Tim DeLaney
The Sight-seers/Kopernik/Swimming Pool Q's

 photo by Andy King, 2003

 

July 15th, 2003- In the Madcap Studio
( the first part of the interview was conducted by Andy King)

 

AK: Who were the first artists that influenced you, that made you want to play?

Tim: Well, I have a little bit different of a situation because both of my parents were classical musicians. So, I was around classical music a lot from the very beginning. Especially flute. There were flutists, not flautists, ‘cause as my dad says, he doesn’t play the flaut. I was around a lot of Baroque flute music, classical music, and I was sort-of steered that way, and didn’t really know that there was any other way but to take lessons and play music. I guess I got the rock and roll bud, middle school, the hard rock that was going on at the time, you had Van Halen, Rush, and all that shit going on. That kind of blew my mind. I was 12 years old, so I give myself a break on that. At the same time, I was always studying classical and studying jazz as soon as I started playing upright, which was middle school because you have to be a certain size before you can really take that up.

I got into jazz, mainly through the jazz instructor at Florida State. He brought over a Miles Davis tape, “Kind Of Blue” and just put it on and told me to start playing along with it, even though I didn’t really know what notes to play, just playing the lines with the quarter notes of the walking bass line. Paul Chambers on that record. And just getting used to that feel and trying to make my note hit at exactly the same time his note hit. That record still blows my mind. It kind of took off from there. I started getting into the progressive pop of the eighties, The Police, U2, R.E.M., and Echo and the Bunnymen. Aesthetic and artistic pop music. I kind of went from looking for hot shot playing to looking for something beyond. A vision and a sound. Originality and all of that. I really started to realize that that’s what I wanted to do. I couldn’t do anything else. It was either that or the county jail.

Once I really started getting into rock, and pop, I wasn’t as into the abstract. There was an Ornette Coleman/ Pat Metheny record called “Song X” or something like that, that I had, and I used to throw that on, and that was really the most out abstract music ever. I almost used to put it on and just laugh. Because it was so fried. It never occurred to me to do avant-garde music, but in slow motion like Kopernik. I guess that probably came about with computers, and being able to let things unfold slowly. That wouldn’t happen in an organic environment. Wind players can’t hold their breath that long. You just wouldn’t have the patience for it. It’s really neat though, the melding of centuries old styles of music with totally modern tape loops. It comes together in a contrast that does something different. It’s neat.

AK: Did you ever listen to Cecil Taylor?

Tim: The jazz end of things too, I prefer the guys that just break your heart, like Cannonball Adderly, Ben Webster, the lyricism is what I’m drawn to. I don’t know what it is about my mental makeup, but I’m drawn to pathos. Romantic and tugging at your heart strings.

I’m anxiously awaiting the next movement in jazz. I feel it’s kind of stuck right now, and there are these great heavyweight players that are mind-blowingly good, but there is something about all of those landmark Miles Davis records that go beyond jazz. They carry on the history of art music. When is that next milestone jazz record going to come out in the jazz world? I don’t feel like its happening. Herbie Hancock did that Gershwin record a while back. That was pretty ambitious. It was all over the map style wise, sounded gorgeous, great playing, but I want to see something new and fresh in the jazz world. It seems like it’s ripe for that.

AK: A big component of that music was that Theloneous Monk, Miles Davis, those guys created an album that was documented at a level that records today don’t get documented.

Tim: That’s true. The photos, the films, the writers being there discussing it, extensive liner notes.

AK: It’s an instant documentary. It’s like this whole package that creates this enigmatic personality. If you can create a personality that is an expert at something, just as far as your knowledge, not your skill, then you can become a personality within that. You can be booked just on your willingness and your eloquent way of speaking about the topic.

Tim: Talking heads.

AK: In music it’s the same thing. Herbie Hancock was like that. He was the big ambassador of jazz.

Tim: He was the Louis Armstrong of the seventies and eighties.

AK: And then you get guys like Miles Davis who are the eccentrics, scary, you just don’t know quite what the hell is going on. The Andy Warhol and Picasso element. He’s the most like Picasso of all the jazz guys. He was so deep down in it and so far removed.

Like all of the straight ahead recordings of John Coltrane: That would be the “pre-electric” version of Coltrane, before he really got down into his sound.

