(Photo courtesy of Chris Gray of Double Leopards. Check out the rest of his Mouthus photos on Flickr.)
One essential component of New York City’s complicated music history has been a unique, self-sustainable noise scene. Since the early 80s, NYC bands such as Swans and Sonic Youth have been credited with translating their experimental noise aesthetic to a more mainstream audience. And in the past five years, acts enjoying Sonic Youth’s support, such as Wolf Eyes, have also risen above relative obscurity and attained a cultish status.
However, today the sheer number of people participating in noise scenes across the United States is staggering. In Brooklyn alone — considered by many to be the central hub for this music — there is a remarkably dynamic, evolving community of musicians who play together, record together and tour together. These are bands that are best understood by what they reject rather than what they embrace: melody, hooks, traditional instrumentation, commercial success. And today, there are more noise bands today than ever before.
Thanks to relentless touring, CD-R releases, countless collaborations, and partnerships with influential record labels, Brooklyn duo Mouthus have made their mark in the noise scene. As Mouthus, Brian Sullivan and Nate Nelson produce a percussive squall with feedback and industrial drone. The duo is a mainstay on the No Fun Festival lineup, a four-day celebration of the world’s finest, most innovative noise musicians (this May’s lineup includes Hair Police, Merzbow and Keiji Haino) and curated by laptop noisemaker Carlos Giffoni. (Mouthus will be performing a set with San Francisco musician Karl Bauer, aka Axolotl, aka Nelson’s former roommate.) And if that weren’t enough, Mouthus released an album, Loam, on Ecstatic Peace, Thurston Moore’s label, and last year, played at All Tomorrow’s Parties’ festival in England (also curated by Moore) alongside peers Magik Markers, Six Organs of Admittance, and Wooden Wand.
With a steady stream of CD-Rs, their first “official” studio album forthcoming on Load Records, and still more touring, the last five years have been a whirlwind for the duo. This Saturday, Mouthus will play Ithaca for the first time (the next day, they’re headed to Northhampton, Mass., the town where Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon live and nurture thriving noise and free folk scenes). The Fanclub Collective — a group of Cornell undergrads who organized the show — hold a burning torch for popular noise acts, and thanks to them, Ithaca saw the likes of Wolf Eyes, Yellow Swans, Grouper, and Jackie O-MF in 2006 alone.
Enough talking — read on for our great conversation with Nate Nelson, percussionist/multi-instrumentalist for Mouthus, who talks about his favorite black metal Canadian band, playing the No Fun Festival, partying with Thurston, and his resistance to MySpace.
Popcorn Youth: How did Mouthus come into being? Were you involved in anything else at the time?
Nate Nelson: It’s kind of a funny story, I guess. Six years ago, I moved to New York to play music with a friend of mine here [Karl Bauer, aka Axolotl] who had nothing to do with Mouthus. We moved into this loft space in Bushwick, and we refurbished the entire loft and built ourselves this practice space. And after about six months, there was a fire in the building. Basically, we got burned out — no pun intended at all there — and my friend freaked out and moved to the West coast. But before that, he and Brian [Sullivan] and I got together and played in Brian’s apartment. And Brian had been sort of playing phone tag with him for a number of years through another friend, trying to get him to play. And, as it turned out, Brian and I decided to keep playing together, and that was how Mouthus came to be. And that’s the origin of Mouthus, and it’s been about five years for us now.
[Karl Bauer, otherwise known as Axolotl, during a live collaboration with Mouthus during last May’s No Fun Fest.]
Popcorn Youth: Would you consider yourself part of a noise scene that is a specific community — whether it is specific to Brooklyn, or New York, or the Northeast, or the United States, and so forth?
Nate Nelson: Hmm. Of course there are… (pauses) that’s an interesting question. It depends — I’m not even sure where I see us fitting into all that. We have our circle of peers in New York and Brooklyn, but nobody likes to see themselves as limited to a specific scene, but I guess there’s obviously reasons to see the world that we in operate in that way. [Phone cuts out]
Popcorn Youth: What’s your equipment set-up live?
