RUN ON

Interview by Chris Crowson and Tim Ross in Tuba Frenzy #2

TF = Chris Crowson, Tim Ross
Run On = Rick Brown, Sue Garner, Alan Licht, David Newgarden

Sue: Ten years.

Rick: Yeah, about ten years.

TF: Was Fish & Roses the first band you played in together?

Rick: We were playing together a little while before Fish & Roses. We were working on some things and Dave Sutter (keyboardist for F&R) was a friend of mine from college. We were looking for someone to play with, so we asked him. That was the start of Sue and I working together.

TF: I wanted to ask you about some pre-Fish & Roses bands that I was unfamiliar with, like V-Effect.

Rick: Oh yeah, you've never heard of V-Effect?!?

TF: No, but I think I should have. I feel guilty now.

Rick: I'll send you a box of records then. (laughter all around)

TF: So they sold like hotcakes?

Rick: Actually they sold really well at first. It was one of these stupid things where the record company miscalculated. They didn't think it was going to sell a bunch of copies but it ended up selling more then they expected, so they repressed it and now there's a lot left over.

Sue: They repressed after the band had stopped playing.

Rick: But for a band on that level, in that kind of world, to sell out a pressing of a thousand records was unbelievably large. Then there was the repressing and I am the caretaker of that large repressing.

TF: What was the name of the V-Effect record and when did it come out?

Rick: It's called Stop Those Songs and it came out in '84.

TF: What was the label?

Rick: Rift.

TF: That's the label that put out the Timber record (Parts & Labor).

Rick: Yeah. It's a label that Fred Frith started with Bob Ostertag and some other people in New York soon after Fred moved to New York. It was around '79 or '80. Anyway, to make a long story short, V-Effect met Fred and he invited us to do a tour of Europe opening up for Skeleton Crew. Through that we became friends with him and he produced our record. Later on. Mark Howell (Timber) and I kind of volunteered to help work on the label, Rift, when things seemed very inactive... About the time we volunteered to do that, kind of ignorant of what you had to do to run a label, Fred and the other remaining people who worked on the label and knew what to do all left town. So it kind of left us with a pile of records, a bank account and...

Sue: And a lot of paper.

Rick: ...and a plan to put out Bob Ostertag's record Attention Span which was already in the works. So we did that and a record by the Momes (Spiralling).

TF: That Momes album is a great record.

Rick: A wonderful record. Then we put out the Timber CD and more

recently a CD by a group called the Same. But I don't know whether Rift...actually, I hadn't thought Rift would do anything else, but I got kind of a vague scheme to maybe do something....(pause). But I'm not at liberty to speak about it right now.

TF: Is Timber still active?

Rick: It's kind of reactivated temporarily right now and may do something in the future. We're playing a show this Wednesday in New York and we are playing a festival in France in July. But we have no plans beyond July.

David: Did Timber get back together because of this festival?

Rick: No, we were intending to play again but this thing in France kind of kicked our ass to really start doing it.

TF: Sue, what was the band you were in prior to Fish & Roses? Last Round Up?

Sue: Last Round Up and Vietnam.

TF: What were those bands like?

Sue: Last Round Up was kind of a country type thing and Vietnam was more of Fish & Roses type thing.

Rick: No, Vietnam was a...

Sue: I don't know...I don't know what we were.

Rick: Vietnam was a no wave-inspired band from Atlanta. (to Sue) I mean wouldn't you say?

Sue: Yep. That's what you might say.

Rick: It seemed to me that the Contortions were a definite influence.

Sue: Well definitely on Stan.

TF: Did Stan play the saxophone?

Rick: They had a guy who sang and played alto sax. Sue played conga and Moog synthesizer in the band.

TF: Wow. What kind of Moog synthesizer?

Sue: You know, I'm so sad. When I left Atlanta I was so sick of it that I gave it away. It was a really great little Moog and I wished I had it now.

TF: When did you (Rick) move to New York City?

Rick: I've lived in New York for fifteen, twenty years. Actually more than twenty years!

TF: Were you involved at all with the no wave crowd?

Rick: I was in a band called Blinding Headache that was a contemporary of those groups. We knew those people and I specifically knew a couple of the members of the more classic no wave bands. In fact my first "professional" gig was when Blinding Headache opened the show during a famous Mars performance. The one where Rudolph Grey joined them on stage for the whole set and then played the final song.

