I Sit With Lindstrøm and He Winces Not: An Interview with Dominique Leone

Dominique Leone is a musician and music critic. I met up with him and his friend and flautist, Maryclare Brzytwa, in Paris during their European tour this fall. His second album, Abstract Expressionism, will be released in September on Important Records. We talked about lazy music critics, ranked Beach Boys albums, and tried to figure out who actually owns the copy of The Rest is Noise in his suitcase.

When I read that you’re ‘classically trained,’ what exactly does that mean?

I’m a classical performance major. I studied trumpet performance in school. I was playing in the orchestra, in recitals, solo concerts, jazz—all that stuff that goes with being a music major.

Do you still play trumpet on your records?

D: Not really—

Maryclare: Yes! We were recording with Lindstrøm last week, and out of nowhere, Lindstrøm pulls out this trumpet—

D: He’s like, ‘Oh, by the way, I have… this.’ So I laid down this disco-salsa horn line on the fly for this Boredoms remix he was recording. I’m curious to see what he does with that.

If you scored your tracks, would they have a formal structure?

D: I do score them actually, when I play at home with six or seven people—marimba, percussion, bass, vocalists. I didn’t used to do that when it was only me performing. But when I moved to San Francisco and started putting a band together, it became useful.

How long have you been making the sort of music you play now?

D: Probably since college. It’s been about ten years that I’ve been working towards this style. The record that’s out now I recorded five years ago on my four-track in Dallas. So, that’s pretty old. The record that’s about to come out is from 2005, 2006. I have a ton of backlog.

How did you start writing about music?

D: I was living in a suburb of Dallas, and there was nothing to do, no musicians, no clubs. I was so bored. So that’s when I started writing about music. I vaguely knew about Pitchfork because they had a couple reviews I didn’t like. So I saw on the site that they wanted reviews, I sent one in and they took it. That was a really off-handed, ‘Why not?’ kind of thing. I haven’t written anything since—I can’t remember the last time. I just don’t have time to write reviews or even hear as many new records as I need to really be on top of it.

What is Pitchfork’s place in the music world?

D: I don’t know that it’s really any different than Rolling Stone was in the 60s and 70s. You’ve always got to have a place where you can find out about new music. And we’re lucky enough to live at a time where you can go to a place, hear the music there, get links to other sites about it and get different perspectives. Pitchfork is in the right place in that they can offer all of this content that, historically speaking, for pop music, people have always wanted, in a lot more formats and more quickly—you have five new record reviews a day, interviews with people that no one had ever heard of a week ago, and that’s cool. It’s not Pitchfork, in particular—with the internet, the shelf-life of a band and buzz is much shorter now… Get to the part where I stayed in a Turkish prison.

What’s it like reading reviews of your own music?

D: It’s not that surprising, to be honest. Having written reviews and having been around the culture of record reviews for years, I’m not surprised by what they look like or sound like. I knew that they were going to pick up on certain things, mention particular artists… It’s still somewhat disappointing to see the same thing written 20 times.

Why does that happen?

D: A lot of writers rely on press releases for information about an artist. And I knew that, so when I wrote the press release, I made sure to put the actual artists I love—if they’re going to name-drop people, name-drop the right people. This is who I like, so if you’re going to write about someone, write about Debussy.

What’s the relationship like between musicians and critics?

D: Depends on the kind of music. It doesn’t really happen in pop music; you don’t have a lot of rock critics going on tour with Madonna. But for some kinds of art forms, the division between critic and artist is really blurred, and in a lot of cases it doesn’t actually exist. In experimental music, a lot of the people writing about it are actually the people participating in the scene… But most the musicians I know don’t have a great opinion of popular music record critics. They don’t seem to cross paths that much.

When I first heard your music a few years ago, I downloaded it from you on a P2P network.

D: Yea, I used to have all my files up there…

Now that you’re making a living as a musician—

[Laughs]

Now that you’re releasing records, has your attitude towards downloading changed?

