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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Mystery Palace: Bending to the breaks
Wednesday 21 February @ 17:07:20 |
  by STEVE McPHERSON
Any discussion of electronic cum organic Minneapolis trio Mystery Palace should probably start with a primer on circuit bending, since it's the bedrock that the group is built on. Catching the group live can be a little perplexing--the rhythm section of Joey Van Phillips on drums and James Buckley on bass lay down a resolute foundation, but then there's Ryan Olcott, who looks a bit like he's fixing your toaster onstage. Sorry, I meant FoodTeam as Ryan Olcott, as he's listed on their MySpace page.
"FoodTeam was a name that was probably conceived four or five years ago, probably in the midst of Future Wives," says Olcott, who's sitting due north of me in the downtown Pizza Luce. Van Phillips is to my immediate right, Buckley directly across from me. Future Wives was a collaboration between pianoman and madman Mark Mallman and Olcott. "It was a name I was toying with and I started using that alias as that project dissolved a little bit. So I just figured I had this new circuit-bending thing--give it a fresh face, a fresh name."
Circuit bending is to electronic instruments like keyboards and drum machines (and toys like Speak 'n' Spell) what James Joyce is to English literature--it's getting in there and messing with the works at a level that was never intended. At its heart, it's an experimental and improvisatory practice--you basically take apart an electronic device and then short circuit it using implements like alligator clips and screwdrivers. The sonic results of these experiments are monitored through amps or headphones, and circuits can be marked for later use. Circuit bending's Lewis and Clark is a guy named Reed Ghazala, who pioneered the technique in 1966 and has built numerous circuit-bent devices for musicians like Tom Waits, King Crimson and Peter Gabriel. It's still in its infancy, though, since the true potential of many 8-bit and low resolution digital devices has been eclipsed by computer recording technology.
 "It's fun, because it's unmapped territory," says Olcott. "Everyone's very computer- and high technology-minded and the fun of older technology is that it got lost in the shuffle. [The instruments] are disregarded and cheap and they're out there. Luckily they're just malleable as hell--you can break down the walls sonically and create a new instrument. There's a limited supply of them. There's a lot of them now, but they're gonna be gone in a few years."
It might be hard to believe, but once upon a time, nobody really cared about electric guitars like the Les Paul or the Telecaster. These days, there are collectors of these vintage instruments, but it took Mike Bloomfield, the guitarist for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, picking up a Telecaster to make them a hot commodity. That was back in '65, and when he dropped the Tele in favor of a Gibson Les Paul, everyone started buying Les Pauls. By the '80s, guitar manufacturers were looking toward the future with all manner of spiky and iridescent models, but Slash's obsession with vintage Les Pauls led another run on the classic models, and now Gibsons and Fenders from the '50s and '60s can fetch upwards of $40,000. Are we perhaps entering a world in which a Speak 'n' Spell might go for 10 large at Sotheby's?
"Casio CT-370s, 20 years from now, are going to be worth four times as much," Olcott says. "Speak 'n' Spells have appreciated in value by like 500 percent. It's kind of frustrating now, because a lot of the machines I work on are getting more expensive to find. Everyday I go on eBay and they're like $70 or $80. They used to be $20. I want a lot of them, because I've already had a few fry on me. Get as many as I can now." Okay, so a Speak 'n' Spell going for five times its original price is still like $50, and perhaps "primitive digital device-slinger" doesn't have quite the ring that "guitar-slinger" has, but it could happen, and Mystery Palace is as good a place as any for the revolution to begin.
For an album born of an experimental technique, their debut album, Flags Forward, is surprisingly easygoing and coherent. It's obviously littered with electronic textures, but Buckley and Van Phillips contributions inject the music with a good dose of humanity. Given the group's roots in improvisation (the trio initially played together at the Speakeasy on Lyndale Ave., where Buckley had a house gig and would occasionally call on Olcott to sit in when his usual partner, Mike Lewis of Happy Apple, was out of town with his other group), it's not surprising to find that the album's creation involved an extended process of crafting songs from raw material.
"As we were playing together, over time, counterpoint starts to happen, melody can exist," says Olcott. As these improvised pieces began to take shape in their rehearsal space, the method for turning them into actual songs came together. "I just figured I could edit that just right, we could relearn it and there you go. It was just a matter of me spending countless hours with Digital Performer and these raw sessions--just like three hours of material we recorded in the practice space. Just finding different combinations and what part begins a new song and what's a good chorus and what can we drone out on. We didn't know if we were going to be an instrumental group. I didn't really want to sing--I thought I'd sing one in ten songs--but they were encouraging me to do more."
"First I wanted it all instrumental," says Van Phillips, "because I've never been a fan of vocals, but it's so different in this group. It's completely different." He's right: While Olcott sings on almost all the tracks on the album (save for a sunny and relaxed instrumental track, which has only lyric-less vocals, titled, archly, "You're a Whore"), his vocals are not the point of emphasis. They're woven into the texture of the music, which is built around Olcott's circuit-bent electronics. Buckley and Van Phillips are supremely sympathetic backers, and, despite the outward appearance of being an electro-pop album, it has some of the conversational quality of a good jazz record. "He's just going through and improvising with the circuit-bending keyboards," says Buckley of Olcott. "And Joey and I are just blowing over it, improvising over it." The result is a generally chill album, even on more uptempo numbers like "NASCAR Survivor," which has the pace and frenetic rhythmic underpinning of a drum and bass track. At first, it's easy to perceive the record as a straight-forward electro-pop record with a bunch of squonky colors layered on top of it, but as you begin to appreciate the way that it developed from those experiments and through a process of recording, refining and recasting those elements as part of a pop song, the album deepens and expands. The off-kilter bits--both on the electronic end and on the rhythm section's end, as on the slightly off drumbeat of "Two-Way Stranger"--are the heart of the work.
"Sometimes I like to keep flaws and accidents where you jerk the beat around," says Olcott about his editing process. "And when I get these guys tracks to learn, they're kind of pissed off because they're like, 'I can play that way better; I was just learning how to play it.' Sometimes those are the best moments to catch, where they're just figuring out a line and they play this dope line and don't even know it."
Buckley just grins a Cheshire cat grin. "We know it," he says. "We know it." ||
Mystery Palace play two release shows for Flags Forward on Sat., Feb. 24 at the 7th St. Entry. 5 p.m. $6 All Ages. With Carbon Carousel, Shoe Shiners and Jonathan Ackerman. 9 p.m. $6. 21+. With Carbon Carousel, Cepia and Jonathan Ackerman. For more info, visit their official website at mystery-palace.com.
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