The Modern Folk Interview
My friends and I started our first band sophomore year of high school, playing Ramones songs in a room above one of our parent's garage. About a year later, we drove from Harrisonburg, VA to Norfolk, VA to take my boarding school classmate Rob up on his offer of an old Tascam Portastudio and some weed. This road trip ended up having a number of terrifying detours, both geographic and psychedelic - we made it back to the garage with the Portastudio, but not the weed. I recorded our demo and when I mixed it down and held the cassette in my hand, I knew that this was something I was going to keep doing for the rest of my life. We had created a piece of my favorite type of art, and the feeling of that power was addictive. As my friends and I grew up and kept playing music together in various styles and configurations, my love of this practice deepened while the gaps between our other responsibilities became increasingly shallow. Every time we managed to track another recording, the result was something I cherished.
While I'm not sure any of us ever labored under the illusion that making music would be a career, I was saddled with the fact that for me it was a compulsion - but the demands of life were making it harder and harder to accomplish as a traditional band. It started to become a solo endeavor. I set up my microphones, laptop and tape machines in the corner of whatever rented room, apartment or hotel I happened to be living in. If the walls were thin, I plucked and whispered, if I had the chance, I turned up, screamed and banged together whatever loud things I could find. Around this time, the music publishing website Bandcamp appeared, which gave me a place to put these things I had been making so that others, however few, might see them. Without the collective identity provided by a band, though, I wasn't sure what all this music was.
-From Moss’s site
Are you originally from Portland, OR? What was your childhood like? When did you first begin to fall in love with music? Were these things that were relevant around your household growing up? Do you have any siblings?
I have lived in Portland for the past 12 years, but I was born in West Virginia and I grew up near Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. My childhood was mostly idyllic, I was blessed with a stable family and a neighborhood where we could roam around until the streetlights came on - nothing much I could complain about, beyond the standard tribulations of a moderately privileged kid. I fell in love with music at an early age, as a listener at least. My dad played a lot of Bob Dylan, which was the first music I latched on to. I ended up trying to learn every song on his first record when I started taking guitar seriously. I also remember hearing Bob Marley's greatest hits compilation Legend and Tracy Chapman's self titled album all the time as a small kid. I was immediately fascinated with songs and the stories they contained - I think the first aspect of music to grab me was the words - I found lyrics intriguing and I always wanted to know what they meant. I always think of Dylan's "The Man In The Long Black Coat", from his '89 LP Oh Mercy, as the first song I ever knew I loved. It contains an extremely cryptic story. I have a younger brother, three years younger than me. We were close growing up and still are. He is an artist too - we used to play music together sometimes, but now he mostly paints - he is a great painter, he fills his house up with beautiful canvases. We live on opposite sides of the country and don't hang out as much as we would like to, but I hope to use one of his paintings as an album cover in the near future.
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 life pursuing music
Growing up my friends and I did the stuff I imagine most suburban kids do - exploring the back alleys and wooded parts of our neighborhood, attempting to skateboard, bike, rollerblade, etc - playing card games and video games and messing around. This eventually transformed into a more mature version of hanging out - driving around aimlessly, trying to get our hands on weed and beer, hiding in one or the other of our parent's garages to consume it, and of course jamming tunes. This is around when I really started playing. We formed a punk band, doing some originals and a bunch of Ramones covers in the garage, I played bass in this band. I had been listening to classic rock and the big 90's alt bands - Dylan, The Dead, Zeppelin, Nirvana, Weezer, NIN, along with whatever else was big on MTV and VH1, I was a music video junkie - and when I discovered Sex Pistols, The Clash and the music of the original CBGB's scene, it made sense as a reactionary mirror image of the music that topped the charts. Still pop in its essence but reaching for more. The old idea that you had to stick to certain genres of music as a fan (punks versus hippies versus metal heads, and so on) was kind of dissolving as I came of age, so I listened to whatever gripped me, regardless of that kind of cultural baggage (but maybe with a bit of youthful snobbiness) - although I will admit there was a time when my punk-leaning friends talked me out of the Grateful Dead - thankfully that did not last! We eventually got a hold of a Tascam cassette 4-track and I produced our demo. The recording process was addictive, and that's when I knew it would be a lifelong pursuit. To me recording felt like magic, or more specifically alchemy - making something out of thin air. That's a feeling you keep chasing! My first concert was either John Hartford in a high school theater or Hootie and The Blowfish at Hampton Coliseum - I'm not sure, they could've been the same year. Both involved drunkenness, but not on my part. John Hartford showed up so drunk he could barely play, and at the Hootie show some guy sitting in the row above us threw up his beer all over the seats next to us. I have to thank my dad for taking me to both of those shows!
