Features | Interviews

Clue to Kalo

By David Greenwald | 30 November 2005

With One Way, It’s Every Way, Clue To Kalo has created one of the most consistent, organically conceptual albums of the year. It’s hard to categorize exactly what the band does – is it electronic music? Is it guitar folk? According to band mastermind Mark Mitchell it doesn’t really matter.

Mitchell found time in his busy schedule (the band is currently touring Australia) to shoot CMG’s David Greenwald an e-mail, answering a few pertinent questions on death, the creation of his intricate songs, the Delta Blues, and how to play live.

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CMG: I think most of our readers are probably familiar with the basis of a rock band's songwriting and recording process, but what you do is probably very different. Can you take us through the construction of one of your songs, from the initial idea to the actual recording?
Mark Mitchell (MM): Sure. There are a number of ways I might approach a song. Sometimes I have most of it in my head and I want to get it down before it’s gone. I’ll turn on a mic and try to sing parts. It’s laying down gibberish over a timeline so I can remember melodies, harmonies, the way that parts interconnect, so I can then construct the ‘real’ arrangement over the skeleton. Other times I’ve got specific sounds I’ve taken from somewhere, maybe from a friend who can play something, which I use to construct a part. With a couple of songs on the record I recorded a lot of isolated notes on my brother’s acoustic, loaded the sounds into the software, and digitally made a melody. It’s not like sheet music composition; it’s more like programming a music roll for a player piano. Other times friends will give me phrases of music and I can hear something in them that will trigger off other ideas. I might take them out of context or remake them. Sometimes the composition and the production process can be difficult to separate.

CMG: One Way, It's Every Way is very cohesive, lyrically and stylistically. Was that a conscious effort, to create one unified piece?
MM: Yeah, I’m not so interested in writing a bunch of songs that may happen to hold together okay. I guess the term “album” implies a kind of disparateness between the songs, like you’re collating a bunch of photographs or something, and that’s fine, but right now I’m interested in approaching my own records as you might approach a novel or a film, as a single project with parts that fit together. I want the songs to be geared towards adding up to something, to be about each other in some way. I guess there’s a danger that the record will end up sounding homogenous or that people will think you’ve shot for that at the expense of the songs. I still want the songs to stand on their own but be something else again when taken with each other. I know this sounds suspiciously like I’m talking about “concept” records and I guess I am. I think they probably get a bad rap because people associate them with rock operas or being pretentious or overblown. Maybe I’m sounding pretentious and overblown.

CMG: What themes do you want to get across with the album as a whole?
MM: I wanted to come at themes of loss from different directions. It’s hard to use the word “loss” without sounding like a sad-sack, but I don’t mean to. What happened was, I was hearing a ringing in my ears and I went to the ear doctor and was told I had tinnitus. The thing that frightened me the most about it was that I was always going to hear it, that it was like a noise floor for everything else, and I saw this as symptomatic of the “big questions.” Although I know there’s been a review or two that’s said I’m too young to be thinking about this kind of thing. But I’m not talking about death as an imminent demise, I’m talking about a living relationship with it, about the speed you move towards it. If you start to zero in on the movement of time in that way it can be debilitating. So just like I do with anything disruptive in my life, I looked over it a number of different ways until I could put it somewhere that wasn’t so destructive. And I wanted the chronology of that process to be the chronology of the record. Death has such a scale to be almost meaningless, but it exists somewhere still in all of those songs. The record is essentially a number of takes on a single idea. By the end of the process I was at a different place in relation to that idea, but the constitution of the idea stayed the same.

CMG:The album is being billed as celebratory work about death, but it seems to me like it's more focused how to deal with the difficulties of life. Would you agree with that?
MM: The problem with explicitly citing ideas of death is that people think you’re morbid or indulgent or fixated on an image of yourself lying in a coffin somewhere. But it is true that I’m talking about death in a really broad sense, almost as a trace of something you can find wherever you look. In the context of the record, it was more about seeing a process of inevitable change in different ways. Because I’m scared of change, because I think it means loss – loss of hearing, loss of life, loss of hair...and of course a lot of people are scared of the same thing, but it can become a problem if you let it get to you. If I’m going to do a phone interview and I know someone’s going to call me at a certain time, for ten minutes leading up to that interview I can’t relax, I’m anxious, I can’t be productive. Those minutes are full of an inevitability that can be a kind of paralysis. It’s a similar sensation to what I’m talking about. I can see my own movement as a set course towards losing everything, including eventually myself, and let it get to me, or I can see it as something else entirely. Those ten minutes before the guy from Cokemachineglow calls – if I’m in a certain space I can think positive and get my washing done.

