Originally posted at LA.Cityzine.com, reposted at Beatcrave on August 14, 2008:
LA.CityZine brings you duo, Gangi, as part of our Know Your LA Bands series. Matt Gangi and Lyle Nesse originally started in Brooklyn, but lucky for us, they have now relocated to the city of angels. Sure, many bands make the move across the nation in hopes of finding a better niche as well as better reception. However, in the sea of many indie bands as well as mainstream bands that come out of LA today, the phrase “It’s harder than it looks,” now has an abundance of new meanings, if not just the levels of intensity within it. Yes, the melodies, the images, and the purposes of bands have eventually taken the music to the masses. But it’s the actual substance within the band members themselves who create those melodies, images and purposes that fundamentally matters.
As musicians these days, Gangi is aware of the many hats they wear as they are creating. With this mindset, they take their understanding into another dimension with their songwriting. The result is indescribable. It is exactly that with no exaggeration. My mind has been searching for ways to describe their music but to say that it’s Grizzly Bear meets Animal Collective just wouldn’t do them justice. Instead, I asked them what others have said. Was the press in the past even close? The question is a difficult task in itself. To determine this answer, you would have to comprehend the thoughts of Matt and Lyle, themselves, and I’ve somewhat cleared a path for you, the listener – the fan, to do so. However, don’t say I didn’t warn you. This interview below includes some massively surreal intellectualism that could literally blow your mind. Then again, there are some funny parts too. Enjoy.
(After the mindgasm occurs, make sure you catch their show at Spaceland (Map) this weekend! Presented by Manimal Vinyl, they will be part of the awesome show going on Saturday, August 16th. The pleasure starts at 9:00pm, so go ahead and get yours.)
There are so many people that try to describe your music. It’s a hard task! What has been the closest description you’ve heard so far?
Matt: At a warehouse show back in Brooklyn, an acquaintance described our sound as, “Neil Young on an acid trip, encountering a far-out hip-hop dj entrenched in textural sounds and the rhythms of reggaeton, garage, & American folk music somewhere out in retro-futurist space.” We thought it was pretty good and funny and had him write it down — some of our earliest press. Particularly the retro-futurism phrase made me happy. It is interesting how the social climate of a particular time or era changes our own perception & depiction of our own universe & the future. How did space look to people in 1934 and then into 1970? The artist Robert Smithson talks about how the florescence, neon, chrome, and formica that depicted space in the 1960′s and 70′s replaced the cement, glass, and plywood of the 1930′s in our planetariums. I haven’t visited today’s newly re-furbished & “updated” Griffith Park Observatory of 2008 yet. I have also been flattered by comparisons to Bobb Trimble, an outsider 80′s psychedelic musician. Someone also made a Skip Spence reference of late. I was also into the fact that he had used the word “textural”… I’m really interested in textural music and layers… have lately been really influenced by Jodorowsky’s film “Holy Mountain” for its textural narrative.
Lyle: A blogger recently described it as, “eclecticism to the point of abstraction.” Lately I’ve been describing the sound as, “garage and psychedelic rock that is often reminiscent of the 60′s and 70′s, the sampling culture and beat heavy elements of electronic genres, and the lyrical style and sensibility of American folk music.” What is so interesting to me is how people understand the music so differently. I’ve seen this gap in perception with a lot of more progressive/experimental/alternative sounding bands. For example, when I hear Animal Collective, Ariel Pink or The Flaming Lips I hear folk, rock, and pop melodies. Often, I think that our parents hear these same records and they hear more of the experimental, the noise, or the unpolished eccentric elements that actually make songs that are essentially re-hashings of pop structures interesting to us. Matt writes folk tunes — it is the arranging and often the experimental lyrical style that makes the sound more complex and difficult to describe.
With all the eclecticism in your music. The psychedelia creates a sense of the abstract, yet with the “information” provided, you seem to touch base with reality. Do you feel that it goes towards one more than the other?
