David Minnick - The Voice in Power

A few months ago, when a friend sent me the “a cappella” versions of several tracks from “Trout Mask Replica” by Captain Beefheart, a whole world opened up before me: the world of David Minnick, who in photos looks like nothing more than your typical nice guy next door, but who is also, under the moniker The 180 Gs, a tireless investigator into the voice's power to devour and then spit back out some of the most oblique and brilliant records in the history of rock. Faced with such nerve, we simply had to invite David onto these pages, so he could explain to us how things really stand in his magical musical universe.

Hi David, and thanks for being here with us. Before we get down to business, satisfy a curiosity of mine: is The 180 Gs an actual band, or is it just your solo project?

It's a solo project, gathering about three hundred tracks of my voice. That said, I do quite enjoy the mystique of having a “band”, even if it's not exactly a well-kept secret...

What's your musical background? How did you get into music?

When I was five, I set up a room with pots, pans, buckets, pieces of wood and metal and various other objects, and I'd spend hours walking around the room with pencils, playing all these objects. A year later, I started experimenting with piano and guitar, to see what sounds they made without having studied them. When I was eight, my parents gave me a cheap drum kit that I played constantly (usually while listening to rock records). A year after that, I discovered I could make multitrack recordings with a two-cassette deck: I'd record the drums, play them back and play acoustic guitar at the same time, recording onto a second cassette deck, then add piano, organ or vocals in the same way. It all seemed pretty primitive, but it let me record my own songs, and I spent every spare moment doing just that. I still have those recordings.

In 1981 - I was thirteen at the time - I met Josh Silverstein (who I still work with today... he's designed the covers for almost every album I've released). He noticed what I was doing and managed to get hold of a four-track reel-to-reel recorder and other gear. We set up in his uncle's garage and started recording whenever we could, bringing in a couple of other friends from school too. Over the following years we kept recording; the studio then moved into Josh's basement, new equipment was gradually added, and the 4-track was replaced by an 8-track. By 1988 we had recorded at least 15 hours of original music. I was usually the one writing the songs and playing most of the instruments, while he handled the engineering and mixing. After high school, I took seven years of drum and percussion lessons and studied piano for three years. Later, I attended Indiana University's School of Music as a percussion grad student, but halfway through switched to music composition. I then enrolled at Wayne State University, where I earned a master's degree in music composition.

At the time I was playing guitar and keyboards and writing a lot of songs for the Detroit ska band "Gangster Fun". Josh and a couple of other friends of mine were founding members, and they asked me to join when they needed a permanent guitarist. Between 1986 and 2000 we released four albums and played live extensively all over the United States.

In the mid 90s I bought a 4-track cassette recorder and started recording music on my own, without having to go to someone else's house or to a studio. I kept experimenting with different musical forms and ideas. In 2001 I finally got a computer and started learning how to record digitally. This period gave rise to the Oven Mitt Johnson, The Sursiks, The 180 Gs and Zermos projects, as well as the "Reverse Engineering" remixes.

David in Bloomington, Indiana (around 1986)

Before venturing into the labyrinth of “Trout Mask Replica“, you had already redone, again a cappella, two other albums: the Residents' “Commercial Album” and the Cardiacs' “Sing To God”…

The 180 Gs came together when I went to visit my brother Chris in Austin, Texas, in 2000. He had an early DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) on his computer, but no musical instruments. All he had was a cheap microphone. I got the idea to try recording an a cappella version of a Negativland track. It was a completely ridiculous idea, given the nature of Negativland's music, but we tried anyway. I arranged some parts, sang, and my brother handled the recording. It came out better than we expected, so we sent it to Negativland, and over the following two months we came up with the idea of recording a whole album of a cappella versions of Negativland "songs", which they would then release on their own label.

I kept the band in "a cappella" mode, because I was still learning how to record and edit digitally and I wanted to keep the studio setup as simple as possible. The only thing plugged in for the entire duration of the album's recording was a $50 V-Tech microphone. I finished the album in 2002, and it was eventually released in 2008 as a bonus CD with Negativland's video compilation "Our Favorite Things".

