John Vanderslice - Analog visions in hi-fi

“Wear your headphones and I’ll whisper you the code”

“Sloppy hi-fi”: care and imperfection, fused into a single, inseparable whole. It's the phrase coined by John Vanderslice to describe his own music: a cross between DIY tinkering and high fidelity that perfectly sums up the nature of an atypical songwriter, devoted equally to expressive spontaneity and to an almost obsessive pursuit of sound.

Raised between Florida, Georgia and Maryland, it was in San Francisco that Vanderslice found his ideal setting. It was there, in the shadow of the Golden Gate, that Vanderslice founded the Tiny Telephone studios in 1997, the perfect culmination of his passion for recording techniques. Within those studio walls, records by the likes of Mountain Goats, Death Cab For Cutie, Okkervil River and Spoon have taken shape. And it's precisely this meticulous attention to sound that sets Vanderslice's music apart from the usual conventions of American indie songwriting.

Between 1994 and 1999, Vanderslice's artistic career took off on its most adventurous footing, as leader of MK Ultra alongside John Tyner on guitar, Dan Carr on bass and Matt Torrey on drums. With three albums to their name, all steeped in a bold strain of alt-rock, and with a following concentrated mainly in the San Francisco Bay Area, the band broke up in the wake of Tyner's departure – just in time to make way for Vanderslice's solo debut, Mass Suicide Occult Figurines, released in 2000 on Seattle's Barsuk Records.

A debut with which Vanderslice managed to make headlines in the States, concocting the story of a legal persecution by Microsoft for having titled one of the album's tracks “Bill Gates Must Die”: a sarcastic, blunt invective hurled at Mr. Windows, blaming him for the protagonist's addiction to online pornography.

The songs on Mass Suicide Occult Figurines sound heavily indebted to 1990s American indie-rock, the Elephant 6 collective chief among them. It's no coincidence that the album's title comes straight from the lyrics of a Neutral Milk Hotel song, “Song Against Sex”.

You can hear it right from the opening “Confusion Boats”, with its hazy melody framed by jagged guitar edges. The atmosphere momentarily unwinds within the folds of “Josie Anderson” and “Gruesome Details”, before flowing into the strings of the instrumental title track. And the saturated electric riffs of “Speed Lab” and “Bill Gates Must Die” confirm the ties to his previous stint in MK Ultra.

Barely a year later, the American songwriter's sophomore effort, Time Travel Is Lonely, is already a reality. But compared to its predecessor, the shift in mood is immediately evident. It's announced by the keyboards and fanfare of “Keep The Dream Alive”, which sketch out, with all the force of an anthem, the first true cornerstone of Vanderslice's catalogue.

Working alongside producers John Croslin and Scott Solter, Vanderslice amplifies the electronic soul of the songs, from the drum-machine accents of “Little Boy Lost” and “Gainesville, Fla” to the instrumental interludes scattered through the tracklist (which even go so far as to beam aboard a UFO none other than Bach's “Well-Tempered Clavier”).

Time Travel Is Lonely also grows more cohesive, both musically and thematically. The album's liner notes give voice to an imagined tale of isolation from the world amid the ice of Antarctica, culminating in a gradual loss of one's grip on reality.

In this solitary concept piece, it's the sense of memory that runs beneath the songs like a watermark. A memory that takes shape now as historical recollection (the image of the tanks in Tiananmen Square cited in “Do You Remember”), now as a family remembrance (the childhood places evoked in “Gainesville, Fla”). It even takes on the guise of technology as a last resort, as the title track suggests: “Wear your headphones and I’ll whisper you the code/ Of a helper application that you can download/ It’s called Remember”. With its solemn, apocryphal gait reminiscent of “Ok Computer”, it's the perfect emblem of Vanderslice's futurist anxieties.

“Can you survive a look inside?”

A basement turned music lab, a stack of ready-to-use TDK cassettes, and a Tascam 424 four-track recorder: this is the backdrop to Life And Death Of An American Foutracker, the album in which John Vanderslice pays tribute, more explicitly than ever, to his visceral passion for analog recording. Starting with the fetishistic ode to the Tascam 424 that is “Me And My 424”, an interlocking play of piano and strings with an obliquely pop appeal, on which the American songwriter is joined by Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie.

