Why the move to the West Coast?

Both: [Pause]…Personal.

HB: Yeah it's personal, to find space for ourselves. Some of us have been living together for four, five years. We've been talking about it for so long, we wanted to move, and to explore. Where we're from, Atlanta, there's no mountains, there's no lakes, there's no ocean. I mean there are, but coming from us, we've traveled so much, and part of that travel was in search of these beautiful spots, because that’s important to us—earth, natural life. So that's probably our main reason for coming out here, the mountains and the ocean—so close together. It's unbelievable. And we've waited for a long time; we've been on tour for like three or four years, and didn't really resonate with anywhere as much as we did with the Bay Area. It wasn't like we finally had time to move, we were just like, if were ever going to move lets do it now, y'know, because we had like a month off, so we just got all our stuff together…

Both: And kicked it….

DM: And here we are…. I had been to Santa Cruz twice, my partner, she had never been there, but it resonated with us the minute we got there. Hunter had a place as soon as he moved out, so in the first week or two of being here, there was a feeling of this is home. Definitely it was a personal move for all of us. For myself, it's looking for some growth personally and spiritually.

Change is always positive.

DM: And that's what it was, it was change. I needed this inspiration and the change in my life to be able to in return go back to music and play music with more to draw from. Everything we've done to this point, and the music we've written, is a buildup of 24 years of living on this earth in this time, and it's easy to draw a lot of emotion from to put into the music. But once you feel like, not that you've leveled off, but that you’ve expressed a lot of that, well where do you go to from here and now? To draw more inspiration to bring back in, to evolve that and grow with it, not to be stagnated and in one place but evolving as a person…

One thing I notice when you guys are on stage is—maybe it’s because there are no vocals, no singer—but it seems like there’s no leader of the band per se, in a traditional sense. It’s more of a collective effort.

HB: Absolutely. We're definitely strongest as a whole, and that's our intention. I guess it’s a metaphor as to how we strive to live, as an equal part of everyone. [In Lakesh] "I am another yourself." That's something we really stand for, that's where the most love comes from for us. That's where we feel the best, when we all share together, so how else could our music be expressed?

And it's cool too, because it opens up a platform for friends and other artists and musicians, to come up and do their thing. Because we're so good as a team, we can really hold back, and a sixth member can step up and really shine, and then we can even take from that. Some of our greatest musical experiences come from that—opening up a platform for someone, anyone, someone who happens to have a trumpet in the crowd….

Whether it’s a guy with a sax, a DJ, or someone onstage painting…

DM: Or spoken word, or singing. The music is that platform. So as a listener, or to someone in the audience, you can feel the one energy that our unit is, and that puts our focus on that person, and in turn the rest of the crowd. We really feel like the music we play is everyone’s music, it’s not our music. We don't play it, it’s everyone in that room making the music.

I can see that connection in the elements of ever comparing us to a DJ or dance oriented music. The crowd, the music…

HB: The crowd controls what gets played.

DM: The crowd is integral. To me, you see a DJ, and you're there together. The next record he puts on is going to be a representation of where the crowd and the vibe has evolved to throughout that evening, and it's always in the now. That's what I love about DJs; that's what I love about our music. It's always in the now, there's never really a preamble of where it's going, there's no saying, "This night is going be like this. By second song, second set, we’re going to be doing this." It's not really like that. Even to write a set list, it never applies or manifests, because you're there and the crowd is controlling that energy. You know when a crowd wants to sit down all night and just watch you, but not even watch you, watch everything and just feel it, just sitting there with their eyes closed, and you know how to play to that. But you know when people just feel it in their root chakra and they wanna dance all night. Not that we don't have a choice, but that's what comes out. Above all we're entertainers, we're there to channel for all of us. For people to entertain themselves…

It’s such a synergy. You guys do vibe so hard on the crowd, like I've never experienced with a live band or a DJ. And it’s not a matter of the crowd controlling what you do, or you controlling what the crowd does but it’s…

Both: The flow.

HB: Yeah. Definite synergy. Thanks—to life, for that. We're just glad to be a part of it.

DM: That wasn't even so much an intent, but that is what this band is. That's why we started playing together. As much as anything because we’d have practice and friends would come over because they enjoyed just sitting in the room, all of us feeling it together. An audible solution to a lot of our telepathic thoughts….

