Growing

“It was gonna be a
strong record, I’m tellin’ ya, but it was gonna be really, really out… The
beat would come and go, sounds would come and go… Sound concepts, industrial
noise. And the cover would be me standing in a misty meadow wearing these baggy
corduroy Dockers with a Ford Aerostar - sort of like a subtler On The Beach
kinda thing. And it was gonna be called Meadow Dusk. Some guy with his Aerostar
in the meadow, standing there. Probably woulda been put down by a lotta people.
They woulda said what a piece of shit it was, how unmeaningful it was. Coulda
been innaresting.”

- Neil Young, discussing an aborted Eighties album project in ‘Shakey’ by Jimmy McDonough.

If I had to use an external reference to describe the sounds created by Olympia’s heavy drone merchants Growing, it wouldn’t be Sunn 0))), or Stars Of The Lid, or Melvins. It’d be Neil Young.

But I’m not talking about the Neil Young of Harvest, the bedridden, lovesick troubadour, nor the Neil Young of Ragged Glory, the wild-eyed, flannel shirted rock pig. Rather, I’m referring to the secret Neil Young, the shadowy figure occupying the no man’s land between those extremes. The one who wove torrents of feedback into an ambient shitstorm called Arc. The one who provided a fittingly chilling soundtrack to Johnny Depp’s journey into the arms of fate in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. The one who released the undervalued but often transcendent masterpiece of live pastoral metal, Year Of The Horse. The one that, once in a blue, blue moon, manages to unite all the strands of what is (for some) an often bewilderingly tangential career, into one sound. That sound is countrified yet crackling with electricity, heavy yet oddly graceful, ham-fisted yet deliberate. The same can be said of Growing’s music. They’re the sound of the earth, rather than the sons of Earth.

“Being in the natural world is really incredible,” enthuses Kevin Doria, bass and guitar player. He’s the talker of the two musicians, and bears a passing resemblance to Jack White. “I think what’s interesting is if we bring that influence in directly, it’s very obviously in an artificial way. So I am at least as interested in creating artificial environments that reference nature as I am in just playing in the middle of nature. When you play a record and you have the windows open, and you hear the people outside your room, all of a sudden that becomes part of the record. I’ve blatantly stolen compositional elements from just sitting down somewhere and being so bored that I’m listening and going ‘Oh, that sounds nice with that’ and trying to replicate that to a certain degree with whatever we have laying around. For me, that’s a big asset to have.”

At what point did the drone creep into your consciousness?

Kevin: “There were certain things that I was always drawn to, that just kind of evolved for me over a certain period of time. Things like Sonic Youth…when I was younger I listened to a lot of that. When I was younger I had an instrument but I didn’t really have anyone to play with. You can’t play ‘London Calling’ by yourself and have it balanced right, or whatever. I just ended up playing a lot by myself and that’s how it kind of started for me. But again it was a long, slow evolution over a period of time.”

“I’d never really experienced, like, sustained notes until I was, like, 19 or 20,” says Joe Denardo, guitar player. He’s the more taciturn of the duo, and the one who actually looks like a metalhead. That’ll be the beard. “You know, really hearing it live and hearing it on records and stuff, and just that as a quality was like, immediately very pleasing to me (Joe elongates the vowel of the word ‘pleasing’ here in a manner so voluptuous it sounds almost sexual). So I was just drawn to it that way.”

Why do you think you were drawn to the drone?

Kevin: “I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it has a lot of parallels just in life. You know, all around you, there’s all kinds of sounds, pulsing or droning in your daily life.

Like the constant traffic drone from a nearby motorway?

Kevin: “Mm-hm. The buzzing of lights…all that kind of stuff. That, and when we’re allowed to play it real loud, it’s a really physical thing and it feels good. There are all kinds of sounds that happen inside maybe one sound or one note that you don’t hear if you’re constantly changing notes. Or if there’s a bunch of percussion going on, you can’t necessarily focus in on all the harmonics and pulsations of the sounds.”

