Chief Tizo Interviews #5: Andrew Henry

Andrew Henry is a lot of things: a musician who creates cinematic ambient/experimental/electronic music, an avid fan of films and their scores, a follower of Frank Zappa, Omar Rodríguez-López and the Dave Matthews Band (back in the day he swears), and a long-time friend of mine from our shared online forum days a decade ago. We briefly discussed film projects, the difficulty of ascertaining why he makes music, Will Long, his faux-soundtrack work, and his future in film and music.

Andrew Henry circa 20XX

Bryan Santizo: Why ambient music? What is the major appeal of it as a genre for you? As a listener and as a musician who makes it?

Andrew Henry: The "why" of ambient music is a thought that comes up a lot for me, and I can't really say I have a solid answer. I don't ever remember making a conscious decision where I said "I'm going to make ambient music." But I can't imagine any musician does that for their respective genre. I remember being really interested in William Basinski and Brian Eno in 2012-13 and discovering that you could mimic Eno's techniques in Ableton Live and make tape loops from cassettes. I just kept experimenting with those formats until good results started developing. Finding Celer - which I will address in more detail later - was the last aesthetic push from that time to put me into making "pure" ambient music. It brought about the visual element that the music lacked.

The appeal, as both a listener and musician, lies in the bizarre dynamic of repetition and freedom. My favorite ambient music is very repetitive, but it is morphed enough or has a good enough loop that you can find different things to hear. You can let the music go in and out of your consciousness - both while listening or sitting focused at your mixing board. Ambient music is also just really relaxing, which is something I have trouble with. So perhaps it all goes to the simplest explanation: I make ambient music because it helps me relax.

"The appeal, as both a listener and musician, lies in the bizarre dynamic of repetition and freedom."

BS: Surely, since ambient is a music genre that is known for its length and build up of sonic textures, it must be a difficult to assess when a piece is finished. How do you do it?

AH: I suppose there is two ways of looking at this. If the piece is based on a loop, I'll know the loop is finished when it has a flow that is either timed perfectly or where the awkward cut and overlap gels together. The loop also needs to be pleasing, of course.

I know an individual track is finished when I've had enough of it, really. The majority of my recording is done through a mixing board and effects processing, so I'm not just dragging out a loop in Ableton up to a certain marker and saying "Okay, done." I'm listening as I'm making, so once I feel that the loop or my amount of effects variance has reached its limit, I stop. Lately I've had many tracks under 10 minutes, where in the past I had stuff of 30+ minutes as the norm. This is a result of me paying stricter attention to what I'm doing. In the past I would just start the loop and put my attention to something else while occasionally adjusting the delay/reverb.

Tools of the trade.

BS: Longing and nostalgia is very apparent in your ambient music titles. Is there a consistent theme in your music?

AH: I would not say there is not a deliberate consistent theme in my music. But since ambient music is very intimate for me, it will always lead back to my personality traits, habits, and lifelong desires. So my sensitive personality is always going to shine through. I do try to keep a consistent aesthetic, and I do have a very cinematic sense of space that I touch upon with my music, so I can see how a theme comes through. So, in short, the consistent theme(s) of my music is just my personality coming back again and again. But I'm never really saying "Okay this one is about nostalgia or this person and that event." I'm never trying to tell a full story.

BS: The majority of your work is ambient, but the rest of your work that is not seems to be written from a different perspective and not as personal. Is this intentional?

AH: There's not a lot of intention there. In a musical sense, I don't view the ambient and non-ambient stuff differently. I mean there's an obvious genre and sound difference, but to me it's just "making music" and sometimes a very ambient loop or idea turns into a full fledged song. But in terms of perspective and meaning, my personal life does seep into the ambient stuff more, and that's because of the ambient music being a recreation of the visuals and moods that pop into my head. Something like "Iridescent Lovers" certainly means something to me artistically, but samples of squeaking saxophones is not what I'm trying to create and insert into my personal life. It's a reflection of what I feel all the time.