Alan: And Eno recorded it.

Rick: Yeah, Eno recorded that. I guess a lot of that stuff on that live CD (Live Mars on Les Disques du Soleil).

TF: I had heard that you (Rick) had some connection to the no wave scene, but I wasn't sure of the nature or the extent of the connection. Rick: Yeah, before V-Effect I was in Blinding Headache and another band called Information. Both of those groups had connections to those people. Jim Sclavunos, who went on to be in Teenage Jesus and 8 Eyed Spy, was the guy I replaced in Information.

David: And there's an imminent Blinding Headache archival release.

Rick: Yeah, Byron Coley and Thurston Moore are talking about putting out some kind of funny collector's item that they can sell for a million dollars.

It's this tape that we did with Blinding Headache, Information and the associated band, Mofungo, back in '82. It's a collection of little things by those three bands.

TF: In what way was Mofungo associated?

Rick: Memberships. Willy Klein, who was the unrecognized auteur of that band, was one of the members of Blinding Headache. It was me, Jim Pozner and Willy with some others off and on.

TF: After these early bands, what did you two (Sue and Rick) want to do in Fish & Roses? I mean it was unusual in the mid-80s to not have a guitar player in your band. Was that a conscious direction to move toward or was it just what happened?

Sue: It's more what happened.

Alan: No guitar players liked them.

Rick: It really wasn't a conscious thing. When Sue and I started playing, she was playing violin. It was violin and drums. Acoustic violin at that, and I play kind of loud so that really did not work.

Sue: My goal in Fish & Roses was to learn how to play the bass.

Rick: A friend gave her a bass and that's how that worked. Then we were looking for people to play with and I knew David Sutter. He was a piano player but we knew that was stupid -- piano and drums. So we tried to convince him to play organ, which was totally a freaky move for him.

Sue: He never did like the organ.

Rick: I loved the organ, but it was like, "you can't leave your fingers there David". It took him a while to get used to that.

TF: So I guess between the two of you (Sue and Rick) you probably can play every instrument around.

Sue: Or we can make noise on every instrument around.

Rick: I blow a mean clarinet.

TF: What happened with Fish & Roses? What was the impetus to stop doing the band?

Sue: It ran its course. It was time to stop.

TF: You decided to run on to something else. (The pun is not appreciated)

Sue: No, it was just very easy to stop it.

Rick: We made three records for three fucked-up labels.

David: I thought it was really notable when you were going to play your last show and the New York Times announced that this was going to be the last show -- and the place was packed. The word was out that this was the last Fish & Roses show. So a lot of people were there.

Rick: Well, yeah, but we were also opening up for the 3Ds so of course a lot of people were going to be there.

Sue: If they had all been like that we probably would have kept on.

Rick: It was very frustrating, the final period of that group. Besides the musical disagreements and differences between us, we made three records for, like I said, these three labels (Fish & Roses on Lost-Twin/Tone, 1987; We Are Happy To Serve You on Homestead, 1989; and Dear John on Feel Good All Over, 1992). Increasingly better budgets to do the records. Not anything monstrous at all; I mean by the time we made our third record, the record company paid for half of it.

Sue: Nah, that's not true. The third one John (from Feel Good All Over) paid for us.

Rick: C'mon, I think we put our own money into it.

Sue: No, no, no.

Rick: Anyway, whether he paid for it or not, he screwed all kinds of shit up. He's a fuck-up.

TF: Who is this?

Rick: John Henderson. He lives in Chicago. He runs a label called Feel Good All Over. Recently, maybe he's got some of his shit together and he's been putting records out again, at least. I mean the records that he's been advertising, some of them are coming out.

Sue: Actually now you can find his records in the store.

TF: Unlike when you guys were on the label.

Rick: Yeah, that's a totally fucked-up story with him, but we were also on Homestead when Gerard Cosloy worked for Homestead. It's kind of the same story. We went to him asking him if he would sign us to Homestead. He had expressed enthusiasm about the band in his magazine and he tried to talk us out of it. Gerard really cautioned us about signing. What he was really advising us to do was put our own record out. Which I do think would have been a better idea, but I think we were...

Sue: Too disorganized.

Rick: Yeah, we weren't able to think like that. The idea of someone giving us money and putting out a record and not having us do the work was appealing. He went along with it, put it out and then he promptly quit the label. He and Craig Marks both quit the label at the same time so we knew nobody at the label and the people that were working there really didn't care about our band and didn't like the record.