He's just one of the album's guests, since John Darnielle of Mountain Goats co-writes a pair of songs with Vanderslice (“Nikki Oh Nikki” and “Cool Purple Mist”), sealing a friendship and artistic partnership destined to endure over the years (so much so that Vanderslice would go on to produce two of Darnielle's albums, the likes of “We Shall All Be Healed” and “The Sunset Tree”).

Life And Death Of An American Foutracker continues along the same lines as Time Travel Is Lonely, without quite managing to match its effectiveness. Underscoring the continuity with the previous album, even the instrumental interludes carry on the numbering sequence begun on Time Travel Is Lonely.

Here too, a unified concept ties the album's chapters together, probing the soul and relationships of a lo-fi craftsman. So what seems like the simple invective of a jilted lover turns, in “Nikki Oh Nikki”, into a kind of reconciliation with oneself and with others, amid vibrating keyboards and interference marked out by a chiming, Pink Floyd-esque rhythm.

The songs unfold through mutant structures, from the sudden horn flourishes of “The Mansion” to the pharmacological digressions of “Amitriptyline”, but they often struggle to find their footing. Vanderslice's temptation, after all, is always the same: falling in love with a sound to the point of neglecting the overall balance.

It's said that “cellar door” is the most beautiful phrase in the English language: a perfect example of phonetic purity, according to J.R.R. Tolkien. In 2004, John Vanderslice chose Cellar Door as the title for his fourth album, blending the literary allusion with a sense of openness toward unknown worlds (as “Donnie Darko” teaches us).

The formula the American songwriter built up over his previous albums reaches its most accomplished balance here, somewhere between the alternative urges of Spoon and a brand of songwriting with a Bowie-esque aftertaste. The songs' skeletons favor an acoustic dimension, but it's a distorted acoustic sound, propped up by keyboards and smudged with electronic grit. “There's something feminine and subtle about an acoustic guitar,” Vanderslice reflects, “even when it's distorted all the way up to the sky.”

Amid piano chords, orchestration and occasional horn flourishes, Vanderslice's metallic-tinged voice passionately declaims his vivid, cinematic imagery, name-checking cult films like David Lynch's “Mulholland Drive” in “Promising Actress” and Darren Aronofsky's “Requiem For A Dream” in “When It Hits My Blood”.

“Up Above The Sea”, with its moog ticking out a Morse code toward the sky, plunges straight into a visionary atmosphere, recounting the musings of a reluctant hunter amid the clangor of martial-paced percussion. The softness of the strings doesn't drain any momentum from “They Won't Let Me Run”, while “White Plains” lets its melody seep in under the skin.

Cellar Door (alongside the remix album MGM Endings) takes the San Francisco songwriter's ambitions to the next level. Vanderslice even claims inspiration from Paul Klee's painting techniques for the "study in distortion" staged over the ragged breath of "Pale Horse". “From the haunts of daily life/ Where is waged the daily strife/ Common wants and common cares/ Cuts the human heart with tears”: the human condition is made of heart and tears, Vanderslice seems to suggest. One cannot settle for illusions.

“Some kind of declaration”

The hardest challenge is always the one you face with your own reflection in the mirror. Especially for someone like John Vanderslice, who has always put the construction of a gallery of stories and characters first. The American songwriter decides to confront it head-on in 2005, with an album destined to become the reference point of his discography: Pixel Revolt.

"What encouraged this change was the fact that everything in my personal life had fallen apart," he says. "It became increasingly clear to me that I needed to dive into writing about what was happening to me." A process more painful than cathartic: "Putting feelings and emotions into concrete form was like watching a butterfly fossilized in amber."

Vanderslice thus decides to call on the help of two of his closest friends and collaborators: sound wizard Scott Solter and word wizard John Darnielle. "Every breath and every note on the record has something to do with Scott and John," he explains. With the Mountain Goats frontman, in particular, a genuine "songwriting workshop" takes shape, as Vanderslice himself calls it: Darnielle combs through every song, offering suggestions and corrections. "He gave me tons of revisions, sometimes even adding lines and whole verses. He gave me a different perspective on writing, because I knew I had to work hard before sending him anything."

On Pixel Revolt, personal anxieties blend with those of an America scarred by September 11. Amid the mellotron phrasing of "Exodus Damage" (its title inspired by a line from his friend David Berman of the Silver Jews), Vanderslice stages a tense dialogue between an anti-government militant and his mysterious handler, in which conspiracy theories swirling around images of suicide bombings dissolve into a fake revolution video game.

