Leisure Birds own Jake Luck also provided us the following expository preface & behind the scenes peak with the following words:
Last November, I got an email from Black Label Music, a music house in Minneapolis, MN, with the header “Can you make this?” I opened the email and there was a link to this video:
The idea of a music licensing company contacting us to see if we can make music that sounds like catalog music from the 70s was mind boggling. Library Music had certainly been an influence for some time. But when a music library commissions you to make an album of vintage Library Music, it’s an excuse to fully embrace a genre without the fear of feeling contrived or detached from reality. Not that you need to be grounded in reality to make music. Simulation of worlds that never actually existed seems to be a running theme throughout all of our projects, Leisure Birds or otherwise. Last year, Cole and Bennet (amongst others) released an album under the name Night Court (Not Not Fun). As Night Court co-founder Chris Hontos put it, life imitates fiction less than fiction imitates life. Exactly. But with Zoom Lens, the line between fiction and life is blurred in multiple ways. Black Label was looking for an album to add to their library that embodied the spirit of late 70s and early 80s library music. While the term “music library” isn’t really en vogue any more, that’s essentially what Black Label Music is. Music houses now tend to favor the term catalog, but it’s still the same concept: a voluminous collection of albums that are solely meant for commercial purposes. It’s music that is just generic enough to attract the largest amount of licensees. The same song could appear in an advertisement, instructional video, tv show and video game—all in the same day. It’s hard to find a discipline where the creative output is essentially to make vague simulations of concepts; e.g., a 70s jazz album or a 90s trip hop album or whatever. In the case of Zoom Lens, it’s a simulation of a simulation; a return to the good old days of library music.
Which begs the question, were there ever really good old days of library music? No. Because record collectors basically invented Library Music as a genre. Sure, music libraries paid musicians to make songs and albums back in the day, but to insert the modern construct of library music into the original day to day output of these albums is probably a misnomer. So. What exactly does that make Zoom Lens then? I suppose it’s an over-simplified and idealized approximation of what my memory chooses to remember of that era. I believe they call that simulacra.
There’s lots of audio and visual cues that immediately came to mind when we first started Zoom Lens. The Bruton Music library seems to encompass an entire parallel world that is essentially the same as our world, but with slight mundane differences. Here’s a personal favorite:
A Google image search of Bruton Music Library really lets you see how serialized this music was, on top of just being visually amazing—every album cover is a winner. It exists in a very contained world. That’s how we wanted Zoom Lens to feel: an entire music catalog whittled down to one album. The idea of the “catalog” is a driver behind the whole project. Perhaps that’s because catalogs don’t exist to the extent they used to. An obvious example is the idea of the album as a sort of mini catalog. Only the most hardcore of listeners still listen to albums. That’s not meant to be a grandiose statement; it’s just kind of a fact. Singles far outperform albums and we live in a world that’s more geared toward playlists than albums. We’re now more concerned with curation than with catalogs. The internet also killed the need to have a drawer in your house the has a manual for every household appliance you own. We don’t rely on neat and tidy catalogs, manuals or encyclopedias the way we used to. So an excuse to make an album that looks and feels like a catalog was comforting. Which is odd.
Interested in hearing about the sound and vision gathering and organizing that went on to make Zoom Lens.
Zoom Lens is a concept that I’ve been talking about for years. The idea was to make a series of albums that create very specific worlds and encompass very specific geography: the band playing at the house party in a 60s biker movie, the octopus theme from a score to an 80s educational film about shallow seas, the one left-field love ballad from a 70s Italian sexploitation film, and so on. Throughout much of the 60s and 70s, when directors wanted to score a film, they often hired on-staff composers to make niche genre music like psych, prog jazz, disco, etc. And the result was usually none of those things. Or at least, it was often a strange simulation of those genres that seemed to have no ground in reality. And it sounded amazing. That’s the space I wanted Zoom Lens to exist in.
The bumper reel is meant to be sort of a companion piece to Zoom Lens. It’s 15, 30 and 60 second audio blips that are essentially meant to be transition music. It’s mood music for news breaks, test screens, and quick, action packed teaser commercials. Turning the bumper reel into a a series of commercials for Black Label Music that go back to the 70s, 80s and 90s felt appropriate. Black Label was established in 2014.
What challenges did you all find in the process?
We had to write, record, mix and master the album in just a little over a month. If you look back at our catalog, you’ll see that Leisure Birds averages about a record every other year. I guess a lot of that has to do with typical album cycles. Certainly, a release schedule of every odd year leaves plenty of breathing room, but it’s still a timeframe most of us are used to within the context of Leisure Birds. Having to turn an album around in a month and a half was certainly a challenge and forced us to conceive and record these ideas in new ways. There was no process of sitting down as a band and writing an album. The process looked a bit more like: 1) clock/sequence/program synths and drum machines 2) Press the record button 3) Start playing what ever comes to your head. After a long series of doing this, we made our way to what felt like complete songs. I realize that this is how many people make albums. In fact, this may be how the majority of the world makes albums. But the key factor for me is that while we’ve basically recorded songs in this fashion before, the difference here is that when we pressed record, we had no idea what we were going to do. That fact is a major departure for me and from how Leisure Birds conceives and makes albums.