D: Not really—I was downloading music last night—[Laughs]. All these Messiaen tunes. I don’t do it as much as I used to, I don’t have time to listen to as much new music. Now it’s mainly for old classical music, comparing four different conductors’ versions of a piece.

When you tour, what sacrifices do you have to make musically?

D: Well, for this tour we have to sacrifice a band. It’s just us two; we don’t have drums or bass. I play keyboard, Maryclare plays flute and we can sing, but there’s not a lot of give-and-take with the music. You’re kind of just running down tracks… For the music choices, I put together a set I thought flowed well, stuff that’s generally more up, not many free-form piano ballads. Otherwise, I don’t have to sacrifice too much musically.

What would you do if you had unlimited resources for a live performance?

D: Probably something similar to what I want to do when I go back to San Francisco, more theatrical things, orchestral things, more with voices. Maryclare played in this thing I did in Berkeley. I had ten musicians in this private residence. We had two grand pianos, four vocalists, a chance to set up where we wanted And we really got a chance to play music that would be difficult to unless you had that many people. A very cool sound… I’d like to have a very resonant space to play in, an ensemble with lots of different colors and vocalists with choral harmonies.

You could build your own theatre devoted to just your music, like Wagner did in Bayreuth.

D: Yea, that’d be cool. And to be able to record all that stuff, have microphones on every single element so you can micro-mix every single thing, like they do on a lot of experimental modern classical recordings. You can do a lot more things with sounds that way.

Have you thought about writing something book-length? Have you read The Rest is Noise?

D: I actually have that in my suitcase; I’ve been reading it for about six months, it seems like. [Laughs]

Maryclare: I lent my copy to Wobbly, and then when we were at Matmos’ house in Baltimore, I found it in their bathroom.

D: Nice. Well, I have Wobbly’s in my suitcase—

Maryclare: No, if you have Wobbly’s copy, that’s my copy.

D: Oh. I thought it was his…That’s a good book. It got me listening to Sibelius.… I actually pitched a 33⅓ book about [the Boredoms album] Vision Creation Newsun, but they didn’t think it would sell. As far as my interest in writing, it’s really insular. I could write about the chord progression of one song, but I don’t think anyone else would care about it. As for big contextual books, hundred-year movements, I don’t I have it in me, I don’t think about music in those terms.

So, Brian Wilson’s 2004 recording of Smile, or a bootleg that you curate?

D: I had a bootleg, actually, that I made. That’s what I listened to for a long time. To be honest, I’d choose Smiley Smile/Wild Honey over Smile. That twofer that came out, that’s, like—I’ve listened to that more than any other record. I’d choose it over Pet Sounds, for that matter. Smiley Smile is just…genius.

Dreams 05.07.09

I’m visiting the library in the attic of an abandoned house and Philip Roth is the librarian. I tell him that I know who he is, but that I’m really just there to find a book. He grimaces when he sees that I’m holding a microphone and says that he doesn’t mind answering a few questions. Some other people come in looking for a hyena, but they don’t even recognize who the librarian is.

Darkness Goes, Softness Shows: KLB’s Summer Mix 2009

Summer. Laure’s sixth-floor chambre de bonne—I’ll say!—is like a convection oven minus the fan. The only Parisian bodies of water to cool off in are the Seine (sludge), the fountain at the Parc Villette (piss), and the canal St. Martin-Ourcq, which one of my friends dissuaded me from (drunkenly) leaping into by identifying its contents as ‘diverse bacteria and sharp objects’. There’s also public pools, but they have a strict Speedo-only policy.

To beat the heat, my tracklist this summer so far has consisted almost entirely of a band I have long misunderstood: the Beach Boys. My parents had the Endless Summer collection on vinyl when I was kid, so I was familiar with the surfing safaris, girls and nation. Fine. (I also saw them play on that Full House episode where Danny Tanner hosts a marathon fundraiser.) Then in college I got to know Pet Sounds, which I respect more than adore, and then Surf’s Up, in my opinion, the group’s last gasp of greatness.

