An article about my solo music project does a good job of covering the music, but also releases more info about my producer roles.

Data Breaker

Jabon’s Chillingly Funny Dark-Ambient Ditties

DAVE SEGAL

A jester-masked, berobed figure stands behind an imposing bank of keyboards before a stylish, boho crowd at the Hideout bar. There he generates unsettling waves of electronic horror—but it’s subtle Lovecraftian horror rather than blatant shock tactics. The haunting, sometimes-antic miasma created by this audio wizard seems absurdly incongruous in this chic setting, but one feels privileged to catch a rare appearance by Jabon, aka studio engineer Scott Colburn.

A longtime key figure in Seattle’s underground-music scene, Colburn is best known for producing albums by Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, Sun City Girls, and Mudhoney, among many others. But since 1985, Colburn’s been recording solo pieces on the sly. This year, he’s decided to take his special, rarely heard music to the live realm (many Jabon tracks and concerts can be heard at jabon.gravelvoice.com).

A Black Flag–saluting punk in the ’80s, Colburn had an epiphany while listening to the Residents‘ Mark of the Mole. A music-appreciation course at Indiana University hipped him to Stockhausen, Charles Ives, and Morton Subotnick, and immersion in mid-’80s tape-trading culture led to him discovering subversives like Controlled Bleeding, Negativland, and Whitehouse. “I figured I could do that kind of music, too. Fortunately, I had access to a studio in which to do tape-loop experiments. Very quickly after that, the convergence of instrumental Black Flag (and [Greg] Ginn’s instrumental trio Gone) and Chrome started to take hold. So from there on out, my tapes were made of ‘rock’ trio improvisation, weird Residents-esque pop songs, intercut comedy, and general madness.”

Jabon flourished from 1985 to 1995, but then Colburn moved to Seattle and put the project on hiatus for about 14 years in order to focus on recording with Climax Golden Twins, Wizard Prison, and Sun City Girls guitarist Sir Richard Bishop, while also burgeoning as a producer working out of his Gravelvoice Studios.

Colburn disagrees with my “unsettling” adjective above, but he admits, “I think [my tracks] might be challenging in the mood department. I can’t make happy music, but I can make funny music, so I think you need to approach it with a sense of humor and it will make more sense. I like to call my project Dark Ambient Avant Garde Disco Comedy. On any night, there’s gonna be someone who is stoned out of their mind and will get into the drone. There will also be someone else who had a bad day and will appreciate the darkness. Someone else will just enjoy the wacky pop ditties and laugh. I’m trying to appeal to the full range of human emotions.”

The Residents’ multimedia concerts inspired Jabon to follow suit. “In Wizard Prison, I didn’t want to play a show unless it would be an event,” Colburn says. “We wanted to put something together that was unlike anything anyone had seen before. So we got a 9-foot-high and 12-foot-wide aluminum cage draped with a white scrim. We made Brakhage-like avant-garde films to project behind us so we were in silhouette. And we’re wizards, see… in prison! And the music is the alchemy that allows our escape.

“For Jabon, I can play with or without films, with or without special effects, with any multitude of masks and disguises. The best shows will be the ones where I can pull off the carnival. The Hideout was close to that. If you watch the video from that show, several people just walked right up to me and took pictures with their cell phones. Probably to send to their friends to say, ‘Look at this shit I saw tonight!'”

As for the upcoming Cal Anderson gig, Jabon’s music seems like the antithesis of Saturday-afternoon-in-the-park entertainment. “I like the idea that it’s gonna be sunny and hot out there, and I’m going to get onstage in a wizard costume and make some sort of freak sounds,” Colburn says. “It just doesn’t make any sense, and that’s a good thing.

“The first set will concentrate on all my goofy pop numbers, the second set will concentrate on ambient improv. So in a way, the sunny day in the park is the perfect wrong venue. I think it would be fun to play a Laundromat, a parking garage, a beach, a forest, or the light rail!” 

Sounds Outside: Jabon, Figeater, Syncopated Taint Horn Quartet, and others perform Sat Aug 15, Cal Anderson Park, 1–8 pm, free, all ages. Jabon performs at 2 and 3:30 pm.