Nate Nelson: It always changes with what I can do in the space; it can be offset pretty drastically. Brian has a chain of guitar effects, and he mostly uses the guitar and sometimes keyboard, but the chain of pedals is always there, and he either engages them or disengages them in whatever combination he sees fit to do. We always try to have some idea of what we’re going for, even if it’s pretty vague. When we’re playing live, it’s usually, almost never, totally random.
[Axolotl, left, with Mouthus, at this year’s No Fun Fest]
Popcorn Youth: How heavily does improvisation figure into a live performance?
Nate Nelson: It just has to be a huge part of it. Mostly because our stuff is so cranky and half of our gear is so shitty (laughs), that we could never really exactly reproduce anything. And we learned a long time ago that if we don’t go with the situation at hand, things can get really messed up and it’s not fun. Whereas if you are making a bunch of racket and you have one thing that’s happening that sounds good and you go ahead with that, even if it’s not exactly what you intended originally, then the end result of the show is going to be a lot better for everybody. Improvisation is always necessarily a part of it, I think. But we always try to balance it out with a kind of structure and riffage as well.
Popcorn Youth: Tell me about your involvement with the No Fun Festival.
Nate Nelson: Well, we played two years ago, and last year we did something with the people from Double Leopards. This year, we’re going to play with Axolotl, who is actually the person that I moved here to New York to play with, but now he lives in California. How did we get involved with that? God, I have to think about that for a second! Mike Bernstein and Carlos Giffoni are both in Brooklyn, so we’ve known both of those guys for a long time from playing gigs. I used to play with Mike and jam with him a little bit, before Mouthus and before Double Leopards and stuff like that. We’re friends and we’re exploring some common ground musically, so they keep asking us back. Again and again and again. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: So was No Fun the first festival you were involved in that was specifically, mostly noise bands?
Nate Nelson: Yes. Definitely. Our DVD performance [from 2004-2005] was maybe the third year of our existence. I’m a little fuzzy on the chronology. We are a pretty young band, and to be able to play with all of those people and to play with a crowd that big that’s actually excited about this stuff, is totally exhilarating, it’s mindblowing. It’s impossible to say no, ’cause it’s just so much fun.
[Brian Sullivan of Mouthus, at this year’s No Fun Fest.]
Popcorn Youth: It seems like noise has had more exposure in mainstream media in the last year. How would you explain the rising profile of noise and experimental music? Since 2006, has the scene been significantly changing and growing, or are people and media just happening to take notice?
Nate Nelson: Yes, it did really seems to coalesce and flower with the first No Fun and stuff, but I don’t know how you would analyze how things rise and plateau, and hopefully not decline. So many people who are involved in the more recent quote unquote “high profile” noise things have been at it for so long. It’s just inevitable that it would gain a certain mass just from people like Wolf Eyes, who are maturing and work so hard and forge the kinds of connections that allow that kind of thing to happen, much in the way of early 80s punk or something like that. Where it can go from here, now that we are all in touch with each other to a greater degree than ever before, I don’t know. (Laughs) Of course, all of the writing on the Internet has done something to raise the profile of [noise]. (Laughs) It’s pretty amazing that you can have 500 people at a noise show in America now!
Popcorn Youth: Speaking of the internet, do you guys have a webpage?
Nate Nelson: (Laughs) Haha, no. We’re trying to build a webpage for our CD-R and vinyl label, and I think that’s going to have news on what we’re up to posted when it does go up. But it’s not really any weird ideological thing against any of that that’s prevented us from doing it, it’s just time. And so much of our time is taken up by playing and recording and touring, and that has been going so well that we haven’t really felt that much pressure to do a website to raise interest because things have been moving along just fine without it. (Laughs) But we’d like to have a website, although I don’t really feel too much inclination to have a MySpace page. Under construction, we’ll say. (Laughs)
[Mouthus at Von Cramm co-op, Feb. 2007]
Popcorn Youth: How did Mouthus encounter Thurston Moore and get involved with his label, Ecstatic Peace?