The enveloping breath of the soft keyboards dotted with needle-sharp notes in "Trance Manual" is breathtaking, while over a barely sketched beat the synthetic string arrangement feels like a mirage in the heat: Vanderslice needs just a few lines to sketch the encounter between a war-front journalist and an Iraqi prostitute dressed like the "flag of a menacing nation", and it's a masterpiece of grace amid the dust of war.

The mood turns more intimate and subdued than usual, from the spare piano of "Farewell Transmission" to the bareness of "Dead Slate Pacific", passing through the hazy aura of "New Zealand Pines". The cinematic references explored on Cellar Door also resurface, giving rise in "Continuation" to a serial-killer manhunt story inspired by Lars Von Trier's "The Element of Crime".

Confirming how important Pixel Revolt was for Vanderslice, two further versions of the album were offered as free downloads: an acoustic reinterpretation captured on a two-track recorder (Suddenly It All Went Dark) and an analog remix by Scott Solter (Scott Solter Remixes Pixel Revolt In Analog), not to mention the Japanese edition of the record, which adds the outtake "The Kingdom" to the tracklist.

With five albums churned out at the dizzying pace of one a year, in 2006 Barsuk Records decided to sum up Vanderslice's journey through the thirteen tracks of the compilation Five Years, a kind of anomalous greatest-hits-without-hits that serves as the perfect calling card for the San Francisco songwriter. Vanderslice's veneration for Radiohead found an outlet the following year instead, with a striking cover of "Karma Police" included on the compilation "Ok X: A Tribute To Ok Computer", curated by the website Stereogum.

The obsessions of early-millennium America, like a wound that refuses to heal, still burn through Vanderslice's next album, Emerald City, released in 2007. The specter of the Twin Towers once again casts its sinister shadow over the lyrics, but this time the paranoia is even more oppressive, the anguish more livid, the insecurity deeper. Lightning bolts ripping through the sky, clouds darkening the New York skyline, the Tower card as a dark premonition of doom: Emerald City stands as the Californian songwriter's tensest, most nervous record, dominated by guitar reverb and images of apocalyptic claustrophobia.

A direct, stripped-down approach leads Vanderslice to take fewer risks in sonic experimentation than in the past. As a result, Emerald City's most effective moments end up being those where the jagged edges of the acoustic guitars take over, filling the space with their distorted effects, as in the opener "Kookaburra", in "Time To Go" and in the vibrant "White Dove".

There's no shortage of ballads in Vanderslice's most classic style, like "The Parade" and "The Tower", but whenever it tries to push in a different direction, Emerald City prefers to set aside the analog pulses of Pixel Revolt: "Tablespoon Of Codeine" and "The Minaret" shift instead toward indietronic atmospheres punctuated by jazzy piano, somewhere between Tunng and Thom Yorke.

The titular emerald city refers to Baghdad's "Green Zone", the enclave erected by American forces in the heart of the Iraqi capital as the headquarters of the provisional government after the fall of Saddam Hussein: a metaphor for a permanent siege in which America feels hemmed in, and where life seems to remain trapped.

From the protagonist of "Tablespoon Of Codeine", doped up on narcotics to escape the nagging thought that the September 11 attacks were nothing but a hoax, to the American soldier in "The Minaret" who reaches the top of a mosque and freezes, paralyzed by the chance to contemplate both sides of the battlefield, the characters of Emerald City seem unable to escape their own cage.

The vicious cycle of the human condition can only be broken by an impossible eruption of forgiveness, toward oneself and toward others. This seems to be the awareness Vanderslice suggests at the record's high point, when in "White Dove" he describes a man visiting his new next-door neighbor, stopping by for a drink with her on the porch. A snapshot of unmistakably American everyday life, shattered by a simple question: "Do you have kids?". With a grimace of rage, out pours the account of the brutal kidnapping and murder of an eight-year-old girl, dramatically clashing with the symbol of peace evoked by the title. "It's not about mercy, not about tears anymore / White dove, what are you thinking of?". Mercy really does seem like a word unknown to the human vocabulary. And yet it's only that seemingly unacceptable paradox that can defeat the spiral of revenge.