Sue: The record wasn't selling like hotcakes either.

Rick: But if there was someone there that cared about it, even if it wasn't selling well, it might have been treated better. Plus it was the last record not to be on CD on the label. It was the last one they decided not to put out on compact disc.

TF: That's a dubious distinction.

Rick: So it was frustrating, the last couple of acts of the band. But we did a tour in Europe just before we broke up. It went really well, it was fun, we played really well and like David said, we had a really good final show in New York. Plus I'm very proud of our last record.

TF: When was that last show?

David: It must have been '91 or '92.

Alan: '92 sounds right.

Sue: '92 sounds right because it was a year before we started doing something else. Then it was a year that we jammed with Alan and then its been a year since we started to play out with David.

TF: After Fish & Roses finished up, how did you get hooked up with Alan?

Alan: They just called up.

Sue: Well Love Child had broken up.

Rick: Actually, Fish & Roses and Love Child had played a couple of shows together. . .

Alan: Just one.

Rick: Just the one?

Alan: That was enough.

Rick: Plus Alan and I had mutual acquaintances who were involved in the improvising stuff. So that was the first time Alan and I played together really.

TF: What was that?

Rick: We played with this guy named Glenn Thrasher at this little Sunday night series of improvised music run by a collective of people in New York who are in different places all the time and are always looking for a home.

Alan: Plus we're both friends of Yo La Tengo. So on a social level, I already knew them anyway. Not to mention the King Sister.

Sue: That's right! The group that never was.

Alan: At one point I came up with one of my bright ideas. This idea of doing a group with Rick and Sue and Tara Key from Antietam that would do four covers. I guess the covers I thought of were "King Kong" by the Kinks with Tara singing and "King Lee's Hat" (?) by Eno with Rick singing. Of course Rick didn't like that song.

Sue: Well "Sister Ann" was one of them.

Alan: Yeah, you guys came up with "Sister Ann" and this other Quincy Jones song.

Rick: It was the song from The Color Purple.

Sue: Oh, "Sister". Right, right.

TF: So that didn't go anywhere I take it.

Alan: We rehearsed a couple of times and then forgot about it.

Sue: We were going to do a double single.

David: Any tapes exist?

Rick: Yeah, but I probably taped over them by mistake.

TF: Now, Alan, you were already playing with Rudolph Grey prior to the break up of Love Child.

Alan: Yeah.

TF: Are the Blue Humans still active?

Alan: In some form or another. For a while it was Rudolph Grey, who's the leader of that group, with Charles Gayle on drums....but now Charles seems to have disembarked from his drumming career to concentrate on tenor saxophone. So I'm not really sure where it is right now. But that was a name (Blue Humans) that Rudolph had used for different groups from the early 80s until now.

TF: So after Love Child, were you more interested in doing improvisation along the lines of Grey and the Blue Humans or did you still have a desire to do something more in a pop context?

Alan: Well, both. I was interested in documenting the solo guitar stuff that I had been working on for a few years previous but hadn't had the time or energy to record in any kind of real way without having to practice or play out of town. After Love Child broke up, it was a good time to finally get around to do some of that. As far as a band, I kind of either wanted to be...after being in Love Child for six years, I figured out what I thought would be good to have in a band and what would not be good to have in a band. And it seemed to me that I either wanted something where people would be contributing more or less equally, or I wanted something where I could be the dictator. Well, Rick and Sue's thing seemed like everyone contributed equally, even though the songs I was writing didn't really fall into their area of playing for the most part. I made some attempts at forming a dictatorship band, none of which really panned out. I've since come to the conclusion that the method of 4-track recording is the best way to go for that kind of thing.

TF: In the Crank interview (issue #4) with you that was done around the time of the first Run On single, you mentioned that you liked Run On but you were still interested in doing something with more extended improv guitar work within a pop context. You hinted that that's what you were wanting to get at with later-period Love Child stuff. Do you feel that it's more integrated now in Run On?

Alan: Well, first of all, when the single was recorded I had only been playing with the band for a little while and was not integrated at all. In a sense, I was just playing on their record. By the time the EP (On/Off) was recorded, I had been playing with Rick and Sue for a little longer and David Newgarden had been playing with us for a few months. A couple of the songs we recorded for the EP, had not been on the original demo tape that Sue gave me, so those songs were more something that we had all worked on together.