That's why there will never be a "leader" on that stage, or it'll never be one of us, or the five of us, we’re just up there together, coming with a good understanding for each other, a lot of respect, and a lot of love, for everyone, so in that I feel like this is your thing, y'know…

Both: This is our thing…

HB: Everyone, all of us.

DM: Yeah… I could talk about that for hours!

Oh it’s a beautiful thing, it’s the essence of the band right there. That’s what I try to describe to people that have never heard the music before.

DM: That's interesting that you say that. If someone had never seen us, if they had been told what you just said about that synergy being the essence of what we are, if they knew that information beforehand, I feel like that would make it a lot easier for people to resonate with what we do. There are a lot of expectations about what a live band does, what things should follow under that, so no matter how much someone says, "They don't sing, they don't have vocals, they don't have a front man," maybe that helps a lot of people that might be more into dance music. But even still someone feels like there needs to be melody all the time, there needs to be a solo all the time. A lot of people are still a little bit confused when they first see us because maybe they think that the music doesn't go anywhere, or they're waiting for it to do something that it doesn't do…. Some nights I stand on stage and those thoughts come into my head, and I think, "But I know what I'm doing here…" [laughs].

HB: It's true, people have come up to me, not as much as they used to but, being the guitar player for this live band, they're like "Man, you should go off more, you should solo, you should do this or do that." That's been interesting and fun for me as an artist. I love those guitar players that do that, but that's just not me. It's about finding your own voice.

DM: It's the biggest cosmic joke we have, ruining people's expectations, and they still dig the music. Some people's feelings are hurt, because Hunter doesn't just go off screaming. I mean for me personally Hunter does that, but I've been playing with Hunter since we were 15, so we share in that mutual love of the art, for doing our own thing. He plays the guitar for Hunter Brown's soul, not for what the guitar, as an instrument is cliched or perceived to be. It's hilarious; we definitely have fun with people. We've had people screaming at us onstage, "Someone solo, please!" You just gotta laugh.

Both: Especially in the South…[laugh].

DM: Yeah you think of southern rock…. When people go to see a band, they have these preconceptions. We've had people say, "I thought y'all were a Grateful Dead cover band," or "I thought y'all were southern rock, you're from Georgia, you're a 'jam band.' What do you mean you don't solo and your guitar player doesn't have his foot up on the monitor?"

HB: It's funny. I mean most of our music is improv. We have definite structure that goes with some things, but all of it is open for improv. We have some of the most structured songs ever but they're different every night.

Do you guys write songs?

Both: Yeah…

How does that happen?

HB: It's different every time. It just happens. A lot of the new material that we put together consciously is taken from live stuff that we just happened to do, and we've morphed that. We'll go back and listen to a song and go, "What was that?" We'll listen to it and make it our own.

Something that might've come up purely by improv….

DM: Yeah exactly, or something that comes out of a structured song.

HB: It's like you're painting a huge picture, and it's got a dog and the beach, and houses and people, but then you really get into that dog right there, and you make a whole picture of that dog.

DM: And then to have an art show with that, you have that collective theme, y'know? Everything is spawned from this one feeling. We wrote a song two-and-a-half years ago, and maybe 6 months ago we wrote another piece of that song, off of that song. That was an original moment that we captured, and even that song was written from something we took off a tape, "Frequency." That was something we wrote jamming with some guys from a band called Squat in Athens. We played this improv piece and went back and I’m like, "Damn I really dig that bassline—where did that come from?" And next thing you know that's a song.

Again it’s like part of this collective process you've got going on. These songs evolve.

HB: But there's a couple songs that we've sat and practiced and wrote and theorized on and talked about and really put a lot of energy into this piece of music…. But still we allow that interpretation.

DM: We represent that spontaneous interpretation through the structure we created, because that's what that piece is there to say. You need all these parts and all those movements and changes and structure to get that certain message across.

HB: We don't want any kind of formula. There's no formula to our music, or music in general. I don't like the thought of that. We're open to any way we can play music or express it. All things are possible. Any way we can come up with we'll play.

…If that makes any sense.

