Aside from a lone show in Brattleboro, Vt., Stars Like Fleas have yet to perform outside of New York City — but it doesn’t look to stay that way for long. As it stands, the NYC-based avant-pop collective are making some of the loveliest music around, but most non-New Yorkers have only heard their two full-length records through a stereo: Sun Lights Down on the Fence (2003, Præmedia) and the soaring, effervescent The Ken Burns Effect (Hometapes), which came out this June.
Stars Like Fleas strike a balance between the soulful and the weightless. No matter what it may sound like in any given moment — graceful folk, cozy electronic pop, epic post-rock, or all of the above — it’s fun to speculate to what extent in a live setting Stars Like Fleas will try to recreate their recorded corpus. Comparisons to Chris Martin or Dave Matthews have already been made to singer Montgomery Knott, but his airy, effortless vocals seem, to us, closer to Mark Hollis, Tim De Laughter or Will Oldham. And it is testament to the strength of the music that Stars Like Fleas have achieved national press and recognition despite the fact that they rarely venture outside of NYC.
Over the years, the collective has included members of Beirut, TV on the Radio, Fiery Furnaces, and Tall Firs, and for their show at No Radio Records on Monday, Sept. 15, Stars Like Fleas will feature Ryan Smith (piano, ukulele, synth), Ryan Sawyer (drums), Montgomery Knott (vocals), Shannon Fields (guitar, keys, electronics), Laura Ortman (violin, bowed saw), Jon Natchez, Shayna Dulberger (upright bass), and Shelley Burgon (harp, keys, electronics).
We recently had the opportunity to speak with multi-instrumentalist and producer Shannon Fields on growing up in the Midwest, his approach to collaboration, and on the state of Brooklyn culture post-9/11.
Popcorn Youth: You’re from the Midwest — growing up, what was your exposure like to experimental music? Both on a local/regional and international scope. How easy or hard was it to find out about experimental music?
Shannon Fields: My parents weaned me on Xenakis, Harry Partch, Soft Machine, Steve Reich, Francois Bayle and Derek Bailey (I wish). The truth is there was nobody really introducing me to anything more “experimental” then early Sonic Youth, Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten, Swans, This Heat, etc (of course this stuff can be a gateway drug that leads you elsewhere, and it certainly was for me).
Growing up, I can’t claim to have been very aware of music much beyond the mainstream, past and present. The places in and around Kansas City where I grew up were pretty depressed and depressing. I come from solid white trash stock, in a very religious home with a deep mistrust of most forms of culture (high and low). I didn’t really travel at all. The High Schools were like holding pens and as long as you weren’t shooting a teacher in the face, you pretty much did what you wanted – every class was study hall, more or less. You just tried hard not to be noticed so nobody would single you out.
There has been an obsessive-compulsive quality to my relationship to music ever since I was very young, but the truth is that as a teenager I was much more interested in tracking down the avant-garde in literature and the visual arts then I was music, and even what I took from that was a hodge-podge historical misunderstanding, what I was most interested in was just taking little bits from every piece of 20th century fringe culture I could find out about, because it made me feel more connected to something outside of my immediate surroundings which, like most disaffected American teenagers, I hated and felt alienated by.
I did not have a particularly sophisticated relationship to music then. Just like most other people, the key elements lie in the sub-cultural attachments – my music was a lifestyle accessory, it gave me access to a community. Subsequently, I played in noise bands where I played processed clarinet and guitar feedback with effects pedals, but I don’t recall ever thinking of it in terms of experimentalism or an avant-garde. It just “fucking rocked.”
And honestly, although the teenage bands I played in were definitely the oddballs in a scene full of mostly skinhead hardcore bands, the few shows we played were always well received even though we were really making exploratory, noise-based, ‘listening’ music. It was visceral and loud and in that scene that’s all anyone really cared about. I also made a lot of tape collage music with friends, but we thought of it as ‘soundtrack music’ – I was just not educated or aware as to the context or tradition of that stuff. “Improvisation” was for hippies, musique-concrete and electroacoustic music unknown.