The new Decoder Ring record “They Blind The Stars and The Wild Team” is out now. Check out this video for the single “Beat the Twilight”

The Sound Projector has a great episode of their podcast dedicated to Sun City Girls. Not only is this podcast excellent, but the whole series is cool. This is the only podcast I subscribe to and it’s always a journey. It’s one way I find out about new music. I totally recommend it to the person who is actually interested in broadening their horizons.

An Interview with Scott Colburn.

Owner/producer/engineer

Gravelvoice Recording Studio

Projects include: 300 full length records from Seattle’s finest musicians, as well as sound design for films, theatre, and gallery installations.

A sampling of clients includes: Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, Sun City Girls, Mudhoney, Hypatia Lake, and People and Arts (Discovery Channel) He also teaches a class in audio engineering at the University of Washington and has received a Parent’s Choice Award for his work on Elizabeth Falconer and Aiko Shimada’s Japanese Lullabies.

Website @ www.gravelvoice.com

Our record store conversations were always entertaining, flowing easily from band and music stuff to something a lot less concrete .The scientific and the magical freely associating, calling out curious examples of the strange and wonderful. I enjoyed Scott’s zest for the puzzle pieces and had been looking forward to visiting with him on his own turf for quite a while. A studio visit seemed like the perfect opportunity.

The studio itself is transformed from an old church in what was once considered working class Ballard, where an obsolete law required the building of a new church for every bar or tavern that was added to the community. Consequently there are quite a few sprinkled throughout the neighborhood. In the car on the way over, I find myself wishing I hadn’t assumed I knew which church it was and paid more attention to the address. Luckily, my timing is good and when I arrive, Scott is outside doing Sunday things. After some warm hellos, we weave our way up to the door and then we’re inside, words drifting invitingly into the large room where the former worshipers met. The church’s earlier architectural function provides lovely high ceilings and comforting wood details. It was easy to see how creativity might live here.

They say the journey is a nice destination, and lately I’ve been wondering how people make their lives happen. Do we just follow our inspiration like glowing bread crumbs illuminating the path ahead, or is there something more to it? I ask Scott about what sorts of things fascinated him as a young person and he shares a childhood memory of seeing the film The Jungle Book.

“I guess I was so excited by it that when I left the theatre, I was like, “Can we go see it tomorrow?”. Everyday I wanted to go see Jungle Book. So what my parents did, was they bought a set of Walt Disney soundtracks that were gatefold with a picture book, and the sound track of the film on a single record and told the story and had the songs. I got Bambi and Pinocchio and Snow White, all the classic Disney films, but Jungle Book was the one I liked the best, and I think it was probably, not knowing it as a child of five or six years old, but it was really the most psychedelic Disney film. I think weird things were attractive to me even as a child.”

With a growing curiosity about things he didn’t quite understand, and both parents encouraging his healthy sense of discovery, Scott talks of growing up in an artistic environment, and his family’s unique identity.

“Our house always had things a little bit outside of what everybody else in the community had. My dad painted the numbers of our address the size of the double car garage door, and he wallpapered the rec-room with a photograph of the moon surface, which was not just repeated, but the full surface of the moon when you looked at it. I remember as a kid laying on the floor and looking at it a lot because you could see detail in it.”

Among Scott’s youthful creative outlets was an appearance as a small child on the local television show Kindergarten College, which leads me to ask a question about accomplishment becoming a form of play.

“I think I owe it all to my parents for supporting that sort of thing. I recall one Halloween I wanted to be Frankenstein, I was into the Hammer pictures and everything, and I always watched the horror host out of Indianapolis. My dad turned it into a learning project; he taught me how to use power tools. We took a jig saw and a sheet of plywood and he took my shoe and put it on there and outlined it many times, and he built some platform shoes for me that I would wear to be taller. I built a Frankenstein head out of chicken wire and paper mache, and he helped me paint it, that sort of thing. So those projects were something like, you have to come up with a costume, or you have to do this or that, my dad would use that as a way of teaching you how to do something.”

