atroopofechoes:

Today, we’re debuting a series of interviews with artists and musicians we enjoy and respect. In these “double interviews,” bands ask each other a series of three questions. No agendas, no awkward plugs, no corporate bullshit. No “HOW DID YOU CHOOSE YOUR BAND NAME” or other garbage.

To kick things off, we sat down with Justin H Brierley, a multi-talented experimental musician, filmmaker, and radio host.

JHB@WRIU

A Troop of Echoes: You’ve been involved in radio production at several levels for many years, most recently as the host of “Music for Internets,” an awesome avant-classical program on 90.3 WRIU. Has this given you any interesting insights into the process of creating music, as someone who is both a DJ and a musician? How has your experience in the radio world shaped your music?

Justin H Brierley: DJ-ing Music for Internets turned me onto a ton of new ideas as a listener, which indirectly affected the music I create. My goal with that show was to constantly find new music, so it really challenged my sense of what was possible. Exposure to different music helps us grow as musicians and should be a part of everybody’s practice. On a practical note, my time at WRIU gave me the opportunity to hone my skills as an engineer, which has helped me to create better recordings. Being around the Indie-Classical world has also given me new goals for my music, and has ultimately played a part in my seeking composition lessons. Perhaps someday I’ll write a Concerto for Troop of Echoes and Electronics [editor’s note: yes please!].

Annie Legace and Emily Johnston laying down strings for The Longest Year on Record.

Justin H Brierley: Several songs on The Longest Year On Record (Pure Alexia, Kerosene, …) are moving towards more of a Chamber Rock sound, partially because they incorporate addition instrumentation (strings, horns, vibes) and partially because they sound more “written” in a classical sense. Does this represent a new direction for the band, or was it more about experimenting with the resources on hand?

Peter Gilli (A Troop of Echoes): Great question! This is the kind of in-depth investigation we expect from Justin H Brierley.

To answer your question:

It all started with Severna. In 2011 we had finished with our first record (Days in Automation) and when we started writing new material, we found that repeating ourselves with the good ol’ warehouse-party-turned-noise-rock-jazz-freakout thing was going nowhere fast. We were done with it. Totally done. Also complicating things was the fact that I had recently had a vocal injury, and around the same week Dan broke his leg or some shit too. It was a bad time. Suffice it to say, we couldn’t keep up with the super-physical playing we used to rely on. So we slowed everything way down, and “Severna” came out of that. And it sounded way better. Then we started really getting into writing the record, and we found out that if we were careful to balance out the parts, we could fit in a string section, or backing horns, or whatever, and it all hung together and sounded really good. So, we weren’t trying to be “classical” in the sense of trying to sound like Mozart, but we did get interested in trying to do as much emotionally as we could with as few notes as possible. We also were just having fun getting new sounds, and not restricting every song to sax-guitar-bass-drums. Then that aesthetic ended up taking over the whole album. Towards the end, when we knew there were going to be a lot of extra players involved, we did look at some modern concert music stuff to see how people like Nico Muhly handle strings in a rock band.

“Kerosene” came from this spooky little foundational jam Dan recorded by himself one night, where he played vibes and tracked a bass with all the …bass…cut out of it, so it sounded like a guitar played through a radio. We liked it and thought it might give the album some breathing room and help balance out the heavy “written” classical stuff you mentioned. So the band fleshed it out and Nick wrote these cool overlapping string / horn parts and that was it. We probably won’t be doing albums in the future that rely really really heavily on additional instrumentation, since we need to play it live. But it’s always fun to add to the mix.

“Pure Alexia” was an idea that failed about 80,000 times before it finally worked out. It started out as a kind of embryonic saxophone / piano miniature, and I brought it in to the band to see if we could do anything with it. That failed. So I put it away and came back to work on it for about three months in Toronto. That sucked too. The rest of the album was completely done at that point and we were running out of time to record it, so one day I got fed up with the micro-tweaking and just threw in 7 additional woodwind parts all on top of each other, and suddenly it worked. You never know.