“Time to go”

A new label, new collaborators, a new setting: the seventh album by John Vanderslice, Romanian Names, released in 2009, presents itself as a new beginning and, at the same time, as a kind of summa of the refined style the American songwriter had been honing for years. Leaving behind the rough edges of Emerald City, Vanderslice returns to the richness of Pixel Revolt, crafting what stands as his most overtly pop work to date.

“I wanted to shake things up,” he explains. “I think it's only a good thing to step outside your comfort zone.” After nearly a decade at Barsuk Records, he moves on in search of new stimuli to the Texas-based Dead Oceans, a “sister” label of Jagjaguwar and Secretly Canadian. “I knew I'd make a different record if I changed labels. I'm interested in what happens when you work with different people: it changes the way you write and the way you think about music.”

The hazy, Grandaddy-esque atmosphere of “Tremble And Tear” immediately sets a sunnier mood than ever before. “Fetal Horses,” with its acidic keyboards and dotted piano lines, seems to come straight out of the pages of the less conventional Joseph Arthur. And the breezy farewell rhythm of “C&O Canal” brings to mind a Casiotone For The Painfully Alone in a lighter mood. But if there's a classic on Romanian Names, it's undoubtedly “D.I.A.L.O.,” with its retro-futurist feel and its softly reverberating Flaming Lips echoes.

The focus here is mainly on melodic lines and vocal parts: the songs on Romanian Names weren't written, as usual, within the familiar walls of the Tiny Telephone studios, but in Vanderslice's basement, with just guitar, piano and voice; the layers of keyboards, mellotron and “interferences” came only later, with the usual collaboration of Scott Solter and the decisive influence of a jazz-trained drummer like Matthias Bossi.

“Stone by stone / I left my only home.” Over the fluid levitation of the keyboards on “Too Much Time,” Vanderslice reflects on flight and loneliness, arriving at a bitter conclusion: “Freedom is overrated.” It's the parable of a relationship in which the two partners end up mirroring each other, the underlying theme of Romanian Names; a parable made of contradictions, like the struggle in “Oblivion” between the will to forget and the need to be remembered. Vanderslice's lyrics take on a tone that's less narrative and more evocative than in the past, right up to the diary-like page of “Hard Times,” which closes the album with a lyrical string arrangement: “To find an answer I searched every sentence / And ended deeper still in hard times.”

Between 2009 and 2010, Vanderslice released a pair of EPs: the first, Moon Colony Bloodbath, co-credited with Mountain Goats, brings to completion his ongoing teamwork with John Darnielle, sketching out a claustrophobic sci-fi scenario with a dry, spare touch. The second, Green Grow The Rushes, was offered as a free download and gathers a handful of outtakes from Romanian Names, without adding much to the overall picture of the album.

The desire for change already simmering beneath Romanian Names sharpens in 2011 with Vanderslice's encounter with the Magik*Magik Orchestra, a modular orchestra of young classical musicians led by Minna Choi, which opens the door for the San Francisco songwriter to an artistic dimension he had yet to explore. “The crucial thing for me now is wonder, risk,” Vanderslice states: that decisive instant when life confronts you with a bet you must accept. “I want to find myself forced to ask where the hell I've ended up: those are the moments that teach us something.” What emerges is a free, airy record titled White Wilderness.

Vanderslice's very modus operandi gets rewritten from the ground up: everything starts from a handful of guitar-and-piano sketches, handed over without reservation to Minna Choi and her orchestra. “I just told her I didn't want to hear anything of what she'd make: I wanted her to be 100% free.” A step back that's anything but easy for someone obsessed with sonic detail like him, but one through which his music unexpectedly transforms: “It was a complete revelation: if you compare the demos to the final result, they're total opposites.”

The chamber-music feel of the arrangements, on tracks like “The Piano Lesson,” wanders through flourishes and interweavings reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens, juggling diaphanous trills and droning horns. Yet the album's conciseness manages to keep a measured balance that's never gratuitously pretentious: just listen to the circus-like richness of “Convict Lake,” enlivened by brass interludes with a Fellini-esque flavor, or the warm choral quality of the arrangements on “Alemany Gap.”

Vanderslice's voice becomes more defenseless than ever, set against the impressionistic landscapes of the title track. Between the ringing emphasis of “Overcoat” and the cinematic lyricism of “20k,” what makes “White Wilderness” special isn't just the contribution of the Magik*Magik Orchestra (hardly new to experiences of this kind, as shown by its collaborations with the likes of Dodos and Mike Patton), nor even John Congleton's touch on production duties: the solidity of the songwriting stands out even when plain acoustic bareness takes over, as on “After It Ends.”

