Robert Poss - When Distortion Is Truth

Masterful auteur of distortion, disciple of the electric guitar minimalists, influential composer: in this interview, we retrace the career of guru Robert Poss, from his avant-garde beginnings, through the pivotal experience with his Band Of Susans, up to the choreographic research of the new "Settings".

Hi Robert, first of all thanks for talking to our webzine. Generally speaking, do you follow rock criticism, or do you enjoy it?

I don't always, or even all that often, agree with rock critics, but I think they're important in spreading the word about new music - the tough, original stuff, the lesser-known, obscure, or underrated bands. The internet has made everything easier even without the need for music scribes, but there's still a place for them. I come from the era of homemade music fanzines distributed to a handful of people, but I'm also old enough to remember when they were carved onto stone tablets with a hammer and chisel (well, not quite that old...).

Your beginnings. Who were, or who do you consider, your true mentors? What do you think they passed on to you more than anything else?

I grew up in the Sixties, exposed to the thrilling convergence of every kind of unprecedented, innovative, revolutionary musical, subcultural, and technological form. I had a very early (childhood) infatuation with the Beatles, the Kinks, Motown, the Rolling Stones (the pre-1974 ones) and early psychedelia, and I developed a solid interest in the many paths of blues music, and later on a more "serious" exploration of musical forms like electronic music, experimental music in general, minimalism. Jazz and classical never really grabbed me. I loved much of the furious sound of '77 punk - the Clash and the Sex Pistols, but also things like the Undertones, the Real Kids and the Jam. Television/Tom Verlaine, Iggy, Bowie, and the Fall were influential too. And I can say that 90% of the music that shaped me I heard on vinyl. I come from the era of the long-playing record.

So, would you describe yourself as a disciple of electric guitar minimalism? How do you see yourself in relation to, say, other forerunners of noise-rock like Thurston Moore, Ranaldo and Sonic Youth?

Age-wise, I'm more or less a contemporary of Thurston and Lee. And Band Of Susans, of course, was on the same British label as Sonic Youth, Big Black, Rapeman, Butthole Surfers, and Dinosaur Jr. But I wasn't influenced by any of those artists, nor by Wire (Bruce Gilbert would later become a Poss collaborator, ed.), whom I discovered late - only around 1987. I was influenced by my apprenticeship with Rhys Chatham in the early '80s, and in general by the work of figures like Alvin Lucier, LaMonte Young, Nicolas Collins, and, alongside Susan Stenger (his partner in Band Of Susans, ed.), I was exposed to mid-twentieth-century avant-garde music in general. As a guitarist, I was a disciple of Keith Richards; I started using his open five-string tuning on material back in 1972. I loved the technique of Johnny Thunders, Albert King, Mike Bloomfield, Jeff Beck, Roy Buchanan, Tom Verlaine, Mick Ronson - all things I got into in the '70s. So I carved out my own parallel path, one that wasn't influenced, for instance, by Sonic Youth and Glenn Branca, both artists and people I admire. But I think that, at least stylistically, I can be placed within the tradition of noise-rock pioneers. I've always been an intuitive minimalist, in the sense that I subscribe to the artistic philosophy of "less is more" applied to music and the visual arts. I'm not impressed by a trillion notes or assemblages of a trillion ideas.

Listening to "Sometimes" and "Inverse Guitar", your first collaborative tapes (with Ron Spitzer and Nicolas Collins, ed.), you can already sense your drive to create a kind of order out of chaos, to draw some form of melodicism out of noise. What do melody and noise mean to you? Are they opposite terms?

Melody has never fully interested me. I'm rather obsessed with texture and the architecture of sound. With repetition, level, space, the density of distortion. I love the interactions between timbres and lines that generate ghost motifs, subliminal melodies and sounds. I like mysterious, buried motifs, sounds that fight against each other to be heard, in opposition to the standardization of "drums-and-vocals-with-everything-else-subordinate-to-them" that characterizes much of rock music, even noise-rock itself. "The Word And The Flesh" sounds like the listener's head has been mashed straight into the amplifier, so to speak. My Bloody Valentine never did anything like that...