JHB@AS220, Providence, RI

A Troop of Echoes: A number of your songs involve pretty rich layering of many electronic instruments, acoustic instruments, and noise. Logistically, this seems straightforward to record one-track-at-a-time, but a nightmare to recreate in a live setting. I’ve always been impressed by your dedication to live performance, and how you’re able to turn these mostly electronic, somewhat pre-recorded pieces into hulking, raw cyborgs. How do you approach these performances? How do you balance live playing vs. pre-recorded aspects? And what is your strategy for bringing these monsters to life?

Justin H Brierley: The question of how to play this music live is central to what I do. Some recordings are approached as studio-only works. For example, last year’s Banter Solo Trio album was studio only. Those pieces are built by layering several improvisations on top of one another. In the past I have played along with pre-recorded backing tracks, but that approach doesn’t really interest me at this point. I’m currently working on a couple of new live projects that will employ various approaches aimed at being close to, if not 100% live, including looping, live pattern triggering, generative works, and perhaps a few other ideas. I’ve also been looking into ways in which a single set of live performance data (i.e. a line played on a MIDI keyboard or on the xylophone) would trigger multiple sounds, layers, or patterns in order to create a big a sound as possible without using backing tracks.

The first-ever A Troop of Echoes performance, NKHS Talent Show, circa April 2005

Justin H Brierley: Throughout your ten years together as a band you’ve written a great number of songs that you no longer play live. While it certainly makes sense to feature newer songs, especially when set times are often limited, you’ve also never revisited older material once it’s been abandoned. Why have you never reworked older material to give it new life?

Harrison Hartley (A Troop of Echoes): Some of it is pragmatic. A lot of the earlier songs featured instruments we don’t play much anymore, for whatever reason. For instance, older songs like New Breath, Little Bird, and Ascenders were based around parts played on a ‘70s Moog synthesizer. It was great, when it worked. After a few tours and thousands of miles riding in a trailer with poor suspension, it became unreliable and unstable. On other songs (Golden Gears, etc.), Pete played a soprano sax. After taking up the tenor sax, the soprano fell a bit into disuse. By the time we got into writing songs for The Longest Year on Record, we basically made the executive decision not to bring these instruments out on the road, which took several songs off the table for our live sets.

Another facet is that we always try and write things that feel fresh and exciting, at least to us. There have been a number of songs (some have been released, some never made it out of the rehearsal room) that we’ve been excited about as a group, only to play them for a few shows and realize that we didn’t achieve what we wanted. So often songs like that get left in the dust, while we concentrate on writing better stuff from scratch. We’re not completely disowning the old material, with a few notable exceptions (ask us about ‘em some other time). We’re just a lot more excited about new stuff, and we always feel like we’re learning and improving with every song we write.

JHB and HH ‘bout to drop the hottest mixtape of 1394.

A Troop of Echoes: So: you’ve spent your career writing these scattershot avant-electronic pieces. And then in 2014 you go and write a “pop record” full of club-ready hits, 60’s garage rock, and some weird disco-themed marriage between Prince and Stevie Wonder. Where did all this shit come from, and why is it so damn good?

Justin H Brierley: For starters, at least half of the credit for the Pop Record goes to Troop’s own Harrison Hartley. Part of the magic in our ongoing collaboration is that we egg each other on. We’ll simply decide to do something, and then actually do it, which is how that album came into being. We had talked about making a pop record for years, in large part because we both love a wide variety of music including a lot of pop music, and in late 2013 while discussing projects that we wanted to work on we decided it was time to make the Pop Record. It was created in response to the RPM (Recording Project Month) Challenge and was therefore (mostly) written and entirely recorded in the month of February. That sort of pressure cooker environment forced us to work hard and fast, often employing a “first thought best thought” mentality. A huge amount of credit also goes to the many talented local musicians who played along with our lunatic idea including Dan & Nick (a Troop of Echoes), Dean (Public Policy), Ed & Jess (the Strattones), and Jon (a Post Modern John). As far as why it’s “so damn good?” I could either be modest and say that we got lucky or I could be pompous and say that we’re geniuses. The answer is probably somewhere close to both of those extremes.

For more band-on-band action, click here.