Sue: The last song, "Beat Out", was just a jam that we recorded and Rick put the vocals on top.

TF: Oh the Jandek-sounding one?

Sue: (laughing) Yeah, the Jandek-sounding one!

TF: You told me you had some Jandek stories.

Rick: No, I'm the only one who doesn't have any Jandek stories!

Alan: Dave and I have Jandek stories.

Rick: I have two Jandek albums that maybe have subliminally influenced me but I have no stories.

David: I have some Jandek test pressings! But I think we should save that for another interview. I've got a lot of Jandek stories.

Alan: Anyway, getting integrated into Run On was just a natural progression and in terms of when Love Child broke up, I knew what I wanted to do in theory, but in theory I'd kind of like to do Fushitsusha, or something like that. But by the same token, that's not the way I write music. When I play something that's song-oriented it's usually pretty tight to the point where it doesn't even have a little guitar solo, let alone a 12 minute long blowout.

David: You also have another band at the same time as Run On.

Alan: Well that's not really a band, but occasionally I play with Tom Surgal, the other drummer from the Blue Humans.

TF: That brings up a point that I wanted to ask you guys about. Since you all come from such diverse musical backgrounds and past musical projects, when you were putting together Run On, did you want to coalesce those influences? Or was it even a conscious thing?

Sue: I think as far as blending all your influences, that just happens naturally, and with this band, I think that's actually something that really worked out well. Especially in that we each do bring something really different to the group and I think, for me, that's the best thing that can happen in a band.

TF: Hard to do though.

Sue: Well it's really hard for it to work out that way, and that's why this is great because it has worked out so far.

Alan: I think I've used certain influences in Run On that I hadn't really used in other group situations that I've played in. I've been a fan of things like Captain Beefheart, Wire, and Can, none of which really showed up in my other projects like Love Child or Blue Humans. So it's another area I've always been interested in but never got a chance to explore until Run On.

Rick: Yeah, I'd say kind of the same thing. In Run On the number of songs in 4/4 is ten times what it was in any of the bands that I've been in before. I mean, I have no disdain for really simple rock beats, but I'm just not very accustomed to it because I just haven't done it. But that's a thing that we have really been working on -- these slowly-evolving songs and longer, dronier things that are in 4/4. That's an element of our group, but that's not all that we do. In contrast, in Fish & Roses, we'd never play more than four measures of 4/4 at a time.

Sue: And the other thing is that the group works in such a way that everything doesn't have to be exactly tight and written out. Now every time we play you can sort of try to do something different, or at least feel like you are doing something different.

TF: The thing that struck me during your live show and the CD is how you play these pop songs which seem to transcend the usual trappings of pop music. I've always been impressed by bands like the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 that strike a balance between experimentalism and pop. I think that's one of the hardest things to do well in music.

Rick: Well this isn't really pertinent to that, but when Fish & Roses were playing, we always thought we were caught between those two areas. We had friends and associates in the so called "downtown/improviser/avant-garde" circle and we had really close friends who were in rock bands in New York. We felt we had both of those influences going on in our group, but we were always facing audiences that couldn't deal with that and didn't like to hear those two things together. I really feel that something has kind of happened in the audience in the last five or seven years or so. I think there's a real interest now among rock people in free jazz, German and European experimentalists. The fact that people who are basically rock 'n' roll fans are listening to Charles Gayle, Faust, Can and La Monte Young is really encouraging. I think it makes a group like ours make more sense to an audience now and that's nice.

Alan: If you go back to the '60s to the Byrds and the Who, you find that they were writing catchy two or three minute pop songs while experimenting with feedback and different kind of sonic textures. So to me it comes out of that kind of attitude.

Rick: Yeah, the fact that the Jefferson Airplane could be this band that was written about in Time magazine and was selling records to everyone while at the same time being a totally experimental rock band -- that was a really cool moment too, when those bands were doing that kind of stuff.

TF: A really odd moment for me was when I saw a review of the new David S. Ware record on Homestead Records in Rolling Stone. I thought that was really strange that this avant-garde jazz musician's record put out by an independent rock label was being reviewed in a mainstream music magazine. But on the other hand, like you mentioned, it's encouraging, because it's not like Ware or Matthew Shipp or Charles Gayle suddenly decided to change their sound for a commercial attempt at becoming popular. They're just doing what they've always done, i.e. doing things that want to push the envelope further, and if it gets that kind of exposure, that's sort of refreshing.

