William Sol - Prana Crafter Interview
Are you originally from Seattle, WA? What was your childhood like growing up? When did you first begin to fall in love with music, more specifically the guitar? Was this something that was relevant growing up in your household?
I grew up in a small town called Longview, Washington on the border of Washington and Oregon about 40 minutes from Portland. I spent a lot of time skateboarding, hiking around in the woods, riding my bike, that classic 1980s-90s growing up scenario, lots of renting video games and eating fast food and eventually, a lot of listening to music, pretty eclectic. I think my cassette collection was a lot of NOFX and Bad Religion, Misfits, but also like Stevie Ray Vaughn, Tom Waits, and I had a lot of what would be considered grunge cds. I also had a friend from the ages of like 15-18 who had a ton of love dead tapes, and then when I was younger I had my dads records. He had a big collection when I was young, lots of old country, all the classic rock albums, acoustic folk stuff too. That’s how I got into music initially, my dad was a bluegrass guitar player and had a run at a career doing it for a few years when I was really young. His band (Silver Mountain Railroad) put out a record on a Vancouver record outfit back in the 70s, covered “Friend of the Devil” on it, so I was around some of the music I still enjoy right from infancy. My first guitar was a rented electric guitar that I used to learn Nirvana songs. I was massively into Nirvana as a kid and young teen, Bleach, Unplugged, bootlegs, the whole gamut. Eventually when it was clear I was going to stick with the guitar, I got a little Mexican made Telecaster and not too soon after I started playing a lot of punk, but just on my own. Then one night I was skateboarding at a bank drive thru and the police came, so we took off down the road and a van pulled up and it was a friend of one of the guys I was with, and it turned out it was the guy and his best friend who was a drummer and they were going to one of their houses to play some music, so we went with them and I played a NOFX song for them and sang it, and they asked me to be in their band, so I did that for most of my teenage years.
What would you and your friends do for fun growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years? When and where did you see your very first concert? When did you realize you wanted to spend your time pursuing music and art?
Even before I started playing guitar though, I was always messing Arbus with little cheap radio shack keyboards, making little loops like those let you do, in a very limited way of course, but it got me into the practice of improvising with sound from a very early age. I would also play guitar with my dad, out on his back porch usually, sometimes he would do mandolin, sometimes friends of mine would come over and we’d have like 3-4 guitars going. I think my first ‘big’ concert was Van Morrison and around the same time I saw Ravi Shankar in Portland, this was back in the early 90s. But before that I guess I had gone to bluegrass festivals as a kid, and then in the later 90s I went to a lot of punk shows and then towards the end of the 90s I started seeing some More psychedelic stuff like Phish at the Gorge in 1999, which was a special time for them, and I saw Phil and friends there and Roger Waters there that year, which was an insane show with his theatrics at such a dramatic venue. I remember seeing Allman Brothers in 2000 pretty soon after Trucks had joined, those are what come to mind for shows that stick out.
When and where did you play your very first gig and what was that experience like for you? Did you participate in any groups, or projects prior to PC? What initially led to the project forming and what initially inspired you to start the PC?
My first gigs were with that skater punk band, played house parties and actually played at some bars in town, but had to leave and enter through the alley cause we were like 16-17. I never formed another band after moving to college and so PC started because I wanted to still make music and didn’t have anyone to do it with, so I just started a solo thing, because I have enjoyed multitrack recording since I got my first tascam 4-track in their 90s, so PC was mainly a recording project and I didn’t play any shows until after MindStreamBlessing had come out, so like my 3rd album, and then Elkhorn asked me to play with them in Portland and because I loved their music, I said yes, this was I think when the black river was coming out for them, that’s why they were out west, Debacle Records is in Seattle.
The band released its debut in ‘14. Can you tell me about writing and recording that album and how did the deal with Reverb Worship! come about? What was the overall vision for this record?
Back in around 2013 I started putting some music on SoundCloud and Roger from Reverb Worship reached out and asked if I wanted to release something with him. I listened to some of the material he’d been releasing and saw some familiar names on his ‘roster’ like Kawabata Makoto and Plankton Wat, so I said yes. And for material, I just curated a collection of recorded material I had made because at that point I was in the odd position of recording quite a bit, but not releasing it, other than putting some onto SoundCloud. That album was reviewed by a blog that’s sadly no more called ‘The Active Listener’ and from there a few DJs started playing tracks and that turned into getting to do the next album, “Rupture Of Planes, with a label out of Pennsylvania called Deep Water Acres.
That following year you released your follow up “Rupture Of Planes”. How did you want to approach this material and what was the overall vision? Would you mind walking me through songs such as “Treasure In A Ruin”, “Vessel”, “Birth Of Blooming Thunder” and “Prana Crater’s Abode”?