The ambient music is what I'm trying to make my life like. The non-ambient is how I feel all the time. And that comes about naturally, not because I'm deliberately trying to make those statements. 

BS: You named Celer/Will Long as a great aesthetic and musical influence. How did you come into contact with his music? Why do you enjoy it so much? How do you incorporate his influence?

AH: I came into contact with his music by browsing a forum thread about William Basinski and seeing a user suggest Celer as a similar artist. I enjoy his music a lot because it's just well done! He has excellent loops and is very skillful with incorporating field recordings. He also doesn't make music that has that weird "spa music" vibe of piano melodies and cheap pad synths, and he also doesn't do a lot of jagged noise music stuff. It's just very clean and peaceful, and that's exactly what I want from ambient music.

I'd say I incorporate his influence by trying to keep an ongoing visual aesthetic and a diary-like approach with liner notes and meanings. The sonic influence is probably obvious!

"Most of the time I just open Ableton and see what happens."

BS: You shift between genres consistently, is this difficult or more of a spitballing (see what works) type of creative process?

AH: I never see it as difficult. I like a lot of different genres of music, and I want to work in all of them as much as I can. I don't even view it as a "see what works" process either. It just happens, really. I'm aware of the genre shifts, but it's not something that's so conscious that I say "Okay, this is gonna be a dance record, this is chillwave, this is free jazz. I need to do another ambient album soon, though." Most of the time I just open Ableton and see what happens.

BS: Film is clearly referenced in your work, and you yourself have been involved in short films and even music videos. Are there any outside influences to your work you are totally enraptured with besides music?

AH: Film is definitely a huge influence, because certain film scores, or even just shots or cinematography styles pop into my head and guide what the music will do. Like I said before, I have visions or moods in my head when making ambient music - even if its not a complete image that I can describe. It's just like a shot from a movie - maybe a florescent street lamp on a summer night with a car coming in the distance. It doesn't really mean anything, but it's something I would pull from seeing Palo Alto or Paris, Texas, and I'm trying to create more context around and within that. But besides film and music, I can't really say there are other outside influences that I'm enraptured with. Maybe minimalism and asceticism. But my work is mostly about that synthesis of image and sound.

The music maker.

BS: You have done faux-soundtrack in the form of Waiting for Contact I and II, how did you form these concepts? Why did you do these time-consuming projects that were so outside of ambient music?

AH: The path of coming up with "Waiting for Contact" is so wacky but I'll try to keep it condensed. I also hope I remember it correctly!

The first "Waiting for Contact" came about because I wanted to make something like that utilized retro synthesizer sounds and Philip Glass-like compositions. The album just started as some sort of beat-less "synthwave" project but as it went on I just found myself making stuff that sounded like a film score. When I was close to done, I realized that I could morph it into some sort of weird sci-fi movie score. I'm also a pretty big fan of alien abduction stories and The X-Files, so I finished the album with an influence from the Allagash River Incident in mind. 

The album then sat on my hard drive for a while until I felt that it should be released. I thought the deliberate cheese of the first album fit in well with vaporwave, so I sent the album out to a label (which fell through), and then the album went to a sister label where it got released. I regret that decision now.

The sequel came about because the label asked me if I would do some sort of sequel. It was "commissioned", I guess. But I did these albums because the first one just developed naturally, and the second one let me flex some retro synth and orchestral ideas that are representative of where my music is currently heading.

Waiting for Contact II

BS: You are outspoken for your love of Frank Zappa, projects related to The Mars Volta, and more experimental and loosely created music, is this something that you feel you can do with ambient music? Is this something that may influence your works of fluctuating genres?