Alan: Which is such a step forward from the 1970s when you had Herbie Hancock doing bad funk records and trying to push that on a rock audience when now these guys (Ware, Gayle, Shipp) are making the same records for bigger labels that they would be making if they were just doing it on their own in a haphazardly distributed, self-released way.

David: If Herbie Hancock's bop records were selling hundreds of thousands of copies I don't think he would have attempted that...not to necessarily slag on some of his crossover attempts.

TF: Have the rock and jazz communities in New York become more integrated over the past few years? Is there more crossover?

Rick: Nah, we can't exaggerate the integration.

TF: Well, how about more awareness?

Rick: I don't know that any kind of mainstream jazz audience is open at all to the more avant-garde jazz, let alone to anybody in the rock world that has some leanings that way. We shouldn't pat anyone on the back, but I think the rock audience is the one that's been more open instead of the other way around. This whole Lincoln Center jazz scandal with the Wynton Marsalis nonsense and his whole "new traditionalism" is not an opening up. It's more like a closing down. When you get down to it, Marsalis is very narrow in what he accepts and he's very outspoken and very powerful. So he's the person who defines what is "good jazz" to a lot of people, and to be that closed as he was about a lot of what I think is really great music from the 60s -- that's not good.

TF: To change the subject drastically, what was the impetus for David Newgarden to join Run On?

David: I guess I knew all these characters previously. I did a radio show and used to run the radio station, WFMU. I was the program director and music director for about 7 or 8 years. Timber played on the radio show, Love Child played a big benefit and I was a Shams fan, so I knew all their music. I remember reading about V-Effect, maybe in the Times or the Village Voice years ago.

Rick: Both of which pumped up our ego.

David: Yeah, when I was a young lad I remember reading about V-Effect but I was too young to see their shows.

Rick: Back in the olden days.

David: I played trumpet when I was a kid and taught myself how to play the piano as a teenager and when I was in college. When I started doing radio I completely gave up musical instruments because for me, radio was a real creative outlet. So I put away the instruments. Actually, Alan was instrumental in getting me started again by introducing me to Hamish Kilgour at a party. Somehow, Hamish talked me into picking up the trumpet again to play one song on his record. But that band happened really slowly and about a year later I actually did pick up the trumpet and Hamish asked me to play this one cut and they never did it. But instead of just playing this one cut, all the band members had just quit the band, so he asked me to join a band to tour with the Television Personalities three weeks later.

TF: Was this the Mad Scene?

David: This was the Mad Scene. I was a little bit nervous about it, but they had an organ that I borrowed. We got together, maybe rehearsed twice and they gave me a tape of the songs. Then they actually went on vacation for two weeks and asked me to get together the rest of the band. They asked me to get a bass player and a drummer. They gave me a couple of recommendations and phone numbers and eventually I got some people. We did a bunch of short tours with that band and then we broke up about six months later. Hamish and his wife, Lisa, continued the band later with new members.

Alan: Well that band had kind of existed in New Zealand and the guy they were doing it with stayed in New Zealand when they decided to come back to the United States to live.

TF: So you never played on any released recordings by the Mad Scene?

David: We broke up just as we were doing demos and most of those songs never got released. Although on their current album, their new trumpeter actually plays one of my lines. So this will be my chance to take credit that I wasn't given.

Alan: Well on the new 9-Iron album, the drummer plays my drum part on some recycled Love Child song. Initially I was really annoyed, but then I figured that Will Baum (ex-Love Child, now of 9-Iron) probably just told him what to play on it.

TF: I heard that before David joined Run On, there were some difficulties translating the band into a live performance context?

Alan: Yeah, there were no live performances.

Rick: Although Sue argued with Alan and me on this point, we kind of thought that it was hopeless to play live. We wanted to do too many things with too many instruments and using the sequencer and synthesizer -- just a lot of stuff. It just seemed like we would never be able to do what we wanted to do live. Sue persisted in thinking that it would work out and then the idea was obvious that if we got another person to help do some of the things that we were talking about, then that would maybe make it possible. Anyway, it would make it better.

Sue: It was more than that even. It was like all of the songs were kind of sketches of songs that really didn't work. So Alan suggested that we ask David. We all knew David and liked him so it sounded perfect. And he came in and it really did add what was needed to make it work.