“The songs on 'White Wilderness' are like brief autobiographical postcards,” Vanderslice confesses. What they share is a desire to break free from the crust of self-forgetting. “English Vines” manages to give this desire a surreal, emblematic representation, through the nightmare of a struggle with a climbing plant that tries to wrap itself around the heart, infecting it with the epidemic of resignation. “By night our neighbours’ invading vines / Rooted into my dreams from underground / Twined their nooses around our lives”. One has to go all the way to the root if one wants to uproot that void that threatens life every day: “I finally scaled their fence / To kill the source of this malevolence.”

“In the deep dark woods”

Treetops fading toward the summit of the sky. Cliffs plunging headlong into the Ocean. Walking, one step after another; walking in search of one's own face. Until, in the silence, one finds the sound of one's own voice again.

John Vanderslice spends a year venturing deep into the woods of California: a backpack and a tent to face the wilderness in complete solitude. And to set life back in motion after the end of a relationship. Dagger Beach is the diary of this rebirth, one that bears the marks of a return to one's origins.

“In the deep dark woods, alone with my fears/ Under the jackpine the sky was galvanized.” The oblique melody of “Raw Wood” reveals itself with a tremor of unease. “While I was walking, listening to records over and over, I started to become obsessed with music again,” Vanderslice recalls. Listening thus becomes the first stage of the journey.

There are three albums Vanderslice can't stop listening to: “Have One On Me” by Joanna Newsom, “The Natural Bridge” by Silver Jews and “The King Of Limbs” by Radiohead. “The first two reminded me how crucial lyrics can be, how your experience of a record can evolve and shift as you slowly decode a deep, complex piece of writing. “The King Of Limbs” showed me how powerful linear songwriting can be, when subtle changes in form and repeated motifs gradually morph into something completely different”.

“I set up in wildcat camp, just me and the owls and the bats”. In the spirit of freedom found on solitary trails, new songs started to take shape. “I refined the lyrics while walking, working on the songs in my head”. A songwriting process entirely new to Vanderslice, which led him to explore new paths. The outlines of the tracks become less defined, the structure built around rhythmic frameworks that reflect the influence of Radiohead (while the Silver Jews get an explicit tribute with “Song For David Berman”, dedicated to Silver Jews).

Back in San Francisco, it's immediately clear to Vanderslice that the experience he's just lived through needs a freer dimension to come to fruition: the Tiny Telephone brand thus also becomes a record label, ready in 2013 to release Dagger Beach with the backing of a Kickstarter campaign (which also offered backers a full cover of David Bowie's “Diamond Dogs” by David Bowie and the odds-and-ends collection JV Rarities).

After the happy chamber-folk detour of White Wilderness, Vanderslice returns to the synthetic filigree of his past work, joined by Jason Slota on percussion. Keyboards with alien reverbs, elusive rhythms, evanescent moog mirages: from the refractions of “Damage Control” to the nervous coiling of “Gaslight”, the tracks on “Dagger Beach” aim for atmospheres that are “looser, stranger and freer”, to use Vanderslice's own words again. Atmospheres that (just as on his early albums) spill into a pair of floating interludes, joined by the instrumental “Song For The Landlords Of Tiny Telephone”, penned by cellist Shawn Alpay.

The songs' personality, however, ends up feeling less sharply defined, scattering into detours and digressions where details overtake the overall vision. It's no coincidence, then, that the most convincing moments are the enchanted delicacy of the arpeggios on “Song For Dana Lok”, the ragged edges of “How The West Was Won” and the marimba accents of “Sleep It Off”, which hew closer to Vanderslice's typical songwriting.

For Vanderslice, “Dagger Beach” isn't so much a “break-up record” as a “put-me-the-fuck-back-together record”: not an epilogue, but a fresh start. “Raw Wood” announces it right away: “One day the pain will pass on from me to you/ It will then be clear if it’s really true:/ I’ve moved on”.

Of course, the bittersweet aftertaste of the literary-romantic saga of “Harlequin Press” doesn't hide a trace of resentment. But all that's left, on the electronic trails of “North Coast Rep”, is the off-screen gaze of a photograph in which one no longer recognizes oneself. “Dagger Beach” faces the first step toward recovery. The hardest step, even when it remains uncertain.

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