AH: Stuff like Zappa or The Mars Volta, when being connected to my ambient music, is only an influence in terms of just, you know, "doing it." Zappa and Omar Rodriguez Lopez are great artists, and they push my desire to make art (and lots of it). Those guys are a way bigger influence on my non-ambient stuff because they both jumped around to different genres, or (in more cases) blended them seamlessly. But I think it's weird to put those two artists in the same space because Zappa was a very rigid musician who composed everything and rehearsed musicians like crazy. The Mars Volta is a lot of vamping and cobbling riffs and jams together - very cut-and-paste prog. But my ambient music is more like Zappa: more rigid with a clear focus and lots of rules regarding what can't happen. I'm more in line with The Mars Volta on everything else. So I don't really view my ambient music as experimental or loose, which I can imagine is surprising.

"There are always albums to be finished or started or changed.  I definitely have lots of ideas I can execute on as well, and those would involve getting into a studio and recording other musicians."

BS: When will the Pinheads, your experimental garage rock music project, return? As a drummer do you have any special influences?

AH: I don't think The Pinheads will ever return. The whole gang of people that is involved with or connected to The Pinheads always seems to be in flux, and we all have conflicting schedules, but hopefully something comes together soon. The duo of The Pinheads will essentially be absorbed into the result of this collaborating group, and maybe it will inherit that name. But there doesn't seem to be anything coming soon, I'm afraid.

With regard to drumming, my biggest influences are Deantoni Parks and Carter Beauford. I'm a little ashamed to admit that Beauford is an influence, but I listened to a lot of Dave Matthews Band as a teenager and fell in love with his drumming. It's hard to deny his skill though. Parks is a more important influence, though. He's able to deconstruct drum kits or use traditional kits with a ridiculous style that sounds like programmed drums. Syncopated and funky drumming has always been my go-to style, and Parks just pushed that into the next dimension.

BS: What is after this? Any upcoming release plans as a solo artist or as part of something else? How do you prioritize between film projects and music?

AH: I never really know what's next, and it's not something I worry about. I have plenty of things I could release, but I have terrible habits with releasing stuff and get sort of careless or uncertain. I'm always doing something, though. There are always albums to be finished or started or changed.  I definitely have lots of ideas I can execute on as well, and those would involve getting into a studio and recording other musicians. That could start happening soon. But I recently moved and the past year and a half has been very frustrating for me, so I've felt very weird and disengaged toward my art. But now the frustration has turned to anger, so something good could come from that. 

And I prioritize film projects and music by not having any film projects anymore! But in seriousness, I never have to think about balancing them. I just start them when I'm ready to roll on them and I just pick away at whatever I feel like working on. I think I have a pretty quick turnaround (which can be bad sometimes), so most projects don't just dangle and have to be scheduled and balanced with others. It works better if I don't think about it too much.

George Constanza: "It was more like a full-body dry heave set to music."

Listen to Andrew Henry's music HERE

Song of the Day: Survival Knife - Cut The Quick

Since the blog had its death in early 2013, three years worth of music that I have enjoyed is sorely missing a written appreciation. Right around March 2012, I was feverishly excited to learn that Justin Trosper and Brandt Sandeno (ex-members of Unwound) had begun playing live in a band called Survival Knife. In the hands of fate though, they would not release their 7" single Traces Of Me/Name That Tune until exactly a year later on March 2013. By then of course, the blog was all but buried and I was not able to give an approximation of how much I loved the single, the following Divine Mob/Snakebit 7-inch, their sole album Loose Power, and how I thought their Survivalized EP was a shoddy collection of odds and sods.

But aside from diverging this into becoming an entire breakdown of the band's small discography (I will attempt it some day), I wanted to focus on what I consider is one of their strongest tracks entitled "Cut The Quick". Starting off with the click of a distant harpsichord, the song enters a slow burning 4/4 trudge with a riff progression reminiscent of Challenge for a Civilized Society. But where the late-career Unwound would focus on atmospherics and layers of unique instrumentation, Survival Knife focuses its collaborative songwriting in a more emotional and straightforward fashion.