Alan: The thing is that besides the fact that we were all friends of David, what he did in the Mad Scene is extremely similar to what he does in this band. To me what kind of pulled the songs together in the Mad Scene when he was in the band was that he was playing really just one or two notes, but it was the right one or two notes.

David: And because I hadn't played for so many years, I was not a very good trumpet player and I was never a piano/organ player. So my ability to play an instrument was not so important as just having a musical sense of knowing when to play and knowing when not to play. I was just trying to add some sounds to it by playing a lot of different instruments in the band.

TF: Any instruments other than trumpet, organ, cowbell?

David: Marimba, banjo...anything you got, I'll play it.

Alan: What I think is actually interesting is that in the last couple of years it seems like the "indie rock trio" which used to be so prevalent has not really been as prevalent. There are still a lot of bands like that, but it seems that there are more bands now with larger groups of people like Lambchop, Tortoise, Strapping Fieldhands.

Rick: Or the Thinking Fellers. Expanding for texture is really something that people are experimenting with.

TF: Speaking of Tortoise, Rick, you did a remix on their new album, Rhythms, Resolutions & Clusters.

Rick: Yeah I was very flattered when they asked me to do that because I had never really been a producer, engineer or a remixer before. But I think they saw something in my attitude that would work. They really gave me free reign to do what ever I wanted but I was modest. I chose one of the shortest pieces on their CD. One that might get overlooked. So I flew out to Chicago for a day and spent the day in the studio with John McEntire. Even though they credit me, John and I really did the remix together. I had some of the basic notions of what I wanted to do but he had a lot of input into it.

TF: Is yours basically just the original tape and whatever effects from twisting knobs?

Rick: Oh yeah. In fact, mine is kind of the most mundane remix on there. There is no sound-producing element that was added to the track that I did. With the Albini thing there were all the footsteps and there's that whole play going on there. The one that John did is really a pastiche of things from a lot of different tracks. His is really kind of pieced together but mine just uses what's on the tape. We slowed the tape down. That's one of the old school electronic music techniques. Some ring modulation. I'm into the early, early techniques -- the old stuff. Although there is some MIDI use on the track too, but ring modulation....I cannot rave about it enough. I love ring modulation and if you know any engineers that could build me a little ring modulator, I really want one.

TF: They don't make them any more?

Rick: Nobody! You know with all this digital technology it would be so simple to put ring modulation in some of these digital effects. And as far as I know there's one -- I think there's like a new Korg multi-digital effect unit that has a ring modulator. I mean ring modulation is really a simple thing where you take two signals and it gives the addition and subtraction or the multiplication of the two signals and puts it out. The analog thing is like four diodes in this simple pattern. It's nothing, there's nothing there. It sounds great, it's really cool and nobody uses it.

TF: (to the rest of the band) Do you guys hear this a lot?

The rest of Run On: (wearily) Yeah.

Rick: I'm always bitching about it!

TF: Now, Rick, you work at a law school. Do the rest of you have day jobs?

David: I have several day jobs. I've got too many jobs.

Sue: We're trying to get him to quit a few.

Alan: I work for a film distribution company in New York called Kino International. It does foreign films and a lot of classic films. That's what I studied in school. I've worked there part time for a few years.

TF: Is it a fairly small distributor?

Alan: Yeah, only ten people work there.

TF: This is a related question for Alan and David. How did you guys get started writing music criticism for fanzines or CMJ?

Alan: Well, my fanzine career was pretty short-lived. I was always a big fan of Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, and people like that so I kind of had an interest from that. And when See Hear opened up, that made a lot of fanzines more accessible. With Black to Comm I just started writing that guy because he had written some articles about some stuff that I was interested in, and he was like, "If you write for the magazine, I'll send it to you for free." So I was like, "Okay." The whole La Monte Young thing I was originally going to write for him but he thought it would be better for Forced Exposure. So I wrote them and they were really, really interested, to my surprise. It was just a case of good timing because Forced Exposure was just starting to shift away from a strictly underground rock focus to a more experimental bias. But after that I really didn't do too much onve Love Child started getting active.

TF: So you don't have any interest in doing any fanzine writing in the future?

Alan: Not really music writing so much. I'd like to do some film writing but not like writing movie reviews of whatever came out that Friday. More like larger, theoretical pieces.