The name "The 180 Gs" came to me because it was a reference to a Negativland track called "A Big 10-8 Place". My idea for the band was modeled on 1950s doo-wop groups, even though their musical tastes were different. Negativland came up with the visual image of the 180 Gs for the album cover. Noel Storey crafted the 180 Gs dolls and kindly sent them to me in 2023. Negativland's album is called "180 D'Gs To The Future!", a reference to reversing Negativland's usual process of turning music and mass-media material into their often chaotic-sounding collages. The Gs took these complex soundscapes and, by singing them, turned them back into music. At the time, "180 D'Gs To The Future!" was meant to be the only 180 Gs album, so between 2002 and 2009 I focused on other projects.

As for the Cardiacs, I'd never heard of them before 2009. At the time, I was entering remix contests on a site called Indaba Music. Through Indaba I met a guy (Peter Dahl Collins of Slunq) who sent me a link to the video for the Cardiacs' "R.E.S.", telling me: "Out of everyone I know, you would love this!". I fell in love with this band immediately and got myself a copy of "Sing To God". I was so obsessed with the Cardiacs that I decided to bring back The 180 Gs to try recording an a cappella version of the song "Bell Clinks", just to figure out the inner workings of their music. It took a lot of time and effort to record that cover; in the end, I uploaded it to Soundcloud and shared it with Cardiacs fans.

Even though I felt like I was treading on sacred ground by covering the Cardiacs a cappella, their fans were incredibly supportive. So I decided I had to keep going. After finishing eight or nine covers of tracks from "Sing To God", I received an indirect message from Tim Smith himself, suggesting I tackle the whole double album. Everything was finally ready in 2013, and for a few years I waited for Abc (the Cardiacs' label) to release it. But things didn't go that way, so I decided to put it out on my Bandcamp instead. The Cardiacs' music struck me immediately, and I found myself wishing I'd discovered them back in the early 80s, when I was in high school. Today, though, they're without a doubt one of my very few favorite bands, and "Sing To God" is one of my favorite albums.

I then decided to try the Residents' "Commercial Album". I had grown attached to this album in the early Eighties, when it had just come out. I listened to it every day for months, thrilled that someone had made a record like that. Every song is exactly one minute long and completely unique. It was so different from what I was used to hearing (instrumentation, harmony, structure) that it immediately won me over. The main reason I decided to cover the "Commercial Album" after releasing "Singin' To God" was precisely the one-minute length of the songs and the sparse instrumentation of many of the tracks. Recording each song on "Sing To God" took several months. I was ready for songs I could finish in a couple of days, and the "Commercial Album" fit the bill perfectly! Of course, since the record has 40 songs, it still took me 18 months of recording.

How did you come up with the idea of revisiting "Trout Mask Replica", which, I'll admit, is my all-time favorite rock record?

After Negativland, the Cardiacs and the Residents, "Trout Mask Replica" seemed like the next logical step on the "ladder of impossibility". Even I thought it wasn't possible to make an a cappella version of it when I started working on it. Plus, "Trout Mask Replica" is definitely a better-known record than the others I'd worked on. It's a cultural icon, and an album unlike any other. But what drew me most to this project was the fact that "Trout Mask Replica" sits at the center of many debates around the question: "What is music?". People either love it or hate it. I knew a cover version of this album would provoke the same reaction. Before starting work on "Trout Mask Replica", I also knew that its music isn't random or atonal. I was excited to take it apart and put it back together to uncover some of its secrets.

How did you tackle the difficulty of deconstructing and reconstructing a record whose structure is, to put it mildly, intricate? I know you worked on it for about six years!

When I started working on "Trout Mask Replica Replica", I had no idea how it could even be done. From start to finish, "Trout Mask Replica" has its own musical logic and its own structural conventions. It's completely different from any other album on a cellular level. Many of the songs have no fixed tempo, no clear chord progressions, no bass lines holding up the other instruments, and no rhythmic consistency between the different instruments. I had to adopt a completely new way of thinking. My only option was simply to trace the sounds that were there without worrying about their musical meaning. After finishing a few songs, I began developing methods for handling this kind of material, but every song hid a host of new challenges.

Can you elaborate on this statement of yours: "My only option was simply to trace the sounds that were there without worrying about their musical meaning"?