For that album I formally recorded several songs I had had floating around in my head for many years, so it was to some extent still drawing from material I had come up with prior to releasing any music formally. So I recorded some of those tracks at a local studio with a drummer i was introduced to through the studio, and then I played the acoustic and electric and bass parts. Those other tracks you mentioned were all recorded at home, all are examples of the approach where you capture an improvisational moment that is special and then build a track around that. Or maybe start with a drone and improvise over it until you get something magical, even just for a moment, and you build on that, careful to not drown it out or lose its under the layers you add. Treasure in a ruin was mainly a meditative drone piece but the guitar just sounded so pleasing to me that it ended up playing a more central role. “Birth Of Blooming Thunder” relied heavily on the rhythm of the vibrato channel on my fender deluxe reverb, letting that pulsating hum set the pace. Now that I think about it, “Prana Crafters Abode” was also recorded using heady vibrato, the warm tubes through that channel is what give it those ethereal ringing tones. Several of the tracks from those first two albums were on one level recorded documents of guitar/amp appreciation, I had just gotten my first good tube amp and this pedal called the zen drive (back around 2012-2013 when the maker was doing all the electronics himself) and was in love with how my guitar sounded through that combo.
The band would go on to release a number of albums the following years before the pandemic. Can you tell me about thes albums and how much your work has changed over the years ?
After Rupture of Planes I started to get a decent amount of radio play, which led to being able to do an album for Eiderdown Records, which is run by Adam up in Seattle, who ended up becoming a friend (and even musical brother, we once played the Olympia Experimental Music Fest on a trio together, and with an experimental musician named Andy Craze, or Idol Eyes, out of Portland. After that I did an album with Beyond Beyond Is Beyond Records called “Bodhi Cheetah’s Choice”, which got a lot of love and led to the opportunity to do another album with them, a split called “Symbiose” that I did with a wonderful musician and good friend PJ, aka Tarotplane. My half of that LP is a track called ‘Jagged Mountain Melts At Dawn’ that is really special to me, kind of a peak experience in terms of having the tape rolling at the right moment and catching a single take of something you could just never replicate; in this case it involved an analogue delay pedal, and a looping pedal (was also a pitch dark room at about 2 am illuminated only by the amp tubes and pedal lights) the whole 20 plus minute thing just unfolded in front of my eyes and ears, it was magical. It’s also a high point for me because the late great Andrew Weatherall played the entire sprawling thing on one of his last radio shows as part of this transcendent mix that included Terry Riley and Don Cherry, which is a favorite of mine. Another really special album to me was enter the stream, that I did with Sunrise Ocean Bender, run by a dearly departed brother named Kevin McFadin who passed this year.
That album I put a lot into, the songs as well as the arrangement, tried to make it all organically flow together like an old Pink Floyd record but more of an acid folk flavor. Then I did another split with a friend named Joel Berk, who goes by Ragenap, and right after, or before that(?) I did an experimental tape called Third Ear Incantations with Null Zone, exploring some heavier sounds as well as experimenting with organ layering, and then the last like full album I did was with Feeding Tube and Cardinal Fuzz, and it was called “Morphomystic”, and it’s I guess what would be called new kosmiche music, or maybe American kosmiche, if that’s a thing… def heavily inspired by Manuel Göttsching (RIP) and AR and mMachines; I’m also a super fan of Agitation Free, so probably some of that influence in their as well. Although it wasn’t a full album, after covid I did do a split 7” with Zachary Cale, where we both covered songs by the British greats “Help Yourself” It was a fun project, Phil from the Terrascopaepedia asked me if I would be interested in covering a song of theirs for a tribute 7” and let me find the other musician, and my first pick was Zachary due to his excellent modern folk sensibilities and style, and I think that turned out really great, but it’s super limited because it was only given out with copies of the handmade zine that Phil makes on an antique printing press.
What have you been up to more recently? Anything in the works for this summer? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
Right before Covid there was quite a bit going on for me musically, I had just come back from playing Le Guess Who festival in the Netherlands and, before that doing a few shows with wooden shjips. So on the heals of that, I had several festival things and fun shows lined up (a progressive music fest in Seattle, a psyche fest in Canada, a show with Garcia Peoples from NY, etc) and then Covid hit and it was all just crazy in terms of being a musician and thinking you were gonna be able to keep doing things the way we had been. I also have 6 kids and my mother in law lives with us, so I was not the kind of person who could take a bunch of covid exposure risks out at bars and crowded festivals, so I just really put on the brakes in terms of anything live and, in a way, that seemed to also push me into a bit of a hiatus to making (or even really playing) music for almost a year. I was invited to play a handful of shows when covid first settled down but I just wasn’t ready or things were not workable with my schedule, so I still haven’t gotten back out there, yet.
Although I wasn’t working on music, I have been in a sense working in the realm of music though, because I’m a professor of integral and transpersonal psychology, so even when I’m not making music, I’m writing about it, reading about it, and teaching about some of the therapeutic and mystical qualities of music. I published a qualitative research study a few months ago in the Journal of New Music Research that involved a lot of really great musicians, some of which I’ve seen you cover here. For the project, the musicians would freely improvise for a few minutes and then we talked about their state of consciousness, etc., and I did a formal qualitative analysis on the transcribed interviews, it was really fascinating; I’m still digesting some of the insights, even though its been quite a while. In addition to producing some great qualitative data that helped me get my doctorate (and turned into a published article), it also gave me a chance to talk to a lot of inspiring musicians, and listen to them play, which was a bonus for sure and makes me want to do another project like this where I work with whole bands to better understand their collective decision making, non-verbal communication, and how state of consciousness factors into a group musical context.