Matt: We live in an Information Bomb, resulting in lots of contradicting voices from different media forces telling us how we should perceive our own reality. In the past, “we” were trapped in the time of the subject (as a “We” or “I”, etc.) and therefore, defined realities. “We are trying to describe this answer to you. We are trapped.” By answering as a defined subject, by submitting to the question, there is the double meaning here of having to submit to the laws & reality of being a defined subject or “we” or “I”… and therefore, touching base within the reality of the certain rules or social status of how “we” as subjects are addressed in the question.
Lyle and I have been digging on Chantal Mouffe’s writings where she talks about how these different identities need to be deconstructed if freedom from subjected realities & new rights are to be recognized. With the glut of information available to us today & the different products that are marketed to us & defining us, we become subjects of contradicting communities of behavior. That is where the line “I am many people of communities contradicting now” comes from in the song, “Subject Positions”. There is freedom in this contradiction, because with the decentering of fixed subject positions, we can oscillate between different identities by fighting any one, fixed group identification. By opposing any singular, subjected view of reality, and instead, embracing contradictory ones, we become free and allowed to wander into our own sense of the abstract. We just have to fight the voices of subjection to any one, singular group’s authority or vision of reality.
Most of the “information” on the album is appropriated from media sources as diverse as the EPA, science books, free sound websites and Google. As the authoritarianism of Google would ask, “Did you mean: _______?” Hopefully, the eclecticism, & the different voices on the record encourage a more kaleidoscopic many-sided point of view. The narrative or realities of the “information” in the songs contradict & overlap each other by doubling back on defined meaning. By taking from different, contradicting realities, we can wander into abstractions– from that abstraction, we can all create a sense of reality (or further abstraction) for ourselves depending on how we, to quote Mallarmé, “Roll the dice.”
Lyle: Often it seems that submitting to structure and reality provides the basis — the foundation for going further out into the experimental abstract. Concrete examples of such structure within the realm of pop music would be rhythm or chord structuring. Applying a familiar, hypnotic rhythm or familiar chord structure to a song allows application of noise, sampling or experimental lyrical abstraction. The solid repetitive underlying reggaeton beat on the song “Shift,” for example, provides a foundation for sonic and lyrical experimentation that occurs on top of the beat: “shift, work, shift, sleep, shift, work, shift, sleep.” Abstraction and reality cannot be separated.
With the “information” you incorporate such as the New York Times, your music somewhat comes off as political. Are you suggesting an agenda for today’s generation?
Matt: The act of appropriation or sampling is a political act. By taking from Google, for example, the “information” of the times is documented and word combinations are produced from sources as disparate or varying as corporate propaganda to personal, emotive blogs. These different voices all become a piece of the psyche within the place or world of the Internet. There is a you and not you of the Internet and the Information & Media Bomb as you humble yourself on the message board to the somewhere masters speaking under newly created names. By acting as cultural DJs and appropriating, or sampling these media sounds & texts, it is interesting how our perceptions are rendered in today’s times where “thinking outside the box” becomes a logo or a trademarked ad. I lifted the line “These matters shook up the community / Now we are thinking a bit about everything” from a book that I found in a dollar store about a farm where some pigs ran away and were perhaps eaten by coyotes. The next line in the book, tweaked and twaddled around a bit, became the chorus for “Commonplace Feathers”. People ask us if that line or that song is about Iraq or September 11th and say they are happy someone is saying something about these times we are living in with their music. I think that’s great, even though I took that line from a book about farming. When someone asks if the song is about a particular political thing… it is, because the question is asked.
Our filmmaker friend Matt Ornstein who comes from a similarly DIY ethos (he got footage for the new Daft Punk video he made by sneaking a small camera in a headband through Federal airport security), interpreted the song in another way. We are going to New York next week to shoot a video for “Commonplace Feathers” with him about the changing times in the community of New York with the closing of Shea Stadium, Yankee Stadium, the end of McCarren Park Pool Parties, the closing of AstroLand in Coney Island, the changing and gentrification of the waterfront in Williamsburg, etc. With these images, the lyrics will take on a different meaning. Once performed, music is public and therefore can be frequently persuasive or political. Believers sing gospel songs in unison. Eavesdropping, wire-tapping, censoring, recording, and surveillance of sounds are weapons of power.