I think I was much more influenced musically by the ecstatic 2-3 hour worship services in Pentecostal church I was raised in, though I certainly wouldn’t have connected the dots when I was younger.
Like a lot of people, it was when I went to college (where I studied linguistics and philosophy and creative writing, not music) and after, when I move to NY, that for a variety of reasons I opened up to all of this other music, and found ways to approach it, listen, and why you would want to in the first place. Until then I consciously valued music solely based on its naïve emotional resonance (and naturally that was mostly sad folk/Americana/goth/indie stuff) – I say “naïve” because I think that most people coming from that place are basing this on a very reductive, ‘cartoony’ relationship to human emotions. I certainly was.
Popcorn Youth: Is this is your first tour outside of NYC? — if so what was the impetus for it to happen now? Why did you wait so long?
Shannon Fields: Aside from a show in Brattleboro, Vermont a couple of years ago, these are the first Stars Like Fleas shows outside of New York. The impetus is simply that we have a record out and have wanted to try to tour it for years. We waited because of money. We didn’t have enough to make it happen and nobody was asking (at least in the U.S.) because there was no record out.
Also, because Stars Like Fleas (or at least t he Ken Burns Effect) does not privilege the values associated with “songwriting” craft (traditionally speaking), when you strip this stuff down to 2 or 3 people it just really isn’t Stars Like Fleas anymore, and there isn’t much there to excite – because it’s not about that (and I get that for many people, if you can’t strip it down to an acoustic guitar that means you ‘can’t write a song’ and we just have to shrug off that kind of criticism, because it misses the point by a mile and comes from a place where you cannot appreciate our music anyway). So while we could have toured something as a duo or trio, I chose not to.
Popcorn Youth: How do you like living in Brooklyn? How supportive / interesting / evolving do you find the current climate for good, local music? Do you get a sense that Stars Like Fleas might be another thing altogether if you were, say, still based in the Midwest, or in another city? Does location influence the music at all?
Shannon Fields: The creative energy in Brooklyn is immense. I think every person in Brooklyn is in a band (and probably more famous then me). The various scenes in Brooklyn are very supportive and safe. There is a very high concentration of extremely brilliant, audacious (an important feature) people with a ferocious drive to “be somebody” and who come here for that purpose. There is a lot you can say about that impulse, good and bad. But these are the characters of culture laboratories since turn of the century Vienna and, for better or worse, the license for bullshit comes with the territory.
In part, the nurturing quality is because, frankly, people are so interested in ‘difference’ and vanguard auteurism, they will quite literally listen to, or make, anything – give anything a chance for fear of not being part of something historic, artistically vital. Some of them are in it more for fashion, some are fiercely engaged and hungry.
But, as disgustingly false and flighty as Brooklyn’s attentions can be, there is something very important about having these Petri dishes where people feel licensed and encouraged to put themselves on the line in the most extreme ways night after night, and then to defend it (and, as must be expected, there are also just a huge saturation of privileged, trend-chasing kids with fame as a first-goal as well, but it does not diminish the fact that interesting things emerge from that).
I’ve thought a lot about regional scenes and, like all regional culture in America, I think the differences have become very slim indeed. But they are there. Baltimore has it, Portland has enjoyed it for a long time. Others (like Brattleboro) seem entirely fictional. Brooklyn had it, particularly after 9/11, when we were all so fried, frightened, and freed by the sense of impending doom that incredible work bloomed out of every crevice for no reason other than pure, emotional need (now I feel there is too much attention on Brooklyn nationally, and it’s style and is a little but of an oversaturated artistic self-parody right now, because the local and national culture media reabsorbs the marginal elements in almost real-time, turning a gesture into blunt fashion so fast it makes your head spin).
Kansas City, it always felt to me, is a place you leave. However, I like to think my aesthetic is very much shaped by the rural towns and inner cities of the Midwest that sort of carved out the inside of my brain in a very particular shape.