The band years, hardcore roots, and the grand storytelling tradition.

Playing in what was essentially a southern rock cover band, because they were from southern Indiana, Scott recalls a junior high talent show from 1979, and his lead guitar part on the Cars song, "Just What I Needed".

“I botched it, and I mean really botched it. There were five hundred people there and it really cured me of stage fright from that point on. I played the lead so bad I was horrified, but I finished the show and at the end everybody clapped and went crazy and screamed and yelled, and I thought, “you can do something really stupid on stage and people will still appreciate you”. That was the beginning of the end for me as far as performance was concerned because I realized that you could get away with anything.”

“That band stopped at one point, and that was about the point I started getting into punk rock.”

As it often does, the next part of the journey involved a good friend’s older brother and a bottle rocket shot into Scott’s back. This of course was followed by a flowering sense of belonging.

“I opened up Trouser Press and saw an ad for Alternative Tentacles and a compilation they put out, Let them Eat Jellybeans. And it was $5.00 postpaid. So I ordered the record and opened up the poster that’s inside and saw a picture of Black Flag. That was it.”

That Black Flag photograph made quite an impression, and I ask what about it turned him on.

“The picture was just them standing there and nobody was smiling. They were just wearing work shirts and work pants and the song on the compilation was ‘Police Story.’ You were asking me about story telling …and punk rock, even though you couldn’t really understand the lyrics a lot of the time, when you did, you really understand how angry everybody was. And that really spoke to me. It’s not so much that punk rock disregarded authority, it was just the aspect of questioning.”

A time honored response and something worthy of bonding around, but as often has it, there was a menace lurking in reaction to all that questioning.

“It was a nice community building sub-culture. You could drop yourself anywhere in the United States or anywhere in the world, walk around any city, and immediately identify someone who was into punk rock. You’d have an instant friend that day who might actually put you up and feed you that night.”

Whose story is it anyway, and who gets to actually tell it?

“Making people accountable for being assholes made a lot of sense to me. I was telling my wife the other day about, you know at a show, any punk rock show, and especially at Black Flag shows, what was invigorating was that you didn’t really know what was going to happen at that show. It wasn’t a safe environment-anything could happen at any given time. It did get kind of violent sometimes, but it was because there was an infiltration of people that didn’t really understand the community that went behind it.”

“It’s also interesting now so many years later to run into people that I knew or corresponded with in that period of time who are now editors of magazines or in a different position. Or are still artists doing all these things, fitting into normal society, but still have the punk rock aesthetic behind them and apply it to normal life and it works.”

In some circular way, we continue to find direction from our roots. Scott observes a truth from his earlier band years.

“When I listen back to the tape of that 1979 show where I botch the lead, it sounded like Greg Ginn was playing guitar, and I realized you can do it, that’s exactly what’s happening, you can play emotionally from the heart and people will appreciate you.”

The irony of this interview being done on my primitive tape recorder, in the midst of all the professional recording equipment causes me to ask Scott if he’s used any unlikely gear to achieve a recording result.

“Yes and no, I would say that I’m very much an engineer that uses what’s ever available to me at the time. So even the ‘earliest recordings’ I made, and that’s got to be in quotation marks because they were recordings yes, but they weren’t of music. It was me recording my sister crying.”

I inquire about Scott’s age when that was going on.

“Well, she was probably, you know at a crying stage, like three or four, which would have made me thirteen or fourteen. I would record my sister crying, then play it back to her to make her cry again, as a mean brother would do, but I used it to try and debunk the Santa Claus Easter Bunny myth by trying to get the Easter Bunny to answer questions on tape.”

“We just had fun making these weird things and listening back to them and laughing. I thought it was normal, you know, I thought everybody did that.”

I suggest that people who had a tape recorder did that, but having the seed of some gear you could document with, or create with, even the desire to make evidence, might not be universal.