When I was doing a cappella arrangements of Cardiacs or the Residents, the music was largely built on specific chords placed at specific moments. That means I can change the structure or add layers without losing the "soul" of the song, as long as it follows the chord progression. Also, in this kind of music, the bass lines usually outline the harmony too (however complicated it may be): a two-bar E-sharp chord can be arranged as a single block of notes, or as an interwoven octave chord, or as inversions of the chord sliding up and down in canon… any number of possibilities. You can add other layers, as long as they're made up mainly of notes from an E chord. "Trout Mask Replica", however, doesn't follow these rules. Every note of every instrument is unique, and you can't count on everything being in sync or on the instruments combining into a coherent harmony. The only way to cover the album in a way that's deeply recognizable to fans who know it well is to copy every single note, respecting its exact placement. Even when the notes don't make sense in terms of music theory, they're still audible. Even the things that sound like mistakes are an integral part of the album.

What process did you use to turn every single sonic tile of "Trout Mask Replica" into its vocal doppelgänger? I read that you didn't use Artificial Intelligence…

At the start, I knew two things:

1) For my project to succeed, "Trout Mask Replica" couldn't be paraphrased. I had to recreate exactly what was there, including the intentional and unintentional tempo changes, the "wrong notes", the extra noises, the sections where the instruments or voices aren't in sync with each other, and anything else that was audible. In my view, these "uncontrolled" elements are the soul of the album. If I had consciously started "fixing" things, I would have gone against what I set out to do.

2) I had to carry out this project without using Artificial Intelligence (I was already halfway through the album by the time AI started to spread widely enough for even me to hear about it). I wanted to approach "Trout Mask Replica" with human ears and a human voice, so as to interpret it as accurately as possible.

The method I developed after working on it for about a year is as follows:

1. Beat mapping: I loaded each original track into a Logic Pro X project and manually mapped it as accurately as possible, adding tempo changes wherever needed. This process aligns the project's beats with the events in the original music. The projects for many of these songs can have over a hundred tempo changes for a two-minute song (with tempos like 121.0469!). By the end of this process, my project's metronome matched that of the original song.

2. Recording the MIDI reference tracks: I recorded reference tracks on a MIDI keyboard, copying each of the song's instruments (bass, left-channel guitar, right-channel guitar, drums, and horns, if present). To be able to hear the bass lines clearly enough to transcribe them, I often had to EQ the original track so the low frequencies were strong and the highs were nearly inaudible. Luckily, the guitars on the original album are panned hard left and hard right; this made it possible to untangle the overlapping guitar lines. If the guitars hadn't been separated, I doubt I would have gotten very far with this project. All the instrumental lines had to be transcribed just a few seconds at a time. Usually I had to make a couple of small rhythmic adjustments for each short segment (for each instrument) before moving on to the next few seconds. It was a time-consuming process, but it was worth it.

3. Starting to record vocals for the instrumental tracks: once the reference tracks were as accurate as they could be, I began recording the vocals. While recording the bass and guitar tracks, I only listened to the MIDI reference tracks I had recorded. When recording the lead vocal part, I sang along with the original Captain Beefheart song. Every bass, guitar, and vocal melody was layered from four to ten times. For example, the four-note guitar chords on the right channel at the start of "Ella Guru" aren't sung by four voices, but by thirty-two (eight voices for each note of the chord). As I went along, I made up syllables for the instrumental parts, trying out a few different options before finding the one that sounded most natural and interesting.

Some tracks (particularly the free-form sax sections) were too fast for me to sing, so I muted every other note in the reference track and sang what was left. Then I'd move on to the notes that had been muted in the first pass and sing along with those. Once both had been recorded, the melody usually matched the original pretty closely. The lead vocals were recorded along with the original "Trout Mask Replica" song, so I could get the timing and phrasing right. In some songs I added harmonies to the lead vocals and some other subtle instrumental touches to smooth out transitions or add a bit more depth.

Which tracks on the album were the hardest to revisit?

In their own way, and for different reasons, they were all very challenging. That said, the ones I struggled with the most were "Hair Pie Bake 1", "Neon Meate Dream Of A Octafish" and "When Big Joan Sets Up".

Working only with the voice, you must surely have taken an interest, perhaps even on a philosophical level, in this instrument, which is, when all is said and done, the most powerful of all. What do you have to say about that?