Popcorn Youth: Can you speak on who will be performing at the Ithaca show? I would imagine that it would be pretty tough to exactly replicate in a club/bar setting any given song on your records, just on a technical/practical level… So what do you see as the difference between the recorded document and a live performance? Do you see the two things as being mutually exclusive or do they inform each other?
Shannon Fields: In Ithaca we’ll have Ryan Smith (piano, ukulele, synth), Ryan Sawyer (drums), Montgomery (vocals), me (guitar, keys, electronics), Laura Ortman (violin, bowed saw), Jon Natchez (just about everything under the sun), Shayna Dulberger (upright bass), Shelley Burgon (harp, keys, electronics). I’ve also heard a wonderful rumor that our cellist Tianna Kennedy, who has been travelling all summer working on various art, music and film projects, may join us. Sam Amidon is absent as he’s off touring his solo album, All Is Well, right now – and we miss him terribly! And Matt Lavelle (our bass clarinet/trumpet/cuica) is also absent, which leaves a crushing hole both onstage and off.
I think of live performances and records as two very different art-forms, albeit closely related by the idea of a band identity. Records and performances are both full of artifice, but the way that they tend to be artificial differs quite a bit.
What ties the two together for Stars Like Fleas, aside from the players and a basic collection of frameworks for songs, is that the group makes music that maybe tries to openly exposes the fictions in whatever medium we’re working with, and we wrestle with the artifice and the baggage head on…all while we’re trying to also transport ourselves and the audience somewhere on a purely physical/emotional level. Why? I don’t know. I don’t think it about it in the walk I talk about it.
But it seems lots of people feel pushed away and pulled in by the music at the same time, and it can be very unsatisfying in terms of resolution, but also unsettling. I’ve seen people giggling and crying at the same shows. But that’s what much of the music I love does and, more importantly, that’s what it feels like to me to be a person and I want to make music that is humane and conflicted in that way. All that having been said, the band is playing the music of the Ken Burns Effect (among other things) and the sound and feel of that record is the sound of this band. So, you know, if you like one you should like the other!
Popcorn Youth: Can you speak more on the effect your music has on the audience?
Shannon Fields: Most of our shows draw crowds of people there to listen closely and just bathe in the sound and the experience, which is sometimes silly and uncomfortable or manipulative, but also frequently really beautiful. At a recent show at Bowery Ballroom people were actually getting angry and a fight broke out between people there to listen and some people who started out dancing and then started throwing glasses when we constantly…I don’t know….interrupted their mojo? Failed to deliver the goods?
When it’s right, I hope every show has that kind of electricity and friction and confusion, although it’s very nice for us when it’s a positive reaction and people really feel like they experienced something they haven’t before. I forgot who it was but some improvising musician said that they very rarely felt moved to discomfort (or anything) in shows anymore and that when that happened they were very excited and hoped they could return the favor. At any rate, I feel that way very much. If we play a show you enjoy yourself at and then forget as soon as you leave, we might as well stay home…that’s a very disposable thing you can get from anyone. We do enjoy ourselves though and our shows can be very fun (I think? Hope?).
People who were at the Ramones’ first gigs say that people mostly just laughed and looked around to see if it was for real, and if anyone else took them seriously. But they kept coming back. That music became very “REAL” and very important and close to the hearts of millions, but not because the Ramones changed the way they played. How great must it have been to see the Ramones at CBGB’s in the 70’s when it made no sense and seemed like a big joke whose punch-line you didn’t get. That’s certainly how Animal Collective’s first shows were as well, and it was very exciting in a way it can never be again. What we try to do is find a way to keep our shows in that place forever.
Popcorn Youth: Lately what sort of musical traditions do you draw upon when you’re creating or performing music? Do you find that the blues, pop, folk, jazz traditions (etc) inform each other, create their own dynamic, when you’re working on a new piece? Like, when noise finds its place in a pop context? Is it about creating a new tradition, deviating from old ones?