“I understand that, it’s interesting that you use the word document, because I’ve always thought of myself as an archivist of sorts, of my life, I’ve almost certainly recorded every punk rock show I’ve ever gone to, and subsequently traded recordings with people all over the world to hear my favorite band. Even though Black Flag put out like four albums a year, that still wasn’t enough.”

Another constant thread in Scott’s life has been his taste for psychotronic films. His favorite film of all time is David Lynch’s Eraserhead. All of this may have something to do with an earlier story of being confused and horrified by the vampire and cannibal implications of his communion experience as a young person in the Catholic Church.

“I mostly like fifties science fiction because the sounds are weird and it’s about alien things, there’s nothing real about it. It’s all fabricated and maybe they’re making a statement about atomic bombs or maybe there’s this underlying theme or something, but most of them, it’s just like people are making films.”

“It goes back to the thing, they did the best they could with what they had. That kind of goes around to the way I approach engineering or producing records. I don’t need to have a particular piece of equipment in order to make the record or make a quality recording. I’ll use whatever is available to me, and I’ll do the best that I can with what I have. Over time you realize the skills are all in your head.”

Motto: It’s not the wand, it’s the magician.

“Some people say well, “he’s a self proclaimed audio wizard”. You know? Yes, I am a self proclaimed audio wizard and I only use that term because it is kind of like alchemy in the sense. It’s not that I’m operating the recording with my hands and magical things are going on, It’s just my idea about recording music is to put people that are really creative in a space that they feel like they can be creative and perform the best that they can. It doesn’t mean putting people under a microscope.”

I ask a complicated question about his contribution to the recording process, and how he aligns differences in perception between himself and the bands. He gently brings me back to an inherent truth in what he feels his role in the process actually is.

“As the caliber of musicians went up that I was working with, all of a sudden my recordings started to sound better, then as it went up another notch, it started to sound better again, and another notch, it started to sound better again. And I’m not saying the musicians are completely responsible for what I’m achieving now, but we’re moving together.”

“I want to build this reflection free zone thing, but where are the plans?”

Dovetailing deep research and a seemingly chance encounter with hidden information, aspects of Gravelvoice’s acoustic design have evolved around principles of the golden mean ratio, as well as other elemental design theories.

“I talked to a painter friend of mine and he told me about different colors and the oscillation of planets, and how different colors, their light waves, can affect certain things. And stuff that affects humans. So I chose colors that would enhance creativity and control electrical interference because there’s all this electronic gear in the control room, bringing that thinking into it as well. The studio has a flow to it that is very fung-shui and provides that energy, but the color series and the combination of colors you get as you walk through the studio and start working in it, are also conducive to creative work.”

What does it sound like inside the sound pyramid?

A friend who had taken Scott’s audio engineering class suggested I ask about this phenomena unleashed during a Hypatia Lake recording session.

“Lance was into numerology and really liked that I designed my studio around phi and augmented fourths, he was just really into that. He was into seven seven seven.”

“He brought in a recording that he did of a sound, a guitar sound, and we split it to three amplifiers. Two amplifiers that were identical in the sense that they were the same power and the same size speaker, basically the same amplifier, and a Fender Twin Reverb. The sound was split out from this delay pedal that was stereo so that he could physically maneuver the sound, the delay, in the two identical speakers, while the sum of it was going to the single speaker.

A further description of the imaginatively involved set up was mesmerizing. “Angling the speakers up so that they hit the lamp to form a sound pyramid of this plane, this plane, and this plane. Not really a pyramid in a traditional sense, but still a pyramid of sound, an environment. Then putting microphones close on each one of those amplifiers, and also building a seven, seven, seven triangle from the Twin Reverb out to where the room mics were going to be. So like here and here, but the measurement being seven feet, seven feet, seven feet. I did that for Lance because I thought he’d be into it, but it creates this other kind of triangular pyramid type pattern.”

“When I stood in the pyramid, in the center of it and was playing I almost fell over because it was like wow, you just get hit from all sides with the sound, all over your head because the pressure around your head was disorienting.” “Lance and I have talked about doing it as a gallery installation, that would be kind of cool because then you could experience the disorientation of it. We’d also have to get waivers signed for the volume level.”