The reason I started recording a cappella covers was more practical than philosophical. I wanted to keep my recording inputs simple (just one microphone), so I could focus on learning digital recording. I recorded music to tape from 1977 to 2001, and the switch to digital recording put me on a very steep learning curve. By limiting myself to recording through a single input, I was able to keep part of the process simple while I slowly learned a new skill. It also gave me the chance to expand what I can do with my voice. I'm a classically trained composer, percussionist, and pianist, but I have no formal vocal training at all.

There are some interesting philosophical implications in what The 180 Gs did, but they weren't necessarily premeditated. While recording the debut album, I was suddenly struck by the fact that I was reversing Negativland's creative process, taking mass-media and music collages and recreating them using only the human voice. All the technological cutting-up of music and speech in Negativland's work was being pieced back together in live vocal performances. It wasn't a concept so much as just something interesting.

Cardiacs' "Sing To God" and The Residents' "Commercial Album" were albums that seemed impossible to reproduce, especially a cappella. The idea of The 180 Gs creating and releasing seemingly impossible albums really appealed to me. That fascination eventually led me to take on "Trout Mask Replica".

Some people who got an early listen to covers from the record have said that "Trout Mask Replica Replica" can work as a "translation" of the original album. What do you think of that interpretation?

For a lot of people, "Trout Mask Replica" is a notoriously difficult album to listen to. On first listen, it sounds jagged and chaotic, and it lacks a lot of the elements many people take for granted in rock music. Even a lot of people who love this album can struggle to sit through the whole thing. I suppose the a cappella version has a softer, less "scattered" sound than the original album. While mixing, I tried to bring out some of the passages that are harder to make out in the original. I discovered some structural aspects of the songs I'd never noticed before, and I highlighted them as best I could. I added harmonies to a lot of the main vocal lines so they'd blend better with the instruments backing them. The effect (hopefully) is that the brilliant musical ideas and innovations of the original album come through more clearly in The 180 Gs' version.

Covering a song (and even more so doing it a cappella!!!) is always difficult, especially when you're dealing with albums as revolutionary and complex as "Trout Mask Replica". In your view, how can the cover version be a useful tool for music lovers?

I like that a cover can give new perspective to a song's meaning. It can make a serious song fun, or a fun song serious. It can let us hear a song we know with new ears, as if we were hearing it again for the first time. In this case, an a cappella version of "Trout Mask Replica" is such an unlikely idea that it ends up being kind of curious in itself.

What was the first song on the album that you redid?

"Frownland". "Trout Mask Replica" and "Commercial Album" were the only two albums The 180 Gs recorded with the intention, set before work even began, of covering the entire record. I knew that if I managed to complete "Trout Mask Replica Replica", it would take several years. I planned it all out and recorded the album working from the outside in. In fact, after "Frownland" (track 1), I moved on to "Veteran's Day Poppy" (track 28, the last one), then "The Dust Blows Forward" (track 2), then "Old Fart At Play" (track 27), until, five years later, the two halves met in the middle with "Pena" (track 15). This was to ensure a more consistent sound across the whole album, as my methods evolved and my voice changed.

Since you immersed yourself so deeply in Captain Beefheart's masterpiece, can you tell us what you think is the quid that makes his music so unique and instantly recognizable?

"Trout Mask Replica", in particular, abandons all the rules of rock music right from the start, while still keeping rock-band instrumentation. It's structured in a way similar to pieces by 20th-century avant-garde composers like John Cage or Morton Feldman. Various melodic and harmonic fragments are played by each instrument a few times before moving on to the next fragment. There seems to be little concern for making the fragments from different instruments line up. What makes "Trout Mask Replica" so unique is that this avant-garde compositional process is carried out with passion and reckless abandon by a rock band with earth-shaking blues influences. Naturally, the lyrics are unique too.

I've always been convinced that, at his best, Beefheart can stand alongside rock's greatest lyricists, starting with Bob Dylan… Take, for example, the lyrics of "Neon Meate Dream Of A Octafish", a dizzying poetic fresco balanced on language itself, meant to show that language and nature are, deep down, the same thing. In your opinion, what makes the lyrics of "Trout Mask Replica" so unique?

