Derek Almstead Talks Of Montreal, Circulatory System

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Derek Almstead Talks Of Montreal, Circulatory System

Published Tuesday, September 26, 2006 by Jeff | E-mail this post

Sunday night Justin Laird conducted an interview with Derek Almstead (currently on tour with Elf Power) on a variety of different topics, many of them of particular interest for Elephant 6 fans. He's passed along a recording of the almost hour-long interview to Optical Atlas. I've just finished transcribing what I think are the relevant passages, and you can read them below. Almstead talks candidly about his reasons for his and Andy Gonzales' leaving Of Montreal, the process of recording the new Circulatory System record, writing music for M Coast, and even a little about the Major Organ and the Adding Machine movie (portions of which I've omitted in hopes of avoiding angering those involved in the production, who want to keep an air of mystery about the film; I have removed the names of the directors, for example). One thing he mentions in the interview that I didn't transcribe below is that he hopes to begin working with Heather McIntosh on the new Instruments album in November.

This recording was done for a college radio station. A very big thanks go out to the awesome Justin for passing us a copy of the interview!

JL: This is Derek, from every band in Athens ever...Now, you have a recording studio. I know you were recently remastering a bunch of old cassettes with Will Hart.

DA: Yeah, he had already transferred it from cassette I guess a long time ago; he had a CD compiled of all the tracks, and I just kind of went in and did the EQ'ing and level adjusting and compression and stuff, to make it all gel, and I gave them a CD--I finished it a long time ago and handed it to them, and I think it's being filtered through the ranks to make sure that everybody is happy with it, and then it's gonna be released.

JL: ...It was Synthetic Flying Machine and Always Red Society?

DA: Cranberry Lifecycle is the name of the primary group, because that was the name of Jeff and Will's band that they did, that's what they were recording under. And I think there might be some really early Synthetic Flying Machine stuff on it or right as they were about to change they were going to play as Synthetic Flying Machine, I can't remember. He told me a whole bunch of stuff about it but I can't remember...

JL: It does seem like at that point in Elephant 6 nothing was that defined.

DA: Well, I wasn't around for that.

JL: Now you came in with Of Montreal, right?

DA: Right.

JL: You came in with Kevin...

DA: Yeah, exactly. I moved to Athens in '95, and from the suburb of D.C., and had money to spend on moving somewhere, and I had friends who were moving down to Athens, so I moved down to Athens with these friends, and we tried to form a band with my buddy Zach, and it never happened. And eventually I met Kevin at a party, I was playing with--there were these girls in this band from Virginia who were living in Athens briefly in this band called Spackle, and they were kind of like a trio/punk/riotgrrl-ish kind of band, and I was friends with them, and they wanted me to play with them, and then do Minor Threat covers...so we were at this party, and playing this show, and I jumped up and played bass on these two songs, and Kevin was at the party and that's how we met. We were talking afterwards and he was trying to put together a band. And so over the next six months we kind of ran into each other a few times. I got together with him once and played bass, and he joined Elf Power, and so we didn't get together, and then after the Elf Power thing--he was playing his songs in Elf Power--he wanted to break away and do his own thing, and he asked me if I played drums, and I sort of--sort of--played drums, and I said "Hell yeah, I play drums!" [laughs] And so we got together and in the very beginning it was me and Kevin and Bryan Poole who was playing in Elf Power at the time, and he was playing guitar, and there was this guy named Joel Evans who was playing bass originally, and we were all rehearsing as a band. Joel Evans used to play briefly with Great Lakes, and then with Apples in Stereo a long time ago. We had our first show opening with Elf Power at the 40 Watt in like late '96, and a week before the show Joel quit the band, so Bryan moved to bass to fill that gap, because Bryan was playing guitar, so that's how that started. And through those guys, going to the parties, and slowly gelling into it, that's how I met everybody. But I was going to see, even before Kevin and I began playing together, I was going to see Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel. Neutral Milk Hotel wasn't living there yet. They came through and played shows at this place called the Landfill. They'd have house party shows, and they played maybe two shows there, and they were both incredible. So I was a huge fan, I was into it, I was aware of it, and then I met all those guys and got involved in the scene, and it just happened naturally.

