Timothy Brown - Lunchbox Interview
Before releasing music under Lunchbox, did you participate in any groups or projects? How did you initially meet Donna McKean, and what was that initial chemistry like between the two of you?
I met Donna at work. We hit it off right away. It was several years before we decided to have a band together. We didn’t know what we were doing at all. Things didn’t get going until we started recording at home in our basement. Before that, we had been focusing on playing live, which is putting the cart before the course, in my opinion. In late 1996, Donna bought me a Teac 3340 4-track reel-to-reel for my birthday. After that, we shifted to a Tascam TSR-8 8-track, which we still record with today. Our first record was recorded on those two decks, which was the 7” we put out on the Japanese label Motorway in 1999. That same year, we put out the “Magic of Sound” LP on Magic Marker in Portland.
Channeling multiple genres, atmospheric attitude, and tonal textures throughout the group’s incredible career, what would you say ultimately inspires you to embrace the process of writing and recording music? I want to jump ahead to the group’s most recent project, the long-awaited reissue of 2002’s acclaimed “Evolver,” which is set for release in mid-April on Slumberland Records.
We were sick of the indie-pop rat race by the end of 2000, a lot of derivative copyism and tired gestures. It was all too cutesy for us—we never fit into that. We gave up playing shows and went inward. “Evolver” was the product of withdrawal from the world. We didn’t want anything, weren’t asking anybody for anything, just following our weird little muse of that moment. In some ways, the record arose from the gear we made it with. Three keyboards were particularly important. We had an Everett home-market console organ with keypads that produced chord progressions we would never have come up with on a guitar or piano. They give the record a jungle feel with those strange intervals. For the re-release, I took that feel to its logical conclusion. I went back to the master tapes to find unused drum loops and weird sonic ephemera and made a side of ambient jungle. It fits with the other material perfectly, as if it was made at the same time. In a way, it was. Another important keyboard was a Mattel Optigan, a kids’ keyboard from the 1970s that used primitive optical sampling technology to reproduce the sounds of guitars, pianos, or whatever. We had a full set of flexi discs with the samples, which you inserted through a slot that was read by a light sensor. You could also put the records upside down, making the samples play backward, which I did a lot. We also had a 1970 Micromoog, and the main use I made of that was to send signals through the External Audio Input and filter the signals in different ways. We used at least five reel-to-reel decks to create tape delay feedback. That sound, and the sound of the Everett organ and the Micromoog, gave “Evolver” its distinctive flavor. There were a lot of other cool, weird, old, half-broken gear we used, too. I won’t go into the whole list, but the main thing is that we were guided in certain ways by the weird capabilities of the technology. Philosophically, we got very interested in Taoism and Buddhism around that time, and the record reflects that. It also reflects the Japanese concept of Wabi Sabi—letting things unfold with all their imperfections. There are plenty of those! But we like to think they are cool imperfections.
What was the overall writing and recording process like for this album, and how did you guys initially approach this material compared to previous works? Tell me a little bit about the background to tracks like “Tone Poem” and “Do You Have Love?” I understand you worked alongside several talented musicians such as Jeremy Goody, Amr Toppozada, and Geoffe Soule. What does this album mean to you after two decades since its initial release? How much have you and the band changed over those years, and what are you most eager and excited about for this new life for the band? Is there anything else you would like to share further with the readers?
“Tone Poem” is a drum loop with those Everett chords over it and bells from the Optigon backward, along with a bunch of tape delay. At one point, I was doing the tape delay with a microphone plugged into it, making delay out of the sounds of the track playing in the room. I know I was doing it on this song because I can hear my stool scrape on the studio floor in the background. “Do You Have Love?” may be my favorite song on the record. It’s all delayed-out Everett over my sloppy Ringo-drumming. It has a nice sonic quality. I dig it when the sirens come in at the end during the jungle outro. Those were the Moog. We were lucky to have all these talented friends willing to play on the record. Jeremy Goody’s horns were indispensable. Stewart Anderson played drums and guitar on “Letter From Overend,” which made the song. We all four played drums on the record (me, Stewart, Geoff Soule, and Mario Hernandez). This record means a lot to us. It’s where we went deepest into uncharted territory. It’s still very poppy, but there is something mysterious going on. Our last three records are very pop, two-minute songs, our version of the AM radio pop we grew up with. It feels good to have this other side of ourselves out there for people to hear. If this were our last record, we’d be satisfied with our accomplishments. On this record, we didn’t strive to be one thing or another—we just tried to realize what was being given to us. It was easy, like surfing a wave. It will never be that easy or magical again. But we’re incredibly fortunate to have Slumberland Records come along to release a 20th-anniversary edition of a record that never came out on vinyl like it was supposed to. It was lost, and now it’s found!