Tim: One young guy can come into modern jazz and set it all off. It will speak to the other musicians, and set of explosions in their creativity, and you’ll have a renaissance. That needs to happen. I wonder if that is not happening in Europe, especially Northern Europe. There are some jazz guys that are phenomenal growing up with their ears wide open, and they are hearing what’s happening in the avant-garde electronic and pop scenes, and that iconic flair that those guys had. These guys in Europe have it, and I wonder if the socio-political-economic situation in America, and America being so bourgeois and Capitalist, and just teaching kids that that’s the only thing that matters from a young age, that kids don’t grow up here with there eyes and ears open to art and humanities like they used to. It’s a hard thing to predict, not that kids growing up in Harlem in the forties and fifties were probably not going around to museums. It’s something in the air. It just does not seem like we have an environment that is happening in the U.S. to create that in the jazz world.

There are so many interesting things going on in the rock and pop world now, even though the big acts and radio is obviously a vast wasteland, there seems to be an awful lot of underground stuff with people who are educated, and have deep roots. They really know where they are coming from, and what they want to do. They are just striving to do something different. It’s hard to strive to do something different because nobody is going to thank you for it while you’re doing it. People are going to tell you that you suck. You know? No one understands that aesthetic; that driving reason for doing it. That’s rare now. It’s stifled. You’re not going to be part of the gang, and swingin' and happenin'. You are going to be the outcast if you do that. You keep at it, and you start to get your craft happening and at the same time, always striving to do something different. And before long, you are doing something different and great. Which is I think the goal.

AK: I think in the American situation, money has a lot to do with it. Talking with musicians from Europe, we have asked them is it hard to be a band in the European countries. Because it’s very difficult in America to be a band.

Tim: Definitely. Absolutely.

AK: America is an expensive place to live.

Tim: America is not going to encourage you to play music.

AK: The economic system makes it almost impossible to make your living off of music.

Tim: Because you have to have time. The time you are spending on it you can’t be exhausted from a fifty hour workweek, of doing something that is just brainless and killing it. The uniquely American system discourages the musician. Of course it does. It came from Puritanism, and Puritans don’t like art. Art is of the flesh. Art is evil. It’s hard work, and piousness, and life sucks so just work really hard and you’ll be fine on the other end. It’s that attitude that America has. The artist says, “No, the good stuff is now, the good stuff is here, this is magic, this is God.”

John Coltrane wasn’t doing ten different hobbies all the time, and trying to do this and that, working, and trying to still find time for the golf course. He just lived with a horn in his mouth, at that was it for years. That early stuff that we were talking about, that isn’t avant-garde, was because he was mastering what had come before him.

AK: I think America’s in that stage. American musicians and artists are trying to master their craft right now. In a way, the industry is adjusting itself to sustain itself, so that the developing artist can evolve in such a way that several underground bands can eventually take on that burden, and fill the gap in American culture. It’s not here right now, so the industry needs to make money so that when that time does come, looking at it from the lowest common denominator, Einstein would just say, “The industry adjusted itself” and wouldn’t judge it. He would look at it as opposing forces that are part of the natural condition of nature.

Tim: The flow back and forth of humanity and nature. That’s an optimistic way of looking at it. I hope we are embryonic right now, and things are going to swing back around, and there is going to be an explosion of new art and ideas that take us steps forward. It’s certainly an interesting time to be alive and watch it.

AK: Talk about the way that you recorded Kopernik, why you decided to record in the way that you did. What was your influence in doing that, and what was different about it.

Tim: It decided to do itself that way. It was a really strange way to make a record. The whole thing was strange. Scott Herron heard the Sight-seers “Airbrush” Ep, and at the end it had this ambient jam that went on for like ten minutes. He took a liking to it, and found out that I played upright bass, and bowed classical bass. He wanted to get some of that stuff on his records. So he would have me improvise to ideas that he had. Then he would take that and run with it, and chop it up and use it on his records.

Scott took “Airbrush” and remixed it, and that’s what got the whole ball rolling. I had some upright stuff in that ambient jam, that was just lines, and it was like grab that, make a groove out of it, and go from there. I like these simple bass lines, find a great little figure that says a lot, and do it over and over again. Reggae bass lines. Melodic little hooks that just go over and over again. I think that fit well with what he was doing.

So when he had a chance to support the community and other artists, he jumped at it. Made this label, Eastern Developments. He told Brad that we should make a record together. Brad has always been more of an abstract music guy. He’s always been into avant-garde, experimental, ambient music. I loved Brian Eno, but I just didn’t go that deep into that world. Coming from classical music and pop music, I was always more into the direct approach. Tell a story. The classical values of songwriting and arrangement. So, Brad was always turning me on to cool, sort of more abstract artists.