Secondly, I do pay attention to lyric writing anyway - an aspect of my work that's often overlooked. And I certainly admire other people's melodic skill - like Ray Davies of the Kinks and David Bowie. But I also love the way Steve Albini or Andy Gill or Bruce Gilbert can make a single staccato guitar line sonically magnetic.

Band Of Susans and its line-up. A maybe obvious question: did you choose the name after noticing that the band featured three musicians all named Susan? Or was it the other way round?

The band was founded by me, out of my idea to create something new and different to improvise around, and to reinterpret in some new version part of the material from the "Sometimes" cassette. That involved using digital delays to sculpt a drone, a riff and the rhythm guitar parts. I didn't feel the need to have seasoned, perfectionist or highly skilled musicians. So I asked some friends of mine to join in. Three of them, as it happened, were named Susan, so the temporary name That Band Of Susans became permanent (from the point of view of my career, though, it was a big mistake: a name like that didn't sound as serious and profound as the music we made, because unfortunately it shifted a lot of attention onto the "concept" of the three women named Susan — a "concept" that didn't actually exist — instead of onto the actual musical goals, but oh well...).

Susan Stenger was a reliable musician with a classical background, with a wealth of experience performing everything from John Cage onward — but on flute, not bass. When she joined the band, she had never played bass, just as Susan Lyall had never played guitar. There was a lot of teaching to be done in the very first incarnation of the band, but that helped keep things genuine and "minimalist".

Did you want, so to speak, to broaden and extend your research with this line-up?

Yes, Band Of Susans was an attempt to make music using exclusively the elements I love. I had no expectation beyond creative fulfilment.

So did you want to become the Glenn Branca of the situation?

I'm the Jodie Foster of my own world. Part thirteen-year-old hustler, part virtuoso.

What tasks, what roles did you demand of the band members on the splendid debut EP, "Blessing And Curse"?

I'm not sure what you mean by "demand"... but in the first incarnation of the group the music had a fairly precise arrangement, with the musicians playing specific parts that I had originally composed. The parts were learned that way and then refined. So, at first, I was the conductor and the band was my orchestra.

In "Hope Against Hope", the true debut, you can hear, piled up within airy, ethereal, magmatic and disorienting distortions, genre citations (rockabilly, soul-rock) that you adapt each time. It almost seems like a metaphor for supreme creation. Do you consider it a natural evolution of your beginnings (stronger distortion, more clearly recognizable citations)?

"Airy, ethereal, magmatic and disorienting distortions, genre citations (rockabilly, soul-rock) that you adapt each time" describes the thing almost perfectly. I think I unconsciously recontextualized some of my rock and blues roots, which means I incorporated the best of everything I've ever absorbed and loved in music.

"Love Agenda". A record that brings to completion the contrast heard so far, as if there were an even greater amount of chaos. If unintentional chaos is often part of masterpieces, do you think yours is a deliberate (and therefore conscious) use of chaos?

"Love Agenda" continues the themes and the approach of "Hope Against Hope", only with more power and intensity, and with a greater contribution from Susan Stenger, who here began to take on a co-leader role in the band. Although the music that makes it up was written, there are elements of near-randomness — the way something comes back around in the mix, the way certain overtones reinforce each other, the way things clash and combine to form something bigger than the sum of its parts, the way a single solo line spontaneously catches fire. I compare it a bit to atomic reactions.

I should add that, besides Susan Stenger, we had highly skilled musicians at our disposal who worked on all our subsequent albums. Karen Haglof and Page Hamilton (pre-Helmet) played on "Love Agenda", and — starting with "The Word And The Flesh" — Anne Husick and Mark Lonergan appear on guitars. Anne and Mark played on every album from "Flesh" onward. Ron Spitzer (already a collaborator on "Sometimes", ed.) was there from the very beginning, ever since I asked him to double the drum machine parts with real drums, which I set up in 1986 for "Blessing And Curse". There were also a few substitutes for live sets, when the official members couldn't make it — Libby Flynt, Jay Braun, Kelly Burns, Joey Kaye...

On subsequent Band Of Susans records you delved deeper into the expressive and semantic possibilities of distortion. On "The Word And The Flesh", in particular, there's "Tilt", a track that's truly overwhelming in the volume and dynamics it reaches. Can you tell us something about how it came about?

