If you're anything like me, maybe you were a big fan of Santa Cruz psych legends Comets On Fire. If you're like me but not too much like me, maybe you some times listened to Comets on Fire and just wished you could move your ass to their music, instead of staring wide-eyed with wonder into the great beyond. Well, boy do I have the band for you.
Swanifant also hails from Santa Cruz, but they now call Oakland home. Swanifant also bring the unbridled, completely cracked psych rock, but they add a groove to it that almost recalls R&B. It's music for your head and your hips. Imagine if In A Priest-Driven Ambulance-era Flaming Lips were playing songs written for them by MGMT at a house party, and you'll get the idea. I'm not one for the booty-shaking, typically, but I definitely dig Swanifant's sound.
Of course, to really get the idea, you should just check them out. You can do that via their Moving Still EP, which is available for download at that link. Or you can come see them live at Cafe Du Nord this Sunday, October 23rd, along with two bands who will actually be driving up from Santa Cruz: Swanifant "life-buddies" Mammatus and "woozy psych troubadours" San Francisco Water Cooler.
Swanifant member Danny Echevarria submitted to the following interrogation so you readers of Wiretap could make a more informed decision about which route you want to go with the Swanifant check-outs.
WTM: How long has Swanifant been around? How'd y'all get together?
Swanifant has technically been around since 2005, when it began as a recording project that our singer, Dylan, did in his garage that summer. Over the next year, Swanifant grew into a semi-solid live lineup that included five people: Dylan (vocals and guitar), Ryan (drums), Jon G (synths/noise), Jon H (guitar loops), and Danny (that's me. At the time I played mostly violin and sometimes guitar). We were all living in Santa Cruz and in school at UCSC, and we had all been in different bands together before (and for a while after) forming Swanifant.
We were a pretty different band then, and the recordings were always pretty different from what we ended up sounding like live. We'd do an acoustic show of country songs one night and totally free-form noise a week later. The recordings were mostly performed and engineered by Dylan, and the instrumentation tended to vary pretty widely from what we'd use live. I think it was really confusing for people. Since moving to the bay area, the band has morphed into a mostly-three-and-sometimes-
four-piece (Dylan, Danny, JaMile on synths and drumbots, and sometimes Ryan), and we've focused our sound on this kind of psych rock/dance music hybrid.
WTM: What were the influences — musical or not — that Swanifant coalesced around?
The driving concept behind the band has always been the synthesis of technology and nature, organic sounds and electronic ones. That split has, at other points in our history as a band, been evident maybe as a conflict between competing tangles of sound. I think it's probably more harmonious now than it has ever been in our time together.
As far as musical influences go, this incarnation of the band has drawn pretty heavily from German bands from the 1970's, Krautrock stuff like Can and Neu and Kraftwerk and la Dusseldorff, but there's an element of looseness in our music that doesn't quite fit with the Krautrock thing. We all like Neil Young a lot, so maybe that's why. Hearing his album,
Trans, I think was a big revelation for us, because he totally did what we're going for as kind of a one-off thing. Like, he was just having fun playing with vocoders and synths but doing his usual rambling guitar jam thing and writing songs that are basically still country songs. So maybe that's the best blueprint for our sound. The Flaming Lips' records from the early 90s are definitely a big influence on, in particular, the sort of guitar sounds we use. Prince is probably our biggest influence as far as how we want the drums to sound.
WTM: Where are y'all recording/did y'all record your EP?
The demo EP
Moving Still was recorded by us at Dylan's house and our practice space with a jumble of digital and analog gear. We're all constantly listening to recordings for their production values and have a lot of fun working on getting the right sound together.
We've recently finished tracking for our next set of recordings, and are at different stages in the mixing process of two of the songs from that: "Bricklayer" and "Secret." Those songs were recorded a few different places. Most of the tracking took place in our studio. We recorded the drum machine, synths, and guitars directly into Ableton Live at our practice space in Oakland. We took those tracks to Expression, where our friend Henry Larsen is a student, and recorded vocals, acoustic drums and a little piano. We ran the guitar tracks back into amplifiers, which we miked and recorded. The whole idea behind recording in stages like this is that it gives us the most control over the sound possible; we had a day to spend just on the playing, on getting the notes right, and an entirely separate day to make it sound good coming out of an amplifier. It was kind of liberating, but also kind of a pain in the ass. We're nearly finished with a mix of "Bricklayer;" we took it to our friend Justin Labrecque in Half Moon Bay for mixing. We'll be working with him on "Secret," too.
WTM: What was "the sound" you were trying to capture? Were you successful? Any surprises with how it came out?
The overall sound we were after is propulsive and tight, with soupy elements that weave in and out of each other's way. We're aiming to walk that fine line between something that maintains a distinct analog feel with ample grit and something that sounds like a polished finished product. We definitely wanted huge drums. We ended up recording the drum kit as separate pieces in different rooms, so that they'd end up accentuating the base layer of drum machine beats. I was particularly interested in having the guitars sound spatially dynamic, meaning that I wanted the guitars not to sound like a single, continuous performance, but like separate instruments that enter and exit and weave together, each with its own unique tonal quality. The idea with tracking was, I think, that we'd just go totally wild and record everything over and over again, using different amps, in different rooms, different mics, etc., and then start whittling it down in the mixing process. We ended up having to be pretty efficient at Expression due to time constraints, so we didn't get to do everything we wanted to, but the whole process felt kind of indulgent anyway. It was awesome.
WTM: Tell us about the Du Nord show. Who you playing with?
We're playing at Cafe Du Nord on Oct 23, with Mammatus and San Francisco Water Cooler. All three bands either have lived or currently live in Santa Cruz (or thereabouts), so it will be sort of a Santa Cruz brodown (don't worry, it'll be a hoot even if yr not from SC). Apart from Santa Cruz, the throughline of the night is wailing guitar psychedelia.
Mammatus is one of our favorite bands to play with or see live. They play a sort of magical, stoney, astroprogmetal. We've been on bills with them a handful of times, and their drummer Aaron engineered and mixed a couple albums for us a few years ago and played saw with our acoustic lineup a couple times. Its always fun to play with them. San Francisco Water Cooler put out an album,
II, last year that was maybe my favorite records of 2010. The songwriting is really elusive and unusual; foggy, woozy psyche, highly recommended.
WTM: What's next for Swanifant? Release part? Tour?
Swanifant is going to keep working on recordings a song or two at a time. We're planning on releasing them as singles, ultimately culminating in a full length. We're hoping to go to SXSW next year, so if all goes according to plan there should be an accompanying tour, too.
WTM: Anything else you think we should know?
The Du Nord show is probably going to be our only show until next year, or at the earliest sometime in December. Mammatus doesn't play too often in general, and in particular not outside of Santa Cruz, and SF Water Cooler does shows on and off. This might be your only chance to see any of these bands for a while, so come check it out!
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