When we decided to go where we could go with it, we totally didn’t go with it. It just went off on a completely random direction. You just have to go with that, wherever it leads. Fearless, you know? Brad got on his computer, and starting building these chaotic collages of sound. He would pull it from anywhere. He would come to me with these crazy sounding things. And I would try and play something to it. Try to pick out what I heard and improvise to that, compliment that. It was a very draining process. Very meditative. Because the abstracts that Brad would bring were not relaxing. You really had to sink into it and just struggle to find what’s in there that’s going to make me go. I’d find something, and lay down the bass, or some bowing, or jazzy plucking improvisations over it. Then Brad would take that back, and start doing manipulations to that. We would just build this giant soup of bass and computer, and then we would start the process of peeling away and peeling away, until you’re left with just a few essential elements. It’s just barely enough meat to sort of string it along. Very time intensive process. It’s like going into a trance for a couple of hours, and then you are completely exhausted afterwards. You don’t even know what happened. Then you listen to it a couple of days later, and it’s like where did this come from? What is this?

Every time Scott came by and he would hear it, he would just start jumping around; he really loved what he was hearing. He was looking for something new. You’re looking for something that hasn’t been said, or some textures that haven’t been put together like that.

We ended up with this neo-classical, electronic, but really not either of those things, abstract, difficult to describe music. When I listen to it, I don’t have any memory of making it, and it doesn’t occur to me that it’s me. I find that it’s very strange that I did that.

It took on all this stuff that I filtered into my brain growing up listening to my parent’s music, that came pouring out in sense of impressionistic melodies. Debussy and Satie, these guys are like splashes of tone and tone colors. They use that, and you make melodies out of that. If there’s any frame of reference it’s romantic melodic pushing the melodies into each other. Like, okay you’ve got this chord, and somehow accidentally this chord comes out of it. It’s evocative, and it creates this flow. My end of Kopernik is for lack of a better word, sort of the representative end of it. The telling the story, making the ark of it. Taking these colors, but not leaving it abstract. Trying to take you on a little journey with the piece, and tell some kind of story. The next Kopernik record could be a country/western record, I don’t know. I have no idea where it’s going to go. It could go anywhere.

AK: What does Cecil Taylor make you think of?

Tim: Chaotic, barrier free emotion: Baby talk almost. Squawking emotion. Freedom…egoless flow.

LK: How about Pink Fuzz.

Tim: Sounds like a drink. Pink Fuzz is hopefully a drink that has a feeling that hasn’t been discovered yet. Mildly psychedelic but an energizing drink. A combination between absinthe, Red Bull, and mushroom tea.

LK: Black Feather Limbo.

Tim: Makes me think of not wanting to get out of bed. Having some sort of darkness that keeps tickling you to not be able to think about the things you want to think about. A negative talisman.

LK: Blue Screen.

Tim: Makes me think of something that should be behind you as you are playing. Or it might be in front of you while you’re playing. Something that breaks up the directness between audience and performer and makes a more abstract connection.

LK: Lamppost and Television.

Tim: A lamppost should be the target at which you launch your television. A lamppost could be some sort of marker; it marks off a period of your life. You reach some sort of well-lit area briefly. You’re going along in the darkness and you’re scrambling around bumping into shit, fucking shit up, and for a second you come to a marker and it’s a well lit area. Things are clear for a little bit. But then you’ve got to head back on out or the lamp gets turned off and you’ve got to find another one.

LK: Modern Orange Sky.

Tim: That might be a symbol for what people are living under now. For some reason it’s giving me a sense of trying to be radical. People are so desperate to stand out and experience something real, that the world’s gotten really artificial and garish, as opposed to the more respectable blue sky that used to be.

LK: The Perfect Word.

Tim: Maybe the perfect word is “community” because it seems like it’s hard to have a perfect anything other than abstractly. I guess everything could be perfect in its randomness or variation, but community implies multiplicity and uniqueness. Much different uniqueness coming together to somehow create “perfect word” or “perfect thing.”

LK: Slow Fear.