Do you consider yourself to be manipulating time with your music?

Joe: “I think it would be great if that happens for people when they’re listening to us. Personally, I’m really afraid of the passage of time. It scares me a lot. So maybe slowing it down like that helps me deal with it, although I’ve never really, y’know, tried to articulate that in my playing.”

Is that fear of age, mortality?

Joe: “Yeah, and fear of change and fear of…I don’t know, just everything about time. Fear of the unknown…”

So the environment of the drone offers you a chance to explore time at a more leisurely pace?

Joe: “When you’re patient with it, it feels like you have control over the passage of time.”

Do you consider your music psychedelic?

Joe: “I don’t know…”

Kevin: “I guess it’s too loaded a term. If you take psychedelics, I’m sure its psychedelic. It’s almost like, the good things of doom, I’d like to apply to our band and the good things of psychedelic, I’d like to apply to our band, but there’s so much in those worlds that I just think is total garbage. So I don’t really want those names on our band ’cause of all the things associated.”

The title of the second album The Soul Of The Rainbow And The Harmony Of Light refers to ‘Bishop’s Colour Organ’, a device invented in 1877 by one Bainbridge Bishop. How did you come across this object? Was one ever built?

Joe: “He built them, yeah. There was actually a couple of different guys in the late 19th century that experimented with that kind of stuff. I came across it just because I was personally interested in synaesthesia. It’s a condition that affects your nervous system, and, like, your senses blend, so some people actually do see colours when they hear certain sounds. So I just came across it, it’s a pretty short essay, and then later on the title had a double kind of purpose. It just seemed like a beautiful phrase, and just spoke so elegantly about a subject I’m pretty naïve about but I would like to have in people’s minds when they listen to us.”

Are you blessed with that condition?

Joe: “I wish! I wish I had real synaesthesia. It’s considered a disorder but…”

It seems like more of a perceptual enhancement rather than an affliction.

Joe: “Yeah, totally.”

The other reason I ask about psychedelia is that there seem to be pictures of mushrooms on your website [author’s note: around this time I was experimenting heavily with magic mushrooms. It was fun for a while but after experiencing the nightmare trip of a lifetime, I put all that shit behind me for good. I think.]

Joe: “Is there a mushroom?”

Kevin: “I don’t know, there might be something that may look like a mushroom…they look like a lot of things.”

Joe: “I think it’s a tree…or a boat. No, I don’t think there’s anything specifically mushroom in there.”

Do you feel that your music is intrinsically American? To me, it seems that way. Like it belongs to an American folk tradition. In fact you seem to acknowledge that in the title of the track ‘Tepsije (All Music Is Folk Music)’.

Joe: “I’ve never really thought about it as American music. But yeah, a lot of things I guess that it ties to are American. It’s definitely pretty raw, pretty organic, almost amateurish, like, uh, rudimentary? It’s just like, really simple, stripped down. We’re not trying to play tricks on anybody, you know? And I would really like it if people felt like they could pick up instruments and do this kind of stuff on their own. It’s not exclusive, and I think folk music is generally a very ‘bringing together’ kind of thing.”

Forgive the pun, but that strikes a chord with me. Your music does seem very embracing, immersive, oceanic. Which is where the metal reference is interesting, ’cause for a long time metal was about chops and playing fast leads, and to some extent still is an exclusive thing, whereas you seem to stretch metal out, burn off the clichéd trappings (which even the otherwise radical Sunn 0))) still indulge in) and wrap it lovingly around the listener. Do you differ much live from on record?

Kevin: “As much as there’s things that we can put on the record, there’s a bunch of stuff we can do live, and there’s a conscious effort to take advantage of what we can do and eventually not worry about it. I don’t think that either is a perfect representation of the other in any way. But they’re always related.

Do you ever go off on improvisatory tangents?

Joe: “I would really hesitate to call it improv, because of the weight of that word. And I kind of consider successful improv only really achievable by pretty advanced musicians. I don’t really know what that means, but…we’re not advanced (laughs). We do have some pretty strict structures that we play within. I think when a lot of people hear us they think it’s just random notes, but it’s not.”