DM: It’s like Hunter said, we try to be within our music how we live our life. Live what we speak: that’s the path that we’re on. We’re there living in a sense of what we know is possible, what we feel in our hearts. In our music we try to be in the now, like we try to live our lives to really be there with the music, because that’s where the creativity is spawned. That’s where all of us feel like the magic and the beauty in our music resides. If there’s any ego in it at all, it’s that. There’s something that we create sometimes that really, really is beautiful for all of us, and we share in that.

HB: I think it's just the respect that we have for the power of music in general. There's this sense of "Who are we to try to formulate this band, and these songs, and this stuff that will be fun for people?"

OK, I gotta ask about the new album. It was all done on analog tape. What’s the story behind that?

DM: Nothing was done digital. Nothing was recorded digital. There are loops on there, for instance…

HB: Well let’s explain the analog difference. What it means to put it on a two-inch analog is like this—you’re listening to a CD, recorded digitally, and it sounds like this is the music, this is what you hear: [makes a small circle out of his hands]. You put it on analog, a record—and we actually got to do this—and it goes boom! [little circle expands outwards]. It’s like the band is right there in your room. The first mastering we did to this new album was on vinyl. Straight to vinyl.

DM: Two-inch analog direct to the lathe. It’s sound sculpting, literally. It’s a ruby that burns the groove, just by vibration. It sculpts the wax. That's what’s so amazing about vinyl—it's such a true representation of the sound. Compared to digital, analog is a much warmer sound. It's tape, it's recorded real time, it's not broken down into numbers. Which maybe music is, but not sound itself. It captures the warmth of the instrument and the unity of the mix putting the sounds together.

HB: Once we got the record burned onto CD, we could synch them up, have the CD playing and the vinyl playing in the studio. We could go, "This is CD, and this is vinyl," and turn one off and have the other be at the same point in the song… and the sound would go whoosh, [does the small to big with his hands again], thwoosh, [and the reverse], like night and day. I mean I had always heard that, and always believed it, but until I heard the two myself, and got to compare…. It was crazy. Still it was hard, because a lot of the stuff we wanted to do on the album we wanted to experiment with, we wanted to use the studio as a medium itself, use all these tools to create something that we couldn't necessarily do live. We did that to some effect, but it was really challenging, getting these machines to do stuff….

DM: I mean, you're asking machinery made in 1970 to try to produce what could be so simply produced by a piece of rack gear, digitally. You could push a couple buttons and loop drumbeats all day long. But for us it was like, 'We play the instruments, so let's physically create the sound." And it just so happened that we were working with an analog genius. In his realm of analog, he's the man. We recorded on the board that Floyd worked and recorded Meddle and Dark Side. The soundboard Herbie Hancock used for Manchild. Analog gear used by the Stones. So this gear had history in a sense. We were creating music for 2000 on this old school gear. Zach would go in there and play a drumbeat that maybe he couldn't play for 6 minutes straight, too crazy to hold the tempo and the tightness enough for me to go back and lay down a bassline. So he would record like four measures of it on tape, and we'd literally cut the tape, re-splice it together and just play it, running on a reel, and record it onto another track, to the point where all his drums are on one track, looped. And then we'd go back and use the studio for its meaning, for recording tracks. I'd do my bass line, and we'd add keys, whatnot. And sometimes it would be drums and tablas, recorded together and then cut 'n' spliced into that loop. So what could take someone who really knows the digital realm thirty minutes to punch in on a rack-mount piece of gear, would take us three hours. But we knew it, when it was done you had watched him manually cut the tape and you were there watching and hearing and seeing the process done, and you understood the flow, how it all went together. I was surprised that we ended up mixing the entire album. When we went in to record I didn't think we would be at that level to really hear and understand our music on the studio/recording sense. And I thought we did a great job. A lot of the album is the mixdown. That is the album, what you hear now. And if there is any structure to the songs, it was more our fingers on faders than our hands on instruments, a whole other medium of art for us.

DM: A lot of the sounds we were using, the lathe [the machine that carves the sound groove into the wax] wouldn't register. Hunter probably knows more about this, but we really had to work it to make the grooves smaller in some places, to fit the frequencies that were going on: maybe the high pitches of it or the low-end bass of it. It's an art; it's sound sculpting. That's why I think the lacquers are cool. It's amazing that it loses its sound if you were to play it thirty times. It's actually giving you back that sound. I guess a good way to describe it is like having no attachment to your art—you're really giving it. It's like a painting that if you looked at thirty times it would disappear. Then those thirty people that saw it really took something from that painting with them.

