Semantic Noise interviews Decatur Fist 4-12-2009 Semantic Noise low fi becomes hi fi, you can hear the room you're in all around you and the negative spaces between the notes become significant compositional elements mood and atmosphere etc etc Decatur Fist ya i'm feeling that dense and intricate layers, pure singer-songwriter simplicity i like that sn contrasted with-- df ya esoteric is key i think i spend a lot of time thinking about hidden meanings in things the songs in this album really reflect the pursuit of just the last 5-7 years of pulling together themes from different works of ancient philosophy sn some of this is from like 2002-2003 df yeah most of it goes back to 2002--i think it's the earliest i spent some time playing with a lot of different musicians, pulling together lots of different sounds but when no one was around i guess i would just pull out my guitar and record on the microphone. so there's all kinds of fubs and weird noises. sn a lot of one takes? df one-takes. you can hear like scotch glasses jingle-jangling in the background. sn so did you initially start making these songs with that idea in mind? kind of letting it go? letting it be lo-fi? letting whatever's in the background happen? was that part of the initial idea of the decatur fist--of the type of songs that you wanted to make? or did that kind of come into itself as the songs came out over time? df yeah i think it just sort of evolved. i sort of had an adversity to lyrics whenever i started writing the album, so there's more instrumental stuff going on. the music was just sort of along the lines of experimenting with sound. i think the themes are just things that i generally obsess about, that i always have, and i probably always will-- sn the lyrics or the sonic ideas or both? df well both. the sonic ideas...there's an infinite array of sounds that one can get and the environment that i'm in is always changing and always producing new sounds that i can capture and just even different rooms that i play in or different people in the room-- you can hear people having conversations in the background of a lot of songs. those people are really in the room. that can't be redone. that can't be duplicated. sn improvisational in a sense, right? i know you've talked about that before. like in "whose dogs are barking" making up the lyrics on the fly. so it's jazz in that sense. jazz is improvisational music and that's what it's all about, right? df well i listen to a lot of hip hop, and there are some people who can just flow in ways that i don't even comprehend, and sometimes i like to try, but my idea of freeform--and the same idea of hiphop--it's coming from within and everybody's got to find their own voice. some people are doing really fast rhymes, and some people are really slowed down and laid back. some people are rapping over old jazz tunes, and some people are throwing in vocoders and stuff like that. we hear a lot of musicians trying to fit molds.... "i'm going to be a rock musician" or "i'm going to do this, and i'm going to be a this-kind of musician." there's something to be said for that. it's not really any different than saying, "i'm a painter." but there's an infinite array of different avenues for sound and for art, and that's what i'm trying to achieve. rolling with it, ya know? sn you got your start in jazz bands, right? that was when you started playing music you started playing jazz... when you started getting serious about really playing some tunes? df truthfully... my mother tells me about this picture she has of me standing on the edge of my bed. i'm probably four or five years old. i'm in my underwear with a cowboy hat on. i have my guitar... i had a guitar then, but i couldn't necessarily play it, but i could hold it right. i had a baseball bat--a louisville slugger actually, i still have it--wedged between the toy box and my bed, and i was having my own little rock concert. i always wanted to be a scientist and a rock star. so i settled on social science and just playing obscure melodies and things like that. sn so that free-form element--the improvisational element--is really present, but also more singer-songwritery type of simplistic songs that are just you. you kind of labored over a lot of those lyrics, right? some of those were written and revised over long periods of time, am i right? df yeah, some of them really were. one of the songs on here--"feel the power see the light"--has got really few lines in it. it's a really simple song, but it's really deeply esoteric. it's a metaphor within itself. i don't want to give too much away about it because that's the whole idea behind esoteric art. it has a meaning on its surface, which everyone is encouraged to grasp. those who have eyes to see will see it. and those who have ears to hear will hear it. and those who don't will appreciate it for maybe just sounding nice. the idea of a metaphor is also having two meanings, so one is not necessarily superior to the other.