Apparently, sound like shadow has its own logic, or as Scott would say,

“You can’t just go like completely out on a pickle; it’s a lot of responsibility”

It’s been a delightful afternoon, and I ask Scott if he has any final thoughts on the nature of detail in art and music. Not unexpectedly, some related conversation on popular culture follows.

.”You know what I was talking about earlier in film, that is trying to control what the viewer is watching and where you’re going, you can tell the story that way. I think about that the same way in music. That’s my correlation to film mixing and music mixing. They’re identical to me because in music mixing what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to highlight, every given second, the cool thing that’s happening at that particular time. You’re trying to reveal to anybody who’s listening, on a very open, above the board thing, THIS is what’s really cool about this song at this moment in this section.”

“There’s no accounting for what’s going to be popular and what’s not, so the only way that you can go, is to do what’s personally satisfying and hope that somebody understands and also appreciates what you’re doing.”

In my mind, we’re happily back where we started, following the glowing bread crumbs. I think they must have been left by the storytellers.

“Put the right microphone in the right place and let the band play.”

Yep, it was August 19th, 1973 at the Indianapolis State Fair. I wasn’t quite 10. If you click on the album cover above, you’ll hear a segment from the album pictured above. That segment was my favorite piece from that record and was the reason I wanted to see them live.

I don’t rememeber much about it except that the first band came on and I didn’t recognize anyone. My Mom and Dad took me to the show, so I asked my Dad, “none of those guys look like Michael”. and he replied, “that’s the warm up band. That’s for the adults.”

my mind was blown!

I still don’t know who that band was, but I hope it was something cool like the Commodores.

When I heard today that Michael Jackson died, this piece started playing in my head. It’s the coolest snippet of psychedelic rock that i can think of that when you play it for people and they ask, “who was that?”. They never believe the answer.

The record is fantastic! Bill Cosby plays a news reporter named Scoop Newsworthy and he sort of looks like Groucho Marx. The live version of their classic songs sound hyper and hardcore. It was some soundtrack to some TV show! It came out in 1971 and it has always popped up from time to time.

Thriller WAS a good record.I really like the way it sounds, but Nirvana knocked MJ off the number one position in the 90’s.

I had to pull the car over when I heard THAT one.

Do you think there will be MJ sightings now just like there are Elvis sightings? The King of Pop and the King of Rock and Roll

Are you feeling it?

I’m feeling it.

There is an interview with the Hoot Hoots in which they describe my influence on their recording techniques. I’m name checked in paragraph six.

6.11.2009

INTERVIEW: The Hoot Hoots

Remember this band name: The Hoot Hoots.

While the phrase gets tossed around a lot, these Beatle-esque psych-rockers out of Seattle are very much on the verge of becoming “the next great indie-rock band”, as their feel-good melodies, complex song arrangements, and positively wild live shows seem to be signaling a very important message to would-be rockers everywhere: get over yourself and have some damn fun. In other words, “Cheer Up Suburban Kid“.

Initially emerging out Illinois, the Hoot Hoots — lead by singer/songwriter Adam Prairie, Animal-like drummer brother Chris, and trumpeter Christina Ellis — have slowly been carving out a niche of optimistic guitar pop that’s classic in structure but modern in attitude, their songs referencing everything from Calvin & Hobbes (“Transmogrified”) to James Joyce (“Australopithecine”) without ever lapsing in the emotional honesty department. With a successful underground EP (Less is More) and a self-produced full-length (The Truth … Relatively Speaking) to their credit, the Hoots have now migrated to the Northwest (along with bassist Geoff Brown and new guitarist Cooper Smith) and are getting ready to conquer the world all over again, starting with this summer’s new Missle Teeth EP and concluding with a full-length by the end of the year. No, they won’t be faulted for lack of ambition …

Speaking with Evcat, Head Hoot Adam Prairie gleefully dishes on how he’s grown as a producer, the electronic-direction the band might be heading in, and his ideas for some delightfully controversial cover art in the semi-near future …

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>>Adam, I remember once you told me you took a course in music production, and how what you learned within the first week made you rethink a lot of the production work you did on The Truth … Relatively Speaking. Listening to Missle Teeth, everything sounds much richer, more fully-bodied, lots more “sonic details” in the mix. Fundamentally, what has changed about the way you produce your records?