What sorts of breakthrough discoveries did you all discover?
Cole and I have vastly different natural skill sets. I think the restraints that were put on us for this project forced us to embrace what we’re naturally good at and run with it. In the context of Zoom Lens, when you strip it all down, Cole is responsible for the sounds and I’m responsible for the notes. We certainly give each other plenty of opinions, and, from time to time, the rolls were reversed. But, for the most part, we found a rhythm of how to work with each other and tried to not look back. I really only say this because at those times when I do look back, I’m forced to acknowledge that without Cole, this entire project—and Leisure Birds as a whole—would be impossible.
What ways do you feel Leisure Birds have grown through this process?
To some extent, the sense of a standard Leisure Birds formula and instrumentation has been reevaluated. That’s perhaps one of the most important lessons. We have three official studio albums behind us now and that tends to be the point in a band’s life when it begins to become formulaic and often boring. But it’s tricky. You don’t want to go too crazy. It reminds me of 60s garage bands, who then turn into blues psych, then into raga, then into prog rock, then into free jazz, then into new age, and then they return to radio-friendly rock in the 80s with an album that actually sounds more like the Lion King soundtrack (love Elton John, though). I don’t want to turn into a monster that was once Leisure Birds. So the key is to figure out how to remain true to the original intentions of the band while also moving forward and trying new things. I think we figured out how to do that with Zoom Lens.
What sort of lasting impact do you feel this experience has had on Leisure Birds?
Our last album, Tetrahedron, was about a place in the universe so far out, that there is nothing but floating geometric shapes everywhere. So if you’re gonna hate us as a band, you probably already do. As each record goes by, I’m becoming more and more comfortable with the fact that some people are gonna get this and others aren’t. Zoom Lens is not pop music. It will never be played on the radio. But someone out there is going to get it. And that’s all I really care about. While I’ve sort of viewed Zoom Lens as music for a parallel world, I think the disambiguation of who this album was made for has helped me work through some of these issues. A music library asked for it, so we made it. There’s something liberating about the simplicity of that.
What will the next Leisure Bird flight entail?
We’ve been recording for the past year and a half. Expect a few more albums this year.
Leisure Birds’ Zoom Lens will be available soon from Black Label Music / TGNP.
Giovanni Ferrario Alliance
Italian artist, author, producer, musician & more, Giovanni Ferraro Alliance just announced his first album since 2008’s Headquarter Delirium with news that his upcoming full-length Places Names Numbers will be available in October from the We Were Never Being Boring Collective (WWNBB). Proud to present the premiere of “Souweija”, Giovanni continues his tradition that he started with his 80s band Views, to his 90s band Micevice, while proudly displaying fractions & fragments of all the musicians he’s influenced & worked with over the years through rich & jubilant arrangements. Having contributed to the works from greats like PJ Harvey, John Parish, Schism, Morgan, The Lights of the Power, GuruBanana, Sepiatone, Hugo Race & True Spirit, to name a few; Ferraro encapsulates the continual Italo pop renaissance (that the WWNBB collective has helped spearhead from Italy to the west coast of the States) that has enraptured the attention & the imagination of world.
Giovanni Ferrario Alliance’s “Souweija” marches to the beat of his own rhythmic processional. With a clever combination of controlled dissonance & decay effects, Giovanni guides the pace of the guitars and the prowess of the drums with whistles & lyrics that ponder what thoughts play about the mind when “things are not going so well.” Despite allusions to adversity & obstacles, the entire song takes on a confident air like a self-assured soldier whistling whilst guarding their post. The pursuits of truth, art & beauty are contrasted with menial jobs in corporate soul sucking factories that exist at the other end of the spectrum that displays life pursuits. “Souweija” is a song that deals with life’s difficulties in honest terms & tones, where nostalgia meets current & future hopes that wish for something more substantial & generative than the acts of subsistence that humankind has grown far too familiar with. Be sure to read the following translated transcript of our interview with Giovanni Ferrario right after the following debut of “Souweija”.
Tell us about your own personal approach to music.
Since I was a a child I always put the music in relation to the images. Both as a listener and as a composer I’m interested in what music can evoke before and sometimes regardless of the lyrics. Very often when I’m searching for a sound the first thing that goes through my mind is a form or a color. My approach can therefore be defined very instinctive at first, when I try to figure out what there may be behind a song that I’m listening to or behind something I’m conceiving myself.
What was the process of writing & recording your upcoming WNBB debut like?
Over the past months I’ve put together ideas born in different times and in different places. Even the recordings were made at least in four studies during the last years. It was not easy to find a common thread and make a sensible choice between something like thirty pieces, but then by chance I found, I’d discovered a possible key. I chose the simple title Places Names Numbers because some songs refer to a city, a specific country, or to a place which is for various reasons peculiar to me. Of other songs I had in mind an image, parts of the music or simply a name, read who knows where and when. Only at a later time I found a theme and wrote a little story. And then sometimes I feel the urge to count the number of times I live the same, or very similar, experience, I think it’s because I don’t like to repeat myself. So on this record, alongside some electric tracks will appear other less noisy songs. It comes to memories, never revived nostalgically, because of a certain idiosyncrasy I have for this feeling.
