Anti-Ark Intelligence: Sagan 2021 Roundtable
B = Blevin Blectum (Bevin Kelley)
L = Lesser (Jay Doerck)
W = Wobbly (Jon Leidecker)
Warning: Contains Links!
W: Sagan had been going for over a year before I officially joined, so... it's up to you to describe the beginning.
B: Sometime around 2002, I asked Ryan Junell if he wanted to form an audio / video duo. He'd been playing around with an analog video mixer he'd gotten at a garage sale. Kristin Erickson had moved to Berlin, so I wasn't playing Blectum From Blectum shows with her. I enjoyed having Ryan play live video with my live audio, much more fun than soloing alone.
L: Bevin suggested we watch the whole Cosmos series when I was just back off the Björk tour [opening as a member of Matmos]. When you're on tour, you don't have time to be sick until it's over, and then you collapse. So I watched the entire series in a delirium, the whole hi-falutin' concept... and by the end, calling the band Sagan just seemed like a good idea...
B: I'd watched Cosmos when it first aired in 1980, on tv with my dad and brother when we were kids in demon-haunted rural northern Massachusetts. I was 9 and into Switched-On Bach and the Tron soundtrack... and the Cats cast recording. At the time I was also on a bunch of harsh asthma drugs that they don't even give to actual cats anymore... The Cosmic Calendar was fascinating and really frightening. The library of Alexandria burning down was shocking, the concept of infinity was new to me, and disturbing. The animation of all of life's evolution, from single cell to flatworm to fish to man, scored by Vangelis, still kind of bowls me over.
W: And that final episode, "Who Speaks For Earth"... the arms race spelled out for ten year olds (start at 8:50 for the heart). But that show's opening, that first ten minutes, Sagan's flight across the universe on the dandelion starseed ship, all set with zero dialogue to a seamless mashup of Vangelis and Shostakovich... so hypnotic, hard to believe that even made it to air...
B: The personal voyaging starship! At some point Ryan watched Cosmos too, and the deal was sealed, and we became Sagan, with two of us doing audio and one doing video. Jay, Ryan and I shot some footage in Golden Gate Park. We went to one of the ponds, got footage of slugs mating, long distance grass shots, the green gardening dream plopped down on sand dunes. That footage became Ryan's live video mixing material during shows, and eventually we shot a bunch more and made the short feature film on the DVD that was the visual half of our first Sagan album.
W: When I saw your early concerts, I just totally got it. A love letter to Sagan's vision of popular science. When we were kids, space travel wasn't just inevitable, it was imminent. Wasn't even a promise... it was simply normal. The decade all our space museums were built.
B: We all jammed it into something part love letter, part fever dream, part piss take. When I was a kid (I lived in Sebastopol until I was 6) the California Academy of Sciences had an old-school planetarium, nothing digital, just hand made planets and stars punched out of the metal. I wish it was one of the things they had kept through the renovation.
W: When they released Cosmos for home video, they replaced a lot of the original music to avoid relicensing. When I found that online post listing everything from the 1980 version, it dawned on me that was the first time I'd heard not only Vangelis, but Heldon, Terry Riley, Eno, Edgar Froese, Jean Michel Jarre, Klaus Schulze, Gary Numan... this show canonized so much of the 1970's cosmic space music underground, as well as juxtaposing it with all the spaciest, transcendental moments of Shostakovich, Hovhaness, Scriabin, Holst, Mahler... so that was another in, when you asked me to join -- that original soundtrack as an open secret history.
L: Well, why does one love Vangelis. What's the use of me making fun of things I don't like?
B: I like Vangelis. Let's talk about the Voyager Golden Record! All those sounds traveling through space. It seems right that the record went out in 1977... it has some sort of emotional gravity that doesn't ring false, being pre-internet and scientifically hopeful. And with the Golden Record being such a massively collaborative effort, it seemed appropriate that our project would be a bit of a loose jam band that was then tightly edited for studio versions, with wildly varying moods coming out of the same bits and pieces on different nights. Which could then get edited down into coherent tracks, initially by me, and now with Anti-Ark edited by Wobbly.