For the past few weeks, however, I’ve been bathing in the rest of their discography, and my opinion of the band has gone from the Animal Collective I-never-gave-a-shit-about-anyone-but-Dennis attitude to a more wizened: ‘In all things, grasshopper, much to appreciate.’ Today!, Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, Friends, Sunflower, 20/20—these are all solid, sometimes transcendent albums. Who knew?

So, instead of assembling a summery mélange like last time, this year’s mix is exclusively Beach Boys (although the Zombies have been getting heavy rotation around here, too). And this is your not mama’s Beach Boys; there’s a place for ‘Little Deuce Coup,’ but it ain’t here! Ceci n’est pas un party mix.

Darkness Goes, Softness Shows focuses more on the group’s more delicate, mysterious and wistful moments, the deep cuts. I realized only after I gathered my favorite tracks that most of the material came from what would have been Smile, the album that never was, until it was, in 2004, when Brian Wilson, who had suffered a debilitating breakdown during the recording sessions, scrapped plans to arrange the scattered vintage  takes into a work faithful to his original vision, and re-recorded everything. (The resulting product was welcome but uninspiring.) But not all the tracks here are Smile manqué.

The highlights for me are: ‘Darlin,’ the kind of track I would eagerly put on at a party, only to be met with shrugs and stares; ‘All I Wanna Do,’ the grooviest cut in their discography; ‘Wind Chimes,’ the lost Sung Tongs b-side; ‘Disney Girls,’ which has one of the most moving moments in the pop canon (starting at 2:05 in this recording) and was later covered and sort of ruined by Garfunkel (..Garfunkel!); and the celebrated solo piano version of ‘Surf’s Up,’ not the take from the eponymous album.

I hope you guys enjoy it. I spent a lot of time putting it together—much more than I should have, considering the amount of work I have right now, between work, school and applications for next year—above all on the sequencing, which I assume will be compromised as soon as you import the file to your media player. So, if you have a moment and you want the full experience, please, please consult the tracklist in the comments section.

Click here to download KLB’s Summer Mix 2009

C.P. Cavafy ‘He Came to Read—’ (1924)

He came so he could read. Lying open
are two or three books: historians and poets.
But he’d barely read for ten minutes,
when he put them aside. On the sofa
he’s half asleep. He’s completely devoted to books—
but he’s twenty-three years old, and very handsome;
and this afternoon desire has come
to his flawless flesh, and to his lips.
To his flesh, which is beauty entire,
the fever of desire has come;
without foolish shame about the form of its enjoyment…

Best Album Ever: Michael Jackson – Off the Wall (1979)

Download: Michael Jackson – Girlfriend

Editing: The Aspect of Cinema

The Associate Dean of American Film Critics, Jonathan ‘I will sit through a 19-hour cut of La Maman et la putain and I will fucking love it’ Rosenbaum has a great article, inspired.. by that same French excellence, in Slate today. Choice passages:

Regarding terms like director’s cut and restoration: The fact that these categories are now integral parts of sales pitches seriously diminishes the possibility of their serving as accurate descriptions. Arguably, one reason why the film industry has encouraged and promoted the concept of director’s cuts, even though this might appear to be counter to its own interests, is that it enables a film’s owner to sell the same product to the same customer twice—or even, in a few special cases, three or four times.

The bottom line is that Welles never had a final cut on either Touch of Evil or Mr. Arkadin, so claiming to ‘restore’ something that never existed, as a good many publicists and commentators do, is tantamount to fibbing.

‘For my style, for my vision of film,’ Welles once declared to André Bazin, ‘editing is not an aspect, it is the aspect.’ By this criterion, no edition of any film that Welles never completed could meaningfully be called complete. But if your criterion is that of a collector and a footage fetishist, the rules change. And it’s the collectors and those servicing them that are rewriting much of our film history.