image//adam cantor words//rob duffy
Robert Schneider, best known for being the front man of The Apples in stereo and producer of several key Elephant 6 albums, is an exceptionally nice dude. So nice, in fact, that after finding that the last 2/3 of my interview had been devoured by audio goblins, he obliged to take even more time out of his schedule to help me resurrect it. The following is a compilation of those two interviews, where we discussed all things Apples, the current state of Elephant 6, and why math is awesome.
The Apples in stereo – Dance Floor
So your newest record, Travellers in Space and Time, was released about a month ago.
I can’t believe it was a month ago. It’s kind of weird [to think about] because when we made the record, we were playing with this whole concept of futurism. We finished mixing on January 1st of this year; it took like three or four months to mix, a lot longer than we had anticipated or scheduled for. The point is that we made the final mixes happen on January 1st of this year. And it’s like, 2010, y’know, it seems like such a futuristic year and I was like, “Yeah, it’s like the record actually made it into the future!” And there was some time after it was finished and then the record finally came out and it was like, “Whoa, now it’s the future, the time when the record actually came out, and that was us in the past!” It was weird.
That’s pretty awesome. One thing I wanted to ask about was the album being released a few days early for Record Store Day. How did that decision come about and why was it important for you guys to make this album available on Record Store Day?
We scheduled our record, partially, around Record Store Day because it’s like, I don’t know, a national music-geek holiday.
Yeah, definitely.
And we put out all of our records on vinyl so it’s just kind of like contributing to the celebration or something like that. [interjects] Although, we didn’t take an extra two to three months mixing it just so that it would come out on Record Store Day. It was supposed to come out earlier. [laughs]
Also on the subject of the new album, the overall impression that I got from it was that it had very similar pop-qualities as New Magnetic Wonder did, but a whole lot dancier. Which I totally didn’t expect and I feel like, for some of these songs, I could walk into a night club or something and hear them playing and they’d fit right in.
[laughs] That’s awesome. That is a cool image. Interesting.
So was there anything in particular that influenced this shift in styles, or do you even agree that it’s dancier?
Y’know, that’s a good point, I wasn’t trying to make it dancier on purpose. Like, as to whether people would dance to it or not, I think it entered my mind several times while we were making the record, but really I was just trying to make it poppy as fuck. I wanted it to be as poppy as like ELO or The Bee Gees or something like that, just poppy as it could possibly be. And part of that was having a sort of “R&B” kind of backbeat. A sturdy backbeat is something that my ears latch onto as really liking, and that’s something The Apples have always kind of used. They’re kind of steady, simple beats as opposed to complicated drum beats. I’ll complicate the rhythm with percussion and stuff, but I like a solid, straightforward kind of drum beat.
But on this record we just kind of went for beats that were chosen by other sort of “white pop” bands such as ELO and The Bee Gees as being poppy, awesome, R&B beats. And they were kind of obvious beats to play given the songs were written on piano and had a sort of chugging feel and I think partially, in the context of the keyboard-orientedness of the record in addition to all the sound effects, we chose these poppy, R&B beats. And we were surprised when we were mixing it, like, “Wow, this is weird, it sounds like disco.” But that’s okay, because I like disco! And especially with “Dance Floor” it was kind of this urge, and I thought it was going to be the last song on the record. And when I recorded it, I wanted it to be a dancey sort of song but more like Silver Apples or something like that. But then at one point I decided that it was really starting to take a turn that reminded me of Kool & The Gang and I was going to really throw it into that direction and I tried to do everything I could to make the backing tracks sound like Kool & The Gang. So it ended up really dancey sounding, but that wasn’t the purpose of it.
Another thing I really like about The Apples in stereo albums is that they all have really awesome openers. I think the one that you guys are probably most known for is “The Narrator” from Fun Trick Noisemaker, and there’s a similar spoken word at the beginning of your newest album.
Oh yeah, I love that, it came off a record from some sort of ’60s scientific conference where they were experimenting with ways to broadcast music by satellite. Jeff Mangum and I found it at a record store in Boulder, Colorado. We were looking through old vinyl and Jeff picked up this record and was like, “What is this?” and put it on the turntable at the listening station and he’s like, “Robert, come here!” He put the headphones on me and I was like “Oh God, can I use this, can I have this, can I buy this, can I use this for our record!?”