The song itself has a song structure reminiscent of Polvo if they were slowed down about 50% (see: "City Birds") and were half as long and complex. But instead of dizzying riffs and frequent tempo changes, Survival Knife allows for "Cut The Quick" to build its tension during its introductory verses, release some "false" tension during the first refrain, enter an uplifting second verse, release the "real" tension ("STOP CUTTING YOURSELF DOWN!"), have a louder noise break, enter the guitar solo outro, and end on an acoustic guitar/banjo/harpsichord instrumental piece. Much like sister song "Roman Fever", "Cut The Quick" is more audibly influenced by guitar-based progressive rock and the more adventurous sounds of late-70's rock.

Yet, it is crucial to understand the most radical shift that Survival Knife introduces is that we hear Trosper loud and clear, front and center. While Unwound's lyrics were typically abstract and passionately sung/shouted, an audibly older Justin Trosper now sadly intones: "A letter from an alien/Never to be read/By anyone/Sorry about the things I did/Couldn't find my way/In this world we live." It is a sign of maturation in a way, where he would previously mask his voice by layers of distorted guitar in the early years or by studio effect trickery in the end, listeners are treated to the full blow of musical inertia in his voice. It seems progression is stripping things back to all muscle and sinew.

Sadly. at present it appears that the band is defunct since their website is down, they have not made any updates since exactly last year (June 2015), and pleas asking about the status of the band have been left unanswered. I was lucky enough to catch them live twice, and genuinely hope they return to make enjoyable and relevant rock music. Purchase Loose Power HERE.

Song of the Day: 12 Rods - Telephone Holiday

It is hardly hyperbole that I immediately loved 12 Rods after about 30 seconds of listening to their music. They possessed a very good and rare sense of experimentation and interesting musical arrangement mixed with catchy melodies, strong drumming, and genuine lyrics. Unfortunately, they never got big, were abandoned by their label after their second album, and never really expanded beyond their regional popularity in Minnesota. Still, they remain a very important band to me that evokes excitement and admiration.

This song, “Telephone Holiday”, is the closing number from their final album from 2002 entitled Lost Time. It is funny to think that while the whole musical world over was busy praising post-punk revival and heralding some sort of second coming of NYC bands, this album was receiving no attention for its great songwriting, performances, and blending of rock with other musical approaches.

“Telephone Holiday” itself is by no means their most experimental or complex song in their discography (it sticks to a standard verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/outro format), but it does seem to mix in all their eras (from the gay? EP to Split Personalities to Separation Anxieties to Lost Time) into a convenient 4:42 package. The guitar and bass interweave in an almost impossible to ignore earworm in the first part of the opening verse, but then the second guitar (at 0:30) reveals the underlying tension of the song to gorgeous effect: “I’m a bad, bad person and I just wanted to play.” By the chorus, the ultimate intention of the narrator to avoid his Other is fully disclosed with swirling (and violent) synths entering, and finally shifting into a chaotic disco rhythm with incredibly melancholy synthesized strings. It is a perfect representation of 12 Rods’ nervous energy manifesting at full potential.

To no surprise, the narrator gets destroyed in the song, as leaving this one night stand now becomes an increasingly fucked up situation (“Little did I know, you were still in high school.”) and as the song gets to the bridge, the dramatics are set to stun. Is it the narrator, or the Other, who is now lamenting, “I’m waiting… for someone to TURN ME ON! Make it SEXY! Make it last LONG!”? It could sound all so sleazy on paper, but instead there is a depressing sense of remorse and desperation in the delivery; the sexual innuendo can double as desire for a meaningful and long lasting relationship. The narrator laments, that while he wishes for this too, that emotional distance and abandonment are just ingrained in nature and cannot be avoided.

Is any of that even what the song is about? Who really knows, but I have always found that 12 Rods mixed sexual tension within relationships in their lyrical content very well (see: "Kaboom”, “I Wish You Were A Girl”, “Accidents Waiting to Happen”), and it is a mature and rare quality in most modern music. If anything, the situation in “Telephone Holiday” is an eternal subject in pop music (see: "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover"), but now judgement is entirely ambiguous as it can often be in real life.