Lyle: Paul Beahan at Manimal Vinyl asked us to contribute a song to his upcoming compilation record, Perfect as Cats: A Tribute to the Cure. We decided to cover, “Fire in Cairo” — a track off of the first Cure record. As the song was taking shape, I decided to run a YouTube search for sounds to sample. Pretty quickly, I came across an Egyptian News report covering 20,000 workers on a wage strike in a Nile Delta town called el-Mahalla el-Kubra. There is a section of the news report in which an Egyptian worker is holding paper currency in his hand and yelling in Arabic, apparently about the unfair wages and price of goods in Egypt. We decided to appropriate that portion of the news report because of the actual sound of the man’s voice and the feeling it evoked. Our use of that sample is not explicitly political; it’s just a reflection of what’s happening. Poverty, rising food prices (particularly in the poorest areas of the world), hunger and the destruction of our planet are realities. We sample those realities just as we sample lawnmowers, sirens on the street, and birds chirping in our songs.
Matt, do you know if Gangi means anything?
Matt: It’s the name of a town in the center of Sicily. In Hinduism, it is another name for the revered goddess Durga.
Lyle: Broto Roy, my tabla teacher teacher, is from Calcutta, India. I think he told me that Gangi means, “undershirt” in Bengali, but I need to confirm that. Ha!
Often when I tell people over 40 the band name they ask, “You mean, like Ganja?” Apparently that’s what they used to call cannabis/marijuana back in the day. For the record, Gangi and Ganja have no immediate relation. Gangi is Matt’s last name. It is pronounced like the Ganges river in India.
Matt: My ex of the St Clair Board of Sound used to describe the pronunciation as “Gan as in gander and gi as in, “Gee, pops. Take a gander at that!” Apparently, it used to be DiGangi, but it got cut off as it sounded too ethnic for those at Ellis Island when my family came from Sicily. It was a good choice as DiGangi wouldn’t have made as good of a band name.Lyle: Yeah, then maybe we would have named the band Nesse.
How did you two meet?
Matt: We met in Prague. Lyle was looking for some Absinthe with high thujone content and I knew where to find some. Then we bumped into each other wandering around in Brooklyn later.
Lyle: Matt smuggled some of that Absinthe back home. We just finished off the last of it as we built our new LA rehearsal studio.
Your MySpace says Matt is the “word processor” and Lyle is the “translation machine.” Can you explain this concept?
Matt: That’s all we are… word processors and translation machines. I’ve been really influenced by the poetry scene happening in New York right now. Lytle Shaw is a really interesting New York poet that has turned me onto a lot of interesting texts and taught me about different language experiments such as passing your words through translation machines and then back into English again. Lyle has retranslated my original recordings & ideas into something even more complex for our live show and will be doing the same on subsequent recordings. Rob Fitterman is another poet I’ve been really influenced by. Rob and I had coffee in a cafe in New York where he said, “Matt, not that you’d ever want to write about September 11th, but say you did… Why would I ever want to hear about what some poet kid who has a garage rock band has to say about it, when I could just type phrases into Google about it and read everything from thousands of personal experience blogs about the event to government propaganda about it?” He and Lytle Shaw both talked about the concept of being cultural surveyors with words and sounds with a DJ’s penchant for mash-ups. Word processing and then translation to the Ear.
Lyle: Cultural Surveyors. What else can we do, given the amount of sound/information we hold at our fingertips at every moment. We sample, cut, paste, and appropriate. Rather than wear one single costume we oscillate between various subject positions. We wear cowboy clothes, fancy clothes, factory clothes, and sometimes just jeans and a baggy t-shirt.