"Tilt" was originally included on a four-track demo tape of mine, to which I added Susan Stenger's vocals (she also adapted the lyrics, which I'd written). I recorded the guitar feedback intro - if I remember correctly - inside Nicolas Collins's loft. I used two distorted electric basses and a rather crude drum machine. It's one of my favorite tracks of mine.

On "Veil" and "Here Comes Success", your last two albums, you perhaps took things to their most extreme conclusions. All sorts of contamination can be heard, to the point where distortion seems to be trying to camouflage - by distorting them - the typical hallmarks of rock music. Could we consider this a return to the avant-garde?

In Band Of Susans we tried never to make the same album twice. I think both "Veil" and "Here Comes Success" show how the Poss-Stenger partnership had matured - we felt we could push a little further into rock music ("Pearls Of Wisdom", for instance) and into a somewhat more serious form of instrumental music (for example "In The Eye Of The Beholder"), while still continuing to work out new cross-genre hybrids. I think Susan and I were mostly interested in stretching the band's vocabulary just that little bit further. The curious thing is that our interest in composers like Phill Niblock, Alvin Lucier, John Cage and Christian Wolff was frowned upon by our peers in the late '80s; it would only become fashionable years later.

By that point Band Of Susans had become legendary. And so had you, retiring temporarily from the scene. You became a guru, a kind of rock music sage. What separates the band's final record from the twin albums "Distortion Is Truth" and "Crossing Casco Bay"?

I've never actually been called a guru or a rock music sage, but I'm happy to accept those titles. I needed to rethink my everyday habits. After Band Of Susans broke up in '95, I got involved in a few collaborations with Susan Stenger and with Bruce Gilbert of Wire, then I worked with Phil Niblock and played on and off with Rhys Chatham. I also worked with David Dramm and Ben Neill; I produced and co-produced a few records for other artists - Tone, Seth Josel, the Negatones, Skulpey, Combine, etc.

I took the opportunity to explore both a more improvisation-based approach for solo guitar, and a move back toward analog synthesizer-oriented electronics, something I'd briefly explored back in college in the late '70s. I definitely missed having a band to back my music, but at the same time I didn't miss the endless responsibilities, the conflicts, all the logistical issues, and the interpersonal dynamics that come with having a band, whether live or in the studio.

I contributed to a few TV commercials. I worked with visual artist Margret Wibmer. I then put together a few performances for guitar and electronics, some of which later found their way onto "Distortion Is Truth". The liner notes for that album offer something of a musical autobiography of mine, and it's no coincidence that I consider it - together with "Crossing Casco Bay" - a kind of summa of my musical output between 1995 and 2001, a body of work that's often even less structured than anything I ever did with Band Of Susans.

"Distortion Is Truth", in particular, strikes me as the more truthful of the two, starting with the title. Is distortion - however contaminated by electronics, stylistic jolts, and a certain return to more ambient minimalism - really truth?

I wrote an article for the Leonardo Music Journal called "Distortion Is Truth", about the use of distortion in popular music in relation to what I've witnessed firsthand. It's a phrase that came to me on the spot while chatting with Live Skull drummer James Lo, during one of my rides on the F train (New York's rapid transit subway, ed.). We talked about our respective working methods. From my point of view, the purest sounds are the least interesting ones, given that so much recorded music relies solely on what lies between the black and white keys of a piano. An irregular waveform appeals to me far more than a sine wave, just as a cello or a bassoon strikes me as more interesting - say - than a flute (forgive me, Susan!). It's all a matter of overtone interaction and timbral density.

Another sizeable stretch of time separates these two albums from your "rentrée", "Settings", again for Trace Elements. Even before getting into the specifics of the individual tracks, I noticed a different artistic persona, one more engaged with composition proper.

Well... life, work, finances, family - it all gets in the way as you get older. I was sorry about the long gap between my first two solo records and "Settings", especially since I'd been planning to release a solo-guitar work very much in the Band Of Susans style, plus another more refined electronic piece, just to eventually give those two albums some kind of follow-up. On the plus side, I started working with Sally Gross, through my collaboration with Phil Niblock, and then also with Alexandra Beller and Gerald Casel, three truly distinctive and talented choreographers, and so I ended up creating music for their dance pieces. And I finally gave in to using MIDI, samplers and computers. Coming from my background as an electric-guitar purist, and with my original work rooted in analog tape, it wasn't easy for me to make the transition to learning music software.