A Preface to a Series of Reviews

Hi everyone! I am happy to be back writing under the Chief Tizo banner once again. Over our hiatus I've been so focused on school I seemed to forget how to write casually about the things I love. Hopefully with more practice and reader support I'll find my tone. Shout out to all three of our followers, you are the reason why we do this!

Iceberg Slim chillin

I've had the privilege of being the only black male in a class full of white liberals speaking about race. It always seems like it is the white liberal's responsibility to face underprivileged communities with the heaping loads of their valuable pity and dignified ignorance. Just as quickly as one person may point out the problems with Law Enforcement, another would point to the flagrant gang culture found in rap music. Becoming the black representative in this kind of environment is easily the most stressful part of the semester, but even after this discourse is had the burden of all these people's unrecognized ignorance hurts. The one thing that makes it it worse is when these discussions are spawned by reading black writers that are a part of academia. Writers like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright are all accepted as great BLACK writers. Writers who speak against Jim Crow, against the dominant white culture that has kept them repressed. Now there is no denying the power of James Baldwin or Richard Wright, but their writings ,as well as the many other names I listed above, have become accepted within an academically constructed black literary canon.

I don't think it would be too radical to say that the majority of black writers published over the years remain unknown. Alice Walker's recent rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston proves there are masterpieces left to be uncovered. While it is so easy for white liberal academics to hold up a Toni Morrison novel as evidence of their diversity, they are ignoring the greater bias within the publishing industry. Academics can't see beyond their Eurocentric culture and values to notice that there is an implicit  favoring of a certain kind of representation.

The great cultural critic, bell hooks points out in her essay "Postmodern Blackness" that academics calling themselves "postmodernist" always attempt to call attention to the experience of difference and otherness. However, postmodern studies are so Eurocentric, they never acknowledge the concrete problems of the black underclass. It not on;y is through the dominant discourse that racial essentialist attitudes are disseminated but also the academic subculture in universities as well.  To bring closer attention to the helpless "Other", and to challenge the dominant white supremacy in American culture, hooks advocates creating new subjective representations of the black living. While there is no doubt that there is an explosion of black talent hitting shelves in the 21^st century, there is still very little understanding of our past. hooks' hope has only partially come true. The problem of color blindness in American culture has created a new impediment for achieving a full acknowledgement of the issues that attack the vulnerable black underclass.

I am not sure if any Pan African Studies department is doing any work to uncover the neglected works by black writers. I am not sure if anyone really cares. Its just that the mold for a black writer was so narrow and still is narrow. The subjective experience of the ghetto is mostly being published by independent publishers as street lit. The black avant garde is still too weird to draw much sales or praise. I am thinking of Charles Wright's zany avant garde satire The Wig. I am thinking of about the gritty and inflated autobiography Pimp by Iceberg Slim.

So,consider this a kind of preface to a series of reviews on neglected novels from the black community. Here is a list of novels I hope to review this summer:

Donald Goines: Dopefiend, Black Gangster, Black Girl Lost, Daddy Cool

Iceberg Slim: Pimp, Trick Baby, The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim

Charles Wright: The Wig, The Messenger

Clarence Cooper Jr. : Weed, The Black Messenger, The Scene, The Farm

Ann Petry: The Streets

Herbert Simmons: Corner Boy

Charles Perry: Portrait of a Young Man Drowning

Chief Tizo Interviews #4: MC Coolarge

Hey folks! We promised new interviews, so here we are with a fresh interview with experimental hip-hop stalwart MC Coolarge. We discuss the lyrical content behind his old/new material, question some of his sonic influences, and get some info about his upcoming untitled LP, which is due in Autumn.

Check it here:

You can find MC Coolarge's current discography HERE.