JL: I read online that you had left Of Montreal because it became such a production, like the theatrics of it.

DA: Well, no, not necessarily that--it wasn't that specifically. It was more like--that was always an element of the band; it was always an element that I was uncomfortable with.

JL: That it wasn't just straight rock?

DA: Yeah, well I mean it's not that I just want to play straight rock, you know, I really don't enjoy getting up there and putting on an act, I kind of like to play and be into it. And I'm not saying that one way is better than the other, it's just what I'm comfortable with. So it was always this deal where he really wanted to do that and a couple other members were hyped about that stuff, and I wasn't, and Andy wasn't, and we'd always kind of naysay that whenever it would come up. And there was this obvious division. And it even got to the point where when the skits would happen onstage, like me and Andy would be off-stage, and they would be doing it, you know what I mean?

JL: And they did a tour that was just skits.

DA: Oh yeah, totally. That was a whole separate thing.

JL: But did that grow out of...

DA: By the time we did Aldhil we had kind of pounded that attitude into it so much, you know what I mean? We didn't want to do that. So we didn't do it. We did pretty much a straight rock tour and I think at the end of that, that's when Kevin did that tour, and it was an unloading of all that stuff he wanted to do, and that's a side of his creative output that he's really into and he's great at and he wants to do. But it just wasn't for me. And it kind of got to this point where I thought, hey, this is silly. Why have this artistic division and it's not even my band? I'm in the band, you know, but it's not my songs, my vision, why fight somebody else's vision? And that was a big thing. And, obviously, look how it worked for them. It's great. What they do now, it's awesome and it's full-on, it's way more full-on, and there's nobody naysaying it; it's more of a pure deal now. Which is great.

JL: What do you think of the new album, Hissing Fauna?

DA: I haven't heard it...I was under the impression that he's really exploring the Princey side of himself. Me and Kevin have always talked and loved Prince, even in the early days. I was a huge Prince fan when I was younger and into my teenage years. I think that's really cool. I'm excited to hear it.

JL: Now that you're writing songs--have you been writing songs since you got into music--

DA: Yes.

JL: M Coast, is that your first...?

DA: Well, when I was younger I'd write songs with lyrics but then I got in this big phase where I hated writing lyrics and I was mostly just writing instrumental music all the time. But I didn't want to be an instrumental musician. I like it, and I want to have a side of it that's that, but I was like, in theory I'd like to write some lyrics. So for the longest time I just never got around to it. I was doing other stuff, I didn't really put the energy into it.

JL: Well, you're in 382 different bands.

DA: Well. Not that many. I try to keep a healthy six bands at all times. Anything more than six is too much.

JL: Bryan Poole said you want to have three bands. You say six.

DA: Well, Bryan obviously only has the energy for three bands. [laughs] I'm just kidding. ... Well, I've got tons of tons of bits and pieces and things that are sort of songs without lyrics or with lyrics that I just built up for years and years and years. I just went through and sifted them out, picked the ones that I was most excited about, and started forcing myself to write lyrics to them. And that's what happened. That's how they got finished. [laughs]

JL: Now, do you have your own recording studio?

DA: I do.

JL: How many recording studios does that make in Athens?