Shannon Fields: I think it’s more interesting when pop finds its place in a noise context! And my joke here is seriously intended. The extension of tradition is something you cannot escape anyway, so I’ve never been much one for focusing deliberately on that aspect of music (though many people in the band are very much ‘deep and narrow’ in that way, and very accomplished).
What’s more important is how the culture at large, the audiences, have been informed by those musical traditions, and what they have become (for example, Charlie Parker or Alban Berg do not ‘sound’ now as they did then, the music just can’t do the same things to people, though it is beautifully constructed music that will live a long time).
For myself, and this is true beyond just music, I’m interested in the spaces between grammars and genres. When you put one “common sense” set of values up against another “common sense” set of values, and they utterly clash, I absolutely live for those collisions. I think we learn a lot more about ourselves that way. And at any rate, the first time you encounter that sort of collision musically, your brain starts firing neurotransmitters like it’s the fourth of July (or at least mine does) and that is a tremendously exciting experience, emotionally, physically, and intellectually. Am I making any sense?
Popcorn Youth: What is your approach to songwriting and that creative process? Do you and Montgomery work together? Does collaboration figure into it at all? What is the dynamic like between the two of you? Do you have something in mind before you go to work with someone, or is it more organic?
Shannon Fields: Montgomery and I work together tightly but, and I think it’s ok to say this, we struggle to get along most of the time. If we were in other bands we would have broken up a long time ago over ‘creative differences’. But for us, for the time being anyway, I think ‘creative differences’ are why we stay together. It’s more interesting. Volatility is at the heart of everything we do as a group.
As for the band, this evolves but leading up to the Ken Burns Effect, and since then, Stars Like Fleas has been a highly collaborative collective of people. And let’s be clear that it *is* a band, and that everyone in the group contributes heavily. Montgomery and I are by FAR the least accomplished musicians in the group, and they are contributing much more than just their technical talents. Our songs may originate with anyone, and evolve or are reworked for almost every show. I act as a sort of ‘lead producer’ and while I bring in a whole lot of the core material (in various states of completion) I really feel like my most important role is to destabilize things. I steer people, especially myself, away from most of our impulses, which keeps us away (sometimes too far away) from stock tricks, canned improvisational tricks of the trade, base button-pushed emotional triggers. I ensure play the arbitrary role of ensuring Stars Like Fleas-ness, and it’s when we’re making music that seems unmoored, aesthetically self-conflicted, that we’re most ‘Stars Like Fleas’. Another way of saying this is that I’m responsible for making sure that we never become famous and nobody ever likes us, ever.
Popcorn Youth: I get a sense that the two Stars Like Fleas records are best enjoyed from start to finish – as one unit, in its entirety. How do you think Stars Like Fleas will be influenced / feel the effects of the paradigm shift into the internet, into mp3 sharing, into online distribution and dissemination? Have you felt the effects of it at all – in a negative or positive way?
Shannon Fields: I don’t have much to say about this. What happens to the recorded music once it’s been shoved out into the world is kind of beyond my control. I do make records to be listened to as records, in one sitting, in the sequence in which they’re presented. And a song like, say, Berbers In Tennis Shoes or Early Riser, taken out of the context of the record, is 50% less interesting. But if somebody loves one song off the record and the rest makes no sense to them, what are we going to do force them at gun point to lay on their bedroom floors and spin the record beginning to end? And I’m not less happy that someone loves the song then I would be otherwise. In live performance we have very few breaks between pieces and I think it makes it harder to hear what we do as a ‘collection of songs’, interchangeable and portable (which is certainly not how we think of it).
Popcorn Youth: It seems like now, more than ever, there is more music than ever – underground music has split off into hundreds of micro niches, and there is something for everyone. Have you experienced this at all, as being part of Stars Like Fleas, and that its been a good thing? Do you get a sense that Stars Like Fleas could only “exist” in this capacity now, maybe not 20 or 30 years ago? That in some sense you are a product of the current music environment, or that you see yourselves as existing outside of that, in a hermetic sense?