Nate Nelson: It’s pretty funny, actually. He heard a little bit of our first CD, which was on Psych-o-Path Records, and that was just a small 500-edition CD, but he heard it somewhere. And he came to see us in this basement in Bushwick, this great little DIY space. It was hilarious because Thurston is a giant, and the ceiling is like only about seven feet tall and he had to stoop down there. There’s was a sewage problem, and there’s shit coming out of the floor, and toilet paper and there’s puddles. (Laughs) Someone asked us to play with [Chris] Corsano, and I think USAisaMonster played. [Thurston] went up to Brian and said he was interested in releasing something, and we had seen him around town at shows, but not really interacted, so when Brian told me, I though it was cool that he liked it, but I’m not going to hold my breath. But then, six months later, we had the record out! So that was pretty cool.
Popcorn Youth: And last December, Mouthus played Thurston’s curated ATP festival.
Nate Nelson: (Laughs) I still have a sinus infection from that. It was crazy. It was just totally fucking crazy. To have all this — I mean, it was like he imported two-thirds of the whole scene that is going on here to this crazy little resort town in the southwest of England. And putting all of those people in that kind of situation together — it was totally nuts. (Laughs) It really was the best time ever.
Popcorn Youth: Do you think a lot of people flew from the States to be there?
Nate Nelson: There were a fair amount of people who were connected to one or more of us, who knew that all their friends were going to be over there. They anticipated the crazy party — which it absolutely turned out to be. Most of the crowd was English though as far as I could tell, aside from our close friends and associates who flew over. But so many of them were playing, too. I’m sure a lot of people wanted to go that couldn’t drop the money for the plane tickets.
Popcorn Youth: So, I heard a rumor that Sunburned Hand of the Man was going to be playing on the Ithaca bill this weekend. Is that true?
Nate Nelson: Wow … what did you hear? (Laughs) That’s definitely news to me. They’re playing the show? I really don’t know. I don’t even know where those guys are right now. I haven’t talked to any of them in months. (Laughs) That would be cool though, you know? We like to collaborate.
Popcorn Youth: What’s your approach to collaborations?
Nate Nelson: Well, we play with Axolotl regularly, whenever we can, whenever we’re in the same place or on the same coast. Double Leopards, in various formations, has also been a big one. We shared a space with those guys. I was just duplicating 200 of these new CD-Rs that have Axolotl and Pete Nolan of Magik Markers and Virgin Eye Blood Brothers and so forth. We love to collaborate, we’re pretty open to it.
Popcorn Youth: Do you learn new ways of playing?
Nate Nelson: Yes, it’s great, because it opens up so many possibilities sonically, and maybe they have other pedals that we don’t. (Laughs) But it’s great because it helps you hear different things in what you’re doing as well as what they’re doing. As a duo, we fill a lot of space when we play together. But if we play with other people, we hang back more and don’t feel like we have to do everything. We can get into some weird spaces that we don’t normally get to go to when it’s just the two of us. Or it can be 100% more hectic. It just depends. When I think about it, we collaborate with a lot of people who tend to cover more melodic or mellow territory, and that helps us get into pretty stuff that has a different feel.
Popcorn Youth: So how would you characterize Mouthus’ songwriting approach?
Nate Nelson: They come out of playing and recording all the time. We have our tape machine and our space and we record everything we do. We use a reel to reel eight-track quarter inch machine for almost everything. [Brian] makes rough mixes at home and then we get together and talk about what we like and what we didn’t like, what we’d like to do again, what we have to remember to try again. And as we play, it becomes refined, or else we decide we like the first take, or scrap the whole thing. It’s definitely a process that happens through playing or recording. We just finished our first real studio record which is pretty different. And that’s going to be on Load [Records]. So you can expect that soon.
Popcorn Youth: What would be your advice for someone who wants to get involved in the noise scene?
Nate Nelson: Hmm … Make it good, don’t make too much of it, and …. I don’t know. (Laughs) Make it good, edit your shit. Even though we have a pretty prolific release schedule, we try to make each thing different and give it a reason for being a separate thing. I’m sure everybody does, but there is so much activity right now, I think that the people who are distributing all of this stuff are really feeling the strain of having to deal with so many releases. And where that can go, I don’t know. I think it’s great that there’s so much going on.