But I guess with the opening of [Travellers In Space And Time], I wanted it to feel like a futuristic Fun Trick Noisemaker a little bit. Like a really glossy, slick version of Fun Trick Noisemaker. Kind of colorful, with these cascading sounds and parts and stuff like that, but it’s also kind of the opposite of Fun Trick Noisemaker. Probably, if when I was making Fun Trick Noisemaker and I had a time machine that let me jump forward in time without any of the years in between, and I listened to the record, I’m not even sure what I would think it’s so different.
Where did the the opener from the new album, “The Code,” come from?
Well, ever since I was in college, I’ve always collected sound effects records. I mean, it’s extremely useful as a psychedelic musician and record producer to have a large collection of sound effects records. [laughs] Especially older ones because of the way they’re recorded, since the old studio techniques sound awesome in terms of the production, compared to more modern ones where you’ll get a real clean, kind of movie-quality sound effect. I don’t want that. I want a crackling piece of crap that sounds like it was recorded in 1950 or something.
The intro from the newest record comes from the last tour I was on [for New Magnetic Wonder]. It was called something like “New Radio World” or something. It’s like an instructional record from 1959 to learn how to do Morse code or something. It was the sort of thing I was listening to at the listening station in the record shop and, just as soon as I put the needle down, it was something about “This is how you learn the code.” Oh my God! That’s so futuristic! Oh my God man, the code! Like, what is it? [laughs] But I didn’t want to listen to the rest of the record because I didn’t want to find out what “the code” was. I cut it up a little bit and put some stuff in the background, but you’re basically listening to this record about learning Morse code. And it’s awesome. That guy has the best voice, it’s so great. It’s the sort of thing you’d find just fifty copies of and pick up in a little electronics store or something. It was in a four record set in this box with this plain, almost generic-looking while and black label. But it’s weird to think that this sort of stuff, like these amazing records that people made just kind of fall into obscurity.
As I understand it, your album New Magnetic Wonder was one of the first records in quite a while to bear the Elephant 6 imprint. What was the significance of this for you?
Well, Elephant 6 had sort of been sleeping for a while. I think around the beginning of 2000 I sort of dropped out of Elephant 6 and that year or so pretty much all of the bands stopped using the logo. There’s a beautiful thing about having a collective and the collective itself having its own personality, but at the same time I think there may be a tendency, especially for the “less prominent” bands or whatever, to get swallowed up into the whole. It’s like, you just finished your masterpiece and then [everybody goes] “Oh, it’s another Elephant 6 release.” I mean, people will like it, but I think there was some sort of restlessness or some kind of thing going on with that. Also, I mean, Elephant 6 is basically my circle of friends socially, going back to like high school and childhood. Actually, like 2nd grade in some cases. And social scenes kind of have their ups and downs and stuff, stuff happens to people and people go places and then they come back from places, or there will be some kind of thing that happens and then it’s not happening for a while, or people are hanging out and then they’re not hanging out again or whatever. It’s just like anybody’s social scene, except that our social scene has this trail of records attached to it. So I think our social scene just sort of went through stress around that time too. There was a period of time where everyone just sort of backed away from Elephant 6 and wanting to identify ourselves as a group. It’s sort of like our “band of bands” spoke up even though the [individual] bands didn’t. Well, I guess in some cases they did. [laughs] It’s not like anything terrible happened or anything like that though, it just takes a lot of energy and enthusiasm to get a huge collective moving and working. And all a collective is is the name and everybody identifying with it and sort of working together, and beyond that you’re just friends who are making music. It’s like a club, and I think that everyone just sort of stopped feeling affiliated with “the club,” even my friends and I who started the club.
I think there were a couple of years where there was some “weirdness,” nothing dark or anything, but things started happening in my life, like I got divorced at a really weird sort of time, and the wonderful experience of having a son. Even though there was a divorce and stuff, it was a good thing. Stressful things just happened to people and a lot of stressful things happened randomly in our social scene and musical scene. That’s sort of the best explanation I can give that seems honest.
But, after a few years, it just sort of happened slowly that everyone was hanging out and playing together again, playing shows and stuff, and then it was like, “Wow, everyone is actually hanging out and playing together again and doing recordings!” And it was really exciting. Around that time, The Apples were recording New Magnetic Wonder and I was kind of traveling around to my friends’ studios. Like, I spent a lot of time in Athens at Bill Doss’s studio and had a lot of my friends come and just record. So Will Hart and I, who kind of conceived of Elephant 6, started to realize that things were starting to seem like Elephant 6 again. I mean, it had been Elephant 6 all along, it was the same social scene and the same people making music, but it had been decked with some sort of weird disconnect, and that [disconnect] had sort of passed gradually over the span of about two years. So Will and I were hanging out one day and started talking about using the logo again. I mean, it is Elephant 6 and we believe in it, so not to use the logo would be stupid. So we decided to use the logo on our new records. He was finishing up the new Circulatory System album, which ended up taking two more years after that to finish, but he thought he was finishing it. So New Magnetic Wonder just ended up being the first record in a while with the Elephant 6 logo. [Using the logo] was meant to show that it was a record made by a band of friends and a band of bands. And it was as “Elephant 6” as a record can be.