I can't wait until it comes out on vinyl. I'm anxious to get it in the hands of some DJs, to really see a different interpretation of our music. I love listening to DJs, and Hunter is an avid listener and spins himself, and to hear him spin our wax, dropped in with some Indian-influenced drum & bass or whatever it may be…. To hear that on top of our music, and to know that there's this group of people who are creating music out there sharing in this collective vibe, that it's not ours, we're just tapping into a feeling through music that's out there. I feel like it resides a huge part in dance music; that's where the biggest lack of ego in music is. For a DJ to spin music, what he's representing is himself. But the music and the sounds of the records, he doesn't have an attachment to that. It's really easy to flow in and out of things; a DJ doesn't have to play one record by one artist all night. There's no ego attachment wrapped up in there. It's way more holistic. For me as a lover of DJs and of dancing, to feel compelled to dance I would be way more inclined to go see a DJ than a live band. Unless I could see Sector 9, but I don't have the privilege of doing that. We're working on that….

So what do you see in the future?

DM: Our next year is hopefully going to be about us. We're trying to bring it back into ourselves. And really do it for us again, allow ourselves some space. To create and to write mainly. When we finish up the next West Coast tour, we're taking about three months of the road, except a play in San Francisco and a play in Atlanta. So that time is for…. As weird as it may sound, we've never had a practice with Jeffrey, our percussion player. We haven't had a band practice in two years. Just gigs. Not that we don't write—we were in the studio, but just for four weeks. Most bands, when they start, that's all you do is practice, you're not gigging. So [with this break] four nights, five nights out of the week we can be practicing, and writing, and playing for the pure love of music and not in front of anybody. That's where a lot inspiration comes, there's a lot more freedom in that realm. You put yourself in front of 500 people, they take over. The energy is so high that you wanna be tight and you wanna just hit and flow and you want everybody to be there. You don't want to take anything away from the crowd by maybe getting into yourself and your instrument and do something random that you don't even know will work or care if it works, you do it because you felt it. So things like that. We're looking forward to having a space to practice, putting ourselves in a room for a month together. And throughout the next year, six-week tours, things like that are just not in our future. There'll be three or four week tours, to allow a good amount of space in between, to put ourselves back into the element of—like Hunter said—going into ourselves. And to see what inspiration we have to bring back to the music, to see what new concepts and feelings will come out of that, and how the essence of our band will grow and evolve.

I mean, to go and sit on the beach in Santa Cruz for an hour and then go back and sit in my room with my instrument…. I've never experienced that. I'm used to walking out from the back door of Zach's parents' basement and looking at more houses and more things that can sometimes perpetuate my anger and resentment with the world. And then that's the reflection you put back, when you go back into that room and pick up your instrument. So to sit with the earth, and then go back, that'll be a something new for myself….

HM: Yeah I mean that's where we came from. When we first got together, we all lived in this old studio in Atlanta, that had no equipment, no kitchen, no windows. We lived there for two years together, and a lot of that pain and struggle really came through to inspire us to get more out into the country, get a little more space from everything and harbor our energy together. And finally it manifested into exactly what we wanted. The beach, the mountains, the air…. We're really blessed and thankful to be here right now.

DM: Really, really blessed. That I could just still have my path as a person and an individual, living out here in this place with so much beauty. That is what I would have for myself. I mean that's probably what I would've had four years ago, before I started playing in this band and living with four people in a studio with no windows and no kitchen. I would've much rather took off to California. But that's where we were, we made a commitment. And to be blessed enough to be able to still have that music, and for my life to be what people call a career—whatever that is—and still to have the luxury of living in such a beautiful sacred space…. For me, I couldn't be more blessed. It's not about money, or whether I make it. It's that I'm provided for, and my brother Hunter is provided for, and our crew has money to eat, and a place to lay their head when they're off the road, and our booking agent can feed his son and his wife. Those are the things important to me, that I feel blessed by—that there's twenty people who put their faith and energy and love into this family, who make it what it is.

HB: We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for those people. We'd still be in a basement somewhere, probably in California… [laughs]. It's definitely a shared vision, with a bunch of brothers and sisters. That's what makes it even more honorable, that I can represent those cats.