W: The idea of Voyager -- not only carrying that record -- but picking up vibrations as it continues to speed deeper and deeper into space, that was part of the model for editing all our shows together. Data in the audible range.
L: I don't know how many hours you spent on editing, but you can still hear the trio, the roles each us are playing. It sounds like a band.
W: It's been edited and layered like crazy, but at any moment I can still hear and remember the gig or the session that one stretch comes from. As in: yes, that's the ending of the set we did on Barb Golden's Crack O'Dawn, or that's Neurosciences Institute at UCSD where we opened for Pauline, or that's that hookah lounge in San Jose. Then I squirrel in lots of details from other shows, so the trio multiplies and sub-divides and refracts into itself, but... still a live band at heart. You can't compose structures like these, you can only play them. At your bLeakhouse home studio, we did those three live streams for Shirley and Spinoza's internet radio station -- so from that, we had six hours worth of multitrack improvisations, and another 15-20 hours worth of stereo recordings of live shows on top of that, all going into the album. By the way, what was the Dickens reference in naming your studio bLeakhouse about?
B: I think just a slightly bleak outlook on life at the time? Yeah, and also beaks. Beakhouse, bleakhouse, etc.
W: It's really wonderful, years later, to see Kiki [Umbrella Cockatoo] still perched right there next to your music studio.
B: He's probably going to outlive me. I'm trying to teach him to sing... he's starting to get the hang of it and sings random melodies, usually using the words 'Kiki' and 'Bird', which quickly devolve into wordless screeching and dog bark imitations. Basically a 'singing' dinosaur. I've lived with him for about 15 years now. His latest fixation is an orange plastic rattle that he treats very lovingly.
W: Whenever he'd join in with us during rehearsals, it was crazy how he'd always be in tune. I mainly remember how different each concert was -- it'd all certainly go off the rails as often as it worked, but each night, the half that really worked seemed finished -- it seemed like the record was making itself.
B: I like having a good Ableton live bank of sounds/samples ready to go, that then end up getting used in new and ridiculous ways when used under live on-the-fly jamming-performance conditions. This happens a lot in Blectum From Blechdom contexts too.
W: It always hit me from the beginning, you really knew how to improvise with recordings. The same recordings sound utterly different in different contexts.
B: It works well with good collaborators. Having an underlying commonality of overall vibe/intent (and/or symbols words images aligned) with said collaborators, and knowing when to fold and switch up your bank/approach as certain sounds stop working.
L: For me, this was a time of me scaling back on tools, getting rid of all the soft synths & plug-ins and concentrating on a hacked together Reaktor ensemble, using a lot of randomization.
W: When your old San Diego pal Pea Hix sent us up his Orchestron & Optigan sample libraries... just couldn't believe it. To finally be playing that Radioactive sound, and not just hearing it. If the 90's had kicked off software versions of discontinued 80's acid gear, the early 2000's were when the 70's instruments started coming back into play. The problem with any kind of live performance of the electronic music canon had once been access, maintenance... budgets. But suddenly, there it was, a software ARP Solina, of course you're just going to dial up an eighth note delay and start playing 'Equinoxe 1'...
L: We were also trying to get more into acoustic instruments. I loved the stretches where we were just playing guitars. And that final track on Anti-Ark, me on dobro, Bevin on violin, you on pump organ -- then live, we'd take that tape and mix from there...
W: The sheer volume of what we recorded became pretty intimidating. The record was actually not making itself. Turning ourselves back from improvisers into composers was not easy.
B: There was a lot of material. Personally I do better with limited resources, than I do with eternal and infinite options.
L: All of our children were too beautiful. I remember that as a time when I was wondering why I was even making music. Putting out records makes no sense, there are already too many of them, and so on... I was getting into a mindset that couldn't have been too helpful.
W: I feel like the blueprint really was already there, we played the main pieces so many times. It was pretty clear which ones were the good nights, your drum kit randomizing just so, while I'm turning into a chord just as Bevin's time-stretched a bird call into a pedal point and suddenly we've landed in a new key...
B: I think one of our aligned underlying image-anchors was imagining the experiences of other life forms, like birds being able to see lines of magnetism.