David: I'm also not a writer....(pause)...uh, I'm really not a writer. I didn't particularly have good writing skills and I was getting really bored at my last job working at the radio station. It was a really great place to work, a really amazing place but I was getting bored after about seven or eight years there. I guess the first writing I did was when I started a mail order catalogue with WFMU just writing descriptions of records. When I left I think what appealed to me about working at CMJ was that it was like learning something new -- like learning how to ride a motorcycle or hand gliding. I wanted to do something I hadn't done before. I felt that my brain was turning to marshmallow because there were certain things that I just wasn't using my brain for at all. I wanted to become a better writer and since I have to write every week at CMJ about a certain number of things, I'm going to get better at it. Plus I wanted to continue to get paid for listening to music which is what I did during my years at FMU. So I took a job at CMJ writing reviews...and something else will be next.

TF: You work at John Zorn's new label as well.

David: I'm helping John run a new label called Tzadik and it's similar to Avant. He's going to continue Avant but he's just shifting more of his priority to this label. We are going to reissue all of his out of print records as well as putting out dozens of things by other artists.

TF: Speaking of putting out albums, I know you guys mentioned a full-length coming out in January but are there any side projects that you are currently involved with?

Rick: Yeah there's a thing that Sue's involved in especially, but I play on too -- that's coming out on Ajax in about a month. It's an album-length CD under the name Peach Cobbler. It's Sue and a friend of ours in France...actually a couple who had a group called Video Aventures which made a couple of records, one of which, probably the better known of them, was on Recommended -- it's a ten inch record. Anyway Dominique Grimaud and Monique Alba are their names. Dominique is a synthesist and he did a lot of analog synthesizer stuff with that group. But now he's picked up guitar, especially Nashville steel guitar, and he's really gotten interested in blues music. So this record is pretty much song-oriented and there are a few blues covers and some songs that he and Sue wrote together. There's also some tape manipulation stuff and things that lean more toward his past synthesizer work.

TF: How did the Peach Cobbler record get set up?

Sue: Well we recorded it about a year and half ago.

Rick: We've known Dominique and a bunch of other friends of ours through this collaboration that I have with the French drummer Guigou Chenevier in Les Batteries. So that's another group that I'm in.

Rick: Moderately so. We actually did a couple of dates in the states. He came over and we went to Chicago and recorded at Idful with John McEntire engineering. I don't know what's going to happen with that but we're going to work on that some more.

Alan: I have a couple of records coming out. One is a duo record with Loren Mazzacane, while we're on the subject of blues. It's supposed to have been out by now but we've just been having problems with test pressings.

TF: What label is that going to be on?

Alan: New World of Sound. It was taken from a tape of a live gig that Loren and I did at CBGB's gallery in early '94, I think. It's a forty minute duel guitar improvisation piece spread over two sides. For all extents and purposes that was the last time I've played with him. I did one other gig with him at the Table of the Elements showcase in New York last year.

TF: What is it like playing with Loren Mazzacane?

Alan: Well it wasn't my idea. It was his.

David: He doesn't play with very many people.

Alan: No, and he's not used to it. And under those circumstances I think that it came off really, really well. Anyway, Bruce Russell is also putting out a solo CD of mine on his Corpus Hermeticum label sometime in 1996. I'm also going to do some solo song 4-track kind of stuff for 18 Wheeler, who put out my other single (Calvin Johnson...) last year. I think that's it...no wait. I also did these recordings with Keiji Haino when he was in town.

Alan: Well there were four track recordings and then a separate session was done and videotaped. Lee Ranaldo has expressed some interest in releasing the video tape and we're trying to get PSF to put out the recordings. I don't play guitar on this, I play pipe organ. It was recorded in a church in New York. Connie plays bass clarinet and this girl Melissa Weaver plays piano. It's really very interesting.

TF: Does Haino play guitar?

Alan: No, he doesn't play guitar! He just sings and plays percussion.

Sue: Actually he and Connie did this show in New York that was so great. Just to see the two of them on the same stage is enough to be intriguing.

Rick: As far as Run On, we are going out to the Midwest in a couple of weeks and we're pretty sure that we are also going to do some recording with John McEntire in his 8-track studio in his loft while we are out there. Maybe we'll use some of that -- maybe on this album that we are planning for early next year.

TF: Well, we look forward to hearing it. Thanks for the interview.

-- Tuba Frenzy, P.O. Box 576, Chapel Hill, NC 27514.