Tim: Slow fear creeps up on you. The problem with slow fear is that you don’t know that it’s there until you are not experiencing it. And then you realize that it was creeping up on you again. It’s not an overwhelming dread, it’s not a terror, it’s not in your face, it acts so slowly that you don’t realize it’s happening, and it affects you. It affects every little decision you make slightly, and adds up to problems.

LK: Mermaid and Pharaoh.

Tim: Mermaid says something that doesn’t exist. Mermaid is an idealized form. Idealized love. Mermaids are always young. You never see an old Mermaid. They are real free. They are happy and frolicking and kind of “go-with-the-flow.” Pharaoh is like the opposite of that. Pharaoh is so masculine. The good thing about a Pharaoh is that you know where the answers are. You know what’s going to be. The Pharaoh represents absolutes. The Pharaoh represents technique. A Pharaoh is very mathematic- The Mermaid is very primal and unrestrained.

LK: White Glitter Notebook.

Tim: I need to get a white glitter notebook. A white glitter notebook would be a great place to keep almost like a scrapbook, some sort of memory book that gives this nice little frame for your life. You put it all in this white glitter notebook, and every time you look back on your life it’s framed as a dramatic existence.

LK: I’ll let my sweater figure it out.

Tim: Letting your sweater figure it out seems to imply keeping some sort of centralized climate. The thing I think about when I think about sweater is the sweater breathing with you, and the sweater pulling moisture away from the body. Regulating the interior environment. So what was I supposed to do with the sweater? Let the sweater figure it out. So you’re not trying to do the work for the sweater, the sweater’s working for you. You don’t have to spend precious mental energy on climate control.

LK: Adopt-a-highway.

Tim: I think everyone should adopt a highway, and that highway should be all yours. That’s where you go drive that sets your head straight. That’s a great idea. You find a stretch of road, and every once and a while you go drive down it. I like the stretch of road, the back road south of Atlanta, heads through Georgia. What people used to use before the interstates came in. 19. Lots of pecan trees, pecan farms, rolling land. I got 19. I’m adopting 19.

LK: Pen lines.

Tim: Pen lines are an amazing thing. Pen lines by themselves are completely random, and you start putting them together, physicality seems to take shape in front of you. You fill in the gaps and the shading, and it’s all from these lines. That’s pretty neat.

LK: Picnic.

Tim: Picnic. I’ve never really liked picnics. A picnic is an excuse to go hang out in a natural setting. That’s cool. And you think that I would enjoy that. But you take some food out there, and you’re sort of on this little mission to find a place to put down a blanket and eat some food that you’ve put in plastic bags in this basket, when it seems like you’d rather just eat the food right next to and immediately after making it. Right there at that location. Something about packing a whole bunch of stuff up, and going out somewhere, going through this little routine and then eating the food; you’ve been on your picnic. Maybe that’s a goal oriented picnic. There’s probably other better ways to do picnics. I should give picnics a chance I suppose.

LK: Porch Light.

Tim: Porch light, I think of off in the distance. It’s like the first thing you see; the first sign of home. I’ve always been around or had funky colored porch lights. I guess porch light is a neat way to stand out. Raise your freak flag high at night. You can have your sculpture farm or neat house during the day, but at night nobody’s going to see that shit. But a funky color in the darkness, that’s a good way to do it.

LK: The Surveyor.

Tim: I think the surveyor is a good alternate word for artist. The artist is a surveyor. Some artists are interior surveyors, they may hold themselves up, but they are just examining themselves. Taking note of details. It seems like the more details that you are in tune with, the more nuanced you are, that’s where the greatness of an artist is. The taking in of details, and the noticing of details. And the communicating of them.

LK: White Room.

Tim: I think the white room is…it’s neat that it is a white room, because it seems like it’s powerful or hot. Like white hot. The white room sort of assaults you. At the same time it feeds you and fuels you. A white room you might use in an interrogation because it’s so demanding of you. You can’t turn it off. The white room being people, the mass of people…it’s interesting because people are so energetic, and I don’t want to say people are demanding, like a jackass kind of person, but even a nice person demands that you wake up, like an interrogation room demands that you wake up.

This feels like a creative writing class. No time to think. You just let whatever tumbles out of your mouth do so. It’s setting your brain in motion. It takes on a momentum of its own. You constantly find yourself checking, like going, is that acceptable to say? But wait, I don’t have time to think about it. So you just say it. And you are onto something else. And your overseer, your surveyor keeps throwing these road blocks at you, but they come less and less frequent, so you just start flowing. I like it.