DA: Oh man, I don't know. My studio is an advanced bedroom studio. I have a lot of microphones, stuff like that, but I don't have--I don't run a studio for the public, you know what I mean? I flirted with that idea, but I decided that it wasn't going to work for me...I basically stay busy all year round working on different bands that I'm in, and occasionally I'll work with an outside person, or a person I don't play with. I've been working on this record for the past year with this guy Mikey Dwyer, he writes these really awesome loose rock tunes, and he's been recording it in his house on his 8-track and then he moves it over to my house and I mix it on my computer and archive it so he can have separate tracks...But mostly I just work on the bands that I'm in. Because when I first started doing it I realized I was going to have strangers coming into my house. And I have a wife, and there's going to be people calling me that I've never met before, coming into the house. It just seemed like it wasn't really for me. If I had a separate place maybe I'd do that, but also there's the whole thing of getting burnout on stuff that you really don't care about...

JL: I know you've been working on the Circulatory System album. How's that been coming along?

DA: We have something like 34-35 mixes of tunes, probably a little over 75 minutes, 78 minutes of music, and to varying degrees of perfection, basically. A lot of it is really great and done. Some of it has some holes in it that we need to go over. And it also needs one more pass-through, aesthetic mix decision: are these drums crispy enough, things like that. I think it would take another good week-long push to finish it.

JL: So you think definitely by spring?

DA: Yeah, I hate to say definitely at this point. The history of predictions about this record. [laughs]

JL: Any Elephant 6 record, I suppose.

DA: Well, some bands are better at turning things out on a schedule and going with it.

JL: The thing about Will, though; I can just imagine him waking up one day and hearing a car drive by, and thinking everything on the record has to be changed.

DA: That is kind of the deal. That's probably a very good summation of the way it is. Which yields frustration, but also yields some cool things. That's the thing about Circulatory System, and the last record, and his Olivia stuff and everything that has always appealed to me as a fan is the incredible amount of different lenses [through which] the music is being looked at by the band. Do you know what I mean? It has all these different focuses and layers and things like that, and within songs, and changes and movements, and I think it is because of that process of saying "Okay, no, the whole thing's wrong, we've got to come at it at this totally different direction" or whatever. That's a frustrating way to work, and could ruin a lot of recordings, but it doesn't seem to do it for us.

JL: Is there going to be an Inside Views released with this?

DA: I would imagine. I joined Circulatory System in 2002, and when I joined the band Will was like "Okay, we gotta start working on this new record," and he wanted me to help getting it going. He's like, "I've got all these pieces and songs and things and I need help sifting through it. Can I give you some CDs to listen to?" I go over to his house one day and he hands me one half of a manila envelope that he's painted and collaged--it's a manila envelope cut in half, and there's collages and paintings and little messages and thoughts, production ideas, all over this whole thing, and inside it there's 20 CD-Rs. Each CD-R with art, collages, full of music on every single disc. I mean, there were a few things with like one song on a CD. And I'm just blown away, there's so much stuff to listen to. I'm like, "Uh, I can't--you want me to sift through this and pick out the best of this?" That's a hard process. And a week later he's like, "Oh, here's 15 more discs." So I have a stack of Inside Views. Inside Views is not the problem. [laughs]

JL: What can you tell us about Major Organ and the Adding Machine [the movie]?

DA: Well, man, I think it's going to be pretty awesome...[portions omitted to preserve the identity of the creators]...I've done a couple scenes; I think it's going to be a silent movie with music, the Major Organ record as the soundtrack. I've shot a few scenes and the ones that I've been in are the ones with tons of people in the scene, I don't think they're all going to be like that. They're doing tons of stuff with green screening. The last time I talked with [the co-director] about it, he was at the stage where he was doing the green screen stuff, and sometimes they'd miss something, so they have to go through and closely edit that stuff. So that's a process. Most of the people who are around Athens are in it. I don't know if many of the Of Montreal people are in any of it; I don't think they were around for any of it.

JL: Not even B.P.?

DA: Maybe B.P. is, but I didn't see him. David Barnes is in it. I did a couple scenes with him. Andrew from Elf Power is definitely in it, he's got a bigger role. And there's also some people who aren't involved in the E6 music stuff who are in it too, to fill certain roles. I might not even supposed to be saying this, for all I know it's going to be the same deal, where it's totally and mysteriously created!