Better gear essentially. For our last album, it was me, a Apple G4 ibook, two somewhat shitty mic (one duct taped to a mic stand), and a two input audio interface from Edirol. Everything was one track at a time. I didn’t want to do a low-quality job like that again, so I spent hours on eBay searching for good mics for cheap, and after a few months I had about 10 mics or so that were just infinitely better in terms of sound quality. Instead of Garage Band I’m using Pro Tools M-Powered now, which I sorta hate because of the propriety handicapping bullshit that they do.

But besides the gear, I learned how to mic a drum set and guitar cab much more effectively. I actually put some thought into mic choice and placement before I hit record. Before I would just throw a mic down in front of an amp and just start playing. Plus, the final term of the Audio Production course I took at the University of Washington Extension was with Scott Colburn, who recorded the Animal Collective’s Feels and Strawberry Jam, two albums that I absolutely love. We recorded an EP for this Seattle band called Ghost Lobby during that term, and we recorded the core tracks (drums, bass, guitar, keyboard) with the whole band playing in one room. That’s such a cool way to record. First of all it’s quicker that way, and also the tracks we recorded had a tight, live feel to them. So yeah, both gear and watching Scott Colburn changed how I record… I guess I read Tape Op (which is a completely free, completely amazing recording mag) too, and I try out ideas from that.

>>Of course, this is the second time you guys have recorded one of my personal favorites — “Cheer Up Suburban Kid” — and this is now the third version of “Transmogrified” you guys have laid to tape. The best part about these tracks, though, is how they’re all so sonically different, the original version of “Transmogrified” from the Less is More EP sounding virtually unregonizable in terms of texture to the hyper, colorful version that’s heard here. Will there ever be “definitive versions” of these songs, or is the urge to tinker and perfect just too great for you guys?

We decided to rerecord tunes from the last album for a couple reasons. One, we wanted to craft a pretty up tempo, in-your-face EP that still had some quirkiness to it, and those two songs fit the bill. Plus, I wanted another shot at recording “Cheer Up Suburban Kid” because I did a pretty awful job the first time. I’m somewhat of a perfectionist, and the way I recorded that song the first time kinda makes me cringe. Also, Cooper Smith, our new lead guitarist, is bad ass! He has a tone and a manner of playing that really fills out those songs, and we wanted to feature that on this EP, mostly to give people a chance to hear how we sound right now, especially since our band members have changed a bit. I think I’m done rerecording “Transmogrified. I’m ready to move on to more tunes. We might put one old song on our upcoming full length album, which is in the works now, but for the most part I’m ready to get into new songs, new sounds.

>>In terms of songwriting, the numerous chord changes of “Australopithecine” mark a quantum leap forward for you guys, like condensing prog-structures down into concise pop formats (this track reminds me a lot of Umphrey’s McGee). What has changed in your musical approach between The Truth and Missle Teeth?

We write songs as a band much more now. Before, I would record almost all the tracks, then I would teach the band how to play the song. Now, I record a rough demo so everybody can hear the changes, and then we get to work. As for numerous changes, that’s something I’ve been into for a while ever since I heard The Unicorns and early Of Montreal. I have a pretty short attention span, so I get bored with my own songs if they don’t change a lot chordally or texturally. I think what you’re hearing in “Australopithecine” as well is the addition of more technical flourishes to the music. That’s probably Cooper’s influence. Like I said, he can fucking shred! And I think I have that as a tool in mind now when I write tunes. It is so freaking awesome to be in a band now where I’m comfortable letting the song grow as we practice it together.

>>This isn’t a question: I’m just giving props for the best Finnegan’s Wake reference I’ve heard to date.

Thanks. Kind of random, nerdy reference but I couldn’t resist.