CMG: How did you get started making music? What led you into electronic music in particular?
MM: Because I could do it. I can’t really play any instruments and I’m not fooling myself about the limitations of my singing voice, but we’re living in this golden age where anyone with a computer and some software can make a record. A recording studio in your own home! This still amazes me. I used to be friends with a music critic who blamed the accessibility of technology on what he saw as a glut of self-indulgent bedroom music (of course, it’s that same accessibility that enables him to publish his writing online). But what’s the alternative? Do we assign someone to make sure someone’s “good enough” before we allow them access to these tools? There’s also an implication that if you’re rich enough you’re good enough, ‘cause that kid whining about his world could have rich parents ready to buy him Abbey Road Studios. Making music in whatever form is for everyone.

CMG: A lot of these songs sound like they could be done really effectively with a traditional live band. Is that how you've been playing shows?
MM: Yeah, I used to play solo shows with only a laptop, but I don’t want to do that anymore. There are three of us on stage. I sing and use the computer, as well as play a little guitar, accordion, tin whistle. Curtis (Leaver) plays most of the guitars – electric, acoustic, and mandolin – as well as some accordion, glockenspiel, bits of percussion. Alan (Beverly) plays drums and other percussion. Curtis sings harmonies. The last show we played we had a fourth member, a saxophonist. We’ve tried to integrate a laptop-based performance into the format of a traditional live band. I know some people who use a laptop on stage because they feel they have to, and ideally would love to play without it, but I’m not working towards losing it entirely. I think the computer is the closest thing I have to an instrument. The composition of these songs is tied into electronic production approaches so it seems silly to try and formulate our live show as an elaborate smoke-and-mirrors exercise to convince people a computer was never involved. And there are just a lot of things you can do with a laptop live. You can use it as a simple vocal or guitar effects processor, or as a live sampler, or as a tool to keep your players synced. I just think people still are a little uncomfortable with a laptop on stage. It’s long past the point where it’s a novelty. It’s uncool. There’s a tendency to read it as a cop-out or a gimmick or as a stand-in for “real” instrumentation. But I honestly think there’s a lot of room for the computer in live performance. Even Neil Young gave in to digital in the end. Of course, he’d kick my arse for even mentioning him in that context.

CMG: What's the transition like from studio to live?
MM: The other guys in the band can actually play okay so it can be personally very exciting to hear them figure out ways of performing parts that were digitally constructed. It gets interesting when Curtis is faced with something that is unplayable and has to invent something that approximates an original part. A lot of variations in the live arrangements are actually done out of that necessity, and to adapt the songs in the wake of those necessary changes. It brings it all back down to earth. Curtis says his style of playing has been influenced by the way I digitally construct guitar parts, and it’s strange to think my way of composing could in any way affect the style of a “real” guitarist. But the translation from the computer to the band is always going to give interesting imperfections. Even if you work towards replicating something you’re never going to get it exact because it’s a different approach to making music. You inevitably end up with something different. A friend of mine had this idea that if you’re not the greatest musician in the world you should try to write a song exactly the same as someone you admire; because chances are your shortcomings will give you something unique.

CMG: One thing that fascinates me about the album is the mix of analogue and digital. Is that combination something that you're really trying to explore?
MM: Maybe not specifically “analogue” and “digital,” but certainly an application of creative production techniques to recorded sounds. Which is nothing new, of course. It just happens that the production techniques I know and love to work with are electronic.

CMG: Is there anyone in the "folktronica" community - Dan Snaith from Caribou and Keiran Hebden from Four Tet come to mind - that you particularly admire?
MM: I respect both those guys a lot, as people and as musicians, although sometimes the comparisons between us seem a little superficial to me. I understand that people can identify aesthetic consistencies there, and that’s cool, but I’ve always seen us as doing different things.

CMG: Who are your influences? What have you been listening to lately?
MM: Two artists I remember hearing at important times when I was working on this record were David Ackles and The Microphones, both for different reasons. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Randy Newman, especially the first three records. Also some Joe Meek, because I love that indulgent use of compression and approaching production with that kind of independence. I’ve been listening to a lot of Delta Blues because you can get it at the local record store for not much money and there’s some amazing stuff there. Although I think people who deny that the nostalgia for a forgotten America has at least a little something to do with its magic are lying to themselves. I think people like Robert Crumb love it because they see it as a kind of antidote to how shitty everything is now. It’s easy to imagine old America as authentic and beautiful but the point is that you can’t go back and check it out. Would those records have the same effect if they didn’t sound so ancient? Pearls Before Swine did a song to sound like an old record, with tinny equalization and 78 surface noise. It would be interesting to see if that changes the way a song is received, because it makes sense that you would be conditioned to responding to that in a certain way, just as you are with the sounds of different instruments, or with different melodies or harmonies. I know there’s a particular melodic progression that gets to me every time I hear it. I don’t know the correct musical name for it but ever since I was a kid it’s worked on me in whatever context it’s used. It’s interesting to be aware of that stuff when you’re making your own music.

CMG: What was the first album you ever bought?
MM: Actually, I bought two cassettes in rapid succession: a collection of Beatles hits and Steve Winwood’s Back in the High Life. The Winwood cassette had that song “The Finer Things,” which my Mum liked. I bought it to make her happy.