Record your stuff, give it to musicians who you admire, but try not to give it to them on tour, because we all get huge bags of CD-Rs and they often get lost when we’re on tour. (Laughs) So try starting with people in your city, and if they like it, it’ll make its way into the right hands with a good recommendation and it’ll go to the top of that bag and other people will hear it and that’ll get the ball moving. So many times, we get these CD-Rs and they could be great or not, but so many people make so much stuff, and there’s so little fuckin’ time to deal with it all (laughs) and still try to make our own stuff and do our jobs and all that, you just kind of have to be careful with how you go about getting heard. But what works for me, might not be what works for the next person, I don’t really know. I mean, we don’t have a MySpace page! (Laughs) So, I don’t know how kids do it these days.
Popcorn Youth: You know, I really find that remarkable, because so much music gets heard and talked about because of that specific website, yet you guys haven’t felt like you needed it.
Nate Nelson: Yeah, it seems kinda strange to me too that [MySpace] has to be the channel that everything goes through. And you must belong to it to be anything. And I think we kind of resent that a little bit. At the same time, it’s cool that some young kid somewhere in buttfuck wherever can stumble on something, and it can be heard where people haven’t heard it before. That’s the counter argument that people always give me. (Laughs) I think that I’d rather just go to their town and play a show. But, we’re working on it, because we do want some information about us to be out there for someone who doesn’t live in New York or San Francisco.
Popcorn Youth: Well, it also made it really hard for me to find any contact information for you guys.
Nate Nelson: Yeah … people say that too. But people seem to find us anyway. We get so much email already, maybe we kind of want to be hard to find.
[Mouthus at Tonic for Winter Ends Destruction, as curated by Carlos Giffoni of No Fun Fest’
Popcorn Youth: Is the Ithaca date a one-off or is there more planned?
Nate Nelson: We’re going to Northhampton the next day. And we’re each playing solo, so that’ll be interesting, a different style. It’s just a weekend warrior thing. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: What else does Mouthus have planned for 2007?
Nate Nelson: We’re going to keep putting out the CD-Rs, and we’re really excited about that studio record because it sounds totally different from what we’re able to do on our own. We recently got a van that was born after the year 2000, so hopefully that will facilitate a somewhat more extensive U.S. tour at the end of the summer, early fall. (Laughs) We’ll do some touring around the No Fun [Fest] too. As the fall sets in, we’ll start moving faster, and do some more touring than we have been for the last few months.
Popcorn Youth: So what were some things that came out in 2006 or 2007 that you’re excited about?
Nate Nelson: Oh man. There’s so much stuff. (Pauses) I’d like to give you an example that’s outside of the No Fun or Ecstatic Peace roster, and that’s why I’m hemming and hawing. And a lot of those people are great and do great stuff, like Lambsbread and The Skaters. But that’s sort of what you expect me to say. So, Wold. Wold is really good. They’re this black metal band from Sasquetchuan, Canada. We don’t know much about them, but they’re exciting and sound great. They’re not really traditional black metal — they’re kind of have some jams that sound like a weird minimalist keyboard thing with kind of a krauty drum feel, really lo-fi, very atmospheric. It’s really good.
Popcorn Youth: Are there any drummers or percussionists that influence your approach in Mouthus?
Nate Nelson: Yeah, I mean, geez, there are so many! But I don’t know that many who have the weird approach that I do. I’ve lived with John Lockey from [the band] Sightings for a long time, and I have to say that he kind of turned me onto using contact mics and other things, and hopefully I’ve taken it to a different place than what he did in that band, but obviously was a big thing for me. And that goes back to early Industrial stuff that we both appreciate a lot. I was just playing Chris & Cosey’s “Trance” just a few minutes before I called you, and I was thinking about how inspiring and great that one is for me, and especially what a great drum workout that is. But, Jesus, there are so many, I don’t even know what to say to that. I’d have to send you a top 50 list or something! (Laughs)
Mouthus will play with Gown, Lucky Dragons, High Places, and Sunburned Hand of the Man on Saturday, March 10, at 8:30pm. The show is at the Von Cramm Co-op on 623 University Ave. This show is also going to be amazing.