You’ve been greatly recognized in the DIY realm. What would you consider the most DIY thing you have ever done?
Matt: Everything we have done so far is DIY. I studied with the performance artist Karen Finley in New York who was pretty influential. The whole DIY spirit of New York punk and the No-Wave scene she was a part of gave me a lot of hope to move forward on our own without much budget or much outside help. Early Richard Kern films and early John Waters work expresses that aesthetic. I recorded, mixed, produced, and played all the instruments on the first record in my asbestos and mold filled rent-stabilized place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (where I eventually had to leave as people were getting really sick in the building)… so Lyle and I packed up his car, formed our own record label to self-release the album and then self-booked and arranged an entire tour out to the west coast. We stayed with amazing kids that we met on the Internet who showed us their towns along the way. We are now living and operating our self-release label, Office of Analogue and Digital out of an attic in L.A. and are currently self-booking a fall tour to New York and back for CMJ with our friends Rainbow Arabia and Hecuba, two bands everyone should know about… their jams are really great. I can hear Lyle talking to a venue right now in the next room as we speak, making demands for free beer and pizza in Iowa City… so yeah, pretty much everything we have done so far is DIY.
Lyle: Since we moved out to L.A. we’ve been working something like 17-hour days. Self-booking, especially a 20-date tour across the country turns out to be a lot of work. The Internet and Rupert Murdoch MySpace really does make it possible though — friends we’ve made in cities and towns all over are helping us put it together.
What was the last song you played on your iPod?
Matt: Let’s see. “Oscillations” by Silver Apples.
Lyle: “Place I know-Kid Like You” by Arthur Russell
Give us three songs you would include on a CD mix with the theme of “Surrealism.” (Not including any of your music.)
Matt: That’s tough, but I’ll drop ones that fit into the Surrealist category off of albums I’ve been digging on a lot lately:
1) “Ah Vida Avida” by Marconi Notaro
2) “Free Form Freak-out/Hurricane Fighter Plane” off of the first Red Krayola album
3) “Firebird” by White Noise
Lyle:
1) “Help me Somebody” by Brian Eno and David Byrne
2) “Tread Water” by De La Soul
3) “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” by Public Enemy
Do you prefer gearing up for a tour or coming home from one?
Matt: Being on tour is amazing… much more so than either getting ready for a tour or coming home, but I would have to say coming home rather than gearing up… as gearing up for us includes figuring out how to book the entire tour DIY. And coming home has been somewhat exciting as home has been shifting ever since we left Brooklyn some months back. For example, home just 6 weeks ago meant a basement in Maryland. It feels good to have a bit of a homebase in L.A. now though.
Lyle: Stasis is difficult after a month of moving around, especially when you have parking tickets, speeding tickets, and a summons to appear in Colorado State Court.
What’s your most memorable on the road story?
Matt: During SXSW this past year, we played an showcase where we only got to play a few songs. Frustrated, Lyle and I brought our gear out into the street. We unplugged an “OPEN” sign for a Pizza shop to get power (and they weren’t happy about that), so we ended up unplugging a vending machine and running power from it to all of our gear. We rocked a set in the middle of the sidewalk and threw a party on a side-street that the Austin police miraculously didn’t shut down. That was one of my favorite shows.
Lyle: On a rainy afternoon in Atlanta we stopped off at a laundromat to bleach the whites and ended up playing a full set of music for a bunch of friendly Georgians. It was like a Tide commercial on acid.
Matt: We had arranged a few pieces of a kaleidoscopic installation, that the visual artist Lucy Burrows made for us to travel around with, all around the washing machines… This added to the synergistic effect while the friendly Georgians were dancing and clapping around the dyers.
How do you get ready for a show?
Matt: It is a secret.
Lyle: Yea, it is a super secret.
What’s your favorite song to play live and why?
Matt: It is different songs on different nights. Lyle and I are always trying to keep it spontaneous and keep each other listening as we are always throwing different samples into the mix. The spontaneity also helps keep the songs in a state of change or flux.