You're a prolific artist having released dozens of albums via bandcamp. What have been some of your most favorite projects to create and why? Walk me through your particular approach and process to writing and recording music. What elements are most important when exploring and expressing yourself?
I think I enjoyed creating all my albums equally - I just love making music. I feel like I am compelled to do it. I have various approaches to the process - I tend to let outside forces guide me, such as what gear I have available or who is available to collaborate with. A lot of times I just get with a band, we improvise and record everything and I'll whittle down an album out of that. I have a band here in Portland (The Modern Folk Trio Band) and we have been doing this sort of thing in one line-up or another for the past 5-6 years. One of us might have a song written, but we will only take a few takes to learn it, and that will be the recorded version, and it will go in among lengthy instrumental improvisations. I will also sometimes reduce my palette of equipment down to just a few items and make something by myself. I find that setting up new limitations to work within is inspiring... like, what if I just use a classical guitar and the DAW? Or only synths and a Tascam, or electric guitars, but no amps, going direct. Variations like that help me develop ideas and techniques. With the above approaches, I generally finish a project in a matter of weeks. I also value the process of meticulously building an album layer by layer, using every sound and tool I have, with long distance collaborations, sharing files across the country or world, and collecting field recordings by season. Some of my albums, like Modern Folk One, were years in the making. I think it is good to both try my patience and to give myself instant gratification with these different recording processes. At times I will have them going simultaneously. Testing out new modes of expression keeps things interesting and helps me adapt to the demands of life. I have a normal job and a family, so I have to be flexible to keep my musical practice vital - coming in with too many rigid, preconceived ideas about how to create will lead to doing nothing when you are short on time and space. I will try anything, but after all these years I have never been able to record in an actual studio with an engineer. I would love to do that someday!
Let’s talk about your most recent record entitled “Modern Folk One”. What was the overall vision and approach for this album? How did the deal with Warhen/Ten come about? Would you mind walking me through some of the songs that are featured on the album and a little back history to them?
Modern Folk One was inspired by the fact that my life was changing - I was welcoming a child to the world and my dog was about to die. The album is dedicated to the two of them, and you can hear my daughter's fetal heartbeat and my dog's barks on it - which is something I feel blessed to have had the chance to do - so many thanks to Warren from WarHen records for putting those sounds on vinyl. So the album is about life's rhythms - the grand, slow beat of life and death down to the piercing drone of a cicada. I used many approaches to make it. I collected field recordings and recordings of jam sessions over a period of months and started to work with those - the two longer tracks, "Alma" and "Almasti" are mostly built out of those. I used a Tascam cassette machine to manipulate these recordings, reversing them, slowing them down, speeding them up, etc. I take a lot of inspiration from DJ Screw in that sense. I also recorded some acoustic guitar improvisations to center the sound collages on and solicited some banjo and fiddle tracks from friends back in Virginia. The two shorter tracks were recorded more traditionally, I played some guitar and bass to a drum machine and then another friend overdubbed drums. I wanted to bring rock'n'roll to the middle of this otherwise somewhat ambient album. All these songs are supposed to loosely represent what it feels like to be a part of the universe - experiencing everything, the lows and highs, life and death and realizing it is all part of a whole.
I think that's what most of my albums try to reach for - replicating the feeling of living life, which happens in seconds and years, moments of despair and moments of adulation, and all the things in between. Sometimes I try to do that literally, like with field recordings of birds, neighborhood sounds, weather, and the cicadas who have such a fast song but a slow rhythm, only popping up once every 17 years. The timing of the album coincided with the cicadas, and I got folks from around the country to send me recordings of them. Other times, I try to represent the experience of life in the sense more traditional to music - by trying to get a vibe across through rhythm and melody. Warren of WarHen Records put out music by a bunch of my friends and acquaintances, and we know a lot of the same folks from the Virginia music scene, so it was natural to ask him to put out some of my stuff. He put out my first LP, Primitive Future 2, about a year prior to Modern Folk One. I love what he does with his label - it's genre agnostic, you can hear everything from gospel to punk to experimental synths on WarHen, which matches my style of both making and listening to music. Wonderful DIY ethos too, and very artist-centric. Great guy, great label.
What else have you got planned this summer? Is there anything else you would like to further
share with the readers?
If all goes according to plan, I have a bunch of music on the way in various formats. We have a CD due out in August on a Portland label called Bud Tapes as the full band, and I have two more synth centered albums coming out later in the fall under the name Modern Folk Electronic Ensemble, one on tape on Horse Complex Records in September and one on CD on Debacle Records, date TBD. I also have another LP in the works with Ramble Records, but I'm not sure if that will be 2023 or 2024. I have been working on a few collaborations with other artists too. There is plenty on the horizon if you are into what I do, and I give the deepest thanks from the bottom of my heart to anyone who is!
https://themodernfolk.stupidwebsite.net/