Shannon Fields I also feel that fragmentation in the air. I wonder if that’s because I’m an obsessive consumer of music and can’t see the woods for the trees, but there is certainly no big unifying global musical form beyond hip-hop the way rock was in the 60s or jazz in the 40s. You hear this baby boomer nostalgia all the time (you know, ‘oh no! where is today’s Dylan or Beatles?’) but I think the heterogeneity is good. I’m paranoid about mass culture and wary of giant unifying movements in theory. Of course, in practice, I love me some ‘dumb’ Top 40 pop music. But without fragmenting the population you don’t see development in the same way. And genres are always the most exciting before they become a genre, before the culture has a name and a face for it.
Popcorn Youth: How heavily does improvisation figure into the live performance?
Shannon Fields: Very heavily. Although my conversations with people suggest that it is perceived as much more improvisational then it is, and I’m always surprised by the things people think are improvised. This is probably just some people’s way of saying “dude, that sounded like formless, made up skronk”, but meanwhile I’m just thinking “wow, thanks, you must think very highly of us to think we could have improvised all of that!” – then I realize, oh wait, mr. guy was just telling you he thought you were making self-indulgent stoner noise and that it wasn’t music. Anyway, the sets are designed to allow for a lot of freedom, but there is always an underlying form and guidelines in play, as with any band. When you take 3 steps back you should hear a very human, very simple little song most of the time…it’s always there from a distance…but when you pull in close you can get lost in the dots, and there are often little unplanned, fleeting but complex little micro-environments within each song where you can just lose yourself…and I think we have fans from both sides of that fence.
Popcorn Youth: Are you involved in anything else, creatively, besides Stars Like Fleas? I.e., side projects, solo projects, etc.
Shannon Fields: Yes. I play more or less full time with a band called The Silent League, which is very into the wierder edges of 70’s soft rock and is super fun to play in right now. We’re working on a 3rd record which I’m producing and it will be a departure – I enjoy the hell out of that. I improvise solo and with others. I am working on various nameless solo projects and producing for and arranging for other people as well, which is something I enjoy very much. The other people in the band are all involved in a LOT of other musical projects – some you’ve never heard of, some everybody knows of. Busy bees.
Popcorn Youth: What do you have planned for the future? What can we look forward to?
Shannon Fields: When I figure out what I have to look forward to, and when I find whatever medication will allow me to really look forward to things, I’ll tell you what you can look forward to.
Popcorn Youth: In a previous interview, you recommended a couple of records labels that put out noise for the ‘angry rockers out there.’ But when I listen to noise, I don’t really feel angry. Is it possible to associate emotions with genres of music? Or were you just being facetious and generalizing, I couldn’t tell…
Shannon Fields: Great question. My point (and I was probably talking about the really aggressive, primitive, brutalist stuff) might have been more about the ‘commodification’ of teen angst and rage, and that some of that music seems like it should ring more truly to a young angry teenage boy then Limp Bizkit. On the other hand, the power of the communal ‘singalong’ anthem is something you cannot discount. Do I think Wolf Eyes or Pita tap into that sort of angsty rage and come from essentially the same place? Yeah, I do. It’s also more accomplished in many ways, but also with what I think is the an undercurrent of punishment (outwardly and inwardly). And that comes across live. But then, some stuff that might sound superficially similar, some Borbetomagus or Voice Crack or whatever, can be really calming to me, and seems made in an entirely different spirit, one of deep listening and inquiry and dialog. Or at least it used to be when I first started listening to it. Because it seemed so free of information, context, baggage (on the quieter side I was a die-hard fan of the stuff on Bernhard Guenter’s Trente Oiseaux label). But I can’t really hear a lot of it that way anymore.
Popcorn Youth: Have you found that your approach to production and engineering has changed at all from ‘Sun Lights..’ to ‘The Ken Burns Effect.’?
Shannon Fields: Yup. I know what I’m doing a *little* bit more now, so I have to do more to fuck myself up. Like make the music with a band that has to be as satisfied with the results as I am. However, I’ll always be a lousy engineer, I have no patience for it and don’t care about it as an end in itself. So that’s good.