Lyle: The faster, more beat-heavy tunes are the most fun for me, especially “Waiting On the Line.”
If you could rid the world of one song, what would it be?
Matt: You can learn something from even the worst song… and even the worst song might have a good sample.
Lyle: Agreed. Joe’s Record Paradise is my favorite record shop in Maryland, close to the home where I grew up. One of the guys who works there would collect all of the “unusable” vinyl that nobody wanted and pass it on to a local experimental DJ. That DJ added samples from those records to an archive he was developing for his music. He would then return the records to the shop, so that the record shop guys could send the vinyl to a company that would met down the records for re-use. We actually used “unusable” 12” artwork from Joe’s Record Paradise to wrap/contain the record before it was officially pressed. So nothing is really unusable.
What would be the best piece of advice you could give someone who is trying to break into the music business?
Lyle: When the little light on the dashboard comes on, pull over and get gas.
Give us two reasons why LA trumps Brooklyn.
Matt:
1. The underground music scene is really exciting in LA right now and there is a really supportive climate for it. To list a few of the many bands whom we’ve met and are digging on out here: Rainbow Arabia, Hecuba, Ariel Pink and the Haunted Graffiti, the Black Hole Oscillators, Nite Jewel, blackblack, the Lucky Dragons, etc., etc. There are people in this city like Paul Beahan from Manimal Vinyl who are really supporting the Los Angeles underground and helping it thrive. Our welcoming into Los Angeles was playing an incredible music festival he organized out in the deserts of Joshua Tree. We are playing a show he put together at Spaceland on Saturday and are going to be appearing on the Cure tribute record that he’s releasing with a lot of other amazing bands. We owe a lot to Paul and Manimal and think he’s an underground hero. Jason Grier from Human Ear is amazing too- Lyle and I just performed in Jason’s rendition of John Cage’s imaginary landscape number 4 for 12 radios, opening for Gary Wilson at the Echo last week. The support of thriving DIY radio in Los Angeles led by kids like DJ Short Shorts at Little Radio and the folks at KXLU, also really help support the scene.
2. There is a lot more space to wander around here and to make sound in. Last night, I got a text from our friend Diva who decided to have a scary story reading at the top of a mountain, up a hiking path in Laurel Canyon. My friends Max, Kari and I wandered up through the fog to share some scary stories. The same thing might take place in Brooklyn, but it would be on the rooftop of a warehouse versus watching a meteor shower on top of a mountaintop in the fog.
Lyle:
1. Paul Beahan and Manimal Vinyl
2. Taco Stands
Where is your favorite place to see a band play in LA?
Matt: Maybe the front room at the Smell or the Low End Theory at the Airliner.
Lyle: The La Brea Tarpits, but only when the Boredoms are there with 88 drummers!
What’s the best cure for a hangover?
Matt: A taco stand.
Lyle: YouTube videos in a comfortable bathrobe. Also some vitamin C either in the form of juice or the Can song off of the Ege Bamyasi record.
What’s your guilty pleasure?
Matt: I typed “guilty pleasure” into Google and in the first 10 search results, a Cobra Starship song came up of the same name. My friend Victoria is in that band and directed that video. Hmmm… Daniel Schmidt, who did the album art on the record, shares a love for Mariah Carey’s pop songs with me. After adding Mariah as a friend on MySpace, we were in her top 8 for some months… I was unaware of this, but kept getting messages from kids saying, “Sick beats, found out about you guys from Mariah’s page.” Eventually I figured out that we were in Mariah Carey’s top friends. Unfortunately, we are no longer in Mariah’s top friends.
Lyle: My guilty pleasure is watching cats on YouTube.
What would be your perfect LA day?
Matt: Surviving a giant earthquake and then throwing a huge party.
Lyle: Sitting front row center in the courtyard of the Hammer Museum for a show with Daniel Johnston, Bobb Trimble, Gary Wilson, and R. Stevie Moore.