My main interest is music, and at first I didn't feel qualified to comment meaningfully on the lyrics. What I find interesting is their unpredictable use of language. As with beat poetry, or certain modern poets in general, the lyrics conjure up surreal images rooted in the era in which they were written. Sometimes they bring to mind dreamlike flashbacks of early childhood, from the late 1960s into the early 1970s. The (possible) purpose of the lyrics makes me think of Dada art and poetry, which I really love. In his 1918 "Dada Manifesto", Tristan Tzara wrote that "Dada was born of a need for independence, of a distrust toward unity", acknowledging "no theory ... [nor] formal laboratories of ideas". That fits perfectly with the essence of "Trout Mask Replica"'s music and lyrics. The lyrics suit this music perfectly.

Lucid tentacles test and sleeved

And joined, and jointed, jade pointed diamond back patterns

Neon meate dream of a octafish

Artifact on rose petals

And flesh petals in pots

Fact and feast, in tubes, tubs, bulbs

In jest, incest, in jest, in just, in feast, incest

And specks, and speckled, speckled

Speckled speculation

Fedlocks waddlin’ feast

Archaic faces frenzy

Ceramic fists, artificial deceased

In cysts, rancid buds burst

Dank drum and dung dust

Meate rose and hairs

Meaty meate rose and hairs

Meaty dream wet meate

Limp damp rows

Peeled and felt fields and belts

Impaled on in daemon

For every track on the record, you're also making videos featuring these little characters (all of them African-American, incidentally) who represent the band into which you've splintered your musical personality. So the project is embracing different media. What else should we expect?

The image of The 180 Gs was invented by Negativland for the cover of “180 D’Gs To The Future!”. It was based on my idea of the 180 Gs as a legitimate doo-wop, gospel, a cappella group with terrible musical taste. The plan is to complete videos for all the songs on “Trout Mask Replica Replica”. Some of them will show the “guys” singing, while others will simply be an image of the album cover or other static images. It helps to have the whole album playlist up on YouTube.

Oltre a The 180 Gs, hai altri progetti musicali?

Ever since the Eighties, I've been part of a few bands, the most important of which is Gangster Fun, a ska band from Detroit. With them, I played guitar for live shows, keyboards and guitar in the studio, and from 1995 to 2000 I also sang. We released four albums and, between 1986 and 2000, we played a ton of shows all across the United States.

My other studio projects include The Sursiks, who make music out of non-musical material. I play most of the instruments and write the music. I have friends who are professional musicians playing strings, woodwinds and brass. Their first album, “I Didn’t Know I Was Singing Vol. 1”, is a collection of songs built from the pitches and rhythms of voicemail messages. Their second album, “Lydia Grace”, uses the offhand musings of a three-year-old girl as the voice around which the music was written. Their third album, “Christmas In March”, draws on various spoken voices taken from TV, movies, self-help recordings, religious recordings and a variety of other sources. “Suave Side Of the Moon”, their fourth album, is a space-age bachelor pad cover of “The Dark Side Of The Moon” by Pink Floyd.

Then there's the Oven Mitt Johnson project, the legendary (fictional) blues guitarist whose guitar gets so “hot” when he plays that he has to wear an oven mitt on his left hand. The album “Hot Guitar” was recorded this way.

The two volumes of “Reverse Engineering”, meanwhile, collect remixes I made for remix contests between 2009 and 2012. The remixes on this collection usually use only the lead vocal from the track being remixed. The music is completely different. For instance, there's a Snoop Dogg song reworked as a sea shanty, a klezmer version of “Shine 4U” by Carmen and Camille, and a version of “Games Without Frontiers” by Peter Gabriel with music built entirely out of found objects (pots and pans, big chunks of broken glass, metal pipes, cardboard tubes…).

Finally, I played with Zermos, a free-improv trio made up of alto sax (Gary Robertson), acoustic bass (Ryan Enderle) and me on piano. We recorded three albums in three hours, in the dark.

David (top, center) in the Gangster Fun days

What do you do for a living, besides music?

I'm married and I have three daughters. I like spending time with them.

I've been a professional musician since 1999, and I'm also the music director of a church and, for the past two years, I've been teaching music at a local university. I give piano lessons and write and record music for production libraries (which supply background music for TV and film). Whenever I get an hour or two of free time, I work on independent music projects like The 180 Gs.

Have you already picked the album you'll be working on next?

The next album will be “Guns” by Cardiacs. Two songs from the album were already finished a few years ago, so I plan to get back to it soon. Other ideas include “Duty Now For The Future” by Devo, “Dark Continent” by Wall Of Voodoo, and “Disco Volante” by Mr Bungle.

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