W: Different subjective nervous systems, all seeing the parts of reality they most need to. Part of the appeal of Carl was in how he keeps the emphasis on what's shareable. The outer reaches of quantum physics and deconstructed humanities have those mysteries there yet to be solved, but he'd keep you grounded: here are the methods that humans can use to agree upon what is real. Not like the show wasn't also mind-roastingly existential, the entirety of life as we know it, clinging to a small rock, just smart enough to blow itself up... I recently watched the link you sent me, the panel discussion that was aired after ABC broadcast 'The Day After' in 1983, with Sagan, Kissinger, McNamara, Elie Wiesel... and of course they let William F. Buckley get the last word in.
B: When we were kids in Sebastopol my dad would bring home the Whole Earth Catalogs, and I loved those. Unfortunately as an adult, I let someone borrow the one with a special synthesizer section, and never got it back.
W: It was so easy to take that for granted at that time, the idealism that intersected the environmental movement and the nascent home computer industry...
B: My dad was a baseball player who then got into computer banking systems, learning COBOL, commuting to San Francisco from Sebastopol. He would come home with dot-matrix printer banners for our birthdays, which were very exciting. He liked things like Tangerine Dream, and got us Jim Copp and Ed Brown records. Your dad played you weird electronic music too...
W: He preferred Switched-On Country & Carlos to Subotnick & Wuorinen, but he taught physics, so yeah he'd buy the Computer Music. He spent the early 60's interning at Bell Labs and had their promotional releases, including the 10" of 'Music From Mathematics' packaged with one of the punch cards used to render the music, and of course he had 'Hee Saw Dhuh Kaet'. Lots of lectures and rants about the inextricability of music and physics, a copy of "'Computer Lib / Dream Machines' lying around... Thanks, Dad! How are you feeling about interplanetary travel these days?
B: I would go. Mainly, I just want Earth. And I think it'd be great if it weren't destroyed.
W: So, about that cover we picked for this! We kind of took some serious liberties with Don Davis' images. Don of course is the eminent space artist hired by NASA in the mid-70's to paint visualizations of orbital space colonies, including his relatively famous depictions of the Stanford Torus design. He also worked with Carl, painting the cover of his book 'The Dragons of Eden' as well as doing some of the visual effects for Cosmos. He even sat in on some of the curation meetings for the show's soundtrack, where his years of listening to Stephen Hill and Anna Turner's show 'Music From The Hearts Of Space' on KPFA came in handy. Before that show was syndicated, it was on right before Negativland's radio program 'Over The Edge', which led to Don being a phone-in participant to that show since 1981. And myself, having been involved in that show since the late 80's -- I knew Don, which led to me asking him for permission to use his paintings for the cover. Shawn Wolfe added the missiles, which took it to a much more provocative place.
B: I don't think I would go to Mars. Maybe in my next life.
W: What happens when space colonization is left to private industry? The same things private industry has done to the planet. The cover shows some grizzly things, but it's depicting, not advocating. Our sounds, I think, are coming from an optimistic place. Music can be programmatically about terrifying things, yet still funnel that hopeful outlook we can use to sanely take things in...
B: Making that music was fun and, if I remember correctly, somewhat joyful.
W: Many of the song titles reference works trying to bridge the sciences and humanities. Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson, the unbelievable father & son relationship of Freeman & George Dyson, E.O. Wilson. Special shout out to Ernest McClain's 'The Myth Of Invariance'. After all the subjectivity thrown up by the internet-based amplification of self, the most romantic thing I can think of is reality.
B: Other people are real! It feels good that you finished this, Jon. I would have finished it differently, but I like what you did with it.
L: I'm glad a bit of the gig we played at that hookah lounge in San Jose made it on. We just loved those twelve people that much.
W: The line our distributor took out of the press release, about how this record feels like being tapped on the shoulder by ten thousand fingers. And how that's only annoying until you realize the rhythms are all so coordinated as to impart some kind of message, which could only mean that those things almost certainly aren't fingers.
B: Put me down for ten thousand copies.
:: Sagan, Oakland, 2005