5 Q&A With Black Magick Marching Band
Can you tell us more about 'Slouching Toward Babylon?'
’Slouching Toward Babylon’ was originally conceived of as a quick turnaround follow up to 2021's The Arts Will Break Our Hearts. Obviously, things took a bit longer than expected--in part because the arrangements became a bit more ambitious and partly because my day job had me on the road a ton. As a result of the long, disjointed gestation, these songs have a bit of a haunted, late-night-behind-the-wheel vibe. These songs feel very liminal to me. There's also an interrogation of the masculinized rebel anti-hero thing going on, but that's probably more subtext than text. When you're traveling alone--or at least when I'm traveling alone--you tend to consume a lot of random media. Podcasts, half-static radio stations, audiobooks, YouTube weirdness, hotel cable teevee junk, and it all becomes this sort of buzzing, edgy matrix that you're sloshing around in. ‘Slouching Toward Babylon’ is an attempt to reckon with this jumbled, dystopian fairyland by giving it the familiar structure of the retro guitar pop that I find most comforting and familiar.
Was there any challenge that you encountered while making this EP?
The biggest challenge while working on this EP was juggling multiple commitments and finding time to create in a way that allowed for an open-ended, inspired process. The thing about DIY is that you're doing it all yourself, so you've got to stay motivated and disciplined--but you can't let that desire to "get it done" compromise the elements of exploration and play that can lead to some interesting new approaches. Unlike previous EPs and singles, ‘Slouching Toward Babylon’ was less well-defined before recording started in terms of specific arrangements, parts, sounds. So when things like an unexpected business trip derailed the process for a couple weeks, you're coming back to the project and trying to reconnect and figure out what the next steps are in terms of adding a guitar part or reworking a synth line. It's a bit like playing a game of Exquisite Corpse with yourself.
Materially, the biggest nuisance was when the bag with my laptop and a lot of my notes got stolen when the project was about two-thirds of the way done. I really did consider that maybe the whole thing was cursed and this project was lost and it might be time to start anew on something else. Luckily, the files were all--unexpectedly--backed up on the cloud and a Good Samaritan found my bag (including my notes and some other goodies) in an alley and returned them to me.
Can you talk about any standout tracks on the EP and what makes them special to you?
I'm particularly fond of how "Wasteland II" and "Doombox" turned out. Conceptually, they're intertwined and they both contain a lot of the core thematic bits of the EP. The titles of both songs are bombastically silly. I also dig the droney, '60s psychedelic feel of "Wasteland II" it's a little off-kilter and druggy. David Jellema--the mixing and mastering engineer who has worked on most of the Black Magick Marching Band releases--did an excellent job of sorting through all the goop and layered parts to really make it pop. "Doombox" lyrically strikes right at the core of the ragged, desperate nighttime stuff that I think is running through this collection of songs. The howling layer cake of angry guitar stuff that comes on like an unexpected summer storm in the choruses was a lot of fun. There're a lot of interesting sounds (to my ear) on these tracks, and it was fun to give my pile of fuzz boxes and whizzers and whooshers a workout.
What is your songwriting process like? How do you usually start crafting a new song?
Some songs start with a riff or a chord sequence/simple improvised melody. "Megafauna" started that way. The initial guitar riff rattled around for a while--and at one point I had a wildly vocal line and set of lyrics for it. I believe the working title was "Lord of Heck," and it was a much sillier song before it got reworked into its final form. "Doombox" was inspired by a neon sign somewhere that read OPEN 24/7 which called to mind the opening lyric "Haul on down and we'll give you a fright/twenty-four seven, we're open all night." The rest--except the bridge which was appropriated from Walt Whitman--flowed from there in a single burst of inspiration that got set to music in a hotel room a day or two later. I'm not really a personal or diaristic songwriter where I can take relationship stuff or emotional stuff and then turn it into something that connects in a linear way to direct expression. I've got to chew through a lot of ideas and take in a lot of disparate stimuli and let it whirl around where it can be sparked by a mood or concept or deadline to pull itself together into a song. Some days you pick up the guitar and you dash off three ideas in a row that become really good songs. Some days you can sit down with a blank legal pad and reel off five sets of lyrics are really rad. And other days it's chipping away and an idea that's been nagging you for months as you slowly get it into shape.
How do you continuously grow and evolve as an artist?
Growing as an artist is, for me, really just about staying engaged and interested in the world. It's about hearing or reading something that inspires you to want to try something similar or something totally different in response. Sometimes it's about wanting to stretch your current skill set and see what happens or learning some new tricks. Sometimes it's taking a tried-and-true method off the table or switching up the order of how you normally do things. For example, so much of the initial wave of Black Magick Marching Band recordings was about getting back into playing 12-string electric guitar after years of not playing that way. And then for ‘Slouching Towards Babylon’ the idea was, "Let's not do that this time" to see how that would change how the songs and recordings changed to fit the new approach. That's a simple and relatively minor change, but I think the EP would have been different--and maybe easier to dash off quickly--if the same approach was used for these songs as were used for the earlier stuff.