Is Olympia particularly important to you as a band?

Kevin: “Yes and no. Yeah, I mean, I have friends there, y’know, that sort of thing, but it was also…it could have been anywhere. But we definitely met a lot of really good people, so from that sense…”

Joe: “We met each other there. We met each other at school, so…”

Kevin: “Yeah. So in that sense, definitely. But as far as like, a scene goes or whatever, not at all. We’d be lucky if our friends came.”

Joe: “So it wasn’t like we had some close-knit world.”

Is Olympia very style-led? That’s how it seems from the outside.

Joe: “It used to be.”

Kevin: “Now the style’s led by meth heads. That’s really taking over. It passes time. Gives you an excuse to steal.”

Joe: “What I kind of liked about the town in the last few years is that actually people got a lot less interested in music than they had been. No one comes to shows anymore, and everyone was really getting bummed about that. But in some ways it’s nice, we were just tighter, you know, we’d been in other bands…”

Is that what led you to playing in museums?

Kevin: “To a certain degree. I think the initial reasoning was just being bored with going to shows, like there’s like the first band, the second band, you know, you can count to six or seven bands and sit and watch whatever and then go, and I guess we wanted to…I mean, the museum wasn’t the only thing, but I guess it was changing the format of being involved in a show, just because the standard had gotten so standard.”

Joe: “And the fact that we were, like, interested in sustaining our sounds for so long and having things evolve really slowly, you know. I don’t really know anything about whether you’re gonna call something ‘art’ or not, but people that are into that world can be sometimes more open to that. And so it’s nice to play somewhere where people can sit and sounds can be going on for an hour or two and it can be changing slowly, y’know, …you’re allowed to do whatever you want.”

Do the crowds differ?

Joe: “Yeah, very wildly. You can look out and see…fairly old people, with walkers or whatever, y’know, sitting down. It’s pretty different, they’re not going to come to the punk show!” (laughs)

Kevin: “The show we played in LA was like - I think if you play in a hip, groovy gallery in town you’ll probably still get similar audiences - but the show that we had in LA was a pretty big museum. The people that go to those museums are patrons, and people that give money to museums, stuff like that. And it was just incredible, little kids running around and older people, and it’s outside, there’s a fountain, and all kinds of people are there.”

I suppose in a museum or gallery the whole environment can be part of the performance, people are walking around in whatever you’re doing.

Kevin: “Yeah, yeah. And that changes how they hear it, most definitely. Y’know, you have a packed venue, people aren’t moving around very much, the sound guys won’t have messed with the PA and moved it around as much. But if you’re in a gallery or whatever and you can try new things out, it changes what you can do and how you hear it.”

What’s your ideal audience conduct?

Joe: “Oh, they can do whatever they want, I don’t care.”

Kevin: “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to lay any ground rules.”

Joe: “I would like there to be a way for them to relax if they want to relax. I really like to sit, I like to not feel the way my body is when I’m seeing something.”

You want more than just a straightforward exchange between the band and the audience?

Kevin: “That’s why we’ve done some shows where everything is just pre-recorded, you know, and just set up shit all over the room and there’s no band playing at all, it’s just the music, and that to me is just a better way to hear music. You know, you’re not worried about those silly lights, silly stage lights…it’s pointless, it’s so silly.”

I wonder if that’s why Stephen and Greg of Sunn 0))) use the cloaks…

Kevin: “Oh I think that’s a whole ‘nother thing.” (laughs)

So. If you can appreciate both density and light, enjoy volume but scorn machismo, if you understand that the sound of crickets and a distant motorway are related (and complementary) to each other, if you romanticise the End Of America in an aesthetic rather than political sense, if you sometimes look at the sky or the sea and wonder at the unfathomable vastness of it all (even though you may feel a little naïve and foolish for doing so)… then you should make friends with Growing.

You’d have a lot in common.

Posted on Tuesday, June 14th, 2005by