Song of the Day: On A Friday - To Be A Brilliant Light

Many adore and love Radiohead's catalog for very deserving reasons (seriously, how many bands match the stretch from The Bends to In Rainbows?), but very few people know of their initial embryonic recordings under the name On A Friday from 1985-1992. Dabbling in a wide variety of different sounds across their handful of cassette recordings (see the hilarity of the sped-up ska in "Tell Me Bitch" or the steel drum tinged "Happy Song"), this particular recording comes from their second demo from 1988.

At the time accompanied by three saxophone players,  On A Friday wastes no time crashing "To Be A Brilliant Light" headfirst with full melodrama and force. Slowing down with a reverberated acoustic guitar riff resembling something out of In the Court of the Crimson King, Thom Yorke quietly sings, "I'm getting sort of worried/Like the time of life I've reached /I'm getting pretty old /I should be reaching my peak". As a song obsessed with growing old (see "Bones") and desperate to find success while one is youthful, the nervous energy is apparent throughout and remains one of OAF's strongest songs.

Possibly influenced by Elvis Costello and the Attractions during Punch the Clock (and perhaps even Dexys Midnight Runners), the trio of horns go further to add that extra touch of desperation as Yorke sings "Where to start to build a clock?" They then joyfully enter a call and response to his pleading of "TO BE A BRILLIANT LIGHT, YEAH", and it is nothing short of melodramatic brilliance. A definite must-listen for Radiohead fans, and to listen to Thom Yorke's powerful and youthful vocals.

Song of the Day: Tears for Fears - Advice for the Young at Heart

My listening history with Tears for Fears is one that is rivaled only by The Police, but to be clear, TFF were my first "absolute favorite band of all time". Despite not being as regular of a listen as they used to be, TFF set the gears in motion for my later taste in music: a healthy fascination with gloomy synthpop and quasi-post-punk music with their debut The Hurting, and introduced a seamless fusion of drum and synth programming with live "arena-sized" instrumentation on Songs From the Big Chair.

Among the innovations that TFF brought into their sound with Songs From the Big Chair, they subtly tapped into jazz flourishes (most notably on "The Working Hour" and "I Believe") and organic, almost post-rock sounds ("Listen"). These subtleties were something that TFF would explore further on their following 1989 record, The Seeds of Love.

The record contains multiple elements of jazz, organic textures, and use of "widescreen" ambiance throughout its running time. Whether it be in "Standing in the Corner of the Third World"'s use of heavy dynamic shifts between its sleepy verses to explosive chorus, the bluesy piano and rattling drum patterns on "Badman's Song", or the sophisticated and expensively arranged pop sounds on "Swords and Knives", it was obvious that TFF shifted to a paradoxical raw but cleanly produced sound.

Many consider it to be the poorest of the group's releases under their first phase, before Curt Smith departed, and it is not hard to see why. While TFF definitely shifted their sound into new territory, it is arguable that many moments are overproduced, pretentious, or at worst, boring (the almost two-minute guitar solo on "Swords and Knives", the sheer length of "Third World", the veering on annoying sentimentality of "Famous Last Words", among other things).

I actually love the record though, and when the mood is correct, The Seeds Of Love comes off as an overly ambitious pop record that has an interesting mixture of psychedelia, jazz, and blues within its roots. Not to mention how damned inspiring some of the production is since TFF spent over a million pounds on this record, and it shows, for better or worse (I am of the former).

But even if you think the whole record is a bombastic mess, I find it hard to believe anyone who does not think "Advice for the Young at Heart" is a brilliantly arranged and produced piece of romantic pop. A song that pleads "Soon we will be older/When we gonna make it work?" and "Love is a promise/Love is a souvenir/Once given never forgotten/Never let it disappear", it is a melancholic masterpiece of romantic territory that many do not attempt today.

With its salsa influenced piano chords, ghostly synths that fill empty space, a rising and falling timpani, wailing organ, and the propulsive chorus, it all comes together to create a really beautiful track. By the end, a downtrodden Smith sings a quiet melody with the sole descending piano, and are treated to a final bit of "Advice."