, or go talk to someone, or maybe go home and give up on it. I think it's a lot to ask of people to expect them to stand there for an hour-hour and a half, and give their full attention. I think hopefully, for the most part we can do what we want to do and say what we want to say in like 40 minutes, or even half an hour.

MN: the only downside to that, or a downside to that is if things are sort of developing in the mix, and there hasn't been a proper soundcheck or whatever, by the time it starts to come together, we're done. So that's kind of been a frustrating thing at times, too. But I think we're kind of stuck on the idea of trying to keep it as concise as possible and having it flow in ways, and that's something else that was missing tonight too, where the music doesn't really stop, it's just a continual 45 minutes, and then all right, you're free to go.

RD: Playing live, I think is just strange, and kind of alienating for us. We do it enough that we must like something about it to some degree, but it always sort of leaves us scratching our heads about what we're doing.

SG12: Isn't that a good thing, to question what you do every once in a while?

RD: Maybe. Maybe it is, I think that if we play a hundred shows we might think ten of them were good and the rest were crap. Maybe it's good not to think that you're brilliant every night.

SG12: You have questions about playing live, so how does that reflect in your recording? It seems like you record fairly often. You pretty much put out an album a year I guess, but for some reason, it seemed like E Luxo So was hot on the heels of Mi Media Naranja.

MN: I guess that's what we like about it, what we like about playing music in some ways. Again, my opinion about that has changed a little since seeing Godspeed. There's something very powerful about a band that's really good live. And maybe that's something we can shoot for in the future, but for the most part the records are more interested in, and the records are why we do it. Live often turns out to be a compromise..

RD: I think it's the most fun we have, the most satisfying. Just getting to go in the studio, get all of our stuff together and work with our friend John, who's engineered for the last three records. He sort of-

MN: Why does it say Future Neighbors on the top of that paper? [laughter]

SG12: Well.. I was actually-

RD: You wanna go ahead and ask the John question? [laughter]

SG12: I wanted to ask about your engineer, John Morand. I don't know anything about Future Neighbors, but I know he was in a band called Future Neighbors. I was wondering how you guys hooked up, I guess you're from the same area, and how much influence has he had on your sound? Is he like the Conny Plank to your Cluster?

RD: It's turning into that. John has been an engineer in Richmond for a long long time, and for a number of years, if a band made a record before they became real popular, he more than likely had his hand in it. So, he kind of learned his skills doing Richmond punk rock bands and stuff like that. Now he is partners in a studio with David Lowry from Cracker, called Sound Of Music in Richmond. We had known John for a long time and we just kind of thought we'd give it a shot and it was a total experiment the first time, because like I said, he's done a lot of punk bands, and pop bands and stuff, but not really anything like what we were doing at the time. It was more that we were friends with him and we were comfortable with him. The more we do it, it seems like the more we all kind of enjoy it. I think John looks forward to recording our records because he can experiment as much as we can. With us, I guess as much as he can, he becomes a member of the band for that period of time.

MN: And he seems to have a lot of energy for it.

RD: Yeah, and I think his tastes, for what we're doing are really appropriate.

SG12: So over time he's come to see things more your way, or-

MN: He's very open. He was never really baffled by what we do.

RD: I think he just has fun. He's not afraid to try new things. Ask him to mic the sink, he's like "yeah that'll be fine" and he'll set up five different microphones to get a stereo field on the sink.

MN: Since he's part owner of the studio, he's bought things specifically for the studio that we wanted to use in our recordings .

SG12: You were talking about mic-ing the sink. Do you listen to people like Ryoji Ikeda where they are actually recording the hum of the floor or whatever?

RD: [pointing to Carter, who has just joined the group] There's a fan right there.

MN: Well, I'd say that I like that stuff, or that idea, but for me and I think for Labradford in general, I think that we're into those sounds in the context of a song. I'd say Carter has the most interest in the more esoteric side of that stuff.

SG12: Why have your song titles seemed to be of less and less importance over the course of your albums? The latest one has the track index mixed in with the technical credits, as if to imply that there are no real titles. When you see people's playlists on the internet, they'll list the title as "Recorded by John Morand" or whatever, and I have to wonder if you guys have personal titles for them.

RD: It's kind of a joke. There's a joke to it, really. The answer is that the song titles are the last thing we think about when we're actually making a record, and we get to the point where we're like, " Okay, what're we going to call it?" It seems sort of silly to assign a title to it when it actually exists in our minds without one. We might have some silly name for it, so we know how to reference it, but not necessarily something you'd want to put on a record. I guess in a way, doing it like this on this record was to try to take some of the philosophy from the album. There would be no real significance to assigning a title to it. They stand on their own.

MN: The idea here is to integrate it into the packaging. It's not just a separate list, a table of contents or something.

SG12: There are six songs. Guess what they're called.

MN: Yeah.

SG12: On the other hand, it seems like the titles of your albums have played a pretty important role. They usually seem to suggest something important to the music. A Stable Reference to me, in particular has a quality that seems to reinforce the cohesion of the songs on the album above even what just the songs do on their own.

MN: Well, that's something to think about. I mean that's the other side of having song titles. It also goes back to the effect we're going for. We're a little bit wary of trying to point people in specific directions.

SG12: Right. Is that reflected in titling your albums now in foreign languages? Is E Luxo So Tagalog?

Carter Brown: It's Portuguese. Tagalog's a good choice.

RD: Maybe in a way. Maybe it's subconscious.

MN: It's also sort of a look and a sound. It's like Autechre has that thing where they've almost invented a language. It's the effect of the letters together or the sound..

We called it a night shortly after this, and I realized I had missed a good 30-45 minutes of Godspeed You Black Emperor!, who I had never seen before. I was worried I had missed the whole show, but luckily for me, they don't subscribe to all of Labradford's ideas about brevity. I still managed to catch almost thirty minutes of their epic show. -Z

Thanks to www.brainwashed.com for the pictures.