I’m not exactly how it came to be that there was an Elephant 6 guitar made for me, except for just sheer magic. The universe was somehow working nice things towards me with this luthier in Colorado who makes specialty guitars, really beautiful, hand-made, kind of psychedelic designs. They’re kind of like sculptures. It’s not the sort of thing you’d necessarily see in a guitar store, but you really should. So, we were recording the new album and this guy who was his sort of business manager came to New York and brought the guitar into the studio and gave it to me. It was really exciting. It’s like a mind-bogglingly cool, beautiful and beautiful to the touch, nice-smelling guitar. He modeled the neck after the one on the guitar that I already play, which is a Danelectro. So it felt natural and like a guitar I already play. The headstock is carved into an elephant and his eyes are made of dinosaur bones. It has an Elephant 6 logo inlayed into the neck that is made of meteorite. Also the body is shaped like the profile of an elephant’s head and it has beautiful curves on the top of the guitar body. It’s got a really good feel. It’s like a psychedelic, hippie-fied version of Prince’s guitar. I’m just extremely lucky and I don’t know what else to say besides that it rocks and I play it in my psychedelic band Thee American Revolution.
I’ve often heard people talk about music as a kind of “overlap” between logic and emotion, like you can either approach it from a really mathematical, calculated way or in a purely impulsive way and still excel at it. How do you feel about this notion?
I agree. I feel very good about it, actually. I mean, there’s a lot of things about music that are mathematical. There’s the obvious things like the physical properties of and characteristics of sound and sine waves, timing, tempo, time signatures that have these fractions involved with them, the notation has mathematical elements with quarter notes and eighth notes and so on. There’s the obvious mathematical elements in music that are satisfying in a logical, puzzle kind of way. There’s also a theory of music that is based on these elements that is satisfying and beautiful, like the circle of fifths. Just the whole of music theory has a logical cohesion that works very well for making art.
For me, doing mathematics as a student of math and doing my own math work and talking with mathematicians, the feeling about math that turns me on is not so much the logical part of it. Although that is nice, that element to it where everything fits together like clockwork. Like all of these various little elements and moving parts that all work in perfect harmony. And that’s got a kind of “nice for your brain” feeling. Which is what most people who like math like about math. More than that though, there’s a sort of element to math, when you think about it on a larger scale with large chunks of numbers and shapes, there’s a feeling with doing math that is sort of like playing piano. Where, even if you know what you’re doing and you could look at it and break down what you’re doing, you’re still sort of closing your eyes and feeling around and listening. And you’re, almost randomly sometimes, moving your fingers around just to see where they’ll go. Or you might be writing based on visual shapes, like if you’re looking at a guitar’s neck and playing chords, you develop shapes with your fingers. Like, minor chords that start on the A string have a certain shape that you can move up and down the neck. And you might not know the names of the chords, but you know what they look like. Without even putting your fingers on the neck, you can superimpose a power chord over the frets. So, on the one hand, there’s this element of visual “shapes” moving around, but on the other hand you’re just sort of feeling around for the shapes and seeing how different combinations work.
Those two things about making music are the same thing that I like about doing math. There are sort of these overlying shapes, and you’re moving around these ridged patterns, but with slight variations within them, like on a piano to make them work in the key. But then you’re also sort of feeling around an empty space where all these pieces wind around and fit together and interlock and work so beautifully together. It’s like, when you’re recording music, you can close your eyes and get completely absorbed. You can record for four hours and not even realize that you’ve been starting at a wall the whole time. You didn’t see anything, you have no visual memory of that time of your life. Nothing but a memory of the stereo sounds you’re hearing. That’s the way recording is for me, and math is the same way. I could be sitting in a crowd of people and there’s nothing, it’s like I’m just sitting in empty space. And playing with these huge, gigantic, sort of monolithic shapes floating around. It’s just like what playing music feels like.
–
To find out more about The Apples in stereo, check out their website and MySpace page. You can also find Apples videos, stream tracks from past albums, download “Dance Floor,” and more at http://www.stepthroughtheportal.com/.