The record, then, brings together pieces you composed for dance performances. There are industrial ballets like "Inverness", labyrinths of electronic distortion like "Border Crossing March", and even almost "landscape-like" versions of your feedback-rock. What do you want to convey to the listener who never saw the pieces they were written for?

Music written for dance is, by definition, meant to be able to stand on its own, and I think mine does too. I think I'm mainly interested in evoking atmospheres and feelings, even if that can come across as ambiguous. In the era before music videos existed, each of us built our own visual fantasies, our own stories, based on whatever a song might more or less mean, so the music became something internal. That's something I love. It's satisfying to see how dancers approach and react to my music. The choreographers I've worked with have a genuinely strong artistic vision, and I feel my mission is precisely to support that vision.

"Settings" includes a track called "Tourniquet Revisited" (a sweeping meditation of synthetic strings in waltz time that keep circling back on themselves, while gradually developing into something more ambient). What's the connection to the "Tourniquet" from "Love Agenda", twenty-two years earlier?

"Tourniquet Revisited" is essentially an extended orchestration of the track "Tourniquet", an orchestration I originally conceived for Alexandra Beller. It was my first attempt at orchestrating something. I used the bass line and chord progression of the original "Tourniquet" as a starting point.

To round off the vision of the album, I also noticed a more pronounced play on timbre, which speaks to the deep elasticity of your art. Is timbre your favorite dimension to work in?

Timbre and juxtaposition.

How do you plan to carry this on? Should we expect another period of isolation leading to new stylistic disorientations?

I'm planning to do something else in about a year's time. And I hope (“and I hope” in the interview, which Robert later had fun glossing with “against hope”, recalling the title of one of his most successful works with Susan Stenger, ed.) to be able to start a new collaborative project (both in the studio and in a live performance context) with Susan Stenger, who currently lives between London and the west coast of Ireland. I also hope to play more with Kato Hideki.

What are your current musical or extra-musical activities?

I've built up a practice in sound engineering – mostly location sound work – for television. I'm basically the guy with the microphone on the end of a long pole. I work mostly for European networks. Living in New York is expensive, so I take on as much work as I can… And that, I'm sorry to say, steals time away from music. I worked as sound engineer for Suicide last year, and that was really something! I spend a lot of time at my computer. I follow politics the way most people follow sports. And even though there are millions of things to do, see and hear in New York, I don't go out much.

The obligatory question: how do you see the current rock scene, avant-garde or otherwise? Do you think there are artists directly or indirectly influenced by your sound?

One thing I notice now (at least with regard to the small corner of musical subculture I work in) is that the scene is far more eclectic and open-minded than it was in the 80s and 90s. Many women have thrown themselves into the fray. More people are willing to admit they come from small, obscure corners of subculture, without chasing the spotlight, cartoon-style idol-worship, or stereotypical rock/pop personas. Audiences are more willing to accept challenges coming from the unusual. Intellectual depth is no longer for losers. Minimalism is more accepted, noise more appreciated. Bands like Pan Sonic have a solid following. More young people know about the likes of Phill Niblock, Rhys Chatham, LaMonte Young, David Tudor, and Alvin Lucier, or have at least heard of them. Labels like Table Of The Elements and Blast First Petite cover a lot of ground and bridge many gaps. In New York City, places like Roulette, Issue Project Room, Experimental Intermedia and Le Poisson Rouge (venues or performance spaces, cultural or musical, ed.) all boast an innovative listening program. There's a big experimental scene in Brooklyn. Nicolas Collins has encouraged a whole new generation of instrument-hacking tinkerers.

Sonic Youth are still around, and a lot of people are discovering Band Of Susans for the first time. Susan and I constantly get stories (at shows or online) about how young musicians were influenced by the show we played in Iowa City in the late 80s, or after seeing us in Hamburg, Germany, or at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, and how it led them to form a band. It's always great to hear things like that.

Thanks for your time, Robert, hope to talk again soon!

Thank you. Right now I'm focused on rehearsals for a performance by Alexandra Beller in July, at the Institute Of Contemporary Art in Boston.

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