>>The ending to “Zoo” might be the single most rocking thing you guys have ever done, almost moving into hard rock territory before being grace-noted by the horns at the end. Given your live reputation, how do you feel these new textures will work in a live context?

Besides some of the extra atmospheric sounds on the EP, we recorded these tracks pretty close to how we play them live. These new textures are a big part of our live sound now, especially the additional chaos elements. I have this pedal called the Fuzz Factory from Zvex that is basically chaos in a can, and Cooper hand made his own version of it which he uses all the time live. Sometimes we wonder if we overdo the noise elements live, because we do not want to be known as a noise rock band at all. But really when it comes down to it, we just say, “Aw fuck it,” and freak out. I don’t think we get noisy enough to make our songs unmelodic or atonal. I just like crazy, whacked-out fuzz and feedback and glitchy noises as a texture.

>>Given how the Hoots are busy working on a full-length as well, this EP seems to be moving away from more of the deliberate minimalism that peppered some of your earlier work (I’m thinking specifically of “Vision Blurred Green” from The Truth). What kind of sounds can we expect from the new album? Ultimately, what’s the next direction that the Hoot Hoots are going to be taking?

I’m really into MGMT, Merriwether Post Pavilion, and M.I.A. these days, so I think we’re going to have some more electronic elements as we progress. Or at least more synth sounds. For now, I’m more interested in creating music with lots of shifting, rich sonic textures, so the minimalism of some of our earlier stuff might be something we drop for a while. I don’t know though. Sometimes I pick up a guitar and write a song and it sounds fine with just voice and acoustic guitar. But more often than not these days, I hear much larger orchestrations when I write. So yeah, I think for our next album I want us to sound like some amalgam of our current sound with some more atmospheric drone and even more lush vocal textures.

>>Finally, so far in your guys’ career thus far, what has been your biggest regret, and — conversely — what’s been your proudest accomplishment?

Couldn’t really think of a regret…. I’m sure there’s something I’d rather not do again…. but I know I am definitely proud of this EP. I think we created something that sound pretty damn good on a pretty low budget, and I worked really hard to try and make these recordings sound as professional as I could given the resources. Also, I think my most fond memory of playing live was at Knox College’s Wallace Lounge when I returned for a week in January of 2007. The Hoot Hoots played a show at the end of that week after having a few feverish practices (we hadn’t played together for a few months). The whole night was amazing, but ending the show with a bunch of friends and drunken pirates on stage surrounding us and singing with us, damn that was great! That’s what we want to create here in Seattle, some fun, energetic shows wth plenty of chaos, tight musical precision, and a healthy dose of, for lack of better phrase, absurd gimmick. I’m totally comitted to establishing this band in Seattle right now. It’s sort of my single driving goal right now. I have a day job right now that’s all right, but it just pays the bills. This is what I want to be doing every day of the week. Oh I thought of a regret. Having our last album manufactured in Taiwan. They fucked up our printing and we didn’t have our CD’s for a show we were billing as a CD release party. So no Taiwan this time around. This next album is 100% American. It’s gonna have fucking eagles and flags and George Bush, Dick Cheney, and John Ashcroft burning the Constitution and pissing on the ashes all over the cover.

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Visit the Hoot Hoots’ official website.

This is the first Jabon performance in over a decade! The last one was on June 24th 1998.

I recently received a batch of cassettes in the mail shortly after my Ipod bit it. All I wanted to do was to listen to some music while I was at the laundrymat but the damn thing won’t even turn on. Then I thought it would be a good idea to listen to these cassettes. So I pulled out my WM-1 (circa 1981) and placed the Damion Romero/ 16 Bitch Pile Up – Cross Sections series Bake 1 cassette in and decidedly walked into downtown Ballard to see what would happen.

The WM-1 still sounded great after all these years. I even have the original headphones. While walking around I reminised about being in college and listening to The Psyclones – Cult Leader Gang Raped by Disciples cassette on this same machine.

But fuck your Ipod! this beast weighs a ton, sounds great and holds up to 90 minutes of music (120 minutes can be achieved at a lower bit rate).